Walkability a key factor determining upward mobility of a city's residents - <AUTHOR> https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/10/we-identified-walkability-of-city-how.html <comment><USER2> Paper: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329729827_The_Socio...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329729827_The_Socioecological_Psychology_of_Upward_Social_Mobility)

So they buy/beg data for 382 "community zones" from walkscore.com, do linear regression, and find a correlation. Then they get funding to do an individual- level survey and there's no correlation. And it doesn't appear in South Korea either.

Their explanation is some statistical magic to pull out a "sense of belonging" as a mediating factor and a statement in the conclusion that "It may be that walkability is an emergent property most clearly visible at the level of aggregate, not at the level of each individual."

No discussion of data accuracy besides noting that even perceived walkability and actual amount of walking are barely correlated in their surveys (i.e., their data sucks).

Interesting paper idea, but the implementation seems like more statistical garbage.

<comment><USER3> To quote the study, the walkscore.com data is "the earning records from all American citizens born between 1980 and 1982 whose parents filed taxes." Your use of the number 382 seems to be rhetorical implying that the sample isn't large enough. Moreover, your use of "buy/beg" verges on a predicative sort of ad hominem. Your criticism are totally valid, but you missed the most egregious flaw: "[O]ur analyses treat walkability and access to public transportation as interchangeable."

<comment><USER4> "whose parents filed taxes."

As an outsider to the American tax system: is this a strong selection that could impact results? Here in Germany for example filing is optional for a lot of people (not just legally, but also in terms of expected returns) which would have quite unpredictable results on a study like this.

<comment><USER5> It is 100% mandatory to file taxes if you make over $12k and over $13.5k if you're over 65 and file single. Doesn't matter if it's from a job, investment, or unemployment.

<comment><USER6> I can imagine Americans living abroad will be shaking their fist at the parent poster. They have to pay taxes in the USA even when working abroad, never mind in the USA!

<comment><USER5> Sigh, this always comes up and I've never met a single person who actually had to pay taxes. My brother in law was out of the country for a decade and a few other friends lived in Europe and never paid.

Has anyone on HN paid US taxes living abroad?

<comment><USER7> You do still have to file a tax return, which can be a bit complicated if you have foreign income. But if you work in Europe, you're right that you likely won't have to pay any actual US taxes. You can take the European tax paid as a foreign tax credit against the US taxes, and that almost always zeroes it out, since European countries mostly have higher tax rates. That was the case for me, anyway.

You will have to pay some tax if you work in a country whose tax rates (for your bracket) are lower than US federal tax rates. That can be the case for Americans working in places like Hong Kong or the Bahamas.

<comment><USER8> This is often also the case in Switzerland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I know a lot of the statistics have been discussed elsewhere here, so I'll add two weak speculations -

Cars are pretty expensive to own and operate. Mr. Money Moustache is constantly railing against them - [https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your- clown...](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-like- car-habit/). Agree or disagree with his approach to things, his blog is very much about high social mobility.

Secondly, walking is a pretty good way to force yourself to get exercise. I'm fortunate enough to work for a big tech company with a shuttle; I recently realized that taking the shuttle forced me to walk more than 500 miles a year just between the stop and my apartment. That's huge when I'm pretty unreliable about going to the gym. The shuttle also strongly encourages me to stay on a reasonable schedule - in before the last morning shuttle, out before the last evening one. I have to imagine that over time, this is also a pretty huge health benefit.

Edit: typos

<comment><USER10> I was thinking recently about whether it would be useful for people to start thinking of things in terms of $/mi instead of mpg. Would make it much more explicit that it costs money to go places.

Also as a bit of a side tangent, one of my big pet-peeves is people who state their mpg in best case scenario and not day to day. "Oh my SUV gets 45mpg cruising down the interstate." Yea sure it does. but overall you're still getting low 20s if you measure fill up to fill up.

<comment><USER11> That depends on the current price of petrol which changes often.

<comment><USER10> And the price of travel changes as the price of gas changes.

I was taught to check my mileage every time I fill up the tank. It would be just as easy to divide `cost / trip meter` vs `trip meter / gallons`, and would arguably give a more interesting number.

Mostly just an idea I had that I thought may be worth trying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Walkability goes hand-in-hand with density. Density tends to occur close-in as a consequence of land values being higher.

Therefore, there is a natural association between high property values and walkability.

I hope the paper takes this into account. It could just be that people with more money live in more desirable locations, which end up being more walkable too.

<comment><USER13> Dense cities being expensive is relatively recent in the United States. It follows decades of restrictive zoning and changes at the federal level to make housing more of an investment. Also, don't forget that for most of history, you could only travel on foot, by horse (or similar), or by boat. "Walkability" is a retronym; for the longest time it was the only way most people got around.

Edit: Downvotes? Stay classy, HN.

<comment><USER14> Dense cities being expensive is also mostly a relatively recent phenomenon in the US because until about 20 years ago there was a next outflow of population in most cities.

Supply is certainly part of the problem for expensive housing in some cities. But it's also driven by a significant increase in demand over a fairly short period. (And IMO it remains to be seen whether trends like remote work, autonomous vehicles, etc. end up reversing the inflow into "elite" cities.)

<comment><USER15> Right, but doesn't this explain what they see just fine? The walkable parts of cities are the gentrifying cores, which are now expensive, but 30 years ago were in deep decline. Were poor, now rich, call that upward mobility to sell the paper?

<comment><USER14> Other than that they're largely different groups of people. It's mostly young professionals displacing blue collar workers and racial minorities.

With some exceptions like Manhattan, graduates of 20 to 30 years ago didn't live in city cores or often even commute to them. In my grad school class--the New Yorkers aside--almost no one I knew moved into a city. They were all out in the suburbs, which is where most of the companies they worked for were located as well.

<comment><USER15> Yea, I know. And since they track people by tax returns it can't literally be the rich newcomers who are the today datapoint. But I'm still pretty dubious about the causality they claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems spurious. Could be talented people move to cities with high earning potential—which happen to be walkable. Do the authors control for that?

<comment><USER17> Agreed. The most desirable and expensive neighborhoods tend to be the most walkable ones. It would make sense that the people who live in those neighborhoods tend to be more financially successful.

It's as if a study came out that showed that, according to their exhaustive statistical analysis, people that drove Mercedes tended to be wealthier than people who drove Chevys. Then they concluded that the key to upward mobility must be to get a Mercedes.

<comment><USER15> It's supposed to be mobility, and I think tracking individuals through their tax returns. (This magic data which only Chetty & co have access to.) So I don't think the Mercedes example works.

But I agree that it's very unlikely to be that being able to walk places makes you succeed. Could even be something as simple as enough people owning a few flats in their neighbourhood, which suddenly became super-valuable when lots of google employees showed up. That would look a lot like income mobility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This sounds at best correlation not causation (and the correlation is pretty weak too). I didn't see any causal effect.

My instinct tells me that walkability is a consequence of the actual cause, which is probably higher property values in denser cities, meaning better schools, or something to that effect.

<comment><USER19> I was living for some time in a city that offered a lot of options for pedestrians but certain things were not available or only with difficulties - e.g. buying furniture - unless you had a car. So living there without a car was fun at first but then it became very draining, especially when having to move from one apartment to the next one.

The logical explanation is probably that with a car one has not only more options but also options are available at lower cost. E.g. one can move to a cheaper area, with cheaper supermarkets but that is only reasonably accessible by car. The irony for me is that cars became that popular in the first place, given that they are a quite unreliable and expensive toy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Walkability is a proxy for whether a city has a knowledge economy (closely packed buildings) or an industrial economy (large warehouses and factories, less walkable). The knowledge economy cities have far outperformed the industrial cities in economic growth over the last four decades.

<comment><USER14> By and large, most "downtowns" are primarily knowledge economies whether or not there is a lot of industrial economy centered around a city. If for example you look at the jobs in central Houston or Dallas I think you'll find they are mostly office jobs but those, like many other US cities, are not very walkable except in very limited areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yet it seems common in American cities that the best schools for children are in the suburbs, where walkability is graded lower.

Public schools seem to be regaining credibility as the upper-middle class flood back into cities, but have they caught up? Unsure.

<comment><USER22> It's less a question of "suburban vs urban" than "wealth vs poverty."

Big cities have wealthy neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, good schools and bad schools. And likewise, there are wealthy suburbs and poor suburbs.

A school that serves a mix of wealthy and poor suburbs probably has a more- average quality than the low end of a highly segregated city, but you can bet that a school in a tony part of NYC is going to be a hell of a lot better still.

All of this is due to San Antonio vs Rodriguez, which IMHO is the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Correlation not causation..nothing to see here.

<comment><USER24> Lots to see when we find correlation, even if we aren't certain of the causation.

First and foremost, we should attempt to replicate it and see if the correlation holds up independently.

Second, we should attempt to determine if their is a causal relationship. The arrow of causality going in either direction is of great interest to urban planning.

Or third, if there is no causal relationship between them, we should attempt to determine whether there is a third correlating factor, or better still, another factor that has a causal relationship with these two.

This discovery is highly interesting, and points in the direction of useful further research to perform. I would definitely not say that there is nothing to see here.

Authors often do some research, and then present some conjectures. Their conjectures may not be supported by the research, but they point in the direction of further research to confirm or refute the conjectures.

Research like this may not be sufficient, but it may be useful.

<comment><USER25> There's another possibility: The two variables are completely unrelated but we only get to observe them when some function of both of the variables is true. The classic example is two independent coin tosses that trigger a bell when both coins come up the same -- and we only think to look at the coins when the bell sounds.

<comment><USER24> Thus my first suggestion that we get independent reproduction of the results :-)

One of the most common such "observability" functions is that humans tend to pay attention to things they find interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ancedotally, here in Detroit the walkable neighborhoods are the ones gentrifying the fastest and in the process becoming more walkable (more shops, grocers, restaurants)

</comment><comment><USER27> Average commute distance is 20 miles or so. At $0.25 per mile in depreciation, maintenance, gas, etc... you are spending about $10 per trip. With 260 work days in the year that costs the average American about $3,000 extra at a minimum. If you make less than $30,000 a year that is 10% of your budget gone before even rent is calculated.

In states with higher road taxes and fuel prices, and if you drive a less economical vehicle, that figure can get as high as $10,000 pretty quickly. I'm always surprised at poverty level families driving vehicles that cost them 25-40% of their yearly income. Often they have to use Uber and Lyft to help cover the car's cost and end up depreciating it even faster.

Imagine, being a slave to a freaking car.

</comment><comment><USER28> I live in a very walkable area. Partly because it's walkable, it's also desirable and thus expensive, and tends to attract people who are either wealthy or at the start of their upward mobility - young people from families with means who are fresh out of college and reporting $50k in annual income now, but will likely be reporting $150k in annual income in the next decade. This is the story of most larger northern cities, and it's a pretty simple explanation for the phenomenon explored here.

</comment><comment><USER29> In general, the fluidity of movement is a key to a healthy economy.

For example, post 2007/2008 one of the things that slowed the economic recovery was the fact that too many people owned homes. When you own your home you can't just pick up and move (to where the jobs are/growth is). Eventually, some people abandoned their homes. Necessary. Unfortunately, those holes left a mark behind them as well.

There is no opportunity without fluid movement.

</comment><comment><USER30> Isn't a city walkable by definition? I am comparing it to a suburb obviously. It feels like they have to define what walkability is first. If there is any correlation it will not be on the overall score but on some aspects that make up the score.

<comment><USER14> >Isn't a city walkable by definition?

Not really. Even if you can walk to a restaurant from a company or your apartment/condo/house, if you still have to routinely take cars and/or public transit to do most things, that city isn't very walkable.

A lot of cities have specific areas that are fairly walkable but those areas may be pretty small and/or not particularly mixed use--so you still need to mostly drive.

Here's Redfin's classification scheme: [https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score- works](https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Correlation is not causation; and public transit is not walking. This is a rat's nest of extreme reaches.

I really like being able to walk places, I think it probably is helping me fiscally, but this is not even a survey.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ugh oh: correlation is not causation - hence you cannot state it's a "determinant".

They are probably both caused by - say - "criminality" which makes a place more or less walkable.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is a factor not being considered in walkability studies.

How far/convenient are pharmacies/cheap grocery places.

Those are the most important things

<comment><USER34> Availability of nearby services such as those is a pretty major component in the walkability scores I've seen like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_Score](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_Score) . I agree they are very important, but I think they are considered. Where do you see them missing?

<comment><USER33> In real life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This reads as if there could be an alternative title: "Multi-story city buildings should include stairs."

<comment><USER11> They all do for fire safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is not a causal analysis. However, the authors do state this as a limitation in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER37> Blog post is a copy of the abstract of a $12 article. [https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0000422](https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0000422)

Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how remote will change this.

</comment><comment><USER39> London is extremely walkable and doesn't seem to have that great of a social mobility for its residents.

<comment><USER40> Do you have better support for this statement than what the authors of cited paper have?

You did, after all, dismiss a whole paper with a glib remark.

<comment><USER41> One example doesn't strike me as a glib dismissal, particularly since this study was done in the United States.

<comment><USER42> They don't give an example, they express their impression rather than providing contrary data.

<comment><USER41> Do you expect an entire research paper in a single HN comment?

<comment><USER42> I don't really care either way. I was arguing with your characterization of their comment, not demanding that they retract it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are videos really the best tool for the job of educating coders? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I've been hacking on a new tool for teaching JavaScript. The main idea is, instead of using videos or articles to explain concepts, I used just audio that's matched with an in-browser editor. I used time cues from the audio to programmatically change the content of the editor and execute code. After each session, a challenge with code assertions can be used to validate what was learned.
Here's a demo (using a basic React example): http://jscomplete.com/interactive-learning-demo/
I'd love to hear what you think of this idea and educational delivery format.
Thanks!
https://edgecoders.com/are-videos-really-the-best-tool-for-the-job-of-educating-coders-e550a3be54a1 <comment><USER2> Can't speak for everyone, but personally I absolutely hate having to trawl through audiovisual format for learning anything, and coding is particularly bad.

It's just so damn slow. I can read and absorb information about 5x faster than I can watch a video. That leads me to feel a lot like the video's just wasting my time.

On occasion I've even considered sending tutorial videos to a transcription service.

So - personally, I much prefer a textual alternative. But I know some people like video.

Given you are doing video-like things, please make sure they're as tightly edited as possible. Really tightly-edited audiovisual content is a lot more tolerable. There's very little more annoying than a two-hour-long, rambling tutorial that could have gotten to the point in 12 minutes.

<comment><USER3> I fall in the same category. And as another commenter has replied, search is a plus for textual alternatives.

But I am sure there is a majority of learners who prefer video/audio medium ( given the vast amount of video tutorials out there ) . If anyone reading this falls in that category, why do you prefer it? Genuinely interested.

<comment><USER4> I prefer video tutorials, but only when the instructor is aware of and takes advantage of the visual medium. It's just that the visual component of over 90% of coding videos is little more than watching someone type text into an IDE, editor, etc. Casters just often completely neglect the visual component by relegating it into static, monochromatic diagrams and flowcharts or at best a digital whiteboard. I don't need to see an instructor actually type out the code or make some barely legible scribbles. I already have the code!

Videos that effectively engage you visually are very powerful learning tools. For example, back when I was learning sorting algorithms, I was having trouble understanding merge-sort. I read about it in numerous texts, and I could implement it, but only because I had memorized the coding pattern. Then, I came across this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INHF_5RIxTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INHF_5RIxTE)

and in an instant it all made sense. Doing it well takes time, preparation, creativity, and often times a bit of resources. The youtube series _Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell_ does an excellent job of engaging you visually and I wish more online coding tutorials would adapt some of their techniques.

But, it's rare to find that so I when learning a new topic, I'll generally inhale a book or two on the topic.

<comment><USER2> Yes, agreed.

If I'm watching a video tutorial from someone who understands the medium and is using it to its full advantage (including understanding editing and visualisation) that's a different story.

But - speaking as a former filmmaker - I know that doing something like that is neither quick nor cheap. It's "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one" x1000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "How long is a rope?"

Some people learn better from video. I've never heard a programmer claim that they were one of those people, but it's surely possible. But consider all the text you deal with on a daily basis and _why_ you use it.

Can you imagine a man-page-as-video: "You can type dash capital A to list all entries except for the current and parent directories. This is always true for root anyway."? That'd be hellish. Did they already get to the part about how to display inodes or do I have to wait for it? Wait, what was that bit about the recursion? In short, you can't _search_ through video or instantly go back a sentence with a flick of your eyeballs.

Well, that's exactly how I feel about videos trying to teach me how to install something. I can't trivially skip past the part where they discuss the differences between RedHat and Debian. I can't go back. If my ears are tired, I can't adjust the "contrast" to make it easier to listen to (although I suppose some video players have audio compressors/expanders). I can't copy and paste it into an editor to see how it works locally.

Your idea goes a long way toward addressing those problems. I could see it being great for people who prefer listening, but still want to, you know, interact with the thing they're learning. I'd vastly prefer this approach to Yet Another Youtube Video.

<comment><USER6> I know some of my friends at school like videos for learning programming, concepts at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I built this approach at a hackathon with a friend, it's something that enables people to teach about code by inspecting different parts of a pre- existing project: [https://www.codetours.xyz/](https://www.codetours.xyz/)

Never took the extra time to polish it up after the hackathon, but if someone is interested I'd be happy to work together on improvements.

<comment><USER8> I already posted to the original but thought I would chime in. I like the idea of guiding someone through some code with a narrative. Your tool is very helpful for this.

I have a similar tool but it allows the comments to be added to the code as it evolves:

[https://github.com/markm208/storyteller#storyteller](https://github.com/markm208/storyteller#storyteller)

The main difference being that the context of the comment is always in line with code at the point the comment is made. One other difference is that a person can add drawings and audio to their comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back in the mid 90s when I was taking electrical engineering courses that dealt with modeling the transistor, I found videos very valuable to review what was said in the class.

Fast forward to today, I think a great blog post with links to code and break outs of sample pieces of the code explained in the blog post do a much better job.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi - I only checked out the introduction, but I think you are right that this is a far superior form compared to traditional video.

I make things like this for product trainings with my company using a graphical tool (Articulate Storyline), and I think your idea and execution are both quite good.

Check out the book "ELearning and the Science of Instruction" for research- based tips on fine-tuning things you're doing.

At first glance, the visual indicators (code or box highlights) are really important and a little understated. I would make them more prominent visually.

Secondly, I would think about feedback on incorrect answers as well as hints. E.g., on section 1.1, the user may feel stuck without a clear memory of how to write Hello class. Allowing for something like "show me the next line" to get started would help learners who need more support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points. Thank you!

I've been thinking about feedback on incorrect answers and providing hints when the learner is stuck. I want to try and make this dynamic based on what the learner tries. Of course there are endless possibilities there, but at least if they do something that's known to be bad, it's a good opportunity to teach them why not to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am actually learning JS, but much basic stuff. I'm using freecodecamp.

I personally prefer "type on the browser following written instructions" than videos. Pace on video is very hard to set right.

I only checked the first and second lessons, but I did like your tool! As I can type while the voice is still talking, I can move faster if i want. And listen to instructions while highlighting the part of the code on the screen felt natural.

So I think you are on to something and you can have the best of both worlds, clear instructions that stick on your brain and flexibility to follow anyone's pace.

The features I would ask:

i) allow me to click at the bar of the bottom and go back (or forward) to the part of the audio that I want to read.

ii) mark at the bar the exact moment where you objectively explain the key concepts of the class (and make sure at each lesson you have _one_ sentence that explains each concept very directly, like "render function is..").

good luck!! Sounds very promising! :)

Example

</comment><comment><USER12> Video can be great for describing certain concepts. Like illustrating the relationship between pi and a co/sine wave. Or anything related to animation, physics, etc. in code.

Video can also be useful for learning how to setup a development environment, to show how to use developer tools in FF/Webkit, setup an Xcode project, etc. Instances where a student needs to navigate a complex UI to begin the work of actually coding.

For coding there's many problems with video. One issue is bandwidth: text can be scanned and consumed very quickly. Text can be given a hierarchical structure that a student can jump between, which makes it easier to understand complex relationships between concepts. Video is linear. Code is not. Code has a relational and web-like structure that is more accurately represented by hypertext.

</comment><comment><USER13> What people who prefer videos wont admit is they just find it more comforting to have someone instructing them. Especially if they left an impression on them previously. It's lonelier and harder to establish a connection through blog posts so they will sit through videos instead.

<comment><USER14> Not entirely true. How would you teach a course like "Ship your 1st iOS App from Scratch". It involves lots of different things that you can't do just with Audio. Like I said, Audio-only instructions works only for simple scripting stuff like batch files, or client side scripting / coding like Javascript (which is what OP's example is in) and HTML, CSS etc.

ETL tools like Informatica, SSIS etc also need a visual, otherwise you get quickly lost. And how will the instructor do it in just audio "Oh, on left you will see a toolbox, look and locate the one that looks like a grid, but not the one that has an X on top right, also not the one that has a red cylinder icon at the bottom."

The 1 caveat I see in video instructions is that you have to constantly pause the video and code and then un-pause again, if you are following along with the coding. I get around that with the dual monitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi samerbuna, jsComplete is very nice. The multi-panel interface is pretty intuitive and the COMMAND+ENTER to re-run the code works well too.

One thing about the speed control. You should consider making it a [-|spped|+] button rather than offer 1 1.25 and 1.5 as predefined options. I can usually handle audio at 2x normal speed or sometimes even more. This Chrome extension[1] is my best friend.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed- contro...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed- controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk)

</comment><comment><USER16> Your world is very different from mine, because it would never occur to me to ask that question, much less to answer it with anything but an emphatic "no". I am fairly sure I have never learned anything about programming from a video and have trouble imagining how that would work. I am curious - who produces these videos? Where do you find them? What sorts of things do you learn from them? How do they overcome the slow pace and low information density which appear to me to be intrinsic to the medium?

</comment><comment><USER14> > Are videos really the best tool for the job of educating coders?

In most cases, I believe they are. Let me explain why.

I checked out your React example and noticed 2 things.

1) You jumped straight into coding, whereas your audience might be at different levels / experience in their coding history.

2) Your audio-only format works well ONLY for client-side stuff like Javascript, HTML, CSS programming. It quickly falls apart if you are teaching ASP.Net, or iOS Programming, Webservices, SQL Server, Oracle, pretty much anything that involves more than just saving a file and clicking refresh in the browser.

#2 is where videos shine. If you take a look at PluralSight videos, or even Udemy coding videos, the Instructor is able to SHOW the IDE, the things you've build by going to various browser, folder locations, as well as menu options, settings etc in the IDE. How will you do such things in Audio only format? It will take a lot of words, and if the student doesn't find it then they panic. Whereas in Video they can see EXACTLY what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER17> What you're describing sounds very similar to how [1]Khan Academy teaches programming. Which is probably one of the best ways I've seen programming taught through a browser.

1\. [https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer- programming](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great! I think all coding education providers should adopt a similar format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think your title question detracts from the real question :)

Your idea sounds like it might be quite good, just try and keep interactivity fairly often, perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am working on a tool that allows developers to walk others through their code. It can certainly be used purely for teaching others but I think there is also value in having developers reflect on what they have done in their workflow:

[https://github.com/markm208/storyteller#storyteller](https://github.com/markm208/storyteller#storyteller)

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it! glad to see other efforts in the same domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love videos for learning visual things - like how to replace the fuel pump on my car.

I hate videos for non-visual things - like code.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very cool. Polish, Package, Sell to education establishments or as training material to corporations.

</comment><comment><USER21> Since I started learning most of the people that helped me told me RTFM sometimes it was kind of rude but I got used to it. Most of the time I read official docs, but if a project is very complex or not well documented I go with books, tutorials, videos, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure why this fad popped up with people recording themselves and overlaying this over 1/4 of the video. Why do I want to see you with a gigantic mic over your face and your cat in the background?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is essentially the same format as Gary Bernhardt's 'Destroy All Software' screencasts, which are absolutely delightful.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't think video is very efficient way to educate, specially for coders, do-by-learning is very efficient I think.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like that you included subtitles in this.

</comment><comment><USER26> Teach me how to do interesting things in wasm.</comment>


Ask HN: Have your parents done anything to make you interested in Science or IT? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> My dad taught CS at high-school beside math, physics, and chess. He got a C64 when I was in kindergarten and showed me how to load up games and write simple three liners in Basic.

As a young teen I got interested in game development and my dad taught me some Pascal and C. I never really gained much traction because I just couldn't see how learning about data structures and OO could benefit me if all I wanted to do was putting pixels on the screen. But it was enough to realize that programming could be fun.

Later I decided to study CS because I thought I had a knack for solving logical problems and that learning how to program wouldn't be too hard for me. This turned out to be true, and although I would drop out of college soon I was always in the top 10 percentage when it came to doing programming assignments or exams.

I spent my 20s making music, getting drunk and chasing after girls. When my dad became ill with cancer I had to find a job fast in order to support myself, so I skimmed Michael Hartl's Rails book and put Rails on my CV. Shortly thereafter I scored a job at a corporation working on a Rails project with about 50-ish Models and what felt like hundreds of routes and controllers, not knowing why the parentheses were missing from the method calls or where some of those Methods are defined (in the Helpers folder).

I showed my dad what I was working on when I visited him at the hospital and he seemed pleased. Two months after he died I got laid off after working there for a year because the company made some losses (about 22 million Euros if I remember correctly) and I wasn't contributing to the core business. I was going to quit anyway because I didn't feel challenged anymore.

Anyway: Yes. My dad has done a lot to make me interested in Science and IT.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nope. There never was much emphasis on education at home. The climate was that if you were old enough to work, you should go work. School was for those not quite strong enough to do "real" work.

I always had the education bug in me, so when I could afford it I went to school, finished my bachelors degree and landed a programming job. (This was two years ago, I am currently 31 years old, so a late bloomer). However I have always had a deep inclination towards tech, and started coding around the age of 10-11. Over the years I just didnt think much of my skills as I didnt have a degree, thus deeming myself not good enough :P

And currently I couldnt be happier :) I understand where my parents were coming from. It was a different time.

</comment><comment><USER4> French here (context).

Legos [1] (starting with Duplo Train) and Kapla [2] were probably the most stimulating toys I played with. Also, Logiblocs [3], Meccano. Oh, and some random basic electric components (lamps, batteries, switches, etc). I did have some more "sciency" toys like chemistry kit or such but I quickly got bored with these.

But I think that, before that, being given the opportunity to read books, play around with a computer and having limitations (restricted computer time, limited Internet subscription, finite number of books) really made me think to find workarounds or other ways to pass the time.

tl;dr: Science and IT skills are just results of a stimulated mind from the early age

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

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

[3] [http://www.logiblocs.com/](http://www.logiblocs.com/)

[4] [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano)

<comment><USER5> Italian here (again, for context). My mother instilled the passion for reading in me when I was a little child. It didn't push me towards anything in particular, but it gave me the possibility to find what really interested me. I'll never be able to thank my mommy enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, but not deliberately. It was the 80's. Gadgets abounded. I'd dismantle things to see how they worked, and would then have to rapidly re-assemble them upon hearing the crunch of tyres on gravel, as otherwise a hiding would ensue. Turns out time-pressured strip-downs and assemblies of pretty much every appliance in the house begat something of a mechanical aptitude. I remember asking for a C64 for christmas, and being heartbroken when I was given a Sega Master System instead... and then trading the Sega for my godfather's C64, much to my parents' chagrin.

I then spent most of my teen years being yelled at for spending time in front of computers, and having unsaved work vanished by plugs being pulled from walls, etc., and having books yanked from under my nose for being "antisocial".

Twenty years on, they still want to know when I plan on getting a "real job" and becoming a banker/accountant/journalist/dinosaur.

</comment><comment><USER7> Early in my life, not directly, but they did support me learning _anything_. Whatever I wanted to learn about, they taught me if they knew it, or learned with me if they didn't. Later on (in my teens) when I was narrowing in on technology, they gave some gentle nudges towards engineering because of the good long-term life prospects. But when I went through a phase in HS where I thought maybe I wanted to be a journalist, they never pushed back and said "no no, engineering is better".

I think they were less concerned with career choice for me (or my sister) than they were with making sure we came out good people able to make our way in the world, by whatever means made sense. They did stress that sometimes any work will suck, but always choose something I find interesting, becuase I'll spend a third of my life working, and why choose to be unhappy all that time?

<comment><USER8> This this this. I was homeschooled up until high school, so my childhood was just a long swath of time to get _really_ into obscure things. I could map out ages 3-15 as phases of things I was obsessed with (Batman, Pokemon, Magic Tricks, acting, Harry Potter, making things out of duct tape, film making, making websites, and coding), and every step of the way - no matter how obscure or ridiculous the future prospects were - my parents would feed the passion.

When I have kids, I'll definitely try to make science and engineering seem cool (by sneaking movies that glorify building things and scientific discovery, like the Iron Man series and Cosmos), but I'll focus on getting really into whatever my future progeny happen to stumble on themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mother hired her friend "fortune-teller" when I was like 1 or 2 years old, and she predicted that I'll become a "computer master".

I'm an atheist now, and I don't believe in any nonscientific stuff, but my whole teen age I thought "I'll become a computer master", so I had no other choice probably.

Still don't know if this was a deliberate attempt to guide me to computers, or my mother really believed in fortune-telling.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, but I think somewhat inadvertently. My mother bought a computer for the house. She made sure to show me how to use the basics of the computer but I really think I just used it for playing video games. Sooner or later my mother decided to put software on the computer to restrict my amount of usage and so forth. I started reading all of the manuals and documentation I could find and eventually found security flaws and ways to bypass the restrictions. This turned into a game of cat and mouse over the years until I eventually got my own computer at around 17 or so. By that time I had gone from playing games to spending all of my time writing software or finding vulnerabilities in my school district's systems.

I really think the constants attempts to lock me out and the subsequent research and trial-and-error of circumventing all of the restrictions really had a great hand in getting me interested in IT. It also gave me the understanding that putting forth great effort towards a problem yields great results.

</comment><comment><USER11> I grew up in china, my family was among the first families to get a home computer in China, thanks to my parents (They worked in Germany and brought one back). many of my classmates got their first computers at their high school age. but we got a 486dx33 when I was in elementary school (around 94 I think). But the machine was new to my parents too, they couldn't provide any CS education to me. I was mainly exploring it myself. it has few games pre- installed, I spent a great amount of time on them. I also created lots of art works with the paint program of win3.2.

I was sent to a student club and then later a weekend school to learn programming. both of them were targeting ACM contest, the only usage of computer those Chinese educators could think of. I hated programming, I couldn't get it at all.

Then in junior high, I met with another student who not only had a computer but also had network at home. I don't know if it's internet, I didn't have a chance to see it or try it. He basically described it to me when we had breaks during the PE class. It seems to have a BBS system, and tons of pirated games. One game he told me was about building a Mars colony and that game blew me away. I soon fell in love with games and then QBasic. I spent lots of time creating images and animations with QB. I worked for three days without sleeping to duplicate a Mario game. I probably didn't even know the name collision detection. I just solved everything my own ways.

I didn't have any hard time deciding which major to take in college, it must be CS. My interests in CS have changed over the years, from gaming to computer graphics to entrepreneurship. But I still love computer very much.

I really want to thank my parents for all these. Even they don't know too much about technology, they have done their best to expose it to me. I remember when we wanted to purchase a second computer because our 486dx33 was too old, I asked for a voodoo card with two chips (along with many other high-end parts). The machine was quite expensive (about $2000) and was a lot to ask from them (because of the salary level in China at that time). But they never said so.

</comment><comment><USER12> No. Or maybe yes, they bought me a Commodore 64 and a BASIC book when I was a kid. It was quite popular at that time for people to have a personal computer. The OS presented itself essentially as a basic interpreter, so learning how to use the computer usually consisted in learning BASIC.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes! I have to thank my parents for buying me a Timex 2068 back in 1985.

As well as giving me pocket money for Crash Magazine, Micro Hobby, Micromania, Computer Shopper, Dr. Dobbs, C++ Report and The C User's Journal (latter The C/C++ User's Journal).

Additionally I also got quite a few programming books as birthday and Christmas gits.

I own them much, as on those days there was no Internet and only very kids living in the Lisbon could afford BBS connections.

So buying such magazines and books was the only way to build up knowledge, pairing with getting to know other people with similar interests.

</comment><comment><USER14> My dad was an accountant, and never said so explicitly, but he made it clear through the books on his shelves, his investment in technology like PCs and portable computers, and racks and racks of floppies, that a serious person should educate themself in programming.

I tried, hard, to emulate him, and though I went on an entirely different path (theatre, design, etc.) I've found myself, 15 years later, as a front end web dev learning as much backend as I have time for. I feel like I've only now started to fulfill some of what I aspired to as a child, watching my father learn to code.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nope, my parents did nothing at all to make me interested in computers or electronics. It was a fully self made decision. My father even lightly discouraged me from computers, telling me that long hours in front of the computer is something very unhealthy.

When I was a kid I spent more time outdoors socializing and playing sports, which I think turned out to be better for me than had I sat in front of the computer for 14 hours every day.

</comment><comment><USER16> My parents are intellectuals both big on giving us opportunities. My dad was a major geek before computers were in every home but never programmed one or used one until he made one available for us. Before that he worked in a building where telephone switchboards were being operated. There he used a combination of Telex machines, morse code "beepers", voice radios and Minitel to help manage a sea port and handle emergencies when one arose.

He learned multiple languages during long night shifts talking with radio operators aboard ships in and near the harbour. At the time of retirement there were no computers in his office (save for arguably the Minitel).

One Christmas a few years before his retirement he brought home a Tandy 1000EX. We couldn't really afford it so we had to cut elsewhere but my parents knew that it'd be handy for us and they were right. We were one of the first families in the city with one and it helped shape my understanding of the world in ways I couldn't fathom at the time.

I'm glad my parents did the sacrifice.

</comment><comment><USER17> My father got a master craftsman certificate in electronics and worked a lot from home. At some point I decided I want to know what he's doing and also wanted to understand it - one of the ideas a kid has when he sees his dad doing things he doesn't understand I guess. My interests changed after we got our first computer (286dx IIRC), I found it way more entertaining.

One day I've seen a book about programming in QBasic and my parents got it for me. They always wanted me to learn new things and to learn things I like / enjoy, so I had the pleasure of regularly getting my hands on one or two new books about programming and other IT related things.

They supported everything I did, especially LAN parties when they still we're not as mainstream as they became. This was the only way for me to meet more people who enjoyed IT and gaming. I'm not sure how much of what I have become and what I know came only from me or is caused by them, but I am grateful for everything they did, they are not perfect but they could have been far worse as parents.

</comment><comment><USER18> They bought home an old 386 machine from work when I was around 6 or 7. It just attracted my curiosity... So I got it up and running by myself when I got home from school the next day, before my Dad had got home from work (with the intention of setting it up for me himself). He came in stunned to see me playing with Paint, with all the bits plugged in correctly, sprawled out across the floor. It just made sense somehow. After a week, my kitchen was covered in dot-matrix printed pictures printed on reams and reams of paper (with those funky perforated holes on the side). I used up the whole ribbon in less than 2 weeks, which was apparently naughty haha. I also used to like making letter and signs, which I helpfully placed all over the house.

The modern equivalent is leaving a Raspberry Pi out for a kid to play with, I guess. So much fun :)

I went on to study Computer Science at uni and am now a Software Engineer, aged 23 and a quarter!

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes. Lego, computers, electronic bits and kits to make, chemistry set, things to take apart, piles of technical books plus my father was a major clone PC importer and manufacturer for over a decade and our house was literally up to the ceiling with PC parts and software.

However, with none of that I think I'd have done the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> We had a lot of books, on a wide variety of topics, and I loved to read. Dad was a phone installer, Mom a secretary until my brother was born (I'm the youngest of three).

But both loved to read, and Dad had eclectic interests. Neither was particularly scientific or critical in their approach, but curiosity was prevalent.

One of my favourite books when I was very young was called "Prove It" (a quick Google search turns up all the wrong books, including theology - wha?).

It was basically science experiments that anyone with a little curiosity and the normal sorts of things one found around a house in the '60s and '70s could do. Nothing harmful, nothing risky, just a whole lot of cool.

There were pictorial encyclopaedia, "real" encyclopaedia, Popular Mechanics magazines, a whole lot....

Exposure and curiosity. Those help a lot.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I think about it my dad did a lot.

He played chess and GO at a young age with me.

He gave me a lot of problems, and books of problems. I can remember seeing him sat for hours with a friend of his and do math problems, I would sit and try to solve them focusing on those for hours as well so I could solve them before my father (never did). I particularly remember the magic square[1] problem.

He put a computer in my room when I was 7, I had to learn how to use DOS.

He taught me how to code in BASIC on old calculators. FORTRAN/PASCAL on computer few years later.

He would also draw 3D stuff on Mathematica thanks to complex equations and I would be amazed, and ask him to do volcanoes, mountains etc...

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

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was very young, my dad traded a motorcycle for our family's first computer, because he recognized them as being "the future". He didn't end up learning to use it very much, but I learned just enough DOS commands to play Space Invaders. Our next computer was a 386 with Windows 3.11, and that's where I really got interested. That computer and the NES probably contributed more to getting me into IT than anything else. For a short period of time in elementary school, my parents encouraged me to get straight As with a Nintendo game each quarter - they had bought several in a garage sale or pawn shop and had them hidden. Once I got in that habit, along with the interest in the computer, my nerdy tendencies were sealed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Programming-wise... when I was around 10 I had an old 80386 machine with MS- DOS, BASIC, Borland C++, Turbo Pascal and Windows 3.1. I learned to hack in BASIC pretty fast and made a good number of scripts and games for myself, and then I learned to optimize those since the computer was so slow, so that helped a lot.

My dad used to teach stochastic processes at the university, so he would try and explain me set theory and complex numbers when I was 5 years old (and also, play Civ 1 with me!)... eventually, I finished high school when I was 14 and college (MSc in CS and applied math) when I was 19. So I'd say my parents have done a lot in making me interested; although they've never pushed it.

</comment><comment><USER23> My father got me a subscription for a computer magazine (finnish Mikrobitti) as a part of it you got an email account some space on their servers /~username/ and a 56k modem connection. He helped me do some fiddling around on Frontpage Express and I made websites with oh-so-cool flame gifs and 3D text banners. I had a huge stack of random 386 and 486 hardware that was brought home from flea markets and such after recession, which I used for my first Win95 "servers" (only running apache)

He was a construction worker and a taxi driver, but had an interest in technology. He's always been very supportive of my nerdy ways, even though my knowledge quickly surpassed his.

</comment><comment><USER24> My mother comes from a Biology background and my father is self-learnt in Computer Science. Today, I am in my final year of Engineering and all this has happened because I had a strong family background in Science where I learnt every single bit of Physics and Mathematics from my father and my mother taught me every other subject until college. My major motivation to code comes from my father because he was the one who taught me C++ when I was 13.

My interest has more to do with the effort my parents put into teaching me and providing me with resources to pursue what I liked.

Also, we own an assembled PC which has undergone numerous upgrades and is still with us for over 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER25> My father bought an Amstrad CPC to learn computing when he got in charge of supervising IT deployment in the company he worked in. I was around three by then, and they let me play a little to a game [1]. I developed a fascination to all electronic device, especially ones with screens. My father did not need the CPC for very long, and sold it. We did not have another computer at home until I was 14, not long after Internet could be reached with RTC dialups. Needless to say, I got completely hooked on this machine.

[1] probably this one [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Attack)

</comment><comment><USER26> They of course supported me. But the worst part was that I had to share a personal computer with 1 sister and 1 little brother. We had to take turns which slowed me down in my development.

My children will each get their own computers for sure :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> My father was an electrical engineer. His ability to just repair/fix all manners of electronics about the house and go into depth detail about how stuff worked gave me deep insight.

We also had a ZX Spectrum 48k in the house which I learnt how to code BASIC on and read/write from tape.

The turning point for me, though, was when I wanted a SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) for Christmas and he persuaded me that I should have a Commodore Amiga instead.

So I got the Amiga 1200 and ran with it. That introduced me to more programming languages, a GUI that was pretty much replicated across the PC platform and beyond and all sorts.

</comment><comment><USER28> No, in fact they actively discouraged me from pursuing an interest in programming.

<comment><USER29> This is a whole different perspective. May I ask, why?

<comment><USER30> In my case, my father was intellectually absent and my mother convinced me that programming was too blue-collar. Her father had owned his own heating company and raised his kids to despise anything remotely blue-collar. My grandmother had been his administrative person, and we were raised thinking that being CPAs, lawyers, etc were 'respectable' jobs. Engineering was 'acceptable', if not 'respectable'; ironically we were discouraged from pursuing it because it would "take a lot of math" (wouldn't becoming a CPA require a lot of math also?). And we weren't allowed to take anything apart because "that would void the warranty!" (heaven forbid!). On the upshot, my mother is now an academic adviser and because I've chewed her out so many times about this subject, she advises all of her students to take every math class they can and she has no heartache recommending someone follow a blue- collar path, if that's what the student's interested in.

<comment><USER29> This is a dire contrast to most Asian parents I've encountered, who seem to think that medical and engineering are the only fields that are respectable. Everything else is a waste of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My dad was a science teacher, so I grew up with a mix of science knowledge thrown into my everyday existence ... including him demonstrating some of the experiments he'd do in class for me at home. In terms of IT, I've still got a vivid memory of him bringing my sister and I out to the garage where he popped open the trunk to reveal the new Apple II GS ... Woz Signature Edition. I suppose both of those influences factored into my degree in computer science, and the path I'm on today.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes, they told me to join business school - at this age the best to infect a teen with the tech-topic, because you will do the converse of what your parents tell you :-)

</comment><comment><USER33> Dad tried to teach me how pointers worked when I was 6. When that didn't really stick, he tried flow diagrams. That seemed more fun than Barbies but I didn't come back to computers until 7 years later when we finally got one at home. I loved playing around with pictures and Word Art in MS Word so dad got me a "for dummies" book of sorts. It went downhill from there. :P

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes my dad, he had to learn some programming language for chips he was using in school, so he always told me: "We will learn together, you can do all _those cool things_ "

The time passed by, he didn't learn it and I was waiting, but as he was always telling me about programming, I got interested and I started exploring. This was my early start.

</comment><comment><USER35> yes, my dad invested in technology in the 80's as that was the future and he and mom thought should get used to it. I remember he bought home the Commodore 64 from Germany. Besides of gaming there was always a push to look at how the machine worked etc. Reading the manual and playing with Basic and later machine code. Good times!

</comment><comment><USER36> Nothing specifically. They pretty much let me do my own thing.

I actually got into computers when my grandfather (for his business) bought it when I was five. He bought those big yellow DOS|Windows 3.1 for Dummies books and taught me what he learnt. We used to spend hours together trying to figure out how to do stuff on it.

</comment><comment><USER37> A few hours before their second date, my father dropped the tray containing his final project in statistical programming down a stairwell. My mother stayed up all night helping him sort and resort all of the punch cards and get everything back into order. They have been married for 38 years.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really.

They were fine having video games around, so I guess gaming got me more into computers (navigating a dos interface always made me feel special). We had a major traffic accident that gave my cat a tumor and made me want to be a vet, so that might also count.

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to copy the code out of Commodore 64 magazines with my Dad to make games.

He also used to wake me in the middle of the night when there was an eclipse on so that we could watch it.

We went to Sellfield visitors centre, museums, mines, etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> My dad introduced me to HTML through a program called hotdog pro when I was a kid. He's a professor and was using it to make class websites. Since he was an early adopter of new technology, that rubbed off on me.

</comment><comment><USER41> They bought my sister and I a Commodore Vic 20 in about 1982. A fairly serious expense for them back then. I don't remember her using it at all, but I did and I owe my career as a developer to their generosity.

</comment><comment><USER42> My dad brought me a book from a library when i was 8 years old:related to astronomy. Also, i found some old geography boojs around that time which made me develop interest in world geography maps!

</comment><comment><USER43> My mum was a maths teacher and had been around computers since she had a job punching paper tape in the 1950s. I started programming on a programmable calculator, and we got a BBC micro later.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, my dad was a chemist... so, yeah. We did science museums and such a lot. Plus we'd watch a lot of the Discovery channel back when it was more science and less reality t.v.

</comment><comment><USER45> My dad paid for school and told me I was on my own after. I switched majors from Art History to Computer Science. So yes.

Not kidding. Glad I did.

</comment><comment><USER46> Beside bought me a computer, they did nothing. I found my fascination of computer science by tinkering myself.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yup, they bought a BBC Micro in 1983. Playing around with that was what got me started.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, they did a lot. Even if they were both Literature and History teachers :)

</comment><comment><USER49> They bought a Windows 3.11, that's where it started for me :).

</comment><comment><USER50> My father gave me as a present an Amiga 500 :)</comment>


Make your 404s into 302s - <AUTHOR> https://4042302.org/ <comment><USER2> The idea is interesting and even kind of tech-funny.

But man, you really have to explain how it works a bit better. At first I thought that we should redirect 404s to your website and I was: "??".

What I understood: Which each iteration of the website, you archive the old one on a specific subdomain. Then, you redirect all 404s of the new website to the old one. Like that: no link is broken.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I thought this is a service that would provide automatic redirects to the Archive or similar.

<comment><USER4> FWIW Brave does that. If you reach a page with a 404 a banner will appear on top with a button to try and navigate to the latest version of the page you're looking for at the archive.

<comment><USER5> There's an official Wayback Machine extension for Chrome:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback- machine/fp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback- machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak)

I use it, it's really useful.

<comment><USER6> Except it very often misdetects a successful load of a page as an error and redirects you away.

<comment><USER5> Really? It's not done that to me yet. It just pops up a 'see this page on the wayback machine' dialog, which I can dismiss if I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 404s are useful though.. how annoying would it be if you wanted to get to a specific part of the site, and you kept getting redirected to somewhere else without being informed that the part you are trying to access doesn't actually exist. 4 __errors exist for a reason.

<comment><USER8> This is right - 404 pages are the right UX when you have a 'stateful' resource that can be deleted, and you need to show that the URL (or ID param within) is correct, and once pointed to a resource, but now that resource has been permanently deleted and can't be shown any more.

In a sense this information conveyed by the 404 page _is_ now the immutable 'resource' that will stay permanently at that URL. Doing a redirect breaks this, it's lossy and usually a bad UX.

<comment><USER9> "Was here but deleted" has its' own http code now, that is 410 AFAIK.

<comment><USER10> Has had since 1997 at least, cf. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068) \- it's just that nobody uses it.

<comment><USER11> It's used in APIs, just not user-facing documents (or rather would-be documents). Too late for that though, while laymen pretty much get '404', introducing a subtly different numeric code to co-exist would be a bit much, I think. And also pretty worthless, anecdotally I think actually displaying big '404' text is on a downward trend, probably because of the prevalence of SPAs/webapps in general.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I mean, for the lay public to have to know what "404" means feels like a side effect of the early web being a frontier. What's important to tell the user is "there's nothing here", and that can and should be done without invoking any magic numbers at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The home page is slightly misleading, the nginx config is of course the easy part, the hard part is to correctly archive all the previous versions of your website every time you make a change. I thought this website provided an archival service but it does not.

People who care enough about preserving history and current links probably already do that. People who don't care aren't going to start now because of this page. Especially those who have dynamic content and probably don't want to keep running a million different versions of their backend forever.

If you like something on the web then make a copy.

<comment><USER13> Doing this as a consumer and doing this as a webmaster are different processes.

As a webmaster, if it's at all possible to go static (whatever your flavor of that is), then do that. A static website is easy to host and keep _forever_ , and it's usually easy for consumers to archive too.

Not to hate on PHP, but keeping older PHP sites around securely has become a major undertaking. You can't safely run a wordpress site that hasn't been updated in 5 years because your security vulnerabilities are exposed to the wide web. If your static site generator has security flaws.. well that doesn't affect your current build artifacts and you can still run the thing in secure ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Remember "Cool URIs Don't Change"? I think about it a lot.

It was written toward the end of the BOHF's reign, when a technical specialist of the web had quite a lot of sway, when their decisions about a site's information architecture and how it was run was, if not the law, at least a very heavy hand on the till.

Those days are long past. Now Ted in Marketing wants a URL and who are _you_ not to give it to him? I remember the pain of creating vanity top-level URLs in SharePoint 2003 because some functionary wanted them, and then they would promptly forget what they demanded. Yes, I used to use 410 Gones where appropriate.

That sort of thing has not been in our hands for quite a white, even if it is probably the best thing to do. After all, has the product URL changed? Or will it be back? Or has it been discontinued? The correct HTTP response, properly and widely used, would be very helpful in moving so much of the web forward but that is not under our control. Hasn't been for a while.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a good idea, but a bad design.

First, it unduly burdens the server, in sending multiple redirects to cover the entire search space of possible versions of a URL - for a mature site, this could be a _lot_ of redirects. It also unduly burdens the client, in following them, and the network between the two.

Second, 302 is the wrong type of redirect to use here, because it is temporary; a well-tempered user agent will treat it as such, necessitating the same cascade of redirects on followup visits. The right way to do this is with a 301, which has a semantic of permanency, and is treated as such by user agents. But it's still the wrong thing to do.

Maintaining access to older versions of websites is, again, an entirely desirable thing to do. But if you're going to do it in a way that requires work on the server (as this design also does), you're better off just having the server maintain version information and serve the latest available page at a given URL, in a 200 response, when the URL is accessed.

<comment><USER15> I don't have any opinion on whether 302 or 301 is the better choice, I'd just like to point out that using 302 seems to have been a deliberate decision:

from [https://4042302.org/how/](https://4042302.org/how/) :

>We use a 302 and not a 301 (permanent redirect) because we want the latest site to have the chance to override the URL in the future.

<comment><USER5> Google treats 302s and 301s differently when it crawls. A 302 is effectively ignored and the search index isn't updated - the original URL that threw the 302, is left in. Whereas 301s result in the new redirect target URL replacing the original in the search index.

By filling up your sites with nested 302s (following this to it's conclusion, in ~10 years time), is not only a management headache, but may fall foul of Google (I'm not sure nested 302s, will send positive signals to Google) and result in your whole site being de-indexed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I'm aware of at least BBC using this approach, where opening really old articles reveals they have their 90s site still up. I'm also aware of at my last employer, an unmaintained wiki with open security issues that nonetheless had vital information for still in use legacy internal software was replaced by saved static HTML grabs so the information wasn't lost.

But for a lot of medium sized companies with dynamic websites, this isn't always practical. They may not have the know how to dump their 2000s drupal install to static HTML files, and don't have the IT staff to upgrade and secure it.

<comment><USER17> I wish people would would change their language regarding tech debt. The companies of your second paragraph _choose_ not to upgrade and secure their websites. It's not something unavoidable.

<comment><USER18> They point your parent poster is making is that these companies instead choose to shut the website down, which is a legitimate alternative to updating and securing it -- unlike just leaving it up without maintenance, which is not.

<comment><USER17> That's why I specifically indicated the companies referred to in the second paragraph of the parent post. The BBC and the unnamed company where Macha was working did it correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Have to agree with all of the disagreements to this. The 404 is a 404 for a reason, just like 301 and 302 are different for a reason. It's not uncommon though for WordPress to do things like this, or blogs for that matter. If an author changes the title or date of their post, and the URL structure is reliant on those two pieces of data, then the URL will change. The old URL is preserved in a DB and if accessed again, 301s to the newly named resource. Others, will throw a 404 and give a cutesey Levenshtein message, "did you mean x?" at which the user can decide to go to the new resource. It's all circumstantial... It shouldn't be enforced.

Re: Google and PageRank, pretty certain they've addressed this and recognize 302 and 301s and treat them the same. Previously, this was an issue.

<comment><USER20> Looks like the op is trying to solve a problem of broken links but has come up with a "brave choice" as they say on yes minister.

The actual solution is put in the work and redirect the old missing page to a relevant new one.

If I had a link from vogue the BBC etc back in 1996 point to a product page to want to redirect that now broken link with a 301.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How I've tackled this problem in the past:

      1. Create a 404.php (or whatever your preferred back-end is)
      2. mod_rewrite real 404s to serve that script.
      3. In that script have a lookup table/db/file that lists all the redirects you need.
      4. Extract the requested URL from the server variables.
      5. Use the lookup table to find the correct URL, and issue a 302 for it to the users browser.

It's kinda seamless, and I've been doing it for years.

</comment><comment><USER21> There was a post here that was deleted by the author before I could write my reply. But he ended his comment with this:

> You know why the web is broken? Because nobody cares.

I agree with this.

404s aren't a technical problem, they are a maintenance problem. If there was time, budget or interest to fix it, the 404 wouldn't have existed in the first place.

<comment><USER22> _404s aren 't a technical problem, they are a maintenance problem. If there was time, budget or interest to fix it, the 404 wouldn't have existed in the first place._

Doesn't that assume that all things on the internet are permanent? Why should that be the case? If I have a page on my website and I decide to delete it then I should be able to do that. Having links that pointed to it return a 404 is correct. 404s are useful. They convey real information.

Sites that do things like 302 redirection to the home page when the link is apparently incorrect are annoying - you can never tell if the page is really gone or if the website has _incorrectly_ bounced you to the home page.

<comment><USER23> In addition to minikites's comment:

> Sites that do things like 302 redirection to the home page when the link is > apparently incorrect are annoying

You seem to be operating on the assumption that this thing is doing something that it doesn't do.

<comment><USER22> That wasn't a comment about the thing in the article. It was a comment about why 404s can be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've read all the pages on that site and still don't understand. And probably can be explained in one sentence by someone?

<comment><USER25> I didn't either, but now I do.

The site is suggesting a best practice to 302 FOUND-redirect you from:

        <version x>.site.com

to:

        <version x-1>.site.com

Until it goes beyond the oldest version in which case you end up with a 404.

<comment><USER26> I'd like to be able to show any eventual 404 from the _current version_ of the site though, which means there may need to be a wrapper around the terminal site (or more reasonably, code that runs locally on the server to find the right page URL and 302 directly to that rather than a client round trip for every version searched).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've maintained link integrity for a long time on my personal site using a similar tactic, however for me anyhow the new Wordpress version of the site had very little URL overlap with the old version so I just converted the old PHP version to static HTML and and set up nginx to serve both. When I migrate off WordPress, I expect I'll maintain a similar approach. No reason to maintain an older version of the site which could have security issues.

</comment><comment><USER28> If I'm reading this correctly, this concept work only if you never take down old sites, and you have a full archive.org copy out there.

This is not realistic for large SaaS apps. I run a SaaS app that has been online for over a decade, with millions of public documents. While we do strive to minimize URLs changes, and we do have robust redirects in place for old URL formats... it is simply not feasible to keep old versions online.

</comment><comment><USER29> My apologies if I am repeating what others have said, but just yesterday I chose to give a 404 for an operation that could not be concluded because a resource is not available. A 404 is not about pages but about resources. It is perfectly legitimate that a resource is not available anymore or is temporarily down in a non internal error kind of way.

A REST request on a IoT device can return 404 if the device is not available at the moment. Any redirect is meaningless and actually breaks the semantics of 404. My understanding is that 404 has been so connected with the file like persistent resources, that people forgot the elegance of the wording in the standard.

I can understand the popular usage change, but I think then the standard actually becomes incomplete because it only fits web pages or document type resources when an HTTP status code is about Hyper text _Transfer_ Protocol.

Alternate view disagreeing with what postulated above is that, actually HTTP has been abused and is being used in scenarios that have nothing to do with Hyper Text, looking at you JSON REST :D

<comment><USER30> I don't think 404 is the right code for "resource not available". If you want to send a request to a device, and it's not online, that is "503 Service Unavailable". The device exists, after all, it just isn't available to handle the request.

Ultimately, HTTP has a very weak set of status codes for application layer concerns. The vast majority of the ones that sound good mean something about the HTTP layer rather than the application layer -- for example, it makes sense to return "precondition failed" if you request deletion of a directory that isn't empty (the precondition for deleting directories is that they are empty), but "412 Precondition Failed" means that the client supplied an HTTP precondition like "If-Match: abc123" and it failed. Trap for the unwary.

For this reason, I think REST largely fails to provide what API authors and users desire. If your API server can successfully convey an error to the client, you might as well say '200 OK {"error": "The Raspberry Pi you were looking for exists, but it's turned off or someone used its Ethernet cable to test their scissors and the test went very well."}' Now the client actually knows what's going on.

<comment><USER29> The Ethernet cable scissor test success made me laugh :D. We agree on the general weak suitability of http codes to convey application layer status, but I kind of disagree on the 503 because it implies an overload and an internal error, which is not the case. Also I really believe the resource not a available is as accurate as it gets. In the end I agree with you we may be splitting hairs with a very unsuitable status report and should just send 200 with the error. I have done this before actually, but it tickles my neck a lot to see an OK, then error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If the redirect chain gets too long browsers will just give up and stop redirecting.

<comment><USER32> That has happened to me, trying to log into Microsoft partner network. Guess they didn't like Chrome, because it worked when using IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I recently dropped my last shared hosting in favor of Vercel/Netlify and some content was lost. This solution wouldn't work for me because the very reason why the content was lost is that I don't want to pay for hosting I barely use.

A better solution would be an intermediary part that never changes — say, CloudFlare — that caches HTML pages forever, automatically adds a "Archived content" header to the page, and warns the author so that they can either allow the archived version or make it a 404/410 instead.

Nobody wants to maintain servers forever, but serving static/frozen pages is much easier and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER34> On a similar note, my blog is hosted on github pages.

Due to laziness and inertia I've kinda just left it there as it just works, but the lack of control makes me uneasy.

So at some point I want to move it, hosted by myself (with CDN) and under my own domain. Except all the links that people have used to link to my GH pages blog are still out there and I'm not sure how to cleanly redirect visitors to my own hosted version of the blog.

window.location hack? Has anyone else done this (I appreciate my lack of foresight on my behalf is a problem of my own making...)

<comment><USER35> Well, if it stays as a static site, you could always set your server to push any changes to GitHub as well, so you effectively keep your GitHub pages site up as a mirror of your personal domain. You could also make all of your navigation links absolute links that redirect to your new domain.

Or, like you suggested, make a skeleton site out of the current version of the site where each page just has a bit of JS to redirect a visitor.

<comment><USER36> Or use a meta "redirect", [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5411538/redirect-from- an...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5411538/redirect-from-an-html- page), assuming they are able to write to the head-tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a good idea, but I'm afraid it's rather unworkable in practice. If you're going to remove a page, you either didn't want it up, or you moved it somewhere else, or your entire site is unavailable. If you moved it somewhere else, you should add a 301, but for all other cases it's not for lack of will that the link died.

The nice thing about IPFS is that it has this out of the box. Pages can never die as long as at least one node has them in their cache, even if the original owner went away.

</comment><comment><USER38> At least you can look up what 404 means and reason about what's going on. What does this change solve? I mean if you moved your site then you would issue a 301 from the old host showing people it had moved. I don't know when exactly people make lots of different versions of the same website where it makes sense to fail over to the old one if the new one doesn't work. Baffling

</comment><comment><USER39> It have a very specific use case, and will keep giving a strong visibility to the old, unmaintained site, for people that had old links to it.

A more comprehensive 404 page (that says that what what you were looking for is not there, and links to the current and the old site), or redirects for the most accessed URLs of the old site in the new one are better approachs in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER40> After a very quick overlook I thought it was 302-ing to archive.org. I'm almost sad this isn't the case.

</comment><comment><USER41> The hard thing isn't the redirect, the hard and expensive thing is finding where to redirect.

</comment><comment> globular-toast I remember learning one of the golden rules of the Web is you don't break links. It's a shame it's regressed this far. Now it's normal to get many 404s every day.

Shouldn't it be 301 rather than 302, though?

</comment><comment><USER42> I thought this was about a service that tries to find the right url and redirect back to your site at first. That would be a nice idea, like a spell correcting url finder for GET requests.

</comment><comment><USER43> [https://1997.4042302.org/whatdidyoudo](https://1997.4042302.org/whatdidyoudo) Is it a 404?

</comment><comment><USER44> "but what about SEO?" \--boss' first question

</comment><comment><USER45> This is as good as the CVS versioning on a per-file basis. Its problems are well known and it is not widely used now for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is neat but hosting costs could be a burden.

<comment><USER47> If you crawl the old version of the site and save off static html, then the hosting costs would be minimal.

If you added a banner at top saying it's "archived content" then that would also solve the issue with people being confused by the redirect that other comments have had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Clever usage of subdomains

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't 302 the permanent redirect? You're kind of giving up that URL on that domain forever then.

<comment> _-___________-_ No, 302 Found is the usual redirect, which is not permanent but also not explicitly temporary.

<comment><USER10> It is explicitly temporary. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.3](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.3)

<comment> _-___________-_ thanks, TIL!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> 1997 version is the best!</comment>


Seven Twitter Tips that Will Blow Your Mind Out of Your Skull - <AUTHOR> http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/seven-twitter-tips-that-will-blow-your-mind-out-of-your-skull/ - Try not to follow more than follow - Say something interesting - Don't complain - Track things - Tweet at the right time - Engage in conversation - Here is my last tip<p>More in the post - of course. <comment><USER2> I think the attractiveness of twitter as a chaotic yet useful and fun medium relies on the fact that there is no need to confirm to rules like "Don't complain."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good point - go ahead. But personally, I've unfollowed plenty of people who tweet seemingly nothing but complaints.

</comment><comment><USER3> writing = cute. twitter = not cute

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Twitter is totally cute, no?</comment>


Books That Make You Dumb - <AUTHOR> http://booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr/

<comment><USER2> I know it's just a joke, but it should be "books that dumb people read", although I'd argue that anyone who 1) reads _anything_ regularly and 2) is taking the SAT is probably not dumb by normal standards =)

<comment><USER3> I do find it hilarious that the "I Don't Read" landed higher than all the erotica, Fahrenheit 451 and 'The Holy Bible'. It appears the books that _don't_ work on more than one level are least useful to your intelligence (assuming SAT is relevant to intelligence).

I do find it highly interesting that many of the books with a wide score-range are books known to work on multiple levels; Dune, Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland, Lolita, Catch 22, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Next up: Infographics that make you dumb. (Spoiler: all of them.)

<comment><USER5> This seems more graph like than infographic to me, at what point do we draw the line?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> According to this, readers of "The Holy Bible" are about 150 points dumber than readers of "The Bible".

</comment><comment><USER7> Shall I say Facebook.</comment>


How a tech CEO biohacked his intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/biohack-your-intelligence-now-or-become-obsolete-97cdd15e395f <comment><USER2> Sound like getting on a hamster wheel for no great purpose. Once you have cash in the bank you don't have to do this shit unless you are a silicon valley CEO trapped in his own hubris. I follow my grandpops's example who lived to 95 leading a active wholesome life measured by the number of people around him who he made happy. Good enough roadmap for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm the author, happy to answer any questions around this :)</comment>