ThinkTwice: Stay Mindful about Blowing Money - <AUTHOR> What's up HN!
My name is Sahil, and I'm an 18 year old developer from Purdue University!
I just publicly launched my first product, ThinkTwice. This app is a fun and eye-opening way to explore the different ways the money you spend can impact our planet! I was inspired to make this after listening to a Beyond Meet exec talk about how companies should never guilt-trip their consumers, but as I walked out, my friend and I asked ourselves: why not?
I would LOVE any feedback you all might have for me. Hack on!
- Sahil
Product: http://www.thinktwice.me
Upvote us please <3 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/thinktwice <comment><USER2> Maybe add a suggested donation websites so we won't just feel guilty but find a way out.

<comment><AUTHOR> On each card, there is a link to donate to the charity! Click Learn More + Donate

<comment><USER2> That is wonderful! Sorry I didn't spot it earlier.</comment></comment></comment>


Spinzero – A Minimal Jupyter Notebook Theme - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neilpanchal/spinzero-jupyter-theme <comment><USER2> +1. The Computer Modern serif fonts look legit. Like LaTeX legit.

Now, if we could make the fonts unscalable and put things in two columns (in order to require extra scrolling and 36 character wide almost-compiling copy- and-pasted code samples without syntax highlighting) we'd be almost there!

<comment><USER3> I searched for Computer Modern fonts and they're all available here: [http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm- unicode/](http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/)

I am surprised why these beauties are not widely adopted on websites and such. I agree, they just look very disciplined and professional.

I'd hope someday these relics are hosted on Google Fonts.</comment></comment>


Pretty boring team pic ... until you hover on each. - <AUTHOR> http://www.walltowall.com/3

<comment><USER3> All I see is a big flashblock in the middle of each picture.

They should have used an animated gif and a simple image replacement rollover for the still.

<comment><USER4> They're even using flash for headings... Why not just use an image if you want to use fancy fonts?

<comment><USER5> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacemen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but when you meet this: <http://github.com/sorccu/cufon>

It's a no-brainer.

<comment><USER7> Except, sIFR has been around a lot longer. HN still uses tables for layout. YouTube still uses Flash for video.

HOW DARE THEY!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great idea. Although the hovering mechanism is quite confusing. For some reason if the mouse is over one picture, the second one on the same line gets animated. Then the animation does not start immediately, there's a small delay, which is a bit irritating.

<comment><USER9> _if the mouse is over one picture, the second one on the same line gets animated. Then the animation does not start immediately, there's a small delay,_

I've just gone to check - I see neither of these problems using Chrome - <USER2> browser are you using?

<comment><USER8> I checked it again and now it seems to be ok. Maybe it was a crappy connection.

<comment><USER10> It happened to me as well (in Chrome), but only on the first mouseover. After that it worked fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like Mark Pinkerton's clip the best. Don't we all sometimes wish we had a decoy that made it look like we're busy :)

</comment><comment><USER12> I liked their founder and creative director in "Jekyll" and "Bloody Sunday."

</comment><comment><USER13> ha, something I did got on hacker news. thanks for the feedback folks.</comment>


Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average - <AUTHOR> http://stuartspencestuff.blogspot.com/2015/02/many-mcgill-education-students-cannot.html <comment><USER2> I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These teachers thought you could just look at the number of questions the students got correct, and see if the students "score" went up.

My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. One of the three other teachers realized their mistake - the other two just chuckled and said it didn't matter.

This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s __* doesn 't happen nearly as often as it does.

Also, I've taught middle and high school math for 20 years now, mostly to students who struggle with math. I don't think I've had many groups of students who could come up with six _different_ answers for a simple average problem.

<comment><USER3> > I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school.

Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and furthermore often interferes with it.

If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous.

How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school?

> want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen > nearly as often as it does.

Teachers aren't in control. They're prisoners of the classroom every bit as much as any child is. Maybe more so, they can't hope to be expelled or to flunk out or to graduate. Teachers will never be in control again, if ever they were.

<comment><USER4> >bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning

Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top college) we might as well make the most of it if the privileges are afforded to us.

<comment><USER3> > Depends on the high school and teacher.

In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool.

Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones?

Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do.

If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"?

I wouldn't say that.

The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.

<comment><USER5> > Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the > good that the good teachers can do.

> If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which > were quacks, would that make you happy?

I don't think this analogy is quite right, nor is the conclusion you are using it to illustrate. A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class (bad teachers nearly always err towards teaching too little and therefore being easy).

The worst case scenario in most subjects is they have a hole there, which in the case of non-STEM subjects is not catastrophic because they (English, history) are more about general principles rather than specific facts that nearly all adults forget. In STEM subjects, it can be worse because they build on one another.

I guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution or something like that, but that typically only happens in controversial subjects where a student should have prior knowledge that there's a controversy. If they aren't, they will figure it out soon enough.

But really, a bad doctor can kill you. A bad teacher leaves a hole that a self-motivated person with natural curiosity can completely fill. Take programming (I'll assume you're a developer). If one of your CS profs had just not bothered to teach a specific course, would you be able to live through it? Of course, as attested by the many successful developers who are self-taught. When you grow up, you have to take responsibility for learning for yourself. If some students have to do it sooner than usual, that has pros and cons.

<comment><USER3> > A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just > coast through the class (

There are many sorts of "bad". Sometimes they're simply ineffective or uninterested teachers. Other times they're borderline mentally ill and abusive.

How many times does the child need to be mocked or called names for lasting damage to happen? Can you judge this before the fact? "Oh my boy Timmy, he can be called names at least a dozen times with no ill effects, and you look like you'll only do that 8 times, Mrs. Kuntzenheimmer."

> guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution

Or lock them in a closet. Or tell them "girls can't do math" so many times they believe it, and roll their eyes derisively if any of the 9 yr olds object. Or fail them out of spite... or have them expelled without true cause.

Oh man, there must be a 100 different kinds of bad. And few children have the life skills to mitigate that (few adults, if we're honest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Real story:

In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters.

I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verbal test which I didn't prepare for. My biology teacher decided to rate it as "three fourth" and logged it as "3/4". [despite being horribly wrong it was commonly understood that it actually means "between 3 and 4"]

However...

At the end of the semester she calculated my score as:

(5+5+5+3+4)/5 = 4.4 -> 4

instead of

(5+5+5+3.5)/4 = 4.6 -> 5

Imagine a 13 year old student arguing a 50 year old biology teacher in front of the whole class about how to calculate my score properly. I even tried to convince her to downgrade my "3/4" to a "3" and recalc my score (that would yield 4.5) She didn't listen, eventually I was thrown out of the classroom and finished the year with a 4, because of a math error.

Edit: This was long time ago, so I am almost sure the exact numbers are off, but I clearly remember the broken math and the result.

<comment><USER7> In my first year of university we had to do a maths module. My final score was 120%. Imagine just many different broken and non-mathematical things have to go into that!

<comment><USER8> I graduated High School with a 6.022 GPA[1]! Texas is Awesome!

1\. Normal max is 4.0, school gave extra credit for Advanced Placement and college concurrent courses.

<comment><USER9> I was once told of a similar situation in a high school: AP classes were worth 6.0 in your GPA, while regular ones were worth 4.0. The valedictorian wound up being the person who realized this, took as many AP classes as possible, _and as few regular classes as possible_.

It is massively stupid and unfair -- but there is a part of me that sees that as preparation for real life, a great deal of which is run in stupid and unfair ways. While you'd like to change that, you also have to know how to respond to it when you can't change it.

<comment><USER10> Why is it unfair? The AP courses are more challenging, and therefore get more weight. Isn't the valedictorian (theoretically) the smartest kid in the school?

<comment><USER11> > and as few regular classes as possible

I enjoyed band so I took it and they didn't have an honors or AP version. So for me to maximize my GPA would mean that I would have to forgo band all four years of my high school existence in order to min-max for GPA.

<comment><USER12> How is this min-max? Isn't this just straight maximization?

<comment><USER11> You are minimizing anything that hurts your GPA. If the highest grade you could get in a course is a 4.0 for a regular course and say a 5.0 for AP or Honors and band is a regular course you wouldn't want to take the hit from band.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm helping teach a math education course at an elite university. We should be teaching how to teach, but we actually teach elementary school math to education majors who struggle with the material. It blows my mind how difficult this course has been for the students. It seems that every week we are lowering our standards a little more. We have no real hope of finishing a significant amount of material in one semester (but that is all they will probably take). I doubt we would be able to just fail the whole class and keep our jobs. Our goal is to teach them one single concept, so they know what it feels like to really understand something, and then maybe they will chase that feeling later.

The author mentions that education students are generally chattier and less respectful during lectures. This is also true for our class, and we have had ridiculous problems getting students to arrive for scheduled meetings and stay on top of their responsibilities. On the plus side, most of them are highly energetic and charismatic, which are great for teachers.

I knew about these problems before this class, but I could have never possibly imagined they are as dire as I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1]

In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2]

Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland.

Depressing.

\--

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are- Finlands...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands- Schools-Successful.html)

[2] [http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...](http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf)

<comment><USER15> For [1]: [2] disputes [1]. It states in [2] that it's the top 20% of _high school_ students on page 17. A very different stat. And [1] doesn't say college graduates, it just says graduates.

For [2] It's strange when I see these stats. Where I live in the US, 60-80% of high school teachers (depending on school) have advanced degrees (masters or higher). And that's also a weird stat to cite. What percentage of teachers with 5 years experience graduated in the bottom third? That would be a more important stat.

<comment><USER16> IME most school teachers with advanced degrees obtain them from pay-for-grade schools. Those degrees are essential for them to either move up the ranks in their programs or bump up their salary (here in GA a master's degree can be a $10k or more pay raise). It creates a strong financial motivation to get the degree, but they don't actually have time or desire to earn it. Same thing in military service (officer's in most branches were required to have graduate degrees by a certain rank, though at times this requirement has been dropped). Also federal civil service, many of my colleagues in a federal government job got their degrees from schools with lame graduate programs (observing their course work it was no harder than 3rd or 4th year undergraduate work at a second tier US university).

Advanced degrees are like bachelor's degrees used to be. Essential for jobs, so everyone's getting one. In 30 years all our children may be doctors just so they can flip burgers.

<comment><USER17> I totally agree with everything you say. Here in Texas a Master's degree gets you about $1000 more a year. And that's still enough motivation to get the degree!

<comment><USER16> Hmm, I had to look it up once you said your number for TX. I don't think it's as big a raise here in GA at the state level as I was recalling. For a particular county I found, Houston County, the difference is $400/month for a teacher with 10 years of experience with a Master's versus a Bachelor's. A PhD offers almost $1k more than the master's alone. So by the time most teachers have it done they get around a $4k-5k pay raise (the difference increases with each year of experience).

A 20-year teacher with a PhD is making around $75k/year vs $55k for a teacher with only a bachelor's. If they're the sole earner for a household that's a strong incentive to finish up the degree and on the cheap/ease at a degree mill. Even if they're not, that extra $20k (or around $10-12k extra take home) is still more money that can be dumped into any retirement accounts or paying off the house before they retire (if they're financially savvy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this is the biggest problem:

> Some of their answers, like 16 and 18, were lower than any value in our > sample.

> Some of their answers, like 120, were higher than any value in our sample.

It suggests that people not only don't know how to compute the average, they don't have a solid grasp of what the concept even means.

<comment><USER19> Not necessarily. The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check.

<comment><USER20> > The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do > any kind of sanity check.

That's exactly what _rayiner_ is saying: they don't understand what they're doing, they're just applying some formula, because they've been told to apply that formula.

<comment><USER19> I'm saying you can understand the concept and still fail to do a sanity check using that knowledge.

<comment><USER21> It's the difference between understanding in some abstract way and internalizing.

Once you've internalized a concept something that is so far out of whack would immediately look wrong. For example:

23894739 x 23894739 = 2

I would expect anyone who has internalized the rules of multiplication to immediately and intuitively reject that. Not that they could tell you what the correct answer is, but know that can't be it at a glance.

The claim is that the concept that the arithmetic mean is going to be somewhere between the extreme values in a list is simple and fundamental enough that it should have been similarly internalized by university students.

<comment><USER22> That doesn't look wrong to me, it just looks like multiplication mod n...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a McGill math grad, I must say that it was a running joke in the math department how the Education students didn't really need to know any math (some B. Ed. students shared classes with us during the first year or two). The B. Ed. students freely accepted this joke and were quite self-deprecating about their mathematical skills. Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP.[1]

I guess these jokes had some basis in reality.

[1] Québec has a somewhat outdated education system where the last year of rough equivalents of high school and first year of university in US are done in a somewhat "vocational" college called a CEGEP which is an intermediate step between high school and university. The original purpose of this was to help bring more students into university.

<comment><USER24> _Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP._

Are you saying that people would go to school to be math teachers and say "teach me the math I need to teach my students"?

That's nuts.

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook. Or a woodshop teacher who only knows how to make napkin holders. Or an English literature teacher who's who's only read two of Shakespeare's plays. Or a computer programming teacher who only knows one language.

My dad taught civics and American history. I could ask him anything about those topics and he would answer, and _love answering_. My attention span would run out way before his knowledge and passion ever did.

<comment><USER25> _I can 't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook._

I don't need to imagine her; she taught me for three years in high school.

<comment><USER26> danielweber ought to damn well be able to imagine it too because I _guarantee_ beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had teachers that worked like that too.

It's easy to miss when we're kids and we still have that presumption that the teachers must know so much more, but what little left of that illusion I had was shattered when I got to college and on a whim started examining the curricula of the teaching degrees. No, they do not necessarily know more than they are teaching. They _may_. They _can_. They may even know a lot more because they really love it. But there are _plenty_ who do not.

<comment><USER24> True, I had some teachers who were just reading from the book, like my health teacher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Underneath this is the simple fact that educational standards in Quebec are disgracefully bad. A frightening proportion of kids never graduate high school either, and making it into McGill is near the upper reaches of achievement for those that do.

This is going to provoke a lot of kneejerk "but it's worse in [x]". No, in the developed world it's probably not. There are lots of dynamics unique to the Quebec situation which allow this to perpetuate.

Edit to add a useful reference: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout- rates-...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-among- french-speaking-students-worry-minister-1.2771757)

"Last year alone, only 40.6 per cent of the boys followed in the 2007 cohort at the French-language Commission scolaire de Montréal graduated in five years."

<comment><USER28> That. Growing up in Quebec, I can honestly say that my mathematical education was really, really bad.

I remember spending a whole year where we had no math teacher, so instead we had one of the french language teacher teach the class. We did mostly math related crosswords.

All the kids were failing the class, so they simply made us all pass. Great job, school.

I still have a lot of issues because of this. Hard to learn advanced concepts when your basics were screwed up.

That being said, one of the beautiful reason that not many Quebecers don't make it to university is the fact that the CEGEP can throw you into the work force for a low price and a short amount of time. I wouldn't want this part to change. High school however? The whole program is a mess.

<comment><USER2> What makes it so hard to find a math teacher in Quebec?

I've traveled through Quebec a number of times, including a bicycle trip that went through Chibougamau - as a visitor, I love the province. I can understand that some remote areas of Quebec are hard to staff effectively. Is this more than a rural/ urban issue?

<comment><USER28> We have a lot of underfunded school. The particular school I am talking about is next to a train track and a metal foundry (everything was covered with yellow dust and there was smog all over) and uses a parking space as a recreation area (hey, you can play hockey on it during winter...). In 2009, one of the wall/window fell during winter and the kids had to wear their coats indoor for a month, since plastic garbage bags and duct tape was all that was covering the hole.

As for what happened to the math teacher in question, I believe that she had left the school because she had to teach multiple groups (can't remember how many groups, but it was without a doubt too many) that were too bigs and filled with kids that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Learning disabilities, violent teens, etc. all crammed in a small room, groups of... I think it was 35 students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is not surprising. My grade 4 kid's teacher told me that our kid "just might not be good at math, and that's OK". This is a shocking attitude, but one I find commonly held: that basic math is some kind of optional, specialized skill.

<comment><USER30> [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck)

She's also exhbiting a static mindset. She of all people should believe in the growth mindset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For those of us who are not from Canada, can someone explain what McGill is? I feel like I'm missing a lot of context.

edit: apparently it's a very prestigious university. I was assuming that it was a remedial high school program. Holy crap.

<comment><USER28> An university.

<comment><USER15> > An university.

Did you go to McGill?

<comment><USER15> Yes, yes, I get the downvotes. But, come on, everyone was thinking it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> McGill is not a great university, but it isn't poor either. It doesn't have the pride that Waterloo (our MIT) or Toronto (our... Columbia? Dartmouth? We don't have a Harvard or Yale) has, but it's solidly mid-tier.

And this does not surprise me one bit.

I've met _engineers_ failing out during first year at Waterloo that didn't know the second law of thermodynamics ("why don't we put wind turbines on top of electric cars?") I've met _engineers_ failing out during first year that didn't understand basic units (ie, velocity (m/s) times time(s) equals meters (m = m/s _s).

Fuck, I even went to a private school and when a teacher went on maternity leave a history teacher had to teach grade 11 math. After a week I told her I would do it (and I did it) because she couldn't even handle basic, basic y = mx + b stuff, let alone hyperbolas.

The worst part of the whole thing is that Canadian students _know* our system is fucked. We have so many immigrants from countries like India and their kids are _years_ ahead of us, but nobody cares! I was screaming about how I hadn't learned anything in math between grade 4 and 8. Nothing. Think about that. We did fraction math for four and a half years. The whole system rewards minimizing absolute failures until around grade 10 or 11. Then people can finally split up into different achievement levels.

It is insane. Also, we underpay our teachers and we don't pay more for math teachers. So for someone like me, I can either earn $200k running a tech company with my Applied Science Bachelors or I can go back to school to get an education degree and earn less than what I earned coming out of university.

<comment><USER23> > McGill is not a great university

It still ranks pretty high:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and_reputation)

and they still sell those "Harvard: The McGill of America" sweatshirts every year.

[https://glasgowuniversityabroad0910.wordpress.com/2009/10/16...](https://glasgowuniversityabroad0910.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/harvard- americas-mcgill/)

That B. Ed. students are coming so unprepared from McGill is quite sad.

Its liberal arts programme is also much bigger than Waterloo's, but comparable to UofT's.

<comment><USER33> >"Harvard: The McGill of America"

mmm and they didn't realize that McGill is in America too? May be the parent post has a point...

<comment><USER23> As a Mexican, I don't like it much either, but I'm also tired of trying to convince the world that America isn't the US.

Here is some consolation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE)

<comment><USER34> There are three [0] "America"s -- North, South, and United States of. Clarification is only required when context is inadequate to distinguish between them.

Similarly, "star" can refer to a shape, a celestial body, or a talented/lead performer or athlete. You wouldn't interrupt a conversation about sports to say "stars aren't just guys like LeBron James; Aldebaran is also a star." That would be asinine and obnoxious.

So please, out of respect for everyone's time and sanity, learn how to use contextual clues and stop trying to argue that "America isn't the US".

[0] OK, there are actually even more "America"s -- a band, multiple cities, ships, movies, etc. But the contextual clues in this post suggested we had "large regions of land" in mind, so I left the other forms of "America" for the footnote.

<comment><USER33> that's not context, that's because USA is the biggest power in the Americas, so powerful that it overshadows all the other regions/countries, and that's why some people living in the Americas feel belittled by that.

I know you were not replying to my post directly, but to clarify my position: I'm european, I don't particularly care about the distinction, I just found that it was a very depressing message to put on a university t-shirt from outside USA.

Ah, and please, out of respect for everyone's time and sanity, stop patronizing other people.

<comment><USER35> There is also the point that the United States of America was the first state to incorporate "America" in its name. It was an independent state when the rest of the Americas were at least nominally colonized by European powers. Much of the rest of the world got used to calling the USA "America".

For that matter, the official title of Mexico included "United States"\--should I apologize when using "United States" or disambiguate in case somebody wants to mention the United Mexican States?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Look, I understand that this should be a topic of conversation. I have no problem with that. If Québécois feel like the education they are receiving is sub-par then there definitely should be a discussion about it.

But! What I also think is distressing is that, based on this article (and its author) alone, there is also an extreme lack of understanding of statistics. The evidence presented is purely anecdotal. I read the entire article waiting for the author to cite some study or personal research, but that never happened. So, unless there is more compelling evidence out there, maybe the author, McGill students, McGill faculty members, or Québécois (or Canadians in general) should start by gathering some more information before discussing solutions.

<comment><USER37> It's just a student expressing outrage at his classmates ignorance of basic math. Especially future teachers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also something that competent mathematicians interested in education have been discussing for many years. It's interesting how we choose to call anecdotes "writing on the wall" when it turns out to be correct and "unsubstantiated by data" in other scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> That reminds me when I took one business class during university studies and during the final exam I wrote a formula like:

      A * B

D=</comment><comment>-

      C

Well, this was rejected by the teacher stating that C should be under B and not A. Oh...

</comment><comment><USER39> Could they figure out how to do it in less than 5 minutes if the stakes really mattered? I agree calculating averages is a pretty basic skill that I find has many day-to-day applications. But this also smells like a lighter version of the trick interview question.

Which is to say, I'm sure there are people out there who would smirk at me when they found out I didn't know how to tie a square knot off the top of my head.

<comment><USER40> IMHO, calculating an average is something _every_ teacher should have to do many times throughout their career (at the very least for calculating how well individual students performed on a test relative to their peers).

Calculating an average is the statistical equivalent of 2 + 2. Who could respect a teacher who had to look up the algorithm for 2 + 2 every time they were asked to compute it?

<comment><USER41> I would hope most teachers stopped calculating averages by hand a long time ago.

<comment><USER40> Similar to another comment, how can you evaluate the correctness of the computed value if you don't know how the computation is done?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I sit on the board of governors of a public school in Wales, which has decided it needs to focus on math after bad PISA results.

We had an official from the local government come in to tell us that she'd gone through our testing scores and divided schools into quartiles, so she could focus her efforts. Good, I thought.

Then she said, because of how she'd done the calculation, she had ended up with three quartiles. And she hoped most of the schools in the middle quartile (like us) would be able to reach the upper quartile for math next year.

I tried gamely to point out she was an imbecile, along with a reference to Lake Wobegon, but most of the rest of the governing body seemed to think this was entirely reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is abysmal and unfortunately, it is far more widespread than people like to believe, particularly in supposedly advanced countries.

I've worked with programmers who could not do proportions, compounded with designers, managers etc. who were in the same boat, I'd hear conversations along the lines of:

"This is terrible, X is 3/4 of Y!" "I don't think you got it right, I got 75%, which isn't that bad"

The conversations and quarrels would go on forever, no joke.

Sadly, basic Maths isn't the only thing an alarming proportion of people do not seem to understand properly. I constantly see people with Masters, PhDs and whatnot, in various subjects (from Sciences to Journalism, Economics, etc.), who can't read and write properly. Not only do I wonder how they got where they are in the first place, but what worries me most is that there's clearly no fundamental understanding of the underlying, simple logic. Not meaning to offend anyone here, but simply looking at the comments on HN, a lot of people are guilty of bad spelling and questionable grammar, and I'd argue most people here are supposedly more educated than the average person.

I see schools competing on how they're teaching four year old kids additional languages, ten year olds how to make mobile apps, and the list goes on, but I'm yet to see a single school that advocates teaching simple logic. For instance, how about teaching grammar again? Most of my friends can't tell the difference between a noun, a proverb, a verb and so on. Not that the nomenclature matters, but I do think the intrinsic logic of a sentence does.

I'm not blaming anyone in particular, I'm really putting everyone at fault here. School systems largely aim to satisfy stats as opposed to humanely helping students, supported by politicians who like to give out numbers, whatever they mean, so that disgruntled parents may assign blame where they see fit (which is very rarely themselves), and on and on. Add to that a toxic culture of anti-intellectualism and the cycle repeats itself.

People like touting the Education system for all, but I doubt that the huge machinery we created really works for anybody, or at least everybody.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I agree with you in general, HN comments should (and do) have lower standards for grammar, spelling, and logical reasoning. If I spent as much time on my HN comments as I do on research papers I probably wouldn't get more than one comment per month.

<comment><USER43> I completely agree with your sentiment and I'm definitely not asking for research paper quality in comments (be it HN or other places), but I do think getting the basics right goes a long way towards better comprehension and credibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I believe these problems extend beyond Canada and into the U.S. I know several of my peers who have started, or are applying to get their masters in Education/teaching to become teachers. I have heard them willing admit that they are very poor in Math like it is something to brag about. I've seen them struggle to compete basic arithmetic, and yet somehow they believe this is totally ok and that they are qualified to teach. Math needs to be elevated and respected, and it is going to take a restructuring of the curriculum in order for it to happen.

</comment><comment><USER45> Before we get too smug, don't let the education majors challenge you to a writing contest :-)

A few years after I finished my BS in Comp Sci, I took both the GRE and the CBEST (California teaching test). The percentile ranking skew between the two populations was interesting.

A 98th percentile ranking in "verbal" in the engineering group only put me at the 50th percentile ranking in writing in the teaching group.

(OTOH, I was at the 99th percentile in math in the teaching group, but I had a reasonably high score at math in the GRE as well)

<comment><USER35> The verbal portion of the GRE didn't used to involve writing--I haven't taken it in a long time. But some of what I see written by and for teachers makes me wonder how good they are at writing, and at distinguishing good writing from bad.

<comment><USER45> True: the GRE verbal was multiple choice, not actually writing. Closest proxy I could come up with to compare the writing results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> And teachers make a lot more in Canada than they do in the United States. If you're good enough at math or science to do anything else, why would you be a teacher? It's a harsh way to look at it, but it's true.

In the US, states have their own teacher certification exams. They are pretty much just testing your understanding of 8th-grade math and science. I know a lot of teachers and I don't think any of them passed it the first time. It's like passing the bar in the world of teaching. People take it up to a dozen times. After they have gone through two years of graduate school.

</comment><comment><USER47> UK has tests in Mathematics and in English for anyone who wants to take teacher training for schools (not needed for 'post compulsory' or pre-school yet).

[http://sta.education.gov.uk/](http://sta.education.gov.uk/)

Might be fun to try the practice tests out on colleagues...

Helping managers to aggregate pass rates per class into an overall pass rate used to be a fun thing to do many years ago. They are better at data management now because of our focus on targets in the UK. Not so good for holistic education but managers can certainly hack their stats.

<comment><USER48> I'm in the UK, and I don't think it's fair to be singling out teachers on this.

I work with retailers - we make eCommerce systems - and I never cease to be staggered at how many CFOs/finance people/buyers/business owners don't:

\- Know the difference between "gross" and "net" when talking about prices, tax, or margin. \- Know how to calculate a percentage. What's 10% off £90? No idea. \- Virtually all fall for the "mark it down by 10%, then mark it up by 10%... same price!" fallacy. \- Completely fail to grasp statistics. "Me" is not a statistically significant sample size.

So long as Western society treats mathematical literacy with contempt, this will only get worse - and treat it with contempt we do, for if you are able to figure out the average of two single digit numbers in your head, you are a "braniac" or a "geek", which is fucking incomprehensible.

<comment><USER47> _" Virtually all fall for the "mark it down by 10%, then mark it up by 10%... same price!" fallacy."_

That is a classic GCSE Foundation Maths exam question: and I have to say most of the teenagers I teach can explain why you won't get back to the same price!

I wasn't singling out teachers myself but the OA looks as if it was. There is an honest desire to improve things over the next 10 years in the UK and all main parties agree about the general policy if not the detail so I am slightly optimistic (but teachers have to be)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Oh my god — I can't believe it.

A professor of mine in college (I'm currently a freshman — this happened a few months ago) told me a story _exactly_ like this — just at the University of Pittsburgh Masters in Education program and wherein nobody knew (or cared) that 1 was not a prime number.

I may be more dumbfounded now than I was sitting in his office during office hours... one is an anecdote, two is pattern.

<comment><USER50> In fairness, thinking that 1 is a prime number (or just not knowing that it isn't) is in quite a different league to not knowing how to calculate the average of a list of numbers.

<comment><USER49> See my comment to the other reply. Ordinarily I'd agree, but these were all graduated undergrad math majors in a course about how to teach math (specifically prime numbers) to high schoolers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I tried to make this comment a reply to a separate comment but it errored out. I had a funny thing happen to me in college that ruined my one chance at a 4.0 semester. I had just begun my physics major but had some electives to take as well.

I was taking the introductory microeconomics course. At the end of the semester I had received a B and I was relatively certain that I had achieved better, so I went to the professor's office and asked to see how my grade had been calculated. As he started showing me the scores, I realized that none of them had been mine! In the end he had mixed my scores with another student who had the same last name (a very common name, in the professor's defense). I was very happy at that point because I was really thinking I would receive an A! Sadly, the professor shook his head and said that I would still only get a B.

I was a bit shocked so I asked what the final calculation had given and he said a 0.8994. There were not 10,000 points possible and final grades had to be a two-digit representation of the semester's work, so I was unsure why this kept me from an A. I explained to him that the last digit was not significant since there was no "point" to represent the digit, basically trying to explain significant figures to him. I then stated that since the grade had to be either an 89% or a 90%, surely it was more appropriate to receive a 90%.

He shook his head again and said to me what was probably one of the most infuriating and condescending things I'd ever heard from a moron with PhD. He said that economics as a field was likely much more difficult than my primary coursework and that I should not take it too hard that his course was my lowest grade that semester. Now I do not really buy into the perceived/nearly mythical reputation of difficulty that physics has gained, but I do know that we at least put our dependent variable on the appropriate axis. I am not an exceptionally gifted student, so I never did have another chance to receive a 4.0 semester in my math and physics coursework. I have always held a grudge against that professor.

EDIT: I realize I forgot to mention the part that was really infuriating, as I see that it is really not that frustrating as told. The thing that angered me the most, and the reason I went on about significant figures, is that the professor himself was not against rounding! He said that had I received an 0.8995 I would get the A! His entire grading framework was hinged on a poor understanding of math.

<comment><USER52> Don't get me wrong, I'd also be frustrated. However, if you view the grades as cutoffs rather than rounded percentages, I think the professor's view makes sense. The cutoff for an A- is .90 Therefore, if the score was 0.8994, then you did not make the cutoff, and your percentage grade of 89% would be more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I TA'd a capstone neuroscience seminar at McGill for multiple years, and you'd be amazed at how much difficulty many of the students had at expressing themselves in writing. And I'm talking about those who spoke English as a first language. These are final year university students who got into a very competitive program.

</comment><comment><USER54> It is worth noting that McGill has over 60% of students coming from outside of Quebec so this doesn't have much to do with Quebec's education system. [http://www.mcgill.ca/about/quickfacts/students](http://www.mcgill.ca/about/quickfacts/students)

<comment><USER55> But the article is about creating good educators, the problem is't the students coming in, it's the ones coming out of that education program, who will eventually become teachers. The problem is the program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I met some education majors in the 70s, when I was in college and grad school, (at McGill, coincidentally). It was clear, even then, that many of them were aiming to become grade school teachers _because they could not do math beyond the grade school level_. My encounters with my kids' teachers over the years have only reinforced that impression.

Two examples:

1) A 4th grade teacher who gave assignments in which presentation counted for 80%, and content for 20%.

2) A middle school _math_ teacher who claimed the answer to the question "Flipping a coin, what are the odds of getting heads or tails?" was 50%. She really meant to be asking two questions, one about heads and one about tails. She completely missed the significance of the word "or" in questions about statistics.

This article does not surprise me at all.

<comment><USER57> I think your point 2) is unjustifiably harsh. It may have been misinterpreted. I think it's an honest mistake.

<comment><USER56> I talked to the teacher, and she was definitely confused. If not by the math concepts, then by the common English phrases used in talking about probability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Recommended reading: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29)

<comment><USER59> Just re-read that book a little while ago. It's dated in a couple of its examples, but it's still pretty powerful and easy to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Purely anecdotal and IMO a bit disingenuous. Most McGill students are _not_ from Québec for starters. I could comb through the requirements set by the government concerning secondary education and easily find many supposedly acquired skills that the author either forgot or never learned.

Write the same story about how a lot of anglophone students do not learn to speak/write/read French properly as they simply do not care and you will be overwhelmed by responses in their defense.

</comment><comment><USER61> I've seen this thing quite often. There's a famous video clip of MIT graduates, in cap and gown, who can't make a bulb light when given a battery and wire. I disagree with the blog author's interpretation that this is about the students being "stupid." I posted the comment below.

I wouldn't interpret this as "education majors are stupid." I would interpret it as, all of us, even the best of us, are stupid in certain contexts with certain topics and certain time pressures. This is partly due to how we are taught and how we learn in school. Our knowledge is inert (inaccessible in other contexts) because it is often taught without context. The technical term for this is "transfer" \- our learning often doesn't transfer. An older term for this is "encoding specificity" \- our learning is "locked" to the context in which it is encoded. For example the myth that if you are drunk while studying you should be drunk when you take the test.

Here is a dramatic example that had a huge influence on reforming science education. On the bottom right of this page is a video clip of MIT graduates, in cap and gown, who, given a battery, bulb, and wire, can't make the bulb light. There's also a clip of Harvard students. [https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/video_archive_2.ht...](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/video_archive_2.html)

The full videos that go into why this is happening (because of how they are taught) and how we can address it (contextualized and constructivist instruction techniques like problem-based learning, simulations, etc.) are "Minds of Our Own" and "A Private Universe", which can be viewed online here: [http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html](http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html) and here: [http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html](http://www.learner.org/resources/series28.html)

Another brilliant example comes from comedian Father Guido Sarducci's routine on the "Five Minute University" \- how he can teach in 5 minutes what you remember 5 years after college: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4)

</comment><comment><USER62> From the headline I assumed McGill would be a grade school/middle school or maybe worse, a high school. But it's a university?

</comment><comment><USER63> On Canada's education: I came from Belarus when I was 10 and was put into 5th grade. Until I got to 9th grade, there was no new math taught to me. I didn't know about the unit circle until 10th grade, however, my friends from home learned about it in 7th grade. This is only one example. Maybe Canada's university education is at par, I don't know, but the years leading up to it are mostly wasted, to say the least. Since grade 1 we sat attentively and quietly at desks listening to the teacher, they commanded our respect and their classrooms were always well organized for learning. Compare that with Ontario, when I was placed in 5th grade. We were never encouraged to read out- loud to the class, come to the front of the class to answer questions, solve math problems on the board or to memorize and tell a poem. We did not read classic authors, or poets and learn their works. Our reading speed was not measured, we were not assigned reading, writing or math homework beyond simple "spelling sheets" and "fill in the blank math sheets". We were not taught to keep an organized student planner, or keep an organized notebook. Our homework was not graded, our grades were not tracked and were never revealed to us. We were never told what we needed to improve. We never had to write short, well formatted and grammatically correct paragraphs and short pieces. We never wrote dictations, we never actually wrote anything beyond single worded "fill- in-the-blank" worksheets. Our penmanship was not judged, proper grammar was not encouraged or judged. All these things were taught to us in Belarus from grade 1 to 5. I was shocked to come to Canada and learn that in fifth grade, students had to sit on the floor for parts of the day as the teacher read to them, like kindergarten. Knowing this I often reflect on how much obvious potential is wasted and opportunity missed by Canadian elementary education systems. I visited Belarus when I was in 9th grade, my friends there were writing essays in English and Spanish as weekly homework. Compare that with French language education in Canada, by 9th grade, after 5 years of elementary school French, I could count to a hundred and read a little. I did not know proper grammar or how to write sentences. Anyway, there are many examples in other subjects as well. Each time I reflect on this, I cannot help but feel how pathetic the education is. It's not serious. It then comes as no surprise that there are teachers at conferences who are not able to comprehend weighted averages, as japhyr mentioned. I wish elementary education in Canada were reformed completely.

</comment><comment><USER64> In my country was a politician who was outraged by the fact that 50% of people earn below the national average.

<comment><USER65> You should look up median and how it is different to the average.

<comment><USER37> Technically, average is ambiguous. Usually refers to mean, but also median and mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The solution is obvious don't allow outside observers into education classes. /s

<comment><USER67> Are you a manager? :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The private schools in QC are a bit better... at least in my experience. It's too bad, the public system is so broken.

</comment><comment><USER69> If true, this is horrifying. I went to McGill and the Education students didn't seem this incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER70> Isn't this story just about a single anecdote? To me that makes it nearly meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER71> My takeaway: I had no idea the ‽ character was a thing. Hooray!

</comment><comment><USER72> This is alarming but not particularly surprising to me, if the culture of education is similar between the US and Canada. Judging by this piece and one I read hear a few days back [1], there may be more similarities than I'd thought.

Ed school for far too many is a compelling choice for people who want a relatively easy college degree. I don't want to diss the countless teachers who choose that route out of genuine passion and love for education and knowledge, but we don't do a whole lot to filter for these people.

And it's an incredible shame, because my brief two year teaching career convinced me that it's one of the most demanding career paths a person could choose. I'm a lead engineer today and was once a startup founder, and neither job comes close to the stress, the emotional demands, the direspect, the time demands, the politics, the motivational skills, and the relationship building teaching required of me.

We act like it's such a big mystery why we have such problems in education. To me it's pretty simple:

1\. It's an extremely demanding job that's only becoming more demanding with the constant shifting of accountability (i.e. blame) onto the teachers.

2\. Teacher prep is largely horrible. Many ed schools will take anyone with a heartbeat, and highly selective alternative prep programs like Teach For America (of which I am an alum) give people minimal training in comparison.

3\. Segregation, poverty, and policy create a situation where the students in the greatest need are the worst-served. This is what really kills our system, because students of privilege often have enough advantages to make out okay even in spite of the first two issues.

No amount of draconian accountability standards, school privatization, or winner-take-all compensation schemes are going to fix these things.

There is some hope though, if we're willing to reach for it. We have a lot of human capital in our education system, but I think we're applying it poorly. Instead of feebly demanding that everyone suddenly become an 10x teacher, we should find better ways to utilize the competent (if not universally brilliant) people we do have. Reduce teaching load and scale back the job to something people can excel at without having to be a martyr.

[1] [https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs- enough-6c56a...](https://medium.com/precarious-physicist/enoughs- enough-6c56afe36d00)

[2] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2013/05/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not- what-you-think/)

<comment><USER59> One thing that I've become a firm believer in is that teaching isn't the problem; _administration_ is. A good administrator or group of administrators will make the entire school into a team that can excel. They set a clear vision for what teachers need to know and do. They set clear standards for discipline, which are practiced in a fair, evenhanded, rational fashion. They uphold high standards and remove the non-hackers who can't do the job. They respond quickly to concerns and show that they legitimately care.

Incidentally, one of the biggest reasons why private schools do so much better is that their administrations tend to be better. When a kid is acting up in class, he gets punished. When a teacher sucks, he gets fired. When concerns come up, they are addressed quickly and promptly. These things are so important that teachers willingly and happily take a pay cut just so that they can be in this environment.

In contrast, a large number of public schools have horrifyingly incompetent administrators. The school then becomes a muddled mess where individual sparks are snuffed out by the chaos. Who would teach in such a place?

One of my favorite models of people's performance is the "10-80-10" distribution. 10% are heroes, who will do an amazing job no matter how bad things get. 10% are shitbags, to be extirpated with prejudice. The remaining 80% will go with the flow. If your school is awesome, they'll approach the heroes. If it's garbage, they'll approach the shitbags. Administration is what decides where the 80% will go.

<comment><USER72> One of the few jobs I want even less than my old teaching job is my old principal's job. The role has insane expectations. The collective administration has to be capable of management, budgeting, academic master planning, public relations, recruitment (of staff and teachers), HR, scheduling, event planning, behavior management, and the list goes on practically forever. The principal has to build a team that can cover all of these bases with no gaps, and in a school district like the one I taught in, they have to do it with a very limited number of people and typically on a very difficult time scale.

In a rough school district, turnover is rampant. Few sane people want to take this role or honestly feel qualified to do it, so it tends to attract manic people, with the assortment of negative personality traits that tends to correlate with. You name it: manipulativeness, sleaziness, narcissism, capriciousness, etc.

I have yet to see a private school that effectively serves the neediest communities with a model that is actually replicable. Even the best charters tend to weed out the neediest students, in their messaging, their admissions or through high daily expectations with lack of support. The lack of support undercuts high expectations at all levels of the educational system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> For those of us out of the loop: What is McGill?

</comment><comment><USER74> Why is this #1 on the homepage?

<comment><USER72> Because a largely highly learned subculture cares deeply about education, evidently. Go figure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I dunno, in elementary schools in the U.S. they start teaching the median by grade 2.

The mean is good when you want an actual expectation value (i.e. how much fast do I lose money when I play this slot machine) but the mean is not the tool to use for characterizing and unknown probability distrbution.

<comment><USER76> Well, CLT does guarantee that most means will follow a gaussian distribution if you repeatedly sample from the same distribution. Also, if you're relying on a single statistic to characterize a distribution, you've got another thing coming buddy. ;) Always report first and second moments, range and/or outliers. Histograms are even better tho binning is tricky. You're right to fear distortion, but changing your one statistic isn't gonna save you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The funniest part of the story is the article got the formula for average wrong.

The article listed all this "add them all up and divide by how many" but thats totally wrong.

The real way averages are calculated is you write a script for an actor wearing a lab coat to sell more toothpaste, and some liberal arts grad picks a number that rolls off the tongue and sounds good. Sometimes politicians use "average" as a verbal filler. like "like" or "um", it doesn't mean anything numerical it just sounds good and fills space.

So the kids that wrote 18 or 120 are the only kids who got it right. You put your nose in the air and sniff what someone wants to hear about a conclusion they've already drawn, and if higher or lower is better, well, thats what the answer is.

The answer to "whats the average of one 100 and nine 20s" is NOT, repeat, NOT 28. Thats never going to sell toothpaste in TV commercials, sounds terrible.

If you have a system of commerce built entirely on lies and deceit and asymmetric unfair marketplaces, some weird rant about mathematical truth is like asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

<comment><USER78> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=psychologists+near+me](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=psychologists+near+me)</comment></comment>


How an F Student Became America's Most Prolific Inventor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-americas-top-inventor-lowell-wood/ <comment><USER2> Intellectual Ventures is a notorious patent troll, one that routinely uses shell companies to obscure the extent of its abuse of the patent system. It's disappointing to see ignorant people in the press continue to naively conflate "filing lots of patents" with "inventing."

A piece like this that uncritically lionizes Lowell and Intellectual Ventures without even bothering to highlight or address the criticism frequently voiced against the organization feels uncomfortably one-sided if not deliberately misleading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quote "a device that can imbue medical gear with videoconferencing and data- transmission abilities so a patient can leave a hospital and use the machines at home".

Some of the patents mentioned sound trivial. It seems to me this guy is focused more on quantity than quality. Is he a borderline patent troll?

</comment><comment><USER4> Reading tip: Use the page down key instead of mouse wheel. Will keep the moving artifacts to a minimum.

<comment><USER5> Or activate Reader View, if you're using Firefox or Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Off-topic: This article has clearly sacrificed too much readability for the "cool" factor.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why is there always so much focus on the "F student turned inventor" trope. What purpose does it serve? It's definitely not the norm. I think that people identify with it because from their perspective it was like oh this guy was just naturally smart and he just didn't buy into the educational system which is why they had bad grades. Many people think the same of themselves in that way. The part that I feel always gets under reported or not digested by readers very well is the amount of work that the people usually had to put into their endeavors. Oftentimes the work was far more intensive than any education they could have received. I think the emphasis should always be on the work instead of what their grades were in high school or college. I guess that headline wouldn't sell though.

</comment><comment><USER8> Terrible presentation on that site.</comment>


More Americans are eating gluten-free despite not having celiac disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/06/gluten-free-eating-celiac-disease-marketing-trend-diet <comment><USER2> I don't understand why people think being able to eat gluten is a binary thing.

Case in point: My wife can technically eat gluten, but doesn't. She started having stomach/digestion issues 6 years ago, and we have spent thousands on medical tests. Her doctor asked her to try cutting out gluten (even though she isn't celiac) and it turned out that it helped. She still has problems but when she eats something with gluten in it, it is worse.

So not celiac, but still can't have gluten because it makes her feel sick. Why do people find this hard to believe? There are many levels of intolerance to something. We don't mock the lactose intolerant even though some could eat icecream if they wanted.</comment>


Respect C Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2007/10/respect-c-programmers.html Recently I just got fed up with unfair criticism of C... <comment><USER2> I haven't noticed as much C-bashing. It always seemed to me that people recognize that C programming is pretty damn hardcore, and that the people who have mastered it are accomplished programmers. I still see quite a bit of reverence for kernel programmers. Yeah, there's some C bashing, everything gets bashed. But Java has taken much more of a beating lately than C.

Otherwise, I largely agree with the article (although I don't actually think C particularly needs defending right now). The only point I disagree with in this article is the exclusion of server-side web applications when he says "show me the code." Server side web apps aren't the dull, stateless things they used to be - trememdous innovation is taking place here.

<comment><USER3> One of the big reasons a lot of code is written in C is because a lot of schools, especially in Europe and Asia teach C/C++ starting at the high school level. Even US schools used to do this until recently (a lot have switched to Java now). So it makes sense that a large percent of the open source software is written in C/C++.

<comment><USER4> By "school" you mean College or University I presume? (which is what most of the english speaking world calls them). Otherwise highschools are far more advanced in the US then I am led to believe ;)

<comment><USER5> My relatively well-off public high school had an elective year long programming sequence that was half Pascal and the second half C++. Then, AP Computer Science was taught in C++.

Right after I graduated, AP Computer Science switched to Java and my school started teaching C++ as the first programming language, then Java, then Java again for AP CS.

<comment><USER4> Wow, that is impressive. Although, when I went to high school there was no Java (barely was C++, actually there was but no one really used it yet as it was a wacky pre processor for C). Pascal baby !

Interesting how pascal kind of quietly disappeared. It has the closest resemblence to the algol heritage that it came from.

<comment><USER5> Yeah... hopefully there will eventually be a pedagogical movement to switch to python as a first language, C++ is definitely a little rough.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Python certainly has its quirks. But what I like about it is that it doesn't force OO or functional styles. You can "ease" into them. I like writing non OO python. Also with the significant whitespace, its great for teaching as it makes the code clear without syntactic noise.

the only thing I find confusing is forgetting that there may be a global function to do what I want. eg len(array) as opposed to list.length (ruby). But that probably doesn't hurt in reality at all.

The few books I have read on python are also excellent and approachable.

Also you can do fun stuff with python (build GUIs etc) and do tangible stuff that makes teaching it more fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some things I like about C:

'void' means an empty parameter list, a function that returns no result, or a pointer to anything.

There is an array type, which you declare with brackets[10]. It's a real type on par with all the other real types in the language. Yet, accessing the values in an array is done exclusively via pointer arithmetic.

int foo(); declares a function with unspecified parameters, unless it is C++ where it means no parameters.

           char x[5] = "Hello"; //Is an array of 5 chars, and has no string-terminator
           char x[] = "Hello"; //Is an array of 6 chars, with string terminator.

You can declare functions that take matrices of variable size, but only in one dimension. int bar(char mat[][4][5]); Unless you're using variable-length arrays which were added to C in 1999, but aren't widely supported in compilers.

<comment><USER7> Excellent examples of C annoyances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> C is as essential as electronic engineering. More generally, a programmer's learning path should go through (a) understanding how machines work (b) understanding C and (c) understanding the rest. You will never truly get the idea of Lisp or Python unless you know the lower levels, including the intermediate ones, which is C in particular.

<comment><USER9> I totally disagree. C is definitely *not a good language to learn to program in. I actually think that programming should be learned the other way around.

<comment><USER8> Why?

<comment><USER3> It's interesting trying to watch a non-programmer try to learn a language like C, C++ or Java and try to figure out the reason for all the boiler plate code to get something simple done. They ask questions like: Why does printing "hello, world" require more code than "print 'hello, world'"?

<comment><USER10> i once let a friend use my TI-89 for a couple of minutes. he wanted to program a game for it. when i checked to see what he had written so far, it said "there is a ball"

although hilarious, it's an ideal that shouldn't be laughed at

<comment><USER9> See? At first you just want a simple language to give instructions to the computer, so you can worry about learning how to come up with the algorithms that you need to translate.

<comment><USER8> A thesis that we want the machines to understand our high-level vision of an algorithm existed long before computers were invented. However, we failed to create such a system that would interpret our vision of a program ("there is a ball") and execute it appropriately. Wish you good luck in inventing such a system.

The reality is, programmers who don't understand how computers work can write ridiculously bad code. I saw it a lot. Efficiency does become an issue when a program is so bad and slow and unreliable that a computer can't execute it in a reasonably useful way.

I'd never hire a Python programmer who doesn't know what dynamic array is all about or what CPUs are dealing with when they run a program -- essentially addresses and numbers.

A recent YCnews post comes to mind: if you want to find a good PHP programmer you have to announce a C++ vacancy with no single word about PHP.

<comment><USER11> I'd take a C++ expert who also knew language X over somebody who just knew language X any day of the week. Being able to do something hard without shooting your foot off and understanding how the bits and bytes work make you better no matter what language you're using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm learning to develop OS X apps and have been learning C / Objective-C and have to say I enjoy it.

<comment><USER13> Objective C is a heck of a sweet language.... It's one of the few C based object oriented language that feels enough like ruby to make me like it ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> C and C++ and Java, etc, were written for practical reasons, and they attract practical followers. When someone writes a blog post about Java, it's rarely to show a "trick" or to prove superiority, but rather to solve some problem.

If I'm typing away in Java, you KNOW I have an end-goal. No one plays around, because...it's not a toy.

It's like saying, French is a more beautiful language than English (it is, you know). But compare the import/export ratio of the film and popular music industries. I can't recall the last French pop song I heard...

Wait, I do: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-sUzR71wpQ>

<comment><USER15> Most of the blog posts I've read about Java lately are indeed about solving some problem. Unfortunately for Java's reputation, the problem is usually the lack of ability to perform one of those "tricks" that "toy" languages like Lisp can do.

As for C, I suspect there's more information about C "tricks" online than all other languages put together. For example: <http://www.ioccc.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, you don't really understand a high-level language unless you understand C. (I'm mostly talking about Python and Java here.) If you think of Python lists as dynamic arrays of pointers to void, the world suddenly becomes easier.

<comment><USER3> It does? I think that actually makes it less clear what lists in Python are actually good or bad for. I think thinking of them in terms of a linked list in C is a much better abstraction.

<comment><USER9> A linked list in which every node is a void pointer. But that would be kind of the same.

What I meant is that knowing how you would have to implement each of your high-level data structures in C helps you understand some of the problems you encounter when working with them. For example, now I know the difference between these two Python lists: l = [[1,2] for i in range(6)] and l = [1,2] * 6

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of software has a base runtime written in C with much of the higher- level functionality written in a higher-level language. Firefox does this with Javascript and Emacs does it with Lisp.

<comment><USER16> "Ousterhout's dichotomy", although I'm sure it predated him:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout's_dichotomy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> C is the language of the operating system. It's also very portable. It doesn't require that any other packages be installed - it compiles to machine code. LISP/Haskell/Python/Java don't have this quality, and so desktop software will probably always be dominated by C and it's sad offspring C++.

Other "high level" languages are however, becoming increasingly dominant on server-side or hosted products, since the developers can control the execution environment closely.

<comment><USER6> Lisp compiles to machine code.

Here's a page on how to do it with clisp:

<http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/image.html>

<comment><USER15> Clisp compiles to bytecode, not native machine code. Saving an image with :executable set bundles a copy of the Clisp runtime and your program's bytecode in to one file. Most other Common Lisp implementations _do_ compile to native machine code, but not all can bundle the runtime with an image.

Similar tools exist for other languages which require the language itself to be present while the program is running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys, many of you missed my point. The post was not about C. It wasn't about the language, it was about people. I wanted to point out that C programmers, as a group, are getting things done.

I suspect there aren't that many of them, there are fewer people programming C these days as compared to Java or C#. But they produce spectacular number of open source products we all use.

Respect them for that. That's all.

</comment><comment><USER18>
      char*____="RDCO$Utho{kfah||0R}wq5\x7fy8Z;";int main(int _,
      char**______){return _>!0xBADC0DE?main(!0[______],&____):!
      (-_)[*______]?!putchar(10):putchar((*______)[-_]^-_)?main(
      --_,______):0xDEADBEEF^!!"Valid C89 but not C++ nor C99";}

</comment><comment><USER11> I gave it some love.

I especially like the part about "You see, most of you Haskell/Lisp/Erlang gurus are true intellectuals and are very capable. You write very well: many great 'functional-style programmers' like you have nicely written blogs filled with sacks of good thoughts and ideas.

However, when I look around I rarely see any results of your work."

It seems his argument is that there is some evolution at work in the marketplace. Instead of arguing the "bestness" of language X or Y, simply look around and see what is thriving and what isn't. That would be a great discussion to have here. I'd add more, but I think I'd sound like a troll. Good article.

<comment><USER19> If you're going to decide that an idea is right based on how many people agree or disagree with it, you have a problem: anyone who creates something new is tied for wrongest person ever.

Also, <http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't judge anything by how many people agree or disagree with it. I would simply acknowledge that a lot of people feel one way or the other.

Why not view programmers as customers, and languages as products? Are the customers buying the products that provide them the most value? I believe your argument is that they are not. Then why? Are they dumb? Misled? Controlled by people who don't know any better?

It just seems like there is some missed communication going on here. I know I'd like to see somebody who is an expert in both functional programming and some ornery imperative/OO language, like C++, make some observations. By expert, I mean several non-trivial deployed production systems in each language, not somebody who played with language A in college is now infatuated with language B.

As for me, I'll pick whatever language makes my startup get to market and adapt to customer's needs the fastest. I hear PG says that's probably one of the functional languages. I'm game. I can prototype and change a web site very quickly in several other languages (with the right tools), I'm always willing to see if something else will work better. But I can certainly also make the observation that there must be a lot more functional programmers who moved to imperative programming than the other way around. Surely they all can't have done so for the reasons I've outlined above.

<comment><USER16> Languages as products rings a bell:

[http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics...](http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics.html)

A lot of the 'value' in a language is its network of users. For every X users, depending on how much your average user is likely to contribute back (some constant C), there will be Y contributions in terms of libraries, help on lists, user groups, articles, things like that.

<comment><USER11> That was good, although I'm not sure I agree with all of the analysis.

Perhaps there is a difference between "language as a solution" and "language as a development platform". If you are looking for the best solution to problem X, choose the language best suited to solve the problem. If you are looking for the best development platform for problems X1..X1000, then the calculus comes out differently. Dunno.

<comment><USER16> My thoughts on that are that _most_ developers are not going to be proficient in more than 2 or 3 "full fledged" languages at a time, with some other things like SQL thrown in that they're ok at. So a lot of people really are looking to learn something that does a lot of things pretty well, or that at least doesn't fail horribly at anything.

More here: [http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages- wor...](http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages-worst-case- vs-average)

<comment><USER11> Makes sense to me.

I think if you strip aside the emotional reasoning that's going on, some languages naturally fit with some people more than others. Thinking in terms of functional decomp and association is just different than thinking in terms of objects. Some people build their own "language within a language" each time they solve something. Some people just want a language that is easy to find help for on the internet. Perhaps the trick is to identify which of those paradigms best fits your long-term goals for your both you and your problem.

I once interviewed a guy with a bunch of different languages on his resume. "So which do you like best?" I asked. He responded, "Java". I said, "Why's that?" He said "Because when I hit the compile button most of the time it just runs."

I thought that was a good answer.

<comment><USER16> > some languages naturally fit with some people more than others

Precisely! Because, in the end, languages are for people, and people are fickle and weird, and often irrational.

I think there _are_ some things that make some languages more or less objectively better for some tasks, but like anything that revolves around people, it's often not so clear cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> awesome post. flame me. i think PG is one of the smartest people in Web 2.0, but I'm not drinking the lisp koolaid. I write in descendants of c - C++, C# and php.

<comment><USER21> I won't flame you -- I agree that it's pointless to bash C programmers. However, you should note that C# is mainly a descendent of Java. When you use it you've been dragged about halfway to Lisp, even though you get to keep your curly braces and semicolons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why this post isn't getting any love?

<comment><USER6> I didn't vote it up mostly because I didn't feel strongly one way or the other about it. It's unclear whether the author really understands why C was chosen for many of the apps he lists as evidence that C programmers deserve respect.

<comment><USER22> This is why I didn't vote it up. The blog post makes a weak argument in support of C; namely, most foundational code is programmed in it. If you go back through computer eras, you could craft a similar argument for each of the dominant languages of the time (including assembly). I agree with Goladus that the author never says why C is appropriate or best for some of those apps he cites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lousy troll.</comment>


Show HN: Www.rlog.io query high volume of flat files using SQL or web API - <AUTHOR> http://www.rlog.io <comment><USER2> First, congrats on launching!

Second, to give your idea a change to take off, i'd guess that you need to:

\- Bring the pricing to realistic level; You are asking for Splunk level monies for beta quality side project. $500 per month for 1m records is just really steep.

\- Have clear messaging why your best-effort schema inference + sql queries from flat files would be superior to standard inverted index + full text search approach.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN community, today I have shipped www.rlog.io , it's a side project I have been working on lately, I guess now I qualify as an Indie Hacker :). If you find the idea worthwhile - or you have any feedback - please let me know. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the idea and I think there might be a lot of demand for this kind of stuff. Did you already do consulting work for customers with this kind of problem? That would be a great way to kick-start the business.</comment>


Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/ <comment><USER2> Kathryn Gould, the real author of the post was one of my mentors. She was one of the first woman VC's in the valley and hated being reminded of it. She said she wanted to be known as one of the best VC's - period - and she was. Her commencement speech at the University of Chicago is worth a read. [https://steveblank.com/2014/08/05/pioneering-women-in- ventur...](https://steveblank.com/2014/08/05/pioneering-women-in-venture- capital-kathryn-gould/) She passed on way too early in 2015.

<comment><USER3> _It's Not the Calls You Take, It's the Calls You Make One of my sayings

You are the creator of your destiny. In whatever business you're in, there is always so much coming at you that you can stay insanely busy just responding. Don't do that. Always think about what is your agenda, what do you want to make happen, what do you want the future to look like. This is not so easy._

I think this is a powerful idea. I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I think more than men typically are, women get socialized to respond to other people rather than setting their own agenda in this way, and it consigns us to servile roles, even if we are very talented.

She was apparently 65:

[https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2016/01/05/kathryn- gould-v...](https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2016/01/05/kathryn-gould- venture-capitalist-and-university-trustee-1950-2015)

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/26/r-i-p-kathyrn-gould-vc- pio...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/26/r-i-p-kathyrn-gould-vc-pioneer- straight-shooter-lover-of-curse-words/)

To my surprise, I can find no Wikipedia article about her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time there's a post like this, young entrepreneurs in the valley tend to ignore the uncomfortable advice like "come to appreciate the sales culture" and idolize "be ruthless" and often interpret it as "be an asshole, all the time".

Also, just because some personality traits worked for a certain place, time, and cultural period, doesn't mean it's applicable to the industry today.

<comment><USER5> I laughed when I read that Ellison often said, "It's not enough to win—all others must fail."

Once, in the early days of the field of synthetic biology, I asked my mentor George Church why he collaborated with so many people who weren't obviously doing the highest caliber work. He replied, "When you're involved in starting a new field, often it's not enough to succeed by yourself. Sometimes you also have to help others not fail."

<comment><USER6> "It's not enough to win—all others must fail."

Because of the way Mr. Ellison been conducting himself business-wise, there is a saying in the Valley: "I would love to live a life as Larry Ellison, but heck I would not want to die as Larry Ellison".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well this anthropomorphizes the heck out of the lawnmower.

<comment> joatmon-snoo It's one of those uncomfortable truths. It's hard to deny that the lawnmower is good at what it does, because it _is_ , and has been doing it for a long time.

Also probably responsible for many decades of lost progress, though.

For those that don't get the lawnmower reference: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246)

<comment><USER8> tl;dr Oracle is not a person. It is a unthinking, unfeeling machine. Treat it appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Larry Ellison has a lot to teach business people today. I'm willing to concede it might not be that he is a genius, but simply because he's from an older generation and has practices that are mostly ignored now.

1). The influence of Japanese culture on Ellison: in a world of Agile ironically everyone seems to miss how incredibly beautiful Japanese philosophy and literature is. In an age of "authenticity" and emotional excess, the "Book of Five Rings", by a 17th century Samurai, is eerily relevant today.

2). Destruction, not profit: I actually like this quote. When I first heard it I rolled my eyes, but if you watch this video Larry Ellison never talks about profit or EBITDA or any bullshit like that. When people think of destruction and failure, they think of Microsoft in the 90's, but really it's more two-way than that. I think this philosophy is very motivational in the sense that Time Warner Cable must be destroyed, Pfizer must be destroyed, Equifax must be destroyed, etc.

3). Steve Jobs: Ellison and Steve Jobs first met when Ellison went over to complain to Steve about his peacocks making noises in the morning. After that they become friends for the next 30 years, and Oracle had a plan in place to buy Apple and reinstall Jobs in 1995. I wish Ellison had more Steve Jobs in- him when upgrading Oracle products, but at least he could see the success of Jobs.

EDIT: I mention a video in one of my comments. For that part I wasn't referring to the audio interview posted above, but this: [https://youtu.be/thRAjlyCfKE](https://youtu.be/thRAjlyCfKE)

<comment><USER10> This seems a bit of a puzzling list...

1) What specifically of Japanese philosophy informs Ellison's approach? What has either Ellison or Japanese philosophy to do with agile or its complement? What is the meaning of "emotional excess"?

2) Why would one think of "Microsoft in the 90s" together with "destruction and failure"? The 90s were an incredibly successful time for Microsoft. Why must TWC, Pfizer, et al., be destroyed? Because some folks don't like large, dominant, somewhat pathological organizations?

3) "Upgrading Oracle's products"\--does this happen? Isn't Oracle's approach the the diametrical opposite of a consumer hardware company that sells on product strength and style?

<comment><USER11> Can't answer all of them but a few thoughts: 1) Agile methodology was essentially developed by Toyota and its roots are inspired by Japanese philosophy 2) Microsoft's main philosophy at the time was essentially to "destroy" all competition in order to remain a monopoly. Regarding TWC, Pfizer, Equifax, strong arguments can be made that they are very bad for consumers, either rent-seeking monopoly (TWC thanks to owning large parts of physical network), attempt to make more money by keeping consumers sick (Pfizer), or plain fraud (Equifax). If a startup can provide the same or better services without the harm, it can destroy these parasitic companies, benefitting both the entrepeneur and the consumer. 3) Sure Consumer (Apple) and Enterprise (Oracle) product strategies are different but I wouldn't say they are diametrical opposites..in the end both Oracle and Apple are in the business of maximizing sales of technology products. Ellison sometimes appeared to lack the visionary aspect of Jobs when it comes to upgrading products, i.e. when he said at a conference that cloud is just hyped B.S. (I think it was 4-5 years ago), then have spent last few years trying to catch up to the competition. [http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/he-said- what-5-things-la...](http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/he-said- what-5-things-larry-ellison-actually-said-about-cloud-4563323/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That photo from 1978 is quite possibly the most explicit portrait of nerdom ever. It makes Comicon look like a frat party. I have never seen anything so completely nerdy.

<comment><USER13> I think this one beats that: [http://www.newsweek.pl/g/crop/0/-1050/newsweek/6360443584828...](http://www.newsweek.pl/g/crop/0/-1050/newsweek/636044358482852449.png)

It's a photo of four young (in the 90-ties) Polish algorithmic contests competitors, chilling out.

<comment><USER14> Oh man. I haven't seen that in a long, long time. It used to be a popular meme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you like this story, you can continue the story with "Softwar" a book about Oracle and Larry Ellison in quite the same tone.

</comment><comment><USER16> Actors wear eye makeup in theatre, so their eyes are visible from the back row. "It's not enough to win—all others must fail." seems to be a similar overthetop way to commumicate a message company-wide. Similar might work for communicating to potential customers...

When Pracle was a startup, they beat IBM to market with a database that used IBM's idea (Codd's relational algebra), and IBM's query language (SQL)... which is one of the few (only?) technologies still dominating almost 4 decades later. Typically, in software, 10 years is pretty good.

So, I think he had excellent foresight into how important SQL could be.

All that said, I was horrified when Oracle bought sun (amd java). I personally prefer their hippy-like approach of free open standards... but I have to acknowledge the merits that Ellison did have.

</comment><comment><USER17> If anyone wants to read more about Ellision, you should read

The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison

[https://www.amazon.com/Difference-Between-God-Larry- Ellison/...](https://www.amazon.com/Difference-Between-God-Larry- Ellison/dp/0060008768/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505737451&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=why+god+is+not+larry)

</comment><comment><USER18> [https://youtu.be/bNfAAQUQ_54?t=16m30s](https://youtu.be/bNfAAQUQ_54?t=16m30s)

</comment><comment><USER19> _Larry always had a 10-year technical vision_

Is that harder to do now than back in the 1980s? The pace of technological development has accelerated, and it's so hard to predict the standards and platforms and business needs that will arise 5 years from now, let alone 10.

<comment><USER20> Those 1980's were quite messy too. Larry picked a robust solution (SQL) to build upon, something the market desperately needed and he somehow grasped it better in the smoke and noise of the day. Of course this is not the only ingredient for them to rise above the heap. The company I worked at that time was a Sybase shop and Sybase SQL performed so much better than Oracle then. An ability to sell aggressively, staying power in improving a good technical vision, etc. is also needed just as it is today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's like watching fish rot.

</comment><comment><USER22> Would anyone here honestly be excited to work for Oracle?

<comment><USER23> In 1982? Yes.

<comment><USER24> If for some reason I would have gotten such a job, or a similar one working close to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the early days, I don't think I would have lasted. Larry, Steve and Bill were all extremely driven and very high- strung guys with nasty habits of treating those around them like shit.

Somewhere along the way I would have gotten chewed out over something I considered either a good-enough solution or an understandable oversight. First time, no problem. High standards, yes sir, right away sir. But the second? And the third? At some point I would have decided that life's too short to be treated like shit by a maniac, and left for some more conventional job.</comment></comment></comment>


You need to know about the Matthews Correlation Coefficient - <AUTHOR> https://lettier.github.io/posts/2016-08-05-matthews-correlation-coefficient.html <comment><USER2> This is a nice demonstration of the MCC, which I haven't used much personally and is definitely now on my radar. An intuitive explanation of the formula would have been nice though.</comment>


Calendar. Not To-Do Lists: Viewing Time as Space - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usejournal.com/calendar-in-stead-of-to-do-lists-9ada86a512dd <comment><USER2> This blog post is utterly overwhelming.

"Become as efficient as I am – just follow these 100 easy steps!"</comment>