Curse Of The Gifted (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html <comment><USER2> I am miles away from Eric or Linus, but the "curse of the gifted" is very real.

Thankfully I wasn't smart or gifted enough that I could ride it for long, but when it comes to math and problem-solving I rode it well into my high school years. I never learned to do algebra "by the book," because I didn't need to. Or maybe because I wasn't smart enough to.

The math teacher would teach "3x + 6 = 9." Basic algebraic problem-solving says you subtract the 6 from both sides, then divide by 3. So "3x = 3" then "x = 1." Easy. But I learned pretty early on that I could do it in my head. It was a little bit challenging, but then I wouldn't have to waste the time of writing it out, and I wasn't handicapped like all of those suckers who had to go through the motions no matter how simple the problem was. If the teacher wrote "x + 1 = 6" I didn't have to subtract 1 from each side, I just thought about it logically and knew the answer. Of course, the math got more complex, but I was good enough at doing it in my head that, at least for a long time, it never really mattered.

I thought it was because I just "got" math, and the other kids were on a lower level. But as the math grew in complexity, I fell behind. By the time we reached Calculus I was still doing most of it in my head, as I had never _really_ learned to write it out on paper. And the complexity of the math outgrew my capacity to visualize. I showed up to my AP calculus test without a calculator, partially because I was forgetful and partly for fun, and it wasn't until I got my score back (a failing 2 of 5) that it finally hit me: I was actually behind. In school. I was cocky enough that this was a slap in the face.

I had to start from scratch, and I'm still not sure if I've made up for a lot of that. I ended up in more creative fields, mostly because I felt inferior to those who had learned the rules and not been cocky douchebags like I had been in the beginning.

This really sucks to write. I frequently wonder what could have been.

<comment><USER3> We home schooled our kids prior to high school and one of the more interesting challenges was this 'doing the steps' part. My eldest was very much like you, look at the problem, tell you the answer. Which was 99% of the time correct, and 1% of the time wrong. She was really annoyed that we focused on that 1% but eventually we got to the point where by writing down all the steps you could then see where in your thinking you had been mislead. The trick was differentiating between "doing math" versus "learning math." (and the nice thing about math at this level is that if you get all the steps right you cannot help but get the right answer). Once we got past the big fight about "always showing your work" not being a 'for all time, forever' edict but instead for a 'these problems while you are learning' edict, it became possible to do math in this ponderous way, but only when learning and only when training our minds on the steps and alerting ourselves to the places we were likely to make mistakes.

<comment><USER4> I was (and still am in many ways) this undisciplined kid. I never learned the value of a good work ethic, of effort.

One of the most important thing I want to teach my 4 months old son, is the value of effort.

I am glad you shared your experience, I will keep it as one of the many tools I am gathering so that I can be able to teach what I haven't learned to my children.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those curious about the context: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/97](https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/97)

Note that noone replied to Eric and the thread continued on. Also go back and read some of Linus's posts before this. Eric writes using vague generalizations about age and experience; Linus writes with specifics about his experience with the kernel. The former style makes for popularly read posts but the latter seems much more effective.

Also, compare this message from Linus earlier in that thread [https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/52](https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/52) with a post of his from yesterday: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/2/10/575](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/2/10/575), especially regarding abstraction.

<comment><USER6> i had to scroll down this far to find people who actually read the link. everybody above just wants to tell us how much of a curse their high intelligence is.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if they want to use their experience with the "curse" as proof of their intelligence? I'm sure anyone here could find some example of it. But I can think of way better things to do than talk about being smart on HN.

<comment><USER8> I modded you up for your accursed intelligence or giftedness :-)

It ought to be called the curse of the lazy until you bring Linus or someone else gifted into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's weird to see Linus on the other side of being disciplined, and a pretty stark contrast to his own slightly more abrasive style.

For example: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75](https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75)

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why people allow themselves to be spoken to like that! Incredicle...

<comment><USER11> Holy shit. I would _never_ work with someone who addressed me like that after I asked an honest question. It's a wonder that there are enough competent people working on Linux who are willing to put up with this. Getting a message like this _once_ would lead to a personal e-mail or in-person conversation explaining that this is in no way an acceptable way to communicate with me, followed by a prompt beeline for the exit if it occurred again.

I knew that stuff like this goes on in mailing lists; I've grown up in the computer culture. But seeing this as an adult, after learning some people skills and how interpersonal communication works, it's really shocking what to see kind of destructive tone prevails in some prominent tech circles.

<comment><USER12> _an honest question_

But it wasn't "an honest question"; that's the point. It would have been an honest question for you or me, but you and me are not Linux kernel hackers. (At least, I'm not, and I assume you're not.)

 _Getting a message like this once would lead to a personal e-mail or in- person conversation explaining that this is in no way an acceptable way to communicate with me, followed by a prompt beeline for the exit if it occurred again._

And I expect Linus would be absolutely fine with that, because if you were unable to understand why he was so emphatic about the point he was making, he wouldn't want you hacking on the kernel anyway.

The key thing to recognize is that Linus treats the kernel as what you might call "mission critical" software. Think of it as like, say, the operating code for the Space Shuttle. If someone came along and changed the operating code for the Space Shuttle so that, say, the program that fired the retro-rockets stopped working, and when asked about it, their response was, "well, that looks like a bug in the retro-rocket program", you would not want that person doing that job. And since the retro-rocket code is mission critical, just saying, "no, that's not a good idea" might not get the point across emphatically enough. You might have to use strong language to make sure it is 100 percent understood that breaking the retro-rocket code is _unacceptable_. In a situation like that, you do not want to leave _any_ room for misinterpretation.

Also, if you look at Linus' posts, you'll notice that he does not _always_ use that strong language. He only uses it when, in his view, it's warranted-- meaning, when someone has done something that is _so_ wrong that just saying "that's wrong" won't get the point across strongly enough. That's why we have strong language: for those (hopefully very rare) occasions when no less strong language will do justice to the situation. There are certainly plenty of people in our culture who abuse such language; but looking at Linus' posts as a whole, I'm not sure he's one of them.

<comment><USER11> It's perfectly possible to get an important point across without being an asshole, and it's really an indication of the social dysfunction that some hackers are unable to. Maybe that's what working with code and little in- person human contact for decades does to you.

I've seen the same tone from crypto hackers, also under the guise of writing "mission critical" software. It's not an excuse. You don't see airline pilots or doctors yelling at each other for making the occaional honest mistake, which happens in every field and can with the correct routines be caught before it causes any damage.

<comment><USER12> _You don 't see airline pilots or doctors yelling at each other for making the occaional honest mistake_

You're right, you don't. But my point was that you also don't see Linus yelling at other kernel hackers for making honest mistakes. The mistake he yelled at someone for in the case under discussion was _not_ honest; it was a mistake nobody qualified to hack on the kernel should have made in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this curse's endgame: getting a typical corporate job.

Everything about it is against your nature: fixed schedule, dictated product and process, micro management and arbitrary accountability compared to the creative freedom of your life when delivering academic performance on a timescale of weeks or months was your only responsibility. Worse still, it's not an "X year work program," it's designed to be endless.

Not that an entrepreneurial career is for everyone, but if you can be dumb enough to try and smart enough to make it work at a sustainable scale, it sure beats a guaranteed slow corporate death.

<comment><USER14> This is so true.

I hated my life for years because I knew if I could have just been more disciplined, then I would have been free from all the horrible, mind numbing, soul crushing stuff I had to do at my corporate job.

It took me years to finally leap into self-employment.

<comment><USER15> >It took me years to finally leap into self-employment.

What do you do? How did you start?

<comment><USER14> I was a teacher for a few years, so I transitioned that into a tutoring company and I am doing some freelance web design as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really how to fix this:

[http://carymillsap.blogspot.com/2011/01/axiomatic- approach-t...](http://carymillsap.blogspot.com/2011/01/axiomatic-approach-to- algebra-and-other.html)

I was an undergrad with Cary, and he got A's, I got B's with the odd C and this is exactly why. Until I took the Discrete Math course ( w/ the Eggers book - which is fantastic ) , I was floundering. I knew what the rules were, roughly, but I didn't _KNOW_ know them.

I'm not name-dropping Cary. It's just a coincidence, but I googled him and found the essay. I bring up the "we were undergrads" thing because it's a nearly perfect natural experiment.

Use one of the Algebra sections in junior high or high school to _teach rigor_. There are _no moves in a solution_ unless you _name the principle by which the move was made_.

I know it seems impossible to implement, but there can't be a better time than 8th or 9th grade to do this. You get exposure to rigor for the kids that aren't pointed at STEM, the kids that _are_ will actually be prepared - win- win. If we have to hire ringers as math teachers - people outside the education industrial complex - so be it. Whatever it takes.

<comment><USER17> That seems like a positively annoying and pointless thing (see the line where they eventually just start referencing them by number; it's become just another 'thing to do').

Not the value of teaching math through axioms and deriving everything you do from them! That's very useful and proper preparation for higher math.

But just because I can express everything in propositional logic with just NAND, I don't do that. Just as I would prove the mean-value theorem once and then simply invoke it when appropriate, I define conjunction, disjunction, negation etc. once and move on with the world. _This_ is the lecture you are trying to teach, after all: you can deconstruct the universe into very simple blocks.

<comment><USER16> Just to reinforce things: we _are_ talking about kids very early in their math career. And math _is_ drill; Khan academy, all that. It's an investment.

You can do drill in 8th grade, or you can do it in your freshman year of college.

The point is:

1) I thought it annoying and pointless in the 8th grade. Oh clever me, I knew so much better.

2) People who sucked it up and did it, with whom I shared classes, blew my doors off in college math courses for a couple of years. A teacher made this the central fact of the algebra class _they_ took.

3) Then I took the discrete math course, and stopped having trouble.

There is something to this. Rigor is not natural. Learning rigor is essential to being able to operate your life well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Soon after this exchange, Linus started using a real source management system (BitKeeper, followed by git) for the kernel.

<comment><USER19> I'm assuming there was at least some scm in place before, but my few google searches haven't turned up what it was. Do you know?

*edit: Didn't look hard enough, according to this: [http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-o...](http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-of-Git) it was just files and patches from 1991-2002. Seems crazy from a modern perspective...

<comment><USER18> Yeah, check this out from 1998 (two years before OP) [https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/30/122](https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/9/30/122)

<comment><USER20> Wait is this where the original idea for git came from?

<comment><USER18> Larry McVoy was the BitKeeper guy. This was early in terms of distributed version control, but I have no idea if it was the first or just (for a while) the most popular. Linus wrote git using several lessons he learned from using BitKeeper. It's not just a copy, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think, in context, Linus was probably right. There are some situations where having 2 very different project/modules depend on common code could be hell. Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs. It might be better to keep an eye on each other, pick the specific updates, but have total independency. Else, you end up in commit wars and endless arguing on mailing lists.

ESR is way overrated, IMHO.

<comment><USER22> >Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs

I don't know anything about webkits, but how are "the BSDs" relevant?

<comment><USER21> They split off a common codebase, but they share a lot of code and patches fly across the multiple codebases without major problem. What takes the most effort is porting across big new features. But that is expected.

<comment><USER22> Oh, it read as though you were giving them as an example of problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is so inadvertently affectionate. It's like a grandparent trying to calm down their overconfident, arrogant child. So eloquent.

As a side note, I can't even imagine how Torvalds worked with others without source control. That sounds like absolute hell.

<comment><USER24> except for the part where he mentions that they all gossip behind Linus' back.

<comment><USER25> That's actually good grandfatherly advice too. It's worth knowing when people are talking behind your back.

<comment><USER24> pointing it out in a public forum?

<comment><USER25> Sure - why not? It is generally best to shed as much light as possible on gossip.

<comment><USER24> > It is generally best to shed as much light as possible on gossip.

Do you say that as benevolent moralist or is it your personal preference that any gossip concerning you be addressed at you before an audience?

<comment><USER25> More the latter, though the former holds true too. I'd rather people say things to my face before going behind my back. Organizations where there is more private than public communications tend to be very disfunctional.

<comment><USER24> fair enough. I suppose your view is a form of radical honesty. In my observations, it takes a particularly mature person to take public shaming in stride, and I tend not to credit most people with that level of maturity.

<comment><USER25> There are degrees in how harsh and public you should shame.

If as a manager, I allow people to frequently complain about their peers with the other people absent, it sets up a terrible precedent. As manager I would become the bottleneck as people focus their energy on politics rather than problem solving.

It's not black and white, but how you lean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> (2000)

Not that it isn't relevant, but it _is_ 14 years old and the title should probably reflect that.

<comment><USER27> yeah seriously this might have been the suggestion that led to bitkeeper that led to git.

Which Linus invented and coded up essentially to solve some of the problems brought up here

Which (git) today arguably has done more for programming groups than all the new languages and frameworks of the past fourteen years combined.

So, it is interesting. But mostly interesting because of how massive Git spawned from it.

<comment><USER28> s/bitbucket/bitkeeper

<comment><USER29> /

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are now lots of articles suggesting praising people for effort rather than intelligence. Seems like Raymond was ahead of the curve.

2 examples of many:

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9862693/P...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9862693/Praise- childrens-effort-not-their-intelligence.html)

[2] [http://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health- information-23/chi...](http://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health- information-23/child-development-news-124/praising-kids-for-efforts-not- qualities-may-help-them-succeed-673377.html)

<comment><USER30> "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)

<comment><USER25> I've read a lot of quotes like this, but I used to wonder, "Is this just people downplaying all the other things that led to their success, like family money?" It's interesting that modern psychology is providing some proof as to why these quotes are true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone explain what "splitting a driver" in kernel parlance and code sharing is? Modularization is just breaking large pieces of the program up into small pieces right? Is code sharing just the same thing or are they talking about something different?

<comment><USER32> I believe in this case that the driver existed as one piece or module and each hardware version was handled as a different case in branch logic in an attempt to keep the code consolidated and modular (code sharing). As the hardware matured and new versions came to be it gets harder to reuse existing code and that's the context of this thread.

Linus wants to split the driver and create a new module to house that handles only that specific flavor of hardware instead of adding new edge-cases to the existing code.

At least, that's how I read it. I wasn't working on the Kernel back in 2000 so I can't say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nothing's quite as destructive as being told over and over that you're a natural at something so it'll be easy for you. It's a shame that well-meaning parents and mentors will sometimes undermine someone's potential by discouraging them from learning necessary skills.

<comment><USER34> Except assuming that if you did a bad job at something, it's because you were lazy.

The message I got growing up was that "you're so smart, but so lazy". This was principally because of my terrible fine motor coordination combined with my intellect.

So I'd try to do some sort of "posterboard" or "project" and it'd look like a slapped together mess no matter how hard I tried. My handwriting was often illegible to me, even when I tried to write very slow.

ADHD was also an issue, but the fact that every project I poured so much effort into was derided as lazy... yet I could ace every test... told me that effort wasn't, well, worth putting in.

<comment> josh-wrale I bet you're left-handed like me.

<comment><USER34> No, actually. But I suffered nearly as badly as most. I think it almost took legal intervention to stop them trying to force cursive on me.

Being allowed to type assignments - in the early 90s - was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.

Then again, I met other problems caused by my terrible organizational skills in creative ways. For instance, I ran a webserver that had had a folder that pointed to where I did all my assignments. When I inevitably forgot to print something... there it was.

Still. My experience, especially prior to high school (and prior to ADHD medication, now that I think about it) was completely dominated by working my ass off and being told that I wasn't trying at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If Linus always did things the "right" way he wouldn't have invented git (or Linux). Sometimes, it's important to be obstinate.

<comment><USER36> You are missing the point.

<comment><USER35> I'm making a different point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is what Alan Kay means when he says, "IQ is a lead weight." [1]

Also see Rich Hicky's talk "Simple Made Easy." [2] In which he suggests that nobody's _that_ smart; you will always hit a brick wall without the tools to manage complexity. "A juggler can juggle 3 balls. A really good juggler can juggle 9. But no juggler can juggle 90 or 900 (paraphrased)."

[1] [http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/](http://www.tele- task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/) [2] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

</comment><comment><USER38> At least no one can accuse ESR of coasting on his native gift of bloviation. The man perfected his blowhard style more than 10,000 hours before that "it takes one to know one" email. (Which is why it's irritating when he's right.)

</comment><comment><USER39> "Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or release- engineering practices."

And then Linus went on to use Git. I'm not a native english speaker so I may be wrong on this one but I feel like there's quite some irony there: Linus got criticized for not properly using version control and... A few years later he went on to write the most succesful version control system ever!

The same person created both Git and Linux ffs! ESR was probably right: Linus is the 2nd coming of Ken ^ ^

<comment><USER40> That's not irony, that's simply someone listening and changing his mind. That is a normal and healthy thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interestingly enough:

"He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the test of greatness."

-Herman Melville

<comment><USER42> This is quite true.

The best thing I ever did to preserve and improve my brain was find things, really hard things, about which I was passionate. It's not so much about studying as it is about finding subjects and venues of learning that just kick your ass. If you don't have the experience of getting your intellectual butt kicked, and if you don't have the ability to learn from the experience, you can only grow so much.

The easy stuff shouldn't be avoided; you should just expect yourself to pick it up as necessary. If you are not getting challenged, if you don't encounter people who are way ahead of you in some subjects, then you are doing it wrong. The feedback is key. Getting stopped in your tracks, just when you thought you were running along at a good clip is invaluable.

Not that I ever achieved greatness, and I do sometimes ask myself why, even in my private life, I always pick the really hard to study (and have for decades now). I'm sure masochism is involved, but the good stuff is just hard, and you have to be willing to be someone's idiot some of the time to learn.

<comment><USER43> And in grad school, you can salt this with wondering where your next meal is coming from and camping out under your office desk!

<comment><USER42> Ah yes, I jumped into a PhD program after the college experience. That's a great butt-kicking too, because suddenly you are responsible for justifying anything and everything you might say or write about something.

At least I learned how to live on far less than 20K a year. I mean, it was the 90's, and it was in new Jersey, but that still wasn't a fortune (and I had a bad book buying habit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why is everyone here so self-bashing about how you should've seen this earlier?

The solution is to make the gifted people working on something that _is_ challenging to them. You can't expect gifted people to work on annoyingly simple problems in school, yet still develop discipline. If you want them to develop discipline, give them hard problems, that will require discipline of them.

I see this as a failure of the education system, not the gifted people.

Or, put another way, you can't blame Linus for not having discipline if he never needed it. It's the educational system's fault for not showing him he will need it.

</comment><comment><USER45> This should be required reading for any developer, if only to hopefully instill the belief that you will eventually reach a problem that you cannot lean on pure ability alone to solve.

<comment><USER46> Fortunately, one frequently transitions to management and/or dies before this happens because one's career is finite.

Linux and other such runaway success stories are true Black Swans and Linus's subsequent embrace of source code control IMO demonstrates you can teach new tricks to old dogs.

<comment><USER47> I don't remember that Linus was against source control -- it's just that none of the solutions at the time really fit the methodology that the Kernel was developed under. That was his main argument.

And actually, there was source control all along. Every version of the kernel was a separate tarball sitting on many ftp servers, and there was a patch / set of patches to bring it to the next version. It just wasn't a database- backed automated version control system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm not gifted, I'm actually pretty dumb. Can anyone help a stupid normal person relate to this article?

<comment><USER49> Lots of good explanations in this thread, but I'll add my own:

I'd call it the trap of the gifted, rather than the curse. That trap has three prongs:

1) Gifted people get concepts right away, almost effortlessly.

2) Because it's so easy for them, they never have to work at learning. It just happens for them.

3) Being so good at something earns praise from their teachers, parents, friends, etc. This often becomes central to their self-esteem.

This is fine until the day when their giftedness alone simply doesn't cut it. It could be in high school, or college, or graduate school or maybe even at some point in their professional career. But eventually it stops being easy and this is usually a very traumatic event.

Because of the three prongs of the trap, the gifted person finds themselves in a very hard situation. First, they are not used to frustration because previously they got everything right away. Second, they have no persistence because they've never had to work hard. Third, they become anxious and afraid and possibly even become depressed because they are no longer "smart" (at least by their own definition).

Being gifted isn't a curse or a trap in and of itself, but it can lead to a certain kinds of bad habits. Schools and parents tend not to do a very good job correcting these bad habits, which can lead to big problems.

<comment><USER50> This is the best written post in this whole thread. a+

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Here's the full thread by way of Google Groups:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.linux.kernel/uhah96NhtAA/...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.linux.kernel/uhah96NhtAA/gDzjQXVRj0sJ)

<comment><USER52> And on lkml.org: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/97](https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/97)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> _edit_ a little stream of consciousness follows

Curse of being gifted is _very_ real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse.

Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option.

It took me a few years of milling around before I finally got my head together the right way and turned my life around into something productive.

One thing that still comes up to this day for me is a profound sense of isolation and loneliness. It's hard to relate to people because the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me and are not the kinds of problems I have and the kinds of things people want to talk about are not of interest to me. I try to stay intellectually engaged by turning the issue into one of how to communicate with people who aren't as quick as I? Adult education, how people learn, are a small hobby of mine. I even did a short stint as a teacher.

I'm consumed with relationships with mapping out the other person's cognitive limitations and patterns and trying to work within and around those. This is not a good habit, but I find I end up doing it with most everybody. The people I tend to keep around me are those that I haven't been able to conclusively do this with. I guess they keep me interested? I'm rarely surprised by people.

I remember I mentioned this to an associate one time. He asked me if I had done this with him. I answered yes. He challenged me to prove it. I went down a list of his cognitive biases, how they fed into his decision making process, and how this created a pattern of where I could even start inventorying what I thought he had in his apartment (I'd never been to his apartment). I missed the color of his couch, but guessed correctly where he bought his furniture, what kind of car he drove and was likely to buy and why, what TV shows he watched, what music he listened to (and had listened to in the past), the clothes he did and didn't have in his closet, what kind of food he liked and where he liked to shop, I picked his neighborhood, choice of home computer, where he wanted to retire and even a handful of books he probably had in his home library. I think it hurt him, or his sense of individuality, to be deconstructed like that. It was the last time I ever did this to another person. On the flip side, he tries to mix his life up, make random vectors in his life now and not be so predictable. But I know also that he does it because of what I did. It's just another behavior to slot into his patterns.

Relating to people impacts me in many ways, from coming up with product ideas to finding a mentor, to the closeness of friends. It's tough, I have very few close friends but I hold onto them fiercely. With most people I interact with I feel like we're simply in a status of mutual understanding and shared purpose, but not friendship. Maybe out for some laughs and a good time, but that's it.

I got very lucky and found a wife who's smarter than me, and she keeps me on my toes and from drawing the world down into my brain and further isolating myself with walls of internally consistent, but bad ideas. I've never figured out how to predict her thinking process beyond some high level abstract patterns. I think she does it on purpose, to keep me appreciative of her.

Not having a mentor has probably been the hardest. I feel like I have nobody helping me find my path most of the time and have to literally carve a path in the universe for myself. My parents were simply not equipped to deal with a kid like me at all and made many mistakes over the years. From moving to the country (thinking the quiet would help me grow, when it just isolated me more) to schooling choices, etc. School didn't know how to handle me and in business I've found woefully few people I look up to.

I yearn for a simpler life, but realize I couldn't live that life for long, I would quickly lose interest. I start to crave novelty and surprise. New things are interesting to me. But I've also found that once I start to understand the pattern of newness in something, an entire field will start to bore me.

Actually most of the life skills I have I learned from my school's music program. How to break a problem down, how to communicate with people of various levels, how to tutor and teach, how to lead a group and present, setting and keeping schedules etc. Most of my adult years have been spent trying to adapt these skills from orchestra into the rest of my life, while most people would have learned them in more context appropriate ways.

But I guess I turned out okay. I do not look back on most of my childhood with much fondness, I do look back on it with a great deal of sadness and regret and wish I could redo it all. I found out a few years ago that my mother had saved all of my report cards growing up, lovingly stored in a scrapbook. When I found out she had done this, in a fit of anger, resentment and deep embarrassment I tore them up and threw them away.

There's no solution, it just is this way. I live a very fulfilling life that I enjoy and I try to minimize regrets and find joy. I think I'm on a path towards simplifying my life, but I have a notion that I'll find a more minimal life dreadful and boring after a few months.

I _do_ seek out others who I sense have a similar story, but I find that none of us ever really build close bonds with each other. We exist more in a group of mutual acknowledgment than in friendship. I'm drawn towards groups that promise an intelligent gathering, but I'm frequently disappointed by what I find once I get there.

My mother once asked me why so many smart kids end up in drugs and drink, I responded that, at least for me, it slows the thinking down and clarifies the thoughts. It's like having an engine in your car that's always at full rev, and then finally taking your foot off the accelerator for a bit. It also lets the emotions flow a bit easier, the ones that we have to keep bottled up during the day, the slow accumulation of small frustrations from dealing with people who I can't relate to. It's like a sore I can pop and let the puss flow out for a bit.

It's hard staying positive, not falling into hopelessness and depression. I've had very close scares a couple times where I thought about disengaging from everything and ending it. Feeling like you're in the wrong world all the time is maddening. I found a way to continue on, and it works for me. But that endless well of despair still sits there, but it's like I'm walking around the edge of it, like walking around the edge of a swimming pool, trying to make sure I don't fall or jump in.

<comment><USER54> > the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me

This sounds a bit narcissistic. If you think other people's problems are trivial, maybe you're just not being empathic enough to understand their full scope.

If everything looks like it follows simple patterns, maybe you just aren't looking close enough.

When you learn something new, there's often this point where you feel you understand it all. If you're a quick learner, you will reach this point quickly. But things only seem simple because you don't understand them fully yet. You have to continue learning, specialising, looking at the details, and only then will you learn that the subject isn't quite as simple as you thought.

You get bored when you figure out what kind of car someone has, or what color their furniture has. You think you have them all figured out. But if you continue talking to these shallow people, you might see there's something beyond these superficial details.

<comment><USER53> > This sounds a bit narcissistic.

I know. That's the trouble with talking about growing up or being highly intelligent, you end up sounding like a narcissistic prick.

Even saying something like "I've tested in the top 1-2% of dozens of aptitude and intelligence tests" sounds like I'm lording it over those who haven't. But I don't think it's really all that different than saying "I'm taller than 99% of the population". Except tall people, or people with some other exceptional attribute can get together and commiserate about their exceptional attribute without the kinds of social stigma attached to it that intelligence does.

It's very hard to have an honest discussion about being smart without diving into lots of euphemisms and using lots of humbling verbiage.

Most people's problems _are_ simple. They just don't want to fix them because the emotional cost for them is high. So they endlessly try to find ways to solve their problems with the minimum of emotional impact and they make no progress. Getting past your own emotions to make forward progress with your life is the best skill almost anybody can make with respect to solving the problems in their life.

It's not easy, and I don't mean to minimize the impact emotions have. It was definitely a difficult skill for me to learn (and I'm still learning it).

But take money, every single person's money problem is solved with the very simple "don't spend more than you earn". Yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of pages written on financial advice and dealing with personal debt. We _think_ it's a complicate topic, and we treat it like it is, but it's not.

I've found that most problems people deal with are similar.

I'm pretty overweight, and when I think it's a problem, I come up with all kinds of excuses about it and how to solve it and endlessly mill about not doing anything. But it's hilariously simple for me to solve: exercise more, eat less. But I struggle with it like many people struggle with money or relationships or whatever.

<comment><USER55> > _I know. That 's the trouble with talking about growing up or being highly > intelligent, you end up sounding like a narcissistic prick._

You've framed this incorrectly. The reason you ended up sounding like a narcissistic prick is because you were being a narcissistic prick. Perhaps you were just reducing his point to something a little too trivially simple.

There's nothing wrong with saying things like "I've tested in the top 1-2% of dozens of aptitude and intelligence tests". That doesn't sound narcissistic. Making the unsubstantiated claim that you are so smart that the problems of 'normal' people are trivially simple to solve and shall be disregarded is narcissistic. Especially when, once called out on that claim, you respond with an example fit perfectly to your honestly very narrow solution and cover every other scenario with an aloof "well, some problems do get complex".

Honestly, it sounds like jakobe was dead on. If the world seems so simple to you, you're probably not looking close enough. If you really are so good at coming up with solutions to the problems of the world, I hope you're spending your time improving it for yourself and those around you in truly substantial ways.

<comment><USER53> I didn't say every problem was simple, just that most problems most people struggle with are. I also didn't say every problem has a simple solution. You read too much into it.

> If the world seems so simple to you, you're probably not looking close > enough.

Funny, the closer I look, the more locally simple everything seems. It's how we learn, how we work and how we simply do things. Take things that are too big to do and break them down until they're simple enough to do. You can't move a mountain all at once, but you can move it if you blow it up into truck sized pieces.

There's nothing in the world that a person does that's more complex than what a person can do.

If the world seems complex too you, maybe you should just look more closely?

> If you really are so good at coming up with solutions to the problems of the > world, I hope you're spending your time improving it for yourself and those > around you in truly substantial ways.

I hope I am too. With great power comes great responsibility, no? I'm definitely not working on the next photo sharing app if that's your implication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Linus' signature is shockingly relevant these days:

"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances." \-- Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party

<comment><USER57> That was Eric Raymond's signature, not Linus'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish I saw the response.

That said, the "curse of the gifted" manifests itself in a lot of ways. One problem is also that "less gifted" see the "gifted" and say, "If they don't have to be disciplined, why do I?"

<comment><USER27> >I wish I saw the response.

You did. Git.

<comment><USER43> I salute your pun there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Linus's issue on "shared code means less bugs" [https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12](https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12)

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm cursed with the gift of being slightly better than most in nearly all things but not at all stellar in any single one. I never learned to study in school because I've always learned things on my own.

This has carried me far but my limits are always there, always visible, at 360 degrees. Meeting and seeing stellar people is a good reminder of that.

The converse point is related to _dealing with whatever talent_ you have. The essence is to learn to _keep yourself in the unconfidence and doubt_ as for your skills even if so many people around you don't seem to "get" what's obvious to you.

If you think too highly of yourself even if the evidence seems to be on your side, the reality _will bite back_. And that makes you go back and shut a part of yourself down, and you're in a position that worse than where you started.

For example, in programming the only way to handle your skills is to assume the role of a beginner and expect the existing code to be right for a reason that you don't understand yet. If it turns out to be blindly obvious that the original author had no idea what he was doing and a partial rewrite is not only in place but unavoidable, only then accept it as there are no other options left.

The trap is seeing too much of that and starting to hallucinate that thanks to your talents you can "just know" and short-circuit right through the way of doubt. No you can't.

As a talented person you need to remain humble and only exercise your skills and vision when there are no other choices left. That will keep your ego in shape.

</comment><comment><USER60> So true.

The benefit of recognizing this isn't just avoiding that crunch at the limits of your talents - it's learning to the use the tools, processes and people which will allow your talents to flow most efficiently every day.

The classic example of this for me has been engineers who resist documentation, project management and delegation as if each is wasting away their valuable productive time when it's _exactly_ the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER61> Indeed, success is only potential times ability to work with other people.

I still wonder what sort of company or business environment Linus works in.

Nobody would have heard of general relativity if einstein would not have been let working in his labs for long hours.

Often you'll have a very skilled technician and you will have to give him more space to achieve more work than other, but at some point, you still have to make this person work a little with others to make this one guy's contribution more valuable.

Apart from that, I still believe we don't give enough chance to introvert types so that they can channel their work and prove their worth. Linux is a success mostly because Linus managed to channel his talent, but there are many untold stories nobody will remember about a talented guy that just gave up trying. I'm still siding with Linus because the system tend to not work properly for talented people in general. I'm sure he must have some sort of anger and frustration issue, and that mail somehow shows it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I always wondered what the difference was between being really smart or just being really interested in a subject.

All through high school I never studied for a science (biology, chemistry and physics) exam. I would often work by myself and complete several weeks of study in a few days. I would read college levels books in 10th grade, just because it was interesting. Teachers would force me to go back to my locker to get my textbooks before an exam because I needed to study; I just put them back when they weren't looking. I didn't study for 12th grade standardized science tests and ended up with scores 95%+. (I also thought English class was stupid and typically got mid-70s by squeeking by).

That being said I am certainly NOT gifted and to be honest I don't think I'm that extraordinarily smart; I just find that if I'm interested in something, the effort I put in seems, well, effortless.

</comment><comment><USER63> Eric is plainly right.

I once heard of a developer that wanted to make programming more interesting to himself, by using just three names for all his variables. They where banana, apple and another fruit. He used only those names. I am not sure what he did, when he needed more than three, but that was what he did.

It might have made the thing more interesting for him, but made the things far more difficult for us others of the "pack".

Software development is about complexity. To manage complexity is the highest form of software development and the real challenge. Not the clever ideas, the talented implementation -- manage complexity can make your project, even your company succeed or fall.

<comment><USER64> From reading some of the other message in the thread, I think Linus makes a well-reasoned argument -- so I disagree that "Eric is plainly right".

Clearly I don't know all the context, and so I am not really sure what Eric is responding (in addition to the previous message), but it seems to me that Linus has solid technical reasons for his argument. He's even trying to avoid clever ideas of favor of simple code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> > Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control

Pretty hilarious reading this now, considering his contributions to version control in the past several years. I am not too familiar with all of the backstory, but Linus' creation of git seems like one of the most extreme cases of "Not Invented Here Syndrome" since... well Linux itself (half-joking).

I certainly won't complain when someone gets so frustrated with the current tool-o-the-week that they go out an build something superior.

</comment><comment><USER66> Warning to the unexpecting, this was written by Eric S. Raymond.

<comment><USER15> I get that the guy is inflammatory, but what is the problem with letting the content stand on its own?

But if you _are_ going to mention that ESR is involved, you may as well mention that Linus is present as well.

<comment><USER66> Torvalds is abrasive, but Raymond is just an asshole supreme, and if I had known this was an ESR post I wouldn't have opened it in the first place.

<comment><USER15> So you really didn't get anything out of the post because ESR wrote it?

<comment><USER66> I got a bunch of hot air and puffery and blah blah blah out of it, which is about as good at you can get from an Eric Raymond post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> it is a real problem and two things make it worse: 1) ego 2) lack of mentorship.

ego urges you to walk into situations wearing nothing but arrogance. (and why wouldn't you? you've been praised since you were a kid for your precocity. by adults!). and while you may have earned some of that praise, it's like your granny chanting your invincibility into your ear. it's a delusion that prevents you from asking questions (acquiring wisdom) and exploring your outer limits (acquiring experience).

with mentoring, that arrogance could be channelled into something else: humility. because it's really impossible to be alert to truth--academic or otherwise--when you think you know all of the things.

it's just that the educational system doesn't really know what to do with academically-gifted kids who have a bit of rebellion/arrogance in them. and there aren't enough teachers or mentors who recognize this variant even among the gifted.

so they're released into the wild, not having acquired the one thing they needed possibly more than an education: humility.

</comment><comment><USER68> The underlying ideas for even simple math are deep. Just because you get As doesn't mean that you grok concepts deeply. Examples: place notation, rational and irrational numbers, axiom, proof, correspondence, logic, countability, etc... The formulations of these ideas were intellectual breakthroughs thousands of years ago. It's takes curiosity to explore these more deeply.

</comment><comment><USER69> Shit. An ESR ego dump. Head for the shelters.

<comment><USER70> No, I just read it and like many other things ESR said it is well thought out, friendly and helpful.

Please note how ESR again and again ranks Linus (the second coming of Ken) higher than himself (old fart) while still trying to convey som hard won experience.

<comment><USER71> ESR is being extremely condescending and patronizing. I don't consider that friendly or helpful. He's giving tons of hand-wavy pop psychology in response to a technical issue on which he's out of his depth. His "experience" was not with anything the size and complexity of the Linux kernel and was not particularly relevant. He does like to set himself up as the wise old mentor to people who don't really want or need to listen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Oh, how I wish someone had told me this when I was fourteen. As a matter of fact, someone probably did, and I just ignored it. Public school isn't exactly challenging, and it's hard to believe that a problem could possibly be beyond your ability to intuitively grasp it when you never see actual evidence of that fact.

</comment><comment><USER73> Working on an OS is an enormous job where teamwork, good communication, planning and so on are paramount. I am the only game coder for a small adver- game company. The projects are small and I have total control, so I will never hit that wall and have to do all that boring stuff :) (One of the reasons I chose such a job)

</comment><comment><USER74> I don't compare to Linus but I think I was hit by this bug.

I cruised through high school without trying and actually made it through undergrad the same way. Now however I am faced with the prospect of relearning a lot of it if I want to move forward. That or be a run of the mill web dev for the rest of my life.

</comment><comment><USER75> Obligatory reference to Carol Dweck's research:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secret-to- rais...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secret-to-raising- smart-kids/)

<comment><USER76> Non-paywall version:

[http://www.ccsf.edu/Campuses/Downtown/scientific_american.pd...](http://www.ccsf.edu/Campuses/Downtown/scientific_american.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> 14 years later Linus seems to be doing pretty ok. The git and all considered.

</comment><comment><USER78> That describes me pretty well. I thought I was going to get by in every field because of my raw talent. It turns out that you actually have to be organized and achieve things, however.

</comment><comment><USER79> For more about 'The Curse of the Gifted' see:

Mindset: by Carol S. Dweck.

Anecdotes aren't data, but I can say that having this 'curse' has been a huge challenge in my programming career.

</comment><comment><USER80> Whoa, flashback. I think I read that on Slashdot back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER81> Wow, I can feel better about myself because now I have another alibi/theory for my shortcomings and under achievements :P ;)

</comment><comment><USER82> Is the reply of Torvalds online somewhere?

<comment><USER83> Someone else mentioned that ESR got no reply, and the thread continued on another path. So, Linus did not reply, it seems. But, he did begin using revision control soon after; though I think that's likely to have happened, anyway.

<comment><USER82> Yeah, I saw that comment and started to read the thread. It's interesting that Linus's talk is very concrete while ESR is rather abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Isn't lack of ability to modularize a sign of lack of another kind of gift? Gifts come in different traits.

</comment><comment><USER85> Gift of the cursed? >:-)

</comment><comment><USER86> Nice nugget.</comment>


Nintendo Wii U rumors run wild – talks of Android integration - <AUTHOR> http://androidcommunity.com/nintendo-wii-u-rumors-run-wild-talks-of-android-integration-20120426/

<comment><USER2> I doubt that. Let's go to the WABAC Machine, Sherman:

Nintendo licenses Palm OS [http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/community/forum/index.php?...](http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/community/forum/index.php?topic=73.0)</comment>


LA "Mystery Missle" - Just a Jet? - <AUTHOR> http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/#more-4

<comment><AUTHOR> A jet seems like a much more likely explanation than a missile that NORAD didn't know about. Plus, he has mathematical equations, who can argue with that ;)

<comment><USER2> Have you seen the videos? The tip of the tail burns really really bright; I haven't seen _that_ many jets in my day, but I have never seen one do that.</comment></comment>


The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/ <comment><USER3> When I was in physics grad school, some 20 years ago, I was paid $11K/year. As a single male with no dependents, living in a room which cost $200/month, and walking distance from classes and work, it was quite doable. Others, married and/or with children, had it more complicated. Some students did get welfare. The plan was that after graduation we would have access to much better paying jobs. But some of my friends, PhD trained in chemistry or physics, still found it difficult to find a job in their chosen profession. Many ended up with postdoc positions, making more than the adjunct professors mentioned here, but still with little money and little job security.

One may say they have "zero pity for highly educated people who do not understand the basics of supply and demand in their chosen job market" - <USER2> bear in mind that I'm talking here about people trained in the sciences, and not humanities which is oft smirked at for its dearth of job prospects. But the thing is, we as people get to decide what failure means. We don't need to let one bad choice prove ruinously disastrous.

As jseliger's link points out, I, as a 21 year old who outside of a few summer jobs had never been outside of the academic environment, really did not understand the job market and options available to me, so made my decision on rather limited information. I hadn't even realized, for example, that graduate schools paid TA salaries. I thought I would have to apply for scholarships like I did for my undergraduate education.

It worked out well for me, but it also felt like a lot of chance was involved. Lady Luck could easily given a worse roll. I do not see my success as purely my own achievement. I do not want my failures to be my own cross to bear, and nor would I wish that on others.

Yes, I believe in funding a strong social safety net.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is tailor made for a lot of Nelson Muntz-ish "HAHA"s.

1) Gloating over your own skills being in demand can be short-sighted. How many of the people here were thinking, "wow, I'm really passionate about medieval history, but I'll go into software development because that's where the big bucks are?" I'd hazard to say none: people choose to do what they enjoy, not what will make them money. Just because your passion happened to line up with today's market discipline doesn't mean that anyone whose passions aren't in that same direction are fools. (And do you really want a bunch of people who have no innate skills in programming flocking to IT and CS in the hopes of cashing out?)

2) That said, I'm not massively sympathetic toward her. Lots of people don't have the ability to easily cease living off food stamps: she could find a job to catapult her into the middle class in a matter of months. It's a choice on her end. Though, it's not even clear that it's a poor choice, since she gets to do what she loves and has enough money plus entitlements for food, shelter, and medical care.

3) But to tease out some points even further... most people are more interested in pissing on her choices than in figuring out how they can use her situation to better the world. Wait, (ostensibly) great teachers in obscure topics are out there in abundance working only a couple hours a week? Shouldn't we be spending more time wondering "Is there an opportunity here?" than wondering if her choices make her education worthless or if she deserves our pity or not?

<comment><USER5> I don't think people only have one passion. I personally have a passion for pure mathematics and number theory. My passion for software and hardware comes in a close enough second that I chose to focus my career on development rather than pure mathematics.

I was all set to double major in mathematic when I got married. When my wife and I had our first kid I decided to finish up a Computer Engineering degree and enter the workforce rather than take an extra year to finish the math major.

Sometimes you have to find something you enjoy enough. I absolutely enjoy programming, but it still doesn't come close to how fascinating I find number theory.

Everyone has options, and they make (or should make) their choices fully aware of the likely outcomes.

<comment><USER6> i read the article twice. something in it really hit home with me. i have an offer from a prof at the local univ to pursue a math phd, and i might do so in the fall. my employer is ok with it, so i get to keep my job as well. however, its a fairly useless part of math ( useless in the GH Hardy sense ) in commutative algebra, specifically prufer groups ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%BCfer_group> ) Now, I could do something "useful" and closer to finance, like stochastic calculus and stats and applied pdes & so forth...but my heart's not in those things. it feels like what i do anyway at work, so why would i do more of the same out of choice ? some of the comments below make me quite queasy. see, supply-demand is not a normative ideal. "One of the things you are are supposed to learn in economics is to avoid extremes. It is never all or nothing. Everything has advantages and disadvantages. And any way you jump has an opportunity cost because there are lots of things you would like to do with your limited means. So life is about trade-offs between rival objectives and you should optimise rather than maximise. " - so said Ross Gittins, and there's much more where that came from.

so this supply-demand thingy - its just something that happens to accurately describe the current state of the world, or more particularly the usa, especially in a bubble where it is infinitely more preferable to drop out of college and pursue ruby on rails than stick it out for a lousy diploma with your name on it. but if an athlete wanting to compete in the olympics mistakenly walked into a circus and started jumping through hoops, the crowd would throw coin at him. he can then collect that coin & settle down, get married, raise a family, get a drivers license, buy an automobile, pay municipal state and federal taxes & so on. but that just means he's become a clown, not an athlete. it is unfortunate that athletics is non sexy and training to be one involves grueling practice for years and years in isolation with no attention, no fame, no coin. but to dodge that work and passion because of what society chooses to value at a particular point in time is quite defeatist. none of what we do in cs today would have been considered useful in the 20s and 30s. church and turing would have clearly been better off working in the railroads or digging an oil well. yet they did what they did, and here we are... so, respect. you never know what the future holds for medieval history or english literature. i spent 3 semesters as a film major before i dropped out, and i must say it was a royal blast. repeatedly watching blondes strip and run towards the beach in their red bikinis while their breasts bobbed up and down, and the professor of film studies pausing the remote at the critical instant when a tad bit of cleavage was visible and saying "hey, _this_ is why baywatch was a hit" and all of us students scribbling down "must place camera on sand level and tile up to show cleavage in beach shots" - i mean, nothing beats that. no amount of fancy research in STEM will match the pure adrenaline that passes for film studies. so there's a reason people in their youth pursue these non-lucrative fields, so lets not rain on their parade.

<comment><USER5> Completely true. My argument isn't to avoid the one thing you are truly passionate about. It's to understand the realistic results of that pursuit. If I hadn't gotten married while still in school I probably would have gotten the double major and perhaps gone to graduate school in mathematics. But my priorities shifted. I found choosing a close runner up in order to better my family life to be superior. Just as I would probably pass up on a promotion that would require me to travel 30% of the time. For me my family is a passion. For other people, having a nice house and nice toys is a passion. As you said, it's all about optimizing rival objectives. For me that optimization between my interests and having a family is software development. That is purely from my perspective, but it's a choice I have made and there are consequences of that choice, both seen and unforeseen.

And that's the point. Once we make a choice, we must accept the consequences. The article indicates there was some sort of agreement between life and students that says "If you study hard and get an advanced degree you won't have financial troubles." Since that wasn't the case, the world seems unfair. There is no such agreement. I'm not raining on the parade of students studying things that interest them. I feel strongly that their studies are beneficial and they become better people and better members of society because of them. But they were never promised financial success and not having it is not a breach of contract in any way shape or form. That's why this article rubs this crowd the wrong way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't the half of it. Many PhD programs are funded, and most people going into them know they're studying things for the joy of learning about them and are not necessarily going to find work easily, especially at lower ranked schools.

Try going to one of the top ten law programs, taking out an enormous amount of debt, dealing with 3 years of opportunity cost etc., in what's supposed to be a professional program that tracks you onto finding good paying work, and then finding out no one wants your professional services.

Not whining ... I made my bed, it's made of student loan bills, I've got to sleep in it. But you can be damn well sure that I shout from the rooftops about the very dubious investment proposition that even "elite" educational programs offer these days...

</comment><comment><USER8> _Ms. Bruninga-Matteau does not blame Yavapai College for her situation but rather the "systematic defunding of higher education."_

In fact, it is the systematic _overfunding_ of higher education that has led this person to getting a degree that is worthless.

Plus her own poor choices, of course.

<comment><USER9> Choices, in her partial defence, she did not make in a vacuum.

I'm willing to gamble that at least one person indoctrinated her with 'follow your dreams, and the money will come'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the underlying assumption in the article is that people who get an education are more entitled to a high paying job than those who don't have such an education.

That entitlement is a huge question. Why should they be entitled to higher paying jobs? Because they worked hard to get there? I used to work 12 hour days as a construction worker making $10/hour. I work half as hard as a programmer as I did as a construction worker, yet I earn 8 times as much. In the 4 years of school it took to get here, I can't even pretend that I worked harder than my former colleagues did. Clearly how hard we work isn't the only factor in our wages.

So what is this entitlement based on? I'm not asking what wages should be based on. We almost all agree that you should be paid according to the value you add. My question is why it is (or why is it supposed to be) surprising that someone with a PhD in medieval studies can't find work. What is the assumption by the general public based on?

<comment><USER10> I'd substitute the word "entitlement" with "expectation". And it's not hard to see why they'd have it. I'm 29, and I can clearly remember getting the message from every corner of society that more education = higher income/earning potential. From every teacher, guidance counselor, and regular adult in my life the message was the same. College education means financial security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The racial overtones of the article confuse me - should I be more sympathetic because the literature professor is white?

<comment><USER4> That's what immediately jumped out at me. Which is sort of funny, because the majority of people on Medicaid are white, IIRC.

I attribute it to, on the reporter's part, two parts laziness to one part subconscious racism.

<comment><USER10> I think the article was seeking to address the widely held view that the vast majority of public assistance recipients are black, and relatedly that they're lazy, uneducated (by choice), and all around primarily responsible for our nation's financial problems.

Of course this has never been true, and part of the point of the article was that it's even less true today. Perception is very important in how people view these issues. When people see someone they can relate to, someone that looks like them, or their sibling, parent, next door neighbor, etc., it becomes a lot harder to sit in judgment and be morally dismissive of their circumstances.

I've lived in various parts of middle America, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and many of these people feel these programs should be abolished exactly because of this misperception. Of course when you point out that their grandma, or auntie or cousin is on Medicare, food stamps, etc., their immediate response is - "Well I'm a hard working, Christian American, I deserve these things. It's those OTHER people who are the problem."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does it make me a bad human being if I feel zero pity for highly educated people who do not understand the basics of supply and demand in their chosen job market?

<comment><USER13> I think the problem is more complicated than basic supply and demand. There is a lot of demand for college education. Enrollment is higher than it has ever been, and the people profiled in this article have jobs. The problem is that in order to cut cost colleges are hiring more and more adjunct professors as opposed to full-time, tenure track professors. It's not uncommon for these adjunct professors to take on jobs at multiple community colleges in order to make enough. The end result is that they are doing as much or more work than a full time professor but for less pay.

<comment><USER14> It is still over supplied. If it weren't then colleges would be forced to hire tenure track professors to fill the positions since there wouldn't be enough people to teach.

<comment><USER15> Oversupplied compared to what? Just because there's no immediate industrial benefit to medieval studies doesn't mean that there's no overall societal benefit from liberal arts programs.

If you took a strict Econ 101 view of this, there would be no medieval studies professors in the whole country.

<comment><USER12> "If you took a strict Econ 101 view of this, there would be no medieval studies professors in the whole country."

I don't believe that. (note that I am the guy who originally made the "zero pity" comment) Knowing how society developed from medieval times into the Renaissance is very valuable, especially from the point of view of someone who studies history of technology, markets, and means of production. Within that context, there is most definitely demand for professors of medieval studies.

The conversation really is about how there isn't enough demand for dozens of medieval studies experts every year. Perhaps there would be demand for a dozen every five years or so.

<comment><USER15> Ok, so a dozen every 5 years, according to who? Nobody pays specifically for medieval history education, it's usually part of a larger liberal arts program, so there's pretty much zero Econ 101 factors in play as far as the employment of medieval history experts.

Your contention that we're producing a couple too many, ok, I can buy that. But the people in the article have jobs -- and it doesn't seem to stand that the depts in question would pay more for medieval history experts if there was a smaller pool of talent.

<comment><USER14> There is some demand, that is why they exist at all. Most likely from people who want to study it and don't care about the financial repercussions later. Not all demand is created by rational buyers.

The bottom line is that if the price is low there is high supply relative to low demand. Econ 101 factors are always "at play". While a more advanced econ class may explain more complex pricing concepts, it really isn't necessarily here since this basically a classic econ 101 example.

What is even more interesting is that every time someone graduates with a history PhD they are in a position where they either go in to the field where their low paid professors already work or go to a different job. The ones that don't want food stamps take the second choice.

Those people who decide to sacrifice for the first 3 or 4 years out of the program and take jobs to get experience in a new field which can yield higher pay later will make more than those that stay in low demand history PhD positions in academia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They make it sound like a new development, but this has been the Chronicle of Higher Education's bread-and-butter topic for a long time.

I somehow got on their mailing list during grad school, and I've received regular updates about the supposed oppression of the worlds PhD's and graduate students ever since.

</comment><comment><USER17> Supplemental skills are essential, even for us fancy-pants code warriors. On the day they were awarded their degrees, the half dozen buddies I have who graduated as computer science majors could barley fizz-buzz their way out of a shot glass; it took a lot of studying, experimentation, and self-direction _outside_ the classroom before they really came into their own as valuable professionals.

Software is a lucrative career path, but a college education from most universities is almost worthless on its face. Degree holders with a dim economic outlook need to consider the value in supplementing their education with a skill set that allows them to capitalize on their specialized knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER18> These people could come to SE Asia and actually make _more_ money teaching basic English, in cities where the cost of living is 1/4th or less that of any US city. The English teachers I talked to in Hanoi said they couldn't spend their entire salary there if they tried.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can't help noticing that she's unpacking her food stamp purchases in front of a $300 KitchenAid mixer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Obligatory Thomas H. Benton link:

 _Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go_ <http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846>

</comment><comment><USER21> What? No one needs an expert in medieval studies?

<comment><USER22> There's a Nova episode about the effort to prove that a portrait was a lost da Vinci.

An important part of the investigation was Elisabetta Gnignera, a costume historian and expert in renaissance hairdos, identifying the bound ponytail of the girl in the portrait as being a style that only ever became prominent in Milan, and only for a few years--the same years when da Vinci served the Milan ruling family as artist and engineer.

I thought it was cool that there are people who are experts in renaissance hairdos--and that their knowledge can actually be put to practical use.

(There is much more than the hairdo evidence to tie the painting to da Vinci. It's worth watching the Nova episode if they show it again. The combination of historical research and modern scientific analysis was quite intriguing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "...with a Ph.D. in medieval history..."

Say no more.

She's just lucky she had a Republican governor to blame for her economic situation.

"Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions."

That's the real problem right there. If she went into higher education expecting to make a comfortable living from it, she should've checked her prospects first. I can't imagine there would be very many opportunities for a medieval history doctorate.</comment>


On Speech Recognition: Pointers for Newbies & Lessons from a failed startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/08/on-speech-recognition-web-app-integration-pointers-for-newbies-lessons-learned-from-a-failed-startup/

<comment><USER2> Long 5am post alert broken into sections corresponding to the authors.

I wish I read this 8 months ago so it could of prepared me for some of the misery to come. I initially thought it would be simple. Use some of the open source tools or commercial SDK's, then quickly move on to the important stuff. Did not turn out that way. In fact, speech recognition is a time killing whore, but it sure is interesting, sometimes at least.

1\. Telephony & VoIP:

I disagree with the author. Freeswitch comes with speech recognition built in and recently added uniMRCP so I think FS is definitely better not even taking into account how shady asterisk is.

The prices he lists are also on the high side. You can get local DID's for half what he lists, probably further less in bulk.

2\. Web Services:

Agree with his comments on web services. Speech recognition is perfect for scaling onto the magical cloud. Dictation is more difficult because for very large vocabulary at least, your going to take up a system to process it and be lucky to get 1RT.

3\. Embedded

Disagree with this. Some decoders are made specificially for this. Well pocketsphinx is. It even used ARM ASM code to speed up calculations on embedded devices so you can get better results on the iphone for example. The developer for pocketsphinx for example recently made this fantastic demo for the N800 which I recall was similar to the iphone in power.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEUeJb6Pwt4>

And I am sure it can be tweaked to be even better. So much of speech recognition is tweaking. As he states correctly, Lumenvox is based on sphinx(sphinx2 I recall reading), just its very tweaked.

Commercially available:

Very funny, I agree with most. MS,AT&T,IBM suck at least for providing API's but their tech is very good. IBM for example released theirs as opensource but changed their mind and just let it die. Nuance is 'contact our salesperson' expensive. Lumenvox is the most affordable.

Open Source:

Minor nitpick, he should of included HTK with Julius. Acoustic models definitely have given me the most grief.

I use sphinx4 and pocketsphinx and am very pleased. They are state of the art decoders. The acoustic model, or lack thereof is the reason why commercial engines are perceived as superior. If you have 50k you can spend get a LDC membership with tonnes of transcribed data. Slap it into the trainers format, BAM. Unfortunately I was not going to do this. I disliked the LDC for what I thought was gauging. Same prices for mega corporations as individuals. But after making my own model, and still in the neverending process of making my own, tweaking it, etc.., I appreciate the misery that is collecting and organizing transcribed data and appreciate the work they do even if I can't use it.

Notice something wrong with your model, need to retrain it. Takes days with a quad core. In fact my new 8core beast of a server I ordered arrives next week, I wonder how my parents will take the noise, apparently servers are loud. Even with that it will take maybe half a day. And spotting errors is hard. I cant emphasize enough how boring it is to listen to hours on end of audio and see that it matches up with the text perfectly. In some cases, listening a bunch of times to make sure. Noticing issues with your model, having to go figure out why.

Voxforge.org is great. They have ~50 hours of quality data, most at 16khz computer microphone but a good portion at 8khz telephone. You can always downsample. But for dictation you need much more.

You dont need thousands of hours unless your doing dictation and if that extra few percent is worth it. You can get good results with low hundreds. There are other equally important factors like language models that he should of mentioned that could be equally as important as the acoustic model. How its important to have relevant, and lots of data to train them. The acoustic model is only one of many factors(as is the decoder for the matter). Perhaps because its that he did not focus on dictation that he left it out.

Wrapping Up:

FS better. At least try both, its trivial to set each up and follow a simple tutorial. You can still plug lumenvox into FS, although it will cost. But it would cost the same for asterisk. I agree that its difficult but I don't think that should stop you. Just be aware its a lot of work, some of it very boring and frustrating, but I am sure the same can be said for most things. Ok maybe not :)

</comment><comment><USER3> As real and raw as anything written by a badly bitten practitioner. If you're doing SR, don't read this article and don't bookmark it, wrecking a nice beach takes a lot of fucking effort; just contact the author and grab the guy while he is between gigs.

If I had the money I would be hiring these guys with "failed" startups and pairing them with good sales people. They haven't failed, they just don't have industry contacts :-(

</comment><comment><USER4> My guess is that if any of this was new to you, it should be a clear sign you have no business doing a company in this niche.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that to say Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't have done a social networking site or Steve Jobs, Pixar..? In fact maybe anybody who has their bachelor degree in liberal arts shouldn't even dream of going to med school or being a lawyer. This line of reasoning is flawed. Some of the most successful people I've met in life have ended up doing things they never would have imagined.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW just to clarify: by all means integrate speech rec into your solution if you feel you get a real value proposition by doing so. For my product it wasn't really needed and was more of a distraction than anything else. However I learned so much in the process I wanted to share this back with the community.

</comment><comment><USER5> he starts out saying "stay the fuck away from this stuff" then goes on to talk lovingly of the tech. WTF? Where's the explanation of why it didn't work as a business?

I think the OP is a bit too in love with the technology, that's probably why he got burnt.

<comment><USER6> And he said exactly that in his previous post: _"So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn't solve anyone's problem."_

[http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/08/the-number-one-reason-my- st...](http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/08/the-number-one-reason-my-startup- failed/)</comment></comment>


Microsoft announces dual-screen Surface Neo - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20887395/microsoft-surface-neo-dual-screen-concept-design-windows-10x <comment><USER2> This is really clever design, and I like how they've incorporated the keyboard, giving you the freedom of the configuration. I just wish I could have a different OS underneath it all.

I really think the trick is not to try to hide the hinge, but to use it as a demarcator as seen here.

</comment><comment><USER3> The addition of the keyboard is genius.

This feels like a very well thought out product. I might end up buying one of the full surface laptops + Duo because of my work flow. But, damn I would have loved to own one of these.

disclaimer: work for MSFT

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this looks really nice. Probably also gonna stick with my laptop for now, but I could see this being amazing for note taking. I could really see this taking off at my school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks like super cool hardware. The hinge in particular!

I think hardware and software made by the same company can have big advantages.

For me personally, I don't really see much use case for something this size the same way I don't see much use case for an iPad. If I have a lot to do, I'll use my laptop. If it's something quick, I'll use my phone. I don't have much need for an in between currently. I'm sure there are use cases for this that I haven't thought about, though.

And not to say I wouldn't want one, looks great!

EDIT: As a phone replacement (new product video for Surface Duo just shown), this is even more interesting!

<comment><USER6> > For me personally, I don't really see much use case for something this size > the same way I don't see much use case for an iPad. If I have a lot to do, > I'll use my laptop. If it's something quick, I'll use my phone. I don't have > much need for an in between currently. I'm sure there are use cases for this > that I haven't thought about, though.

As somebody who has tons of textbooks in PDF form, the ability to use something like this (or the iPad Pro, which I currently own) for reading, annotating and otherwise working with them is pretty damn useful. I'm especially excited about the Duo, since PDF's are unreadable on even my 6.5" smartphone and I don't always want to bring my iPad with me everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When the Courier concept was first shown, I almost couldn't contain my excitement.

Now, ten years later, it feels like most challenges the Courier (and now the Surface Neo) tried to solve have been solved by bigger screens, better multitasking and great pencil support.

New note taking and productivity apps benefit from the big screen and fluid resizing of apps that the iPad Pro and similar tablets provide.

The separation in the middle that made the courier look awesome ten years ago, now feels like an unnecessary hardware separation between the two sides of the display.

<comment><USER8> It seems like the Nintendo DS worked because every single piece of software for it was written to use both screens effectively. With this, I can't imagine there will be hardly any software ever written for it specifically to use two screens, except maybe some first party stuff at launch.

I'm also worried about use on the go. When you're holding it in your hands, a folding device is a pain to use. If there was some reason you couldn't have a single large screen maybe ok, but as you say this is a solved problem.

<comment><USER9> YUP. This will end up like all the other Surfaces of the past... It will just get used like a regular laptop, docked to external peripherals 99% of the time. It will run Word, Outlook and Edge, and be locked down so the user can't do anything new or interesting with it. I doubt that the majority of Microsoft's own applications will even be optimized for this configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Panos' announcement was hilarious. Announcing it 1.5 years before release though...

<comment><USER11> I think this is a smart strategy. They're trying to involve developers as early as possible to avoid repeating the Windows mobile mistakes. It'll also allow them to collect feedback and adjust the product before launching it. This will give it a greater chance of success.

<comment><USER12> Is there any info what they offer for developers? A simulator?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently bought the Note10+ and really like the pen functionality except for the fact that the screen is a little too narrow for any serious writing. I really like the idea of a A5 size screen for hand writing. I'm a heavy onenote user and would be very interested in the Neo if its priced right

</comment><comment><USER14> "Partnering with Google" \- Be very interesting to see how deep that goes. The google logo was on the homescreen of the demo device...

<comment><USER5> This device (Surface Neo) does not have a partnership with Google. It's a Microsoft device running a flavor of Windows.

The other device they announced (Surface Duo) is Microsoft hardware running Google software (Android).

Makes sense, as it's really the only way to get into the phone market and still have an app ecosystem.

<comment><USER15> its a very Microsoft thing to do to name a Microsoft product built on (aka extending) a Google product after a different unrelated Google Product.

If my friend has a Microsoft Surface Duo and I say "open your Duo" do I mean to unfold the phone, or open the google video calling app?

<comment><USER16> Somebody is actually using Duo the chat outside Google?

<comment><USER17> I recently started using it. It's nice because it comes with E2E encryption and is usable on desktop. Alternatives all have various limitations: Skype (no E2E encryption), Signal (no calls on PCs), iMessage (only usable for Apple users), Wire (requires additional program installation and account creation).

<comment><USER18> I haven't used the desktop Signal app, but there appears to be one:

[https://signal.org/download/](https://signal.org/download/)

<comment><USER17> Yes, Signal and WhatsApp both have desktop apps, but they're only for text chat, neither do voice calls like their mobile counterparts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will be interesting to see Microsoft return to the smart phone market. Satya Nadella's organization is much more geared towards catering products towards their demand signal instead of repeating Ballmer's blunder of always acquiescing to the Windows fiefdom.

<comment><USER20> Microsoft is a software company first, and is supposed to only be in hardware for "aspirational" reasons. It doesn't seem clear what the Duo will encourage (Android) OEMs to "aspire" to, and at least from the announcements so far doesn't seem to give much reason for software innovations either. As a return to the smart phone market, it is hugely underwhelming for Microsoft's stated goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> CNET's two-part series on Courier:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/the-inside-story-of-how- microsoft-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft- killed-its-courier-tablet/)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/how-windows-8-kod-the- innovative-c...](https://www.cnet.com/news/how-windows-8-kod-the-innovative- courier-tablet/)

<comment><USER22> Here [1] is the original concept video for the Courier. I remember it generated a ton of hype when that video came out.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp- MdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is huge... but the biggest thing remains if the Windows platform will be ready to meet this hardware. It's painfully obvious that Andromeda and Centaurus and all this hardware has been there and solid, but that Windows' true universal platform structure hasn't been good enough to meet it.

<comment><USER20> Presumably why fast-track Windows Insiders have been testing 20H1 for months already, if most of the platform guts have to go out in 20H1 for these devices to meet shipping goals.

<comment><USER23> 20H1 of Windows 10 is essentially a different operating system than Windows 10X. My understanding is that the 20H1 focus is around standardizing what's running on Azure with what's running on desktops.

<comment><USER20> I think it behooves Microsoft today to brand 10X as a "different operating system", but it's not like it is an entirely independent fork. Some of the same "OneCore" improvements Azure needs on the one side are likely what 10X needs, so 20H1 can be (and probably is) for testing both. Microsoft can test two things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is fantastic. I've always found it cumbersome to write on onenote and have a browser / PDF reader open simultaneously. Split screen doesn't really work, especially in landscape mode.

Might finally be able to drop the paper notebook in my backpack if they can make screen larger on this one.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if this will take off. People are _Very_ entrenched in traditional laptop world, so this seems essentially useless for corporate settings.

<comment><USER26> This looks more like a device to take notes on in meetings rather than replace a work laptop or desktop.

<comment><USER25> So, limited use case, no specialty, and overlaps almost completely with a tablet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice -- but I want two 15" screens, not 9", and set it down as two 15" portrait monitors for code editing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> I counted 5 seconds from flipping keyboard until all screens rearrange and complete rendering

</comment><comment><USER29> Hardware aside, I'm not a fan of the delivery. The presenter comes across as fake humble and insincere.

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh neat, a Dock.

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazing hardware, looks well thought out. Would never buy it with Windows OS though - I have a Surface for work with Windows 10 Pro and it's invasive crappy nagware.</comment>


Ask HN: Online resources for learning Linear Algebra - <AUTHOR> I am compiling list of free online resources where one could learn Linear Algebra. Any resources that you found useful would do. Thanks! <comment><USER2> 3Blue1Brown youtube series 'essense of linear algebra' is a good way to build your intuition. skim watch to get some visuals, then dive into something like Strang and then go back and critically watch a vid on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course[0]. Material is of superior quality.

[0] [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear- algeb...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algebra- fall-2011/)</comment>


Spell check your entire website in one go - <AUTHOR> http://spellr.us

<comment><AUTHOR> Been a while since I've been to news.yc, but I've been reading the RSS feeds more recently, so thought I should pimp my new job at some stage :)

Feedback welcome!

<comment><USER2> Crawling should respect the excluded pages in robots.txt and rel="nofollow" directives.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a tough one. This has been much debated, but at the end of the day we decided to go with our own filtering system since robots.txt and rel="nofollow" are created with search engines in mind, not spell checking. In general you want search engines to cover a subset of what you want spell checked.

You can filter on any CSS3 selector & a[rel="nofollow"] would block no-follow links if you don't want them included. By default we filter out any block with a class or an id that contains "comment" which does a pretty good job of filtering a lot of user comments.

<comment><USER3> You could always just have an option for it.

I feel people would trust your tool more if they are able to tell it what to ignore.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the intention of choosing CSS selectors over robots.txt or nofollow, although a checkbox to specify following robots.txt & nofollow would be useful as you say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a little bit silly that it says "The first 100 pages have been reviewed …" when the site I submitted only has a handful of pages.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is wonderful. I scanned my website and found two spelling errors. I did not know "seeked" was not a word. It is supposed to be "sought".

</comment><comment><USER6> The five things it found on my website (only five because, as zemaj explains, that's all they list if you use the quick scanner on their front page instead of creating an account) were all false positives. (Two non-English words, both in the middle of lengthy tracts of non-English; it seems to me that there might be useful heuristics for spotting this situation. One phonetic explanation of how to pronounce something; not much they could do about that. One colloquial neologism; not much they could do about that. One perfectly correct but uncommon word.)

I bet there are genuine typos, at least, on some of my pages. I find one every now and then. So whatever heuristics "spellFOCUS" is using to distinguish errors from non-errors seem like maybe they could be improved.

Nice interface.

The pay-for-service prices seem awfully high to me, but I'm not the target market for several different reasons.

</comment><comment><USER7> Should "Your site has queued." be "Your site has been queued."?

<comment><USER8> I think "queue" could arguably be used as a verb.

<comment><USER9> Both of the OP's examples are verb uses of "queue". I believe the question here is whether to use active or passive voice.

IMO the passive construction ("has been queued") sounds more natural, because you wouldn't normally think of an inanimate object like a website queuing itself in a line. But it could go either way, as "queue" technically can act as either a transitive or an intransitive verb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Immensely useful. Well done.

<comment><USER11> I use it every week and find it extremely powerful. The custom dictionary and the ability to highlight exactly what is wrong are two key differentiating features. A grammar checker add on would also be very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be nice to have the ranking of error by likelihood on my desktop, but only being able to spell check my site (where everything has already been through a desktop spell checker).

It might be useful for user generated content (I assume that is what they mean by "multiple content contributors cannot be easily identified by the website content manager"), but then, should you be editing everything your users get wrong?

On my site the free scan found 0 likely errors, I possible error that is an accepted shortened form in the context, four unlikely errors. These were my surname, the name of the site, a correct (if not often used) plural form and a common abbreviation.

<comment><USER13> Shameless plug but I'm working on the user generated content side at <http://www.afterthedeadline.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unleashing it on YouTube now, I have no high hopes.

<comment><USER14> Ok well after letting it go on several websites known for butchering the English language, it seems that the results have been capped at 5 for the free version.

This is either a bug, or an undocumented feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, that totally wasn't clear from the text we had on there. Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated the copy so it makes more sense now. The quick scan on the homepage only lists the first 5 errors. You need to create an account to see the full list of errors.

<comment><USER14> Anytime.

I've got a couple suggestions for further things you could do with the tool. Should I just send that via the email on the contact page?

<comment><AUTHOR> That be great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> awesome, found a couple on my site

i have always looked for a service like this

</comment><comment><USER16> Great implementation, I especially like how it visually shows me the error on my page. It would be nice if I could add the words it thinks are errors to my custom dictionary, so I don't have to type each one in.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nicely done. I would add 404 and other error checking as a premium feature if you haven't already done so.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hate the name, but it found a spelling error on my site. Cool! "Langrangian" != "Lagrangian"</comment>