The number of seed rounds in 2014 fell compared to 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/16/the-seed-bubble-has-popped/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed <comment><USER2> Except: "Bear in mind that the total dollar amount of money flowing into seed deals barely declined".

That is a questionable definition of "popping" a bubble.

The article does go on to admit that it's just selectively illustrating the _number_ of deals, not the _amount invested_ in seed deals, which is actually still the same in aggregate, and then wishy-washily says it's up to you to interpret this yourself etc. But since most people don't read too far past the dramatic chart and the headline, I think it would be fair to say this smacks of click-baity sensationalism.

<comment><USER3> And it's equally possible to interpret this data positively. Perhaps VCs are becoming more selective and concentrating their money on better teams/ideas instead of casting as wide of a net as possible(I am not saying this is actually the case). I don't understand why so many journalists try to find catastrophe in the absence of contrary evidence.

<comment><USER2> That's negative for shitty teams/ideas, but yeah, probably positive for the health of the ecosystem.

I would apply the "San Francisco Rent Test". Are SF rents still high? Then Seed Bubble: not popped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a big hairy recap of 2014 venture capital:

[http://blog.pitchbook.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-vc- in-2014/](http://blog.pitchbook.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-vc-in-2014/)

Nothing on here is alarming at all - look at fundraising, look at how much money was invested in venture companies, look at valuations, look at capital exited; all really healthy.

Sure, maybe the "spray and pray" style of seed investment has stopped as VCs are pickier about early stage companies or prefer to focus on later stage companies with their portfolios, but that's not necessarily a terrifying sign of some big bubble popping. It might be harder for a business plan and a website to get a few hundred thousand dollars circa 1998, but a lot of promising companies are still getting the money they need to grow.

</comment><comment><USER5> This plays right into YCs hands: seed money is harder to get, but YC is still open for business. And with the number of deals they fund the remainder of the seed world is left with what they (incorrectly) perceive as 'second choice', now that the path to YC is well known.

<comment><USER6> This is true. I think what we saw was an accelerator bandwagon. It was truly a revolutionary mechanism in the VC world and everybody under the sun wanted in on the action... but there were too many and hardly any of them could replicate the same results as YC and TS. We knew some of them were going to die off and now they have.

I fail to see how anybody but the "me too" accelerators lose with this trend (and they were losing already, obviously). Startup founders shouldn't have been taking money from them anyway, so the fact that they're dying off just saves naive founders from making at least this one mistake.

<comment><USER7> That's something worth remembering about reading graphs. When you're looking at the aggregate of a trend, it's worth asking what changes in that aggregate represent. Sometimes, growth means taking on dead weight. Sometimes recession means shedding it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That first graph doesn't really show the bursting of a bubble. Yes, the number of rounds have gone down, but I think an important metric is the amount raised, which has only slightly decreased. This make it seems like there have been stricter requirements by seed investors before jumping in.

Which to me sounds like not a bad thing. Ideally we'll get less Yo apps this way.

<comment><USER9> The problem I see is that if fewer companies are being funded early-stage today, then there will be fewer companies around to get later-stage funding tomorrow. One of the reasons we have so many companies getting later stage funding right now is that there was so much seed funding a few years back. If early-stage funding is starting to dry up, that may be a sign of other things to follow...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting graph. The "bubble" goes parabolic right in 2009, as the financial system is awash in QE money, searching for yield. Almost textbook.

<comment><USER11> QE has nothing to do with VC

<comment><USER10> > _QE has nothing to do with VC_

Sure it does. Easy money is easy money. That goes for you and your mortgage at historically low rates, or VCs raising capital. When stimulus is occurring, it's interesting to see where it ends up.

I'm not implying anything nefarious. In fact, I'd say it's working as intended (or at least expected).

<comment><USER11> To make sure we're talking about the same thing; the pink line in the second graph on the techcrunch article is what you're talking about when "the bubble goes parabolic".

That pink line represents the number of seed deals completed, not the amount of money in the system.

Unfortunately, I cannot download the original dataset that Mattermark is using, but using a dataset from Pricewaterhouse Coopers[1], and data from FRED[2], I have run some statistical analysis using R.

My results are here: [http://imgur.com/a/eFzs1](http://imgur.com/a/eFzs1)

In short, the only statistical correlation I can find between QE and Seed capital is a negative one, which would contradict your original hypothesis.

[0][https://medium.com/mattermark-daily/why-is-the-number-of- see...](https://medium.com/mattermark-daily/why-is-the-number-of-seed-rounds- raised-in-q4-2014-down-30-38627517ca4e)

[1][http://www.pwcmoneytree.com/HistoricTrends/CustomQueryHistor...](http://www.pwcmoneytree.com/HistoricTrends/CustomQueryHistoricTrend)

[2][http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=MBST#](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=MBST#)

<comment><USER10> > _My results are here_

Why would you compare quarterly values of seed money to a cumulative total (QE) and expect a correlation? They are completely different series. Try doing a running total for the seed money and the graph will look different. The first and third graphs don't make sense for this reason.

The second graph is better, and you can see there is some correlation. Did you test for lags, or do you assume that QE money would flow instantly into the coffers of institutional investors?

I applaud your effort, but there is more to this analysis than overlaying two graphs. You need to understand the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most professional investors are sheep. The number and scale of opportunities in technology is growing incredibly and they're _not_ all doubling down.

It's been almost 10 years and no one has launched a credible competitor to YC. That's proof of how incredibly weak the industry is.

Where investors are afraid, consumers aren't the least bit deterred. They don't talk of bubbles. They want cool new stuff that makes their live better and they're paying for it. The internet has reached critical mass, everyone is online and has a credit card. Which is why, in the near future, new technology will mostly come from companies that were funded by crowdfunding, not professional investors.

<comment><USER13> crowdfunding? really?

Both crowdfunding and VCs fund a tiny portion of the total small businesses started.

Did you see those charts? The scale is in hundreds.

In the US alone there are millions of small businesses started each year. Sure, most of those aren't trying to change the world (haven't seen statistics on that)... but even if it's 0.5% and you exclude all the solo founders, it would still far out number crowdfunding and VCs by a large margin.

<comment><USER14> How are the millions funded?

<comment><USER15> Loans, savings, investments from friends and relatives, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > And of course there is another possibly — maybe hundreds of startups > collectively decided to stop announcing their funding rounds?

There is also a much simpler explanation... there is a lag in when seed rounds happen and when they are announced. The fact that the most recent data point stands out as a massive outlier is a strong indication of this possibility. Simple to check as well, we can look at this same plot in 6 months with the back filled data and see if the conclusion is the same.

Jumping to conclusions for the sake of a headline is fine, that is Techcrunch's job after all. But for those of you that do data analysis for your own companies, be careful when jumping to conclusions. If you see a massive outlier on your graph like this, more often than not it is a data collection/sampling issue than a giant change in the world. And of course if you do think it is a giant change in the world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So there shouldn't be a caveat, which if true, completely disprove the whole conclusion.

<comment><USER17> You also need to consider the source of the data. From what I understand, much of Mattermark's data comes from Crunchbase, and the categories in the Mattermark chart[1] mirror categories on Crunchbase.

Crunchbase is by no means a comprehensive source of _all_ deals. As an example, I work with a company that raised a seed round in Q4 2014. Crunchbase does not have this funding despite the fact that it's public.

For the deals that Crunchbase does have, the categorization can be very spotty. For instance, you can find $2+ million party rounds with institutional investors categorized as "Seed" while there are sub $1 million rounds categorized as "Venture" or even "Series A." There are also oddball categories like "Debt Financing" and "Convertible Note" which in some cases appear to be the same thing.

In my mind this is almost certainly a case of garbage in, garbage out.

[1] [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen-...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/screen- shot-2015-01-16-at-2-35-10-pm.png?w=680&h=514)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We definitely found this out the hard way. We tried to raise $750K for a seed round and were repeatedly told that our tech/team were great but that we didn't have enough traction.

It's kinda hard watching people go on about the "bubble" when you're just out there trying to scrap it out and find something that works.

<comment><USER19> YC offers 20k+ for a few percent. Startup Chile is 40k with a co-investment of around 10k. That money is supposed to support the founders for a few months while they get the prototype out the door and build traction.

In comparison, 750k is a metric ton of cash, and should be enough to support a founding team for several years. Not judging, but if you're positioning it as a seed round instead of Series A that may be part of the problem.

<comment><USER20> BTW, YC now invests $120k in most of their companies: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal](http://blog.ycombinator.com/the- new-deal)

<comment><USER19> Wow. I didn't know they'd dropped the convertible round. The new arrangement is a great deal -- more than a $1.7 million valuation for each company accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So bootstrappers are on the rise now?

<comment><USER6> Yes and it's going mainstream. Starting a company is so cheap and fast now that it doesn't even take a team of 2 or 3 anymore. A single person can do it.

There are so many benefits to solo-founding, it's not even funny. Without co- founders, there's no delay in getting started. There's no drama. The development cycle is fast and the code can be remarkably clean. Personally, I make changes to my production code all the time because the whole thing is in my head and I know what effect my changes will have. (And if I screw something up, I know how to fix it in minutes, not hours.) With a team, that's simply not possible.

Investors are going to wake up to this reality soon and accelerators will trip over each other to claim to be the "accelerator of solo founders".

Corollary to this, MBAs and other non-tech types are screwed in the years to come. Engineers won't need them anymore. 1. Make a product. 2. Get some baseline traction. 3. Join an accelerator or raise a seed round, if you need it. 4. Hire the founding team. 5. Profit.

<comment><USER5> One small problem: co-founders make you stronger. You are your own single point of failure. For many customers that makes you a no-go zone.

<comment><USER22> "Co-founders make you stronger" is a questionable generalization. Cofounders add a lot of things, both positive and negative, and as long as you and (each of) your cofounder(s) have vital skills/resources that are unique in the group, you now have _multiple_ "single points of failure."

Yes, cofounders can contribute bandwidth, skills, connections, and all sorts of other positive things. They can also contribute friction, disagreement, and various other negative things. It's not a cut and dry benefit.

<comment><USER23> Reminds me of remote working. Some people claim it's bad, some people claim it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. There's pros and cons to each. People build successful companies with both methodologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Suppose you got $40-100k from one of the dozens of accelerators and the cost of running an online business shrinks every year. Is your next raise still counted as seed or series A? Are successful kickstarter campaigns counted as seed deals? Should they? Maybe it's not that seed bubble is popping, but there so many new ways to run a startup that old metrics are no longer relevant.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's a significant time delay between when seed rounds are closed and when they're announced, so data for the most recent quarters are almost certainly incomplete. This leads to the spurious conclusion that the number of seed rounds declined in 2014.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seed deals decline while total $ spent stays still? Good news IMO. Means VCs are putting more of their weight into co's they do fund. #win

</comment><comment><USER27> I totally misread the graphs. Sorry Danielle!

<comment><USER28> Did I see the same chart you did? I went back and looked, all I saw was "Q1" and "Q3" labels while the data showed all four quarters, but only half were labelled. It /was/ missing a Q4 though at the end.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creator of the graphs and author of the original post (here: [https://medium.com/mattermark-daily/why-is-the-number-of- see...](https://medium.com/mattermark-daily/why-is-the-number-of-seed-rounds- raised-in-q4-2014-down-30-38627517ca4e))

All the quarters from Q1 2005 through Q4 2014 were plotted. The axis labels do not show all of them due to space constraints. Apologies that this was confusing, I will make sure to add all the tick marks and labels in the future.

<comment><USER28> I don't think you need all, I mean, there were space constraints. This is why a bar graph can be clearer than a line graph for discrete data though. They may be boring, but they are often effective at communication. :-) Oh and it's helpful to label both ends of the graph, from Q1 2005 to Q4 2014, then fill in what labels you can in the middle. If you'd picked random Qs or even just every year, perhaps to shade the backgrounds of each year, that might have made for a more understandable graph. Our fault for misunderstanding it in the first place, of course... This is also why some places link to tables of data used in the graph. You could click to view the table if you had any questions about what you're seeing in the graph. Stephen Few's an accessible read on this subject.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, this is great feedback. I'll check out Stephen Few's work too -- thanks for reading and caring!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "The Seed Bubble Has Popped" has popped.</comment>


Ask HN: I created a new GitHub project, and I need some suggestions and ideas - <AUTHOR> I am a Junior programmer. Recently, I had an ideas of improving development efficiency and saving our time. So I start new Github project named "Sloth", https://github.com/coolcooldee/sloth . Sloth is A tool to generate scaffold code from SQL databases. You just need to specify your application database may be used. Until now, Sloth 1.0 has been finished . It accomplished several goals:
Generate Model–View–Controller Code
Generate CRUD  Code
Generate API DOC
Provide Many Kinds Of Data Access With JDBC :Mybatis、JOOQ、Spring JDBC Sloth1.0 is effective in my daily work ! Currently, I plan to develop Sloth 2.0 . So I would like to listen to your more experienced suggestions and interesting ideas about new features in Sloth 2.0 . What is your opinion on the schedule and next steps we proposed?Look forward to your feedbacks and suggestions soon. Thank you for your understanding and your attention to this matter. <comment><USER2> Clickable: [https://github.com/coolcooldee/sloth](https://github.com/coolcooldee/sloth)

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


Fleksy - Awesome new predictive text input method - <AUTHOR> http://fleksy.com <comment><USER2> I had this on my PalmPilot in 1998 but from a different company. It was written by a friend who worked at a company with all kinds of patents for it, but they never released the Palm version publicly. Only a few dozen people had it in the world. It was amazing and it changed the utility of the PalmPilot significantly.

You had to put a sticker with the qwerty layout over the silkscreen area and then you just tapped away madly with the stylus. It was so good.

This is very, very close. Most of the mistakes it makes are due to the fact that it seemingly doesn't look at your address book for completion options, so when you try to type in people's names you know it picks a different word and doesn't even have proper names as an option. Fails on stuff like my name (Pinstein) or well-known things like "MacBook".

But it's still awesome! I've been waiting 10 years to have this on my handheld again!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using Fleksy for about five days now. As a totally blind iPhone user this app has some promise and some major flaws. The first issue is the fact that the app takes at least 30 seconds to load on my iPhone 4 if you haven't used it in a while. I'll deal with the crappy typing experience using the iPhone onscreen keyboard instead of waiting 30 seconds if I'm just sending a quick text. The second issue is the inefficiency of entering custom words. If a word isn't in Fleksy's dictionary it's much faster to type the word using the normal keyboard instead of with Fleksy. This makes writing technical emails or messages with lots of nonstandard words quite difficult. Since you can add words to a custom dictionary in Fleksy though I would expect this to get better with time.

<comment><USER4> Actually, touch typing on Fleksy is faster than on the standard keyboard. We reduced the lag time required to input letters from .5 seconds to .35. Plus, you only need to input those terms once.

<comment><USER5> The thing he mentioned was startup time, though, not the actual input lag.

<comment><USER4> Was responding to the second issue: "The second issue is the inefficiency of entering custom words". On that front Fleksy is the same or faster than the standard iOS keyboard.

<comment><USER6> I think he's suggesting that for "custom words" flesky autocorrects to the wrong words, whereas the standard keyboard doesn't - thus leading to longer input times under flesky ... at least until it learns those words.

<comment><USER7> The standard keyboard also autocorrects non-standard words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone explain how this works? Seems like total black magic to me... the dude is typing random gibberish and it still figures out the word? Then he's just tapping randomly on the screen, gibberish comes out, then turns into the word he wanted?

Don't mean this to sound unintelligent, the video was just crazy. What kind of key proximity algorithms are behind this?

<comment><USER9> Patent pending kind? I doubt they are sharing it quite yet but the one beauty of patents is we'll get the entire answer once the patent isn't pending anymore. If I had to imagine though, the algorithm is just accounting for the most likely word to follow the previous wording, that could have been formed by hitting keys that were next to the ones you really hit wrong. I'd like to see how it handles my wanton throwing of swear words in messages to friends. And, the use of l33t speak and text talk.

Example, at 0:45 he swipes to the right and kryuwt turns into letter.

k -> l (k is next to l)

r -> e (r is next to e)

y -> t (y is next to t)

u -> t (u is next to y, which is next to t)

w -> e (w is next to e)

t -> r (t is next to r)

The options are letter, proper, merger and keeper (plus something else further) Given the previous three words "you miss ever" the algorithm uses some prior dictionaries and knows that when talking and saying "you miss every" we get probabilities of of likelihood for each probably word. Letter ends up being 35% as opposed to the 7 percent chance you see any of those other words. ( that last bit of percentage math is an estimation given for the sake of example, in a true text prediction dictionary the percentages are usually small, given the incredibly large amount of words that can and do follow "you miss every" (chance, shot, etc are probably more likely, but not near those letters we kept missing earlier.)

It would seem they've made improvements on that algorithms. I wonder how novel it really is though.

<comment><USER10> This is pretty much how the stock Android keyboard works. It's been able to spot missed keys since at least Ice Cream Sandwich - e.g. I just typed "kettrt" and it's suggesting "letter" as a correction. Since Jelly Bean it's also had some bigram support too (guesses the next word based on the previous without you typing anything).

Aside from the "typing without a keyboard" part, it's not obvious from the video how Fleksy differs from this, but the focus on blind users probably makes a difference.

<comment><USER11> But does Android use context clues? iOS can't quite handle the two-letter distance, but it accurately corrects "kryywt" (kry _u_ wt is too far away) without any context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've realized that for my mobile phone the typing speed will just never be great regardless of the input method. Tools like this (and SwiftKey) improve that a bit but not to a life-changing degree.

For the desktop this might be quite amazing however since, unless you're a perfect touch typist, you will always make a small number of mistakes.

These small mistakes can be caught fairly easily (especially given the much larger training set you'll gather on a desktop) and since you're looking at the screen anyhow it's fairly easy to detect damn-you-autocorrect mistakes before they slip through.

TL;DR; Don't use this to make inherently slow data entry a bit faster; use it to make fast data entry even faster.

<comment><USER13> > for my mobile phone the typing speed will just never be great regardless of > the input method.

Actually, way back when PalmOS and PocketPC were all the rage, there was a company that released something called the Fitaly keyboard. I don't know what you qualify as "great" typing speed, but with this keyboard they advertise 50wpm with a stylus, I was able to achieve 60wpm after some practice.

The point is, it is definitely possible to achieve fast input speeds on mobile devices.

Admittedly it did take some practice and probably isn't great for the average consumer.

<http://www.fitaly.com/product/fitalyppc.htm>

<comment><USER12> I agree that a stylus changes everything; I should have been more specific.

I never got up to 60wpm with Fitaly but I do remember not really feeling hampered by my typing speed.

In general you don't get a stylus with your phone anymore these days though...

<comment><USER13> Agreed.

Also it seems like it's finally coming full circle around back to styli again. It seems like they're now being advertised as a new feature, which I think is kind of funny. Granted, they aren't using resistive screens anymore, so it is sort of new.

I'm waiting for a good stylus-enabled device before I purchase anything new. The fact that you can't draw on most of these tablets is silly.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I wrote about this a while back, the stylus will always be useful for pretty fundamental reasons, though there will be phases in which it's not easy to implement (we're coming out of one right now): <http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/in-defense-of-the-stylus/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm, this is probably the best argument for QWERTY I've seen. It's probably based on relative key taps identifying the keys, so having a keyboard layout that scatters everything makes it easier than a keyboard layout where aoeui are all right next to each other, which are very frequently interchangable between two legal words. Quite a few of the Dvorak consonant clusters are also often interchangable in the same way (crl being the one I have the most, err, "fun" with).

</comment><comment><USER16> This… this looks and acts almost EXACTLY like the stock Android keyboard. The swipes to accept a correction and to delete a word are new, and the graphic design of the keyboard is more minimalist - but the core functionality of "spellchecks based on words you could spell with keys near the ones you actually hit" and "shows autocorrect candidates in a horizontal row above the keys" is absolutely identical.

It's a shame iOS is so monolithic, if you could wedge in a new keyboard like you can on Android, I would totally be willing to shell out some bucks for this because I really loathe the iOS autocorrect experience compared to the Android.

<comment><USER17> I don't think the similarity to the stock Android keyboard is coincidental. The authors of this previously made Blindtype which was purchased by Google.

<comment><USER18> Hope they hired a good lawyer to review the IP transfer agreements they signed in the previous sale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Windows phone pretty much does exactly this already. It's horrid.

I genuinely think that a better solution is to buy a phone with T9 if you have input problems or like to enter stuff when not looking at it. You simply NEED a tactile interface to do that effectively.

I carry a Nokia 3330 and Lumia 710 around. The 3330 is still a thousand times easier to enter text messages into. I can use it with my eyes shut and make absolutely no mistakes. The 710 however, is painful to enter text into.

<comment><USER20> T9? Seriously?

I think you're an outlier, my friend.

<comment><USER19> I'm definitely not. I think your perception is warped by your social circles which is probably smart-phone oriented.

The overwhelming majority of the handsets getting shifted out are feature phones and below and they are mainly shipping with T9. Have a Google round for the stats - they are not hard to find.

These stats also only cover traceable sales. There are a lot of second hand sales.

T9 with some sort of tactile keyboard and some practice results in considerably less errors and corrections being made compared to a touch screen with a standard QWERTY keyboard.

<comment><USER20> Yes, the world is a big and poor place. But in the United States where (like other developed nations of course) people have the financial means to choose, the majority of phones sold are smartphones. And T9 is generally looked at like rotary dial.

<comment><USER19> Rubbish. Going back to September 2011 as I can't find any newer stats:

[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/40-percent...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/40-percent- of-u-s-mobile-users-own-smartphones-40-percent-are-android/)

<comment><USER21> [http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/16/technology/smartphones/index...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/16/technology/smartphones/index.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I missed it, but I don't think I saw any demonstration of correcting words that were typed with one fewer or one more letter than the intended word. The absence of tactile feedback when typing makes this a fairly common error -- anyone know if their algorithm is capable of handling it?

<comment><USER23> My iPad app needs very few keystrokes to spell most words - only the first letter has to be correct. You can see how few keystrokes need to be pressed to type full sentences in this demo: <http://ktype.net/demo> (app is now free: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ktype-free/id550288060>)

I wrote my own algorithm that parses through a dictionary of one-million words and phrases in real-time (even one iPad 1) and suggests the most probable word based on the letters you've typed and in context of the last 2-3 words you typed. This means, typing 'P' after 'HARRY' will suggest 'POTTER' instead of 'PUT', 'PICK' or other common words that start with 'P'. I haven't made my algorithm public yet but when I have some time, I intend to, especially if there is a demand for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> But you still have to type! I'll take Swype every time.

<comment><USER25> While I do love my Swype (especially as, similarly to the claims made by this keyboard, I am getting close to being able to "touch type" on it), I really, really like how this keyboard looks. Just letters, no fake key edges or anything like that, I think it's a huge improvement in the usage of the space available.

There are several keyboards available for Android that just plain suck on this front, with more space taken up by their early 00s pseudo-3d button styling than by the letters. I love what Fleksy is doing here and I hope more people follow in their footsteps.

<comment><USER26> I can't get Swype to stop autocorrecting normal words to gibberish, no matter how many times I remove the gibberish word from the dictionary. For example, every time I type "do" it becomes "siop" and nothing I can do impacts this.

<comment><USER25> The latest version has a much improved dictionary management, and I've found this issue has basically disappeared now, whereas it was very common before. Whether this is solely due to the new dictionary management, or if there have been other less visible changes under the hood, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fleksy team guy here.

Thanks for the feedback guys, feel free to send anything else you might have for us at email@example.com We want to make Fleksy as good as it can possibly be.

@fleksy on twitter.

<comment><USER27> Software ("app") pretty much depends on dictionary. What about words that aren't in the dictionary?

<comment><USER4> There is a solid way to add and remove custom words to the dictionary. You can also import a friend's(or a community's) dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Err, SwiftKey anyone? It's been around since 2008 and even has an xkcd comic featuring it: <http://xkcd.com/1068/>

<comment><USER29> I love SwiftKey but don't think anything equivalent was previously available for iPhone. My wife missed Swype terribly when she switched to iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I downloaded this and thought it was a little better, but not revolutionary. Then I decided to try copying a paragraph of text without looking at my keyboard. That's when I said "Wow!"

The combination of very smart prediction, speaking the words so I knew the couple of times I missed, and one-stroke delete made typing on glass, dare I say it, magical.

</comment><comment><USER31> Ok, maybe I am extremely daft but how do you turn off the voice reading out each word you type? I turned my device on vibrate/silent mode - no dice, then I tried turning the system volume down to nothing - no dice. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER3> There is no way to turn off the voice. This app is primarily designed for visually impaired people who need that feedback.

<comment><USER4> The option to turn voice feedback off will be coming in the next update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The main problem I have with input auto-completion is that the majority of times I'm using my phone to type, I'm using non-dictionary-but-meaningful- words (e.g. street names, foreign language terms) and the autocompletion usually just gets in the way. I've yet to see a system that addresses these kinds of usability issues.

<comment><USER4> Getting the exact text as you typed it is just an upward flick away with Fleksy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Initial dictionary not trained with profanity. I hate how much time I have to spend stopping things from being autocorrected to "duck." Fleksy didn't improve on the situation.

</comment><comment><USER34> This kind of technology has been around forever, but my guess is that the quality increase here is due to one or both of these two factors:

1) Computing a two-dimensional vector for each word typed, and calculating MSE against the ideal vectors for dictionary words, instead of just comparing the distance of the keys you hit to the locations of keys for dictionary words.

2) Using LSM (latent semantic mapping) to discover context and increase accuracy of #1.

</comment><comment> sean-duffy Certainly looks faster than typing on a standard touch keypad, but this makes me really not look forward to my next phone. For the last couple of years I've had a Blackberry and I've become used to being able to send out paragraph-long text very quickly and efficiently. But of course a Blackberry Curve leaves a lot to be desired in terms of the functionality of a modern smartphone. So I want a better phone, but I'm just regretful of the fact that it's going to end up being some kind of iOS or Andriod fully-touch, because I know my efficiency will go straight down.

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, I'm afraid I wouldn't like it. It seems it continues the only thing that is annoying me in iOS input method - not writing what I actualy type. Sorry, too often I use words it doesn't know (maybe in english it's better, but in polish/russian/ukrainian it's quite a big problem). It would mean disaster when using this app, isn't it? Does it support other languages at all? How about cyryllic script? Does it allow to switch between languages easly? Does it replace standard input method everywhere in iOS?

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting approach, and it makes a lot of sense. It would be interesting to see the algorithm behind it.

That said... every time I try out a new virtual keyboard, even for a few days, the more I yearn for a physical keyboard on a phone I actually want. The current options in the market for phone's with physical keyboards isn't great.

My passwords all contain plenty of special characters, and it requires many more keystrokes to enter in my password on a virtual keyboard vs a physical one. At least give me a shift key.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was skeptical but just tried it out and it's amazing. I even tried to type a sentence blindly just by remembering the approx. position of the keys and it worked perfectly

</comment><comment><USER38> How would adaptive keyboard layouts fair? I wrote a simple prototype that tries to minimize (mouse) movement for highly functional people who cannot speak and are fully paralyzed:

<http://davidjarvis.ca/keyboard/>

The centre key is the next most likely letter that will be pressed, based on digraph lexical analysis.

</comment><comment><USER39> Pretty cool. I've been thinking of something along these lines for a while now. The fact is, the relative position of each touch very likely determines the word you're trying to type, regardless of what keys were actually hit. It's surprising it took someone this long to release prediction at this level. Looking forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER40> I tried this out just now. While the tech is very impressive and I could see why this is a great keyboard for the blind, I've honed my iOS tapping to a point where the stock keyboard is a bit faster. What slows me down is the swiping for space. Hitting the spacebar is much quicker in my experience. Still, very cool app.

</comment><comment><USER41> To me this just seems like lipstick on a pig. I can type really fast on my Motorola Pro+ (it's like an e63 running android!) and not relying on autocorrect means I can do things like type unix commands and control vim.

For the blind - what is the advantage of a phone with a giant battery sucking screen on it in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER42> SwiftKey already does this, and more. You can miss all the letters in a word, and type multiple words without pressing the spacebar and it can still accurately detect what you intended to type. Nothing revolutionary here.

</comment><comment><USER43> I assume we can now look forward to DamnYouFlesky.com to complement DamnYouAutoCorrect.com. I hope this works a little better than the iOS auto correct that I have had to shut off, but my expectations are not high.

</comment><comment><USER44> Assuming this achieves some mainstream success, Apple offers "the bullet or the bribe" (get bought out or we just rebuild your product in house and destroy your business) in 3... 2...

too cynical?

<comment><USER45> Getting bought out by Apple is basically their only option for mainstream success on iOS because of the way iOS's keyboards are locked down. A keyboard like this loses a lot of its usefulness if every app has to implement it via SDK separately, because it is far better to have a consistent keyboard system across all apps.

So I'm cynical too but from a different angle -- Apple has already fixed the game when it comes to alternate keyboards (unlike Android where you can install 3rd party keyboards that work system-wide).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I remember this product back when it was called BlindType. If you combined no look input with swype, I think would be a pretty robust product.

<comment><USER47> BlindType was purchased by Google and as far as I can tell implemented into the stock keyboard as you can touch type without looking and it will successfully correct the words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> What's the business model on this?

<comment><USER3> In order to get the actual text out of the app into an email, sms, or onto the clipboard you need to buy a $4.99 in app purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> i don't get it. how is this different from Swype? or is Swype not available on iOS?

<comment><USER50> It's different in that Swype uses one continuous motion instead of discrete taps. (There are undoubtedly other differences as well.) And no, Swype isn't available on iOS. (N.B. I use Swype on Android and love it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is more magic than Googling for s,sxpm and still getting what I want.

</comment><comment><USER52> Alright guys, get ready to bought out by Apple.

</comment><comment><USER53> Awesome. Again. Another keyboard implemented for an OS where you can't even use the damn thing.</comment>


Frink - <AUTHOR> https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/ <comment><USER2> I enjoy reading the comments in Frink's units definition file, which I'm pretty sure I discovered via an old link from HN.

[https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt](https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt)

I particularly recommend checking out hertz and candela.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one thing I want to see in a programming language readme is a code sample. What does it do? The author recognizes that:

> Perhaps you'll get the best idea of what Frink can do if you skip down to > the Sample Calculations further on this document.

But I never saw that because it was a normal text link in the second paragraph, and because the table of contents is so long I assumed it was the entire document.

There should be at least one sample calculation higher up, with a link to the others, under its own heading called "What you can use Frink for".

</comment><comment><USER4> A thread from 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745726)

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825366)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974948)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893319)

2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541452)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Frink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Frink)

>Frink also has a tendency to over-complicate simple matters and use or invent scientific terminology while expressing various concepts, e.g. "Father and I got along like positrons and antineutrinos!" or "microcalifragilistics".

</comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a similar tool that uses the same unit database (from GNU units) but is open source, has a somewhat better online interface [1] and a crappier app [2]

[1]: [https://phiresky.github.io/qalc-react/](https://phiresky.github.io/qalc- react/) [2]: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.phir...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.phiresky.qalc_react)

</comment><comment><USER7> Frink is a mainstay on my phone, despite its not being open source - I make an exception because it's so darn useful. I don't use its programming features, though - it's kind of hard to be bothered with a weird language on a phone, even if unit-awareness is a great feature.

On desktop, for calculation and unit-conversion, I've completely replaced it with Qalculate, which doesn't have a programming language but does have a symbolic solver built-in, which is surprisingly useful for general calculations: you don't have to rearrange your calculation so the unknown is by itself, you can just write the equation from your textbook and replace the thing you want to know with 'x'.

Frink's "Sample Calculations" segment is an amusing read, in much the same ticklish way as xkcd's "What-if" series.

<comment><USER8> I use ncalc+ on my phone which is a pleasant to use simple opensource calculator with symbolic capability when you need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wasn't able to find what the value proposition of Frink is compared to Soulver, other than the more-difficult UI.

<comment><USER10> Soulver is MacOs/iOS only, and Frink works ~everywhere?

<comment><USER9> Is that the only value proposition? Given the apparent complexity of using Frink, I figured there should be some other upsides

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of Wolfram Alpha.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would love this if it was open source

</comment><comment><USER13> What does this do that mathcad doesn't?

<comment><USER14> I use both. Frink is on my phone. I have SMath Studio (or Smath)on my phone, which is a MathCAD clone, and is now free even for commercial use [1].

I have a bunch of tools in my toolbelt from working in engineering for many years. I always recommend Frink, SMath Studio, and the J programming language among the many tools. I am a polyglot, and I find Frink's simplified Java easy to use for even creating an input window for applications I find myself using repetitively.

[1] [https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary](https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary)</comment></comment>


Product Video for the New $2.75M Patek Philippe Watch Is Most Incredible - <AUTHOR> http://www.patek.com/movies/events/2014/175th/175th_5175R_Grandmaster_Chime_Full_EN.mp4

<comment><USER2> An incredible amount of engineering for what's ultimately an obsolete plaything of the super rich.

<comment><USER3> "Plaything" is generous. A yacht is a plaything (and far more functional). An expensive watch is a status symbol -- the "classy" way of wearing a sign that says, "I can burn [thousands/millions] on something pointless. That's how rich I am."

<comment><USER4> Not really. It's all very relative. I don't see what difference it makes if you have 3 billion dollars and spend .09% of your wealth on a watch vs. having a net worth of 10 thousand dollars while spending $50 on a watch, which would be over 5 times the amount relative to net worth. As a first-world inhabitant of moderate means, you could argue there are better ways to put that 2.75M to use, but so could a third-world inhabitant of lesser means with your $50 watch.

<comment><USER3> You're looking at it from a different angle than I was.

You're saying that, as a financial decision, spending $2.75M isn't necessarily stupid because $2.75M is peanuts to some people.

I agree, though it depends on their goals. If they want to make more money, it's obviously a poor decision. If they want to look like a vain, wealthy, frivolous person, then it's a great decision.

My comment was from the angle of whether I think someone who would spend $2.75M on a watch is A) cool, B) a good person, or C) a good decision maker.

Related to all of those aspects, I consider "looking like a rich person" to be an incredibly sad, ridiculous goal, especially when $2.75M could be used for such interesting, useful things (both selfish and unselfish).

And, of course, it's not 100% relative because goods/services cost absolute amounts of money. Fifty dollars is equivalent to, let's say, 10 hamburgers, and $2.75M is equivalent to 550,000 hamburgers.

Put that into any other unit you want to (charitable donations, vacations, houses, massages, political contributions, art, etc.). The point is that throwing away $2.75M on something frivolous is far different from throwing away $50, no matter how much money you make.

<comment><USER4> Not at all. You're discounting the fact that $50 is a month's wages to some people in some countries or that a loaf of bread cost a wheelbarrow's full of trillion dollar bills in Zimbabwe. A person might buy a watch like that because the amount is disposable, and they like the craftsmanship. It's you're assumption they're trying to impress people because you've formed a value system through your experiences in life, and you can't see it through any other lens that your own.

Someone who can buy a $2.75 M dollar watch likely looks at life very different than you do whether they go and buy a watch like that or not. Don't assume people who get what they want are naive, greedy, vain etc. They might have different reasons that on a relative basis are just as good as any you'd have.

<comment><USER3> I already agreed that, depending on the goal, it's a good decision. Sure, craftsmanship could be their reason. I find it unlikely that there aren't any $100k watches that approach the quality or aesthetic appeal, but it's certainly possible.

It's not just that the watch is $2.75M. It's just that the markup is so high. It's being sold for that price just to sell it for that price. It's not like paying for the construction of a $2.75M house, which might cost nearly that much to build.

And as far as conforming to my value system, I acknowledged that there was subjectivity in my reaction. But I don't have any problem with that. I also wouldn't mind including my own subjective morality when criticizing Bernie Madoff or John Wayne Gacy. Value systems may be individual and entirely relative, but our society has agreed on some useful tenets that I happily subscribe to (don't harm others, don't be greedy, etc.)

<comment><USER4> Fair enough - I can appreciate your point of view and logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are still have working watches from the late 1800's. That is kind of cool, but now its a status symbol.

</comment><comment><USER6> Warning: this link points to a 926MB mp4. Anyone have a non-direct download mirror before we kill the site?

<comment><USER7> With those margins, maybe we can expect them to afford keeping their website up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's subtler than a facial tattoo, louder than the startup-school after party, and it looks gaudier than be-sequined sliced bread.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is the green mechanical pencil the artist is using early on in the video?</comment>


Skype goes down - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/skype-goes-down-and-twitter-goes-insane/

<comment><USER2> oddly the guy next to me is fine, but i can't get online.</comment>


Introducing the Google+ Share Button - <AUTHOR> http://googleplusplatform.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-share-button.html <comment><USER2> Is this as slow as the PlusOne widget? I pulled all the PlusOne buttons from my site because, even with asynchronous loading, they were taking ages to load and seriously affecting performance of my site.

Totally unacceptable considering that Twitter and Facebook both loaded in under a second.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, same here, Twitter seems to be the most well behaved followed by Facebook but +1 is atrocious.

Also, will this now support IE7? The earlier one did not.</comment></comment>


Startup investing is still relationship- and location-driven - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@arlogilbert/silicon-valley-s-dirty-secret-67b1f0efdce

<comment><USER2> _" The problem is that within a reasonable proximity of these founders, there are no venture firms, so they will not be discovered. Without the capital needed to hire additional engineers, sales people, and build infrastructure, their idea will wither and die."_

It's still possible to bootstrap a company without venture capital. For example, the founders might live off their own savings for a couple of years until they have a product to sell. Or the founders can supplement their income by doing contract work on the side.

Also, not all startups need huge investments in infrastructure because not every startup creates a consumer product that's used by millions of users. For example, if your product is a developer tool, all you might need is a simple $50-per-month virtual server where the product can be downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article. I think the big thing for me that Arlo left out was the parallel process for someone who is already connected:

1\. Call rich investor friend tell him my idea and who is on the tentative team (provided we get the $2M in seed funding)

2\. (optional) e-mail him pitch deck

3\. Funds are wired

</comment><comment><USER4> The article's title breaks the HN guidelines, so we changed it to a representative sentence from the text. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a better one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Question: In the future, should I attempt to summarize the article or use the exact title from the post (which I think is another HN rule?)

Because I agree that the title was terrible but I've been scolded in the past for changing titles.

<comment><USER4> The guideline is: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." (It has never said to always use the exact title, though people sometimes misremember it that way. More discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9898976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9898976), if anyone cares.)

So yes, please do change misleading or linkbait titles to make them not be misleading or linkbait.

When changing a title, it's better to find accurate, neutral language in the article itself than to make up something new. We usually look at subtitles, introductory sentences, or (if necessary) the body of the text. Occasionally we don't find anything suitable for a title and have to make one up, but that's rare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for the clarification!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Study: Rewarding Good Teachers and Firing Bad Ones Accomplishes Nothing - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/06/new-study-concludes-that-rewarding-good-teachers-and-firing-bad-ones-accomplishes-nothing/#disqus-container <comment><USER2> My sister is a teacher, and had been recognized as "high performing". She was even given some type of award. She always taught in pretty well off areas where students came from supportive families.

A few years ago she moved to a school on the edge of a native reserve. She is now officially a "low performing" teacher. She insists she works twice as hard as before and has much more positive impact on the lives of her students. She's been robbed and beat up by students. Yet she now devotes her life to these kids, and would probably be fired in this type of experiment.

My guess is that the 'good' and 'bad' teachers in the study were almost totally dependent on the kids they had.

<comment><USER3> This sort of research is amusing in a sad way. IQ studies on large populations have revealed data for nearly a century that would easily have predicted the outcome of your sister's efforts. The scores for teachers have to be normalized against the best available data for the demographic composition of their classroom, if we're going to bother with it at all.

Unfortunately, people don't like what the IQ scores show, and so instead the Gates Foundation has to spend millions on a grand experiment that "teaches us nothing" as Mother Jones would put it, mostly because they refuse to acknowledge just how precisely it confirms the uncomfortable things we already know.

<comment><USER2> The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused and mistreated their entire lives. They were then released back into the world with a very poor education, and obvious mistrust for the government.

Friend of hers have taught in schools where a cycle of poverty inflicts the population. Most children are raised by single mothers because the father is in jail. When the father is released he has no opportunity to make a honest living for himself and the cycle continues.

The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ. It has everything to do with centuries of mistreatment of groups of people.

<comment><USER3> > The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away > from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused > and mistreated their entire lives.

Let's keep in mind that residential schools were absolutely the most progressive thing going at the time. Let's reach out to these poor beleaguered people and give them the benefit of our modern school system! You can see how easily the story could be sold to people as a very moral act before the actual results of the way it was handled were known, generations later.

> The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ.

Why establish a false dichotomy here? You've obviously pointed out an uncomfortable truth which I was already well aware of. There's no reason we can't also be aware of the implications of IQ and any number of other factors determining school performance of any intersectional cohort against standardized metrics.

<comment><USER4> It's one thing to teach people, it's another thing to beat their native language out of them, which is what these schools were designed to do from the beginning. The whole point was to forcibly Christianize them and exterminate their culture.

> The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded by the US Army officer > Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 at a former military installation, became a > model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt > said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good > Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in > this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the > Indian in him and save the man." Pratt professed "assimilation through total > immersion." He conducted a "social experiment" on Apache prisoners of war at > a fort in Florida. He cut their long hair, put them in uniforms, forced them > to learn English, and subjected them to strict military protocols.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_sch...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools?wprov=sfla1)

<comment><USER3> So does this unfortunate and regrettable historical event mean that we can't use research, demographics, and psychometrics to determine likely outcomes and inform policy decisions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the canonical motivating sketches for total quality control, developed by Edwards Deming et al, is a mythical factory with three production lines, each with their own line manager. The lines are performing equally well, staying within a bell-shaped distribution about approximately the same mean. (Widgets per hour, or defective unit rates, or what have you.) As factory manager, in an effort to improve the situation, you decide that, at the end of each month, you will promote the top performer and fire/demote the laggard. Congratulations! You promote and demote/fire a line manager every month for six months. However, you notice that the performance of your lines has remained the same. What happened? You were essentially using the performance numbers of your three lines as a random number generator. The system was in control, producing no results outside of three standard deviations. You promoted and fired at random.

In order to improve the output of a system, you have to understand it. You can't just blindly incentivize on the randomly distributed results. If this research leads to a more humane work environment for teachers, freer than before of misguided incentive programs, then that will be a good thing, indeed.

<comment><USER6> Your comment assumes that educational achievement is a "randomly distributed result". It may or may not be, but you can't just assume it.

<comment><USER7> What holds true is that the teachers' effect on their pupils' educational achievements is not under full control of the former, so rewarding and punishing them on that basis alone is ineffective.

Edit: grammar.

<comment><USER8> This seems to be a semantic argument with "full control" implying 100%, whereas in reality it could be 98% or 76% or 59% or 11%, who knows.

What's the actionable item here? Should we fire all teachers and replace them with hamsters who would coincidentally also not exercise full control?

<comment><USER5> In the sense of Total Quality Control, a process is "under control" or "under full control" when the output of the process conforms to a statistical measure, such as every data point falling within three standard deviations of the mean. To a first approximation, anything outside of that range implies a "special cause of variation," as opposed to a "common cause" of variation. In this case, think of a special cause as something like a layoff at the major industry in town, causing something like stress at home or missed meals. Those would affect the performance of students, outside of the "common causes" of the usual variations in ability, interest, temperament, and so on.

So, no, the answer is not to throw away the experience and insight embodied in the faculty. The answer is to try to understand and remove (or compensate for) the special causes of variation in the population of students, as well as the special causes of variation within the faculty. One of the other things Deming said that I find very insightful is that the interesting thing about geography is not where the borders are, but why the borders are where they are. Applied here, the interesting thing about the variation in grades or test scores is not the variation itself, but why the variation is there, and why is it shaped the way it is. These 'why' questions only have answers that are close to the data and contingent upon the systems, in contrast to blanket incentives that try to sweep an understanding of the system under the rug of punishment and reward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As anyone who's been a teacher knows, the parents are the most important part of a kids education.

The teacher is there to set up the framework and guide the parents as to what to teach.

The parent has to bring it home.

The single biggest indicator of future student success is how many of the parents at the school are married with only one working parent. I.e the parents with the most free time to help their kids.

<comment><USER10> I'm left with two thoughts after reading this, either teacher quality doesn't matter or our ability to measure teacher quality is garbage.

The latter is no more satisfying because when you can't tell the difference between good and bad you get a market for lemons, so you end up with a pile of bad teachers despite the fact that good ones would help.

<comment><USER11> The quality of the teacher does matter, but OP says it's not the constraint for most children.

This is basic theory of constraints: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The quality of a students education is a function of many variables, and the teacher is just one of those variables. This is why rewarding a teacher based on their classes performance is unfair. By luck they may either get a class filled with exceptional and privileged students, or a class of children with abuse and attention problems.

The only way to really get a good measure the quality of a teacher, would be to control the quality of the parents, and all the other variables too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not super-surprising to me, but I agree with the postscript: "kudos to the Gates Foundation for running an honest test. They designed it well; they funded it properly; and when it was over they hired a third party to provide an honest assessment of what happened. That's the way it should be done."

</comment><comment><USER13> Can it be the case that the constant fear of being fired is not an ideal environment for a teacher? Teaching needs a long-term commitment which needs a different kind of incentive than a bonus. I have similarly observed that researcher who wants to do fundamental research are not very comfortable in startup environment which lacks security.

<comment><USER14> We could argue that the fear of being fired ought to motivate as well. Professional athletes operate under this model. Perhaps we could implement a teacher's "draft." Lower performing but still competent enough teachers could be "traded" and stars could result in bidding wars. At the end of each "season" the lowest school gets first pick in that summer's draft. Substitutes could be like free agents. And winning "seasons" could be financially rewarded with bonuses. There could be a system of measurement based on improvement of students rather than just raw scores, so even lower performing students could help the team "win" by improving even if they are still not meeting the overall standards. You might find teachers wanting to go to tougher schools because bringing a kid from a 20 to a 50 earns more "points" than bringing a kid from an 80 to an 85.

I haven't fully thought this out yet, but we do know one thing: if you are in a hole, stop digging. If something isn't working, brute force rarely helps. We need innovation in education but not just pedagogical— but with the entire incentive structure for both teachers and students.

Crazy idea, I know. But sometimes crazy works.

<comment><USER13> In my opinion carrot and stick model works in areas where 1) participants are extremely competitive 2) End reward is huge (fame, money). That's why such model excels in areas like competitive sports, investment banking, startups etc. Teaching has neither component. If you give great teachers rockstar like salary may be it will work. Similarly most of the researchers I meet are fed up with publish or perish model of research

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every teacher knows that learning performance depends primarily on students. The very same lecture, with same methods, teacher, books, resources, have drastically distinct performance with different classes.

<comment><USER16> There is a huge informational asymmetry when debating education: almost everyone was a student once, but most people have never been teachers.

This is how people know that the quality of education in the same class can change dramatically when you replace a teacher. But most of them don't know that the same is true in the opposite direction: the quality of education can change dramatically when the same teacher teaches different classes (or just when the most disruptive child in the class happens to be sick at home today).

There is also no teaching method that would make everyone happy. Some students prefer to work in teams, some prefer to work alone. Some students prefer to have explained how things work, some insist on receiving a list of stuff to memorize. Most people who have a recipe "how to fix education" simply want everyone to do it their preferred way.

(So perhaps the best approach would be to have different kinds of school for everyone? Problem is, people would not want to honestly admit some of their preferences. If you listen to internet, everyone prefers understanding to memorization. Then you start explaining stuff, and students follow every sentence you said with "do we have to remember this for the exam?")

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like the real problem is in how we measure teachers. It shouldn't be about how well the students do, it should be about how well the students do _relative to expectations_.

Imagine a school in a well-to-do area where we expect all the students to do well and get A+'s. If an entire class of students gets A- on a standard test, that means the teacher actually _negatively_ impacted the students. But because they all got A-, we reward the teacher for having done such a great job.

I propose this: for each student, far ahead of time, guess how well they're going to do on a standardized test based on previous tests, family situation, zip code they live in, etc. Predict based on all the things _other_ than the teacher. Now measure a teacher on how well they did _compared to expectations_.

To do even better, don't rate teachers based on how well the students do on the test the same year they teach them, but rate them based on the following 3 years. Now you're asking what the _long term impact_ the teacher has on students, on average. That's a useful measure to pay bonuses on.

The problem is that politically, it's hard to explain to the general public (or to politicians).

<comment><USER18> That is not a useful measure because there are an unlimited number of factors that influence the outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems like the primary purpose of school is to make sure kids have been well trained to sit still and follow the rules, learn how to jump through societal hoops, and have a place to be for parents who can't/won't deal with them all day. How much can a teacher really do, trying to enforce all this and get across a subject to 15+ kids in a room, who have various degrees of motivation (sometimes none) to want to learn anything?

It seems like there must be a better way to help kids acclimate into adults and give their parents a break/opportunity to work.

<comment><USER20> Sitting still, following the rules, and jumping through societal hoops are all critical life skills for that cushy job adding to the world's pile of webshit in JavaScript. So in some sense schools are doing the job of educating the young to prepare them for adult life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've seen more sophisticated schemes for teacher evaluation, in which the metric takes into account the ability of the students as they enter that teacher's class. So, for a student who got a B, say, in grades N < 5, there's an expected grade value for them to achieve in 5th grade; that student counts towards the teacher's "score" only insofar as they do better or worse than that expected value.

Theoretically, this puts teachers on even footing, even when one might be teaching a class of Harvard-prep elementary schoolers and another teaching a class of inner-city kids who have been educationally neglected their entire lives. And data from student performance over time in the current educational system should be entirely sufficient to train the model.

It's not clear if the study referenced controlled for student variance this way; if so, it would readily explain the lack of results.

<comment><USER22> >It's not clear if the study referenced controlled for student variance this way; if so, it would readily explain the lack of results.

This headline is pretty click baity. A "better" teacher is one the produces better outcomes for their students. Firing the "bad" teachers, and rewarding the "good" teachers will obviously lead to better outcomes for students. This experiment was only testing whether the metrics they were using truly measured the quality of the teachers, and whether their insentive structure was productive. Turns out they weren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This title is really misleading. There are many other factors that this article does not cover or examine, and it reaches a premature conclusion. Furthermore, standardized exam measures are poor way to understand teacher impact. From what I remember from school, the best teachers made me understand, the poor ones helped me memorize.

</comment><comment><USER24> Neat, glad to know that we don't ever need to give teachers raises.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe they should put more effort into figuring how to create an environment where teachers and students can perform well. It's not like the teacher is the only player here. Students and their environments play a big role, curriculum and so on.

Reminds me of the 10x programmer nonsense. Give people a decent work environment where they feel respected and most will perform well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find it hard to believe that teacher quality doesn't matter at all. I'm not sure that that's what this study is telling us. Maybe it's just telling us that there is no significant (or at least measurable) difference between teachers that are a little bit below some threshold and teachers that are a little bit above.

It surely isn't telling us what would happen if you replaced all the teachers in a school with teachers recruited from the top 5 or 10 percent of all teachers in the country. I really want to know what would happen if you did that. On the other hand, suppose it works really well. We still can't replace all the teachers in the country with the top 5 or 10 percent of all the teachers in the country, so it's not like that would be actionable.

<comment><USER2> > replaced all the teachers in a school with teachers recruited from the top 5 > or 10 percent of all teachers in the country.

My Sister and SO are both teachers and we've had this discussion. They believe that if you took a low performing school, and replaced all the teachers with the best teachers in the country, you would find zero difference.

My sister has been beaten up by students, breaks up fights nearly every day, deals with child protection services, assault from parents, weapons in the classroom, drugs, gang activity, students who haven't eaten or bathed all weekend, etc. She teaches Grade 6. It doesn't matter in the slightest how good of a math teacher she is.

She's has it bad, but I think many people here may be surprised just how common her situation is.

<comment><USER26> That's a pretty strong argument for increasing the baseline level of social, community, heath, employment services, in addition to a focus on education. likely need to invest in those changes and then keep the programs funded and running with careful adjustements for multiple generations.

i agree, there's only so much a single teacher, or a school full of teachers can do if a lot of other basic needs aren't being met.

<comment><USER27> This again links back to the Finish system. It doesn't stand alone by itself. All the other social services are also in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If it accomplishes nothing then the 'quality' of the teachers is irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps the least surprising finding ever, given the previous research:

[http://www.citevault.com/#vam-efficacy](http://www.citevault.com/#vam- efficacy)

[http://www.citevault.com/#vam-statistical- problems](http://www.citevault.com/#vam-statistical-problems)

[http://www.citevault.com/#vam-implementation](http://www.citevault.com/#vam- implementation)

<comment><USER30> All this means is that better methods will need to be invented to score teachers, not that it's impossible. For example, one thing I've seen missing in these studies is a system design that attempts to control for the distribution of students in a given incoming class, which seems like the single most predictable metric for end-of-year performance.

<comment><USER29> > All this means is that better methods will need to be invented to score > teachers, not that it's impossible.

No, it is impossible. That's the whole point. If it wasn't impossible it'd be a great idea.

<comment><USER30> I suspect some in the HN community assume that because public school curriculums were generally so easy and aligned with textbooks such that they got all A's regardless of the teacher, that the teacher does not matter. No, the teacher definitely matters, as does the inflexible and oversimple curriculum and a million other factors.

Switch 'teacher' with 'professor' and I highly doubt you would argue that quality no longer matters. The difference is that professors are less bound by stringent curriculums and teach more advanced material. This is where everyone really feels the difference. Whereas for public grade school teachers, an academically inclined student will only struggle under exceptionally bad teachers, less well academically inclined students will suffer without decent teachers even in grade school. The first quarter/semester at a good college typically provides a reality check for students who breezed through primary education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Alternate title: we thought money is what good teachers find rewarding, but we were wrong

<comment><USER32> That's not the story at all. They meassured actual performance and fired teachers who showed bad performance, and rewarded those showing good performance. This was not just a test of dangling money in front of teachers and expecting them to improve their performance.

What you could get out of this study is however that it doesn't matter if teachers find the job rewarding or not. It doesn't matter if you keep on bad teachers, in fact the study might point to the fact that teachers are not the bottleneck of student performance at all.

<comment><USER33> Good point here, that we ought to expand the scope of how we look at student performance. We're quick to blame teachers, and indeed teachers probably have as much an impact as anything else, but measuring up teachers and expecting big changes isn't the greatest idea.

Yes, it gets more complicated looking at more nuanced measures. Like resources available for the students, their home lives and personal situations, their time available to study and focus.

Then again maybe they should look at discrepancies between teachers in districts that pay well and districts that pay less. Perhaps the answer isn't to pay some more and fire others, but rather pay all of them more!

I'm a fan of the Education Endowment Foundation(1) on this which looks at all the measures you can think of to try to improve education practices (in the UK).

[1]: [https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/](https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Next up: fire the educated teachers and just let random grown ups run the class ...

<comment><USER35> Sudbury Schools [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school) have no curriculum, they let the students do whatever they want. Graduates don't differ significantly from traditional schools in standard educational assessment testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is unfortunately a complex, multivariate system problem and won't rely solely on the "quality" of a teacher in it.

In addition to the behind-the-scenes work most teachers have to deal with, such as departmental objectives, I think great teachers enter the profession in order to benefit children, not to get that fantastic paycheck . It's a socially focused decision, not an financial one, so if I were designing a system to grade a teacher's quality I would focus on attending to their efforts with students, not throwing more money at them.

<comment><USER37> Money may not be the end all for people who go into this profession, but it most certainly does matter. See the protests over the past couple of years in areas where teacher pay is low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This conclusion is amazing! Finally we have a study that says hiring good teachers does not matter. And that going to teaching school to become a better teacher is not important!

If this conclusion is correct, teachers can be replaced low wage unskilled laborers!

/s

This (possibly MotherJones simplified) conclusion must clearly be bogus. Perhaps I should take a look at the actual study, because this article is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER39> Mother Jones is an extremely left leaning website.

Teachers Unions are among the core groups supporting democratic and liberal candidates.

I love a good study but it is possible that they are misinterpreting the results of this study on purpose.

During the last election, I became very sensitive to this type of media manipulation. Tread carefully.

</comment><comment><USER40> What are good resources to learn more about what works/ what doesn't in improving education?

At the end of the article, they add that the study deserves a lot of credit even though it didn't work. Kudos! I was pretty happy to read that =).

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone check this for the quality of the study?Doesn't look like this was randomized. Also would have been nice to see more pretreatment years for evidence of a trend but maybe that was in the actual report.

</comment><comment><USER42> If teacher salaries were $120k and up I bet you'd get a whole new class of teachers.

<comment><USER43> Would we really? At some point a higher cost will stop resulting in better outcomes.

<comment><USER44> And yet we keep paying CEO's more and more.

At least teachers are only in control of one class room. The most mischief they can do is to buy animatronic dinosaurs for the one lesson where they mention prehistory to kindergartners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Someone should make a study about management theories. The issue is that the major examples of management theories were ... fraud.

Taylor ... was a fraud [1]. Lied about his data in order to get paid more. Even paid the people he "tested his theory on" to act out the outcomes he wanted to see for company higher ups. And he acted like what I've come to expect from managers: first he commits scientific fraud, then writes a book and titles it "Principles of Scientific Management".

Because when you go for bullshit, the big lesson is: don't just bullshit a little. Go all out.

Weber and Fayol were no different, and even Ford ... let's just say that if you focus on his technical accomplishments and skip all the management bullshit you will not be missing much (besides a big part of Ford's ideas were high wages, so I doubt many managers will be repeating it).

As can be seen, among many other places, on wikipedia [2], the fact that Taylorism was an outright fraud has not stopped pretty much every management school in the country from expanding and pushing on with his "work".

It's like most of the famous economists. The top ones were simply frauds, who got important positions like chairman of the Fed, or secretary of the Treasury and just happened to be in office during big events. Their theories were wrong (really fraudulent, as they didn't believe in it at the time, which makes it a fraud rather than just being wrong, and Keynes, Hayek, Friedman and Greenspan have admitted as much, and let's face: they were "the greats". If they were frauds, then people like our current Mnuchin, Powell or Geithner aren't even frauds : they're ignorant and actually proud of that (Mnuchin has said in an interview that not understanding much economics makes him a better secretary of the treasury). Yellen actually had credentials, and seems to need another year or two before she'll confirm she was a fraud too, she has already admitted her theories were wrong, so all she has to do is also admit that she knew they were wrong when she decided to implement them. And boy, she was, like Keynes, more than a little bit wrong).

Once money or power gets involved, humans, "scientist" or not, become lying bastards.

At least this research was honest. But it's not saying what people want to hear, and so it will be ignored, as it wouldn't contribute (and that's being polite) to the careers of the decision makers implementing these policies. Meanwhile, Trump is happily pushing on Obama's efforts in this regard, who simply continued from Bush's policies, ... and so on and so forth. Don't worry: Trump is not about to let such a detail as science stand in the way of looking good to a few people, and let's just not kid ourselves that Hillary or whoever gets elected in 2020 will be better.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the- man...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management- myth/304883/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Relation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Relationship_to_Fordism)

<comment><USER46> > At least this research was honest. But it's not saying what people want to > hear, and so it will be ignored

I think you underestimate how much teacher unions want to hear this result, and their political influence</comment></comment>


Buggy code is biased code (in Scientific Computing) - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/19/buggy-simulation-code-is-biased/

<comment> alan-crowe Years ago I wrote signal processing software for a speech recognition project. My code did fairly sophisticated spectral estimation, which then feed into powerful statistical learning software.

It became clear that one had to be really careful. If the front end software had quite serious bugs, the back end was powerful enough to learn to recognize mangled speech, thus hiding the bugs. One could continue with ones research, vaguely puzzled as to why ones results were disappointing. One could continue to do research and improve the performance of the system without realising that it was all pointless; everything would have to be redone once the bugs were discovered.</comment>


My First Week on Meerkat and Virtual Reality – Brandon Lipman - <AUTHOR> http://www.lipmanb.com/virtual-reality-meerkat/?utm_source=meerkat-blog-post&utm_medium=hacker_news <comment><USER2> I never considered Meerkat to be comparable or applicable to Virtual Reality. Technically speaking it does not fit but it is similar.</comment>


Archive Extractor Online – Extract 7z, zipx, rar, tar, exe, dmg and 70 others - <AUTHOR> https://extract.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> DAAS - Decompression As A Service...

<g></comment>


E.P.A. Dismisses Academic Scientists from Major Scientific Review Board - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/07/us/politics/epa-dismisses-members-of-major-scientific-review-board.html <comment><USER2> The Collapse of the Cod Fishery of the Grand Banks

[http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/grandbanks.htm](http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/grandbanks.htm)

"The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) formulated a mathematical model of the cod fish population which they used to calculate the maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The U.S. government had a similar concept which was called optimal yield. ...

 _In 1989 the DFO advised that the total allowable catch (TAC) of codfish should be 125,000 tons. The Canadian Minister of Fisheries thought this figure was too low and arbitrarily increased it to 235,000 tons. In the course of DFO management the TAC was often set by negotiation between the DFO, the fishing industry and politicians. The DFO, using their defective model, was setting setting the TAC too high. The politicians responding to pressure from the industry increased the TAC from the already too high figures. The net result was that in the last years of codfishing on the Grand Banks the catch was about 60 percent of the population instead of 16 percent. The collapse was catastrophic._

In January of 1992 the DFO was advising that the TAC should be 185,000 tons. By June of 1992 the DFO was advising that the cod fishing should be stopped."

25 years later, the cod haven't recovered to healthy levels. In 1989 the industry representatives probably thought that getting politicians to discount the scientists' advice was a _victory_.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to in any way challenge the analysis here (obviously the overfishing was catastrophic), but FWIW the atlantic cod fishery is actually recovering (at last): [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/08/06/after- years-dec...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/08/06/after-years- decline-cod-and-community-rebound- newfoundland/oNxKF14RpE47yc65OOAy6O/story.html)

There was some concern that Cod had been permanently dislodged as a predator in the ecosystem, but there has been good news recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Republican House member Lamar Smith:

"The E.P.A. routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government. The conflict of interest here is clear."

Yes, how dare they put scientists on the "Scientific Advisory Board". What we really need is businesspeople from the coal industry!

Is there no shame? No limit to the blatant disregard for science and public safety in favor of coal companies?

<comment><USER5> > Is there no shame?

No.

I'm quite sure men in the smoke filled rooms are right now bellowing "This is OUR TIME! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!"

<comment><USER6> You're downvoted but I think you're right. Climate change won't wipe out everyone; it'll be a long process that takes hundreds or thousands of years, during which time there will be an enormous concentration of power to war- lords and the creation of a new slave class. This is the outcome that I believe is being banked on by some of the most powerful people. There are others who believe in the "rising tide floats all boats". Game on for the ultra-powerful. The rest of us are mostly bystanders.

<comment><USER5> "rising tide floats all boats" is just attractive psuedo-logic made up by "supply siders" (which is cover for "hyper rich") or their shills (Congress and the President) to lull have-nots into taking on a larger share of the tax burden.

If you're not a cynic, you're still fucked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Time to start an alternative to EPA. Perhaps volunteer effort by academics, non profit. no government dependency.

<comment><USER8> No government "dependency" means no enforcement.

<comment><USER9> Are fines and coercion realy the only way positive change can happen to deal with climate change?

Are there no significant projects that could be accomplished through private funding? No public outreach campaigns? etc

There were hundreds of millions of dollars going to Clinton's campaign and other anti-Trump PAC. That kind of money put on issues could go a long way.

Not to mention the fact that EPA's budget was $8,139,887,000 in 2016 with 15k employees. They are still a significant force in the country. [https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget](https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget)

If we're just talking about marketing alone I'm pretty sure there is still a significant amount of work that needs to be done just to convince the public (and not just your everyday simpletons) that this is something serious that requires a top heavy government approach. Cleary many influential people still believe otherwise and they have influence in American politics.

If you look at other controversial issues in America that have made progress over the years, across both parties, such as gay marriage [1] and marijuana [2] it's clear that opinions can change.

[1] [http://www.pewforum.org/2016/05/12/changing-attitudes-on- gay...](http://www.pewforum.org/2016/05/12/changing-attitudes-on-gay- marriage/)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/29/publi...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/29/public- support-for-marijuana-legalization-surged-in-2016/?utm_term=.b4615d0ba5e4)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, basically. We don't need another damn public outreach campaign, as if somehow we just haven't been marketing it right all this time and suddenly everyone who has vested interests in fossil fuels is gonna see the light and want to protect coral reefs and fluffy animals. Let's get real here, this fight has been going on about a quarter of a century now and the problem is not a lack of effort to explain the importance of the issue to the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And who will take their place? Lobbyists?

<comment><USER12> Pruitt has stated he would like to see officials from the industries being regulated taking these positions.

<comment><USER13> Better than lobbyists - just let the corporations we regulate write the laws! (edit: clarity)

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by 'let'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Once upon a time there was a public pool. Everyone used the pool and enjoyed it, but very soon it became apparent that a few of the pool-goers were relieving themselves in it. The pool quickly turned yellow and smelly.

So the community got together and formed the pool-pissing committee; the goal of which was to cut down on the general amount of pool-pissing that was being done. They would do this by hiring some local experts from the town to measure the pool water regularly, and tell everyone when somebody had taken a leak in it, and to the best of their ability, who was responsible.

Right away, some chronic pool-pissers were caught and yanked from the pool. This was very embarrassing for them, so everyone paid attention when it happened, and so the new standards of pool play caught on very quickly and were known by everyone. Soon the water cleared up, and people were able to enjoy the pool again. It wasn't perfectly clean, but it was much, much better than before, and it was improving every day. This worked pretty well for a long time.

A few people didn't like the pool-pissing committee. Some people didn't like the idea that someone could tell them what they could and couldn't do in a pool. Others were mad because every once in awhile, the committee would accuse them of having peed in the pool when they had only peed a little bit, while Jimmy over there drank a whole 2 liter bottle of mountain dew before he swam and let it all out through his bladder, but the committee didn't catch him and that wasn't fair.

But by far, the people who hated the pool-pissing committee the most were the biggest pool-pissers. The pool-pissing committee was always bothering them, they complained, embarrassing them in front of their friends, and cruelly yanking them out of the pool. All they wanted to do was play in the pool, and didn't they have a right to do that? So what if a little pee leaks out every now and then. Worse (they argued), if the committee was allowed to yank anyone who peed out of the pool, then pretty soon the pool would be empty and the community center would be bankrupt.

Of course the solution was simply to not pee in the pool (as most of the rest of the community was able to handle this just fine), and to hold it until afterwards, but _that really cuts into out pool-playing time_ , the pool- pissers whined.

So the pool-pissers got together a plan: They would band together and take over the pool-pissing committee-- but first they had to convince the other pool-goers that this was a good idea.

"The system is rigged!" the pool-pissers squawked. "The pool-pissing committee _gets paid to test the pool!_ So you see, they all have a stake in the outcome of the piss tests! This is a conflict of interest! They're on the take!"

A lot of the swimmers began to nod their heads-- this sounded really unfair. They started to worry if the pool-pissing committee could be trusted.

"We're being paid to do our jobs," said the pool committee. "That's not a conflict of interest. And we all signed up for this job because we care about having a clean pool."

But the swimmers didn't hear them, or maybe they didn't care because they were all very worried that something unfair might be happening. And they were right, something very unfair was happening, but it wasn't what they were thinking of.

"We should kick out these crooked _pool experts_ from the pool committee," said the pool-pissers. "They don't know the reality of what it's like to be a swimmer, or how hard it is to hold your pee. Besides, us swimmers have the biggest stake who stays in the pool. It would be much more fair to put _swimmers_ on the pool committee".

This sounded reasonable to everyone and soon enough the pool experts were sent away, and the pool committee was filled with swimmers. Someone noticed that everyone on the pool committee happened to be swimmers who had been caught many times pissing in the pool, but it was decided that this was okay because they knew the most about pool-pissing, so it made sense that they were on a committee about pool-pissing.

Almost immediately, the pool turned bright yellow and smelled rancid. Nobody was really sure why. Some swimmers kept saying something about strengthening the pool committee, but it seemed clear that pool committees didn't work, because we _have_ a pool committee, and look how yellow the pool is.

Many people got very sick, and the mystery of why the pool turned yellow remains to this very day.

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291854)

</comment><comment><USER17> After Trump and his gang are finished gutting the EPA, there will be a much wider purge of scientists and intellectuals from all facets of the executive branch. The only rational response is an organized campaign to convince American citizens to remove Trump from office as soon as possible.

<comment><USER18> First, you have to convince them that science is a good thing. I have a friend, who literally believes that scientists are either evil people, who's primary goal is to gain power over others by outsmarting them, or, willfully ignorant tools of a predatory political / economic system. To him, big-S Scientists represent a threat to his way of life.

I reminded him that many of my own family members, people that he trusts, work in scientific endeavors; a marine biologist, for example, who has dedicated his life to the wellbeing of the various Pacific salmon species, for the sake of our food supply and forest health. He just lumped me into the second category, insisting that salmon are only managed for profit. That the funding for wild salmon research was being redirected towards improving the yield of fish farms, to the detriment of both the forests of western Canada, and to the detriment of the families and communities that live off of the wild salmon fisheries.

We don't talk much anymore. In order to convince people like this to support science, instead of attacking it, we must convince them of two things: that "real, working" scientists have a conscience, and that they have the power to follow their conscience without losing their status as real, working, scientists.

<comment><USER19> I see you are just a random developer guy, so I would recommend you talk to your friend more. Then, improve your skillset in the sciences, so that you may outsmart him/her and put whatever resources they possess to better use.

<comment><USER18> In my opinion, this would only reinforce his assumptions, and possibly even radicalize him to the point of violent rebellion. It would be a form of oppression, and we all know how that plays out over the long term.

Sun Tzu's philosophy of "taking whole", of carefully manipulating your opponent into aligning their goals with yours, is the best strategy that I can come up with. But, because of the communication barrier between us, I am unsure of how to apply it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Was it Bill Nye ?</comment>