Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-super-smart-children/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read, but I have one major qualm about this.

There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.

I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so).

My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.

<comment><USER3> Knowing a few friends and other acquaintances with PhDs, all they have common is endurance and focus. They were not exceptionally creative, or apparently breathtakingly genius.

And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.

<comment><USER4> _" Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success."_

      -- Thomas Edison

_" Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity."_

      -- Louis Pasteur

_" Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly."_

      -- Alexander Hamilton

<comment><USER5> Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.

<comment><USER6> I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert > performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top > with enough focused effort of the right kind.

Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind.

Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.

Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.

I was one of these kids, I played with geometric objects, with music, etc. Sure I was weird sometimes. I didn't have anybody to share my interests with.

Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes.

But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

<comment><USER8> I don't feel like that's true. I didn't expend any effort on my studies and it just came easily to me. Now, I'm not a genius, but there's a huge difference between my aptitude towards anything and the average person. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam. I went to community college at 15 (while still taking some high school courses at first, but upon taking the proficiency exam I stopped taking high school courses), I transferred to a university as a junior at 17.

It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it.

Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.

<comment><USER9> >I didn't expend any effort on my studies

>I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old.

I suggest that you, indeed, spent effort on your studies.

<comment><USER10> Calculus textbooks are difficult but rewarding.

A 10 year old child who can enjoy them must have some gift that makes it easier for them to understand the difficult parts quickly and get straight to the rewarding part.

<comment><USER11> > must have some gift

Or what?

The rest of us are dumb?

It could have been a good teacher, who found a way to make it make sense, or some other series of positive reinforcement that shaped them and prepared them, to be thinking about mathematics clearly. It doesn't have to be the luck of the draw.

I don't want anyone to give up, thinking they just didn't get the gift, so they should be content with playing with the ball. If you don't _get_ mathematics, you might just haven't had the right circumstances to get it _yet_.

<comment><USER10> It just means the rest of us have to work harder. It doesn't mean you have to be content with less intellectual pursuits.

Just because most people will never be Olympic medalists doesn't mean they shouldn't play sports and exercise. Lots of people do those things even when they don't have a particular gift.

<comment><USER11> I think that's exactly backwards.

If you want to be an olympic medalist, you need to work as hard as an olympic medalist.

If you do not want to be an olympic medalist, you do not work _more_ hard than an olympic medalist.

And indeed, if you actually did work as hard as an olympic medalist, you could possibly receive an olympic medal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as > were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician > Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.

Didn't expect Lady Gaga to be listed although it confirms one of my pet theories. It has long been my opinion that success in STEM fields correlates with general high intelligence which will affect strongly with a person's success in her field, be it maths or sculpture.

It's only anecdotal but I've noticed that people that have a good grasp of maths when young also excel in their other favorite activities, even if it's physical activities.

EDIT: more thoughts on the article

> In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted > children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion.

This is truly a pity, and it's not only about educational programmes, but the general mentality in Europe is against competitiveness, and sometimes people will even frown at you if you suggest that there truly are different intelligence levels among the population.

Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area.

There was a comment here the other day on a post about interviewing saying that russian candidates were much more likely to excel at technical interviews than european candidates, and in my experience many more engineers in this area are really dedicated to their work.

<comment><USER13> While I'm all for the logical/rational ideal of extracting the most amount of potential from people, but competition needs to be treated with care.

How do you propose competitiveness be constructively harnessed? If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion. There is also a social benefit to both the talented and less-talented from interfacing - the talented can learn humility while the others can gain inspiration for example.

<comment><USER14> The trouble with competition is that it creates an order of magnitude more losers than it does winners. Yet it is the foundational element of nearly all school systems in the world. Students don't just get accepted to every school they apply to; they have to _compete_ to "get in." The basis of that competition is grades.

If you want to fix competition in education you must first do something about grades and how they influence _outcomes_ rather than _learning_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a > good match for that particular test at that point in time," says Matthews.

If Matthews is correct that scores are transient, then we'd expect test scores to have little to no predictive ability. In other words, we'd expect the rate of career achievement among high test takers to be approximately equal to the rate of achievement among low test takers.

But this claim is directly contradicted by actual evidence:

> Follow-up surveys—at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48—backed up his hunch. A 2013 > analysis found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed > publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and > spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the > variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.

<comment><USER16> Depending on how you define it, you could say my research is in this general area. My sense of how to interpret these sorts of findings has changed greatly over time, and become much more moderate and humble. Discussions over these issues tend to be very heated and people oversimplify issues on both ends.

These tests are predictive, and as you point out, it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They're measuring _something_ valid. However, they're doing so relatively poorly, or rather, roughly. Even the quote you cite suggests that the total amount of variance accounted for was about 19%, which isn't too shabby by any means, but is also very crude when you think about implications for real-world consequences. Interpreting that 19% also becomes very murky, when you consider factors like teaching to tests, that tests like those are used for academic and career selection, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. In rare circumstances where researchers have been able to remove some of these effects (for example, due to unusual legal decisions about acceptable use of test scores), the relationship between test scores and career performance has been shown to be very weak in the short-term, and almost non-existent in the long term.

Somewhere underlying the distribution of test scores is some distribution of ability that makes it easier for some people to thrive in certain settings. But ability is just one thing in a long list of things, along with practice, resources and other environmental factors that contribute to success, and sociological dynamics. Add to that test scores being very crude indices of ability to begin with, and you're in a very messy situation.

What's frustrating to me is that there's this sort of all-or-nothing attitude about testing, where tests are seen as useless, or as a perfect indicator of skill or ability. The truth is in-between.

<comment><USER17> "Even the quote you cite suggests that the total amount of variance accounted for was about 19%, which isn't too shabby by any means, but is also very crude when you think about implications for real-world consequences."

This is 19% _after_ range restriction. They're making the same point that the graph of quartiles does: even after you set an extremely high bar, differences in the test score are _still_ predicting quite a bit of variance despite all the other possible diluting factors like geography/family/test- error/personality/interest/wealth/opportunity... If anything, it shows that institutions aren't being 'crude' enough - if they were using the test scores optimally and extracting all of the signal, the variance would be 0%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Didn't see any answer on how to "raise a genius". The presumption is that we want more geniuses and that Ph.D.s are precious resources to society. Is there also a tacit belief here in the Great Man theory of history?

The message here is, well if you don't get a Ph.D., make a lot of money. If you don't make a lot of money, get a patent. If you don't get a patent, at least get published. There are other things that we also want to be able to cultivate other than those I bet.

When a group of geniuses could build a nuclear weapon to take out a whole country, I believe the interest in genius started to spark. Before then, what was the icon of a a genius (I'm thinking before Einstein became iconic)?

The article is interesting, what were the lessons though?

There are other measures of value to society other than STEM publications, income, patents, and Ph.D.s It's often the outliers that don't even fit the Gaussian that are more interesting to me. (Feynman said he scored 120 something on an IQ test.)

<comment><USER19> the idea is that more resources are needed to nurture top talent, instead of these smart people being neglected. Cognitive capital is like any resource, and it should not go to waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article is short on actual lessons learned from the study. Two representative paragraphs:

      SMPY researchers say that even modest interventions—for example, access to challenging material such as college-level Advanced Placement courses—have a demonstrable effect. Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities.

      Despite SMPY's many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement. "We don't know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won't," says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "Intelligence won't account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important."

</comment><comment><USER21> This article is a bit of a mess regarding who it is talking about. It hops around and changes it's target constantly.

Sometimes it is talking about people in the .01%, AKA, 1 in 10000, so actual geniuses. Sometimes discussing people in the above average range, IQ of 120+, which is about 10% of the population (depending on your test), as well as people in gifted programs, which again, depending on your test is the top 1 or 2%.

These are three different cohorts with different needs. The top 10% need to be continually challenged so they can find satisfying careers. These are your class president types, people who really excel within the program, I think society serves these types well.

The top 1% are your gifted people (again, I know definitions vary), and they usually need something extra. Depends on the person, but it might be extra math or extra latin studies, or the ability to do side projects, but they generally flourish with something special.

The top .01% though? I have no idea. Most here on HN are in one of the other two groups (sorry, me too). The article seems to say that they just need to skip grades. But it's hard to tell if they are right since they are talking about a moving target.

(Edit: Adjusted the % for IQ of 120 based on this chart: [http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx](http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx))

<comment><USER22> > Most here on HN are in one of the other two groups

What would make you say that? Since there is no actual filter and no one is actually forcing any requirement, it should be that most of any group are somewhat similar to the standard distribution of the population, so most on HN should be like most of any other group, bog standard average.

I know I am.

<comment><USER21> The topics and the community are both a filter and forcing a requirement. From my own observation I would wager that a majority here are in that top 10% .

People are not just randomly assigned to reading and commenting on Hacker News. It's an intellectual community that would naturally attract those who have such skills.

<comment><USER22> > People are not just randomly assigned to reading and commenting on Hacker > News

No they randomly show up being either directly or tangentially associated with either technology or startup culture. That's it.

And while those people really do love to think of themselves as more intelligent than the general population, I don't see it.

<comment><USER23> Of the users of this site with top 100 karma there's at _least_ two people that are unquestionably in the top 0.01% of math ability. (They'd both pass the 0.001% cutoff, too.) And there'd be a third if we went to the top 150 karma (basing this off how karma tails off on [https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)).

That would be very unlikely if HN was a random assortment of the population, or a random assortment of the top 25%.

<comment><USER21> "at least two people that are unquestionably in the top 0.01% of math ability."

To whom are you referring to, if I may ask, and what do they do? (I would just like to learn about them)

<comment><USER23> cperciva and michaelochurch (not listed on /leaders because he hasn't posted in a while), and it's easy enough to look up what they do.

<comment><USER24> Don't forget lacker -- he won the Putnam twice (the year before me, and two years after me).

<comment><USER23> I didn't! His karma's too low.

<comment><USER24> Ah, I didn't notice that you were filtering to the top 100 karma scores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I get quite depressed when I read articles like this. I'm resentful of the fact that my early academic performance was merely above average, rather than exceptional. Some days I feel confident in my abilities and my plans for the future; other days, I fear that it's already too late for me to accomplish anything of note.

<comment><USER26> Don't fret; everyone in our generation was raised to believe we were the 1 in 10,000. That simply can't be true 99.99% of the time.

We're a generation that needs therapy to realize that a stable, six-figure job as a mid-level engineer at 30 isn't failure. Our expectations (some might say entitlement) were set so unreasonably high that most of us have no chance of meeting them.

<comment><USER25> Well, that's simply unacceptable to me. A stable six-figure job is failure. If I'm fated to try and fail for the rest of my life to break into the 1 in 10,000, then so be it.

<comment><USER27> >A stable six-figure job is failure.

If you look at the study, only a quarter of the gifted students made it to the 95% income percentile.

Being a Genius doesn't make you rich or happy or give you a satisfaction. It makes it more likely you'll have a PhD & produce academic papers.

<comment><USER28> To get to 95% income percentile, you need to earn at least $190k a year. I'd be very interested in seeing how many gifted students don't reach, say, 75% percentile, which is around $90k a year, and why.

<comment><USER29> Smart people dont need to grind their life away to brag to their peers about their middle class income.

Hopefully for all of us, theyre doing something more innovative for society, no matter how long it takes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I probably count as some kind of example.

\-- I was born in 1960.

\-- I got my first algebra book when I was 4, and aced the subject immediately.

\-- I had one IQ test score higher than the one that got Marilyn vos Savant into the Guinness Book of World Records.

\-- The National Merit folks thought that I was the youngest winner of their scholarships until that day.

\-- I got a math PhD from Harvard when I was 19.

\-- At least up to a point, I check a lot of the usual boxes, like music and chess.

That said, I was not some kind of math genius. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi were at Harvard when I was, having started in grad school at 16 and 17 respectively (I started at 16), and both were clearly better at math than I was, even adjusted for age.

More particularly:

\-- When I was young, I was really, really good at keeping a problem in my mind and worrying at it until I made progress. I could fall asleep doing that and keep going when I woke up. I understand that's quite unusual, and as I aged I lost the ability myself.

\-- I'm not particularly good at spatial reasoning. I can power my way through some of it by raw inferencing, at which I am indeed very good, but that's about it.

\-- I can learn a bit about any subject and appreciate key issues in it very, very quickly. That's reflected in my actual career, and also in the large number of subjects I dabbled in in school.

\-- I probably COULD have been world-class somewhere in the vicinity of economics/public policy (as academic areas). But I was burned out on academia at age 21, after 9 years at universities, left for the business world, and never went back.

\-- I don't know how good I'd have been as a computer scientist. I never tried.

<comment><USER31> What do you do now? Do you have children?

<comment><USER30> You can google on my name to see what I do. I'm the only Curt Monash who ever shows up on a web search.

I never raised a kid, and the one stepdaughter I have was old enough that she never really regarded me as a parent.

She has a kid now, however, and I am indeed a grandfather. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm one of those gifted children (at least by the measure of standardized tests) who were missed by the people looking for them, I reckon. I was always in the .999 percentile on those (SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT), was very good at math and loved it at a young age.

Somewhere in my teens I lost the desire to achieve all this stuff discussed in the article. Intellectually it would not have been difficult, but emotionally I didn't give a shit. I didn't really mature until I was in my 30s or 40s (and some would say, not yet!).

Sometimes I think, well, I wasted my life. Then again, although I haven't done anything noteworthy, I have no regrets for the life I have lived so far, even though many would say I "squandered" a lot of talent. The core values instilled in me by my parents are intact and actually stronger, and those values don't place much emphasis on reaching the pinnacle of success as described in the article. Frankly, the responsibility for shaping the world into what it has become would be almost too much to bear.

My advice would be that if you are one of those high achieving geniuses, it is worth thinking about yet again whether what you value is the best it can be. If you have a very gifted child, be extraordinarily careful about who you allow to influence them for as long as you can. Teach them your values, and make sure they're worthwhile.

I still recall a story about Thomas Aquinas in his old age. He realized that his magnum opus, the _Summa Theologica_ , was worthless vanity and tried to destroy it. The professor or author who told the story said, "Fortunately, he was prevented from doing so." But was it fortunate? Who better to judge than its author what its true value was? How many of these people will find small comfort in their accomplishments when they reach a ripe old age?

But talking this way is very unpopular, I realize.

</comment><comment><USER33> It seems weird to me that nobody seems to see the evidence: as a parent you just want your kids to be happy. Happy in the correct way, which means long- term happiness, built with good cultural background, reasonable social skills, constructive hobbies, ability to have some of those good friends, etc.

Most of these are not achieved if you're kid is "super smart". Being the father of Einstein is probably very good for the ego, but "being Einstein" is a curse. (Same with pop or movie stars: people that get a lot of attention are less happy.)

<comment><USER34> This is certainly true, but there is another way to think about it. If you suspect that some kid (including your own) will be likely to make some moderate-scale positive contribution to the world (e.g. invention of the telephone) do you have some moral obligation to ensure that the kid has the training, resources, and encouragement to do so?

Essentially, can you weigh the potential benefits to humanity against that child's preferences?

<comment><USER35> In theory this is an interesting argument bit I feel that in practice it relies on too much hypothetical thinking. There's no way to predict what such a contribution might even look like in our era.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I feel like we put too much weight on the idea of detecting intelligence in children. I always did really well on all tests as a kid, getting 100% on assessment tests and crap. But I'm a total dumbass. Just look at my comment history.

Just raise your kid the best you can, if you are trying to purposely craft a genius you'll probably just instead make someone with serious performance anxiety and neurosis.

</comment><comment><USER37> I skimmed the article pretty quickly because I was looking for the answer posed by the title and rightly expecting 90% background and filler stories. I didn't find much in the way of answers... Let me know if I missed anything.

Why some kids excel greatly beyond most others is still pretty mysterious. Don't call them gifted. High school is not a great social environment for introverts to learn in. Just give them access to more advanced material. Spacial ability may play an important role and we aren't focusing on it much.

Anything else?

<comment><USER38> > I skimmed the article pretty quickly because I was looking for the answer > posed by the title and rightly expecting 90% background and filler stories

Me too, hate this type of article, couldn't find it either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The problem with studies like these is that, in almost all fields, we find that the average is much better than the average of 50-100 years ago while the top is only slightly better.

This holds across things that even have physical components like athletics or music. The virtuosos of yesteryear may be as good as the virtuosos of today (and I dispute that) but the average orchestra player is _WAY_ better today than even some of the best players of 100 years ago. Similarly, the average athlete today is _WAY_ better than the average athlete of 50 years ago.

Training and education matter.

</comment><comment><USER40> > _"... these people really do control our society," says Jonathan Wai, a > psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program ... "The > kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and > academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and > billionaires" _

The article assumes that promoting these super-bright people and geniuses is the way to solve the difficult problems the rest of us face. There's a faith in the generosity and altruism of these high-performers.

But, I see plenty of selfishness in their behavior too.

It seems plausible that the top layer of brilliant geniuses is creating as many problems for the rest of us as it is solving. Maybe the top layer of brilliant geniuses mostly focuses on work that is personally enriching (e.g. financial engineering, patent lawsuits, investing in 140-character-type startups, pharmaceuticals that don't actually cure diseases, etc)

Maybe what society needs is not "more geniuses" but a better system of regulations and incentives for existing geniuses.

<comment><USER35> Yep that is what I instantly thought of when reading this. I have no problem accepting that plenty of people are just smarter and more competent than I ever will be, but it will be difficult for me to swallow that they are actually automatically helpful. If they were, we'd probably live in some sort of utopia by now.

<comment><USER40> California seems like an interesting case. A disproportionate share of Nobel prize winners and other exceedingly bright people live here.

At the same time California has a large number of impoverished residents, a huge backlog of unfunded repair work on roads and bridges, huge unfunded worker pension obligations, much of the nation's worst traffic, a housing shortage for the middle and lower classes, severe water shortages in various places (like East Porterville), a persistent diversity problem in tech employment, a low credit rating, low per-capita spending on education, state college and university funding shortfalls, mediocre educational results at the elementary and secondary school levels, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone interested in education (of self and of others) and generally interested in the notion of talent itself, I have been trying to form my own personal understanding of what it means to be talented.

My fundamental belief is that almost anything can be learned under the right instruction. Talent determines two things:

1 - your upper ceiling of "achievement" in a particular dimension, and

2 - how far you can progress within a given dimension without instruction.

That is, a naturally gifted person is likely to get very good at something they were "destined to do" regardless of if they had any decent instruction. With the right instruction, they may well reach some stratospheric heights.

1 is important because at some point a talented individual reaches a place where there is no longer any one person who can teach them anything new in their dimension and so they have to rely on their instinct to progress further.

Schopenhauer had the quote:

        Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target … which others cannot even see.

There seems to be some conflict in how Schopenhauer interpret talent and genius, but that final sentiment is important to my point regarding a talented/gifted/genius individual not requiring instruction. No one can really teach you how to push a field to new unreached heights.

My personal favourite anecdote of genius is when Chopin's first musical teacher Zywny refrained from teaching him (aged 8 years old) any keyboard technique lest he interfere with his natural instinct. In his later teenage years and early twenties went on to write music quite unlike anything written for the piano at the time - thanks to his unorthodox technique.

<comment><USER41> Related to your Chopin anecdote, numerous monster & legendary guitar players and song writers (Chet Atkins, Willie Nelson, & tons more) cited Django Reinhardt, the "two-fingered gypsy jazz guitarist" as opening their horizons more than any other. It was from his technique that his creativity could flow. As if the handicap was simply an augmentation - as you mention - and didn't terribly interfere with what he was 'destined to do' by way of art.

As both a passionate study of both guitar and writing (fiction, essays, etc), I do agree that reaching 'beyond' is part of achieving high personal success in either field. Sort of like the phrase "knowing the rules before breaking them" can acknowledge the role of both structure and rebellion. Both have important facets in growth, and I think a lot of times lay-people can mistake "broken rules" that accidentally work for "talent" and it is frustrating.

<comment><USER13> >I think a lot of times lay-people can mistake "broken rules" that accidentally work for "talent" and it is frustrating.

Couldn't agree more. To quote Picasso:

        "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child"

Children break all the rules when painting and it literally took him his life's work to understand how to effectively formalise the lack of formalism. And thus there are millions/billions of children in the history of art, but there was only one Picasso...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "They're just developing different talents," says Lubinski, a former high- school and college wrestler. "But our society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents."

Bingo! Along with our society has been much more encouraging with the extrovert personalities vs the introverts.

I encourage everyone to read the book Quiet by Susan Cain.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm so glad I'm over my "being super-smart" phase and into my "being a well- rounded, functional human being" phase.

People who fetishize things are the source of all things bad in the world.

<comment><USER44> Same here. The first phase can lead you to BIG psychological pain. Recovering is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> ask him: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r)

<comment><USER46> Wow that's an awesome read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Consider this:

Their gift is the ability to work hard.

They are able to work hard because they find it fun.

Q: We have all felt the "fun" of learning math (for instance), so how do we share that with others?

<comment><USER10> Maybe it's impossible. Just like you can't force a gay man to be more interested in women and you can't force an asocial nerd to enjoy loud parties, you just can't force most people to enjoy math.

EDIT: changed an example to be more specific and precise.

<comment><USER48> There are a lot of people for whom "math" means just the algorithmic computation drudgery they teach you to vomit out on exams by pouring it down a funnel into you in an ordinary American high school or UK A-levels math course. Doing a similar (or even the same) calculation a bunch of times to get the same result is, in short, boring, no matter how you dress it up.

If prior to college everyone learned how to visualize math and some of the cool things you can do with, say, something as fundamental yet "advanced" as the FFT (the "why" to go along with the mechanics of the thing) I think the story would be different.

<comment><USER10> And I'm sure some homosexual men just haven't found the right woman yet.

But clearly most homosexual men just don't like women no matter how attractive they are. Is it so hard to believe that some people see math in a similar way?

<comment><USER48> Yes. It is incredibly hard to believe, considering sexual orientation isn't a matter of like (as in liking math, or strawberries, or the color blue) but as far as I know is innate.

Preference outside of sexuality is attained through experimentation and learning. A lot of people are deeply suspicious to the point of hatred of cultures and ways of thought they don't understand well or have a misunderstanding of. I believe dislike of mathematics falls into the misunderstanding category. Being a gay man versus a straight man isn't a misunderstanding, it's part of who a person is. Obviously it took some self discovery for an individual to determine their sexual identity, but whether you like or dislike math isn't on the same level. Some people are more spatially inclined and have an easier time grasping higher math (I am not included in this group) but some people have to work their ass off for every shred of mathematical understanding (I am in this group). Some people don't understand why this work would or could be worth it. Some people never even get to the point where they have to do anything other than 'plug and chug' to get the right answer for the worksheet, and so see nothing valid or useful in the stuff we teach in most math classes before upper division college level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I probably had a gifted kid but never had enough bandwidth to lead him, comparing to his siblings he just memorizes so well(e.g, mechanically memorized PI to 600+ digits in two days until I asked him to stop), doing high-school-level math at 4th grade, learn many things by himself and so on. Meanwhile he is bored, hard to make peer friends due to lack of shared interests, etc.

Everyday I have to work and care for other kids, I tried to home-school him but then you get the financial pressure quickly.

I wish there are some programs that can help kids like him, i.e. group them somewhere to study and learn from each other. We have quite some program taking care of the disadvantaged kids, what about the gifted ones? After all, they can potentially contribute to the society in some way that helps many others. We probably need a state-level or federal-level or even college- sponsored program for those really gifted kids.

No I'm not talking about the gifted class in the school district, those helps, but far from enough for those really gifted, you probably only have about 5 who are really gifted in each school district.

<comment><USER50> You might try something like [https://www.mathcircles.org/](https://www.mathcircles.org/)

(They weren't around when I was a kid, so I can't say from experience.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The gift is being interested in something and feeding ones own curiosity. It is the difference between an organism that grows only when fed vs one that feeds itself. I was "gifted", the biggest factor was an environment of experimentation and exploration. Questions with answers beget more questions. Feed that cycle.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hung out with a brilliant heart surgeon, genius. I asked him about what cartoons he watched growing up.

He said "what's a cartoon?" He was dead serious. Parents would never let him not study. Never.

100+ hour weeks. Zero time for anything else. He was happy, rich, had it all. But wondering if he every found time to watch a cartoon.

<comment><USER53> He didn't know what a cartoon was? Or was it a bit of playful retort?

<comment><USER54> He said the surgeon was "dead serious"... but it must have been an act, right?

Sure, maybe he never saw one, but being unaware of at least the dictionary definition of "cartoon" seems highly unlikely.

<comment><USER55> Child of immigrant parents who didn't let him watch TV, and who socialized with likeminded families.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Naturally, when the result of a scientific study is entangled emotionally with something so personal like intelligence, it is hard to look at the results without bias. Lots of people are going to have a problem with this study, because it literally makes 99.999% of the population feel inadequate.

</comment><comment><USER57> The popularity of comments about hard work on this thread make me think that it's difficult for people to accept studies like this. And for two reasons: 1) We _are_ born with very different innate abilities, which leads to great inequalities in our lives together, and 2) That innate difference is not to the credit of the gifted. They had nothing to do with it. It's like being born rich or white or male or American or all of them at once. So it's an undeserved privilege. An yet people born with such talents _should_ be treated differently. We _should_ cultivate them, because they can do so much to advance society. To those who have much, much is given...

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone interested in the nature-nurture debate, and prodigies should take a look at Stephen Wiltshire (the "human camera"):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YXZTlwTAU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YXZTlwTAU)

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

</comment><comment><USER58> why is it bad to label somebody ungifted? if i had known before i did not have what it takes to become a good mathematician, i would perhaps not have pursued that. maybe i would have saved myself a lot of trouble.

<comment><USER25> There are many ungifted people who make their livings as mathematicians. Have you already abandoned math? If you haven't given up yet, there are likely things you can do to improve your chances of success.

<comment><USER8> > There are many ungifted people who make their livings as mathematicians

They're still well above average IQ.

<comment><USER25> Sure. It depends on what definition we're using for "gifted". Practice may not make you into von Neumann, but it may very well make you into a professional mathematician with stable employment.

My intuition is that if someone is interested enough in a career in mathematics that they begin putting regular practice into it, then they're already likely (but not certainly) past the minimum IQ threshold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Interesting piece from one of the studies referred to by article: "...many individuals who completed their degrees in non-math-science areas ultimately chose math-science occupations, and vice versa. Among mathematically talented populations,the leaking pipeline is not an appropriate metaphor. Upon reflection, this fluidity is not surprising for mathematically precocious females. In samples of males and females selected for mathematical talent, females display higher levels of verbal ability than males, and also more uniform levels of mathematical and verbal ability. Thus, mathematically precocious females more often than mathematically talented males are endowed with talents that enable them to excel with distinction in domains that require highly developed verbal-linguistic skills (these skills and the flexibility they lend could perhaps propel these individuals in varied directions, in part because verbal-linguistic skills tend to co-occur with social, or organic, interests and values)."

</comment><comment><USER60> Interesting read. However, I wonder if for education purposes it would better if _every_ student who is bored with their current schoolwork could just move into more advanced materials until they are not bored, instead of trying to spot the "super geniuses" early on and leaving the rest, the "not talented enough", to continue with the normal course material.

Because if you have some kind of test for identifying the geniuses who can enter your "special gifted genius program", the test is going to have a some cut-off line or threshold, and that's going to be unfair. For example, assume you're using an IQ test, and the kids who score above some arbitrary threshold would be ushered into the special awesome program, but the kid who scores only one point below the threshold _does_ not get in. Even if the difference is just one point ... That would be a quite silly (and deeply unfair) policy, because there's always going to be some random noise in the test taking.

</comment><comment><USER61> "Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,"

Personally, I like it. Clearly SMPY recruits have changed the world for the better.

</comment><comment><USER62> So... the higher a students test score the more likely they are to be a scientist - isn't that a truism? In order to become a scientist you have to get accepted into universities ... that will look at your test scores as judgement of whether you should be admitted.

Can anyone think of a notable scientist that didn't do well in school? We don't really encourage people who perform poorly on tests to become scientists - so none of these results are surprising.

How many students that score in the high .01% on tests end up becoming professional athletes? Or a rapper? Probably just as unlikely as a student who scores in the low .01% becoming a doctor.

Is it because smart people aren't interested in sports or don't like rap music? Doubt it.

For better or worse, our society pushes archetypes. If you do well on biology tests you are "supposed" to become a biologist. Good with computer? Become a programmer.

<comment><USER63> well lady gaga was listed she is sorta a rapper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> But are they happy?

<comment><USER65> I'm in the study and the long-term tracking surveys they send us periodically have many questions designed to ferret out different aspects and indicators of happiness and success in different dimensions of life.

I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.

I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.

I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.

<comment><USER64> Thanks for the comment. I have a sincere question for you, if you didn't have a great healthy family, and you had a shitty career or whatever, would you still be happy?

<comment><USER65> I tend to be fairly optimistic and see the good in even bad situations, so I'd probably OK with even a worse set of circumstances (once that was the steady- state normal).

IOW, if I suddenly lost my wife or we split up, I'd be unhappy as hell for a while. In a counterfactual where I never met her or even ended up single, I'd probably still be happy because I'd shape my world and interpret my world in a way that made me happy. Likewise, a career that paid me the local median wage, I'd probably find a way to be happy.

I don't claim this to be a super-human strength of mine, but just a choice. I have friends and friends-of-friends who seem miserable despite no particularly devastating circumstances. They just choose to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have no idea if that's correlated with anything SMPY-related or not, just one guy's life experience.

<comment><USER64> Thanks. I relate to what you said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I agree with the article that spacial ability is an untapped resource, key to understanding and problem solving.

I think there is a pretty easy way of testing this, simply by finding out what they find _funny_.

Different kinds of humor tap this skill, and those drawn to certain types of humor, IMHO, likely have better spacial skills.

<comment><USER63> interesting, do you know of any studies showing this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> My question is how many doors did this program open up which led to the success they were trying to measure.

</comment><comment><USER68> I've not went and read any of the actual studies, only the article, but it seems that they start measuring kids around the age of 10 onwards, is this not too late?

One of the themes seems to be that certain measurements of ability at this age were accurate indicators of future success if the kids were not discouraged (ie allowed to push themselves and learn more advanced stuff). But by age 10 surely most kids have already been discouraged? I was reading another article earlier today that I can't find talking about pre-school being more important for life chances than high school. Could it be far more kids than we think are capable of being 'geniuses' and that the majority are discouraged at an early age? I'm not read up on this so if anyone is please share!

</comment><comment><USER69> "Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children—that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps."

And we still wonder why in the US our children are so stupid? Clearly, they're getting a lot of help in being the dumbest they can be. To hold a child back from their full potential so they can be bullied and made fun of for another year or few is an atrocity that should be criminalized. I can think of few things worse than ruining a child's life in this way. Instead, these people are our children's' teachers, teaching them to be mediocre, stupid, mindless, lazy, underachieving idiots.

</comment><comment><USER70> Mailing lists, blogs and social media resources for gifted education: [http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/on- line_support.htm](http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/on-line_support.htm)

</comment><comment><USER71> Survivorship Bias (what Taleb calls Silent Evidence).

What's missing: all the children whose parents raised them the same way, and who ended up committing suicide, or are in mental institutions, or fill the ranks of the homeless today.

<comment><USER17> This is a longitudinal study, not a cross-sectional one; attrition can be measured. You should also provide some evidence for the idea that hordes of high-IQ people are going homeless and committing suicide, as opposed to occasional ones with mental illness (especially schizophrenia), given that all the existing evidence tends to imply the opposite, if you don't want to come off as a Taleb-citing crank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I don't doubt that there's a wide range in people's aptitudes for various subjects. However, when it comes to the study cited, it seems there's no control sample so you can't tell what part of the outcome is really because these people are special and what is because some study identified them as special when they were children and they've gotten special opportunities ever since.

</comment><comment><USER73> Hope indian parents don't read this article! I'm pretty sure that they will start looking for signs immediately. :D pray for the kids!

</comment><comment><USER74> For those of you getting 500 or "Article not found", SA has blocked the ycombinator.com referer url. Just open the link in a new tab.

</comment><comment><USER75> I was "student one". AMA. I dislike that the title of this article conflates intelligence and genius. Genius is impact, not talent. The one thing I've learned is that intelligence is highly overrated. Especially in the thing I know the most about: programming.

</comment><comment><USER76> Instead of super-smart they ought to say good at something, because concepts like super-smart got us into this mess.

I know of a kid who was responsible for a sheep herd at the age of 12. He'd live in the mountains and take care of sheep for weeks. Have some imagination.

</comment><comment><USER77> Ask HN: I'm quite interested in this, but it's a long read; can someone who has taken the plunge summarize these lessons? Though there are many comments already, searching for terms like "TL" and "summary" yields nothing.

</comment><comment><USER78> What do people actually mean when they say "genetics"?

Is it some physical aspect of the brain (like more neurons, more connections among them, etc) or is it that somehow the ability to do Math or any other thing is coded into their DNA?

I'm confused.

</comment><comment><USER79> This reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote. My opponent practiced 1000 kicks and I practiced a kick 1000 times. I am paraphrasing that quote But he mentioned this in the context of focus and priority to become great at something.

<comment><USER80> I think this is the one you are referring to: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

This can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but I like to have it in the context of this other Bruce Lee quote: "Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick"

My interpretation is that we've all gone through these three phases in one way or another: 1) how do we do this stuff? ok use an editor... who cares if it's emacs (boy is that tough to learn), vi (huh? what's this context thingy), nano (cool, a menu!) etc

2) learn that there's a whole bunch of gee whiz stuff we can use (hey look, I have this special screwdriver designed to fit around the corner). Proceed to OCD over the pros and cons, figure out special cases etc.

3) realise (hopefully not too late), that actually all these specialised tools are just a means to an end. Use the most appropriate one for the situation; and appropriate here might mean that you use that one kick practised 10,000 times ("superfoot" Bill Wallace anybody?), in the right situation, rather than try to remember than wushu butterfly kick that you practised once (it hits, hero points to infinity! but if it misses, oh boy am I in trouble...).

I think step (2) is where we can start to distinguish those who will make it to (3), and those who will not. In order to be really good, if not genius level, it's not sufficient to just practise 10,000 hours (a Gladwell meme which I'm not fond of, although I understand what Gladwell was trying to imply), but to also understand and appreciate these "tools" (whether tangible or not).

<comment><USER79> Bravo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Despite the article's title which gives the impression of unlocking the training secrets to "produce genius scientists", it is actually a "Nature vs Nurture" report. This particular article is biased more towards "nature."

The opposing sides are mentioned in the middle of the article:

 _> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status._

The sentences favoring either "nature" or "nurture" are interwoven and alternate throughout the piece but the 2 sides can be seen more clearly by grouping them together...

Excerpts about "nature":

 _> , what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence._

 _> Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. "The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics,_

 _> But data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis [about practice time]. A study published this year compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25 times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate._

Excerpts about "nurture":

 _> "For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them 'gifted' or 'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine a child's motivation to learn."_

 _> In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. _

_> Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It's far better, Dweck says, toencourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking._

 _> "There's a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn't be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids."_

</comment><comment><USER82> My martial arts teacher told me a relevant proverb: people are like vessels, some larger than others, and the vessel with less capacity can still hold more water.

</comment><comment><USER83> There is a characteristic not mentioned that can determine if someone will reach a high level or not. Self gratification or the ability to delay self gratification. The "marshmallow kid", even a gifted kid that cannot fight their own human condition to seek a dopamine reward from eating, entertainment, etc can't reach their potential. If you got a reward from problem solving and knowledge acquisition then it wouldn't take much to focus.

Why can we focus for hours gaming, but when it comes to solving a math problem, most of us will never start or stop shortly after.

</comment><comment><USER84> I think the integration with the existing education system is, and will continue to be, problematic. One thing that really brought that home for me was how kids who were developmentally behind were given extra care and attention and kids who were developmentally ahead were not. At the extreme ends (very behind, very ahead) the contrast is startling both in programs that are available and in how the school "celebrates" the achievements of the students in those categories.

</comment><comment><USER85> "Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,"

I'd be pretty disappointed if this is actually true..

</comment><comment><USER86> I think there is so much more going on that our systems don't account for and thus fall short.

</comment><comment><USER87> I will not deign To now refrain From laying bear the nudity of scholars Who think their robes Befitting clothes And prove it to themselves in words and dollars The fittest minds In all mankind Regret now all they ever took for granted Remove your blinds And see the signs; There's more to all than said will be recanted.

</comment><comment><USER88> In to make a post before a bunch of narcissist HN'ers (subtly) brag about their childhood accomplishments of being math wizards and programming assembly at age 6 and a half.

Edit: Too late.

</comment><comment><USER89> My 2 cents:

\- How do we control for self-fulfilling prophecy? I would imagine that having "Member of gifted kids study" will be quite impressive to the gatekeepers at elite universities. Did they add a few dummies to control?

\- How do we even measure ability? You'd think the smart kids are smart because they try to learn the things that are tested. It's like testing people for strength. People who've trained are stronger. And they want to be.

\- It makes sense that spatial ability is somehow predictive. Nobody ever teaches it, so you're left with whatever nature gave you. Probably like testing someone's toe strength as an indicator of overalll muscle quality (not that I know anything about physiology, it's just that I've never seen anyone at the gym training their toes).

\- From what I can tell, it helps an awful lot to have someone nearby who has the skills you're after. Look at the people mentioned. Terence Tao's parents were both highly educated in STEM. Lenhard Ng's dad is a Physics prof. That kind of resource takes you an awfully long way along your path. I mean imagine being able to ask the guy you eat dinner with every night anything from "what is a prime number" to "what's the quantum hall effect". If you don't happen to have a parent, it probably helps to go to a school that is well resourced. There will be teachers around who find time for the kids who show aptitude. I remember being put up a year in math and sent to math contests. I don't think I'd have studied it as much if I hadn't been noticed by the teachers at a young age.

\- There's an inherent conflict between society's goals and the gifted. It's a lot more economical to pour money into the mediocre for society. You want to teach everyone to read, write, and a little math. It's cheaper to produce that resource, and it's at the margin you get the most bang for your buck. PhDs cost a fair bit to fund, and like that famouns xkcd, you are only slightly enlarging the world's knowledge. Putting a kid in front of a world authority is expensive.

\- It may not be so bad that society doesn't spend money on the gifted (I'd rather call them the more motivated, but...) than the marginals. It's possible that the mass of money needs to be spent making sure everyone can be a little educated, while a rather different effort is made to help the gifted. For instance, what I really, really needed as a kid was other kids who cared. These days that should be easy enough to arrange over the internet.

\- There will be a natural experiment occurring soon, right now, about whether it's innate ability or exposure. The proliferation of materials on the internet will create a bunch of kids who are able to learn huge amounts about whatever they're interested in, before they even finish school. When I was a kid, you had to lug your ass to a library to find out what a quaternion was. And it wasn't a specialist library, and there'd be a chapter or something like that. These days there's a flood of information, you just have to type into google. There's so much that if one guy doesn't explain it well, another guy will.

</comment><comment><USER90> I'm getting a 500 error on this page... anyone else getting the same problem?

</comment><comment><USER91> I just knew these comments would fill up with humblebrags from HNers who wish to casually and inoffensively proclaim their genius.

<comment><USER92> Having tested in the 99th percentile of scholastic tests despite being a lazy git is not humblebrag, it is relevant to the discussion at hand.

Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds.

<comment><USER91> > Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here > that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school > tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds.

Which is exactly why so much of the discussion here is predicated on middlebrow intellectual checkboxes instead of legitimate insight.

But if you want to keep thinking this is some genius society, I can't stop you.

<comment><USER93> > middlebrow intellectual checkboxes instead of legitimate insight.

Nice humblebrag about your superior judgement of whats "middlebrow" vs "legitimate".

<comment><USER91> The post to which I was responding made the absurd claim that technically- minded/introverted individuals who score high on tests can approximate themselves to being geniuses. I really don't think it was much of a reach to ridicule that assertion...given that it is...well, ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> >Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol[sic] as an undergraduate.

>"I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me," says Bates, now 60. "But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content."

OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students. In this case, he was a boy, but imagine if he were a girl? One of the main causes of failure to achieve educationally for bright girls is getting pregnant. 40% of the fathers who impregnate girls under 15 are 20-29 years old [0]. So in the case of girls, this is a super visible obvious problem, but what happens with a teenage boy? I could see him getting in an abusive relationship or otherwise preyed upon in a zillion ways.

This article takes a blasé attitude toward the social concerns and cites no sources about the actual social outcomes for these kids. Let your kid study by themselves, send them to a gifted child summer camp, etc.

[0][http://www.teenmomnyc.com/](http://www.teenmomnyc.com/)

<comment><USER75> They called it "radical acceleration", but they don't do it anymore. There were some mixed outcomes, like mine. These days it would be considered unethical experimentation on human subjects.

<comment><USER94> Did you run into social adjustment issues?

<comment><USER75> Yeah big time. Not that it's ever easy for smart asocial people, but being four years younger than everyone else made it way worse for me. Some people managed a lot better though, especially if they could pass for older.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it legal to do what MixRank is doing, spying on others Ads? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I would like to know how MixRank, the company which spies other companies Ads is legal, aren't they doing page scraping and other things which are against Terms and Conditions of most of the Publishers(not to use their data for commercial purposes). How to they manage to get out of this?
Thanks <comment><USER2> MixRank cofounder here. We're fully compliant with all legal regulations- we only crawl publicly available data, like the ads on the page. Just as Google can index any page without violating terms, we index only a part of the page(the ads).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi il,

Wow I never expected the co-founder to reply, Thanks.

Good to know about that, although my next question is irrelevant to your startup but you might throw some light on it. So here is my question can't we similarly crawl job-sites data since they are also publicly available?

Thanks</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Longterm Remote Work Perspective - <AUTHOR> Anyone care to share their perspectives on remote work after say 4+ years?
I expect companies to be even more open to remote work in 2021 and beyond.
Personally, I am evaluating if I want to take the plunge, buy a house somewhere nice, but not a major hub and focus on quality of life. I have 3 kids under the age of 10 and it's a big factor for me going forward. Do I really want to spend 2 hours each day commuting?
I have done short stints of remote work in my 15 year career - six months, eighteen months and currently in a six month stint which I expect to stretch to a year at least.
Am curious to see how things have evolved for folks who have been doing this for a while.
- Has there been an increase in remote opportunities?
- Career progression
- Small vs Medium vs Large companies?
- Mental Health
- Work/Life/Family balance <comment><USER2> I've been remote for the bulk of the past decade. There is definitely an increase in opportunities. I decided to live close enough to a metro area that I could get an in-office job if needed. And I did for one year before going back to remote work. Your career progression probably is slower when remote, in particular if most of the company goes to an office, and in larger companies. You'll have the best shot at growth in smaller companies who are 100% remote. You also do limit your job options, so if you job goes south, you might feel a bit trapped without local options for on-site work.

Mental health varies based on your own preferences. Self-directed, organized introverts thrive. Less organized extroverts... not so much. Remote work isn't for everyone, but if you enjoyed it for 6 month stints, you'll probably enjoy it for longer.

As far a family balance, it can't be beat. You do need to define and stick to some boundaries, both for family to leave you alone to work, and to put work away and go spend time with family. Be flexible, though - don't commit to a 9-5 schedule, and don't fill all your days with meetings. Give yourself days when you can take a 2 hour lunch with the family, and then make it up after everyone else goes to bed. Don't feel bad stepping away from your desk to see what kids are up to for a few minutes. Make sure your boss appreciates the benefits of that flexibility, that they also benefit by letting you work at the times when you are more engaged and productive.

Overall, you take a bit of a hit in career growth, but gain family time. I believe it is worth the cost, but that ultimately is something everyone needs to decide for themselves.</comment>


Real-time GIF images - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/ErikvdVen/php-gif <comment><USER2> Motion JPEG is arguably better suited to the task as the browser knows not to cache the previous frames by rule. It's actually designed for this exact purpose.

I made a little example project a few years back. The format is dead simple, keep the connection open, flush multiple JPEGS separated by a header. It's used pretty often by cheap security cameras and is supported by most browsers. It just seems to be not widely known about.

[https://github.com/donatj/mjpeg-php](https://github.com/donatj/mjpeg-php)

<comment><USER3> I've found MJPEG to be more bandwidth intensive, especially as the resolution increases however, since its flushing the full frame every time (whereas with GIF you could send just the differences between frames).

<comment><USER2> Would depend on what you're sending. If you take make good advantage of gif interframe transparency and are just sending small updates the result could be very small. That still leaves the problem unless I'm mistaken of the browser hanging on to the old gif frames.

<comment><USER4> Are you saying that retention is bad from a memory use perspective, or that there is a risk of looping mid-broadcast?

<comment><USER2> Memory use. If it thinks it might finish and need to loop it would hold on to all the frames it's received.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe gmail caches all the images so that leaves out a huge amount of the world maiboxes.

<comment><USER6> You're right. Google changed the way they did images a while back to prevent email image marketers who used to track when the user opened an email using a 1pixel transparent image downloads.

<comment><USER7> "1x1 transparent pixel" is called a "tracking pixel".

Gmail still allows marketers to track when a user opens an email (even better than before, since it no longer asks users whether they want to load images). However, they proxy the request so that the tracking pixel host no longer gets the user's IP address or third party cookies.

<comment><USER8> Where can I read more about this? Doesn't this help spammers? I thought I was safe if I disable auto-loading of images!

<comment><USER9> You're safe either way, but if you have autoloading disabled they still can't track that you've read until you load the images.

The change is that clicking to load images is no longer the default [0]

Do you get enough spam on your Gmail for this to be a worry point? Genuinely curious; I get roughly zero.

[0][http://www.wired.com/2013/12/turn-gmail-auto-image- loading-o...](http://www.wired.com/2013/12/turn-gmail-auto-image-loading-off/)

<comment><USER10> > You're safe either way

Eh? Before they used track-me.example.com/IDHERE and got blocked, now they use IDHERE.track-me.example.com and don't get blocked.

Move the unique ID to DNS and Google will let it through.

<comment><USER9> I assumed by safe you meant something else.

Yes if you load images they can track that you have opened the email.

I fail to see how that is 'unsafe' though. It's expected functionality.

<comment><USER10> It's expected that they can track you, when before they blocked the images to prevent that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm mildly baffled by the coding style of the main encoder class[0]; where do these conventions come from?

(All-caps three character properties, namespaced(?) arguments, spaces e v e r y w h e r e, curly bracket array access.)

Also, I didn't know `class` and `array` were case-insensitive.

[0] [https://github.com/ErikvdVen/php- gif/blob/master/GIFEncoder....](https://github.com/ErikvdVen/php- gif/blob/master/GIFEncoder.class.php)

<comment><USER11> Comments say it's based on this: [https://github.com/demouth/DmImage/blob/master/example/sampl...](https://github.com/demouth/DmImage/blob/master/example/sample_node/animate/GifMerge.class.php)

Some of what you mentioned is already present there. Some other things are new. But they're both terrifying...

Extra details: the rewrite into gifencoder happened in 2007, so gifmerge must be older than that (maybe 4.x times). The original license forbids modifying gifmerge without author's approval - since this file doesn't mention it at all, I doubt dmimage is legal.

<comment><USER12> > But they're both terrifying...

Welcome to PHP! Truly the language which most directly represents the soul of the web - a stateless static documentation presentation system which we shoehorn application functionality into regardless of the pain!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is better: [https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets](https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets) \- it's event based so doesn't tie up lots of memory while running and doesn't stop after 30 frames.

<comment><USER7> Oh, this is actually neat:

> what about progress bars for stuff that your server is doing in the > background

This seems like a really good micro-service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Funny how we go full-circle. This is roughly the way I did live video in '95.

<comment><USER15> I don't think it is really funny. Hacks like this is how progress is delayed. Because why innovate when you can rely on "hacks that provably work in the real world"?

<comment><USER16> This hack is an innovation in its own right. And it should work with most browsers, contrary to completely new technology.

<comment><USER14> Well, it _was_ innovation 20 years ago. Today there are more direct ways that achieve the same effect (such as canvas) without taking these roundabout ways.

<comment><USER17> Good luck finding an email client that supports canvas.

<comment><USER14> Good luck finding an email client that will load animated gifs from remote sources _and_ will keep the connection open indefinitely. Personally I'd consider either one of those to be a bug worthy of a ticket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only issue with this kind of hack is that it uses a lot of bandwidth continuously, as long as the image exists. I wouldn't exactly consider GIF to be a good compression format for live streaming.

This might not be an issue for users on broadband internet connections, but on low bandwidth, metered cell phone networks, and congested Wifi networks, this could cause issues (such as slowdowns or unintentionally using up your metered bandwidth allocation) that wouldn't be nearly as bad if a piece of Javascript was used to live-update a page instead.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a live WebM version of this instead.

<comment><USER19> Additionally, GIF has only 256 colors.

<comment><USER20> Only 256 colours per frame, but they don't have to be the same ones, and can be combined to use a wider palette - for example: [http://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif- images....](http://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of an IOCCC entry (further details elided; read the hint file if you want it "spoiled") [1]

[1] IOCCC 2013 winner, most timely rendered: [http://www.ioccc.org/2013/mills/](http://www.ioccc.org/2013/mills/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Netscape did a similar thing to this in 1994 with their Fishcam, converting frames from a video capture and served up as new frames of a GIF image. It was eventually shut down in 2007 and the original developer[0] setup a dedicated site for it: [http://www.fishcam.com/](http://www.fishcam.com/)

Nice to see the forgotten technology repurposed.

[0] [http://www.montulli.org/lou](http://www.montulli.org/lou)

</comment><comment><USER23> Great bit of source code. We've taken a similar approach to create free timers for email marketers.

[https://niftyimages.com/TryIt/Timers](https://niftyimages.com/TryIt/Timers)

</comment><comment><USER24> Well a good way to troll. You send an image to someone in the email and then change the image once the person forwards this email to others.

<comment><USER25> not just trolling but could also be used for social engineering...

<comment><USER26> You are right. You receive one image containing a inspirational message for your family and decide to send to your family members. Then it changes to a image asking for money to be sent to an account because you are in need. I could see this working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Funny coincidence -- I just received an email with a countdown like that today and was very curious. In my case, the email was using: [https://www.realtime.email/](https://www.realtime.email/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Now you can do it yourself haha ;) I still have to cleanup the code a bit. Thinking of creating a class which allows you to create such image by just writing a multidimensional array, so less code to write. But I couldn't wait to share this already so... But updates are coming soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Intriguingly, I've been thinking about exactly the same thing recently.

</comment><comment><USER29> why not go to the next level and do Real-time video generation: [https://pv.idomoo.com/](https://pv.idomoo.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the purpose of the code is to use it in mail clients. And because mail clients don't allow you to use javaScript and such, using an image is the most obvious alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> from the source code: "Updated at 2007. 02. 13. '00.05.AM'"

<comment><USER31> Urmm, going by the filename ("GIFEncoder.class.php"), that's just the GIF Encoder. This post isn't about the ability to generate GIFs using PHP (as that class does), but about varying the content of the GIF on a per-request basis (in "real-time").

Looking at the git commit history, this was created ~2 days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> PHP. On my Hacker News? :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I am confused? How is this being upvoted? This kind of project has been a staple in the programming community from gaming to forums for two decades now.

<comment><USER7> It has? Can you give an example?

This is generating a custom GIF file on the server. It's most likely been done by someone somewhere before, but not something I've been both gaming and forum-ing for a little while.

<comment><USER34> This is roughly how early webcams worked. So, it's indeed not novel.</comment></comment></comment>


'Rare' Atom Finding May Advance Quantum Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/41184-holmium-may-advance-quantum-computers.html <comment><USER2> If I'm not mistaken: "invisible" really means it's a "symmetry-forbidden" interaction to disperse the energy stored as a qubit in the holmium atom into the platinum matrix. In physics and chemistry "forbidden" means it happens, but has a modest energy barrier to arrange second-sphere stuff in the right way so that conservation (angular momentum, probably in this case) rules aren't violated. In this case, the apparatus is chilled so the likelihood of crossing that energy barrier is low.

not 100% certain; chemist (not a quantum physicist) speaking here.</comment>


You are getting old - <AUTHOR> http://you.regettingold.com/

<comment><USER2> I am old already....

This is a very interesting site, and I see they got a ton of visitors in the first week. But is there a business model for this? Its seems like just another novelty site that will be exciting for the next month and then no one will remember it. How could you make money from a site like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm old, but I'm not that old. I'm young, but I'm not that bold.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice idea! For the curious, it works from 01/01/1898 until today

</comment><comment><USER5> For a minute there I thought I was gettin' gold.</comment>


Our presentation on investing with ETFs using Modern Portfolio Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/wealthfront/engineering-your-portfolio-with-etfs

<comment><USER2> So you took ifa.com and made it open to low end retail investors exchanging etfs for dfa funds. I had this idea a few years ago... then I read the Black Swan and realized I didn't want to be responsible for possibly ruining people's lives. Hopefully no "1 in 10,000" year type events happen on your watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> cool stuff. this is very helpful!</comment>