Ask HN: I'm writing my first book ever, on HTML5, do you have any advice? - <AUTHOR>

I signed the contract last week.
I'm shooting for ~500 pages, give or take, with the largest part being Canvas at ~150 pages. The book will be in full color.
I've never written anything of this scale before and certainly never authored a book.
Do you have any advice in general? Or anything you'd wish was in an HTML5 book that might not be present in others so far, etc?
Also, do you have any pet peeves about technical books, or things you wish authors did more or less of?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I just finished up my first book and while it is much shorter than yours will be (18k words) I'll share what helped me:

1\. Write how you want to write. In other words write in your own style. If you are funny, that's fantastic, but if you prefer to present things in a straight-forward methodical fashion then do that. You will be spending a ton of time writing and re-writing: It will come much easier if it is in your own voice.

2\. Don't be afraid to jump around. You do not need to start writing with chapter 1, then on to chapter 2, etc. Write whatever you are inspired to write at the moment. You can always go back and fill in the hard stuff later. You should do everything you can to make the process enjoyable, so, with that in mind, procrastinating frustrating parts is OK.

3\. Write on a schedule and stick to it. If you don't feel like writing but it is the time you've scheduled, do it. I found on a number of occasions that even if I didn't feel like writing, once I started my mood shifted. Although sometimes I just failed to produce anything.

That's just off the top of my head. I'll come back and add more if I can think of worthwhile stuff to add. I will say though that the act of writing and completing a book was tremendously empowering and fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know this isn't something you can just "turn on" but... personally I love it when technicals books read with a nice "flow".

For example I hate it when books read like "here's an explanation of this. Here's how you do this. Here's the next thing. Here's how you do the next thing". They read like a step by step manual.

I like technical books that read like a novel, even though you're instructing the user. If you can incorporate a "story" at the same time, you have my attention for the length of the book.

A book that I can think of off the top of my head that I enjoyed reading, and how it read, was The Well Grounded Rubyist.

I wish I could better explain what I'm thinking at the moment. Once I get done with my nights work I'll try to come back to this.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree. To expand on this idea, perhaps you could select a couple of sample problems, and work through their solutions. Example being a simple canvas game, explaining the various elements as they are introduced, concluding with a working game.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Turing Form. Simple and free forms for your tribe - <AUTHOR> https://turingform.com/ <comment><USER2> Most of the times, of single or multiple choices, the choices could be long. Basically, I will prefer to have search autosuggest on a choice and select it. It will be great if the choices can be fetched via api or something like that. So far , no forms satisfy this requirement yet.</comment>


Nine Web 2.0 Startups Beating The Odds in Down Economy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/460014/Nine_Web_._Startups_Beating_The_Odds_in_Down_Economy_ <comment><USER2> "Beating the odds"? The fact they have a business model (or a notion of one) and were launched for little money does not mean they actually make profit in the long run. This article reads like something from 6 months ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure this guy was just playing buzzword bingo. He used "nine" to create the top ten feel people so love (why he didn't go with ten I have no idea). Also mixed in "web 2.0" and the "down economy". He should have used recession instead of that last one, might have gotten some search engine love.

<comment><USER4> Because if you use 9, instead of 10, it makes it sound like your choices are so well researched and vetted that you'd never sacrifice your integrity just to make it a "top 10".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many YC startups are included: Wufoo, Polleverywhere, Posterous, Rescuetime, Dropbox, Posterous, Disqus, Mighty Quiz.

Although if you don't have a business model and revenue for that matter, I wouldn't call you "beating" a recession; I'd call you surviving.

<comment><USER6> In some economic times, surviving _is_ beating a recession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are nine companies because that's how many were presented at the Web 2.0 Summit. There are no other reasons behind the decision to use that many.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's with all the terrible articles today? Just desserts, I suppose.</comment>


TiDB 4.0 GA Release - <AUTHOR> https://pingcap.com/blog/tidb-4.0-ga-gearing-you-up-for-an-unpredictable-world-with-real-time-htap-database/ <comment><USER2> What I find interesting about the whole TiFlash part (Which is not open source as far as I can tell).

Is that looking at the symbols table of the binary, they have embedded the entirety of the Clickhouse database as their processing engine.

I hope they do open source it at some point. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of having a transaction database do analytic predicate pushdown by just transparently querying an actual OLAP database.

<comment><USER3> That is an interesting observation/claim that TiFlash is based on ClickHouse. I'm not sure what benefits ClickHouse has over the ORC/Parquet based Open Source engines like Presto/Impala.

What is emerging in HTAP is two patterns: scale-up like HANA and scale-out like TiDB 4.0. The engine/system in both cases transparently handles the merge between the OLTP delta row store and the OLAP column store (AutoETL) and there is a transparent federated query that is aware of both store types.

Does Presto or another scale-out solution transparently perform these two HTAP functions?

<comment><USER4> The reason for ClickHouse is simple: it's fast. And we need to have it function like a TiKV coprocessor which support filtering and aggregation mainly and ClickHouse is good at aggregation and filtering. Also it might take more time and dirtier to do seamless / compatible integration to TiDB if Impala or presto on top of MPP layer. But the price we paid is implementing MPP layer by ourselves now.

Almost all the data lake based products loss full control over storage system. It makes them very hard to build delta-main engine we need. To make HTAP storage transparent to query layer, TiFlash need a lot more control over storage engine than data lake can provide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently benchmarked TiDB (pre 4.0), CockroachDB and YugabyteDB. TiDB outperformed the others for write throughout and latency, probably because it has a bit weaker isolation guarantees (snapshot vs serializable). However, for all read operations, CockroachDB performed significantly better than TiDB. It would be interesting to do a new comparison with version 4.0, as it seems from this article that they have improved performance quite a bit.

<comment><USER6> How did you benchmark?

<comment><USER5> I used oltpbenchmark and ran automated tests on hetzner cloud using Terraform and some automation scripts. The comparisons are based on the YCSB workloads executed by oltpbenchmark.

<comment><USER7> Hi, I want to reproduce it. Could you tell me how much scalefactor did you use and did you change the default weights?

<comment><USER5> I used 100 as the scale factor and used different weights for benchmarks A through F, defined by the original YCSB project here: [https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB/tree/master/workloa...](https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB/tree/master/workloads)

<comment><USER8> May I know how many instances are there in crdb/tidb cluster and the concurrency in the benchmark? We found that for small clusters (for example 3 instances), CRDB could be fast in read-only workload. Because CRDB is single binary, about 1/3 read operation will not involve RPC. TiDB need to involve a RPC for every request. For larger scale cluster or high concurrency, it is a different story.

<comment><USER5> I tested clusters with between 3 and 12 nodes, and the differences were similar for the different sizes. I'm not sure how it performs for larger clusters than that though. Additionally, the results might have been a bit misleading on the large clusters because of the low scale factor, leading to higher contention on some rows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone find it unfortunate that they abandoned optimistic concurrency control as default because it is less compatible with MySQL?</comment>


WikiLeaks publishes security files in case Assange got arrested - <AUTHOR> https://file.wikileaks.org/file/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, looks like I was lied to, this is not their security archive, but normal archive that's been available for long.

</comment><comment><USER2> A link to a directory of files isn't very useful or informative. I was expecting some commentary from WikiLeaks.</comment>


How to Name a Baby - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html

<comment><USER2> Funny, I recently had the opportunity to organise a structured brainstorm to name a friend's baby daughter. I've done this quite a bit over the years for new brands, and figured I could apply similar methods to arrive at a name they felt some connection with and that expressed their values and hopes for their daughter.

It was an interesting exercise, and a very fructiferous one. We ended up with Héloïse, naming her after Héloïse d'Argenteuil ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lo%C3%AFse_d%27Argenteui...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lo%C3%AFse_d%27Argenteuil) ) whose love letters with Peter Abelard are a medieval classic ( [http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aah/index.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/chr/aah/index.htm) ).</comment>


The Tragic Death of Practically Everything - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2010/08/18/the-tragic-death-of-practically-everything/

<comment><USER2> Declaring something to be dead must be a sure fire way to get people to read your article. Here are some others: [http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire- headline-formulas-th...](http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline- formulas-that-work/)</comment>


Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/education/major-changes-in-sat-announced-by-college-board.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER3> This sounds nice, but I'm not holding my breath for hope that the "new" SAT will be any better.

I took both the "old" SAT (the one that they discontinued around 2004) and the "new" SAT (the one that they're now discontinuing). I actually thought that the structure old one was better in many ways - for example, the analogies were often terribly _written_ , but the idea of testing analogies as a reasoning tool is very powerful, and much more so than just doing passage after passage of reading comprehension.

Furthermore, this is the _exact_ same language that they used to justify the decision to change the SAT 10 years ago. Coleman isn't saying anything new when he's criticizing the SAT today; he's just recycling the same PR language that they used a decade ago.

Of course, perhaps they really are genuine. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised. But reading this gives me total deja vu from the news stories I remember reading in 2002.

<comment><USER4> Analogies are legitimate tests of reasoning ability. As I recall, however, the analogies of the "old" old test often relied on obscure words. This turned them into de facto vocabulary tests, defeating their purpose as pure assessments of reasoning. At the very least, vocabulary became a confounding variable in assessing the specific aptitude that analogies were meant to assess.

One could make a strong argument for plain-English analogies, absent the $10 words. If every test taker understood most of the words, then we could test for reasoning ability on a more normalized basis.

That's not to say testing vocabulary is totally invalid. Opinions vary. But if we assume vocabulary is worth testing, then we should test it independently.

<comment><USER5> I always assumed analogies were explicitly designed as a mechanism for testing vocabulary, not reasoning. I don't understand how analogies would have any value in testing reasoning skills. I can't imagine an analogy question that isn't either obvious or subjective.

<comment><USER6> why not both?

<comment><USER7> when you test for both, its tougher to get a good measure on either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At Khan Academy, we're really excited to work with the College Board to provide awesome, free test prep to everyone. We're putting huge emphasis on really learning the material instead of practicing test-taking skills that won't be useful afterwards.

Here's a little more about the partnership if you're interested:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/khan-academy-gets-major- par...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/khan-academy-gets-major-partnership- to-close-rich-advantage-in-college-test-prep/)

<comment><USER9> "Instead of teaching to the test we're going to put huge emphasis on really learning the material instead of practicing test-taking skills that won't be useful afterwards."

Now how do we get the schools to actually do that?

<comment><USER10> Changing the incentives would be a start. If you give schools very specific metrics, and then judge them on how well they optimize those metrics for the least money, it's no surprise that they are going to... try to find the most direct way of optimizing those metrics. In fact, the ones who don't do that will be penalized!

<comment><USER11> "Beware your metrics, for they will improve."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do not envy the College Board. We are in a social and political environment where many issues that bear directly on the test are things you can't discuss in polite company (e.g. whether IQ is a real and relevant phenomenon, the 0.8 correlation between IQ tests and the SAT, the correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status). This makes it extremely difficult to both optimize for their goals, and to communicate that to the involved parties. Because of this it's hard to even know what their true goals are and whether they are actually going to achieve them.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think these changes are long overdue. To me, the CR portion of the SAT seemed incredibly biased against people from other cultures. Not only was there a language barrier, but also there was the problem of allusions. Many of the passages contained references to things that you wouldn't expect a typical immigrant to know (things like Greek mythology, the indulgences of the wealthy, cultural icons, etc).

I think the waivers for low-income students are also pretty great. When I was in high school, taking all of the standardized exams cost me hundreds of dollars. I went to school in a place with a lot of gentrification, so a lot of my classmates could barely afford to get their high school transcript (let alone pay to take tests). There were many efforts to get the school system to subsidize standardized exams, but they were all unsuccessful.

<comment><USER14> These tests are for admission to an American college / university. Basic knowledge of Western culture is immensely useful if you're going to be in such an environment, both for studies and for social purposes.

<comment><USER13> Yes, basic knowledge is useful even if you aren't going to college. But the problem is that the tests reference arcane parts of western culture that an immigrant wouldn't be reasonably expected to know. My parents are both immigrants and I was born in the US (I have lived here my entire life), and I _still_ had a hard time understanding some of the allusions in the CR portion. They aren't references to popular culture; they are references to an insular culture.

<comment><USER15> The only question I recall from my SAT required knowledge of the recipes for various alcoholic drinks. I thought that was a bit unfair as I was well below drinking age, so why would I know that stuff? I'm sure I got that one wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one here that's bothered by a further narrowing of the expected knowledge of students? A good engineer or programmer isn't a human calculator who can bang out hundreds of caclulations per minute or recite petty facts in a very specific area. Good programmers and engineers draw on their wide breadth of knowledge, and the deep understanding it generates, to solve complex and abstract problems.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects.

While I'm not terribly concerned with the changes in the SAT, I am concerned about it adding more momentum to this trend.

<comment><USER17> No. I was also depressed about the approach of 'we're excluding arcane words!' I do really well on those tests - not because I have encountered every word that might come up, but because I do have a big enough vocabulary to draw analogies and guess at the meaning of arcane words by looking at their internal structure, eg Membranous seems to consist of membrane + _ous_ , so I guess it's an adjective to describe something that has a membrane-like quality.

I developed a love of etymology from spending many long hours poring over dictionaries as a child, including the bits about word roots and so on. When I see that things like this are being dropped from the SAT, it's like being told that that knowledge and the effort to acquire it lacks value.

<comment><USER17> TepidSolarSoul, your account seems to be banned so I can't reply to your comment directly.

I certainly agree that 'maudlin' is harder to figure out etymologically, but on the other hand I don't think it's all that unusual either; one would certainly have come across it if one had read any amount of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century, whether than was something by Dickens or a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories.

I personally think the fact that everyday vocabularies are shrinking is a terribly bad thing, and a trend we should be resisting rather than accommodating.

I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth or as the offspring of professional educators, incidentally - indeed they went through a phase of trying to discourage me from reading material that was too advanced or adult- themed. My parents read to me when I was small, my mother enjoyed crosswords, but the main thing they did for me was tell me to go look up a word in the dictionary rather than supplying a definition whenever it was asked for. I enjoyed reading enough to find the dictionary an interest in thing to browse in its own right.

 _Better keep opening Old Nassau 's gates to the upper echelons of society for anybody who can ace this sort of trivia._

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but I'm not holding my breath for an invitation from Princeton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > For many students, Mr. Coleman said, the tests are mysterious and "filled > with unproductive anxiety." Nor, he acknowledged, do they inspire much > respect from classroom teachers: only 20 percent, he said, see the college- > admissions tests as a fair measure of the work their students have done in > school.

What is really interesting to me is that while the rhetoric against the SAT (and similar tests like the MCAT and LSAT), have increased over the last few decades, in practice the tests are more important than ever. In the last 30-40 years, median scores at the top 10-15 schools are up about 100 points adjusted for recentering in 1995. In practice, SAT scores are almost entirely determinative for college admissions. High schools pump out so many 4.0+ students, that 100-200 point differences on the SAT dominate differences in admissions outcomes.

And apparently, even companies are asking people for their SAT scores these days: [http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-bain- mckinsey-j...](http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-bain-mckinsey-job- candidates-sat- scores-2014-3?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29). Without taking a position on either side, I have to wonder why the rhetoric and the practice are so out of step on this issue.

<comment><USER19> Higher population numbers would account for both effects, no?

<comment><USER18> To a degree. In 1976, someone at both medians at Yale would have a 1410 on the 1996 scale.[1] In 2013, that was a 1510. I can't find percentile charts from back then, but I believe the distribution has stayed roughly the same, which means that Yale has gone from a median score in the top 4% to one in the top 1%.[2] In 1976, about a million people took the SAT, so a top 4% score was a pool of about 40,000 potential students. In 2013, about 1.7 million people took the SAT, so a top 1% score was a pool of about 17,000 potential students.

So population growth explains part of it, and much of the rest can probably be explained by improved financial aid causing applications at Yale to go up by a higher percentage than the overall increase in number of test-takers.

What's really telling is that, despite all the criticism of the SAT, Yale responded to the increasing number of applicants by using the SAT more aggressively to filter applicants. In other words, when faced with a larger applicant pool, Yale decided to reject students with SAT performance that it had previous deemed adequate, because it couldn't think of any better criteria to use to distinguish the additional applicants.

[1] Yale's data: [http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/W032_Fresh_SATs_5.pd...](http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/W032_Fresh_SATs_5.pdf). Tables for calculating recentered scores pre and post-1995: [http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalen...](http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalence/sat- individual).

[2] [http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/S...](http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SATPercentileRanks.pdf).

<comment><USER19> Yeah, to expand on what I meant,

Population growth -> Naturally leads to more people willing to criticize the SAT because percentages. Especially if there remains a similar or greater level of exposure to it, which there has.

Population growth -> Larger applicant pool, and assuming Yale or whoever is unwilling to drop the SAT as a filtering mechanism, naturally means they'll raise their various bars, including the SAT score cutoff.

<comment><USER18> Obviously you would expect Yale to raise SAT medians in addition to other criteria as the number of applicants goes up, in order to maintain the class size (which it has done for the relevant time). What's interesting is how much the bars are raised relative to each other. Remember, the criteria aren't perfectly correlated. If you go from top 4% SAT to top 2%, and top 10% GPA to top 5%, you should expect the number of people passing the filter to shrink by much more than 50%. It could be as much as a 75% reduction if SAT and GPA aren't correlated at all.

Apparently, the number of applications at Yale have gone up by 2.6x since 1976, and the admissions rate has gone down by 3.5x. So Yale needs to raise its various bars to let through 1/3 or 1/4 as much of the applicant pool, in totol. The fact that it has raised its SAT bar from top 4℅ to top 1% suggests that _all_ the increased stringency in the admission standard comes from the SAT criterion. Indeed, to achieve that increase in SAT median with only a 2.6x increase in apps, Yale probably had to make some criteria _less_ stringent.

That's the crazy part. Not that SAT went up, but that it seems to have been the primary tool to filter the additional applicants, to the exclusion of other criteria.

<comment><USER19> Hrm. Couple things that come to mind, if you want to keep poking:

* how did the distribution of SAT scores among applicants change during that period?

* how did tuitions change over that period?

* what's the GPA distribution versus the SAT distribution? At some point we went from a 0-4 GPA scale to a 0-5 GPA scale, and IIRC, the SAT's numbers have moved around as well. Can the preference for modifying the SAT bar be related to finer granularity being available? You sort of allude to this in your original comment. GPA may not have gone up simply because it's a worse metric than even the SAT.

* did the rise coincide with all standardized tests, or just the SAT I? SAT II? AP exams? IB?

* was the applicant pool affected by accepting transfer students or affirmative action type of deals?

* what does "top X%" actually mean in this case? Is it a stated admissions policy? Or is it it just that students below a certain SAT score virtually never qualify on some other criteria?

Sorry if some of these would be answered by your links. I'm less interested finding the answer and more just giving you a sounding board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Removing the penalty for wrong answers seems to be an interesting choice to me. I thought a strong part of the test was the emphasis on carefully considering the questions so that the answers given were deliberate.

Without a penalty, guessing is just a chance for free points. Not really a measure of any skill aside from test taking (of which the SAT already suffers from enough). But I guess if all of your tests at a university are similar to the SAT, it might be a good measure of your potential success.

<comment><USER21> Penalties for wrong answers are the ultimate test of test-taking abilities (actually, to an extent, an ability to implement probabilities). Your strategy changes based on how many answers you can eliminate, rather than on if you know the correct answer.

<comment><USER22> Being able to eliminate wrong answers is pretty much the same skill as being able to notice that you made a mistake when you look over your work. It's valuable for more than test taking.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. Checking your work and realizing you forgot a semi colon or that you made an addition mistake is a very different skill than being able to eliminate an answer since you know it is incorrect. Further, it's an even more distinct skill to know when you have eliminated enough answers for your expected correct answer value >= your expected wrong answer value.

That's not saying that they are not valuable skills on their own, but at age 16, they are far more associated with test prep than what the SAT purports to measure.

<comment><USER22> No, if you're actually checking your work properly, you're going in with the assumption that there are mistakes to be found, and you're looking for reasons why your answer might be wrong - the same as when you're trying to eliminate a candidate answer in a multiple choice test (especially if "none of the above" is one of the choices). The gaming the odds aspect of the SAT only comes into play when you've run out of time or run out of knowledge to use to support or contradict possible answers.

<comment><USER21> Checking my work with the assumption I made mistakes is distinct from knowing that 2 of the 5 answers are wrong, and therefore my expected value of a guess is positive vs. when i cannot eliminate any. Saying that checking your work and knowing some answers are wrong but not which one is right are the same thing is simply not true.

<comment><USER22> Way to ignore the last sentence of my comment. I consider the guess to be separate from the process of elimination that precedes it and sometimes obviates it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is the best news about college admissions that I've heard in a very long time. As someone who was fortunate enough not to be disadvantaged by the clear socioeconomic preferences of the SAT (and I'm guessing the ACT as well, though I had much less exposure to it), this is absolutely a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER24> What are these "clear socioeconomic preferences" of the SAT?

<comment><USER8> Here's a striking image from NBC:

[https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/441295567168081920](https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/441295567168081920)

<comment><USER25> That's hardly specific to the SAT, that's true in basically every single thing measured. Including health.

Lower income people do worse. Or perhaps people who are "worse" have lower income.

<comment><USER26> Yes. And these are problems that need addressing. Especially when the people who are doing worse are not even the ones earning the low income, just those with the bad fortune of having low income parents.

<comment><USER22> It's not the College Board's problem to solve. Their goal with the SAT is to offer colleges a predictor of college success. Why should they try to incorporate a form of affirmative action into their test? Why not leave that up to the admissions offices that will have a more complete picture of the applicant's background?

<comment><USER27> Making test prep materials more accessible doesn't really sound like affirmative action to me. It's not an attempt to _counterbalance_ this particular socioeconomic bias, but rather to _remove_ it.

<comment><USER22> The socioeconomic correlation isn't a bias - it reflects the reality that a poor childhood leaves you less prepared to do well in college. Erasing that effect without fully erasing the causes of the effect is a cover-up that defeats the purpose of the SAT.

Making the test harder to hack by acquiring shallow knowledge (like memorizing "SAT words" without actually being well-read enough to have seen or used them before) is a good thing, because it will make the test a more accurate predictor of the applicant's general level of knowledge. But simply making those test-prep tools more affordable and easier to find will only have the effect of compressing the distribution of scores, making the SAT a less discriminating test in the technical sense and thus a less useful measurement.

<comment><USER28> The fact that there's a natural correlation doesn't mean the SAT's correlation is identical to the natural one. And if it's worse than it should certainly try and change that.

<comment><USER22> Of course - I never said otherwise. But the changes they're making don't seem to be simply about making the test more accessible and less elitist; they seem to invite ceiling effects, and I don't see how that helps anyone.

Rather than making test prep widely available, the College Board should strive to design a test for which the only effective prep is getting a solid well- rounded education, and they should pay no attention to the complaints that some of the questions are too hard for almost anyone to answer.

<comment><USER27> I agree that, if the SAT were ideal, there'd be no way to prepare for it in particular.

However, a nationally standardized test must have consistent scores to be useful, and currently the best way to do that is to keep the general format and content consistent. That means that a student can discover and prepare for the test's general format and content in advance, which is definitely advantageous.

A truly ideal SAT would have a different format and test wildly different skills every time it's issued in order to defeat the idea of test-specific preparation, but still produce meaningful scores. I'm skeptical that such a test can produce sufficiently consistent scores, though I'm very willing to someday be proven wrong by some clever test developer. That'd be pretty neat.

So, until we create an SAT for which test-specific preparation is meaningless, it's important that test prep resources are distributed evenly so that students with good educations won't have artificially lower scores due to unfamiliarity with the SAT's standard format and content. It's an unfortunate but necessary compromise :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My immediate reaction: My score is now forever unrelatable to all except those who took the exam between 2005 and 2014. Not that anyone has asked my SAT score since I got into undergrad, but now a sizable group of people who did substantially poorer than me will seem as though they did extremely well (a 1550, for example, means something very different depending on which exam you took, while my score of above 1600 will immediate remind people I took the 2400 exam).

It doesn't affect me at all, and I'm not complaining, but that's what ran through my head.

<comment><USER29> If you chop off the essay score, you'll still be related to everybody ever (with respect to test revisions).

<comment><USER21> Yes, I know. But if I got a 1500 on the new 2400 test, you could always just say you got a 1500. There's going to be some number of people who forget about the change and when it happened (people do it now, I doubt they'll forget less often now). However, you say a score above 2400 and everyone immediately remembers the change.

Again, I don't care about how this affects me, it's just the most interesting and relevant part to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Math questions will focus on three areas: linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning. Calculators will be permitted on only part of the math section."

As if math requirements for American students aren't low enough already.

<comment><USER31> What do you propose to add to this list?

<comment><USER32> Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations.

I think probability, in particular Bayes' Theorem, and basic number theory should be covered in a high school curriculum for the college-bound as well. Including converting numbers between base 2, base 10, and base 16; solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization; determining whether a pair of numbers is relatively prime. Teaching the extended Euclidean algorithm in high school would be on my "nice-to-have" wishlist, but there's only so much classroom time available.

<comment><USER33> Part of the problem for why this stuff isn't taught in high school as much is that (and I do say this with some hesitance, as an engineering student who has had a strong math education, imo) I feel most people would probably not benefit much from having that additional content added into the high school course. The other and more major issue I see is that universities seem to be (just from personal experience and hearing friends stories too) starting to want students to take most of their higher maths, that above basic algebra it seems sometimes, at the university. While you could argue that this is because they are greedy and want more money from forcing students to take more classes, I'd like to think that the reason why is because of how fragmented american high school math courses can be.

Personally, as an engineering student, I'd rather take most of my math classes here at my university because they tend to all be tied together (both with the math department and engineering department courses) well and I know that where I leave off in Ordinary Diff Eq, I will pick right back up from in Ord. Diff. Eq 2. Coming from having taken calculus and calculus 2 in high school and having entered straight to calculus 3 in university, I didn't have this comfort and in fact ended up missing some content between the classes as a result. There is also the issue of choice, and the limits of it within the context of high school curriculum.

Just my 2 cents against teaching additional stuff in high school (or probably addressing the wrong point within this comment). Also, I'm not sure (obviously) what its like across the nation, but at my high school at least these topics where all covered and taught to (nearly) all students: > Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden problem" (maximize area of a rectangle given fixed sum of 3 sides); naming the Platonic solids; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing complex numbers; logarithms; solving exponential equations. [...] solving linear congruences with small moduli by trial and error; finding gcd and lcm; prime factorization;

<comment><USER32> > most people would probably not benefit much from having that additional > content added into the high school course

It would be great if we could switch from content to teaching actual mathematical reasoning. You can read a famous essay called "Lockhart's Lament" for more about this subject. But that's not something that's happening right now either in classrooms or on the standardized tests.

My point is that you have to teach _something_ in high school, and it doesn't feel like the new SAT tests anywhere near four years' worth of content.

> linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages > and proportional reasoning

"Linear equations" are a topic that can easily be taught in a month or less. "Complex equations or functions" is unclear, but I assume this means quadratic equations or maybe basic trigonometry -- probably a semester's worth or less. "Ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning" is really middle school level math -- or even elementary school level. It doesn't belong in a high school curriculum, except as review or remedial material.

So all of this content consumes less than a year of high school. I agree that maybe four years of intensive math coursework may be the wrong bar to set for the SAT, but is it setting the bar too high to expect college-bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?

For that matter, only the best students should be expected to get a high score on the SAT; otherwise, the SAT score becomes meaningless. So I should re- phrase the question:

Is it setting the bar too high to expect the best math students among college- bound seniors to know more than a single year worth of math content?

<comment><USER31> The suggested prep for the Math 2 subject test: More than three years of college-preparatory mathematics, including two years of algebra, one year of geometry, and elementary functions (precalculus) or trigonometry or both. I think the "put it on the subject test" is a powerful argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> David Coleman, president of the College Board, criticized his own test, the SAT, and its main rival, the ACT, saying that both "have become disconnected from the work of our high schools."

Understatement of the year.

<comment><USER35> When I took the ACT, two of the sections were Science Reasoning and Reading Comprehension (or something similar). The thing is, they required the exact same set of skills: the ability to read a passage and answer questions based upon what you read. The only real difference between them was that the Science Reasoning portion dealt with science related topics. I scored 36 in both sections the first and only time I took the test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like they're dumbing down the SAT. Those soon-to-be-cut "obscure" vocabulary words are critical for mastering English.

<comment><USER37> First of all, I don't think it's true. And secondly, even if that's true, mastering English isn't exactly a top priority skill needed for young people to succeed in today's world, especially not up there with math and science (which is ridiculously easy on these standard tests and is weighted less. Actually, does SAT even have a science portion???). SAT does not test general knowledge either. (Yes, I know of SAT-II, but they aren't taken by most people and aren't required by colleges).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> To be honest I'm somewhat sad that Khan Academy is jumping on board with this and planning on offering SAT prep videos. I don't think it's appropriate to mix such meaningless skills as test taking, with the true skills Khan Academy helps teach. I believe it could distract students from the important material, by allowing them to care more of what will help them improve that one particular test score.

<comment><USER8> The official SAT problems are well-written and so we're happy to teach students how to do them.

We're not going to teach test-taking.

<comment><USER38> But by specifically focusing on the SAT questions aren't you not focusing on the fundamental skills, but rather the specific of how they show up in the SAT's?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is great. I think the changes to the essay portion are excellent.

As a native english speaker, my instinct is to emphasize the essay part - <USER2> I realize that's idealistic. Still, I think essays and writing are critical for showing one's ability to synthesize (there's that word) and organize one's ideas or those of others. I think writing should be emphasized and multiple native languages supported... but that's work for the next revision. This one is certainly welcome.

<comment><USER40> Sucks really badly for dyslexics though.

<comment><USER39> Agreed... a test that aims to be as broadly applicable as possible should accommodate as many variations and common problems as possible. It may be the difference between 20 million people taking it and 20.3 million, but for that .3 million it's incredibly important.

<comment><USER40> Yes probably needs the ability to do an oral Viva - funnily enough one of my uncles did that at Oxford back in the 50's for his MA as his writing was so bad :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why is "ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong" a good thing?

<comment><USER41> When there is a penalty for wrong guesses, students who have a pretty good idea that they know the answer, but aren't certain, must waste time determining whether it is in their favor to answer the question.

Evaluating whether it is worth it to take a guess is a test-taking skill, and the SAT is trying to shift away from test-taking skills.

<comment><USER5> What's hard about it? If you can eliminate even one answer it's in your favor to guess.

<comment><USER42> Really you can just always guess. When you can't eliminate any answers, guessing has the same expected value as leaving the question blank. If you can eliminate one or more answers, the expected value is higher for guessing than for leaving the question blank. So in no situations does guessing decrease your expected value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's worth noting the similarities to the Common Core. David Coleman was one of the main authors of the Common Core and is now president of the College Board.

This article: "Sometimes, students will be asked not just to select the right answer, but to justify it by choosing the quote from a text that provides the best supporting evidence for their answer." "Going forward, though, students will get a source document and be asked to analyze it for its use of evidence, reasoning and persuasive or stylistic technique."

CCSS CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

</comment><comment><USER44> As a member of the first year of students who were required to do the writing section, I'm glad it's gone. What an absolute crock that was, and it probably screwed up the other sections as well. When you make an already ponderous test over an hour longer, it becomes less about aptitude and more about endurance.

<comment><USER17> As if real life never presented such challenges.

<comment><USER44> Real life has never sprung a random topic on me at 7:30 AM and required me to have a handwritten essay written 25 minutes later. This essay, in a wildly naive attempt to limit the subjective value of writing, was judged largely on "coherency".

We had computers back in 2005, and almost all students typed their school essays out, but the college board hadn't got with it. Since it took me so long to handwrite things, I didn't have a moment to think about the topic. Instead, my strategy was to prepare an extremely formulaic essay, and then furiously write as fast as I could. Hey, it worked, except I was already stressed and tired by the end of the essay with over 3 hours of test to go.

To backtrack a bit, I've always assumed the SAT to be about aptitude for reasoning, not about throwing "real life" challenges at you.

<comment><USER17> _Real life has never sprung a random topic on me at 7:30 AM and required me to have a handwritten essay written 25 minutes later._

But you knew in advance taht you were going to have to write an essay when you took the SAT, no? And while it may not have happened to you since, I can think of numerous examples where people have to do exactly that - lawyers, managers, doctors...

I'm sorry you find it hard to write things by hand, but that's something most people learn to deal with in junior school. I was a very slow writer myself, and I overcame it with...practice. Indeed, when under time pressure to write something I often find it easier to write by hand because I _don 't_ have editing facilities available beyond basic crossing-out.

<comment><USER45> He did knew it advance and thus memorized formulaic essay. Yes, you can also get faster at writing by practice.

The problem is that speed of writing is irrelevant in almost all contexts and training it ridiculous waste of time - unless you need SAT. Which is reasonable complaint about SAT. If they would be measuring how fast you run, then you could prepare for it by running a lot. It would not make it the best possible test.

Mangers and doctors do not write essays on random topics. They write texts about their work on topics they supposedly know well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "She still embodies all the awful stereotypes she did before!" "But she's got a new hat!"

</comment><comment><USER47> I wish I had had the chance to take this, I could have gotten a perfect score. Taking the SAT as an ESL student those obscure words just kill you. There is a set of words that appear nowhere in modern English other than on an SAT test.

<comment><USER15> If I was on a college admissions committee, I'd take into account ESL status when comparing verbal scores from one applicant to the next. It only makes sense.

<comment><USER28> There's TOEFL:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_English_as_a_Foreign_La...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_English_as_a_Foreign_Language)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'll start respecting the SAT just as soon as the results can be accepted as a measure of general intelligence. It shouldn't be that difficult to simultaneously test for both content mastery and aptitude.

<comment><USER49> It _used_ to be a fairly good measure of 'g', and I note the tables I found on the net that equate the scores of the 1979 exam I took are very close to my results on formal IQ tests, like within 2-3 points.

Reversing the watering down of the exam ... that's pretty hard to imagine for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's great when a standardized test keeps on changing. It kind of negates the point. Fundamentally the SAT (or any general test) is an arbitrary measure of you much you study. Just leave it be I say.

</comment><comment><USER51> One thing nice about the change is that for a wrong answer students won't be penalized.

</comment><comment><USER52> R.I.P. SAT Vocab Flashcards [& every App dedicated to them]

</comment><comment><USER53> I take the SAT this saturday. To be blunt: They owe everyone a fucking apology over this.

</comment><comment><USER54> The education system is designed to operate backwards on purpose. Think about it.

<comment><USER54> Throw independent thought out the window please.</comment></comment>


I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave - <AUTHOR> http://motherjones.com/print/161491

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641184> (208 comments) and there are a few other dupe submissions, with 6 or fewer comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I did not know it was submitted before.

<comment><USER2> No problem. Search is your friend. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who's here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks' worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don't end up like Brian."

It's amazing we allow this. It should be illegal.</comment>


What should companies look for in a candidate's tweets? - <AUTHOR>

I know that companies already look at blogs, but tweets give you more insight into how a person thinks throughout the day.<p>Would you consider a candidate who tweets mostly about mundane matters for example? <comment><USER2> I think I would prefer not to hire folks who spend their days trying to cram their insights into 110 character textboxes instead of working on the hard problems.

<comment><USER3> It's 140 characters, not 110 characters; and the best insights are the short ones.

For instance, "Pondering password hashing techniques", "Decided that bcrypt isn't good enough for tarsnap", and "Loving the random oracle model" tells quite a story. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that if I were going to that much trouble to investigate a candidate, I really have too much time on my hands.</comment>


The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/features/nypd-demographics-unit-2013-9/#print <comment><USER2> As a Muslim, I've had to make peace with knowing that I have no privacy and little guarantee of my rights. I recently graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the NYPD was even spying and monitoring us there. [0]

History's pages are filled with instances of minorities being targeted and persecuted. One can go back and look at what happened to the Blacks, the Jews, the Japanese, and many others. That the targeted group is different isn't the key here. What's different now is that technology has progressed to the point where the invasiveness and secrecy of what goes on is unmatched.

[0] [http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/NYPD- monitored...](http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/NYPD-monitored- Muslim-students-all-over-Northeast)

<comment><USER3> Don't make too much peace with it. A lot of my muslim friends have been reluctant to stir the pot about their treatment by the authorities and society in general, saying things like "it is in god's hands." The problem with that attitude is that in the US the system is designed such that the squeaky wheel is the only one that gets the oil.

The civil rights movement happened because blacks organized, the japanese were really passive about the whole interment camp thing. I knew families that had lost everything -- houses, farmland -- because it was basically stolen from them while they were interred. When they were released they preferred to avoid talking about it, as if it were a great shame on them rather than a shame on the rest of the country for doing it to them. So practically no legal action occurred their property was never recovered, depriving their children of opportunities that were rightly theirs.

You have to do whatever it takes to live without completely losing your marbles over the situation, so I'm not judging - just saying that it is important to talk about it as much as you can stomach with as many people as will listen so they can start to understand what your experiences are.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, nobody is placing Muslims in internment camps nor are they being forced to ride in the back of the bus.

If anything, we are learning that we are _all_ under constant surveillance.

<comment><USER3> The japanese internment did not happen out of the blue, there was a lot of agitation against them leading up to it. The goal is to stop things from getting out of hand rather than trying to fix them after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this is the group that (allegedly? warrantlessly?) searched Aditya Mukerjee's apartment and took a religious photo during his recent boarding troubles and temporary detention.

(See the last 5 paragraphs of: <[http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont- fly-...](http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-during- ramadan>.))

</comment><comment><USER6> We've accepted so many hedges and exceptions against the rule of law and the constitution that it's hard to argue against the idea that our country isn't on a slippery slope into some horrible devastating loss of freedoms.

We've created so many "constitution free zone" bubbles that they are rapidly merging into one solid wall-to-wall exception for nearly every part of our lives: the ways we travel, communicate, are entertained, do business, etc. Soon enough the parts of our lives where the constitution is actually fully in force will be so small that it might as well not exist.

</comment><comment><USER7> From the end of the article:

 _" Whatever the shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act oversight system, at least there is, theoretically, a check on the agency's activities. But in New York City, for Muslim citizens and activists of many stripes, there is no such outside system meant to safeguard their privacy. The NYPD conducts its oversight in-house. City Hall doesn't review intelligence programs the way Congress does. Courts can step in to settle questions about constitutionality, but only if somebody finds out about programs that are designed to remain secret forever.

In 2010, the Demographics Unit was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit over fears about how the title would be perceived if it leaked out. But rakers still troll Muslim neighborhoods, filing an average of four new reports every day, searching for hot spots. The Muslim community is marbled with fear, afraid to speak openly because an informant could be lurking near.

Kelly is unapologetic. Like the department's use of the tactic known as stop- and-frisk, raking is a tactic Kelly maintains is legal. He said the program is operating just as it always has. "Nothing" has changed, Kelly boasted to The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

In many ways, Ray Kelly has been a remarkably successful commissioner—but when it mattered most, the Demographics Unit was a failure as a matter of police work. And now, the lawyers in the Handschu case_ [which resulted in the original prohibition of the NYPD spying on people not suspected of crimes] _have returned to court, arguing that Kelly and Cohen, in their effort to keep the city safe, have crossed constitutional lines. Regardless of the outcome, the NYPD's programs are likely to join waterboarding, secret prisons, and NSA wiretapping as emblems of post-9 /11 America, when security justified many practices that would not have been tolerated before."_

<comment><USER8> _the Demographics Unit was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit over fears about how the title would be perceived if it leaked out._

The same way the NSA, CIA and FBI repeatedly rename their continuing activities.

<comment><USER9> The correct term is newspeak [1]

In newspeak the contracted name for the unit would have been DemoUn, pronounced /ˈdiː.mən/.

UnDem would have been a good second choice.

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

<comment><USER8> The problem there is that "Newspeak" is itself a placeholder term for a certain set of behaviors, not to mention that 1984 quotes carry about as much weight as Simpson's ones.

The term _you 're_ probably looking for is "euphemism treadmill:"

[http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism- treadmi...](http://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmill- replacing-r-word.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's a good headline. We should start calling what NSA is doing "un- American" too - because it is.

<comment><USER11> It's a reference to [1], not a description.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un- American_Activities_Co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un- American_Activities_Committee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Although I've been alarmed by many of the abused of power reported recently, I'm not sure about this one. It may well be illegal, but the article doesn't make the case that any actual harm has occurred. After all, what we are talking about here is a bunch of cops _" sitting round eating kebabs and buying pastries"_.

 _" That's when Berdecia realized that, in the hunt for terrorists, his detectives gravitated toward the best food."_

 _" the Demographics Unit never built a single case"_

It sounds more like a waste of money than an abuse of power.

On the other hand, what it does do is show how easily law enforcement officers can use nebulous suspicions to justify what they want to do. In this case, they label people as suspicious in order to justify getting a nice meal. Others do so in order to go on a power trip.

<comment><USER13> "It may well be illegal, but the article doesn't make the case that any actual harm has occurred"

Funny how that logic does not apply to the rest of us when the police make an arrest...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Always watch out for the use of the word _Intelligence_ ... it has special meaning to _them_.</comment>