Many gifted children fail academically - <AUTHOR> http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news-digest/many-gifted-children-fail-academically.html <comment><USER2> That seems right. I think that a lot of the educational curriculum is just targeted to the average, so if you are smarter, it can just all seem incredibly boring.

One example which really pissed me off when i was a student is how so many math classes in college base a huge portion of your final grade on tons of mind numbing homework. This of course is targeted to the average idiot: the university has figured out that most students have trouble with math and in order to avoid high failing grades they create homework which is a way for people to get points toward their grade by solving the same simple problem over and over and over again. And of course you do not need to understand the material to do the homework, because if there is a problem you cannot do you can just ask the TA, etc. Thus, they replace true understanding with memorisation and dull grinding work. Of course most smart people I knew would more or less blow off the homework and just ace the tests, and thus they would often end up getting a B- even though they probably understood the material better than anyone else.

<comment><USER3> I hate "me too" posts, but when I saw what you wrote I really did want to give you more than one "upvote". I'm a mathematics (and computer science) major at a large, middle of the road university and I can say my experience has been exactly this. I gave my full rant in another comment ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1312043> ). Basically, real mathematics takes a lot of mental resources, so in order to appeal to the masses universities have to make the material mind-numbingly stupid. Remember: it would be unacceptable to large corporations if only 1% of the current engineering graduates were graduating, regardless of how much smarter that smaller group would be.

> Of course most smart people I knew would more or less blow off the homework > and just ace the tests, and thus they would often end up getting a B- even > though they probably understood the material better than anyone else.

My Calculus II class graded mostly on the stupid homework (from James Stewart's book, no less) and _attendance_!

Unless you care enough to work hard in highschool and have enough money to go to a school like MIT, "higher" education is a huge joke.

<comment><USER4> MIT is free if your parents make less than $75k/year.

<comment><USER3> If I had known that, I would have actually tried in highschool.

<comment><USER4> That's why I'm trying to spread the word. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tested very highly in grade school and was invited to take part in a gifted student program. I didn't have a chance to enroll however, as my family moved that summer. After that I started doing very poorly in school, mostly because I just stopped doing any of the work which I considered pointless busy work. I was both bored and lazy.

In high school I started skipping classes and found refuge in the back of the school library. Later I became bold enough to leave campus all together. I would take the bus to the local university where I would pretend to be a student. I mostly hung out in an isolated area of the 'terminal room' where I would log in to my various hacked student accounts and work on programming projects. I dropped out of high school my sophomore year. I spent some time at same university studying computer science as a non-matriculated student before leaving to join the tech industry where I've been ever since.

While I feel I've been reasonably successful in life, I am an academic failure. My high school GPA was I believe 0.62. I have never bothered to earn a GED.

<comment><USER6> Wow. I imagine I could have ended up very much in the same situation as you had things gone somewhat differently.

I would highly recommend earning a GED, by the way. Also, I think you might be capable of being more than merely "reasonably" successful if you put in the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of this resonated with me.

There is a hidden assumption, however, that somehow a gifted child is failing if they do not get some post-grad education. Lots of gifted people become autodidacts. I would be more interested in gifted people who gave up on learning than I would be gifted people who didn't complete some formal education system.

The title is correct. The value system underlying the study is debatable.

<comment><USER8> > _"The title is correct."_

Perhaps a modification would be appropriate:

 _Many gifted children fail at the commonly accepted academic standards._

The value of the commonly accepted academic standards is debatable.

Given my IQ, I could be considered a failure because I stopped with a Masters instead of finishing a PhD. I might be considered a _huge_ failure because I've devoted myself to raising my son (and learning lots of interesting things along the way) rather than to a technical career. But I'm not a failure, I'm simply succeeding on a different path from the expected one.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I might be considered a huge failure because I've devoted myself to raising my son (and learning lots of interesting things along the way) rather than to a technical career._

Not by me. I've been following much the same path. Learning more about my children's interests has helped prepare me for a more challenging career now that my children are growing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gifted students fail because the system is setup for hard work, not intelligence (or results).

I went to a special high school (Illinois Math & Science Academy). It was very difficult and very engaging; I learned a lot and enjoyed every day.

Taking hard classes, though, is not good for college -- I was mostly a B student (but in things like number theory, linear algebra, electricity & magnetism), and was being compared against the A students from average high schools when it came to college admissions. The result was that I didn't get in anywhere really great, went to an average school, and was so bored that I basically failed out. (Technically, I withdrew without credit after the second semester. The first semester was great, because I took classes that I wanted to take instead of "required classes", including DJB's UNIX security course. If every class was like that, I would have never wanted to leave college. But sadly, most classes involved little more than showing up and reading 1000 pages of boring books.)

If the college classes had been more interesting than kindergarten, I would have gone... but the reality was that the professors didn't speak English, the students didn't speak English, and I already knew everything they were teaching me anyway. It wasn't going to work. It depressed me, so I had to leave.

The good news is that once you get out of academia and into the real world, the odds shift very greatly in favor of the gifted. Nobody cares how hard you work, they care that you solve their problems. Seems like every year, a new job offer comes around that wants to double my salary -- not exactly what the academic establishment would say about long-haired hippies that get up at noon and dropped out of college.

But the programming world is an odd one :)

<comment><USER10> _If the college classes had been more interesting than kindergarten, I would have gone... but the reality was that the professors didn't speak English, the students didn't speak English, and I already knew everything they were teaching me anyway. It wasn't going to work. It depressed me, so I had to leave._

There is being gifted, and being arrogant (and young?). It's hard to tell them apart when reading comments on HN. How do we know if really you knew those thousands of pages already, or if you only thought your knew them.

<comment><USER9> Why would I tell you I knew them if I didn't know I knew them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was considered "gifted" throughout elementary school. Around the beginning of high school I put my mind to work—and realized that as long as I continued to _pass_ , no one was going to look at my _high-school_ marks besides university acceptance committees. Further, it was both easier and cheaper to attend Low-Status Community College A, get a high CGPA, and use that to enter/finish at High-Status University B by course transfer, than it would be to try to be accepted by B from the start, given that the first few undergraduate years of A and B are basically the same (there's really a limit to how much you can learn in a Calculus I course, no matter how well the teacher is being paid or how many grants they've received.)

I promptly stopped being "gifted." (That is to say, I invested much, _much_ less than my full effort in anything asked of me from that point on.)

<comment><USER12> Things I wish I had known when I was younger...

The current education system is essentially a massive gift to people* who are willing to make the most of it.

You get a ton of free time which you can use on any project you like. People (in education, business and especially government) are willing to put in a huge amount of time and effort to help you if you ask. Any (business) mistakes you make, even quite serious ones, are treated with leniency and there is no stigma to failing and starting over.

For a good portion of that time trivia such as cooking and cleaning can be entirely delegated to someone else, provided you are engaged on a venture that can be described in a way that makes it meet with parental approval.

The only thing you have to do to stay in this paradise of self-determined education and exploration is to turn up to some classes (40 hours a week! that's hardly a full work load) and occasionally pole vault over a final exam. If you really are so smart you should be able to do that with ease.

Frankly I think that people who think that the current educational system let them down probably failed to hack it to their best advantage. I know I didn't take full advantage of it, but I acknowledge that it was my problem and not the fault of the system.

*At least, people with parents willing to help you work out how to pay the bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my experience, school was incredibly boring for the most part. I'm far better at teaching myself than other people are at teaching me.

<comment><USER14> Figuring things out on your own takes longer than having someone simply tell you what they already know. Learning alone is often reinventing the wheel. Sometimes that is good for you, sometimes it isn't.

I think the issue here is that average teachers aren't good at teaching above- average students. What you need is an above-average teacher. Someone on your level, but older and wiser.

Also, you can find teachers outside of schools. I consider a few of my friends to be mentors. Older, wiser people are very much worth paying a great deal of attention to.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but figuring things out on your own are lessons that stay for a lifetime. Having someone tell you stuff is easy come, easy gone.

Learning by doing is not all bad, even if it is a bit slower.

<comment><USER6> Learning on your own is not necessarily significantly different than studying, especially in the modern day of omni-available media (e.g. wikipedia).

Many years ago when I was in high school (before the web) I discovered that reading things like national geographic and scientific american on my own time was a perfectly adequate and often superior replacement to a full year long course in biology (which I didn't take and yet still managed to be at the very top of my class in AP biology). And I didn't start to outstrip my home grown knowledge of particle physics until I started taking 400 level Chemistry courses in college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's because the school system, and especially the social system embedded in it, fails us thoroughly. As far as I could tell, it's actually designed to discourage gifted children from realizing their potential.

</comment><comment><USER17> For these I usually casually nod, but it's actually a bigger problem than I'd normally like to admit.

I have read seriously less books than is healthy and have memorised as little as humanly possible from a young age on the logic that I should simply compensate with creating enough intelligence to work it out (no joking).

Didn't start learning any reactions in science until very late on the basis that we couldn't _possibly_ have to memorise all reactions that could be made, therefore why learn just a few arbitrary ones in class.

Scored a standard pass in mathematics at 16, naturally went into the standard mathematics class for the next two years instead of the advanced class. Found the mathematics more interesting at this level (though still quite arbitrary) and scored a high grade. The point isn't that I scored high, but that I could've taken the more interesting further mathematics, had I taken an interest in mindless long division methods earlier on.

The sad part is that I'm not even the smartest guy in the room, I'm just so damn insistent on doing things logically.

Anyway, I'm posting this anonymously because it's more than I'd like to admit to, but am throwing it out there in case anyone else has taken this style of learning to such absurd levels (and I'll re-iterate, I'm not blowing my trumpet, I'm not especially smart).

<comment><USER18> I hear you. I've always insisted on figuring things out instead of memorizing them.

Here's an anecdote: back at high school, my class was told to write all of the basic sine-cosine formulae 100 times. The homework was worth 5 marks. I found I could derive most formulae myself, so I didn't do the homework. The result? Not only did I lose 5 marks, I also scored badly on the test because it was rigged. You could only solve the test questions if you had crammed every one of those trigonometric identities. (I did manage to solve most of those questions, but deriving the formulae from scratch took time. The test consisted of a lot of questions, each of which was worth very few marks.)

This has happened to me over and over in the past four years, in both high school and college. And no, I'm not "gifted". I'm just an average student who likes to understand how things work.

<comment><USER19> The two aren't mutually exclusive. Just because you understand how to derive a formula doesn't mean that it's not useful to memorize it.

<comment><USER18> Aye. That is what I do these days. But my long term retention rate for math formulae is nearly zero.

I just came home from a math exam. During the exam, I could recall almost every formula I had crammed last night. By tonight, I'll forget nearly half of them. In two weeks, I'll only remember 10% of the stuff I learned, and that too merely because some of those formulae were strikingly obvious or wonderfully symmetrical.

I guess I just have a terrible memory.

<comment><USER20> You're not alone in this department. Repetition is the key.

More: <http://www.supermemo.com/english/princip.htm> (the whole site is pretty decent at explaining the process of learning)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can be a stealth failure, too, by breezing through Podunk University instead of challenging yourself. Probably requires low personal/family-imposed aspirations to go unquestioned.

<comment><USER22> Going to Podunk University has little to do with challenging yourself. Most people (including "smart" people) would likely be better off taking a free ride at Podunk U than an $80K+ degree at a "prestigious" private school.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much of an academic difference do you think is WORTH a difference in out- of-pocket cost? Some people take out loans to study at a particular college, viewing attending that college as an "investment." (My oldest son, having just had that choice, chose to attend our state flagship university. He essentially will be paid to study at State U.) Is it reasonable to suppose that some brand names of colleges (even if not all) might be worth more up-front expense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I understand that they're using a specific definition of gifted in the article (mental age > 1 + physical age), but the tone still bothers me. If a child is gifted, and does not succeed, does that not mean they are not gifted? Or, to phrase it as a solvable problem, doesn't this mean our metrics for determining success at an early age are flawed?

We've known for a long time that IQ does not guarantee success at any level in life, so I'm not sure why it is a surprise when high-IQ children do not come out on top. Even worse, they don't explain how they calculate mental age, and why this should translate to success throughout the school years.

The thesis here ("Initially promising children often underperform") might be correct, but there is nothing in the methodology that supports this point. It seems too fluffy and full of assumptions to take seriously.

<comment><USER24> _"If a child is gifted, and does not succeed, does that not mean they are not gifted? "_

It depends on your definition of success. Most people would not define success in life by their GPA. This article is telling us that high-iq children are not _academically_ successful (as measured by their school grades).

 _Even worse, they don't explain how they calculate mental age_

"Mental age" can be synonymous with IQ. I assume thats how the author of the article was using the phrase. Some variations of IQ tests present IQ as a ratio of mental age over chronological age, especially useful for testing children who are expected to be underdeveloped compared to an adult.

<comment><USER23> Then there seems to be something missing here. I agree -- academics is only one area of success. But if gifted does not correlate with academic success, what kind of success are they talking about? Marking certain kids as gifted is a useless exercise unless that information actually translates into some kind -- any kind -- of success. If there is no predictive power to the test, then, at best, the test is useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reflects my own personal experience. Despite participating in the occasional extra-curricular gifted student program and a voracious appetite for knowledge I did relatively poorly in school up through middle school. I was horrible at completing homework or projects regularly. Had one or another of various factors (such as my parents, my personality, my group of friends, etc.) been different there's a very significant and non-zero chance that I would have dropped out of school before completing high-school (and a very real chance of becoming a juvenile delinquent as well).

Instead, at some point during my freshman year in high school while I was contemplating why I had fallen onto the average track for english and science (and hating the boredom of it) I said to myself "fuck this" and decided to do something about it, working the system as hard as I could to my advantage and putting in a significant amount of personal effort. Ultimately I graduated as one of the top students in my high school (after completing 7 AP courses) and I went on to achieve a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics only 2 years later.

However, not every student is lucky enough to have the parents, school system, etc. that I had. And not every student has the personality or the moment of epiphany to turn things around. A lot of gifted students find themselves at odds with a school system that increasingly turns its backs not just on gifted students but on teaching itself. I don't find it shocking in the least that so many gifted students are ill served by the modern school system and find themselves at odds with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Many gifted children are failed academically.

</comment><comment><USER26> There seems to be an assumption that academic success leads to successes in life in general; and it's assumed that the converse is also true. I don't think that this is necessarily true.

Some people fail academically but feel that they have good lives later on, and I'm sure there are academic successes (however you define "academic success") that end up living lives they never wanted.

Some experiences (or often, failures) outside the sheltered educational environment might just teach some lessons that could lead to success.

Disclaimer: not saying we shouldn't try and nurture the gifted, but formal education isn't the be all and end all in life.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm an example of that. Started school a year earlier, but could start at 3rd grade (didn't because of emotional development worries etc). Everything was easy, nothing required any heavy work. Until I started university. Now everything is at reasonably high level, but I'm not used to studying. But still, I can get by on low grades, so that's what I'm doing. No one will look at them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER28> My grudge with this line of thinking is it encourages one to stay a failure while considering themselves an unrecognized genius.

<comment><USER29> Amen, brother !!

I have asked a lot of people in my life: Every single person I meet consider itself above the means!!, and when things don't work as they want, they make excuses.

It is so easy to blame the school,college, university system and don't accept personal responsibility. I met people with enormous success in live(social, economical, and personal) and they worked a lot in what makes them special before getting results.

Of course, you need to be special in something, like good on math or writing, but then you need to work in this area. It takes risk.

I recommend "the tipping point" if you are interested on this area, it talks about the creator of IQ test and its experiences(he tried to prove that "gifted children" would success in live, so he made a study in California and the people that won Nobel prices were dismissed as non gifted by him when they were children).

<comment><AUTHOR> The two subsequent Nobel Prize winners who were passed over by the Terman longitudinal study because their childhood IQ scores were too low were William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, both Nobel laureates in physics. No student included in the Terman study ever won a Nobel Prize.

[http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study- Gift...](http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study- Gifted/dp/0316788902)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll second the opinions of the people who felt lost in the college. I work since I finished high school, and the best colleges in Brazil require full dedication, so no time to work. I regret the fact that I decided for continuing my career instead of dedicating myself to get into a public college, right now I just can't do that, because I'm 22 and would have to spend an extra year working on the admission exam preparation.

So now I have to pay for whatever college I can afford, in order to get a degree ASAP. And man, they are totally tedious, not to say stupid considering it's a college class. What's left for me is work hard on my Masters once I get my Comp. Sci. degree, this time in a good institution, hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER31> I failed academically, does it mean I'm a gifted child

</comment><comment><USER32> Getting an IQ test also informs the child that their "gifted", meaning that they are less likely to put in the same effort later on as their peers assuming that their superior intellect will get them across the line.

Sure there are problems with the education system, but whatever path you take I think you need to show some intelligence in knowing what you need to do to achieve what you want. If you do want a degree, follow the rules of the degree, it may not be the best education, but it's what you want. If you don't, well great go that way. Sometimes you have to work within the limitations of the system to get to your goal.

Needing a degree as a tick off prerequisite for some jobs is of course another problem entirely.

<comment><USER33> Children whom underperform are also IQ tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've never seen such a concise description of my academic life.

</comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps Intelligence never did define success. Perhaps it was this unrelated _determination_ that drove people to succeed regardless of their graded abilities.

</comment><comment><USER36> > _Despite their high levels of curiosity and hunger for learning, many of > these children lag when it comes to writing. "For these children, > psychomotor development doesn't develop at the same pace," says co- > researcher Cassandre Bélanger-Legault. "This is sometimes at the root of > academic failure."_

I found this bit new and interesting. Does anyone know about any more research or info on this topic (psychomotor)?

<comment><USER37> I don't know specifically about this, but we've researched neurodevelopmental delay therapy (which asserts that many issues are caused by the delay of the proper development of certain brain functions).

[http://www.neurodevelopmentaltherapy.ie/whatisdevelopmentald...](http://www.neurodevelopmentaltherapy.ie/whatisdevelopmentaldelay.html)

The therapist we talked to noted that many very smart kids who have delay issues (which may manifest themselves as "simple" eye tracking or gross motor skills issues) will eventually struggle academically because they reach a point where their brains can no longer compensate, and generally this manifests itself with writing issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> School was painfully slow for me. Especially with math.

I never used the textbooks for my math classes, and never did my homework. I would never show up for the classes, except for chapter tests and finals. I used cliffs notes. I only looked over the material for the test during the break before the class, and I always scored highly.

This school system really wore down on me. I just didn't give a crap at all, and my GPA suffered.

</comment><comment><USER39> Alternate explanation:

We suck at telling who is _actually_ gifted from early performance.

See ch. 5 of _Nurtureshock_ : "The Search For Intelligent Life in Kindergarten"

<comment><USER40> It depends how you define 'gifted'.

If you define 'gifted' to mean someone who is adept at manipulating the system and/or playing within the system, an IQ test or other aptitude tests might not be the best metric.

I interpret 'gifted' to mean 'inherent intelligence, critical reasoning skills, and curiosity'. I believe these things, for the most part, are completely unnecessary if one desires a successful academic career.

<comment><USER39> That might be how you define gifted, but if that's the case, then it would be erroneous for you to draw any conclusions about the "gifted" based on these data.

These data are based on standardized testing of young children. _Nurtureshock_ makes the argument that because performance on these tests is a bad predictor of later success, early testing and tracking are doing children a disservice.

This article makes the assumption that its the _latter education_ that's flawed, and that the tests are accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The other problem is that not all teachers are able to handle a class full of normal or even problem children AND meet the needs of a gifted student.

The teacher spends their time dealing with majority of the class leaving little challenge for the student who needs more.

</comment><comment><USER42> Forget gifted. Genius = 99% hardwork 1% smart.

</comment><comment><USER43> in my high school, sci, math, and english classes were streamed, putting brightest students together for accelerated learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> What was the most difficult mathematics class at your high school? At what grade level did its students take that class? How many students were enrolled in that class?

<comment><USER44> I'm not the parent commenter, but where I went we had up through multi- variable calc and linear algebra, though really I thought the toughest was Prob/Stat in HS but that's probably because the teacher wasn't very good at motivating students. P/S was required on the 'accelerated' track- the accelerated track prepped you to take the BC Calc AP exam which will test you out of Calc and Calc 2. The Multivariable and Linear classes were both elective credits and only half a year each, and also there were no AP tests so you had to convince your college to let you test out of them on your own (though I can't imagine anyone had any problems with that). Both those courses had maybe a dozen kids in them (in a class of 400ish), and it was taught by the same teacher we had for Calc and Pre-Calc our Junior year.

Truly the best teacher I ever had without any doubt, had a passion for the math, the students, the teaching, and did an amazing job motivating a few of us that were used to doing the bare minimum and gaming the system (which as has been noted is what ends up happening to a lot of 'gifted' students). If only all our teachers (or hell, most) had half (or a quarter) the passion she had, our schools probably wouldn't be failing like they are. Not to take anything away from the great teachers out there, they exist, but the system just drives away the best ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Signs you might be in "Survival Mode" - <AUTHOR> http://5whys.com/blog/signs-you-might-be-in-survival-mode.html <comment><USER2> Ever seen those web adverts that list a few generic health problems and ask you to 'click here', or read a horoscope that makes claims almost anyone can relate to?

So how is this different? Why so many upvotes...really, this is just more spam - is it not?

<comment><USER3> I think it's either (a) a voting ring, or (b) the changing demographic here. Ignoring (a) (because we can't prove/disprove as we aren't admins/mods), we can discuss (b).

5-7 years ago, this place was "mostly founders and early employees". This would've likely been flagged or, at best, only received a few upvotes. Today, I suspect its 10% "founders and early employees" and 90% "other". This is likely interesting to the "other" demographic - first they've seen it, or it may resonate with them because it's very negative focused and they see themselves in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a quicker method of identifying "survival mode": just ask your accounting/finance officer about your cash flow for the last quarter and the projection for the next.

If your company isn't able to cover its burn rate and keep some cash for these two things:

1\. Setting up a growth plan (more revenue), or 2\. Continuing pivoting until you find something that allows you to do 1 ...

... you're in survival mode.

In survival mode, the only move is to lower your metabolic rate or burn rate. Much like a body would shut down non-critical functions just to "survive" so too will the company need to eliminate non-critical expenses. All this simply to buy more time for a eureka moment that will answer your growth question.

Tough as hell.

<comment><USER5> That's not quite a silver bullet definition for all scenarios.

Having worked for large organizations, where "money is no object", the reality of your scenario becomes distorted by the fact that you have to pander to the almighty overlords who control the purse strings. Suddenly everything becomes purely political, and success solely relies on entertaining the favor of powerful people (powerful individuals, with respect to the scope of the organization, and their capacity for making broad, sweeping decisions).

In very big organizations, there might be three or four degrees of separation, between you and your actual masters, the ones that your direct boss is beholden to. Your boss might meet directly with these _VEH-HEH-HERRRY_ important people maybe less than twice a year, but have direct orders handed down from them by their heralds on a weekly basis.

Such orders might come in the form of:

      In addition to your usual work load, make X work by next
      quarter with with Y people; We understand that you
      already have Y people, but your job now depends on making
      X work. Do not fail us.

I had a boss come back from a very short meeting like that, ashen and distraught. She left early for the day, and the next few months were a living hell for all of us. We did get X done successfully, and on time, but afterward I quickly drafted my resume, and took a hike.

With jobs at large companies and other forms of organizations and institutions, you might be completely disconnected from the cash flow situation. The reality may be that the organization, by most measures is actually nearly indestructible, and has existed since before you were born and is sure to exist long after you die, but as with any form of collective human effort, there is still a bottom line somewhere in the mix, and you might not have obvious clues as to how it expresses itself, other than the amount of stress your involvement inflicts upon you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Equally valid symptoms for having dysfunctional leadership.

<comment><USER7> Yes, nothing here that's really exclusive to survival mode projects. I've experienced all of these on projects that were well funded, but poorly run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This could also be read as - "Signs you might be in a startup"

<comment><USER9> I think just about every software company I've worked for exhibited most, if not all, of these traits. Two in particular:

Urgency

I've observed, on several occasions, at multiple companies, senior managers talking openly about deliberately instilling "a sense of constant urgency" into the team. I don't know if we were perceived as unmotivated (we were) or if there was some external threat coming that warranted urgency (debatable), or whether management just picked up on the "a sense of urgency" phrase from some HBS article (probably). Either way, the end result was this kind of "forced urgency" with motivational speeches about how we should all feel urgency about the company's success, and that every task assigned to everyone was always an emergency. Needless to say, it was a great place to work.

Reaction Mode

I've worked at very few software companies that seemed to have an actual long term plan AND were willing to stick to it. It's easier to "just do what the customers are asking for today and then change to do what they are asking for tomorrow". I've worked at companies that pretended to be selling a product, when, in reality, nobody wanted their product as-is and they would get roped into constantly doing custom engineering for VIP customers (bonus: every customer was a VIP customer). So, while the team would be ostensibly working on improving their core product, in reality, they were adding buzzers and lights that had little to do with the core function of the product, in order to react to what one or two customers wanted. The recent "agile" craze has not helped in this regard.

<comment><USER10> >> I've observed, on several occasions, at multiple companies, senior managers talking openly about deliberately instilling "a sense of constant urgency" into the team.

Holy crap, that's a terrible thing to do. But if senior management thinks like that, it would explain some stupid stuff I've seen in various companies...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a father with two young children. I matched all of those 8 points.

I think I've been in survival mode since the first child was born!

</comment><comment><USER12> All of these sound like symptoms of a total loss of control. Whether through poorly negotiated contract or necessity, you're in a position where decisions of any importance are taken out of your hands.

Not being the master of your own fate (edit: insomuch as you can choose what to work on and when to work) can be brutal for some people. I'm not at all suited for it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Since plenty of people here seem to have experience with this sort of thing ... I'm currently in a place where I can at least see 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 for me and 1 and 7 for others as well. Would it be wise to stay there or are those signs rather a sign that I should be looking somewhere else?

</comment><comment><USER14> Well said, describes where I'm at now. Many people associate these signs exclusively with "burnout" but my problem with that term and thought is that it feels "terminal"\-- meaning there is no fixing it apart from quitting and taking time off, finding a new idea/company you are passionate about and trying again.

I think it's common to be in this state without being what I'd call "burned out." If your management doesn't understand or support your team, and have undue expectations, that could easily put you in "survival mode."

</comment><comment><USER15> Living in survival mode past couple of years. It's beyond painful.

<comment><USER16> Me too. Maybe those who have doubts if they are in survival mode should also check if they are burnt out at the same time. To identify the problem is the first step solving it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome, short and sweet. I read this as "do the opposite of these if you want to be a good leader running a great organization."

</comment><comment><USER18> Okay. That's me right now. How to leave the survival mode in the long term? I involuntary slip into it again and it again...

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the main reasons is that the team is over committed. An important move is to draw a line in the sand. After that line, you will reestimate your current work to include learning and quality built in (lots of slack time). Until that line, figure out what you CAN finish, and only commit to that. Yes, this involves having a sincere talk with your peers and leaders, something we are usually shying away from doing, but is an important part of making everyone see the same reality that you see. It's not easy. It just works.

I write more about these at 5whys.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, let me pick everything negative that can be said about a working environment, put it in a post and then come up with a term for it. How about... survival mode! Great, post finished.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel exactly like this but regarding my studies at university

<comment><USER21> OK, a few suggestions (which you might be sick of hearing, but restating the basics can some times help)

1) Get the calendar for deadlines for assignments and dates for the exams for all the modules. Synthesise all the dates onto a single planner. Work out the order of priorities.

2) Make a time plan for the week and try to stick to it. The plan _must_ include breaks and (at least) a day off a week. Do things with other people in the day off and at certain times of day like meals.

3) Get topic lists for each module and check them off as you study those topics.

4) Find other people at about your 'level' of confidence in each module and try to buddy up with them for study periods in the library...

5) ...find a place to _study_ that isn't your own room/house/wherever. Libraries can be good, as you _have_ to get work done, but somewhere else helps as long as it is away from where you sleep (&c).

6) Reduce friction to getting started. Keep notes, study guides, any equipment and textbooks for each module organised. Pop them into your bag as you go off to the study location. Pack the night before if possible. Put the bookmarks to module Websites on your Web-browser tool bar. Use a password manager so you don't even need to authenticate.

7) Google The Pomodoro Method for the actual study time. The author has gone commercial now but there are summaries. Its easy.

Any good?

EDIT: 8) At the end of each study day, prepare the stuff you need for tomorrow. Try to find an easy task on whatever is on the time plan that will get you started (the Hemingway strategy).

<comment><USER18> For me this regularly fails at:

2) Make a time plan for the week and try to stick to it

It sounds so simple but is near impossible for me to do.

<comment><USER21> Is this because of work e.g. random shifts? because of family commitments? Or just time drifts?

If latter, then try planning just one session a day for now, but be definite about it. Google the Pomodoro Method.

Anyone else got any time plan mind tricks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I confirm almost all of the signs.

The state of urgency hasn't stopped my productivity completely but it certainly has slowed it down.

My fix for now is this:

STOP MULTITASKING, ONLY ONE TASK AT A TIME! (seriously!)

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought learning by isolation would be a way to enforce deep understanding, it turned exactly into what's described there. Time for a change.</comment>


Why are domain registrars such scamming bastards? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexmuir.com/2011/09/why-are-domain-registrars-such-scamming-bastards/

<comment><USER2> Low-to-no-value-added reselling is in general a tough business, and thus encourages scammy/spammy behavior.</comment>


76B opioid pills in 7 years. How pharma companies drowned US in drugs - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/76-billion-opioid-pills-in-7-years-how-pharma-companies-drowned-us-in-drugs <comment><USER2> It's a little unrelated to opioids, but increasing medicine prices is currently undermining the public health systems of Scandinavia to the point where we have to debate where to prioritise our funding. Do we really want to spend millions of dollars on people who have 6 months to live if it means children have to wait two years for knee surgery. Terrible, and that's with a national budget struggling after just a decade of out right immoral price hikes.

I'm typically not a "to the guillotine" guy, but I can't wait for the EU regulations on big pharma.

<comment><USER3> Sounds a lot like the struggles people have with medical triaging. When resources are limited sometimes you have to make a decision to remove care from someone, and it's tough. I don't think there's a way around it in today's world.

<comment><USER2> There is a way around it. Big pharma is still just a bunch of companies.

We could make 4000% price hikes on things like insulin illegal. We could set legal price limits on medicine. We could reform medicine patents. We could open research. We could even nationalise medicine production. And so on. I'm not suggesting that's what we do by the way, that's why I suggested EU regulations. The EU bureaucracy is much, much more apt at finding the right solutions than I am.

<comment><USER4> No. Do all that. (Maybe). Still resources are limited. Still if you had another $x billion you could save more lives. Still you have to weigh stuff like the cost of a hip replacement saving pain for old people against a long shot treatment for a terminally ill child. You can always do more. Someone has to miss out. Who? Why?

There's no way around it.

There can't be.

<comment><USER2> Except there was a way around it until medicine became so expensive that nation states stopped being able to afford it.

There will always be a debate on priorities, but it's gone from being about how long certain things could wait, to, who doesn't get treatment at all. The triage example of earlier is excellent, because war time is a time of scarce resources, and that's the state we're at. Not because the resources are actually scares, but because an immoral industry got way too greedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jeebus. I got oxycontin for a very bad cough coupled with pain from an oldmlung surgery. That shit is dangerous. One pill (20mg?) And I was pain free and half brain dead for half a day.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have a link to or a way to access the dataset? I couldn't see one in the article.</comment>


Show HN: How to create a simple chatroom with sentiment analysis in 5 mins - <AUTHOR> https://coderecipe.ai/architectures/34142257 <comment><AUTHOR> This is my first attempt gluing AWS's advance serverless platform with Google's advance Natural language API together. Traditionally creating a chatroom required a dedicated server that maintains and manages the websocket connection. API API Gateway's websocket API makes it easy so that you no longer need to do that. Any feedback would be greated appreciated!</comment>


How to find an apartment in San Francisco during the tech boom - <AUTHOR> http://jasonevanish.com/2012/05/20/sf-startup-survival-guide-how-to-find-an-apartment-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER3> Missing option: (11) work remotely and live wherever you want.

Red Hat's virtualization team is based all around the world, in offices but also many remotees. I'm one of them and I like nothing more than sitting in my cottage garden on a sunny day with a laptop and wifi connection. It's a great place to think.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I lived in the Bay Area for 10 years and while it's nice there, there are other places that are equally nice without the hassle of having to pay so much in rent. Think of it this way: Even if you cash out rather nicely from a startup (as I did), you _still_ won't be able to afford to buy a house outright unless you want to go back to work right away.

I left for Austin, TX and I truly love it here. I'm running a tech company here, too, and so far we haven't had any problems finding talent--even a Python developer!

I wrote an article about living outside of the Valley, and whether it's worth it for you, here: <http://www.erica.biz/2012/austin-vs-silicon-valley/> Nearly 2,000 people have read it, and there is some interesting discussion in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > He who hesitates, is lost.

I tried to be the super flexible tenant recently. I needed to move 200 miles and I found the PERFECT place (<http://imgur.com/a/XpksU>) so I contacted the letting agency and asked for a viewing, they gave me a date a couple of days later so I booked my train tickets. Day of the viewing I get a call that it's cancelled, that sucks but we can re-arrange, so we re-arrange for a few days later and I swallow the loss on my train tickets (about $150) and order some more (this time paying a premium for refundable tickets) and again they cancel, so I re-arrange (and get a ticket refund, yay!), this time the viewing is for a day later so the tickets I needed were going to be $400 for ordering so late and so I decide whatever I'll go first class; it's only $100 extra and I can work from the train. Next day I go to the station, collect my tickets and board the train: finally I'm going to get to view my new home! My heart was set on the apartment... anyway 10 minutes into the journey I get a call, the viewing is cancelled and the apartment has been withdrawn from the market and unless I'm willing to _buy_ it for $1m I can't live there... so I'm sitting in first class on a train using $500 tickets for no reason. Hurrah!

Anyway moral of the story is renting sucks and moving long distance also sucks, good article, next time I move a long distance I think I'll follow the advice and stay in the new place and look for apartments, much easier than travelling the entire distance frequently just to view.

</comment><comment><USER6> Renting in SOMA right now is crazy, and 1 brs in the heart of SOMA near 4th and King are going for over $3000/month. If cost is an issue, places like SOMA, PacHeights, etc, are not good choices because it's super expensive. The danger with renting in SOMA is that unless you're moving into an old apartment, there is no rent control. If rent prices go up next year, you could find yourself paying $500+/month more next year.

Nob Hill, etc, has terrible, terrible parking. I have a good friend that lives there that I no longer visit unless it's in the middle of the day on Saturday, because of the terrible parking, you could literally spend 1 hr looking for parking after 6pm. If parking is not an issue (no car or get a scooter), then it's a viable option, but not having a car in the Bay Area ends up being severely limiting.

There are plenty of other cost-effective places on the west side of SF that can go for less than half the price of SOMA. For someone new moving into the area, my advice would be to get a cheap single place in Outer Sunset with hopefully a short-term lease, and then once you meet more people, you can band together with people that you know well and rent a bigger apartment somewhere else in the city. Signing a lease with someone that you don't know has tremendous long-tail risk, so I would take the hit in terms of moving a bit further away when you first move to SF, and do a lot of due diligence and get to know the city and your potential roommates better.

Another viable option is to not live in the city, especially if you don't work in the city. Places along the peninsula are much cheaper, and if you do work in FiDi or SOMA it's probably more cost effective to rent a place outside of SF and Caltrain it in.

My own strategy is:

      1) Check Craigslist once an hour, or more depending on how much web surfing I'm doing.
      2) If I find a place in an area that I like, I immediately contact them and ask for a showing that day or as soon as possible.
      3) I come with all my documentation ready, including my checkbook.
      4) If I like the place, I immediately submit an application.
      5) Continue looking at other apartments, because they're no guarantee that I will get this one.

I've never personally heard of the law that says that you have to rent to the first qualified applicant, and it sounds unenforceable, so I wouldn't count on it. How do you determine who is "qualified"?

<comment><USER7> > There are plenty of other cost-effective places on the west side of SF that > can go for less than half the price of SOMA

Exactly! Look at where Muni and BART end up and then look at places to rent in those locations. West Portal, Glen Park, Noe Valley, etc. There are a lot of cool choices with public transportation if you start looking.

<comment><USER8> Friends don't let friends ride muni. I've ridden public transport all over the world and never been in physical danger on public transport before. Riding muni it happened multiple times in 16 months.

Not to mention it's slow, untimely, and crap.

<comment><USER9> I've ridden public transport all over the world as well, including in San Francisco and Oakland, and the only place I've ever felt even moderately uncomfortable was in Chicago. Muni does suck, but I've only got anecdotal reports that it's _unsafe_.

<comment><USER10> Well i rode MUNI a few days a week for 15 years becuase otherwise I'd get $300/week in parking tickets, but read last month's anecdotal stories in the Chron and Examiner

[https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+muni+bus+robbery&ie=u...](https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+muni+bus+robbery&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You might also want to consider living in Oakland instead of San Francisco and taking BART to the city to work. My rent is 1/3 less and my commute (20 minutes door-to-door) is much shorter than that of many of my colleagues who live in the city.

Oakland is a big, heterogeneous city, with really nice districts that offer great dining, bars, and the usual city trappings.

<comment><USER12> That sounds like a great way to get murdered (<http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/oakland/crime/>). What are some of the places that are better or should be avoided?

<comment><USER13> You're just as likely to be murdered in San Francisco, and statistics really don't mean shit except scaring people like you. The number of people being murdered in drug violence and other crimes has a very negligible impact on the probability of a mid-twenties software developer getting murdered.

It's extremely amusing how much people worry about being killed by thugs in places they've never been, when they're far more likely to be killed by a dumbass texting on 580.

<comment><USER12> Guess humor/sarcasm doesn't always come across when written. I lived in downtown Cleveland for a year or two and while Oakland has worse crime statistics it's probably not too much worse. There was someone murdered on my doorstep when I lived there, but I still generally felt safe. It is something to be cognizant of. Even in the good parts of town, I'd hesitate to be outside alone at night, which isn't a concern I have where I live now. And there are parts of town that I wouldn't venture into at all much like anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obviously there's a lot of demand in SOMA, but one suggestion to anyone thinking of living there: spend some time wandering around, both during the day and during the evening, and see if you like the vibe of the neighborhood (this advice holds true for any neighborhood, really). I say this because I lived in an area that seemed desirable — about 5 minutes away from the 4th & King Caltrain, at 4th and Brannan, and, while it didn't seem so bad at the time, in hindsight I've come to realize that I really wasn't very happy there.

It's very convenient for work, but it doesn't feel like a neighborhood at all. Everything seems to close around 8pm and most of your friends probably aren't going to be hanging out around there. Yes, there are a handful of cafes around and you can find a few blocks that are busier, but in general it just feels like a generic chunk of tall buildings — I found it pretty gloomy.

<comment><USER15> I couldn't agree more. SOMA is a terrible place to live if you're under 30 and want urban nightlife. SOMA has some cool places with a bit of character... District, 25 Lusk and 21st Amendment, but on the whole it feels either very sterile or very industrial. If I had it to do over again, I would have braved the 20 minute commute and lived in somewhere that had more culture... the haight, mission, pac heights or (gasp) marina.

<comment><USER16> There's always SW SOMA (11th st) which is quite different from 2nd/3rd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You put a lot of work into this article and wrote quite a few great tips when looking for a place to live in SF.

Unfortunately you undermined the entire post with your "immigrants" comment. In fact you made yourself look like a huge bigot. That sucks because it was otherwise well written and useful.

It's sad that this is going largely unnoticed by the rest of the comments on this post.

<comment><USER18> Haha. I hadn't realized that PC has come so far that you are no longer allowed to recognize or comment on immigrant neighborhoods.

There's lots of poor people and Spanish speaking people in the mission. This is good if you like Taquerias, bad if you dislike grime. If you don't fit in with homeless, hipster, or Latin culture, you will feel like an outsider. Some people may like it, some people may not. But if you don't like it, you are no longer allowed to say so!

I'm guessing that his offense is not embracing Latin culture. It is okay to dislike homeless culture, because everyone does, or hipster culture, since it is predominantly White. But you aren't allowed to dislike Latin culture, since it is non-European and therefore protected. Interesting.

<comment><USER19> Have you read the quote? Or are you assuming that all uses of the word "immigrant" are innocent and above reproach?

<comment><USER18> Oh, I get it. He's saying he doesn't want to live in a neighborhood where the only culture on offer is hipster, homeless, or Latin. And he's not allowed to think that, at least out loud, because Latin culture is non-White and therefore holy and infinitely lovable. He is guilty of crimethink.

<comment><USER19> As opposed to neighborhoods where the only culture on offer is American?

Also, "homeless" is not a culture.

Author is very obviously complaining about the _presence_ of hipsters, homeless folk... and, well, _immigrants_ , and seems to think that his aversion to such people is shared by many others. Judging by rent prices in the Mission and public opinion, this does not hold _any_ water whatsoever.

Author is entitled to think whatever he damn well wants, but we are also entitled to judge his commentary on their own merits. And please, don't come to this table with 1984-bullshit whenever people are inclined to call a duck a duck. We really ought to make a term for it like we have for Godwin.

<comment><USER18> I don't like to live in Spanish speaking neighborhoods because I don't speak Spanish. I enjoy the food and the low prices, I don't enjoy the culture. If you don't speak English in America, you tend to be poor and less educated, which means you and I will have less in common. I fully realize I am not allowed to say this in Liberal America because this makes me a DISGUSTING BIGOT, so I don't post this under my real name account. But I admire the energy that you Right Thinking people put into your witchhunts.

<comment><USER19> > _"If you don't speak English in America, you tend to be poor and less > educated"_

Such as the Asian immigrant population.

Which, last I checked, is experiencing quotas at Ivy League schools because they're getting in at rates much, much higher than any other race, and tend to come from backgrounds of higher education, even if their parents' English is poor.

You're trying to generalize your argument to minimize the appearance of being racist - but your argument doesn't actually generalize beyond the Latino community, which by and large _does_ fit your description. So really, your objection isn't against "people who speak poor English", it's against Latinos.

> _" I fully realize I am not allowed to say this in Liberal America because > this makes me a DISGUSTING BIGOT"_

Nah. From your own self-description I'd characterize you as an ivory-tower elitist (ironically, something conservatives tend to accuse of Liberal America) - you know, inability to find common ground with people with low-SES and low-education and such... Race does seem to play as a factor for you, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when you say it does not. But of course, I don't know you in real life, so such judgments are rarely wise.

This argument isn't going anywhere productive, so I'm going to step out of it with this: your _exact_ same rationalizations have been used against Blacks, and smells very close to the same arguments we hear coming out of the "I'm not anti-gay, I'm pro-marriage" camp. If it quacks...

<comment><USER18> I wonder how many of the second generation Asian students flooding Ivy League schools come from poor, non-English speaking ethnic ghettos? I'd guess not many. All the people I knew who fit that description in college went to good high schools. How good are the high schools in Chinatown?

For what it's worth, I wouldn't want to live in Chinatown either. Or any of the White non-English ethnic ghettos that used to exist a few decades ago.

I think calling people "bigot" happens too quickly. We should show some restraint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Read this post right up to the following line, "There's also huge differences from neighborhood to neighborhood as you are unlikely to find someone interested in the Mission (hipsters, homeless and _immigrants_ )"

Pretty repulsive point of view IMHO.

EDIT: I am a recent immigrant to the United States

<comment><USER21> Yes, I also found this disgusting. You know, the people he's calling immigrants are actually the people that have lived there for generations.

<comment><USER22> There's actually no negative connotation to the noun "immigrant."

<comment><USER20> You're absolutely right. But reading this article the author seems to imply a negative connotation by saying you'd be hard pressed to find somebody willing to live in the mission because of "hipsters, homeless and immigrants".

<comment><USER23> My interpretation of that paragraph was that no single person was likely to be interested in all three of the neighborhoods mentioned because they're all so different.

<comment><USER24> No, they're portrayed as undesirables. If he had said the neighborhood was diverse, that would be a positive light. Instead he's lumping them together with homeless and hipsters (a derogatory term).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you don't have any friends you can stay with in San Francisco, a good alternative is booking a bed in a hostel for a few weeks. They're cheap (as low as $25/day, if you're willing to share a room with a few people), centrally located, and sometimes offer perks like free breakfast and coffee. You should take a few extra precautions with your valuables -- I keep my laptop, wallet, and phone next to me when I sleep, instead of putting them in the locker -- but most of the people who pass through are young travelers. There are plenty of options to choose from in the Tendernob, which is basically a hostel/student district, and not nearly as bad as this blog post makes it sound.

<comment><USER26> Unless you are a very light sleeper, it's way easier to steal a laptop out of your arms than out of a locker if you have in-room lockers.

<comment><USER25> I sleep in the top bunk with my backpack between my body and the wall, which would make it really difficult to steal anything without waking me up. I don't totally trust the lockers, since every lock small enough to fit them is trivial to pick or just slice through with bolt cutters when the room is empty. Honestly, though, most of the people who pass through the hostel are rich young people on backpacking trips. The only thing I have to worry about them stealing is stuff I leave unattended in the bathroom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm looking to make this move in August and some of the advice here won't work for me.

For instance, I can't get a reference from a past landlord or a list of past landlords - I'm just graduating college and have lived in on-campus housing my whole time.

I'm hoping having a very good credit score and a very good offer letter in hand will solve this issue, but I'm not sure.

Additionally, I can't move out mid-month and look for an apartment starting at the beginning of the next - my job starts mid-month and I've moving out at the beginning.

Any advice for how to deal with these situations? Thanks!

<comment><USER19> There are several ways to resolve your situation, few of which you will find palatable... which really sucks:

\- Rent a less desirable place. Desirable places in SF will have easily 20 people lined up out front, with the landlord taking his/her pick of the crowd based on income, credit, and references - and as a recent grad you will lose on all 3 counts.

\- Seek roommate situations. Houses are more flexible about all of the above criteria and care more about personality, this is where you might have an edge (I don't know, I don't know you at all).

\- Live outside the city. This is going to be a real bummer sometimes - <USER2> friends will want to hang out in the Mission till the crack of dawn, but you'd have to hop the BART or Caltrain before midnight to get home. But places outside SF proper experience far, far, far less competition.

And here's the one that works, but really stinks:

\- Offer to pay more than face value of apartment. This is just insult upon injury - but it does work. Odds are, if you have a Unreasonably Wealthy Startup Guy(tm) viewing the apartment with you, _he/she_ will bid the apartment up. It's become more and more common, and that's incredibly depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is very interesting. I just moved to San Francisco from Beijing, myself!

I got here at about the beginning of the month, stayed 3 days in a hostel, 4 more days at a friend's place in Oakland and then signed a lease for a place in the heart of Chinatown. It's a fairly small room and the kitchen and showers are shared, but at $500/month all my acquaintances are saying I got a fairly good deal.

My trick was I got the landlord's number from a friend in Beijing the week before I left. Having friends in Oakland was just total luck. I'd met them years ago in Taiwan! All in all, Chinatown is pretty nice. It's safe, there's a ton of fresh produce to buy all over the place and things are cheap.

The two things which would be downsides for some are the hilliness and the Cantonese speaking community. I hated the hills when I was carrying my stuff across town, but now I generally appreciate the exercise while walking and the fun while on wheels. I do have a huge advantage being literate in Chinese characters, and Mandarin is more useful than English in a lot of areas, which mitigates some of the issues being surrounded by Cantonese.

I'm not working yet, but I've been going to a lot of Ruby and JS meet-ups, and it's generally a sub half-hour walk to any of their offices. All in all, I like it. I just have to avoid the Tenderloin when coming back from the Adobe/Zynga area.

So far the only difficulties I've had have been general country adjustment things (having spent nearly my whole adult life abroad), not SF things. To be honest, I'm amazed at how friendly and helpful everyone is!

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a welcome and timely article since I'm about to pull up stakes in Georgia and move to SF in late July (cue Otis Redding). I am planning on couch-surfing with friends for the first few weeks while I find a good sublet for a few months. Hopefully after that I can get an apartment when I have a job and know the neighborhoods a little better. Are rents really accelerating upward so quickly that I'm better off finding an apartment as soon as possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just looked at rents after posting this article and it looks like things are going up about $100/mo at least in the areas I had saved on PadMapper.

My advice would be to wait and find a place you'll like and just realize once you get a full lease (ie- 1 year or more) you'll be there a while because in a year, rent will definitely be way higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You don't have to support YC's favorite spammers to land a short-term place. There are some month-to-month apartments in the city (e.g., Landmark, who I'm using now, basically wants a pulse and a credit card for the rent) and motels on the peninsula with weekly rates that are about the same as renting a studio but with utilities, parking, and cleaning included.

<comment><USER31> Hi, the short-term option sounds very interesting to me. Will definitely check out landmark. Meanwhile, do you have any particular motels in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Two things:

First, the bart shutting down at midnight doesn't mean there is no public transit. You can almost always take the bus.

Second: You can move near SF state, either in the city or in Daly City, and have an ok roommate/rent situation with managable transit options. Especially if you are willing to bike a bit.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seriously, can someone in the know please explain "bro central" to me? I know what a "brogrammer" is (I think), but maybe I missed the "bro" meme.

<comment><USER33> Think brogrammer minus the programmer. Frat boys and whatnot. (named because the tend to call everybody 'bro')

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You can also use Amtrak to ship your stuff to the Oakland station. It's by far the most cost effect way to move long distances.

[http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=Page&pagen...](http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=Page&pagename=am%2FLayout&cid=1241267371736)

<comment><USER35> To ship boxes, yes.

But honestly if you're an engineer taking a job at a bay area tech company, you will be getting a relo package. If you move here on your own dime you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER34> I sold everything at the other end and used the relo to buy new stuff.

If you move your old worn out stuff you're doing it wrong. :)

<comment><USER36> While this is a great strategy (I did just that when I moved cross-country a few months ago), it's worth recognizing that it's predicated on owning suitably cheap furniture. As you move beyond the stage in your life where your apartment is outfitted solely by Ikea, this gets less and less viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Move mid-month so that you can look for places starting the first of the next month; I moved out on March 14th and moved into an apartment then starting April 1st."

I would have guessed all the really good apartments would be spoken for by March 5th. Odd.

</comment><comment><USER37> <http://www.creditkarma.com/> is a better service for credit reports than freecredit.com

<comment><USER38> While great, creditkarma.com only provides your score.

If you're looking for a complete credit report, there is no reason to not use <https://www.annualcreditreport.com/>. It is the official site set up by the three reporting agencies, as mandated by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ack. I want to move from the south bay to SF for young single person reasons, but now this is making me reconsider.

<comment><USER40> No reason to stress if you're already settled in the Bay Area -- you've got a natural launching pad for the apartment search, which makes it so much easier. Rely heavily on contacts in the city to get the inside track on an apartment, and it shouldn't be too tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Thanks, this will help greatly, I leave for SF in 2 days!

</comment><comment><USER13> I pay $2,000/mo for three very spacious bedrooms in Dublin, and I'm to work in SoMa in about an hour on BART _(with an empty inbox!)_. Not to mention Dublin is an absolutely wonderful place to live for suburban types, like married couples. It's really depressing that discussions like this revolve around the city only.

There is an _entire world_ of commuter residences all around San Francisco, and people figured out how to commute to San Francisco long before the tech boom (and most people wanting to live in the city) existed. Dublin/Pleasanton is the extreme, but there's also Castro Valley on my same line, a whole shitload of Oakland like Lake Merritt, and if you take the Pittsburg/Bay Point a whole bunch up there, too. Take off the San Francisco blinders and take advantage of the commute options that were built long before this industry.

It feels like people moving to San Francisco now treat it like New York City, where living in New Jersey and commuting in tends to suck. So most people focus on the boroughs, and landlords take advantage of them. San Francisco's out-of-town situation is _far_ better, and I don't regret choosing a place an hour out of town at all.

<comment><USER42> I want to work in SoMa and not spend 10 hours a week commuting. I can empty my inbox at work, where I'm paid to do it.

<comment><USER13> So you'd rather spend 10 hours a week commuting inside SF?

<comment><USER42> No, I'd rather live close to work. Currently I have a 5-10 minute walking commute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> SF just isn't worth it anymore. The fog (I know there are fog-free areas, but much of SF is foggy-to-super-foggy), the filth, the homeless, and the insane landlords and rents are out of hand. Also, I'm of the opinion that SF culture peaked in the 90s.

<comment><USER44> > Also, I'm of the opinion that SF culture peaked in the 90s.

Could you elaborate on that? I'm very new to the Bay Area, still absorbing it all.

<comment><USER43> SF in the 90s was an awesome place for punk and industrial music, cyberpunk visions of the future, ratbikes, raves, and a lot more arty types mixing with the nerds. As things cleaned up and gentrified, a lot of what I consider to be the cool culture was replaced by trustifarians and graphic designers who like to cultivate the image of a bicycle messenger or blue-collar worker.

SF still has a lot to offer, but it just feels very fake and flooded with money to me. When everyone in the room is making six figures, it's hard to take the person in the thrift-shop shirt and tattoos seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As a non-US person moving to SF later this year, I don't have a US credit rating yet. How do I go about looking for places?

<comment><USER35> 1) No credit is way better than bad credit.

2) Get a secured credit card so you at least have a file when they run your credit check. I'm sure you can find guides on how best to do this as a foreign citizen. If you don't have family or close friends here you could be out of luck. But if you do, you could easily have the card shipped to them and allow them to use it for things occasionally to help you get a credit rating.

US Credit ratings (FICO scores) are heavily weighted on revolving (credit card) accounts, not so much installment accounts, so don't worry about those.

Doing these things will help you immeasurably. Pulling credit is as much about identity verification as it is credit risk.

If you can't, remember: There are a TON of people with bad credit everywhere. They're not homeless. You will just have to be tenacious about it.

<comment><USER46> >>No credit is way better than bad credit.<<

When you are trying to rent an apartment, yes. If you are trying to buy a cell phone or get a Mastercard or buy a car or a house, it's just the opposite: there's nothing worse than no credit.

<comment><USER35> Respectfully, I disagree.

If you have no credit, you can get a secured credit card and have a 650-700 fico in a few months. You'll have a thin file so don't expect a mortgage or anything, but in a year or two even that will be no problem.

Bad credit? You can do a lot to clean it up before the 7 years are up, but ive seen this in my own family and it's really a waiting game for bad entries to age off your report.

And anecdotally, which would you prefer to lend to: somebody with no track record, knowing the average American has a 650+ credit score, or somebody who has bad credit and a proven history of not repaying obligations.

It is subjective though, and ymmv.

<comment><USER46> I have no credit report, in spite of living 35 years in the USA. My friends with bad credit and bankruptcies can buy cell phones, rent expensive things, get apartments, get mortgages, and deal with other life activities much more easily than I can.

So there's your answer: you'd rather lend money to the known deadbeat than someone with no credit history.

<comment><USER35> I think you should consider that probably the largest reason you have so much trouble is that they cannot use your credit profile to verify your identity.

You can fix that very easily. You don't have to have a line of credit to get into their database. All you have to do is apply for one. That inquiry will be reported, you will have a credit file, and from then-on to whomever is pulling your credit it won't look as though you just made-up a 9 digit number in place of a real social security number.

The best way to do this will be to apply for credit some place in-person, like a bank.

So I'll reiterate: Having no credit is a much better position than having bad credit.

Having no identity? _That_ is a problem I'm sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Flex or JavaScript.  Which way to go? - <AUTHOR>

I am adding features to a large web based enterprise application shared by several companies.  The sever is Jboss/Java/Spring/Hibernate.  The client side is HTML/JavaScript with a small amount of AJAX.  400K lines total. The appearance is ugly as sin and performance is slowed by too much page loading and 200k of JavaScript libraries( fixable).
5-10% of the application has been converted to Flex and the client loves it.  The interface is stylish, clean, and responsive.  The client wants the new part done in Flex.  Nothing in the Application uses any advanced features like video or animation.
My objections to Flex are several.  The full conversion will take a year or two, because it needs to be rewritten.  For that period there will be a Flex interface and a JS/HTML interface, right now in different windows.  I think this will be awkward for the other companies participating.  The HTML interface can be cleaned up using a little design and CSS and rewritten as needed.
In any event the client side needs to be rewritten.
I think, but have not verified, that there are a lot more third party JS widgets than Flex.
Flex and JS can talk to each other, but they use different DOM implementations.  I wonder how easy it will be to keep a client side global state while loading different sub-pages.
And I dont know Flex.  This is not insurmountable, but it will slow me down.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I briefly flirted with Flex and it reminded me of the era when I waited on a corporate custodian to release features that I needed yesterday. Flex might be open source but the culture is really hard to stomach; Adobe runs the show every step of the way, and nothing gets done without their blessing.

JavaScript improves at the pace of your users; i.e. you can roll out next- generation features by edict :-) it's free, portable, well-established, pleasant to work, and it's _ours_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe you could use ExtJS or ExtGWT (<http://extjs.com/>) since you're already developing in Java?

</comment><comment><USER4> You might want to consider separating your front and back ends with an API that could be accessed by Flash or AJAX.

You can then introduce a simple client and progressively enhance it according to your client's sensitivities. If you use AJAX I recommend jQuery.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want Flex/JS interoperability: haXe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you used haXe in a production environment or enough to see if it works as it promises, truth verses wishes, and warts? Does it deliver on the promise to seamlessly compile to different target languages? It looks promising.

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The client wants the new part done in Flex.

The Customer is always right - use Flex.</comment>


Recurrent Neural Networks - A Short TensorFlow Tutorial - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/silicon-valley-data-science/RNN-Tutorial <comment><USER2> _If you have a NVIDIA GPU with CUDA already installed_

It's unfortunate OpenCL mostly failed to gain mindshare. It would've let anyone with a powerful video card enjoy the benefits of acceleration, rather than half the market.

Cool tutorial. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER3> I don't think anybody is opposed to Tensorflow on OpenCL, it's just that CUDA is so common.

You can follow the issue to add OpenCL support here:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22)

and one of the projects here:

[https://github.com/benoitsteiner/tensorflow- opencl](https://github.com/benoitsteiner/tensorflow-opencl)

From what I understand it requires Linux at the moment since it is built on ComputeCpp

<comment><USER4> Tensorflow and Theano themselves only really support Windows. Unless you have a spare 5 hours to set up (and more hours to maintain), you NEED Linux for any serious ML.

Note: I'm just a beginner at ML, but this was my experience setting things up for the first time.

<comment><USER5> _Tensorflow and Theano themselves only really support Windows._

I think you mean "only really support Linux"? The rest of your comment reads like you know that.

TensorFlow at least has now begun supporting Windows in the main release, but you are absolutely correct in saying it has much better support on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very good - I've never seen a RNN-for-speech-in-Tensorflow model before.

Note, though that the real problem here is the lack of training data.

In a recent podcast I heard that the Baidu speech recognition team uses "small models" of 10,000 hours of speech. I forget how big the production quality models were, but it was at least 5 times that.

This model uses ~1500 hours[1]. It's very impressive it does as well as it does just using that.

[1] [https://svds.com/tensorflow-rnn-tutorial/](https://svds.com/tensorflow- rnn-tutorial/)

<comment><USER6> Mozilla Deepspeech has been around for a while ([https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech)). In fact, this code looks like it heavily copied from there (see attribution notices in comments).

Their examples use much less data, just 5 utterances from the Librispeech training set. Which is perfectly fine for a tutorial, since training on 1500h worth of speech data takes from several days to multiple weeks, depending on your hardware.

[edit: IMHO, the tutorial from the Bay Area DL School is more useful to get started: [https://github.com/baidu-research/ba-dls- deepspeech)](https://github.com/baidu-research/ba-dls-deepspeech\))]

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/baidu-research/ba-dls- deepspeech](https://github.com/baidu-research/ba-dls-deepspeech) is 404

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there a way you can decode arbitrary wav files by cloning the repo after you train it? I couldn't find out whether it was capable by reading the tutorial and README.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Aetherspawn, the current repo does not currently have code for decoding individual fed in .wav files that are not in the train/dev/test sets. We'll polish up our code that simplifies decoding and add it to the repo soon, then shoot you a message

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you this is very interesting. I wonder about your initial train config, wouldn't it be more efficient with time in mind for demo purposes, to use more wav samples with less epochs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it would be more efficient to have more wav files in the github repo, but we kept them minimal to reduce the total file size when cloning the repository. You can find more of the Librispeech data here: [http://www.openslr.org/12/](http://www.openslr.org/12/)

We kept the epochs at 100 to demonstrate the negative consequence of overfitting training data, when doing the test or dev set evaluations. We could probably reduce that to ~50 though to save time in training :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this speech-to-text or text-to-speech or something else?</comment>


What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf <comment><USER2> Here's a good companion piece that focuses on CPU features rather than memory: "What's new in CPUs since the 80s and how does it affect programmers?"[0]

[0]: [https://danluu.com/new-cpu-features/](https://danluu.com/new-cpu- features/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Past discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20Every%20Programmer%20Sh...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20Every%20Programmer%20Should%20Know%20About%20Memory&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER4> A fascinating document, but I find it far-fetched that _every_ programmer needs be intimately familiar with capacitor timing to use RAM efficiently, let alone write efficacious programs.

As languages without MMM become more popular, it's really up to the compiler authors (or at least a subset of them) to get all of these details right.

<comment><USER5> What is a language without (or with) DMA? The document's mention of DMA does not seem language related.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I mean't manual memory management. It seems like I'm having some problems with DMA myself!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (slightly) OT:

The article is well known and the author Ulrich Drepper is also well known in the FOSS world for his work on the GNU C Library. [1]

So I was surprised to find that he did not have a small English language Wikipedia page, even though there were pages in German, French, Norwegian, Japanese and Persian.

Oh, "that can't be right - I'll create one!", I thought. (By translating one of the existing pages.)

But I could not! The page "is protected from creation" [2].

An archived deletion discussion from 2014 states "This article fails Wikipedia:Notability (people), Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and should be deleted." ... etc.

Edit: s/Dropper/Drepper/

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Drepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Drepper)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ulrich_Drepper)

<comment><USER7> That is bizzare. Is there any way to view historical justifications of this? Ulrich Drepper is undoubtedly worthy of a Wikipedia page.

I'm starting a draft page now - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Ulrich_Drepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Ulrich_Drepper)

<comment><USER6> >Is there any way to view historical justifications of this?

See my 3rd reference above from 2010:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ulrich_Drepper)

<comment><USER7> I've been looking for information about Ulrich for these past few minutes trying to build a draft document and I'm starting to put together the reasons why Ulrich will not have a page soon...

Ulrich has accomplished so much as a programmer, more than nearly any programmer ever will. If we measured contributions objectively, he'd definitely be one of those _" 1% of programmers who produce 95% of software that is used by more than 1000 people"_. In fact, I just grepped for 'Ulrich Drepper' on my own personal computer and I've got pages-upon-pages of results (at least 2kloc) of bylines, commits, man pages and tiny thank you notes with only one recipient (Ulrich) deep in places you expect and then many you don't: the Android SDK, Coreutils, Wine project.

When you do a bit of research about him (of the variety Wikipedia would accept), there's a different story. There are no awards for Ulrich Drepper, there are no 'real' publications outside of open source that are describing what he does, there are no lively pieces of evidence that the world recognizes his contributions, there most certainly are no fanclubs.

What does emerge is a consistent message that the big players of free software wont tolerate him or his software (along with thousands of 'critiques' of his leadership style). Looking over this you see a pattern that emerges where an issue is brought up on a mailing list by people who are trying to help him or at the very least are neutral towards him and he cuts them down, insults them, belittles them for absolutely no reason whatsoever ( _" I have to let them know that they are dumb so they don't write software that hurts the world"_). It's so comically obvious that he doesn't actually believe he's making "software" or "the world" any better while he's doing this.

I'm not sure why, but reading about Ulrich Drepper has put the broader world of software in perspective. I've never thought about the 'legitimacy' of Linus Torvald's (and others) management style. I have even been known to think that "asshole bosses get shit done". I had never seen what comes out for the projects that _aren 't_ Linux. The smaller & more mundane pieces of software whose petty tyrant isn't tolerated for long.

My initial feeling was that Ulrich Drepper deserves a Wikipedia page, but the evidence is that the deletionist might be right. Ulrich Drepper is not widely recognized because he has let his pride, his hubris and his attachment to criticism condemn him to a life of loneliness and anonymity with no indications that he wants either.

<comment><USER6> I agree with nearly all of that except the last paragraph:

>My initial feeling was that Ulrich Drepper deserves a Wikipedia page, but the evidence is that the deletionist might be right.

Should niceness/sociablity/etc be a criteria for notability and hence "deserving" a Wikipedia page?

I'd argue that it should not.

Linus Torvalds, Stephen Wolfram, Steve Jobs - none of them seem particularly nice - but all have achieved great things - and hence they are notable.

The difference from the case of Ulrich Drepper, is that those achievements are documented in a form that Wikipedia will accept as evidence for notability.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/ <comment><USER2> This set of slides seems to be the best overview of what this is and what the goals are: [http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/attachment/wiki/Presentations/P...](http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/attachment/wiki/Presentations/PPAMLKickoffOverviewSlides.pdf?format=raw)

(It seems to be a big DARPA-organized effort to create next-generation tools that enable the creation of probabilistic machine learning systems that are significantly more capable and can handle more complex models than current tools allow.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen a few references to probabilistic programming, but I'm not familiar with it. Can someone who is briefly describe what its advantages are and where it's likely to provide a better solution than more traditional techniques?

<comment><USER4> Read this: [http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/attachment/wiki/SummerSchools/2...](http://ppaml.galois.com/wiki/attachment/wiki/SummerSchools/2014/LectureMaterials/BasicsOfProbabilisticModelingAndInference.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Probabilistic Programming is a new programming paradigm for managing uncertain information."

I thought probabilistic programming has been around for decades.

<comment><USER6> I wonder - How else would you manage uncertain information?

<comment><USER7> e.g. fuzzy logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> is this a research program, an online course or a startup or what is it?

<comment><USER9> This is a fairly large project, spanning 4 years, so there are quite a bit of moving parts.

There are a group of teams developing new programming languages, and are being funded to do so by darpa. Some of the teams are leveraging their languages, and networking/collaboration opportunities provided them through their participation, to kick off start-ups.

Because success of a language is largely dependent on acceptance by the community, there are also summer schools sessions that are hosted to increase publicity and provide strong feedback to the language development teams on usability.

Those who have interesting and well defined problems in the space of machine learning should consider attending the summer school, or submitting a 'challenge problem' to the Galois team for the language developers to solve.</comment></comment>