Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery  - <AUTHOR> http://codemanship.co.uk/parlezuml/blog/?postid=1053 <comment><USER2> Posing Apprenticeships as a significant alternative to higher education is delusional. First because a true apprenticeship requires a contractual relationship between the apprentice and the master. That sort of contract is extremely problematic to modern business entities because it does not allow flexibility in staffing levels, requires a significant investment in training (several years), and because indentured service is generally frowned upon and body warrants are hard to obtain these days -- there is little viable recourse should the apprentice terminate the apprenticeship early.

In addition apprenticeship is difficult because it easily runs afoul of equal opportunity expectations and requirements (in the US). The difficulty in differentiating between individuals and in determining each person's unique skill set before they are on the job is the reason all soldiers go through the same basic training and then are assigned to their specialties (of course one could argue that military skills are often determined before hand - but that is an argument for prior training (college) not against it).

Indeed the significant latitude of the military is an indication of what is needed to create any semblance of a workable apprenticeship program which provides equal opportunity on a large scale - an organization where meritocracy is highly advantageous both to the organization and the individuals who lead it, extreme prejudice in the enforcement of contracts (e.g. execution for desertion), and very one sided contracts (e.g. imprisonment for AWOL).

Modern higher education has grown because it offers such a powerful solution to many of the problems created by apprenticeship particularly lack of equal opportunity, exploitation of apprentices, diversion of resources to training and away from profit making activities, and long term commitments to particular individuals who may not be suited for the profession.

<comment><USER3> "Posing Apprenticeships as a significant alternative to higher education is delusional."

This is absolutely absurd and just shows pure ignorance of the economic realities beyond your grasp. Germany thrives off of apprenticeships. You can't find a job without having an apprenticeship under your belt in Germany. Students spend between 50% to 70% of their time at a company, while the rest is spent on traditional education. Apprenticeships are a vital source to Germany's economy. Dismissing it based on your pet theories is bordering on asinine.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany>

<comment><USER2> The German apprenticeship model doesn't scale well to less affluent and less homogenous countries (i.e. pretty much the rest of the world) - and it is my impression that German Hauptschule students don't apprentice in professions such as computer programming. Then again, if one accepts the idea that it is o.k. to channel children into career paths at the age of nine or ten and generally reserve the best schools for the upper social classes, then the German model might be as successful as you suggest.

<comment><USER4> Germany is successful despite the Hauptschulen, not because of it. The apprenticeships are one of the things that allow Germany to get away with its aweful schooling system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's my rough criteria when selecting applicants for technology roles:

1) What have you done lately that is like what I want you to do?

2) What is your attitude like? (past references very important here)

3) Have you taken some test or certification (or can we give you one) that demonstrates skills in areas we might be concerned about?

From there, perhaps _you can start learning_ , that is, it might be worthwhile to talk about a position. But all of that factual and procedural knowledge will be put to the test when you are inserted into our actual environment where your social skills are going to have as much to do with your value as your technical skills.

None of that involves a college degree (unless the job duties and environment mimic the college experience), and it all fits nicely into some kind of apprenticeship program. Yes, there can be a lot wrong with apprentice programs, but "apprentice program" is a very, very broad term. The trick is going to be in the setup and execution of the program.

I freely admit that we apprenticeship supporters wave our hands around a lot while yelling "apprenticeships! apprenticeships!" without providing necessary detail. But I really feel that under this rubric is where the eventual solution will lie. We need to bring education down to be as close to the actual work environment as possible. We need more rapid feedback loops in education and more specific, tailored in situ instruction. Apprenticeships do this.

Note that there is another topic -- the importance of a classic liberal education -- which I am a huge supporter of. But I think we have mixed up two concepts: things that directly translate into money for me and my family and things that make me a better overall person. Both may or may not be important to a particular person, but by mixing up the terms and lumping them all under "college education" it has confused the education argument to a terrible and unnecessary degree. This confusion is what is at the heart of the seemingly- unsolvable education discussion.

<comment><USER6> _I freely admit that we apprenticeship supporters wave our hands around a lot while yelling "apprenticeships! apprenticeships!" without providing necessary detail._

A lot of those details could be worked out along the way. I'd be more excited to see the supporters provide actual apprentice programs than details on how everyone should operate such a program.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. Knowing the details of an apprenticeship program upfront are critical to attract and retain both the "apprentices" and the "masters" necessary to make a program work. It would be unfair to both groups to have divergent programs and skill levels being passed off as apprenticeships.

There are plenty of successful models that a program could be based on. In the US, electricians require 5 years of work with a journeyman + classroom instruction. Professional Engineers require a degree in their discipline, 2 examinations, and 4 years of relevant experience, usually under a licensed engineer before they can get their PE license (its not called an apprenticeship, but an EIT - Engineer-in-Training. You are expected to learn from a more experienced engineer who is responsible for overseeing your work and providing a recommendation before you are licensed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many employers use a university degree as a proxy to judge whether or not you're employable, not whether or not you are qualified. As the article rightly points out, it's easier than ever to get a college degree, both because there are more universities offering them than ever before, and because the requirements to get those degrees are lower than ever before. Obtaining a degree merely shows whether or not you have the minimal foresight and work ethic required to be admitted to a university, and the even more minimal determination and resilience to actually get the degree. Thus, many employers think "If you can't muster a degree, in this lax environment, you're probably not going to be a good employee."

That said, if you can prove you have that determination, work ethic, and competence to do the job, many employers wouldn't give two shits if you never got an otherwise meaningless degree. The problem is, there's not a lot of other great proxies to demonstrate those qualities, especially proxies that would save your resume from getting tossed immediately.

As to the "degree snobbery" thought, it makes a lot of sense for some employers to use universities as their recruiting system. Think about law firms that only hire Harvard law grads. Snobbery at its worst, right?

Well, say Harvard Law gets 10000 applicants each year. This group is already self-selected to a certain extent, because most people who don't have a shot at getting in don't even apply. Next, Harvard only selects the most elite candidates (those with perfect scores only have about a 50% chance of getting in). So, anybody who makes it out of Harvard, even if they're at the bottom of the class, has already been screened extensively. If an employer just picked totally at random from this Harvard pool, he's got an excellent shot at picking a great employee, because the barrel he's choosing from has already been screened for him. This can hugely reduce the amount of effort an employer needs to put into making a hire, and so, even if lots of qualified candidates are overlooked, such a system might still make great sense.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the idea of setting time aside in your youthful life where you invest in yourself and expand your horizons is a powerful one. It makes the world a more interesting place and pushes human achievement. To what extent a university helps for this might be debatable and will depend on the person and the university, but I wonder if an average person would earmark 4 years of their life to learning and improvement left completely to their own.

<comment><USER10> Patio11 said it best (re: "do I _have_ to go to college??) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182552>

_edit_ : just re-read your comment, and I realise you're not necessarily taking sides and merely speculating if the average person can get by without the investment into college. I agree so strongly I would upvote you twice.

<comment><USER11> If only US society actually did provide four years of education and living expenses, then patio11 would be correct. Sure, such offers exist but only if you're poor. Or are the valedictorian. Average Joe gets no free ride for four years.

<comment><USER10> He meant a social subsidy, as opposed to monetary. Basically, you aren't too strait-jacketed as a student, the world is your oyster, you can try out lots of different things, etc.

There was no mention of a 'free ride'...

<comment><USER11> That's a plausible interpretation of patio11's comment. I, however, think it's a bit of a stretch given the language of the comment. Perhaps it was his intent to say what you interpreted, but I'm inclined to disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well computer science is not only about programming. Programming is a big part of it and people without a degree might be good programmers, but do they really have gone through all the math and theory by themselves or just skipped it alltogehter ? For example most people without a degree might not know what Big O Notation is or how it works or why certain data structures are better than others.

So it depends much on the work someone is going todo, relativly simple programming tasks ? No degree required. Working on something that scales to millions of users or has to run with exceptional performance ? A CS degree would atleast tell me the candidate has learned about the theory required for this.

Generally for a good CS grad its easier to get really good at programming, than making a programmer comfortable with all the theory.

Try to get into any of the TOP software companies in the world without a degree and i wish you good luck (not impossible though).

I say this as someone who quit half way into his Bsc to start a company btw ;)

<comment><USER13> My experience interviewing says that a great many CS graduates still have no idea about Big O, or even really understand hashtables. That's from years of interviewing quite qualified candidates coming into AMZN BTW.

They might have passed the class and test where that was covered, surely it WAS covered, but they didn't actually retain it in a meaningful way.

I'm a dropout and worked at AMZN for a few years BTW. I don't think I would have had any problem working at Google or Amazon if I had wanted to either.

Granted, I probably couldn't have worked at those companies as my FIRST job, but that isn't the argument. The argument is who is better off after four years, someone who attended university to get a CS undergrad, or someone who worked in the trenches.

I'd say if there were more good apprenticeship positions available the latter would almost always be better.

<comment><USER14> I agree on the last point. I think this sort of stuff _can_ be learned in an apprentice-type way, but not many positions currently do a good job of it. A great motivated way to learn big-O type analysis, for example, is to work on a system where a bottleneck gets improved from an O(n^2) to an O(n logn) algorithm, while working alongside someone who explains to you what that means, how you determined which algorithm was which, and why this is useful analysis to know how to do.

A lot of non-degree programming jobs seem to lack both the challenge and the mentoring to make that happen, though, so you end up with people who learn more about how to bang scripts together out of snippets pulled off the web. That's actually also a pretty useful skill, especially if you become a very fast and skilled applier of band-aids, but it's not quite the same as a CS apprenticeship.

<comment><USER13> Good point, and actually one I overlook too often in my own experience.

I went to CMU for two years before dropping out, so I did get a decent grounding in data structures / algorithms etc.. And I absolutely agree that that grounding has been important and is hard to get in the trenches.

Maybe we need to be arguing towards one or two year of school then apprenticeships?

My housemate teaches a one year CS fundamentals course here in Rwanda. It is essentially the only real CS training available in the country, though there are plenty of people with degrees from the universities. But he does a pretty good job of covering the basics. I'm sure he'd confess that two years would be better than one, but I'm not sure he'd argue for more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm of the opinion that a university degree is less about learning the subject matter, and more about teaching you how to learn. So a programmer who has not completed a degree may be a fantastic programmer, but one who has done a degree may have a few extra skills on top of simple programming skills.

I.e. Communications skills, analytical thinking, knowing where to look for solutions, how to ask the questions that improve your knowledge and the proven ability to see through a project etc...

<comment><USER15> When I completed a CS degree in '88 I remember thinking that what it was really doing was lining you up to possibly go on to do postgraduate research - which I did eventually do. If you aren't going to be doing something that is vaguely like research then I'm struggling to see the relevance of CS degrees for most development jobs.

Universities are really rather splendid places for research and absolutely awful at vocational training!

<comment><USER16> I couldn't agree more. Universities _shouldn't be_ for everyone - they should be for people who are in it for the learning, or for highly skilled research, not degree factories for entry level positions.

What breaks my heart in academia in the UK is seeing courses being dumbed down so that students are "happy" in their courses (i.e. not failing) so that the university gets a good response in the National Student Survey. The other thing I see is an increasing sense of entitlement - "we pay your wages so you should pass us". Going to uni is like going to the gym. You don't get fit by simply having a gym subscription - you have to work at it. Same goes for a university education. Higher fees are only going to make that sense of entitlement worse, which means for more dumbing down... and the cycle continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> St-Clock So the solution to increased cost of education is apprenticeship? Is this part of the current trend at bashing higher education to make sure that we become obedient but efficient drones?

There is a lot of things broken in higher education, but saying that hiring a CS/SE graduate for a developer position is like hiring a theoretical physicist to repair a car is disingenuous at best.

Guess what, graduate students who write a compiler as part of their course, who are working on a vm for matlab, who are improving IDE auto-complete based on all sorts of algorithms, who are devising a new distributed merge algorithm and evaluating its performance through hardcore network simulation, well, they know how to program! As a bonus, they know how to apply the scientific method and be rigorous when they report a result or an improvement. They have been exposed to all sorts of things that an undergrad don't even suspect their existence.

Sure, some grad students aren't good. Sure, people who don't go to college/grad studies can end up being way better and knowing more than grad students, but don't discredit a degree because you __believe __that it's too theoretical. Just ask about the homeworks, the projects, and the thesis the grad student worked on.

<comment><USER17> "Is this part of the current trend at bashing higher education to make sure that we become obedient but efficient drones?"

No, the goal is to remove vocational training from higher education and return it to its supposed goal.

The graduate student that you describe is rare. A masters degree in CS typically means that the person took more random computer courses and knows no more about software development. What you fail to realize is that nearly anyone who wants a masters in CS can shop around and find a school that is willing to accept them.

<comment> St-Clock "What you fail to realize" <\- ?

First, I believe there is a cultural difference between Canada and the US. In Canada, a Master's degree is typically not a professional degree and you usually cannot buy a M.Sc. Typically, half of the credits come from courses and the other half (often even more) comes from your thesis. I don't know about the situation in the UK, the author's country of origin.

Second, I TAed and taught programming, algorithms, and software architecture courses for undergrads, Master's and Ph.D. students so I'm well aware of the advantages and limitations of higher education. I saw students in an advanced architecture course who did not know what a thread was or who had never written a single SQL query. Well, they learned it in my course.

The graduate students that I described aren't rare. At least 75% of the Master's and Ph.D. students in the SE lab and PL lab at my university match that description. Maybe they would have a hard time building a web application in a day, but I think they have demonstrated that they can learn pretty complicated things and that they will learn how to solve your particular technical problems.

I felt the article was really about "degree snobbery", meaning that the author promoted snubbing people with degrees. I understand the frustration of people without degree who need to prove every time that they don't need one. But I don't believe that having a systematic negative bias on candidates with a degree is wise either. Honestly, does it make sense as the author says that someone with a bachelor in C.S. don't know how to implement a binary search (see [1] for a possible explanation)?

Regarding the vocational training that needs to be removed from higher education, I believe a compromise is needed. I agree that you cannot efficiently learn development process and all the latest languages and frameworks at school. But you need to learn some good programming skills and software engineering practices, otherwise, it is a lot harder to understand and play with more complex concepts and it is also more difficult to bring a significant contribution if you do a Master or Ph.D. later.

[1] [http://www.skorks.com/2010/10/99-out-of-100-programmers- cant...](http://www.skorks.com/2010/10/99-out-of-100-programmers-cant-program- i-call-bullshit/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine you offered a job position of "software apprentice" and say you got a thousand responses. How would you identify the ones that would be worth gambling on ? - there would be little to nothing to differentiate candidates.

By and large you'll have candidates who didn't do well at school (because those who do well at school tend to go to university), have never done anything to show that they're capable of long term commitment, and have never done anything significantly intellectually challenging.

CS & SE courses at top universities which get to have the pick of the best students still have a first year drop-out rate of 10-20%.

Any company offering software apprenticeships can expect to suffer huge drop- out rates with minimal upside.

<comment><USER19> How is that different from any other job application? The job will clearly go to the boss's nephew, who is totally great at computer stuff because he plays so much WoW. (Though it is a well known fact that the best middle management comes from Eve Online).

Seriously, you will generally want to look for people who are intelligent and good at abstract thinking. In my biased opinion, you should be shooting for the best humanities majors (In disciplines like English, music, philosophy and math), as the targets of such an apprenticeship. Not high-school graduates.

Until it catches on, your competition for employing them will be Starbucks and grad school which means they will be a steal compared to programmers trained at Stanford or MIT (TM). A liberal arts major would be pleased to be making 30-40k a year out of school. Also, you can always fire them if they don't work out.

If it then catches on, you might be able to expand to people who are interested in making programming a career, then you might be able to catch some of the

Currently, CS courses at top universities have very little to do with the business of actually programming, they are more based on mathematical theory. SE courses tend to look more like 'software engineering management.'

In each discipline, you learn important skills... but they tend to have very little to do with the craft of sitting down at a computer and making your thoughts into working code. (I have a master of science in computer science, I learned many things that made me a better coder, but the degree didn't teach me to code, work experience did).

<comment><USER20> _Also, you can always fire them if they don't work out._

I'm guessing you're in a right-to-work state, in the UK and EU firing someone for anything other than gross negligence is very, very hard. Hiring someone who "just doesn't work out" is a huge risk for an organization that can't afford to shuffle them off into a "VP of Paperclips" position.

<comment><USER15> "in the UK and EU firing someone for anything other than gross negligence is very, very hard"

It certainly isn't difficult to fire people in the UK providing they haven't been working for you for too long (it's either six months or a year). Other countries in the EU can be a nightmare though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Degrees are usually a signal about how well the person is expected to perform. A degree from a top school with a decent GPA means that not only was this person select among many to attend, but they also managed to go through it okay. That is why employers ask for a degree in anything for certain jobs. They may not care about art history, but a degree is a good signal that "hey this person is smart."

For CS it's a little more practical but a degree is still fundamentally a signal. As is an active github account, blog, etc...

</comment><comment><USER22> We have to stop pretending degrees are worthless. The way I see it, going to school, expedites your learning process, by exposing you to professors and your peers, it helps you learn best practices, which although generic, saves you a lot of time making same mistakes others (your professors and your peers) have made. Also it gives you the focus and urgency to finish your learning on time.

As an analogy, consider the knowledge accumulated while atending school as open source software, even if your knowledge or the OSS is generic to be fully usable for the task at hand, it almost always gives you a big headstart to get your job done, because it avoids the trivial and non-trivial pitfalls through years of maturity.

<comment><USER23> You're conflating the degree and the relevant knowledge gained in pursuit of the degree. They are not one in the same, and I believe that is the point most people are making. At least, that's what I believe.

The skepticism directed at college education is a result of cost/benefit analysis. I would gladly take a 2-year associate's program that yielded a degree in computer science, much like nurses have an 2-year nursing degree. The four year degree I'm in pursuit of now (in my 30s)? I'll likely drop out after getting the discrete math, algorithms and other math-intensive courses I likely would not study on my own.

<comment><USER24> "I'll likely drop out after getting the discrete math, algorithms and other math-intensive courses I likely would not study on my own."

I think that statement right there is why degrees are still valuable. To earn your degree you will have to study subjects that an independent learner would not likely study on their own.

So far in my career, the amount of math I was required to take to earn my CS degree has been very valuable. I have to use it a lot. (Graphics, GIS).

<comment><USER23> No, that statement is an example of why the information is valuable, not the degree. There is still a whole lot of stupid hoops people have to jump through to get a degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Agree absolutely.

I'd long ago decided that even with the £3,000 per year fees (which Labour said they wouldn't do in their election manifesto, got an overall majority then did anyway - remember that Aaron Porter and others slamming the LibDems at the moment), the investment in a degree before a career in software just didn't seem to add up. Realistically a £25k debt against a 3 year delay in starting a career - you may well earn less for the first few years but by the time you've paid off that £25k, is the degree _really_ going to be a differentiating factor?

With now £27k just on tuition, plus living expenses for three years, what's the point? Honestly, I learnt more that I use professionally at A level than in my degree, let alone what I've learnt professionally. Sad to say this but I would actively recommend against an 18 year old with an interest in working in IT studying at university, the way things are at the moment.

<comment><USER26> Agree with this. With £27k debt for tuition alone, plus other debts for living costs, in a field that changes so fast as Computer Science, you'd be paying off this debt long after much of what you'd have learned would be obsolete. Far better to go straight into work, and study part-time (if employers will take you without a degree that is, which they might if they realise that 18-yr olds can be smart and cheap). It'll be interesting to see what 18-yr olds do in response to these fees. Sadly I fear many may not be clued up at that age, and will study Computer Science then regret later.

<comment><USER20> _Computer Science_ doesn't change quickly at all. Slightly faster than maths does, perhaps. Only the fashionable language changes quickly.

I think that many people these days don't understand the difference between CS and "making websites with RoR".

<comment><USER26> I agree with that. But, a typical course contains bits that don't change e.g algorithm theory and bits that do , e.g programming skills learned from implementing algorithms, which, back in the day would have been in Pascal or C, nowadays is in Java or Python, and in future maybe some other language. So taking such a course would have 2 aims - get a good grounding in theory, and get some buzzwords on your resume / c.v too . People who don't understand the difference between CS and making RoR websites , sadly include many hiring managers, right? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it says something about the kinds of employers that look at people who have spent upwards of 100k to obtain a piece of paper that implies some arbitrary level of understanding in a given subject. The same level of understanding that I could get on my own for probably a few hundred bucks.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against higher education in theory. We've gotten to a point though were it's not about the education anymore, it's about the diploma. We enforce this idea in our high schools that you can't be successful without one and as such send our kids in droves to Colleges. We've artificially made the demand so high that these institutions can charge whatever they want and the kids are still going to attend and put themselves (or their parents) further and further in debt.

<comment><USER28> > says something about the kinds of employers that look at people who have > spent upwards of 100k to obtain a piece of paper

great you're an employer. for fun, let's say you're google, except you just ignore the 'education' line resumes

> The same level of understanding that I could get on my own for probably a > few hundred bucks

oops, now, you have 10k resumes of people claiming they have knowledge of computer science. but you only need to hire 10 people. what do you do?

<comment><USER27> Surely I could filter those resumes just like many employers currently do anyway. First of all we'd likely be talking about some type of entry level position as education plays less and less of a role when looking for experienced engineers. So I start with some type of test before I'll even look at your resume. In fact, if I'm an employer as popular as Google, I may have more than one level of tests to get through based on the job before I give any resume's a look. It's not hard to test for knowledge in Computer Science and I'm sure companies like Google already do to some extent anyhow.

Once you've done the initial filtering it's not too terribly hard to spot some potentially good candidates. Especially in the field of software development where it's easier than ever to build products and make them available for others to see and use.

I'm also not saying to ignore the education lines...I'm just suggesting that I don't like it as the main criteria for filtering out candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Let's face it, the best experts aren't the ones who knows all the answers, > but the ones who know where to look for the answers.

In many ways I feel like this is exactly what a degree in Computer Science or a related field gives you. Becoming an educated member of society isn't about learning the "correct" answers it is about learning to ask the right questions. It is about learning some questions outlive their answers. Universities enable students to glimpse the horizon of human understanding. A glimpse of the infinite unknown.

I understand people feel burned by: their experiences at university, hiring practices of corporations, poorly performing well credentialed hires, and the cost of education in general. However, let's not toss the baby out with the bath water here.

@brudgers said it best:

> Modern higher education has grown because it offers such a powerful solution > to many of the problems created by apprenticeship particularly lack of equal > opportunity, exploitation of apprentices, diversion of resources to training > and away from profit making activities, and long term commitments to > particular individuals who may not be suited for the profession.[1]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899059>

</comment><comment><USER30> I could not agree more, and although this applies to a broad range of industries it is extremely pervasive in software development (Related, I have heard a few computer science folks highlight that computer science as a major is not targeted at creating software developers - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884255>). True enough.

I stand by my sentiment on that post, that open source projects are a great 'apprenticeship' opportunity for those interested in computer science-like fields (software/web development and the like). That said, I have participated and watched at <http://opensource.com> and <http://teachingopensource.com> and come to realize just how difficult it is to get opensource into the educational system.

Knowing that difficulty, I might categorize experiences in the following best to worst order for new hires:

1\. Active open source contributor 2\. Active open source contributor w/ non- CS degree 3\. Active open source contributor w/ CS degree

Two additional notes:

1\. These are not meant to be absolutes, there are certainly individuals who fall into the above-mentioned category 3 that far surpass a category 1 candidate in a particular skill. I am merely suggesting that at a high level, the _likely_ skill-set available to a category 1 candidate is often more desirable than the _likely_ skill-set of a category 2 or 3 candidate. A lot more could be said here, but it is not the point of this post. 2\. While this most obviously applies to software development, it also has a natural home among technical document authors, marketing, customer relations, QA, and many other aspects of business that exist and flourish in open source communities.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've run into this exact issue.

However when you've got the managing parties who have degrees, they seek out justification for their expenditure, through self-seeking-self activities, consciously or subconsciously.

Additionally when grad students are willing to work, and have been trained in the shadow of those who are managing, all the gears in the system work as expected.

The issue comes into play when you've got kids like myself. We are ITCHING to learn, fail to see the benefit in 4 years of learning. And most of all:

We know the fastest way to the bleeding edge of research is NOT through the "tried-and-true" channels. It is most efficiently attained through jumping right into the fray and working with said researchers.

THIS is what will create that innovation that we seek. The degree system simply is the easy answer and a way to continue with the entrenched system, by providing slave labor.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm skeptical that this is going to happen on its own any time soon. While the legal frameworks are in place to prevent discrimination on sex/race/age/etc., I think we should put similar mechanisms in place for formal education. Especially when so many degrees are worthless as a measure of skill, so they've become irrelevant to the job at hand just like a person's race.

Make it so that employers can't ask for education, just like they can't ask for age, nor make a degree a job requirement. Of course when an applicant comes in for an interview, their race and relative age quickly becomes apparent, so it's not really a matter of information hiding as removing a more-and-more irrelevant filter. There's also nothing stopping an applicant from explicitly exposing their age/education/etc. on a resume or during the interview, and I'd still want to mention an MIT education if I had one. At the very least you would want to talk about school projects since you may not have any other experience, but that's up to the applicant. The question is "What things have you made? How did you do it?", not "Did you take a data structures course at an accredited university?" I'm not even sure it would create that much extra burden on HR departments since I hear they're already swamped with applicants matching degree requirements.

On the other hand, a free market approach may be to just leave it alone and let the tech companies that require CS degrees, or black people only, suffer to the companies that care about skill alone. I'm pretty okay with that too as a practical outcome. The question there becomes really philosophical and whether you want a big government to slim down in an inconsequential way or continue its historical path of trying to enforce certain moral directives on supposedly less enlightened people.

Downvoter(s): would appreciate a discussion on which idea(s) is/are most offensive to you. There's the additional filter of "this person made it through a 4 year program and may therefore be determined/have long-term goals/etc.", but really I don't find that a very compelling or useful filter for many jobs.

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem with this is that universities get away with screening processes that would be problematic at a company. For example, screening applicants based on SAT scores is a legal gray area for a lot of companies, but the college you went to is a proxy for your SAT score.

I'm convinced that more than half of the value of hiring someone from a top- tier college is who they admit, rather than what they teach.

Frightening true story: Someone I know at a government contractor startup was hiring a fortran programmer. As part of the interview test he was giving a simple fortran sritten test. The company lawyers found out and had him stop. Apparently tests that haven't been vetted for cultural/racial biases are a potential source of liability for government contractors.

<comment><USER24> So very true. At the company (very large defense contractor) we have to ask the same questions to every applicant. We can't ask follow on questions or deviate from the pre-defined question list. It was deemed legally unfair to ask different applicants different questions. That makes it harder and harder to distinguish the good from the bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> _I suspect there are countless CS graduates who can describe Binary Search theoretically but couldn't hand-roll a binary search implementation to save their lives_

If this is the case, and I doubt that it is very often, then your CS program has failed you miserably.

<comment><USER29> I believe Knuth says in his article on Binary Search in the art of computer programming that it took some ridiculous number of years from when Binary Search was first described to a implementation free of bugs.

I find it highly likely that the majority of _programmers_ would produce a buggy version of Binary Search on their first attempt. Why? History indicates programmers often make small mistakes even when writing simple algorithms. A survey of 26 papers on variations of binary search found that 6 of the papers had serious errors in the published algorithms.[1] 4 of the errors were "design" errors. That is the algorithm they designed had a fault. 2 were implementation errors (1 in assembly, 1 in cobol). All of the errors were published in a peer reviewed publication. Therefore, even peer review does not always spot errors in a "simple" binary search algorithm. Why would you expect recent graduates to do any better?

[1] <http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/2/154.abstract>

<comment><USER32> That's fascinating that less were implementation errors than design errors, though "the distribution of errors among families of algorithms is not uniform" accounts for that I guess. Though the paper is from 1983...

I scanned through the paper and found no explicit mention of the typical coding error caused by using M := (L+H)/2 instead of M := L + ((H - L) / 2) (though the paper interchanges both). So I suspect a re-analysis would find more coding errors than design errors in languages without arbitrary-sized integer auto-conversions. My reasoning for that conclusion is based on: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra- read-...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all- about-it-nearly.html)

Of course, given the stories of all the CS-degree wielding applicants who flat-out can't do FizzBuzz, and the amusing incorrect designs/implementations of commenters who scoff at the notion of not being able to do FizzBuzz and try to prove they can but fail, I was already inclined to believe there's a lot of incompetence to go around. It's not even necessarily a problem with the CS programs, but there is the danger of learning to recite an algorithm's steps word for word without knowing what it means or what it's useful for and fail with a live use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A "Fachinformatiker" (for some reason translated as specialist by google translate) you can become through an apprenticeship in Germany for some time (there where predecessors to it with different names)

see [http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=...](http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fde.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFachinformatiker)

oder auf deutsch <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachinformatiker>

so it is nothing new at all.

<comment><USER36> As a fellow german, but not a Fachinformatiker, I suspect colleagues without a degree still have a hard time to work their way up into more advanced management roles or just into the higher income brackets. I wish that would not be the case though.

What I find intriguing, although I'm surrounded by "Programmers", almost no CS! We have physicist, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, historians and english majors even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Most (if not a lot of) startups i've seen look at portfolio and experience more than do you have a degree, anyway. I'd rather hire an 18 year old who's got lots of great stuff on Github, internships and other experience.

Than someone who's just finished their Computer Science degree from a random uni, with no experience. Almost all of those I know going to university are just planning to do their course and apply for jobs afterwards, expecting their degree to mean instant an instant job.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have found firsthand that the lack of a college degree has increasingly become a scarlet letter in our society. It's not quite as bad for coders as it is in the rest of tech(the fact we have open source projects to prove we know what we're doing helps a lot) but it's still disproportionately difficult to get a job that pays a living wage unless you have the degree to "prove" you know what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Discarding the bachelor's degree as a job qualification would not be difficult. The solution is to substitute certification tests, which would provide evidence that the applicant has acquired the skills the employer needs."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28murray.html>

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm an self taught programmer from Germany and since leaving school I have been working as a free lancer.

Some time ago I decided that doing the free lance is a little to stressful for me (you know, customer acquisition, taxes, business overhaed) so I talked to some friends of mine who work as "normal" office developers. They all said something like "yeah, any company should be happy to have you working for them" and so I started so send out applications.

Guess what: The HR guys won't even look at my CV without any sort of official paper. Be it a CS diploma or a finished apprenticeship (yes, in Germany we have programmer apprenticeships) - without that not even an interview.

So what I'm thinking now about is doing the 3 year apprenticeships. Only to get a paper that says "yeah, that guy knows how to spell Java and knows what ISO norm 23542 is" (programmer apprenticeships isn't more than that in Germany). Oh happy time - where I will spend the next 3 years and "learn" nonsense I already know or I don't want to know. And my classmates will be ~17 years old.

</comment><comment><USER41> 'Education', K-12, college, and later, is pushed and shoved by several large influences.

As in this thread, two of the influences are (1) employers want some 'criteria', maybe even 'credentials', that will simplify selecting promising employees and (2) students seeking jobs want to keep down the costs in time, money, and effort to meet such 'criteria' or to get such 'credentials'.

Broadly there should be some 'market forces' that provide answers: (1) If the education employers want is expensive, then employers will have to pay employees enough to pay for the education; (2) if the education costs more than it is worth to the employers, then students and employers will make do with less such education; (3) if students don't come for the education, then some educational institutions will have to make some changes to offer the students more value for the costs.

Such 'market force' influences are easy to see, but there are some other large influences less easy to see:

In the US, the 900 pound gorilla is the interest of Congress and the US DoD in technology for US national security.

Such was not always the case: Indeed, during the rapid rise of engineering in the decades before WWII, schools of engineering actually concentrated on teaching engineering for students seeking careers in engineering! Amazing! Radical! Astounding!

Then we had WWII and radar, sonar, and the bomb, right, the atomic bomb, and Ike and other influentials concluded that "Never again will US academics be permitted to operate independently of the US military" or some such. Congress went along, that is, pulled out the US national checkbook, and started signing.

Then the top three dozen US research universities got an offer they couldn't refuse: Take the US Federal money for research in math, physical science, and engineering, with a tilt toward what might be useful for US national security, or cease to be a leading research university. They took the money!

Now, for such a university, for the money, the most important activity on campus is research, research, and research as in "How do I get a grant?", especially, now, from the NSF, DoE (that is, energy, not education!), or DARPA. Since then Congress has also provided money to the NIH and its grants -- you see, there are a lot of old people in Congress eager to see progress on some of the serious diseases of old age and ..., well you can see the connection!

Now for this 'research', there are some examples and, now, a 'model': The most influential example, for both science and US national security, is physics, especially as for the bomb, right, the atomic bomb and now, too, the hydrogen bomb. So, 'research' has a really severe case of 'physics envy', especially theoretical and mathematical physics envy. So, good 'research' is supposed to 'mathematize' a field.

So, at top three dozen US research universities, math, physical science, and engineering pursue research, research, and research with physics envy.

Yes, there was that report, yes, the David Report, that said that some of math was, well, not so applicable so soon and should, then, maybe get less money. That's why now at some of the research universities the math department has trouble keeping the lights on but is still working on the analytic-algebraic topology of the locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds (extra credit for the source!). Math is still the most respected field, but for some decades more applicable topics in math -- e.g., probability, stochastic processes, optimization, statistics, control theory, signal processing, numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational complexity, math for finance, math for theoretical physics -- has been done outside the 'pure' math departments.

Now it turns out that somehow some huge fraction of good students are really eager to get their bachelor's degrees from such research universities. So, the universities can be very 'selective' so that employers can get some of the 'criteria' they want just by a student being admitted to such a university!

But the students are being taught mostly just by professors interested mostly just in narrow, leading edge research to get grants. So, the education is not really about, say, engineering for engineering students who want jobs in engineering! Instead, in, say, computer science, the education might be closer to background for research in 'the fundamentals of computing', not that we really know what they are but some people would like to!

How to work through the security model of SQL Server for SQL Server installation, administration, and management? Professors can't get grants for mud wrestling with the messed up SQL Server security model or its just awful documentation and terrible problems with installation, management, and administration and, thus, mostly DON'T! So if someone actually wants actually to actually work with an actual, real installation of SQL Server for a real, actual, important, practical database application, in the real world, outside of academics, as part of a career, that can pay enough to buy a house and support a family, then the professors in a research university are not a very direct sources of such information!

Still good students like to go to research universities.

Then there is the money, that is, what the universities charge. So, tuition has gone up, way up, over the last few decades, up faster than even health care! Why? Well, there's a dirty little secret! What has gone up is the published, 'list price'! But there are also 'discounts', especially for good students, called 'scholarships'! So, if the student's father is wealthy and the student only so-so as a student, then go ahead and charge list price! While this student pays list price, they can also do well in their studies in beer and bed! But for a really good student, especially with poor parents, there are scholarships.

In the US, there are also many colleges and universities that don't try to be top research universities and concentrate on teaching.

And there are many community colleges where 'job training' is the goal and not a dirty word and where there are courses in auto repair, auto body repair, framing carpentry, finish carpentry, masonry, cosmetology, plumbing, electricity, HVAC, and, yes, computer programming and network management. Tuition is low; the courses are fully intended to be practical; the teachers are not researchers and are often practitioners.

For computer science, there is a secret: The more advanced parts of computer science have been heavily 'mathematized'. So, net, the best background for such material actually is not even in the computer science department but in the math department, especially a course in, say, abstract algebra.

Next, for a career, e.g., in computing, there is now a big, dark, ugly secret: 'Jobs' are no longer such a good idea! E.g., the Stanford AI course got interest from 50,000 students in 175 countries! So, generally, if take some material in college and look for a job, then here in the US, both you and your employer will be competing with thousands of eager people in 175 foreign countries!

Meanwhile here in the US the people buying houses and getting their children through college will, may I have the envelope, please? Yes, here it is: Often they will own their own Main Street business where they have a geographical barrier to entry and, thus, no competition more than, say, 100 miles away. In particular they will have no competition from anyone in any of those 175 foreign countries.

So, what future for computing in the US? Broadly, gotta do something new, out there, on the leading edge in at least some respect, something entrepreneurial, something you can't get hired for because the guy hiring doesn't understand that new thing yet. So, have to be an entrepreneur. For that, something in advanced computing might help. Then, just getting 'skills' with, say, Linux, C++, Java, Python, MySQL, SQL Server, Flash, HTML5, etc. is 'routine', maybe at some point necessary but not sufficient.

Just what should such new stuff be and just how to get help from a research university? No one really knows! Welcome to the challenge of the future!</comment>


Chinese plan for "traffic-straddling bus" ended after 32 people were arrested - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/world/asia/china-bus-road-straddling.html <comment><USER2> Their only demo went back and forth for 200 meters, and nothing happened ever after. SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM, there is no way for the bus to turn except for tearing down infrastructure and using 10 lanes. The creators made a fund out of the project(promised 12% annualized return) that attracted a lot of small investors and scammed them out of their money.

<comment><USER3> That does not actually kill the concept as long as you treat it like an above ground subway system. The real limitation is the buses can't cross 4 way intersections while cars are blocking their path and they can't travel around obstructions.

Another options is you placed them on slightly elevated tracks and add bridges over intersections, the larger problem is they need a lot of space above them which means overpasses etc could limit placement without major investments and it really just reinvents the monorail concept.

So, IMO it's unlikely to work in most cities, but there are a lot of city's and you only need a few. Thus, it probably did not start as a scam even if evolved into it.

<comment><USER4> All real-world above ground light rail transit systems are able to turn and don't require gigantic roads.

<comment><USER3> These could turn much like how trains turn, they are simply stuck following the same road. Granted, they can't do a sharp turn with cars under them.

<comment><USER4> Light rail is able to make 90-degree turns at intersections. Being stuck following the same road is a pretty major problem.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is a good solution, but _it 's not as bad as your suggesting._

Again, these could be built to spin in place they simply can't turn sharply when cars are under them. So, they could do a 90 degree turn as long as they had a separate turn signal or bridge over traffic to do so.

However, even if they where limited to nearly strait lines many city's like NYC for example have a lot of strait lines.

<comment><USER4> Their concept looks like a multi-car train, not a single vehicle. Even as a single vehicle, I don't see how it could turn in place without the wheels being able to turn 90 degrees (sounds hard and expensive, but maybe I'm overestimating it) or a rotating ring built into the intersection.

<comment><USER3> Ahh, ok here is what your missing. There is no axle between the wheels so they could turn them independently. EX: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IpHQRKheac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IpHQRKheac) You can do something similar whenever you have independent motors for each wheel. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJUogOpfcp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJUogOpfcp8) But, even without that you can do something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrasteer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrasteer)

So, yea it would be cheaper to build something that can't turn, but turning radius is simply an engineering trade-off.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure it's possible, but it seems impractical. In any case, the part where they run as multi-car trains (as seen in the video in this article, for example) seems to be the more significant problem for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If nothing else, this always seemed like utter _madness_ from a safety perspective.

<comment> maze-le I bet people had the same thing to say about cars in the early 20th century (not without some justification though).

<comment><USER6> Still have them today... Driving home last night, I tried to imagine how many of the people next to me on the road were drunk while riding their 2 ton steel horses home.

<comment><USER5> As a Brit, the cavalier attitude to drink-driving in the USA never ceased to amaze me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to to compare the comments now versus then

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675)

</comment><comment><USER8> They actually built a prototype? Renders of that thing have been around for years. I'd wondered if the track system would be designed into one of China's new cities. It would have been the largest mobile passenger vehicle since the German Imperial Gauge Railway.[1]

The CGI videos of it cornering show the sections bending, which only works in CGI.[2][3]

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

[2] [https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131](https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131) [3] [https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138](https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138)

</comment><comment><USER9> BTW this isn't the original headline (the error in the rewrite caused me to click on the title).

NYT would have written this in the indefinite present: "Chinese plan for "traffic-straddling bus" ends with 32 arrests." Except it didn't end, and the NYT headline says so.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean? It ended a while ago.

<comment><USER9> Not sure what you mean. Either the project is effectively dead, or ended, after the arrests, or its technically continuing though for all intents and purposes is over. Or it ended a while ago and that's why it's a scam?

The article as up right now has a title that says it's over, but did not have the same headline when I added my comment :-(. Also says it's effectively over as a result of the arrests which it didn't before. Unfortunately the NYT does not have a policy of always indicating edits. So this may have made my comment look odd.

However FWIW the NYT typically won't use the past tense, and in particular the perfect, for topics which are ongoing. US Civil war? Sure. Bernie Madoff? Possibly, possibly not, depending. People having just been arrested gets a present, or at best imperfect tense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bicycle sharing companies are next I guess, give it a year or two.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g)

<comment><USER12> What worries me about the bike shares is they all take a 100-200 rmb refundable deposit from each user. That's an unsecured interest free "crowdsourced" loan! If the company collapses, it's riders' deposits that'll go down the toilet.

<comment><USER13> There was an article in chinadaily a while back in how the government was forcing the bike companies to deposit these deposits in a special account. So it might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't expect to get my deposit back either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A tram would be much safer and probably cause less disruption.

<comment><USER15> A "tram" is also a proven technology that doesn't get investors.

A traffic straddling bus is one of those "so crazy it just might work" ideas that gets funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Intersections and cars under the bus wanting to turn left or right would be interesting. Dedicated turn lanes helps a little, but you would have to trail or lead the bus to see them coming soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER17> From the photos it looks like this thing runs on tracks. OK, this concept was invented a century ago in cities like Chicago, it's called an Elevated Train.

</comment><comment><USER18> Too bad, I was picturing this as another way for Amazon to deliver packages or perhaps snacks to people (while waiting in traffic)

</comment><comment><USER19> why don't we have low altitude blimps? ones that pick up a car and drop it off between the car's destination and the next customer? or pull it by cable using a filtering bike of sorts?

</comment><comment><USER20> If this was a scam... what does that make the hyperloop?

</comment><comment><USER21> still seems a decent idea to me. maybe something went wrong in the execution here, but it could be a solution for densely packed historical urban centers that do not wish to tear down too many buildings.

</comment><comment><USER22> "China's Vision", I mean, come on. There seems to be some opinion leaking into the title.

<comment><USER23> It was just the vision of a bunch of hustler/entrepreneurs. It seemed too easy to hit with large vehicles and a death trap for vehicles underneath it.

An elevated rail system seemed so much easier and without the difficulties that this introduced.

But an elevated rail system required significantly more investment thus it had to be city sanctioned in a large way, rather than the minimal investments this required.

<comment><USER24> I imagine the turning radius for this thing is significant enough that you'd have to tear out existing intersections and even push the buildings back from where they exist now.

Just so it can turn. I think in this specific comparison elevated light rail would be significantly less-disruptive and cheaper too.

<comment><USER25> They just need to install a giant turntable at every intersection!

<comment><USER26> It would be better if they installed two turntables and a microphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just ban cars. It's not that hard. We banned horses, why not cars?

<comment><USER28> I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean?

Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Maybe that's the reason why cars are not banned.

<comment><USER29> >I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean? > >Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Cars do it, but instead of it being a hard to clean mass, it's a nearly- impossible-to-clean toxic gas that kills thousands of people every year.

<comment><USER28> I actually agree with what you said.

What I mean is that the "nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas" is also "nearly-impossible-to-see" when in the air.

See, that's why they're not banned, because people "Don't see" the problem.

If cars needs to take a sold mass smelly hot dump every few miles too, they were long banned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Says Firefox Is For Regular Users, Not Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/06/27/firefox-not-enterprise/

<comment><USER2> The debate reminds me of some of the angst the Perl community went through over what was known as the "DarkPAN problem" (i.e. all the hidden enterprise code that might get broken by new releases of Perl).

A lot of the corporate argument comes down to "someone should do this for me for free." I'd say this could be a great business opportunity for someone, if not for that pesky "for free" part.

[Edited to add the last sentence]</comment>


AT&T Stops taking iPhone 4 Pre-Orders - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-06-16-iphone16_ST_N.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I had so many troubles yesterday with placing my order.

Today, I see my bank account has been debited the wrong amount from the invoice. I called AT&T and they say not to worry about it, they didn't communicate the order total properly.....

When you take way more money than you invoice, I see a problem in that...They offered me a $29 credit after activation....

<comment><USER2> The AT&T site wasn't calculating tax yesterday or the extra "phone tax" if you're in CA. You are probably being charged up to $100 more than what they said the total was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the reports are true, and iPhone 4 has generated over 10 times the pre- orders that 3GS did, then I don't think you can fault AT&T or Apple a whole lot for the screw-ups yesterday, or for the lack of inventory (the supposed AT&T data exposure excepted). I would have predicted 2, maybe 2.5 times, but 1000%? That's unheard of.

</comment><comment><USER4> _AT &T suspended iPhone 4 pre-orders Wednesday after demand overwhelmed inventory._

Really? Are they incapable of predicting demand after four versions of the phone, or are they unable to manufacture enough even though they knew demand would be high?

Or are they just artificially limiting supply?

<comment><USER5> The last option seems the most likely.

<comment><USER6> Why?

<comment><USER5> The cellular/mobile phone industry in the US is probably THE worst when it comes to treating customers like customers, instead of assets. When you actually value customers through a four letter acronym (look it up/do the research if you're unfamiliar with ARPU), it's not entirely unlikely that there are things in motion behind the scenes to drive up demand artificially, while on the books companies like AT&T and Verizon (the latter of which has a well documented history of locking built-in features out of phones in order to extract a premium fee from their use by customers-see below) look squeaky clean.

\-----

[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Verizon- Wireles...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Verizon-Wireless- Users-Sue-Over-Disabled-Bluetooth-Features/)

[http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/verizon-locks- ou...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/verizon-locks-out-spectrum- features-444)

[http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161019/verizon...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161019/verizon_locks_out_gps_competition_customers_complain.html)

[http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/want-droid-work-e- mail-i...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/want-droid-work-e-mail-itll- cost-you-extra-575)

<http://www.pencomputing.com/wireless/motorolav710.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope Apple is getting fistfuls of cash from AT&T.

From the failed WWDC demo (couldn't activate cell data) to the leaked iPad emails to the iPhone preorder, I can't imagine Jobs + co are too pleased with the negative brand impact AT&T is bringing to Apple.

<comment><USER8> I thought the WWDC demo failed because they couldn't get on the WiFi, not on the 3G. I might be wrong though.

<comment><USER7> No, you're right -- they were trying to use WiFi, but when he switched to the backup phone, there was an error displayed about not being able to activate the cellular data. The audience laughed, Jobs brushed it off, and the demo went on.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried all day yesterday to order. After maybe 30 attempts at going through the buy process on Apple's site, I got to the final page of it and it said it had to ship to my AT&T billing address. Which happens to be wrong now. For the rest of the day I tried to log into AT&T's site to change it. I was never able to. Now trying to log in on it gives me a 404.

I'm an app developer, and I need the phone for testing as soon as possible.

Update. I got one ordered. It will arrive by July 19. I predict we'll get deluged with negative reviews.

<comment><USER10> It sucks that Apple's secrecy makes it difficult for legit third-party developers to have access to proper testing hardware and infrastructure so their apps, which Apple touts as one of the reasons to have an iPhone, are ready to go on the day of release.

<comment><USER9> We've got it working in the simulator, but the device is always different. For instance, before the iPad there were four possible device orientations. Landscape left and right, and upright left and right. They added two, face down and face up. So any code that if blocked between the original four broke. A lot of apps were thrown by that when they got the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really bothersome that so many people I know were unable to upgrade their older phones yesterday. Now they'll have to wait for (presumably) months, while the fanboy wankers who already have the latest phones pay full price to be the first guy in their neighborhood bar to stare at a retina display, instead of talking to women.

I know this will never happen, but it would be a thoughtful gesture toward customer loyalty if AT&T were to give priority access to the latest hardware by contract age, instead of just creating a free-for-all scramble on pre- registration day.</comment>


Got a sweet tooth? Your gut bacteria are asking for some sugar - <AUTHOR> https://massivesci.com/notes/gut-brain-axis-sugar-microbiome/ <comment><USER2> I know fruit contain still a bunch of sugar, but a bunch of fibers and a treasure of nutriments

If only more kids were raised with more fruit and vegetable in mind than processed products.

What's a better treat than an apple, an orange, a persimmon, fig, kiwi (tip: don't hesitate to eat them with the skin, above all if they are organic), and spinach, salad and all sort of herbs, or even a raw scallion or leek for the adventurous?

<comment><USER3> >What's a better treat than an apple, an orange, a persimmon, fig, kiwi...?

If 'better' refers to taste, the answer is simple: an Oreo.

<comment><USER4> For someone who really likes sweet chocolate etc, an Oreo is too vulgar even too me. I feel sick to my stomach. Powdery sugar with something brown in it.

<comment><USER5> Are there different Oeros? What you described doesn't seem to fit the description of a the North American Oreo. It's artificial sweetened shortening wedged between two chocolaty "wafers". No powdery sugar involved.

<comment><USER6> > _Are there different Oreos?_

In fact... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oreo_varieties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oreo_varieties)

But I suspect they are describing the texture of the classic wafer when chewed, which does seem like an apt description.

<comment><USER5> Oh yeah there's a ton of varieties, but I was wondering if there was a regional thing here where the products are totally different even with the same name, like chips.

<comment><USER4> No I mean the classic (I assume) dark wafer with white shortening in it. Now I also remembered how vile the white stuff is too - it kind of sticks to your upper palate.

There are sugar overloaded competitors [0], which are pretty shameless too. But at least they taste like an honest lot of sugar, flavouring, fat and flour.

I feel bad for kids getting fat on Oreos. If you get fat on real sweets, at least you taste something decent in the process. Oreos are vile. I have given them the benefit of a doubt!

I have even tried putting them in ice cream, thinking maybe they are just too sweet, and that their sweetness will fit better together with something else not as _intensely_ sweet. But no, the ice cream just diluted the Oreo vile- ness. The perverted, gone-one-step-too-far industrial wiff of Cthulhu was still in there, carefully masking the fun from each spoonful of icecream.

Vile.

0: [https://www.goteborgskex.se/products/](https://www.goteborgskex.se/products/)

<comment><USER5> That's a lot of vitriol for a tasty vegan snack.

<comment><USER4> Uranium, selected from the finest natural ore, carefully enriched, is vegan too. :)

<comment><USER5> Harder to chew though.

<comment><USER6> Just grind it fine enough and mix it with vegetable shortening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > One of the key things in the study is that all of the action is happening > away from the tongue. This shows that there are circuits inducing our love > for sugar, beyond our love for sweet tastes. _This also helps explain why > artificial sweeteners have not changed our consumption of sugar,_ since they > fail to activate this new gut-brain circuit.

Could this be (yet) another explanation of why people who use artificial sweeteners don't control their weight or real sugar intake in the long run? Developing habits is quite hard for many people. Any advancement in handling sugar addiction (without other negative side effects) could prove to be a good thing for all humans (except the ones running corporations whose purpose is to create, maintain and increase such addictions).

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe. Or maybe you're just bored and looking for a distraction. I'm certainly guilty of that.

HN + Ice Cream is 200% more interesting than HN without Ice Cream.

When you are craving something, ask yourself: "Would I eat boiled tilapia because I'm so hungry?"

If the answer is no, you're not hungry. Just bored, or thinking of food. Reductionist, but it works for me.

Writing it down _before_ giving in to your craving also helps immensely. Shameless plug, I do run a nutrition tracking company at [https://www.joyapp.com](https://www.joyapp.com). But even a handwritten log will help.

<comment><USER9> I've found I crave food for the reduction in anxiety. Fasting makes me feel panicked and anxious. (Like I need to get outside and chase down something to eat RIGHT AWAY.) Eating relieves that anxious feeling. It's not true hunger, just pain and suffering. Exercise and controlled breathing help a little. But mostly just make the effects happen faster.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like withdrawal (sugar).

See: white bread intake, sugar intake.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, seems to not be a problem after 2 days of fasting. I kind of focus on protein and fat before a fast to try and get there a little earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does this article talk about _bacteria_?

I don't see any mention of bacteria in the original article [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2199-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2199-7) Instead, if I understand it correctly, it seems to say that it's certain intestinal cells (not bacteria) that sense sugar. Do I misunderstand, or is the news article wrong?

<comment><USER12> The Nature article's abstract says:

> _neurons in the vagal ganglia and brainstem are activated via the gut–brain > axis to create preference for sugar_

Wikipedia says:

> _Broadly defined, the gut–brain axis includes the central nervous system, > neuroendocrine and neuroimmune systems, including the > hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis), sympathetic and > parasympathetic arms of the autonomic nervous system, including the enteric > nervous system and the vagus nerve, and the gut microbiota._ [1]

Having access to only the article's abstract, it's hard to know how or if the microbiota (bacteria, etc.) are involved in nerve activation. E.g., are the neurons activated directly by glucose, or are they activated by some chemical that the bacteria produce in the presence or absense of glucose?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've had this sticky note on my monitor for 2 years that says 'what do my intestines want for lunch'

I'm very one dimensional and being in opposition of something trying to control me has helped me get much more in shape this decade. I basically got fit because of a personality flaw but I am happy with the results

<comment><USER14> Can you elaborate on how reminding yourself of this has changed your behaviour? How do you action this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rule of thumb: If you don't think carrots taste sweet, you're eating too much sugar.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2199-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2199-7)

"...these findings reveal a gut-to-brain post-ingestive sugar-sensing pathway critical for the development of sugar preference. In addition, they explain the neural basis for differences in the behavioral effects of sweeteners versus sugar, and uncover an essential circuit underlying the highly appetitive effects of sugar."

</comment><comment><USER17> The article doesn't mention whether giving those bacteria the sugar they want is a _good_ thing. I am not an expert by any means but I have researched this extensively as a lay-person. I would be very concerned that this sugar is feeding the wrong kind of bacteria (or fungus) and would ultimately be harmful. That's before you consider the negative effects of consuming sugar.

</comment><comment><USER18> > These neurons are stimulated in response to sugar but not artificial > sweeteners

That kind of sucks for those who reach for e.g. stevia to add to their tea when feeling the sweet tooth?

> Brain stem and vagal ganglia

So would it be appropriate to guess that this sugar benefit has something to do with the brain processing more primal pressures, like really harsh treatment by a boss at work?

</comment><comment><USER19> "The scientists directly injected either glucose or an artificial sweetener to the guts of mice, and saw an activation of different regions of the brain when glucose was present, but not with the artificial sweetener. "

How do they directly inject?

<comment><USER20> In humans this would typically be an oral or naseo-gastric tube that runs down to the stomach, effectively bypassing the mouth.

Of course you could use a needle but that's generally rare.

Not sure what is considered standard for mice.

<comment><USER21> Maybe an artificial, intentional fistula like they do with cows to study and monitor their digestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _they genetically silenced that specific brain region, which completely took > away the mice's preference for sugar_

Hopefully it will not come to that in humans and someone finds a way to "re- educate" gut bacteria :)

<comment><USER23> It's easy to re-educate them with fasting.

<comment><USER7> That mostly works if one is able to stay away from other humans and social events forever. For the rest, there are ditches everywhere to fall into.

<comment><USER24> Self-discipline. Impulses and social pressure are more like brightly lit billboards than ditches. You don't have to fall for them.

<comment><USER23> I think our current culture over-emphasizes "self-discipline" or "willpower" and doesn't admit the influence of our environment enough.

Personally, as a nearly-life-long sugar junkie, I know that if I'm around a pile of cookies, it is difficult to resist, and will wear me down until I eat one, and then another, and then another...

On the other hand, if there is no pile of cookies, there's no temptation or possibility of that happening.

I have had much more success with adjusting my environment than with trying to exercise willpower.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Complex impedance matching using scalar measurements, math and resistors - <AUTHOR> https://mightydevices.com/index.php/2019/08/complex-impedance-matching-using-scalar-measurements-math-and-resistors/ <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"Now let's divide by |Γ|^2−1:

a^2+2aRs|Γ|^2+1|Γ|^2−1+b^2=−Rs^2

This is somewhat similar to the circle equation in form of:

x^2+2xp+y^2=r^2"

(Note, cutting and pasting a math equation into text loses several important details -- so this excerpt is a placeholder into the web page only... for the correct equation, properly formatted, see the web page...)</comment>


Apple debuts 'Switch' - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/switch/ <comment><USER2> This take comparison charts to a whole new level. I wonder if this was meant for iOS users to try and persuade their friends to switch.

I don't see it being so persuasive standalone.</comment>


Google sampled my voice and all I got was this lousy T-shirt - <AUTHOR> http://friism.com/google-sampled-my-voice-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-t-shirt

<comment><USER2> Circa 1993 the speech recognition team at Apple was giving out T-shirts to their volunteers. On the front, there was a nice scene of an island lagoon with palm trees. The text read, "I helped Apple recognize speech."

The back showed the same scene, but with trash strewn about. The caption: "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach."

<http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/W7XJhGme1hC7fNct3Lpepg></comment>


Ask HN: What are some fundamental books in math/sciences/art/social sciences? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for some suggestions around the fundamental and absolute basic books that one can refer to for elementary to pre-univ education reference. I'm specifically looking for math/science/social sciences/literature and language (English)/art - the usual curriculum in schools. These could be ideally one book like (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Practical-Reality/dp/0935218084) or a handful. I'm not looking to be an expert - just looking to refresh myself in the absolute fundamentals of the various fields. I didn't do my schooling in the US but I'd love to read these to (re)acquaint myself. <comment><USER2> The book you linked to is really cool. I like it.

Math alone is GIGANTIFIC! To working mathematicians pre-university math is not fundamental. I hate saying this, but high school math is not even considered "actual" math. Even undergrad curriculum is just a sampling of pieces and bits of what's to come in grad school where you get to look at things a bit deeper. But even after grad school it's still very hard to say you know all the fundamentals of math. You might come out a capable differential geometer (after grad school), but that doesn't mean you'd know the, uh, the "fundamentals" of, say, number theory past the undergrad level (which, frankly, is not enough to say you know the fundamentals of the subject).

That said, not all is lost. All aspiring mathematicians must start somewhere. You can start here [0]

[0] BOOK OF PROOF by Richard Hammach.

[https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/](https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/)

Prerequisite for reading [0] is math at the level of, say, 7th-grade. Basically, all you need to know is some elementary algebra. The material in [0] is what all math people must know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Art: Gardner's "Art Through the Ages" as an overview in terms of art history. If you are looking for technique I couldn't recommend just one.

Political Science is tough, because there are plenty of decent primers, but there are enough sub-specialties that they each have their own pillars. Conversely, you can go for a lot of the 'classics' (e.g. Plato's "Republic", Hobbe's "Leviathan", Locke's "Two Treatises" etc)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using openstax[1] to learn math prerequisites for a CS program. They have peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks[2] on many college courses.

[1] [https://openstax.org/](https://openstax.org/)

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

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a pretty broad request. esp. not knowing you well enough to be able to tell what level you can handle/want. I suggest going to the local library and skimming the collections. If you have a half-decent local library they'll have a half decent collection in each of these fields.

</comment><comment><USER6> For anyone interested in psychology, reading _The Denial of Death_ by Ernest Becker is a good introduction to many fundamental ideas of psychology and an overview of the problems that consciousness gives us and how humans handle those problems.</comment>


Announcing Linode Block Storage Volumes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.linode.com/2018/02/01/announcing-linode-block-storage-volumes/ <comment><USER2> Speaking as Linode user with all my eggs in their basket: I'm sad that they are falling so much behind other players like DigitalOcean. I'm looking more and more to DO these days just because of the speed they are able to deliver new features.

That being said this is a great addition! Looking forward to trying it out when it reaches my datacenter. And I'm also looking forward to see what their next big project will be.

<comment><USER3> Why does block storage seem to take so long for companies to implement? DigitalOcean only implemented it in the past year, when they had hundreds of employees. It seems like it would be a priority feature, so I imagine a sizable team was working on it. Why did it take so long for digitalocean, and now Linode, to implement block storage? Are there some inherently architecture-dependenent complexities that render it a deceivingly difficult project to implement?

<comment><USER4> I was the Engineering Manager for the Storage team at DigitalOcean that took the Block Storage project from conception to launch (though I no longer work there), so I might be able to shed some light.

In general, it's really hard to do at-scale network-backed storage - by the time your applications get access to the file system, there are a myriad of abstractions that aren't always receiptive to the idea of the network "going away", or even a modicum of lag. On top of that, in order for it to be profitable, you need to work at a massively-shared scale. This means expensive SSDs, servers and switches that require a lot of capex and no guaranteed revenue because it's a new product. For us, this meant building entirely new network architecture in some places to allow the massive amount of data being shared in the storage cluster and across VMs to not overwhelm existing traffic, etc.

In order to create the reliability in network and persistency that your normal application desires, you need extremely strong consistency and low latency. Every replication strategy (replication and erasure coding) requires each write to touch more than one SSD/HDD/NVMe device in order to acknowledge the write, and that all needs to happen in a shared system with an immense amount of contention, every time.

It takes a while because you only get one opportunity to get all of this right - it's one thing if the network has a few more blips in a month, or if there's a bit more CPU contention than you'd like, but you absolutely can't lose peoples' data.

I can understand why companies are so hesitant to do this - there may be technical debt in their software/network stack that makes it very difficult, or they may not want to proceed unless they have the right set of experts working on the project.

<comment><USER5> How do you like Ceph generally as a technology, rest of the implementation aside, thoughts on Ceph?

<comment><USER6> Not the OP, but I've been running production Ceph clusters for the past 4.5 years at two different fortune-50 companies.

We've had very good success with Ceph for block storage and a fairly rough time with it for object storage. We're currently doing our best to try to improve it (both our own upstream contributions and collaborating with RedHat).

From a technology standpoint, I think it is very interesting and for the most part has a lot of very good engineering. However, it is fairly complex and even today it's very easy to have a hard time with it when starting out. You really need to pay attention to every detail and your hardware selection is extremely important.

It is extremely resilient, and goes to great lengths to preserve your data. Ceph can be performant, however that requires very good hardware and network.

My experience is limited up to the Jewel release (we haven't upgraded to Luminous and we are not planning on using BlueStore anytime soon).

<comment><USER7> > However, it is fairly complex and even today it's very easy to have a hard > time with it when starting out.

Sage's talk at LCA covered the work they're doing here; [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrStE7XSKFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrStE7XSKFE)

But yes, at small scale Gluster is still a lot easier to deploy and run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how difficult it would be to build an S3 like interface on top of this so you can get a coarse pay-for-what-you-use, avoid downtime, but also have a much larger capacity than the max of 10TB for one drive.

You might be able to build this on top of minio. Start with, say, 4 1GB linodes (smallest), with 8 volumes each (the max) of the smallest volume size of 10GB, and a somewhat low 1:3 parity in minio (redundancy is mostly handled by linode replication). That would be 320GB * $0.10 + 4 * $5 = $52/mo to start with. After some utilization threshold, incrementally resize all drives to grow dynamically, the parity drives would fill in while a drive is offline & resizing. The parity is also enough to resize the linodes one at a time too if you need to up their compute capacity. This system could grow up to 320 TB raw / 240TB accessible.

The last I poked around at this idea when linode block storage was introduced, this "should" work with minio, but I got the impression they didn't really consider this kind of use case.

<comment><USER9> Depends on how many 9s you want in your reliability. The first couple aren't too bad, gets harder after that.

<comment><USER8> If you run it at a higher level of abstraction than linode volumes with parity and can tolerate up to 8 drives / 1 server going down at once (like this setup on minio should get you), that would take you a long ways towards adding one or two 9's.

High availability is just one S3 feature though. Other important features are paying for what you use, and effectively unlimited storage growth (you will probably revisit this before you hit $32k/mo the 320TB would cost). Even if this didn't add reliability, those other features still have utility above the raw Block Storage Volumes provided by linode here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish these block storage services gave you some idea of failure rate/durability and availability. Amazon publishes some rough volume loss rates but not even Google tells you what kind of durability to expect out of a persistent volume. They all say they are tri-replicated, which semi-implies highly durable storage. What about availability?

Lastly, I'd love to know if DO/Linode have custom rolled their solution or are using Ceph or something similar. Not that I don't trust them, but they aren't recruiting the same engineers as Google.

<comment><USER11> Since they just started offering it, Linode probably doesn't have accurate statistics to share, and most people can't correctly interpret very small probabilities anyway. They'd probably be better off saying something like "you should assume that each volume will fail at some point in its life".

<comment><USER10> They have been offering it since June, FWIW. And it is worth knowing the order of magnitude of expected failure rates compared to just running against the local SSD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know that DigitalOcean uses Ceph under the hood. Does anyone know what Linode is using?

<comment><USER12> We are leveraging Ceph for our Block Storage solution.</comment></comment>


An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://sebastianruder.com/optimizing-gradient-descent/ <comment><USER2> Why are algorithms other than gradient descent (e.g., bfgs, newton's, conjugate gradient, etc.) always seemingly absent from discussions on fitting neural nets? Are there not batch / stochastic versions of these methods? Is it simply ease of understanding / implementation? I seem to only ever see "gradient descent + tricks", and I wonder what the reason for this is.

<comment><USER3> Stochastic gradient descent methods are the most-used for neural net fitting, so the most discussed.

However, the methods you mention are sometimes used too. For the closest thing to Newton's method applied to neural nets, search for "Hessian-free optimization". Hacky minibatch updates based on batch methods have been tried, and can work ok [http://ai.stanford.edu/~quocle/LeNgiCoaLahProNg11.pdf](http://ai.stanford.edu/~quocle/LeNgiCoaLahProNg11.pdf) . Any method could also potentially be used with growing batch sizes, [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4308-statistical-tests-for- opti...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4308-statistical-tests-for-optimization- efficiency)

Minibatches are good for parallelizing computation, especially on GPUs. And batch methods can be less of a fiddle to tune. So the alternatives you mention are popular in some commercial settings, for cost functions with nasty curvature, or to make it easier to write fast code. I guess most people's experience is that the dead simple SGD methods often work well though, and that's why they keep returning to them.

<comment><USER4> I wonder what the quasi Newton methods would look like if adapted to this framework

<comment><USER3> BFGS is an example of a quasi-Newton method. L-BFGS is the popular "low- memory" variant. Any such method can be used with the two references I gave above. One could also attempt to approximate each of its internal computations to within some tolerance with minibatches. Work in that sort of direction here: [https://ei.is.tuebingen.mpg.de/publications/mahhen2015](https://ei.is.tuebingen.mpg.de/publications/mahhen2015)

Perhaps surprisingly, given how fundamental optimization is to so many fields, there isn't consensus on what's best. And as I previously hinted above, the answer may change with the hardware landscape.

<comment><USER5> > Perhaps surprisingly, given how fundamental optimization is to so many > fields, there isn't consensus on what's best. And as I previously hinted > above, the answer may change with the hardware landscape.

Not entirely to your point, but related, my understanding is that is no best at everything: methods that work well in one field won't necessarily work in others. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)

<comment><USER3> I agree. But part of it is sociology: people use what their friends use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There were some standard, old techniques I didn't see.

For the set of real numbers R, a positive integer n, and a function f: R^n --> R, we seek x in R^n to minimize f(x). Let z in R^n denote the value of x that minimizes f(x).

Borrowing from D. Knuth's mathematical typesetting system TeX, we let x_i denote component i of x. More generally we use the underscore to denote subscript.

Assume that function f is differentiable and let D_x f(x) be the derivative, that is, the gradient, that is, the vector where component i is the partial derivative if f with respect to component i of x.

(1) Line search. Suppose we have iterations j = 1, 2, ... where x^j is our jth estimate of z.

Then, for positive real number s, our _step size_ , we can the usual gradient descent is

x^{j + 1} = x^j - s D_x f(x^j)

Well, with this approach, it need not be that

f(x^{j + 1}) < f(x^j)

So, an improvement is, for each iteration j, to do a _line search_ to find the set size s. If f is convex, then there is a simple, standard approach to how to adjust s on this like search.

(2) Conjugate Gradients. Gradient descent is vulnerable to a lot of movement in directions that are nearly orthogonal to the best direction. The classic technique _conjugate gradients_ after n iterations improves this situation.

(3) Newton Iteration. The simple Newton iteration for, say, square root generalizes to a function of n variables but, of course, requires finding second derivatives of f.

(4) Quasi-Newton. Look up quasi-Newton that estimates the second derivatives of Newton iteration from the gradients from the iterations.

</comment><comment><USER3> For a mathy academic survey of gradient descent methods (from this month, June 2016), I recommend: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04838](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04838)

(It was submitted by someone else a few days ago, but saw no traction.)

<comment><USER7> If I understand HN policy correctly, interesting links maybe reposted, which I know did. Hopefully, it will get some traction now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also: ftp://ftp.sas.com/pub/neural/kangaroos.txt (less mathematics, more kangaroos).

<comment><USER9> Fun read. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice content introduction but painful for me to read with the light grey letters on the white background.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and this contrast fails WCAG AAA validation. That's a harmful fashion currently with gray texts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who is trying to educate himself on concepts in machine learning, I appreciated the 101 overview on gradient descent optimizations. I love how most of the approaches to these optimizations are relatively straightforward, conceptually, to understand, even if their implementations and rigorous proofs will require more work to get through.

</comment><comment><USER13> I came across this yesterday - proposing non-negative matrix factorisation as an alternative to backpropagation

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.04639v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.04639v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a theorie that submissions like this get to the frontpage because there are a lot of procrastinators who will always upvote to save for later reading, and they never actually read the articles so they keep saving them. I admit I do.</comment>