Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/well/family/lunch-shaming-children-parents-school-bills.html <comment><USER2> Aside from the whys are wherefores of the situation, the thing I find the most disturbing is that people who set these policies and do things like this:

> staff taking debt notices to class

> when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the > tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in > the trash

Are allowed _anywhere_ near children. I know it's nothing new, and in many countries we're beyond school staff being enabled by the state to physically abuse children (at least by a couple of decades in the UK), but it seems like we still turn a blind eye to emotional and psychological abuse. It's one of the things that petrifies me about potentially having children at some point.

> It shows how lasting these experiences can be.

<comment><USER3> Given the general chaos of any single school, and the amount of " _normal_ " discipline applied across all students in aggregate, it's probably incredibly difficult for bystanders to notice and distinguish types of discipline, and the underlying motives behind disciplinary actions throughout the day.

Schools are noisy places. It's partly a signal-to-noise and triage problem.

Kids fighting wjth each other. Kids disrupting class. Long quiet noiseless periods during tests. Fixed attention while movies are shown in class. Noisy cafeterias, amid rushed, scheduled lunches. Gym class as a more general hell. During the pace of everything else, it probably just blows by, while other more chaotic events grab attention.

To the individual child, it's all-consuming. To the reader, each experience collected with similar accounts reads as deliberate child starvation. To bystanders in the moment, there's probably a moment of temporary confusion, and then it's ignored.

Kids should pretty much eat for free, especially at public schools, but in general too. It doesn't change the fact that healthy food remains expensive, and that kids will try to eat junk food as much as possible, but the last thing anyone wants to hear is kids being deprived of food for petty reasons.

It probably rings in the mind as less urgent in the moment, when there are no apparent signs of malnutrition visibly evident. Not as much the Dickensian orphanage of the imagination. In the moment, the situation probably strikes a person as the usual scolding ever-present throughout any school.

<comment><USER2> That's kind of what I mean. The kind of person who will put a child's lunch in the bin, even (especially?) if they are in a rush, is not the kind of person I think should be in the school environment.

<comment><USER4> Ah is it their lunch if they haven paid fo it? Also I think you may be going a bit far with the schools as sanctuary angle. Schools are imperfect places and seeking to shield children from all possible stress only leads to raising adults who cannot take any stress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So basically there is some policy like "Throw the lunch into the trash" despite it being paid for by school? i.e. school pays for lunch, but denies it to student and throws it into trash. Its some deranged enforcement of artificial scarcity(like food being destroyed by farmers to prop up high prices, below article). [http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/news/europe-farmers- russia/](http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/news/europe-farmers-russia/)

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a point at which you have to wonder how wealthy the U.S actually is, if it can't even feed school children at no cost to their parents.

At some point it starts to resemble DPRK propaganda.

<comment><USER7> The country is wealthy. The people are not. Add it all up and the average american pays a fairly high amount of tax. They just dont get much of the basics the rest of the western world expects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _But when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash._

So we leave a kid hungry, we throw the food. An we bear even more costs. Also - don't want to live on this planet anymore.

For the price of a single textbook you could probably feed a child for an year on bulk prices.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why food isn't considered a basic cost of school. They are a few things more boring that a day old lunch pack, so when you have several hundred children to feed, make some proper food. It's not even all that expensive when you're at that scale.

<comment><USER10> Because schools can't pay their basic costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just give up.

If the day were shorter, students could make it through the day without eating. The loss of hours can be partially compensated by changing the school year from 180 days to 240 days. The time would be better-used because long hours make people tired of thinking, and because long vacations cause students to forget. (the long summer sets students back by at least a month) Shorter days would even save money on buildings, because there could be an extra shift, with students going to school at different times.

Lunch causes huge logistics problems for schools. People all want to eat at the same time. That means the facility has to accommodate a large portion of the school. The better schools might pay for a cafeteria that holds everybody, which is wasteful. The crummy schools will have 4 or more shifts, meaning that some people eat "lunch" soon after they arrive and others eat it right before they go home. There usually isn't much time to eat; it can be 20 minutes for a fast-growing teen or inefficient first grader.

You'll never get people to agree on a tolerable lunch. Some people won't eat this, and some people won't eat that, and spending the money to deliver a decent experience is just not going to happen, and all of that conflicts with obsolete-when-written nutritional mandates.

Nobody is washing hands. If they were, they wouldn't be able to keep their hands clean due to doorknobs and chairs and so on. Disease spreads during lunch; this causes real harm. Nobody is brushing teeth, but some students have braces.

Enough is enough. School lunch is a disaster and we aren't going to fix it. We should just admit that.

<comment><USER12> I think that this point of view ignores the fact that a big under acknowledged purpose for public school is daycare. The school day needs to be long enough to give the parents time to go to work.

Not sure what the solution is here but I don't think shortening the day will work due to this.

<comment><USER13> End the long work day. Higher pay, fewer hours.

<comment><USER12> I can get behind this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's up with kids buying lunches at school? At my school everyone brought lunches with them. Never had any drama that I can remember.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be nice if schools were funded enough to provide every child with a full stomach, which is very helpful when you're trying to learn something, and the adults training to become soldiers would have to pay for their own meals instead?

Or, why not pay for them both with taxes? How in the hell can you expect a child to learn while hungry?

</comment><comment><USER16> That child has not been hungry in a while. A little hunger can do you a world of favour.

<comment><USER17> Yes, everyone pictured in that article is obese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As for the "Why are they doing this?" or "how is this possible?": in the US, the way of thinking "it's the poor's fault for being poor, and they need to be shamed for being poor so that they do something to not be poor anymore" seems quite entrenched in the society.

The US is in for an even nastier surprise once all those low-skill-demand jobs like transportation are going to be automated away...

<comment><USER19> _#1: "I never give money to homeless people. I can't reward failure in good conscience."_ -gselevator [1]

[1][https://mobile.twitter.com/gselevator/status/233183548029427...](https://mobile.twitter.com/gselevator/status/233183548029427713?lang=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is lunch free in schools outside the United States?

<comment><USER21> Not in the Netherlands, most older kids (>12) bring a lunch box, usually filled with 4 slices of bread with cheese, meat, "hagelslag" or peanut butter (we call it peanut cheese and it is almost only peanuts). Children until 12 often eat at home during the afternoon although that is rapidly changing. Many children now spend lunch time at school, I think the cost is ~1 euro for some slices of bread with topping as mentioned before, they are helped by volunteer parents.

My 4y/o brings a box to school with 1 piece of fruit (some bring a cookie/oat bar or something but the school encourages fruit) and a bottle of water which is eaten around 10:15 I believe. I think this is only for young children.

By the way, if a kid forgets his or her fruit they make it point to share, I like that policy. Also I hear from colleagues more and more schools are switching to water only to battle weight increase in children, although this leads to some discussion :)

Edit: see below, the Netherlands is waking up I guess :)

<comment><USER22> In Belgium it's pretty much the same. Except that it's usually a cookie and a piece of fruit they bring (morning and afternoon snack).

Some schools (kindergarten, primary and secondary) do offer the possibility to buy lunches. But those are quite expensive (more than $2, for 4y olds in my kids' previous school) and not very healthy, since at that scale, cost of food matters a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> make it free

<comment><USER24> x2. Meals cost pennies compared to the trivial BS schools waste money on.

<comment><USER25> Cough cough...smartboards.

I installed around 50 of those in a 2 week period about 7 years ago. They were very expensive, and extremely poor products. They did not effectively do any of what they advertised to a competent level. However, the school sounded modern to the PTA when they said they were buying them.

<comment><USER8> A child learns better if itis hungry, crying from humiliation and desperate. Smartboards are cheap necessities, whereas a chunk of slow cooked cheap cut of meat and some lettuce, tomatoes and carrots are opulent luxury.

It is not as if research has shown that nutrition in those first years is extremely important. Who wants more of those pesky tall, healthy kids with properly developed brains and internal organs. /s

<comment><USER16> TBF that one's internal organs seem bountiful. Perhaps too bountiful.

<comment><USER8> Obese kids feel hunger too. And her obesity is even better reason to have access to nutritional food at least once per day.

<comment><USER15> So give the students fresh, healthy, nutritional food for free and then you can rightfully blame the parents for giving the kid junk. Pointing fingers does nothing, offer an alternative and let the other side shoot it down and you can honestly say you've tried.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Film Entire Nervous System at Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/scientists-film-entire-nervous-system-work-first-time-n407986

<comment><USER2> <disgression mode>

 _" Politicians declare a war somewhere"._

 _" A baseball team played last saturday"._

 _" Humans create some stuff and named it "iphone"._

Would those be acceptable titles for a piece of news?

I'm talking about the abuse of the generic "scientists" word for all in the newspapers. Is because those people have no name? They work for a company without name maybe?

What if we would give a chance to modern journalism and just say: "Dr. Keller's Team filmed..." or "Team of the Howard Hughes Institute filmed ...".

After all, NBC, is your science section; even the dumbest reader can guess that we are talking about either scientists or dinosaurs. As videocameras are not cretacic stuff, the answer was obvious from the start.

The problem is that being systematically dehumanised and treated as a category in newspapers (something that never-ever-no-way occurs when we talk of politicians of sportsmen) makes easier for common people to detach itselves for science and see scientists as a bunch of "robots/lab rats/strange asocial people doing weird things" and this is not good. </disgression mode>

<comment><USER3> Good point. I'd always rather hear where the team is or who funded the study. That would give some basis to judge whether the finding is of interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the Nature Communications paper to which this article refers: [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150811/ncomms8924/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150811/ncomms8924/full/ncomms8924.html)</comment>


Blockchain for Near-Planetary, Interplanetary and Metaplanetary Space Domains [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prototypo/blockchains-in-space/blob/master/Journal%20of%20Aerospace%20Information%20Systems/Blockchain%20Properties%20for%20Near-Planetary%2C%20Interplanetary%20and%20Metaplanetary%20Space%20Domains/Blockchain%20Properties%20for%20Near-Planetary%2C%20Interplanetary%20and%20Metaplanetary%20Space%20Domains.pdf <comment><USER2> Id settle for a blockchain that worked on earth with reasonable throughput.</comment>


16 hilariously unimpressive computer ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.oobject.com/category/16-hilariously-unimpressive-computer-ads/

<comment><USER2> Unimpressive by todays standards. Try looking at them from the standpoint of the year it was released in instead.</comment>


Lessons Learned from 2 Years Marketing AI Bots - <AUTHOR> http://blog.talla.com/14-lessons-learned-from-2-years-of-marketing-enterprise-ai-bots-and-knowledge-bases-for-support-teams <comment><USER2> i guess the lessons i learned from writing marketing content for an "AI" "bot" company (read: shitty chatbot which nobody would willingly use, yet VCs threw money at) would be different. pardon the cynicism here.

1\. people don't need education about AI. it bores them. they know what the potential for AI is. what they do not know is the potential for your company's product. they need education about what your product is -- and your product is not "AI". when you brand it as "AI" you immediately start to fight a losing battle against the hype cycle of AI and also your own marketing, which will always oversell the product.

2\. specific use cases are all that some of these "AI" products are good for. they're so weak in comparison to what their marketing is claiming that they eventually have to rebrand as a tool for the few things they do correctly because it's cheaper than broadening their strengths.

3\. free trials work excellent for AI, but they work terribly for "AI" companies, as the author notes. it takes five minutes of demoing to set up a test case and find out that the "AI" product doesn't work. chatbot companies know this, and hate this. users can immediately tell that the marketing is disgustingly oversold and that they will need to invest a lot of time in getting the product to do what was advertised.

note: i'm not accusing the OP/their company of anything, but we seem to have taken different lessons from similar experiences.

<comment><AUTHOR> We must have had very different experiences. Our customers who use the product as it was designed, rather than like a saas product, see great results and rave about the AI success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Without having any experience in marketing, let alone AI or AI marketing, as a _maybe_ potential client I find the "what buyers get wrong" and the "buyers asked dumb questions" to be a very adversarial approach to selling a product.

Maybe Talla needs some more lessons on the matter that they haven't yet learned (not specific to AI).

As I see it, the buyer has a given set of problems and wishes to pay money to solve them, it is up to the seller to show (patiently and respectfully) how the product can solve _those_ problems, if the buyer was already an expert in AI, knew already how AI works and its limitations, probably he/she wouldn't need the product at all and would have already solved the given set of problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> My last company was a Saas company, and buyers wanted to discuss maintenance contracts like they would for packaged software. They dont matter for Saas. Buyers disnt always understand that and it took time to change their buying habits. It was goid in those days to challenge customers on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "AI doesn't work very well on unstructured text, for example, but buyers expect it to. They anticipate magic at times when they shouldn't. Push back on this."

What's the difference between AI bots and ML?

<comment><USER5> Elfen magic(tm) or Blue Crystals(tm). Your choice.</comment></comment>


A spaceship shooting game developed using JavaScript ES6, Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gd4Ark/star-battle <comment><USER2> This is the 8th time you posted this project. It's ok to repost things here a few times, but somewhere between 5 and 10 is too much. The mods will notice and may ban your account and your site. Try submitting other projects or other content.

Anyway, I'll repost my comment in other thread:

* Add instructions in English

* I want to move the spaceship with the arrow keys too.

* Why are the asteroids shooting?</comment>


Distill: An Interactive, Visual Journal for Machine Learning Research - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/distill-an-interactive-visual-journal-for-machine-learning-research <comment><USER2> Currently at #1 and #3 respectively:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915808)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915865)</comment>


Tumblr introduces highlighted posts for $1 - <AUTHOR> http://staff.tumblr.com/post/16980189397/highlighted-posts

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a screenshot example of what a promoted posts looks like in the dashboard - <http://cloud.jonathanmoore.com/Dsu4>. Users have the option of choosing from several dozen feature options like "buy this", "very special posts", "super proud of this", etc.

Right now it appears to be limited to one highlighted post per day, and with all purchases on Tumblr they give you the option of donating an additional $1 to EFF, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

<comment><USER2> Off-topic but what are you using to serve up images on your site like that? Is it a custom script or an OSS solution?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using CloudApp (<http://getcloudapp.com/>) to upload screenshots I take. Quite the handy tool.

<comment><USER3> +1 to this. CloudApp is AWESOME.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And there are the thousands upon thousands of dollars that will come in from people who just want to try it out for fun, since it's only a dollar. Wicked smart.

<comment><USER5> At Tumblr's scale, thousands upon thousands of dollars isn't worth worrying about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is a really smart way to generate revenue. Traditional ad placements would be inconsistent with the experience. Of course your posts are essentially ads, but users can now unfollow people who get too spammy. Kind of plays on the Google model of letting people pay to highlight their offer, or in this case their content. Interested to see how it plays...

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the reasons i don't use tumblr is they dont seem to have a notable revenue stream. This sounds like a good step in the right direction.

<comment><USER8> Honest question: Revenue streams of the host company are an important consideration in choosing a blog platform for you?

<comment><USER9> Seems reasonable. If they run out of money, where does your blog go?

<comment><AUTHOR> With most platforms that is a valid concern, but with Tumblr you can easily create a local backup your entire blog ([http://staff.tumblr.com/post/286303145/tumblr-backup-mac- bet...](http://staff.tumblr.com/post/286303145/tumblr-backup-mac-beta)) as basic HTML, images, assets, theme, etc.

With that said, Tumblr has a very bright future ahead of them.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but then you're stuck setting up again elsewhere - so why not do it from the start?

Answer to rhetorical question: because we can't be bothered, so we'd rather just pick a provider who is more likely to stick around than not.

<comment><USER8> That's a totally reasonable consideration but the revenue model of the host platform isn't always the best indicator of its success or longevity.

LiveJournal & Six Apart have longstanding revenue models but aren't hosting users like the President of the United States or large corporate media entities.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but they're still around. Or are you implying that the President and Corporation, Inc. would bail Tumblr out to keep their blog up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just purchased a highlighted post to announce our new publishing platform for photographers (<http://getbokeh.com>).

I'll report back in a few days on the results.

FYI here's the post I highlighted: [http://getbokeh.tumblr.com/post/16999137678/bokeh-now-in- pub...](http://getbokeh.tumblr.com/post/16999137678/bokeh-now-in-public-beta- create-your-portfolio)

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't Facebook attempt to sell 'Gifts' for $1 back in 2007? I recall they even got Susan Kare to design them.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't this make more sense, though? It's a combination of paying for advertising and paying for application features, both well-tested business models. Paying for random fake things that annoy your friends, however, is not as well-tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, this is a surprisingly non-terrible way to generate revenue. Good job, Tumblr. Ad placements and premium membership would have pissed off a good chunk of their users, but this is kind of a nice compromise.

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of a business that was very successful for one of my brother's in-laws.

It was a site where you could post free press releases. If you liked, you could buy one or more stars for your press release, and the more stars, the closer to the top it sorted.

He bootstrapped in the late 90's without investors, his only co-founder was his wife, he grew it organically and got very profitable, ended up hiring a couple dozen people, and ultimately had a very nice exit.

</comment><comment><USER15> A lot of users are complaining about it right now, but to me, it seems like a genius way to monetize the platform. When things calm down in a couple of weeks and it gets used in the way intended, this will probably look much smarter in hindsight.

Still would like them to figure out a way to help bloggers monetize their sites on the platform. That's the rub for bloggers trying to go "professional" through a Tumblr site — all the readers they get through the dashboard are difficult to monetize right now.

Once they figure that out, it's going to be huge.

Here was my cheeky attempt at using it: <http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/16980898109/one-dollar>

</comment><comment><USER16> Forrst has a similar system for promoting user posts as an advertising alternative, though Kyle (founder) uses credits (called acorns) and there are several ways to earn credits, outside of simply purchasing them.

It's a great idea: it's hard to get more "targeted" with ads than content that would have been posted within the community anyway.

If anecdotal evidence is any guide, it seems to have been received really well within Forrst, and the backlog was huge the last time I looked (not enough pageviews to match demand).

</comment><comment><USER17> The fonts look bad in chrome/win7, at least on my setup: <http://i.imgur.com/eCGEL.png>

<comment><USER18> That's what it does, just a little tag? That's pretty unimpressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's about time tumblr started generating revenue

<comment><USER20> They have already been selling themes

<comment><USER21> And the money they made from it probably didn't pay their unearthly Amazon bills.

<comment><USER22> this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tumblr's previous paid promotion system was massively effective. I'm glad they've brought it back in this new form.

</comment><comment><USER24> Twitter should be paying attention to this experiment.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just tried it out on my Tumblr. Wonder if it will have any impact on whatever post-ranking/call-outs they already do. Unfortunately, I tried it on a Friday afternoon, which is not a good time to ever post anything.

But I love the easy integration of donation to good causes. I'll be making a lot of $2 purchases out of impulse, it seems.</comment>


Nvidia Sues Samsung and Qualcomm, Seeks to Block Galaxy S5, Note 4 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/nvidia-sues-samsung-qualcomm-seeks-to-block-galaxy-s5-note-4/

<comment><AUTHOR> unfortunate that nvidia will chose the route of lawsuits instead of competition.</comment>


JSii - full text search in 100% javascript - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/karussell/jsii

<comment><AUTHOR> Write what you think about this idea and especially the opportunities explained in my blog post:

[http://karussell.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/full-text- search-i...](http://karussell.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/full-text-search- in-100-javascript-the-future-of-javascript-is-bright/)</comment>


The Feed Fast Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twonegatives.com/post/3367590115?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+clojure+%28Planet+Clojure%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm increasingly noticing that I'm a mile wide and an inch deep. I find > myself lacking any discretionary time to go deep on a subject and instead > find myself constantly 'catching up' with what my feeds have sent my way.

This was a challenging post for me so I thought I'd share it with HN. I have felt this way for awhile but had not put it into words so well as the author.</comment>


Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/id/2250704

<comment><USER2> The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

\-- Henry Ford

</comment><comment><USER3> God how I wish this type of stuff would coming up on HN, and not because I feel that HN is going down the tubes or whatever is the most common complaint about this site - the real reason is that I really am somewhat of a gossip junkie, and I end up reading these stories, and then feeling mildly unsatisfied at the end after finishing them, at the time wasted and the knowledge not gained.

<comment><USER4> You're missing a word (my guess from context: "stop").

<comment><USER5> or .. "not".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To summarize Google's fight against Apple: "When Eric Schmidt slumps his shoulders and says that Steve Jobs is 'the best CEO in the world,' it's not because he's shaking with fear. He's just being nice."

Google may do no evil, but they definitely don't pull their punches.If Apple has iAds, Google has GAds in their hands :p

<comment><USER7> So did Novell have NAds in their hands? ;-)

<comment><USER8> My internal monologue, just now:

"Wow, I can't believe he posted that on Hacker News."

"Wow, I can't believe that's getting upvoted on Hacker News!"

"I'm totally upvoting that."</comment></comment></comment>


Migrating GOV.UK to new infrastructure and nobody noticed - <AUTHOR> https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2014/03/28/migrating-govuk-infrastructure/?hn=1

<comment><USER2> Sorry I drowned in buzzwords there. What did they actually do for our cash and why didn't they do it the first time?</comment>


Show HN: I made a comparison table of 585 camera lenses (DSLR/Mirrorless) - <AUTHOR> https://lensvana.com/ <comment><USER2> Pentax mount lenses are missing

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, still need to add Pentax (and some others).</comment></comment>


Google Is Shutting Down Google Helpouts, Its Expert Video Chat Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/13/google-pulls-its-helpouts-mobile-applications-from-the-app-stores/ <comment><USER2> Too bad; I've enjoyed running my free CS/programming Helpout [1].

Besides the decline in user growth that Google mentions, here are the major problems I saw while using it:

* hosting a free Helpout meant dealing with constant no-shows [2]. I started charging $1/hour and then refunding it to folks who showed up.

* attendees of free Helpouts were rarely prepared

* the scheduling system was very limited (especially compared to Google Calendar)

That said, when everything worked, it was an amazing experience.

[1] [https://helpouts.google.com/103350848301234480355/ls/a344f06...](https://helpouts.google.com/103350848301234480355/ls/a344f06e06d4d5db)

[2] [https://simon.codes/2013/11/07/google-helpouts-first- impress...](https://simon.codes/2013/11/07/google-helpouts-first- impressions.html)

<comment><USER3> How are you gonna do it now? I have a friend who I help but I really don't have time.

Also, why did you do it for free? I've found when I help somebody for 10 mins or so it usually gets me in the mood of programming my own stuff.

<comment><USER2> > How are you gonna do it now?

I'm not sure.

Ideally I'd have a site where I can put my email and encourage folks to write me. This has worked better than video chat for me, since:

1) folks rubber duck [1] themselves while writing, so they ask better questions.

2) it's asynchronous, so we don't have to find a matching slot in our schedules (and don't commit to an amount of time beforehand)

I've redirected all my Helpouts schedule requests to email recently and it's worked well.

> Also, why did you do it for free?

I just never considered charging. I don't think I could do so and feel good about it with the amount of free help I've received (irc, SO, hacker school, college...).

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As prophesied in the top comment (by user24) right here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771)

<comment><USER5> This makes me think of the launch of Google Domains[1]. One of the top comments was "What happens when Google sunsets this product?" which is a great question we should all be asking before investing resources (money or time) into a new Google product. Maybe even more so the ones that are labeled as beta. We should also be skeptical of their customer service, because as many of the comments show[2] users are wary of this too.

I made the choice to use Google Domains last week for a pet project because: 1) Google has been good at letting users get their data _out_ of their system, and they give a long notice of impending sunsets and opportunities to migrate away. 2) Google specifically called out email, phone, and chat support for this new product.

So far I've been very happy and they addressed a few of my particular needs. But I do worry about lock-in or wasted time.

Maybe one of the questions I'd ask upset Helpout users is how much time was spent "wasted" or if any of it was useful. Perhaps Google was trying to _help out_ everyone (make them more skeptical of Google products, learn from their mistakes, etc.) by sunsetting Helpouts! ;)

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7934146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7934146) [2][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933870)

<comment><USER6> > This makes me think of the launch of Google Domains[1]. One of the top > comments was "What happens when Google sunsets this product?" which is a > great question we should all be asking before investing resources (money or > time) into a new Google product.

Nothing really special about "Google" here.

Any product from any company runs the risk of (1) the company failing, taking the product with it, or (2) the company canceling the product. The more a company is committed to mitigating (2) by maintaining products that aren't profitable, the greater risk (1) is.

<comment><USER7> Actually there is something special about Google for that service. It's not their core business.

Unlike other registrars who would typically be happy with being profitable & having typical growth, Google may be unsatisfied with such a result and consider shutting it down. Namecheap will keep their business open even if they have a soft quarter.

Further, a service for domain registration will struggle because it's targeted at an audience with heightened awareness of Google's tendency to put their products & services onto the chopping block. They've created a chicken & egg problem for themselves; they will shutdown their products because they don't get enough traction, and they don't get enough traction because everyone expects them to shutdown.

<comment><USER8> Eh, startups 'pivot' all the time. Fun fact: Mongo, formerly 10gen, was originally a cloud/web-hosting service. They pivoted to just publish their database, which is cool, but if you were one of the early customers it kind of leaves you high and dry.

<comment><USER9> Well, not all companies are get-big-quick-fast-and-sell-or-die Silicon Valley VC-funded "startups". Many registrars have been around for years and making decent money doing that and are likely to be around for time to come.

<comment><USER8> Iron Mountain was a mushroom farm for 20 years, until the mushroom market crashed and the owner needed another use for his abandoned iron mine. Tandy Leather took a brief detour through consumer electronics, purchasing Radio Shack and selling the Tandy computer, before eventually going back to leather.

<comment><USER7> It took a mushroom market crash to ruin Iron Mountain. Was there a crash in people seeking help with stuff between Google launching & shutting down Helpouts?

The point is that Google didn't need Helpouts, Google Wallet, Google Reader, Google Checkout, etc. They have a core business. If one of those products had been their core business, they likely would have kept going. Each of the products they shutdown is typically profitable to some degree, or could be made profitable. Google shuts them down because they've have too little traction for Google to stay interested, but if they were companies in their own right, they would likely continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The Helpouts community includes some engaged and loyal contributors, but > unfortunately, it hasn't grown at the pace we had expected.

(from helpouts.google.com)

Google feels more and more like a company that suffers from gigantomania (a nice service "hasn't grown at the pace we had expected" \- so it should be no less than Google Search?) on the one hand, and inability to bring new products to the market on the other.

I have a theory that there is no such thing as bad idea. Any initial idea, be it seemingly good or bad in the beginning, requires refinement, development and a lot of solid work. If you look at any successful product or service today, the initial idea wouldn't have necessarily be qualified as good. It's a thousand of new derivative and auxiliary ideas that make the original one interesting and eventually also successful.

So according to this theory, if a company shuts down its own products one after another, and screws up others that used to work well - that company is clearly malfunctioning. In case of Google it doesn't seem to be bad engineering, in fact Google can be considered one of the top few companies in the world in terms of technical quality. It seems to be more on the product management side.

Google, you need to change, fast. I have a feeling your countdown timer may have started already.

<comment><USER11> > If you look at any successful product or service today, the initial idea > wouldn't have necessarily be qualified as good.

Confirmation bias. You aren't looking at the 100s of _un_ -successful products and services out there.

<comment><USER10> I am looking, and many of them seem like good ideas. Others are bad. So what?

<comment><USER6> > I am looking, and many of them seem like good ideas. Others are bad. So > what?

Upthread you said:

> I have a theory that there is no such thing as bad idea.

You seem to have just rejected that theory.

<comment><USER10> Let me then rephrase my hypothesis (of course technically it can't be a theory): any sufficiently novel initial idea, whether good or bad in our perception at first glance, can be brought to success by amending and developing it.

<comment><USER12> So, according to your hypothesis, guaranteed success requires only two things: novelty and hard work.

Are you serious?

<comment><USER10> I am serious about one thing: there is no such thing as bad idea. Any of the Google's discontinued products weren't a failure. It's Google's product management who failed, not the products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This happens a lot, before using any service by Google I tend to ask myself, twice, "if they shut this down, which they might very well do, what is my backup plan?" Honestly, it's hard to make a good case to rely on them for much outside of their core products.

<comment><USER14> I did a focus group hangout with a Google staff member many months ago, and under the NDA I signed, and I can't discuss which product it was for. Most importantly, the staff member asked me what's stopping me from using their service over a competitor's service.

I replied, "I know they'll still be supporting/providing the service 1-2 years from now".

<comment><USER15> How scary is the "Google could easily enter that market" line now-a-days?

<comment><USER14> I think in B2C markets, its definitely a fear. Witness how many people use Gmail because its free. But B2B products? I'd have no fear of Google coming into my market. I'd be more worried if it was Amazon, Apple, or Facebook to a lesser extent.

<comment><USER16> Be fair, I started using Gmail all those years ago because it was awesome. And although it's stagnated and they're about to fuck up the desktop UI by "Materializing" it, it's still pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I offered help with electronics projects and had maybe a dozen sessions. I charged the default $1/minute and really enjoyed it, because I got to hear about all kinds of cool things people were working on, and I got the satisfaction of helping them, and it helped pay for my own projects. I'm kinda bummed they're shutting down.

<comment><USER18> Me too. I did free math tutoring for a while and it was a such a good feeling when I helped folks understand a previously difficult concept. Had a big problem with random cancelations, which made scheduling really difficult and made me less enthused to Helpout. Still, I'm sad to see it go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the first time I've heard of Google Helpouts

<comment><USER20> same. never heard of them before

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone looking for a alternative should check out [http://liveninja.com](http://liveninja.com) which is the largest and most refined player in the space.

<comment><USER22> Helpouts had tons of advisors for home/kitchen remodeling which I simply don't see at liveninja.

Which is unfortunate - I was thrilled when I found that on helpouts, but now that I'm actually starting a remodel project it's unfortunate that I can't get basic help for relative cheap costs.

Google really needs to do some tying of their services together - not in a Google+ kind of way where it's unwanted, but if, for example, they had helpouts to bolster Google product support and pushed some of that massive interest/traffic into the service, it might have found its mark sooner.

<comment><USER23> Try [http://fountain.com](http://fountain.com). There are a lot of home / kitchen experts available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm in no way surprised. I thought this was a questionable idea when it debuted and it never struck me as something that could actually grow into something popular.

Part of the issue, I think, is that Google as a company fundamentally does not understand content. (YouTube is the one exception here and even with YouTube, the way the whole YouTube partner program works, the way the ad side is run and other aspects make it clear that they still really don't get content -- they just happen to have a great platform and a few people trying to convince people who make more than them to think outside the algorithm).

It was an interesting idea but marred with poor execution and a dwindling Google+ audience.

</comment><comment><USER25> Google and Googlers for that matter always want to work on the newest cool thing, maybe something that has been done before. If you're a developer at Google would you rather work on maintaining something like Google helpouts or Google voice? Or would you want to work on the next big thing? I know what I would want on my resume.

The downside is that Google seems to abandon things. I feel like they need to have a better exit strategy since some people really like the products they put out to pasture. I liked how they outsourced Google wave for example.

<comment><USER25> edits: "maybe something that hasn't been done before"

"How they open sourced Google wave"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The first clue I have to there being a problem is that this is the first time I've heard of Google Helpouts. I use a wide assortment of Google products, but never heard a thing about this one.

</comment><comment><USER27> What if Google took the "enable" approach, instead of the "content owner" approach:

\+ Enable existing expert communities (and developing ones) to add voice and video consultation via libraries and APIs that leverage WebRTC</p>

\+ Enable choice of Google ID or other IDs

\+ Enable choice of Google Payments or other

\+ Enable record and streaming options via YouTube

I know the above doesn't have the same short-term business model upside as Google Helpouts did, but, then again, would Helpouts still be around today if it took the enable path?

<comment><USER28> Google's profit model isn't to enable, it's to collect & warehouse massive amounts of sensitive user data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I tried this. Among other things, I do LSAT tutoring. I don't think I saw a single inquiry.

People have specific places they go to look for LSAT tutors, and google helpouts wasn't one of them.

LSAT is more specific than some other niches, but I imagine this same problem occurred in most areas.

<comment><USER30> The biggest problem is they needed to be the "Backend" here. If they just got a cut of the 30% LSAT/SAT sites and those sites simplified their stack it would be a win all around. Look at AirPair, Their core product was their network using hipchat and Hangouts to accomplish the goal. If sites could leverage this technology (read: google marketed it as such, a technology, not and end product) I'd suspect some of those sites would have leveraged it.

<comment><USER29> I put it on my site, but no one used it. It was on the sidebar of every page. People just clicked on the "tutoring" page instead.

I'm not sure it would have worked for LSAT/SAT at all. People seem to want to talk to a human before they book a lesson, since they're expensive.

In theory, people could find it very useful to consult an expert for five minutes. But in practice the sort of people who would want to do that don't even look for a tutor. The typical tutoring students wants hours. If the client is a parent, then they're looking to hand off the problem to an expert. (For almost all SAT tutoring, the client is a parent.)

Could you see this working outside of a technical niche?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was surprised to find that this isn't among Gwern's 10 Google services most likely to be shut down[0], but I think it may just be too recent to have been included; I don't know that he's ever re-run the analysis.

[0] [http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#predictions](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#predictions)

<comment><USER32> Hangouts was launched 4 November 2013, so it came after I finished it. I did ad it to my followup list for the 2018 update when I evaluate the predictions and update the data to take a second look at the model results, but the followup list is stashed as a comment in the page source so unsurprisingly you didn't see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Plot twist: No need for Helpouts when Hangouts become embedded within search results.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you use Google products, you are gonna have a bad time.

Find alternatives and become free. You don't need to replace everything at the same time, you can do it one product at a time.

</comment><comment><USER35> Google Helpouts was the greatest thing ever when it first launched, for me, from a hiring helpers point of view ... I got amazing help solving some coding problems for a reasonable price ... really saved me from a terrible jam I was in.

But over time it seemed like less and less "helpers" were available, so obviously it wasn't working for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER36> No need to be negative, but this was a failure from the beginning. I tried a number of times to "helpout" but was not accepted. I'm no industry expert, but I do have some things to freely offer and thought it was weird that I had to wait and wait and wait to become accepted and by the time that happened, I was no longer interested.

</comment><comment><USER37> Codementor is alive and growing - we are an open marketplace for on-demand developer help and longterm mentorship. Anyone is welcome to apply as mentors. Once you are approved, you can set your rate however you'd like.

Check us out: [https://www.codementor.io](https://www.codementor.io)

</comment><comment><USER38> Try ClassDo ( [https://classdo.com](https://classdo.com) ). There are teachers and students from 140 countries. It's also featured on the Wall Street Journal [http://on.wsj.com/1yhzGCK](http://on.wsj.com/1yhzGCK)

</comment><comment><USER39> The service was a good idea, but it probably needs to be decentralized to avoid a central party bearing legal liabilities.

Run by Google, it was killed by all the regulation surrounding the sale of services. Can't give medical advice, can't get payments in Europe, etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> Google Answers was great because it was text based and asynchronous; Google Helpouts was not so great because it was video based and (mainly) synchronous.

Why didn't they put more resources into Answers? And what were their expectations for Helpouts?

</comment><comment><USER41> Can they atleast open source this technology? I can use it for my business.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just wondering: why not spin off a separate company to continue the service? Because they don't want to lose the engineers working on this? I guess that seems more important to the company?

</comment><comment><USER43> If you're looking for an alternative you should check out www.vexbook.com - the calibre of people is higher. It's over Skype or Facetime so it works with any smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is this service anything at all like HackHands?

</comment><comment><USER45> it should be moved over to youtube and market in a different way.

Google really need a product realigning on a few things.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder what this means for startups like fluentify.com

</comment><comment><USER47> #GoogleFAIL

</comment><comment><USER48> I misread this as Google Hangouts.</comment>


Amazing JS rainbow effect - <AUTHOR> http://labs.dragoninteractive.com/panel/demo/

<comment><USER2> Looks pretty nice, but isn't actually that complicated. He just moves a background image ( [http://labs.dragoninteractive.com/panel/demo/lib/img/form/ma...](http://labs.dragoninteractive.com/panel/demo/lib/img/form/map/rmap.jpg) ) around all the time, and only let a small part of it shine through.

<comment><USER3> As anext step one you could use webkit animations to make it js-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not particularly hard to do these kinds of things with a bit of imagination. This is our demo from 2005, unzip and run index2.html: <http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=18327>

<comment><USER5> It's a webpage hosted on a webserver. Can I just view the webpage with firefox please?

<comment><USER4> <http://fi.bemmu.com/demo/>

<comment><USER6> That kills my CPU. I'll be sticking with <canvas/>.

<comment><USER5> Parts of that are <canvas/> I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I expected, it also takes an Amazing amount of CPU. Also, the caret flickers like mad.

<comment><USER8> Agree with the CPU. But I'm on FF 3.0.10 on Win7 RC and there is no carrot flickering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Additionally, you can log in with labs @dragoninteractive .com and password demo

</comment><comment><USER10> That's inspiring. As bemmu said it's not difficult, just takes some thought.

</comment><comment><USER11> I see only a login screen.

<comment><USER12> Click inside one of the inputs (login/pass) and watch the border of the form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Truly amazing, no matter how easy it is.

Simple is beauty.

<comment><USER14> Just look at your CPU spike though... not so good for netbooks or phones.

<comment><USER15> the lab start-page (<http://labs.dragoninteractive.com>) is even more worse. it's funny to have the task-manager open and watch the CPU usage while clicking through the site. poor, poor CPU</comment></comment></comment>


A lesson in blindly trusting start ups as a service. - <AUTHOR> http://www.getwillet.com

<comment><USER2> At least their new product will be "DISRUPTIVE"! But, the question is, can it be as disruptive as pulling the tablecloth out from underneath your customers? I'd be curious to find out if their customers knew.

Also, look at their twitter feed: <http://twitter.com/getwillet>

It looks like they had some kind of weird spammy auto-retweet operation going on. Weird.</comment>


Do human rights exist? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/oct/20/human-rights-exist <comment><USER2> Rights do not inherently exist. We create them to further our existence, usually.

</comment><comment><USER3> No they don't. They are just another set of rules that are created by a bunch of people and other bunch of people apply them to everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Insofar as one is obligated to not "infringe on them"?

Not in being deserved by default, or in any case, though?

.. This is satire-ish right? (I know it says it isn't)

</comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely human rights exist. At least for those that have the power and leverage to demand them. For everyone else, not so much.</comment>


Tehran's Unplugged Internet Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.payvand.com/news/10/oct/1189.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> On one hand you could say that they got the message after the protests, on the other, you could also say that the protests failed and twitter had no effect so it's unnecessary to bother with this huge infrastructure plan.</comment>


Show HN: Ventee. Event discovery and management platform - <AUTHOR> https://ventee.city <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

This is an attempt to help people find about cool events in the city. I've worked on this responsive web app for about 6 months now. It's only available in Amsterdam for the time being.

Event organisers can list events for free. Selling tickets and event analytics are also available.

Would appreciate any feedback. Feel free to create accounts and events, just don't publish them so that the content is still relevant.

Thanks!</comment>


The death of e-mail - "Email is increasingly for old people, as kids turn to IM etc." - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/id/2177969/ <comment><USER2> Jesus... yet another email bashing BS. Email has always been for "old people" because it's (mostly) a working tool. Kids don't like to do work, they like to play.

It's like saying that _"doing dishes is dead. leaving them dirty all over the place is the future"_.

<comment><USER3> I see you've been a guest in my modern kitchen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to abandon "email" as a metaphor. Its not like the -protocols- are going anywhere, but I've thought before of routing all my email (= server, Gmail, Y!mail, and college FirstClass) to IM. That would centralize all my "messages", and make it easier to check all my accounts on my cell. IMs are already logged and stored if I'm offline.

I just did a cursory search, and it doesn't seem there's a way to do it directly in iChat or Adium. It'd probably be easiest to do it through Jabber. I don't know enough about XMPP though... Anyone have an idea how to go about this?

<comment><USER5> i'd love to have something like that, since most of the time I access different sites and apps, I'm looking for a small amount of specific data, such as the content of my most recent email, my facebook notifications, a date from my google calendar, etc, and frankly don't need all the flashy UI and the redundant clicking to access them. If i can access my email via IM by simply sending "read newest gmail" to a specified SN, my life would be just a little bit easier.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, actually, a good bot would be really awesome -- I could ask for messages from a specific account, person, by un/read status, etc. or delete spam, get message history, and so on.

Hell, why not just make a "smart command line" bot-based web app? It's the goddamn twenty-first century, why do we still manually navigate when we can just concisely -ask- (in words, not "commands" or "actions") for portions of sites, definitions, files, apps, etc.? This was how it was -supposed- to be, but for some reason we're still just using glossed up versions of 1980s (or earlier) paradigms. Why hasn't the A.I. scene done anything practical? Or are those guys all just too enamored with the beauty of 1950s technology?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the article is garbage, but i gotta give the author props for his tremendous indecision on this non-issue, as displayed in the subheading: "Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?"</comment>


Apple-style Garbage Collection for GNUstep - <AUTHOR> http://etoileos.com//news/archive/2011/05/26/1933/

<comment><USER2> How hard is to port software written for OSX to GNUstep?

<comment><USER3> It primarily depends on the following:

\- What Cocoa features does the application use? Something written for OS X 10.2 using "oldschool" APIs is much easier to port than a new app that perhaps makes extensive use of 10.5+ features, binding magic, Core Data, etc.

\- What other frameworks does the app use? If it makes heavy use of something like Apple's media and animation APIs (Core Animation, Core Image, QTKit, etc.), it will be very difficult to port because GNUstep doesn't cover these.

(Edit: one important factor is the degree to which the port needs to integrate with the target platform. GNUstep doesn't look very native on Windows, for example. But if the port is something like a custom application targeting Linux, then the look of widgets and fonts may not matter at all.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible to use this in an iPhone app? I.e. extending NSObject's retain / release and having a NSGarbageCollector like thread run around and collect.

<comment><USER5> Bolting on garbage collection to system libraries that weren't made with it in mind probably wouldn't work well. Even in OS X, when the system had been designed for garbage collection and extensively tested, it still didn't work right (memory leaks, extreme slowness at times) in the first version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone here used GNUstep? How complete is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've found that you can write reasonably complex GUI applications using the current Apple API documents for reference and for the most part get the results you expect.

The trouble is the few times when it doesn't behave as expected. I tried porting a paint program I had once written for OS X to GNUstep. Everything was going swimmingly until I ran into a behaviour of the OS X NSImageRep caching mechanism that wasn't replicated. Unfortunately, the program more or less depended upon that behavior, so coding around it wouldn't have been trivial. I know where in GNUstep the issue lies but I just haven't had the time to have a go at fixing it, so for the time being, I remain stumped.</comment></comment>


We're gonna party like it's 1923: A Grand Reopening of the Public Domain - jonah-archive https://creativecommons.org/2019/01/16/public-domain <comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I love how this was presented. If I was in SF during those dates, I'd go for sure.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Resources to Learn Japanese? - <AUTHOR> I have decided to learn some basic Japanese, but I am a bit frustrated by the material you can find online; most things leave room for interpretation (e.g. Hiragana, one textbook starts with 46 characters, then add others; another mentions 62, and I'm not sure where the 16 left come from.).
I guess, being an engineer, I prefer a specific approach to learning a language.
I also tend to hate the stupid online apps that pretend you are as smart as a snail and take forever to teach you anything, plus their freemium model means you are constantly spammed to sign up for the paid version.
Have you been successful at learning Japanese? If so, any good suggestion? <comment><USER2> > Have you been successful at learning Japanese?

So far I got good at kanji, and I know about 2000 words. It's enough to enjoy reading stuff like "Welcome to the NHK".

> If so, any good suggestion?

You might want to start with learning about Spaced Repetition:

1\. [https://ncase.me/remember/](https://ncase.me/remember/)

2\. [https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced- repetition)

For further reading see links provided by Gwern. Then, specific to Anki:

1\. [https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html](https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html)

2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz60qTP2Gx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz60qTP2Gx0)

Those tools will help to retain what you memorize. Further, see [https://massimmersionapproach.com/](https://massimmersionapproach.com/) for guidance on language learning. It focuses on immersion, that's, reading books, listening to stuff, etc. I got good at English by means of immersion, reading The Way Of Kings and other awesome books like that, and now with the systematic approach from Mass Immersion Approach it goes even better than before.

</comment><comment><USER3> I studied Japanese for around two years independently before visiting Japan (for only a few months).

During that preparation I had no conversation partners, and focused on vocabulary, reading and listening. Like many, I had difficulty learning to read. It was a slog. Additionally, I found that my low reading level was a barrier to finding Japanese content I could read for fun (as opposed to boring textbook dialogue).

Actually having real conversations in Japan, even with my incredibly-broken Japanese, was far more effective and far more enjoyable than any of the learning methods I had used prior. Not surprising, is it? That is how humans learn language naturally, after all. Japanese people are friendly in general, and quite willing to engage foreigners in conversation, even if your speaking ability is very low. Even my reading ability grew as well by simple immersion.

If I were to return to Japanese study:

1\. I would make an effort to be in Japan. There is no substitute for being in the land where the language is used. If that is not possible, I would attempt to find a conversation partner in my country or online.

2\. I would skip the difficult and less-rewarding reading and writing initially, and focus exclusively on conversation until I achieved a decent level of speaking and listening. To me, it would not be so bad to be illiterate-but-conversational. Later on, I could attempt literacy.

I never achieve fluency, so maybe my advice is not worth taking. I gave up on Japanese because, given my other choices and obligations, I cannot live in Japan, and I do not live where there are many Japanese speakers. It would not be a useful language for me to learn.

</comment><comment> jim-jim-jim If I could do it all again, I'd use Anki right from the beginning. Once you do SRS, you won't go back to reviewing things linearly. Other apps like Duolingo, Memrise, etc are just neutered versions of this algorithm that make their money wasting your time.

I'd probably work through the Genki textbook series until it introduces kana. Then download an Anki deck for those and memorize them. Then keep working through Genki alongside a basic (N5 level) vocab deck. If you want to read something other than a textbook, White Rabbit Press has a great series of graded readers. Those are specifically targeted at adult learners of Japanese—way saner than reading actual Japanese kids' books.

After getting a solid grammar/vocab foundation through that combo, I'd recommend working through Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji." It's a controversial allocation of resources, but probably the single most useful "hack" I used when studying Japanese. Completing that (and grinding more advanced vocab decks) will leave you in a good place to read normal media and learn naturally.

I suggest cramming the Shin Kanzen Master series for all grammar/exercises after that (N3-N1).

</comment><comment><USER4> Background: I've been studying Japanese for about 20 years, starting in grade school. Self-studied through high school, took Japanese in college and spent a semester in Tokyo at a Japanese language school.

What worked for me was grabbing raw (physical) manga (something from Shonen Jump, they have furigana over the kanji), a English-Japanese dictionary, a print out of hiragana/katakana, and a notebook. I then started to slowly and painstakingly translate the manga, first getting the hiragana sounded out; memorizing hiragana/katakana as I went. I wrote down characters I didn't know. I looked them up. I would translate a volume of manga in about a week.

Those exercises helped cement foundational characters, vocabulary, and grammar without having to use a computer. I was able to go into college and skip the first 2 semesters of Japanese just by slowly translating my favorite manga. This might not work for you, but it certainly worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are 46 basic Hiragana characters. No idea where 62 would come from.

I found one-to-one lessons quite useful after I'd reached a certain stage. I have found that I don't retain information learned from study apps. In particular, writing out Kanji seems to help me memorize them better than flashcard apps. Watching TV shows in Japanese, looking up words has been helpful. But I'm far from fluent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two popular Japanese grammar books among beginner adult learners are Minna no Nihongo (popular within Japan) and Genki (popular outside Japan and among English speakers) series.

Pimsleur Japanese audio series is a good start if your interest is listening and speaking Japanese.

The writing and reading system is made up of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.

Why do you want to learn Japanese? Answer to this question will be the primary driver on deciding an appropriate learning strategy.

Review the starter guide in wiki and beginner sticky threads at [https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjapanese](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjapanese)

You can find inexpensive Online tutors on iTalk.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html](https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html)

This may be of interest

</comment><comment><USER8> First, you should be clear what your goal is. "Learning Japanese" is ambiguous. For example, I know many people who passed the JLPT N1 exam, but cannot have a simple conversation with a native and have a horrible accent nobody can understand. It's clear they've just "hacked" the exam by memorizing stuff. And that's totally fine if that's the goal to e.g. get a job or a visa. And I know people who are absolutely fluent in conversation, but would never pass an N3 exam and cannot read simple articles. My point is that these are very different skills that need a different approach. What do you want? What is your end goal?

Then, everyone learns differently, so there are no generic "best resources". I don't know if this works for you, but I can tell you what worked for me. For each of the step below, use Anki [0] or any other SRS system to memorize things.

1\. Start with a formal textbook like Elementary Japanese (that's what I used) or Genki. This will give you a curriculum for the basics and you don't need to worry about what to learn next. Simply following these textbooks will bring you to a lower intermediate level (JLPT N4 to N3).

2\. Do something like "Remember the Kanji" [1] to memorize more characters and get a feeling for them. There are many variations on this you can Google. You can do this in parallel with step 1 too. Learning Kanji in isolation is IMO overrated and not super useful, but just having the familiarity will pay dividends later.

3\. This IMO is the tough part. You are now ~lower-intermediate level. You are past beginner books, but probably not good enough to read real-world stuff. For me, it was a mix of resources here. Find people to practice with, listen to podcasts like JapanesePod, read more advanced textbooks, read some online websites you are interested in, etc. I don't have a good answer on how to get past this level. Also, if your goal is to speak conversational JP you really need to talk to people here because so far you've only read textbooks.

4\. Once you get to something like ~N2 Level, just immerse yourself while you keep adding stuff to Anki. Do you like videogames (like me)? Just play them in Japanese. Like movies/anime? Watch in Japanese. Tech news? Read in Japanese with browser plugins. Really, just do whatever you enjoy, but do it in Japanese. It will be hard at first, but you'll get used to it.

5\. If your goal is to pass an exam (like N1), get books specific to that exam.

[0] [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)

[1] [https://kanji.koohii.com/](https://kanji.koohii.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Personally, but I started studying it ~12 years ago (in 2008), I had to shell out for some courses, at least at the beginning, because the material is kind of fragmented.

As some other posters mentioned, you have to start consuming a bit of material in the language once you get acquainted enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the 24/7 Youtube Podcast to learn Japanese. They introduce the basics and even go through everyday activities in a video, such as ordering a bus ticket.

[https://youtu.be/wU_OSPWe5sU](https://youtu.be/wU_OSPWe5sU)

</comment><comment><USER11> I haven't learnt Japanese though I did start... But to get a grounding in Italian before moving there, I did use Michel Thomas CDs and would highly recommend giving them a go.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seriously, unless you intend to spend several years in Japan, don't waste your time.

If you do plan on going native, find a girlfriend who likes you but has no desire to learn english. You will thank me later.

<comment><USER9> > Seriously, unless you intend to spend several years in Japan, don't waste > your time.

Why not?

<comment><USER12> From my very long experience, it made the learning expeditious, natural and much more fun.

In the meantime, find a copy of Jack Seward's "Japanese in Action", and commit it to memory. It is the most honest book about learning the Japanese language that has ever been written. [http://www.trussel.com/jap/jbooks01.htm#49](http://www.trussel.com/jap/jbooks01.htm#49)

Seward died in 2010, but the man had extraordinary insight. [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/11/19/national/jack-s...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/11/19/national/jack- seward-leading-expert-on-japan-dies/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am not succesful yet, but I am watching the Japanese From Zero series on youtube and for kanji I am using the Wani Kani website.

</comment><comment><USER14> Japanese Pod 101, Remembering The Kanji and Genki</comment>


Robotic Motion Planning in Real-Time - <AUTHOR> https://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/robotic-motion-planning-real-time <comment><USER2> Looks like this is the actual paper, doesn't seem to be linked in the article: [http://people.ee.duke.edu/~sorin/papers/rss16_chip.pdf](http://people.ee.duke.edu/~sorin/papers/rss16_chip.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! That's the paper, sorry about it not being included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This _could_ be very very useful. A 7 DOF arm operating in an unconstrained space is a seriously intensive task to plan. The only concern I have for them as a company is if rnn based learning catches up quickly to the much more established search based planning. If they had a standard pci board we could test tomorrow that worked with a URDF and a stream of depth data, we'd almost certainly request one.

<comment><USER4> RNNs with their inexplicable output are impossible to justify in case something goes wrong. I'm not sure how secure their reliabilty is.

<comment><USER5> Finding an optimal solution is much more computationally intensive than verifying that the solution is good enough (no collisions). If you don't really trust the RNN's work, then you can use a second algorithm just to check for collisions in the proposed plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was going to say that motion planning isn't a field that's standardized enough to benefit from hardware implementations. But collision checking, collision checking is something that's straightforward and very expensive so this seems like an excellent idea. Right now we think carefully about our workspaces and planning to make sure we don't _have_ to do collision checking but that's not something you could get away with in unstructured environments.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, but I was under the impression GPUs have greater power efficiency than general purpose processors at least some of them have physics support (collisions, etc.) these days. Since the problems are primarily spatial, shouldn't even GPUs without dedicated collision detection in hardware easily support reasonable speed prediction? (eg. Simple CSG[1]-style union?) Is this purely about power consumption, as suggested in the article? (Surely a low-res approach with area-of-interest identification for potential collisions to suggest higher-res calculation could speed things up, in the same way "I've got a bad feeling about this" makes us think twice? Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the algorithms could clarify?)

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

<comment><AUTHOR> There certainly has been research into the application of GPUs to motion planning. However, the paper presented is faster, and results in power consumption, approximately 10% of the power consumption of the GPU for the same task.

<comment><USER7> Now that the paper has been posted, it does seem it's not just about power consumption but also parallelism. Although these factors were discussed in the conclusion with reference to their suggestion for future R&D with a hardware- based approach, the reality for implementors now is that commercial availability, cost and solution development time probably do heavily favour usible mobile GPUs. The biggest drawback in the paper seems to be that if the robot's physical configuration changes (for example, an arm is bent or it picks up a large object) the planning circuitry may no longer be accurate.

Finally, I couldn't help but think of this quote: _Sin #3 - Picking the low- hanging fruit: It is unsurprising that it is easy to beat a general system by specializing it. Few researchers comment on the composability of their solutions. - Schwarzkopf et al, 'The seven deadly sins of cloud computing research' (2014)_ [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect this could also benefit path planning for autonomous ground vehicles (e.g. self-driving cars).

<comment><AUTHOR> It can help in the region immediately surrounding the vehicle. The PRM graph that is developed is built with reference to the robot, so if the robot moves around so does its capability to plan.</comment></comment>


Military Reaper Drone Documents Leaked on the Dark Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.recordedfuture.com/reaper-drone-documents-leaked/ <comment><USER2> I think the US needs more tech people at all levels of the armed forces to plug holes like this before they're used...</comment>


What's your idea? - <AUTHOR>

Interested in sharing some web or internet ideas? Here are mine:
idea 1) a system for collecting the realtime browsing behaviour of a group of people (eg YC-news readers via a Firefox plugin) and then displaying stats of popular and fast-gaining sites and urls as submitted by the plugin. A name for this system could be: eg 'swarmlinks' and group owners would link their group to a particular site for those stats to then be displayed on the site, with the group owner also promoting participation of the plugin from their site visitors.
idea 2) site widget enabling anyone to enlist themselves to help develop any site that displays the widget with a notification sent to the enlister once a certain threshold of other people have also enlisted or once a certain number of those enlisters have forthwith become active developers.
How the first idea came about: I just think the information would be useful in discovering new sites and learning about different communities.
How the second idea came about: would create an alternative to Sourceforge for helping people decide where to focus their development time. <comment><USER2> The second idea runs into the chicken-and-egg problem.</comment>


How is this QR code scannable? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/wQ8Se1T.jpg

<comment><USER2> Maximum error correction and each QR Code "pixel" is 6x6, while each video pixel is 1x1. And, there is enough intentional "pixelation" to ensure enough codewords read correctly. (Repeated for each frame.)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QR_Ver3_Codeword_Ordering....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:QR_Ver3_Codeword_Ordering.svg)

</comment><comment><USER3> The encoded text is just a bitcoin address, if anyone was wondering. bitcoin:154R1264X1EVGP1L4HNAHU87DD5NANQR9H

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is the pixelation of the video a requirement for a successful scan? Would it be possible to embed a higher-quality video within a QR code, or does it have to be pixelated like it is in that one?

<comment><USER3> Not sure if there's a trick in this particular code, but in general it doesn't matter what the resolution of irrelevant pixels is.</comment></comment>


What Would Happen If Your Digital Life Was Destroyed?  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/what-would-happen-if-your-digital-life-was-destroyed/

<comment><USER2> (The couple of 19-year-olds) told him "I honestly didn't have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before."

"No heat towards you" -> But I will wipe your laptop. :/</comment>


Why Go is skyrocketing in popularity - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/17/11/why-go-grows <comment><USER2> "Superior error handling and easier debugging are helping it gain popularity over Python and R"

What the fuck are they talking about? I thought a "feature" of Go is that it DOESN'T have any error handling, and it forces you to catch exceptions yourself? Last I checked python already has a great solution for this built in.

<comment><USER3> Are you saying you prefer giant try catch blocks everywhere? I don't know python so not sure about how exceptions are handled there. I've switched from c# to go and in total I prefer go's style of error handling. The built in error type is lacking but there are plenty of packages that fill in the gaps.

<comment><USER4> If you program like that i'm sorry, you are doing it wrong. You really just need very few try catch blocks in a standard lob application, a few more if your are using some style of communication that requires it. If your code base is polluted with try blocks i think it's a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, the programming language hype train. There's always a new bandwagon to jump on, isn't there?

<comment><USER6> sure, there is always that. but here's another perspective. I basically only wrote C for decades. Except for some interesting side projects and playing around with research languages. Did projects in language de jour (i.e. Java) and hated it.

but now I program almost exclusively in go. because for almost everything I do, especially web services. I appreciate the completely and well thought out runtime.

the primary development team could be alot more friendly. i think the channels stuff isn't as useful as its supposed to be. the vendoring thing is still screwy.

but it saves me time, and tends to make more correct programs. thats enough.

<comment><USER7> > Did projects in language de jour (i.e. Java) and hated it

Because there is one thing Go isn't is "le language du jour" (ou du mois) ??? Come on.

Personally, I'd still be betting on Java which has really become better and simpler to work with/deploy compared to 10 years ago, it's especially true for web apps, and has the largest ecosystem of all languages. Go is nice, but has a poor ecosystem for enterprise integration, its type system is the reason why it will never replace languages such as Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mentions "engineered" three times, but "pragmatic" only once. Not conformant with the Go Advocacy Playbook.

</comment><comment><USER9> Prediction: 5 years from now Go will be viewed with similar scorn to Java

<comment><USER10> Java is so much better as a language and ecosystem than go. Java is getting better with each release slowly. My next favourite is Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't know why other people's reason of choosing Go.

I don't actually like the Go itself, I use Go because the batteries it includes, and most of them are cross platform.

Sure, other language can do it with third-party lib management (npm, composer, crate etc), but then you have do deal with lib-associated problems (Log, error handling, bug, deprecation and license etc), and that is troubling.</comment>


A POS Software That Checks You In to Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.pointofsale.com/Point-of-Sale-News/marriage-of-facebook-and-pos-produces-revenue.html

<comment><USER2> I really wish this was from a dystopian parody, and not the world we actually live in. Several decades ago, I thought that the critiques of the "consumer society" and marketing were overblown - but I have changed my mind. Now, when I read an article like that, I feel like I'm in Burrough's Naked Lunch and a giant insectoid creature has its proboscis inserted at the top of my spine, trying to suck up my brain. The idea that my personal relationships are becoming just more feed for the marketing mill is so oppressively alienating.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has to be the first time any one has compared us to a "giant insectoid creature" but we're happy for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> :)</comment>


Why Have So Many Internet People Lost Touch With Reality? - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2010/02/04/why-have-so-many-internet-people-lost-touch-with-reality/ <comment><USER2> I get why Cuban feels the need to respond here but I think this is just an example of blogs playing the traffic game. Saying "Mark Cuban is a hypocrite" draws a lot more traffic than "Mark Cuban said X at random conference Y". So that's what several of the "big name" sites did.</comment>


Sudo: CVE-2014-9680: preserves TZ by default - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=772707

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand the severity here. Is $TZ read before granting sudo permissions, or after? And if after, if someone has sudo rights anyway, surely there are more interesting DoS possibilities?

Or is the risk that someone with restricted sudo rights (say, to an individual command) might be able to do things they weren't supposed to?

<comment><USER3> The (possibly restricted) command that sudo runs reads TZ. Then it crashes.</comment></comment>