How I improved my rspec suite time by 53% - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mybema.com/2014/04/10/improving-Mybema-test-suite-time-by-53-percent

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting post and I went on a similar adventure about 8 months ago to build a Rails-free test suite (based on MiniTest) for an existing large Rails app.

It was a work of art. But ultimately a triumph equalled only by its monumental failure.

The amount of hacking necessary to make tests work without autoloading is insane. Also the amount of refactoring required to take existing, working code to use dependency injection to be Rails free has introduced too much friction to be useful to the dev team.

As a team we're re-evaluating the strategy and trying to determine if it's something we want to continue with, or of it's just a useful thought experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I share many of the same sentiments. The hackery required was frustrating.

I'm hopeful that it does at least serve as a stepping stone for ripping out all non-DB methods in the ActiveRecord classes into POROs which ought to be WAY faster to test.</comment></comment>


I want to prevent the execution failure of kubectl - <AUTHOR> I think everyone has experience running kubectl on wrong clusters or namespaces. This is a wrapper (plug-in) that prevents it.<p>https://github.com/pyama86/cluster-caution <comment><USER2> Also check these two as a complement:

[https://github.com/ahmetb/kubectx](https://github.com/ahmetb/kubectx)

[https://github.com/jonmosco/kube-ps1](https://github.com/jonmosco/kube-ps1)</comment>


Ask HN: Best cross platform mobile SDK for simple apps / rapid development? - <AUTHOR>

I know there are many SDKs, and I have boiled my choice down to a select few: phonegap, appcelerator, ionic, and maybe xamarian (but it's pretty pricey).
My use case is pretty simple: talk to a middleware server and implement about 4 features with different sets of json data.  What's the platform that will allow me to get this out the fastest (ideally a month to 8 weeks)?
The app does have to be production quality though...this is a consulting gig for a small company. <comment><USER2> ionic (which includes phonegap/cordova), seems to be very popular

<comment><AUTHOR> that's actually what I ended up going with : )</comment></comment>


Object Oriented Programmer's Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://r6.ca/blog/20090511T013939Z.html

<comment><USER2> "When you call a virtual method, you never know what might happen."

Good OO programmers can be confident enough to not care what happens when you call a virtual method.</comment>


Why stress causes people to overeat - <AUTHOR> https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-stress-causes-people-to-overeat <comment><USER2> Completely fails to answer the question 'Why do people stress eat?'

As close as it comes is "people who responded to stress with high cortisol levels in an experimental setting were more likely to snack in response to daily hassles in their regular lives than low-cortisol responders"

So there's a statistical association between high cortisol responses and snacking in response to stress. That is not "why", it's a correlation, and meaningless to an ordinary person.

</comment><comment><USER3> If "stress" = "worrying about (something that may happen in) the future", then mightn't 'over eating' be a primitive physiological response? e.g. similar to how 'threat of imminent attack' -> 'fight or flight', perhaps 'threat of something bad in future' -> 'better pack on the kilojoules now in case we can't secure an adequate food supply'.

<comment><USER4> IMO more likely to be emergent behaviour. Stressed people generally have issues prioritising difficult long-term goals over tasks that yield short-term gratification.

<comment><AUTHOR> so true. Stress leads to burn out state which has to be one of the biggest productivity issues. The body and mind go into this odd state where they are looking for instant small boosts to feel good. Food is an obvious feel-good with many obvious 'next stage' boosts that people opt to get 'rewards' from. You could write the same article about alcohol, excessive gaming or excessive social media consumption. Personally, keeping an eye on the level of burn out is one of the most important lessons so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the exact opposite problem -- when I'm stressed, I do not eat at all, so I lose weight.

<comment><USER6> That's actually covered in the article. Stress induces under-eating in the short run (loss of appetite) and over-eating in the longer run, when cortisol starts to take a toll on you.

<comment><USER5> I have had situations where I had been stressed for weeks and months at a time, and I never noticed a shift.</comment></comment></comment>


Russia Tests Parts of 6th Generation, Railgun Equipped Near Space Warplane - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russia_Tests_Parts_of_6th_Generation_Railgun_Equipped_Near_Space_Warplane_999.html <comment><AUTHOR> Is the author confused, or am I confused as to the proposed armament on this plane? Does it have a railgun or some sort of EMP generator, or does a railgun generate an EMP? (I don't think it does, because other railgun articles never mention it.)</comment>


Show HN: pyGitDeploy my first serious python project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MindTwister/pyGitDeploy

<comment><USER2> I get the feeling it's probably a useful project, but I'm not quite sure what it does or how. I'd consider putting a more in-depth description up there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up, I'll update the readme

To be brief its updates an ftp site with the changes made since last deployment, only uploading and deleting files that has been modified. Its a work in progress scrip to scratch an itch I have with some of our customers web hosts (no ssh access).</comment></comment>


Napster: The Heavenly Jukebox (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/09/mann.htm?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> _Edgar Bronfman Jr., the head of Universal, the world 's biggest music company, predicted in a speech in May that soon "a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded." In this vast intellectual commons nothing will ever again be out of print or impossible to find; every scrap of human culture transcribed, no matter how obscure or commercially unsuccessful, will be available to all._

It's 2015, 15 years later since that was said by Edgar Bronfman Jr. I find it interesting that we're still not there. It seems that it's getting harder to find out of print publications/books/records, especially if they were somewhat obscure or rare from the beginning.

I don't know why, but I would guess that it's because those works are drowning in the vast and seemingly endless supply of others works. That, combined with it not being digitalized and that the physical representation might have rotted away or on the verge of rotting away.

What do you make out of this?

<comment><USER3> Ironically, Bronfman's vision is closest still only in the piracy world as legitimate licensing requires too much organizational buy-offs to ever be universal.

Interestingly, services like spotify could have only come about after pressure from piracy because the industry would never have conceded such control and monetary loss unless forced to.

Now comes the next wave: video which popcorntime will help force the path.

It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking regulation theses day - there's something these services have in common with uber and airbnb.

<comment><USER4> Of course piracy better solves the distribution problem, distribution is easy. Copyright helps solve the problem of artist compensation. That problem's hard but ask any artist* who isn't living off a trust fund and they'll tell you how important it is. If you skip the hard part by definition you've made things easier on yourself.

If the community of music listeners took better care of musicians then they wouldn't run to the arms of the music industry. Unfortunately music listeners want and expect free or near-free.

> It's remarkable that progress can be achieved mostly through breaking > regulation theses day

Not to be offensive but I think it's completely uninteresting. Human decency has always slowed progress. Which empire obeyed the laws of the lands it invaded? Think of how our medical knowledge would progress if we abandoned all ethics, or how efficient our criminal justice system could be if we abandoned due process, how much oil we could drill or ore we could mine if we abandoned environmental regulations.

We don't do these things because local actors pursuing locally optimal solutions don't always benefit the group. In fact it's possible for the opposite to happen like in _The Tragedy of the Commons_.

IOW I dislike regulations too but they solve problems we don't have better solutions for.

*who you know well enough to ask personal questions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Heh, now that's something to think about: Over 20 million users shortly after launch in 1999/2000\. That's not insignificant growth at that time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Confession: I would kill to hang out with Justin Timberlake pretending to be Sean Parker for just one day.

I really, really wish they'd make a Napster film.

<comment><USER6> It would be cool to see a Napster film. There was an entertaining documentary about it, titled Downloaded, that was released in 2013. Link to full documentary: [http://on.aol.com/video/downloaded---full-documentary- film-5...](http://on.aol.com/video/downloaded---full-documentary- film-517844258)

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Never forgetting those times when each file was truncated over and over again at like 99% each time it was transmitted.

Couldn't find a reference right now.</comment>


Students Evaluating Teachers Doesn't Just Hurt Teachers, It Hurts Students - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/article/Students-Evaluating-Teachers/245169 <comment><USER3> This strikes me as a very whiny article, not worthy of publishing in the Chronicle. A lifetime of hurt feelings and resentments bubbling up into a rant full of straw men and frankly irresponsible misinformation about the role student evaluations play in instructor assessment.

It's too bad, too, because there certainly are criticisms to be made, and this article hints at some of them. But a well designed evaluation instrument along with critical interpretation of the results and comments can be an invaluable tool for instructors who want to improve their teaching.

But unfortunately this article also spreads untruths about the weight given to student evaluations, and dismisses common-sense security protocols like having a student deliver the results instead of the instructor (not perfect of course, but the student has much less incentive to tamper) as demeaning rather than a sensible precaution.

If the author had presented any evidence whatsoever to support her claims linking student evals to grade inflation (possibly related, and I'm sure studies have been done, but evals are very far from the only obvious contributing factor), or even made a passing attempt to explain what percentage of weight is given to raw eval scores for actual tenure considerations (very little in the broad scheme of things), and cut the junk out about how universities seeing students as customers is a new thing (it's not new at all as any skim of the history of universities as an institution will make clear, but someone at a US state university should realize that it's skyrocketing tuition rates, and not whiny students, that give students a bigger sense of entitlement) the article would have been much better.

<comment><USER4> > _a well designed evaluation instrument along with critical interpretation of > the results and comments can be an invaluable tool for instructors who want > to improve their teaching._

An instructor who actually wants to improve their teaching solicits and engages with feedback from the very first day of the term and doesn't wait until end of term evaluations roll in. Why? Because end of term evaluations, by definition, cannot help the students who wrote them.

<comment><USER5> That's not easy at all. Instructors design their course typically before the first class starts. Trying to incorporate suggestions from students -- students who have no experience teaching -- is just going to lead to disaster.

<comment><USER4> Feedback isn't for suggestions, it's for understanding problems that your students are having. If you aren't normalizing the process of students telling you when they are struggling, then they either won't tell you when they're struggling at all or you'll only find out too late. It could be pedagogical stuff like they don't understand your explanations, or it could be emotional things like they're having panic attacks and don't know what to do, or it could be simple technical details like what fonts you use on your slides. And if you know right away then you can do something right away and actually help someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Student reviews are also _ridiculously_ sexist in the average case. In a recent study, the students rated identical teachers differently enough by gender that actual teaching performance was lost in the noise: [https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article- abstract/doi/1...](https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article- abstract/doi/10.1093/jeea/jvx057/4850534?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

Another pair of studies showed that identical courses where students thought instructors were male rated higher than those that had a female professor, and their qualitative answers were also very different: [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says- st...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-students- rate-men-more-highly-women-even-when-theyre-teaching-identical)

I'm grateful to be a computer scientist, where the consolation prize for not getting tenure is a cushy industry job, but I feel deeply for my pre-tenure colleagues in the life sciences who have to work twice as hard for their evaluations while still maintaining their research and service requirements.

<comment><USER7>
       students rated identical teachers

Did you actually read critically the papers you cite?

[1] claims to be comparing "identical teachers" but [1]'s sole claim to courses taught by male and female instructors is " _neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender_ ". Clearly those are hardly the only factors relevant to teacher quality. Moreover [1] claims to use "objective measure of the instructors' performance", and which includes -- I kid you not -- " _self-reported_ number of hours students spent studying for the course".

[2] is similarly vague, and claims that " _the courses were identical: all lectures, assignments, and content were exactly the same in all sections_ " only to to state in the next sentence that the "only aspects of the course that varied between Dr. Mitchell's and Dr. Martin's sections were the course grader and _contact with the instructor_ ". Well, isn't "contact with the instructor" significant?

Both [1, 2] use p-values [3], which doesn't increase confidence in the results.

As an aside, neither paper discusses potential bias the authors might have, in particular their own _social desirability bias_ [4].

[1] [https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article- abstract/doi/1...](https://academic.oup.com/jeea/advance-article- abstract/doi/10.1093/jeea/jvx057/4850534?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

[2] [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says- st...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/14/study-says-students- rate-men-more-highly-women-even-when-theyre-teaching-identical)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)

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

<comment><USER8> > Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even > read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article > mentions that."

<comment><USER9> This has nothing to do with the article. This has to do with sources _the poster chose_ as evidence to support a position. It is definitely relevant to question whether a poster has read and understood their own citations, particularly when those citations are not very good or contradict the poster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty skeptical of the claims in this - it'd be interesting to see actual data.

Evaluations are one of the extremely few levers students actually have to pull when dealing with a terrible teacher. I'd expect that given an entire class' worth of evaluations you'd be able to strip outliers and get some genuine useful responses.

Though the worst professor I had at RPI held our grades hostage until the evaluations were in, so they're not perfect.

<comment><USER11> In America teachers get tenure so your feedback has no impact on them improving.

Also if you look at literally any study of them TAs for harder courses get harsher ratings, they get harsher ratings from weaker students.

I also spent a number of years as a TA I can say anecdotally that is my exact first hand experience - good reviews in easy courses like graphics, atrocious scores in design of concurrent systems. In fact for concurrent systems it was well known that the TA for the course would literally always get the lowest review rating in the department, and that was independent of their rating in any other courses that they TAd.

TAs also get punished if the actual instructor is bad - because students blame everyone in the course.

I mean the American system has its own slew of problems - lecturers run the tests themselves, they by design don't provide prior exams (hint: if knowing the prior years exam questions tells you enough to be considered your exams are bad and you should feel bad)

<comment><USER12> Very few professors are granted tenure, as was the case in the past. It's weakly non-zero: times have changed. There are far more adjunct professors today. Universities are more run like businesses than in decades past.

<comment><USER13> I don't have data, but I think most tenure track professors get tenure (if not at their current university, than another).

Adjunct professors are not tenure track, so there is really no expectation that they would get tenure. Though I have seen the numbers that say the number of adjuncts is increasing.

<comment><USER9> The point is that far fewer professors are tenure track to begin with, compared to past decades.

<comment><USER11> Almost every lecturer my wife has is tenure track or already tenured.

One of them just plays videos of himself in his lectures. He doesn't actually go to them. He is actually around during less than half of his scheduled office hours. He complains to (and at least once has shouted at) the TAs about how students keep asking him questions. He has tenure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To be honest, I'm not sure how teachers get and keep their jobs, but as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should be graded every fews years on their teaching skills.

My girlfriend is studying in a distance university, so she basically never meets any of her teachers. This year she has to do practices at a chosen company, and she got a teacher assigned to her who is supposed to "help" her. In her study guides it is written that the teacher has to give her classes every week. After first contact the teacher said that she will give every information by email (or other kind of online communication), and won't waste the students' precious time with classes. At first this sounded awesome, because my girlfriend has a lot to do in her last year. BUT... Since then 2 months have passed, the teacher has been repeatedly asked to keep at least a few classes, because things are not moving forward. She ignores her messages for days, answers in very short sentences, and although it is mandatory for her to keep the classes, she is always "busy" at those times and doesn't offer any other dates, so it is impossible to meet her. My girlfriend spends crazy hours combing through PDFs hoping to find information on how to do her practices, what she should prepare, how to write her work diary, etc.

And the other day, when she tried to contact the teacher's higher-ups to do something about this, one guy basically shouted at her, on the phone, saying that she is making her teacher look bad, even though the said theacher works really hard, and she should just listen to the teacher and let her be. After some of this preaching he just put the phone down.

It has been a really frustrating experience for us.

<comment><USER15> > as students are graded on their studying skills, I feel like teachers should > be graded every fews years on their teaching skills

If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions. They have an incentive to grade fairly and accurately. The same isn't true of students, who can grade on feelings and grudges.

Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded. Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at evaluating their teachers?

Student evaluations lack even the smallest part of the rigor that they should contain. They are practically worthless.

<comment><USER16> > If a teacher grades a student poorly, there can be repercussions.

Yes, but the above poster was talking about TEACHING poorly. It is easy enough to expect students to know things at the end of class, but harder to be of use in them learning that material.

> Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded.

Some are. Maybe even most. But definitely not a universally true statement, particularly in areas where teacher pay is dramatically out of line with industry wages.

> Students aren't trained as educators, so why would they be any good at > evaluating their teachers?

Fair point. But as pointed out by others, there are few other forms of evaluation/accountability. And while a student may not be able to identify WHY they struggled to learn, they can certainly evaluate IF they did. If many students agree, that's a problem best addressed quickly.

I teach a university class (just one, my day job is coding) and I've been utterly amazed at the lack of accountability applied to me and my peers. Meanwhile I have friends that teach teens, and the bureaucracy and policies they must follow seem just as bad, but in the opposite direction.

If you have a good alternative to student evaluations, please share, otherwise I'll agree with the flaws you listed but still find them better to have than not.

<comment><USER17> >> Teachers are also subject matter experts in the material being graded.

> Some are. Maybe even most. But definitely not a universally true statement, > particularly in areas where teacher pay is dramatically out of line with > industry wages.

So you say that if we find out which teachers are incompetent and actually kick them out, we would need to raise teacher wages to the point of being competitive with the industry?

Sounds like a win-win to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let me a add a wrinkle to the mix specifically in terms of grade inflation.

The value of most coursework and any learnings gleaned from it, has dropped significantly.

The best value from entering education institutions is instead from job opportunities after. Unfortunately, these opportunities are often based on grades.

If the grades are more important than the coursework, then _of course_ students will optimize for it.

Students should choose institutions & teachers based on both quality of opportunities and ease of coursework.

Going a step further, teachers that don't understand the changing interests of their students should be reprimanded.

At my university, most major recruiting for internships and such happened in one semester. Now, I specifically remember the dichotomy of two of my professors' approach to this.

Prof John - If you miss a class/deadline/exam due to recruiting, you get a 0.

Prof George - I understand recruiting is happening, reach out to me ASAP if you feel overwhelmed or need a date changed.

Now, the coursework has largely been forgotten. But, I will _never_ forget John's idiocy.

<comment><USER19> The grading just gets kicked down the road. Now, because we don't trust your credentials, we give you a coding exam, that is effectively a grade.

Likewise, an open secret is that college work is a simulation of the workplace. Those college students who develop through practice the ability to turn in work on time that makes their teachers happy, will also be able to do the same in the workplace. If you give up the chance to learn it while it's available to you in college, where your only risk is a Zero on an assignment, you will learn it later in the school of hard knocks. Your performance review will be a grade. There are people who come to work knowing how to get good grades, and others who don't.

This is coming from one who struggled to get good grades in college. A goose egg on an assignment is rarely an isolated occurrance.

Knowing educators, and having kids in high school, I know that the kids who miss a deadline during recruiting tend to have already missed many deadlines over the years.

I strongly believe that while credentialism and college brand recognition are real and probably regrettable, if those are your only reasons for attending college, then you are wasting your money and your life, whereas someone who has other reasons for attending the same college is getting a lot more value out of it. But colleges assume they get the same money either way, so it's really your choice.

<comment><USER20> > Likewise, an open secret is that college work is a simulation of the > workplace.

I don't think this is the case, and hasn't been for a long time. Assuming you're not looking at graduate classes college is largely a game of keeping your head down and doing the work you need to when you need to and the minimizing effort other than that. Cramming is totally a viable option as the metrics for success in college are totally different than the workplace. The skills one learns to survive in college are extremely maladaptive to a long term functional career.

If the criteria for success are orthogonal, how can one be a simulation of the other?

<comment><USER19> In my view treating college as largely a game or whose metric is sheer survival, is wasting money, or more likely, paying to support the students who are getting something else out of it. This is not necessarily a personal judgment, because there may be people who are predisposed to see everything as a game, but who deserve to get the best education possible anyway.

Here's my stupid parable. Give two people shovels and send them into a mine. One of them comes back with a bag of gold. The other comes back with an intense hangover. What's broken, the shovel or the mine?

Colleges, despite the image of paternalism, are actually designed to let you fail. People will leak clues on how to _survive_ , but are less likely to tell you explicitly how to _succeed_. But everybody has the same chance of getting a degree in _something_. As a result, the people who benefit from the signaling and branding of the college outnumber the people who got a good education out of it, creating the impression that college is largely about signaling and branding. But college is really about deciding what you want to get out of it.

There are doubtlessly many things wrong with college education today, but in spite of that, taking college at face value and pursuing it in a relatively straightforward way may still be a better strategy than trying to figure out what game to play in order to survive.

<comment><USER20> > But college is really about deciding what you want to get out of it.

If college is really a simulation of work, does that apply?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "A teacher (also called a school teacher or, in some contexts, an educator) > is a person who helps others to acquire knowledge, competences or values."

The target audience is a crucial part of the feedback loop. Removing the students from the equation sounds counter intuitive. What are the proposed alternative metrics? Who delivers the feedback? And what is the feedback based on, if not on the direct opinions of the people on the receiving end of the service?

<comment><USER22> I think the main idea here is that student evaluations only make sense if we assume that students are actually interested in acquiring knowledge, competences, or values, however if their main aim in a course is a good grade then their evaluations suddenly hold little value since they will rate "easy" instructors highest.

<comment><USER23> When I was a college instructor I found that when I tried hard - putting a lot of thought into pedagogy, having weekly (open notes) quizzes, assigning challenging but fair homework - I got terrible evaluations, even though the average grade in my class was higher than other teachers who were teaching the same course. When I phoned it in, didn't really try, was very lax with the homework and often made the quizzes take-home, I got excellent reviews but the average grade in the class was worse.

<comment><USER21> > "When I was a college instructor I found that when I tried hard - putting a > lot of thought into pedagogy, having weekly (open notes) quizzes, assigning > challenging but fair homework - I got terrible evaluations, even though the > average grade in my class was higher than other teachers who were teaching > the same course. When I phoned it in, didn't really try, was very lax with > the homework and often made the quizzes take-home, I got excellent reviews > but the average grade in the class was worse."

It must've been a frustrating experience.

At the same time - you're making a very broad statement here based on a rather personal experience. You went from a certain regimen yielding certain results, to a different regimen yielding different results. There are way too many parameters here to draw conclusions.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but that's the sort of data we have to deal with in this arena. Who's going to run a large randomized trial where students are purposely assigned to different classes (keeping in mind that schedule conflicts already add additional constraints to this which may bias these assignments) and then, furthermore, have the instruction fixed apart from how easy the assignments are? Is it even fair to the students to knowingly assign students to relatively poorer teaching? Clearly it happens all the time, every department has that professor who is known for being a bad teacher yet they still have to assign classes.

In speaking with other grad students this seemed to be a well-known phenomenon, to the point that most other grad students intentionally didn't put much time into their teaching and basked in the positive reviews as a result. It was suggested many times to me that I was spending too much time thinking about my teaching. In my case, the lax teaching was not intentional, I simply was overcommitted that semester and had less time to prepare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> An interesting way to evaluate professors would be to contact alumni who have graduated and ask them about the professors that they remember. Chances are that the really good and the really bad will stand out. I still remember my calculus professor and statistics professor who both did a great job. I remember some other professors on the other hand who were bad at teaching undergraduates. My opinions on my college professors seems independent of the grade I received or how hard the class was.

Often times, time and experience give a different perspective on how valuable something was.

<comment><USER25> > Often times, time and experience give a different perspective on how > valuable something was.

Indeed. I'm a professor in a STEM field.

One of the most valuable courses I ever took was in medieval feminist art history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the age-old doctor question. You go to the doctor's office because you have a medical problem.

Doctor 1 comes in on-time, she's smart, capable, friendly, and spends a good amount of time concerned about you and your situation.

Doctor 2 comes in late, she's irascible, pedantic, hurried, and only listens long enough to tell you what to do. She also insults you and your family in various ways and doesn't seem to care.

After the visit, you go to Yelp. Which one was the better doctor?

You have no idea! But do you think that's going to stop somebody from forming and posting an opinion anyway?

You can make the argument that these other qualities are good to have in a doctor. I agree. I want a doctor like the first one. But people go to doctors first and foremost to _get better_ , not to make new social acquaintances. If the first doc is incompetent and hurting people, and the second doc a genius, and her attitude is actually causing more people to comply with what's best for them out of a sense anger at her style, perhaps? That's the thing. Who the hell cares if the outside looks cool/sexy/friendly or not?

So when we ask for reviews from students who have never worked in the field they're studying for, they're like that Yelp doctor reviewer. I don't see how this situation is good for anybody. In fact, it'll probably lead to a bunch friendly, good-looking morons with great people skills entertaining bunch of kids who aren't learning anything. That's the only natural consequence here.

<comment><USER27> It's not like there can't be an accurate way to measure this.

Pre-register patient problems, and see how fast doctors solve problems on average/median. Then it doesn't matter how jovial/amicable the doc is.

With enough data you can fish out potential signals (and then test them properly), maybe bedside manner really doesn't matter, maybe being on time is more important. (Because then people spend less time in the clinic among other sick people.)

And as others mentioned the teacher eval problem can be solved by splitting the lecturer, exam writer and grader roles. (Grading should be done by a book written as edge cases accumulate, edge cases should be handled without names to prevent bias, as much as possible.) And then aggregate stats can be published about each class and school.

<comment><USER26> Sorry no, it doesn't work like that. In either case.

Doctors, like professors, are evaluated by former patients based on a mix of factors.

In your doctor example, doctors don't "solve problems". They see patients. Many times these patients present with conflicting and hard-to-resolve symptoms. I imagine with the internet this has gotten worse. They use a mix of Occam's Razor, deductive reasoning, and social psychology for _the patient 's long-term health_.

You don't want a doctor that finds the answers to complex problems and gives out morphine. You want a doctor that over decades has patients with the best outcomes. In my example, the one doctor may have ticked you off so much you decide never to go back -- and quit smoking just to prove her wrong. That's a win for both you and the doc, although there's no problem being solved.

You can speculate various ways to go at this. Perhaps the doctor is evaluated by other doctors working at that location. Or perhaps it's a matrix of various things. As long as you're just pulling stuff out of the air, you can invent any kind of system you'd like. And tech will deliver it for you.

Human interventions are messy affairs, and thank goodness for that. We are not robots. Your proposal might do a great job of sorting out professors who teach students well enough to take the test, but heck if I see where that is the end of the analysis. That's just the beginning. We're just getting started talking about professors who can lead a class to mostly pass a test. That should be a baseline for any professor.

This is the problem we see in software development. You can come up with all sorts of metrics to stand in place of evaluating whether a team/person is good or not, but whatever you come up with mostly seem to work -- and has very bad effects on those being measured. (With the possible exception of business- value-loop feedback time)

I don't think this is tractable in the way you seem to want it. If I were picking a college or professor, I might look at five or six variables and weigh them in various ways depending on my personal needs and goals at the time -- which might change tomorrow. I might want to go interview them. Meet some current and former students.

There is a severe and onerous "platform danger" in tech. It starts with the conceit that we can build platforms for anything. It ends up with people not- as-smart-as-they-used-to-be having Google tell them where to go for dinner. Or Wally in Dilbert coding himself up a minivan. [0]

I'm not saying the metric definitions and accumulations aren't _interesting_. They deserve to be considered. I'm saying that by reducing human judgment to single vector, it makes us as a species dumber. That's one of those intuitive things that sound good but are in reality quite bad.

0\. [https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13](https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13)

<comment><USER27> Over decades, yes, but that is moving the goalpost.

The vast majority of healtcare problems are dependent on using the right known technique (medication, surgery, etc.) and of course the problem is finding that, so diagnosis. Handing out morphine is not a solution in the genral case.

Long-term health is sadly largely independent of acute healthcare providers' work. It depends on genetics, environmental factors, behavior (exercise, diet, lifestyle) and a stochastic factor of acute problem solving (as the body breaks down more and more depends on doctors, and the fast and correct identification and application of the best healthcare technique).

So healthcare has two categories, the first is the common flu, I have some gastro issues, refer to specialist, manage chronic illnesses (diabetes, pain, low/high blood pressure) and the other is usually the problem for specialists, when they have no or wrong idea what's going on and thus an acute problem becomes a year(s) long trail of tears.

Now, that said, I'm not advocating for ignoring the edge cases and just use this one simple magic formula to decide who can play doctor. But we are still stuck in the dark, because we focus on the complexity, the long term, the human component, the expertise, yet fail to do the most basic thing to get at least somewhat reliable data.

And I'm aware of the problem of fishing for signals in data, but without it we can't even start the trial and error process, we can't differentiate between the two cases, and on average let's say we end up doing nothing.

Furthermore, we know that the obvious solution is to refactor the system. But that rarely presents a real possibility for education and human long term health. (You know, the small stuff :)) It'd be easy to ban smoking and alcohol and give less damaging stuff for people instead and spend more to treat addicts, and introduce negative income tax as a form of basic income to help poverty to reduce stress and help mental health to reduce number of smokers. Similarly it'd be easy to reform schools, and do all of the above to help parents to have more time for their kids so they get a better nurturing youth overall, which makes them ambitious and motivated to learn, study, explore and understand. And it'd be easy to do all this, but that's not likely. Hence the proposal for simple but maybe vastly effective changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a teacher, I disagree strongly with the conclusions of this article. Anonymous student evaluations are an invaluable tool to improve my teaching. The students say so many fair and useful things!

<comment><USER29> I think the problem is when student evaluation have an affect (positive or negative) on the teacher career.

<comment><USER28> Yes, when that measure becomes a target it may have some unintended consequences. But the device is too useful to be discarded for that reason.

<comment><USER30> The teachers can do it voluntarily and for their own eyes, without making it an evaluation form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is my suspicion that the attitude of american students towards their professors is perhaps a function of the privatization of schools. since students are paying for their education they feel entitled to a good grade regardless of performance. I would like to know others thoughts on this. I don't know much about post secondary education in Europe but it seems different from the American collegiate system somehow.

<comment><USER32> > privatization of schools

Hmm? There has always been private schools. Nothing is new about them

<comment><USER33> Over the last several decades, US public colleges and universities have generally seen a declining share of funding from the chartering governments, relying more on business activity plus student fees.

This is probably what is being referred to.

<comment><USER34> The student fees and tuition are mostly paid for by government backed student loans. There really isn't any private education in the US past high school.

<comment><USER31> I don't see the government paying for my college... In my experience a majority of my friends have or are on track to have student debt from having to pay for college.

<comment><USER25> Technically you wouldn't see it even if it was there. For most public universities, it comes as a direct allocation from the state legislature to the university.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No shit basing compensation on reviews by people who have an overt bias to blame the instructor.

The purpose of the review should be purely to provide feedback to the instructor and TA. It should not be available to the administration - <USER2> purpose is to help the TA and instructors improve their teaching. Especially if the instructors have tenure and so can't be fired for failing to teach.

Ratings should also be scaled to control for biases - what are the average grades given by each student, how do they compare to other students in their classes, and to their course grade.

<comment><USER35> My university explicitly rewards TAs with high reviews. I swear I've walked in on people handing out assignment solutions.

<comment><USER11> In the US at least you're essentially expected to be a TA as part of most PhD programs, so if your ability to complete your PhD is dependent on the will of students who you might be causing to fail - or you might just not be a good teach - why would you not do that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the main problems with the educational system is that students are evaluated by the same person that teaches them. If the teacher wasn't the one grading the mean grade of the students would be a decent evaluation of the performance of teacher.

<comment><USER37> If another professor wrote the exams for a class they didn't sit in, you'd have the students screaming in unison, "this wasn't discussed in class!" Not exactly disagreeing with the idea, but students have been normalized to the idea that, with enough studying and concentration, any exam can be aced. When they feel like they've been cheated by the system they get discouraged, making a harmful learning experience.

<comment><USER38>
      If another professor wrote the exams for a class they
      didn't sit in, you'd have the students screaming in
      unison, "this wasn't discussed in class!"

In standard testing at other levels, this is solved by a syllabus.

For example, in electronic engineering I would expect a second-year class in switch mode power supply design at any university to look extremely similar.

Admittedly there may be classes in cutting-edge research, opinion-based subjects or extremely niche topics, where you can't find two academics in the country who could agree on a year's syllabus and set of answers. In my degree I'd say less than 25% of courses were that way, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a short commentary piece, not exactly much there. There's some interesting comments, the one at the top right now says

"They are no doubt imprecise, but for a majority of the faculty the scores form a tight bunch around a mean. Newer faculty are likely to have lower scores, so it is often times useful to sit down with them and review the feedback and talk about ways to improve. A few faculty members continually score higher than average, and I want to know why--perhaps they can help do some mentoring with the lower scoring faculty."

<comment><USER40> > mentoring with the lower scoring faculty

Of course this comment assumes that higher scores means better teaching.

FWIW, my experience both as a prof and as an evaluator of profs is that when students are reasonable good their comments, in general, are reasonably useful. After all, they are in the room and they see what is happening.

The problem is that when students diverge from reasonably well-prepared and reasonably hard-working, their responses diverge from valuable. It is a kind of Dunning–Kruger, where you get evaluations that are hard to reconcile with any kind of learning goals standard.

All this would be mitigated if there were multiple measures. But there are not, at least in practice that I've seen.

It is a problem. As an evaluator you want to give people credit for doing a good job. But it can be hard to tell.

As a prof for many years, I know how to increase evaluations. (I don't agree that it is grades; I recently had a fifth year review and calculated the correlation between my grades and class evaluations for those years and r^2 was basically zero.) But the things that increase evaluations are not very tied to increasing learning and are certainly not tied to increasing the amount of material covered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I had taught two semesters of a basic pharmacy course at a local community college. Of the 20 or so student reviews I received, 80% of them mentioned my 'ta-tas'. Enough said.

<comment><USER25> I've read the evaluations of a few of my female colleagues. Without fail, a good portion of them are toe-curlingly sexist.

<comment><USER42> Care to give an example? Are you male or female?

<comment><USER25> I'm male.

 _Lots_ of students under the impression that commenting on their dress is appropriate. A large chunk of those being suggesting they dress in ways more visually interesting. Some direct references to their appearance (usually "positive").

One particularly egregious one speculating on who she slept with to have her position.

 _Tons_ of gendered expectations in language. Expectations to "be more nurturing" and things like that. Far more comments about them being "young", "inexperienced" and "new" than my own evaluations, despite being considerably more experienced than I am (and no, there was no way my class was just more polished - it was thrown together last minute).

<comment><USER43> > Tons of gendered expectations in language.

That would make for a rather interesting study if they look at gender expectations overall for teachers. From Swedish studies it has been clear that male teachers leave the professions significant more and earlier than female teachers, and same with male students for the teacher master program in higher education. The numbers is very similar if not almost identical to master programs in STEM except for the genders being reversed, a fact that is rather unexplored in gender studies but noted in a somewhat recent government study.

Just looking at evaluations, I wonder how height, build and wealth symbols (expensive car, clothing, jewelry) impact the rating for male teachers. Do a non-typical male traits contribute more negatively to the score for male teachers than non-typical female traits do for female teachers? Same question for typical male traits and female traits. Is it correlated to leaving the profession, and is there a difference in abuse tolerance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> There's a much better way to hold educators to account - have other educators sit in on classes. But this is often very strongly resisted, apparently it's 'unprofessional'.

<comment><USER45> I'd be curious to hear who thinks this is unprofessional. Not any educators I know.

<comment><USER46> While I can't find any specific sources in the field of education, I was taught in engineering school that engineers reviewing the work of another engineer, unless their job specifically required them to review work, was against the code of ethics in Ontario. It looks like this is true as well in the USA which has this tidbit in their code of ethics.[1]

"a. An Engineer in private practice will not review the work of another engineer for the same client, except with the knowledge of such engineer, or unless the connection of such engineer with the work has been terminated."

[1][http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/4099](http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/4099)

<comment><USER47> This is different though, because of the "except with knowledge of said engineer" line. This code is trying to prevent clients from, for example, getting a "second opinion" on a project if they are unhappy that the first engineer deemed it unsafe. This isn't really an issue in teaching. I think that it would be impolite to just drop in on a colleagues class unannounced, especially if it is a bit lecture where you might go unnoticed, but I don't see why a prearranged visit would be unprofessional per se. (Perhaps because it would cause students to doubt the quality of their instructor?)

FWIW my understanding is that at my university the response to poor evals is a visit from a colleague, to assess whether the teacher really is weak or if the material is just difficult. Depending on that, the instructor may get additional coaching in teaching technique. This seems like a sensible approach to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We pushed very hard at my alma mater to publicize course/teacher evaluations. We eventually got the University to accept iff a minimum participation rate was met (on a per course basis-- so it wasn't all or nothing. We'd get a subset of the data when enough participation occurred. We considered this reasonable, since if very few students participate, the data isn't all that meaningful).

Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas where students feel improvement could be made.

Also, the biases pointed out in these reviews aren't unique to academia. Gender and age biases exist everywhere. This article sounds like it's just pushing the idea that students should have less influence in the hiring and promotion decisions of professors. You know, the very people that the teachers first and foremost serve at a university.

<comment><USER48> > Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, > if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't > feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas > where students feel improvement could be made.

There is also the third option, which the author is arguing for: that the professors do not think the ratings are an accurate reflection of their teaching skills.

<comment><USER49> I'm sure many professors would agree.

Perhaps the engineering statistics professor I met who bragged that no one ever got an A on his final, because teaching wasa competition between him and the students. And the government professor I had who was inordinately proud of the fact that his course was required because three soldiers from Texas stayed in China after the Korean war and spent the rest of the first class going around the room having students introduce themselves and then mocking them. (I dropped the class the next day.) And a number who were just disorganized and incompetent, but protected by their relationship with other faculty. And the professor who was given tenure for political reasons, after threatening to fail an entire class (of a required course) of computer science undergrads because they weren't electrical engineering great students.

<comment><USER50> I bet the adjunct whose english was so bad that she would just answer a question kind of close to what you asked, as quickly as possible and try and move on would too.

She also answered any questions asked in Mandarin, in Mandarin. When asked to translate an exchange for the rest of the class, she blushed and said 'it was complicated'. At the end of the semester, the class was so far behind, 1/3 of the materials for the course exam were delivered during an optional study session.

And so would the electrophysiology professor who spent over an hour of a grad seminar explaining how to use a floppy disk. Because he had trouble with computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> A possible solution would be to split the job, to avoid conficts of interest. One teacher teaches. Another one grades. When I was studying in France in "prépa", all students wanted to get a real evaluation of their level, because the really important exam to enter the best universities was organized nation- wide. But, this is hard to organize in private universities where students are also clients. Which parent would pay 40k$/y to be told that his kid does not study well? Maybe, here also, to avoid conflicts of interest, the job can be split. One university teaches. Another organization grades.

<comment><USER52> This is precisely what some private schools in Germany do (yes, there are a few of those).

They might've started doing so to combat the notion that private education is worth less because it just might be easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> My best advice I got about college teaching:

University is a place of higher learning, not higher teaching.

If you're relying on being spoon fed the course, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER54> What exactly are universities selling in that case?

From an individual standpoint, sure, a student is always well-advised to take charge of their own learning process. But if you can do _that,_ what do you need a university for?

At this point I'm pretty sure the answer boils down to "a piece of paper and a dating pool."

<comment><USER55> Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if uni for tech becomes a thing of the past. Uni didn't teach me anything I didn't already know from working on personal projects and im fairly sure my public git repos had far more effect in job interviews than uni did. I have talked to others who have finished and they hardly know anything compared to those I know who are self taught.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In my experience this has been good for weeding out really bad profs. At my Grad school they turfed a prof 1/2 way through that was bones bad.

That said - it's perverse at the other end and I do believe that there is unconscious sexism.

We had a really smart bunch of people, and some of the female teachers were a little more apprehensive in front of us which I think signals to people subconsciously.

Another way: the feedback has to be _interpreted_.

I suggest that the profs should not be 'graded' by students - rather there should just be an open ended opportunity for feedback.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's been awhile since I was a student, but I remember the reviews on ratemyprofessors.com to be pretty accurate.

There were some asshole teachers employed at my college and they were called out for it accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm a CS student in Germany and contrary to the authors claim we actually do evaluate teachers (to be fair that might not have been common place when she was teaching).

This is obviously anecdotal but in my experience these ratings seem to reflect my perceived quality of the lectures quite well.

</comment><comment><USER59> Sure, evalutations are flawed, but it appears that universities are unable or unwilling to develop other quality measures. For example, this semester I've had a networking professor that would get half way into explaining something interesting and then state that he didn't care about the topic so he didn't prepare to talk about it and we'd be moving on to something else.

I've got an A in that class, but I wouldn't say that I learned much from it due to that attitude. I don't think that the CS department here has any way to tell that something like that is happening without evaluations.

<comment><USER60> Right. I think anybody reading comments in these review sites can see if students are ranking professors well for being "easy" or if they're ranking them well for being great educators.

The universities I went to for my undergrad and graduate programs both had an informal rating system for professors and I definitely encountered some of both.

One of the most highly rated professors I encountered was also one of the best educators at the school. He had a reputation as being a brutally hard grader. But most of the students who left his classes with some bruises and (what would have been in any other class) a mediocre grade, ached to take more from him because you felt the immense value of his teaching.

I had other professors who taught poorly, tolerated cheating, or gave non- sequitur exams on material they never covered and so on. There was absolutely no recourse or way of providing feedback on these professors and even ones who received universally poor reviews at the end of the semester stayed on and even attained tenure in some cases.

The only _real_ recourse was for students to rank professors amongst themselves and simply starve out poor professors with lack of registrations. _That 's_ the only signal universities seem to respond to.

<comment><USER59> I got the impression that the author was talking about department run evaluation sheets rather than review sites. Student evaluations shouldn't be seen as an evaluation metric but a smoke detector that indicates a staff member might need some more direction.

Teaching is an art, just because someone isn't doing it well doesn't mean they can't do it well. In fact in some cases I imagine they are doing poorly because they would rather be working on their research area. Providing the opportunity to course correct rather than starve out is good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> There could be sexism at work or not, but how can you even define "identical" teachers? I never saw two teachers that were identical (even if they had the same gender, ethnicity, age and sexual orientation).

</comment><comment><USER62> If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away.

Grading on a curve is not without problems, particularly when class sizes are small, but it has a lot of benefits. It makes it easier to compare students across schools when the schools use the same curve.

<comment><USER63> That is a horrible idea. Then students will try to take courses with weak students. Oh, that smart group is taking CS340 next semester? Guess I'll wait until the following semester. Do not turn it into even more of a competition than it already is.

Why should someone else's ability influence my grade???

<comment><USER64> Because the meaning of your grade is that it gets compared to their grade.

<comment><USER63> Says who? Why can't it be used to evaluate my individual learning/effort?

Grades only make sense to compare _within_ the same class at the same university during the same semester.

<comment><USER65> Grades are relative to other people. That's the point of places asking for GPA. If you were just evaluating your effort / learning, your grades could just say "learned a lot" or "made a good effort". But GPA is a way to discriminate between potential candidates for schools/businesses, and thus needs to be quantifiable and comparable.

<comment><USER66> No, not at all. GPA tells the difference between "mastered the material" and "did well enough not to get expelled" which can be a useful signal for an employer, but universities and professors don't view it as their responsibility to sort students for industry's needs.

For starters, the quality of students is not uniform across universities. Middle of the pack at Harvard is a very different thing from middle of the pack at a party school. To get a useful ordering, you'd need to give every CS graduate the same standardized test, like the bar exam.

<comment><USER67> Grades are relative to other people in your school and program; it's why you mention the institution on the resume. And IME you don't often communicate your grade but your class rank, most notably if you're at the very top (valedictorian, etc); even with grade inflation schools still must be able to differentiate the very top students from everybody else so they can actually provide these honors. You can't graduate an entire class of "top" students, no matter how earnestly they studied.

With few exceptions there is no mastering the material, or at least there shouldn't be. Not in college. There's always more complex material you can use to differentiate students. When you grade on a curve the test should be difficult enough that even the best students will typically get at least one question wrong, with most students falling along a nice bell distribution. (I say most because it's probably better to err on the side of a handful of students clustering at the top rather than at the bottom, especially if the bottom means flunking out.)

This can be more difficult for smaller, seminar style classes. One solution is giving the professor leeway to shift up and tighten the curve so he's not forced to give Fs or Ds. These classes are usually in the latter years of a program, particularly in undergraduate, where it's less important to winnow students out and ensure challenging curriculums.

That latter point is important. If you don't enforce some sort of statistical distribution how can you gauge the quality of your curriculum? If everybody is getting As is that because all your students are smart and disciplined, or because the material is too simple? If you require a bell distribution, then the curriculum will by _necessity_ be a good fit for your cohort of students. In this way a university can maintain a quality curriculum without having to resort to external metrics or comparisons with other schools.

<comment><USER66> I'm aware that this philosophy of education and grading exists, and it may well be superior, but it's not how things worked in any part of my education. Grades indicated how well you met the instructor's expectations. Most classes gave mostly As and Bs: if you weren't going to do well relative to the course, you wouldn't let it get to the point of a letter grade.

Instead the differentiation was between departments and courses. It was well understood that X majors were Y majors who couldn't hack it, and that within a major, certain classes were for high-achieving masochists while others were schedule padding. (This was crucial information, not just dick-measuring. You could easily put yourself in crisis by taking a class beyond your abilities, or multiple hard classes at once. Friends helped each other avoid such nightmares). If you asked me to evaluate a classmate's transcript, I wouldn't even look at their grades, only at the classes they allowed themselves to have grades in.

No one has ever asked me that, or to see my transcript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is also a problem with developer bootcamps since they get a lot of "sales" from reviews. They can often cater to students to the detriment of the learning experience. At times it is about catering to creature comforts, but can bleed over into lessening the learning experience.

And especially in bootcamps since things are so fast paced and often times emotional, the reviews are not objective. Many are too positive or too negative.

</comment><comment><USER69> Teachers should be judged on the longitudinal performance of their students. Khan Academy and BlackBoard must have some utterly fascinating data in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER70> As someone who had a teacher who literally was tenured, had the absolute worst reviews ever on the website and wherever, literally recorded his lectures once and now goes to lectures just to answer questions (which btw he barely answers em he sometimes just posts to the lecture video) I strongly feel evaluating teachers is a necessary thing.

<comment><USER67> Is something preventing you from communicating your concerns directly to the administration (in person or anonymously) outside the context of a perfunctory, after-the-fact review?

I would imagine a truly poor teacher would standout for the number of unsolicited complaints.

<comment><USER70> Truthfully I have no idea what he even does with the required review papers that are given to us a the end of the class. Lots of people have reviewed him on Askmyprofessor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Possible alternative method is to hire and train students to be observers, both covert and overt. Put them into classes as if they were students, and those students Would then Evaluate that professor. It could work especially cross colleges, where those students will never naturally take classes by that professor.

<comment><USER27> Around here the student associations have seats on the accreditation bodies and they do indeed sit on in classes as they tour the county.

I don't think this is effective, but it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This article seems to suggest larger problem with grades than reviews. It seems like reviews are just aggravating the grade problem.

</comment><comment><USER73> I would also assume that the students, taken as an average, would also be some of the worst qualified people to evaluate educators, pretty much by definition.

</comment><comment><USER74> As I expected, this is an opinion piece from a teacher whining because they got bad ratings:

> I got a terrible rating, and its publication humiliated me.

While this doesn't mean that the article can't make valid points, large parts of it also complain about "today's youth".

I suspect this got upvoted mostly based on the contrarian headline...

</comment><comment><USER75> I was a visiting professor in a local university for a while. The student evaluations were directly proportional to the grades - easier courses = better grades. I refused to see the evaluations and refused to discuss them with my supervisor, it was pointless. BTW my long-term relationship with ex-students is great, at least with the ones I care about.</comment>


Be anonymous, create your own proxy server with AWS EC2 - viral-sangani https://dev.to/viralsangani/be-anonymous-create-your-own-proxy-server-with-aws-ec2-2k63 <comment><USER2> Every time I read a post like this, I feel compelled to talk about the value proposition commercial VPNs provide. Commercial VPNs provide some level of plausible deniability because multiple people's traffic will be shared across a single IP. Building your own VPN or proxy does not provide this level of plausible deniability, as the only person ever having traffic coming from that IP is you.

<comment><USER3> Depends on who you want to be anonymous from right?

Would personal VPN's be a wrong tool to use even if the goal was to be anonymous only from ad-tech companies ?

<comment><USER4> From my understanding, yes. All that an ad-tech company like Google needs is associating your IP with your Google account once and they will know that all traffic from that IP address is yours. Especially when you are the only one using that IP address. Also, visiting a Google site is enough for Google to associate your account with your IP.

This is all coming from my knowledge about networking and browsers. This doesn't mean it is proof that Google is actually doing this, but I would make no sense for them to not do this.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER5> With a proxy server on AWS, it's trivial to change your IP address regularly. That's not a complete solution but it would help.

Another thing you can do if you're rolling your own anonymity solution is to run your browser in a container. That way whenever you start a new browser window, it doesn't inherit any state from your environment or previous browser sessions.

Finally, using a proxy with built in privacy features helps. Privoxy is one example, although it's not being updated very often lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article would be more helpful if it had specified how exactly proxy servers help make browsing more anonymous on the internet. I would also have expected someone who is talking about proxy servers to compare and contrast VPN and why or why not use one over another.

The article initially identifies all the talking points w.r.t online browsing surveillance (cookies, fingerprinting, isp snooping etc). But it never tells how exactly a proxy is solving all those problems. If the author had in fact dug into those aspects, it would have become apparent that a proxy only changes the clients IP address visible to the website. Cookies, fingerprinting still exists.

I haven't followed through on the instructions yet for setting up proxy. But the authors ignorance (intentional or not) about proxy servers impact, makes me question if it's even worthwhile to follow the instructions.

I am still curious on a couple of things after reading this though 1\. What is the difference between a proxy and VPN? 2\. How much does hiding my IP address help w.r.t hiding myself from corporate surveillance?

Here's a list of stuff that I am currently experimenting with as part of balancing browsing experience v/s being anonymous. 1\. Use a VPN[1] 2\. Configure Firefox to resist fingerprinting 3\. Do not use ISP's DNS resolver. 4\. Block JavaScript on browser 5\. Use Tor as your browser.

[1] setting up a personal VPN was a breeze with [https://trailofbits.github.io/algo/](https://trailofbits.github.io/algo/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I didn't see any mention of encryption. Wouldn't this mean that data is flowing unencrypted between you and the proxy, _even if you are visiting an HTTPS site_ , thus defeating the whole purpose of HTTPS? And without even any indication in the browser that you are doing so. It's possible to set up a proxy over HTTPS, but it's a much more involved process.

<comment><USER7> Normally if you set the proxy, HTTPS will be sent over CONNECT verb and the shoot connection will be proxied, not by plaintext forwarding of the original request.

<comment><USER6> Ah interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks!

I've been using exactly this method for a few months as a cheap alternative to a VPN for putting me in certain countries (that AWS has a zone in of course). I was always very careful not to access sensitive websites when using it - <AUTHOR> guess my caution was misplaced!</comment></comment></comment>


Cloudspotting - An app to draw on the sky - <AUTHOR> http://cloudspotting.co Startup Bus competitor Cloudspotting, is an app that lets you draw on the sky, and share your imagination. <comment><USER2> You should either change the way you get random clouds or increase your database. I got a bunch of repeats in very few clicks. If you do it the way that iTunes comes up with a shuffle list, for instance, by creating a randomly seeded list when someone opens the site, you'd prevent the repeats.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, sir. They are all clouds D:

</comment><comment><USER4> Y'all get my vote!

</comment><comment><USER5> allright!</comment>


Siggraph2019 Geometric Algebra by Charles Gunn and Steven De Keninck ( - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo <comment><AUTHOR> Steven De Keninck is the author of ganja.js ([https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js](https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js)).

Check out this demo [https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated- orbits](https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits)

He's also created a community for people into Geometric Algebra, bivector.net. Join the discord channel, [https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk](https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk)</comment>


Ask HN: I'm scatter brained. What do I do? - <AUTHOR>

I religiously keep a journal to keep track of my thoughts. Two weeks ago, I had a "great idea" that I was dead set on executing. Now I have no desire to do anything with it. But I have a new shiny idea...<p>This has been going on since I can remember. What can I do? <comment><USER2> Accept that most "ideas" which have no actions behind them are relatively meaningless flights of fancy, recalibrate your expectations such that doing meaningful work on a project constitutes work and having great ideas constitutes daydreaming, and if you desire to execute on a project, execute on a project.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can do a few things, starting from defining what your goal is.

It seems what you want is to start a startup [1], but regardless I would suggest you pressure yourself to do the opposite: to try not to have ideas, and to try not to start a startup. Don't pressure yourself to pick an an idea. Stop setting up expectations because they limit creativity.

The more general underlying principle is that constraint is no less important than freedom. Constraints unleash the imagination and are key in creativity. Limit yourself to less, and you start overflowing to a new direction.

The more specific advice is:

(1) Continue keeping a journal of your thoughts, but write in the morning, preferably as soon as you wake up. Don't leave this for the evening. Besides helping get the negativity out, it helps unearth fringe thoughts at the time where your critical self who can kill them isn't awake yet to do so. Shoot for writing for at least 30 minutes.

(2) Let thoughts pull you in any direction they want, and give them time to do so. By time I mean three things: (a) make 1.5-2hrs of time for yourself to "play" with thoughts like that uninterrupted from the world, (b) give yourself (what seems to be) at least 2 weeks for these thoughts to develop, because that's enough time for the subconscious to displace bad thoughts with better ones [2] and to grow fragile thoughts (which you might even not be willing to admit to yourself) into stronger ones, and (c) _when_ (NOT IF) you get stuck, pursue other interests, because besides relaxing you it removes the expectation to come up with a solution, which then frees your subconscious to have thoughts it wasn't allowed to have before; thoughts tend to drift back to what you want to pursue on their own.

(3) Since you are still incubating [3], there isn't a focused session yet where you should go in "closed mode" shutting the world out. What you want to do at this stage is gather material to feed your subconscious. So play. Indulge. With constraint: your goal is _not_ to create something; it's to play. When an idea grows enough it will pull you on its own for (what seems to be) longer than 2 weeks, where the idea shuts the world out for you.

Also understand it's important to have and trust a process, and this one appears to be well documented [4]. As John Cleese said, creativity is not a talent; it's a way of operating. But faith is a key ingredient here [6].

I'd be happy to learn what you discover. And if you want to start a startup, better to solve problems you have yourself.

P.S. I'm also sorry to say I disagree with the comment in [5] (closed now) on confidence. It's important to lack confidence to some degree, because that's a sign you are tackling something slightly beyond your reach. The real danger is that if there is one person around you who makes you feel defensive you lose the confidence to play and then it's goodbye creativity. So find people who are equally willing to play with ideas. Just as you need confidence to take decisive action -- to move into "closed mode" and execute when you are sure you got it all right -- you also need to _not_ have confidence when you are gathering material because you don't know what all the options are yet. If you are confident from the beginning, you should be alarmed. Keep yourself honest.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537091)

[2] - When you say you are scatter brained, you probably mean you are displacing weaker thoughts with stronger thoughts. So you are already doing part of what you should be doing.

[3] - You seem to be between 1 and 2 in [http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/04/a-techniqu...](http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/04/a-technique- for-producing-ideas-young/)

[4] - The brainpickings link from [3] is full of links to related research.

[5] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537566)

[6] - Robert Greene described this process as:

 _When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient. Assuming your practice proceeds at a steady level, over days and weeks certain elements of the skill become hardwired. Slowly, the entire skill becomes internalized, part of your nervous system.

The only real impediment to this is yourself and your emotions - boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions - they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters.

What you can do is have faith in the process. The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle. The panic disappears after repeated exposure. The frustration is a sign of progress -- a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice. The insecurities will transform into their opposites when you gain mastery. Trusting this will all happen, you will allow the natural learning process to move forward, and everything else will fall into place. _

</comment><comment><USER4> Usually if you are not sure about an idea it means it didnt grow on you. Many people have issues with multiple ideas popping in their heads. I would suggest planning each idea (making mini business/action plan). After 10-20 scraped plans like that (that you spend at least ~10 hours developing) you will be more willing to commit to one bigger idea and stop wasting your time. This worked for me and first time in my life I committed to project that is 1 year long. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you consume a lot of caffeine? Honestly curious. I find myself in the same state you report when I consume a lot (>2 cups) of strong coffee per day. New ideas spawn at a great rate and I feel frustrated that I can't pursue them. When I cut down my intake significantly my mind is more restful and I feel able to focus more deeply. This helps greatly with filtering ideas and choosing which to follow through on.

<comment><USER6> Also Aspartame. I know I have better focus without that junk in my system. Try it for 30 or 40 days and see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I'm currently reading "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ([http://www.amazon.com/Flow-P-S-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Flow-P-S-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi- ebook/dp/B000W94FE6))

Perhaps you need to think a bit about your life theme, what you should concentrate in and how it unifies your ideas. This subject comes later in the book and my advice for you is to read the book from the beginning as it would give you lots of food for thought and might help to give you focus in your life as well as to your ideas (and what you worry about).

Regarding what do to with the multiple ideas, relax, you can't embrace the world. Focus on the ones that have a deeper meaning to you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Stop caring

</comment><comment><USER9> what's your goal? get better at a skill? start a business? if it's starting a business there's a whole lot more than having an idea. if you don't have the resources to put behind something it's probably better not to try.</comment>


Twitter admits that the White House tweet it censored doesn't break its rules - <AUTHOR> https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-admits-censored-white-house-tweet-doesnt-break-rules/ <comment><USER2> Fringe nonsense, get this off HN.</comment>


Only 27% of Employees Believe in Their Company's Values - <AUTHOR> http://cactushr.com/blog/2016/09/28/only-27-of-employees-believe-in-their-companys-values/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/195491/few- employees-b...](http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/195491/few-employees- believe-company-values.aspx) [http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/195506/few-workers- app...](http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/195506/few-workers-apply- company-values-jobs.aspx)

^ the link is more of a brochure, those seem to be the source from the article.

One of my standard questions while interviewing is * What is your favorite company pillar and why? * What is your favorite thing about the culture? * What is your favorite thing about your job?

They seem very similar, but two look at interaction with the company, and one from the employee. I get a significant pause on the first two. With a similar enough response, the work atmosphere fosters team work, good people, and productivity. The answer skates around the culture and pillars of a company. Why you enjoy worker here, I've heard often enough that they like working with tech.

There is generally company culture, and team culture. I'd be more curious about the metrics for team culture. For me to commit to the company I need to be committed to my team culture.

Lastly it's a give and take, your culture, team or company, needs to be mallable. You have core beliefs and ways you operate. But each team member, employee, is different. What lights their fire will vary from one to the next. They come because your building this application, or part of your culture is down time with co workers. But that's broad, what makes them tick. Find that and add that as part of your team culture, give that to them and it naturally progresses.

</comment><comment><USER3> The word 'values' often has a strong connotation with bullshit. Probably because of it being used in superficial ways, counterfeited values. This is one of those things that you cannot 'fake until you make it'. They are there or they are not.

Despite these associations of subjectivity, obfuscation and vagueness, it is very important. The power of this to attract people to your banner can never be underestimated. It is something that resonates deeply in our brains, that makes us work together in a way nothing else can.

Musk would be nowhere close to where he is today without having enough people believe in his company. People are willing to work harder, for less money, to be part of the story.

<comment><USER4> > People are willing to work harder, for less money, to be part of the story.

Much of what makes "silicon valley work" is exactly this - people who grew up in Middle America and who have low time preferences managed to get a good education.

They are then misled by the spirit of the times into coming to the coasts and largely working for less than a market-clearing wage. Generally they do this because they think they will "make a difference" or "get a fat paycheck when the equity comes in".

Looked at this way, it seems that silicon valley is an engine running on fumes. Eventually employees with skills will demand market clearing wages.</comment></comment>


Rotating a map with CSS3 and jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://isithackday.com/hacks/map-rotate/

<comment><AUTHOR> Blog article about it here: [http://www.wait-till-i.com/2010/02/09/rotating- maps-with-css...](http://www.wait-till-i.com/2010/02/09/rotating-maps-with- css3-and-jquery/)

I had some problems getting it to work at first. To fix it, try using the tab key to get the focus onto the map, then it'll work. Pretty neat!</comment>


Ward Cunningham on Exploratory Parsing - <AUTHOR> http://c2.com/~ward/sao/TechIgnite-v1/

<comment><USER2> This is vintage Ward. He comes up with stuff that is so simple and so obviously useful that you immediately wonder why you didn't think of it.

I love how this takes a weakness (incorrect parsing) and turns it into a strength by making it interactive.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a part I'm not sure I'm clear on. Is this process completely automated? Or does it still require a human in the loop to iterate the grammar? I'm assuming it's the latter.

If it's completely automated, how does it choose what the subsequent rule to further refine the parsing is?

<comment><USER4> A human is in the loop, deciding what to dive deeper into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads like it was written by an exploratory text generator. For example, at the end of one of the paragraphs we find the sentence "Is happy to read the whole file."

</comment><comment><USER6> Very neat. Based on the work of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar>

</comment><comment><USER7> You just made my day. This is fantastic.</comment>


Apache 2 or Nginx as a highly secure (PFS) SSL encrypting reverse proxy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.exoplatform.com/2014/04/17/apache-2-nginx-highly-secure-pfs-ssl-encrypting-reverse-proxy-exo-platform-4-0-web-application

<comment><USER2> Thanks Eric for this post ( [https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricTaiebWalch](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricTaiebWalch) / [https://twitter.com/teknologism](https://twitter.com/teknologism) ), you are an amazing community member!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good detailed tutorial ! thanks

</comment><comment><USER4> a very complete walkthrough</comment>


Netflix suffers first massive global outage - <AUTHOR> https://news.alphastreet.com/netflix-suffers-first-massive-global-outage/ <comment><USER2> At PyCon in Cleveland this year Amjith Ramanujam did a presentation on "how Netflix does failovers in 7 minutes flat" [0]. Worth a watch/listen for anyone interested in what their response may have looked like. Now I'm curious to read a post-mortem from them and see whether their procedures worked as expected (it sounds like they were down longer than 7 minutes) or where they encountered unexpected issues.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQI56-up3Yk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQI56-up3Yk)

<comment><USER3> Is 7 minutes good? If you have a multimaster redundant systems, you don't need failover.

<comment><USER4> You write that as to indicate it is easy do. It's more than "a multimaster db" to Netflix, it's CDNs, authentication, logging, security...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It might not seem like this is a big deal. For now that's probably right; but Netflix has aspirations to do nightly news and if that's intended to be live or near real-time we should be comparing their uptime with broadcast TV. When was the last time ABC or Fox went off air?

Again, not right now, but at some point this sort of outage becomes critical and will probably deserve more scrutiny.

I'm impressed by how reliable Netflix is, hopefully this just pushes them harder.

And maybe even prepares them for a less neutral internet.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't seem to be all that reliable or is it just me? I have it on a fire stick and it regularly stalls at 20%, the only reliable way to get it going again is to reboot the whole stick. About once every two weeks the cache gets corrupted and I have to clear it and login again. Both a total PITA when you are just trying to squeeze an episode of something in between kids bedtime and grownup bedtime...

<comment><USER7> That sounds like the difference between Netflix-the-service and Netflix-the- app. Maybe ditch the Fire stick and get something more reliable?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope they release a post mortem about this. Would be very interesting.

<comment><USER9> I was just about to reply with the exact same message.

Netflix has spent A LOT of time and money on their infrastructure, expounding their engineering views, proclaiming best practices, and how they use redundancy/sharding/insert best practices and major buzzwords in order to combat the chance of this happening.

I'm a huge fan of Netflix and their approaches to infrastructure, and I'm almost certain that they'll have some very interesting conclusions from this.

<comment><USER10> Can't test for _everything_ , but seeing this is the most significant outage in ages, I'd say they're doing a damned good job.

I mean, after all, the internet's true natural predator still lurks, its yellow CAT steel present across all of the nation...

I speak of course, of Backhoes.

(1): [https://www.wired.com/2006/01/the-backhoe-a-real- cyberthreat...](https://www.wired.com/2006/01/the-backhoe-a-real-cyberthreat/) (2): [https://it.slashdot.org/story/06/01/19/1643215/the- backhoe-t...](https://it.slashdot.org/story/06/01/19/1643215/the-backhoe-the- internets-natural-enemy) (3): [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fiber%20Seek...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fiber%20Seeking%20Backhoe)

<comment><USER11> I heard a story from the construction company (not int US) where my brother is working: on a construction site, they had to dig in an area with fiber. So they called the telco, aking them to disconnect the cables so they could start digging. But the telco was late and a few days later, fed up by the delay (and associated costs), the site manager said "start digging, we'll deal with the fallout". So the backhoe start digging and cut the cables. The telco were quick to send a guy after that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ironically, the article isn't loading for me.

<comment><USER13> Same here. Netflix on the other hand is perfectly fine.

<comment><USER14> The outage happened last night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I thought they have a button in their office which shuts down a server, as a means of testing. Maybe someone brought in their 3 year old and he just kept hitting it.

<comment><USER16> They have a "Chaos Monkey" [1] feature that is intended to bring down individual nodes. "Exposing engineers to failures more frequently incentivizes them to build resilient services."

If Chaos Monkey had been responsible for setting off a global outage, I could imagine business leaders getting cold feet about using a tool like this. In traditional companies, anyways, they'd never have seen the benefit of it and after only hearing the costs, they'd probably be livid that a widespread outage had been caused by something like this.

[1] [https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey](https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey)

<comment><USER17> It's possible that executes would think that way but only because they are not too technical. Every company should have a chaos monkey to make sure stability is at the top of the list always.

<comment><USER18> > Every company should have a chaos monkey.

Big companies do though they call then interns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fnews.alphastreet.com%2Fnetflix- suffers-first-massive-global-outage%2F)

</comment><comment><USER3> Instagram, GitLab, Netflix all down at the same time. Coincidence?

<comment><USER20> Add StackOverflow to that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's an alternative article from CNBC since the linked article is having trouble loading: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/netflix-down-streaming- servi...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/netflix-down-streaming-service-says- it-fixed-problem-that-caused-outage.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mKL4Iq...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mKL4IqFNOO8J:https://news.alphastreet.com/netflix- suffers-first-massive-global-outage/)

</comment><comment><USER23> HN hugs of death? It seems like the article is also down.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm looking forward to the post-mortem of this (hopefully by someone like Dave Hahn)

Hopefully it wasn't a Hurricane's Butterfly kind of deal...

<comment><USER25> What do you mean by Hurricane's Butterfly? I'm familiar with the "if a butterfly flaps its wings" thing but not sure what you're referring to in this context is all.

<comment><USER24> Apologies, was referring to bcantrill's tech talk. [1]

Similar idea, you're in a hurricane but it may have been caused by an insignificant butterfly far awaya.

[1] [https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/hurricanes- butterfly/](https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/hurricanes-butterfly/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> cool to see people totally having to face their addiction. my kids were flopping around on the floor like fish out of water.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to AMP page of the article: [https://news.alphastreet.com/netflix-suffers-first- massive-g...](https://news.alphastreet.com/netflix-suffers-first-massive- global-outage/amp/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder why they have not given an official statement on why it happened. Probably just a one-off case.

</comment><comment><USER28> Did someone at NFLX point Chaos Monkey at something they shouldn't have or was this an "honest failure?"

</comment><comment><USER29> Net Neutrality's been dead for less than 24 hours. Tin foil hats aside, is it realistic to consider a relationship between these two events?

<comment><USER30> Not realistic at all.

<comment><USER31> I think you should expand on why you think so. Here are my reasons:

1\. This is a global outage. Net Neutrality is down in US only.

2\. The pattern of failure is not consistent with American ISPs past attempts. They've wanted to make Netflix less attractive compared to their services, not outright broken. Subtlety is better because outright breakage brings too much attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not surprised.

I've tried to get Netflix's OSS tools like Spinnaker running and it's a total nightmare with how many interdependent services need to run. It took me days to get running and was never reliable. I think they drank a little too much koolaid.

Microservices + async DB updates = hell. After working on such projects, I respect the wisdom of Google making all of their data stores immediately consistent.

A monolith isn't bad at all if it's organized and built to scale horizontally. Move your consistency concerns back to the database where they belong, not between services. It's a joke that monoliths are bad when you look at every popular operating system kernel. These things are multi million line binary blobs in languages that aren't friendly to mistakes and they run EVERYTHING

<comment><USER33> Seeing as this is their first major outage, and Netflix-the-streaming-service has existed since 2007, I'd say don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER32> Assuming their internal projects are built similar to OSS, I ask you to try playing with them yourself and see if you come to the same opinion. There's better ways to critique an arch than just measuring outages.

Netflix has built an amazing system for messing with their servers to try find failure points. And they have a bunch of cleanup jobs that run to fix consistency errors. This is just what I picked up from a past obsession with their architecture.

Then I worked on a few projects built that way, and realized it was a horrible nightmare. By having a global immediately consistent datastore you can push all these concerns back to the database, and your codebase ends up far smaller.

The failure modes tend to explode in complexity when you're doing rpc across services with different datastoress because you have to deal with distributed transactions yourself. Every single call needs to be able to unwind itself across all services.

If you have a call that fans out to 10 other service calls, you need to be able to unwind any of them in any order. It quickly becomes untenable</comment></comment></comment>


Aurelia is 2-3x faster than React and 15-40% faster than Angular 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.durandal.io/2015/12/04/aurelia-repaint-performance-rules/ <comment><USER2> With web workers although it use 3 Watts more CPU power consumption than Aurelia and gain 3 or more fps (Aurelia 45-48fps vs React 51-54fps) more on average. [http://web-perf.github.io/react-worker-dom/](http://web- perf.github.io/react-worker-dom/)</comment>