Baby genius? - <AUTHOR>

Building off of VaedaStrike's thread, I decided to get your opinions.
I want to raise my child (2 yr old) for greatness, as every parent, but the hacker in me wants to augment his upbringing to aid the process.  Assuming these goals:
1.  Graduating High School by age 8-12. 2.  Enjoying Childhood despite the rigorous training 3.  Minimizing resentment for such hard labor.
Why graduate at an age between 8-12?  I want to give him time to explore many disciplines at an advanced level before puberty.
Disagreements with he goals aside - what would you do different to meet these goals?
Some steps I have taken so far - 1. Has him enrolled in a top-rated preschool 2. let him experiment with computers 3. piano instruction 4. read to him nightly
Its not much so far, but I'd love to get your input on what more I should do to reach the goals. <comment><USER2> There is no guarantee that is even physically possible. The jury is still very much out, but we know the brain is still growing and developing in puberty and even beyond. We aren't so clear on the implications of that fact. There is some reason to believe certain modes of human thought simply aren't available to you until a certain age and level of _physical_ development, and that these modes of thought are required for higher level math understanding and in general what we'd consider a sophisticated adult understanding of issues across many fields. The age these things occur seem to vary and have unknown dependence on the personal experiences of the child, but expecting these processes to be done by 12 is probably hoping for too much.

The only way I could see "graduating high school" by 12 to be done is either if you come up lucky and get a child with the necessary brain development early, or you define "graduate high school" at a relatively low level. (There's a world of difference between merely graduating, and graduating with honors and heading to college... _everybody_ "graduates".)

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the opposite. i believe that with the proper direction, any child of "normal development" can excel. But I did not intend for the thread to turn into a nature vs nurture debate. I was more looking for suggestions for hacks or techniques for teaching or encouraging self learning (etc...).

<comment><USER2> What you said isn't the opposite of what I said. It's actually entirely orthogonal.

You might want to spend some time with child development literature. It isn't all that difficult to understand. I mean that as a positive suggestion, not a criticism, and that it's much easier for a layman to get into than, say, particle physics. Just be sure you keep an eye out for what is the result of solid studies, and what is just some professor's pet idea somewhere, but the former _is_ available, and it paints a complicated, but interesting, picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Since no one saw fit to attempt to actually answer your question (don't you just hate when people feel the need to give you their opinion rather than answer your question), I came up with something: Talk to him _all the time_. There was an article a while ago here (or maybe reddit) that studied the amount of words a child hears before certain age between lower, middle and upper class groups. The difference was massive. Upper class children heard a huge amount more words by a certain age (I don't remember the exact range, I'm guessing in the hundreds of thousands). This difference showed up in much improved language skills for the upper class child.

Anecdotally, I've noticed this first hand. On my commute to work I've noticed how different classes interact with their children (as approximated by race). Black and Hispanic parents tend to give some distraction to the child so they don't bother the parent, or are themselves distracted by a cellphone thus ignoring the child. While white and Indian parents (likely middle to upper class by context) tend to constantly interact with the child, asking questions, speaking in complete sentences, etc. Just always having a conversation with them. The differences were stark.

Another idea I picked up recently was to constantly attempt to give your child age-appropriate decisions to make. This will train them to be able to weigh options and decide on the best course of action for themselves. The example I heard was when you're at the store, give the kid the option to buy two snacks --absolutely anything they want. But just two. This may help them develop decision making skills.

One more idea is to attempt to train their ability to delay gratification. You may have heard of the "marshmallow experiment" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment>) where a child's ability to delay gratification as a young child was correlated with their "success" as adults. Try to run the marshmallow experiment in your home as a standard course. Let him have a bigger payoff if he can show self control for some period of time: food, learning, whatever it may be.

Good luck with your future genius!

</comment><comment><USER4> Your child will grow up with his own personality and interests. Let him follow his dreams...not yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> He can follow his own interests and dreams as he wishes. But as a parent, my job is to guide his development. And I choose to try to give my child an advantage in his education. That is it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can always follow stories of famous prodigy.

Bad case - Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) Good case - Terrence Tao (Fields Medalist)

I especially suggest you check out Terrence Tao's because he writes a lot and a lot of people write about him. I would consider him a success story as he is super intelligent, smart, and clearly grew up fine. However, I remember he warned prospective parents to "not do it".

Link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao> Quote: "At the age of two, during a family gathering, Tao attempted to teach a 5-year-old child mathematics and English."

<comment><AUTHOR> My wife brings up the Unibomber as well... That is one of the difficulties - social development. I wonder if anyone has actively made attempts to focus the child academically, without taking away from social development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that you are using the wrong metrics.

Defining the results achieved by a certain age is a different thing than defining the qualities that you seek to nurture.

By setting results based goals, you are putting your child in a subordinate pass/fail position.

Who are you to define success for your child? It is their life.

By defining some qualities that you would like to nurture in your child, and implementing strategies to help them develop, you would be acting as a supportive participant in their development.

Milestone thinking can be very dangerous in this context.

<comment><AUTHOR> "By defining some qualities that you would like to nurture in your child, and implementing strategies to help them develop, you would be acting as a supportive participant in their development."

I think that is exactly what I seek to do. The goals are examples, and very loose. As I said before, I would not be disappointed with my child for not reaching them.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, in trying to be succinct, I came off as harsh.

I'm not questioning your motivations.

I just think that it is healthier to make statements like 'I want to help my child to realize their creativity' or 'I want to help my child realize their programming potential' than to say that 'I want to help my child to do X by Y years'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I wasn't too clear... I don't want to force my child into any profession or path. It is my duty as a parent to see him succeed at anything he chooses, and a good education can't hurt.

Again - Disagreements with the goals aside, Has anyone done anything with their children that has directly benefited their learning? Are their any little known hacks/ techniques that you or your parents have used to encourage excellence?

</comment><comment><USER7> It takes a certain amount of natural aptitude to excel at that level. Don't be disappointed or try to push too hard if he doesn't reach that level.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't be disappointed at all if he graduates at a normal age. I would just like to try everything I can do to aid in his progress. Hopefully I can establish some habits or give him some sort of boost to get the most out of his childhood.

<comment><USER8> _get the most out of his childhood._

Wow, I'm flabbergasted. I've got four children, and I am not at all trying to get them to "get the most out of childhood"; rather, I am trying to give them gentle encouragement in the areas they show interest in, and expose them to the wonders around them. Some people feel that children are like cups to be filled up; others feel that children are like candles to be lit. I'm doing everything in my power _not_ to push my kids.

<comment><USER3> >I'm doing everything in my power not to push my kids.

I don't understand this. Children are simply adults-in-training. That's what they always have been for every species on this planet. It is our job as parents to train them to be the best adults they can possibly be--for their own future benefit. In this world, that means make sure they excel academically as well as socially.

Not pushing your kids is the exact opposite of this. Most kids don't have the motivation to study hard. It's your job to try to instill a love of learning, while at the same time pushing them to try their best in its absence.

This modern idea of childhood as something to be cherished and protected for its own sake misses the mark. Childhood is a very delicate time for a developing child, so great care must be taken. But we need to realize that childhood is only 1/5 of a persons life. We need to make sure we give them the tools in that first 1/5 so the rest of their lives can be as fulfilling as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was a full-time parent and homeschooling mom for quite some time. I had no such goals for my kids. I had very different ones. But I like the results I got.

Some things you could try:

Instead of seeking to have him graduate by age 12, homeschool and pursue an unschooling path which gives him the freedom to explore as he pleases.

Give real choices (decision making practice) every day starting now. Lots of parents don't seem to do this. Some things I did: I let my sons pick two junk food things at the grocery at that age. They could pick any two. I didn't do any censoring. But they could only get two. I recently had a lengthy discussion with my oldest about how this fostered decision-making ability.

Generally speaking: If the rules aren't working, change the rules rather than punish the child.

I'm sure there's lots more, but, hey, if I really wanted to talk about this I could be developing my languishing homeschooling and parenting site.

Peace and best of luck.</comment>


Show HN: a tool for measuring the resource utilization of a process over time - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jgehrcke/goeffel <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

Author here. Goeffel is meant to be simple and solid CLI tooling for measuring the resource utilization of a process over time, for storing the resulting time series data in an interoperable fashion on disk, and for a useful out-of- the-box plotting experience.

I am looking for feedback before continuing development and would therefore love for you to review the README and to maybe give it a try and leave some critique and suggestions.

Thanks!

(this has so far been tested only on Linux with CPython 3.6, happy to add more platform support based on demand)</comment>


I put together a list of 62 books recommended by Keith Rabois - <AUTHOR> https://www.mostrecommendedbooks.com/keith-rabois-books <comment><USER2> Another of this submitter's collection of Amazon affiliate links with no added content (tag=mostrecommendedbooks-20).

In this case, a "single* recommendation is enough to make this list. How handy.</comment>


Ask HN: Computer, programming book and no internet. Is it still doable? - <AUTHOR> Back in the "good old days", that's how I learned everything. Do you still consider that doable nowadays? With npm, pip, cargo and other package managers. Can air-gapped programming be done in 2019? How? <comment><USER2> Yes, it can be done.

Microsoft had great documentation in 1998. It is called MSDN VS 6.0. You can find it at WinWorldPC. You had everything there (in the documentation)! DirectX, WIN32API, what ever you wish... Hit F1 on random keyword and it would still pull out the documentation for it with code examples too. No need to connect to the internet.

Comparing that to nowadays Visual Studio documentation... it's... bad. Offline documentation has links to online resources which is missing the point. You have some information there but it is not complete, it is full of holes.

<comment> non-entity I swear modern MSDN is nearly impossible to navigate without a search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Offline C programming on OpenBSD is still pretty comfortable due to the excellent manpages. It helps that you can get source for the userspace and kernel in a single CVS checkout.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why wouldn't it be possible? That's how I learned to program back in the day and I maintain that it is still the best way to do it. It teaches you self- reliance, how to solve problems yourself and how to think hard (since you can't google solutions on the net).

</comment><comment><USER5> Although there are many solutions I like the story to choose a language that existed before package management was part of the process. C, Ada, lisp is a great language, the Man pages are well written, use apropos to explore functions.

</comment><comment> non-entity Depends on what type of work you're doing. I dont think modern app development would be easy given the amount of dependencies that need to be downloaded. But if you're working on something without that, and have a _really_ good reference manual, than sure maybe. Of course no guarantees things get done is the same amount of time.

I did some kernel work a while back on a machine with no internet access. While I did use the internet on a laptop, it was mainly to read docs get help, so assuming I had all the docs offline, had the source already, and was smart enough with all the background knowledge (I seriously doubt lol), I suppose I could have done it offline.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sure, but it'll take a lot longer without easy access to the burble and chatter of programming forums, the archive of other learners hitting walls and creating illumination.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd say not only doable, but would likely also encourage better habits initially. This question reminds me of a school I read about that taught programming using only pencil and paper.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, if you learn fundamentals of programming, find some good books, setup programming environment, offline from internet is good for you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yep, with a suitable Linux Distribution installer disk that includes the basics.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are you accepting internship applications?

<comment><USER10> Lol wrong thread my bad</comment></comment>


'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult' - <AUTHOR> http://erhugirl1213.pixnet.net/blog/post/30864466 <comment><USER4> It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker!

The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?

I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.

"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

<comment><USER5> Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world "langauge" existed haha.

When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with chinese (because you're learning it for example) :

_出租车 (chuzuche) means taxi (rent - car)

_火车 (huoche) means train (fire - car)

_飞机 (feiji) means airplane (fly - machine)

<comment><USER6> I'll grant you fly machine. But if a taxi is a rent car, what do I call a rental car? And if a fire-car is a train, what do I say if my car catches fire?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word.

She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the _character_ is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.

EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub- language, so it's not so useful.

Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.

<comment><USER8> > _...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying > the word._

Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).

> _Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide > pronunciation._

Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].

> _Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, > Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the > same writing._

Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).

It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.

[1] <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical>

[2] [http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh- CN&...](http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh- CN&q=%E8%9C%B1&hl=en)

<comment><USER9> From experience, Mandarin and Cantonese are fairly close to each other, in my opinion. But Shanghainese (and basically the Wu dialects) is not intelligible to me. 我們 (wo men = "us" in english) in Mandarin is not so far from 我哋 (ngo de) in Cantonese, but is pretty far from colloquial Shanghainese, 阿拉 (a la).

 _It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation._

That is nonsense, people are people and will do what makes them happy. If they don't care about Mandarin, nothing will stop them from not using it. Personally, I totally enjoy the fact that there are different dialects, each with it's own flavor in expressing certain concepts(especially profanities!). For example, everyone's favorite profanity in Cantonese, 仆街 (pok gai/pok kai) "go to hell" (transliteration is "go lay on the street (and die because you'll get trampled/ran over)". Over time, this has bled over to English and the English bled back over to Chinese speakers into PK. And in today's Taiwan reality shows (I'm sure mainland China uses this term today as well), we have PK rounds where contestants get eliminated from the shows. In these contexts, PK has turned into a term about competition!

Sure, having a standard is good so that there can be less ambiguity in communication between people, but at the same time, diversity is what breeds new ideas and innovations. Take computers, programming languages, designs as an example; 1 processor to do computation and graphics? "unifying" everyone to C# be such a good idea? Is a centralized versioning system the most awesome?

<comment><USER10> PK = penalty kick

<comment><USER9> PK = 仆街 (pok kai). I find it funny when playing mmo's and people use PK as Player Kill, hehe.

<comment><USER10> wow ok... haha, I always thought the term (used widely in Taiwan too) came from soccer...

Perhaps the coincidence that there is a cantonese term AND it also stands for Player Kill made "PK" take off?

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pk>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9).

It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).

<comment><USER12> This is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent.

<comment><USER7> Those things may well trip you up when writing.

But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters > appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), > but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are > combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if > you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For > simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 > for 90% and 2377 for 99%.

Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is the one you don't know.

And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to memorize a few thousand characters _and_ memorize how multiple characters form a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.

<comment><USER7> This is one of the wonderful things about English (and other European languages that I have knowledge of).

My wife (also referenced in this thread here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092> ) struggled with English at first until an ESL teacher showed her how easy it is to manufacture noun, verb, adjective, or adverb forms from a single base. She had been working hard memorizing every word form that was taught her until somebody showed her that the way English actually works is generally pretty logical. She says her vocabulary tripled overnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.

<comment><USER16> Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power".

Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).

<comment><USER17> Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who more or less single-handedly revived the modern Hebrew language, spent a great deal of effort coming up with Hebrew words for modern things. "Telephone" was "sakh-rakhok", from the classical Hebrew words for "conversation" and "far". Not all of his suggestions took root: Israelis just call the telephone a "telefon".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (& lousy - <USER2> relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S. especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly, most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very good at it either.

As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and keep it _in_. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific papers written in english...

</comment><comment><USER19> I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards).

My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english.

Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages.

Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all relative.

Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.)

I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131> ) have hit the nail on the head (translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language, becomes more fun for me.

Back to the cooking thing though...

I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools, and how that contrasts with western cooking.

I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset.

The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine.

I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested in studying the differences and similarities.

Disclosure: I'm Chinese.

<comment><USER19> Also, when eating out in Western culture you are more prone to just ordering your own meal, whereas in Chinese culture it's typically family style.

It is also, with few exceptions, acceptable to grab food in the 'center' with your own chopsticks. I guess chopsticks don't get dirty :)

One thing that drives me crazy about chopsticks is when you want to cut something, you have to do that X trick and sort of cross the chopsticks, or use the spoon. I'm a wiz with chopsticks, but a knife and fork is the ultimate combo. It wins at every category except noodle soup and sushi.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those chopsticks and communal sauces do get 'dirty', but hey, a few germs keep your immune system on its toes! There may well be an aspect of group bonding there in saliva-exchange.

If you have to cut food, that's someone else's failing before it gets to the table - tough cheap meat, cut too big, or cooked badly. But yes, I've often had to cut meat with a blunt china spoon too!

Yes, the spoon - glad to hear you're one of the few non-Chinese (I presume, from your name) who uses it. Always amusing to watch people eating rice 2 grains at a time with chopsticks...

<comment><USER20> I always have the idea that the westerners are more aggressive because they use knife on the dinner table. If you cut your own food, and sometimes see blood dripping out from it, you tends to think making others bleed is more or less a pleasure, or even a daily need.

As a programmer, I think the cooking process should be well encapsulated, and the knives should be left in the kitchen. The eaters should care about sending the food to the mouth, rather than having to postprocess it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact

Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - <USER3> quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand how _that_ managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly there.

<comment><USER22> LOL Anyone who's ever worked with a Chinese PhD's, grad students or serious developers (such as in finance) knows this is complete horseshit...

But you're right, this thread is the perfect place for some casual racism to vent your frustrations in working with third-rate developers foisted upon you by your company's outsource policies.

<comment><USER21> My primary experience stems from working for a Canadian-based company with 200+ developers (located in Canada), 80% of which were Chinese programmers. The CTO of the company was Chinese and he had an obvious preference for hiring graduates from his own university and/or country. Top picks, but few with more than a couple of years of non-Chinese experience.

Just to emphasize - EIGHT PERCENT of my coworkers came from Chinese software development companies and they quite naturally brought their work ethics with them. My four years in this company is a basis for my original comment.

If it's not obvious, I am not talking about Chinese nationality, I am talking about developers with Chinese way of working in a software development environment. The way that revolves around never saying No to the boss, which in turn is deeply rooted in their cultural heritage. If the project manager says that the bug needs to be fixed today, it _will_ be fixed today. Meaning that it will no longer be reproducible. How it will be fixed and what else is going to broken along the way is secondary. This will create another bug that can be taken care of later in the same manner.

And this was the company that developed sophisticated networking software including their own embedded OS down to the kernel level. Moreover most of these guys were perfectly capable of NOT cutting corners and doing a splendid coding job if forced. But god forbid if they would ever do it on their own accord. Everything was always done in a rush and sketchy-patchy way. I don't have any other explanation except for it to be a cultural thing.

You can certainly call it a horseshit and a casual racism if you'd like. However that's how things are in reality.

<comment><USER22> > However that's how things are in reality.

No, that's how things are in _your_ reality, which is not necessarily anyone else's reality.

You've just perfectly described under-skilled, over-worked, under-paid H1b-style immigrants who get _deported_ if they're fired. Not talented people working at the top of their game in finance, biotech, startups, etc.

When you're at the bottom of the pond everything looks like shit. You even said yourself they're fresh grads with very little experience. Dumbass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to _speak_ ; it's that it's hard to _read_ and _write_. Although the wonderful article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (<http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>) does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.

</comment><comment><USER24> I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wait, what? I think the author is just ignorant of Greek and Latin roots (it's ok, most native speakers are too).

iso-tope is literally "at the same place"

commun-ism is literally "share-ism"

<comment><USER26> You're absolutely right. It's just that, at least in the case of isotope, most people wouldn't realize that "iso" and "tope" have meanings. They might notice that "iso" also occurs in "isolate" but probably wouldn't look much beyond that. The author's point is that the Chinese use simple, everyday words instead of archaic words from dead versions of languages.

<comment><USER27> Be careful. "isolate" comes from Latin "insulare" (or insolare? I don't know). "isos" is Greek for equal, and "in" is a Latin prefix for not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From OP _Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%._

Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help tremendously while learning chinese.

<comment><USER29> <http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/>

Try this site for some frequency lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho.

The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing.

otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to.

The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart.

I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...

</comment><comment><USER31> Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive.

For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term. English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along, a brand new word has to be invented.

On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g. Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95% of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words.

In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase) to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a firetruck as waterboat.

</comment><comment><USER32> After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer than driving to the corner store.

Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner, learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I want to say.

No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for those neural pathways to develop.

</comment><comment><USER33> A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non- delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the latter of which I have some fluency).

While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no separation between those words just adds to the confusion.

When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it, which is critical for moving on to true fluency.

</comment><comment><USER34> Classical Chinese is very difficult

here is a list of Chinese words about horses:

<http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/>

马 骎 騤 駉 驵 骜 骥 骀 驽 騑 骖 驷 骃 骅 骆 骊 騧 骐 骠 骝 骢 骓 牿 驺

<comment><USER6> Here is a list of English words about horses:

horse, mare, stallion, gelding, foal, colt, yearling, filly, pony, equine, _Equus ferus caballus_ , mustang, brumby, mount, steed,...

and so forth, without getting into different breeds of horses or special- purpose horses.

<comment><USER35> brumby? now i know fo shizzle that y'all just yankin my chain...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"?_

It's amazing how much this sounds like Newspeak. Evidently you can translate Newspeak into Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER36> Read _Asia's Orthographic Dilemma_ by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is _not_ true.

Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.

<comment><USER37> I found Hannas' book boring. I much prefer John DeFrancis' _The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy_ ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fant...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fantasy)) and Sampson's _Writing Systems_.

These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese characters is much more important than I imagined.

Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers.

One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore) but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I never knew this was the case. It actually makes me want to learn Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese etc.) now because it sounds like a very neat system.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's all just a matter of abstraction. "In Chinese, a bus is called a "public wagon"..."

Ok. What's "public"? What's "wagon"? Would it not be easier to use "all people carrier"? Then, what's "people?

Since it's turtles all the way down, the article is picking an arbitrary (and comfortable) turtle to stop at and say, "this is the right spot".

</comment><comment><USER40> _I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated?_

Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own.

Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other language, like French>" in the source.

English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots).

Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself.

Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made _English_ a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized")

Further, _Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share- property-ism"?_ ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding.

Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real.

In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java.

I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc.

Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things.

Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs.

_EDIT_: When I say _a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America._ I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish.

When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots).

This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate?

English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid- Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.

<comment><USER31> That was a false comparison in the borrowing words from other languages. The European languages are similar and thus make it easy to borrow from each other. When is the last time you see English borrow from Chinese straight stroke by stroke? The borrowing is usually at the phonetic level, which happen quite frequently in Chinese, borrowing foreign terms phonetically.

In your analogy of Java vs Scala, you got it reverse; may be not what you hope for. Java as small keyword set is English with 26 alphabet. Scala has large building set and can build DSL, that's Chinese.

<comment><USER41> Considering phonology... Mandarin Chinese has 400 syllabic sounds, each with 5 tonal choices (4 tones plus unstressed). English has 170,000 possible sounds ([http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_Engli...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_English_language)), each either stressed or unstressed. So the phonology of English seems more like Scala's in allowing symbols, not just alphanumerics, for names.

As for graphology... Chinese has 3000 commonly used characters, >50,000 counting all historic characters, compared to English's 54 (26 uppercase, 26 lowercase, hyphen, and apostrophe), so at first sight looks more varied. But most Chinese characters are made up of components, e.g. 蜱 being composed of 虫 and 卑 in a left-to-right pattern. Depending on how you count them, there are about 400 to 600 hundred of these components in all Chinese characters, including historic ones. It's better to compare 54 English tokens to 600 in Chinese, more but only 10 times more.

As for lexis... Last year English reached one million words, the most words in any known language ([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-wor...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-words.html)). Not sure how many 'words' Chinese has, but it seems until recently Chinese never defined the concept of 'word' in their language, only of 'character', so there's no (intra-word) morphology in Chinese, only (inter-word) syntax. So perhaps it's best to leave the comparison at the phonological level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As a half-german when I see this I just think literally wth.

> There are German words as long as > > "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft".

<comment><USER43> It's kind of like saying there are english words as long as antidisestablishmentarianism.

<comment><USER44> My system dictionary has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's freakin difficult as hell to read and write.

I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once you stop using it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds as if he wants German...</comment>


Can Repelling Magnets Replace the Spring in a Pogo Stick? - <AUTHOR> https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=pogo-stick-spring <comment><USER2> Neat. I was also thinking of compressed air but that clearly won't work. The spring require less effort to start it moving, and that effort doesn't ramp up as quickly as with compressed air.</comment>


Tesla Cars Will Become a Lot More Expensive When Full Autonomy Is Reached - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/07/08/tesla-will-stop-selling-cars-full-self-driving-elon-musk/ <comment><USER2> In light of continued questions about demand problems for the Model 3, this comes across as Musk trying to gin up demand from people thinking they "soon™" won't be able to buy a Tesla.</comment>


Canadian grocery chain orders 25 Tesla electric Semi trucks - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/18/canadian-grocery-chain-orders-25-tesla-electric-semi-trucks/ <comment><USER2> Why would they do this? It doesn't seem to make much business sense other than to be PR for the grocery company.

They've given Musk $5k x 25 trucks ordered, on promises of trucks delivered in a year or more, from a company that usually misses its deadlines. And oh by the way the truck doesn't have a price yet, so they're not committed to actually buying.

Maybe they're just giving tesla an interest free loan for a few years for PR?

<comment><USER3> A company pre-ordering is quite different from a consumer. They've probably put up a fraction of the regular $5k.

But even if they hadn't, this story hit newspapers in pretty much every region they have consumers. At a WACC of 6%, a two-year 125k loan means they've got quite an effective PR move for $15k in interest payments.

Remember this is a company with $46 billion in revenues, not a mom-n-pop store or small local chain.

It's a good move without even going into whether the semi ends up worth buying a few years down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Canadian grocery chain buys some trucks AND cheap PR"

</comment><comment><USER5> If this is what makes corporate embrace new technology and protect the environment in the same time, I'm 100% for it. 25 doesn't sound much, but it's enough to test the ground and get some advertising for "free".

<comment><USER6> >If this is what makes corporate embrace new technology and protect the environment in the same time,

If the electric-semis deliver on the promised cost savings you won't need to convince any business of anything. No business is resistant to anything that can reduce the cost of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess we are going to seem this kind of coverage for next couple of days - X, Y, Z companies have order a, b, c quantities of Tesla Semi. Unless there are real world reviews these orders amount to nothing but test runs.</comment>


The Secret Sauce of Coding - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-secret-sauce-of-coding-34e0e2348e1d <comment><USER2> This is spot on. The only thing that allows me to succeed in programming is relentless drive to bulldoze the problems in front of me.

<comment><USER3> Awesome, glad you liked the piece!

Genuinely, we're all just steamrollers and I don't think many new programmers really understand just how often solving a problem comes down to sheer willpower and persistence.</comment></comment>


Google Search is only 18% Search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/09/googles-serp-is-only-25-serp.html <comment><USER3> So the major issues I saw with this article were:

1) the left-hand column is counted as non-search, when the left-hand column is entirely about search. The left-hand column gives you ways to refine your search: you can limit the types of search results like news/images, slice/dice search results by date, limit search results to verbatim matches or to change the geographic weighting of search results, etc.

2) the actual _search box_ is counted as non-search, as are the estimated results count and the time the search took.

3) the article treated whitespace as non-search, when shorter columns can actually make it easier and faster for users to scan the results.

That's still leaving aside facts like

\- We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that's not a new attitude. I found a quote from 2004 that said "In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content," and I'm sure I could find similar quotes with a bit more looking.

\- And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. A lot of people like to take a query that shows ads and say "Aha!" but they're forgetting all the queries that don't show ads.

Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are looking at.

In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use.

I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.

You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?

<comment><USER3> But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search experience better for power users.

Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is <http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/> which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to [http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless- telephones/...](http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless- telephones/all/) which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models.

Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.

<comment><USER5> Percentage aside, I think it is perfectly reasonable that Google reserves a lot of space for ads. What pays for the search results after all? I am surprised that people expect to get great service for free. It's just not sustainable.

What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result. If Google is confident about an Ad being information then why not let people click it for its relevance? Why make the background just barely different from the search result so that its almost impossible to visually separate ads from results? Let people clearly know that its an ad and let them decide whether they want to click on it or not.

Bing is as deceptive as Google here so not singling you guys out but please don't portray a reasonable effort to make money as a something larger than that.

<comment><USER6> >What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result.

I'm not sure if this is true as I almost never click on an actual add link rather then a search link. I'm not sure if this is subconscious (I'm simply not seeing the adds), but I think if it was deceptive I'd be clicking them all the time.

<comment><USER7> Those of us who are in marketing, publishing, & start ups are not generally an accurate reflection of the general market. We tend to be far more aware of advertising than a typical web user.

Most searchers are unable to distinguish the difference between search ads and content. From a number of surveys we did here <http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results>

"Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Only 18.5% of the screen is devoted to something that people are actually looking for."

Once again, people dismiss ads as simply spam or something that provides no value to the search query when in study after study, at least on Adwords and SEM, paid results often boost relevance vs. a page only of organic results. This will of course differ by query and category of query but Google has already done a lot of work to make sure ads don't show for queries that have little to no commercial value or do not have enough query volume to risk jeopardizing the search experience.

If you're shopping for something, the paid and Google shopping results are often more relevant than the organic results since a lot of them incorporate real time price feeds or promotion codes. These are driven by the recognition of your shopping intent

Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query. Through quality score, AdWords also shows ads that have been engaged with most often and with strong landing pages so that you don't get spammy ads or irrelevant ads that are unrelated to your query.

<comment><USER9> People don't go to a search engine to look at ads, despite of what Google may say. Most everyone knows that half of these ads are scams, and the other half is of dubious precedence. People visit a search engine because they want to see organic results. For example, most people, as soon as they have enough technical ability, choose to install ad blockers to avoid losing their time with Google ads.

<comment><USER10> I do not install ad-blockers. Tried out Ad-Block Plus, but disabled it after a week. Your claim about "most people" installing ad-blockers as soon as they can is completely unsubstantiated.

I don't do that because if a website or web service doesn't respect me as a customer, pushing annoying ads down my throat, I would rather stop reading/using it, which is a form of voting with your wallet. Instead I prefer to reward loyalty to websites that are tasteful and put users interests first. As an example, such a website would be Reddit.

Installing ad-blockers has the reverse effect of what most users want. Ads will become more and more intrusive and difficult to block. And by visiting such a website, you're still giving that website eyeballs, you're still passing links around to your friends, you're still rewarding them for their behavior. It's like hiding the cookie jar from a fat kid, then congratulating him for being fat.

Installing ad-blockers is also immoral, just as software piracy is. I've seen arguments of people that don't think so, but it's hard to justify the piracy of Photoshop when there are free or cheaper alternatives available, it's hard to justify the piracy of MS Office when LibreOffice is available and it's hard to justify using Google Search with ad-blockers when there are alternatives like DDG.

If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the service/website in question. It's amazing how self-entitled some people are.

<comment><USER11> > _If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the > service/website in question._

I have zero responsibility in the website business model. I don't want to see ads either on TV or on the web, I use the available tools. I've used ad blockers proxies since 1998 or so.

When some websites (reddit, osnews) ask nicely to deactivate adblock to support them, I do. When they whine about how that's their business model (like ars technica), I don't.

Oh BTW software piracy isn't immoral. It's maybe wrong, but morality has nothing to do with it. After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at least for a part on software piracy. Furthermore, from your point of view Gutenberg was wrong because of all those poor scribes he put out of jobs by going against their century-proven business model. Does not make much sense, doesn't it?

<comment><USER10> I also hate ads on TV. That's why I don't watch TV anymore. Except for HBO which is not ad-supported.

This is not about responsibility towards a business model, it's more about rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. As a consumer, you definitely don't want bad treatment.

        After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at
        least for a part on software piracy

That's true, but look at the other side of the coin as well ... because of software piracy, alternatives don't have a chance to penetrate a market that's monopolized. It also keeps Microsoft and Adobe lazy. No competition means no incentive to improve and no incentive to lower the prices.

Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have pockets deep enough to ensure that piracy is kept under control. But the story is very different for small companies or independent developers that just want to make a living. Also piracy doesn't work in the same way for games, or other products that people aren't using on a daily basis.

That's why I consider piracy immoral - it kills small software developers, it perpetuates the monopoly of big companies and is simply unfair to the people that worked on that software, pushing them towards more control, flawed technologies (DRM) and server-side subscriptions (in which case users don't really own anything anymore, not even their own data).

<comment><USER11> Notice that I don't like software piracy either, and I don't pirate myself: I use almosts exclusively free software (yes, I'm one of these guys :) and I buy my music, movies and the very few proprietary programs I use (like some games).

However, it seems to me that software piracy is a given of the media; there is no solution to it. Remember the 1976 Bill Gates' open letter to pirates? It's like drug prohibition: there is one supposed "right" state of the affairs which is unattainable, but for some reason the pragmatic approach is taboo.

I suppose software piracy is actually closer to the "tragedy of the commons" mechanisms than actual theft.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I agree, piracy is not theft, but new business models are needed.

For the record, I also pirate movies and music from time to time, because I live in Romania and getting certain music and movies is difficult - <USER2> content available in the US is either not available in my country, or is made available with a significant delay. I don't have access to services like Netflix, the content on iTunes is a fraction of what's available in the US, the local bands still sell packaged CDs and we don't have a local Amazon/iTunes, etc...

Fortunately for HBO Romania, they are airing shows as soon as they are available. I also go out to movie theaters, but I only go to movies that are worth it. I'm not going to go out for a subpar movie, but I would pay $2 for viewing it in my home, if only such a thing was possible as soon as they are released.

Basically these media companies are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting the availability of content. Too bad that we don't have a "piracy subscription" to be paid monthly, because I would gladly pay it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using Adblock+ for the last 6+ years. Granted the 13.8m users [1] are a drop in the bucket compared to googles non Adblock+ viewers. I was a little shocked to see this post as it is much different than what I see.

For the search "saas help desk" ([https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk](https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk))

I see: <http://imgur.com/xMB6t>

They see: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq- qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAd...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq- qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAdU/KAojWeHbhpc/s400/serp2.gif)

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/>

<comment><USER13> They are being good guys about it; they could easily block all "Ad-Blockers" and ask you to disable the adblocker to continue (as some sites already do).

<comment><USER14> Actually, there's no way to really block ad-block.

It wouldn't be too hard to make an ad-blocker that used CSS and Javascript to do all of the blocking during page render. It'd be an inefficient use of bandwidth and rendering time, but it'd be able to block 100% of ads and undetectable from the web server.

In fact, before Opera had a built-in ad-blocker, I think there was an ad-block extension built on its "User Javascript" and custom CSS abilities.

<comment><USER15> Seriously?

      function verifyAds() {
        if (!adContentsVisible()) {
          loadAdContents();
        }
        setTimeout(verifyAds, 1000);
      }
      verifyAds();

<comment><USER16> Huh? Extension can override JavaScript on the page, too, you know:

window.adContentsVisible = function () { return true; }

<comment><USER15>
      (function() {
        // local scope, can't override
      })();

My point is that I agree with grandparent, that they just allow ads to be shown, and it's not technically impossible to reload ads, or prevent page contents view, if no ads visible.

<comment><USER17> The plugin can absolutely mock the ad element(s) and make them seem to be visible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the image where you show the 18.5% organic footprint vs 81.5% ad footprint, you are lumping in a lot of page real estate used for navigation and search tools. The entire left hand side is not add related.

I'd be a more accurate/fairer way to represent the info by providing 3 categories: organic, ads, navigation/misc. If you did this, you'd provably see a closer to 40/60 split, still in favor of ads. Similar to what you showed in your screenshot from the past.

<comment><USER19> He didn't go to Google looking for navigation, he went looking for the results of his search.

So the way he discusses the real estate devoted to fulfilling his purpose is quite reasonable.

<comment><USER20> Except you use the navigation to improve your search. No one wants a page completely full of organic results.

<comment> qu4z-2 I do.

Well, except perhaps my query at the top so I can refine it if necessary.

<comment><USER21> So turn on adblock or get one of the scripts that strips down the UI. Mountains of testing have shown that you're in the severe minority here.

<comment> qu4z-2 I do use scripts for that. I was just providing a counter point to the parent's "No one wants". "Most people don't want" would be more accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This observation made the rounds at Google a few months ago. Note also it depends on the topic of your search. 3 ads in the yellow box are reserved for highly monetized queries - "flowers" or "car insurance" for example.

Queries about programming topics - "sinatra post parameters" is one I tried a few minutes ago - usually don't have ads.

<comment><USER23> are the "highly monetized queries" queries also the most common queries?

<comment><USER24> They can be -- but not necessarily. It has a lot to do with conversions. Someone searching "car insurance" or "cheap flights" is most likely on the hunt for something they are willing to pay for; while someone searching "football scores" is most likely just looking for free information.

Of course this doesn't even scratch the surface of running a site for ad revenue that provides free information to common search questions, e.g., "how do I change the oil in my car"

<comment><USER22> Ads are actually more likely to provide the answer to your question, or the solution to your task, when you're searching for something to buy. Which may weigh into why Google puts so many of them on the page.

<comment><USER25> It's one of the things that prevents me from ad-blocking sites like Google. Some of the time I will actively be searching _for_ the ads, and avoid the natural results, because the natural results for some product searches can be extremely spammy with "review" sites and comparison shopping sites with horrible user experiences dominating the results, while the paid results are usually decent retailers or distributors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _> Is Google becoming a Yahoo?_

I suspect that all ad-revenue sites are subject to the same economic pressures. Almost all such companies eventually succumb to these pressures.

All such companies will tend to cater to the lowest common denominator. They will tend to put their own interests (that of showing ads and increasing ad effectiveness) over the interests of users.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. Apple and Microsoft are well positioned to become this company as well, as is Google.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Yahoo! became this company?

<comment><USER27> The failure of A/B testing. More ads => more revenue. People won't abandon the site immediately just because a new ad or two showed up, like a slow boiling pot, so short term effects are always positive.

<comment><USER28> Just like the sesame-seed hamburger bun: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html>

(Though, personally, in this case, I don't think Google's getting enough credit. The added space for search tools is designed to make search better for most users, and probably do, even if most of us don't need them.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some results are even worse. There were keywords where you could see only 7 organic results.

The rest was AdWords.

To make things worse, Google adds more and more "product search" results (paid placement).

With each day, there's less and less traffic for those people who don't pay Google. I suspect that the paid placement trend will increase until it is possible.

To make things worse, Google not only decreases the SERP "real estate". They also introduce frequent algorithm updates which tend to drop down websites which earn on search-engine traffic. Leaving those which may have lesser quality but don't earn on their traffic ( no monetization ). And if you do it to a million websites, you will gain quite a lot of new AdWords buyers. Some of them have to try your PPC ads. Let's say that 10% of them will try to get traffic out of PPC - now you've got yourself 100.000 paying customers.

It's obvious they want to force people both to buy and to click ads. They don't gain anything by sending free traffic to other affiliate websites ( which will then convert to sales/leads ).

The question is: Where do you draw a line between a search engine and an "ad engine"?

To many people, especially those less tech-savy, Google = Internet.

I personally think, it's pretty bad for the overall state of e-economy to have this one big mogul who administers the majority of targetted traffic. He wants his share of the pie from everyone. If you are too small to pay, fuck you. They don't need you. The consumer won't notice you are not in the search results, there are 50 other websites happy to take your place. Either you are at the top or you don't exist.

It'd be great if there would be something like Google but with a more "socialistic" approach. Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more.

<comment><USER30> > Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the > traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more.

How would you do that? Throw in some random numbers to shuffle the search results?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The percentage of space occupied by ads varies depending on the search.

35% ads only 1% of the time isn't nearly so bad as 35% ads all the time. And the auctions help guarantee that ad-crowding happens most often when searchers are actually well served by advertisements.

People searching for "saas help desk" probably want to find people to sell them support, rather than just info about saas. Searching for just "saas" alone reduces ad volume. Searching for "origin of saas" reduces ad levels further. Wikipedia is the top entry, and we're down to one lonely ad at the bottom of the page.

Similar divergences occur with "linux" and "linux support."

I'm not convinced fewer ads would be better. Imagine asking a friend for help with your broken machine, and he hands you the short biography of Linus Torvalds.

When you want pure information (for me, most of the time) ads drift out of the picture. When you want to buy something, they're more prominent, just as you probably want them to be.

N.B. - There is a hell of a lot of whitespace on a 1920x1080 monitor though.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not to be a shill for Duck Duck Go, but the amount of search information displayed is refreshingly dense:

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk>

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel>

<comment><USER33> <http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk>

How is DDG any better really?

<comment><USER32> I'm not bombarded by fifteen different ads, who are all trying to pretend like search results?

The results are hit or miss...I probably !g about half my queries. But the other half are entirely pleasant experiences and I'm hopeful DDG continues to get better.

<comment><USER34> The ads on the Google result page are probably better links than most of the organic results. People who pay for traffic usually make the payoff worthwhile.

<comment><USER35> Nonsense. All three ads on the Google page are to thin domains with little more than a contact form to harvest your info and spam you to death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To be fair you should factor whitespace out when you're calculating the area.

In the recent screen capture all the whitespace is added to the non-search results.

In the not-so-recent results there is a fair amount of whitespace added to the search results (as well as non-search).

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly thought about cutting all the white space completely, but then after having a chat with our designer... He said that every page is visually divided into blocks (even if there are no explicit visual borders of these blocks), subjectively, of course. This, the "F-pattern" and "left-to-right" orientation for the most of us brought us to an agreement that the last screen was ok... The subjective "blocks" are somewhat like this.

But I agree, I shouldve been more precise

<comment><USER36> That makes some sense; sort of defining what the whitespace is "devoted" to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Aaron Wall has documented the decline of organic search very well over the years. Worth checking out: <http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine>

</comment><comment><USER38> I've had trouble staying focused when using Google a while back and decided to write a Chrome extension for improving the Google Search experience. Here's the URL for those interested: <http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google>

EDIT:

Turns this: <http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png>

Into this: <http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png>

<comment><USER39> A big improvement, but as with ad blockers, you still have search results crammed into a fairly narrow box. Obviously, you won't be able to get Google to show longer titles and descriptions, but you should be able to widen the box so that the two-line descriptions end up on one line, which would fit more results on each page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Arguably, from a design perspective, a wider column of text is harder to read than a narrower column of text. I personally find Google to be more legible than it was before at 53% result space. That's just me, though.

<comment><USER41> I'm not sure it is just you. Shorter columns are easier to read, which means it serves users even better; our eyes don't have to track a massive row of characters to see what the search result is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is that actually so different from the way things used to be? If you run the example 2008 query, "open source social networking," the number of ads hasn't changed.

It seems like most of this complaint should be directed at the navigation sidebar to the left. I'd imagine Google tested the sidebar ad nauseam, though, and is leaving it there for a reason (probably increased engagement in other search products and more readily exposes advanced refinements).

</comment><comment><USER43> Ironically (or not) jitbit.com is a similar percentage of content above the fold, with almost identical content width.

I say 'or not', because there are well established readability reasons for having a narrow content width. Would many people genuinely prefer the google of the 2008 screenshot? The days of sites with full page width text are largely gone, and for good reason.

I'm sure google would also suggest that the ads _are_ content.

</comment><comment><USER44> Can we please change the headline to something a bit less invalid and full of sensationalism? This is a perfect example of distorting statistics to serve ones purpose.

* Author has a small screen.

* Author compares results space vs everything else, and then calls it "ads"

On my 1920x1200 screen, overall ad space and results space actually take up the same amount of space. There's a ton of UI and white-space though. While Google could arguably make better use of their empty space, suggesting the remainder is entirely ads is absurd.

Screenshot with results in red and ads in blue: <http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png>

<comment><USER45> > * Author has a small screen.

Author has a big screen. His screenshot shows five results above the fold. I can barely see two on my 1280x800.

The argument works both ways.

<comment><USER44> 1280x960 is not a "big screen" by any modern definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Two minor nits about Google search:

(1) the bias toward current results seems overweighted. Maybe I'm the only one this annoys. I use the custom date settings more than any other feature on Google, maybe it could always be exposed.

(2) I wish there wasn't two buttons that say "News" that do different things while they have more sets of buttons in identically analogous places that say "Images" and "Maps" yet for some reason both buttons do exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I can never remember which "News" keeps my current search and which doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Related, I noticed a few days ago that google.com, which was once the most minimalistic page possible, was cluttered by (1) an ad for chrome on top, and (2) an ad for the Google tablet on the bottom. It felt messy.

Times have definitely changed.

</comment><comment><USER48> I believe the number of ads displayed varies based on the perceived usefulness of the ads in answering the user's query. The ad space above the organic search results shouldn't be lost space.

Note: I work at Google but not on web search, ads, or UI design. This is just based on my personal observations.

</comment><comment><USER49> If you scroll down the percentage of the search results significantly increases :) I found this article quite dumb, honestly. If you make stats, make it on the whole experience, not just the first seconds using Google...

</comment><comment><USER50> I was reminded today of the kind of tricky things google gets up to when I went to the download page for "Win32 Disk Imager" on Softpedia (as linked to by the Raspberry Pi's Download page).

[http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD- Burnin...](http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD- Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml)

Check it out for yourself. You see that big, prominant "Download Now" button - that's an ad served by googleadservices.com.

I don't know how they get away with crap like this, it surely must be against their own ad policy.

<comment><USER51> It is against policy:

[http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...](http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346295#Encouraging_accidental_clicks)

I'll ping folks internally. If you look at the button with Developer Tools, it's one single giant image that's an ad for Download Manager. The advertiser stuck a Download button on it and is presumably running ads on sites where you download things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Question for people more familiar with google ads that me:

I quite often type in a search term for something that I imagine must be a very common search term and I don't get any adverts whatsoever.

Does this mean that nobody has bid on this keyword (because it's too expensive?) or are some search terms simply not allowed to be advertised on?

<comment><USER53> By definition if no one has bid on the keyword, you can easily win the auction by bidding the minimum amount. It is likely that the terms you were searching for are not ideal targets for effective ads. Can you give an example of such query?

<comment><USER52> I can't remember which terms I searched when I discovered this, but I tried it just now.

"computer networking" yields 1 ad. "networking" yields no ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It seems to me that linear vertical space matters more than area. It still is small, but not as small. Showing ranked search results in multiple columns makes no sense, and screens have gone from 4:3 to 16:9,, so you would expect the extra area to be used for something other than search results.

<comment><USER55> When you have enough vertical space, Google will screw your results with botched site crowding. See [http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result- same-page-152...](http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same- page-15287.html)

I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Google would apply a Panda-induced penalty to any website that followed a similar content strategy.

[http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold- now-...](http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now- penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613)

It's good to be the king.

</comment><comment><USER57> The author is only analyzing content above the fold. There's no conclusion to draw from this, other than that Google used to cram more content above the fold, like all other sites.

</comment><comment><USER58> bing seems to be doing better in this regard.

<comment><USER23> ok granted it is doing better by allocating more space to the search results. But how about the search result quality? How's it doing there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I can't believe Google removed the ability to scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER60> I almost pathologically click on the ads. If I hold down CTRL and click I am giving back more than is enough to receive such an amazing, life changing?, history changing?, service. Here's that click.

The room that is taken up by the left and right columns also are welcome. I sometimes find exactly what I am looking for in the right column. I actually wish Google gave more information and less site links as results.

</comment><comment><USER61> Maybe it's just me, but all that wasted empty whitespace bothers me. I think it may have gotten worse when google did their big UI overhaul.

I think some screen real-estate could be saved by simply tightening the padding. I see a lot of areas that are blank. It would be really nice if the content was allowed to take some of this dead space.

</comment><comment><USER62> Use Adblock Plus. Problem solved. Google SERP is 100% relevant for me. It's just results, white space and a little bit of UI.

If you think advertising is going away or getting scaled back any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Just block them and stop thinking about it. Now if only they could invent Adblock for Reality....

</comment><comment><USER39> At first I thought "well, if you're using an ad blocker, it's different", but in Google's case, you just end up with white space instead of ads because the search results are still crammed into a 42em wide box. I wonder if there's a user script or chrome plugin to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER63> This seems to me to be a similar kind of evaluation that Google would do on its own work. Nice angle.

</comment><comment><USER64> Considering the present standards of organic ranking an aware user(searcher) will look for natural results more, than paid ones. So it is better to let organic results take more space on Google search pages than inorganic ads.

</comment><comment><USER65> What I use:

GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and allows you to format them to your liking.

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310>

</comment><comment><USER66> I think a big difference also is that Google's landing is clean, this is the results page. Yahoo's landing page is cluttered but their results page I would say is comparable.

Could somebody do this for other sites?

</comment><comment><USER67> This is something Aaron Wall has been trying to expose for the past 3-4 years over at SEOBook.com (why oh why are these SO few comments compared to SEOMoz everytime I visit there? this guy is NEVER afraid to speak the truth), and it's just 1 of many disturbing trends happening. Google's mission is simple: they want you to rely less on organic search and more on Adwords for your traffic.

Nowadays, you can't even see what keywords are driving traffic to your site if users are logged in (50% of queries or so). Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly so you don't know what works.

<comment><USER68> > Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because > Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly

And therefore they would have to increase your rankings randomly as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I always forget that Google does ads on search page, after I installed the amazing AdBlock extension on Chrome.

I don't see Google, Facebook Ads and many more, AdBlock knows what.

</comment><comment><USER70> I had to disable ad block to see the same screen and wow what a difference. No wonder Google still looks clean to me - I'm not even seeing their ads.

</comment><comment><USER71> There was also a big change in May 2010

<http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png>

2011 / May2010 / pre-May2010

(thumbnails are from searchpreview extension)

</comment><comment><USER72> The search in our isn't considered 'search'?!

</comment><comment><USER73> google have ads above fold, but matt cutts not tell us anything about it. And how it improving user experience. Google now cares only about adwords money, not about quality of their main product - organic search results. All that stories about best possibly user experience it just tries to hide that fact.

</comment><comment><USER74> my version from about a year ago [https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/A...](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/AAAAAAAAAFc/pRhc_fM6big/s1267/scumbag_google.jpg)

<comment><USER33> For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results. Why do people assume that if it's an ad that it must be non-relevant? Advertisers wouldn't be advertising on these keywords unless they were converting a good percentage of users ... that means a good percentage of users are finding those links relevant.

I don't use AdBlock, don't really see the reason to as I find most of the search ads to be relevant whenever I'm searching for a term that actually shows search ads (which isn't really that often). Hate for search ads just because they are ads is kind of an odd imo ...

<comment><USER75> _"For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results"_

That's almost certainly on purpose to get better ad click ratio. Google manually inspects all major keywords, you can bet "credit cards," "mortgage" and "insurance" are tweaked and tweaked to Google's specification. Showing "bofa.com" when searching for mortgage isn't that useful to the average user, so people click on ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> to me this is like tv shows. it use to be about 50 min of show, 10 min of commercials

now its about 42 min show, 18 min commercials

</comment><comment><USER77> maybe google is just 82% advertising.

<comment><USER78> Actually, doesn't the amount of advertising change based on the actual query used?

<comment><USER77> that's actually a really interesting point and something which i had never really considered. googling 'computational linguistics' (for me anyhow) renders exactly zero ads, while googling 'computers' gives me almost an entire screenful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> This shouldn't be an issue to programmers. With Greasemonkey or Scriptish it's trivial to write a script to clean up the page so that you only see the results.</comment>


Show HN: HackerNews Redesigned - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jitenbansal/hackernews <comment><USER2> I like it ! But as I mentioned in the chrome extensions review, when you upvote a post, the white heart disapear (on chrome)

<comment><AUTHOR> Because, without chrome extension when I upvote a post, Upvote icon disapear.

<comment><USER2> Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, didn't even notice haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This theme is beautiful and transparent appearance. Good work

<comment><USER4> What a pity not has theme for Firefox/Opera.

<comment><USER5> It should be easy to port using the WebExtensions standard (implemented by Chrome, Firefox and Opera).</comment></comment></comment>


President Trump asks SEC to study abolishing quarterly earnings reports - <AUTHOR> https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/17/news/companies/trump-drop-quarterly-reports/index.html <comment><USER2> So what are the problems? One, as stated, is that quarterly reports turn into quarterly voting by the Stockmarket, and thus poor decision making. Another, frankly, is the work on putting them together. It doesn't seem like cutting the frequency in half will matter much: long term planning has a longer horizon than six months.

Why not go the other way? Allow companies to publish financial statements monthly (with a rolling close) plus annually one month after the annual close. And as for the various material statements and representations that go along with them, let various press releases, tweets etc account for them, plus the annual formal statement (shareholder letter).

IIRC Cicso famously had a "three day close" closing their books three days into the new month. Some reasonable software investment should permit many companies to do a rolling close. Those who make that investment would be permitted to stop doing quarterlies.

This is a case where a more frequent cadence of lower amplitude might allow a better long term view!

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that tend to encourage faster more volatile trading?

<comment><USER2> Probably not. That's what I was getting at with this sentence:

> This is a case where a more frequent cadence of lower amplitude might allow > a better long term view!

Essentially, the quarterly cadence makes each release a big deal. More frequent releases may have slightly more volatility encouraging investors to look for longer trends.

Ideally you'd have weekly closes but except for large companies that would offer all sorts of swings due to trivia like expense reports or other transients. But GAAP in theory would allow a large modern corporation to close every day. The whole point of accrual is to damp out this nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After reading the WSJ version of this article, I can see the argument in- favor: quarterly earnings reports put more weight on hitting short-term goals over long-term investment. That's just basic human nature, I suppose.

Yet flat out abolishing them seems a terrible price to pay in terms of transparency. Perhaps a middle ground, based on the size of the company in terms of revenue? Or some other (less onerous, I guess) means of reporting -- in quantifiable terms -- the health of a business each quarter?</comment>


A New Way To Pay Student Loans: Slowly or Not At All - <AUTHOR> http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/06/bailing_out_graduates.php

<comment><USER2> In Socialist Australia, here's what we do:

\- Most Uni places are sponsored by the Govt.

\- A proportion of the cost (4000-9000/year - only for tuition) is given to the student in the form of a loan (HECS, FEE_HELP, whatever the acronym is now)

\- Interest is charged at the official CPI rate (so I think mine had 3.6% interest charges this year)

\- The loan must be repaid once a students income is over a certain level. ($41,595 The required rate of payment goes up with income - about 4% for $42K, up to 8% for >$77K)

Wikipedia have a reasonable summary: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aust...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Austraia)</comment>