Coming in 2018 – New AWS Region in Sweden - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-in-2018-new-aws-region-in-sweden/ <comment><USER2> When will Africa get a region?

Seriously, we have companies willing to pay big money to use a region closer to us.

<comment><USER3> Where would you propose hosting it in Africa? I understand that the consumer internet situation is not very good over there, are there datacenters and strong fiber links to USA and Europe?

This is essentially why my company doesn't target African markets, because our software requires a persistent internet connection.

<comment><USER4> Why not Israel? * We have multiple fiber links * A lot of AWS heavy workloads comes from Israeli companies * Easy connection to other location through Egypt and Jordan

<comment><USER5> Israels economy is too small to justify an AWS region (yet).

To find out where the next AWS regions are going, go to wikipedia and sort countries by GDP, any large country without a region is a target. Obviously there is some massaging happening, like AWS is considering all the nordic countries near Sweden.

Another thing would be if AWS started building smaller regions with only 1 DC. Right now a region requires at least 3 DCs with the AZ model... so that's a lot of capacity to fill.

<comment><USER6> While what you say makes perfect sense to _everyone_, sadly it is not true. London and Canada - both very new regions for AWS - each only have two availability zones (making them basically useless for a large class of infrastructure).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A map of the new locations can be found here: [https://www.thelocal.se/20170404/map-amazon-to-open-three- ne...](https://www.thelocal.se/20170404/map-amazon-to-open-three-new-data- centres-in-sweden). Seems like the one in Västerås is right next to the Westinghouse uranium fuel factory. Sadly no power plant right next to it though :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Also an entry on Werner Vogel's blog about this.

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/04/aws-announces- eu...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/04/aws-announces-eu-stockholm- region.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that AWS didn't chose to place their DC's at the "Node Pole" ([http://thenodepole.com](http://thenodepole.com)) in the northern parts of Sweden where FB have theirs.

<comment><USER10> I'm actually disappointed they went with Stockholm. Though I can understand why (proximity to a large pool of talent among other things).

<comment><USER11> Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting? It doesn't take that many people to run a hosting facility, the ones I'm familiar with are mostly deserted. They take people to set up and a large amount of capital but once that's done it takes _very_ few people to run.

Even the (very large) Google data centers typically do not employ more than 100 people, that's 30 people over 3 shifts and some overhead.

<comment><USER12> >Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting?

They don't. There will be a handful of English speaking data center operators, but that's it.

<comment><USER13> Most Swedes are actually English speaking, they won't have to get people from other countries for the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have to wonder how much of the push for more EU AWS regions comes from dealing with a potential exodus from the London region due Brexit (e.g. because of data protection issues)

<comment><USER15> I imagine the greater concern is the deep integration between the NSA, GCHQ and ISPs in the UK and USA.

<comment><USER16> As if _any_ first-world government weren't already monitoring everyone as best they can?

<comment><USER17> AFAIK the US and UK share the databases access(or have an easy/fast way to share info - sorry I forgot where I got this information so I don't have a link tas a proof but I think is already a known fact) so hopefully NSA has to do more paperwork before asking other EU country for data.

<comment><USER18> it's not just the US and UK - they're just 2 members of the intelligence sharing community. There's Five Eyes, bringing in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and from there the scope widens considerably: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes.2C_14_E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes.2C_14_Eyes.2C_and_other_.22third_parties.22)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Morocco, South Africa, Dubai could be new regions.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's a slightly awkward looking reference customer list (assuming that's what it is).

<comment><USER21> May I ask why? Is it just because you don't know them?

<comment><USER20> I know them, but those startup names are hardly household names even in Sweden.

<comment><USER22> SuperCell and TrustPilot are big names....</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Inspect element" is not the same as "View source" - <AUTHOR> http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201009/inspect_element_is_not_the_same_as_view_source/ <comment><USER2> > When you choose "Inspect element" or otherwise bring up one your browser's > DOM inspector, what you're looking at is the document tree after the browser > has applied its error correction and after any JavaScripts have manipulated > the DOM.

Isn't this fairly obvious?

Being unable to inspect elements after you've fiddled with them via javascript would eliminate about 99% of the usefuless...

<comment><USER3> I think the article was making the point that someone debugging a HTML page would do well to look at both "Inspect Element" and "View Source," as there might be errors only visible in the latter.

For example, a few weeks ago, I was testing a website. It worked fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but broke horribly in Internet Explorer. A look at the source made me realize that a syntax error in my templates was causing the first few lines of the source (including <html><head>, etc.) to render. The other browsers all ignored this.

<comment><USER4> I can't, of course, speak to your issue directly but the chrome/webkit debugger usually shows these errors in the console?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related question: is there a "gold standard" parsing library for html, like webkit is becoming the standard DOM engine?

<comment><USER6> There's Amaya (<http://www.w3.org/Amaya/>), the browser that the W3C uses for experimentation.

I'm confused by your question, though; are you implying that webkit is a standard DOM engine, or asking? Webkit isn't a standard, it's merely broadly used. And a standard DOM parser and a standard HTML parser would be one and the same.

<comment><USER5> I'm playing around with scraping, and one of the first things to do is parse the html.

I was just wondering if there was a standard way to parse it. Right now I'm using HtmlAgilityPack, but I'm not adverse to hooking into a third-party dll (or writing my own parser) if necessary. Just wondering what was out there.

As an example, today I ran into a website with opening <p> tags but no closing </p> tags

Wreaks havoc with the DOM on the parser I'm using. Before I start hosing around with that I was just trying to make sure I wasn't re-inventing the wheel.</comment></comment></comment>


Measuring cloud performance just got easier and better - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/12/measuring-cloud-performance-just-got-easier-and-better.html <comment><USER2> Very collaborative effort. Now that we have a solid foundation and extension model it's time to think about scoring.</comment>


Sustainable Startup Pace - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupcfo.ca/2012/04/sustainable-startup-pace/

<comment><AUTHOR> One thing I have noticed is that the times when I get into situations where I am working 100 hour weeks for extended periods of time, it is not something that I can just make a decision in that moment to work less. I painted myself into a corner and I left myself with limited options (i.e. work harder to get it done or admit failure). The better way is to see these types of situations ahead of time and make decisions so that you will never be put in that situation. I think the hardest thing with that is that making those decisions often requires passing on opportunities (i.e. I can't handle that right now) or backing down from a challenge (i.e. I am not able to get that done fast enough). Both of which are extremely difficult for a type A personality.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Google index pages I cannot access? - <AUTHOR> Today I googled "follow famous readers online" and this is the top result:
https://www.nytimes.com/programs/better-reader/day-1
Google shows that the term is on the page. But when I try to access it, it redirects me to a signup page.
What's the deal here?
Does Google not notice that? Does it turn a blind eye? Does the NYT trick Google by displaying something else to Google then to me?
Or are pages that only members can read now part of the Google index? <comment><AUTHOR> I now noticed that you can read the page if you hit escape fast enough:

[https://www.nytimes.com/programs/better- reader/day-1](https://www.nytimes.com/programs/better-reader/day-1)

When you visit it, it shows the page for a split seconds. Then redirects. By hitting escape in that split second, the page stays on screen and the redirect does not take place.

Modern developers :-) Implement everything clientside in Javascript.

It's kind of a fun game. Especially since the page then has no ads at all. All newspaper pages should look like this.

<comment><USER2> Spiegel Online used (or uses, idk) a blurring overlay to hide their payed content. My first thought was "That'll be easy!" and I removed the overlay only to find that the underlying text was obfuscated in a way that made it look like the original text through the blur. Well played Spiegel!

Still, I suspect the substitution could at least be partially reversed but I never tried. What makes it more complicated than a usual substitution cipher is that it can be arbitrarily lossy because it isn't meant to be deciphered. As an extreme case they could just replace all uppercase letters with X and all lowercase letter with x - for example - and no information could be gained while still looking similar when blurred. Luckily it's not what they did, the substitution looked more complicated. Another reason to make me believe that it's reversible is that I think I remember David Kriesel (the _" Lies, damned lies and scans"_ guy) once hinted that he did it. Anyway, deciphering it would be a nice Sunday afternoon entertainment, I guess...

<comment><USER3> They did in fact use a Caesar cipher [1], a quick calculation on letter frequencies gave a strong hint. The rest was looking up the shift value and coding a js bookmarklet [2] to "decrypt" the text. It had some issues with certain German Umlauts, but was not enough of an issue to fix it.

Looks like they now longer include the full text publicly. So they seem to have improved.

[1] (German) [https://andreas-zeller.blogspot.com/2016/06/spiegel- online-n...](https://andreas-zeller.blogspot.com/2016/06/spiegel-online-nutzt- unsichere-casar.html)

[2] javascript: document.querySelectorAll('div.obfuscated- content')[0].parentNode.classList = [];var cc = (s, c) => s.split('').map(s => /[^\s]/.test(s) ? String.fromCharCode(s.charCodeAt(0)+c) : s).join('');var dn = (n) => { if (n.hasChildNodes()) {Array.from(n.childNodes).map(dn);} else if (n.parentNode.nodeName !== 'A') {n.textContent=cc(n.textContent, -1) }};document.querySelectorAll('p.obfuscated').forEach(dn);document.querySelector('.lp_mwi_payment- method-wrapper').parentNode.parentNode.remove();

<comment><USER3> Others [1] still seem to use this technique.

[1] [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/klagenfurter...](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/klagenfurter- kunststreit-was-soll-ein-wald-im-stadion-16377833.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+paywall+policy](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+paywall+policy)

first result:

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/4054...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/40543?hl=en)

>We've removed the First Click Free requirement for publishers on Search and News. Read more about the new policy on our blog[0]

[0][https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/10/enabling-more- high...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/10/enabling-more-high-quality- content.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Even worse for google image searches. Every search is invested with Pinterest results you can't see without signing up...

<comment><USER6> Google seems intent on ruining their decent image search engine. The removal of features like search by exact size is making it worthless for certain tasks, without a good alternative.

<comment><USER7> Probably a bullshit concession to the copyright cartel

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know why but I know it used to be against Google rules to show one thing to the crawler and different content to the user. Apparently they don't care anymore.

<comment><USER9> That sounds like something one would have read in a computer magazine from the early 2000s...

<comment><USER10> See Google's Webmaster Guidelines on cloaking: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's really hard to balance without giving us better personal search settings. This is anecdotal of course, but I rarely find anything on free "as in beer" media that's worth my time. If Google excluded paywalled content its search functionality would be a lot less useful to me as a result.

On the other hand, you don't subscribe to everything, and it might be useful to tune some of it out. Like I have a subscription to two Danish news papers, Information and Weekendavisen, and I like when google provides me with articles for them, because those articles are often going to be the height of what I want from my search results on subjects they cover. I don't have a subscription to other Danish news papers, however, and maybe google would be better if it let me filter them. Maybe not though, it would certainly increase my personal bubble, but banning paywalls outright would really break google for me.

<comment><USER12> Would help if you could easily filter out non-free results. Or highlight the free ones.

<comment> m-p-3 Or put a little dollar sign beside non-free results, like they do (or did) for ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A number of paywalled sites allow Google through either because it's in their self interest to do so or because they have a business arrangement with them. This has been going on for a long time. It used to be that Google would penalize a site in its search results for showing their web crawler something other than what a user would see but that appears to have been relaxed in recent years, at least for the larger paywall sites.[1]

[1] I believe that's the case... I don't recall in earlier years paywall pages ranking so high in the search results but my memory could be faulty on this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not answering your question, and I'm not sure how general or useful this is, but if it's in the cache, the text only ("strip") version should presumably be free of the redirect/whatever action. It may sometimes only contain initial content I suppose, but worth a try.

E.g.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.nytimes.com/programs/better- reader/day-1&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER15> > Does it turn a blind eye? Does the NYT trick Google by displaying something > else to Google then to me?

Pretty much this. Google used to have a policy called "first click free" that basically said "you can have a paywall, but a user must be able to see the first content they click on from a search result. for more content, you can make them sign up". They dropped that policy at some point (and it was never _really_ enforced, though many/most did follow it), so cloaking for paywall- purposes is okay now.

<comment><USER16> Do you know anything about how they're doing this? Is it special content in the http headers of the requests from Google? Or do they explicitly know which IP-addresses Google will be doing it's web crawling from?

<comment><USER15> It's just a different version targeted at Googlebot. Google's IPs aren't secret, and Google is open about how to identify (and verify) their webcrawlers: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google must give a paywall filter in my opinion. I totally agree that a lot of times there is no intent for the Google user to see paywalled content when looking for information.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sometimes you can bypass signup/restricted walls by using developer tools in Firefox. My son does this when doing homework and looking for answers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because they removed the requirement for "first click free" for paywalls

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/4054...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher- center/answer/40543?hl=en)

So google is basically now offering you ads, paywall span and stock photo spam in their image results. Wonderful

</comment><comment><USER20> There was a time when paywall articles from Google search were free. Sigh! [https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/2/16395604/first-click- free...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/2/16395604/first-click-free-policy- flexible-sampling-publishers)

</comment><comment><USER21> Accessing hidden pay content is WRONG.

And I dussent think you wuz brought up to do WRONG.

</comment><comment><USER22> At some point google entered into an entreaty with corporate news organizations to drive users towards subscription sites and paying for news. It is also probably influenced by more recent attempts to steer people towards establishment media sources rather than "fake news" websites.

<comment><USER23> Is this speculation or do you have a source?

<comment><USER22> I believe it all centers around this:

[https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/](https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Beware of Automated Hiring - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/opinion/ai-hiring-discrimination.html <comment><USER2> There is too much performative expression of concern and not enough discussion of actual factors. The problems are basically the same as for human bias, and the automation of the process gives us an opportunity to examine them transparently.

Having lacrosse or sailing as a hobby on a CV is probably correlated with job performance, because those things are independently correlated with wealth and greater educational opportunities earlier in life. It's pretty simple to exclude them from a logistic regression. But what about education? A degree from an Ivy league university is correlated with job performance for both good and unfair reasons, and the correlation is very noisy. Which variables should be allowed? Which ones does the human system use, and how are they weighted? What causal models are appropriate? I don't know the answers, but the conversation often doesn't even happen at this level. And this is just at the level of transarent models, like graphical probablistic models or structural equation modeling. I generally think there's too much AI alarmism, but in this case I think banning non-linear machine learning methods using large high- dimensional training sets might be appropriate.

<comment><USER3> Wealthy people are also lazy and have a much higher tendency to politicise their environments (just like they do with their parents when they need their money).

Compared to a poor qualified-enough candidate, they would not have an option of going back to the sh*thole they came from, so they would definitely not be as motivated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fundamental problem here seems to be _scale_ (like often in tech).

I don't think it is correct to say that algorithms "enabled discrimination against job applicants". Otherwise we wouldn't have discussions about ageism or the amount of personal information which should go on a CV. Closed loop systems are also not something AI brought upon our world, otherwise the term "white privilege" would not have made it into public consciousness. There are racist hiring managers and interviewers who mentally discard anyone looking like their ex for sure.

The key is: All these effects are fairly contained in comparison. Companies can be sued, people can be fired and even systemic biases can be evaded in a lot of cases. I am not trying to say that e.g. sexism in hiring is harmless or anything, I'm just trying to weight two evils.

We do enter a disturbingly dystopian world when the AI-hiring start up brings their fancy algo to the mighty gods of cloud computing and just scale into infinity. Now suddenly hundreds of companies and millions of people are hit by the biases. Having discrimination at that level, personal damage compensation becomes a warm gesture at most just because the cultural deterioration done by subconsciously establishing a group as subpar workers is plain immeasurable.

And if you think about it, this exact problem transcends hiring. You have the right to kick everybody who is carrying something resembling a paint spray can out of your mall to prevent vandalism. You may discriminate some people just trying to get something done about the flies in their kitchen, sure. Happens. But if GoogleMaps, or Cloudflare, or Netflix does it, they are ever so subtly nudging the tech interest, or the information accessibility, or the quality of life, or the probability to get hired by minus a fraction of a fraction of a percent. For a billion people, or for all Hispanic people in the US, or for everyone using sub $300 phones.

That is a very real, very dark problem we should be all aware of in its greater context!

<comment><USER5> I wonder if it's possible to audit AI for discriminatory practices. Of course this would require a completely different set of legal processes (needing access to the algorithm, needing access to enough data to prove a bias) that could take decades to implement in a way that covers even a slim majority of applicable, obvious cases like race, sex, pregnancy status, religion, nation of origin, veteran status, and age.

Decades of the bar being just that much higher for the disadvantaged demographic. Potentially, a generation of disenfranchisement, which we know has generational effects. (The USA arguably still hasn't 'recovered' from segregation's economic effects on the populace)

<comment><USER6> This would require it to be generally possible to audit AI at all, which would be a nice problem to solve.

<comment><USER7> DARPA has this same problem; most people aren't just willing to "trust the machine", and it's hard to know where it went wrong, how to improve it, or who messed up without it. See XAI: [https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable- artificial-intelli...](https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial- intelligence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >So when a plaintiff using a hiring platform encounters a problematic design feature — like platforms that check for gaps in employment — she should be able to bring a lawsuit on the basis of discrimination per se, and the employer would then be required to provide statistical proof from internal and external audits to show that its hiring platform is not unlawfully discriminating against certain groups.

How would this work? Without ground truth labels of "should have been hired" and "shouldn't have been hired" how can you demonstrate that your algorithm isn't biased? I mean counterfactual labels like "we hired this person the algorithm said not to hire, and they turned out good/bad."

Base rates will be different, which means any algo _will_ be biased in some way (see these impossibility theorems [0]), so the question is what demonstration of non bias will be sufficient without counterfactual data.

[0] [https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunchconf_2018/sl...](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunchconf_2018/slides.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Burden of proof may need to be on the employer here. Much of the research here revolves around extracting human readable decision support, e.g. "I recommend this person for hire 25 percent because they have experience in devops and 75 percent because they were on the men's cross country crew."

<comment><USER10> If the history of credit unions is anything to go by, then due process rules will enshrine the ability of individuals to force the employer to do their due-diligence. But as this is initiated by the individual, only a relatively small number of people will do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I applied to a few jobs at United Healthcare and they sent me HireVue interview invitations. Wasn't sure what HireVue was so I looked it up and was completely appalled that this sort of AI hiring technology is actually being used already.

Of course they frame it as a benefit to you (interview whenever and wherever you want!) but we all know their real motivation...

</comment><comment><USER12> Archive link to full article: [http://archive.is/1szN3](http://archive.is/1szN3)

</comment><comment><USER13> The reason hiring becomes automated is because there is a flood of people who apply to jobs. Here is a rough list:

1\. Graduates looking for their first job

2\. Unemployed people looking for work

3\. Employed people looking for better work

4\. Recruiters scouring the web.

5\. Automated systems that apply everywhere they can.

6\. Spam.

The people from 1-3 are lost in the noise of 4-6. Automation should only try to discard the last 3. That's it!

Automation will save you time and money in the hiring process. You will spend that time and money in HR and employee management, which will end up costing you more. The more you rely on automation, the less you will personally screen people, which means you don't really know who you are hiring.

You are better off using my secret algorithm[1] to select candidates, then personally review their resume.

[1]: SELECT * FROM candidates ORDER BY RAND();

<comment><USER14> I once worked with a man who would take half of the resumes he'd receive and throw them out without even glancing at any of them. His reasoning? "I only hire lucky people."

<comment><USER15> Wow!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Holy Moly! The author of this paper makes a very scary argument further shifting the burden of proof onto the employers.

The problem with hiring is that there is a hugely disproportionate supply/demand ratio. We might have 1 position to fill and 100+ applicants. How can any company correctly protect themselves against allegations of illegal hiring criteria in this type of environment? Right now the best protection is to say "we hired the most qualified candidate", but even that argument is shaky. What if the most "technically qualified" candidate performed the worst in the interview process?

Hiring is scary enough already without bringing the law into the picture. :/

<comment><USER17> Hiring decisions can be made defensible by openly publishing a transparent process that reveals metrics at the end for all candidates.

<comment><USER18> If the hiring process is transparent, wouldn't job seekers just figure out how to game it? Unless the process is confidential, and only comes out in lawsuits, and isn't disclosed to the public, this would only serve to further obscure the candidates who can do the job as opposed to just get hired.

<comment><USER17> At FANG-style companies the decidedly non-transparent process is already well known and is gamed on a regular basis.

<comment><USER18> AFAIK the only part that is gamed is the one that is fairly transparent, the leetcode problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would seem to me that this is another symptom of overly concentrated industries. Automated hiring is driven by a desire to optimize - either to cut costs and/or to handle a situation where applicants outnumber openings by an exponential number. Automated hiring is another concentrating, anti-people solution - we should be using anti-trust laws and regulation to create a system that encourages a greater number of firms, distributed over a much wider geography. That's the democratic solution to this problem, and abrogates the need for these types of solutions.

I would also disagree with the premise of the article - the government has shown time and time again that they are not good at compliance. They are good at investigating and regulating. Trying to audit these systems is an impossible task that will wind up with the agency responsible captured by the industry. The only permanent, self-executing solution is to make the companies smaller such that these systems are no longer viable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article expresses one piece of the problem that's increasingly suggesting to me that it's not hiring or job-hunting that's broken, but the model of employment itself.

(For yet another example of broken hiring, see this story, also presently on the HN front page: [https://medium.com/@bellmar/sre-as-a-lifestyle-choice- de9f5a...](https://medium.com/@bellmar/sre-as-a-lifestyle-choice- de9f5a82d73d))

Skills assessment (and assertion) is difficult. Skills _relevance_ is hard to assess. Incorportion and business as risk-externalising systems has worked rather too well (though the problem's hardly new), with much of employment risk being shifted from employers to employees, and from large employers to small ones (answering the anticipated small-business / startup response). The entities most able to manage risk are those most equipped to shift it elsewhere.

There's also the problems of offshoring, outsourcing, and shifting to the modern variants of endentured servitude, generally: employment-contingent temporary visa workers (H-1B in the US, similar equivalents elsewhere). And of gig, contingent, temporary, part-time, and other employment conditions, as well as of the tying of specific benefits (most especially healthcare) to employment status.

Don't even get me started on pensions/retirement, professional ethics, whistleblower protections, and labour organisation.</comment>


The First Animated Feature Film: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-first-animated-feature-film-the-adventures-of-prince-achmed.html

<comment><USER2> The first animated film is [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Apóstol](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Apóstol) , from 1917.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't the first hand-drawn flip book effectively precede this?

<comment><USER4> Sure, you could argue that zoeotropes with half-second loops are the First Commercialized Animation, too. But if you're talking "film" as in "something you could put in a movie projector" neither of them counts, and they sure wouldn't count as a _feature_ either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whether or not it's the "first", I highly recommend Prince Achmed, it's really an amazing film. The paper silhouette method has aged remarkably well.</comment>


Planned Smear Campaign against BO - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/us/politics/super-pac-storyboard.html?ref=politics&gwh#/#10

<comment><USER2> CNN ran an "angry black man" article this morning by a Republican consultant. Obviously they're really hanging this one on turning out the racists.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see a chart of that 200 years of debt accumulation.

<comment><USER3> answered my own question.

<http://zfacts.com/p/318.html>

<comment><USER4> That's a nice graph, but it assumes that the Congress would have just gone along with surpluses and done what they never do -- stopped increasing spending. Both parties are to blame and sites that claim that the Republicans or Democrats are to blame for the national debt are just exposing their biases. We are where we are because politicians can't help themselves and they can't stop spending.</comment></comment></comment>


Faster docs for iOS - <AUTHOR>

A while back I got frustrated with slogging through the ultra slow Apple documentation pages. I kept asking "Why is it faster to lookup the UIView docs in Google than directly on developer.apple.com?" So one afternoon I cooked up this super-simple page to make it quicker to get to the docs:

  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1892875/ios/ios_search.html
 Just start typing a class name in the box. It autocompletes for most class names, or you can hit "enter" and it will run a little Google search for you. Stackoverflow answers are thrown in just for grins.
As you can see, this little page is super primitive, but in fact I use it constantly when I'm programming on iOS, just to avoid that molasses-like Apple interface. If anyone feels like expanding on this script or building a better version - please have at it. <comment><USER2> This is great! The Apple doc browsers are SO awful. I've filed a report with Apple about it. The problem seems to be that their search/index code always runs locally and is abysmally slow.

Can you auto-select the top result by default? It's a drag to press down-arrow to select the first result.

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually find the built-in Xcode documentation (⌘⌥?) reasonably snappy (and I'm on a pretty slow Core i3 box whose only redeeming feature is 16GB of RAM).

I would definitely choose Google (or your app -- it's pretty slick) over the current documentation web site.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try Dash, it's great

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dash/id458034879?mt=12>

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like the free OS X application Ingredients - <http://fileability.net/ingredients/></comment>


Stop teaching calculating; Start teaching math - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerbasedmath.org/resources/reforming-math-curriculum-with-computers.html <comment><USER2> Of course, his main point is to advocate for using computers to teach and learn math; he's selling Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha.

But this is dangerous and a little shallow. And here is why.

Math is the language of science; just like a C -- or any other programming language -- is a language of computing; just like English is a language of humans.

There are many ways to learn a language, but I think they all have something in common. You have to spend a lot of time learning, reading and _writing_. The _writing_ is quite important. You have to write the language to be good at it.

The thing about math is that currently to write as it is supposed to look like can only be done most conveniently on paper. Writing a math formula in Mathematica or Wolfram alpha requires a latex-like mini language, another thing to learn, and can be disrupting.

This fact alone means that computers can only supplement; and they can be an excellent supplement. But it can not replace doing math by hands, on papers, particularly for those who are learning this new language.

<comment><USER3> I do not disagree with you, but this is not answering his arguments.

 _Math is the language of science[...]. There are many ways to learn a language, but I think they all have something in common. You have to spend a lot of time learning, reading and writing. The writing is quite important. You have to write the language to be good at it._

He's not arguing that scientists should drop _writing_ math altogether (although you have to admit that they _are_ spending huge amount of efforts making the computers do the calculation for them). He's addressing the more general issue of "teaching math in elementary schools". Why do we do it today? not everyone is going to be a scientist!

 _The thing about math is that currently to write as it is supposed to look like can only be done most conveniently on paper. Writing a math formula in Mathematica or Wolfram alpha requires a latex-like mini language[...]._

Yeah writing math formulas on a computer is a pain. But:

\- you and I come from a generation of pen and paper math solving. The idea of markup annotation of your text is still very young, but is it so far fetched to imagine that in few generations, all text will be filled with metadata and tags? LaTeX is a pain because of our current primitive keyboards and screens.

\- more people should work towards improving this. Wolfram Alpha is doing good things, they're not the only ones working on this either, but we still need to bring more attention to the issue.

Also, who cares if he sells WA. Let's talk about his idea, not his persona.

<comment><USER4>
      > but is it so far fetched to imagine that in few
      > generations, all text will be filled with metadata
      > and tags?

Yes, I think it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think he argues from the wrong point. Yes, we need to teach math, not calculating. No, the argument is not "because we can do calculating with computers today". Lockhart got it right in his famous lament - the problem is that we face a system of self-sustaining bullshit that actually _thinks_ it's teaching math.

My guess is that Conrad Wolfram probably plans to conveniently also sell the accompanying software for this new education, which would make it natural for him to focus on this point. I actually agree that computers can help us educate people better, and that we need to create appropriate software for this. But my concern would then be that such software _must_ be free/libre. No compromise. We cannot risk the education of future generations to be locked into $corporation's proprietary products.

<comment><USER6> I recently had the experience of helping a young algebra student with her homework. She is very bright and is in an accelerated math program that teaches algebra in the 7th grade.

However, it was so disappointing to see the curriculum. I was in the same accelerated program 15 years ago and the curriculum hadn't changed a bit. It was still vague and unhelpful. They sent her home for the summer with a large packet of problems to solve without any explanation how to solve them.

I majored in math and I still had to guess at what the worksheets were asking the student to do. They used vague variables and were essentially just teaching rote memorization. It reminded me of my own confusion in mathematics when I was growing up, how one year a variable would mean one thing and the next year it would mean something else. "Solve and explain," means just as little to me now, using math on a daily basis, as it did to the 11 year old version of me.

After so many years, it would have been nice to see the curriculum focus more on application of mathematics and less on how to memorize and calculate.

<comment><USER7>
      > how one year a variable would mean one thing and the next
      > year it would mean something else

I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean, but isn't that the purpose of a variable? In programming, a variable _foo_ in one method which represents Widget objects is completely independent from a variable _foo_ in another method which represents Gadget objects. In math, solving for X in one problem might be to find the missing angle X, but in another problem it might be to determine the elapsed seconds X.

<comment><USER6> I'm not disagreeing that variables are meant to be variable.

However, it's important to teach context behind variables before asking an 11 year old to solve them or else it becomes a point of confusion. They are asked to use rote memorization to complete the calculations but they don't seed their memory before asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In high school physics about 22 years ago, we did an experiment to calculate the acceleration due to gravity by repeatedly dropping a weight with a ticker tape attached to it that fed through a hole punch tool and measuring the spacing of the holes in the tape over time. As part of the analysis and write- up, we had to calculate the standard deviation across our sample runs. That seemed really tedious to me, so I wrote a program in BASIC that took a data file, ran the calculations and saved the results. I recall a certain to-do as the school deliberated over whether this was an acceptable way to complete the assignment, and I was asked to include the source code for my program so the teacher could determine that I understood the concept well enough to program it.

<comment><USER9> I think it would be cool if calculators weren't allowed in school unless you programmed them yourself. Now trying to enforce that might be difficult but it is an interesting idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I noticed a few of articles on Hacker News has been about math recently. According to Google Trends, math is also rising in popularity, especially in US.

I think math is even more appealing to programmers. You are allowed to assume that certain things happen. You may define a set on the fly and all of a sudden, the set is populated without pressing a single key. Let me try, {prime numbers}. There, I got an infinitely large data structure. I hope HN doesn't crash after posting this comment.

As programmers, we put abstract ideas into implementations. Math seems to forgo all of that. Everything just happens magically as long as your mind can wrap around it and you have a precise definition for it. No debugging. Isn't this a dream?

So I am wondering if there's a community of programmers who have turned to devote their time to math. Like the video said, computer frees you from computation. Hence, it makes sense for math's popularity to rise, especially since we got more people interested in programming. Math seems like the natural next step. I don't have any hard data about this, just my intuition.

</comment><comment><USER11> "And, of course, as we all know, with a computer you can take a simple problem like solve 5x2+2x+1=7 but you can make it harder, for example solve 5x4+2x+1=7. The principle of the problem is still the same."

This is not, in fact, true for polynomial equations of order greater than four. From Wikipedia, "the Abel–Ruffini theorem states that there is no general algebraic solution... to polynomial equations of degree five or higher." This is often featured as one of the main results in an undergraduate abstract algebra course.

I'm all for automating calculations, but the algorithms behind calculations and their proofs are important and often fascinating. Handing students an implementation of such algorithms, e.g. Mathematica, takes away their opportunity to code up the algorithms and understand them deeply.

Edit: Wording

<comment><USER12> For that matter, asking students at the high school level to derive the quadratic formula will likely be quite challenging for even the best students in the class.

Asking students to come up with the formulas for 3rd or 4th degree polynomials on their own is probably going to be beyond anyone below the very top tier of human capability. A teacher would be extremely lucky to see one or two students that can do this in their career.

Then again, most people could easily solve these problems if they know what terms to Google :)

Anyway, as I recall the third- and fourth-degree cases require clever substitutions (whereas the derivation of QF is just completing the square with general coefficients).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> On one end you will hear people equate math to calculating, this is almost exclusively how math is taught in school today, and on the other, people like to talk about math ideas, and how we shouldn't really teach people how to calculate anymore since we got computers for that. Like in many aspects of life, learning math is about balance.

In truth, people should learn from both areas simultaneously, since they are mutually connected. Calculating is a tool that makes you a better problem solver, and being a problem solver will allow you to find new tools to calculate faster. You can't separate either discipline from one another.

In my view, I think students should take one calculation, and one deeper math class a year starting in high school. That wat they could delve deeper in learning how to calculate (learning different methods for multiplication that might come in handy when doing mental math, for example), and start dealing with real, thought-heavy math from an earlier grade (learning about combinatorics, graph, game, and probability theory early in high school, etc).

<comment><USER14> I would say, stop concentrating on calculation, and teach math. However, calculation is often a useful way to ensure you understand something. So, calculation will likely still be a part of learning math, but it shouldn't be the focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's sad how many people think that math is arithmetic, and that if we let kids use computers or calculators then they're not "doing math". Not just the general public but PTA leaders, school board members, and school administrators.

<comment><USER16> I live in a relatively wealthy school district in Ohio where the schools generally are well-regarded. Last year, I went to the schools "parents math night". I had expected to be exasperated by, you know, those idiots who will be teaching my children (my older son is entering first grade this fall). However, I ended up impressed with the teachers and disappointed by the parents in attendance. The school had chosen the "Connected Math" curricula (connectedmath.msu.edu) for its middle school math program, and some parents were outraged that Little Johnny wasn't learning long division (or whatever). Their arguments could be summed up as, "Well, that's not the way we learned it." I angered the other parents by playing a bit dumb and asking for a short description of the curriculum. Then, I stated loudly that it "sounded delightful." The teachers barely contain their smiles. I ordered a couple of the books in used form from Amazon to see for myself, and I think I would have found the exercises fun as a middle schooler. I really wanted to ask the parents doing the complaining, "Don't you love your children? You pay more for a house just because it's in this school district, and then you lobby to dumb- down the math curriculum?"

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I remember reading an article about almost the same topic by Felleisen, maybe Flatt, maybe Culpepper and some others from the PLT group, it was about using DrRacket to teach maths, there was an example involving the take-off of a rocket iirc. Is anyone able to find it? I don't remember the title nor where it was published.

<comment><USER17> I really like the idea of teaching math in tandem with elementary programming. It demystifies writing code and can be very helpful in teaching important math concepts like functions, variables and graphing. At the very least, exposure to programming at an early age will get more kids interested in the subject.

Does anyone know of good examples of schools that are already doing this with something like Dr Racket?

<comment><USER18> I think you'd be interested in Bootstrap World, which is basically what you described: <http://www.bootstrapworld.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember to this day the lesson in primary school, when we first started solving word problems. It was sth like 3rd class. Teacher would ask simple question, like "how many apples we had to add to each chest, if there is 4 chests with 7 apples in each, and we need to have total of 32 apples". And kids had to "brainstorm" and translate that into mathemathic process and solve (not algebra, just "first we need to know how many apples we lack, so we substract, then we need to know how many apples per chest we lack, so we divide", we didn't knew algebra yet). If the question wasn't specific, the kid that pointed it out got praise for being observant, and teacher specified what he meant. Most kids liked that lesson, and there was fierce competition to be the first to guess. That was the moment I felt in love with math, before that I thought I'm more of a humanist (which meant it's OK I can't understand decimal fractions ;) ).

I think teaching kids to translate problem into math is very important, not only for math, but also if they want to be economists, computer programmers, etc. I cringe when I read that kids "know math, but don't know which equation to use to solve the problem". My wife taught math in secondary school for a while (in Poland, not USA, but we've recently had reform modeling our schools on those in "the West"). Many kids she taught had no idea how to translate word problem into math problem. They just pattern-matched keywords to equations. It's very sad, and I understand why they hate math - it must be completely frustrating to play this "guess the equation" game.

So - I think there should be more focus on teaching kids to understand the basic word problems, before they even know algebra. To be sure, that they understand when we need to substract x, and when we need to substract from x.

</comment><comment><USER20> So basically what he is saying is that drilling kids into memorizing math procedures like LONG DIVISION is not a good way to get people interested in math and analytical thinking in general. Ok. Sure. He is right that modelling is probably what "people who don't get math" struggle the most with.

But saying that math is just "computational stuff, turn the crank, let the computer do it" kind of thing is ludicrous. You can use mathematics as a blackbox model to do cool demos and stuff, but at some point you //have// to open the box and see how it is done.

It just happens that the standard math curriculum (numbers, functions, sin, cos, etc.) is a very good mix of conceptual complexity and computational complexity that can all be understood with pen and paper. You won't need to trust anyone, the proof is right there on the sheet. Anyone trying to take that understand in order to replace with with a SolveEquation[.] is not on the right side of intellectualism. Demos yes, but view source (is there view source for Mathematica functions?) and explain source are //sine qua non// for deep knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is sad. Really sad. My personal opinion is that Americans just dislike academic matters so much that they are incapable of forming a coherent solution for their children's schooling.

Let me tell you some personal anecdotes. I moved to Minnesota during my High school senior year from Vietnam. It sucked: I couldn't hold on to conversations, and people couldn't understand my pronunciation; so I was bored and very lonely. You know what I do during my lunch time? Trying to re-prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Is there any "real world" application of that? Well, there may be, but I don't care. It was fun.

You know how people listen to (and rock to) puke music on buses? I rode bus a lot during my college years, and spent that time wreaking my brain to work on various NP complete problems (my favorite is the man-woman-dog matching :D). Do I know it is beyond my capacity? Yes. Do I care about any real world problem of it? No. Why did I do it then? It's fun. It killed time. I still do this from time to time during meetings at work.

When you think about it, most of math, or most of the academia for that matter, is not readily applicable. True, people use calculus to build Hoover Dam, but the effect of that information on whether or not a student likes math is equivalent of a political speech to a person political orientation: either you already like it (math/Obama) and cheer for it, or you already hate it (math/Obama) and boo/ignore it. These things, by itself, can't change a person's opinion regarding the big picture.

You know why I like doing math in my free time? Because I have done a whole load of it. Vietnamese High School graduates are required to learn around sophomore math level in American college (and I fully expect most other East Asian systems to be the same). This explains neatly why Asian students are "smart." They freaking know the things already. Furthermore, the learning of math there involved an absurd amount of drill (compared to American high schools). Oh, calculators are banned until high school, and graphing calculators are banned. Period.

Now, should that not make me abhor math? I mean, slaving myself so much time over such stupid and abstract matter must bore me to death, right? Actually, the opposite happened. It's like taste bud. You rebuild your taste bud every so often, so if you have been eating a whole load of broccoli lately, you will start to like broccoli. Yeah, after the first few days, you can't even digest to crap. However, after a few months, you can't digest without broccoli. Humans are adaptable. Do a lot of math, and you will like it.

This also speaks of the problem with calculators and computers. The problem is no so much that they dump down math. The problem is that they alienate the students from math. When you do math, all of it, the result is made of your sweat. It may be wrong, but it's yours. It may be stupid and winded and long and whatnots, but it's yours. It's personal. I remember once, during 5th grade (yes, elementary school), there was this problem that I just could not solve, and we were kicked out of class for lunch break. Walking out, I cling to the teacher and cried out of frustration. The same frustration that keeps me up at nights when some stupid bugs could not be fixed. Must be the same frustration that all artisans experience at challenges. It's the indication of the bond that I have with my work, MY math, and it necessitates the toil, the slaving, the mind-numbing work of calculation.

I hope you see my point: there is no elevator to interest in math. Math lovers must have toiled and slaved over stupid calculation over and over, until a point that they could actually produce the trace of math working, just like the zone in programming or any other art. That trace, that focus, that absorption builds the love for math.

Of course, this means that the students must fist cross the initial barrier of math, just like the first few days of broccoli eating. In Asian cultures, academia is a point of pride. Parents take enormous pride in their children's academia success. Schools take enormous pride in their students' academia achievements. Think about football in American high schools. It's something similar. Study well, perform well in competition, and a student will enjoy numerous privileges and honors that is just unattainable through any other mean. The whole culture rates academia above any other activities, and use that as the measure for potential success. Playing sport well will earn praise, but it is understood to be temporary, fast passing. Studying well, and people will talk about how you will got to such and such colleges, and will become such and such person in the future. It's just different.

Back to problem of American math schooling. Here is my prescription: just make the damn students do it. Require them to work on math. Forget about the whole, um, personality and uniqueness and whatnots. You know where these things are from? The toil of work (for students, that's studying) builds personality, values, and one's importance and uniqueness. You know where self esteem is from? It's from holding a piece of paper on which a problem has been solved and solution has been neatly presented; it's from the overcoming of frustration and challenges that the problem presents. Artisans take pride and esteem in their works. Students take pride and esteem in their tests and homework (except when you tell them that the football players will get the praise, the money, and the sex, and only these 3 things matter). Stop worrying about overworking them. Actually, overwork them to the ground. Leave them no energy and time to experiment with drugs and sex and alcohol.

It takes challenges and toil to make a person. Stop taking these things away from the youngsters!

<comment><USER22> _Back to problem of American math schooling. Here is my prescription: just make the damn students do it. Require them to work on math. Forget about the whole, um, personality and uniqueness and whatnots. You know where these things are from? The toil of work (for students, that's studying) builds personality, values, and one's importance and uniqueness. You know where self esteem is from? It's from holding a piece of paper on which a problem has been solved and solution has been neatly presented; it's from the overcoming of frustration and challenges that the problem presents. Artisans take pride and esteem in their works. Students take pride and esteem in their tests and homework (except when you tell them that the football players will get the praise, the money, and the sex, and only these 3 things matter). Stop worrying about overworking them. Actually, overwork them to the ground. Leave them no energy and time to experiment with drugs and sex and alcohol._

Um, no, this has nothing to do with hard work, and everything to do with the way mathematic is taught. I am a programmer and I would love to understand mathematics the way I understand programming. There got to be far more to mathematics than simply learning how to follow steps.

As a programmer, I write, debug, fix and improve code. With math, I don't understand why am I merely following steps when computers can do it at far higher reliability than I could.

<comment><USER23> _There got to be far more to mathematics than simply learning how to follow steps._

Nope, that's really all there is. Just like computer programming is nothing but learning to string arcane commands together in anal retentive ways. It's just a lot of making variable names and putting data in them and using little symbols like "argc" and "foldl" and "fopen" that have excruciatingly dry definitions that are completely disconnected from the real world. You memorize rules of syntax and look up function definitions and follow all of the rules exactly correctly, and even after you've done what feels like a _ton_ of that you're still just writing a dumb program that you would never use anyway. What's the point?

But I bet you didn't feel that way about programming when you were first learning, right? Things like foldl and dlopen seemed kind of neat, if not mind-blowing. People who become good at programming get there because they take delight in the simple things that make up the basics. Is there anything intrinsically beautiful about loops? There is the first time you encounter one. Oh, man, the possibilities! The feeling passes quickly, but I can't imagine how anyone who never enjoyed loops could endure the boredom long enough to become skilled at programming.

It's the same thing with math. Like programming, it really _is_ just symbol manipulation and nothing more. The pleasure and beauty is in your perception of it, the concepts you develop to give intuitive substance to the abstract rules. Your appreciation gets deeper the more you learn. But to get there you have to enjoy the basics, the simple things. How many times did you have to write

      for (i = 0; i < m; ++i)

before it became second nature? You must have derived some satisfaction from your initial fumbling with loops and functions or your interest would have died before you learned to write more complex programs. (The kids who don't enjoy the basics quit programming as soon as they realize they won't be making a state-of-the-art video game in a weekend.) Learning math is the same process; you start by enjoying where you are, even if you're starting at the mathematical equivalent of

      for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
        System.out.println("I love cake " + i + " times!");
      }

That may not sound very attractive to an educated person with many sophisticated things to think about. It's entirely possible that there are some people who are not simple-minded enough to enjoy math. However, I think those people do not enjoy programming, either ;-)

<comment><USER24> _Like programming, it really is just symbol manipulation and nothing more._ I strongly disagree. Arithmetic, perhaps... but not "math."

Some of the best math proofs require little-to-no direct symbol manipulation. You might be able to reduce a mathematical statement down to the symbolic level (eg. using sets), but so much of the beauty is in the simple intuition. One simple example: the pigeon hole principle -- you can teach it to a 3 year old, and yet its incredibly powerful.

EDIT: If you read about Lockhart's Lament (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), he specifically writes:

The cultural problem is a self-perpetuating monster: students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. _Worse, the perpetuation of this "pseudo- mathematics," this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values._ Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were "good at math," that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it's about making new directions.

<comment><USER23> Be fair. I do get around to saying there's more to it. Why, it's in the very next sentence after the one you quoted :-)

 _The pleasure and beauty is in your perception of it, the concepts you develop to give intuitive substance to the abstract rules._

<comment><USER25> That seems to imply that the pleasure and beauty of mathematics is in the way one perceives symbolic manipulation. I actually think the pleasure and beauty of mathematics is in the stage before one gets to manipulating symbols; the stage where you have an idea about something and are thinking about ways to communicate it or prove it. People should be given problems ('how much of this box does this triangle take up?' to paraphrase Lockhart's example) and allowed to drum up their own solutions/syntax.

Admittedly, this is kind of idealistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I didn't really see much specific stuff here, to be honest. There was some program that you could use sliders to figure the best life insurance policy ... I mean, ok ... that's great ... What's the big deal again?

What are some specific examples. There's all this "wah schools only teach calculation." Well, what specifically are they teaching that is bad and what specifically should they teach that is better?

So, are we saying, no reason for a student to know how to take a derivative, they should know how to turn the knobs on some program to figure out the best fuel efficiency of some device in some really neat simulator?

The example about limits ... ok yeah that's cool but if you aren't actually teach them how to "calculate" (is the word "calculate" used as a boogey man?), how is that you are not doing anything other than teaching "math appreciation?"

</comment><comment><USER27> Though it isn't worth much, I'd like to put my two cents in as a student currently going through high school.

In the district in which I'm partaking in public education, there's a dead even split between contemporary and traditional math courses. Our school offers both the Core-Plus Mathematics Project (<http://wmich.edu/cpmp/>) and some variation of what I'd consider traditional (Geometry 1, 2, Algebra 1, 2, etc.).

The students more often than not will prefer the Core-Plus Mathematics Project over the traditional courses early on in their education - but once the math switches over to a primarily calculating class (take, for instance, Calculus), the opinions shift and favor the other one.

What we honestly have in my district is a case of a system that's trying to split itself down the middle politically - as we're attempting to switch to a modern, context driven approach to mathematics, whilst maintaining the link to processes like Advanced Placement, which only judge on the traditional aspects ([http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_calab.htm...](http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_calab.html)).

While it might be a better route for the future, the present is demanding math to be calculation based for the near future. It'll only start switching into a better realm when colleges and pre-college programs like those offered by CollegeBoard make the switch to context-based systems, rather than calculation based ones.

(I'm very well aware of how rambling that is, sorry!)

</comment><comment><USER12> Mathematicians are basically just accountants, right? And the IRS has gazillions of accountants who only really work during tax season...so, if our math programs suck, let's move our tax due date to overlap with schools' summer break, fire all the math teachers and replace them with those IRS guys!

It might be better than the existing system and it could hardly be worse. There's already been some work done on a curriculum (warning: PDF link): <http://www.cs.amherst.edu/~djv/irs.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER28> These how-to-apply-math skills are valuable, but they aren't math itself. Math is about building more general abstractions, keeping strict rigor, being careful with axioms, and developing techniques that are really, really broad as a result.

Granted, calculation isn't a very good way to get into this either.

</comment><comment><USER29> Added to the reading list. I've been saying this for quite a while. I think we were able to capture this in our 9th grade math games we have been working on.

</comment><comment><USER30> Enjoyed skimming your article. If only more geeks actually wanted to teach kids... unfortunately most of us will only be able to do that once we've retired!

<comment><USER31> If I went back into education for 2 more years, piled more student debt on top of myself, not to mention living like a student again, PLUS having to have a part-time job while studying (while the loan is bigger for a PGCE, the costs of living are much much higher), and then got a job as a teacher, worked my ass off for 10 years, I would, if I was lucky, be earning the same salary I am today, a couple of years after leaving university.

Sounds like a great fucking deal to me.

<comment><USER32> This cannot be upvoted hard enough. Education would reform itself overnight if teachers were hired from the top third of high school classes, not the bottom two thirds, and paid salaries that started ~$70k and reached ~$100k in five years if they were good.

Students struggle because you have to be a saint or an idiot to teach under the conditions currently imposed. We don't have nearly enough of the former, and way too many of the latter.

I have a really hard time imagining that brain-dead curriculum boards and mediocre administrators would sustain their death grip on a profession suddenly flooded with really sharp, well paid, professionals.

<comment><USER33> Imagine the change in classroom atmosphere if teachers had the same social credibility as professors did (or more aptly, if high school teachers had the same respect and admiration from students as kindergarten teachers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> His talk is fundamentally wrong. Turning real life problems into a mathematical form (in other words, modelling) is not a subject of mathematics.

<comment><USER26> To be fair, I disagree with his position, but he is willing to call it something else, but the end of the day it is to teach his proposal as opposed what we now teach.

<comment><USER34> Using computers. And with computers, he means Mathematica.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> He's basically trying to sell Mathematica.</comment>


Can You Solve This? - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/can-you-solve-this/id832093267?ls=1&mt=8 This is my newest game that is available today. Get it for iPhone and iPad. <comment><USER2>
        The address wasn't understood

        Firefox doesn't know how to open this address,
        because the protocol (itmss) isn't associated
        with any program.

Nope, can't be bothered.

<comment><USER3> It's a link to an itunes application. I think I'd prefer not to install random applications on my computer, though.

<comment><USER3> oh apparently it opened a window in chrome as well. It's a link to that app where it generates a rule, gives you three numbers that follow the rule, and you have to guess other numbers and see if they follow the rule, and eventually you have to guess what the rule is.

There was a youtube video floating around a few weeks ago. It's really not worth it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Epic Games Primer - <AUTHOR> https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicgamesprimermaster <comment><USER2> > But if Epic is successful in building out its 'flywheel', it will even more > dramatically reshape the digital world - from data and privacy rights, to > emergent technical standards, the distribution of profits, and the very ways > in which humans work and relax.

Give me a fucking break from the bullshit please!!!

<comment><USER3> Time to rebrand as WeGame...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is a reasonable summary of Epic's accelerating ascent, but little factual inaccuracies littered throughout smell like investor hype and some bits of tortured prose stink of advertising copy.

The whole thing feels like it was written for investors who want to know just enough about a topic to pat themselves on the back for the 'value' their decision making will bring to a related enterprise.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. An example of this would be the mention of rival engine Unity in part 6:

"But Unity, the most widely deployed engine for small/mobile games, deploys a flat "per seat" fee for its engine. As a result, for users with a Unity Pro license, even a game with $1,000 in revenue would generate revenue for the company."

This is inacurrate, in fact Unity previously waived these fees for the first few thousand dollars of revenue earned, and with their current plan it looks like licencing is free of charge for dev generating less than 100k/year.

Source:

[https://store.unity.com/compare-plans](https://store.unity.com/compare-plans)

[https://unity3d.com/unity/faq](https://unity3d.com/unity/faq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> JFYI, pressing `esc` on your page takes me to a squarespace login page, which was rather jarring.

<comment><USER7> why did you press `esc` in the first place?

<comment><USER8> What, you don't hit it reflexively whenever the computer pops up something weird that you don't want?

"Nope, none of that, don't want pop-ups or questions. Whatever it is, I'm canceling out of your dialog box. Nope!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you don't want to read the essays, I published my notes on them.

[https://www.arilewis.com/aris-posts/notes-on-epic- games](https://www.arilewis.com/aris-posts/notes-on-epic-games)

<comment><USER10> These are actually very good notes and totally dismiss the VC fluff from the articles. Nice work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good essay, but it felt like the six sections weren't meant to be read consecutively. Seeing entire paragraphs reused is a very jarring experience.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great series, really liked the exploration of their flywheel and I wish there was more writing like this about other companies and how they are poised. Unreal's moves into the movie industry and their detail-focused engine upgrades recently have been the most surprising but compelling strategic pieces they've recently added

</comment><comment><USER13> Why the hell does epic need financing when they're sitting on a huge pile of Fortnite money?

</comment><comment><USER14> The lines labelled "Funding" from Fortnite to literally every other part of the flywheel looks like a big risk.

</comment><comment><USER15> This was a really well written essay! Great breakdown of Sweeney's strategy!

</comment><comment><USER16> TLDR a breakdown of each of the ways Epic is making money and expanding its empire in the present.</comment>


UberCab Cease & Desist Means One Thing: They're Onto Something - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/ubercab/ <comment><USER2> "The argument that this could threaten taxi dispatchers' way of earning a living is the best though. Just because you're an incumbent doesn't give you the right to rest on your laurels and never be challenged. If the dispatchers feel threatened by UberCab, they should try to compete better, not hide behind some lame legal threat."

This is such an obvious truth I'm always surprised that people don't recognize it sooner. It's dragged out all the time, and it's never based in reality. Sure, electric lighting put the coal haulers out of business: Good!

</comment><comment><USER3> 2nd Article Means One Thing: First Tested Well, Generated Ad Impressions</comment>