Visualizing Clusters of Clickbait Headlines Using Spark, Word2vec, and Plotly - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2016/08/clickbait-cluster/ <comment><USER2> "Once the dictionary is created, we can average all the word vectors for a given headline to get the numeric representation of the headline itself."

Can someone explain me why this is useful? Aren't we losing a lot of precision from word2vec results?

And as a general question: is there any useful knowledge we can extract from this vizualisation apart: most of the time, news channels write about different things?

Don't get me wrong, I think the techniques displayed here are really cool, but I have the feeling the conclusions are either absent or trite.

<comment><USER3> > Aren't we losing a lot of precision from word2vec results?

Not really, because the vectors are really high-dimensional, and the words that occur in the same headline together usually aren't close together.

So it's not really losing precision, it's more like combining the meanings of the words (numerically).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All that in-depth explanation, and he forgot the first rule of data visualization: always label your axis!

This should have been at the top, but was buried at the bottom of the article: "The left side of the 2D representation represents the more serious headlines, while the right side represents the more silly headlines. "

<comment><AUTHOR> The axes are _intentionally_ unlabeled. They don't represent anything, just spatial coordinates.

The fact that X-axis had a parseable interpretation (and the sliding scale of serious is not a hard rule as there are many counterexamples; I noted the scale as an quick observation) was due to the randomness of the clustering algorithm. It is possible that the chart could end up rotated if the algorithm is run again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its interesting to hover over the blue buzzfeed dots on the left side. Those are those interesting cases where buzzfeed does actual reporting.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Coincidentally around the same time Facebook announced their anticlickbait > initiative, Facebook open-sourced their fasttext project, which can quickly > build models to classify text using some of the above example techniques. > Hmmmmmm…_

There's an interesting notion, a clickbait filter.</comment>


MasterCard considers changing its name - <AUTHOR> https://babylonbee.com/news/mastercard-changes-name-to-equalitycard <comment><USER2> Can't say I've ever even connected Mastercard and racism in that sense.

Striping the word master out of the language completely even in contexts where it has nothing to do with race seems a little silly to me frankly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm considering to change my Master of Science degree to Mainly Scientist. Not sure if it'll work out ...

</comment><comment><USER4> On a similar train, many GitHub repositories have recently changed their "master" branch to "main". Lots of blog links going 404, wish GitHub could do some redirects.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a satire website.</comment>


IndieAuth: Sign in with your domain name - <AUTHOR> https://indieauth.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> How come I never heard about it, this seems like a better successor to openID.

</comment><comment><USER2> It is better than OpenID, and as a bonus it will proxy the OpenID protocol for you so you can sign into gnu social or blogger or other things that still use openid.</comment>


Introducing Elastic Fabric Adapter - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/introducing-elastic-fabric-adapter/?sc_channel=sm&sc_publisher=TWITTER&sc_country=Global&sc_geo=GLOBAL&sc_outcome=awareness&trk=AWS_reInvent_2018_launch_Elastic_Fabric_Adapter_TWITTER&sc_content=AWS_reInvent_2018_launch_Elastic_Fabric_Adapter&linkId=60210812 <comment><USER2> Who comes up with those horrendous names: Super Elastic Fabric Constructor Conductor is my guess at the next name.</comment>


China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is scary to think about. Imagine if private companies provided our government information and the totality of our communications and purchases, or even content of private conversations or prescriptions that you filled determined a "trust level" and that this factored into whether we were accepted by a college or determined if we were eligible for loans etc. This would change the course of each life without question.

<comment><USER3> You mean the credit system we have here in US, which allows you to borrow money from banks at a low interest rate, buy a car/house with little down payment, or even rent a place without having to prepay 6 month rent?

Yeah, I think every country needs it.

<comment><USER2> And then when we have a change in control in our governments administration the rules also change, as does the formula for calculating this rating. We will have a never ending target you cannot hit regardless of how much you try....just when you think you are getting close to your target score or rating the equation changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, I strongly believe that there is always going to be an arms race between the government surveillance and people who will want to circumvent such measures. Like people who use tor, VPN, cryptocurrencies etc.

Advancement in technology was always going to enable better surveillance capability and anarchists had to always come up with new ways to dodge it.

Does this new initiative from Chinese govt change anything at meta level? To me, it doesn't feel like a paradigm shift, but merely the next logical step in status quo.

<comment><USER5> Silicon valley will always win; they strive for freedom and nobler reasons

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does the citizen score have something to do with the social apps from Tencent? If yes, you have to wonder how does a South African company called Naspers fit into all of this.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-naspers-tencent- holdings-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-naspers-tencent-holdings- ceo/south-africas-naspers-rules-out-114-billion-tencent-stake-spin-off- idUSKBN19H1S7)

</comment><comment><USER7> The problem is not how bad things goes on in China, but every _other_ government want it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny how HackerNews deletes comments that warn against this... what side are the admins on?

<comment><USER9> Citation needed, especially given the degree to which the moderators give all but the most flagrant trolls multiple chances.

<comment><USER10> By "deleted comments", your parent is likely referring to the flagged dead comments in this thread.

<comment><USER9> Could be but that seems to be normal user voting rather than the moderators doing anything unusual

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I agree. It seems often members aren't aware of the difference or choose to make the distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given the amount of fraud and scams which abound, this may be the best system for them. It's the "People's Republic" after all. Let them decide what they want.

<comment><USER5> Haa, downvoted for speaking the truth. Got to love it. I am the polar opposite to the statement above (as in V for Vendetta) in philosophy but until the people demand change, why should we force western values onto their thing? Let them find the error of their ways in a cataclysmic way if that's what it takes. That's the historical record over millenia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would rather be monitored than seeing some psycopath killer pledging not guilty because of lack of evidence

<comment><USER12> Don't worry, you will both be monitored and see the killer confronted with no evidence. After all, are you the killer in this hypothetical?

<comment><USER11> No but I believe the cameras are prepared for people like you in my hypothetical</comment></comment></comment>


In Memory of Andy Grove - <AUTHOR> https://haifengl.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/in-memory-of-andy-grove/ <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329374)

Google Preps for IBM, ARM Shift. ARM is not powerful enough. But big boys are preparing themselves to pull the trigger whenever it becomes ready.</comment>


If Richard Branson Ran GM - <AUTHOR> http://www.graduatedtaste.com/2008/11/20/if-richard-branson-ran-gm/

<comment><USER3> This whole taking a private jet thing borders on completely stupid and shows how inept some folks are in understanding how companies work.

CEOs are any companies most important human asset. That asset has a finite amount of time he can work in any given day.

Standing in line at an airport, waiting on layovers, not having access to communications -- are all wastes of time if you are a CEO.

Especially NOW, when the big 3s are about to enter bankruptcy, you can't afford to waste a minute of the big 3's CEOs time.

(Nobody is bitching that the US President rides around in the air's biggest fuel pig -- a 747.)

EDIT: I just noticed a news clip where a senator was making the point, too. I'm embarassed. It's harder to build a broom closet than a nuke plant. Wasting anyone's time to talk about a $20,000 plane trip versus dealing with the $50B bailout is sad.

<comment><USER4> "CEOs are any companies most important human asset."

Please explain to me how these CEOs who have managed to bankrupt an entire U.S. industry constitute an "important human asset." The empirical evidence seems to suggest they are a net negative asset, and maybe filling up their schedules with unproductive activities will mitigate the further damage they could do by actually trying to make decisions and taking actions.

<comment><USER5> That is really missing the point. If they want to make calculated decisions that are unpopular but rational, taking into account the importance of the executive team, go do that. Go make your businesses profitable. Go arm wrestle with unions. But ask for no quarter.

They are asking for bailouts. Asking for unions & employees to cut them a break. Asking for help & understanding. If you go to a bank to ask for a loan, you better not show up wherein banana leafs & a feathered top hat. Where a suit. Shut up about air flow, weather & being more productive in a banana. If you don't need the bank, you can wear what you want.

They want unions to cut them a break (or someone else to cut the unions). They want tax money. They need to meet the expected terms. The public doesn't like executive jet CEOs. Neither do unions or ground floor employees. A CEO that meets with a banks in a banana is not showing good judgement. Neither are these CEOs. It's not a good sign.

<comment><USER6> "They want unions to cut them a break"

Sort of. It would be at least as accurate to say that the UAW wants the US gov't to hand over $25B (or $50B, or $75B) to the big 3 s.t. all 4 entities (Ford, GM, Chrysler, UAW) can carry on with business more-or-less as usual, and stay out of bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 would likely mean bad things for the UAW.

It seems (and, of course, w/o seeing the books, it's awful hard to tell) that the big 3 just can't make money - despite making some pretty nice cars - <USER2> to labor costs that are perhaps 150% of market, and a bloated dealer infrastructure that can't be trimmed due to franchising laws. Plus, a lot of b </comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>t mandates (CAFE, etc.) to make products people don't really want.

The Detroit bailout isn't about saving the jobs of the executive teams (who can always get other jobs, and hell, who tend to be highly incentivised to stick around through Chapter 11) or saving the US manufacturing base (it's not like all those factories will go _poof_ overnight, or all those cars will stop being built and sold) or avoiding shocks to the economy, or preserving shareholder value (which has already been largely wiped out). It's about propping up an uncompetitive cost structure in order to serve special interests, with a side-order of do-gooder power-tripping meddling.

And none of it has a g-----n thing to do with how the big 3 CEOs travel around the country.

Sorry about the rant. But the idea that the unions are gonna get all huffy about the private jet angle, or indeed that this is some sort of "suits- vs.-line-employees" drama strikes me as wrong-headed; if the bailout doesn't happen, no one is going to be more unhappy than the UAW.

<comment><USER7> Your post would have been easier to read (for someone not entirely familiar with English curses at least) without the ----.

<comment><USER8> It would also have been in better style. Either use expletives, and spell them out, if you think that best gets your point across; or don't use expletives at all.

<comment><USER6> Nice to see that the <http://bikeshed.com/> is alive and well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What amazes me about the CEOs of the automakers is how tone-deaf they are to the PR debacle they're creating.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to escape your environment, strip everything away, and see your life from 10,000 feet. It's hard to see what it's like at the bottom if you're on top and there's dozens of layers between you and the people that actually get their hands dirty. It's even harder if you've done this job for years and have no idea how things have changed since you rose in the corporate structure, if you were even at the bottom to begin with. It's a perennial problem in large groups with hierarchical structure, and GM is one of the largest and most hierarchical groups out there.

What may seem to them as being a "go-getter" and exercising earned corporate privilege just makes them seem even more elitist and out-of-touch to the general public.

It reminds me of the importance of the consigliere in the Italian Mafia (or at least in the fiction surrounding it). You need a close friend that you can trust to tell you what is right rather than what you want to hear. If you don't have a way to back up and see the big picture, you won't be able to see trouble until it's staring you in the face, no matter how dangerous it may be.

Every time I hear of something like this, I remind myself to always be aware of the echo chamber that may be surrounding my own life and its affairs. What I think is real could very possibly be wishful fantasy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tongue in cheek perhaps but very true! Never underestimate the power of publicity stunts :D (hmm).

Although of course if he did run GM then they wouldn't be in this mess in the first place would they (though Im not sure I'd want to drive a care branded "Virgin".. only comes in white :P).

Sharp commentary.

<comment><USER12> And he clearly has a very good eye for how Richard Branson promotes his businesses!

Definitely concur... very sharp commentary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I read his book about a month ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And undercar kits would be standard.

All jesting aside, this blog author makes a good point about the lack of panache and poor PR of American auto manufacturers to coastal Americans.

</comment><comment><USER14> If he ran GM they wouldn't need a bailout in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Take it further: he is probably not running GM because you cant make it profitable.

<comment><USER14> I think he could make it profitable. He's making cash in the airline business ($90m last quarter), which isn't exactly an outperforming sector. The car business isn't hard to make money in, it's just the big three that are fuck ups.

<comment><USER11> fair point I suppose (making Virgin atlantic pay was certainly no mean feat :D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> thats the problem isn't it? GM/Ford/Chrysler CEOs just don't get it. If they got it, their companies wouldn't be in the crapper like they are today.

</comment><comment><USER16> he would bundle an alternative energy source with the car and deliver it as one product. he would realize the dealers are the prefect distribution system to establish a standard. he would mobilize the retirees who still somehow love the company and make them an asset instead of a liability (to say nothing of the perpetuity the old, loved cars represent). he would make an opportunity of the customization trend that has been going on for years and listen to his customers. he would have one more than model of a brand like corvette he would....

</comment><comment><USER17> These guys are not entrepreneur. They are executives(read PHB's). They might not even be good leaders. Henry Ford would have done things differently....

<comment><USER18> These guys just need to get hit in the face with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What if pg ran GM? :-)

<comment><USER20> We would be reading an essay about people painting cars?</comment></comment>


Get Billions of Correct Digits of Pi from a Wrong Formula (1999) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://academics.rowan.edu/csm/departments/math/facultystaff/faculty/osler/Billions_pi_digits.pdf <comment> man-and-laptop Sketch of an alternative proof, more DSP:

Use the fact that the approximation in the paper is equal to the inner product of e^{-x^2} with a Dirac comb [1]. The amazing thing about the Gaussian function and the Dirac comb is that they're _both_ preserved by the Fourier transform. So apply the Fourier transform to both of them, observe that the Fourier transform is unitary (essentially a rotation), and therefore doesn't affect the inner product; then expand the inner product of the Fourier transforms.

Essentially, it's the same proof, but not in the language of Theta functions. In fact, I'd argue it's a better proof, because it generalises.

Generalisation: This technique applies to all Riemann sums, as long as you can compute the Fourier transform of the function. The thinner the tails of the function's Fourier transform, the faster its Riemann sums will converge.

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

<comment><USER2> Myself, I would say this is 80% correct. The bigger deal is the spectral convergence of the trapezoidal sum for periodic entire functions.

<comment> man-and-laptop I gave my generalisation in terms of frequency, and not in terms of "number of rectangles" in the Riemann sum, which I conveniently assumed to be infinite.

A better generalisation: if a function is thin-tailed, and its Fourier transform is thin-tailed, then it's Riemann sums converge to its integral at an exponential rate. In particular, this applies to the Gaussian function.

I'll check out what you said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The formula involves a parameter c=10^10 and initially seems unbelievable because one's initial inclination is to assume that the 10^10 is particularly important, like it has to be that particular value in order for the formula to work. The "trick" is that higher values of c, like c=10^19, give even more accuracy. Obviously c=10^10 was chosen to optimize the formula's aesthetic beauty.

<comment><USER4> Even c = 2 works.

      > n = seq(-1000, 1000); #assume 1000 is big enough to be infinity
      > sum(exp(-n^2/2))^2 / 2
      [1] 3.141593

<comment><USER5> Which programming language is that?

Edit: Ah, it's "R".

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's R. Not necessarily the ideal language for this but I had an RStudio window open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That "wrong formula" approximates pi by an integral: more precisely, exp(-x^2) integrated over the real line integrates to sqrt(pi). So the question is, in some sense, why is that such a good approximation? (My Fourier analysis is rusty, so I can't answer that question.)

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integral)

<comment><USER4> I'm familiar with the integral. But why is that sum a particularly good approximation to the integral? It seems better than one has a right to expect, although it's been a while since I did any numerical analysis.

<comment><USER4> Replying to my own comment. See (4.4) in the article and the discussion after it. The error in this approximation is like exp(-pi^2 c). (4.10) in the article translates this to that we should expect about 4.2c digits of accuracy, since log_10 exp(-pi^2) is about 4.2. This falls out of Poisson's summation formula, according to the OP.

Generally I'd expect a numerical integration scheme to have an error like h^k for some constant k - for example for Riemann sums the error goes like h^2 and for Simpson's rule like h^5. h is the distance between the sampling points and so is analogous to 1/c. So this doesn't just follow from Riemann summation.

<comment><USER7> Trapezoidal rule quadrature is better than you would expect (2nd order) for periodic (even better for analytic and indeed entire, in this case) integrands. See this paper: [http://eprints.maths.ox.ac.uk/1734/](http://eprints.maths.ox.ac.uk/1734/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like the formula is simply a fine enough Riemann sum for calculating Gaussian integral int_-inf^inf e^(-x^2) dx = sqrt(pi). It makes it much less surprising, though the exact estimation of error is still quite ingenious and worth following.

</comment><comment><USER9> Spoiler alert: It's just a Riemann sum. This is like being surprised that (1+10^-100)^(10^100) approximates e astonishingly accurately.

<comment><USER10> What is surprising is how small the error term is. For the sake of comparison, (1+10^-5)^(10^5) only gets five digits of e right.

<comment><USER11> And this one gets fewer than a hundred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting article, but I found the title a bit funny. I'd like to see an article about Newton's laws titled "Getting to the Moon from a Wrong Formula".

</comment><comment><USER13> This formula is worthy to be printed on T-shirt :)

</comment><comment><USER14> For any pattern, constant, irrational, etc, in math, there exists a set of formulas that models it up until n. It still is a cool little Riemann sum in this paper

</comment><comment><USER15> There's still the hypothesis that _any_ finite sequence of digits appears _somewhere_ in pi.

<comment><USER11> Ah, the normality hypothesis. It seems like it should be true, but apparently this is something that's really hard to prove.

<comment><USER16> I might be ignorant here, but wouldn't it suffice to prove that digits of Pi are random? Just check whether the distribution is uniform, the same way you would validate pseudorandom sequence generator for a programming language. Once you proved that Pi digits are random the normality hypotesis becomes trivial: as number of known Pi digits approaches infinity the probablity of any finite sequence to appear approaches 1.

<comment><USER17> The distribution wouldn't even need to be uniform, right? As long as one or more digits never stopped appearing at any point, the infinite sequence would include every possible sequence of numerals.

<comment><USER18> I'm 100% sure that Pi doesn't include e.g. 0.(3) sequence, or e sequence, or many many other sequences, or even just million of zeroes in the row.

<comment><USER19> Why would you be sure it doesn't include a million zeroes in a row? If the digits are random, as appears likely, it definitely will include a million zeroes in a row. The problem is even if you could turn every atom in the universe into a supercomputer, and somehow get them all cooperatively working on calculating the digits, you'd still never get to the million zeroes sequence in a million universe lifetimes. But they're still out there somewhere.

<comment><USER19> I cannot reply to the reply from v_lisivka (for some reason) but I don't know why you'd think a temporary run of decimal digits in pi would have any effect on the geometry of a circle. It all comes down to whether pi is Normal or not. Repeating the quote above, it is thought likely but not proven at this stage;

Quoting:

> It is widely believed that the (computable) numbers √2, π, and e are normal, > but a proof remains elusive.

<comment><USER18> My rough understanding is that Pi is representation of certain curve: circle. If we skew sequence too far to one side or another, then curve will lost it shape.

<comment><USER19> I hope it is becoming apparent that you need more than a rough understanding of one of the properties of pi to contribute usefully to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wouldn't a better title be, "An accurate approximation of pi"? Not as clickbaity though....

<comment><USER21> > _" Not as clickbaity though...."_

Not as accurate, either, given that the title of the paper is "Get Billions and Billions of Correct Digits of pi from a Wrong Formula," and it was published before "click-bait" was a thing.

<comment><USER22> Click-bait has long existed as headlines and movie and novel titles.</comment></comment></comment>


On Math Teaching: Lockhart's Lament - <AUTHOR> http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a great reading.

I didn't read it all so far (but I will), but I think if people were taught mathematics in a more explanatory way there would be a lot more of them interested in it, and therefore interested in areas related to it, or at least we wouldn't have a society so afraid of it.

It's amazing how many people don't know the very basics of it like, for instance, how multiplication is just a compact way of expressing a repetitive sum. And things like that happen because they were trying to _remember_ numbers and formulas instead of _understanding_ the concept.

It's just hard to forget about a concept, which gives the basis to understanding more complex things. I think maths teaching would be more productive if we spent more time elaborating on why things are done in some way (or how to come up with a concept just by reasoning about it, without doing calculations and writing symbols on paper) than trying to teach more complex concepts for someone who doesn't understand the basics, and therefore won't grasp the complex ones.

There's clearly something wrong about teaching maths, and very likely other subjects too, or maybe something wrong about teaching (anything).

<comment><USER3> The problem is that schools don't teach logic. Everything that they teach is arbitrary.

English class is essentially potpourri. Random order of books + Shakespeare. No teaching as to what makes writing a joy to read. Only emphasis on the relevant social issues.

History class is horrible, no explanations needed. It stinks because History has so much potential. If you have a good teacher, the sort that teaches you shades of grey, then it's amazing. But that's not the curriculum. Also, there's no emphasis on what MATTERS, which is current events. Rarely do you learn anything 80s onward. That means that most high school graduates are functionally retarded in terms of modern politics and news.

The science classes vary between schools, but it's making certain types of science MANDATORY that just lack logic. Bio and chem? I get physics, but even there: most people just don't need to know, and NOBODY learns in a way that makes them like it.

Electives are universally horrid. Teachers regularly have the attitude of "I didn't specialize in it, so standards don't matter."

...and there's math, which is explained properly here.

I've speculated before on what I think a logical school would be like, and it would be something like the following:

-Math and physics form the core learning at a younger age, because with them you can do anything.

-English courses focus not on movements, not even necessarily on "we think these guys are great," but emphasize different attitudes on how to write. Aesthetic, deconstructionist... teaching students to actually look at how writing works. Also, pop literature needs to be examined as well. Not teaching it ignores a field of literature that never gets brought up.

-Philosophy would be a great starter high school course.

-What we call "health/fitness" would focus less on STDs in 7th grade and focus MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more on understanding other people. It took me until about sixteen to learn that people aren't solely irrational beings, and the fact that it took me that long is that school is heavy on mysticism (like, assuming that older ALWAYS means better). That should be fixed.

-Emphasis on current affairs and technologies. Learning about the past should be focused on events rather than sweeping ideologies, and more comprehensive on a few key areas.

-All classes should emphasize writing and conveying ideas clearly. But that means no grading things based on length, either: people good at writing short should.

-No grading at all, actually. Grading has done nobody any good, least of all colleges that assume a high GPA necessarily means a working mind.

<comment><USER4> I agree with all, but: grading is currently a horrible means of evaluation, but still some sort of evaluation. Without evaluation --read, _accountability_ \-- no forced studies can acomplish anything. And currently school is nothing else than forced studies. Demeaning, even.

On the other hand, if you make school optional and create a culture of liking or perceiving as essential to attend school for one's well-being, then motivation is way different, and grading is then really an impediment.

<comment><USER3> I think - this is just me, mind you - that interviews are the best way of weeding out really bright kids from pretenders. It means you can't hide behind any words and have to rely on who you actually are. Although, granted, that's not quite as efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This lament applies to ALL the subjects in school, not just math. The problem is you just can't teach the joy of each one of these subjects to each of the students.

Some students will enjoy certain subjects and just 'get it'. But most won't, and I do not think there is any to teach it. You just can't.

So you teach what you can: at least they can read, even if they don't understand literature. Same for math: at least they can manipulate the symbols.

And the proof of the problem is the "new math". It tries very hard to do what he is saying and it's been a failure. At the end of it students don't know how to do math.

Except for those students who excel at math - but they would excel at it no matter how it was taught.

<comment><USER6> There is a stunning gap in basic capability between the best worst students, but even within subjects there are large ranges. I found Calculus II in collage a lot easer than mesmerizing multiplication tables in 2nd grade.

Many people say they _hate_ math but love logic puzzles like SUDOKU which is math but not the type of thing they learn in school. The important thing is to not confuse students that learning the basic tools like addition and spelling have anything to do with the type of work you do as an engineer or writer. The way the system works you need to have a wide range of basically irrelevant skills before they are willing to teach real math the gray areas of history. Grouping writing poetry in the same subject as grammar is probably harmful because teachers spend so much time on grammar they the skip poetry because it's to "advanced" and it's not on the tests etc. Yet, they don't build off of each other and many of the greatest poets lived before grammar or spelling rules where written down.

PS: I expect most students would pay more attention to the basics if I they had some use for them.

<comment><USER7> I think that 'finding some use for them' is an ultimately doomed approach, if only because each student is going to have different ways in which they want to use the mathematical tools with which they are presented.

My father, who is an 'educator', seems to think that the best way to learn trigonometry is to use it to teach carpentry, but I can't think of anything that would be more dull, for several reasons. One, because I imagine that well less than half of the class would have a genuine interest in carpentry; and Two, because building things with wood requires very little trigonometric calculation, so nearly all of the examples would be highly contrived.

<comment><USER6> Trig _is_ useless. There is about 2weeks of useful math and the rest is a waste of time. People like putting trig on tests but the basic 4 year HS math program should be:

Logic + Algebra I, Geometry with a touch of number theory and topology, Grab Bag (1 year including the useful parts of Algebra II, Trig, and pre Calculus), Calculus I.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with this to some extent, but I think the author goes too far. The purpose of math education is not to make theoretical mathematicians. Only a small number of students in math classes will become mathematicians, and the rest are acquiring a set of tools that they'll use to solve problems in the real world. Proofs and conjectures and abstract reasoning, interesting as they may be, are irrelevant to most people's needs.

Here's a better analogy: a mathematician is a composer, and people who use math are singers and instrumentalists. There will always be a few people who love composing, and their work is important. But the majority of people have neither the ability nor the motivation to write original compositions. They'd rather just be given music to play.

For the composers among us, this can be hard to stomach. Writing music is so exhilarating, and playing is so mundane! How can anyone prefer the latter to the former? Well, the fact is, most people do. The rest of humanity really is different from us, and we need to accept that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the best pieces I have read on mathematical education in quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't necessarily agree with the article. Math was my main subject at the University, so while I work as a software developer, on paper I am a mathematician.

I don't agree with the premise that math is an art, and that "Better to not have math classes at all than to do what is currently being done." First and foremost, Math is something which learns one to _think abstractly_ in patterns. And this I believe is indispensable and useful for almost everyone - even if the concrete pieces of knowledge will be forgotten later or not directly applicable to one's work or life. Even the so-called "drill" is somewhat useful.

Also, during my work in software companies, I was able to notice when someone didn't receive solid Math at university level - they were lacking in the area of their ability to think more abstractly and thoroughly about more complex problems.

Of course, the education could be improved by having better teachers with passion and ability to explain the ideas, no doubt about that.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was sad to see that not once did the author mention the works of Polya. Discovering new ideas in mathematics ultimately boils down to solving an existing problem in a new way or solving a completely new problem.

I believe students should be posed the fundamental questions that forced many of the most beautiful ideas in math to be discovered. The advantage we have now is that if the students get stuck, they don't have to wait 2000 years for someone to discover how to find the area under a curve. We can give them hints. The teacher can compress time with a well thought out question pointing the students in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Old news but this is something worth duping.

</comment><comment><USER12> Imagine an ideal math class as Lockhart might envision: one that focuses on the art, joy, and beauty of mathematics, in which students genuinely _play_ with mathematical ideas. Then, ask yourself how the progress of these students could be evaluated via standardized testing. The two mix poorly.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the goal of school is supposed to be to teach children how to evaluate which actions will be most beneficial to them. What school actually teaches is how to be dishonest/illogical in all the correct ways for a given society.

</comment><comment><USER14> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256638>

</comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone link to the original pdf? Scribd always crashes my computer (no other Flash apps seem to).

<comment><USER16> Click on the title outside of [scribd] for the original PDF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> God, I remember reading this on reddit. Brilliant article.</comment>


Dean Kamen on The Luke Arm.  Simply Amazing. - <AUTHOR> http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2008/09/the_luke_arm_at_all_things_d.html

<comment><USER2> I found this to be really touching. Dean's work is just amazing. I wish I could give this 100 or even 1000 karma points. It's not just the technology and the ingenuity, but the fact that he's helping people who are beyond help. I'm truly inspired.

HN talks a lot about startups and I'm sure most of HN's readers dream of their own startup. Something to think about before taking the plunge is "What benefit is this startup offering?" It can't be just to "make a lot of money". That's why I like what Dean has done. Sure he has made a lot of money, but look at how much he's helped people.

They solve some really tough problems, but the rewards are unbelievable. The video show's a guy named Chuck who has no arms and hasn't fed himself in 13 years, feeding himself. I mean can you even put a price on that kind of reward.

That's the kind of thing that drives you. That keeps you going even when things seem hopeless.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this! Extremely interesting.

Here's another very interesting story involving Dean Kamen, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos:

<http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html>

<comment><USER4> This excerpt was _awesome_. Thanks for posting.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Any man who can listen to Jobs prattle on about imacs and then tell him that his invention sucks, but simply take it in stride as one guy's opinion...

Much respect to Dean. Wow.

<comment><USER6> I would say, much respect to Jobs, given that his analysis seems to be correct in retrospect.

E.g.:

"You're sure your market is upscale consumers for transportation?" said Jobs.

Turns out Segways weren't a hit with the target market and they ended up selling to enterprises and mailmen. Bezos had some good analysis too saying the real question is whether it would be legal to ride them - in many places it was illegal to drive Segways on either sidewalks or roads.

Of course, I don't have their initial presentations so it's possible they were already expecting these to be their main problems. I just think it's unfair to call it "prattling on" when in fact they were giving some pretty accurate analysis on why the product wouldn't be a success.

<comment><USER5> The respect wasn't about who was right. Jobs is right a _lot_. That's why I think its cool that Dean pushed on and believed in his invention anyway. The world might just not be "hot, flat and crowded" enough for Segway yet.

I wonder what I might do if I had an invention and Steve Jobs told me it sucked, or if I got Bill Gates' trademark "thats the stupidest f*cking idea I've heard since I've been at Mircosoft." Considering their advice, shrugging my shoulders and then pressing on anyway might not be high on the list.

<comment><USER7> _The world might just not be "hot, flat and crowded" enough for Segway yet._

According to New York city officials, New York is already _too_ crowded for Segways.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/nyregion/12segway.html>

 _Gov. David A. Paterson signed a law in July legalizing Segways everywhere else in the state.

Officials in New York City, where many streets are already clogged with taxis, tourists, dogs and double-wide strollers, deliberately asked lawmakers to leave the city out of the bill. ...

"To introduce a foreign, unproven, untested element into the mix complicates the job before us, which is to make the most efficient use of city streets," said Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York advocacy group._

<comment><USER5> I think the idea might be that if there are more Segways, there could be less cars. We're talking about a level of crowded here that's a little less like _Its SO crowded in this city that I can hardly find a place to park_ and a little more like _a CAR?! Those things haven't been allowed inside the city limits for years!_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At one point in the interview Dean says that's he's naive. That's a great thing since anybody else would write what he's accomplished off as impossible without even trying.

Not to take anything away from his work on the arm but I find his comments on the US's education system and our cultural values from the last two videos the most interesting.

<comment><USER9> I agree. Barring absurdly high levels of natural talent, wanting to do well at something is the first step to doing it. It amazes me that this point has been lost on a lot of people.

<comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297737>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember a team from my school winning the national competition in Germany and being invited to Atlanta with their Lego Robots. "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" is as amazing as his work in prosthetics.</comment>


Website Quote - <AUTHOR> http://gregpilling.com/2009/09/thanks-for-coming-in/ This is an actual response after a interview with a company about their website <comment><USER2> I guess you are supposed to be a mind reader. I'm not a web programmer, but I am the founder of a web startup, and have worked with programmers on my projects before. I is common sense that it behooves the customer, as in someone like myself whom is not a programmer, to give as much detail as they possibly can in order to get the end result that they want. Give details, and examples. If they don't, I guess they be expected to come back and complain later that what they got was not what they wanted. They should have spoken up when asked. After all, its their project, and therefore its in their best interest.

To all those customers out there looking to get a quote from a programmer on your next web development project. If you say exactly what you want, you are more likely to get exactly what you asked for.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, so you just posted their email to you on the web and then posted links to it? What are you, the pirate bay?

This was an opportunity for you to educate your client on the design process, and you not only failed, you embarrassed yourself trying to humiliate them.

Feel free to send me the client's deets and I'll walk them through the gig.</comment>


Study: People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/people-want-power-because-they-want-autonomy/474669/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is obvious in the workplace. Here are some of the things that lack of power/autonomy will lead to:

\- Being forced to do work assigned to someone else.

\- Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation

\- Being forced to appear as though under someone else's control (other than direct manager)

\- Being forced to do the more dangerous, risky, difficult, or thankless work

\- Being forced to do work far below one's qualifications

\- Being forced to take over failed projects or projects that have already been rejected by upper management.

<comment> ux-app

      > Being forced to do work for which someone else will receive credit or compensation

I have a severely low level of tolerance for this. My first team leader at my first job as a code monkey blatantly took credit for a huge improvement I made to one of the company's long standing processes. It soon became apparent that climbing the corporate ladder meant climbing over the backs of others. I quit 2 weeks later and never returned to a cubicle.

Autonomy is king. Without it, I personally cannot function.

<comment><USER3> And how do you achieve autonomy if not via taking power? I mean you can work as a contractor, but the game is the same. You either make low pay, or work for someone else, or have the power to govern other people's agenda.

<comment><USER4> Personally I made some websites and started selling my apps from then. I quickly started making more than most salaried jobs and get complete control without having to be horrible to anybody. I don't understand why more people don't do it.

<comment><USER5> I wanted to reply "I never get good ideas for websites / apps", but then I realized I actually meant "I never get good ideas IN FIVE SECONDS".

Maybe I should spend more time thinking about this :)

<comment><USER6> Maybe you should spend more time making apps, whether they're a good idea or not. Often ideas in an area come from working in the area, solving problems in the area, talking to other people about the area, thinking about the area in the shower ...

<comment><USER5> Thank you, that is a GREAT point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really cool article that goes really well with Daniel Pink's book Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Pink says that people need 3 things to truly feel motivated at work. Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose.

That seems to be based on self-determination theory mentioned in the article that autonomy, relatedness, and competence are human's basic psychological needs.

The link ([http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2004_DeciVa...](http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2004_DeciVansteenkiste_SDTandBasicNeedSatisfaction.pdf)) about self-determination takes you to a paper that references a researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has done a lot of research on optimal experience and has written a great book about it called Flow.

<comment><USER8> I think Pink was making a even stronger statement than you give him credit for.

His statement in the book is that traditional methods of improving performance -- more pay for more work -- just doesn't work for tasks that require problem solving. In fact, counter-intuitively, experiments have demonstrated lower performance when paid to accomplish problem solving tasks.

What Pink outlines is that to improve performance on problem solving tasks (including creative tasks) you have to provide people with Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy.

The latter thing is often missing from most managerial textbooks since most managerial textbooks seem to have been written for industrial workers where precise control is emphasized. This totally backfires for IT jobs (and other types of jobs), and everyone has seen those disasters.

<comment><USER9> The ~10 minute RSA Animate video for "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" is terrific:

[http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc](http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now all we need is a couple of independent researchers to replicate these conclusions to verify them and we might have learned something.

I get really sceptical about these social sciences studies, especially after the recent round of replication attempts that failed.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree, and I'm glad someone's on this thread reminding everyone about the terrible state that social science research is in.

Human beings are complicated and difficult to study, so I can appreciate the challenge that social science researchers have in front of them. But, propagating conclusions from a field of research that has a 33% reproducibility rate is just negligent journalism. It's not true just because it's in one study and it matches our intuition or something we read in a Malcolm Gladwell book.

1\. Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test. [http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology- studies-f...](http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail- reproducibility-test-1.18248)

<comment><USER12> > Human beings are complicated and difficult to study

Well that's a positive way to put it. I wonder whether it is possible to find steady cause and effect patterns at all.

Same goes for economy (which IS basically a proxy for human behavior). You can certainly have a go at documenting its history but the present and future are probably not predictable because they are subject to evolutionary responses. When I had to take an economics 101 class negative interest rates were out of the question and look what we have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is what has been bothering me all day / week and just before I clicked this. I _cannot stand_ being micromanaged. I'm being driven crazy by it now, and it makes me want to go back to entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER14> Can I ask you a question. Is your boss able to (in practice) fire you?

I have been a manager in situations where I could fire at will and others where I had no ability to fire. When I could fire I could just explain to my reports what needed to be done and leave them to get on with - when I couldn't fire the only way to get the work done was by micromanaging. I hated every moment of micromanaging, but there was no other way to get done what had to be done. Responsibility without power is a nightmare.

<comment><USER15> BOSS::Make those sales numbers! You have 12 dealers in that territory who should be feeding you leads!

ME(1997)::Uh, boss about that. Those 12 dealers hate my program because they get 10% commission instead of 30% commission like they usually do. They actively work against me! Instead of feeding me leads, they are trying to sell competitors product because they make more money!! They hate my program! They make less money!

BOSS:: (hits loop phase of discussion) You have 12 dealers in that territory who should be feeding you leads! Make those sales numbers or your fired!

ME:: well, shit. <proceeds to make sales numbers by not telling dealers anything>

When money fell from the sky, dealers didn't seem to care if it was 10% or 30% money because it showed up like free money. 0 effort for them. It was hell working with a group that not only I couldn't fire, the corporation could not even discipline them. They were independent dealers. I could make a sale, and they could refuse to process it (happened a few times). In those cases it was then a no-sale. I had to sell the customer and the dealer. Or do the deal without the dealer knowing about it until they received the check. After a year of free money, the worst dealer became the best dealer. He had been around 30 years, a grumpy old codger who was king of his area and all his customers trusted him 100%. His change in opinion (in his area alone) was worth about $25,000 a year in commissions in 1998. Thanks again Bob!

I vowed to myself to never get in a position where I had all the responsibility to make something happen, but none of the authority to make it happen. That vow has kept me out of some situations, and whenever I break it is when I get miserable again. Then I re-vow ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a shill for libertarian socialism, i am obviously glad to see controlled experiments that validate my prejudices about human nature. I switched jobs a few months ago from a steady job with good benefits to a less steady job with no benefits because it gave me far more autonomy and independence. I know many people who are very ambitious and want to be their own bosses: few of them want to rule others. In fact, of the bosses i know, all of them are _frustrated_ by having to order and direct people.

There is one pattern of thought that i think is missed by this experiment, but another one could just as well measure it too and i hope someone decides to: it's easier to order people to do what you think is right than it is to convince them that you are right. I think under circumstances where a person feels frustrated that their point of view isn't being validated by others they will have a greater tendency towards authoritarian power as opposed to autonomous power.

Certainly, how many of us have gone through the phase of growing up where we think that if everyone just _listened to us and did what we said_ , everyone would be better off? I think well intentioned paternalism is a greater cause for authoritarian desires than narcissism and ego validation.

<comment><USER17> Lest we forget, that well-intentioned paternalism is sometimes entirely on target: on Reddit at the moment there's a link 'Engineer Who Blamed Himself For Not Stopping Challenger Launch Dies' [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/challenger-engineer- bob-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/challenger-engineer-bob-ebeling- dies_us_56f09f3be4b09bf44a9e41f2)

<comment><USER18> How on earth could one consider that case to exemplify paternalism in any fashion? "Detail-oriented engineers overruled by schedule-obsessed management." Film at eleven.

<comment><USER17> He talked about bringing a shotgun to work to stop the launch. Perhaps it would be better to say it exemplifies what the paternalists imagine they are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The classic explanation is from E. Fromm, _The Art of Loving_ with, to paraphrase,

"For humans the fundamental problem of life is getting a feeling of security in the face of the anxiety from our realization that alone we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society."

rough quote from memory.

So, alone we feel vulnerable. So, we want security in the face of that vulnerability.

Notably, Fromm does not say that money or power will give that feeling of security and, instead, claims that the first recommended solution is a good romantic relationship, that is, with "knowledge, caring, respect, and responsiveness" where the _knowledge_ means the couple readily exchanges knowledge of themselves.

Sure, one can try to use autonomy and self-sufficiency, and those via, say, money and/or power to get the feeling of security. But if only by omission, Fromm is saying that being so alone won't work well.

<comment><USER20> +1 for Erich Fromm!

My entire concept of office politics is based on a work by Fromm, Escape From Freedom. His Premise in the book is that people don't want to have to make decisions or be responsible, that they would rather have other people make decisions for them. He makes a point there there is a relationship, like a ratio, between being responsible and freedom. People would gladly give up freedom over being responsible.

<comment><USER21> This is something I struggle with. A part of me just wants to put my brain on autopilot and simply let my manager tell me what to do. That usually doesn't end well for me.

However, I realize that people who want less responsibility and make no decisions are looking for a sense of stability and security in their lives. They want to wake up each morning, go to work, come home, and get paid on a regular basis. They want the regular paycheck.

The irony of this, of course, is that this course of action is no less risky than entrepreneurship, because, at a moment's notice, your employer could fire you and destroy the illusion, even if you've worked over a decade for them. No matter what path you take in life, you need to own it. The days of working for a company for a few decades following a defined path were brief.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think the distinction between autonomy and influence/power is so clear-cut in practice.

The article defines autonomy as the absence of unwanted influence. But in a human society, unwanted influence is not something you can simply opt out of. Having autonomy without isolating yourself from the rest of the society means having at least some degree of influence over those who would like to influence you in unwanted ways.

As long as there are people out there (politicians, marketers, burglars, terrorists, etc.) who are trying their damnedest to influence you, the only way you can achieve autonomy is to be able to tell them to get the fuck off your lawn. Sometimes you need to push people physically off your lawn. Sometimes you need to kill them, because they would kill you if you don't. An autonomous person without effective power will quickly cease to be autonomous.

So autonomy is just another form of power. Some might even say that _everything_ is power, and it's not just empty rhetoric.

<comment><USER23> Makes me think of something i ran into about the freedom concept that was bouncing around at the time of the American revolution (and thus inspiring and influencing the founding fathers).

I think it boiled down to freedom being the absence of coercion in any form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, it's different things at work, right? Yes on one side people want autonomy. This very much so applies to many developers. But power is actually also exciting, for some people even sexual. Why do I think that? Well, computer games and porn for instance. In both you already get your agenda. But there are games and porn that gives you explicitely power over another (virtual) person. And people still like that, when they already have power over themselves.

<comment><USER24> To add to this: Women are attracted to men who are leaders, be that in the work place, in social situations or, yes, in the bedroom. A lot of books on seduction advocate this.

<comment><USER25> A lot of books on seduction are full of bullshit. And that's putting it kindly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Mostly", because quite a few people still just want control over others. And someone striving for "autonomy" through power still just wants to make you a tool for achieving their autonomy.

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember seeing a talk a while back where the presenter was attempting to define the utility function that characterizes intelligent agents. His thesis was that an intelligent agent would work to maximize, up to some event horizon, its number of possible courses of action. This reminded me of that talk - money, power, etc... are all ways to increase one's freedom of choice and thus autonomy.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this really the results of a new study?

I'm sure I was reading results of studies > 10 years ago, about stress levels of people within some number of large organisations, and finding people towards the top of the hierarchy were less stressed than those at the bottom. It was possibly speculative, though I'm sure I recall they'd confirmed it somehow, that it was due to people towards the bottom of an organisational structure had far less control over what their day or week looked like, and how they could plan out their tasks, than those at the top.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's like I'm motivated to work like crazy until the point I can afford to be nothing.

</comment><comment><USER30> > To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That > in itself would be enough to make me ambitious. (Ernest Renan)

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't mean to be glib - but they needed a study for this?

I think this is one of the primary reasons people have chased power for millennia - either to have control over themselves, change the world they live in, or lord over (seek retribution) those who've wronged (done arbitrary things to) them (perceived or otherwise).

<comment><USER32> You just listed three things, and the study is suggesting that it's the first, not the second two.

<comment><USER33> The study suggests that it is the first for the majority of people. It doesn't suggest that there is no one who wants number two or three.

<comment><USER32> A study can show that men are taller than women without showing that every man is taller than every woman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Man, I never got to BLARP as an undergrad. I feel so left out.

<comment><USER35> I've been BLARPing since I graduated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> "If I was black, and I lived here I'd want to be a big man in the FBI Or the CIA.

But as I'm not, And as I'm free, white and 21 I don't need more power than I've got... Except sometimes, when I'm broke"

</comment><comment><USER37> This is why I started my own company: So nobody could tell me what to do. It's not really even about the money.

<comment><USER38> My view has been that someone always works for someone else. Even the most powerful board members answer to shareholders and entrepreneurs answer to their customers - lest they go out of business.

Tell me about why you don't think you have to answer to your customers.

<comment><USER39> Customers are a constraint, to be sure, but so are the laws of physics. Customer preferences are just market conditions, and adopting to market conditions is closer to dealing with physical constraints in your product design than it is to being told what to do by your boss.

I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.

Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.

And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.

Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.

<comment><USER5> I believe this is the most important difference, at least for me:

> Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent

This gives me freedom. Sure, it would be best if I just received a one billion dollar gift (I don't think small :P) but until then, having the freedom to choose what projects I'm willing to work on is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My feeling is that it is impossible to achieve autonomy in the workplace for no other reason than the fact that the factors for what you end up doing in day-to-day job is, ultimately (if not immediately), dictated by the investors of the company. Essentially I am exchanging my skills, expertise and time for money.

<comment><USER41> It is not a law of nature that companies need have investors.

<comment><USER14> Even workers cooperatives have investors (the workers themselves). Unless you have a business with no capital requirements then you must have investors.

<comment><USER42> Bootstrapping (or simply being rich) is a thing.

<comment><USER14> When bootstrapping or being rich then you are the investor :)

<comment><USER42> Sure but we are talking about this in the context of being autonomous. So while you could say that you yourself are the investor, it ultimately doesn't matter for the overall argument.

<comment><USER14> I was just responding to the claim that it is not a law of nature that companies have investors - in fact it is :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tech Pros: The Next Dinosaurs? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/08/22/tech-pros-the-next-dinosaurs/

<comment><USER2> This just sounds like individual employees/managers bypassing IT and just going straight for the nearest SaaS for the solution to their problems. I personally don't mind that at all ;)

The whole SaaS model followed by many startups now aims completely at putting this power into the hands of non-technical but savvy users.

</comment><comment><USER3> The role of a CIO (and his org) is to manage information technology in a way that optimizes the value for the company. In the cases where these things are slam dunk fits, IT should be _suggesting_ them, not stonewalling them. Failing to do this is just being bad at your job.

If people becoming more tech aware means that there's less of a role for people who are bad at their job, good digging riddance.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a hard time understanding which kind of IT person this article is referring to. Does it mean the kind of person who uses full blown J2EE for a simple data-driven Intranet app that will only ever have 5 users and spends weeks drawing UML diagrams/writing useless specs before writing code? I certainly hope that kind of person becomes obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER5> You could make a pretty strong argument that IT guys in a solicitors office means something is broken.

This article is just saying that taxi companies don't need as many on board mechanics.</comment>


Researchers Advance 'Quantum Teleportation' - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4384 <comment><USER2> Previous submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8643774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8643774)

Response: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689912)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could someone point me to better explanation how this is teleportation if to restore state at destination, you need to send some information via fiber cable anyway? Aren't it more like encoding and decoding at destination?</comment>


Detailed Balance Explained to My Son - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/detailed_balance_explained_my_son <comment><USER2> Why have there been so many "<complicated topic> explained to 8-yr old" posts?

It's great that the gist of things can be explained (most complicated things have simple premises), but the devil's in the details!

<comment><USER3> Because offering a simple, intuitive explanation that doesn't skimp on details is a hallmark of expertise, and the holy grail of education.

We like it because it works, and because it's a show of craftsmanship. Very much like hacking, I suppose.

<comment><USER4> That first sentence is beautiful. Well said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me who kinda hates formulas. They so counter intuitive.

<comment><USER6> Nope: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733113></comment></comment>


Quirks of the arXiv - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/quirks-of-the-arxiv <comment><USER2> The paper "The Proof of Innocence" linked to there has a wonderful sentence in the abstract ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162](https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162)): "The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California."</comment>


Mozilla and Free Speech - <AUTHOR> http://me.veekun.com/blog/2014/04/05/mozilla-and-free-speech/ <comment><USER2> AFAIK the donation was 8 years ago, not 6.

Other than that I upvoted because of the seemingly honest account, and the datapoint, but I disagree in several points. This was IMO what in modern times we call a witch hunt, at full blast. He was pressured inside the company in several ways, inquired at every opportunity in almost every meeting.

And I also believe that you are not in a position to claim that nobody from the board pressured him to resign in anyway. I think it's likely that they did, even if they didn't spell it out.

IMO firing him just worsened things for Mozilla a lot more than appointing him. This is now an even much more divisive issue and it has reached out to many, many more people.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you rebuild the browser today? - <AUTHOR>

(Using today's technologies.)
(Would you rebuild the browser?)
Just coming off an impromptu and hotly contested ;) debate with my brother about the current state of browsers. The premise, what if browsers were reinvented from the ground up today? What would we do differently.
> Imagine that the huge breakthrough technology that got everyone in software, business, and marketing all excited about computers and on board were Microsoft Word, and from thenceforth all software were run inside Microsoft Word's layout system, and a programmer's life was writing Word macros and getting them to work together and scale well, just to beat the fickle layout into shape. Then people decided they wanted dynamic content inside Microsoft Word, and to make them do all kinds of things... and we can call them "apps" and wow people with all the things computers can do these days (while software outside of Word has been doing these things for 15 years and in more elegantly designed and maintained ways). Good thing that never happened. Oh wait, it did, but it's called a web browser, html and css, php, javascript...
I think it's a great question. Genuinely curious about people's opinions. <comment><USER2> If you're rebuilding the browser from scratch but keeping everything else the same (same market, same popular web-tech, same backwards compatibility concerns) then my answer would be "I'd just build a WebKit wrapper and be done with it." With all of the history, momentum, and peoples expectations there isn't a whole lot you can do differently even if you are starting from a blank canvas.

Honestly the only thing I'd want to change if I could re-write history is:

\- HTML is now XHTML based.

\- JavaScript would be scrapped and redesigned entirely.

\- Fix a few issues with CSS (nothing major, but maybe make the spec more specific/less ambiguous in places).

<comment><AUTHOR> > JavaScript would be scrapped and redesigned entirely.

That's a significant change. What would you replace it with?

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind time travel, but maybe Dart. I realise they've discontinued it, but if you could travel back in time and provide Dart as a JavaScript alternative, it would no doubt win outright (since JS took so long even to get to where it is now).

Honestly, and this is going to sound crazy, even VBScript is a better language than JavaScript. I understand why it didn't take off, it was only supported by one vendor, and was proprietary (as opposed to JavaScript's "free"), but in terms of the core language it had features JavaScript won't have until ECMAScript 6 is released.

<comment><USER3> Is Dart discontinued? Or, did you mean Dart VM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> a single web specification that browsers would be forced to adopt in order to prevent fragmentation. html and javascript may be different technologies, but as react has taught us, are of the same concern. so merging them closer together would be good (web components is a step in the right direction). throw in css in there too because it's currently a joke. it should have consistent behavior across varying divs, regardless of usage.

post script: javascript should be type safe and support interfaces/abstract classes.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would include a Bittorrent-based CDN as a first class protocol element and I would make a clear and unbridgeable distinction between "web apps" and hypermedia documents. Web apps would be carefully sandboxed in order to ensure that the user, not the developer, has control.

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually have a personal side project addressing precisely this.

You see, we don't use the web as a publishing environment any more. We use it as a view layer for n-tier applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any details you feel comfortable sharing?

<comment><USER6> Not just yet.

I think it's super obvious and would rather nobody beat me to the punch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd allow browsers and sites to be extended by languages that weren't JS.

\- Support sandbox'd languages in browser, perhaps python.

\- Plugin support for other languages, perhaps python.</comment>


How safe are chemicals in eyeliner? - <AUTHOR>

Ricinus is a chemical in eyeliner.  Agatha Christie used it as poison in her 1929 mystery, "The House of Lurking Death."
U.S. FDA does not comment as far as I could see.
How safe is this stuff? <comment><AUTHOR> According to [http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/11/nyregion/cuttings-the- cast...](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/11/nyregion/cuttings-the-castor-bean- plant-so-striking-so-poisonous.html?pagewanted=1)

"Wayne Armstrong, a botany instructor at Palomar Junior College in San Marcos, Calif., said ricin is 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisonous than rattlesnake venom."

So don't eat your eyeliner :)</comment>


A Simplified Jira Clone Built with React/Babel and Node/TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oldboyxx/jira_clone <comment><USER3> Creator of "Jira Clone" here.

First of all I want to make it clear that this is just a showcase/demo product. It's definitely not something I'm planning to sell.

Additionally, it's not even remotely production ready, and it's missing about a zillion features that would make it a full-fledged project management software.

The main reason I built this was to have a good showcase for potential future clients.

The second reason was to share with the community. More specifically to show how to organize non-trivial React projects and to provide folks with a bunch of React code to learn from.

The third reason was to improve my skills and get better at working with hooks, TypeScript, and a couple of other things.

Back when I was learning React (4 years ago) I was a bit frustrated by the lack of non-trivial example projects. It was either a bunch of to-do lists, or hugely complex codebases like [https://github.com/Automattic/wp- calypso](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso).

I like to think that this Jira Clone presents a nice middle ground.

Bonus: Here's a Trello clone I built while learning React four years ago: [https://boxd.ivorreic.com/](https://boxd.ivorreic.com/) :)

<comment><USER4> Fewer features sounds great. I personally loath Jira, and avoid using it whenever possible, but your clone looks really nice. You can improve 100x on Jira just by making it faster, simpler, and easier to use.

One suggestion: it looks _too_ similar to Jira, you might want to change the design a bit so that Atlassian doesn't try to sue you or something.

<comment><USER5> What do you prefer to Jira? At a former workplace we used Gitlab, which was a pleasant suite to use. These days we use Atlassian and often find myself incredibly frustrated by their products

<comment><USER6> We've been using [https://subtask.co](https://subtask.co) \-- it has 3 pretty awesome features which I'm baffled why Trello doesn't have:

\- You can break down tasks into subtasks and those subtasks into subtasks themselves, etc

\- You can dynamically group task columns by who's working on them, what is their status, what is their goal, etc

\- You can arrange what's to be done on an effort-value grid, which helps immensely when choosing what to take on next

<comment><USER7> Looks good but I can't find anything on their pricing..?

<comment><USER8> Hi - (creator of subtask.co here) - Noticed a few signups coming from hn and thought I'd pop in. We're still in an early beta phase now and so pricing is still TBD - we're happy to have any input on what would work for folks though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of my pet theories is that if you are building a software engineering product, you should never write your own tools. You can't sell them, and you'll just be learning lessons completely unrelated to your product.

However; if you are building a software engineering culture, you should write as many of your own tools as you can get away with. Nothing builds culture like a shared unique experience.

<comment><USER10> Or, you know, you accidentally create Slack ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real issue with jira is how unresponsive the backend feels.

<comment><USER12> First, this clone looks very nice and worth trying if your workflow fits it.

If this tool is still needing some feature you want, Do you run JIRA cloud? Jira by no means is perfect. It's one of the few tools that can handle complexity.

I noticed a huge leap in JIRA speed in switching from cloud hosted Jira to self-hosting.

On Cloud, Atlassian is mischievous and aggressively optimizes and constrains the resources.

If you don't use Jira often enough on cloud, it will be slow. The more it is used, the faster it gets.

One way to speed up JIRA Cloud is to hit the urls regularly with a script, keeps them cached.

<comment><USER13> Mind the "What is this and who is this for" [https://github.com/oldboyxx/jira_clone#what-is-this-and- who-...](https://github.com/oldboyxx/jira_clone#what-is-this-and-who-is-it- for-%EF%B8%8F).

Looks to me like the OP developed this to showcase his skills and get hired, not for production use by other people or with any intent of maintaining it.

<comment><USER12> I'm not one to tell anyone what to run in production or not :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> maybe dont call it jira_clone. People dont like installing something called a "clone".

Brand it differently and build something really cool here

<comment><USER15> I don't think people like using JIRA in general, especially after companies bloat it with a number of useless plugins that only certain teams will use.

<comment><USER16> After being forced to switch from Jira to a much less capable system, I now wish nobody had complained about Jira. Grass is always greener.

<comment><USER15> I would much rather not deal with jira tbh. Some companies take it too far and use jira as a micromanagement tool.

<comment><USER17> I've found jira dysfunction often reflects the dysfunction of the underlying corporate structure.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, any time someone complains about how many FEATURES JIRA has, it's actually an issue with how their company's management team uses JIRA to micromanage the shit out of them and aggressively optimize metrics that don't matter. But that would be an issue with the organization instead of the tool. And those are much harder to fix.

<comment><USER19> I agree. I use JIRA at work (cloud hosted) with all kinds of plugins (TestRail, Aha, etc.) and its a horrifying experience, on top of that all the fields that are used for (micro?)managing people and work is cumbersome to work with.

For my personal projects I use JIRA server (solely because its cheap at $10 and has a decent mobile app to capture ideas in tickets/boards on the move) and my experience has been pretty good.

That being said if Github had a good mobile app I'd switch in a minute. My main problem with Github issues is that you cannot edit milestones in the mobile web app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A bugzilla clone please. Jira is not designed to be used by software devs imho.

<comment><USER21> Jira is garbage. Its slow, clunky, and its UI doesn't lend itself to a providing users with a small learning curve. I'll take Asana over Jira because it's fast, simple, and has a low learning curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really minor feedback, but I reacted almost viscerally negatively to the tickets "rotating" when you drag and drop them. Looks super unprofessional. The box-shadow and the basis of the interaction already made me know I was dragging it.

</comment><comment><USER23> What motivated you to develop your own query and mutation hooks? Was there something unsatisfying with things like swr and react-query, or were you motivated to demonstrate/learn how to do it yourself?

<comment><USER3> I wanted to get better at writing hooks and working with hooks. Learning was one of the reasons for creating this in the first place.

<comment><USER23> That is as good a reason as any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good to see someone working on this. Jira is awful but they have a strong enterprise hold with a bazillion switches.

It's slow as hell and even the simplest things in their UX takes multiple clicks. Like resolving a ticket should be as simple as dragging it to done column but JIRA makes brings an additional popup for resolution type. Annoying UX like that.

Definitely a big opportunity to make a dent here.

Feedback: don't use Atlassian JIRA's screenshot on the main repo page. Have a screenshot of the UI you've actually built.

<comment><USER25> This is a great learning project for patterns & Best practices on so many aspects TypeORM, Hooks, React, NO-Redux ... as the Author mentioned already.

I am recently using a Next & Nest combination, Combining some of the good patterns of this project with Next&Nest combination would be great. Here is a good Next/NEST starter project [https://github.com/saltyshiomix/ark](https://github.com/saltyshiomix/ark)

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

[https://nextjs.org/](https://nextjs.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> (shameless plug):

We are building a new issue tracker for software teams. [https://linear.app](https://linear.app)

Especially making the UX feel fast, we since the slowness is really annoying in software that you use daily. The app built more like native client, caching the data locally and syncing the transactions the the background. That way it also supports offline use.

</comment><comment><USER27> Starred. Well done, I think this would be a good codebase to learn react.js from

</comment><comment><USER28> JIRA's UX is horrible, why would you want to make a clone of that?

<comment><USER29> To get a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks great, two suggestions:

First, I wouldn't call it JIRA clone, because JIRA is a registered trademark by Atlassian and they might sue you for using it.

Second, I wouldn't call it JIRA clone because most people rightfully hate JIRA and at least to me your issue tracker seems to be simple, fast and user- centric, which is exactly what JIRA isn't.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've found that keeping separate 'package.json' files in a _client /_ and _server /_ directory (and thus, having separate _node_modules /_ directories) leads to some annoying issues down the road.

I've heard that lerna[0] is maybe one tool that can help avoid this type of setup: does anyone have experience with this or recommend any other ways to organize separate dependency configurations within one mono-repo?

[0]: [https://github.com/lerna/lerna](https://github.com/lerna/lerna)

<comment><USER32> IME, using a single package.json is a harmful and naive practice, in abstract it results in a single product version and leads to poor separation between the client(s) and server(s) codebases.

 _It falls apart especially quickly when adding an iOS, TV (JS) or other client (or server) codebase._

To resolve the multiple node_module directories you can use tooling like Workspaces[0] (with both npm and yarn) which hoists the node_modules to a "workspace level".

I'd be interested in hearing other annoying issues you have with multiple package.json files.

[0] [https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/workspaces/](https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/workspaces/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not sure if this is your project OP (can't tell from a quick bio check) but if so, GREAT idea!

I love the idea of having an open-source showcase project to help with consulting client development. It's awesome on multiple levels - <USER2> potential clients how you think / how you work, gives a nice resource to those learning React, etc. etc.

Nicely done :)

</comment><comment><USER34> This is great! Really like the modern react/babel + node implementation - should make for a great reference

</comment><comment><USER35> it's already way better than Jira.

</comment><comment><USER36> Impressive! Just curious - how long did it take you to build this?

</comment><comment><USER37> Just a suggestion after skimming the README: the technologies something was built with are not its features. Features are the things the software can do for the end user.

<comment><USER38> Seriously are you and many commenters here missing the point? Author says several times this is not a product, it's a showcase of his skills as well as a reference codebase for people wanting to learn how to use ts/react/hooks/whatever in medium-size complexity project. The "features" here are technologies used.

<comment><USER25> Well said !!!

> The "features" here are technologies used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Really great, I think something like style-dictionary, or similar token manager could help remove your use of magic numbers in your styles (padding: 13px, margin-top: 7px)

</comment><comment><USER40> I suppose this is intentional? [https://www.ivorreic.com/](https://www.ivorreic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Just randomly reading into React over this example, I'm surprised by how React itself confused me with the useState function.

<comment><USER42> useState is a memoization technique and an abstraction to hide global state. You can do:

        let _count = 0;

        function Component() {
          return (

{_count}

              <button onClick={() => { _count++; render(); }}>Increase</button>

          );
        }

        function render() {
          React.render(<Component />, root)
        }

Or you can abstract it:

        let _count;

        function useCount(initialValue) {
          return [_count, (value) => { _count = value; render(); }]
        }

        function Component() {
          const [count, setCount] = useCount(0);

          return (

{count}

              <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>Increase</button>

          );
        }

And then generalize it and make each state dependent on the order of useState calls:

        const states = [];

        function useState(initialValue) {
          const state = states.shift() || { value: initialValue }; // Pop or create
          setTimeout(() => states.push(state), 0); // Defer the push

          return [state.value, (value) => { state.value = value; render(); }];
        }

        function Component() {
          const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
          const [name, setName] = useState('World');

          return (

{count}

              <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>Increase</button>

Hello {name}

              <input value={name} onChange={(e) => setName(e.currentTarget.value)} />

          );
        }

Actual hooks also track the component that's being rendered, and don't just call the global render function, but that's pretty much the whole useState implementation.

Here's a codepen: [https://codepen.io/lxe/pen/RwbXPKo](https://codepen.io/lxe/pen/RwbXPKo)

<comment><USER43> For a developer who has not done React before - this looks super convoluted for some reason. Global functions with constants defined in another function, that act as ... methods? I'm lost :D

<comment><USER42> Global functions? It's just an example -- real world applications are more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> nice work! license?

<comment><USER45> [https://github.com/oldboyxx/jira_clone/blob/master/package.j...](https://github.com/oldboyxx/jira_clone/blob/master/package.json#L5) claims MIT but I don't know how binding that is without an actual license file or explicit mention in anything user-facing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty cool bro. Not usually a fan of side scrolling when on mobile because it makes dragging and dropping difficult. But on mobile dragging over multiple columns is very smooth.

Just don't allow companies to add an infinite amount of plugins and fields which would likely bring the system to a crawl.

</comment><comment><USER46> Those are some massive git commits.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does/will it support an API?

</comment><comment><USER48> mate - this is super cool. Love how you structure your project (very similar to mine).

</comment><comment><USER49> Nice work man.

</comment><comment><USER50> > simplified > React/Babel

That's an oxymoron.

<comment><USER51> I believe they meant simplified in the sense that it isn't full-featured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Some suggestions that may or may not be good

* Sentry.io for error tracking

* add dark mode. In fact, just let your users choose from any of the generic bootswatch css files. Use a cookie or something to remember which one so it sticks around longer than their user session. If your not using bootstrap 4 usually other popular framework's have something like bootswatch.

* use crystal lang instead of typescript or expresses for the server. You'll have a codebase that's faster and safer than typescript. You'll also be able to ship a binary to customers that don't pay the open source price.

* trello app for android has a bug where if I turn my screen off, it'll delete any text I've written but not yet saved. Don't do that.</comment>


The Young Entrepreneur Myth - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/06/the_young_entre.html <comment><USER2> I know several people in the 55+ age range that are starting businesses right now including my father. His problem is that at 59 it is near impossible to find someone who will hire you for 4-5 years, so why not start your own business? He has enough cash to start a small business without outside investment and he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive business to his new company. It seems significantly less risky than if I were to tomorrow even though I fit the more typical demographic.

<comment><USER3> "...he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive business to his new company..."

He can also use his 30 something years of industry experience to know _what to do_ without too many false starts. Don't discount meaningful experience. Not everything important is learned from a book.

<comment><USER4> As a part of their training, CIA analysts are shown satellite photos of a civil war battleground near Washington DC. There is what appears to be a large open field there. They are asked for an analysis. Afterward, they take a field trip to the actual site. There, they discover that the "large open field" actually has undulations that are as much as 10 feet from peak to trough.

Being there on the ground can be a drastically different experience from reading reports and looking at remote data! 30 years of industry experience can give you some special insights.

<comment><USER5> I think HN needs a "spoiler" tag.

<comment><USER4> Whoops, I didn't stop to think that CIA analyst trainees might be reading this site! Anyhow, they had this bit on freaking NPR!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The 3D chart at the end is an awful way to present the data - at the first data-point (1996), you can visually compare the graphs easily. After that, it becomes pretty much impossible.

<comment><USER7> We need an army of Tufte Jihadi Hackers to bring down bad charts across the interwebs. They can chant "Tufte is great! Tufte is great!" as they rootor the boxen of the infidel.

<comment><USER8> I agree in spirit... but the delivery needs work.

<comment><USER9> How about just: "war against пошлость!"?

(See:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poshlost>

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0002kk)

<http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0002uN-5267.jpg>

)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Duh? There is no myth. The "accepted wisdom" in most circles except the startup scene is that you should wait until you have years of experience before starting a company. The whole point of pg in his essays is that young people are best fit for the job. Not everybody agree.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yet again, the failure to distinguish between startups and small companies generally. This "proves" that Larry & Sergey starting Google at 25 is a bad data point by showing that a lot of 50 year olds start landscaping companies.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if you mean it to, but something about that strikes me as derogatory toward 50-year-olds with landscaping companies. They are taking a big risk too, and doing something important, even if it's not as sexy as a 20-year-old making a web startup.

(Or maybe it's just the older I get, the less enthralling the young, inexperienced founder appears to me?)

<comment><USER11> A landscaping company is structurally different from a startup. That kind of service business only scales linearly.

<comment><USER13> If the comments on the linked page are to be believed, it's worse than your assumption: Apparently Kauffman only selected "small businesses" with at least $1MM annual sales and 50 employees.

That excludes an awful lot of landscaping companies AND legitimate startups.

My gut also says it skews a little towards older entrepreuners. Because it takes time grow to $1MM in sales, and I'd imagine that more young people found startups that fail than do 40 and 50 year olds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmm, (this is from word-of-mouth), note that 34's also the average age people get their PhDs.

I doubt there's a correlation between degrees and entrepreneurship, but there's something about that age that seems interesting.

<comment><USER15> At least in the US, I'm pretty sure the average age of a PhD (at least in the sciences) is closer to 27 than 34. 27 = 18 + 4 years undergrad + 5 years grad school.

<comment><USER16> The problem with that is all the outliers. Such as my mom just finished her second PHD at 58. Also, lot's of people only finish their dissertation at the 10 year deadline before they need to take more classes.

<comment><USER17> Exactly, 27 is sort of the practical lower bound, and probably a median. I believe very few people complete a PhD before 27, but many complete one after. Years in industry, years off, taking an extra year here or there, it adds up. This means the average will be significantly higher than the "optimal" or even "median" solution.

<comment><USER18> Actually, it's not _that_ remarkable to have a PhD by 24 in the UK. Our university system's much more intensive than the American one; three years to your bachelors', three years of flat-out research for the PhD. (We don't do quals.)

I was slower; I was 26, which was pretty typical. Four year undergrad because I did a Masters, four year PhD because I overran a bit and started my postdoc before I'd finished writing up.

<comment><USER19> UK PhD's are not as intensive or valuable as American PhD's. The lack of a qualifier and the relatively lax criteria on which a PhD is awarded are two reasons for this.

<comment><USER18> Got a source for that? I'm pretty sure that the institution I went to you (hint: it's got more Nobel Prizes than yours) would disagree.

<comment><USER19> Here you go: [http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=40...](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=404928)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Without opining one way or the other about the young entrepreneur myth, is this the best metric to prove or disprove it?

I'm assuming the "rate of entrepreneurship" means the percentage of people in that age range who are entrepreneurs. If that's the case, wouldn't the mid to older age ranges have an advantage, since people who started being entrepreneurs in their twenties, could conceivably still be entrepreneurs in their 30s and beyond?

In other words, at the upper age ranges you're counting both people who just started being entrepreneurs as well as people who are continuing to be entrepreneurs. Whereas in the 20-25 age range, the only pool of people to count is the just-starting entrepreneurs.

I think it would be more informative to show the median age of first-time founders. The article linked in this post mentions the average and median age for founders is 39, but in the context of this myth it makes a difference if that's a 39 year old first time founder or if he's on his seventh company and has been an entrepreneur since he was 19.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's really a time tradeoff. I see the first option, as pg and others espouse, as being the typical 20-something right out of college with no life (family life) and no money. They can afford to spend 100 hours a week on their startup gaining knowledge and experience as fast as they can. Since they have no outside commitments and no huge debts holding them down (other than college), they can do this.

The other option is to work a normal job for a decade building experience and knowledge slowly over time and then when you're in your mid-30's start your company. It's a race to gain knowledge and experience and while one way might be preferable to the other, it doesn't mean it can't be done either way.

<comment><USER3> "It's a race to gain knowledge and experience..."

Good point. The right job can actually help you play leap frog once you start your own business because of the experience. The wrong job is just a waste of time and life.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More findings from this study are here:

[http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and- te...](http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-tech- entrepreneurship.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER22> are the people 55+ just becoming entrepreneurs like a youngster? or are they entrepreneurs with a ton of experience already? (success or failure)

</comment><comment><USER23> When you are young, you have more time, more tolerance for risk, more imagination.

</comment><comment><USER24> This happens because successful young entrepreneurs grow old and if they choose to start a new business they fall into one of the other categories along with first-time older entrepreneurs.</comment>