Reverse engineering and removing Pokémon GO's certificate pinning - <AUTHOR> https://eaton-works.com/2016/07/31/reverse-engineering-and-removing-pokemon-gos-certificate-pinning/ <comment><USER2> Pretty much how I started cracking game copy protections in the late 80's/early 90's. I already owned the games I was cracking, it just became more interesting to me how these protections were implemented and how I'd defeat them. Sometimes I think that was more fun than the game itself. I just didn't want to have to look up pages in manuals or read maroon colored paper with dark blue ink.

I didn't have the luxury of Ida Pro back then, but I did find a disassembler. Using that I'd read through the game code until I found the conditional jumps and then patched the original file with 0xE8 (JEZ?), 0xEB (JMP?), or 0xCD 0x90 (NOP?). At one time I used to be able to recognize just the Opcodes in hex, so I might have those wrong today.

When I started working at Egghead, I was granted time by my manger to crack games for our demo station, so we wouldn't have to jump through hoops on the sales floor. For various professional reasons I've had the pleasure of bypassing my company's own protections. Most recently I used Smali/Baksmali to demonstrate how our company's Android beta timebomb was pretty easy to circumvent.

Once a hacker, always a hacker. I have no doubt that this low level tinkering was why I got into computers in the first place and why they still hold my fascination.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be down, Google webcache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://eaton- works.com/2016/07/31/reverse-engineering-and-removing-pokemon-gos-certificate- pinning/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Here's a copy on archive.is as well: [http://archive.is/gjgYx](http://archive.is/gjgYx)

<comment><USER5> And here the archive.org version for the people in the countries where archive.is is unavailable[1]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160801021520/https://eaton- wor...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160801021520/https://eaton- works.com/2016/07/31/reverse-engineering-and-removing-pokemon-gos-certificate- pinning/)

        ________________________

[1] The author of archive.is blocked entire countries in a fit of rage

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate on [1]?

<comment><USER7> It might not be blocked any longer... [https://m.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/46sefz/archiv...](https://m.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/46sefz/archiveis_no_longer_blocked_in_finland/d07l9h6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Patching an APK like this would break parts of the app, specifically the parts that are arguably the most crucial to be followed by pinned API calls. For example, in-app purchases via Google Play that validate the app's signing would all fail. Similarly restoring any previous in app purchases would also fail. Finally, you wouldn't be able to install this APK without uninstalling the valid production APK first, again due to signature/signing mismatch.

<comment><USER9> A normal user wouldn't do this, someone who cared more about examining the network traffic than in app purchases would do this.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I was commenting on this workaround's viability to be used by a bad actor attempting to compromise the game and other players of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool workaround in the article, but it feels like it's just another hole that is going to be closed off. It's impossible to balance because on the one hand we want these fortresses to protect us from prying eyes (see apple vs fbi), but manufacturers are also using these fortresses to keep out owners who just want to hack on their own things.

I'm glad Apple is working to keep backdoors out of iOS, but I still prefer Android because I can get into it anyway I want, and do things like the OP without having to resort to backdooring my own device.

<comment><USER11> > It's impossible to balance because on the one hand we want these fortresses > to protect us from prying eyes (see apple vs fbi), but manufacturers are > also using these fortresses to keep out owners who just want to hack on > their own things.

I think it's very easy to balance: it's _my_ fortress, because I bought it; I should therefor be allowed and enabled to make it do anything I like. The recent changes which Google have announced — which mean that apps will no longer respect the keys I have installed on my devices — are a move in _exactly_ the wrong direction.

<comment><USER12> How do you prove to the device that _you_ are the one who bought it? You don't want e.g. an FBI agent to be able to root your device.

<comment><USER11> > How do you prove to the device that you are the one who bought it?

An arbitrarily-complex passphrase of my choosing plus a fingerprint seem reasonable.

<comment><USER13> Plus a set of long and complex commands to type to stop normal people being tricked into enabling it

<comment><USER11> Y'know, I honestly don't care all that much if normal people can screw up: learning not to screw up should be part of the public school education all our taxes pay for. We trust normal people not to stab themselves in the eye, not to shoot themselves through the head, not to crash their cars into others: we should trust them not to do stupid stuff on their computing devices.

And when they do, we should hold them liable for any damage their actions have caused to others, just as we do with all those other tools. Yes, I think liability for allowing one's computer to become part of a botnet is a Good Idea™. Car crashes aren't accidents, and allowing one's computer to become infected isn't accidental either.

<comment><USER13> We ban guns, have extensive driving courses, and let anyone do anything with computers.

Of course if your car crashed because you were driving down a street that a criminal was standing on you'd probably take it back for being terrible.

<comment><USER11> > We ban guns

Not in civilised countries.

> have extensive driving courses

That's what I'm arguing for. In this country the public pays for 12-13 years of education and subsidises another four; I'm arguing that among the subjects we should cover with that massive investment is 'don't be an idiot with computers,' much as we have drivers' ed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204742)

</comment><comment><USER15> In iOS though, SSLKillSwitch v2 does the job well.

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems like overly complicated. He could have made the public key extremely small by just placing 0x00s in it so that he could crack it. Easy patching.

<comment><USER17> He patches two instructions, or 4 bytes, removing the check entirely. No need to "crack" anything. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.

You'll also notice that the code checks for the certificate length so I'm not sure replacing it with zeroes would have worked.

<comment><USER16> the key is still the same length, it just has a lot of zeroes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> it could also be done pretty trivially using an xposed module, such as: [http://repo.xposed.info/module/mobi.acpm.sslunpinning](http://repo.xposed.info/module/mobi.acpm.sslunpinning)

i haven't personally tried this route yet though

<comment> jor-el Xposed module patching only works when SSLPinning is performed in the Java code of the application, as Xposed provides a mechanism for intercepting Java method calls only. Unlike in this case, the code is in C/C++ layer, hence can't be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> is this cert in the update the reason apps like pokevision stopped working?

<comment><USER20> I don't know for sure, but I'm going to say 'not entirely'.

Certificate pinning would prevent you from sniffing the requests, and if they made API changes, you would be unable to analyze them.

So I think the reason Pokevision stopped working is because they may have made API changes, but they've been unable to see what the changes were.

<comment><USER21> Pokevision stopped working because they banned the whole ec2 IP range.

<comment><USER22> I believe you, so please don't take this is a challenge. It's pure curiosity that prompts me to ask: Do you have a source for more info on this IP range ban?

<comment><USER23> The pokemongo dev forums on reddit have been compiling a list of known hosts that will result in a 403 response code when an api call is requested.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4vhygk/vps_pr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4vhygk/vps_providers_banned_from_accessing_apis/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's the added value of using imgur's embed code rather than a good ol' <img>? Is this a trend? I would understand it for albums, but why would you do it for individual images? </rant>

<comment><USER25> Direct links are against imgurs TOS ([http://imgur.com/tos](http://imgur.com/tos)):

"Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network."

<comment><USER26> Funny how not long ago that was one of their selling point.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, but then massive gifs became a thing.

<comment><USER13> but then serving animated gifs as mp4 became a thing. Of course then using it as a video host became a thing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As mentioned in the comments, this doesn't work when you try to sign in via Google because it checks the signature of the app. The PTC signon doesn't do this so it's currently allowed, but I'm sure Niantic will patch it soon.</comment>


Tesla upgrades its motors to last 1M miles - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/07/04/tesla-electric-motor-update/ <comment><USER2> I've heard the long term plan is the autos will be able to drive all the way to Mars.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing discover.</comment>


Ad Blockers to Become Illegal in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmeedia.de%2F2016%2F06%2F21%2Fnach-lobbyarbeit-von-medienhaeusern-rueckt-ein-gesetzliches-verbot-von-ad-blockern-auf-die-agenda%2F&edit-text=&act=url <comment><USER2> Nothing is decided yet, it's media companies pressing hard for law changes.

It's worrisome to read (not in this article) that such a law might be considered to keep/guarantee diversity in the media landscape, basically allow small players to keep earning money. With the same argument Germany got fixed book pricing ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price_agreement)) and the TV license ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#Germany)).

That said, I see ad-blockers similar to video recording that skip commercials: media companies fought for laws forbidding them (did they succeed?) but a large body of the population would keep using them if they had the choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> > media companies pressing hard for law changes

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers#History)</comment></comment>


Larry Page's Flying Taxis, Now Exiting Stealth Mode - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/business/dealbook/flying-taxis-larry-page.html <comment><USER2> Nice to see a local East Lansing boy (Page) behind this project;<).

I know the engineers would throw a fit but I'd find a way to add a parachute to this craft similar to Cirrus. As of 2016 the parachute has saved 131 lives.

[https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all- news/2016/july/24/ho...](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all- news/2016/july/24/how-cirrus-reduced-accidents)

<comment><USER3> Just wanted to point out that the parachute has mixed reviews overall (from owners), due mainly to the costs associated with it. It requires a $15,000 repack every 10 years, which immediately adds $125/mo to the cost of ownership. Wouldn't be that bad, except you can't just choose to fly without it. The plane is not airworthy if the chute repack is due, and is illegal to fly. Not to mention the fact that if you _use_ it, you're firing rockets out of the top of the plane and essentially destroying it.

So yes the parachute is obviously a net positive but let's not just go slapping it on every new airframe that gets developed.

<comment><USER4> Why not? If $125/month saves your life some day, isn't that with it?

<comment><USER5> The vast majority of owners never deploy it.

<comment><USER6> The vast majority of car owners never deploy their airbags. Doesn't mean they aren't worth every penny.

<comment><USER5> Of course. My point is that you can't just look at the number $125/mo and make a decision. You need to also ask how often they are successfully used. Your airbag definitely _wouldn 't_ be worth it if they were used 1/100th as often (and probably not even if it were 1/10th).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The transition to winged flight is interesting. There's a large drone which works like that. Takeoff and landing are on electrical quadrotor props, while for forward flight, a gasoline engine provides power. This give the drone six hour endurance.[1] So it's useful for search and patrolling. This new thing is a scale up of that.

The successor to the Osprey will hopefully be something like this, not the mechanical nightmare of that tilt-rotor. Each engine on the Osprey can power the other rotor in an emergency. The mechanical linkage for that is a nightmare.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2kcyw99V2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2kcyw99V2E)

<comment><USER8> > Takeoff and landing are on electrical quadrotor props, while for forward > flight, a gasoline engine provides power.

There's a reason for that: takeoff (and landing for VTOL) require _much_ more power than level flight, especially with a VTOL design where all of the lift comes from the engines, and gasoline engines get a lot heavier with power than electric motors. On a conventional plane, you are carrying that huge/heavy engine around for the entire flight, just for the power during takeoff.

Electric motors are a lot lighter for a given power level, but on the other hand, the "fuel" for electric motors (i.e. batteries) is a lot heavier than gasoline, limiting endurance.

So some sort of hybrid mechanism that blends the advantages and disadvantages can make a lot sense, despite the extra cost/weight of a hybrid powertrain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very talented bunch. I've seen the tech and the engineering behind it, and I have no doubt that they can build the aircraft they're claiming here.

What remains to be seen is how they interface with the existing aviation regulatory framework. They even hint at this in the video, with the "making this useful to society" line, and what looks to me like regulatory allowances from NZ.

I'm fairly certain that they know powered lift isn't compatible with dense urban environments, so don't expect a Fifth Element situation in NYC anytime soon. :) I'm super curious to see what the use case ends up being. My money's on super short haul, like Mountain View to Oakland sort of distances, with numerous small, dedicated taxiports similar in scale to ferry terminals.

<comment><USER10> I think that the interesting use for air taxis isn't in going through cities, it's in traversing terrain that's difficult or impossible to build roads through. So going over water or rugged terrain like steep hills or ravines.

In the SF area, there's not a ton of use for it, but perhaps a fast hop from Treasure Island to the Embarcadero (feeding into BART) would make the proposed redevelopment of Treasure/Yerba Buena island more attractive (as of right now, it's hard to imagine thinking it was a great idea to live some place where you had to take the Bay Bridge to get _literally anywhere_ ).

Going mostly over unpopulated terrain would limit (not eliminate, just limit) both safety and noise concerns.

<comment><USER9> The use case is oddly specific- ideally you have a region that's geographically challenging, but not sparse enough that you can just wedge an airstrip somewhere and call it a day. It also can't be so developed that there's existing or imminent Real Infrastructure, like a metro rail link between Treasure Island and SF.

<comment><USER11> I think the main tricky bit about the commercial side of the use case is that you need your settlements to be either side of the geographically challenging bit but also quite close together due to range limitations, and probably in areas with usually benign weather conditions.

Small archipelagos would be an obvious use case, but I wonder how it compares cost and convenience wise with using a boat.

<comment><USER12> It's probably a bit more faster and more flexible, with the downside of holding much less cargo. I'm not sure that's enough to displace already existing boat services to be honest.

Few areas come to mind immediately that fit that criteria. (The only one that came to mind personally as a "maybe" was the small Pacific coastal communities stretching up British Columbia up through Alaska, that are mostly served by water taxi now. I don't see an advantage even there initially.)

One other possibility I see for this if there are significant advantages to this over helicopters in certain situations, it might compete with services currently provided that way. (EG: Could this replace a helicopter air ambulance? Is there differences (engine volume comes to mind) that it would be desirable to replace helicopters with this for the tourism market? Etc.)

<comment><USER11> It's not going to compete with an air ambulance because it doesn't have the carrying capacity. In the long term it might have favourable economics and possibly even safety vs the Robinson R22, a helicopter which has sold a few thousand units. But yeah, I think there are more cases for it as an alternative low-end short range helicopter sometimes deployed as a taxi than as an Uber alternative

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How fun would it be to have billions to sprinkle on cool projects like this.

<comment><USER14> It would be even cooler if he would sprinkle his billions on solving real problems instead of wasting them on toys for rich people like this.

<comment><USER15> He is solving problems. What an inane comment. Almost every hugely innovative technology started as a "toy for rich people."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Kitty Hawk Cora launch video from Monday:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFxjRMv5U8)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone chime in how this aircraft is so energy efficient? It seems like the props on the wing will give a ridiculous amount of drag. Also, one of the key requirements for an energy efficient rear prop plane is super laminar air going to through the rear prop for efficient thrust. The wing design seems to remove this advantage.

</comment><comment><USER18> Feels like billionaires solving billionaires problems - this doesn't scale.

<comment><USER19> How can you say that when you don't even know the price of the service?

<comment><USER20> Well, if you base the costs off of a traditional aircraft (around which this is based), they'll be in the $100+ an hour range, minimum. The cost to buy will be in the $2-300,000 range, minimum. They will require yearly maintenance, not counting any maintenance required on the electric props and batteries. This is based off a production aircraft, the Cirrus.

I'm also not immediately seeing how this would not require a pilots license - more likely a helicopter license, though this is easily debatable.

So perhaps not billionaires, but millionaires to be sure.

<comment><USER21> It already costs me 100+ an hour to transport 4 people from San Jose to San Francisco. This would be cheaper and faster.

<comment><USER20> Via what method? Iirc, there are many economical methods of transportation between those two cities... Also, that $100 per hour is pure cost with no markups to provide for revenue or growth.

I could easily be wrong, but the aircraft they were displaying looked like a 2 seater, not 4.

<comment><USER21> Uber X, or 4 Caltrain tickets gets us close to 100.

<comment><USER20> WRT Caltrain, I remember using it for commuting, and certainly don't remember paying $50 a day to do so. But perhaps the times have changed and the prices with them. Still, $25 per ticket one way seems ridiculously high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a huge step up from last year, where they showed off a drone-esque machine with 20 minutes of battery life: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_rDkVIhQeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_rDkVIhQeY)

Edit: they're working on both concurrently, it seems: [https://kittyhawk.aero/](https://kittyhawk.aero/)

<comment><USER9> The drone-like vehicle hasn't been around as long as the concept from this release. You can see earlier versions in patent drawings from 2010 [1]

[1] [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130214086](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130214086)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like the kind of thing that would be useful in specific situations, but won't be feasible for broad use until we come up with much cheaper electrical energy production (and probably storage too) than we have today, e.g. fusion power or much cheaper solar. At least I don't imagine it can be very energy efficient to expend power on moving up and staying up in the air instead of using the normal force from the ground 'for free' like a land-based vehicle does so it only needs to expend energy to move horizontally (for an intuition about this, think about how hard it is to jump half your body length upward, versus walking half your body length forward). So while it's cool that it's emissions free, it's not great if it ends up using e.g. 5-10x as much energy to make the same trip as an electric car, and it makes it that much more difficult to offset the environmental impact of its production and operation.

<comment><USER23> The Uber Elevate study from 2016 answers many of these foundational questions.

A traditional car achieves about 1 mile/kWh. An electric car achieves 3 miles/kWh, since the electric drivetrain is much more efficient. An electric plane might achieve around 2 mile/kWh. So, worse than an electric car, but better than a conventional car.

Some background: A car has aerodynamic and roll drag. At typical speeds (50 mph), they're of approximately the same magnitude. A plane has aerodynamic (parasitic) drag, similar to a car, but no roll drag, but instead an additional aerodynamic drag, the so-called induced drag, that is concomitant with generating lift. At typical speeds (higher than a car though), they're also approximately the same magnitude.

With lots of simplifications, one can thus say that one basically trades roll drag for induced (=lift generating) drag.

EDIT TO ADD: Link, the economics section starts on page 81 or so: [https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf](https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf)

<comment><USER24> So whats the real power consumption? After all, getting that thing up into the air IS the problem and not flying it.

"These examples for car and VTOL have only considered the energy required to cruise at a specific speed, and doesn't include the additional energy required to get the vehicle to cruise for either the car (acceleration) or VTOL (takeoff). "

They know exactly why this figures are missing.

<comment><USER23> hm, I tend to disagree. You might underestimate how much energy is spent on overcoming drag, and how strong the earth acceleration _g_ is: One always needs to overcome it, and overcoming it just a bit more for a while is enough for a climb, basically.

If we take the performance section for the Cessna 172 N, for example, we see that it burns 8.4 gallons per hour at a (speedy) 75% power cruise. It takes 10 minutes to climb up to 6000 ft, and burns 1.9 gallons. In cruise, it would burn 1.4 gallons in that time. So, the climb requires about a third more.

So, given that PEVA (personal electric VTOL aircraft) would likely cruise at fairly low altitudes, and the climbing constitute only a small part of a flight, say a quarter, the total extra fuel consumption would be a fairly minor increase on top of the quoted numbers.

Note also that cars tend to accelerate and brake much more than aircraft tend to climb and descent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> im really excited about planes that have several smaller motors and props instead of one or two large ones. its a design that is only now becoming possible commercially because of EV popularity. really looking forward to seeing where it all goes.

<comment><USER26> Yes. It seems to have 13 rotors, 12 on the wings and a larger one in back. It looks like each of the wing rotors can tilt on two axes. That should make the plane very maneuverable. Better perhaps than a quadcopter. And more tolerant of rotor failures. Also, the rotors are less likely to behead people.

<comment><USER27> My guess is that the 12 wing rotors are at a fixed angles similar to a quadcopter V-tail. Unlike a v-tail, and to hazard another guess, I figure the inner 8 rotors point outwards to help provide stability so that a roll ends up with the lower side pointing straight down providing more lift and the higher side points out the side providing less lift. This pushes the craft back upright. There are times when you actually do want to roll so the 4 outer rotors point in. They're further out so there is more roll leverage. The mechanisms to tilt the rotors would add extra weight to a craft that's probably already low on margins. I'd say it's better to be a little less efficient for a short part of a flight than carry the extra weight for the duration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Smells like a publicity stunt to me. Feels like Amazon's announcement of drone delivery where the product is vaporware.

<comment><USER29> Normally that would be the case for something like this, but eVTOLs have been in the news a lot in the last 24 hours due to the helicopter crash in NYC. There are also about fifty different companies working on the tech, so there legitimately is a race to get it out the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Only 8 months ago they were showing just this little sit-on multi copter: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ASH0kMSCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ASH0kMSCM)

I wonder how long they've been working on Cora

</comment><comment><USER31> That test aircraft looks very well developed. The article says it can fly 62 miles. I wonder how long it will take to recharge.

<comment><USER32> Note that 62 miles is 100 km.

<comment><USER33> Ah yes, that's much longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 13 engines, electric.

And clearly they have built multiple aircraft (I haven't found N-numbers for all of them yet).

[http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NN...](http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=301XZ)

[http://www.aviationdb.com/Aviation/Aircraft/3/N301XZ.shtm](http://www.aviationdb.com/Aviation/Aircraft/3/N301XZ.shtm)

<comment><USER34> Looks like they have a number of aircraft registered, some as rotorcraft, some as gliders.

[http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Name_Results.aspx?Na...](http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Name_Results.aspx?Nametxt=ZEE+AERO+INC&sort_option=1&PageNo=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How is the energy use compared to ground transport ?

Are we going to dump a massive amount of heat into the environment if flying vehicles become as popular as ordinary taxis ?

</comment><comment><USER36> I think I am with Musk on this form of transportation. Much too loud for even a small number of people to use them without high noise pollution in any urban area. Helicopters and planes are bad enough and they are quite rare. Even existing freeways are quite noisy. Bring on the tunnels. Unless we can get some kind of anti-gravity or super noise cancellation, I hope these flying cars don't become popular.

<comment><USER37> There are many remote areas in the South Island that are hard to get to. For example, West coast and particular the Haast area, wasn't connected to the rest of the country until late 1980s. That is, 130 years after Western people started colonisation here.

Previously the only way to get to these remote areas is via light aircraft and helicopters. "Flying doctor" and nurses weren't uncommon. (Our midwife used to fly in, deliver a baby and fly back home for tea.)

Public transportation, especially long distance ones, are poor. (Comparing to Switzerland and China.) Dunedin is only 100 miles away from Queenstown but it usually takes us 4:30 to 5:00 to get there by car.

So if you see this news from these perspectives, you'll see why it's so cool and why the downsides aren't that bad at all.

<comment><USER38> So, you think those vehicles would be restricted to the country side? I find that very hard to believe. Especially suburban areas will be doomed by broad adaption of this kind of technology.

And while you may now see the advantage in remote areas, do not forget that when you get faster out you get in faster and the amount of people (and hence general noise) will increase so much. If a commute of one hour is acceptable for most people, its just the range those people live in that increases. And even if traffic is not that dense, some 100 dB noise every 2 minutes can be as annoying as a busy street nearby.

I always have the feeling that people always just look what they could do if they had this kind of technology and not what other people might do with it.

<comment><USER39> I'm curious, if a local community doesn't want to adopt a technology, don't you think they should regulate it locally, instead of fussing about the fact that it may work fine for a different community? If a city doesn't want flying taxis I don't see why they can't just pass an ordinance banning them.

If flying taxis work great for New Zealand's use cause, are you really opposed to developing it because it won't work in your country? What an odd way to think about technology.

<comment><USER40> Some things don't work as well with a federated model of rules, and one of the things that's an especially poor match for that is comprehensive transportation systems, sort of by definition.

<comment><USER41> These planes are designed to pilot themselves. When the passenger enters a destination, it should query a database of areas where it is permitted to fly and pick the most appropriate route given the constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hijacking the thread to ask others opinions how much such aircraft could be scaled: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nbMrxJo64M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nbMrxJo64M)

Ekranoplans where around for a while. Uses ground effect to fly quite fast and efficiently. Imagine we made a solar wing, instead of propellers, use water propellers to push for extra efficiency. Anyone wanna do the math?

</comment><comment><USER43> Would love to see them partner with Passerine Aircraft Corp.

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

</comment><comment><USER44> Wonder how this compares in size to Dubai's flying taxis. This one seems like it takes up more space.

</comment><comment><USER45> Article doesn't mention where they're going to build all the helipads for what are really battery powered autonomous helicopters.

Do I have to take a normal taxi to the airport or an elevator to the top floor of the nearest high rise to get a ride?

</comment><comment><USER46> Thats a very large meat grinder!

<comment><USER46> Oh, now I see thay have both high and low-wing configurations. The high-winged one is obviously much safer from the grinding aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If they can make a "flying taxi" airplane that isn't unsafe, isn't obnoxiously loud, isn't energy-guzzling, doesn't require undue landing/takeoff space, and is scalable beyond the ultra-elite, great!

But how many of those criteria do you think that even Page could get, simultaneously? Two, maybe three? Flying cars are known for being a _somewhat difficult_ engineering problem; that they've been hard enough to prevent partial solutions may turn out to have been a blessing.

And it's not like there aren't _other_ solutions to transportation issues, either.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not much of an airplaneologist, but this looks like a deathtrap to me. I appreciate all of the efforts in new transportation modes though.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not going to criticize that particular aircraft, no. I respect the effort it took to get it up in the air. But everyone is building an electric, pilotless vehicle for ride sharing, which also happens to be an oversized RC multicopter. Like trying to put Tesla, Uber and DJI products and business models into the blender and get guaranteed receipt for success. I'd love to see more thinking outside of context here.

</comment><comment><USER50> Anyone have any idea on what percentage of the energy budget is spent on vertical takeoff? Just curious.

</comment><comment><USER51> I prefer the term _air-taxi_.

I think this is an industry worth growing, but hopefully it won't become _too_ mainstream. Not sure we want thousands of these flying above our heads every day. I like Musk's underground transit plan a bit more.

[https://youtu.be/YqoyQ0NZs9I?t=29s](https://youtu.be/YqoyQ0NZs9I?t=29s)

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how expansive it would have to be to be cost effective.

Also, can it lands in the streets? is that safe ?

</comment><comment><USER53> To reduce noise you could shoot something with extremely noisy electric ducted fans out of a big tube (tower), and get it to land into another big tube elsewhere.

By the time the vehicle has left the tube it's high enough where noise at ground level cannot be heard.

Something with blades could also carry less juice (or none) and glide to its destination.

</comment><comment><USER54> Am I the only one that finds these unprotected rotating blades unsettlingly dangerous?

<comment><USER23> No. That's one reason why I much prefer the Volocopter (where the rotating blades are high above you, like in a conventional helicopter) to the eHang 184, where they seem to be aimed at your kneecaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Doesn't Dubai already have air taxis? Would that be a good pilot area?

</comment><comment><USER56> Literally the vehicles described in Brave New World. Life imitating art.

</comment><comment><USER57> How much does a ride cost? I'm very price sensitive.

<comment><USER58> Helicopter in Germany costs you 15-25€/minute. There is room for 3 passengers. You can negotiate if booking more time. The flying taxi should be less than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't get it. Musk (boring company) and Page (air-taxi) are pumping money in a few garbage projects.

Why don't they even try to accelerate and bring relevant technology to the masses?

</comment><comment><USER59> When I interviewed with Uber, I met an engineer who had worked for Page @ Kitty Hawk directly before joining Otto (which as we know got acquired immediately by Uber). I don't know that I really have a point, except I found it interesting to hear first-hand about another "Alphabet" (technically page's non-alphabet venture) crossover to Uber.</comment>


A new school curriculum - <AUTHOR> https://notes-txt.com/curriculum.html <comment><USER2> > _there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your > ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how > did we miss that in school?_

Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing classes, the person who understood the least I later found out had the ability to recall anything the professor wrote on the board. Clearly with that ability you would never have to learn anything to get As.

Also, the author should add the idea of capitalizing sentences to their curriculum somewhere. ;)

<comment><USER3> Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion of mathematics sure appears to require having a huge mental mapping (memorized) of names of things to what they are and what they're used for, not to mention memorization of a large number of symbols.

On a more practical note, lots of memorized knowledge appears to be the _primary_ thing the big tech companies want out of candidates, plus highish general intelligence (ability to quickly spot similarities between one problem and another so you can apply a memorized solution, chiefly).

<comment><USER4> I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at the end of each chapter. I just had to memorize a lot of them, as the derivation was not something I was capable of doing.

Being able to quickly recall facts is really important for problem solving, even though we live in an era where you can search online for just about any fact known to humanity.

<comment><USER2> Bear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for _exams_. If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing, but now that we have Mathematica, the only useful professional tasks that are left for humans to do involve the kind of knowledge it takes to do a derivation.

<comment><USER4> I had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem becomes trivial.

Deriving information from facts is a vital skill. But recalling facts is also incredibly important as well. Having knowledge immediately available for use allows a person to apply that knowledge in real-time, which is important for problem solving and thinking on your feet.

<comment><USER5> Every college math class I took gave me a sheet with those kinds of identities on it. If I was doing the kind of work where I actually had to do calculus involving trig functions, you can bet I'd pull up a similar sheet while I was working. Sure having it memorized would be a bit faster, but that's true for _far_ more things than I can actually memorize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula?

I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research projects.

I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits.

I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a day where career counselors came to class.

We had multiple arts and gym classes.

I remember a section of an English course where we covered professional skills such as public speaking and drafting emails.

Many of my classes required group projects.

I had multiple science classes that covered evolution and the cell.

Nearly everyone of the author's bullet points raised my eyebrows and left me wondering what their science/health/gym/English classes covered. I think the author fails to realize how much of what they want is already incorporated.

Edit: Corrected punctuation.

<comment> jagged-chisel I'm in the southeast US. Have been my whole life. Went to public schools in populated wealthy counties, and in a sparse, poorer county.

> I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits...

I had similar, but it wasn't part of the official curriculum, so didn't get the amount of focus it might have required to get students to take it seriously. Now that I'm an experienced adult, I know that I had a way of learning that worked for me, and having a teacher who A) knew what good note taking looked like and B) could identify my own peculiarities and help me adapt the techniques for me would have helped tremendously.

> encouraged to find an after school club/activity ...

More time at school? Ugh... didn't want that. Offer me a "job" doing something I enjoyed? OK, I'm there - I need the money.

> ... career counselors ...

These people talked like my extended family - "Why would you want to do that? Clearly you're more qualified to swing a hammer..." uh, no thanks. I recall one specific instance where a supposed mentor replied to one of my stated career goals with "do you think you're smart enough for that?"

> ... English course where we covered professional skills ...

I think I got a total of two weeks of that in four years of high school. At least this was part of the official curriculum, but there just wasn't an actual focus on it.

> ... evolution and the cell

Only AP classes for us. _Elective_ AP classes, which personally I did choose. (By 'elective' I mean students had to choose these classes - there were required science credits, and these fulfilled the requirements, but why choose the harder classes when the easier one will suffice? I was interested, most other students were not.)

I guess my point is that although you might have had access in your public school education to these things, they're just not as ubiquitous as the need to be.

IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on how well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test, rather than gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt.

<comment><USER6> > IMO, the entire problem with the US education that I experienced is the > insistence on a bullet pointed list of things to cover, a minimum grade on > how well the students retained that specific knowledge until the test, > rather than gauging students' understanding and ability to learn and adapt.

I 100% agree and I think the educators I've spoken to (several friends are teachers) would also broadly agree, but that's not what the post advocates.

My understanding of your reply is that your school had many of these elements, but they weren't quality or weren't emphasized appropriately to students which is fundamentally different from the post's view that these things didn't occur.

<comment> jagged-chisel > ... your school had many of these elements, but they weren't quality or > weren't emphasized ...

Yes, that exactly. I hope I didn't come across as arguing back in the direction TFA, just adding my input to your input :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy.

The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

<comment><USER8> Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking.

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

<comment><USER2> You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.

<comment><USER3> > The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s > psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.

The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose.

Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, _hot garbage_.

Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would also add many things that are taught have a lot of historical cruft.

For example, calculus. What is taught currently by most high schools is a horrible mess that mixes infinitesimal calculus as devised by Newton-Leibniz with late 1800s epsilon-delta formalisms. Clarifying this would shed a lot of light into student understanding.

Same thing can be said about linear algebra, where lots of algorithmic stuff hides a simple abstraction that is rarely mentioned. Matrices encode linear transformations.

I was taught way too many algorithmic tricks without proper conceptual motivation.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for saying what I was about to.

Yes I find the curriculum often runs in 'historic' order, as if the students are expected to learn in the same order as humanity discovered things.

Why not teach the powerful underlying principles as soon as they can be comprehended? For example, it's not until after you've learned about many kinds of chemical reactions that you actually learn what chemistry is, about atomic electron shells, valence, etc.

Same with biology, too much naming flower parts, and not enough evolution, molecular biology, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would argue that a well-run school addresses many of the items on this short list. I learned most of these in my schooling, and I saw most of these things being taught in the reasonably-run schools I have been a part of in 25 years of teaching middle school and high school in the US.

That said, I also know there are many schools that are so poorly run that very little of this comes up. So the larger, and much harder question becomes: What do we do politically to make more schools well-run?

The answer to that question is critical, but probably isn't covered in a 2-min read.

<comment><USER12> You ignore the problem of inputs. What if the unfortunate truth is that educational outcomes are mostly determined by the native capacities and attributes of the students. If the input determines the output and school or teacher level effects merely mediate some of that, then isn't it all just a cruel charade designed to give the illusion that we live in a meritocracy. It seems like students and our society are the ultimate victims If that were true.

<comment><USER13> There is certainly a strong influence brought by the student, but then one of the key influences in that regard is that of the parent(s) and what happens in early years, especially encouraging kids to read books. That is one of the most crucial 'learning how to learn' things you can do for a child. And if kids grow up to be parents themselves without understanding how to learn, the responsibility is passed even more to schools.

Learning starts in the home and continues there through school life. I've seen parents complaining to teachers about how their kids aren't doing well enough, but as though it's nothing to do with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Warning: comment strongly biased towards a specific type of learning technology :)

At a molecular level, all memory (dendritic spines) declines at roughly the same rate. Some memories last much longer because the dendritic spines formed were much stronger (such as traumatic event, a well-formulated memory, or a memory strongly linked to other things such as a smell). But they all decline at the same rate nonetheless. I've been a fan of spaced-repetition learning for a few years. Programs like Anki use a variation of an old algorithm (SM-2) based on decay-rates for memory extrapolated from data gathered through tens of thousands of people over many years. I use a similar program for rote memorization first, and then to remember concepts.

After I grasp the basics of a subject I can eventually delete that flashcard and create a concept-based flashcard that allows me to understand the forest for the trees. Example: "very frothy urine is a possible clinical symptom of what disease? Proteinuria/Nephrotic syndrome" → "what macro-nutrient, when mixed vigorously in liquid, makes it frothy? Protein". So now I understand the key concept for both nephrotic syndrome and why I should only add whey protein to my shakes at the end of the mixing to avoid creating bubbles, etc.

If I had started using these programs when young, I would have saved years of life not having to re-learn the same thing year after year, because it takes much longer to re-learn than to remember. And now imagine I hadn't been forced to rote-memorize useless things just to pass a boring exam. Years of life... I wonder if spaced-repetition can also be used to remember skills that aren't practiced often.

The only limitation I know with spaced-repetition algorithms is that the data shows that it's not very useful for children until they're about 7 yo. This is because the algorithms are tuned to adult-level memorization, and children under 7 usually aren't nearly as good as adults at retention (for many reasons).

<comment><USER15> Do you have a pointer to where do you get that children under seven have bad retention? Or is it a personal observation? (this is not a "citation needed", i'm genuinely interested as I look into spaced repetition from time to time).

<comment><USER14> Sure. It's from the personal wikipedia maintained by Dr. Piotr Wozniak, the guy who invented spaced repetition and put it into software back in 1986 (SM-2 algorithm) when computers became available to him.

The relevant part of the article starts here: [https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Plasticity- vs-...](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Plasticity-vs- stability_trade_off)

The summary of the article can be read here: [https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Summary:_Child...](https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Childhood_amnesia#Summary:_Childhood_amnesia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You may be interested to learn more about the work of Dr Taddy Bleacher.

While he is not hitting every item on your list, his organization provided over 600k street children with a highly diverse education based on developing whe whole student and not just a scholastic portion.

Recent talk: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kvcgBOizjN0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kvcgBOizjN0)

</comment><comment><USER17> You missed personal finance in that list. I'm not sure if you are recommending doing away with regular curriculum completely or supporting it with your curriculum. I am all for latter because that's the change which is feasible, former is not.

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing that'll go under "organization". I think these topics are intentionally general to cover a bunch of stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I learned most of this in school. Did everyone else not?

My partner is a grade 2 teacher, and she covers a lot of this. Everything in learning skills, individual skills, social skills, and most of our world.

You probably just don't recognize it when it's taught at a level understandable to six year olds, or 14 year old. Before writing posts like this it's a good idea to go look at a your school board's curriculum. You'll likely be surprised how closely it matches this.

<comment><USER4> People tend to forget a lot of what they learned over the 9-18 years they spent in school. Then complain that a topic, which is taught in schools, should be taught in schools.

Example: how interest is calculated. It's been part of algebra for a while now and most states require algebra to graduate. Thus, if you graduated high school, someone taught you about interest rates. You just forgot.

I'm guilty of this too. I don't remember much of what I learned in grammar school. I went back to research the parts of sentences and found that it's a topic taught in the third grade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by > hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill > in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only > 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

I find it dubious that you can only learn this by age 7 - although I'm sure it's easier if you're younger. Is there science behind this claim?

I am not a musician, but I have recently started learning to play piano, and training my ear is something I'd really like to learn. I've used some apps to practice ear training, and I'm able to discern intervals decently, but I can't recognize and identify a single note on its own. I do hope I can get there with more deliberate practice.

<comment> F-0X > the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by hearing it, can > be a massive benefit to a musician

It can also be a curse. I've known a number of people with perfect pitch. Those who were pianists typically insisted on playing only electric pianos, because a typical mechanical piano that's not in a performance hall is probably not tuned until "regular" listeners can tell it is out, but it could be out enough to make it unplayable to a performer with perfect pitch.

Another thing I noticed which I thought was surprising - they weren't notably better composers despite their "better understanding" of pitch.

<comment><USER13> I'm probably one of those people that can identify specific notes, but probably only if they're played on a piano. I play an electronic piano and what I find amusing/frustrating is if I use the 'transpose' function. So when I play for example in C but it is D that comes from the speakers, I will often find my fingers migrating to 'correct' the pitch. And if you wonder why I'd transpose, it's because - to my ears - a piece of music can sound noticeably different shifted just half a tone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The challenges to the education system go way deeper than just a better curriculum. I was speaking to a local administrator last week in our fairly affluent community and she estimated that about 10% of the kids in our district are functionally homeless. The only decent meals they will get are breakfast and lunch on school days. That many within this group don't have a place to wash their cloths. If the goal is to bring up things like test scores across the board with an improved curriculum then you have to first address some of these societal issues.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ctrl-f taxes: 0

This might be under "how the world works" but I think there should be a separate "how to be a reasonable citizen" like how to deal with taxes, voting, civics in general, that kinda stuff. It has a pretty big impact on day-to-day life.

<comment><USER4> This is part of social studies curricula. Here's an example from Washington state standards for social studies:

[https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject- area...](https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/resources-subject-area/social- studies/learning-standards#dexp-accordion-item--2)

There are requirements for social studies, civics, economics, geography, and world history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> there is lots of work done to improve education, mostly in how information is conveyed to people, and how they are engaged to interact with subjects. a lot of current western educational facilities still implement the banking theory, where people are seen as an empty bank, and filling them with information is filling the bank with money, i.e. more information provided == smarter people. now people are realising this is terrible ,and applying different models.

doesn't really have to do with memorisation techniques or other little nicknacks that can help people in specific domains. more about how people take in and interpret information, process it and make it their own to apply.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of my English teachers when I was 13 asked us what 'to educate' meant. Everyone associated it with being told things by a teacher, in school.

Educate comes from the Latin ex duco - to draw out of. Education isn't about pushing knowledge in, it's about pulling understanding out.

I think the schools systems worldwide struggle with balancing skills for life vs qualifications for the next stage of life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Dorothy Sayers (a contemporary of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and friend to both) wrote an essay about this about 60 years ago, titled "The Lost Tools of Learning" [https://gbt.org/text/sayers.html](https://gbt.org/text/sayers.html)

<comment><USER25> I attended private Catholic schools in NYC starting in 1960. I remember being told early and often by the nuns, brothers and priests who taught that "you are going to live 80 years, we will be teaching you for a small fraction of that time and it's impossible for us to teach you everything you are going to need to know. What we can teach you is how to learn on your own." And they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Public schools are representative of politics: it's all about special interests. People have deeply held-beliefs that their special interests are more important than someone else's.

In my state, we had state history class, I believe this to be utterly unimportant to be a functioning human. How do I know this? Literally every other place on the planet doesn't teach the history of my particular state and gets along just fine.

Same with Literature, it's culturally focused, and seems to be self- perpetuating. Why don't we spend as much time focusing on, say, Japanese culture as we do on Shakespeare? Well, that's because some self-entitled, rich rulers of ours decided we should learn about Shakespeare.

I think it's a perfectly suitable system to maintain the status quo of the world. Public education's format is believed in so dogmatically that the only choice is to defect and choose home school or private school.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems to me that a lot of things on that list _were_ in my curriculum, at a fairly typically crappy rural school system. I'm guessing that it was in OP's as well. Did they just miss it because it wasn't explicit?

</comment><comment><USER28> Things that don't change because they've always been that way are thing things that most need to change.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is neat but plain wrong. xD The premise AND the conclusion (the suggested solution).

</comment><comment><USER30> >How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia

About 10 years ago, in my second year CS program, I created a program to Teaching secondary school students how to use the internet to find stuff online for free and learn. This was in lieu of a 6-month internship program.

I first spent weeks creating a training manual. (I should have spent time selling before spending weeks on the manual). I then talked a friend into helping me send proposals to private schools. A marketing manager friend of mine proofread the proposal letter - that's when I learned about business writing - Must Be Straight to the Point.

I approached a number of government secondary schools. The teachers there loved it but told me a government approval was necessary for the program. I pursued the approval but it didn't go through.

The private schools were lukewarm. Approached my alma mater and received the same lukewarm response. The students who I spoke to listened to the pitch and gave me a response I would never forget. They said, "Google? I know how to use google."

I didn't expect the naive response. In hindsight, I should have made up a complicated sounding title for the program. It's just that I'm a, "say it like it is person."

I sold only one copy of the manual and received a thank-you note (Found it a few months ago. Unfortunately, there was no name signed to the note and I don't remember who it was).

Now I work in a school environment and 90%+ of the students hate learning. They only go through the motions because it's required.

>memory palace, mnemonics, Sleep's role in learning, note-taking

I did teach this when I handled an elective class and my students loved it. They spread the word, and their classmates who weren't taking the subject started hanging around my class. I also taught them the difference between reading for pleasure and reading for exams. And that perfect practice makes perfect.

Reading for exams simply practices reading. But setting one's own questions, and answering past questions is much more effective at preparing for exams.

>Meditation

I thought deeply about this but never implemented it. Or I didn't know how to. Also, it kept skipping my mind.

>Writing of all forms

This was the first thing I tried with the students - their writing ability is subpar. Out of 30 students, just one did the exercise because I wasn't their English teacher and that was the end of that.

>reading old literature.

Now I mind the library most of the time (it was locked before). And I've spent on different occasions up to 5% of my salary on story books and literature. Wanted to buy 10 used ebook readers from the US (eBay) in October but couldn't work out my own shipping. Buying from sellers who send directly to my country means a 5X price increase.

>Our World

Downloaded kolibri late last month. Downloaded 2,007 khan academy videos so far. Set up one of my laptops as the server and networked it with my phone wifi with another. Created accounts for 2 senior students who are library regulars. And they love it. One other student showed interest this afternoon. Time will tell if their interest is sustained or not.

</comment><comment><USER31> > absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify a musical note like F# just by > hearing it, can be a massive benefit to a musician. you can learn the skill > in a matter of weeks, but it can only be acquired before the age of 7. only > 0.01% of people end up learning it in time!

This seems to be a very problematic paragraph. In particular:

> it can only be acquired before the age of 7

I'm doubtful about how true this is. I can't find anything backing up this claim (unless you count "being born with synesthesia" or "being blind at birth" as "acquired"); the closest I can find is Mozart having demonstrated this ability by age 7.

On the contrary, this seems like the exact sort of thing someone could readily memorize well beyond that age (maybe not _perfectly_ , but within a given margin of error, sure), much like one might recognize a given tempo or a given shade of orange. It's _hard_ , but with practice it's possible.

In fact, most people are able to recognize the pitches themselves; even amateur singers (and non-singers entirely) can sing songs they've heard in approximately the right key, and the average person can usually recognize when a song is pitched up or down relative to how it's "supposed" to be (this is one of the common traits for both nightcore and vaporwave: shifting the pitch up or down, respectively). What's missing here is the ability to actually name that pitch, but just because one can't vocalize what the brain recognizes doesn't mean recognition/identification doesn't happen _at all_ ; it just happens through other mechanisms (like singing/playing that note again later).

In my case, I certainly don't have "absolute pitch" as defined by that paragraph, but if you sang something to me and asked me to play it on a trombone I could probably do it without having to fumble for a reference note. Worst-case, I can produce a reference note in my head (usually B-flat, since most brass instruments nowadays are keyed to it) and extrapolate.

And on that note:

> can be a massive benefit to a musician

I'm _very_ doubtful about how true this is. Usually what's far more critical is _relative_ pitch - that is, the ability to accurately recreate a pitch in relation to some arbitrary reference pitch (e.g. singing/playing a note in a chord or scale). Absolute pitch (in this specific sense, rather than the more innate/internal sense I described above) helps for music transcription, and... that's about it. Being able to sing a perfect 440Hz A does jack squat if that A's supposed to be in an F-major chord/scale.

If anything, absolute pitch recognition can make it _harder_ to perform in an ensemble, or to perform music with a different pitch convention other than A=440 (e.g. Baroque music), or to otherwise be able to adapt one's pitch to match the actual music to be performed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Post-capitalism skills conspicuously absent.

</comment><comment><USER33> "How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill."

"How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about learning" to you?

<comment><USER3> Kids used to have to be taught how to use the library. Card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, all that. The kinds of things one may find at a library other than books. People aren't born knowing this stuff and may not realize what can and cannot be gained from a resource, or how to go about getting it, if they aren't told at some point.

Hell, you have to teach kids about _book features_ like captions and tables of contents and indices and footnotes and, believe it or not, kids aren't always great at picking up that knowledge even when taught.

<comment><USER33> I get that, it just strikes me as ridiculous that a curriculum about how to use the internet to learn would be summed up by: "Google, Wikipedia." Maybe the author is sacrificing too much depth here and I'm missing the overall point, but I'd rather teach my kids how _not_ to use Google than teach them how _to_ use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, this is a starting point. I agree this topic has considerable depth which I omitted.

there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub, Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment Internet learning

you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend many hours on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iTunes Connect Issue Logging Developers into Other Accounts - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/29/itunes-connect-issue-logging-developers-into-other-accounts/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to compare Apple and Google. Talent-wise, Apple has always been a "front-end" focused company, and they've now had several fiascos when they've started to get into "back-end"/cloud stuff (this, iCloud privacy leak, etc...)

In contrast, similarly Google had been a "back-end" focused company, and their first few versions of Android were horrible and clunky compared to iOS (but they've improved a lot).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's such a bad fuck up that it would justify someone pulling power cables from all iTunes Connect servers to disable access.

</comment><comment><USER4> That is one major (excuse my language) fuck up.

</comment><comment><USER5> logged into another app. Then refreshed and got this.

'use strict'; define(function () { var itcApp = angular.module('itcApp', ['ngRoute', 'routeResolverServices', 'angularFileUpload', 'global_services', 'global_directives', 'global_filters', 'form_elements', 'ngCookies', 'angulartics', 'angulartics.adobe.analytics', 'ngSanitize', 'pasvaz.bindonce']); itcApp.config(['$routeProvider', 'routeResolverProvider', '$controllerProvider', '$compileProvider', '$filterProvider', '$provide', '$httpProvider', '$locationProvider', '$cookiesProvider', '$analyticsProvider', '$sceDelegateProvider', function ($routeProvider, routeResolverProvider, $controllerProvider, $compileProvider, $filterProvider, $provide, $httpProvider, $locationProvider, $cookiesProvider, $analyticsProvider, $sceDelegateProvider) { $routeProvider.when('/', { template: '

', controller: ['$window', function ($window) { $window.location.href = '/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa'; }] }).otherwise({ redirectTo: '/' }); }]); return itcApp; });

So they load all of Angular then redirect to another page?

</comment><comment><USER6> What were the security implications for an entity that has applications there?

Anything we should check or change as soon as iTunes Connect is back up?

<comment><USER7> Somebody mentioned that trying to perform actions on the apps would error out, so it seems more like an information leakage issue.

That being said, when it come back online I'm definitely going to go through all my apps.

<comment><USER8> Check your users as well. Someone could have created an account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's back up but it's still broken. When I log in with account X, I see the apps associated with account X. Within My Apps, and within Payments, I see the apps associated with account X. BUT. When I tap Sales & Trends, I see data for account Y. It's also one of mine, but it's associated with completely different Apple IDs and user names. I am able to navigate back and forth through the different sections of iTC and get a bizzaro merger of the two accounts. The Sales & Trends sections seems to be powered by [https://reportingitc2.apple.com/](https://reportingitc2.apple.com/)? and that's when I end up on an incorrect account. Scary.

</comment><comment><USER10> Saw it firsthand, it was like account roulette for about 5-10 minutes. Then someone hit the big red button around 11:50a eastern.

Smells like something messed up in their session or caching layers..

</comment><comment><USER11> Probably has to do with them trying to finally release the analytics they were supposed to release in Fall 2014.

</comment><comment><USER12> god damn, and posting the images to twitter.</comment>


My JavaScript/React interview study guide - <AUTHOR> https://zeph.co/javascript-interview-guide <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, these are my plain-English notes on popular JavaScript/React/web development interview questions (recursion, event delegation, component lifecycle, reducers, XSS and CSRF, personal questions, etc.). The post is clocking in at 11,000+ words, and I've tried to make the answers as simple/easy-to-understand as possible.

I'm an intermediate-level developer (3 years of React experience, 5 of general web dev) so I certainly don't know as much as some of you. Please let me know if you find any mistakes — I'd love to learn more.</comment>


App Store SEO: The tools we used - <AUTHOR> http://invantory.com/2012/07/app-store-seo-the-tools-we-used/

<comment><USER2> This is a great post. I've had a lot of trouble coming up with good keywords without putting competitor's names in the keyword field. Thanks for the good data and the links.

BTW, did you use the paid service, or did you make what you could of the free info?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For App Annie and AppCod.es, I used the free services, which cover the basics. AppCod.es search is very, very helpful for determining good keywords to use (be sure to look at their slideshow first).

The AppCod.es competitor tracking service (paid) looks very interesting as well ... but it's not something we're ready to sign up for.

<comment><USER2> We already use App Annie, but I'd never heard of AppCod.es before today, so thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Getting started with Python: Tips, Tools and Resources - <AUTHOR> http://lurnq.com/lesson/Getting-started-with-Python-Tips-Tools-and-Resources/

<comment><USER2> Python as a language is great. Its the GUI frameworks that always stop my advances into Python...there are about half a dozen of them and they come in various flavours of broke, ugly, incompatible, difficult or abandoned.

So I end up downloading VS C# Express...

<comment><USER3> As someone who's relatively comfortable with VS ('08-'12) and who has licenses, I'm curious to know what the limitations (if any) are to using VS for development with Python.

Do you (or does anyone) know of any quick-start guides or tutorials to working with Python (or any other non-.NET languages) in Visual Studio?

<comment><USER2> All the code on the internet is C#, so I don't really both with python on VS. I guess its possible, but for learning it strikes me as a bad starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also, Project Euler for "Practice Exercises and Projects", and vim+python-mode and geany for IDE's.

python-forum.org and #python on irc.freenode.org for getting specific help.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are already a programmer, official tutorial will be the best and fastest <http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/>

The page list some other domain as official python tutorial: <http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python.html> That's not the official python tutorial(it's giving me an access error - no ideas what's hosted there).

</comment><comment><USER6> I took Udacity's cs101 class as a (lazy) way to get introduced to python. While I felt like it was a very well done introduction to computer science, it wasn't a very effective way to learn a language as it made a deliberate effort to decouple python and cs (and rightfully so). I would suspect that this is also true of the other MOOCs listed here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try MIT one, i guess that you will like. I have just started learning python ( after learning javascript ) in i find it best resource available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another good resource :- <http://learnpythonthehardway.org/>

<comment><USER4> This is the first resource the article mentions.

<comment><USER7> ohw my bad !.... guess i didn't have my reading glasses on

<comment><AUTHOR> i guess you dont read documentations too..:)) just kidding..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like <http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest> enough to point it out specifically (it's linked far down the page).

Combined with PEP8, it's a fantastic stylistic resource.

</comment><comment><USER9> I miss Dive Into Python. It was awesome.

<comment><USER10> Why are you talking about it in the past tense?

<http://www.diveintopython.net/toc/index.html>

<http://getpython3.com/diveintopython3/>

<comment><USER9> I know it's been mirrored, but is someone keeping it updated?</comment></comment></comment>


Open-source App IDE.  Make Apps.  Fast.   - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kulapa/magikai-make-apps-fast

<comment><USER2> Existing _completely free_ cross-platform apps with free IDE support:

Haxejs <http://haxe.org/>

Titanium Mobile <http://appcelerator.com>

Cordova/PhoneGap <http://phonegap.com>

Wakanda <http://www.wakanda.org>

These all have widget systems and GUI tools to create apps fast. Initially, making a cross-platform app seems easy and simple. It turns out debugging is really, really hard. There are many layers and a ton of version/device fragmentation. Betting my dev money on it for professional apps doesn't seem like a great idea. I think the killer feature should boil down to this:

        Magikai is great for kids who are just starting out in programming

Right now everything seems to be business focused, i.e. these 'no need to learn code' systems:

App Breeder <http://www.appbreeder.com/>

AppBotic <http://www.appbotic.com/>

App Inventor <http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu>

App Press <http://www.app-press.com/>

Chatty Apps <http://www.chattysolutions.com/chattyapps.html>

Shout 'Em <http://www.shoutem.com/>

Snappii <https://www.snappii.com/>

_EDIT: And more --[http://dailytekk.com/2012/04/02/100-tools-to-develop-a- kille...](http://dailytekk.com/2012/04/02/100-tools-to-develop-a-killer-ios- or-android-app/) _

Generally a decent programmer will hit the limits of the 'easy' framework just slow enough to have wasted a ton of time. Then you have to drop into native code to fix the bugs that are not the priority of that specific framework.

Appcelerator has gained so much traction because they have a ton of developers concentrated on bugfixes and full native API support.

But, to get children started on programming is always a great idea, and as all of us young devs grow we will want to share the dev experience with our kids. If they can make that possible I think they'll have a home run on their hands.

<comment><USER3> > But, to get children started on programming is always a great idea, and as > all of us young devs grow we will want to share the dev experience with our > kids. If they can make that possible I think they'll have a home run on > their hands.

This is worth repeating. Kids are, in general, fabulously creative and completely open minded with new technology. I can see all sorts of fun, frivolous, nefarious and downright evil uses for a simple app maker that works on any kid's phone. Little Johnny makes a simple set of static pages that stores crib notes for his classes. Evil Britney, who has a few more coding chops, comes up with an app that screen-scrapes the yearbook site and lets her friends rate all the boys in her year (she got the idea from The Social Network.)

If these guys can get their teeth into that market either officially (through schools) or via the terrifyingly powerful playground word-of-mouth network, this could become quite big. It's a hell of a long shot though.

<comment><USER2> That's why even though I am skeptical, I gave them an upvote. Kids also have a ton of time and are very tolerant of things not working right on the first try. If I could amuse myself with Logo and BASIC (and later on, writing class notes and formula-solvers in graphing calculators), then I'm sure modern-day kids could take a system like Magikai to places I can't imagine.

None of the other frameworks I am aware of even _consider_ kids as a target market.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for great response! I would love to talk to you further. If you like to contact me via the email in my info

<comment><USER2> Hi Eddie, no contact info shows for me in your HN profile. But, feel free to contact me through any channel, I am doublerebel everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The world's already got a few of these to my knowledge, Brightcove launched one last week with native plugins..I personally would love to see a fully native version of this. People want real UIKit/Android components, not an approximation of same.

</comment><comment><USER5> Before putting out a crossplatform IDE/Framework like this one should examine the existing ones like Adobe's PhoneGap or Trigger.io etc.. They have been working on this for some time and they have started out supporting native UI elements.

Magikai may only be useful for people who really have a basic understanding of html and want to create a simple app that they have been thinking of.

But not my cup of tea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, founder here. In fact, we build on top of Phonegap, and enhance it with plugins that don't exist for Phonegap yet, i.e push notification, SMS, facebook connect, and so on. We'll make the change in the kickstarter page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds too good to be true. And you know what they about that

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, founder here. We're really trying to promote HTML5 development, and we believe can pull it off with our team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The screen shots seem to show iOS apps on both sides. If the Android apps don't look like Android apps then it isn't a tool I want to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, founder here. Apologies, that was a mistake. We'll fix it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is $18,000 nearly enough for this?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll back it if it comes with that awesome bugs bunny sound track.

</comment><comment><USER10> In 29 days they've managed to get two people to pledge $1 apiece.

<comment><USER11> If you actually looked, you'd see that there's 29 days to go, and it started today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "in browser"

why!?

<comment><USER13> Because web programmers are terrified of native development.

It infuriates me to no end.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but it keeps rates up on the native side. I kinda like them being scared; when they get too close I can wave pointers around like a wand and they scurry away.

For my part, I'm a bit scared of web development: without a compiler, I'd have to keep working _all the time_. I'd miss fencing on chairs.

<comment><USER13> You can add a few layers here and there, like a build process, and continuous integration or static analysis or release engineering.

It doesn't come near compiler times, but it's close enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nnnnnnoooooppppppeeeeee

</comment><comment><USER15> This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER16> Have to agree with that. Especially the video: He doesn't even seem to try to talk freely at the beginning, and later the music which makes it harder to understand anything. Also, I don't see why I would want to use something like that. I can just use MacVim for editing and Phonegap for native API access. Phonegap also has tutorials for how to package the app (with a web view).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, founder here. Thanks for the suggestion! We'll fix it for the next video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Personally, I want to be able to easily make cross platform apps that use Native components, not HTML5 apps.

<comment><USER18> Qt? wxWidgets? Gtk? XUL?

<comment><USER17> I think that our definitions of easy differ.

I don't consider any of those kits very easy to deal with, despite the fact that I am fully capable of building apps with them.

They're certainly nowhere near the realm of kits like RealStudio/RealBasic, FileMaker, Access, VB4/5/6 or even WinForms with Visual Studio (some of which I know are not cross-platform...but they _are_ easy).

<comment><USER19> perhaps the reason those are easy is _because_ they weren't cross platform?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python Decorators: What they are underneath - <AUTHOR> http://crschmidt.net/blog/352/python-decorators-what-they-are-underneath/

<comment><USER2> The article that this article is responding to is useful in understanding as well.

[http://sgillies.net/blog/858/how-to-decorate-python-gis- code...](http://sgillies.net/blog/858/how-to-decorate-python-gis-code/)

This one as well.

<http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240845>

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you! I've been trying to wrap my head around decorators this past week. Definitely a good guide.

<comment><USER4> Really, the only thing you need to wrap your head around to understand decorators is the concept of first-class functions (functions that can take functions as parameters and return functions).

If you understand those, and how they can be useful, the only remaining step to python's decorators is a syntactic transformation.

      def decorate(func):
          def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
              print "I'm decorated!"
              return func(*args, **kwargs)
          return wrapper

      @decorate
      def foo():
          print "I'm foo!"

Above, @decorate is equivalent to having foo = decorate(foo) underneath the definition of foo. Decorate takes a function X as a parameter, creates a function Y that takes whatever arguments, prints a statement, and returns the value of calling Y with whatever arguments. It then returns the object representing X.

If you need a bunch of good examples of how first-class functions can be extremely useful, go through a bit of SICP ( <http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html> ). It's a challenging tome, but well worth the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't realize that Jython was out-of-date enough to miss decorators... I hope that Jython doesn't die.

<comment><USER6> "As of October 31, 2008, the Jython development team is proud to announce a new beta release: Jython 2.5b0!" <http://www.jython.org/Project/>

Jython is alive and well.</comment></comment>


Xoom With Honeycomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/23/Xoom-Honeycomb <comment><USER2> I wonder which of the Xoom and the 10" Galaxy tab will come out the strongest. I'll be getting one of those two for sure. The Notion Ink is out for me.</comment>


Torrentz will always love you, farewell - <AUTHOR> http://torrentz.eu/search.html?q=45+years <comment><AUTHOR> I heard that this is related to the arrest of the Kickass torrents admin. But I don't understand why a search engine would need to shut down.</comment>


The challenge of realistic music generation: modelling raw audio at scale [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://papers.nips.cc/paper/8023-the-challenge-of-realistic-music-generation-modelling-raw-audio-at-scale.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Piano one minute samples:

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fvS- DU8AcK078-5k6WGu...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fvS- DU8AcK078-5k6WGudiBn0XSeE0_D)</comment>


Cobol Web Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.infogoal.com/cbd/cbdweb.htm <comment><USER2> I've done COBOL based web stuff on the IBM i/AS400. Nothing particularly tricky about it, wouldn't really recommend it for anything super complex. But it's less of a hassle then the various "tools" that's ment to make it easier, which always have horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations. Just point Apache to a binary, read environmental variables and print to stdout. Using it doesn't really make sense as such, but developers who only know COBOL can just write regular programs and be done with it.

<comment><USER3> > But it's less of a hassle than the various "tools" [...] which always have > horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations.

Can you share what exact "tools" you are talking about?

<comment><USER2> Well, tools is probably not the right wording. But solutions for making systems accessible over web APIs. There's usually in-house solutions. But IBMs own, "IWS"([https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services- ib...](https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services-ibm-i-web- services-made-easy)), is probably the main one I've heard of. I can't really remember all the solutions to serve up html pages.

It works. You pass stuff in and out through what would best be described as ARGV. Some Java middleware and so on analyzes the program to determine the amount, name and length of in and out variabels.

The process is that you choose to deploy a service, choose between SOAP and "REST" and point to your program. You then get to specify the resource name, description and a regexp for your path. The resource name becomes a part of the URL. You then specify which variables are input and which are output. And after that assign some generic settings and choose which variabels are sent in as a part of the path and not and so on.

Works sorta nice. Some drawbacks are that you'll still need to add rewrite rules to get actual restful URLs, since the URL of your service will be along the lines of [http://example.com/web/services/<resource](http://example.com/web/services/<resource) name/<your regexp>. If your program is written in COBOL instead of RPG, all variable names will be in all cap. There's a max size to how much data you can send in or return that's not super small, but around a few MB unless my memory fails me.

I mean it's almost there, just not really good if you ask me. It could use some love. Also anything you're unsure of results in you having to dig into the hell hole that is IBMs website. Not exactly made easier by some buffoon naming the platform as such into a three letter name of one of the worlds biggest companies followed by a space and a single letter. So google is worse than useless.

I've found most in-house solutions to be more reliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Redhat's "Command Line Heroes" podcast has a very insightful episode about COBOL and Go, talking about legacy languages, and how all languages may or may not become legacy, and their impact on new paradigms like the web (and vice versa).

[https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line- heroes/season-3/the-i...](https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line- heroes/season-3/the-infrastructure-effect)

My takeaway is that particularly with COBOL, there is a vested interest in the finance industry to find and retain COBOL talent, and making efforts to popularizing a language for the web is essentially a recruiting tactic more than anything else.

<comment> non-entity I wonder how the market for that is now, and how it will be a decade from now. I imagine a lot of the people with significant experience working with COBOL and mainframes are getting older and retiring

<comment><USER5> Eventually companies will pay people to get up to speed on older technology like RPG and COBOL. For sure, they are fighting it hard, but I don't see a lot of other options. It's harder for me to imagine all of this legacy software being replaced with new code.

<comment><USER6> It is substantially cheaper to train people and training people in COBOL is easy. Some businesses are starting to realize and even try to encourage IBM to do more to promote their products.

As another user said, allowing people to spin up z/OS would be awesome. As of now, it's not really practical to learn without direct access to mainframes. So all the cost is on the business to train devs. Which is not as important in other dev positions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I put together a REST API for COBOL a while back:

[https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/r...](https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/retrocomputing/2019/03/26/cobol-60-give- rest-framework-birthday.html)

The blogpost describes how to get the web stuff done, then moves on to API routing. This post has reminded me that I need to write part two of the article which covers parameter handling and so on...

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm certainly surprised I don't see a mention of [http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM](http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM) anywhere.

<comment><USER9> Also: [https://github.com/azac/cobol-on- wheelchair](https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair)

<comment><USER10> I'm in a mix of offense and amusement because __COBOL on Cogs __is the joke and __COBOL on Wheelchair __is the serious one.

<comment><USER8> oh man after actually looking at the website again, I realized that I had the two confused for some reason and posted the wrong one. at least someone came through and gave the proper one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> COBOL is a loose abstraction over assembly. Don't laugh, it's fast, and it'll outlive you.

<comment><USER12> COBOL is jq for column-oriented data.

SQL is COBOL for relational data.

COBOL is a loose abstraction over 1950s assembly languages. You know, the ones with built-in support for decimal arithmetic and no support for recursion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm gonna save this link for when my dev friends complain about their jobs

<comment><USER14> Sure, there is always going to be someone working a less comfortable job, but that should not keep people from pursuing better working conditions.

On the contrary, those working in less favorable conditions should be the ones to take other jobs as an example and precedent to make their job better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how long this could last in a container on kubernetes with a million other microservices. Could the author develop something so rock-solid nobody looked at it until after they left? Then imagine the face on the intern asked to add feature X years later after they dig into the code.

</comment><comment><USER16> A great history of web designs in the links (for those that still works) in that page

<comment><USER17> I find this one interesting: [http://www.ils- international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm](http://www.ils- international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm)

<comment><USER18> I would really like to hear more from the author of these pages:

[http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/](http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/)

[http://www.coboloncloud.com/](http://www.coboloncloud.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What are the actual business opportunities for cobol programmers? Are there chances for remote work, freelance consulting per project, etc. ? Or it's just office jobs in banks?

<comment><USER20> Although there is perceived demand, COBOL jobs pay very poorly. Like $50K.

Exception of course for consultants with a following, and customers that believe you have 'unicorn' skills.

One advantage is the software stack is mature and not subject to fads and fashion.

<comment><USER21> This is the first post I have ever read that stated: "COBOL jobs pay very poorly".

<comment><USER22> If it helps, it's my experience as well.

COBOL consultancy is a niche, but one that pays poorly (against what internet common sense would have you believe). All the COBOL consultants I know are not doing particularly well; they are mostly old guys who naturally ended up in that role. They occasionally must switch jobs when their services are no longer needed. The new jobs don't pay well either. They usually do not want or can learn new skills.

There is young blood learning COBOL, but really, they don't stay long doing that. If you're young and in tech, there's a world of more exciting opportunities out there.

<comment><USER19> There's also a lot more competition. Question is just how hard is it to get outsourcing contracts in COBOL world?

<comment><USER22> Young people tend to prefer excitement to lack of competition.

COBOL has a terrible rap, so the kind of young people who would still work with it are a self-selecting group... in a bad way.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>