Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/18/poor-kids-who-do-everything-right-dont-do-better-than-rich-kids-who-do-everything-wrong/ <comment><USER4> An event that will always stay with me, some years ago I a job opened up where I would have some sway in recommending candidates. I had a uni friend who would fit the role well. A great bloke, smart and hard working. He came from a very blue collar, low income background. His job was pretty middle of the road stuff.

This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times salary. I mentioned this role and said I would get him a chat with the hiring manager. They seemed interested. I said you can double your salary. At this point they got cold feet and said 'it sounds too important for me'. I told them I knew the job, that it would suit them and I wouldn't burn my own credibility if I want confident they would succeed. But they money spooked them.

And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment. And simply the expectations you approach life with, having a overriding effect on natural ability.

There are so many variable in play for this its not a one issue answer but I suspect this one is more important than we typically give it credit for. An expectation on oneself of where we should end up based on how we grow up.

<comment><USER5> This really hits home for me.

I once had a conversation with a very, very experienced developer who ran a local meetup and was discussing salary options at a new job. He balked when I told them what I asked for, and replied:

"Just because you grew up as poor as me doesn't mean you should fear wealth. If it makes you feel that guilty take the shit and donate it to charity."

And its really true.

My first engineering job I made almost 3x what my mother ever made in a year over her entire life's highest salary.

I was a college dropout that was enthusiastic and knew enough to be functional.

It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.

Edit: The first thing I did after collecting my first 'engineering paycheck' was go out to Applebees and get an appetizer, a drink, AND an entree, and then proceed to not worry about it.

<comment><USER6> This is a throw away account. I'm writing this because I'm the embodiment of poor and the embodiment of lack of social mobility.

As a child of divorce, I lived in affluent suburbia. However, everything was devoted to keeping the house and to food. There was next to nothing for anything else. I had three jobs going through high school. When I was in school I was told that I couldn't qualify for financial aid because of how much money my father made. His life was dedicated to revenge on my mother and he spent HUGE swaths of money to avoid paying $200/month in child support. Getting money from him for tuition or getting him to sign on the student loan forms was an impossibility. Ironically, I had none of the advantages of being poor.

Graduating average was going to be 96%. They kicked me out at the last minute almost. Truancy. I had the flu for a couple of days. Doctor's note required. The father trying to make my mother's life a living hell by yelling everyday at school administrators did not help either. Nothing in my life was stranger than having a school administrator that I had never previously interacted with tell me that they want to kick me out of the school simply to make life easier for themselves.

Finding employment in 'my field' had not been easy. Usually I worked at mind numbing non-WDS Windows 7 deployments for a one or two month stint. I have not been able to ever get work 'in my field' that paid over $20,000 USD per year. I've had employment where I was programming at minimum wage and the clients were billed $3000 USD per day for my work. Respectfully negotiating was of course fruitless in this situation. I've been in this sort of situation several times. The worst people seem to find me and take advantage. Usually, pay to billing factors are between 5-10.

I started to not want to interact with employers in person. I started making my living making making Android Apps for clients on RFQ sites until 2014. I was getting paid from $50 to $400 per app or app framework. One client took one project and now has over 100 million users across a dozen similar apps. I was hoping I could start to charge more but that never seemed to happen. The best thing that happened was that I had people halfway around the world constantly hounding me to work at what was essentially still minimum wage.

I am lucky because I took an early interest in Bitcoin. I'm willingly hiding in the lowest caste of society. I'm trying to work on myself. I'd like to be treated like a human being one day by an employer, when I am ready.

I'm not writing this to ask for help. I'm writing this to say that the stigma of being at the bottom is very very real. And while it, at least for me, has predominatly been an internal battle of asserting self-worth, there are definitely people who saw the precarious situation that I was in and use it for their advantage. Or to revel in being cruel.

<comment><USER7> I mean this respectfully, but have you tried to do some introspection?

If you actually have the skills you claim, there is huge money to be made in hiring you as a programmer making $40k/year. Your background _really_ should not be such a determining factor: I have clients who have literally never met me and have only the vaguest idea of who I am. It's all about making compelling work and demanding compensation for it.

If you think this is impossible, I would happily be that guy and pay you $40/hr (which is under market but a hell of a lot more than $20k a year) to work on client projects.

<comment><USER8> Im not sure where you guys are from, but the average Android developer salary is like $90K a year [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/android-developer- salary-...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/android-developer-salary- SRCH_KO0,17.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is terrible. It makes a shitty and misleading graph, and generates a variety of nonsensical judgements from it.

The graph used makes it really hard to see what the actual distributions of overall income are. If you make, say, a bar graph of the income distributions, you'll see that poor college grads do much better than rich high school dropouts. I made such a graph here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112K9ejdFQMPcnvEqERT2...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112K9ejdFQMPcnvEqERT2k2Oe7Tk7zJ- YHFuA3LikFRA/edit?usp=sharing)

I also estimated the average incomes of both groups based on the given statistics, and found an average income of $78k for the poor college grads and $60k for the rich high school dropouts.

The main piece of evidence that this blog post uses to support its thesis is: "Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne'er-do-wells. Some meritocracy."

The first of these statistics is not clearly related to meritocracy. If you want high income mobility, you want both these numbers to be low. The sentence is phrased as if it's bad that the numbers are similar; that doesn't make sense.

The second of these statistics is correctly interpreted, but seems cherry- picked: I could just as easily point out that 41% of poor college grads end up in the top 40% of income, while only 19% of rich high school dropouts do. To prevent such cherry-picking, we should probably use the Schelling point summary statistics like mean income or median income, both of which indicate that the poor college grads are doing _significantly_ better.

As far as I can tell, the original paper didn't do anything wrong, this "reporter" just decided to make up some bullshit conclusions from the statistics. This is even worse than most reporting--the mistake isn't something you have to read the original source to find, the mistake is right there in the graph that Facebook is suggesting as the image preview. Alas!

<comment><USER10> Agreed - this article is quite disingenuous.

From the graphs provided, comparing them makes no sense. Each should be taken own its own; i.e. At the start of college, 100% of the poor kids where in the lowest income percentile. At age 40, only 16% remain. Whereas, for the high school dropouts, only 14% remained in their income percentile (the highest) at age 40.

I think that describes a meritocracy very well. The opportunity is there - <USER2> have to work at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't seem particularly remarkable to me.

> Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as > poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, > respectively.

They're saying social mobility (up or down) is attainable for 85% of each group. And graduating college is not really the same as making all the right choices...

<comment><USER12> The linked PDF's conclusions and figures gives a bit more context; the numbers are not 85%. From the PDF, rich means the top 20th percentile of income, whereas poor is the bottom 20th percentile.

For the dropouts, you only have a 46% chance of mobility if you're poor. For the college graduates, only 63% of the rich will be downward bound.

Another interesting bit: a poor dropout is more likely to remain poor as a rich dropout has to remain in the top three quintiles of income. They also have only a one percent chance of bucking the trends and becoming rich.

A rich college graduate has almost 2x the chance of remaining rich as a poor graduate has of getting rich.

Also, the country heatmap of percentages of people who achieve mobility is very telling as well.

In all, college appears to be a good equalizer for mobility; but given that most people want to be upwardly mobile, you probably don't want to be poor to begin with. Also, don't be born out of wedlock or black. If you really want the best chance of living the "American Dream", your best chance is to be born to white, rich, continuously married parents, and go to college.

[https://www.bostonfed.org/inequality2014/papers/reeves- sawhi...](https://www.bostonfed.org/inequality2014/papers/reeves-sawhill.pdf)

<comment><USER13> > A rich college graduate has almost 2x the chance of remaining rich as a poor > graduate has of getting rich.

This is all super fuzzy and almost impossible to interpret. It sounds to me like people are becoming rich at some rate, and staying rich at a higher rate. Seems like it would lead to everyone being rich, in the end (though these are quintile numbers, so it's a relative ranking, so I assume some other outcomes are available that make things balance).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is presented as if this opinion journalist found a causative relationship when he's done no such thing. He's just looking at correlations and then shoehorning in his favorite explanations (glass floors, glass ceilings, diploma mills).

Take a look at his previous articles and maybe you'll identify a trend: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/matt- obrien/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/matt-obrien/)

<comment><USER15> This is a much better analysis on social mobility:

[https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...](https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my- response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/)

<comment><USER16> I skimmed it, but I didn't see much of a point except that he seems to be implying that poor people are more likely to be less intelligent (or rich people are more likely to be more intelligent).

So, let's say his analysis is correct. What then? Does it mean that we should, as a society, test for intelligence early in life and subsidize incomes appropriately? Or, just let the poor suffer if they don't have the correct genes?

<comment><USER17> It's probably not genetic. Ask any school teacher who does well in class and who struggles, who has ADHD and who concentrates for hours at a time and they will tell you diet and routine (also linked to wealth) are almost always obvious signals for success.

It's not scientific, but the kids that struggle eat frozen pizza and stay up late. It could be the teachers I know finding evidence where there is none, but year after in that job by all those teachers suggests otherwise.

<comment><USER18> I created the blog post. That post was largely focused on _academic_ outcomes, especially variation in various test scores and related measures of general cognitive ability (aka "intelligence"), but:

1) there is also good direct evidence that genes explain a large fraction of the systematic variation in economic outcomes. I invite you to read this [https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER...](https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER_DP364.pdf) (especially pg25, table 1, and compare h^2 vs c^2 )

2) Parental involvement is unlikely to explain much of the black-white disparity. [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09645292.2016.123...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09645292.2016.1235137)

3) teacher observations and other casually observed bivariate correlations are heavily confounded by genes. the kids with seriously disordered lives are significantly _more likely_ to have parents with low executive function and cognitive abilities and are more likely themselves to have low executive functioning. [http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/137/2/201/](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/137/2/201/)

4) I am not arguing that parents/communities are entirely unimportant in all dimensions, but the role is much, much smaller than is commonly believed and it particularly has relatively little influence on cognition and closely related phenotypes. The influence of parents is more on things like educational attainment which, while significantly determined by innate ability, are probably not purely genetic (holding other things equal children of more educated parents get more education..... much more about culture/preferences than ability to afford though

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w22734](http://www.nber.org/papers/w22734)

<comment><USER16> So, assuming that you've thought a bunch about this topic, what kind of policies would you recommend to address it? That is, given the genetic influence and subsequent lower quality of life, should it be considered and treated as a disease?

<comment><USER18> I'd recommend focusing on policy that is actually informed by a realistic assessment of the evidence regardless of your personal views/preferences.

In my view, we spend a tremendous amount of money on schools (over-funding -> fancy facilities, labs, etc), pre-K, enrichment programs and the like that have approximately no effect on predictors of future success, some direct evidence suggests does nothing for income/employment, etc. I'm not fully on board with the progressive agenda (basically center right), but I'm not totally heartless either. I'd rather see that money spent on direct transfers to families. I don't believe the issues faced by lower income are purely economic though. Redistributing money will generally accomplish _less_ (not nothing) than people think in terms of the things that are associated with poverty/low income (health, behaviors, etc). The issues are in part moral and spiritual; lack of purpose through lack of steady work, family connection, etc is an issue in some parts of the country and more money won't do much to solve them (may actually make them worse in some dimensions, especially if it encourages less work->drugs etc). We may find that we accomplish more good by keeping people engaged with some kind of work and community activity (which is why I'm opposed to minimum wage and would rather see EITC expanded).....

I also think we need to think carefully and _honestly_ about immigration policy. Bringing in genuinely low-skill labor by the millions is not a formula for long term economic or social success. Though many of these immigrants are decent hard working people that stay employed and see large increases versus what they would have had in their home countries, their children and grandchildren tend to look and act more like equivalently skilled multi- generational citizens (similar problems in multiple dimensions).

Maybe in 10-20 years genetic engineering people for intelligence and related characteristics will be feasible, probably a few more for it to become cheap and acceptable in the developed world, but I'm not quite prepared to bet the farm on that today. If it does, however the implications for the world will be staggering though (especially in the developing world..... so many problems are ultimately a result of issues here)

<comment><USER16> Do we really need genetic modification to address this though? Humans have had an effective history of inventing tools to scale their performance by magnitudes. For example, a Human was quite ineffective at digging the land so they invented the shovel and plow. There are a million examples, of course.

Why would attributes of the mind somehow be impossible to similarly enhance?

Anyway, it seems like you're main concerns are ineffective and costly methods that don't address the root problem. So, why not propose a new method or invent a tool? Bringing light to the issue helps a little, but at a certain point it is better to do what we're good at - inventing things to make us more effective.

I don't know about you, but personally, I'm exhausted from always being the smartest person in the room. I would love it if someone invented a mental shovel, because there's too much work to do and not enough people to do it.

<comment><USER18> Sure, it'd be great of someone invented some kind of mental effort multiplier. We might even call these devices "computers" ;-) In all honesty though, (1) I don't know where to begin here (2) I'm not sure something akin to a "mental shovel" would significantly address the distributional issues. Some people are still going to be significantly more able than others.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/10/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/10/Poor- Grads-Rich-Dropouts.jpg)

Hmmm but it doesn't look so bad when you consider that 67% of poor college grads are at least 50-percentile in wealth, vs 49% of rich high school dropouts.

I'm sure is even better when you compare poor high school dropouts vs. poor college graduates, which is why a college degree may still be worth the money and the best pathway out of poverty, especially if you major in a high ROI field like STEM.

<comment><USER19> _> Hmmm but it doesn't look so bad when you consider that 67% of poor college grads are at least 50-percentile in wealth_

Where does it show that? The chart you linked to shows income quintiles, not wealth. I couldn't find it in the article either, but may have overlooked it.

A wealth visualization would be quite appropriate here though, as a high income does not necessarily lead to retaining wealth. Some suggest that those who grow up poor struggle to manage their money, so it would be interesting to see if those who came from poor families with higher earnings became rich themselves, or if they remained poor.

 _> I'm sure is even better when you compare poor high school dropouts vs. poor college graduates, which is why a college degree may still be worth the money and the best pathway out of poverty_

I'm not sure what you are really going to glean from that comparison? People generally don't drop out of high school without a reason. Usually, those reasons are what also lead them to do poorly in the workplace. If you try to compare education and income like that, you end up with a bias towards those whose situation did not provide the problems that resulted in them dropping out of school and doing poorly in the workplace.

What may be revealed here is that rich kids have more opportunity. They have all the reasons to drop out that the poor have, but additional reasons such as having a golden opportunity at the family business or within the family's social network. The latter does not negatively impact their future because they dropped out for positive reasons, not because they had a deeper problem that was holding them back in their schooling and continued to hold them back in the workplace.

<comment><USER20> I think this is overlooking another potential factor: Rich culture is better than poor culture.

A college dropout who has grown up rich is going to be more likely to value knowledge than a poor person, will have been exposed to more money management, and being rich is positively correlated with making good life decisions.

Contrast that with poor culture, where we know that the inverse is true in many cases: Knowledge is not valued to the same degree -- or at least not the same type of knowledge. Money management might have been understanding how to live paycheck to paycheck (which is a valuable skill, but not the same as understanding how to save). And being poor is positively correlated with making bad decisions.

The more that I unlearn my "poor person habits", the better my life becomes. While I always enjoyed learning, so much of my time was spent on useless, consumerists things. I binged on television and video games. As recent studies have shown, rich people were more likely to have been doing something productive (networking/reading etc.) with that time.

<comment><USER21> Being poor is actually associated with making modally appropriate decisions. That is to say that people adjust to it.

Case in point is discounting: offer someone £20 today or £100 in a year. A person poor enough will likely take the money now, and this is because _it has more value to them now_.

People aren't awful, they're adjusted to circumstances that are awful, being the products of a sick system. Properly provisioned welfare - a genuine safety net instead of a humiliation - could prevent the circumstances that lead to this kind of adjustment.

Economics has much to say about how people value things differently based on their circumstances. There is no "better" or "worse".

<comment><USER20> 'There is no "better" or "worse".'

This assumes that everyone is a rational actor. Unfortunately, assuming that everyone is effective at allocating resources or time is unsafe and wildly inaccurate. My mother's hours spent cutting coupons rather than finding a job (over years) misvalued the long term impact of having a job and developing a career. My father's allocation of money that we did not have to cigarettes rather than a savings account had extremely negative long term effects.

I grew up around poor people, and I saw their mistakes. I made their mistakes, and I still do. Which isn't to say that all poor people are incapable of making effective financial decisions, just that the distribution is skewed; there are "better" and "worse" valuations of things, and fundamentally people who are worse at making these valuations will on average be poorer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like the provided chart doesn't quite match up well with the presented narrative. Granted it's hard to evaluate since they neglect to define what the bar for rich and poor is, however, assuming by rich and poor they mean born in the 1st and 5th quartiles by income, the chart would imply over 80% of 1st quartile dropouts fall at least one income quartile and corresponding graduating college (note there's no stratification as to what kind of college, ie whether predatory for profit schools are included, breakdowns by tier of university, etc) results in income mobility (measured by an increase of one or more income quintiles) for over 80% of 5th quartile students.

Granted, I think a better state would be closer to 100% of college graduates are able to live comfortable lives, but I think the data doesn't point to the doom and gloom of insurmountable educational advantage the author seems to want to present.

<comment><USER19> _> the chart would imply over 80% of 1st quartile dropouts fall at least one income quartile_

While I agree that stronger definitions are necessary, that implies that _all_ high school dropouts from rich families were personally making 1st quintile incomes at some point before the age of 40. That seems _highly_ unlikely to me. Even children of rich families are usually expected to work and find a way to make their own income (even if that comes through family connections), not have their parents income flow to them unimpeded and reclaimed as their own income. There is no reason to believe that these children of rich families were ever making as much as their parents at any point in time, save the 14% that did accomplish it.

As such, for all intents and purposes, the chart shows what two groups who both effectively started with zero income were able to achieve by the age of 40. The interesting thing is that there isn't much variance. Yes, the poor college graduates fared slightly better – but only slightly. That is in stark contrast to the popular narrative that high school dropouts are doomed to failure, forever stuck working for minimum wage, _if they are lucky_ and that getting a degree will magically save you from being poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> See, this is the thing about population studies.

1\. Millions of people live their life 2\. Academics put people into buckets in order to count them 3\. Other academics group that data and label those people 4\. Even more other academics come along and do more groupings then write a paper. 5\. A newspaper writes an article with a catchy headline and an out-of-context image with arrows drawn on it to call your attention to one correlation but not others, then proceeds to use that data to make arguments that don't actually follow

At every step along the way, a biased researcher or newspaper makes assumptions, discards outliers, and labels individuals in such a way that if we focus on their chosen pivot, we see what they want us to see.

Longitudinal studies, machine learning, and more are all improvements on the current shaky process. I just hope they continue to catch on despite being tougher to do.

<comment><USER24> I agree with your take on newspapers: they try and capture the attention of a layman audience. As such, their work can be simplified to the point of impropriety from time to time.

I'm less inclined to agree with your opinion on academic research, however. Systems of peer review--and softer systems, like those of repute amongst colleagues--are in place for the express purpose of eliminating biases and errors across research works.

In the social sciences, there is a great amount of care that goes into ensuring that: 1\. Data is handled properly 2\. Future inquiries are sound

Whether or not that care happened in this body of work is up for debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a lot of conclusions being drawn here and not much data analysis.

Just going off the chart, it seems that poor college grads are more likely to be in the top half of the income distribution, while rich college dropouts are more likely to be in the bottom half. Isn't that good news as far as social mobility goes?

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not what you know, it's who you know.

If you're a poor kid that manages to mingle with the rich and famous, I'd imagine you'd have some pretty good opportunities come your way too regardless of education.

That's the real factor here. If you're connected, you can sell your shitty web hosting to all your dad's friends, and you can have doors open for you with minimal effort.

Regardless, there are rags to riches stories - sure, if you're poor you will probably have to play life in hard mode, but it's pretty cool to say "I started on $4.75ph, and now I make $100ph". There will still be struggles however - it's hard to buy a house when none of your family can act as guarantor, and you may have to help family members out every now and then.

In the end, we all die, and life is what you make of it. It's also nice to remind ourselves every now and then of how much better off we are than 90% of the world still.

<comment><USER27> _If you 're a poor kid that manages to mingle with the rich and famous, I'd imagine you'd have some pretty good opportunities come your way too regardless of education._

In theory. It is a theory I would like to believe in. But as a homeless woman who has managed to become the top ranked woman on HN, a forum that has plenty of people with quite a lot more money than me, as well as expertise in making money online (the thing I desire to do to resolve my personal problems, rooted in an incurable medical condition), so far, it seems to have not done all that much for me.

Being homeless has been incredibly eye-opening as to just how invisible you can be to people who think you aren't good enough for some reason. So saying "well, you just need to _meet_ the right people..." sounds like yet another excuse to me for The Haves to wash their hands of improving the world and justify the suffering of The Have Nots as somehow all their fault.

FYI: I was not only one of the top students of my graduating class, I was one of the top students in my state and in the country. I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program at age 15 and I won a National Merit Scholarship at age 17. So my lack of ability to make connections that benefit me isn't because I am inarticulate or incompetent.

<comment><USER26> Being popular on HackerNews is not what I'd consider mingling with 'the haves'. Mingling to me is being invited to dinner parties, socialising in the real world, being called a friend.

Of course if you start from homelessness, then you have a hard journey ahead of you. I'm not saying it's easy - it's a long and arduous affair no doubt.

I resent your tone somewhat, I can assure you that I did not start from the top at all - that my views are extremely well balanced.

It sounds as though you are quite competent intellectually, but as we can see from the research, competence does not equal effectiveness at least not in the financial sense. This is why I say - it is who you know. And not just 'who knows you', but who likes you, who has a feeling of obligation towards you or someone close to you.

I don't say this to beat down on people that haven't 'succeeded' in life, I say this as a pragmatist - as someone that recognises inequality, recognises that the world is not fair (and may never be), and offers a view of how to cheat the system somewhat. It's a hack, but it seems to work so why not give it a go?

<comment><USER27> You resent my tone. I resent your implicit dismissal that I have a point at all. That is something routinely done to people who are "the wrong kind of people," whether it is their gender, sexual orientation, social class or some other Othering category.

Calling it a hack that you are suggesting is an extremely different idea from your initial framing. I am someone who focuses a lot on what the disadvantaged individual can do for themselves in the here and now, in spite of the system being broken. I have learned to be more careful about how I speak of such things because if you aren't careful, it absolutely reads as blaming the victim and dismissing the idea that the system itself needs to change.

Your initial framing of "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is an incredibly problematic framing. It implies that you don't really need to study or make an effort or have ambition. That works for the rich kids, as this article suggests. If you are poor and trying to find a hack to get ahead, you better be smart, knowledgeable, hard working and ambitious and have a plan. Then finding the right person to connect with might open doors for you. But when a poor person hears _It 's not what you know, it's who you know,_ there is the danger that they will interpret that to mean that they just need to find a rich person to latch onto and take advantage of. It also is very disrespectful of the few who do make it that way, like their sorry ass got saved, not that they succeeded against long odds, in part due to using a social hack.

Some of your implicit assumptions seem to be that we are talking about people with entrepreneurial ambitions. Not everyone has that. Furthermore, my mom and aunt used to work dinner parties at rich folks' houses. Most folks at those parties are pretty well heeled. Most poor people at such events are serving the food and cleaning up, not hobnobbing with the rich.

I suggest you seriously rethink your dismissal of the value of meeting people online. Plenty of people make that work and it has the potential to bring down social barriers and allow poor folks to make connections and further plans in spite of not dressing right, not being able to get an invite to a cocktail party, etc. But one of the problems is that if people online learn you are poor, they turn a deaf ear to your efforts to further your entrepreunerial plans and dismis you as someone trying to hit them up for money rather than recognizing that your goal is to make money online -- just like a lot of them are currently doing.

I will also note generally that you are not the first person to dismiss out of hand the idea that me having a few thousand karma on HN should mean something. I don't know if it is classism or sexism or what, but that is an example of "the rules are differemt for some folks, and not in a good way." Because when men here have several thousand karma points, it absolutely does get cited by people as evidence of their intelligence and the value they have to offer. (Recent example : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775170)) But if I say I have inordinately high amounts of karma for a woman here, that is routinely dismissed as not meaningful in any way, shape or form.

Also, I am not "starting from homelessness." I was 46 when I ended up on the street. I am noting that as a PSA. People who are homeless routinely get treated like they were born homeless and never had a life. Their educational background and other relevant life experiences get completely dismissed. This is a significant social barrier for those who are homeless and would like to actually solve their problems.

Best. Thanks for replying.

<comment><USER26> I never intended my initial post as a dismissal of hard work. I actually assumed that people would understand it to be an expansion of a common saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" \- although I didn't feel the quotes were necessary.

I'm not saying that there's no value in meeting people online - I think that's quite different than having a million karma points on a forum however. I also don't know how you can equate sexism and classism to 'dismissing' points on a forum... for starters, I didn't even register that I was talking to a female, and to be honest, all the points say to me is that you must spend a whole lot of time on here!

Lastly, I understand that you relate what's said on here to your current living situation. It seems to me however that you're reading into things that are simply not there. I have no intention of oppressing or judging anyone, and in fact my intention is quite the opposite. I would hope that if anything, someone might stop and think critically - think about their connections, or their social skills, think of how to improve that area of their life alongside their other skills. That's my real intention here.

I wish you all the best - I know that it sucks to be poor. My mum is poor, I bought her a car last year (she used to just walk everywhere) to be able to take my brother to school etc. When it comes to money, my Grandmother instilled in me a great mindset (probably some Tony Robbins in here as well). She would say that she is rich - that being poor is a mindset. My Grandmother is actually extremely rich - she just happens to be temporarily broke a lot lol.

<comment><USER27> I do not really want to fight with you and I think you are reading in a bunch of stuff that is not there. But I do want to say framing matters and the quotation marks you left out would have helped, though probably not enough.

Take care.

<comment><USER26> No worries, I guess our minds want to see what our minds want to see.

I wish you all the best with your situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> These stats are interpreted wrong. Assuming poor college kids started out from 1st quintile(<20%), then at 40 yo, 41% of them are above 4th quintile(>60%), while only 19% for poor HS dropouts. And there are more poor college kids in 5th quintile(>80%) than poor HS dropouts, 20% to 16%. This is from conclusion of the paper: "Nonetheless, we find it encouraging that a set of well- evaluated programs appear, according to the model, to make it possible to close most of the gap in the lifetime incomes between children born into lower and higher income families"

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone else confused by the diagonal arrow on the graph?

edit:

> Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as > poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, > respectively.

weird comparison

<comment><USER30> The arrow basically says that 14% and 16% are similar.

"As a rich high school dropout, you have a 14% chance of being in the top 20%." "As a poor college grad, you have a 16% chance of being in the bottom 20%."

If you're in that ~15% of each group, you get the premise that the "poor" college grads didn't do better than the corresponding "rich" dropouts.

<comment><USER9> But that makes no sense--if you want high social mobility (and you think college grads should be paid more), you want _both_ those numbers to be lower. The article treats it as a problem that they're similar.

<comment><USER30> I agree. I actually think this whole article is just a puff piece; the premise makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, that's what economical disadvantage is about.

A rich student can afford to attempt to enter a top school many consecutive times, by not having the pressure of having to work as soon as possible. Then once accepted, can afford to have minimum passing grades.

A poor student can only enter a top school by earning a scholarship by having good grades, and sometimes that scholarship needs to be maintained by keeping certain grades. A poor student might also need to work to supplement his income since the scholarship might not cover all costs. So less time to socialize and relax.

Then, there's also a disadvantage of food, health, housing, risk of being exposed to bad influences, physical security.

So it's a little bit of a rigged game.

<comment><USER32> To people who agree with this post, I have a genuine question: Is it a general principle of yours that the parents' efforts and accomplishments should not carry on to the child or there should be a limit to the benefit? Aren't you ignoring that, excluding historic inequities, rich people's parents didn't grow money on a tree? If Rob Rich's and Pete Pauper's grandparents had the same opportunities, but Rich's used their resources more wisely, made better decisions and fewer mistakes, shouldn't Rich benefit from that? Or is it that you think most old money is tainted? If so, do you have a # of generations in mind beyond which the money should become common good instead of go to heirs?

<comment><USER31> We should invest resources empowering people that have a higher chance of advancing our society.

Just like people believe that a guaranteed minimum income --or other forms of arbitrary wealth distribution-- is not a good idea because it encourages people to work less, this would be the same thing but across generations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why should a meritocracy be individual based instead of family based?

I personally think it's okay for families to give their inheritance/assistance to their children even if the children don't "deserve" it. etc. Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning.

<comment><USER34> That is what I often wonder on the larger discussion of "privlege". What draws the line between your parents or grandparents having worked for a better life for you and having some sort of shameful "privelege"? I understand that there is a difference when it comes down to historical oppressions of entire categories of people, but I feel that many people often confuse that and "rich parents vs. poor parents", seeking to remedy some percieved unjust inequality where the inequality comes from earlier sacrifices leading to more positive outcomes.

<comment><USER35> A person can be privileged because their parents worked hard to provide them with a good life. The person was born into a privileged situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think it also has a lot to do with the way different "classes" of people like to interact with each other. People can tell when you're from a different social group by the way you act. If you're a lower-income person interviewing for a job at a company run by more affluent people, there might be a culture clash which could hurt your chances of being hired. I think I've experienced this a couple of times.

<comment><USER37> What was your experience like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "cultural fit" is a huge contributor to this limited mobility

<comment><USER39> Honestly, I think this explains quite a bit. I grew up fairly poor (single income household in Appalachia). I had to train myself out of a lot of speech patterns / mannerisms that don't fly in other parts of America.

It's unfortunate, but the stereotype of inbred white trash is still alive and strong when most people hear Appalachian drawls. They hear the way we talk and immediately think we're ignorant. It's an openly-mocked culture.

<comment><USER40> I'd go so far as to argue that it's harder to get by as a white Appalachian than as a black urbanite. Plenty of people & programmes care about the latter; few about the former.

<comment><USER41> That may be true, but the white Appalachian can learn to switch accents/mannerisms (code switch). A black urbanite (who may already have had to learn to code switch, depending on where they grew up) can't change their skin color.

<comment><USER40> Yup, that is indeed a problem. 'Race' in the U.S. is, I believe, really a cypher for class, and where in other countries someone born to a lower-class can learn to fit in among a better class, it's impossible to change one's race.

This also hurts immigrants from other countries: they may be well-educated but on first sight they appear to belong to a lower class. It's very unfortunate.

There's also the reverse effect, notably lampooned in the film _Love, Actually_ : if you've a British accent, Americans will assume you're posh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its much easier to make money when you already have money, ever had to play monopoly while behind?

<comment><USER24> For those who aren't aware, Monopoly and its predecessors were actually designed to demonstrate the effects of income inequality:

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-landlords- game/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-landlords-game/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Missing the chart for poor highschool dropouts. Otherwise it is unclear if the lesson is just that highschool doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER44> > But, of course, it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a > matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more > hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a > child's formative early years. That's why, as Stanford professor Sean > Reardon explains, "rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much > better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students," and > they're staying that way.

I agree... that's why I work a traditional 9-5 instead of traveling the country with my wife and kids in an RV and working 15 hours per week remotely.

I view wealth not only as an exercise in creating income streams for myself when I retire, but as a means of ensuring that my descendants have the best possible chance at success.

</comment><comment><USER45> There is an old proverb my grandmother used to say: "My house is my castle, my cheap cotton silken, my wooden chair, made of gold". My take from that saying was that our current economics is all gold-backed economics, and that we express the value of something only in terms of how much we value gold. The moment you unlearn that gold is valuable, or has some innate intrinsic value is the moment you can replace gold with your own _version_ of value. That is to say, the currency you use is the language you are speaking in your society. If nobody speaks your language, the task is on you to disseminate your language and propagate it, and this can be tough. This is where the 'hard work' ethic does apply. It's easy to talk gold; not so easy to convince us of silver being more valuable.

Some might argue that gold merely enables us to create these abstract forms of currencies, or in some cases, economies, in the first place, but actually they could form in pirate utopias that have little or no scaffolding at all, or exist cybernetically, for example, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, of course, where gold bootstraps /enables the other alternatives. But frankly I think we are left with no other choice. We either innovate our way out of gold backed economics (using gold) or we don't prosper and thrive.

</comment><comment><USER15>
        "It's an educational arms race that's leaving many kids
        far, far behind."

This isn't a bad thing. It's an educational arms race that is moving the human race forward faster. Communities that have placed emphasis on education early on have not only typically outperformed their peers, but also add a lot to human knowledge.

        Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 870 individuals, of
        whom 185 - over 21.264% - were Jewish or people of Jewish
        descent, although Jews and people of Jewish descent
        comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population (or 1 in
        every 500 people).

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

Furthermore, I don't understand the criticism regarding "opportunity hoarding". I don't have children yet, but I hope to have children in a few years once I've built the amount of wealth I would like to have before embarking on that adventure. I don't yet feel like I've built the amount of wealth necessary to provide my children with enough of a competitive advantage to succeed in the 21st century. If I've worked hard to create opportunities for my children, why should I give them away to someone who is not my child?

It's not "rigging the game". Saying that it is rigging the game is a misunderstanding of the game. The game spans multiple generations. The game isn't reset every generation. That's not a game I want to play. My parents were my teammates and my children will also be my teammates.

The criticism of pitfalls out there (e.g. degree mills, payday loans) that entrap and deprive people of opportunities is totally fair, but criticizing the decision to spend the wealth one has earned to their progeny seems like wanting to change the rules of the game.

Wealth inequality itself isn't the problem. Not having access to basic necessities (health, education, sustenance, shelter and the Internet) upon which an individual can start building their wealth is. I think it's reasonable to pay a certain amount to level the playing field at the bottom so those that are determined and principled can reasonably begin creating wealth, but that's a totally different goal compared to reducing wealth inequality. Basic income for example would be a great way to begin meeting needs so individuals can start building wealth.

If wealth inequality were the problem, the 10% should complain about the 1% and the 1% should complain about the 0.1% and the 0.1% should complain about the 0.01%, so on and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wouldn't discount the probability that some people know how to handle money and how to make money, and they transmit this knowledge to their kids. I attended public schools K-12 and do not recall a single lesson on handling money or making money.

</comment><comment><USER47> It sucks, but what's the solution? Because let's face it, the primary purpose of "being rich" is to provide for one's family, at least from my point of view. If I work my ass off it's to make sure I can help my kids do better than I did.

What's the point of being "wealthy" if it's not to help your kids have a better life than your own?

I don't want to sound insensitive. All these studies about kids born in poverty and unable to escape it sound very unfair. On the other hand, there has to be a reason for people seeking wealth. And taking care of your children has to be the main driver.

<comment><USER48> Fix the fucking educational system and stop wasting people's time.

<comment><USER49> The educational system is a scapegoat for far bigger and more entrenched problems.

<comment><USER50> Exactly.

I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility.

Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poor anyway. So why worry about school? Families don't care (exceptions do exist, of course), peers look down upon you if you're "bookish", it's a vicious cycle.

There's a lack of hope among those at the bottom. No amount of educational reform will fix that. People know they're in a social straightjacket from birth.

Fix whatever systemic problems keep America's social mobility so low, and the aforementioned issues will get a lot better.

<comment><USER51> > Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their > environment don't value education.

Have you considered the possibility that the educational system doesn't value the needs of the poor?

<comment><USER52> And if it did, how would that work or operate?

<comment><USER51> What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.

<comment><USER53> What subject matters do you think are substantially neglected by the American educational system that fails to reflect the needs of the poor? How should curricula be changed? What specific problems are unaddressed?

<comment><USER48> The main issue is that you don't really learn anything in depth. You get some sort of very general overview but your knowledge still has so many gaps. If you make the educational system more efficient, when you leave the reformed high school, you might actually be somewhat proficient at X.

<comment><USER53> It sounds like your complaint is that the basic primary/secondary educational system does not produce specialists. Have you considered the possibility that neither primary nor secondary education serves the purpose of specialist training, that being reserved for tertiary education?

The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

<comment><USER48> My main issues are the lack of efficiency and lack of educational freedom.

> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to > produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can > be built.

Yeah, it's not very good at that.

<comment><USER53> It's relatively efficient compared to alternative currently available approaches. We have not reached a point where Khan Academy and Udemy can replace everything - or even a major part - of education after basic literacy and numeracy.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I don't think some people realize the value of a hard day's night. I think it is completely fine to pretend they didn't exist.

And finally - I don't respect the rich and the meaningless kind that have been plaguing corporate America for years.

<comment><USER55> > I don't think some people realize the value of a hard day's night.

What do you mean by a hard day's night? AFAIK this expression was invented by the Beatles for their eponymous song and means something like "a rough day". But that doesn't really make sense in the context of your comment so I'm wondering if there's some usage that I (and a quick googling) am unaware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> TL;DR

It's not quite a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game where rich kids get better educations, yet still get ahead even if they don't—but it's close enough. And if it keeps up, the American Dream will be just that.

</comment><comment><USER57> The study also doesn't mention anything about what percent of rich kids dropout of HIGH SCHOOL vs what percent of poor kids finish COLLEGE.

</comment><comment><USER58> "opportunity hoarding"

>That includes everything from legacy college admissions to unpaid internships that

>let affluent parents rig the game a little more in their children's favor.

Why does the author imply something sinister with economic division? I want my kid to succeed, so I fight for his chance to succeed. I have high end skills to offer, first in line to learn from me? My children.

This isn't deliberate exclusion of everyone unprivileged, it's hyper-inclusion of only the ones I love the most.

</comment><comment><USER59> (2014)

</comment><comment><USER60> This is interesting. I was a scholarship kid to a private boarding school, and then went on to get a scholarship at a private university that was $50k+ a year in tuition. I need to preface that I met a lot of good smart hardworking kids who did alot of great things with their education and their parents taught them good work ethic. Alot of the parents worked hard for their success and knew instilling good work ethics was important. I also went to an Engineering University so more likely that smart successful people there were inclined to have valuable degrees to put to work than say maybe a school where Political Science dominated the potential work atmosphere.

Anyways, despite this, there were these disease ridden people called "helicopter parents". The angry moms who believed their genius little sons didnt belong at ANY place beneath what they deemed to be good enough for them, which of course was only the Ivy Leagues or perhaps the trailing 5 after (but only because they DECIDED, not because they couldnt get in ugh how dare you make such an assumption).

The sons, these rich little beleagured alcoholics had been drinking their way through highschool as their parents shoved them into every extracurricular they could think of and 1\. Made them feel they were never enough while simultaneously sending the message they were privileged geniuses who were entitled to the best --> that mindset will screw with ya abit and I witnessed it in the guy I dated for 3.5 years from college

2\. Completely strips away their ability to have a. self initiative b. be curious and have confidence in their own intelligence

This leads to a lot of rich entitled kids who simultaneously had low self esteem and no idea what they wanted to do with their lives and were alcoholics.

My ex is interesting particularly because his 4 closest friends were all just like him/similiar background. They all have brand new sports cars fresh out of college and 3 of them have totaled them drunk driving and should be in jail or loaded down with fines and lost their jobs. Needless to say parents payed for lawyers, court, new cars and hooked every single one of them up with jobs and when they "get sad" they can go home and layout at their pools while their mothers dote on them.

My ex before I met him was "depressed" because he wished he could go to state school so his parents sent him to Denmark to party in Europe for a Semester to "cheer" him up....

These kids don't have any sense of consequence for their actions or any idea what its like to work to get into college. They actually have the attitude of being dragged there against their will...

As someone who started on welfare very young and eventually reached lower middle class, going to my college was a dream come true...

Let me tell you though in our 20s ill be paying off student loans and working hard but I am a much happier more intelligent curious person and love my job. These kids are miserable alcoholics bored with life and sitting in jobs their parents put them in.

Their snapshot wealth portfolio may look better than mine ....for now, but they are not happier. They may inherit their parents houses and money but they will still be bored and sad and drinking all the time.

That being said, I know alot of kids who are wealthy and genuinely doing well in life though. I think it is opportunity hoarding when kids who don't want to be in college are forced to go to college, and while some of these kids are obnoxious, upon years of observation I mostly blame the parents for exerting their awful pretentiousness and ways of life onto these kids who basically feel helpless like they don't have any other choice.

</comment><comment><USER61> _But, of course, it 's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years. That's why, as Stanford professor Sean Reardon explains, "rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students," and they're staying that way._

It's also a matter of genes. Actually, mostly a matter of genes because this is by far the biggest influence parents have on their kids. Affluent parents pass high IQ and conscientiousness to their children which are critical for the rest of their lives. That's why, as anyone who skimmed the twin studies or maybe on of these new fancy GWAS can explain, rich children increasingly exit the womb better prepared to succeed in life and they stay that way. (That and the fact that we removed most of environmental instults.)

It doesn't end there either. They will also be wealthier, healthier, and live longer. "All good things tend to go together, as do all bad ones."

<comment><USER62> This is one of the most HN comments ever. Without getting into the nature-vs- nurture debate for the trillionth time, "Actually, mostly a matter of genes because this is by far the biggest influence parents have on their kids" is a totally preposterous statement. Genes are certainly AN influence, but I think my parents' encouraging my nerdiness, buying me a graphing calculator in high school and surrounding me with computers my whole life had something to do with how I got interested in computers and subsequently developed a career out of it.

That's just not an option for a lot of kids, and that has zilch to do with genes. But hey, keep thinking Ayn Rand's not full of shit, Hackernews :)

<comment><USER63> My view is anecdotal. I come from a family with adopted children. My siblings say how I talk, act and think like our parents. I am the only biological child of our parents.

Does this prove IQ? No. however, I would be astounded if there was no relationship (just looks, voice, height, thought patterns, but no IQ correlation).

At the same time, my kids are quite different from each other. However, my siblings' kids reflect their parents and have diverged significantly from my family far more so than my kids diverge from each other.

My eldest brother (as an example), earned good money but spent it all. He put very little love or effort into his kids, despite him being raised in a household of caring and sharing. He's also a drinker and drug taker. His kids all have troubles with drugs and alcohol.

This is nothing like my family. We have continued down a path of caring and sharing and support quite a few community activities.

I'm not inclined to equate IQ directly, but, I am strongly inclined to say "there is a lot more than just looks that gets passed down to children".

My eldest sister is a behavioural clone of her biological mother. They didn't know each other until their 20s. That was the moment I knew that behaviour could be inherited by children, because my eldest sister is an aggressive hedonist. No drugs, just wild partying and ladette behaviour.

The other aspect of this article that is true is that luck favours the prepared. Some people send their kids to private schools so they can Mingle with other well-to-dos.

What I do like about today's society is that there is a wealth of opportunity if you look for it, regardless of socioeconomic status. I am a huge believer in opportunity but I totally reject political correctness (and any other prejudice for that matter, PC just happens to be the most popular prejudice today).

<comment><USER64> You raise some really interesting points. I've seen similar as well. But what I draw is not so much that there's an IQ gene (though I'm sure that there are genes that affect brain physiology in some ways), but more so that there are known genes that affect compulsive behaviours which can trump rational processes e.g. addiction, risk-taking.

And while I'm sure lifestyle factors (including nurture, environment) may impact the "degree" to which the expression of these genes "take hold on behaviour", the overall probabilities are more likely to be based on the genetics. I'm thinking similar to how genes increase likelihood of getting cancer, while behaviour/lifestyle can affect treatment outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Back a couple of decades ago in India. I was working for an American telecoms co. I grew pally with an HR manager. He showed me the background on a new hire. The new hire was the son of a mid-level government official cum career civil servant in a dept that oversaw the telecoms industry.

I saw the letter Daddy wrote ON HIS OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT LETTERHEAD... addressed to the head of the Indian division of the telcoms co... recommending his own son for a job.

My point? It's not just rich kids. It's also well connected kids. In high- regulation environments, government officials, although they may not be rich, have the highest access.

</comment><comment><USER66> I worked at a Fortune 50 and we hired a lot of interns.

After I left, I thought back on the kids we hired, how talented they were, and what they went off to do afterwards.

The 'rich kids' were better prepared, more responsible, better communicators, had a better sense of the vision for the company and the consequences of what we were doing.

'College education' is surely causative to some degree, but in America, most wealth is not inherited, and those parents who can afford 'activities' for their kids are probably far, far better parents than others. It's not the 'activities' that I think develops the kids, I think it's the very fact that these parents are investing a lot of time and energy in their kids, teaching them positive behaviours that matters much more.

I wish I had the link but I read a study a while back that showed that 'rich parents' were far more conscientious than other parents.

I don't doubt that money is a big advantage, as well as social class, but it would be foolhardy to think that these are the fundamental issues.

Rich kids are posited as 'brats' in films and TV because it's populist - <USER3> viewers are not rich. And of course - those douches exist. By by enlarge, upper-middle class kids are great. I would bet they make better players than otherwise _on average_.

I should also point out that kids from communities wherein they were not seen as lower class - i.e. rural communities, seem to have decent dispositions as well, and at least by the numbers, they didn't have a lot of money. But it doesn't cost a lot to have a stable home / good parents out in the sticks.

<comment><USER67> Blaming "culture" is often an excuse for shoddy research.

How would you measure "conscientiousness" if you were designing a study to correlate that with wealth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Dropping out of high school isn't "doing everything wrong" and finishing college is pretty far from "doing everything right" so this seems to be a little bit of editorial journalism.

From the paper: "Children who go on to achieve a college degree, irrespective of their parents' income, are more likely to make it to the top income quintile [...] Bottom-income children without a diploma have a 54% probability of remaining on the bottom rung as adults."

So really what it says is that you have a much better shot in life being educated regardless of who you are. But if you don't like to stay in school, you'd better be rich, because there are some chances you will end up being rich anyway. If you are poor and don't stay in school, you are very likely just live your life miserably.

<comment><USER19> _> So really what it says is that you have a much better shot in life being educated regardless of who you are._

Not quite. All it says that the people who are able to do well in school also are able to do well in the workplace.

If you want to try and derive causation here, the simplest and most reasonable explanation is that the qualities that allowed them to do well in school are also what allowed them to do well in the workplace. It does not seem shocking at all to think that those who have drive, desire, ability, etc. perform better in everything they do, be it education or the workplace.

The idea that schooling magically turns you into a new person able to finally succeed for the first time seems like a huge stretch.

<comment><USER68> That's better. There is some back-and-forth between the how much drive one has correlated with how far can one get in education, but I totally agree that you have a more direct narrative of what the paper claims.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon sues 1,114 reviewers, some selling reviews for $5 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/amazon-sues-1114-reviewers-some-selling-reviews-for-5/ <comment><USER2> How are these different paid reviews different from say, Kirkus or any newspaper that pays freelancers for book reviews? The fact of posting a paid review on Amazon's site? All the reviews in the New York Times Book Review are paid reviews--they're just not paid for by the publisher. But if the issue is that some payors (media) are OK and others (publishers) are not, this is certainly not clear from Amazon's TOS.</comment>


This Robot Uses Computer Vision to Find Waldo in 4.5 Seconds - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjk7gy/robot-uses-computer-vision-to-find-waldo-redpepper <comment><USER2> There is the Waldo. Awesome progression.</comment>


Ask HN: What's software engineering like in the health sector? - <AUTHOR> Looking to make my first career move, just wondering what it's like and what to expect. I'd like to apply my skills there <comment><USER2> The health sector is large and big. It depends on what you want to do and where.

If you are manipulating personal information and patients data, and perhaps storing it, it's very very different whether you are in USA or Germany for example. The local laws and rules are very different. Germany is very strict while USA isn't at all.

In my personal experience, security and privacy are very important. The quality of service is also critical too, though the healthcare providers do have backups plans when a service is unavailable.

In terms of technologies, it's mostly the same than everywhere else. You can't really expect to have full stack medically certified software, including the kernels, the compilers, the vms... So you usually use the software industry standards and certify your service only.

</comment><comment><USER3> As the other poster wrote, in terms of tech it does depend. It is cliche but true for me. I have worked on a few different teams at my current company. Previously I wrote an HL7 parser and worked on data integration services, so it was very domain specific. Now I am writing frontend React, which has almost no healthcare domain technology in it. I like this flexibility. It's fun to write parsers and data integrations, but when that gets tiring it's nice to do something nearly unrelated to healthtech. Edit: We deal with lots of archaic formats and protocols but most all our code is Golang and Typescript</comment>


Mozilla Skywriter has been merged into Ace - <AUTHOR> http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/2011/01/18/mozilla-skywriter-has-been-merged-into-ace/

<comment><USER2> Most important change seems to be the switch from a canvas based renderer to a DOM based renderer.

From what I've seen ACE feels a lot faster than Bespin did.

I've been wondering if it would be possible to build a WYSIWYG HTML editor on top of their DOM based renderer ala Google Doc's editor. ContentEditable based editors are a real pain to work with due to all the quirky browser behavior that comes with contenteditable. Would be great to have an alternative...

</comment><comment><USER3> Can this do code-collapse? I'd love to plugin the Ace editor like a textarea and replace almost all of the JS at <https://zetabee.com/text> \- I see that it supports hidden characters so maybe there is a way to hide entire chunks of text (while preserving them during cut-copy-paste). Has anyone worked with Ace? I tried customizing SkyWriter but it was more work than just rolling my own JS.

The demo source <https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/blob/master/demo/startup.js> is pretty clean but it doesn't appear if there is a way to extend the editor's features via plugins.

<comment><USER4> From the article, wrt extending:

"Along the way, we repackaged the plugin system as "pilot" and the command line, which has become even smoother to use, is in its own package called "cockpit". You can use just these components in your own projects if you want to make them extensible or keyboard-friendly."

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I dug in and looks like it's still a non-JS system: <https://github.com/mozilla/cockpit> \- I was hoping there'd be something like a jQuery.fn.plugin system to hook on to the Ace editor and override specific things.

<comment><USER5> It's definitely all JS. There are hooks to plug in specific things, but not any arbitrary behavior.

code folding is a nice feature though, and one I'd expect we'll see along the way. code folding requires some work though, because it changes how line positions are computed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how many people will realize that Ace is the new Skywriter. The last name change was only in September.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how this affects HP/Palm's Ares online editor for WebOS.</comment>


Facebook image assets not rendering - <AUTHOR>

I'm on the east cost. Wondering if it's a regional instance or everyone is experiencing the same thing. <comment><AUTHOR> Back up and running.</comment>


Something is wrong with this picture. - <AUTHOR> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2011OctDec/0707.html

<comment> buff-a Either you have separation of data and presentation or you don't. HTML didn't. HTML5 still doesn't. It is not possible to present an arbitrary block of data in a normalized, optimal form, and have CSS render it any way you want. For that you need script (or XSLT!), but even then, unless you go canvas, you have to deal with a markup language for presentation that is actively trying to not be presentation but be data instead. Its trying and failing. Life would be so much easier (and involve much less cognitive dissonance) if the DOM stuck to being presentation.

As it is, developing web apps is this giant joke, where you encrypt what you really want to happen in the form of pseudo-data (html) and magic rule-based transformation (css), and then the browser goes to a ton of effort to attempt to recreate what you really wanted. The effort the browser has to go through as soon as you introduce a div, or change its class, just to determine which, if any, of the CSS rules now apply to that node and any of its children, is just offensive. Worse: its something you, the programmer, must be able to model in your head to determine what the fuck is going on. Good luck with that! The result we get is "try it and see" "programming".

HTML1.0 was a local optimum. Somewhere there is another, better optimum. The W3C appears to be willing to travel the Himalayas of suboptimal to find it.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree.

In my opinion, the problem of separation of data and presentation won't be solved by markup or CSS.

If a Web page is to contain data and a service wants to act on this data, it has to scrape the Web page. Which is even harder with scripted pages. But scraping data isn't a solution. The semantic web may try to have web developers bring sense to data on a web page, but the problem remains. It's just a markup patch. It's doesn't define how to act on that data. Web Intents are just another patch to markup to bring verbs.

Direct access to the data sources with well define methods to act on that data and interact with it (instead of using form) is what works today through APIs. What doesn't work is that there aren't a lot of open standards APIs. Most well used APIs are proprietary and Facebook's a good example. I believe standard bodies should put their brains and efforts on defining API standards. Some standards APIs some clunky, are in use in B2B in the back ends but there's not much of it on the consumer facing Web. We must move forward to push separation of presentation, data and verbs for the whole Web, one small step at a time.

If most use cases on the Web used standard APIs, we would have true separation of content and presentation. We would even have the verbs to exchange/create understandable content. Then, you can use HTML/CSS to adapt a UI to any device with true separation.

That's the way we build apps and sites today and with standard, it would pave the way to a more exciting future.

So one day, if I want to have my own customized UI for that new holographic/gesture recognition device to shop with my preferred merchants, I just have to build an app and I'll be able to browse their merchandise, sort it like I want and finalize a transaction without even visiting their Web site.

<comment><USER3> > I believe standard bodies should put their brains and efforts on defining > API standards.

Have you seen SOAP?

<comment><USER4> He said put brains into it.

Not in a sense: "Throw your brains in for zombies to have a party". But in a sense that one should try and think and find protocols which are elegant in a sense that it makes reasoning about and using them easy and simple.

I agree that coming up with SOAP and XML-RPC took quite some brains and effort, too bad that some really good people had to be lobotomized for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HTML markup is a good example of premature design optimization. It may have been a good in theory to separate content from presentation, but if you look at the web today, the way pages are generated is a huge mess.

Even this site, which uses tables for layout when "you're not supposed to used tables for layout", is a good example of why HTML is so bad for creating web pages. There's no reason I should have to jump through all the hoops I do to display two div blocks side by side in a horizontal box. All other XML based layouts I've used (Android and Flex) are a piece of cake compared to messing with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

<comment><USER6> HTML had the opportunity to get better with XHTML and strict enforcement of schemas and XML syntax (which I'm willing to bet Android and Flex require).

The problem was that doing so broke most of the web, or was not internalized by page creators. So we're stuck with the current situation (bad markup, crufty designs, etc.).

Imagine if the first HTML editors forced a schema check before save. I think we'd be in a much better place now if they did...

<comment><USER7> The myth that the web would be better with strict XML parsing is convincingly debunked here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122249/http://diveintomar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110514122249/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment)

Web pages (unlike Android layout files) are complicated composites of multiple data sources that are generated on-the-fly, and are combined in complicated (but sometimes low-tech) ways like string manipulation. Under such circumstances, it is simply too hard to create perfect XML every time.

<comment><USER8> That isn't really related to what he said at all. Sure web browsers should be forgiving in what they except, but dev tools shouldn't be. How would you like the C compiler that tried to interpret any old chicken scratch as a valid C program? Never a compiler error again!

<comment><USER7> > How would you like the C compiler that tried to interpret any old chicken > scratch as a valid C program? Never a compiler error again!

Oh fun, bad analogies time! How would _you_ like it if your word processor refused to save a text document because it detected an incomplete sentence?

<comment><USER8> Nope no analogy. If I expect a machine to understand a language, then it had better be able to determine weather or not a document written in that language is valid. It doesn't matter if it is a programming language or a mark up language. Permissive modes are great for accepting the work of others, but when learning how to write that language in the first place a strict interpretation is best. That way you can focus on getting it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many of us are developers on here, so I propose the following: rather than be lead around by the nose on this, why don't we change it? We could define our own XML (or JSON? optional?) based _data markup_ format and a separate _presentation markup_ (XML/JSON based though!) format for displaying it on a graphical interface. Then we could create a browser plug-in that used it, or fork a browser to understand how to render it (or both).

We could set up our web servers to detect if the client has the plug- in/browser and serve this new standard if so, or redirect to "legacy" web pages if not (with a little "best experienced with" badge). If the day comes that we aren't getting anymore "legacy" requests we can just drop them (or even better, just program the servers to be able to auto-generate something passable if a legacy client did happen by). If done right, this really could get traction, since most web designers would prefer a nice format to fighting their way through as one has to today, and clients shouldn't be able to tell any difference.

The web is ours. If the "standards bodies" are making crap standards we don't have to stand for it.

</comment><comment><USER10> "I heard people speak of Web Authors and Web Developers and making various distinctions about them. I heard some folks of arguing that this audience of ours prefers markup over scripts, and when faced with concrete examples of the opposite, retort that those are just some script library folk, not the majority."

Get these people some personas, stat!

<comment><USER11> I find that personas are nearly useless for this kind of design discussion. Personas are an attempt to homogenize some group of people into a single pseudo-person that has specific attributes. When the lines between personas are hard to draw or there are so many lines that you wind up with lots of personas, you can find yourself spending lots of time managing personas without a ton of direction or solving anyone's problems.

For a heterogenous audience like "web makers" of various types, an activity centered approach can be really helpful. Don Norman explains this idea better than I ever could:

[http://jnd.org/dn.mss/human- centered_design_considered_harmf...](http://jnd.org/dn.mss/human- centered_design_considered_harmful.html)

<http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/hcd_harmful_a_clarification.html>

<comment><USER10> Thanks, those links were well worth the read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A markup language, by definition, cannot define behaviour. You can do design, layout and animations with markup, but you simply cannot do any kind of processing or behaviour (when I say behaviour, I mean things like authentication, processing, manipulating data, etc). So if your webapp needs to be behaviour-rich (which I don't know how you can call it a webapp if it isn't) then you're going to need a scripting language to define those behaviours.

HTML + CSS + JavaScript are complex tools, it would be great if we could unify them into a single language. I think that jQuery's success is in part due to this unification, but I certainly don't think jQuery is the answer.

<comment><USER13> Lispers have said a few times that HTML/Javascript would be well replaced by S-expresssions and (a) Lisp. There are more than a few reasons why it won't catch on, of course, but even to an old-school imperative programmer like me it sounds a damn sight better than what we have now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess the real question is can you or how would you try to reform the culture that has surrounded the process? Or is the alternative branching out and creating your own like WHATWG?

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing is, web was supposed to be about documents but it always wanted to be about programs. A basic markup language together with styling goes with the former but in the latter it becomes something you need to work around.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me this just demonstrates W3C's distancing from reality... There where pretty good data-driven and thought-out decisions on HTML5 from the beginning, but things were pretty grim for this year. Parts of the spec are being just pushed around (microdata…), meanwhile there is no public place for developers to be heard (and no, mailing lists and bug trackers are not ideal. this is 2011).

Despite that, the web as a platform is getting better and better. Yes, it's hard to build stuff with HTML/CSS/JS, but it gets easier by the month, and the current state of the technology is really amazing (except for a few legacy browsers still bogging things down).

</comment><comment><USER17> I like to think the whole problem with web development is that it is popular. Almost all of the exclusive web design/script people I have met are essentially terrible at what they do - I think this happened because the web is so popular and so new that the good engineers and designers are so few and far between that their direction is diluted by the masses. Hopefully it will right itself over time.

Ultimately the tools will mature to the point where what the data representation is beneath them will mean nothing to these kinds of consumers. (e.g. how you save your photos as .jpg, .tga or whatever and usually care less about the details).

<comment><USER18> Most sites use an HTML page to launch a JS-driven app because HTML as a presentation medium is not as responsive and lack the UX elegance that one can achieve with Javascript. It's simply a technology stack that works better at solving the job.

The main problem is that everyone is reinventing the wheel to deliver that kind of experience with custom JS code that augments the DOM in different ways. If browsers and the W3C worked out a way to deliver a similar UX over something standardized that browsers, crawlers and other consumers of the web could rely on, that would get used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In this age of rich webapps, the markup is just there to launch javascript. There's nothing particularly wrong with that IMHO.

<comment><USER20> There's everything wrong with that. There are huge benefits to handling the internet as a linked graph of documents and resources. Try writing a site that loads all its content via Javascript and see how well you rank in Google.

I have nothing against the existence of web _applications_ , as long as it's recognized that they have a fundamentally different nature and purpose than a web _page_. The W3C doesn't always make decisions that are right for everybody, but they've done a pretty decent job of preserving the ideal of a document/resource-centric web. And it's important that it stays that way.</comment></comment>


Making Stone Soup: Establishing a New York State Local Government Data Center  - <AUTHOR> http://www.albany.edu/polis/research.shtml

<comment><AUTHOR> Thought this was an interesting topic. It is sort of mind boggling to think there is no central database for NYS (or any other state for that matter).

It's 2013 and we still can't come up with a data retrieval standard for governments?

Maybe too many players (lawyers and lobbyists to name a few) have too much to loose if anything changed. Too much transparency?</comment>


Female Google employee responds to James Damore memo - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/female-google-employee-responds-to-james-damore-memo-2017-8 <comment><AUTHOR> Other items that are much older and with fewer points are on the front page. Simplest explanation is that this item is being flagged.

So I'm curious. If you think this doesn't belong here then I'd appreciate hearing _why_ you think that. Submissions about the original memo and the opinions it contained seemed pretty popular, so I thought that having a reasonably senior woman give a response was equally worth having.

If not, why not?

<comment><USER2> It's kinda late. This whole thing already blew up, and the articles brings nothing new to the table.

Also the person interviewed doesn't seem to know what a statistical distribution is.</comment></comment>


SF 1906 quake seen through private collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-1906-earthquake-rare-photos-6922034.php#photo-9767201 <comment><USER2> Those are pretty impressive pictures.

Interesting btw that some buildings totally didn't take any damage, like the Post Office. Today of course people would immediately come up with some great conspiracy theories, but it's probably just every few 10000 buildings there's one lucky one or so.</comment>


Do Product Faster: On being a Techstar Hackstar - <AUTHOR> http://www.roycehaynes.com/do-product-faster.html

<comment><USER2> Just out of interest, how are you compensated for this? Do you get paid a salary by Techstars, or do you get equity in the companies you help, or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey simonw, author here. Thanks for reading. TechStars Boulder currently pays $6,000 on a three-month contract. It's certainly not financially attractive, but it's a good experience if you (a) want to get into Techstars someday or (b) Want a job with a promising startup and/or (c) interested in making relationships with smart, well-connected folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is that header transition called? Where the title fades away... I like it and would like to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heyo piratebroadcas - author here. Its custom and you can view how its partly done here: [http://www.roycehaynes.com/theme/js/app.js](http://www.roycehaynes.com/theme/js/app.js)

Feel free to tweet my post! ;)

<comment><USER4> It was a little weird for me on clicking the back button. I wasn't at the top, and the transition happened in the middle of the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shopventory co-founder here - Royce has been amazing to work with this summer, great job!

</comment><comment><USER6> ...and faster. Great breakdown of the experience. Thanks Royce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the love bro.</comment></comment>


New Tesla product line – not a car – will be unveiled on Thurs 8pm, April 30 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/582581865682350080 <comment><USER2> My guess is that this will be the home battery line that Musk teased on the conference call in February. At the time he said they were likely to be unveiled "in the next month or two."

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2015/02/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2015/02/12/this-new-tesla-battery-will-power-your-home-and-maybe- the-electric-grid-too/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that was my gut reaction, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please be a motorcycle...

<comment><USER5> There are several electric motorcycles that look pretty good. Google around. I forget which I thought were best (and I'm not knowledgable enough about "normal" bikes to be a great resource anyway).

<comment><USER4> Brammo, Zero, both good.

Mission Motorcycles are an SF favorite, but are outrageously expensive.</comment></comment></comment>


Mastodon Community Stimulus Redistribution - <AUTHOR> https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/25/mastodon-community-stimulus-redistribution/ <comment><AUTHOR> Or: what happens when you try to raise a few dollars to split with your community and end up raising 5 digits. You get to deal with anti-fraud and community management systems/people at all kinds of places.</comment>


USENIX Enigma 2016 – NSA TAO Chief on Disrupting Nation State Hackers - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA <comment><USER2> >> "Rob Joyce, Chief, Tailored Access Operations, National Security Agency: From his role as the Chief of NSA's Tailored Access Operation, home of the hackers at NSA, Mr. Joyce will talk about the security practices and capabilities that most effectively frustrate people seeking to exploit networks."

BIO, Slides, etc: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2016/conference- prog...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2016/conference- program/presentation/joyce)</comment>


Oss-sec: Linux kernel futex local privilege escalation (CVE-2014-3153) - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q2/467 <comment><USER2> A follow-up comment describes how it works: [http://seclists.org/oss- sec/2014/q2/469](http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q2/469)

<comment><USER3> Nice. I didn't quite understand though:

> Specifically, the futex syscall can leave a queued kernel waiter hanging on > the stack. By manipulating the stack with further syscalls, the waiter > structure can be altered.

Is the bug that the waiter is left on the stack, or that other syscalls can alter the stack?

Allowing syscalls to alter the stack seems like a vulnerability regardless of what happens to be on the stack when it's altered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any proper information on this issue? The patches do not apply cleanly against the latest stable kernel (3.14.5) and there's no indication I can find as to what version they're intended to be applied to.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't BPF a virtual machine inside the kernel? Does this have any impact on the likelihood of exploits?

</comment><comment><USER6> See, this is what happens when (presumably white, male) programmers don't check their privilege.

<comment><USER7> That made my day brighter. Sorry you're getting so many downvotes for that. :(</comment></comment>


WebRTC, disruptive? - <AUTHOR> http://nextblitz.com/blog/webrtc-disruptive/

<comment><AUTHOR> Two parts for HN input:

1\. WebRTC itself

2\. Can we extend Clayton Christensen's definition of disruption to replace "consumers" with "developers"?

An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of _software developers_ at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to _software developers_ with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

Should we consider a developer to be a consumer in that the distance and time from developer to product to consumer has become so short?</comment>


"Atypical" mad cow disease detected in Alabama - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/rare-form-of-prion-disease-pops-up-in-an-alabama-cow/ <comment><USER2> According to article this version of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) seems to be more a matter of a natural mutation that happens in older cattle. IE: similar to the way humans can spontaneously generate Alzheimer's Disease with no family history. Also being atypical its much rarer to be transmitted. Good news. I wish that did more testing like this.</comment>


Ghetto gourmet: underground supper clubs in America (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/22/MNGOOGRA241.DTL

<comment><USER2> This is awesome!! I'm gonna try running a dinner party in my area. Proposed menu:

Hickory-smoked pork ribs

Yam Champloo (yams w/nuts&fruit&otherstuff)

Coconut-Squash Soup

Stir-fry & brown rice

Fried spicy banana peppers</comment>