Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts' - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/ <comment><USER2> When my Daughter was born (now three) my wife insisted that I and everyone who has regular contact with her focus on her hard work and not simply say "you're soo smart!". It's tough to make that association but I think I've seen actual results from it. My daughter is about three weeks into ISR swim classes and I can see her shift into her "hard working" face even when she's a little upset or crying. She knows that she has to work hard (show visible effort) at staying calm or calming quickly or trying new things if she wants her reward (her favorite thing in the world: Futurama). It's one of the few developmental guidelines my wife has laid down and I've come around to see it as the most important because to be frank I didn't learn that lesson until WAY too late.

<comment><USER3> The fact that your three year old daughter loves watching Futurama already says a lot about her mental aptitude/attitude.

I'm sure she doesn't "get" a lot of it at this stage, but I bet she will learn a surprising amount from sticking with it.

<comment><USER2> Actually that's the strange thing. She's learned not only the specific funny quotes but she uses them in situationally-correct instances. When crashing two cars together, "Buckle your sphincters!". When I pull her out of the tub and she can't see because her massive amount if hair is in the way, "My lawyer will hear about this!" When she wants to make us laugh she puts both her claws up in the air and goes for a Zoidberg scuttle.

I've had to defend the fact that I let a three year old watch Futurama many a time. Mostly to people who would rather I show things like Dora (I don't like my kid yelling at the TV) or movies like The Little Mermaid (truly horrific from viewpoint of relationship modeling). Admittedly sometimes my kid walks around quoting Bender "Ass Ass Ass Ass Ass!" and it might one day get sent to the Principle's office but she also admires female star ship captains, recognizes hard work (fry and the holophoner), and naturally distrusts cephalapod doctors. There are a lot more issues I hope she can start to pick up like the value of friendship, that math is awesome and to never be without your doomsday device "for duck huntin'!"

Sorry for the tangent.

<comment><USER4> Mutant anthrax is for duck huntin'. Doomsday devices can be used for, amongst other things, triggering chronoton implosions and powering bending units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These things seem to go in waves. In the 1990s, I remember the _opposite_ worry, that a bunch of new educational theories had put too much emphasis on praising effort rather than results, the whole A-for-effort thing.

It's interesting that the politics have shifted a bit, though. I remember the emphasize-effort view being associated with clearly "liberal", almost hippie approaches, that what's important is encouraging every kid to give it their best try, so they actualize their own potential, etc. Meanwhile the more "conservative" view was very results-oriented, sort of: I don't give a damn if your kid is trying hard or lazy, all that should matter in math class is whether he does the math right or wrong. The current wave of articles don't seem to have that same political divide.

<comment><USER6> Emphasize effort doesn't mean emphasize effort that lead to bad results. That is, it's not "as long as you put in effort" (which is the approach you're talking about), it's that when there _is_ success the thing that should be praised is the effort to reach that success.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes you need to learn from your mistakes, regroup, change strategy, and try again. It's a balance between avoiding failure and learning from it, but not fearing failure of something that is just beyond your reach. Otherwise, we risk making the bar so low that we're praising effortless success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an excellent quote from the Korean file "My Sassy Girl" about this. To paraphrase, "Never tell a child he's smart, after a while he'll begin to believe it and start to get lazy."

<comment><USER9> It's such a shame that people who want to be popular define "smart as"

        smart = results/effort

It gives them an incentive to slack, and while that may work in the lower tiers of the school system, they're going to hit a brick wall at some point, and for many, it will be too late for them to do anything to catch up.

I also recall someone on Quora referring as the distorted picture in places like Stanford described as the "duck syndrome": on the surface, everyone seems to be coasting calmly, but below, they are paddling like mad.

* * *

Praising kids and people can be so friggin' difficult. I remember playing football (soccer) in school, and I was a bit of a geek, but when I played, I would sometimes get all these "compliments": "Nice one, kmfrk!", "You played a great match today" from class mates and the gym class teacher. Most meant well by it - some didn't - but even though I wasn't very old, what was going on was very transparent. (I was a blatantly bad player, except as a goalie, so I took the compliments about my role as the latter more to heart.)

It downright annoyed me, because I knew that I was awful.

It has made it very hard for me to discern actual praise in my life.

<comment><USER10> Your equation is mathematically equivalent to:

        results = effort x smart

The problem is optimizing this equation for smart, rather than for results.

<comment><USER11> I like that construction. The article also emphasizes teaching kids another contributing equation:

      smart = sum(previous efforts)

Giving a final equation:

      immediate results = immediate effort * sum(previous efforts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like reading this article may make me react in the same way that the sample groups of the tests did. Hopefully in the much greater long term, that'd be nice. Good thing I read it(maybe).

I had noticed the same pattern in myself. My parents would tell me that I'm smart, and then I'd get pissed and frustrated at my math homework if I didn't understand the concepts within a grand total of 15 minutes. Then Discrete Math hit me and I realized that there would be no way for me to survive on just 15 minutes of attempts of any problem/concept(but I'd still be frustrated all of the time).

<comment><USER13> That is exactly what happened to me, made cs at the university unbelievably hard...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Watch Malcolm Gladwell's interview with Fareed Zakaria for his book "Outliers" (part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCt1Wc8Kx4U>, part 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3NalDYIT8>).

In "Outliers" Malcolm explores what makes a person successful and asks the question, "Why do some talented people flame out early while others go on to brilliant careers?"

Malcolm's main premise is, "Success doesn't have much to do with talent. It's almost always a product of hard work and the culture of which we live our lives."

But I think Malcolm is really describing the development of genius and how the environment/culture either encourages or discourages people from focusing on a certain areas or ideas. Go the wrong way and you miss developing into your true potential.

From my perspective, genius is not so much measured by IQ, although a high IQ helps, but genius can be measured by how rare and valuable your perspective is and how effectively you see patterns in- and make associations or connections among disparate ideas. Paul Cooijmans has a similar perspective (<http://www.paulcooijmans.com/genius/>).

Developing these rare or unique perspectives usually takes deliberate and devoted focus on something (like when Malcolm talks about the 10,000-hour rule).

Einstein wasn't a genius because he was most skilled in math -- he wasn't -- Einstein became a genius because he relentlessly explored a problem, following it our farther than anyone had taken it before. This allowed him to see connections that no one had seen before, and these connections/discoveries were valuable to humanity.

So yes, praise kids for their effort -- it's one of the requisite components of genius.

</comment><comment><USER15> Using "Once again" in the title seems misplaced, since the article is from 2007.

When I was growing up, it seemed ok to be praised for being smart, because life outside of being smart was terrifically difficult. Taking the school bus to school, being bullied, having a weird foreign name, the Canadian winter, those all seemed to promote some resilience, and being smarter than your average bear just seemed to be a light of hope.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/> is the non-print version for anyone that ran into problems with the javascript on the print page.

</comment><comment><USER17> This advice applies not only to kids, but to everyone around us.

</comment><comment><USER18> > These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new > neurons when challenged.

> To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific.

> Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies > he could apply the next day.

This strongly reminds me of how successful companies experiment to improve their products' performance. These experiments, by definition are trial-and- error, and involve mistakes and backtracking, because they don't yet have enough data to develop a theory that predicts exactly what will work. Over time, as it does become formalized, that aspect is no longer profitable because then anyone can do it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Calling someone smart has little meaning, because it means different things in different contexts and one persons smart may not even be considered smart at all to others. A lot of it is age related to, being good at multiplication in the first grade is going to get you called smart, later in life it's just assumed.

Also as a related example people confuse memorization with smarts, here in Australia times tables are generally taught up to 12*12, if a kid if very fast at these but falls over once the number goes over 12 they have just put a lot of time into memorization without picking up the principles properly.

</comment><comment><USER20> When praise becomes the reward, the strategy is to do whatever it takes to get praise. When success is the reward, the strategy becomes learning how to succeed, which often means passing through failure. We all have an innate ability to find the success strategy. For example, video games have no mercy-- the only way to succeed is to keep trying until you get better. And yet most kids will continue to play a new game until they improve because, in this case, learning is an adventure, its own reward. The best teachers seem to apply this to the classroom.

</comment><comment><USER21> Praising kids for effort is a mistake. That leads to adults who excel in giving the impression of expending great effort without properly planning for success. Praise kids for what you want - achievement.

<comment><USER22> Like most things in life, there's a middle-ground and a balance between the extremes that isn't easy to figure out. There's no easy answer for such things.

<comment><USER23> There's a good bookm that reiterates the point in the article. Brain Rules. Worth a read.

It also depends on how strong your kids are. There is no silver bullet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To be honest your kids can usually figure out if they are smart or not pretty quickly once they enter the school system. The thing is there are lots of smart people out there. As you progress through the education system you usually meet people smarter than you and hopefully realise that you need to work to keep with them. It's like thinking you are the king of code in your job and then discovering HN - you quickly realise there is always someone smarter so you need to work to get their level.

</comment><comment><USER25> The real world doesn't care nearly as much about effort as it does about the end result, except as a mitigation for failure. Why effort and not .2 x effort + .8 x accomplishment?

<comment><USER26> You can control your effort directly. You can only control your accomplishment indirectly, through the effort you put in.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, but the accomplishment is by far the most important part. It's very easy to expend a lot of effort doing things that don't actually increase one's chance of success on something, and I don't think that should be praised.

<comment><USER26> The reason to expend lots of effort on useless things is so that you're mentally conditioned to succeed when the important things come along.

Truly life-changing opportunities are fairly rare, and they usually pop up when you don't expect them. To capitalize on them, you have to be prepared. If you've been sitting around slacking off for the previous several years, you're probably not going to be in a position to pounce when the opportunity arises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone have some good advice on getting out of this sort of pattern, if it was established in your youth?

The only teacher that broke that habit at my school was my Chemistry teacher. He knew I was very smart, and I started handed in the bare minimum of lab reports. For example when he was expecting 6 steps of working and 10 lines of analysis, he got 1 line of working/answer, and two lines of "bloody obvious, X = Y" style analysis :P. He fixed that by shouting "What is this? Hmm? You're a lazy toad!!!" at me in front of the whole class... not very professional, but it worked. He always got the best of my effort. And I think he always marked me down compared to the rest of the class: whilst my work may have been to the same standard as them, it wasn't close to my best work.

In the world of work, the best antidote has been working with other very smart people. To stand out or earn their praise, being smart isn't enough, you have to get things done too. When I was slacking off for 20mins here to check Facebook, and 10mins there to read some news... they knocked out 30mins of code and moved on. Crap!

So I now look for smart people to work for/with, ones who work harder than me, because they inspire me to actually work, not just coast-work-coast through my day.

</comment><comment><USER28> Its not that we think too much of ourselves or too little, but that we think about ourselves too much.

Here the praise is feedback about actual effort made, not about some abstract concept of how great or smart we are. The abstract raise focuses the mind away from the real world towards an abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why not praise them for both. Joel Spolsky wrote a whole book on the importance of hiring smart people, but also people that get stuff done. I tend to think that having a strong work ethic is more important than being smart, as longs as you are smart enough to complete the task at hand, but if you spend all your time grinding on the wrong thing, you aren't going to get anywhere.

Praise kids for effort put into intellectually challenging work that they complete with good results. We should praise intelligence, it's what our society runs on. Intelligence certainly doesn't need to be devalued any more than it already is.

<comment><USER30> _Praise kids for effort put into intellectually challenging work that they complete with good results._

Because you don't want to tie praise to good results, because that stops people from trying things when they aren't sure if they are going to succeed.

It's an issue of practical psychology and incentives, not a politically correct devaluing of successful people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The author of this article has an excellent book titled "NurtureShock" (co- authored with Ashley Merryman), covering this and other relevant subjects. I highly recommend it, even if you don't have kids but especially if you do.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm reminded of Philip Larkin's "This be the verse", sometimes referred to as "They fuck you up, your parents do" - <http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm>

I was one of those kids praised for smarts and I attribute that to my innate laziness. I somehow believe that we're missing something when we tell people not to praise being smart. Surely a better way would be to adopt a more rounded approach? But then again, I'm neither a child psychologist nor a parent so what would I know?

</comment><comment><USER33> The article actually gets it wrong.

 _I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts._

No, I don't think that's it. At least for me, I have caught myself thinking many times "I'm not good at X, so odds are I won't be able to be one of the best at X, so it's not worth trying"

(My parents never praised smarts and neither did my teachers, but I unfortunately discovered far too early I could skate by in even the hardest classes with very little effort.)

<comment><USER34> I was praised for being smart, and my experience, at least, is more similar to the article's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish my parents had doen this. I definitely fell into the mindset where "oh, I'm smart, so I don't need to try". Needless to say, I'm now playing catch up.

Another consequence of this upbringing is that learning became a grind for me - pursuing intelligence rather than interest.

I burnt out at the age of 12, and the past 8 years have been trying to find direction and motivation for my academic life.

</comment><comment><USER36> 1) Praise kids for results.

2) When there's no success yet, recognize effort and praise progress toward the result.

3) Recognize smarts and talent in general for how they help get results.

We should be encouraging, about intelligence, effort and results. But it's important to remember the goal (result), otherwise there's no clear focus.

</comment><comment><USER37> They may have gone to a lot of effort, but I have to say it's not smart to put content on a page that doesn't work when javascript is off.

</comment><comment><USER38> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc>

insert upvotes and a repost to the front page

</comment><comment><USER39> This article is right on the spot. When I grew up, I never remembered myself being told as smart. I never was. But I always worked hard and probably took longer to finish home work and stuff like that.

I think persistence and hard work are very closely related. Will Smith during his interview on PBS once said something like "If you put me in any challenge, no matter how smart you are and I may not have the natural talent but I will practice and work hard till I die or win"

When I got good scores, my dad never told me I was smart but always said "Your hard work is paying off". I guess he did this naturally and did not put any logic or theory behind it but now it all makes sense.

With my kid, I am going to be more aware of what I am going to praise him for and track the changes. Amazing article.

<comment><USER40> Conversely, I was always told I was smart. I always aced tests but I struggled constantly with doing my homework (not because it was difficult but because I avoided starting it until the last minute).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> That's not what my Chinese mother told me.

<comment><USER42> yah your chinese mother told me she only cares about results ;)</comment></comment>


The structure and function of the corporate organism (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=corporate_metabolism

<comment><USER2> Not a rebuttal but rather an extension that has been on my mind for some time:

how does PN's theory of the self-preserving and self-perpetuating (are those different?) nature of a corporation fundamentally differ from the nature of any other power-gathering institution, individual or social?

Consider his clever summary:

"Externalize risk and perpetuate wealth for shareholders."

Now replace shareholders with whatever individual/group that a given institution is set up to serve the interest of (honestly shareholder still works, though maybe interest-holder is closer) - I would even venture to include non-profits and charities.

An interesting history, and useful narrative.</comment>


Ask HN: Engineering Degree: Mathematics and Statistics vs Software? - <AUTHOR> I am torn between having an engineering degree in Statistics and Mathematics or in Software.
I am more interested in the first since the courses are data science oriented (R, Stochastic calculus, econometry.. etc) but as I live in a Third World country and want to seek employment abroad I am afraid employers might disregard my degree as it doesn't come from a reputable university.
Software engineering universities here however are slightly more reputable abroad.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> My BA is in Math (theoretical, no statistics) with some CS courses (mostly basic ones and a few advanced ones in crypto). I didn't have a big issue finding a job beyond what others at the same time that finished a CS degree.

I did do quite a bit of open source projects both on my own and joining into other projects (LyX is a good match for a math degree :-)

If I had to do it again I'd learn statistics properly now, I find this is actually a useful part of mathematics for what I do these days (failure analysis and data mining). I believe that if you do your own software projects it should be good enough to be hired.

<comment><USER3> Same degree. I work in Software. I didn't have a problem finding a job either. I started off in industrial process automation, traveling around the U.S. doing very high level programming to make the UI for waste water treatment plants. Then I moved into web development.

But, let's move past the "no trouble getting a job" part. If getting a job is your goal, then choose a CS degree. If getting job doing a particular form of programming is your goal, then focus on a CS degree with a speciality in that type of programming.

Getting a Math degree is a super way to get a job in programming, but not as good as a CS degree. It's a matter of not closing a door, versus opening it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm assuming you are talking Bachelor. If I were in your I would go for Stats and Math. And during my free time I would pick up a programming book. Also try to contribute to open-source project. It's on the job learning.

Why am I recommending this? Because I started with software engineering. And now that I want to do data science I know nothing. I find it really hard to get started with free courses online. I lack foundation in strong stats, linear algebra and etc. It is just so difficult to acquire these from books for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I did all three + electrical engineering. No regrets. It's easier to find employment writing software. Thus, if you want something that will let you bootstrap yourself so that you can pay to learn more later, you should lean towards software first and the other stuff after.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hands down, definitely statistics and math with software projects on the side. Those together will be a win for sure.</comment>


Ask HN: Compatible with $big_vendor_product - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am thinking about turning a customer product of mine to a saas business. The software configures other devices/programs and manages access to them.
My question:
Am I allowed to write something like '$my_product is able to configure $big_vendor_product' and put the logo of the big vendor next to it? Am I allowed to use other companies logos in my presentations? Or is it a grey area? What do you do?
Thanks for your help. <comment><USER3> Obligatory disclaimer: Ask a lawyer; legal advice obtained on the Internet is worth what you paid for it.

That said, from what I can recall from (random internet sources | a "Business Law 101" class years ago | etc), I _think_ that:

1\. You can mention other companies by name in advertising, without their permission as long as you make true statement. Example: Ford can run an ad saying "Our new 2012 Foobar gets 23% better gas mileage than the 2012 Chevy Blizzle."

2\. Using the other company's logo for commercial purposes - <USER2> permission - is almost certainly not allowed. I'm thinking that will get you sued for trademark violation pretty quick.

Of course it may be possible to get permission from $big_vendor to use their logo, but you would have to get in contact with them and negotiate some arrangement. If your product is complementary to theirs, they might give you permission to use it for free, since you both benefit. Or they might want money, or they might say "no" altogether. It really just depends.

Anyway, my advice is to talk to an attorney before going down this rabbit hole.</comment>


I took a pay cut for a more meaningful job; it was nothing like I expected - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90308995/i-took-a-huge-paycut-for-a-more-meaningful-job <comment><USER2> "Quitting her job meant she could spend more time with her daughter and offset some of her childcare expenses, but it also required her to make lifestyle changes"

There are many women that have this same sentiment. Which is why there will always be a pay disparity. I don't think it's a bad thing, but it's not related to sexism or women intentionally getting paid less.</comment>


FireChat: what it is, what it's not - <AUTHOR> http://opengarden.net/2014/10/firechat-what-it-is-what-its-not/ <comment><USER2> Where's the SDK?</comment>


Morepath: Python web microframework, with super powers - <AUTHOR> http://morepath.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting.

Some feedback for whoever is writing the docs:

The first thing I always look for in the docs for a python project is: Was this developed for python3, which was first released in 2008? If not, I'd like to at least see a requirements section.

I'm aware I could figure this out by digging through the code. Just saying the docs should also mention it.</comment>


Ask YC: Games programming, JavaScript or Flash? - <AUTHOR>

On the one hand, it seems to be golden times for flash games, with casual gaming booming and platforms like kongregate mkaing them popular. On the other hand, flash is still flash, and JavaScript seems to become an alternative.
So if you were designing a game that could be implemented with either technology, which one would you choose?
Do you expect there will be something like kongregate for Javascript games? <comment><USER2> Flash is definitely the way to go. Flash's capabilities as of Flash 9 are astounding, and from what I've read about Flash 10, its only going to get better.

There are also other plugin platforms to look at. Shockwave for example.

With that in mind, there are some games that simply can't be produced in an online format. So make sure that a web browser is the right channel for your game.

</comment><comment><USER3> i would probably design the game and figure out the best technology to get the job done.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if "being playable on the web" is an integral part of the plan? Otherwise, sure, some other technology would be much more suitable than Flash or JavaScript to create games.

<comment><USER3> there's still quite a few levels of being playable on the web.</comment></comment></comment>


Freedom in the World 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017 <comment><AUTHOR> The full report is available here: [https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FIW_2017_Rep...](https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FIW_2017_Report_Final.pdf)</comment>


Would you buy a laptop locked down like the iPad? - <AUTHOR> http://perpetualstudent.net/blog/2010/04/03/apple-locked-down-lapto/

<comment><USER2> The question is not "would you buy" but "would people buy" and the answer to that is undeniably YES.

You can argue this is not a good thing, as Cory Doctorow has at least tried to, but the argument comes across as tired and pointless. It's the ramblings of an "old man" (measured in internet years of course) who, had he been born a hundred years ago, would probably have been railing against car companies for removing the hand-start crank.

People don't want computers. They don't want notebooks. They don't want compilers or user serviceable parts.

What they do want is Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all the other things you can only do, for the most part, with computers and notebooks. The sooner some device delivers an alternative that's easier to use, more reliable, and less fuss in the long run, the sooner people will switch to that new thing.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to think that the future will not always be Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

<comment><USER4> Of course not, but the future will continue to be visited primarily using a web browser.

<comment><USER5> God I hope not. I hope some day I wont have to use HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a serverside language just to write an app.

I'd like to just use one language and hit all platforms.

<comment><USER4> You don't necessarily have to touch the markup directly, your app can essentially be pure JS (or compiled to pure JS) that paints it all into the DOM dynamically (see <http://cappuccino.org/>)

You don't need a server-side language if the app doesn't _really_ need to communicate with your server. You can do everything client-side with LocalStorage (SQLite) and cached assets. If the page has the right metadata on it, "Add to Home Screen" saves the whole app locally.

And there's no reason why the server, if it needs to exist, shouldn't be executing the same language (see <http://nodejs.org/>)

The modern web is _the_ platform. There are nice local platforms, but your "write once run anywhere" 'native' app isn't going to fit in on any platform that actually gets used.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to use Javascript. I want to use to be able to use _any_ language to write web applications. Any _one_ language. :/

I think we're really choking ourselves as hackers if we let Browsers either end up as completely JS or the hacked together combination of (poorly enforced) HTML, (ugly syntax) CSS, and Javascript

<comment><USER6> Well, that's easy: just write a compiler for your favourite language that outputs javascript (plus glue to integrate with jQuery/MooTools/whatever).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I descend from hundreds of generations of intelligent beings who conquered the world using tools they could understand and improve. I refuse to have some vendor demote me to a lesser species, no matter how shiny the beads are.

</comment><comment><USER8> Years ago there was a time when I used to be a big MS Windows fanboy. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best combination of everything that worked right at the time... The frequent blue screens, freezes, and constant virus & trojan cleaning was getting old, but Windows was still doable overall. Then something MS did, totally pissed me off enough to start trying desktop alternatives: MS started to ensure that Windows could only be installed a certain number of times for a particular machine that had a specific set of components. So if you changed enough of your components for the same licensed machine, Windows might think it was a different computer which was a big no no. Given that you had to have a clean install of Windows every x number of months, I just got fed up. It was the tipping point. I then started going through various distros of Linux and eventually happily landing on OSX.

For me, like the blue screens and the viruses, I see this as a possible beginning of enough frustration building to make me move on again. Hopefully this year's WDC (or next) will prove me wrong.

<comment><USER9> I've frequently upgraded and changed parts in my PCs over the past few years an only once has Windows refused to activate. It was fixed with a 15 minute phone call to Microsoft. I find it hard to believe this is a serious issue unless you're reinstalling or changing parts every week or something.

Edit: And by upgrading parts I mean things as big as upgrading the CPU and/or motherboard.

<comment><USER8> why should I have to call MS for permission to upgrade my PC? It's the principle. Besides it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Crashes and freezing were fine when I was a kid, and Windows was primarily used for video games. Once I grew up and started using it for work, that was no longer acceptable.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree with you on this, though I'm still a big fan of Microsoft over Apple.

Any company that treats their customers as criminals (or assumes they are stealing) doesn't deserve and clearly appreciate their customers.

<comment><USER8> MS does the same thing. They started that practice before Apple which I said in my above post =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Say this with me: iPad is not a laptop.

Once people understand that it is a consumer device, an appliance like an iPod or a DVD player, that just happens to do a lot of extra stuff, we can start talking about what it can do and how people will use it.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. I see no reason other than Apple's choice that the iPad shouldn't be on the same level as a laptop or desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe, depends on the details. I wouldn't be ideologically opposed to it. I just don't want to spend much time dealing with the nuts & bolts anymore. In my case I work with technology 8-10 hours per day for my job. The last thing I want to do is come home and micro-manage my own stuff. With most of these closed platforms what we really are talking about is a _managed platform_ where a company takes responsibility for the end user experience. This is about the same as a company hiring an IT department to lock down their office desktops to improve security and increase workers productivity by creating a trouble free, consistent, environment for them to work in. There's nothing wrong with that. In the end, as the consumer, I get to make the choice what type of product I want. I think it's kind of a downer that someone would oppose my ability to make the choice to buy one of these managed platforms because they don't like them. I certainly wouldn't want to stop people from being able to dig into the nuts & bolts if that's what they want. If we can have some hybrid of both I'm all for it but it seems very difficult to strike a good balance.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes—because obviously it would have _an IDE and Compiler-suite app_! Otherwise, how would you develop on it? ;)

(And then all the free, unlicensed apps anyone likes could just be released as source, and compiled+run locally in test mode.)

<comment><USER4> Typed in out of a cheap newsprint magazine, even!

Apple wants to kill the "power user" dead. Every one uses the system on the same clear, easily understood terms. A fraction of those users will be developers, but even they will use the device itself _as users_ in the same way as everyone else, not as wizards. Some people see this as _Harrison Bergeron_ , but I sure don't — the people they're 'handicapping' didn't know anything in the first place, they were pretenders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1) Create a new user on your macbook. 2) Enable Parental Controls. 3) Allow Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie. 4) ... 5) Profit!

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, I intend to buy my mum a iPad and keyboard so I can prop the iPad up on her desk, and she can use it just like a normal desktop PC. She will be able to do all the things she does normally, but with many orders of magnitude less tech support calls to me! So yes, a iPad laptop would be even better.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sure, if I had a kid and it was one of those toy ones with learning activities.

</comment><comment><USER18> no.

Same for a cell phone. No.

Same for a car. No.

Same for every crap. No.

I would open an exception if there was some free service. I am considering the kindle because of the free wikipedia all the time.

</comment><comment><USER19> Stop writing these articles people. Please. I'm tried of writing the same response over and over.</comment>


An Introduction to Task-Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/dmpl/ <comment><AUTHOR> Implementation of TOP here [http://www.itasks.org/](http://www.itasks.org/)

As a business person rather than software engineer the highly functional concept appeals.

Has anyone used this methodology in a live environment? Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> Hi! I work a bit on iTasks and there are several examples where iTasks was used in a live environment. I can urge you to take a look at [https://top- software.nl/en/index.htm](https://top-software.nl/en/index.htm) a company formed around iTasks and lead by Rinus Plasmeijer.</comment></comment>


A Scripter at Heart - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001216.html

<comment><USER2> Well... While coding mostly in Python, I am still a programmer. I am only using a more refined tool more adequate to my needs than C would ever be.

Obviously, I disagree with the "C programmers have to be masochists" view of the article. C is powerful and can be cruel and unforgiving, but once you get it (and it's not that hard), you can appreciate how powerful it really is.

As for the pain of going from interactive-prompt-nirvana to edit-compile-link- run-wonderwtf-reboot hell, it took me years to learn C++ because I was introduced to OOP in Smalltalk and then wrote some stuff in Actor. C++ most definitely, did not look like a step in the right direction. In fact, it wasn't.

For years, I used the following tagline in my BBS messages:

"Hello World in Assembly: 30 bytes, Hello World in Turbo Pascal: 10K, Hello World in C: STACK-OVERFLOW: SYSTEM HALTED"

</comment><comment><USER3> IMO, knowing C is absolutely essential for a true understanding of how modern computer systems work. It should not be avoided, even if it is "hard".

<comment><USER4> 10-12 years ago I was hearing people say that exact same thing about asm when I was first learning C. I wonder what they will be saying in 10 years is essential?

<comment><USER5> Uhm. Maybe 25 years ago. That was when you had to actually check the output from time to time because the compilers were so bugged and often terrible at their job. 10 years ago you needed to learn C to understand how Perl worked.

In 10 years "they" will still be saying learn C because C is nothing but a glorified assembly language with some syntactic sugar. C shows you how your computer works. There is very little to gain by using assembly over C (with the special exception of specialized instruction sets, like SIMD).

Until the computer changes so fundamentally that a simple imperative language no longer matches the hardware, or some other simple imperative language does a better job (unlikely), learning C will always be good advice.

<comment><USER6> _In 10 years "they" will still be saying learn C because C is nothing but a glorified assembly language with some syntactic sugar. C shows you how your computer works._

It's possible to be a solid C programmer (ie clear understanding of pointers, stack vs. heap, etc) while still not having the depth of knowledge one gets from understanding at least some assembly. When I first learned about the concept of stack overflows (ie as explained in Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit: <http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html>) my understanding of C really expanded, mostly through the added insight provided by thinking about C in the context of assembly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's often a better design to keep the parts that are largely set/need to be efficient in a "hard" language like C (or something like Common Lisp with type annotations), but keep the parts that need to be flexible in a "soft" language like an embedded Lua, Python, or Scheme, etc. _You don't have to use just one language._

<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers>

</comment><comment><USER8> _Larry Wall's epic Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities._

I would hardly call it an "epic". To the contrary people I spoke with who saw his state of the onion keynote that year said that unlike his prior presentations (which were often entertaining) that one was a disappointment especially considering the state of Perl at the time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why are we continuing to have the same old conversations about these things?

So-called scripting languages were discussed a decade or so ago.</comment>


A solution to domain names - <AUTHOR> http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/04/solution-to-domain-names.html <comment><USER2> If I understand this right, the article proposes IP addresses as a replacement for domain names in URLs. This would be a bad idea:

\- They'd break if you wanted to load-balance with something like round-robin DNS.

\- They'd be a disaster whenever you changed hosts.

\- They make it impossible to tell (without clicking) where a link points to.

\- They're broken with respect to IPv6 (and any future protocols). By specifying an IPv4 address, you're intermixing a transport-related detail with the semantics of the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that the connection between a domain name and what a site is about is broken.

All your problems can be solved with a Domain Numbering System I mention in the comments. Map a nondescript number or another IP to your real IP. This way, people don't even expect a connection to what you do. They'll just find you through a search engine anyway.

<comment><USER2> Basically, numeric-only domains?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But that isn't to say people will be giving out strings of numbers as identifiers. The point is that those identifiers are pretty useless today, so may as well stop using them for human consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One huge issue with this is phishing. DNS certainly isn't bulletproof, but combined with SSL it's pretty secure.

If I'm at <https://www.bofa.com> and my browser doesn't warn me, I can be pretty damn sure I'm actually at Bank of America's website.

If I were taken to <https://184.108.40.206> by Google I would really have no idea whether or not it was BofA's site.

<comment> a-priori This is a UI issue that can be solved with good search.

When loading a page, the browser can do a "reverse lookup" on the URL through a search engine and display common terms associated with it instead of (or in addition to) the URL. If you're expecting Bank of America, and it shows "sex, porn, xxx" in your status bar, you may not want to click it.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't porn sites masquerading as banks, it's fake banks masquerading as banks.

A reverse lookup through a search engine is more akin to a blacklist of bad sites, whereas DNS and SSL is essentially a whitelist of good sites. The problem with blacklists is it's inevitable that bad sites will slip through the cracks.

DNS solves the UI problem: the inability of humans to easily remember IP addresses.

As I mentioned in another comment, DNS isn't the problem, it's the allocation of domain names. If squatters and spammers couldn't register domains so easily and cheaply it wouldn't be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has already been happening. I remember seeing a story on News.YC about ads in Japan (I think) that told you what to search for instead of what site to visit. And spammers have been doing it for a couple years.

<comment><USER5> 37signals is a case in point. They're currently the #1 Google hit for the words "basecamp", "backpack", "highrise", and "campfire", despite not owning a single one of those domains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think that'll work at all. Instead of competing for presence in domain names, squatters will simply compete for presence in keywords and phrases. Getting a user to a specific website could become kinda challenging.

As one example, in my soon-to-end part-time job, I had to ask a user almost every day to go to "www.whatismyip.com". Occasionally they would type this into their search bar instead of their URL bar, and would magically end up at something that wasn't helpful at all. (When I try it, it works, but who knows what they're typing.)

This would just move the problem of competition for recognition to a new area.

<comment><USER7> Spammers already do compete for keywords and phrases - its called SEO.

I sort of do what the post suggests: if I want to go to wikipedia, I just type 'wikipedia'. Works for a lot of sites.

<comment><USER6> Hmm. So, it might work for specific cases, just not generically.

Maybe it's time for the search engines to support a "certainty" statistic, an algorithm which calculates the probability that the top result is what the user is looking for, based on a combination of the user's search request and the linking for the top result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting idea, but way broken.

The problem with an IP address based solution is that it wouldn't scale well for web farms, load balancers/fail-over equipment, etc.

Also end-users/web businesses can't really "own" an IP like they do a domain name, only ISP's can technically be assigned IP's. IPs aren't portable like domain names, so you'd be stuck with 1 ISP once you built up your site.

<comment><USER9> This doesn't imply anything about load balancers not working. Load balancers work by creating what are called VIPs - virtual IPs, which aggregate the IP addresses of the balanced services. In a lot of cases, the individual services need not even be routable from the public internet as long as they are reachable from the load balancer's internal interface.

(edit: fixed a typo)

<comment><USER8> Not all load balancing schemes use the VIP concept.

In either case, you are still tied heavily to the existence of a single IP, which greatly limits portability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And exactly how are you supposed to tell your customers the name of your site? It might not be there next month if someone out-SEO's you.

And no "check my great site over at 239.263.137.852" isn't quite catchy enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out mydomainsucksbecausetheyrealltak.en

It's a hot new service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The problem isn't with the domain name system itself, it's with the allocation of domain names.

Recently a huge problem was so-called "domain name tasting", which allowed squatters to register hundreds of thousands of domain names, monitor the traffic (typically from typos, etc) for a week, then return the duds for a refund. Fortunately ICANN is putting an end to that.

I think the best solution would be to raise the barrier to registering domain names. Sure, it's nice that it's convenient and cheap to register domain names, but that really doesn't matter if all the good ones are taken by squatters, now does it?

If you had to either pay a larger fee (something on the order of a trademark registration fee -- ~$300?) or demonstrate you had a legitimate use for a domain, I think the squatters would back off. Of course, ICANN and the registrars don't have any incentive to limit the number of domains registered.

Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to reverse the current situation, short of creating new top-level domains and enforcing stricter guidelines. Perhaps certain TLDs could be designated for "premium" or "verified" domain names (basically like .edu) while .com, etc remain free-for- all.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like a way to blacklist domains that are being squatted. I've thought it might work to have a Firefox plugin to report and block these sites. If you could get a large enough community using it, the list would grow pretty quickly. You could maybe even have a script that would gray out any of those sites on Google. Would this be enough of a disincentive to squat?...if the domain was effectively "removed" from the Internet for those using the tool. If a domain was actually bought and contained real content, it could be removed from the blacklist...but the process to do so would have to be difficult enough to not negate the disincentive of the blacklist. Any other ideas on how to harm the value of a squatted domain enough to make squatting not worth while? (When I say squatting I also mean domains that are just parked and for sale. Technically I don't think that is squatting, but it seems like that is being lumped in the conversation here...could be misunderstanding that though.)

</comment><comment><USER12> You might have a web browser that allows the user to assign pseudonyms to websites. A user could have the word "news" mapped to "news.ycombinator.com" for his browser. If such a browser collected pseudonyms from enough people, then the pseudonyms applied to each site could start to have importance and make it easy to give an intelligent guess on what the user might want. I guess the idea is to apply del.icio.us type information to the url bar.

<comment><USER11> That is an interesting idea. It sounds kind of like a user-driven pagerank concept. Since the mappings would be different for everyone (most of the population would not map 'news' to 'news.ycombinator.com') could even introduce a recommendation system where your unmapped pseudonyms came from users whose pseudonym mappings were most like yours.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should mention that I thought of this in 10 minutes, and don't feel too strongly about my proposed solution. I do feel strongly that the current system is broken and in need of institutional change.

</comment><comment><USER13> You still need absolute domains as one form of brand-awareness.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think lots of people have this issue, and it's backwards.

Domains are used as identifiers, so people associate them with brands.

They are horrible identifiers. It needs to stop. Your domain is not your brand.

I'm incredibly lucky to have tipjoy.com. It's such an excellent and short name, on a .com. I'm amazed it was available. That this is the exception is an indication of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> AOL keywords were just this - and didn't work. And AOL is still using them. You probably even will run into patent problems against them.

</comment><comment><USER15> What about e-mail?</comment>


US diplomats' brains were shrunk by sonic attacks at Cuban embassy, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/23/us-diplomats-brains-shrunk-sonic-attacks-cuban-embassy-scientific/ <comment><USER2> Rather than simply having "shrunk" these brains -- according to at least on other summary article, the team's findings were rather less conclusive:

 _But the medical team that performed the scans said the findings were not conclusive. They do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries and the severity of symptoms did not vary with the extent of the brain differences spotted._

 _"It's a unique presentation that we have not seen before," said Ragini Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of Pennsylvania. "What caused it? I'm completely unequipped to answer that."_

 _Independent experts agreed the findings were inconclusive and said it was still unclear whether the diplomats were victims of any attack or had suffered related brain injuries. The apparent abnormalities might have pre-dated the attacks, they said, and could have more mundane explanations such as anxiety or depression. One said the study did not meet the usual standards for publication._

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain- scans-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/23/brain-scans-of-us- embassy-staff-to-cuba-show-abnormalities)

</comment><comment><USER3> The real take-away from this article is: These people are legitimately ill. But we still are no closer to knowing what caused it or by whom. The previously released sound recordings are likely made by Indies short-tailed crickets.

There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all (e.g. disease).

</comment><comment><USER4> Was it a sonic attack? or some drug which destroys brain tissue, and as a side effect messes with sound processing parts of the brain too.

<comment><USER5> This is an interesting theory. Probably one of the more plausible ones. I imagine some sort of biological or toxicological attack could cause some sound processing related symptoms.

On the wild end of things one could imagine it being a combination of sonic and chemical attack where the an innocuous chemical structure became active as a result of high frequency sound.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemistry) I have no idea about that application, but the idea of using sound in chemistry seems to actually be a thing ...

<comment><USER5> At risk of oversimplification, sound is just energy and given the right amount of energy chemical changes can be carried out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That headline seems inaccurate -- I was surprised when it seemed to point to "sonic attacks" being the definitive cause of the brain abnormality, but it's not:

 _"The study supports the validity of the patients report of symptoms, but doesn't answer the question of whether they have had a brain injury or not or whether the exposure they report is relevant. "_

So something happened, but no one knows what caused it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most academic literature attributes the complaints (which are inconsistent with each other and span ambassadors of some countries but not others), to a mass psychogenic event. You can find out more here: [https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603](https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4603)

<comment><USER9> And this is shaping up to be yet another case where doctors and researchers ignored what their patients were telling them and labelled an illness as psychogenic when it wasn't.

Through history doctors have all too often assumed their current testing capabilities were perfect and there was nothing more to learn. Thus if a patient looks normal on tests of the day then they must be imagining the problem and they label it psychogenic. Then this can't be disproved until new technology or research reveals how wrong this label was.

People should think about the amount of grief these people and others through history have suffered due to this.

<comment><USER8> > Different people reported different symptoms. Most people did not report > hearing any particular sounds. Of those who did, they said they heard very > different sounds, and at different times and places. None of the sounds bore > any similarity to sonic weapons. Only one person reported permanent hearing > loss; and as nobody else did, we can safely assume that it was likely due to > natural causes for that person. One reported a concussion with no apparent > cause, but nobody else did either. So if we are looking for some external > cause for these symptoms, we learn that it was probably not any one cause. > It was a number of different causes, suggesting that these people were > suffering from various unrelated problems.

The point is that this event is inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries, including sonic devices, but completely consistent with other events of (self-reinforcing) mass hallucinations. No one is saying the affected have not suffered.

<comment><USER9> But isn't this just saying: "we have no existing evidence or test _today_ showing a physiological illness so therefore we are going to call it this other imagined thing for which we also can't prove, yet which has been repeatedly disproven over history."

All illness have at some time been "inconsistent with any known diseases or injuries", MS, epilepsy, CFS, etc. What's more likely at this point.

I think lack of evidence in medicine shouldn't be used as evidence for "psychogenic illness." Just as lack of evidence for something in physics shouldn't be used as evidence for "god put it there."

Doctors should get used to saying "we don't know what's wrong with these people yet" instead of trying to force an answer where there currently isn't one. It's far more correct and much kinder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> my favorite theory of those sounds - the people hearing (and affected by) them is just a sideeffect of the sound attack on electronics by generating suitable intermodulation distortion (IMD) :

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we- reve...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reverse- engineered-the-cuban-sonic-weapon-attack)

"Computer science researchers have explored the physics of IMD. In the DolphinAttack paper, we used ultrasonic signals to trick a smartphone's voice- recognition assistant. Because of nonlinearity in the smartphone's microphone, the ultrasound produced by-products at audible frequencies inside the circuitry of the microphone. Thus, the IMD signal remains inaudible to humans, but the smartphone hears voices. In an early 2017 paper, Nirupam Roy, Haitham Hassanieh, and Romit Roy Choudhury at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign described their BackDoor system [PDF] for using ultrasound and IMD to jam spy microphones, watermark music played at live concerts, and otherwise create "shadow" sounds."

Your Siri is talking to the voices in her head... Conspiracy theory wise i'd think (ie. hope that "at least some of my tax dollars at work") that NSA uses such tools too, and this is why everybody is so mum about it.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if there could be a mashup between IMD and BadBIOS/ultrasonic communication [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03422.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do they know that their brains weren't small to begin with? Are they measuring against an average?

<comment><USER13> Seems to be refering to this study: [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/27385...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/2738552)

> Design, Setting, and Participants: Forty government personnel (patients) who > were potentially exposed and experienced neurological symptoms underwent > evaluation at a US academic medical center from August 21, 2017, to June 8, > 2018, including advanced structural and functional magnetic resonance > imaging analytics. Findings were compared with imaging findings of 48 > demographically similar healthy controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I don't understand is how these "studies" seem to find things that would require a baseline to compare with. Results like, brain damage was suffered, cognitive impairment, brain-shrinkage, all would require the subjects to have some baseline snapshot before the "sonic attacks" occurred.

</comment><comment><USER15> I never expected to see a headline like this. This is certainly an exciting dystopian future we're living in.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure the affected parties would agree with the descriptor 'exciting'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Assuming that there was in fact shrinking, could that be caused by being in a warm climate for an extended period of time? Studies have shown that heat affects cognitive ability, but has anyone ever studied if there's a temporary efect on brain size? [https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002605)

<comment><USER18> I think someone would have noticed, for example, the entire population of Cuba.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember listening to a segment on NPR where it was claimed this was already solved and the "sonic attacks" were actually caused by a specific species of cricket:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2019/03/25/7049036...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2019/03/25/704903613/doubts-rise-about-evidence-that-u-s-diplomats-in- cuba-were-attacked)

<comment><USER20> The article covers this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They say sonic attacks but reading the various articles is seems quite likely it was microwaves [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack- cuba...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba- microwave.html?module=inline)

I wonder if microwave damage would be consistent with the effects found.

</comment><comment><USER22> What about sleep deprivation and stress (possibly caused by the sounds)?</comment>


Workers Unbound - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-workers-unbound/ <comment><USER2> Additional discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965514)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Advice for would-be writers (image) - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/WritingAdvice.jpg <comment><USER2> Here is a copyable list - <http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/writegood.cfm></comment>


"How do I raise a boy not to be a rapist?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/living/son-do-not-rape-steubenville/

<comment><USER2> I could have done without the gender-specificity in the article. I'm not just talking about the title; there was also a glaring omission of a certain gender combination in the example of how to talk to an eighth-grader about this.

</comment><comment><USER3> The original title of the op-ed was "How do I raise a boy not to be a rapist?" but I see that they've since changed it to "How do you talk to your son about rape?"</comment>


Ask HN: Web browser for reading? - <AUTHOR> I was browsing amazon today for an e-reader but it struck me that I already have an expensive phone that outperforms every e-reader on every front except for the display.<p>Then I started wondering, are there specific Android browser for reading only? This might sound like a weird question but I'm looking for a browser that lets me read longer articles without being distracted by popups or images, I just want black on white text, maybe even something that emulates the look of e-ink. <comment><USER2> Several browsers have a "reader mode" that does just that. Try Firefox.</comment>


A statement on online course content and accessibility - <AUTHOR> http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/13/a-statement-on-online-course-content-and-accessibility/ <comment><USER2> Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798)

In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong.

What I see is:

\- Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity

\- Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population

(The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.)

That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you _must spend_ that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me.

E.g. The school budget has _finite_ money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity?

Sure, we should _encourage_ the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.

<comment><USER3> What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/legislation/policies explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation.

The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible.

Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating.

Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.

<comment><USER2> _> The Americans with Disabilities Act [...] explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation._

Sure, that seems justifiable for _commercial_ businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking _free_ donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted.

If UC Berkeley used the viewing of those videos as a _mandatory requirement_ to qualify for admissions into the school or required viewing for the students to pass a class, then I think most of us could see the fairness of forcing them to caption it -- regardless of costs.

However, the goodwill act of making them _free_ for humanity's knowledge- seeking causes the DOJ to threaten lawsuit? That does not seem right.

 _> Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" _

In the last page of the cited PDF, the DOJ explicitly writes _" lawsuit"_:

 _> "In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA"_

That this particular DOJ letter is one or a few steps removed from a "formal lawsuit" doesn't detract from my overall point. The DOJ _threatening a lawsuit_ is the tool of choice we're using instead of other options ... such as raising a crowdsourced fund to pay for captioning or recruiting volunteers to transcribe them into braille.

If there is an effort of _goodwill_ to make something available, I think society should pay that back with _reciprocal goodwill_ in finding a way to make the material accessible to the disabled.

The donation and the litigation response to that donation is asymmetrical. It gives the ADA bad press.

<comment><USER4> I came back to make a comment just like this, but you already did it better than I would have.

The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic.

In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.

<comment><USER5> No but people would say they food they give away should still comply with health regulations.

Just because you're making a gift doesn't mean the law doesn't apply to you.

<comment><USER6> That's not a good comparison, not complying with health regulations substantially devalues the food given away, because of the significantly increased risk of illness resulting from consumption of said food.

Your second statement is irrelevant, we are not talking about what the law _does_ , but what the law _should do_. And I absolutely think that gifts (and good samaritan acts in general) should be held to a much lower standard than commercial enterprises.

This is not at all unprecedented in US law (or in many places in the world), every state has some form of good samaritan law[1], which protects (to some extent) individuals who act in good faith to aid strangers in need of immediate medical assistance. There is also a federal law indemnifying donors of properly labeled foods, except in the case of gross negligence or intentional misconduct.

These laws are important, because donations result in no benefit for the bearer, so making them cost money is a significant deterrence to charity.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_States)

<comment><USER5> What does it matter in your scheme if the food being given away is substantially devalued? It's a gift, it should be held to a lower standard, right? Or are you saying that the gift must be of an equal value to that sold? Do they have to also serve it on fine china to the homeless? How low should the lowered standard be, then?

My second statement is disagreeing with yours. The law does _and should_ absolutely hold organisational gifts to the same standard as commercial transactions. Not least because otherwise you create a massive loophole ripe for exploitation, at all levels.

"Hey, don't tax my import, it was a gift!".

"Hey, my formula milk shouldn't be subject to marketing laws, it's a gift to new [and ill-educated] mothers!"

"Hey, I shouldn't be subject to your weird license restrictions, my source code was a gift to the community!"

Now, sure, good samaritan laws are important things. But so is equality legislation, and disability rights legislation, and much of the other legislation that defines the standards society expects of its participants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> U.C. Berkeley has some fantastic classes online. It would truly be a shame to lose them. Many were clearly produced on shoestring budgets.

The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help?

Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least this starts a conversation about how to create smarter regulations -- regulations that cause less collateral damage.

<comment><USER8> Would it be legal to have community created transcripts for all courses? Would not mind to spend some time doing so in lieu of free content.

<comment><USER9> Khan Academy gets help dubbing and translating videos from volunteers around the world [0]. I would also be happy to help.

[0] [https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/categories/20018602...](https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/categories/200186020-Translators)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"...the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities..."_

Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all.

IANAL, but I believe the ADA would be applicable for students of the college, not necessarily online content consumers viewing the college's courses.

Of course, the problem here is that you have to start playing expensive lawyer games to get that clarified -- and it might take years. So even if Berkeley has done nothing wrong, they still might end up having to pull the courses.

<comment><USER11> > Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all.

To be fair, the whole point of the ADA is to harm millions of people for the benefit of very few people.

<comment><USER12> About five years ago I was on crutches for several months and I can highly recommend the experience to anybody who is against the ADA as an eye-opener.

<comment><USER13> You can be against ADA without being against disability access entirely. The main complaints are that it's enforced through lawsuits which bankrupt small businesses. Often over trivial issues, like their mirror being 1 inch too high, or the parking sign not having the correct sticker on it, etc. That's a very different thing than not having a wheelchair ramp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks DOJ for the Kafka-esque move that will most likely deprive everyone of free educational materials. Glad to know justice was served.

<comment><USER15> What if the proposition to take down the content is rather a threat to instigate the public, than a real concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like it's about time to ditch all that accessibility stuff and join forces to create a more human screen reader.

Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?"

<comment><USER17> > Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker > News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links > to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles > titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of > the page?"

Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google Now (e.g. conversational), I would have ditched computers years ago. It's all about giving semantic information to screenreaders so the user can eficiently navigate that content. In the rare case that I need some kind of human description, I just share my screen with someone that has working eyeballs.

FYI, I'm totally blind.

<comment><USER16> oh, great to hear from someone actually needing this. But than I'd still argue, that semantics should be possible to parse from the style of the site. Big letters? Must be a headline.

Well actually I would love html to be more to be like latex/markdown, I just thought, that if I recognize it as a list, it should be parsed by a screen reader as such too.

May I ask you which screen reader you use and at what speeds? (or do you use some braille screen?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous precedent for the future. You can't design a system that accommodate everybody from the beginning. Progress requires time and the rational reason for DOJ to begin this investigation is corporate lobbying. What businesses or markets would benefit from this?

The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles.

The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.

<comment><USER19> You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they've been extensions of the physical world (Target, UC Berkeley). More recent cases (Netflix) have made it clear that online-only entities are also considered places of public accommodation.

Why UC Berkeley this time? I don't know, other than the complainants came to the DoJ about them, and not some other school.

The purpose of the letter is _not_ to cost the University or to stop them making the materials available. The DoJ never suggests that, it's Berkeley that raised the idea on their own. The purpose is to explain how the University has been violating the law and what they can to correct it so ultimately what is offered can also be used by people with disabilities.

<comment><USER18> I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence.

If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about.

FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER19> Harvard and MIT did not receive the same letter, they've actually been sued by the National Association for the Deaf. The DoJ and I think the DoEd. have also been involved. That case is also about freely offered online educational material but specifically video lacking quality captions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are any of these courses paid?

Do any of these courses or the means through which they are made available advertise paid options, paid alternatives, or other paid courses?

If both of those are 'no' then this is disgraceful. If either is 'yes' then it is completely justified.

<comment><USER13> Even if they made advertising money on it, it may not have been very much.

<comment><USER20> When providing a paid for service you have significantly different obligations to if the service is charitable.

<comment><USER13> It is charitable. It's provided freely by a nonprofit organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Follow the money.

[http://www.wendel.com/knowledge- center/publications/older/no...](http://www.wendel.com/knowledge- center/publications/older/notorious-disabled-litigant-entitled-to-pursue- access-lawsuits)

<comment><USER19> This is a slur. Almost all accessibility cases seek only correction of the problem and reimbursement for the costs of the lawsuit.

<comment><USER21> Just because most are not, does not mean that this is not being monetized by some unscrupulous people. In the city where I live, there are law firms where this is their business model. They'll go into a bathroom and carefully measure it. Any reasonable person would say it is accessible, but because it doesn't 100% correspond to the ada standards that came out later they get to sue and make money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The same forces caused Andrej Karpathy to have to take down his YouTube videos of his Stanford CS231n course on convolutional neural nets. [[https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704)] Fortunately, unofficial mirrors have surfaced.

It's not very expensive to do the basics of adding transcripts (for the deaf) and verbal descriptions of diagrams (for the blind). The reason the university didn't just do it seemed to combine departmental politics with ambivalence about undercutting their main product (in-person education) with a free online version in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER23> A lot of this sounds like there's an engineering solution that edX and Coursera can offer as a service. Course creators would have SOME work to do, but limited to uploading the charts and files used in their video.

From the DOJ letter:

> 1\. Some videos did not have captions.

> 2a. many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or > visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides)

> 2b. videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast, which made the > text unreadable for those with low vision

> 3\. Many documents were inaccessible ... [HTML and PDF stuff]

> 4\. Some links were not keyboard accessible

> 5\. Websites and materials that were integrated into the course material > were not fully accessible

Before we jump to debating the ADA, let's see if there's a sensible solution!

<comment><USER24> If you're going to crowd source education, crowd source this. Ask people to correct computer generated captioning, annotate slides.

2b, 3, 4 should be fixed at the CMS level.

5 Can't you blame those website creators?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? I hate to say but "this is why we can't have nice things". We are trying to move into an age of more digital education, but if there are a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to even attempt it, won't the barrier to trying be too high for some institutions?

<comment><USER11> > Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company?

No. University of California, Berkeley is a part of the University of California system, not a private company.

<comment><USER26> To expand on this, the government of California requires the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems to comply with the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act of 1974 (if you've ever heard of 508 compliance, it's a reference to section 508 of the latter Act). In recent years, both systems have been expanding their efforts to comply with this requirement, especially in regards to technology. (The CSU system includes not only the schools with CSU or Cal State prefixes, but also most of the schools with State or SU suffixes, including SFSU, SJSU, and SDSU.)

For more information: \- UC Policy: [http://www.ucop.edu/electronic- accessibility/initiative/poli...](http://www.ucop.edu/electronic- accessibility/initiative/policy.html) \- CSU Policy: [http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/](http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Berkeley should just incorporate a non profit in another country, transfer the IP and serve it via there. Outside the jurisdiction of the DOJ.

<comment><USER28> Why would they do that? UCB is a public insitution, with a mandate to serve the public. They're not a torrent site trying to skirt the law.

While there are discussions to be had about how to move forward; I would hope the end result would be continuing to offer the free courses, while solving the accessibility problems, perhaps with the help of the communities they serve. I would be happy to contribute transcription and captioning to the courses that I take online; I transcribe and caption all of my videos on YouTube, religiously. It's not that big of a time cost, and I take notes when I'm taking a class, anyway.

I hope this will be viewed as an opportunity to (not necessarily in this order):

1\. Improve accessibility tooling for these courses, particularly captioning videos.

2\. Improve awareness of accessibility guidelines for websites and online materials.

3\. Make all of these fantastic learning resources available to people with disabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This simply doesn't make sense.

Yes, certainly, content should be made accessibly available. Yes, certainly, Berkeley's responsibility is to its enrolled students.

But _removing_ content from public access serves neither of those needs. It doesn't help the blind, deaf or otherwise handicapped; it doesn't help tuition-paying students.

It makes everyone equal, in the same sense that an eye for an eye makes everyone equal.

</comment><comment><USER13> The biggest concern is not even that the lectures get taken down. It's that other universities see this and don't put their content up in the future. Many organizations are extremely risk averse when it comes to lawsuits, and our crazy legal system has trained them to be that way.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunate to see this free content be lost. In the same line of thinking it is also sad that in this day and age there are not easy tools / systems to help transcode and make content ADA approved. (At least cost effective)

<comment><USER26> One of the things pointed out in the findings is that Berkeley makes people/tools/systems readily available to the people producing these resources, but does not require them to be used. Generally, the costs may be prohibitive after the fact if the people producing the material did not take them into consideration. However, they can usually be factored into the costs of production up front, and steps can be taken to make it easier to make the material accessible.

In most cases, it is probably simply a lack of awareness on the part of the people making the material available. The difficult part is educating the faculty and staff of the University about the legal requirements they must meet and the resources available to them to make compliance easier, and, perhaps more importantly, an integral part of the process.

<comment><USER19> Yes, Berkeley has quite a few resources available, more than most schools. It's probably because of a settlement in a separate case about not serving the needs of their enrolled students. The costs may be prohibitive to an instructor or their academic department but they shouldn't be for the institution as a whole. Not cheap, but not prohibitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone provide an estimate of how much it would cost to make one course accessible.

Or rather:

1\. What would be the cost to transcribe a one hour video?

Does the transcriber need any knowledge apart from English? (and presumably a one week course so that when the teacher points at something, it goes into the transcription)

2\. What would be the cost to take an unformatted text, and format it in accord to guidelines?

3\. What would be the cost to make a one-page website accessible? What kind of change does it entail?

4\. In the matter of 'poor contrast', would a color transformation applied to the video be enough to comply (to the letter of the law)? Would it be enough to make it accessible (i.e.: comply to the spirit of the law)? AFAIK, the requirement that "[no] chart or graph [should] differentiate information only by color" seems to make sure that at least some manual video editing is necessary.

5\. Is it the case that, in any part of the process, the transcriber/developer/editor/worker involved needs (by law) a certain qualification, or can anyone (in principle) do the work?

6\. Are there any other measures necessary?

<comment><USER31> having written that list of questions, I am left _quite_ sure that the cost of making a course accessible is above 1000$ per course, and my best guess is 5000-10000$.

1\. Do you disagree?

2\. How many courses does UCB make available to the public for free? (on edX, this number seems to be around 50)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps add a login and get people (crowdsource) to contribute transcripts/accessibility features until it is deemed OK for public release? I don't know how to incentivize people to contribute though - maybe add their names as credits in the video description?

<comment><USER28> Seems like early access could potentially be incentive enough, perhaps? I mean, it's a public service that I would think/hope many people would be willing to chip in their time for free (I mean, you take notes when you're in a class, anyway...the very act of writing down what you've heard is an important part of learning for many people). So, sign up for a class, get access while it happens if you agree to help with the transcription and captioning. Progressing to the next video requires either contributing to the transcription or signing off on it. YouTube has incredibly good tools for captioning; perhaps they can be convinced to work with UCB to enable this kind of system.

It would need some kind of percent complete count, or something, along with maybe a rating system where visitors who need those captions can report poor or confusing transcription.

Braille is harder; but, I would think most courses already have written course notes and materials, which can be read by screen readers. I'm not sure what to make of the mention of braille, here, actually. Are they expecting UCB to send out printed materials? That doesn't make sense, and goes beyond what websites are required to do by the ADA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For anyone working on federal training, this has been a thing for a long time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973)

</comment><comment><USER34> can someone explain how they can keep the same material for access by enrolled students but not to public considering ADA requirements?

<comment><USER26> More than likely, the material released to the public is not the material used for enrolled students. At the same time, they most likely have funding to make material accessible to enrolled students on an as-needed basis. If a person with a particular disability is enrolled at the University, the University will work with the student to discover their requirements and how they can best meet their needs. At that point, they can go through the list of courses the student has enrolled in for each quarter or semester and ensure that all of the course materials are accessible to that student.

Once they've completed that process, it usually has the side benefit of making those specific materials accessible to all future students with similar needs. The whole process is also getting better over time, especially for textbooks and similar material. However, video and audio are especially problematic areas when they are produced by individuals who don't understand (or aren't aware of) these requirements. If you just setup a camera and/or microphone to capture a lecture, public release and captioning may not be on your mind at the time.

<comment><USER19> Yes. There are more options for providing accommodations to individual students taking a short list of classes in person. Out of all the classes, relatively few will have a student enrolled who requires the most elaborate accommodations. Some books will be used for many years so making an accessible version will likely get reused but quite a lot of course content can have a short shelf life so an accessible version made for a student today may never be reused.</comment></comment></comment>