The trouble with non-profits - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/measurenonprofit

<comment><USER2> "But it does mean that if you're involved in nonprofits (or predictions), you need to be much more careful about making sure you're doing a good job. Unfortunately, few nonprofits do that."

Oh really? So he can cite research that says, for example, that only x% (where x < 50%) of nonprofits with an annual budget of $500k have ever done any sort of evaluation, either comprehensive or more basic?

His assertion may be true. But just throwing this out there with absolutely nothing to back it up, in a blog post titled "The Trouble With Nonprofits", is frankly insulting to me.

I spent > 4 years working in a technical role for a nonprofit, and I can assure people that measurement and evaluation were very much on the minds of staffers. Everyone (funders, management) was becoming more data-driven, so our organization got a grant to conduct a multi-year evaluation. It was a very positive and necessary process, and the results were very positive. Like Aaron, I definitely recommend some sort of measurable goals for most every nonprofit out there.

I don't take issue with his opinion. What I take issue with is the tone of the article.

For example: "...but an actual attempt to measure how much they're improving people's lives. For most nonprofits, I expect these numbers will be depressingly small. "

It can be easy, as young paragons of technology and entrepreneurship, to look over to the nonprofit world and disparage it, to think of it and it's practitioners as "lesser than". I should know; it's the attitude I had before I started working at a nonprofit.

Truth is, running a nonprofit can be a hell of a lot harder than running a for-profit. At any stage, you have all the issues that for-profits have - hiring, firing, managing employees, management issues, getting money in the door, technological problems - PLUS a whole other layer.

A lot of this other layer comes because of the weak link between financial health and results. Am I accomplishing my mission? How do I measure success? How do I maximize success based on dollar spent? How do I judge where to allocate capital or resources - when maximizing revenue isn't a goal?

Why am I wasting my time writing this? Because this article uses a lot of conjecture and one very poor example to make the entire nonprofit sector seem like a bunch of bumbling idiots who don't know how to use spreadsheets. They're not, and it's not fair for this community to see such a distorted view.

<comment><USER3> I've worked at two social ventures that had non-profits as clients (Web Networks, and most recently Urbantastic.com).

There emphatically is something wrong with non-profits. Just because there are some excellent ones (Sturgeon's law applies) doesn't mean that the field at large isn't ill.

An anecdote: we had a meeting with a guy who worked at a large company with a philanthropic streak. They provided, free of charge, a "dashboard" for planning, along with free training and tech support to any non-profit that wanted it (it cost considerable money otherwise). It was simple but very powerful, allowing you to do sensitivity analyses on projections to determine which courses of action would result in the best returns - both monetary and any other metric you wanted to put in (i.e. the social goals of the project).

It was like he was selling popsicles at an ice rink.

We ran into a very similar issue with Urbantastic. We had a web service that was very effective at getting small things done for non-profits: it's called micro-volunteering. There's no supervision required, you just write down what you want and someone always did it.

When we founded Urbantastic we thought the challenge was going to be in getting skilled people to help out for free. That was not a problem. The problem was that we'd go up to non-profits and say: here's a machine where all you have to do is post your todo list, and people will cross off items for you. For free. And we never got uptake.

People lined out the door offering to help, and almost no one took them up on it. Despite our offers to walk non-profits through it, and despite the recent funding cuts which meant that they needed all the help they could get.

I'm not saying that Urbantastic is perfect, but in our pilot cities this was overwhelmingly the result, and I still can't think of any incremental change that we could have done to get the non-profits engaged. A big part of it was that most of them were still uncertain about the whole email thing. It's not an exaggeration to say that some of them didn't know how to use a spreadsheet.

With our fancy web 2.0 ajaxy website, we felt like we were giving out iTunes gift cards to the lost tribes of Papua New Guinea. They didn't value it because they weren't even close to being at the point where they could use it.

I care about social good - I wouldn't have founded a social venture if not. And twice now I've been floored by the state of the non-profit world. Again, 10% of them are brilliant, but the other 90%... It's a big problem, and it's not going to get better by pretending that it's not there. That world is amazingly backwards. And it's saddening to see such important mandates being handled by such ineffective organizations.

My advice to anyone here planning on doing a social venture: drop backwards compatibility with the non-profit world. (one giant caveat: working exclusively with one or two of the few clued-in orgs might work).

<comment><USER4> A lot of what you are saying here resonates with me. I work part-time for a local charity in my town and have been involved in various others at times. There are a number of problems charities normally face which may explain your findings to some extent, including:

\- well meaning but incompetent staff. People don't seem to understand that wanting to do good doesn't naturally translate into the ability to do it.

\- no real management. I suppose this may be local phenomenon, but where I am (UK), there seems to be a tendency for small charities to be managed by wealthy housewives as a kind of hobby job. There is very definitely a social network of them that dominate the charities in my town. Often this means the management will be consistently absent from the organization. You can also see my previous point.

\- no real check on the management. Charity trustees are often people who just want their name to be associated with a charitable organization. I can think of several trustees of the charity I work for who probably have only a vague idea of what we actually do.

\- funding constraints. Charities in the UK who receive funding from government departments are usually monitored in terms of the volume of work they do rather than the outcomes they produce (which are much harder to quantify). Thus the incentive is often to not try to improve efficiency as reducing the work load may negatively impact funding.

Obviously my examples are to some extent just personal experiences that may not be universal. However I would guess that most non-profits face similar problems and that these problems may help explain why you got such a negative reception with your projects.

With regards to volunteers though, what did you to do assess their competency to perform the tasks they were willing to help out with? I ask because part of my job is to manage my organization's volunteers (which mostly come to us on work experience placements from the job centre). They frequently start working for us claiming to have various skills and then we discover that they often don't. For this reason I am usually quite unhappy about accepting new volunteers - when I have to get rid of them is is much harder (emotionally, for me) than sacking an incompetent employee. This might also help explain some of the resistance you encountered to what you were doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This isn't to say that we should have companies replace nonprofits

Yes we should.

Charities I donate to are selling me a product just as much as companies I buy from. That the product is a better world--by some measure that seems reasonable to me, rather than a simple benefit for myself, matters not a whit to my decision making process.

I don't give without a very concrete understanding of what the money will be used for, any more than I buy stock without a concrete understanding of what I'm buying and for how much.

By all means, sell me peace, charity, and goodwill! Perhaps that will motivate you to learn how to produce it, and to convince me that you have done so.

<comment><USER6> For-profit companies selling you goods and services often spend enormous amounts on marketing, advertising, and branding in order to convince you to part with your hard earned money. This doesn't mean their product is any better than their competitors though. It just means they've spun you into believing it is.

While I think it's a good idea to research your charity or donation to a non- profit, I definitely do not think they should operate like a for-profit business.

I think this is a great article, and there are some really pointed areas of improvement for non-profits. However, let's not turn to the free market gods for a solution please.

<comment><USER7> I think it really depends on the specific area/charitable cause - but where it comes to economic development, markets are a far better solution than charities and aid which have often done far more harm than good (e.g. food aid). In general, the potential for inefficiency and even fraud is arguably even higher given the lack of transparency and often weak governance).

Anyone who donates money to a charity should at least spend as much time researching what they're "selling" as they would a comparable product/service. The tax returns are available but some of these firms spend as much as 80% of their funds raised in administration and overhead - which is often far worse than most for profits. Yes, not for profits also "often spend enormous amounts on marketing, advertising, and branding in order to convince you to part with your hard earned money".

Fortunately at least anyone can look up any charity's IRS Form 990 that lists such things as salaries (which are sometimes as much if not higher than private market salaries). I usually start here: <http://www.guidestar.org/> (using bugmenot for login/password)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a board member of two very active nonprofit organizations, and former board member of another, I really appreciate the suggestion to devote attention to demonstrable results. I'll bring that up at our next board meeting for each organization. It's easy to track membership, and reasonably routine to track member satisfaction in membership organizations, and some organizations set policy goals (within the scope of the IRS rules about political activity by some kinds of nonprofits) that are verifiable. But, yes, organizations doing work far from most supporters (e.g., foreign relief organizations or missionary organizations) often can gain funds for years without having to show results. It's regrettable when a willing donor isn't giving money to best effect.

<comment><USER9> "But, yes, organizations doing work far from most supporters (e.g., foreign relief organizations or missionary organizations) often can gain funds for years without having to show results. It's regrettable when a willing donor isn't giving money to best effect."

Not to be a shill for my own blog again, but the reason so few organizations run real evaluations is that it's really, really hard, expensive, and time- consuming to do. Consequently, funders by and large don't offer real money or incentives for it, and if they don't, there's not much of an impetus to improve, and I describe this basic idea in much greater detail here: [http://blog.seliger.com/2008/04/24/studying-programs-is- hard...](http://blog.seliger.com/2008/04/24/studying-programs-is-hard-to-do- why-its-hard-to-write-a-compelling-evaluation)

Furthermore, some funders don't want real evaluations, even if they say otherwise; for example, we wrote a bunch of Community-Based Abstinence Education proposals for various clients, where the main purpose of the evaluation was to try and demonstrate that abstinence-only education works, and I described the problems with that in this post: [http://blog.seliger.com/2008/10/12/what-to-do-when- research-...](http://blog.seliger.com/2008/10/12/what-to-do-when-research- indicates-your-approach-is-unlikely-to-succeed-part-i-of-a-case-study-on-the- community-based-abstinence-education-program-rfp)

<comment><USER10> The pool of funds is often not fixed. A non-profit can make themselves more competitive for available funds by providing metrics.

<comment><USER9> That's true in theory but not in practice because most funders don't care, which is a point I describe further in the posts linked to above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I take his essay to mean that, if you want results, measure results and hold them to it. Chess experts are experts because they are measured by their results. Political pundits are hit hit or miss because they are not held accountable for their results. Non-profits should be measured by their results, not their process, PR, or grants. Makes sense to me, but quantifiable results are often hard to get, witness the discussions here about how to to tell goo programmers from bad.

<comment><USER12> How do you measure the "results" of a non-profit, when most of them work in non-quantifiable fields?

You end up with the quantity versus quality argument, favoring large, superficial efforts over narrowly tailored, substantive efforts.

<comment><USER13> _How do you measure the "results" of a non-profit, when most of them work in non-quantifiable fields?_

If McDonalds can work out how to quantify feeding hungry people then any charity working in Africa should be able to quantify feeding hungry people. If an insurance company can tell me the average lifespan of their clients to six decimal places and what exactly the risk factors are among that pool, then health-focused charities should be able to do it as well. etc, etc

(I have some familiarity with the literature and know the excuses for why charities operating in Africa with mobile phones and computers can't be expected to have as good a handle on their numbers as a British bank circa 1780. Yeah yeah, it must be difficult when you rely on globally distributed workers, many of whom are not literate. Oh wait, so does McDonalds.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another important thing to remember when comparing non-profits and companies is the power of the customer. Companies go bankrupt because the customer has the power to discontinue their patronage if they deliver a product or service poorly (unless there are anticompetitive practices in play - ahem comcast). However, in the non-profit world the recipient of the service or products has very little power to motivate a market. Those who contribute money to non- profits could theoretically be this force, but does someone who wants to invest in reducing malaria really have to invest in understanding the health metrics and do this assessment with each investment? I don't think that is a permanent solution either. No doubt feedback and accountability are vital to making non-profts more successful, but let's challenge ourselves to think of a more systematic way to implement this type of change rather than summing with measurement is needed.

<comment><USER15> _Companies go bankrupt because the customer has the power to discontinue their patronage if they deliver a product or service poorly_

This definitely happens to many kinds of non-profit!

 _in the non-profit world the recipient of the service or products has very little power to motivate a market._

For 501-c3 organizations that provide classes, lectures, and performances, often the _opposite_ is the case. Many non-profits have to be run much like a business. There can be something like a marketplace where the "customer" pays not with currency, but with their time. (And sometimes, both money and time are involved.) Also, very often, the "recipient" of services can easily directly involve themselves with running the organization. (KPFT radio in Houston is an example of this.)

<comment><USER16> >> Companies go bankrupt because the customer has the power to discontinue their patronage if they deliver a product or service poorly

>This definitely happens to many kinds of non-profit!

Unless I missed the sarcasm, it doesn't happen with charitable non-profits. They die when funding dries up, and since their customers don't provide funding, their customers have little/no effect on their survival.

Yes, a charity can continue to exist long after folks stop showing up to receive services.

<comment><USER17> _since their customers don't provide funding_

That depends on your point of view. I'd argue that the people supplying the funding are the customers and that the work they do and people they help is the service they provide. So if their customers aren't happy with the quality of the service they'll take their money somewhere else, exactly like in the for profit case.

<comment><USER18> The problem is the customers of nonprofits often cannot measure the results themselves.

If McDonald's serves me a burger that is inedible, I know about it immediately and can stop patronizing McD's.

If Burgers4Africa distributes inedible burgers in Somalia, how do I know about it?

<comment><USER15> My point is that often the customers _can_ measure the results. The article is worded as if this applies to _all_ non-profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is why I don't donate. Charities usually don't publish exact reports what's the money is used on and what have they achieved.

Building schools doesn't help if you don't hire teachers and get kids attend school and money used on clever guilt marketing doesn't solve ecological problems.

</comment><comment><USER20> _"This isn't to say that we should have companies replace non-profits..."_

Actually, that is not necessarily a good thing to just sidestep. A lot of things that non profits work on might work better if they were worked on by companies. A lot of things that companies work on might have to be filled by non profits if companies weren't doing it.

Think of second hand stores. They are often run not-for-profit in order to provide cheap stuff to poor people. These compete directly with commercial low cost stores and other second hand stores. If these beat the non profits, there is no societal loss. One of the worlds most celebrated not for profits, the Grameen Bank provides small loans to poor people. It seems very possible that this NGO (and its many imitators) will be put out of business by commercial banks.

The UN has started a free online University to help the world's poor. I would take an either-or bet on for profit variants making a lot of progress on this issue commercially.

A great way of making non profits more like chess masters is making non profits into businesses. You don't always have to. But if it is feasible, its worht considering.

<comment><USER21> _"Grameen Bank provides small loans to poor people. It seems very possible that this NGO (and its many imitators) will be put out of business by commercial banks."_

Traditional, for-profit banking simply can't, which is the entire point. Even when microfinance institutions lean further toward for-profit, they end up more and more like traditional banks making traditional big loans.

And that's the way it actually moves, with microfinance institutions edging toward becoming more commercialized, and when they drift too far away from poorer clients, new micro institutions will likely come in to take their place. In other words, the shift naturally moves in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER22> Compartamos in Mexico is a for-profit bank making microloans. There's some controversy about that: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/business/worldbusiness/05m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/business/worldbusiness/05micro.html)

<comment><USER21> Indeed, it's former NGO that aggressively went for-profit. That's a good article and sums up some of the major debates around latin american microfinance.

The problem with for-profit microfinance is that, as a general rule, financial performance increases with loan size, and that's why commercialization is a cause for concern, along with a lot of the other baggage that comes with commercialization like pressure to increase profits and employee incentive programs that negatively impact service toward small clients.

Compartamos accounts for the problems of the small loan market (notably the inability to determine which borrows are good or not) the same way moneylenders needed to before them, by charging very high interest rates. But this ends up screening out lower end borrowers, hence the discussion of "mission drift."

Commercial banks have long dabbled in elements of microfinance, but there are fairly concrete obstacles, mostly operational and information-related issues, that make it tough to be profitable, and even tougher to approach it as strictly for-profit while continuing to be actual microfinance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is also interesting in how it relates to the study of airplane crashes and the strong, relatively immediate feedback that these provide. It seems that auto safety was much more slow to catch on, and required odd forces to bring the topic to the forefront.

This also has an interesting interaction with a small startup essentially searching for the important metric for its survival.

<comment><USER7> For profits have the benefit of having profit/positive cash flow as a guide that not for profits do not. These are probably much better metrics for small startups given that success in any stated altruistic endeavours are ultimately going to show up in these two metrics anyway (and must in order for a startup to be sustainable).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is _one_ of the reasons why non-profit companies are flawed. There are no incentives in place for monetary gain. Non-profits are good at raising awareness, not being a sustainable entity.

If someone wants to make a difference and change world (especially developing countries), I believe there has to be financial incentives : _social entrepreneurship_.

<comment><USER24> If you can't make money doing something, is there any good evidence that it is worth doing at all? Leaving aside goods with "free" competition from the gov't (schools, roads, libraries, etc). EDIT: Also leaving aside things you do for your more direct benefit, like growing your own food or contributing to open source projects you use.

<comment><USER25> Did you really ask "is there any value in leading a moral life if it doesn't pay off financially?"

Non-profits do not actually aim at financial gain (duh!), so measuring their success in monetary term is an error of categories. Of course it is difficult to assess success of an endeavour like that, and Aaron is right in raising awarness for these difficulties, but forcing an inappropriate kind of measurement (did your non-profit make enough profit?) on them doesn't help solving this problem.

The correct question to ask are "what are our goals?" "How do we go about reaching our goals?" "Did our past activities in fact further our goals?" and so on. "how much more money did we raise and distribute" may factor in the analysis, but on its own it is pretty meaningless.

<comment><USER24> There are many reasons to do things other than money, but when you are dealing with people that you don't personally or directly know the fact that they are willing to pay for your services is basically the only real signal you have as to whether you are benefiting them. And if you are not making more doing this (for a combination of monetary and non-monetary benefits) than you could something else, then you need to switch to a better use of your time.

Of course, the contributors benefit from donating money, etc by signalling effects and warm fuzzies, but that doesn't mean the recipients are benefiting nearly as much as the contributors are spending.

<comment><USER24> As Friedman put it in "Machinery of Freedom", there are basically only three ways to work with others - love or shared goals, free exchange, or coercion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Making a bad prediction isn't like that... it's months or years before your prediction is proven wrong. And then, you make yourself feel better by coming up with some explanation for why you were wrong: ...And so you keep on making predictions in the same way — which means you never get good at it."

I think this also applies to many macro-economists

</comment><comment><USER25> There is of coure a very important problem charities trying to do this kind of measurments of efficiency face. They are in a market for public perceptiom to get donations, and (if we take the numbers the article cites for Oxfam), can you imagine the loss of donations and goodwill after a few newspapers and TV programs run the headline "Charity X spends half their donations on statistics instead of helping people!"? Even if the costs could be amortized over a few years, the charity would be dead by then.

Perverse incentive factors, again. (And the news might be right, collecting in depth statistics about the help program might just be a pretext to give a lucrative consulting contract to the director's best friend).

</comment><comment><USER27> I would argue that there is a second, equally-important, albeit interrelated, problem with non-profits in general: they are highly risk averse. Many non- profits still operate under a create an endowment and dispense funds to proven -- or at least perceptive -- good projects model. Consequently, there is a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which is to say weak experimentation.

I should mention that most of my non-profit experience deals with medical research foundations. Political think tanks are limited by the general impossibility of proving all but trivial problems.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone have a recommendation for a charity with demonstrable results in improving the lives of people in a measurable way?

<comment><USER28> <http://givewell.net/> investigates charities to make sure they achieve demonstrable results, they have a list of those that do.

There are also meta-charities like GiveWell and the MIT Poverty Action Lab that investigate other charitable attempts.

<comment><USER29> _Fuck that noise_ \-- if you'd have even bothered to google their name, you'd have found that Givewell are total scumbags:

[http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em- Hel...](http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em-Hell)

Summaries: <http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell>

They got caught out because they were blatantly astroturfing for themselves and slagging 'competing' charities all over the web. Then it turns out that even by their own generous accounting, more than half of their funds goes directly to their own overhead. On top of that, their 'research' is at best based on getting charities to rigorously assess themselves.

Their rubberstamp board publicly (in the NYT) pretended to fire one of the founders, but less than a year later he was quietly back at his old position.

<comment><USER20> You would expect that any organisation doing this kind of work would attract criticism. There is a taboo against harming a charities ability to raise funds.

Do you know of any organisation doing similar but better?

<comment><USER30> There's <http://www.charitynavigator.org/>, and the arguments against: [http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/11/charity- navigator%E2...](http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/11/charity- navigator%E2%80%99s-vital-mission-hides-flawed-rankings)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is extensible well beyond non-profits. The general form is still rough in my mind but it is something like "avoid situations where accountability and feedback mechanisms are not essential parts of the environment"

</comment><comment><USER32> A good book just came out about this very issue: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470454679/ref=ox_ya_os_pro...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470454679/ref=ox_ya_os_product)

</comment><comment><USER33> Of course, if one looks at the profit-seeking world, one sees multiple examples of organizations blind to feedback: GM springs to mind these days.

<comment><USER24> True, but responding to feedback is a lot harder than being aware of it. And especially so in a larger organization. I'm not so sure that GM's problems stemmed from not being aware of the problems as not being able to respond for various structural, legal, and social reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Somewhat related, on charity: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800663></comment>


Ask HN: Is it reasonable to have job applicants complete a test before applying? - <AUTHOR> I'm advertising an SDET position and I've included a test as part of the job application.
The test is something like this: I've described a fairly simple json specification in words and requested that applicants submit a cover letter that conforms to that spec. The spec has an optional value called challenge_checkvalue which can be derived by completing a challenge - querying a url with an id between 00 and 99 for json payloads that may or not conform to the same spec. The checkvalue is derived by combining the ids of all the ones that are not compliant.
So it's a decent amount of work. I've deliberately made the number of payloads to check high enough that no one is tempted to check them manually. Validating JSON, even making http requests like that is not something that every valid candidate will have ever done, but I think that these concepts should accessible with some research.
My question is; is this too much to expect people to do before I even look at their application? <comment><USER2> That's more the type of question I'd hang out as a programming puzzle on the web and then encourage people who solve it (guide them to a solved screen) to apply with a link to a gist or similar. I've applied to companies before just because I like solving programming puzzles, and once you're at that point, why not?

FWIW, speaking as an SDET lead, I'll do something like that voluntarily, time allowing.

But I A) don't submit applications, I send resumes, so let's start there; and B) wouldn't do something like you describe as a formal prescreen. Before I've talked to you, you have maybe half an hour of my time if I've heard of you, maybe five minutes of my time if I haven't.

After you've convinced me I'd like to work for you, then I'd give you an hour or two on a project, interest depending. Any more than that, and you need to pay me. You'd also probably have to be on my short list of final employer candidates. I'm interviewing y'all too, you know. I'm more inclined to do homework after a successful round of interviews than beforehand, mostly because there'll probably be a job out there I'm equally interested in that doesn't require this. I do pay attention to how much of a pain in the ass a company is to apply to, and it does weigh into my decisions to accept (or even continue).

I realize this comes across maybe a touch arrogant, but it's honestly accurate. Ask yourself this: Do you want the type of developer desperate enough for a job to jump through hoops?

SDET is an extremely competitive niche for good developers, since the QA path tends to filter people out into other disciplines before they hit a good amount of SDET skill. A good SDET can afford to be choosy. This is more friction than I'd put on a process to hire for my team.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great perspective, I tend to think an affinity for puzzles is a good indicator of the SDET mentality I'm looking for; I was trying to attract people who'd be interested by that challenge.

However, the universally negative response to having the challenge this early has made me rethink a bit. I think I may make it much more optional and/or apply it later. Maybe look for places to hang it out on the web...

<comment><USER2> If you came up with a testing challenge in particular, I'd be interested to see it!

I wouldn't use this as your only feeder--as someone else mentioned, puzzle affinity isn't going to be a 100% crossover with the people you want to track. I'd see a puzzle as one of a few tactics to all try simultaneously.

That's probably another argument against making something like this mandatory --it essentially becomes your only feeder/filter if everyone goes through it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Forget about the social expectation for a bit - I don't think it's a good idea in terms of attracting the best talent that you can get. There are people who have better things to do with their time than spend an hour or more on a programming puzzle for a company they've never talked to. You want to hire these people.

In terms of economic efficiency, it's much better overall to do resume- screening before the coding challenge. Both you and the candidate spend something less than 5 minutes each checking if it might be a good fit before committing to spending much more time on the process. With the challenge that early, you either make people waste time when you could have found out more cheaply, or you convince people that it's too expensive to find out more about your compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER4> > My question is; is this too much to expect people to do before I even look > at their application?

I can understand your desire to pre-filter somehow. But: I would skip this job ad as it is.

You need to have a real good selling point for your company/product/project that makes the applicant really crave the job. (You left that one out to anonymize your post, right?)

You might deny yourself a pool of smart people who either dislike jumping through hoops or have easier access to jobs they deem equally (or more) attractive.

You might attract folks who are more desperate than skilled but nonetheless able to solve your task.

On the other hand: I am not a lawyer and i don't know under which jurisdiction you are operating. Some countries have laws requiring you to consider all incoming applications. So please consult a lawyer, too.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I'm hiring I break off some small slice of my project. Its something like 4-12 hours of work. We negotiate what there wage would be if hourly and I pay that, with a cap. Then I eval their work, code review (if necessary), pay for the work. The process tells me much more than any interview ever would and costs the same (or less). For the final 4|5 candidates it works well for me

</comment><comment><USER6> Your job post has two main functions.

1\. sell the opportunity 2\. have candidates self-select out

Every job pipeline is going to follow traditional funnel math and you are starving your funnel.

The test you've proposed is more appropriate for later in the funnel when they are more willing to trade their time for the potential opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER7> It depends on the type of candidate you hope to attract.

If someone is applying for a lot of positions at once, an up front homework problem can be seen as unreasonable before even a basic semblance of role compatibility is established.

Why not offer it as a HW problem after a resume and phone screen?

</comment><comment><USER8> Did you complete this exercise, or have a colleague complete this exercise? If it took more than an hour or you couldn't complete it then it is too hard/long.

If you haven't completed it or had someone complete it then you shouldn't be sending it out at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think having to submit the cover letter in this format is kind of cheesy - it's difficult enough to express oneself concisely. I wouldn't mind posting an application to some well documented endpoint, which included the code to do some task so you could run it. I have been wondering lately about the utility of asking people to do some puzzles on leetcode or whatever if they don't have a github.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's reasonable to have candidates submit a solution to a problem prior to an _interview_ , but if you require it in order to apply I think you'll find that you don't get very many applicants. In the first case, the candidate has entered the pipeline and has some confidence that the position is still open and that you aren't rejecting him out-of-hand (unqualified, etc).

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say it's too much to ask at the application stage. If you want to give a code test after a phone screen, that seems more reasonable. Both parties have more confidence that the position is a good fit, which makes the time required a fair request.

</comment><comment><USER12> You should try to evaluate candidates based on their portfolio, resumes, etc. If after doing so you still don't know enough to evaluate them properly then sure, give them a take home test.

</comment><comment><USER13> If they have a good resume, sound good on the phone, and pass the PI test, I usually give them a coding test when I bring them in for a formal interview.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd only do that sort of thing if I felt there was a decent chance I might get the job. The application stage isn't far enough along.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yep there should be some indication of mutual interest before any reasonable candidate would expend energy on that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can you post a similar or simplified challenge here? It seems like a nice exercise

</comment><comment><USER17> It all depends on how you sell it!

If you advertise a salary 50% over market I'll do it.</comment>


My parents give me $28,000 a year - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/11/12/18057130/money-income-inequality-basic-income-generational-wealth <comment><USER2> Previous post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316647)</comment>


Vbench: run Python benchmarks throughout your repository history - <AUTHOR> http://wesmckinney.com/blog/?p=373

<comment><USER2> Nice and lightweight- I like it!

Seems like a really nice addition to this would be to demonstrate a quick integration with git bisect (<http://book.git-scm.com/5_finding_issues_- _git_bisect.html>). That could help you quickly identify troublesome commits where the speed dropped significantly.

<comment><USER3> Inspired by that, someone else has made "svn-bisect" <http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-SVN-Bisect/bin/svn-bisect> Does the same thing, and is a godsend when trying to track down bugs in a svn project.

<comment><USER4> Also in darcs since 2.5 as an option for the (way older) linear "trackdown" command <http://wiki.darcs.net/Using/Trackdown>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting. I'd be interested in potential uses for other languages. I might do some research.</comment>


Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing - <AUTHOR> https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2018/0806/Japanese-students-create-VR-experience-of-Hiroshima-bombing <comment><USER2> The most meaningful day of my college career was a guest lecture by a Hiroshima survivor. Just that phrase "Hiroshima survivor" was impactful. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone survived.

The professor translated as this woman, now old, described a week of her life when she was a very small child. She saw some absolute horrors. Not all of them were unique to nuclear weapons. Traditional aerial bombing has some awful outcomes.

Trying to understand the trauma experienced in those days and weeks and months afterwards will always be very difficult. The smells described won't be present in VR. A 90-minute lecture by a soft-spoken septuagenarian was hard to bear.

The Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta has a great exhibit to simulate the abuse lunch counter sit-in protesters had to endure. The museum is all-around excellent and that exhibit in particular is a highlight.

<comment> 52-6F-62 This reminds me also of the playable prologue to Battlefield 1. Before you get to play the rest of the chaotic typical crass online environment you have to play through a series of situations centred around a person you're introduced to before getting dropped into a messy battle where the character inevitably is killed.

Unfortunately judging by the comments you'll hear online after playing through the emotional introduction, it doesn't seem it makes a lasting impression on many.

<comment><USER3> Frankly, I'm of the opinion that that's because it was an equally crass attempt at stimulating that kind of emotional investment. You don't get feelings for free. They are contextual things with many more dimensions that what is put immediately in front of you. Trying to build a genuine commentary on the nature of war into a game like that requires a fundamentally different kind of game, and attitude towards game-making, more than just a tacked-on nod to the fact that some people died in the War.

<comment><USER4> I found it unexpected and sobering, even if it was a 'tacked on nod'. It certainly changed the way I played the single player campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if this would be a highly controversial opinion here, but I think that teaching people about the horrors of war isn't what stops war. It is the governments feeling the pain of war, such that they enact safeguards against easily going to war, and established norms to prevent the slaughter of civilians.

I may be mistaken, but I rarely see good faith efforts to, say, curtail the unchecked ability of the executive power to simply plunge into a de facto war without much direct authorization, or to use weapons such as the atomic bomb against civilians.

Let me add: visualizations like this are important, I think. I am not arguing against these, I'm just saying these probably don't produce political change.

<comment><USER6> My view is that the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed people to see the destructive power of these weapons and the horrors of the wounds inflicted. It's my strong belief that those images that prevented nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. I also strongly believe that without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we'd have seen nuclear exchanges between nation states.

<comment><USER7> I can't read this in any other way than just speculation for which the primary purpose is to act as a comforting rationalization to what happened.

<comment><USER6> I think you are very naive if you think the images of survivors didn't do anything to prevent nuclear war. Of course there is no "evidence" because how could you prove something like this. Also it's your own bias and perhaps your politics that leads you to believe that I'm rationalizing.

<comment><USER7> I didn't say that images didn't do anything. In addition, I would expect someone to call me naive, not for what I wrote, but rather if I'd thought that what stops powerful people from doing horrible things are images of suffering civilians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting article, can definitely see the potential for learning/empathy here. Ethically (in the US), I wonder how VR modules like this will be received. I see a case for and against a VR module that allows next gen students to 'experience' 9/11 or any other historic catastrophe.

<comment><USER9> I mean, we have video games that depict both world wars, with very realistic recreations of major battles. Does being in war make it fundamentally different?

<comment><USER10> >Does being in war make it fundamentally different

Do you mean, like, is there an experience difference between "being there" and experiencing a highly realistic VR simulation?

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding because the questions seems to answer itself... "yes, of course!"

Besides the obvious fact wherein if you get shot you die for good, and if you don't die you'll feel tremendous pain and be potentially maimed for life, you've got other factors such as

-Friends you've developed closed bonds with being killed next to you

-A campaign lasting months or years that consumes your existence

-Terrible food

-No sleep

-Extraordinary boredom in downtime (which doesn't exist in videogames or nobody would buy them)

-The endless question of "why are we here" (which doesn't exist in videogames - we are here to have fun)

<comment><USER9> I wasn't asking if a VR experience is different than reality.

I was asking if this new experience of the atomic bomb in VR is different than the other WWII games we have, some in VR.

Basically, if war video games based on real wars are ok, are other games based on real, horrible, events ok?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?

<comment><USER12> Commenting, because interested too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think I would have preferred being in Hiroshima than in Nanking.</comment>


Deixis – words that cannot be fully understood without additional context - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis <comment><AUTHOR> "this"</comment>


Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/261186/computer-randomly-plays-classical-music <comment><USER2> A while back I was playing Half-life on Steam, and every so often a classical madrigal would start playing, with oddly familiar voices. A truly strange bug; I couldn't think of any good reason for it.

Months later, I opened my computer's DVD drive for once, and discovered the reason: my sister, a professional classical singer, had sent me one of her recordings, and I had put it in the computer to listen and forgotten about it for the next year.

Somehow the game was--from its original on-cd release--assuming the proper soundtrack was on track N of the CD, instead of the Steam install.

Remarkably simple in the end, but a very baffling bug at first.

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of games used to play tracks on the CD unit if you put an audio CD, so you could listen to your own music while playing. I think even some Playstation games did it, not sure if that's common nowadays.

<comment><USER4> Usually it came down to the game CDs themselves acting as actual Redbook CDs, though not fully standards compliant. It was easier just to store some normal songs like that then use one of the rather poor compression standards of the time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See, it's little things like this that made Windows 2000 my all-time favorite version of Windows. It has as much personality as Windows 98 SE minus a ton of unreliability. By the time XP rolled around, they had made the OS so corporate and safe that while it had class, it was less 'personable'

<comment><USER6> This was a feature of the BIOS, not of the OS.

<comment><USER7> One of the rare times a BIOS error message was less useful than the microsoft one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hahaha, some coder had a field day with this one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good example how volatile is information on the web. Link provided as more info point to completely different company as many of my bookmarks.

<comment><USER10> Is this account a bot?

<comment><USER11> either bot or very confused.

<comment><USER12> It is time cube.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Learning a Second Language Changed My Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.chadfowler.com/2009/8/2/how-learning-a-second-language-changed-my-life <comment><USER2> I'd be hard pressed to name any 30 seconds in my life more consequential than these:

Counselor: "Wow, that's a lot of AP credits. Well, you've passed out of 3 of the 5 classes freshman CS majors are supposed to take. We don't have enough CS classes you're qualified for to fill the rest of the schedule. What are you going to take?"

Me: "I don't know, I'm thinking a language. Do you have a list of the ones the school teaches?"

Counselor: "Yep, page XXX."

Me: " _scans list_ Oh, Japanese sounds fun. High tech country, lots of money, few English speakers. Sign me up."

Counselor: "I studied it in college, too. Its a "#%"%."

Me: "I'm up for a bit of a challenge."

I loved every minute of it, added another degree on, and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university entrance exam administration system.

<comment><USER3> "and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university entrance exam administration system."

So what would you recommend as a course of _self study_ in Japanese? ( I assume such a thing is possible. I could be wrong)

Anything on the Internet is fine of course and I can buy any books available on Amazon, but I can't really go back to school or attend classes (no good Japanese teachers/schools where I live).

<comment><USER2> Candidly, I wouldn't.

If you put a gun to my head I'd say find yourself a copy of Japanese the Spoken Language with the CDs and drill them until your ears bleed. In particular, make sure you practice production (i.e. talk, talk, talk, if you don't sound like the CD keep talking until you do, then drill some more). The lack of somebody to tell you "You're saying everything... wrong" is one of the largest problems with self-study.

The largest is that almost everyone gives it up.

<comment><USER3> "Candidly, I wouldn't.

Thanks! What if I wanted (primarily) to read, write and understand (spoken) Japanese? (vs speak without mangling pronounciation) Would that be equally hard? Iow can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip or movie in Japanese and not have to look at the subtitles?

<comment><USER2> So can I level with you for a moment?

Nine times out of ten, when someone in my social circles asks me how to study Japanese, it is because they have some vague idea of enjoying anime/manga/video games in the original. ( _Especially_ when they start suggesting "Well, I don't need to actually be able to read anything, I just want to be fluent" or the converse.)

Without specific reference to you, approximately 98% of the people I know who went into Japanese with that objective gave up before they achieved any useful level of proficiency. (And one now works at SquareEnix, living the otaku dream.)

Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next _several years of your life_ because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work.

Two years from now, your fingers will bleed from writing practice, you'll know a few hundred characters, and this snippet from Wiki:

米国Googleは人類が使う全ての情報を集め整理すると言う壮大な目的をもって設立された。独自開発したプログラムが、世界中のウェブサイトを巡回して情報を集め、検索用の索引を作り続けている。約30万台のコンピュータが稼動中といわれる。検索結果の表示画面や提携したウェブサイト上に広告を載せることで、収益の大部分をあげている。

will still be _mostly impenetrable_ to you. That is 6th grade Japanese.

I strongly suggest you find your driving motivation to learn the language which will get you through moments of despair like that one. Which you'll have plenty of, because learning languages is BLOODY HARD WORK.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am fairly decent at Japanese. I can read 6th grade level Wikipedia articles. Yay. I can also give technical presentations to engineers and discuss outsourcing strategy with C-level executives. And you know what? I have a veritable mountain of HARD WORK ahead of me.)

 _can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip_

Self study can get you to the point where you'd appreciate exactly how much you just asked to be able to do. (Here's a trivial example: I watched Monsters vs. Aliens yesterday. All of the military characters speak a cartoony parody of what Japanese translators think Japanese people would think sounds like what Americans think macho military types sound like. Were you planning on learning fake military Japanese? )

(Five second fake military Japanese lesson: 諸君 (Shokun) means "you", in the sense of a form of address used by a military officer to address his underlings as a body. An American writer might substitute "gentlemen", as in "Gentlemen, it has been an honor and a privilege serving with you. _stirring music_ "

This word has no practical use in Japanese aside from signaling that you're trying to talk like you're military (or nationalist). Because this little factoid is 99.95% useless, you are unlikely to ever encounter it in a textbook.)

<comment><USER3> "Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work."

Great answer, thanks!

Just for some context, I speak read and write about 7 languages (4 Indian languages - 3 contemporary, one ancient - Sanskrit) and 3 European languages (English, French and German) fluently, (fluently == I can read and write classical works, can be airdropped into a country speaking the language and be fine, but no one really speaks Sanskrit anymore of course :-D ) and can speak (but not read and write) a couple more Indian languages.

From my experience of learning all the languages I _do_ know, I know that they are "work" to learn and don't have any illusions of learning Japanese being "easy".

I took 3 plus years of classes in both French and German for example, but I _can_ imagine someone who puts in _serious_ self directed effort (and knows a language in the "family" already - Sanskrit grammatical structures are close to the the ones in German, for example with the verb coming at the end of a long sentence,and several word "running together" and so on) learning either of these from instructional material (books + cds), listening to radio/mp3/videoclips/ newspapers + dictionary +grammar book + Internet discussion and so on, to the point where they may have strong accents, but they _can_ read, write and listen to radio broadcasts etc.

Now I've learned only languages within the Indo European (English, French and German) and "Indian" langauges (though the South Indian languages belong to a different family than Sanskrit and Hindi which are "North Indian").

I enjoy learning languages and was considering learning a non-European, non- Indian language "just for fun". So yes, the motivation was "for fun" but without the illusion of learning languages being easy, or with an anticipated "giving up" before a few years of effort.

So anyway I was considering Arabic or Hebrew or one of Chinese/Japanese.

Unfortunately I don't have teachers/classes nearby and I _think_ Japanese/Chinese etc may have additional difficulties than say, French or German due to their scripts and tonality and general mind-bendingness(at least I think they are mind bending!).

I was just asking you whether you think the combination of all other possible resources (books, cd, dvd, internet discussion, video clips etc) could get one to a point of reasonable, non-perfect-pronounciation-but-can-read-and-write- and-understand fluency in Japanese, effort over a few years being a given, for someone gifted at languages.

I take it you are saying "no, not likely".

Fair Enough!

Thanks again! The great thing about HN is that it is so easy to tap into so many knowledgeable people.

<comment><USER4> Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language.

That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled.

So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I absolutely agree with all of the points Chad makes here! I just recently returned from a 3 month stay in China after studying Chinese for two years and feel the same.

An interesting story was when I met another American traveler in a hostel in Shanghai. He was clearly loving his time exploring China, but every time we spoke I felt so bad for him. He was absolutely shackled to the parts of town where he could safely tread or easily find. I would spend a day wandering through streets, major and minor, dipping into shops or checking out maps to find new locations. I could fearlessly walk into a restaurant and have some idea of what I would be getting into. Best of all, I could ask anyone to help me out or just to tell me about their country -- and in a place like China, with thousands of years of rich history, people love to tell you wonderful stories about their country.

When you speak someone's language, they feel comfortable around you. They're willing to help you out or listen to you try to explain things you're not quite capable of. There's an immediate reciprocation of the effort you put into that immersion in their warmth and desire to help. Better, if you go somewhere where foreigners are less common (seated train rides in China are a particular example) everyone is excited to meet and share with you.

All of these things are pretty much inaccessible if you don't speak the language. So, as stereotypical as the desire to stop being monolingual is for your average American, absolutely do learn another language and then go use it.

You can't imagine how tiny a chunk of the world you live in until you do.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always reminded of an anecdote my father told me.

Once, when he was working abroad in Australia, a faxed document arrived in French, which no one else on site could read. So he translated it to English.

This prompted a coworker to comment "How nice, you speak two languages!" So he reminded this person that he was, in fact, Dutch - he could speak that as well.

"Oh, that doesn't count, it's your native language!"

....

<comment><USER6> He should have asked the coworker how many languages he spoke.

<comment><USER5> The coworker only spoke English. My dad made some remark about his coworker not speaking any language at all, but I figured you'd get that from the context.

I mean really - that's pretty easy from here on out, right?

<comment><USER6> Very straight forward. The point was to see the coworker realize on his own that by his own standards he spoke no languages at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To anyone considering a second language, I would recommend choosing one that is widely spoken somewhere where you can't get by with English - it will unlock a whole new part of the world for you.

You might also consider studying a non-Indo-European language. It will take more time, but the experience is the linguistic equivalent to discovering functional programming after a lifetime of seeing procedural code.

<comment><USER8> which Chad did by learning Kannada, a Dravidian (a non-Indo-european) language.

<comment><USER7> Wow, you read the article too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here in Wales schoolchildren are forced to learn a minority language in school. Welsh Language is given a very prominent position - it's only spoken in Wales (and bizarrely in a small area in Patagonia). I'd sooner have my kids learn a language they can use to communicate with other people that can't speak English - it's possible that there are perhaps a couple of kids now that haven't been taught English, Welsh all but died before being resurrected as a [false] part of nationalist pride.

I find it very strange, I'd sooner Hindi or Urdu or Mandarin or Japanese or Spanish. Something useful. They may as well be learning Ancient Sumerian (I'd still probably prefer that).

Not all second languages are equal.

<comment><USER10> A language that your kids can identify with as their own and practise everyday will do more for their further language learning ability than an 'useful' language that they'll gloss over in the classroom and seldom get to practice with natives.

Also, if that 'false' nationalism perchance catches on, your English-Sumerian speaking children might end up feeling like half foreigners in their own country. I've seen that kind of thing and it's sad.

<comment><USER9> It's catching on, the gov spend millions on it. There's a lot of anti-English [people] sentiment which feeds into not speaking English (just because of the name of the language _rolls-eyes_ ). Gov jobs require it, despite not needing it. Middle classes use it to get kids into Welsh school and away from the poor performers and chav-y types.

There are more daily Urdu and Mandarin speakers in the city I live in than Welsh speakers. Indeed, I work in a store and the only welsh language I hear is from educators speaking to their kids.

It's probably the thing that would/will push me to move or seek alternative education (eg home-ed). I don't see Welsh language as being important enough to be a part of every school lesson.

<comment><USER10> What you call "not speaking English" I'd just call "speaking Welsh". Your framing such self affirmation gestures negatively, as an aggression to the other, only shows your bias. The world will hopefully keep one more language around thanks to the people that make that perfectly legitimate choice. In any event, I bet any adversary feelings towards the English language are not due to the name but to the fact that it's been dislodging Welsh out of existance, as your reasoning illustrates.

A Gov employee should be expected to know all official languages in the country where she'll be serving. Especially if she is going to have to face public.

Considering to move or home school your children only to keep their minds uncontaminated by Welsh sounds more like political or social prejudice than actual educational concern. Trust me, knowing Welsh will only make it easier, not harder, for them to learn Urdu and Mandarin. In Spain, students from nations with one or more languages of their own average a higher proficiency in foreign languages (including Castillian, AKA Spanish) than those of monolingual provinces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a saying in czech (and in some culturally close languages as well) that goes like "Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem".

I was totally stuck with the translation but google says it could be something along the lines of "You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once" or shorter "How many languages you speak, so many times you are a human being".

<comment><USER12> The way I heard that quote was "You receive a new soul every time you learn a new language"

<comment><USER13> What a delightful, and in my limited experience, true idea. Having spent stretches of my life thinking mostly in english, then mostly in french, and now mostly in japanese and english, there is a noticeable influence on the basic kind and character of thoughts I have in each of the three. It isn't huge, but each has its own thought coloration and has concepts that are more easily expressed than the others.

Most fun for me now is talking with someone else that speaks all three, and watching the conversation just naturally blend them. Sometimes the blending is black/white (several sentences in one, then a statement in another state- changes the conversation into another language) and other times it ends up a mish-mash of two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I speak Indonesian and Javanese as my native language, "forced to learn" Japanese, English, Malay, and a bit of Chinese here in Japan. Contrary to common opinion, I regret that I learn and speak a lot of languages because I don't feel adequate enough in any of them, even my native language. Being able to use a lot of language really broaden your view, but at the same time, you will incline to develop multiple personalities/conscious in your effort to speak like the native. I find it difficult to express myself in a "constant" way regardless languages, hence the feeling of inadequate.

<comment><USER10> I was raised in Galician but taught to read and write in Castillian (Spanish), and grew up in an environment where almost all media, signs, labelling, ..., were in Castillian. Programming related learning and work has taken most of my studying since my teen years, and I did that exclusively in English. Because of this, I estimate English is already the language in which I've done most of my reading and a fair share of my writing.

I can relate to what you say, because for quite a time when trying to express myself formally I used to end up resorting to a lot of transliterated Castillian constructs and phraseology. Other times, ideas would come in English and I'd try and find a Galician equivalent. I only got past that after a conscious decision to immerse myself in Galician and Portuguese literature. Sometimes I still feel like learning my native language as a second language.

And I'd be at a loss if I had to talk about programming related concepts in anything but English. I'd have to reinvent the vocabulary as I go. My own scribbled notes for personal use are written in a patois that is mostly Galician generously sprinkled with English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I learned English when I was about 12, in part thanks to my passion for computers and in part because I had great teachers (in public school!). It's been one of the greatest gifts I've been given.

I know very few people who understand it. I do tell many how life changing it is, and how it greatly opens up your world and your mind... but mostly they look at me bewildered:

"why would I learn that? I'm doing fine!" or, "Nah, too difficult, and I don't have time"...

It's a shame, to not be able to share so many things I've learned with the people I care about, and to know how much they're missing. Ignorance is indeed bliss I guess.

I wouldn't even be here on HN if it wasn't for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Most 14 year olds in Europe study 2 sometimes 3 foreign languages.

It's very hard to stay mono-lingual in this environment. And then there are all the children that have parents from more than one country. It's not rare to see them growing up fluently tri-lingual.

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://smart.fm> is a very useful service for learning a second language (especially Japanese), highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER9> I always got non-first language words confused. What interested me was when I was relearning French and learning German (to read patent docs) after having learnt sign-language (as my 4th studied language) I could think of words in sign when I was trying to find the right French word. It's kinda weird to think of a word and have an action come to mind.

<comment><USER18> I have a similar anecdote — getting muddled between French and German when learning them back-to-back at school — but bringing sign into the mix blows mine away!

<comment><USER13> Makes a lot of sense actually. Just today I was forgetting the name of someone I had just written down in the morning, and visualising the japanese characters of their name as I had written them brought the name into clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a child, I wanted to be fluent in six languages. I speak a little German and read and write a little French. I know a few words of Russian and a smattering of Spanish. I have gotten some use of those, mostly German because I have German relatives and lived there for a time. But I never became as fluent as I wanted and it never opened up social opportunities like I had fantasized it would -- opportunities like the author of this article experienced. For me, learning a little HTML, XHTML and CSS have done far more for my ability to reach out to other people and therefore has done far more towards widening my horizons. I'm not particularly fluent in those either, but they get a good deal more use than the human languages I dabble in. It has had the unexpected side effect that I no longer bitterly regret not becoming fluent in six human languages.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article showcases that a critical component of attaining fluency in a language is immersion. Many linguists insist that language cannot be separated from culture. Another important ingredient in language learning is practicing output; i.e. not restricting yourself solely to input (reading, listening).

</comment><comment><USER21> My university forced me to take a second language for a CS degree. The department was located in Arts/Sciences, not engineering where it belonged.

It was a perilously stupid waste of time. It required 14 credit hours. 14 credit hours of learning a language I will never speak to anyone ever again and never had any interest in learning. The only thing the language requirement does now is make the CS degree at my alma-matar less competitive since I would have taken more CS/Math/EE electives.

21 or 18 hours of humanities is enough. I'll get down-modded for being this way but I don't care. This was the reality of the situation. It genuinely hurt me. The only way it changed my life was make me miss out on interesting elective classes, like AI or computer music and I also didn't have enough time (in semesters) to do undergraduate research.

<comment><USER22> Give it time, man. Your priorities will change. Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you to learn.

It took me 5 years before I appreciated the German I learned in high school. I was in Bangkok airport and met a German woman that didn't speak a word of English. She asked me something, and I _understood_ it. I opened my mouth and a complete sentence came out in a language that I'd never truly believed that people actually spoke in real life. That was the moment I got it.

So yeah, wait and see. Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across Guatemala, burned out on writing code, and thanking that stupid university for forcing you to learn a foreign language.

<comment><USER21> > Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly > Math they were forcing you to learn.

No, I wasn't. I minored in math.

> Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across > Guatemala

And no, I won't. One of the ways to make the pain go by faster was to go to a language school in Mexico. Worse two weeks of my life in recent memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The easiest way to learn a second or third language, would be in school. Many Indian schools are English medium, but kids learn at least one more language, as their 'second' language. Sometimes Hindi, sometimes Sanskrit or even a foreign language like French. In addition to it, we learn our mother tongue (assuming Hindi is not the mother tongue), so its easy to be trilingual.

There is one disadvantage though. Kids don't get to choose the language, its pretty much decided for them by their parents. When we learn as adults, we can pick and choose - depending on our goals.

<comment><USER8> The three language system exists in all South-Indian states. I studied Kannada, English and Hindi from grade 5-8; Sanskrit, English and Kannada from 8-10; Sanskrit and English from 11-12. So that's 4 languages in 8 years :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India.

I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese. It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.

<comment><USER8> Kannada is no harder to learn to learn than any other Dravidian or Indo- european languages.

If kannada is difficult to learn, the same can be said of Telugu, whose script is close to kannada. And Hindi which also follows the same script rules (forming composites from consonants and vowels using Devanagari script). This is so much true that Sanskrit is often printed in Kannada script in my state without any loss in phonetics and "spelling"

Tamil might be harder to learn as it is not phonetic. there is no unambiguous way to write 'ha' and 'ga' for instance. Mohan (a proper noun) is written mokan and called mogan.

So says a native kannada speaker who can speak 3 other languages, read 4 and comprehend a couple more.

<comment><USER25> My experience from learning English, Spanish, Portuguese, some Japanese and French, and a little bit of Chinese is that mostly-phonetic writing systems are not actually difficult at all. I suspect I could learn the Kannada script well enough to read aloud fluently in a day or two, but learning Kannada well enough to speak it in conversation would take me at least three months, probably more like three years.

My talent for scripts is very unusual, but I think that any person could probably learn a phonetic script in maybe a few weeks at most.

<comment><USER26> "My talent for scripts is very unusual"

Your humility is very refreshing Mr Kragen.

<comment><USER25> Your sarcasm is noted, but misplaced. I came in first in the school spelling bee every year throughout my childhood (until 8th grade, where I came in second), without drilling for it, competing with kids who did drill for it, so my disclaimer is just being realistic.

It's not a particularly important talent, since as I said, orthography is far from the most important part of learning a language; if it were, I might feel embarrassed about bringing it up.

But in context, it's important to point out that my experience with learning scripts probably doesn't generalize that well, and normal people's experience will be an order of magnitude worse. If you have a way I could have explained that without either sounding conceited (to you) or simply not mentioning my experience at all, I'd like to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's pretty awesome. The fascinating thing is how his life changed just because of his interest in a second language. What if he had learned just french or spanish?. I think taking a different path than others sometimes pays off well. Also reminds me that luck favors the one who is well prepared.

</comment><comment><USER28> My whole life was entirely changed by the decision to try learning Chinese after elementary school lessons in German (also a heritage language in my family) and secondary school lessons in German. The East and West can meet-- just learn the language of the other side. I strongly recommend to everyone to give an earnest try to learning a language you don't speak as a native language, especially if your language-learning efforts can be paired with lengthy foreign residence. There is a lot to learn from speaking to everyday people who grew up in another country and who don't share your cultural assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love that these types of articles make it to the front page of HN. It's not about being shackled to technology but using technology where you need to to free you and enrich your life. /swoon

</comment><comment><USER30> "we've discovered...when you even try to say "Hello" or "Thank you" in their language."

I'll attest to that, even though I live in the states. While this article I was proud of both the author and my own Indian heritage. Learning languages is a great thing to do, it's just a shame not all of us have the time to do it. Makes me sad that my high school was forced to cut Latin from the curriculum — it's a very interesting language to learn.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've read that "joke" many times before. MOST people around the world are monolingual, there are just fewer multi-lingual people in the US.

<comment><USER28> According to the book The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign- Language Crisis by United States Senator Paul Simon,

[http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting- Forei...](http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Foreign- Language/dp/0826404049)

the United States is EXTREMELY unusual in its degree of monolingualism among native-born people. The book said that the United States is the only country in the world, for example, in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. academic degree without gaining a working knowledge of a second language.

<comment><USER32> The book is wrong. People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department.

Recently, some English-only programs have been popping up and foreigners here are getting advanced degrees from Taiwanese universities without learning any Chinese. Amazingly, quite a few of those foreigners are getting degrees in _Taiwan Studies_ , without the ability to understand much of anything Taiwanese people speak or write.

Monolingual PHD programs aren't limited to Taiwan, either. In mainland Chinese schools, 100% mandarin programs are even more common. I've also had the acquaintance of a Japanese physics post-doc with what couldn't possibly be construed as a "working" knowledge of English.

<comment><USER28> _People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department._

Thank you for mentioning the example of Taiwan, the country where I have lived longest outside the United States. Let me first agree with you that I should have reported the book's statement as "earn a Ph.D. academic degree without being expected to gain a working knowledge of a second language," which more accurately represents what the book said, and takes into account cases in which the Ph.D. candidate does the bare minimum of what is required before giving up on language study.

Let me ask some questions about current conditions in Taiwan. Isn't 大一英文 (first-year university English) still a routine course for university students in Taiwan? And isn't English still one element of the college entrance examination in Taiwan? And isn't English still a compulsory subject in secondary schooling in Taiwan? (And, after all, isn't that the language we are writing to each other just now, although it appears we could both write in Chinese?)

But the situation of bilingualism in Taiwan is more nuanced than that. Most people in Taiwan in my generation learned a second language in primary school. They learned Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) even though their home language was either Taiwanese (in most cases) or Hakka or some other non- Mandarin Sinitic language, or one of the non-Sinitic aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Most people in Taiwan my age (Baby Boom generation) or younger are proficient in Mandarin, but two generations ago very few people on Taiwan spoke Mandarin at home. That's a major example of a huge amount of second- language learning in a Third World poor country.

Accepting your correction that some people get Ph.D.s without MEETING the expectation that they should learn a second language (which is how I should have said what the book said in the first place), I still find it baffling that in the United States there are large numbers of young people who pursue higher education who never even consider enrolling in any second language course, and who have not taken any such course in high school. Study of Spanish is quite widespread in the United States, with French, German, and now Chinese following behind, but there do seem here genuinely to be more people farther along in higher education who have never, ever studied a foreign language than there possibly could be in most other countries, where taking a test in an acquired language is usually a routine part of college entrance testing. I have had the appalling experience of meeting United States professors of Chinese history who can't speak Modern Standard Chinese well enough to talk their way out of a paper bag (I've met others who speak well), so I think the Ph.D.-ready standard even in related disciplines here is not high by world standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Learning a second language as an adult, while difficult, is definitely worthwhile.

As an American in Norway, I'm struggling to learn Norwegian for many reasons, not the least of which being that pretty much everyone here speaks English very well and doesn't mind switching to English. Still, I'm continuing to work on it and hopefully will be fairly fluent within a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER34> The same applies to programming. (And I don't mean learning C# if you already know Java.)

<comment><USER35> Yeah, we might as well cut straight to the Sapir-Whorf chase

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

<comment><USER36> Executive summary of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The languages we speak and think in have certain inherent cultural understandings that affect our perception of things. Reading the whole thing is recommended though.

<comment><USER28> Agreeing with the author of the submitted article that learning a new language is a wonderful thing, and agreeing with you in your capsule summary of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity hypothesis), I have to respectfully register disagreement with the strong version of that hypothesis. Most people are stuck in their thinking because of evolutionarily developed cognitive illusions that are not language-specific.

<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1>

Many people can be very creative and think thoughts that have never been thought before by their fellow language-speakers even if they are resolutely monolingual. And many of the features of language that might seem to be the most influential on human thought (e.g., whether or not a language has strong concord for grammatical gender) in practice don't seem to lead to any differences in thinking.

That said, even though the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong, it's still a good idea to learn a new language. That does, at the very least, expose a reader or listener to authors or speakers from a different cultural tradition, and that does tend to result in new ideas and new approaches to identifying and solving problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I am Australian, living in Austria. My two year old son speaks German and English now. It is an _awesome_ thing to see him understand English speakers, and reply in German, and vice verse. I also speak German, but he is really teaching me things about the language already that I never knew I'd comprehend, after 10 years of speaking German myself already.

Once he gets older, I want to move us to somewhere in Asia, perhaps India, and give him another language to speak, which we will learn together. I can't think of a greater gift to give your child than another language, personally. It really truly opens the world to him.

Of course, I'm a programmer. Language is my bread and butter. To be truthful, I'm a bit ashamed that I haven't learned as many human languages as computer languages, but there is still time for that.. ;)

<comment><USER16> Downmodded?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A fantastic book about learning languages:

How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own

by Barry Farber

\- [http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language- Inexpensively/d...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language- Inexpensively/dp/0806512717)

which is available as a PDF here:

\- [http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/20085121524...](http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/2008512152454548.PDF)

Some articles on the TPR method for language learning:

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/tprmax.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/krashentpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/firstday.htm>

More great articles on language learning here:

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/articles.htm>

<comment><USER7> Anything with "quick" and "easy" in the title automatically discredits itself. Language learning can be a lot of fun, but it's on a par with learning to play a musical instrument, or build furniture. You're going to spend a long time on it, and you're going to spend a long time sucking at it.

<comment><USER39> I'd second the recommendation for Farber's book. It doesn't try to hide that you will need to work, but the work can be enjoyable and productive - that's the sense of the word "easy" in this context, rather than "work-free". It also recommends some techniques for memorisation and has some great anecdotes from Farber's own language-learning experiences.</comment></comment></comment>