Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/graphing-calculators-expensive/ <comment><USER2> This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added.

As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes.

Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break out of, maybe things will change.

But until then, they're going to require devices without internet and note taking.

Edit: Since everyone is replying "you can store notes!", yes, you can, but most test proctors know about the programs and make you clear your memory before a test.

<comment><USER3> You can easily store notes on a TI calculator. I had a TI-85 in college, and was occasionally guilty of writing TI-BASIC programs to make tests easier (for example, I had one which computed Euler's method).

<comment><USER2> Most test proctors make you clear your memory before a test in high school. In college they don't care as much because they are used to making "open book tests".

<comment><USER4> The trick with those is you can make a TI-BASIC program that will make it look like you cleared the memory - fake empty "programs" list and all. There were a few tiny details you couldn't replicate like the highlighting animation, but they never noticed when I did it.

<comment><USER2> I in fact did this in high school. But now that the current high school teachers are people my age who actually grew up using the calculators, they are wise to that ploy. :)

<comment><USER5> I went to high school in the early 90s, at the dawn of graphing calculators but before teachers were wise to the "notes" trick.

One time before a calc test I dropped my graphing calculator. The battery door popped off and the batteries popped out. The unit was otherwise unharmed... but my cheat sheet in the notes app was gone!

I nearly crapped my pants.

Luckily though... as most cheaters know... to make a decent cheat sheet you actually have to comprehend the material first. Half the time you wind up not even using your cheat sheet. Luckily for me that was the case. I still did well on the test.

<comment><USER6> I am a little older than you, so my cheat sheets were on paper. There was definitely something about miniaturizing notes that reinforced learning. I made dozens of cheat sheets but never had to use one.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the vast majority of mine were on paper!

        There was definitely something about miniaturizing notes that reinforced learning

We have to comprehend a thing in order to summarize it, right? The more compact the summary, the more comprehension required. =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Approximately related, I find the NumWorks calculator [1] absolutely enthralling. It has a fairly beefy modern ARM Cortex M4 processor which runs an attractive GUI written in Python. And yes, you can write and run Python on the device. The hardware is very well described [2] in human terms and electrical schematics are available. Software is totally open source and the device can be easily reflashed. I'm not sure what I'd use it for, but I've had one on my birthday list for a while.

There's a web simulator [3] online if you want to play with the OS.

[1] [https://www.numworks.com/](https://www.numworks.com/)

[2] [https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/open-source-calculator- teach...](https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/open-source-calculator-teaches-us- about-quality-documentation/) (full disclosure, I wrote this)

[3] [https://www.numworks.com/simulator/](https://www.numworks.com/simulator/)

<comment><USER8> It's nice but as far as I know it doesn't have a real CAS despite its processing power.

<comment><USER9> The TI-89 series' CAS is really impressive, particularly since it was released over 20 years ago with automatic equation formatting and a powerful unit subsystem.

The price of this is worth it for the software alone.

<comment><USER10> It was/is amazing, and was actually released 31 years ago!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_\(computer_algebra_system\))

I used it as a DOS program well up into the late 90s on my HP200lx... One of the badass things about it, afaik, hasn't been reproduced in any CAS: the quasi-ncurses looking menu made it easy to use on limited hardware and you didn't have to waste time looking things up. I occasionally consider buying one of the TI calculators just to fool around with it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti- trust investigation. There are programs that even dictate which TI _model_ is accepted.

<comment><USER12> "There are programs that even dictate which TI _model_ is accepted."

At this point in 2019, with such cheap computation, the school calculator lines are being sold as much on what they don't do as what they do.

Around 1994 or 1995, I had an HP-48G calculator, a real scientific programmable calculator meant for engineers and scientists, where the rest of the class had the TI line of school calculators. The HP-48G could do most of the integration problems we had, symbolically. IIRC, there were a few high school integration problems it couldn't do, but it did a pretty good job. And it was a bottom-of-the-line, stuck on an embedded system computer algebra system even at the time. It only goes up from there.

You don't want the students to be rolling into the SATs with computer algebra systems that can solve all the problems on the exam. This is also why they can't, for instance, bring in an Android system running the TI in emulation; it's not about doing what the TI calculator can do, it's about _not_ being able to reach Wolfram Alpha.

The model restrictions are about the test authors being sure they know what's up.

(On the plus side, if you want to teach students how to use computers well, leave them a loophole where they can bring in their android phones, install a linux app, run Sage[1] from within that, and figure out how to use it to solve their high school calculus problems. You _will_ learn something students, one way or another!)

[1]: [http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/calculus/sage/symb...](http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/calculus/sage/symbolic/integration/integral.html)

<comment><USER13> I used a TI-89 (which has a CAS) on the AP Calculus exam. I maybe used it to double check an answer, but I don't remember it being more useful than a TI-83 on that exam. You can only use calculators on part of the exam. On the calculator portion, I remember formulating each problem to be the hard part and the actual differentiation/integration was straightforward.

The SAT math is so rudimentary that it's difficult to use a calculator beyond its basic arithmetic functionality (unless it's been changed since I took it). I bet most people would get similar scores with and without calculators.

In college, calculators were never allowed in exams. They just constructed each exam problem so that you didn't need to perform arithmetic with large numbers. It does make it seem like exams were written to sell calculators...

<comment><USER14> I find the 89 to be a huge leap over the 83 entirely because of the screen UX.

On the 89 it would draw the actual fractions and show exponents in superscript rather than only using parenthesis. You could also scroll up to previous entries and bring them back to the editor (or get previous answers).

The mistakes you avoid from not having to count parenthesis and being able to easily access previously typed equations was really helpful.

<comment><USER15> The 84 did that too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there (non TI funded) research showing that graphing calculators are actually helpful in high school level math education? I'm somewhat sceptical.

I had a ti-85 in high school, but in university graphing calculators were verboten (basic scientific calculators were allowed). And I don't think they would have been useful, even if they would have been allowed.

My university experience sort of mirrors my "real world" experience as well. If I need something non-trivial, I have access to a computer with python/R/Julia/Matlab/octave/mathematica/take-your-pick that blows those graphing calculators out of the water. If not, a plain scientific calculator is good enough. I've literally never thought "if I only had my trusty ti-85".

<comment><USER17> I had the same at uni, no calculator allowed at any of the non-stat classes. You had to memorize the table or rules for a few special sine/cosine values, but that was it.

Then my gf had to take some extra math classes for a program she wanted to take, and I got to help her as she had been weak at math in high-school.

At just about every problem she got all confused looking at her graphing calculator, and I'd ask "why are you looking at that thing for?"

"Well, I'm trying to find the button to compute the answer".

After a little while like that I simply took her calculator away. Took a couple of weeks but she finally got an understanding of the math. In the end it turned out she is actually quite good at math, and passed the courses with high marks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that > integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into > classroom curricula. It sought approval for standardized test use from > administrators like the College Board. And every time a competing tech > innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola.

Absolutely disgusting

<comment><USER19> And absolutely killed the absolute best engineering calculator to ever exist-- the HP48SX.

I _still_ use all my HP calculators from the 80's and early 90's.

It's all about the keyboard. I can enter enormous streams of numbers and operators and _never miss_.

<comment><USER20> I worked for the HP calculator back in the early 90s. It was the first generation HP calculator that is looking to using new keyboard technology. The amount engineering effort to keep the tactile feedback was significant. It had to be just the right amount of click as well as the amount of pressure needed to make the contact.

The tactile feedback on the HP calculators is one of the those things that defined that product.

<comment><USER19> If you don't mind my asking: what was the "old" generation technology?

It seems like with modern manufacturing we ought to be able to replicate that.

<comment><USER20> To be honest, it has been too long ago for me to remember the details Sorry. From what I can recall, The "old" technology needed to be updated as the manufacturing methods were too costly.

<comment><USER19> > The "old" technology needed to be updated as the manufacturing methods were > too costly.

Sure, costly for a volume manufacturer. However, for low volume, boutique manufacturing, you can tolerate a whole lot of "non-optimal" methods that may actually be easier to manufacture even if not cheaper.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that HP would see themselves as boutique manufacturer of calculators. :-)

<comment><USER19> I mean for a hacker/maker to clone. HP is clearly not going to bring back an HP 48SX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article suggests the basis for the price is a result of lobbying to make calculators manadatory for certain tests. This rings true to me - even TI's comparison page ([https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/graphing- cours...](https://education.ti.com/en/product-resources/graphing-course- comparison)) has a section on test requirements but not on actual product features!

However the argument for why this might collapse seems to be that technological change - touchscreens, phones, tablets, apps etc - means that institutions will be more willing to break from TI's grip. I don't believe this is likely. From the point of view of those institutions, saving student's money isn't a high priority. They are more likely to care about how a single use-device makes cheating hard. Not to mention the fact that despite the article's love of convergence, physical calculators are genuinely much easier to use for calculating than a touch screen device.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been a math and science teacher for the last 25 years. I have always told students they could use whatever device worked for them, and I have alway been very clear that the only reason TI calculators are so prevalent is because the test-taking companies require them.

The only time I have encouraged their use is for students who are going to take a test that requires them, and even then they should only use them enough to know how they work. There are much better tools for learning and exploring many areas of mathematics.

For students who don't have a specific device they wanted to use, I steered most of them over the past few years to [https://www.desmos.com/calculator](https://www.desmos.com/calculator).

<comment><USER23> I never heard of Desmos until now; it looks like an outstanding educational tool with pages and pages of exercises, demos, and aids for teaching math.

But I can't fathom how they make money. Their "about" page lists 29 high- qualification employees, and they're located in a high-cost city (San Francisco). If the loaded cost of each employee is $150K, they'd have to make $4.3 million a year just to pay salaries and overhead.

I can't find a single item on their website that has a price listed: everything is free! They don't even have ads. They talk about partnerships and such, but I can't figure out how they charge money and what they charge for.

Public schools are stingy when it comes to learning aids; teaching math is not in the same category like spending for a football stadium. There are 56 million elementary, middle, and high schools in the U.S.[1]. If they charged $1 per student in some partnership deal, they have to sign up at least 7% of the entire U.S. student body just to meet payroll and overhead. Don't get me wrong, their software looks absolutely wonderful, but I don't understand the business case.

[1] [https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enroll...](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enrollment)

<comment><USER24> Their business model is actually described in the article:

> "Our business model is the exact opposite of TI's," says Luberoff: "Their > model has always been to give [tech] away for free to textbook companies and > force families to buy it at a premium price; our model is to give [tech] > away for free to students, and charge textbook companies to integrate it."

It must have been a challenge to convince textbook companies to pay for something they always got free with TI, but I suppose the network effect had a big role there, and also printing a QR code to an already-prepared graph on desmos must be easier than writing a complete set of instructions to get the same graph on your calculator, even if you limit yourself to one model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Timely thing - I actually dusted off my TI-89 over the weekend doing taxes. There was something about a focused tool with a physical number that I was really desiring. I have fond memories of tapping around on it in high school.

Turns out it sucks, and I wound up just buying one of the $5 solar basic calculators and was way happier. I can't wait for this monopoly to get blown up.

<comment><USER26> Opposite story here... I still use my TI-89 (or my even older TI-86) from time to time, even when sitting in front of a PC that has R, Maxima, Gnuplot, Axiom, Sage, etc. installed. There is something about the format of those old TI calculators that I find oddly appealing for whatever reason.

That said, when I don't have a hand-held calculator handy, I usually just fire up bc or R when I need to do some quick calculations.

<comment><USER27> What is bc?

<comment><USER28> If you're using bc for the first time, be aware that you almost certainly want to run bc -l -- otherwise no decimals will be displayed and you'll get whole number answers to everything.

The -l flag changes that behavior to instead use 20 decimal points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am not a fan of the lobbying side of this story, but I do think that the TI graphing calculators are good products. They are very durable and easy to use. I fondly remember programming a multiplayer poker game in TI-BASIC on a road trip complete with a CPU player! I also would browse TIcalc.org to look for new games and utilities.

I later bought a TI-89 Titanium which opened up the gaming possibilities! Check out square-z for a fun tetris-like game

<comment><USER30> Very cool :) My road-trip project was Connect-4.

A couple of my more ambitious friends got into Z80 assembly, which was super helpful for them down the road.

<comment><USER31> That's what I did! I fell in love with the Z80.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a reformed math major (that is, I've forgotten all my schooling), I think its worth debating whether or not there is even any value in having middle school / high school students use these calculators in the first place, let alone requiring them. In my hastily formed opinion, I think students might be better off learning without them. What does the average 7th grader need a CAS for?

<comment><USER33> Nothing. There's not a single operation that you learn between grades 7 and 12 that requires anything more than a scientific, non-graphic calculator to perform.

<comment><USER34> You don't think graphing equations is an important function for any math done by kids in grades 7-12?

<comment><USER33> I think that knowing how to graph y = x^2 + x is a far more important skill than knowing how to punch it into a graphing calculator.

"Oh, it's a parabola... Plus a slanted line. It's going to look like a parabola for large, and small values of x, but it's going to have an odd behaviour around the origin, where x^2 ~=~ |x|. If I compute the approximate values of y, when x = -3, -2, -1, -0.75, -0.5, -0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 and 3, it's going to give me a great approximation of what the graph looks like."

Those values are, to a rough approximation, 6, 2, 0, -0.2, -0.25, -0.2, 0, 0.3, 0.75, 1.3, 2, 6, and 12.

Given that 'connect the dots' is part of the kindergarten curriculum, I don't think that connecting those data points should be that much of a challenge for the average grade 8 student.

Now, compare that to the 'skillset' of plugging the formula into a TI-83...

<comment><USER35> > Oh, it's a parabola... Plus a slanted line.

> If I compute the approximate values of y, when x = -3, -2, -1, -0.75, -0.5, > -0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 and 3, it's going to give me a great > approximation of what the graph looks like.

FWIW, this was almost completely useless to me in visualizing the parabola. If I was doing this by hand, it's easy to find the roots and glance at the leading coefficient to figure out what it'll look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Casio makes several graphing calculators that are cheaper and faster than the TIs. $70 gets you the top color one that can run Python programs and is test compliant - it has a flashing test mode that disables all user memory. But the $35 b&w one works just as well for tests. So low income parents can get a good graphing calculator that does it all for around 1/4 the price of the recommended TIs.

Students fear Casio because the button pressing procedures are slightly different than TI and TI also has cleverly captured the textbook market, with TI specific instructions only found in many courses, textbooks, and teacher materials.

Below $35, there's $15 Casio models that can do numerical integration, solve equations, and find roots, enabling students to do most all things required for say AP Calculus exams easily, and the couple of questions that involve looking at the graph can usually be done by interpreting the critical points. One can get a 5 on the AP Calculus with a $15 calculator, though a couple questions will be slower and that might lose a few points, but not many because there's only a few questions like that. Most calculator required questions on various tests don't need the graphing capability at all even though a graphic calculator is recommended for the test.

Serious bad-asses can also take calculator required tests with no calculator and attempt to still get the highest score, and some manage to do this. College Board requires you to sign a waiver when you do this since the test center will normally lend you some random calculator and wish you the best.

<comment><USER37> i wont claim to be a serious badass, but taking these exams without a calculator is very doable when you consider how the questions are scored. I forgot my calculator for ap phys C and just left all my answers in symbolic form without numerically evaluating them. If your steps are correct you get the vast majority of the credit regardless

<comment><USER36> > i wont claim to be a serious badass

AP Physics C without a calculator qualifies you!

Some of the most fun teachers had open-book open-note any-calculator tests for various technical subjects, but the questions were carefully designed so that if you stopped to rifle through a book or notes or pull out the calculator, you would run out of time. Everything was set up to be symbolically done faster if you knew your stuff. In addition many students hearing open-book open-note simply don't bother to study and thus blow the test that way despite having too many resources available to distract them during the test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How is there not a giant 2nd hand marketplace of TI graphing calculators for super cheap? Like after 30 years of basically producing a functionally identical product that few people need after college, there should be cheap used graphing calculators everywhere.

<comment><USER39> There is. I bought my son's TI-84 on eBay for 1/3 of the retail price.

There are plenty in desk drawers of graduated kids, but they're also pretty beat up. In particular, the display seems to be built very cheaply and prone to damage.

<comment><USER40> That hasn't been my experience. I've had my TI-84 for 9 years and that thing took quite a beating. Still works perfectly today: can't say that for all the phones I've had in that time.

<comment><USER39> While trying to select one out of the multitudes on eBay, a significant number had this "smudge" on the LCD. And they all look similar:

[https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fyQAAOSwzahdiVGQ/s-l1600.jpg](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fyQAAOSwzahdiVGQ/s-l1600.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I feel really out of the loop here. I went through a pretty standard curriculum in the 2000s and have never owned or used a graphing calculator (aside from the few times the teacher demonstrated our school's TI-83s in class in high school). What are they used for?

[And while I used a bog standard scientific calculator regularly in science/stats classes, I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with. It might even be plausible to go through a whole math curriculum without a calculator apart from whatever stats/applied classes you're required to take.]

<comment><USER42> > I'm pretty sure my calculus classes disallowed calculators and only stuck to > magic numbers that were easy to manually calculate with

That's the key. There's two schools of thought that have their pros and cons. 1) using magic number means no calculator, but students can get by searching for clean answers and might not truly understand the topic. 2) using real world examples grounds the curriculum in reality so there isn't a gap applying it, and you're not used to the cleanliness in the future, but might be a bit opaque in the short term.

Both sides have pretty good arguments why they do better than the other teaching a number sense to students about the various transformations.

<comment><USER43> I have a strong bias towards the first school, the point being that opaque calculation are simply harder to reason about.

I also agree that handling complex computations is a relevant skill, but then what you need to learn is the mental book keeping of where you are and what you need to do that you need to learn.

The only case where calculators are truly useful is in sciences, where numbers are just a tool to scientific insight.

(moreover in math if you need trigonometric tables chances are that you are going to learn better math by keeping symbolic answers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Bedridges law of headlines: If the answer to a question posed in the headline of a news article is either "yes" or "no", the answer is "no". (paraphrased)

I think the problem here is that this is ultimately left up to individual teachers, and 15% of them will take the easy way out and say "you can only use the ti-84. Not the Casio equivalent, not the HP equivalent, the ti-84". Word goes around to not bother with the 1/3 price alternatives because you have to pay for the ti markup eventually anyway. Better to pay $150 up front than pay $50 now and $150 later.

I would like to see, for instance, the State of California sitting down and establishing three levels of accredited calculator:

1\. Scientific calculators. Roughly equivalent to the ti-36.

2\. Graphing calculator. Roughly equivalent and compatible with the ti-84.

3\. Symbolic calculator. Full symbolic computation is acceptable, but notably lacking wireless connectivity.

Require that publicly funded education systems choose a calculator level for all their classes. No ad hoc individual teachers fucking the system for everybody.

That being said, playing dumb is a really good option. I went back to school in my 30s, and my military service taught me the value of begging forgiveness instead of asking permission. I was an objectively good student, (sat in front, paid attention, asked questions, responded to teacher prompts) and had both a 90s ti-84 and ti's latest and greatest CAS calculator. Only got called on it once, and got away with it, because I knew exactly how to navigate "just following orders, sir".

Honestly, the military is a great way of learning the important stuff a middle class upbringing breaks us of.

<comment><USER45> As a teacher, just having some kids using a TI-84 and some using a TI-89 is a headache. If I don't have a consistent set, I constantly have to stop and give two sets of instructions to account for minor UI differences. There's no way I could deal with everyone having different ones.

<comment><USER46> In school when we got introduced to calculator, the teacher told us that he was not here to teach it to us. Only maybe guide us, we had a few lessons of us sitting down with the manual and having to learn (mostly by ourselves, but he would also help) how to use the calculator we chose. After that, it was to each its own, he wouldn't give any explanations...

This is IMHO fair, he was anyway teaching us math, not using a calculator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> For $100, you can buy a Pinebook with an 11" or 14" screen, a multitouch trackpad, gigabytes of storage, WiFi, a keyboard without a numpad, and an ARM processor.

On this machine, you can create reproducible analyses with JupyterLab; do arithmetic with Python; work with multidimensional arrays with NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, xarray, Dask; do machine learning with Statsmodels, Scikit-learn, Dask-ML, TPOT; create books of these notebooks (containing code and notes (in Markdown, which easily transformed to HTML) and LaTeX equations) with jupyter- book, nbsphinx, git + BinderHub; store the revision history of your discoveries; publish what you've discovered and learned to public or private git repositories; and complete graded exercises with nbgrader.

But the task is to prepare for a world of mental arithmetic, no validation, no tests, no reference materials, and no search engines; and CAS (Computer Algebra Systems) systems like SymPy and Sage are not allowed.

On this machine, you can run write code, write papers, build spreadsheets and/or Jupyter notebooks, run physical simulations, explore the stars, and play games and watch videos. Videos like: Khan Academy videos and exercises that you can watch and do, with validation, until you've achieved mastery and move on to the next task on your todo.txt list.

But the task is to preserve your creativity and natural curiosity despite the compulsory education system's demands for quality control and allocative efficiency; in an environment where drama and popularity are the solutions to relatedness and acceptance needs.

I have three of these $100 calculators in my toolbox. It's been so long since I've powered them on that I'm concerned that the rechargeable AAA batteries are leaking battery acid.

For $100, you can buy an ARM notebook and install conda and conda-forge packages and build sweet visualizations to collaborate with colleagues on (with Seaborn (matplotlib), HoloViews, Altair, Plotly)

"You must buy a $100 calculator that only runs BASIC and ASM, and only use it for arithmetic so that we can measure you."

Hand tools are fun, but please don't waste any more of my compulsory time.

<comment><USER48> I would LOVE to live in a world where Jupyter notebooks are the defacto standard for post-primary education. It would take some vision and leadership to bring about that sort of change, but would far better prepare kids for the world they will be running one day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Back in the Android 2.0 days, a guy had a set of TI emulators which, when loaded with the ROM downloadable directly off of TI's website, perfectly replicated several well-known TI calculator models. Think the one I used got shut down, but there's a number of newer ones:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89Emu)

I already owned a TI calculator at the time, it was just nice not to carry it around. TI probably would still make good money selling an official version.

<comment><USER50> For studying it would be fine, but for taking exams no way the instructors can let you in with your phone.

<comment><USER49> I know this is a crazy thought: But why should every student need to buy their own calculator for testing? In a given class period, what, 10% of a school's population is in a math class? The school should be providing adequate calculators for test-taking, but of course, that would cut TI's income by a factor of 10.

(It's worth noting that "an X for every student" mentality really only is beneficial to whoever is selling X.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> HP 48g FTW!

Seriously considered it's IR data sharing capabilities with other classmates... imagine beaming messages across the room!

<comment><USER52> I had an HP28c ( [https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm](https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm) ) that saw me through high-school calculus and undergraduate work. In it's day, it was a revolutionary product.

I never got to play with the data sharing stuff, since none of my classmates had such an expensive or geeky piece of kit (I got mine used, but it was still expensive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've used the same TI-89 since I started my engineering coursework in 2004. It's a very useful piece of everyday kit for those of us who need to do basic algebra and calculus on a day to day basis. In particular, I find it indespensible when just doing desktop brain work with pencil and paper. I'm sure using a smartphone would probably work just as well, but I like buttons.

What bums me out is that there hasn't been any attempt to release a version that slims down the whole package, without revamping much of the actual capabilities of the device.

</comment><comment><USER54> > was first released in 2004 for around $120 ... still sells for nearly the > same price [$102.99]... One analyst placed the cost to produce a TI-84 Plus > at around $15-20, meaning TI sells it for a profit margin of nearly 50% — > far above the electronics industry's average margin of 6.7%.

Wouldn't that be a 81% - 85% margin? (gross profit / revenue)

Edit: I finally got through the paywalled article they were quoting. It says "over 50%". Retail distributors take a margin, so that is probably where the uncertainty is coming from.

<comment><USER32> I was wondering the same. Also annoyed that an article about math/calculators called 120 and ~103 'nearly the same'... thats ~16% less!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a shame we've standardized on something so ancient and limited, but we'll be losing something when we give up on the standardization we've achieved. At least if we accept that basic graphing capability is crucial to high school and undergrad maths.

I'm picturing a high school math teacher trying to support 20-30 kids running 20-30 different BYOD'd devices... multiplied by 5-6 periods of teaching per day. Even if one app becomes dominant, teachers will still need to keep up with updates.

We can complain that teachers are technology-resistant at times, but have you ever spoken to a teacher? They're typically quite overworked already. Generally they take a lot of work home with them. The thought of adding anything additional to their workload should really give us pause.

I would hope some sort of de facto standardized replacement emerges. Like that free Desmos app mentioned in the article. That's not a perfect solution (students still need devices) but it certainly lowers the bar for entry. I'm sure a budget $50 (new) tablet would run it just fine. And there are plenty of older devices on the used market that can do it.

Thing is, BYOD is still really problematic. Some students will have an advantage over others. And there's the non-trivial matter of making sure that students aren't accessing cellular data during tests.

 _Ideally_ schools would purchase cheap tablets with no cellular modems and slap them into ruggedized cases. Then lend them to the kids or at least sell them to the kids at nominal cost.

<comment><USER55> _> I'm picturing a high school math teacher trying to support 20-30 kids running 20-30 different BYOD'd devices_

I don't get this fear of BYOD. It should be fine to say "these are the devices I'll support, if you'd rather use something else, that's fine, but I won't be able to help you."

(In testing situations, I do understand the fear of BYOD for devices that might provide too many capabilities.)

When I was in high school, my teachers had no problem saying

\- Here is a list of the devices that are allowed on the standardized test. If you're planning on taking the test, I advise that you use one of these for the duration of the course, so that you will be comfortable with the device you use on the test.

\- Here is is a list of the devices that I am familiar with, and can support. I advise that you use one of these devices, so that if you have trouble with it, I can help you. You are free to use a different device if you like, but if you have trouble with it, finding the solution is your own responsibility.

<comment><USER5>
        Here is is a list of the devices that I am familiar
        with, and can support. I advise that you use one of
        these devices, so that if you have trouble with it,
        I can help you. You are free to use a different
        device if you like, but if you have trouble with it,
        finding the solution is your own responsibility.

This is utterly reasonable, but here's the problem: a lot of kids have utterly unreasonable circumstances.

Please think of the least-advantaged kids when we think of things like this.

A lot of kids don't even have parents that are willing or able to help with their education at all.

There are a lot of parents who can hardly _feed_ their kids.

Let's recognize our privilege here. There are a lot of parents who don't have an ability to buy something from a list of approved devices. They can't order things online, because they don't have credit cards or they can't safely have packages left on their doorsteps. They may be long bus rides away from someplace they can buy one of these blessed devices.

And yeah, a lot of parents _will_ jump through whatever hoops necessary to get their kids the $100 or $50 thing they need for math class.

What's the plan for those who don't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Man, I used to cheat on so many tests with my TI-89. I had a TI-86 and then the 89 came out and I convinced my mom I needed it for AP Calculus in 11th grade, but really I just wanted to play better games and have an easier way to cheat on my Physics exams.

Edited to add: I'm of the opinion every teen deserves to go through the process of programming hacks to hide their cheat sheets on their calculators. It's a right of passage.

</comment><comment><USER57> I picked up the relatively new HP Prime in the last 6 months and the ability to do 3D graphics with a touchscreen is amazing and really gives a great appreciative for the underlying functions you are plotting. Would have loved to have something like this in my advanced math classes.

So much better than the pretty terrible TI series by comparison.

<comment><USER57> * appreciative => appreciation, if a mod/@dang can edit and then delete this comment. I hate typos. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I had a Casio graphing calculator in the 90s and while it was ridiculed and I was made fun of sometimes by other students, it did the job just fine. If the school requires a certain brand, they should pay for it themselves or stop being such entitled assholes. Many students and their parents don't have $100 to throw away unnecessary. Especially now that there is undoubtedly free software to do the same thing and much more. I inherited the calculator from my big sister and my parents were barely able to afford it. Schools need to take into account the feasibility of their requirements when making such ludicrous demands. Or pay for it themselves. Period. Playing into this stupid monopoly was ridiculous in the 90s. It's frankly just a lesson in the stupidity of administrators and teachers today.

</comment><comment><USER59> The article author doesn't seem to have kids. I do. The elementary kids leverage Alexa for arithmetic and spelling. This is why their spelling is awful and they complain about the math teacher forcing them to "show their work". Alexa ruins spelling education but not arithmetic, as long as the teacher isn't lazy about requiring explanations and multiple lines of proof of doing it by hand. The teens use wolfram alpha to learn how to do algebra, and graph, so given the answer, they use their crappy calculator which hasn't changed since I was in HS to get the same result as wolfram provided, so they can pass tests.

Another oddity that indicates the journalist has no kids, is making it an amazing invention in 2011 that a Yale guy is the first human to ever notice income inequality, which is comedic to read. Both in the 90s and today, classrooms always have a basket of calculators for either forgetful or poor kids to use. Also the school library. Of course a borrowed calc will not have special notes hidden in them...

Much like cursive, nobody uses calculators after school. Even the last few genx I know have given up on balancing checkbooks using calculators. Actually the only people I know who still balance checkbooks the old fashioned way are boomer and older and they're literally dying out. With everything paid online, I only have maybe one or two checks per month to "balance" and that doesn't require a protocol and algorithm to "balance".

</comment><comment><USER60> I wouldn't even mind the monopoly if they sold them at a reasonable margin which I imagine is something close to $20.

More importantly, we need to change the curriculum to allow students to use softwares such as Mathematica.

</comment><comment><USER61> So long as TI (and other) graphing calculators are the only approved calculators for the SAT and ACT tests, they will continue to sell. For students with college aspirations, purchasing one is mandatory.

<comment><USER62> Fortunately, that isn't the case.

For the SAT, you may use "All scientific calculators" and "All four-function calculators (not recommended)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I used to be a math teacher, but somehow I don't know what the use of a graphing calculator is. Why do students need them compared to a basic scientific calculator? In one school system I taught in, you didn't even need any calculator at all for physics because we graded them entirely on their working and explanation. They didn't need to produce numerical answers. A calculus course I taught effectively didn't need calculators either, although they were allowed, but pretty much no use.

</comment><comment><USER64> One of the things I picked up was a Numworks calculator ([https://www.numworks.com/](https://www.numworks.com/)) which makes the technical specs available. I've written my own firmware to play around with calculator UIs for fun.

They don't do a particularly good job with buttons though, and a nicer screen would be a bonus. All in all though, a calculator you program in python is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER65> Good riddance. There's no reason to have a graphing calculator in high school math. A four function to speed up arithmetic? A scientific so you don't have to use tables to look up values of trig functions? Fine. A graphing calculator for calculus? If you need it, you missed the point of calculus.

Plus there's no reason tests can't be set up so you don't need a calculator at all, which makes the whole discussion really simple.

</comment><comment><USER66> Seems like there are many options available that improve the accessibility of the TI-89 (and as a parent of a middle and a high-schooler I've been frustrated by this as much as the next parent):

\- You can go to eBay - Here's a used listing at $29 [1]

\- You can go to Alibaba and purchase what is likely a knock-off at $20-$50 for a minimum order of 100 units (perhaps an arbitrage opportunity for an enterprising student? :) [2]

I also came across an interesting article that calls into question the ability of TI to copyright the keyboard layout which cites Lotus v. Borland and Oracle v. Google decisions [3]

[1] [https://www.ebay.com/p/1800843141?thm=3000](https://www.ebay.com/p/1800843141?thm=3000)

[2] [https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/ti-89-calculator.html?searc...](https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/ti-89-calculator.html?searchweb=Y&)

[3] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnxeqb/one-reason-why- you...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnxeqb/one-reason-why-youre-still- paying-120-for-a-ti-89-calculator-copyright)

</comment><comment><USER67> Yeah no, please tell me when they figure out a good calculator software that can replace my TI-nspire CX CAS.

It has a pretty powerful symbolic math engine that is pretty insanely powerful and it might as well be considered cheating. Difficulty of integrals is limited by how fast I can type it in my calculator.

But the problem is the keyboard sucks ass (because stupid SAT requirements) and programming it is also hard. I want something that is free or pretty cheap (I can see myself paying 50 bucks for this) that has a nice symbolic + numerical math engine (fuck you SymPy you suck ass) and has textbook-style symbolic math entry (so integrals look like long S's and not Integral[]).

I think MathCAD comes close but its symbolic math is a little suboptimal.

It's fucked up when the best thing that matches these requirements is the official emulator for TI-nspire cx cas that you get a license for when you buy the calculator.

I might make my own but making a full math engine sounds like a huge project (considering SymPy is nothing short of a disgrace)

<comment><USER67> Desmos seems pretty nice. [https://www.desmos.com/calculator](https://www.desmos.com/calculator)

Things like this has already existed for a very long time though. Like Grapher in Mac OS.

When will some galaxy brain disrupt the market for high end math software like Mathematica and others?

It's 2019 and I should not be doing integrals and symbolic manipulation on paper. At least outside of school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I am ambivalent about using either _MathWorks_ on my iPad or iPhone and my _HP Prime_. As far as I'm concerned, to be a valid competitor for my attention the solution _must_ have a Computer Algebra System (CAS). Something that can merely manipulate numbers through various forms of arithmetic is far short of what should actually be expected.

<comment><USER69> The HP Prime has CAS. Maybe you need to update your firmware or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I don't understand what kind of numeric calculations are needed by math students. I completed my graduate and PhD math studies without use of any calculator. I only needed a scientific calculator for Physics problems and even there I had made use of a Casio fx-991MS which cost me $10 .

</comment><comment><USER71> Interesting that the TI-84 is mentioned so much. I am pretty sure this article is making a big deal out of nothing. I think this is a case of journalists reading "graphing calculator" and assuming the 84 is being used. SAT's allow CAS calculators, the Inspire is a pretty impressive specialist calculator and makes algebraic expressions incredibly easy. Any sensible student should be taking one into the exam or they're just putting themselves at a disadvantage. I can't speak for what calculator students ARE buying, but they are allowed to buy and use far better ones, the 84 might be overpriced but just don't buy it. You wouldn't care if the Apple II is currently overpriced, no one should be using one, so it shouldn't be a big deal that the 84 is overpriced, just move on.

<comment><USER72> If what you are saying is true, then there is no way that TI would be able to maintain a $100+ price point on a $25 calculator. So that itself is evidence that the TI-84 is a requirement in many student situations. Even if something else can be used on exams, if you don't have the calculator that the text books are written to, or that the teacher knows how to teach against, you are at a major disadvantage.

<comment><USER71> You can't use the pricing as evidence it's necessary. It's possible it's both unnecessary and overpriced. All that matters is TI deems it to be a profitable price-point. They might be selling to mostly misinformed or confused buyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> You know, this could all be solved if TI would lower the cost of their calculators, and make them easier for schools to buy them and maintain them as opposed to students having to shell out $120 for a glorified Z80 processor.

</comment><comment><USER74> My question is how has the second hand market not killed it already?

<comment><USER75> I once helped a girlfriend move and while going through her stuff to organize it, found 3 different scientific calculators that all cost over $100 that she had no intention of keeping. She wasn't an idiot, she acquired them over years of post secondary education and has several degrees - I think people just don't give a damn about them once they're done with them. They disappear into drawers, then another is needed for another course, so they go get another. Then one day they move, realize they have 3, and promptly forget an hour later after stuffing them into an odds and ends box that'll sit in a closet for another 5 or 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> The article mentioned that:

> In its annual reports, TI wraps calculator revenue into a larger category > ("Other"), which includes additional products. Since 2014, this category has > seen a 35% decline, from $2.2B to $1.4B.

But didn't mention the fact that "Other" accounts for only 3% of TI's revenue.

[http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/investor_relations/annual_report...](http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/investor_relations/annual_reports.html)

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm surprised these are allowed in exams at all. Can someone who wrote such exams tell me what sort of questions were asked for which graphing was useful? Clearly there would be no point in asking many curve-sketching questions.

In teaching, I can see the utility of sometimes being able to ask the computer. But ideally not a cheap computer from the 90s. And of sometimes being forced to do without. But in exams, where standardization matters, why not restrict to basic 4-function calculators?

<comment><USER78> I may be misremembering, but I want to say I was allowed to have a calculator (a TI-83 Plus) when I took the SAT & ACT in 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> All thoses peoples talking about TI or Casio as real calculators, while real fun was hp48. TI or Casio were real piece of shit, Reverse polish is the true path. Many of my generation (+40) learnt assembly, language machine and coding with this model (not even talking about hp41C or hp28S for the oldest of us). Long live to Saturn, and sysinternal. I often buy refurbished one on ebay or other site, i actually own 6 hp48s, i hope it will be enough for my offspring.

</comment><comment><USER80> Substitutes are not so easy to find. After using an app on my phone, and then my desktop computer, to try and do homework that included lots of numerical calculations, I quickly reverted to the hard-keys of my calculator with which I was working faster and more accurately. I've personally found the key layout of the calculator to be a lot more efficient than a desktop computer's, and the touchscreens to be flexible but error-prone.

</comment><comment><USER81> You can already get a graphing calculator on your phone today. Desmos is interesting but their business model isn't going to fix the costs of anything, as many commenters have noted.

At best, Desmos is pushing the costs from students to the book-buying taxpayers. Schools can solve that problem more simply by just buying the caclulators themselves. A TI-89 calculator last for 20 years, $5/yr/student, no big deal, despite costing more than it should.

</comment><comment><USER82> I still have and use my TI-84+ that I purchased when I started college. As a professional I use it here and there but rarely for anything that actually needs more than a basic scientific calculator. During college (civil engineering) I used many of the more powerful functions like matrix math stuff. In high school, I don't think I used a graphing calculator once. Just doesn't seem necessary to teach geometry and algebra 2 in my mind.

<comment><USER83> Yea, I loved by TI91 (I think that was it's designation); very durable, long battery life, a real work horse. I still have it. Don't remember how to to anything on it. The thing is, a full computer, python notebook, and keyboard are quite an advancement over that even. I get that $100 is high, but it's in the range of other BS like always-new textbooks. My only regret about these calculators is that they really are old tech now. In almost any industry or research we don't use calculators almost even, we always use full laptops. Kids should train on the best tech we use in the field, that's the laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> HP-41C (non graphing) was used on the space shuttle. I thought it was inline as a failsafe in case of the loss of one or part of the main computers but I can't find that from a quick search. here((1) is a quick article on the HP-41C used at NASA

(1) [https://www.hpmuseum.net/pdf/KeyNotes_1981_Jan_Vol5No1_17pag...](https://www.hpmuseum.net/pdf/KeyNotes_1981_Jan_Vol5No1_17pages_OCR.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER85> meanwhile on Europe (at least Spain), it's forbidden to use programmable calculators on exams. Casio semi-programable calculators (aka, no memory to store functions or programs when is poweroff) are very popular. Also, I never saw a exam or exercise that required to use a calculator (with the exception of some no trivial sin/cos values) Everything can be made with paper and a pencil.

</comment><comment><USER86> Somewhat unrelated: I really enjoyed this recent NYT article about how schoolkids in Japan master arithmetic by learning how to use an abacus: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/asia/japan- abacus.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/asia/japan-abacus.html)

</comment><comment><USER87> This is a baffling article.

It starts with description of the current monopoly and how is it caused, which is fine. And then it pivots to "but this app is changing everything."

I don't think an app will change anything, there are existing apps that are sufficient. The only reason TI has the monopoly is because it is not internet connected, another calculator app will not change anything.

</comment><comment><USER88> My son is working on an Eagle Scout project collecting unused calculators so kids don't have to buy them.

Drop me a line if you're interested in donating.

</comment><comment><USER89> In regards to the rest of the posts stating its because of lack of functionality rather than functionality, why not design and write tests (math tests specifically) so that no calculator is required. Core Calculus, Stats, etc. concepts are testable without exact numerical precision. Substitute variables if needed, or have end results allowable in non reduced formats.

<comment><USER90> I guess the only thing good in it is that parents (and maybe even grandparents?) can pass them on to younger generation like a family heirloom, and child won't even get anything outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> This article reminds me of that famous video of Steve Jobs talking about how sales & marketing guys take over a tech company and engineering gets pushed out. TI has no monetary incentive to make these calculators better, the only way for them to make more money is to aggressively sell to schools and lobby for more favorable legislation around their product.

</comment><comment><USER92> They can upgrade the technology to a much bigger screen, like the one in an e-reader, for a smaller profit but much better value for students.

If they don't change their hardware, at some instant in the future the inflexion point could even bankrupt them.

</comment><comment><USER93> I learned programming on a TI 83+ while ignoring math lectures in high school. I grew up to become a full-time software developer, so IMO that $100 calculator was money well spent.

I also learned some stuff about math and graphs on the TI 83+, but I haven't used much of that knowledge in my work.

</comment><comment><USER94> The $100 calculator era has long been a racket and blatant collusion between test taking companies (College Board, ACT, etc) and Texas Instruments.

Same goes for universities forcing students to buy the latest edition of textbooks, despite the new version having very few differences.

</comment><comment><USER95> > it wasn't until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81, that > graphing calculators really began to hit the mainstream.

Casio FX-7000G was well established before TI came onto the scene.

</comment><comment><USER96> I 100% guarantee an old-fashioned calculator beats a smartphone full of apps, games and social media for actual studying. And I further guarantee that everyone knows this.

</comment><comment><USER97> Why would you ever use a calculator except for tests in school where you are not allowed to have equipment that can do all the stuff that a modern device allows you to do..

</comment><comment><USER98> These teachers need to know about WolframAlpha...

</comment><comment><USER99> The good thing about the Ti-83 and 84 is that they're nearly standard. Want to know how to do x? Someone nearby will know.

</comment><comment><USER100> I'm sure they're still botching quotients with cube roots because 'kids only need the principal one'

</comment><comment><USER101> I still have fond memories of my TI-89 because it could do symbolic manipulation. Eventually it got banned in our classes.

</comment><comment><USER102> There used to be so many cool gadgets with lots of buttons. Now there are almost no buttons. I miss the tactile feedback.

</comment><comment><USER103> Am I the only one who never used a calculator? It felt like learning the formula on paper cemented the knowledge.

</comment><comment> vincent-toups I had an HP48 throughout high school, college and grad school and I still look down on the TI people.

<comment> cbm-vic-20 I think that was actually a bullet point on the side of the box.

        Features:
        * ...
        * IR/Serial Port
        * Look down on TI peons.
        * Removable Storage
        * ...

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r Get used to it, kids. Wait until you see the price tags on those required college textbooks.

<comment><USER104> Buy the international editions, buy used from graduating seniors who are trying to get rid of their stuff ASAP, or buy the ebook versions.

Oppenheim and Wilsky's Signals and Systems is $100+ in stores in the US, <$30 on eBay, $5 for Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Not when an exam requires you to use a TI calc, no phones allowed

</comment><comment><USER106> I still have my ti-85 and the serial link cable I built for it.

</comment><comment><USER79> droid48 or any hp vintage calculators available on ebay are doing the same job, first solution for free on android devices second for some bucks

</comment><comment><USER85> why no body are doing cheaper clones of the TI-84 ? You will need to write the firmware from scratch to avoid any legal problem.

</comment><comment><USER107> Takes me back to the days of my HP 50g.

</comment><comment><USER108> Everyone uses Desmos now.

</comment><comment><USER109> I am genuinely impressed how capitalism can solve a problem that never existed before they started solving it and then forcing that particular and often quite expensive solution on you. Never needed calculator until advanced statistics where calculations became monotonous and no longer instructive. Before that, actually, use of calculators was explicitly banned both in school and uni.

</comment><comment><USER110> Former math TA* here. What if the pb isn't the $100 barebone calculator but the way/medium by which math is currently instructed in the U.S.?

To this day, we're still teaching math with pen & paper, and require students to memorize concepts like how to differentiate functions of the form 1/x, x^2...etc. To test proficiency, well we give pen & paper tests and forbid most notes, but we still provide you a calculator because it'd be almost dumb not to. But given the prior rules about no notes, the calculator that doesn't have fancy note storage & programming wins, even if it costs $100.

But my recollection as a student is that math didn't entirely click until I started playing with Excel and later with Jupyter notebooks. Honestly, nothing quite like coding along a spam filter from scratch to really understand the basic principles at play behind Bayes' theorem.

In summary, I didn't love math in the pen&paper contest, but absolutely loved it when applied using a computer and some visualizations...etc. Based on my TA'ing experience, I am willing to bet most kids feel the same way. Mathematicians have long moved away from using abacus; maybe it's time our education does too.

Context: Former college TA for linear-algebra/vector-calculus/differential- equations.

<comment><USER63> > differentiate functions of the form 1/x, x^2...etc. To test proficiency, > well we give pen & paper tests and forbid most notes,

Maybe it's a US thing, but that sounds horrible. When I was a teacher, we usually allowed notes and always gave them the differentiation formulas as well as every other formula they might need. Why are you guys getting them to memorize a bunch of specific facts that they'll forget after the exam? You don't learn math by reciting formulas to yourself the way you might learn vocabulary in a foreign language. I'm not even sure you learn languages very well that way either.

<comment><USER110> I completely agree. By the way, I'm not convinced it's just a U.S. thing. I went to high-school in France for 1.5 years. I also have some exposure to Japanese high-school math. In both contexts, rot memorization of derivation techniques was at play.</comment></comment></comment>


Hulk: A Haskell IRC server - <AUTHOR> http://chrisdone.com/posts/hulk-haskell-irc-server <comment><USER2> HULK SMASH SHA1 FOR PASSWORDS!

No seriously, before you get like a million users you should switch to a much slower hashing alg that's designed for passwords, not for checksums. Scrypt is good, bcrypt is good, and there are a few others. But here's a(n?) scrypt package on Haskell that will do it for you and has a really nicely designed API: [http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/scrypt/0.3.1/doc...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/scrypt/0.3.1/doc/html/Crypto- Scrypt.html)

<comment><USER3> Could you explain a little more about why you need a slower algorithm? How is anyone going to crack a well-salted SHA1 password?

<comment><USER4> It is increasingly trivial to try millions or billions of hashes per second. Using scrypt forces the computer to use more resources (in this case, memory in particular) which means that scaling the guess rate is orders of magnitude slower and cannot be significantly increased by building faster computers (because it's limited by memory not process speed).

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

It comes down to this: Why use something which is designed for speed like hashes to do something that can be broken by highspeed guessing?

<comment><USER3> >Why use something which is designed for speed like hashes to do something that can be broken by highspeed guessing?

Perhaps you have hundreds of millions of users? The slower your hash algorithm the more resources it takes to run it.

<comment><USER5> At hundreds of millions of users, I rather suspect resources spent on password hashing are going to be low on the list of concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It's also common to put all your types into one module named Types, as you > tend to use types from every module

Is that true? Wouldn't that mean that typical Haskell applications aren't very modular, if every module needs access to all types? How can this be a good thing?

[I'm not good with Haskell; I sort of like it, but it makes me feel rather unintelligent.]

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't confuse modules with modularity. Think of it like this: types are the primary API for the program. In fact, I tend to call the modules that perform this function in my code something like 'Core'. Since they're a shared language that allow different parts of the code to communicate without knowing any implementation details, these types actually make it possible to write code that is more modular, not less. Different parts of the program can go about their business and perform specialised tasks, while still being interoperable (and composable) with other parts of the program (and, hopefully, code not yet written—although this very much depends on how well your types model your problem domain).

I'm not sure the author's explained this point quite as clearly as it could have been. One doesn't want to expose every type used in the program across all modules: there are many that are just used in internal representations within particular modules.

Here's an example from a project of mine, which is a command line program to produce truth tables. There's a Core module which contains the types shared across the whole program, and the most fundamental operations on them.

[https://github.com/beastaugh/hatt/blob/188.8.131.52/src/Data/Logi...](https://github.com/beastaugh/hatt/blob/184.108.40.206/src/Data/Logic/Propositional/Core.hs)

Then there are other modules like Parser which just exposes a single function, but of course makes use of the core types.

[https://github.com/beastaugh/hatt/blob/220.127.116.11/src/Data/Logi...](https://github.com/beastaugh/hatt/blob/184.108.40.206/src/Data/Logic/Propositional/Parser.hs)

The command line program itself is defined as a Main module, which imports the pure library modules and does all the I/O. It has a few types of its own but these aren't shared across the program, because the library doesn't need to know about all this stuff.

<https://github.com/beastaugh/hatt/blob/126.96.36.199/src/hatt.hs>

<comment><USER6> Ah, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mean to criticize the blog post, since it's probably valuable to some people. But if you're sick of Skype for Linux and you realize that something like IRC would be good replacement, then what's the point of writing an IRC server in Haskell (except for fun/education/pleasure) when you could use existing software (open source or not) like Apache Wave, Mumble, one of the many XMPP servers, IRC servers etc.?

<comment><USER9> > _But if you're sick of Skype for Linux and you realize that something like > IRC would be good replacement_

Huh? How do those even compare?

<comment><USER10> I know at least one organization that mainly used the group chat bit of Skype. In that case, one might think it possible to replace it with XMPP or IRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Instead of writing about purity and impurity all day he could have spent that time improving the IRC server to the point where the authentication can not be trivially replayed in what is a clear text protocol and implemented IRC over SSL/TLS.

That sounds a bit snarky; it just seems like purity/impurity is the favorite bikeshed for haskell programmers.

<comment><USER12> He only used part of the blog post to talk about purity; when explaining how the code is designed and organized, it's not like he could reasonably skip that part. Besides, Haskell makes the distinction sufficiently natural that it does but take much effort when actually coding, so the main "cost" in terms of time was probably in writing the blog post :P.

Since it's an internal effort, simplicity trumps security and features. I doubt making the IRC server more complete would be worth the effort and maintenance cost. It's much better to add features only of they are obviously missing when they actually use the server.

<comment><USER11> Well yes, and then he went on to completely rewrite it, for puritys sake:

[https://github.com/chrisdone/hulk/commit/d9093c76a49ea417091...](https://github.com/chrisdone/hulk/commit/d9093c76a49ea4170917db2c3b3b4109c61c49cf)

<comment><USER13> God forbid someone learns while using a new language and may not implement it the most optimal way the first time. What a waste!

<comment><USER14> It is the second time I fear.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Neat trick with the generalized derived classes! You don't actually need to make IRC a monad transformer if you don't need it. Just drop the `m` from the `newtype` declaration, and you have a nice simple `IRC a` monad.

<comment><USER15> It's a common trick from the 'transformers' lib to define type SomeMonad = SomeMonadT Identity

<comment><USER2> Ooooooooo neat!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We agreed something like IRC would be good, _so I thought it would be easy in Haskell to make such a thing_.

Or you can use any of the thousand services running IRC servers ;-)

<comment><USER17> Why pass up the opportunity for a valuable learning experience? Even if it doesn't pan out, chances are that you'll learn _something_ , no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> that blog post is from 2011. just so you know...</comment>


Coding is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/coding-is-not-fun-it-s-technically-and-ethically-complex <comment><USER2> Sex is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

This has to be the worst false dichotomy I've heard in years.

<comment><USER3> Drawing is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

Driving is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

Cooking is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

Life is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

<insert any hobby here> is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

The art of click-baity article titles is not 'fun', it's technically and ethically complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article starts out making a case, then about halfway through it takes a weird turn and gets pretty surreal. Am I the only one who got lost there?

I think within 'coding' there is such a vast range of different pursuits - code can be like architecture, document filing systems, artwork, marketing, etc… there is just such an abundance of variety it's really hard to put all of 'coding' into one box like this.

It's like saying 'writing' isn't fun, it's technically and ethically complex. Some writing, like medical records - carry life or death sentences if there are errors. Some strokes of the pens call for executions - not all writing is fun… but would you argue that because some writing is hard, painful, or dangerous - that writing can't be fun as well? Think of love letters, recipes, poetry, maps, music etc. All different forms of writing that can be fun in their own way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this article assumes that 'learning to code' and 'being a programmer' are one and the same. I personally believe than (like many things) there is a huge difference between the two - I do believe that anybody can code, but being a programmer is a completely different kettle of fish.

Anybody can code, sure. Not everybody can code _professionally_.

<comment><USER6> The hard part of coding professionally is getting a job. Practice is much more important than native ability for most intellectual activities until you get to the very peak of competitive performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something can be fun, technical, complex and laden with responsibility.

Very strange article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Was waiting to see why coding was ethically complex - I was disappointed. Strange article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Making things is fun... Programming is fun when you do it for you (side projects, hobbies, etc), but when you have to push a 70h week to meet a stupid deadline, it's not. When you have to debug some weird bug on a conflicting environment or platform, it's not fun.

Professional programming can be fun, but it's usually not. But it's a job I wouldn't change for anything else.

</comment><comment><USER10> I believe most technology is being developed and sold under the guise of "betterment" and "progress"; However, very little ethical scrutiny is performed and probabably not a lot of forethought given to long term impacts.

If one looks truly, looks deeply and really asks themselves, "Is my work really having a, lasting, positive impact and making me happy", one might be suprised at the answer. Doing this can be a confronting, life altering exercise.

The author makes valid points, coding can be difficult, isolating and stressful. It's not always ping pong tables and bean bags, though it often starts out that way.

The truth is, most of the worlds major issues could be solved using some self- sacrifice and common sense, technology is not everything. Looking into the origin of your food, your pay check and your motivations can be be good start in realising that.

</comment><comment><USER11> i really don't understand the ethically complex part. off the top of my head i can divide these kind of decisions into 3 categories: offensive security which in most cases is clear on which side you are on, bugs that can affect user's wellbeing for which there must be guidelines or someone is not doing their job (technical incompetence is besides the point, everybody makes mistakes but some risks can be quantified beforehand and mitigatios be put in place), and intended functionality like fingerprinting which most of the times are pushed top down from the product manager's side, again, pretty well clear cut where the responsibility lies. the point is most of the time the 'coders' decide on the how part and less on the what, which is where the real disasters come from.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nah, man. Coding IS fun!

</comment><comment><USER13> Coding can be fun. It can also be technically and ethically complex or not. I personally think the problem with coding is that it's exhausting. That to me is the biggest problem with the software profession, that it's exhausting.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree that it's technically complex. But ethically complex? Not at all. In my 12+ years of SE experience, I've never once come across an ethical dilemma. He doesn't really explain why it would be ethically complex.

</comment><comment><USER15> FTA: >inevitably white and male

What the heck does that have to do with the rest of the article? Just a cultural dig at coding and coder stereotypes that fits the current zeitgeist?

<comment><USER16> Noting a stereotype is a "cultural dig"? Why don't you take offense at the other stereotypes preceding those (ie "socially challenged, type-first-think- later hacker")?

<comment><USER15> Because "socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker" has some sort of relationship with people not thinking about wider social implications of their work.

I'd have the same reaction if they said "Asian immigrant on a h1b visa" \- why are you even bringing this up when it has absolutely no relevance to the subject at hand? Might as well bring up hoodies and jeans while you're at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> charles-salvia Coding is fun. Debugging sucks though.

<comment><USER17> It sucks until you figure out the problem, then it's euphoric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> you have a rather boring definition of fun, then. technically and ethically complex things _are_ fun.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is this story flagged??

</comment><comment><USER20> Fun, too.

</comment><comment> sid-kap Can we stop making references to the trolley problem with respect to self- driving cars?</comment>


Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg-businessweek/ <comment><USER2> We've seen some fairly aggressive voting rings organized by publications with well known names. Only a few are actually banned though. Usually we just take away the voting ring members' ability to vote.

<comment><USER3> I deal with so many folks trying to scam our search engine every day I can't imagine the hordes at that gate here.

Reddit's response seems to be to take away the cheese in order to make the site less appealing to the rats. Its one strategy.

So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse. The first time we tried returning a straight error code for a robot search we got to see how fast a robot could send requests (pretty damn fast!) but we can send them the same 10 bogus serps again and again and again and they will chew their robot cud all day.

<comment><USER4> _So far I've found that making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed is most effective at keeping them from getting worse._

Right. The quality of feedback information is one of the biggest factors in development cost. The bugs you can't reliably recreate are the biggest problems, sometimes by one or two orders of magnitude.

This should be used as a weapon in the security battle. Seems like not enough people use it.

In all likelihood, the scam initiator is not the same person as the scam implementor, so "making it seem to the bad actors that nothing has changed" is likely to inflate their costs tenfold. This also works when the scam is entirely the work of one person, but it's especially effective when multiple parties are involved.

<comment><USER5>
        Seems like not enough people use it.

Well, since this is a tactic that works best if the bad actor never finds out about it, isn't it possible lots of people do it without ever talking about it?

Relevant Coding Horror [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension- ban-or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or- hellban.html)

<comment><USER4> _isn't it possible lots of people do it without ever talking about it?_

I hope it's the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The biggest issue reddit has isn't the spam, it's how the site has become a "work safe" 4chan, it caters to the lowest common denominator. reddit used to be a great site and there are parts of it that still are, but the majority of the "visible" content (stuff that you don't have to search out) sucks.

The subreddit idea is fantastic but I don't understand why they aren't making this their focus. A netflix style recommendation system for subreddits would improve the quality of reddit 10 fold and give it a _chance_ of lasting the next few years. I'm a fairly typical and regular reddit user and the sort of spam they're banning rarely (if ever) affects me, I've never seen a link on the front page and thought "what is this doing here?", focusing on this seems misguided.

<comment><USER7> that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the lowest common denominator winning is because it _is_ the lowest common denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.

re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.

<comment><USER8>
      moderation. this is something pg understands well and is
      also the foundation of hacker news.

This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like meta.news

<comment><USER9> >This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense?

I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot to do with its continued high quality.

<comment><USER8> Do you know how the moderation actually works? I beleive much is auto-modded - I am seeing dead links but no reasons for them. It would be nice to know.

(Google bot not telling me either)

<comment><USER10> This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?

Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.

Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.

These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. Kind of assumed we were all nice people. Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members? Presumably a combination.

Just interested, mostly I suspect because stack overflow elections are on us and they are ultra upfront about it.

Whatever, it seems to be working.

<comment><USER9> >Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?

Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.

Also, I sort of got the impression that _only_ founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.

ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a pretty interesting move, but they really need to make sure the rules are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to those willing to learn them.

I work for ForeignPolicy.com, which could loosely be described as a competitor to the Atlantic. To avoid being spammy/bad community members, we specifically don't submit all of our pieces to reddit/HN, or even all the ones we think are relevant (Virtually our whole site would fit, say, /r/worldnews. HN less so, but occasionally FP stories do rise to the top here). Most major things get submitted anyway, and often drive a fair bit of traffic.

That said, the tradeoff here is that we lose control of the headlines that we get submitted under, and the submission timing, and have to work quite a bit harder to make sure that we see submissions to get involved in comment threads when possible.

It would be nice if we could get some sort of account that would let us submit our relevant content, but without any special privileges a la' the publisher feeds that helped ruin digg.

We _could_ just get people with well-built-out legit personal accounts to trade off in submitting our stuff, but that still strikes me as too spammy.

I know in the comments thread on reddit Alienth said that this action will only be taken in cases where they can prove that the sites knowingly offended [1], but it really worries me that the lines aren't set in stone, and a competitor could potentially make a very compelling attempt at spamming all of our links and get us banned.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/v03qc/physorg_is_not_allowed_on_reddit_this_domain_has/c5046xt)

<comment><USER12> I really like the content of FP and the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, I already have a feedreader, and I don't need to see HN, or reddit turned into another RSS feed or twitter.

If your stuff is good it will rise to the top.

In the meantime, especially at HN, it crowds out less well known sources and authors and bloggers.

<comment><USER13> Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of an official content feed and democratic filtration of stories are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER14> The initial work-function of someone submitting a link is the first filter for if something is good/"worth other people looking at". Taking it away means more stress on the remaining levels of filtering. So if the same things are to get through the sum of all filters, either the remaining levels will need to be more robust to compensate for taking away the first filter, or the first level should just be kept in place.

More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As long as the good articles from The Atlantic (and many are quite good) keep getting posted here by regular participants who respond to other participants, I suppose it is okay for members of voting rings to lose voting privileges. I would hate to see whole publications banned just because of the actions of their paid supporters, when the same publications have willing readers who like the content of the publications.

<comment><USER12> "I would hate to see whole publications banned just _because of the actions of their paid supporters_ ,"

It seems there is a simple solution to this...

<comment><USER14> If only there were some way for the publications to stop writing those checks, or somehow make them contingent on the "supporters" not spamming sites that don't want to be spammed... but what could it be? </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reddit has a horribly broken spam filtering system for comments and links, which frequently catches legitimate posts, and then people have to ask subreddit moderators to mark them as "not spam".

Why? Well, moderator abuse. Moderators can mark stories and comments as spam to get rid of them. But there is always moderator abuse. So the spam filter has got trained on tons of comments and links that aren't spam.

How would they fix it? Give moderators a means to get rid of bad posts other than marking them as spam.

<comment><USER17> this has been implemented (fairly recently). there are now both "remove spam" and "remove ham" options, the latter removing a post without using it as spamfilter input.

<comment><USER16> Ah, that's good. I haven't done any reddit moderation in quite a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The single most common complaint on Reddit about Reddit is its lack of original content. "Repost!" would be the rallying cry of Redditors, if ever there was one. This move takes those people who _do_ create original content, and throws them out on their collective asses.

Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

<comment><USER19> > Rather than throw out OC, why not throw out the actual rule breakers? Those > who manipulate Reddit by illicitly acquiring votes should be the target of > anti-spam measures, not simply those who submit their own content.

That's exactly what was done. These publications have employees manipulating social media sites. They're not just submitting stories, they're actively spamming for traffic.

<comment><USER18> The article says that people who post their own content get banned from Reddit if they cross some ambiguous threshold of self promotion.

I think self promotion shouldn't be frowned upon on Reddit, only when someone manipulates the aggregator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this heavy-handed banning approach pretty much a tacit admission that the voting algorithm is broken? Why couldn't this spamming be prevented through pattern algorithms/frequency analysis and...this is what I __thought __Reddit aspired to...democracy? If a lot of articles from a source are voted up by a diverse group of users, then maybe it's because the source is good?

The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally benefits...as long as the content is good?

<comment><USER21> > The worst part of this is how this countermeasure reeks of the fallacy of ad > hominem: who cares who the submitter is and how he/she personally > benefits...as long as the content is good?

Well, the easiest answer to that is that one of the best ways to separate the good content from the bad algorithmically is to look at the submitter behavior. Saying "as long as the content is good" glosses over the practicalities of actually measuring that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> People realize that most professional news publications now have social media editors or social media teams whose job it is to make that publications content popular on social media sites and in online communities right?

Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the whole domain banned.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yay! I've gotten annoyed at seeing the links in HN to theatlantic.com and others, posted by people who _only_ post dozens of links to a single domain, and who never respond to comments in the thread.

<comment><USER24> That was odd to me, because even people at The Atlantic know that doesn't work here. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285156>

<comment><USER23> Just for reference, here's Alex Madrigal's submission list: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alexismadrigal> . Self-posts links to theatlantic every week or more.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nbj914> posts links to "outsideonline.com"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jnickhughes> posts links (almost) only to soentrepreneurial.com.

I've seen others, but these were the easiest to find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like a purely anti-competitive move considering that Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and most of those sites blocked are direct competitors to Conde Naste's publications. Conflict of interest.

<comment><USER26> I don't know if this changes anything but I think recently they moved up in the pecking order to be sister companies with CN.

However banning competitors outright vs banning competitors that spam are two different things.

<comment><USER27> But when and where do you draw the line?

Here's the top comment from reddit...

 _Not sure how to feel about this, on the one hand if they were cheating then blocking them makes sense, on the other hand, I don't see a public list, and this could be abused by admins to block unfavorable sources (maybe not the current admins, but who knows what batch of admins we'll get in the future?)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Atlantic shows up WAY more often on HN than I think is likely, as well. I think on the New page, the user's top domains ought to be shown...

</comment><comment><USER29> I tend to post to reddit from my website once every few weeks when the article is specifically good and "redditable". I would hope that is not a potential ban target.

What probably is happening is that theatlantic / businessweek had a group of up voters that they paid (staff) that would constantly manipulate the voting.

</comment><comment><USER30> The first thing that came to mind was that anybody might be able to get _someone else's_ site banned from Reddit by making it look like they are trying to spam/game the site.

</comment><comment><USER31> Content is the most important if you want to create a sustainable sharing based model.

But, generally with reddit since quite some time the frequency of which the content is repeating is shortening substantially: Try for yourself - have a look at imgur and point out the images that you have not seen during the last 24/36 months repeating over and over ( not counting the variations of cat pics, funny heads etc)

So that is their mainstream - but there are many other still functional areas underneath.

Now if we are talking mainstream that's where this ban of BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost comes into play.

When an organisation like reddit that is facing a more and more immanent lack of content bans content - well looking at that as a desperate move might be kind.

In other words - they have lost the understanding of their own business model or more precisely the underlying principle of their overall existence - sharing content.

So if those sites are the ones who share the most content - fine - IMHO at least most of them are known to have created value content for many years (some for decades and beyond).

The whole thing that a shop like reddit might achieve with that is pushing more and more of their long time supporters to the sites where the most of its content originates from.

Or in other words - sure wag the dog - or even better - post the whole thing on AOL, digg.com, myspace or name your own previous network(s)...

</comment><comment><USER32> I find this kind of fascinating after Digg v4, which basically tried to ban everyone else but mainstream publications.

</comment><comment><USER33> It seems that "The Front Page of the Internet" only includes some of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't a lot of those companies hire professional astro-turfers to do their dirty work anyway?

Besides, how hard is it to point to a proxy that forwards to the spam site?

</comment><comment><USER35> The major problem I have with reddit isn't censorship, although that's certainly occasionally there. It's not even the increasing stupidity of the users and the move to the lowest common denominator. It's not the astroturf advertising that pops up every day. What bugs me most is the blatant support and promotion of certain classes of bigotry and hate speech by the owners. Yet I still keep coming back...

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm just bewildered here.

We're banning QUALITY content?

BusinessWeek and The Atlantic are some of the BEST and most RELIABLE source of info around.

</comment><comment><USER37> I hope they ban link shorteners, too. As I recall, they both violate site policy and are prominent.

</comment><comment><USER7> this will blow up. hopefully the bans are interim measures and something more advanced is under development.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is the biggest caveat with community spaces. Although Redditors can subscribe to subreddits to customize their content, each subreddit remains a community space. IMO there isn't an alternative to heavy moderation when shared spaces are inherit to the design.

</comment><comment><USER39> Doesn't appear to be up and running yet:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/junk001/>

Has recent links to all 4 announced bans.

</comment><comment><USER39> Do mirrors still work? Like posting the google cache instead of the original article.

<comment><USER6> Yes, all the block does is check if the domain matches a domain that is blocked, nothing more. Using a redirect domain will get around the block, the changes are here on github: [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/44ebdeb378f4bf09d6bd...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/44ebdeb378f4bf09d6bd1f395764868b57d9fd82)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If Reddit wanted to end karma whoring in general (to an extent), they'd move to a slashdot system where numbers are hidden, and only vague ranges (bad, new, good, excellent) are given.

It wouldn't completely rid the site of the bigger voting rings, but it would cut back on many individuals who spam posts looking for a quick turnaround.

</comment><comment><USER41> I actually know that Cheong fellow and have visited him and his family in Asia.

I know exactly what sort of work he does, and frankly, I'm not sure what he did wrong.

<comment><USER42> Ian Cheong?

<comment><USER41> Aye.

<comment><USER42> That's really quite funny. I used to hang out on the #fallout IRC channel with him years back. I remember just when he started doing all the gaming sites. Interesting fellow.

Just for fun: <http://www.duckandcover.cx/content.php?id=111>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This really won't work. I can easily make a blog that pulls all of the articles from these sites and posts them.

</comment><comment><USER44> social media is the new SEO, with all the bad and good that entails

</comment><comment><USER45> Reddit, the new Digg

</comment><comment><USER46> This is crazy, Phys.org may be a little spammy but it's one of the best sites on the Internet. It constantly pops up in my Twitter feed and rarely disappoints.

<comment><USER47> I'm glad phys.org and science daily are banned, I think /r/science and other subreddits will be better without them. They're both interesting sites, yes, but they blast out articles about X Y or Z if a scientist somewhere finds a b or c.</comment></comment>