WHO: Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) Situation Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd <comment><USER2> Not to start a political conversation, but why are Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau not listed as separate countries? All 3 have their own measurements and cases, surely that shouldn't be included with data from China...

Not only that, it gives a false perception of what's going on in those areas. Macau only has 10 confirmed cases, with everyone recovered. Hong Kong and Taiwan both have less than 200 cases, definitely a much different situation than in Mainland China.

EDIT: I see they have a separate option to show by province / autonomous region, specifically for China.

<comment><USER3> It's just sad that when we point out the obvious, the pro-dictatorship camp just dismisses it by saying "don't politicize science". But this data is in fact the result of politicized science.

By bootlicking China, WHO is just expensing her own credibility. Many no longer follow the authority of WHO. For example, many countries started restricting travel from China[0] to give themselves more time to prepare when WHO opposed it[1]. Experts had long questioned WHO's decision to refuse to declare it a pandemic[2], before WHO's late announcement yesterday.

There are some efforts to stop the ripple of this China political power play, particularly by Taiwanese and Hong Kongers[3]. We should all be more alert.

[0] [https://fortune.com/2020/02/06/countries-china-travel- restri...](https://fortune.com/2020/02/06/countries-china-travel-restrictions- coronavirus)

[1] page 5 of [https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/transcr...](https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/transcripts/ihr-emergency-committee-for-pneumonia-due-to- the-novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-press-briefing-transcript-30012020.pdf)

[2] [https://time.com/5798797/un-who-coronavirus-outbreak- classif...](https://time.com/5798797/un-who-coronavirus-outbreak- classification)

[3] [https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418)

<comment><USER2> Almost every other data source lists Macau, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries, and for good reason.

China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan all publish their own individual statistics, why would the WHO aggregate them into one.

> > [https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/418) > I hate to disagree, but they should be listed as separate countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can we discuss the impact of visualization parameters on perception?

On first look it seems Europe is way worse than China regarding case numbers. But actually checking the scale for the bubbles shows that they are categorical and the largest bucket is ">12,000 cases" thereby putting China (80k) and Italy (12k) into the same visual bucket.

Why would you do this?

<comment><USER4> Two possibilities:

\- the goal isn't to convey information, it's to appear to convey information so they can defend themselves later on

\- we tend to hire artists who are concerned with appearance into roles that require visual engineers

The former seems to be something that the UN struggles with. For instance, they can't indicate how many people have coronavirus in Taiwan because they need to consider the feelings of their member states. And they can call one recent coronavirus "Middle East respiratory syndrome", whereas another has to be called "SARS-COV-2" to avoid racist implications of a geographic name.

The latter is a widespread problem. For instance, once upon a time, software design gave consideration to making it easy to approach and use, especially by people who might be using computers for the first time. Nowadays, it's primarily about making sure the software looks fashionable.

My trust for international organisations has gone down the loo thanks to this outbreak. I am sad.

<comment><USER5> This article has some decent thoughts on the quality of data-viz, which has been pretty shocking [1]. ArcGis seems to have pretty bad scaling generally

[https://www.futurehealth.live/blog/2020/2/10/coronavirus- dat...](https://www.futurehealth.live/blog/2020/2/10/coronavirus-dataviz- sucks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This version shows cases by state in the US:

[https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

<comment><USER7> I'd recommend everyone use this one over the parent articles.

1\. This one is supposedly maintained by John Hopkins. I'd expect at least some level of quality control.

2\. The parent link seems to be a copy of JHU's dashboard.

3\. The parent link does not break out smaller regions (mainly the US).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have found the worldometer page easier to use than the others : [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

<comment><USER4> What I don't like about that page is the way they hide the active cases graph, and when you show it it's tiny. I would like a graph that shows the active cases as its most important figure. Total cases is interesting from an immunity standpoint, but active cases is important from a "will i catch it" standpoint.

<comment><USER9> I'd prefer a graph that shows exactly how many tests are done by each country per day. All other extrapolation hinges on that. If the data is not available in a country (e.g. US), then everything for that country should come with a warning that says "we have no clue what is happening because we don't test"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amusing technical flaw: If you select the dot representing US cases, then click the plus symbol, it zooms straight to a field in Kansas, and makes it appear as though all cases are in that field.

<comment><USER11> Surprised it isn't Lebanon! [https://www.kcur.org/post/kansas-town-being- geographic-cente...](https://www.kcur.org/post/kansas-town-being-geographic- center-us-may-be-lifeline#stream/0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I heard an interesting comment on the Recovered figure, this doesn't mean the patient has recovered and can go back to their life. I heard it just means they don't have a fever and have passed two tests for not having the virus. They might still be fighting for their life on a ventilator.

Is this true?

<comment><USER13> At least for China, the requirement is no fever for 10 days and two negative swabs. Only then they can get discharged. I'm not a doctor but I'd be surprised if you still need oxygen by then. You probably won't run a marathon either.

</comment></comment><comment> chupa-chups If you're interested just in the numbers with the option to show the development over time with logarithmic axes, i found this site quite interesting:

[https://coronavirus.arik.io](https://coronavirus.arik.io)

</comment><comment><USER14> They're showing 987 for USA. Surely, that's a bit outdated?

<comment><USER15> Same for other countries - this seems to be lagging.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's been lagging for days. Worldometers is up to date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is old data, Iceland is already up to 90 cases</comment>


"yarn is dead, long live npm" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1300655408688709633 <comment><USER2> The author of the tweet seems to be one of the original members of the yarn team at FB.

And a reply by the person (current/erstwhile maintainer) that they seem to be attacking in their tweets:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/arcanis/status/130071210391814144...](https://mobile.twitter.com/arcanis/status/1300712103918141440)

No idea what the actual issue is behind all this Twitter drama

</comment><comment> matt-attack Did something happen?

<comment><USER3> Couldn't find anything in that Twitter thread. Last time I used NPM (some months ago, less than 1 year) it was slower and a few times it would change the lock file when used by different co-workers re-running `npm install`. Happy so far with yarn, building faster, and deterministic (as far as we can tell, no more issues after pull requests that update deps)</comment></comment>


800+ H1-B Salary Disclosures from Facebook Inc. by location/position/year - <AUTHOR> http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Facebook+Inc&job=&city=&year=All+Years <comment><USER2> Long time lurker, first time poster from Bay Area ;-)

I was expecting to see a bunch of PHDs with 5+ years of AI or autonomous driving or big data or other specialties.

At a glance, and in my opinion only, well over 50% of these are just "regular tech jobs"(tm). I can't fathom why the first FB job can't be hired locally for example.

I expected to see this with the big outsourcing companies, but not with the top Silicon Valley companies.

This is eye opening and I suspect big change is coming...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the same salary disclosure for Amazon Web Services: [http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Amazon+Web+Services+Inc&job...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Amazon+Web+Services+Inc&job=&city=&year=All+Years)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 11,000+ disclosure records for Google Inc: [http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Google+Inc&job=&city=&year=...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Google+Inc&job=&city=&year=All+Years)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For Uber Technologies Inc: [http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Uber+Technologies+Inc&job=&...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Uber+Technologies+Inc&job=&city=&year=All+Years)</comment>


Yochai Benkler argues for Net Neutrality and against the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/04/benkler_on_net.html <comment><USER2> My favourite quote: "If somebody in 1999 had said 'Build me a massive data storage system that would be available to a hundred million users around the world, would be capable of terabytes of data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and robust to attack from armed people bringing down attacks,' you would say 'Give me a billion bucks and ten years.' You wouldn't say, give me Shawn Fanning in a dorm room, building peer-to-peer (p-to-p) file sharing systems."</comment>


Genius API - <AUTHOR> http://genius.com/developers

<comment><USER2> Very nice. I hope the full song lyrics are exposed through the API [https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2](https://docs.genius.com/#songs-h2)

MetroLyrics locked down their API and did not respond to my email :( [http://api.metrolyrics.com/v1/](http://api.metrolyrics.com/v1/)

All I wanted to do was NLP based stuff, nothing for profit. The Genius API should hopefully help. Such a pain creating custom scrapers each time</comment>


I Guess The Twitter Doesn't Fall Far From The Twit - <AUTHOR> http://b0ing.me/i-guess-the-twitter-doesnt-fall-far-from-the-twit/

<comment><USER2> > _" An appealing-enough decentralized alternative will eventually present > itself"_

No. The network effect makes this pretty much impossible.

Unless facebook does something truly egregious, above what it already does with privacy settings every few months, a critical mass will never be somewhere else long enough for all and sundry to move on.

I reckon one way that this might realistically happen is if there's a product which replaces facebook by doing something genuinely different, while fulfilling the same functions. I don't know what "genuinely different" might mean in this context though (if I did, I'd be writing it!).

<comment><USER3> I've read this exact same thing over and over and over again, which leads me to believe that it's not true. The genuinely different bit for me, by the way, probably won't be its decentralized nature that makes it appealing. It will be appealing, and someone who cares enough will make it decentralized.

<comment><USER2> You don't believe in the network effect because too many people have heard of it? that's not how science works.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect)

(if you're talking about something else, phew, could you clarify which bit?)

<comment><USER3> Sorry, what I meant was that I don't believe in the network effect like I don't believe in [the eternal "rightness" of] Communism, not like I don't believe in Santa Claus.

<comment><USER2> !!

Ok, then I don't think we'll agree. about the nature of evidence, or this.

<comment><USER4> He's saying that he thinks people who employ the network effect as an argument for the unshakeableness of Facebook are probably appealing to dogma, because there cannot be _that many_ people who deeply understand the dynamics of networked behavior. And I tend to agree -- the network effect is often offered as undeniable proof of a near-eternal reign from Menlo Park. I don't think that's what it means to have network or lock-in effects in your product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its part of the continuous cycle of creation and destruction.

</comment><comment><USER6> People who don't use twitter find the "twitter/twit" thing irresistible, it seems.</comment>


Should Software Engineers Care About Ethics? - <AUTHOR> https://digitalculturist.com/should-software-engineers-care-about-ethics-8b1d98a62b66 <comment><USER2> > Engineers should develop a shared set of ethics that they can turn to when > they are asked to build something illegal or unethical

Absolutely!

> Software should be regulated

This is a bit of a stretch. Or at least, it should be expanded upon a bit.

I agree that certain classes of software should be regulated (biomedical, avionics, self driving cars) and, mostly, already are.

But to regulate _all_ software seems a bit of an excessive reaction. Also because this may lead to really unpleasing consequences wrt free software (as much as trusted computing was threatening to do at the time).

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.</comment>


Pattern Recognition in Texts Using Complex Networks - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3254

<comment><USER3> Can someone who has more of a network theory background say why this would be interesting?

From an NLP angle, both what they're doing (text classification) and how they're doing it (constructing a co-occurrence matrix) don't sound particularly novel nor do the network-theoretic properties they get from the unweighted, undirected form of the co-occurrence matrix seem to give any valuable insights.

As a comparison, see the 2009 workshop on text graphs <http://www.textgraphs.org/ws10/index.html> or papers such as Gaume et al (2007) Semantic associations and confluences in paradigmatic networks [http://w3.erss.univ- tlse2.fr/textes/pagespersos/gaume/resour...](http://w3.erss.univ- tlse2.fr/textes/pagespersos/gaume/resources/Gaume_Duvignau_Vanhove_final.pdf)

Did I mention that the physics people totally ignore all the (interesting and non-trivial) existing literature on the topic? It's a bit as if a CS/NLP person would write a paper on an information-theoretic approach to physics while totally ignoring the physics bits in it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just gave the PDF a quick read, and it looked useful enough to put in my NLP permanent reading collection. There seems to be growing momentum in both NLP research and the number of good papers that are freely available. Last month, someone posted a link to "ICWSM – A Great Catchy Name: Semi-Supervised Recognition of Sarcastic Sentences in Online Product Reviews" on HN - <USER2> interesting and potentially useful paper.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that they used the research equivalent of a Minimum Viable Product. From the paper:

 _Of course, more complicated semantic network models are certainly possible. For instance, one could construct a weighted network. However, we sought the simplest possible model which could distinguish between fictional and non- fictional written storytelling._</comment>


Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-27/crypto-s-hottest-hires-aren-t-millennials-they-re-banking-cops <comment><USER2> >The drumbeat of hires crescendoed in November when Ripple, [...] added Ben Lawsky to its board. He earned a tough reputation as New York's top financial watchdog by pushing banks to scrutinize client transactions for illicit dealings. >[...]Lawsky's jump to Ripple was particularly notable because he helped pioneer regulation of cryptocurrencies. He introduced the BitLicense, a requirement for digital currency companies that wanted to operate in New York.

What a bunch of white washing. Imagine a parallel universe were the DMCA and the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act made online service providers responsible for the content that their user's posted and being called a "pioneer".

Lawsky rose the specter of unsubstantiated "terrorism" fears to create onerous, outdated, maladapted Bitcoin regulations. Shortly after that he quit his job as a regulator and then setup a firm to collect fees for helping "guide" firms through the regulations he just created. Corruption / rent seeking / anti-competative behavior. Bank lawyers even told Lawsky to shut bitcoin down[1]

[1][https://twitter.com/MarcHochstein/status/922611866848804864](https://twitter.com/MarcHochstein/status/922611866848804864)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. There's a movie called "Banking on Bitcoin" currently on Netflix that I recently watched, and while it's got plenty of libertarian rhetoric, it showcases well the transition of "Bitcoin's going to fund terrorism" to "Hey, y'know those regulations I wrote to prevent Bitcoin terrorism? I'm the only one that knows them, so hire me for cryptocurrency regulatory guidance".

<comment><USER4> Can you believe Ripple actually hired Benjamin Lawsky? [https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-welcomes-new-board- member...](https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-welcomes-new-board-member- benjamin-lawsky/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense.

I've stated this a few times, but one of Microsoft's biggest misteps in the 90's, and there weren't that many, was its absolute lack of any political lobbying.

There are alot of very politically connected people who pointed out that if Microsoft had of "played the game" that the chances of their anti trust trial actually happening would have been alot less.

Google and Facebook learned this lesson well and now spend on lobbying at a rate that would make wall street blush and is on par with the heaviest lobbyist out there. it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that the new tech elite are the real Washington insiders.

Just look at what Uber and AirBnb spend on lobbing.

Given this, it makes sense that if you were in a new industry with the rules being created all around you, you'd want to control the narrative as much as possible.

I'd argue that Silicon Valley now dominates even wall street in terms of buying political influence in the US nowadays.

To bring an example back to my Canadian roots, The Toronto Maple Leafs hired the man who wrote the NHL's Collective Bargining Agreement with the players to better have an advantage when writing player contracts.

<comment><USER5> Silicon Valley's political influence might be a large splash but finance is the pond itself.

<comment><USER6> The Wall Street bailout probably saved the financial system, ultimately made the government money, but was incredibly unpopular. The bailout of GM lost money, helped some politically connected groups, and was mostly popular and uncontroversial. Jobs are political capital, and neither finance nor tech have that many, so they make it up with cash.

<comment><USER7> But the lack of any major financial reform has left commercial banks open to continue making risky investments. As well as a lack of regulation on subprime lending, leading us to a now-growing subprime auto loan bubble.

The bailouts treated the symptom, not the cause.

<comment><USER6> I don't have a ton of first hand knowledge on the risk appetite of banks or the effect of banking regulation. But I assert that Matt Levine is very knowledgeable about these things and he disagrees with you. His points are that multiple 10 figure fines, higher capital requirements, and a general culture shift have actually made banks less profitable and less risky, as was intended. EG:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-20/capital-r...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-20/capital- rules-aren-t-the-only-reason-banking-is-boring)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-07/boring- ba...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-07/boring-banks-and- silly-cds)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-16/deregulat...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-16/deregulation- and-proxy-recounts)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-20/utilities...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-20/utilities- analysts-and-fines)

<comment><USER8> Until you start throwing executives in prison, nothing will change long term. 10 figure fines are nothing compared to how much many Americans lost in the housing market crash. Consider how many people got foreclosed upon improperly. The loss of quality of life (and actual life) due to Wall Street greed is unmeasurable, but surely more than 10 figures.

<comment><USER6> This is definitely the conventional wisdom I see here and on Reddit, but I disagree.

Banking has changed, perhaps permanently. It is less profitable and by many measures less risky than before.

And I disagree with throwing people in prison for losing money and hurting the economy. I want people to go to prison because they have committed crimes. The government could certainly have been more aggressive about charging individuals, but if you look at the cases they actually brought they were against low level people and they had a lot of trouble showing any of them actually broke laws. Most of the actually harmful decisions by high level bankers were not clearly illegal.

<comment><USER8> >Banking has changed, perhaps permanently. It is less profitable and by many measures less risky than before.

Banking has "changed" many times before. But these incidents keep happening. The dot-com bubble, the Great Depression, and currently the student loan crisis, municipal debt crisis and subprime auto loans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Centralized solutions are currently much faster, but they may not be in the future. Also, other coins (that offer spare computing power) or commercial enterprises could act as a power nodes (sub-centralized solutions) in a decentralized network, to speed it up for a fee when needed. Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users. [https://cryptonewstrends.com/](https://cryptonewstrends.com/)

Because the software has to operate in a trustless environment, a lot of attention has to be spend in making these systems more secure. Security through obfuscation is not a fall-back anymore. If we had known that LastFM stored password hashes as unsalted MD5, would we have trusted it with our accounts? We will have fuzzing tools and static program analysis to help automate checking the security of a contract.

Forks can be dealt with in a decentralized manner: voting power being assigned by a provable amount of tokens you own. You can run an entire election in this manner, cryptographically voiding any "vote rigging" argument.

You may have so much freedom as to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, Cryptocurrency banks may provide support for payment solutions, insurance, lending, for people who don't want to store all their money under their flammable mattress.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember reading in a Michael Lewis book (Big Short maybe?) that Wall Street hires from the SEC and Rating Agencies in-order to know the in's and out's better as well as get better treatment.

Hence the implication in the book that those who stay behind at the SEC and Rating Agencies are not wanted by the banks.

Seems like they're copying from those who came before them.

<comment><USER11> That means working at the SEC is an auditioning process for big money bank jobs. Talk about conflict of interest.

<comment><USER12> This is statement is unfortunately true for every regulatory agency in the U.S. government.

\- CFPB -> all consumer corporations

\- FCC -> tech

\- FTC -> corporations spanning many industries

\- SEC -> finance

\- FDA -> big-pharma

\- USDA -> big-agra

...on and on and on...

<comment><USER13> > \- CFPB -> all consumer corporations

CFPB is very new; is there really evidence of revolving door hiring going on there?

<comment><USER14> It isn't (always) about some sinister revolving door. It's just that the people who enforce regulations and the people who manage compliance at regulated entities are experts in the same field even when they are not the same people.

Both sides can be doing their jobs entirely honestly, but still they will co- evolve in ways that make the system convenient for existing players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of funny that this "kill the banks, bring down the system" technology is being infiltrated by Wall Street lifers.

Reminds me of this quote from a recent Matt Levine article:

> [Andy] Noto is leaving Twitter to become CEO of Social Finance, the online > lender whose mission just a couple of years ago was to "kill banks." Now it > will be run by a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker. The banks do not > want to be killed, and they play a long game.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is what fuels the revolving door. Regulations create a class of workers with previous experience in the regulatory and political system, that fetch an access premium.

Another example of this is members of Congress who become lobbyists seeing an average increase of 1,500% in their salary upon the career change.

<comment><USER17> Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there?

Your characterization rests on the premise that the regulations are _a priori_ negative. If you start from the premise that the regulations are good things, then there isn't necessarily anything wrong or inconsistent about someone saying "I'm going to help create these rules which I think will be good for the industry" and "now I'm going to help companies implement and follow these rules."

I'm pretty skeptical of regulation myself so I can see where you're coming from. I personally think we should let crypto currencies be complete anarchy as an experiment. But crypto currencies are a good illustration of how regulation and regulators arise naturally. Big bad government doesn't come in and start regulating things people never complained about. First people lose a lot of money. Second, the industry welcomes some level of regulation, in order to reestablish trust with consumers that might otherwise be scared off. Third, regulation gets implemented on the premise that its good for both consumers and for the industry, because it allows the industry to overcome trust barriers.

<comment><USER16> >>Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there?

Code is objective and apolitical. Regulatory enforcement is a people business, and having the right people on your team can affect how regulatory agencies treat you, irrespective of your actual conduct vis-à-vis the regulations.

An open standard can also be studied by anyone. The secret rules and customs of regulatory agencies are only privy to those who worked in the agencies.

>>Second, the industry welcomes some level of regulation, in order to reestablish trust with consumers that might otherwise be scared off. Third, regulation gets implemented on the premise that its good for both consumers and for the industry, because it allows the industry to overcome trust barriers.

I suspect that is not the main reason industry players support regulations. I think it's far more likely that their support is motivated by a desire to create regulatory moats to competition.

An example of this would be the "Money Services Round Table":

[http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20110510/in-fifty- days...](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20110510/in-fifty-days- payments-innovation-will-stop-in-silicon-valley/)

There is empirical evidence that regulations exacerbate income inequality:

[https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/McLaughlin- Regulation-...](https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/McLaughlin-Regulation- Income-Inequality.pdf)

This supports the 'lobbying for regulations as an anticompetitive measure' thesis.

<comment><USER17> > Code is objective and apolitical.

Hardly. Code can be intensely political (competing standards championed by competing companies, etc.).

> An open standard can also be studied by anyone. The secret rules and customs > of regulatory agencies are only privy to those who worked in the agencies.

Regulatory agencies are for the most part incredibly transparent organizations. Nobody has any insight into what happens when a Google executive talks to an Apple executive about a web standard. But when an industry executive meets with a federal agency commissioner to discuss a new rule, a detailed notice and summary of the _ex parte_ contact will be published. Agencies conduct their business in intensely public notice-and- comment procedures.

> I suspect that is not the main reason industry players support regulations. > I think it's far more likely that their support is motivated by a desire to > create regulatory moats to competition.

And your speculation is based on?

> This supports the 'lobbying for regulations as an anticompetitive measure' > thesis.

A lot of regulation is _bad_. _E.g._ zoning regulations. But for the most part they're bad because regulators and constituents have bad ideas, not because there are shadowy cabals at work.

<comment><USER16> >>Hardly. Code can be intensely political (competing standards championed by competing companies, etc.).

The decision to make a particular segment of code the standard can be political, but the effective utilization of that code within a project once it has become the standard, has no political element to it.

>>Regulatory agencies are for the most part incredibly transparent organizations.

That is not the impression I get from the many complaints I've seen from those trying to navigate the regulatory framework. Of course I haven't done a comprehensive/rigorous study of this topic so my impression may not be an accurate representation of reality.

I also find it hard to believe that a legalistic (as opposed to programmatic) domain like regulatory enforcement does not have a significant human element that cannot be fully articulated in formal notices and procedures.

>>And your speculation is based on?

On the fact that there is a very large rent-seeking opportunity in enacting regulatory barriers to entry, as demonstrated by the impact regulations have on income inequality (which is a consequence of economic rent accruing to those at the top of the industry ladder).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >Days before Omega One announced his hire, Chilton said he wished he had invested in Bitcoin and its major rivals years earlier -- back when he was warning people as a CFTC commissioner to be careful while calling for more regulation. Generally, the wild price fluctuations are "mellowing out," he told CNBC on Jan. 11.

Hilarious. Just for note, bitcoin (not even going to mention alts) was swinging 10% a day around January 11th and dropped to half its price in less than a month.

I guess once you're on the bankroll of some of these places, you give up on trying to sound credible.

</comment><comment><USER19> Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

</comment><comment><USER20> Given that this is a thread on regulation of cryptocurrencies, can someone explain to me what is good (for countries, societies, the global economy, etc. and not individuals) about cryptocurrencies? I get that blockchains are useful for recordkeeping. But then I don't see what the appeal is of having a profusion of them co-exsiting as currencies. Am I missing something?

Related question, can I think of the cryptocurrency market as analogous to the FOREX market, but that these currencies don't have attached countries?

<comment><USER21> Imagine that you want to hire a woman that is a blog writer on a radical Musulin country (where woman don't have the right to property) how you are going to pay for the services.

Imagine that you want to hire a remote software developer from North Korea.

Imagine that you want to send a donation to Wikileaks or similar organization that is banned from using the financial system.

Imagine you are a Syrian war refugee that wants to cross borders without the fear of your wealth being confiscated.

Imagine that you belong to a small ethnic minority and the government is confiscating your assets.

Imagine that you live in rural Kenya and the nearest bank branch is 50km away.

<comment><USER22> And how does your Kenyan/North Korean/Syrian person buy gasoline/rice/paper with this asset?

Meanwhile, drug cartels, first world millenials and financial investors are in possession of ~100% of this technology. They are shaping it to further their gains, scamming the naive, and undercutting legitimate sanctions and laws.

<comment><USER21> > And how does your Kenyan/North Korean/Syrian person buy gasoline/rice/paper > with this asset?

Ideally, the seller would accept the cryptocurrency directly, that is what is happening on Venezuela that the country currency is completely worthless. Another not ideal option is to have local gateways that convert to local currency.

> Meanwhile, drug cartels, They are still using dollars maybe Monero, but if > the technology is good enough that the goverments can get informations on > the transactions or censor it, offcourse bad actors will use it, technology > is not inherently good or bad is what people do with it. Personaly I am > worried with the 3 Billion that don't have financial services not a small > minority bad actors that already does their business using Fiat currencies.

> first world millenials and financial investors are in possession of ~100% of > this technology. They are shaping it to further their gains, scamming the > naive, and undercutting legitimate sanctions and laws.

That is a really problem and personally I think that the solution will be the creation of new blockchain protocols that have the genesis on developing countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone else bothered by the way media refers to these companies as 'cryptos'?

</comment><comment><USER24> Always funny to see people in finance call crypto currencies "virtual currencies". Do they mean fiat currency is not virtual? Does it represent a real value or so? IMHO it's even worse, they keep increasing the maximum supply, devalue the worthless paper even more. But at least they have a chic word for it: Quantitive easing.

<comment><USER25> Central banks increase the supply to keep inflation stable (at a first approximation). Monetary intervention (in the form of quantitative easing) was required to keep the economy from crashing once fiscal policy couldn't. If you think it devalued the dollar you're utterly wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What a strange website experience.

The original headline, both on the article and HN, was "Crypto's Hottest Hires Aren't Millennials. They're Banking Cops".

I have no idea what the term "Banking Cops" means. I press `CMD-F` to find "cop" on the page. The first result is the instance in the headline.

I press enter to find the next occurrence of "cop", the one in the story that will surely explain the title, and I'm immediately shown an all-black website with the headlines of the day:

[https://i.imgur.com/ttNHeDM.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ttNHeDM.jpg)

This is seemingly an entirely different website from the article I was just reading. The URL has changed from the HN-linked story URL to instead now read `[https://www.bloomberg.com/crypto`](https://www.bloomberg.com/crypto`).

I still have no idea what a Banking Cop is, or why they are interested in Crypto.

<comment><USER27> IMO "banking cops" is just clickbait. Ah, the vicissitudes of prose: journalists trying to coin a phrase. But it's just confusing, as you point out.

They're just talking about regulators and compliance officers. The former work at the SEC/FINRA, and the latter work in-house for banks, broker-dealers, and investment firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does _not_ make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

<comment><USER29> I can think of a few reasons why most blockchain technology won't take off.

1) Centralized solutions are cheaper. Consider Amazon vs. Filecoin. Amazon can buy hard drives in bulk and receive large discounts. They can pass those savings onto their customers. The Filecoin users providing storage to customers will have to 1) convince customers that their technology is safe 2) offer cheaper service. There isn't a trust issue with Amazon. So why would customers move to Filecoin?

2) Centralized solutions are much faster. Yes, there is a bunch of work being done now to allow for smaller transactions (lightning networks, plasma). There's no proof this is going to work. High level scaling solutions remain academic.

3) Development takes longer because the software has to operate in a trustless environment. Every update, no matter how minor, requires an independent security audit. There are quite a few examples of why security audits are not optional.

4) Because money is involved forks can be contentious. The default is to do nothing. A centralized solution with a board of directors and CEO can outpace a blockchain community in development speed and time to market.

5) If the private keys are lost or stolen the consumer is screwed. That makes blockchain technology incredibly risky. It's still safer to pay friends with Chase QuickPay. Banks also have insurance. How can a blockchain be insured?

EDIT: Thought of one more.

6) Smart contracts are too rigid to replace the legal system. One option is to use an oracle as a source of information. However, using oracles to pull data from outside the blockchain means most of the logic is centralized.

<comment><USER30> Why blockchain technology may take off:

1) Centralized solutions are costly to freedom of choice and privacy. Consider a solution where Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook photos, S3, and YouTube is run through Filecoin. No more "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network.". No more "we ran these nets over all your photos and use the information gathered to make a better advertisement profile for you". This is what happens when users make and own software: Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa. Though most of these are now depricated/forced shut down, it was not for having a better alternative available.

2) Centralized solutions are currently much faster, but they may not be in the future. Also, other coins (that offer spare computing power) or commercial enterprises could act as a power nodes (sub-centralized solutions) in a decentralized network, to speed it up for a fee when needed. Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users.

3) Because the software has to operate in a trustless environment, a lot of attention has to be spend in making these systems more secure. Security through obfuscation is not a fall-back anymore. If we had known that LastFM stored password hashes as unsalted MD5, would we have trusted it with our accounts? We will have fuzzing tools and static program analysis to help automate checking the security of a contract.

4) Forks can be dealt with in a decentralized manner: voting power being assigned by a provable amount of tokens you own. You can run an entire election in this manner, cryptographically voiding any "vote rigging" argument.

5) You may have so much freedom as to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, Cryptocurrency banks may provide support for payment solutions, insurance, lending, for people who don't want to store all their money under their flammable mattress.

6) Smart contracts will fully replace the paper notarial system. Criminals will be booked into networked systems where their identity is biometrically verifiable for the duration of their "stay". Trading and lending circle contracts will be heavily vetted and proven standard smart contracts one can select from a library.

<comment><USER29> 1) > "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account".

The cost of storing data long-term is non-zero. How would Filecoin offer free storage?

> No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our > network."

YouTube creators want community guidelines. They don't always like the way that they are interpreted and enforced. I'm sure a small minority wants to build something where they can upload absolutely anything without being censored. For those folks there is Gab.ai. It will never become mainstream though and the advertisers with big budgets will opt out.

> Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa

Users chose Netflix and other centralized streaming services because of their ease of use. Also, copyright enforcement may have played a small role. Some users were claiming that they weren't using the above software to download pirated content. That was a bunch of bullshit.

2)

> Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized > players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned > by its users.

There's no reason why it couldn't work, but there's also no business need driving it.

3)

Once an account is compromised in a trustless environment there is no way for the owner to take ownership of that account again. Also, in a trustless environment it's always possible for A) a smart contract to be hacked and B) a bug in the virtual machine to be exploited. Both centralized and decentralized face security issues.

4)

They will still be contentious though. Look at Bitcoin. Imagine the last election but applied to software. It's not going to end pretty and unlike a normal company people in the community may not "move on."

5)

There may be services in the future, but that would be anathema to the movement. The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys. They would argue that 1) if you don't have control of your private keys you do not have control of your cryptocurrency 2) it's centralization.

6)

This didn't address my criticism. There is no proof that anything like this is even remotely possible.

<comment><USER31> >The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys.

Actually, a hybrid solution is possible using multisig and secret sharing algorithms. Many crypto enthusiasts are aware of how the "real world" works. People need to be able to recover access to their accounts if they lose their keys. It's not all black and white like you make it out to be.

For example, I implemented a solution for a mobile app that stores a users private key in their phone's keychain. It also splits the key into two parts, and emails the user 1 part, and stores the other part on a centralized server. If a user loses their key, they can get the first recovery part from their email, and by verifying their identity via 2 factor, the centralized server provides them with the second recovery part.

<comment><USER29> Parity's multisig was hacked. It's a risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I mean it's hot and a growing field with exchanges skimming off money 24*7 in billions, so no wonder the ex-govt talent would be willing to work.

Crypto Exchanges and companies are making some real money, so the goal now is to make it more legitimate and prepare to lobby the regulators and government.</comment>


Using CSS to detect prime numbers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xieranmaya/ <comment><USER2> Kindly correct your link.. It currently points to your github profile instead of the content</comment>


When Will I Use Math? - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2011/05/21/when-will-i-use-math/ <comment><USER2> I solve partial differential equations on parallel computers. This is a key competitive advantage for many industrial applications including aerospace, reservoir, reactor, and data center design. It is also crucial for medical applications, climate, and many disciplines of computational physics. There are nowhere near enough qualified people in this field. If you are qualified, you can more-or-less have your pick of jobs anywhere in the world.

I use every mathematics and physics course I took until part way into my undergraduate studies on a daily basis. In contrast, I believe that I have never had an English course that improved my writing (they emphasized the wrong things for technical writing). Indeed, it would be difficult to find a single thing I learned in any course outside of the hard sciences that has ever added value to my contributions.

It is a disservice to people going into fields like biology or social sciences to pretend that mathematics does not play a pivotal role. Many, perhaps most, professional grade tasks in those fields involve designing studies to test a hypothesis or quantify an effect. This requires statistics, and not just an introduction. In the state I grew up in, Fish and Wildlife had one biometrician. He was a coauthor on every paper published by biologists any office in the state because he was needed to design the study appropriately and analyze the results. With one exception: my father has a Masters in biology, but his coursework was primarily in statistics, and he can design his own studies. Just barely, it still takes a significant amount of reading for each study.

Math matters.

<comment><USER3> _I use every mathematics and physics course I took until part way into my undergraduate studies on a daily basis._

I think this highlights an issue I have with the meme that with a major in math, you can do anything. What you can do with a math degree still depends on what you learn aside from pure math (essentially domain knowledge), be it in elective coursework or on your own. "You can be a physicist"? Yes, I could if I'd studied physics more. I would strongly advise other math majors to take a minor or a second major (my other major was CS, where the math background definitely helps, and it would be nice to have even more).

<comment><USER4> This is an insightful comment.

My first-order take had been that the lucrative jobs that the video advertises are plentiful only if the "math person" is also proficient at some type of computing. Reason is, I've known a lot of mathematically talented people who are not able to compete for these kind of jobs because they have no sense of how to compute with their abstractions.

But I think your idea captures the problem with the video better than the simplistic "lack of computing expertise" does. The budding "math person" that the video targets could do quite well at, say, a biological or finance application, even without being computer-savvy, just by acquiring expertise in these areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's shame that in the entire video, not one concrete example was given about the application of math in a real world profession.

It's mostly just "Yes, math is cool! You can do so much with it!". This is what my teachers always kept telling me, but it never registered because it was presented in a very abstract and meaningless way.

What would have convinced me was concrete applications. Something as simple as defining and understanding the algorithms required to make a simple Pong game work. That would have inspired me.

<comment><USER6> Yeah that's how I felt about the whole video but I think this is just the introduction. Maybe the future videos will show people at work. They could talk to a video game programmer who takes them throught the process of displaying an object in a 3D space (no code just the idea) and show them it's pretty much the stuff they are learning right now but more advanced. Then interview a carpenter, the carpenters I know do a lot of calculations during a day. It can be considered low level math but I think the point should be to show that there is no safe place from math ;p

<comment><USER7> If they hope to reach out to people and interest them in math and how practical it is, then not showing examples of this does a disservice to their goal.

It's like playing World of Warcraft for me... I find it incredibly boring to play a game where the majority of what you do is "Gather/Hunt/Mine X units of Y and take it to Z". My friends who are into it say "Yes, but that's just the beginning... the real fun starts at level 60+". That may be true, but I'm unwilling to torture myself through months of "gameplay" just to see if at level 60+ I still find it fun.

If it's not interesting from the beginning, what are the odds most people will stick around?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the question is badly formulated. "When" will you use math implies that, no matter what, you will end up using it. This is simply not true. The vast majority of jobs out there, from flipping burgers to fixing toilets, involve nothing except the most basic arithmetic.

I think a much better answer is: _if_ you learn math, you will have plenty of opportunity to use it. It's the only way to become qualified for some very good kinds of jobs.

<comment><USER9> _The vast majority of jobs out there, from flipping burgers to fixing toilets, involve nothing except the most basic arithmetic._

I remember working as a busboy in a diner in Alaska in the early 90's and applying queueing theory and Little's Law. Miraculously, I efficiently had tables ready for the waitresses when they needed them, and they liked me for this and gave me great tips.

A girlfriend of mine told me about doing the same sorts of optimizations intuitively while working as a take-out order taker at McDonalds. Her manager loved her, because she always cleared out the queue quickly. She later went on to medical school and is now a doctor.

I also remember trying to order from a McDonald's some years later on a road trip and noting that everyone behind the counter was consistently waiting 2 or 3 on line on the same station. It took me a full 15 minutes to get my order!

If you want to see the result of people being sheep and losing out because they aren't applying such knowledge, just go and take a drive during a busy time on a Houston freeway when people are merging and taking offramps. People consistently make the worst choice. A small minority do egregiously bad things.

<comment><USER8> I should have been more clear and said "require" instead of "involve". Yes, math can improve almost anything, but you can do an acceptable job at McD with no math knowledge. Still, it's a McD job, and if you had learnt some math then you could have found something a lot better.

<comment><USER9> _Yes, math can improve almost anything, but you can do an acceptable job at McD with no math knowledge._

The optimally suboptimal queueing at that one place was _not acceptable!_ Still, as my ex demonstrated, you can manage the same optimality at that job just be being observant and using common sense. The human brain is a pretty powerful general optimizer. Math is most useful in situations where data is not so accessible to a casual observer. The problem in those situations, is that the optimization itself then becomes harder to observe/explain/comprehend. There is a similar problem in large enterprises with automated testing and refactoring.

 _Still, it's a McD job, and if you had learnt some math then you could have found something a lot better._

Well, in Homer Alaska at the time, from my vantage point, it would've been some more machismo so the right person would give me a job as a forklift driver, some cooking experience, so I could get a job doing that, or maybe some more muscle -- all those would've done a lot more to get me a higher paying job than math.

<comment><USER8> "some more machismo [...], some cooking experience [...] or maybe some more muscle -- all those would've done a lot more to get me a higher paying job than math."

In the short run.

<comment><USER9> Well, for that, I had the prospect of saving enough money from the diner busboy job so that I could drive back to the lower 48 and grad school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some clear, strong answers to the question in written form,

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

with a lot of interesting information about mathematics education.

(Hacker News may not style this URL as a link, but I've been there and it works.)

<comment><USER11> That's a great find. The first quote I feel directly related to the Software Dev explosion since it is so hard to find a good programmer. I feel the reason is deeply rooted in sucky education, and a lack of mentors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I usually refer people to read What Is Mathematics For? published on the Notices of AMS. <http://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf> In short, most people will not use math more advanced than arithmetic, unless they are mathematicians/physicists.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember asking this very same question to my Math teacher when I was 12, during middle school.

She paused 5 seconds and then replied: "It's exercise for your brain, it makes it more _elastic!_ ".

Eventually, I became an engineer (and learned the hard way why math matters), but I really hope she dosen't teach anymore.

</comment><comment><USER14> The only thing I took away from this that wasn't really vague is that you can make money if you have a math degree. As someone who has been tempted to study mathematics but not for the purpose of making money, this is the opposite of what I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not exactly job related but... Just today while talking to my girlfriend about making plushies, we stumbled on the question of how to make ball plushies. Upon realization that you get cones from flat sheets by cutting a triangular wedge, resulting in a cylinder's whose radius changes at a constant rate (and therefore a cone), we realized to get a dome, we would just have to get a wedge who's sides have the right curve (we're still working it out... got kinda distracted, intuitively feels like a tan or something).

Math pops up in the darnest places (queue Donald Duck in Mathemagical Land).

<comment><USER9> A friend of mine once did the calculus to create his own juggling ball pattern. What he found is that there are all sorts of factors (like the changing stretchiness of the cloth versus direction and details of doing the stitches) that were too hard to calculate, which left lots of room for engineering. (Making a lot of examples, and tweaking the design.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems to be an organization rather than just a one-shot video. Does HN perhaps want to distill it's criticisms and suggestions and forward them to weusemath.com to try and actually be helpful? The goal is certainly laudable.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think using maths isn't about applying equations that one has learned, or something like that.

Learning maths changes the way one thinks. But the benefit of this is very hard to explain to someone who doesn't know.

</comment><comment><USER18> This video would be a lot stronger if they had only 1 or 2 academics out of the dozen or so people, rather than the opposite ratio.

</comment><comment><USER19> Q. "When will I use math?"

A. In business, whenever you can find a use and start a company to pursue it.

Note:

(1) I know some math: My Ph.D. dissertation was on the applied math of stochastic optimal control. The work was advanced enough mathematically to address measurable selection, solved a real problem, and made some contributions to making such calculations faster.

(2) I'm pursuing a use of math in business. My current work is an information technology startup based on a Web site. The key to the promise of the work is some original math I did based on some advanced prerequisites.

So, I know something about applications of math.

Jobs? Early in my career, I knew some computing, was at GE which was shrinking (again) in computing, sent some resume copies, and in two weeks got seven interviews and five offers. The computing worked for a job.

Broadly the video is nonsense, contemptible, deceptive, misleading, badly supported nonsense. Students need to be warned.

Wall Street? In graduate school, Wall Street was one of the career directions I had in mind. So, I got a relatively good background in stochastic processes. Later I wrote Fisher Black (as in the Black-Scholes option pricing model) at Goldman Sachs and got a nice letter back saying that he saw no opportunities to apply math on Wall Street.

I interviewed in computing at Morgan Stanley, showed some nice applied math I'd done, and mentioned that I wanted to work on automatic trading but got no interest.

I got a call from Google, and they wanted only C++ programming.

I got a call from Microsoft and explained some work I'd done, and published, that would help Microsoft but never got past the first 'phone-screen' girl.

Early in my career, there was some interest in applied math, but this interest was essentially only for work paid for by the US DoD and for the Cold War. The US DoD has done a lot of good applied math, but those successes have had essentially zero influence in business.

Can look at the Web sites of 500+ US venture capital firms, nearly all in Silicon Valley, near Boston, or in New York City, look at their investment interests, and never see the words math or mathematics. Chris Sacca dropped out of a math Ph.D. program and may have the best background in math of any venture partner in the US. His biography may have the only mention of math on a venture firm Web site.

The interest of math in information technology venture capital is somewhere between zero and deeply negative. E.g., I got back from Ron Conway's son at Andreessen Horowitz

"your company is outside our area of expertise".

By "expertise" he had to mean the math, not the Web site.

Yes, in topics central to Hacker News, there should be interest in math for 'machine learning, data mining, big data, ad targeting' etc., but there is not. Instead, the world would rather stumble along with intuitive approaches to these topics instead of solid (powerful, valuable) math approaches.

Here's the main point: In business, the US is still organized mostly like the factory floor of 100 years ago where the supervisor knew more and the subordinate was there just to apply muscle to the ideas of the supervisor. And that 'inequality in technical knowledge' continues all the way to the CEO and COB who want to believe that they know the most.

So, no one in middle management wants to bet their budget or career record on some project using some math they don't understand; they don't get bad marks for such projects they do not pursue.

Essentially only a CEO could sponsor a project with some significant math, and CEOs rarely sponsor projects directly.

In venture funded information technology entrepreneurship, the 'technology' is supposed to be just routine software that could be understood by a bright, self-taught middle school hacker and, thus, can safely be ignored as crucial 'intellectual property' by any Ivy League history major, Harvard MBA venture partner.

Broadly, bringing high technical expertise as an employee to a business is a fool's errand. Yes, there are a few exceptions, e.g., some technical topic deep in the CIO's organization, but generally the employee is supposed to know less, not more.

An employee who, on the side or whatever, starts a good project based on math will find that their management doesn't like the project. If the employee proposes the project more broadly, then they will be told not to communicate outside of their management chain or face getting fired.

Once as a professor, hired in optimization, I wrote a research paper in optimization based on some math, with theorems and proofs. My department reviewed the paper and concluded that it was "not publishable". It published right away, without significant revision in the 'Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications'. At Yorktown Heights, we were doing some work in server farm and network monitoring of health and wellness using artificial intelligence. I found a much more powerful approach with some original work using some advanced topics in stochastic processes, and the lab concluded that the work was "not publishable". The work published right away without significant revision in 'Information Sciences'. The reason: The people I was working for didn't know math and didn't like it.

Really, if math is to have a significant role in a business, then the main mathematician has to be the founder, CEO of the business, e.g., Jim Simons, Andrew Viterbi. Otherwise, f'get about it.

Broadly, math is by far the most exacting and difficult academic subject, is rarely pursued by students beyond what is needed for K-12 teaching, physics, engineering, or basic statistics, and is just not known, liked, wanted, or even tolerated in society more broadly.

For a good career, mostly an electrician's license is a better foundation than a Ph.D. in math, electrical engineering, or anything else.

My view is that math is by a wide margin the most powerful and valuable topic for the future of information technology entrepreneurship for at least the first half of this century, but to make this promise real the mathematician has to be the founder, CEO of the company, and the math will not be an advantage in seeking equity funding.

To make this promise understood, about the best I can do is be successful financially, buy a yacht over 200' long, and give some interviews on the yacht cruising in Long Island Sound.

Broadly our society does not value, want, like, or tolerate math.

<comment><USER10> _My view is that math is by a wide margin the most powerful and valuable topic for the future of information technology entrepreneurship for at least the first half of this century, but to make this promise real the mathematician has to be the founder, CEO of the company, and the math will not be an advantage in seeking equity funding._

An interesting comment. I wonder if the YC funding process is at all an exception, a funding process in which mathematics background might be an advantage.

<comment><USER19> Some of the qualifications of some of the YC partners are exceptional for venture partners: You might be correct.

But, to add a little detail, it appears that information technology (biotech might be significantly different) venture funding has been reduced to a large font on one side of a 3 x 5" index card: For a seed round, see a demo of the software. For a Series A, see 'traction', that is users and revenue both growing quickly. For a Series B, see good accounting numbers. For a Series C, are basically just buying part of an on-going company. Could teach a dog that 3 x 5" card in a weekend.

The Series A criteria are so uniform that my guess is that they are 'suggested' by some of the more important LPs.

But, for anyone with a serious background in math, science, or engineering, (information technology) venture funding is a shock because, if only as a special case of the 3 x 5" card, the partners will essentially never take seriously a technical review of the project on paper. This is a shock because essentially all serious work in math, science, and engineering is done just on paper, not with prototypes or 'market ready' products.

My joke about venture capital is that they would have said, "You build and test one and get one more ready for delivery, and we will buy half the gas for the Enola Gay".

But the bomb was a big waste of money? The bomb cost about $3 billion in 1940s money (see Richard Rhodes), and that's $3000 for each of the 1 million US soldiers that might have been killed or injured in an invasion of the home islands of Japan, that is, a grand bargain just as money.

So, (information technology) venture capital just won't judge based on looking in detail at the core 'secret sauce' intellectual property and, in particular, won't consider math.

So, if the math helps with the traction or accounting numbers, then fine. The entrepreneur can tell the equity funders that the project is just 'software' and otherwise keep what is crucial in the secret sauce just between his own ears. If he has an algorithm that shows P = NP (not what I have) and is blazingly fast on the full range of NP-complete problems, then don't tell anyone and just let the software run and do logistics, manufacturing scheduling, etc.

In my project, the math is the crucial work and the main promise of a valuable company quite beyond just some Series A 'traction' numbers. But the only person in business who can see this promise now is me, and this is at least a surprise.

In the end, for me, now, that the venture partners will ignore or just hate the math is no longer very relevant: I have the math and the corresponding software long since done, and it was fairly easy given my background. The rest is just routine programming. Since I'm using Windows, .NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET, I've had to learn those topics. This learning has been routine but slow. But a few more Web pages, and the software will be ready for at least first production. Then get and load some good initial 'base data', and I will be able to go live. If the project is good, then there will be good 'traction' numbers. Then I could raise a Series A, but if the project is good soon it should throw off enough cash that I won't t need a Series A. If I get a good business without equity funding, then the venture partners won't be part of it because they refused to evaluate the real promise, the math, and waited until the business was so far along it didn't need equity funding.

Then, just why would I want a Board that hated math?

Net, for this thread, for an information technology entrepreneur, the math just has to be something the entrepreneur keeps between his ears, and that is a piss poor career direction to recommend to young people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This video is completely worthless for the people they claim to be targeting, the average student. It literally doesn't talk about where math is used in the real world in any meaningful terms to a highschooler.

<comment><USER21> Right, a student is thinking, "WTF is this quadratic formula for?" might not have gotten much from this. This shows the benefits of the end-game, not the middle point. Bridging that gap for students I think is the hard part.

<comment><USER22> I learned the quadratic formula in algebra II (the highest math class I've taken) and promptly forgot it. Then a year or so later, I was writing a raytracer and realized that the ray-sphere intersection is just the quadratic formula. I couldn't help but wonder why we weren't given a _single_ use case for it in school.

<comment><USER21> The only reason I can imagine is that most use cases require other specific knowledge that will also seem like useless stuff to 99% of the students and its hard to find a use case that fits most of their probably interests.

"So in the future, when you're writing a ray tracer..." just doesn't ring with most students anymore than the word problems that required the formula either.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Type Driven Domain Modelling – Evolving Models with F# – Lucas Reis' Blog - <AUTHOR> http://lucasmreis.github.io/blog/type-driven-domain-modelling-part-1/ <comment><USER3> Good post. I'm getting into F# myself having been a C# guy for a long time. I love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm getting into F# from a non-dotnet background: JS > Clojure > Elm > F# :)

<comment><USER3> Great, I love it so far, and turns out F# is really an evolution of OCaml - <USER2> you sort of get two for one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do I only see Domain-driven design in the context of f#?

<comment><AUTHOR> I only heard about it after researching F#. Not only Domain modelling, I also started hearing about Event Sourcing and CQR after learning F#.</comment></comment>


Rails Is Not For Beginners - oscar-the-horse http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/code/rails-is-not-for-beginners/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you optimize a framework for beginners, you're optimizing for learnability. That's great for the first few days or even weeks of learning. But once you're past that, it's not so great. What you care more about is the usability of the thing once you know it. There are plenty of cases where learnability and usability are in conflict. Letting learnability win is a short-term relief.

If you on the other hand optimize for usability, for making things simple and easy to use for someone who understands the basics, you'll often end up with something that has great learnability as well. Maybe not as much as could be achieved as if that was your only goal, but plenty still.

The other aspect is whether you as a framework designer are designing something for yourself and your peers or if you're trying to dumb things down on behalf of beginners. In other words, designing for what you think beginners might find easy in their learning phase. That's really hard to do. Most technology I've seen designed in such a master/apprentice fashion sucks.

Finally, when you're comparing complexity, it's generally more helpful to look at the complexity involved with completing an entire task. Comparing complexity of "hello world" tells you little about what the complexity is going to be like developing a complete, modern web application from database migrations to XSS/CRSF protection.

That's where learnability and usability are again in conflict. Yes, it's harder to learn a framework that has answers for things like "how do I migrate a database once I have data I care about", or whatever feature you want to focus on, but once you hit that problem, you'll be glad that it's there and find the solution less complex than stringing something together from tons of separate parts yourself.

All that being said, I think Sinatra is wonderful. So what if it's not a fit for building a whole Basecamp or Github? It's great for teaching someone the basics of how HTTP works and it's great for smaller surface apps or for smaller, isolated parts of bigger apps.

<comment><USER2> I beg to disagree. Learnability and usability can get along together. Good examples are Jquery and Cakephp. Both have executed this very well from producing well written and well maintained documentation then add a good amount of plugins that is contributed by the community.

For example, in cakephp we have this cook book <http://book.cakephp.org> which the quality of the content surpasses every cakephp book on amazon.

So, like apps "simple & feature rich" can get along together like "learnability & usability" can get along too. It just needs more work.

<comment><USER3> The problem with cakephp is that every book written on this subject surpasses the quality of the framework itself. cakephp is easy to learn, but for me it's unusable in the long run. Easy stuff get's even easier, hard stuff get's harder. That's exactly what David meant. If you trade everything for learnability, it's not usable.

<comment><USER4> That sums up my experience with cakePHP too. I don't know what's happened with this framework in the last couple of years, but when I was first learning Rails and enjoying it, I used cakePHP for a big project because I knew PHP well, and didn't yet feel comfortable with committing to using Rails for it.

That was a decision I regretted many times. The hoops I had to jump through to deal with complex database queries were ridiculous. The difference in quality and robustness between ActiveRecord and cakePHP's ORM (at that time, anyway) were pronounced, with AR coming out way, way ahead.

There's no doubt, in my mind, that if you are going to take on a large, ambitious web application project, you'll be better served by Rails.

<comment><USER5> Yes, CakePHP's "ORM" isn't a real ORM - it was built when Objects were awesomely broken in PHP4 - but I've actually found it much more usable than the current state of Ruby's ActiveRecord/Datamapper. Manipulating arrays to get just the SQL you want is sometimes annoying, but for the queries that you honestly can't get out of the ORM in CakePHP, it's also likely you wouldn't be able to do the same in any other ORM.

You'll also have to note that both frameworks have progressed significantly in the last few years - CakePHP actually just released a new major version, as did Rails a few months ago - so your experience a few years ago - was this in the 1.1 era - would just be indicative of the framework's beginnings, not where it currently is.

Feel free to message me with your thoughts if they still conflict; I'd love to hear the other side of the story since improving CakePHP as a framework helps not just my ego, but other developers who are using CakePHP to make a living :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The size of the code base has nothing to do with whether something is for beginners. Beginners don't read the code to find out what something does, they read the docs and the tutorials. It's mostly about tutorials to get them started, and quick iteration so they can see the fruits of their progress, combined with being a solution to a problem they have.

Excel is a great example of something that can get beginners involved in computing. Huge code base, but lots of tutorials, and solves problems people have.

If people's problems were along the lines of needing a website that can say "hello world" then Sinatra would be perfect, if their needs are more along the lines of CRUD app with web and iphone front ends then rails will likely serve them better.

I've been dealing recently with a guy who asked me for some tutorials on XCode, although he absolutely cannot code with Storyboards and Interface Builder he's fully mocked out apps that he wants developed. It's that kind of thing that gets people coding.

<comment><USER7> > Beginners don't read the code to find out what something does, they read the > docs and the tutorials.

Until the docs and tutorials fall short, or something unexpected happens, or they want to see why something behaves the way it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I teach Rails a _lot_. I've ranted and raved for the last year how Rails 3 is much harder for a beginner to grasp than previous versions, but the things that make it difficult for the beginners are not specifically Rails itself. Usually the difficulties come from a few specific things:

First, it's the absolutely fragmented ecosystem, made up of everyone who has opinions on the best way to do Rails development. "You need this gem, and this gem, and ZOMG you're using that library? So last week! Use this one!"

Sure, it's funny to exaggerate that, but if you joined a community, you'd probably look around. A person who does daily work in Rails is going to have a preferred development stack. They may write tests with Rspec, they may use Cucumber. They may even use CoffeeScript. And they'll tell a newbie that they should too.

But a wide-eyed developer who thinks Rails will solve all his or her problems will get freaked out at all of the options available.

When I teach beginners, I don't teach RSpec or Cucumber, and I try to even avoid talking about Bundler. I stick with the core components of Rails. I stay on the happy path. Rails has all these hooks for experts that you can unravel after a few months (or years) of daily work. But a beginner can understand ActiveRecord, controllers, and views easily.

I love the Dreyfus Model. It basically says newbies don't need choices in the beginning. They need clear instruction, clear tutorials. Once they master those, they can move on to reading the docs, exploring the options, etc.

I've been pretty successful teaching Rails to folks who know how to program.

Where Rails falls flat on its face for the beginner is when the beginner doesn't know SQL or HTML. That's a whole different ballgame. Then something like Sinatra is a nice slow introduction.

</comment><comment><USER9> There seems to be a silent disagreement on what the goal of a beginner is: Is it to become a better programmer or is it to get a working app with the minimal amount of work?

Sinatra seems to be better for the former, Rails is better for the latter.

I'm partial to thinking that the former goal is the more noble. But I'm also immensely proud to work in a field that allows anyone with little more than motivation and patience to apply the immense power of computing to whatever itch they need scratched.

One of my favourite consulting jobs of all times was when a friend of a friend asked me to come in: They knew _just_ enough of a certain PHP CMS to build an online history textbook, which they'd then gone on to sell to, oh, well, every school in the country. The traffic was strangling them and only just knew enough that they knew they didn't have a clue what to do. A week and change later, upgraded hardware and the clumsy CMS search engine replace by Solr, they were flying.

If they'd started out with the equivalent of Sinatra (essentially plain PHP), I'm not sure they'd have launched at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rails is definitely not for beginners and the code size is an indicator - there is a steep curve to understand everything that Rails 3.1 uses per default - especially the (initially) arcane handling of javascript runtimes to compile coffeescript...

But: Sinatra ain't beginner-friendly either, I also don't think thats the goal. Sinatra is basically a minimal base framework for matching HTTP requests, generating responses and building a Rack stack around the base class. But it doesn't give you a lot beyond that. As such, it requires deep knowledge of how to use HTTP and Rack to do more fancy stuff.

I also don't think that there are "beginner-friendly" frameworks beyond the most simple ones. The problem is that each feature that a framework encodes also requires the user to learn how it works. Most beginners don't even understand the benefits, drawbacks and best practices when it comes to HTTP - how would they understand all the things that Rails has amassed over the years?[1]

If any, I would recommend pure Rack: its a one page specification that can be read and understood in an hour.

As a shameless plug: if you consider Rails too feature-laden, consider Padrino - it is definitely worth a look. (Disclaimer: i have commit access to the Padrino repository and sometimes use it)

[1] I don't consider users coming from other frameworks (even in other languages) as "beginners" - usually, they already know the domain language - for example what CSRF is and what Rails does against it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Although Rails code can be straightforward if you stick to the conventions, many real-world apps call for something more than that. So in practice, it's usually necessary to perform at least some level of metaprogramming, or at least some more exotic configuration.

Also, if you're using Rails library, you'll notice the hipster aspect of the Ruby/Rails community, which is to say many libraries are active for 1 or 2 years before the developer gets bored and someone else comes up with a hotter alternative. That's cool, it's quick evolution, but it also means real-world Rails developers have to spend a fair amount of time dealing with libraries that are either no longer maintained or are not yet mature.

<comment><USER12> I Disagree.

I've built many real world applications. Very complicated ones and not just your average CRUD apps. I never had to do exotic configurations or metaprogramming craziness.

If a popular gem is replaced, I see many times, that the API of the gem, mimicks the old one, or detailed migration tutorials will be delivered. So a new gem is often similar to a major version bump.

<comment><USER13> I don't know if labeling rapid evolution as "hipster" is quite fair, but the underlying point is true. Have you gone back to a update a Rails project that is 3 years old or more? I have, and it's significantly more hassle in general than going back and updating a PHP project that is 10 years old.

Personally I think this is a small price to pay for a framework that stays up to date and still releases forward-thinking features on a regular basis (Rails modularization in 3.0 and the asset pipeline in 3.1 are amazing features that an emphasis on backwards compatibility could have made more difficult), but let's acknowledge that it is not an unmitigated win in all aspects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I usually say this about the types of webframeworks they are:

Rails - > great for intermediate people who see benefits it brings. Great for pretty straight forward projects for beginners that can follow a book.

Sinatra -> Great for beginners to "just get something working". Not great if someone needs everything decided for them. Awesome for advanced people. Awesome for non-standard projects.

Padrino (Why don't we hear about this more?) -> kind of the sweet spot between the two. I honestly think that Padrino should rightfully start taking mindshare. I don't know why it hasn't.

<comment><USER15> People get Padrino confused with Audrino and think they're gonna have to hack hardware. That scares them and they move on :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd tout Rails as more beginner-friendly than Sinatra. Much more beginner friendly.

Once a beginner gets past the trivial usage of Sinatra, where does he go next? Rails already has everything set up for you. If you want to implement something, you can just google it or find a tutorial or Railscast that can scoot you along. Or a free online tutorial that shows you how to test and implement a nontrivial application from scratch including testing. Or just dive into the massive community.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article rubs me the wrong way. Rails _is_ good for beginners because it has more tutorials than probably any other web framework ever. That's the main metric that matters for a true beginner.

The fact that Rails has a ton more features that will take longer to understand than Sinatra is neither here nor there. If you don't need those features than Sinatra is the obvious choice, if you do need them then Rails is the obvious choice. This is orthogonal to the user's experience level.

</comment><comment><USER17> By the way, "beginners" wanting to get started building Ruby-based web applications should have a look at Serve (get-serve.com). It's not a framework per se, but if you're coming from PHP, it will probably get you started with the Ruby ecosystem pretty fast (and well), since it allows you to just create an .erb file and add inline code.

(Which is what most PHP people seem to want initially - you know, before that magic thing happens where they realize that real applications need structure.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Sinatra is cool. However, then I need to start thinking about how to integrate database connectivity (configure it, set up controllers, what not). I need to worry about XSS attacks, and a zillion other tiny details that go into a web app. So I often end up choosing Rails anyway, because they made a lot of choices for me already that I frankly don't care much about making myself.

Still, Sinatra is great for a lot of small web projects.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use both rails and sinatra.

Sinatra is great for small things and beginners.

However, if you're going to spend all day writing web-app code, learning rails pays off HUGELY. It's the full package for modern web-app development, with massive productivity bonuses at the expense of a higher upfront.

<comment><USER20> Sinatra, Cuba[1] etc. can finely be used for larger apps as well. It may require some more discipline upfront, but the notion that those are only usable for small hacks is moot. In fact, I have found it easier to introduce new coworkers (without prior knowledge of either) to medium sized (5k LOC) Sinatra apps than Rails apps the same size.

[1] <https://github.com/soveran/cuba>

<comment><USER21> Everytime when you try to build bigger app with sinatra, you will probably end up building half-rails. So it the end it doesn't make much sense just the time it was needed to put in to find and require additional libs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It occurred to me while interviewing the other day--web development is not really for beginners anymore. To do web development without endangering customer passwords, data security and credit card numbers now takes very substantial knowledge, and it is knowledge that some beginners won't realize they need.

If you don't understand how to prevent sql injection attacks, cross site scripting, why SSL by default for web apps is needed, and whole host of things, you should probably stay away from anything more serious than flat html.

<comment><USER23> It never was for beginners. All those problems have been around since the web has, and beginners have been making insecure crap ever since the first perl cgis.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps I'm dating myself a bit here, but there was a time when there was no such thing as an "e-commerce app" and no wi-fi to eavesdrop on. Black hat hacking has evolved also, so although some techniques have always been possible, new vectors have opened up over time as they are discovered and disseminated, and I would suggest the corresponding knowledge burden needed to enter the arms race for a developer is higher now. Also, the tools have evolved in such a way that the barrier to entry is lower and lower. For example, FireSheep.

<comment><USER23> Of course there was a time before ecommerce apps. That would probably explain why I was talking about the very first perl cgis. While there's a lower barrier to entry for people to exploit security holes, there's also far more targets. Automated tools to go around exploiting the latest holes in "insert shitty PHP app here" aren't an issue for web developers who are writing their own apps. The security issues that impact web developers are the same as they have always been for all kinds of developers, input filtering, escaping output, etc. Web developers have always needed to understand basic security issues, it is just that 99% of web developers historically have been completely incompetent. This does not appear to have changed recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am a beginner. I am trying to learn Rails. I am finding it difficult because the tutorials tend to be walkthroughs of creating very specific types of web apps, with understanding of the concepts being offered a side effect. I often have questions about why and wherefore of certain decisions tutorial authors make. My only recourse is the documentation, which is too large for me to maintain my excitement for too long, especially with my busy schedule.

I do not get excited about the sudden ability to make things because I have been making things (not webapps) for some time.

I have had much more success learning Sinatra. While the tutorials are similarly designed, the reduced reliance of magic makes it easier for me understand the purpose of the commands given. There are no files that are generated for me in places that I have to go looking for that do something important that I don't have to think about (but I do have to understand.) In fact, Sinatra has helped me to understand Rails in hindsight.

I think the issue is that the tutorials I have looked at tend to be trying to sell Rails as an awesome tool to make things. This has emphasized ease of use over understanding of concepts. You can contrast these tutorials with books or tutorials for any programming language. Books on programming languages tend to be more abstract and while they limit one's power at first, they enhance one's awareness in the end. Tutorials on Rails do the opposite for me.

Maybe I should have just bought a book on Rails (like the tutorials said.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I read the article, and while it is easy to see where he is coming from, I remembered the WTF the first time I encountered web programming more than a decade ago. The idea of GET vs POST didn't make any sense at all to a person who wanted to put something on the screen and capture its value.

Some of these higher level frameworks dispense with get and post. This means that to an old timer, there is suddenly nothing left to build on, and this is why the learning curve appears high again.

</comment><comment><USER26> the fact that rails is not for beginners is true (and main developers say so), but suggesting for beginners a smaller framework that gives you less and hence requires you to do more, know more and make choices that rails has done for you is simply nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER27> Weirdly, this post has a Shyamalanic twist where it ends up being an exhortation to use Sinatra.

</comment><comment><USER28> What does the number of lines of code have to do with whether it's appropriate for beginners?

<comment><USER29> The number of lines of codes, in this case, speaks to the amount of features in the framework. Rails is harder to __fully __understand than Sinatra because there are many, many more features, and it's possible for a beginner to get lost in, or confused by, all those features.

<comment><USER28> Well, it's harder to understand _all_ of rails, because it has more features. That's a fair claim I think.

However, the question is: Is it harder to understand the subset of rails that does what sinatra does, than it is to understand sinatra as a result?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's why we chose to start with Sinatra with our interactive courses on <http://www.trybloc.com>. It's an easier transition to learn Sinatra which is conceptually much simpler.

<comment><USER31> FYI There's a bug in the REPL on your Ruby basics course: if you enter more than a handful of lines the cursor runs down the page while the actual input is at the bottom of the JQuery console...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have a harder time using Sinatra because I never know where to put things.

Also, the biggest problem with learning Rails is the Ruby language. After you learn the language, switching from Sinatra to Rails and back is not problematic.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, Rails gives beginners a big advantage by generating a huge scaffolding. It clears up a lot of ambiguities about where things go, and as a beginner it lets you explore different things that you can do in Rails.

<comment> guard-of-terra As a novice developer, I absolutely loathed scaffolding (IDE-generated header and source files) because I could never understand why all the code got there, how do those files relate and what does it do.

I tried to learn COM once but gave up essentially because I could not find any docs not falling back on IDE code generation (and that code was huge and absolutely opaque).

I always loved tools which let you to type in a small program from the scratch and run it. So, perhaps, sinatra is the way to go for beginners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've enjoyed using Rails for a long time now and still do. That being said, I've started steering towards Sinatra more given the minimal startup time and speed. The biggest gripe I have with Rails is the long startup time. It's a real drag on test driven development. Waiting close to 30 seconds per test run while the framework boots really sucks.

</comment><comment><USER35> Rails is not for beginners because if you aren't good at OO design it's extremely easy to write horrible code that does a lot.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've just getting started with Rails and what I miss the most is good documentation like CodeIgniter. But other than that that's an impressive piece of software!

</comment><comment><USER37> PHP is pretty good for beginners. Right tool for the job?

</comment><comment><USER38> I think beginners can struggle through Rails. Learning Rails is much less difficult that learn best practices for programming in general, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER39> My response: <http://www.southpolesteve.com/rails-is-for-beginners/>

</comment><comment><USER40> I am the profile this article talks about, and I can assure you Rails is perfect for beginners. Sinatra confuses the hell out of me, admittedly and I think the key - less and less so every day.

I also taught, being a total noob myself, my best friend how to code Rails in 2 months. He doesn't even know HTML, or how to make/compile something. But he can code Ruby/Rails. And I mean Ruby, not just plug together a scaffolded app.

So yeah, I'm not so sure I agree with this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Implementing your own version of Rails is left as an exercise for the reader.

</comment><comment><USER42> rails is indeed make things easy, and sinatra is indeed easy to learn. however, imho they are in different leagues, just like different code patterns you are going to make use of.

</comment><comment><USER17> Web application development is not for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER43> >rails is hard, let's go shopping.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm actually starting to think there's something to be said for letting each generation of programmers grow up simultaneously with a hot new framework. It encourages learning through experimentation, lets them make the mistakes we all have to make, helps spread new ideas unbounded by the received wisdom (many of which will be stupid, some will have important influence for decades to come).

In the end, you get a bunch of developers that are both comfortable with a modern framework, have some understanding of the growing pains of new, complicated systems, and are ready to bring fresh ideas to more mature parts of the industry.

The contrasting mentality of sticking to what we already know is "good enough" leaves developers dull and uninspired, less equipped to think outside the "rules" inherited from previous generations that came from solving problems that look a lot different when you examine them 10 years later.

All of which is to say, Rails probably isn't for beginners anymore, and it shouldn't be, but I don't think trying to substitute a simple framework that explicitly avoids becoming complicated is necessarily what the doctor ordered...

</comment><comment><USER45> I can't read the font on this webpage, it is making my eyes blur.

<comment><USER46> Afta Serif has some issues. With weaker eyesight I find myself mistaking characters. That k keeps turning into ß.</comment></comment>