Textbook manifesto (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://greenteapress.com/wp/textbook-manifesto/ <comment><USER2> In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally, a particular textbook was "recommended", but there would always be ample library copies available, and often you wouldn't _really_ need it. I'd have about 4-6 courses per semester, so I'd spend maybe 25-30 EUR on our own textbooks. Occasionally I'd have to shell out for a traditional textbook, and that would utterly dominate that semester's materials budget.

The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

<comment><USER3> As a fellow European, my experience is similar (though our prices were higher but still substantially lower than the big-name commercial publishers.), but I suspect it would never fly in the US (communism, boo!).

<comment><USER4> Having been a US citizen for all of my 60 years, and often wondering "why things so f __ked up? ", I've come to understand or believe this about the US:

If it makes money, it's good, regardless of whether it's good or bad for people or the environment. Once something is making money, it becomes a god- given right (cheap labor, insurance companies as health-care middlemen, etc).

If you propose something that inhibits the above, you will be opposed with all available resources by elected members of government at every level. That _people_ are the ones suffering and electing is a mystery that I don't think I have enough remaining years to understand.

<comment><USER5> Being opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected.

Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?

<comment><USER6> Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

<comment><USER7> _Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs._

1) A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work: [https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working- poor/2014/home.htm](https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working- poor/2014/home.htm)

2) Reducing poverty can work by either raising the baseline (stronger social safety net, maybe higher minimum wage, better overall vocational education, etc) or by moving individuals into other economic classes (getting people (better) jobs). I think raising the baseline is probably a better approach, since it works by not leaving people behind.

<comment><USER8> "A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work"

This sentence is not wrong but a casual reading of it would nearly always give the wrong impression. Herein "poor people" is defined as the people below the federal poverty limit. For one person this is around 12000 dollars.

A more common sense colloquial definition of poor is those barely scraping by based on the cost of living in their area of residence. In most of those considered poor by that broader definition someone in the household is working. Remember that not all families have both partners working.

Your perhaps too brief post would inspire people to think that most people by the common sense definition of poor are in fact unemployed which is not correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented.

> If you can't find one, write one. It's not that hard.

I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering that the set of professors who currently choose to write their own textbooks probably skews toward professors who are good at writing textbooks, I'm not super high on this plan.

> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, > don't buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don't read it. There's just no > excuse for bad books.

Many students already do this. It's not uncommon for students to not buy a single textbook in a semester. In fact, the professors that do care about textbook price generally make textbooks optional. It turns out that's a lot easier than writing your own textbook and somehow selling it for cheap.

<comment><USER10> > there's no actual solution to that presented

I think you missed this part

> All of our books are available under free licenses that allow readers to > copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows > them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material.

Along with the source to all the books, [https://github.com/AllenDowney](https://github.com/AllenDowney)

We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen Downeys

<comment><USER11> Fortunately, from first-hand experience, Allen is churning them out himself in the form of students. He's a truly amazing professor, so while not exact, the clones are effective.

Many of his students are even involved in education in some way (incl. me, I make software for university bookstores).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with the main point that students should read and understand textbooks. But disagree with some assumptions and points.

1\. Many textbooks are written to be understood, but they vary a lot by field and class level. Generally, I think lower level textbooks best meet Downey's standards.

As you get into what is junior/senior (300-400 level) classes, there is not always a neat textbook available.

2\. I disagree with 10 pages per week per course. I think the expectations of what students can read per week are too low. I attended a couple different schools, and one has a reputation of having high expectations of students, and most students tend to rise up to the challenge. I think most professors don't expect enough, and what a degree represents is watered down.

I do feel strongly that busywork and pointless readings should be avoided. Pages per week should not be some sort of metric for learning, but 10 well- written information-rich pages a week per course is not usually going to be a challenge.

Nationally, most students don't even read much of what is assigned, so telling students to not read a book if it has 500 pages won't change the status quo.

3\. The idea that writing a textbook is easy is crazy. Even if you ignore the other requirements put upon professors, it is time-consuming to do it right. Even short niche books, think O'Reilly type stuff, take time to produce.

<comment><USER13> 10 pages a week _might_ be fine and well in a mathematics course and related fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of Rudin's _Real and complex analysis_ is a small book of 400 pages, and and is supposed to a full-year course.

What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the student is assumed to be taking the same time.

But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s), and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.) Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_ : I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30 minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high.

If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the problem is that students are not _willing_ to find time to study preferring other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Its funny. This was my exact shower thought this morning.

I find books overly verbose, and too formal. I do not think there is a need to dumb-down technical content. I also disagree with having a page limit as it would likely lead to omission of topics that might be otherwise useful.

I think the publishing industry has to change or be weeded out by self- publishers and video makers. I have learned many topics of my courses through Slide decks and Youtube videos to avoid reading.

My plan was to start re-learning everything from Uni and write informal tutorial (snippets) of blog posts about the topics and perhaps compiling to a open source book. I'll keep you guys posted so you folks can blindly upvote my fancy submission titles =D

Addendum: I'd really like to pug Brian Douglas' Youtube playlists on Control Theory. AMAZING. Got an A thanks to him.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just implemented the reading quiz idea this term, and I thought that it went really well. Give the students a manageable chunk of reading material (in my case, the material came from various sources, not a single textbook), and give them an offline quiz to test their reading comprehension. The quizzes were graded by a TA, but the weight was quite small; small enough not to matter if they cheated (and cheating won't help them in the final exam. Aside: is it cheating if they didn't read the material but just hunted for the answers by skimming?) but enough to provide extra incentive to read.

In class we go over the answers to the quiz. I don't post the answers (the TA will have provided them the feedback they need when grading); rather we make it an interactive session. I answer questions the students have, we go over examples, I supplement the reading with slides if need be. Effectively, a flipped classroom.

This was done more out of necessity: first time teaching the course, no proper textbook (and in a quickly changing tech landscape for the topic at hand), lack of confidence in my own understanding of the material (I also tried gathering student questions beforehand so I could investigate them offline and come to class prepared to answer them), but now I think I'm going to stick to this way of teaching this course in the next installment next year.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a trick we used when I was a student: we had an FTP server shared by students of all years of our program, and we put there a copy of every required and recommended textbook, as well as slides from the lectures and every other piece of material that was relevant to our classes.

Honestly, I think this kind of setup is something _universities_ should provide for their students. We live in 21th century, it's not _that_ much work to provide PDFs (with restricted access, if needed, because copyright blah blah).

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's the list of free books from the website: [http://greenteapress.com/wp/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/)

<comment><USER18> Free as in gratis, not free as in libre. It looks like most of them are under a "Non-Commercial" license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Richard Feynman's adventures in textbooks 50 years as told in "Surely you're joking" ago are still instructive. It's pretty embarrassing that it is still so bad. More power to Downey, support him. Perfect is the enemy of good and the ally of the status quo, which is horrible.

<comment><USER20> You refer to this story, right? [http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm](http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Textbooks are flat out unnecessary. The notes on the board should be enough to understand the material, and the teacher can either write their own problem sets or copy them from somewhere and put them online. There's just no excuse to require a textbook for a class - it means the teacher is unable to communicate the material effectively and needs the students to read it on their own, can't be bothered to write or copy homework sets, or is forcing students to buy the professor's own book out of greed, none of which should be seen as acceptable. If the department makes you have one, just don't use it (happened in a few of my classes). For classes that need some out of class readings like history or English, there's no excuse to make students buy books when the body of freely available, uncopyrighted work out there on the internet is so easy to access. Good example: a history class I had a few semesters ago where the primary documents were a simple downloadable .doc.

I've had lots of classes that worked like this, particularly my Calculus I/II classes where there was a textbook but homework from it was just suggested, not collected, and the lectures were entirely sufficient to understand the material and do well on the exams.

Beyond being a pointless scam, I'd go as far as to say textbooks make professors worse than they would be otherwise by letting professors use them as a crutch.

<comment><USER22> I disagree fairly strongly. Maybe this is reasonable for lower level courses, but in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to expect the bulk of their learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures. Requiring them to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.

On covering more ground: this isn't just about expecting students to spend "their own time" learning things not covered in class, it's also about more efficiently using their time. With textbooks (and, to a lesser extent, prerecorded lectures) students can learn at their own pace. They can spend more time on the parts that they find difficult without holding up the rest of the class, and they can move more quickly through the material that they understand easily.

<comment><USER21> >in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to expect the bulk of students' learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures.

I'm about to graduate a 4-year Computer Science program. It hasn't generally been necessary in any classes so far to get additional information outside the lectures from the textbooks for me, besides in one online class where there were no lectures, or an instance where the specifics of the virtual machine's language you had to write a compiler for were specified in the textbook - written by the teacher, but free digitally from the campus library, so no big objection in that instance aside from that not being mentioned in the syllabus, and that he could've just put all that in the text file where all the lab-section assignments were defined. But back on track, the general learning of the concept of compilation/parsing/etc occurred in class, and you applied it there. Your notes and the task description were enough.

>Expecting students to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.

Posting the notes online is great and often necessary, as it was in my algorithms class last semester where long algorithm pseudocode was in the notes, but the way the class worked was that everything was explained in- class, with the premade notes plus running trough things on the chalk board, and only what was in the notes was what you were responsible for. It was an effective format.

>save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to students' individual needs.

People asked questions if they had any, and more explanation would follow, and it wasn't a problem. Taking notes on paper while listening to the lecture in real time has been shown to be very effective compared to alternatives, so using lecture time on that is probably better than leaving any concepts to be learned primarily by textbook reading.

>students can learn at their own pace.

Lecture notes being posted beforehand, as it was in that algorithms class, works for people who feel they're struggling and need to read over the notes before class, and the notes are always there later if you need to review something. Though, the student will have to resist not writing notes just because the notes are already there - aside from the audio-to-paper process's effectiveness in learning, additional explanation/metaphores/comments will be given, especially in response to questions asked. I've almost never seen it be the case that one person holds up a class with questions everyone else knows the answer to - often many others were wondering the same thing, or the answer adds more even if you thought you already knew everything about that specific point. I also think enforcing a certain pace is good - it's happened that I've read on subjects on my own and forgot parts due to going "too fast," but that's never happened in a college class, so it seems like a tradeoff of classes feeling annoyingly slow sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I completely agree with the author's comment on shorter books. My biggest problem with instructional books in general is that they're filled with too much fluff. It isn't that I can't read 50 pages a week. I just don't want to, when the usable content could have been written in a page or less. While anecdotes and metaphors are great for inflating page count and price, they do little to help me understand a concept, and just become busywork, which I cannot abide.

</comment><comment><USER24> I recommend "The no Bullshit guide to Math and Physics". It is about 300 pages, but goes along with what this article is about. This book is such a different approach (combines math with engineering and physics principals) so as to give validity to the maths you're reading. Also, it is written in a casual tone. Highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Learning from Data" is a reasonable example of the type of textbook the author is asking for.

There is something to be said about the value of "reference" books, however. Maybe reference books shouldn't be used in classes, but there can be great value in a 1000 page book that has a complete discussion of everything you'd expect.

<comment><USER26> I personally work with one of the authors of this book (Malik). He has mentioned that the book optimizes simplicity and brevity, and that when the authors were writing the book they constrained themselves to an exact number of pages to force themselves to make decisions on what was important or unimportant.

Another interesting tactic they employed was an indicator on the page that the reader could skip ahead to another page (usually before a challenging proof) without losing the chapter's main concepts.

<comment><USER10> That is excellent. Do the authors have any articles about their process? Sounds like something that should be replicated in other educational material.

Textbooks have gone off the rails in terms of price (high), information density (low) precisely because the goal is profit and not education.

<comment><USER26> I don't know of any articles they've written about the process, they do maintain a forum where they post extensions to the book (on things that change often, e.g. neural networks) for free.

I agree, though I do think that professors evaluate each textbook to make sure it has the information they'd like to teach within it so the issue becomes more of a professors preference- should they provide a reference textbook or a book that perfectly matches their course.

In the case of Malik, (I believe) he writes books to fit how he thinks the material should be learned then teaches the courses to match the books. Attending the class would usually give answers to some of the example problems and go through the concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The two biggest universities in my city have some sort of publishing agreement where they can print and bind the relevant textbook material to give to students for free and when possible they use open textbooks [https://open.bccampus.ca/](https://open.bccampus.ca/) though there is a government grant paying professors to maintain the texts.

The best thing about the open textbook site is other professors and TAs review the books like this Precalculus example [https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open- textbooks/?uuid=2fdb8a19-...](https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open- textbooks/?uuid=2fdb8a19-9f31-40fe-80e9-0a4d2dd4cc7a&contributor=&keyword=&subject=)

</comment><comment><USER28> While I agree with the content of this in general, I find books to be burdensome and would not like a course centered around them. I think a series of well crafted video lectures are a better medium for some people, myself included.

I also find that I can learn everything I need to in my Software Engineering program via a series of pointed google searches much quicker than reading a text. Most courses have 1 or more $100 books which are "required" but I haven't bought them in years.

What I /would/ like, is sample problems with solutions ;)

<comment><USER29> In contrast (because people have different learning styles) I get almost nothing out of video lectures, and _vastly_ prefer having books. One of the things holding me back from learning Julia is the current dearth of quality books.

<comment><USER30> The language docs are pretty well written and accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For high-level math courses, the best I've seen is a reader written by the professor, combined with an optional 1000 page tome.

The reader goes with the lectures, and is focused on the actual material of the course. The reader, combined with your notes, basically covers the lectures. Meanwhile, if you need another take on the material, or some wider context, the 1000 page tome is always there. This works especially well if the reader points to equivalent chapters in the tome.

<comment><USER32> To add a different but orthogonal perspective to this:

My higher-level math courses were pure mathematics courses, and we pretty much always used Springer textbooks, which were only a few hundred pages long and the size of a normal paperback (i.e., not the size of, say, CLRS). When we didn't use Springer textbooks, we used other textbooks similar in size and length (e.g., [0]). I found these textbooks to be completely manageable to read as a student, and they were the best textbook-related learning experiences of my undergraduate years.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Galois-Correspondence- Ma...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Galois-Correspondence-Maureen- Fenrick/dp/0817640266)

<comment><USER33> I've had a similar experience with linguistics. The main textbook I've used was $40, is a bit under 500 pages (but is smaller than a typical textbook, and paperback), and I've used it for 3 classes. That's the kind of book I'm happy to buy. Meanwhile my experience with CS classes has been a > $150 textbook that is never referenced in class, is outdated, and is seemingly on the syllabus just to have something there. I ended up just not bothering with the books even if the syllabus claimed they were required.

<comment><USER34> What was the book?

<comment><USER33> Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition by Andrew Carnie. I got it used, so it's probably a bit more expensive if you want a new copy, but it's a great book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As a student in my forties I have been appalled at the price and quality of many of my textbooks. The $300 dollars worth of textbooks in one class could have done with a few youtube videos. The publishers know this cash cow is coming to an end due to piracy and online textbook rentals. Now, they are charging less for textbook but gouging students on the mandatory online components.

</comment><comment><USER14> Professors often do not have the choice to pick a book. They have to teach off of one recommended by department.

more politics into the education industry.

<comment><USER36> But 'the department' is nothing more than all the professors grouped together.

<comment><USER14> Yeah and one of them decided to venture into book writing, had connections and was friends with other professors...

That's one way to sell that pig lipsticks.

Edit: And incorrect about department = array(Professors)

<comment><USER36> That still doesn't make sense. If a department had a professor notable enough to write a textbook in a particular area, wouldn't they be teaching that course themselves? Rather than pressuring the other professor who is teaching it to use their book?

<comment><USER14> MATH courses typically have large student count, thus needing multiple professors and sections.

BTW, What I said is anecdotal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Allen B. Downey needs to be a MacArthur Fellow.

Most commenters here should re-read the article and internalize the body of work created.

</comment><comment><USER37> At the school I went to, many of the classes had no formal textbooks.

You bought a 50-100 page of not terribly dense text/examples; these were photocopies on plain old letter paper that were stapled together and pre- punched for three-ring-binders. Each class you'd buy one of those per semester and they were developed in-house. That was it. Naturally, it wasn't always this way, but certainly for the basic classes it was exactly this way.

Note this wasn't any sort of engineering field and what they were teaching didn't have a lot of authors writing standard issue coursework to begin with, but it was great material that was very focused to the classes they were teaching. I still hold on to them, too: very concise and a nice reference if I ever need to brush up.

</comment><comment><USER38> Much of this articles comes across as basically complaining: "these books are long and these books are hard". Why, it's true that sometimes this is a valid criticism, but what about when the subject matter really _is_ long and hard to understand? What then?

</comment><comment><USER39> > Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, > don't buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don't read it. There's just no > excuse for bad books.

This is bad advice.

You need the book for reference or at least will do better with the book most of the time. If you want to stick one to the publisher, buy used.

Textbooks need a "microservices revolution". And not with these crappy interactive DRM-ridden e-textbooks with exercise codes... the experience with most of those is markedly worse than print books. We need more open content like webpages and journal articles. O'Reilly does it best. Textbooks authors should follow / adapt their model.

<comment><USER40> Governments should definitely pay content creators to make open-source curricula for schools and universities.

I agree with Stallman that proprietary learning materials are antithetical to the spirit of learning itself. Part of the process of learning is rearranging information, changing it, collectively annotating it, and consuming it through convenient new media (a digitized, hyperlinked document on a open comment platform, for example). There are only limited possibilities with proprietary information in this regard, and even fewer possibilities with proprietary software. Schools should not use either one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'd like to see this philosophy applied to some of the open content out there already like the OpenStax textbooks [0]. For example, the Prealgebra text is 1152 pages in the PDF format.

I think there would be a huge amount of value in distilling these down to chapters which are 10-15 pages each instead of 100-150 pages each. Of course you would loose a lot of detail, but they could serve as a summary of 'this is the important stuff you need to know'. The expanded textbooks would serve as reference material if you want to go into more detail.

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

</comment><comment><USER42> I've taken a class from Allen and used his books. In the context of his classes they are very good and the short readings can be useful, but taken as a reference like many other textbooks are they don't do as much.

</comment><comment><USER43> I believe the earliest textbooks contained a gloss in the margin written by students which clarified the main text. It contained translations, notes, references, etc. This helped to circumvent the _curse of knowledge_ whereby most authors have zero memory of their early misconceptions of the subject (a major reason why most textbooks are rubbish).

I think this ought to be reintroduced by major publishers -- new editions to contain copious annotations garnered from students who field-tested the previous edition, explaining how they conquered the parts that _they_ found hard.

</comment><comment><USER44> I studied Computer Science in Germany, and I didn't use a single book during my entire bachelor. The way it worked was professors always put the slides from their lectures online, so we could reference them as sources. Sometimes, additional references or texts were available online.

In addition to lectures, we had weekly classes where we applied the concepts from the lecture in practice. Exercises for these classes were also available online.

All of this material was free for students, and created by the professors and instructors specifically for the course.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like the suggested price point of under 50$. Perhaps I'd go even lower and require < $40. This is enough money to keep self-published authors motivated to maintain their books and write new ones, and also affordable enough for most students.

This is the approach I've been following with my MATH&PHYS and LA books, and I will continue to use with future titles.

I guess the ideal case for students would be OER, but then when everybody owns the book nobody is particularly invested in maintaining it and improving it...

</comment><comment><USER45> "Before long, the students learn that they shouldn't even try. The result is a 1000-page doorstop."

My oldest two are through college and learned that they shouldn't just purchase the list of books dictated by their classes. As stated by the article, many times the textbooks were not required to pass the test. If I had to estimate, I'd say they spent half as much as their fellow students on textbooks.

</comment><comment><USER46> Also all CS books (ok, maybe not all but the vast majority) need to ship with code. To quote Linus, "talk is cheap. Show me the code".

</comment><comment><USER47> I agree that textbook costs are exorbitant, and I use open source, online, or very low cost books when teaching at the community college level. I've been using the interactive version of the "Think Like a Computer Scientist" book when teaching the introductory programming course. The students still don't read the material, at least not before the lecture.

<comment><USER10> Start with a quiz?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think this is needed, most courses have one or two textbooks which compounded together with a full courseload is a lot of pages, however the full textbook is also never used, only several chapters are usually recommended reading, really beating the point of buying the whole book

</comment><comment><USER49> Back in my student days there were really extensive textbooks that no one of us read and short brochures on the subject published by university that was the real source of knowledge and how to apply it in practice.

</comment><comment><USER50> Many teachers use chapters from several books and their own material.

It should be possible to buy student textbooks by chapter and print your own book. Most cities with college have few high quality printing services.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm thinking of writing a ebook that I can use for teaching a course. I would like to see examples of well written textbooks. Are there good examples?

<comment><USER27> Anything by Kernighan/Pike/Ritchie such as The C Programming Language, The Unix Programming Environment and gopl.io book are all concise and well written books with just exactly the right amount of material it seems. Paolo Aluffi's Algebra Chapter 0 is a good math text as a math example for something that is more than just dumping propositions/theorems and proofs.

I liked this draft book as an algorithms book example [http://www.parallel- algorithms-book.com/](http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com/)

MIT's course notes are good as brief material that compliments the lectures [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- compu...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-fall-2010/readings/)

Knuth also labels the difficulties of each problem set in his books like Concrete Math, something I wish more authors did. Concrete Math is also a good example of a well written and engaging math book accessible to a motivated highschool student.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Disagree - many students have different learning patterns. Textbooks are only one way to teach, and there are many different ways to learn

</comment><comment><USER53> "If you can't find one, write one."

What would be the best way to write a free book please? Any pointers? Experience?

<comment><USER54> I wrote one last year. It started out as notes for a series of "lunch and learns" I was going to give at work. The notes just kept growing and growing, until over the course of a weekend I ended up sitting down and pounding out 200 pages of content. That was the easy part! The hard part was then learning how to build an effective index (harder than it sounds), coming up with examples and figures, tuning and tweaking, etc.

So, to recap my experience, I would suggest that you think of a topic about which you know enough to have something to say. Not just "pure knowledge," but real opinions founded in real-world experience. Pretend you're going to give a series of presentations, lectures or articles on the matter. Start typing up the notes, looking for organizational structure as you go. Keep typing. Reorganize as you go. Keep typing. At some point you'll realize you're on your way, then the momentum will start to carry you as you figure out to what "depth" you want to go. Don't edit at this point, just keep generating content.

When you think you're close, start "spiraling" back through the book, editing, cleaning, editing, adding, editing...If the material deserves an index, go read up on that (again, it is NOT just a cross-reference of non-trivial words!) Somewhere around now hand it out to some friends to read. Incorporate their feedback. Edit again.

Look! You've written a book! :)

<comment><USER55> This is very similar to my method. The first time I teach a class, I draft some notes. After the class, I fix the problems, or at least flag them for next time. The second time through, I add, remove, edit, refine, etc., based on feedback from students and my own observation (and, often, what I have learned since last time :)

Many of my examples start with code, so the first draft of the chapter is mostly explaining the worked example.

It's not very different from the work most profs do when they are developing a class, but at the end you have a book that has co-evolved to fit your students and the learning goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I was just thinking about asking HN about free books that will get me started in phython. This seems to have a quite a few [0]. Has HN read any of these or recommends anything in particular?

(I went through learning python the hard way a few years back and have been slacking off)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

[0] [http://greenteapress.com/wp/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/)

<comment><USER57> I know you're looking for free but Humble actually has a pretty great python ebook bundle right now, [https://www.humblebundle.com/books/python-book- bundle](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/python-book-bundle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Amen. This author's thesis sounds pretty darn good to me.

</comment><comment><USER59> > Choose books your students can read and understand.

A noble and audacious goal.

> If you can't find one,

Realistically accessed.

> write one. It's not that hard.

WTF?

Ok, I can see how this could be either plausible, or utterly absurd, depending on the domain.

> check whether they understand.

Err, does this mean "I think they didn't do too badly on the midterm"? Or daily quizes and clicker questions? Or a grad student, with a focus on the field's education research, dedicated to running concept inventories and stats?

At least in college introductory science education, "check whether they understand" is hard, an area of active research, and historically, a cesspit of professorial self-deception.

> It's not that hard.

Let's draw a proton. With marker on whiteboard, as a circle (not hard). With an illustration app, as an arbitrarily-sized hard sphere with physically-bogus lighting (not hard). With code, as a gradient, based on the proton mass density curve (not hard, but did eat some hours).

Let's draw atomic nuclei. As balls of red and blue marbles (not hard). As gradients, post-processing from recently published ab initio density functional plots, when available (hard). Background: light nuclei are lumpy.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Let's draw the Sun. As an arbitrarily colored circle (not hard). What about as a circle, with a color at least vaguely realistic? Demonstrably hard, as it's so rare. You likely can't ask your first-tier astronomy graduate student to do it.[1] Or almost any of the professorial authors of the many introductory astronomy textbooks.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Last week I was reading an AP Chemistry curriculum standard. Towards the top, "atoms are conserved". Great. Later on, "atoms are neutral"[when charged, they're instead "ions"]. Okaaaaay. So are there any atoms on the right side of H + light -> H+ + e- ? The old "molecules aren't made _of_ atoms, they're made _from_ atoms" school. Two historical threads of definition. Left for students to reconcile, because that's obviously where the burden should lie. And this wasn't Pearson trash content, this was a curriculum spec (albeit a poor one). So what do you tell your kids to make it safe for them to take standardized exams?

"[N]ot that hard." I know wizzy education-focused MIT and Harvard professors who work really hard to raise some small bit of intro physics and biology content from wretched, to very-slightly-less-wretched.

Perhaps for some domains "not that hard" is true. And it helps if the objective is "no worse then the rest of the crap out there". And if "check whether they understand" means "ask a few clicker questions, and give a random quiz" instead of "systematically run formative misconception checks". But, wow. It _so_ doesn't match the areas I'm most familiar with.

Perhaps the manifesto is missing some scope-of-applicability predicate?

[1] [http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6](http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6) "Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content"</comment>


Can't sign in Google Calendar on my Samsung refrigerator - <AUTHOR> https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/calendar/UhfpcwO0X0c <comment><USER2> I propose a new category for HN --> "HN Onion: ". this one is the honorary founder and proof that art can only imitate life.

<comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion](https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion) exists, although more a parody of HN itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Everything is broken and nobody's upset." [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUps...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> Man the future is weird. Fridges needing firmware updates, books and cigarettes that can run out of battery...

</comment><comment><USER6> This is hilarious and dystopian at the same time.

Actual quote: "Holly, Did you try rebooting the fridge?"

I foresee this becoming a big problem in the future with Google providing no explicit retirement dates for API's upfront (which is very understandable) and manufacturers of not-so-easily-updated devices not caring.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll just leave this here: [https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en](https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER8> In what kind of parallel future are you? Thought we all realized an internet- enabled fridge was just an artifact of our internet-philia and past lack of imagination.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like it's almost 2016 and we still can't reliably share a calendar over a computer network.</comment>


Introducing Passion Projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1433-introducing-passion-projects <comment><USER3> So I started programming (for real) about two years ago. I spent about four months teaching myself coding PHP, JavaScript and CSS. I was able to secure a job after four months. I wasn't really good enough for the position.

My wife is doing the same. She is following my path. She have me, I teach her and she is learning much faster. After a year, she is still looking for a volunteer job! Nobody believes she can do anything.

This is extremely sad. My wife is far more advanced than me when I got my first job. We are immigrants and we are not white, I believe those adds to our problems.

Everyone who says women don't deserve this kind of attention never saw a women struggling get in tech world.

<comment><USER4> She should just release whatever she creates why learning. Stereotypes are no longer valid if you have a proof of your skills in Github.

<comment><USER3> What if I tell you I didn't know Git when I got my first job and she has a bunch of green dots in her Github profile?

<comment><USER5> I tell you I absolutely believe you, because I watched my wife have the exact same problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with everyone saying, "Why create something separate for women? Isn't that further separation?"

For the most part, women don't take up much space in the tech industry. Women look at the big names in tech, and they don't really see people who are "like me." This can be intimidating and disheartening. Creating more spaces for women to connect with other women, and share their experiences and encouragement is much needed. Of course, let's also not forget women of color and trans women, who obviously face additional challenges in finding people like themselves to look up to in tech. I hope that GitHub makes an effort to include a wide range of women with different backgrounds to include in this series.

Also, there's no reason why any women's group should have to admit men to appease the "I promise we're not sexist against men" line of reasoning. I probably shouldn't be surprised that some of the first comments on something oriented towards women is, "But...WHAT ABOUT MEN?!" Get over yourselves! Let this be a reminder that the world does not revolve around you and people like you.

<comment><USER7> > Also, there's no reason why any women's group should have to admit men to > appease the "I promise we're not sexist against men" line of reasoning.

Is sexism not reason enough in itself? Is this not the very thing we're trying to fight against?

I fully acknowledge and lament that there is a severe lack of women in tech, and were it up to me men and women both would have equal opportunities in all regards, but you only debase your message and dilute your efforts when you try to level the playing field by making an environment that is more hostile towards men rather than one less hostile towards women.

The overarching goal is to be inclusive, of people of all genders, races, and the spectrum of people that fall in between. Yes, celebrate successes, find role models of all types and praise their accomplishments. Bring them forward to share their wisdom and experiences so that everyone can learn and benefit.

Edit: To clarify, I have no issues with an initiative that seeks out role models specifically within a category of minorities, such as by gender or race. My only qualm would be in limiting the audience.

<comment><USER6> To put it simply, sexism against men does not exist. You can discriminate against men, but let's be clear: sexism is systematic oppression by those in power on the basis of gender.

So...having a series of talks that is for women by women cannot possibly be sexist. You can say it discriminates by not allowing men to be speakers, if you so wish. I can't say I'd find it to interesting to listen to a man tell me what it's like to be a woman in tech, though, so you could also just say that they're just featuring people who are interesting to their audience: women.

Also -- who said anything about hostility? What I meant was, "This is about women...why are you bringing men up at all? Don't they have their own spheres which they already dominate?" I just get tired of all this "reverse sexism" nonsense.

Edit: To be clear, I agree with your last paragraph. I don't think it's limiting the audience to feature women speakers, unless you don't think that men can find women interesting. ;)

<comment><USER8> _sexism is systematic oppression by those in power on the basis of gender._

I think you're using the wrong word then. Discrimination against men is sexism. Maybe a better word for what you want is hegemony [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_theory#Hegemo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_theory#Hegemonic_group)

<comment><USER6> The key element is that women are not able to systematically oppress men for being men, as they do not have the social privilege to do so. You need all the elements in order to produce sexism.

<comment><USER8> A single individual event or person can be sexist. I understand the idea you are describing. That idea is not what the word "sexism" refers to. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sexism>

<comment><USER6> Sexism is an institution, so to speak. A single individual could not "bring sexism into existence". Women do not have enough power, as it stands, to impose a systemic oppression of men. Perhaps in the future, or in some female dominated societies, sexism against men exists...but not in the United States.

<comment><USER9> > Women do not have enough power, as it stands, to impose a systemic > oppression of men.

And men don't have enough power to impose a systemic oppression of women -- for that, they need women to cooperate in their own oppression. Women voluntarily rise to the challenge.

> Perhaps in the future, or in some female dominated societies, sexism against > men exists...but not in the United States.

No. You may have meant effective, oppressive sexism, but not sexism per se. There's plenty of sexism directed at men.

"If men knew what women said about them in private, the human race would cease to exist." -- W. H. Auden

<comment><USER10> I don't think I can buy the victim-blaming argument. Is a woman who is born into a culture with female genital mutilation, or forced arranged marriage "cooperating in their own oppression"? Both of these acts can occur at young ages.

<comment><USER9> > I don't think I can buy the victim-blaming argument.

With respect to the topic of women who cooperate in their own oppression, they aren't victims, and no one is blaming them. Would you blame someone for choosing a lifestyle that didn't suit your personal tastes? No? Then we lose the right to "blame" women for making the choices they do. This is what personal freedom means -- the right to make choices others may disapprove of.

> Is a woman who is born into a culture with female genital mutilation ...

Surely you're aware that's not the topic. Such things aren't volunteered for, but the sorts of behavior we see in the West are often chosen by women who have options and rights.

> ... or forced arranged marriage "cooperating in their own oppression"?

Again, not the topic of discussion. Consider the all-too-common example in which a woman, removed from one abusive relationship, promptly seeks out another. How is that "forced"?

Real liberation will come, not when women are given the rights they deserve, but when they accept them.

<comment><USER6> > Consider the all-too-common example in which a woman, removed from one > abusive relationship, promptly seeks out another. How is that "forced"?

That is a really poor example of women being instruments in their own oppression. In cases like that, women are likely suffering from internalized problems that result from patriarchy -- such as a desire to be dominated, to fit into the patriarchal framework, to fill out the role of the victim that they are told is their identity. Sure, some choice is involved, but it's more like Stockholm Syndrome than "I think I fancy having the living daylights beat out of me today."

My much less dramatic example is a woman who claims that she doesn't enjoy the company of other women, finds them to be too catty or bitchy, would rather hang out with men, etc. Commonly, this woman is seeking the approval of her male peers at the expense of...basically all women ever. She wants to come off as a "pretty tomboy" -- 'cool' enough to be one of the guys, but also conforming to sexist expectations about her appearance. This is obviously a stereotype, but I personally encounter it a lot. How can anyone truly respect women when their own kind are debasing them left and right?

> Real liberation will come, not when women are given the rights they deserve, > but when they accept them.

I don't think I even need to explain how absurd this statement is. I'll agree that women are part of the problem in fighting for women's rights, but frankly I see and experience sexism far too often to be so dismissive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a female developer, I would intuitively feel glad when seeing this kind of events/groups being formed, but thinking about it I am not sure why. I don't even think I feel like going to them for any other reason than, well, I am female and they're also female so I should probably check it out.

After reading the reasons Github wrote, I find it hard to relate. For me picking up coding has nothing to do with seeing some other women do it, but perhaps seeing some human beings do it. And I don't think seeing female developers would inspire me further more than male developers. But I could be completely false and it might be that turns out I don't know what I really feel...

Perhaps it's because I have not yet noticed any serious injustice around where I've been, could be that I just didn't realised what they were or I haven't spend enough time in the tech industry. The most unfair thing in tech I've ever encountered was interviewing at a company where there is no ladies restroom...

Anyhoo. I don't personally know any other female developer and I've been coding since 11, that's 10+ years, I guess that's ought to be wrong. And since there are no samples around me, I don't really know what inspired other female developer to learn how to code. Is there anyone here who cares to share her experience?

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks Github, it's great to have your weight behind making tech more friendly to women, and spotlighting female role models so that more of the young might pursue a career in the field.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this is an excellent initiative by GitHub. It's well-acknowledged that there is a lack of women in tech, for what I'm sure is a wide variety of reasons, and celebrating the successes of women in that field is a noble endeavor.

Personally I believe that these women are capable of being a role model to both men and women, as they presumably have achieved their successes through their own merits and not by virtue of their gender, so I'm sure the wisdom they have to share at these meetups would benefit everyone. To that end I would be disappointed to hear if, while the meetups may encourage or advertise to a female audience, they chose to exclude men.

</comment><comment><USER13> To those saying that "this is discrimination is it is morally wrong" (and I don't think this event constitutes discrimination, but here goes):

1\. Should we then do away with gender segregated sports teams? 2\. Should other minorities (e.g. LBGTQ groups) no longer have support groups that focus on issues relevant to them?

Having groups that cater to certain minorities feels to me both necessary and useful. We are not all identical. You probably don't want to live in a world without exceptional and different people in it; it would be boring.

That means there are times when some of those people who are like-minded want to get together and support each other. In some cases, that means other groups need to be discouraged (because that minority would otherwise be overwhelmed, drowned out in a sea of majority voices).

Why are so many voices in our industry constantly fighting events like this?

<comment><USER14> When will "enough be enough"? When will we have no more need for these separate groups? Instead of actually choosing the best candidates based on their best abilities, we now resort to purposely choosing people based on their sex or race. That is wrong.

There are much more women than men who attend college now. Women score better than men in reading and other subjects. The wage gap IS a myth. More money is focused on women's health issues.

Do you see that any area where women don't already represent at least 50% of the workforce, there will be loud voices decrying sexism at this?

On the other hand, there are 0 efforts on raising standards for boys, or trying to get them into X field. Nothing. As seen in history, once a group starts to gain power and privileges, it will continue in that direction no matter the actual circumstances.

<comment><USER13> "Instead of actually choosing the best candidates based on their best abilities, we now resort to purposely choosing people based on their sex or race."

I call bulltwang. Please provide evidence of this supposed systematic selection of 'minority' candidates, because I'm sure as heck not seeing it where I am.

You assert that the wage gap is myth. Please also provide evidence for this statement, because everything I've read suggests that it remains a problem across the board - and for the record we're talking about IT specifically here, and we're not talking about the wage gap, we're talking about the abysmally low rates of entry into this sector by half the population as defined by gender identification.

It's all well and good to say "NO ENOUGH IS ENOUGH MERITOCRACY NAO PLZ", but who decides what is meritorious? The entrenched majority? This is why that term was coined in derision.

I say, enough will be enough when there's no longer a problem (c.f. uptake of science/engineering/tech by women). Until then, we have a problem, and we need to do things to fix that problem.

<comment><USER14> Sure, I would love to answer this.

To give some perspective to you, I come from the humanities field and have switched to IT. In the humanities field (from college majors to actual employment), men are underrepresented. Women hold majority positions in many places (and in related fields, HR, communications etc.).

Even still, when looking at job applications many times will be a blurb such as: "Qualified female candidates are especially encouraged to apply."

The issue I have with all of this, is that there is a sole focus on bringing in women into science and engineering, which is of course a GOOD thing.

However, there is zero effort to increase reading rates for boys, and to push boys and men into the communications and humanities fields, ZERO. Boys lag behind girls in many places when it comes to education, and nothing is done about that.

I've actually worked at a place where this was verbally justified. I am not lying when I heard a female senior management official state: "Women are better communicators than men, so it is only natural that they be placed in greater leadership and communication roles."

Why is there ZERO effort in getting men out of dangerous positions, such as mining and logging and hundreds of other fields and instead actually focus on THEIR education? Men die at a much, much higher rate than women in the workforce, but this is ignored.

So that is coming from my perspective.

If you are insulated in the IT field and that is what you have experienced, then I cannot blame you for thinking "Wow, there are so few women in this field! We need more!"

However, please note there are many fields where women are the majority of undergraduate and graduate students.

Sorry, but I do not have specific pay gap data for the IT sector, although I have plenty of reports that address the overall pay gap: [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-28246928/the- gender-p...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-28246928/the-gender-pay- gap-is-a-complete-myth/)

When you in fact compare individual jobs to one another there is no wage gap. Plus we have laws (at least here in the US, not sure where you are) that if you find out you are getting paid less because of your sex, you can bring this to court.

And for the record, yes I love meritocracy. I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Educate more women in the sciences, educate more men in communications/humanities/social work/education and get them out of dangerous positions. That is fair.

<comment><USER13> I totally agree with you that there are many problems here. I have also seen the research on male literacy and numeracy rates, and agree with you that there's a problem there that needs to be tackled.

That does not invalidate _this_ problem.

And back to my original point: even if the problem of women in tech were solved, I still don't see the beef with having events held for particular subgroups of people. There's no cost here. Nobody is disadvantaged if we have a Geek Girls night, or a Gay Coder Hackathon, or the Left Handed Sysadmin Support Group.

Equality of opportunity is one thing, forcing everybody into the same cookie- cutter mould and insisting we all do the same things with the same people? Ick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really neat! Kudos to github.

Here is a question: as one of two engineers at a 6-person seed-round startup, what could we be doing to contribute to the ecosystem of people who support women in technology? We don't have the office space - much less the money - <USER2> find or sponsor a monthly talk. So within the context of running our business, what can we do?

Sometimes I fear that, until we have a successful and profitable company (with spare conference rooms, clout to find people who would like to give lectures here, or an otherwise large audience), there isn't much we can do to contribute.

What can smaller companies or even individuals within organizations do?

<comment><USER16> I'm not as familiar with this problem as I'd like to be, so please take this with a grain of salt, but maybe you could invite female CS majors from nearby universities to come see your offices? Or better yet, to see what it's like to work with you for a day.

After all, one of the major issues seems to be that women don't see role models working in tech companies. If you have female students come and work with you, then they should be able to imagine themselves working at your company, or another small startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is how you get more women involved in tech, by actually taking action. I hope that we see more initiatives like this rather than hateful articles, which we've seen so many of recently.

</comment><comment><USER18> It is brilliant to see a move forward to recognising that there are women in technology and they provide as good a contribution as everybody else,

BUT,

Is creating a specific, segregated, event/group really the way forward or is it just creating a greater divide in the tech community along gender lines? What would really need to be done is look properly into why there is a disproportionate number of men versus women who go into technology, rather than introduce yet more segregation.

I do not believe that there is an event/group out there currently that would place any sort of restriction, intentional or otherwise, on female entry.

<comment><USER19> > What would really need to be done is look properly into why there is a > disproportionate number of men versus women who go into technology, rather > than introduce yet more segregation.

This isn't some big mystery. At least one reason that women don't enter technology fields is a lack of female role-models. Another is societal pressure that dictates that women are bad at technology.

Technology conferences focusing on women aren't just for the participants, they help counteract these two forces by giving visibility to notable women in tech.

[http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.ca/2006/03/women-need-fe...](http://bps- research-digest.blogspot.ca/2006/03/women-need-female-role-models.html)

[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/21/where-have- al...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/21/where-have-all-the- women-gone)

<comment><USER20> What role models did Grace Hopper have? And I can only speak for myself but I was never drawn to 'technology' out of having famous neckbeards or Jobs or Gates and so forth as role models.

You have to ask why women are _more_ under represented in this particular field than others which used to be just as male dominated in the past. But people don't like to think about such deep large hairy societal problems.

None of this is to say that what's described in the OP is a bad thing.

<comment><USER21> >And I can only speak for myself but I was never drawn to 'technology' out of having famous neckbeards or Jobs or Gates and so forth as role models.

You may not have been drawn to it because of Jobs or Gates, but you never once looked at the field of technology and thought "People who look at me don't do this". That is, you never felt deterred because of the people who dominated the field.

Scott Hanselman recently hosted Kyla McMullen (first black female Ph.D out of UMichigan) on his podcast where she shed some perspective on how difficult it feels to break into tech when no one looks like you and it feels like you don't belong. I enjoyed it a lot, and maybe you might too. [http://hanselminutes.com/357/dr-kyla-mcmullen-on- diversity-i...](http://hanselminutes.com/357/dr-kyla-mcmullen-on-diversity-in- computer-science-and-spatial-audio)

<comment><USER20> > but you never once looked at the field of technology and thought "People who > look at me don't do this". That is, you never felt deterred because of the > people who dominated the field.

That's a rather huge assumption on your part.

> That's nice, but I don't see how your personal motivations are relevant on > an industry-wide scale.

I don't think my personal motivations are relevant on an industry-wide scale, that was my point to begin with.

Like I said, the OP is hardly a bad thing, by all means, try. I hope it helps somebody. In my opinion it is treating the symptoms and not the disease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this is a good idea but is the word 'Passion' only in the name because it's women?

<comment><USER23> A "passion project", in my mind, is simply a project that you're excited about (notably one that is likely outside the bounds of your normal, day-to-day job). I distinguish them from "side projects", which tend to be something you're interested in, but not something you're necessarily defined by. That's the reason the program's called _passion_ projects — hopefully we'll have a ton of talks on really interesting things that our speakers are really, well, passionate about.

I don't view "passion" as a word that is exclusive to women, in other words — we could just as easily pull in men for the same talk series.

<comment><USER22> Most definitely. We share the same meaning of the concept of a passion project. I was probably just over thinking it, I am just suspicious of the way such highly emotive language has been used and it just happens to be for an interview series with women.

I'll admit I had not read the link before I posted that comment, but looking at it now I still believe that the language used is overly emotional and I think that it has been used just because this is a series on women.

A definition of the word passion involves, among other things "strong and barely controllable emotion" and I think this may be an obvious case where a gendered stereotype has been blatantly applied.

Some sentences taken from the link:

"celebrate the work of some of the most passionate women in our industry."

"share one of their nearest and dearest passion projects with our community."

"to hear about some positive experiences from other women in our industry doing what they love."

<comment><USER23> > "celebrate the work of some of the most passionate women in our industry."

> "share one of their nearest and dearest passion projects with our > community."

> "to hear about some positive experiences from other women in our industry > doing what they love."

Yup, I'm pretty excited about all of these things. Don't know why this is a problem.

<comment><USER22> There is obviously no problem with hearing about these things. I am focussing on the language used which could be seen to feminise the people taking part in the series when in fact we know nothing about them other than they are women and that they are in tech. I doubt you could find any other tech series which uses language as seen in the link.

Really, I am focussing on the mundane ways in which "women = feminine = emotional" has been portrayed in the few words that were written on the new series.

If you are interested in the way gender is reproduced in this way I recommend this reading [http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/BtlrPer...](http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/BtlrPerfActs.pdf)

It is a text by Judith Butler, probably one of the most influential living social theorists who writes on gender and focuses on 'the mundane', meaning language, acts etc

Anyway, I am excited to watch these. So, if you were involved - thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone happen to know the percentage of women that work @Github?

<comment><USER25> 19 out of our 152 employees are women, so a little over 12%.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very cool!

Not too far off topic: I worked for a good tech company for most of the years between 1973 and 1996. The only major negative thing about the company was a 'glass ceiling' for women engineers (we did have some very high profile women on our board of directors though). I found that situation embarrassing.

So, yes, special events featuring women engineers are a good thing.

BTW, my granddaughter can program fairly well using the Scratch game platform :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> It makes me pretty happy to see that this event is already full.

</comment><comment><USER28> Tech should be friendlier to women.

However, segregation isn't the way forward, IMHO. I'm always sad to see gender-focussed events and groups. I'd much rather see women and men -integrate- than congregate within their own gender.

And just to pre-empt, please don't give me the disingenuous "men are welcome too" line. This is, by definition, a women-focussed group.

<comment><USER29> Women are underrepresented in technology. This event is to help promote the potential as well as accomplishments of women in technology.

I fail to see how this is segregation, they make no claim that this series is to be representing everyone, just highlighting women. It is an event focused on women's roles in technology and available to the community.

<comment><USER30> By the self-centered logic of the OP, even if a minority group has only 0.1% representation, they should have no events targeting specifically them and their causes -- the 99.9% majority should be able to attend, and presumably contribute to the conversation with no ability of the event's organizers to moderate the dialog or direct the focus to the minority's experiences. Anything less than that is segregation.

It doesn't occur to the OP, apparently, that they are trying to create something that is decidedly _different_ from the ordinary tech experience -- a conversation dominated by awkward-to-arrogant, entitled males who think that their very important opinions need to be heard everywhere and at all times.

I wonder if the OP (presumably male) insists on attending (female) rape survivor meetups, or if he could understand why attendees thereof would not feel totally comfortable with his attendance.

<comment><USER31> I see, women are going to share their traumatic experience in tech.

BTW, this discussion is just silly because there are millions of meet Ups in tech filled with only men, but in the other hand meet ups of rape survivors not accepting men would be just evil, men are a minority in that group, it would be like a tech company not accepting any women.

<comment><USER30> Ok. Good luck trying to convince them to let you in, I'm sure your unassailable logic misses nothing obvious. Make sure you let them know that it's evil for you not to be allowed in.

<comment><USER31> What? Fortunately I wasn't talking about me, just men victims of rape. And doesn't matter if they follow my logic or not, we are discussing what's right, not the logic of the organizers of such meetings.

<comment><USER30> If you can't take your knowledge of "what's right" and actually change objective reality with it in a useful way, then it's dubious as to whether what you know is actually true. And IMO you would not be able to convince a female survivors group to let you in with logic, so again, I doubt strongly that it actually corresponds to truth.

<comment><USER31> Why you keep suggesting I'm talking about me?... are you just trolling?

<comment><USER30> I assumed that you would take ownership of the argument you're forwarding, and at least monetarily, you could put yourself in the position of someone who would try to employ your logic. To do otherwise would be arguing in bad faith. And whether or not you are the person employing the logic, the point remains: a person couldn't take your argument and do something useful, like convince a group that he should be allowe in, and so I really have to wonder in what sense you think this argument is true. Presumably because it exhibits logical consistency, which by itself is irrelevant (cf bounded rationality)

<comment><USER31> > a person couldn't take your argument and do something useful, like convince > a group that he should be allowe in

Have you heard about civil war? That was one group trying to convince another that some people should be allowed in.

And anyway; I wasn't making an abstraction but the very evil segregation such as rape victims meetups excluding men. Unsurprisingly these meetups don't exist in reality; there are some about violence or abusive relationships in general.

<comment><USER30> You obviously don't know what you're talking about if you think there are no female-only rape survivor groups.

<comment><USER31> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem>

But is not the classic case of Ad-hominem, you did a deduction from point B to make a personal attack to deny the validness of point A. Interesting.

<comment><USER30> It's not as hominem to say that you do not have facts. Moreover, I already said that being logically correct is not my aim. Your argument lacks relevance or informedness, so you can make as many valid points as you want, your words simply have no correlation to reality.

<comment><USER31> Correlation with reality? If I wanted to speak the news I would become an anchorman. Most people here is discussing how things _should_ be and how that could become a reality.

And say what you want, Im pretty sure white female rape-victims is not a valid meet up.

<comment><USER30> When did "white" get added? Also, you could have easily searched for this:

<http://www.raap.org/support-groups.html>

As you obviously know nothing of rape, and probably not much of women either, I really have to question why you're still typing. You seem to be woefully unqualified to be participating in any conversation about what _should_ be, even supposing, as you have, that such a conversation doesn't need to be informed with facts.

<comment><USER31> "White" excludes 40% of Americans, "female" excludes 50%. Its just semantics.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In praise of dissenters: It pays to encourage a variety of opinions - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/10/in-praise-of-dissenters <comment><USER2> The practice of purging the ranks of "difficult" subordinates - people who question the wisdom of conventional thinking, who challenge their superiors, who do not automatically salute and say "yes sir, yes, sir, six bags full", when their superiors speak - over the years has produced a crop of senior officials long on form and short on substance. The long-term result of stifling dissent and discouraging unconventional views, while rewarding those who conform, is an officer corps that is sterile, stagnant, and predictable. Promoting clones, while purging mavericks, is tantamount to incest. We all know the possible long-term effect of generations of incest - feeblemindedness, debilitation, and insanity.

\-- Colonel James G Burton, _The Pentagon Wars_ (1992)

<comment><USER3> That quote is brutal in it's simplicity, bluntness, and distinct lack of cleverness.

I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://outline.com/mEjNBa](https://outline.com/mEjNBa)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191013235042/https://www.econo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191013235042/https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/10/in- praise-of-dissenters)

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that large organizations like government agencies and corporations don't want alternate opinions, except in the rare cases where they specifically have a devil's advocate position to test the validity of ideas.

Better performance isn't an argument that sways these organizations that care more about preserving the status quo than about success in their stated goals.

<comment><USER6> Differing opinions are seen as an annoying impediment to decision making: yet another variable that needs to be weighed up _eye-roll_.

Management is easier when everyone just agrees and when Management is easy then Managers are happy, which generally means employees feel less "under the microscope".

Therefore alternative opinions have the appearance of working against both (lazy) Managers and (paranoid) employees. There's only a small percentage of humanity that are either willing, or unaware, enough to potentially get off- side with their boss and peers to provide dissenting opinion. Despite the great long-term value there is in attacking problems with the knowledge of the various angles of entry and exit.

It's sad, but human nature. And here we find ourselves in a world of our own making.

<comment><USER7> It's purely a cultural construct. Companies, societies, families, organizations, universities, etc. all have different internal cultures that dictate the social behavior of those in the group. When a culture of diverse opinion is encouraged and supported by official and implicit policy, it tends to thrive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone have experience surveying project teams anonymously?

"Do you think this project will be successful? Why or why not?"

<comment><USER9> I don't trust the anonymity and without that you can't trust the honesty. These surveys always get sent out with some sort of id/token in an email and after that you're feeding data into a black box where you have no idea what kind of information is being stored and how much of that information is available to the creators the survey.

If there were some sort of neutral third party (like a non-profit or maybe a union) running the survey I might have some trust, but companies in this space like survey monkey are not neutral, they're beholden to whoever pays them.

<comment><USER10> You could just do it the old school way: print out responses and put them in a ballot box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm unable to read the article at the moment, but I certainly agree with the title. I recently had to hire 4 new developers for my team, and I found 4 I'm really happy with, but the one I'm most happy with is the one I hired primary because he was very opinionated, and now after two weeks, he's already having a major positive impact on our way of working.

By contrast, the two developers with the most experience on paper are very timid, and it's hard to get a straight answer out of them. It's probably a cultural issue. Which makes it extra annoying, because in many situation, it's valuable to have opinions from all cultures represented, and not just the most direct cultures.

<comment><USER12> I'm curious which phrase you find is a better expression of this dev's communication:

\- "Strong opinions, weakly held"

\- "Clear opinions, openly offered"

<comment><USER10> Those two don't appear mutually exclusive

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We need a diversity of opinions for sure, people without opinions are just Yes Men.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's Rosa Luxemburg who said "freedom is always the freedom of dissenters". I believe that's true, the problem is knowing who are the dissenters, as many political groups want that label while many of them do not deserve it at all (obvious example: Trump presenting himself as an anti-system candidate).

<comment><USER7> Huh? Freedom of speech is for everyone regardless of their label.

<comment><USER15> The quote means that freedom really exists when it applies to all, including those who disagree with the government/powerful/majority.

I.e. the freedom of the dissenters is the measure of freedom in the group.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. The people in power, the dominant social group, etc, are rarely short in freedom. It's the people who don't fit in that are most at risk of losing their freedom. Of speech or otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "People from different backgrounds approach problems from different angles—that much should be blindingly obvious." It's not obvious and in my experience is nonsense when it comes to the workplace, it doesn't matter what color your skin is or where you grew up, if you're at company x it's because you fit through the same sieve and have the social awareness to shut up and conform. I have both observed and learned the hard way again and again that even a good solution to a long term problem will be ignored or treated with hostility.

You are more likely to be fired for your suggestion box submission than your idea implemented.

<comment><USER17> Right. If everyone in an organisation is a graduate of the same handful of universities, attended the same lectures from the same professors, read the same books, is about the same age etc then where is the actual diversity?

<comment><USER18> In my fathers life you would see and hear stories of people who started in the mailroom / loading dock and, they made it all the way to the top. That doesn't exist anymore. And if you catch the hiring threads here every once and a while. You can see people hire for 'cultural' fit. Few if any people would hire for conflict or dissent.

<comment><USER19> In fairness, the journey from loading dock to executive suite probably included enough sieving and sanding to produce a fairly precise cultural fit. That is, the loading dock supervisors probably possess more variety than the VPs, but less than the loading dock workers they supervise. How likely is a person who has spent an entire career climbing one ladder to have _any_ ideas foreign to the organization?

<comment><USER18> My point was more that they had that job for a time, and that shaped them. Falling out of the Ivy League and into a job with friends in SC and then climbing the ladder up doesn't expose you the rungs of people in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unless they're misogynists or skeptical of "climate change", then it's best to burn them at the stake, just to be safe that the crimethink isn't contagious.

<comment><USER21> > Unless they're misogynists

The article notes that an important factor of success is psychological safety. Makes it rather more difficult to ensure that when you have employees who bear hatred towards roughly 50% of the population.

Are you seriously defending misogyny as a useful character trait?

> skeptical of "climate change"

What does this have to do with the average workplace's diversity?

<comment><USER22> > who bear hatred towards roughly 50% of the population

Either the word misogyny is not used in this sense anymore, or the word "hatred" has changed its meaning. It's too common nowadays to see men being accused of misogyny for poor control of sexual impulses (not necessarily at the time of the accusation, but at any point in the past), or for expressing scepticism about certain political claims of feminists. Whatever that is, it can hardly be described as "hatred".

<comment><USER11> Maybe 'hatred' is too broad, but surely it's not hard to see that people are likely to be uncomfortable to share their opinion in front of people who disagree that they should have an equal voice merely for being who they are.

<comment><USER22> > surely it's not hard to see that people are likely to be uncomfortable to > share their opinion in front of people who disagree that they should have an > equal voice merely for being who they are.

But surely the same argument should apply to people sharing the current left sociopolitical theory, which uses terminology such as "privilege" (with various qualifiers such as "white privilege", "white male privilege", "straight white male privilege", etc.), or "unconscious bias", which also implies that a certain section of the population should not have an equal voice for merely being who they are. And yet it's not how it works, somehow.

<comment><USER11> That's rather the issue. According to the sociopolitical left, everybody should have an equal voice. That's the entire point. The problem is that in practice, some voice are louder while others are often ignored. And that's something to be aware of when your voice is one of those that does get heard: try to be aware of those that tend to get ignored.

<comment><USER22> > According to the sociopolitical left, everybody should have an equal voice

There are well-documented cases when that's patently not true. For example, when "those whose voices are louder", to go with your description, voice an opinion that no-one is stopping others to be as loud as they wish, they are told that their opinion does not count, because they have privilege, and that they should keep quiet and learn. And yes, they may be accused of misogyny (as well as other evils) in the process.

<comment><USER11> I'm saying "should", not "does". Obviously there are inequalities, and there will always be, for a variety of reasons. The goal is to reduce those differences and keep them from getting out of control.

Saying someone's opinion does not count is generally unproductive and needlessly hostile. The only cases where that might be defensible, is if the opinion that's under attack is itself attacking other opinions. For example: if someone claims that women's opinions don't count, I can see how you could argue that such a clearly bigoted opinion is not worthy of attention: it's arguing for the exact situation we should be getting away from.

Another case might be where an opinion is obviously badly informed; sometimes you see people voicing weird opinions based on wrong assumptions about other people they know nothing about, and refuse any correction on those wrong assumptions. (In politics, those misinformed opinions are often still the loudest, though. See the abortion debate for some bizarre examples.) In those cases, shutting up and learning may indeed be the best idea.

But in most cases, all opinions deserve to be heard, and nobody should be excluded from the debate for who or what they are. Of course that also means they shouldn't exclude others for who they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Totally misunderstands "psychological safety".

The reason why people are afraid of speaking up is because of an excess of "psychological safety", not a deficit. It is because the boss needs to feel "safe". That culture comes from and is for the senior staff.

It is funny because I have seen companies understand this and try to hire a diverse group. But they do everything else in a very rigid, hierarchical way. So most junior people end up leaving, and the senior people go on as before. One particular firm has been doing diverse hiring for close to three decades...their senior staff is still composed of the good old boys who have their come to Christ moment about diversity every few years but never change themselves.

You really have to focus on those senior people to understand this. Everyone says they want diversity, they may even hire diverse...but when a junior person is telling them why they are wrong, they will utterly lose their shit.

I do know places that have comfortably achieved diversity too. But the thinking required is basically antithetical to everything that people are taught about how to behave i.e. think things through for yourself, don't think emotionally, be prepared to be wrong and change your mind when that occurs, etc.</comment>


What Manning Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/2013/06/as-debate-continues-what-manning.html

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of bullet points there, but not many seem to be actual crimes committed by the USA. Isn't that what whistleblowing is about? Specific crimes related to the agency you are directly blowing the wistle on? Not wholesale release or everything you can get your hands on?

<comment><USER3> I think they're all things that the public should know. Unless it's crucial to national security these should not be hidden from the public. We should know what our employees are doing on our behalf. I think _that_ is what whistleblowing is all about. It doesn't have to be a specific crime, just a revelation of behaviour that was previously being kept secret for unjust reason.

<comment><USER4> The government already has people whose job it is to ensure that material is classified appropriately. There is most likely both a volume issue and a err on the side of caution issue.

While many of us disagree with all items that are classified I doubt you will find any organization which we would all agree upon that could make good decisions. Any such organization not within government would have to thoroughly vetted to insure their integrity and that all documents until accepted as non classified are treated as classified

<comment><USER5> > The government already has people whose job it is to ensure that material is > classified appropriately.

And, clearly, Bradley Manning believed that the public's definition of "appropriately" might differ significantly from the government's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > -U.S. used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at last year's > crucial climate conference in Copenhagen.

Some people here were speculating that NSA spying on the world means US will be able to blackmail all the world's leaders to do what's in the interested of US instead of their own citizens.

Yup. Confirmed.

<comment><USER7> > US will be able to blackmail all the world's leaders to do what's in the > interested of US instead of their own citizens.

I am very interested to see how much longer the world will tolerate this nonsense, before they eventually tell the US to f __k off and get out of their affairs. Obviously Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc. are doing it, but I really want to see a whole stack (all?) of the OECD countries stand together and make the US irrelevant.

I think it would be pretty effective if they all agreed to sever all trade with the US, and stop using the US dollar for anything (gold, oil) etc. This can't continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow and so far the death toll from the Arab Spring is only ~127,000... there's a long way to go until it matches Afghanistan + Iraq.

Perhaps before he's out he'll make that grim milestone.

Not to say that he is responsible, only that the chaos introduced by his massive classified data expose contributed to uncorking that unrest. And to think, he was hoping to stop war.

</comment><comment><USER9> another list: [http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/21/what-bradley- manning-...](http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/21/what-bradley-manning- revealed/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought Manning should be addressed as Chelsea now.

<comment><USER11> Last name is still Manning.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I meant "Chelsea Manning" instead of "Bradley Manning".

<comment><USER12> Did the title change? It just says Manning now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Account Manager coming to Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/account-manager-coming-to-firefox/ <comment><USER2> This is great for a power user, and hopefully for mom too.

To me, it's the same power-to-the-people type of idea where a personal server is advocated rather than Facebook; in this case, it's your browser rather than OAuth.

The only plug-in that keeps me on Firefox rather than switching to Chrome is <http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces/> because I can sync my passwords across Firefox installations on multiple computers.

<comment><USER3> for me, the only thing keeping me off of chrome is that it has no "master password" concept to protect stored passwords. on firefox, i use the master password timeout extension (<https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/1275>) so it has to be re-entered after a few minutes of not using it.

<comment><USER4> Set a password on your OS account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is somewhat a simple process, but I wish this article had detailed it out a bit more clearly than they did:

a) Create /.well-known/host-meta (XML) which features a URL -OR- set X-Account-Management HTTP header to a URL.

b) Create a JSON document at the provided URL that contains the control document which has connect/disconnect/register/changepass/sessionstatus/accountstatus as applicable (if sessionstatus/accountstatus are provided with a URL that returns 200 HTTP status if logged in, 4xx/5xx otherwise, skip c).

c) Set X-Account-Management-Status HTTP header to active; name="Username"

d) Use Add-on until Firefox adds Account Manager.

\-- Refer to [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Identity/Account_Manager...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Identity/Account_Manager/Spec/Latest) for granular details on syntax.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've just finished adding support for Account Manager to my site, FireFound: <https://www.firefound.com/> if anyone wants a live example.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am using 1password <http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password> to keep track of my passwords. It does a lot of magic making it feel integrated into the web experience, although it doesn't tell my browser whether I'm logged in or not, although I didn't quite feel a need for that before. It syncs the passwords to my iPhone as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an Interesting idea - and a very useful one. I would like to see it being proposed as a cross browser standard though.

<comment><USER9> It has been, but all the drafts are spec and subject to change. I think it's early enough in the process that trying to get cross-browser support is somewhat infeasible-- the spec is still too much of a moving target.</comment></comment>


Gary Johnson is speaking at my house in LA this Friday and you're all invited - hustlebear-judd http://hustlebear.com/2011/04/05/gary-johnson-running-for-president-and-speaking-at-my-house-this-friday/

<comment><AUTHOR> Gary Johnson spoke at the University of Michigan a week ago. Very interesting speaker, I highly recommend that people go if possible!

<comment> hustlebear-judd I'm looking forward to it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Gary Johnson- Solving problems instead of just throwing money at them.

<comment> hustlebear-judd ha, that's a cool slogan, I like it :)

</comment></comment><comment> hustlebear-judd <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbaOFkC8tQE></comment>


DNS Terminology - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7719 <comment><USER3> Ah, yes. There's an additional mess not documented there, which is in the standard C library for DNS resolution.[1] The semantics there are not quite what you might expect.

A fully qualified domain name has a dot at the end, as in "example.com.". Such a domain name must be looked up relative to the root. For non fully qualified domains, "resolver queries having fewer than ndots dots (default is 1) in them will be attempted using each component of the search path in turn until a match is found." The idea was that if you're on "foo.com", and you want to reach "bar.com", you can just type "bar".

This has some unexpected side effects if "ndots" is > 1, which it is on some systems. If you're on "foo.com", and you look up "nosuchdomain.com", the resolver tries "nosuchdomain.com." and gets a no-find. Then it tries "nosuchdomain.com.com." There, it gets a find, because "com.com" has a resolver which reports a find for anything of the form "*.com.com.", leading, of course, to a page of ads.

Then there's the problem of single label top-level domains. If you type one word into a browser, should it be looked up as a domain or fed to a search engine? Browsers usually choose to search first. But try putting a "." after the query; browsers are inconsistent.

There are an insane number of TLDs now.[2] Some of the one-word ccTLDs do resolve to an real IP address. "ac.", for example. Some of the new one-word TLDs, such as "gmail." and "fairwinds." resolve to "127.0.53.53", which is meaningless. ICANN took the position that single-word TLDs should not resolve to IP addresses, and mostly, they don't.

Then there's the question of whether IPv6 addresses should be looked up first, second, or simultaneously. And, if simultaneously, do you take the first response, or wait for both responses, one of which may time out and stall your DNS query?

[1] [http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag2/x-087-2-resolv.library.html](http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag2/x-087-2-resolv.library.html) [2] [https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat](https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat)

<comment><USER4> > There, it gets a find, because "com.com" has a resolver which reports a find > for anything of the form "*.com.com.", leading, of course, to a page of ads.

There's a few insane SLDs, such as 'uk.com', (operated by centralnic - <USER2> owned by demys) which responds with an A record for any unknown query, that should result in an NXDOMAIN. The webserver at that record has a link to buy the domain from centralnic, and a bunch of chinese language ads from Baidu.

      $ for RAND in $(uuid -n 10); do QUERY="$(uuid).${RAND}.$(uuid).uk.com"; echo "searching for ${QUERY}"; dig +short $QUERY; done
        searching for dc39f90a-a4aa-11e5-92e9-1c872c602432.dc39e492-a4aa-11e5-9d09-1c872c602432.dc3a0ba2-a4aa-11e5-b8dd-1c872c602432.uk.com
        220.127.116.11
        searching for dceaa728-a4aa-11e5-ad0a-1c872c602432.dc39e50a-a4aa-11e5-9d0a-1c872c602432.dceab920-a4aa-11e5-81a4-1c872c602432.uk.com
        220.127.116.11
        searching for dcf0df9e-a4aa-11e5-8613-1c872c602432.dc39e51e-a4aa-11e5-9d0b-1c872c602432.dcf0f218-a4aa-11e5-8abf-1c872c602432.uk.com
        18.104.22.168
        searching for dcf95dcc-a4aa-11e5-a599-1c872c602432.dc39e532-a4aa-11e5-9d0c-1c872c602432.dcf970be-a4aa-11e5-b099-1c872c602432.uk.com
        22.214.171.124
        searching for dcffa6c8-a4aa-11e5-81ac-1c872c602432.dc39e53c-a4aa-11e5-9d0d-1c872c602432.dcffba8c-a4aa-11e5-884c-1c872c602432.uk.com
        220.127.116.11
        searching for dd45fa4c-a4aa-11e5-82d0-1c872c602432.dc39e546-a4aa-11e5-9d0e-1c872c602432.dd460d0c-a4aa-11e5-a519-1c872c602432.uk.com
        126.96.36.199
        searching for ddacda6e-a4aa-11e5-89ba-1c872c602432.dc39e55a-a4aa-11e5-9d0f-1c872c602432.ddaced42-a4aa-11e5-913c-1c872c602432.uk.com
        184.108.40.206
        searching for ddb4995c-a4aa-11e5-bc63-1c872c602432.dc39e564-a4aa-11e5-9d10-1c872c602432.ddb4abfe-a4aa-11e5-9f73-1c872c602432.uk.com
        188.8.131.52
        searching for ddba4a82-a4aa-11e5-bb77-1c872c602432.dc39e56e-a4aa-11e5-9d11-1c872c602432.ddba5dce-a4aa-11e5-92cc-1c872c602432.uk.com
        18.104.22.168
        searching for ddc08ece-a4aa-11e5-80da-1c872c602432.dc39e582-a4aa-11e5-9d12-1c872c602432.ddc0a3b4-a4aa-11e5-b2b4-1c872c602432.uk.com
        18.104.22.168</comment></comment>


Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5une6u/reddit_is_being_manipulated_by_professional/ <comment><USER2> In other news, water is wet.

"If you aren't paying for it, then you're the product."

Facebook, Reddit, Google... they are all out to sell you.</comment>