Apple's Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2012/09/apples-free-ride-why-journalists-treat-product-launches-like-news/

<comment><USER2> Ryan's a smart guy, but he has got this one wrong.

Product launches ARE news, no matter how you slice it. News is simply a product of what people want to know about, plus what people SHOULD know about.

So people want to know about new Apple products. So the news media delivers.

But they also SHOULD know about things like the failure of iOS 6 maps, which has been roundly slammed by the media. If the media were truly in bed with Apple, would it be writing this kind of negative portrayal?

Is there symbiotic relationship between the marketing departments of companies and journalists? Absolutely. Do journalists give them free passes? Hell no.

<comment><USER3> The product itself can at times be news--especially if it is a major technological advancement. What is NOT news is the "event," the perfectly choreographed dance between the corporation and the media, where the company manufactures fanfare and urgency and theater around the launch and the media turns it into reality by writing about it.

Many news staples fall into this category from movie premieres to press releases to anniversaries to deliberate "leaks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a show run by the government broadcaster in Australia called Mediawatch. It does just that, keeps watch on the news organisations to highlight when they are acting inappropriately.

They did a short segment on the launch of the new iPad this year [0] in which they echoed the sentiments of this article. They were especially critical of the excessive coverage given by the government broadcaster themselves, which is supposed to be particularly careful when it comes to even mentioning brand names in most other contexts (e.g. They never use the sponsors names when referring to sporting stadiums):

"Why on earth, we wondered, did ABC News Breakfast spend nine minutes in all on a bunch of techheads queuing outside a shop with a piece of fruit on it, to buy a marginally updated product that they could have got anywhere?"

[0] www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3464157.htm (the video and transcript are both here).

</comment><comment><USER5> I read it. The whole article. And all I can think after digesting what I read is, "U mad?" I think this journalist is just irritated that someone scolded them for "working the news cycle."

And it's not clear why saying, "Well Apple's events are also over covered!" is somehow a dodge for "The RNC is being massively overcovered."

P.S., If anything CES is undercovered. In the 10 years I've been following it I've never once felt like I have any clue what is going on there.

<comment><USER6> You didn't read it very well.

A) he's not a journalist. B) He's saying that however much the convention coverage is a problem, tech journalism is a bigger mess. C) His point is pretty clear: journalism purports to be reporters working for readers, but that is no longer the case.

<comment><USER5> A) Seems like he is. B) And I am saying that is faulty logic. C) I am not sure this is entirely true. But it's a different conversation than the one being had here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is wrong. I am always interested in hearing about Apple's products because they are so incredibly good, and the new features often have a dramatic impact on my life.

The 2007 iPhone introduction showed me what my future phone would look like. The latest LTE feature on iPhone 5? Awesome because it means I won't have to hunt around for wifi once it becomes widespread.

To sum it up, people care about these announcements because the company that makes them actually delivers (and they do it in style).

<comment><USER6> Is there somewhere in the article where he said that Max Harris doesn't want to read about Apple products? Otherwise, I'm not sure how your particular interest proves the article wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell

<comment><USER9> Well... There are many phone makers who would be happy if the iPhone 5 got less press coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there was one Android phone released every year, it would get at least as much coverage as the release of the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Polls say 1 in 5 in the US plan to get the new iPhone.

Its release certainly is news if that is the case.

<comment><USER12> True, but the article makes the point that the causality doesn't go only one way.

<comment><USER13> Maybe so, but from the perspective of a single writer or publication that's just a why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The advertising buys are misleading, as Apple doesn't include (or directly disclose afaik) the money spent on their paid placements, which anyone who watches western media knows is quite substantial.

<comment><USER3> I think that only proves my point more: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/apple-the- ot...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/apple-the-other-cult- in-hollywood)

<comment><USER14> Is that accurate that they never pay? I thought they refused to discuss it. I didn't mean to suggest that it refuted your point either way though, as I generally agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good for a company if they don't need to spend in advertising. For me, in an ideal world word of mouth if the product is good should be enough.

Apple master the process of creating expectations and surprising people, in their staged announcements, good for them.

Why the hate? envy?

<comment><USER3> It's not hate. If I ran Apple, I'd be doing the same thing. But JOURNALISTS are not supposed to carry water for business--let alone a multi-billion dollar corporation that could more than afford to get these messages out another way. What is Apple announcing at these events? New products they are selling. That's "news" under only the saddest of definitions.*

There are some great books written about this, namely Daniel Boorstin's The Image <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ridiculous metaphors FTW: "You know, the twice or often thrice yearly events that bring everyone out to Cupertino, where they stand in line and contribute a few licks to the collective rim job the press loves to give Apple."

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm deeply suspicious of this article, because it could have been written and published any time over the past several years, but Holiday chose today. My cynical impression is that he's just riding the wave of iPhone news and using a sensational headline to drive traffic. Oh, and what's this?

"Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers."

It seems ironic to me that someone would lambast Apple for getting a free ride in the media, only to end the article with an advertisement of his own.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's hardly a free ride. Sure, journalists pay more attention to apple than they maybe deserve, but that's not because journalists have some great apple bias. it's because the apple PR department works their asses off to cater to journalists and make their product launches media friendly events. They deliver their product in easily reportable chunks, and they craft a public image so that news about apple is what the media's customers want to read about.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Apple's marketing strategy these days is essentially 'hold off on the advertising, just sit back and let the media go hog wild.'"

What a joke.

<comment><USER20> In what way?

<comment><USER21> Apple does gain from the release events, but they have a huge advertising budget and run some of the largest known campaigns.

<comment><USER20> Huge only in the sense that a billion dollars is a lot regular people...Apple spends a fraction of what its competitors spend. Plus up until 2011 I think they spent about half of what they spend now.

<comment><USER22> Apple spends less than Microsoft, but it is almost entirely on a single product (the iPhone). Product for product, Apple's marketing budget is immensely larger than other similar companies.

<comment><USER20> And the iPhone is a bigger business than ALL of Microsoft's offerings combined

Per Vanity Fair:

"Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.

No, really.

One Apple product, something that didn't exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion."

[http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost- mo...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve- ballmer)

<comment><USER22> FWIW, because of your comment about "before 2011", I was purposely looking at data from 2008, to help control for that (when the iPhone wasn't yet that popular as the original device kind of sucked; the 3G had just come out, however, as had the App Store, so things were already on an uptick).

Looking at data from 2007, it seems like Apple was spending a third what Microsoft was on marketing, and had half the revenue; arguably then, Apple was spending 33% less than Microsoft on advertising per revenue, not really "a fraction".

However, you seem to be correct about now: I pulled some 10Q's from this year, and it seems Microsoft is spending $3.4b/Q for $17b/Q in sales ($6b/Q profit) while Apple is spending Apple is spending peanuts (although I honestly couldn't find the data I needed to verify this from the 10Q) for about $35b/Q in sales ($9b/Q profit).

While looking into that further (as I was especially bothered that I couldn't find the exact advertising numbers), I then came across this article, which looks at yearly data and comes to the same conclusion.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/08/02/who-spends- mo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/08/02/who-spends-more-on-ads- apple-or-microsoft-another-lesson-in-quality-vs-quantity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "The media, when it's functioning properly, should protect the public from marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things."

This may be true, but had media ever "functioned properly?". Nearly every media outlet generates far more revenue from advertising than from viewership/subscriptions. So of course the media is beholden to the marketers.

</comment><comment><USER24> Apple masterfully plays the media with every product. The secrecy they keep before a launch leads to tons of articles speculating about features and reporting leaks. I agree with the author that it's all just a big infomercial.

I used to be a big Google News readers, but about a third of their Tech section is devoted to Apple, so I've gone to other sources.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm really surprised Ryan Holiday made it on HN.

He's intentionally controversial - that's his strategy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because they get page views. And page views keep the lights on, through advertising.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's two sides to this relationship: the media know apple sells as well, so they do their best to keep them prominent.

That said, the iMania can go too far at times: Today on the BBC news website (even right now), first item is "19 people killed in pakistan protests", 2nd item "Apple says map app will improve". I understand that first world problems have their share, but we 're talking about a very small part of the population that will actually care about either maps issues or the people who are affected by them.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's heartening to see that the HN responses echo my sentiment. Also..

"Democrats or Republicans look too rehearsed on stage? Let's pounce. Apple? Let's sweep it under the rug."

Look too rehearsed? When presenting a demo to a client, managing an "Apple like" demo is the holy grail. Although, you could expect a political candidate to partly be "too rehearsed" and still be his real self (or his other pretend self) on stage.

</comment><comment><USER29> Not that anyone reads newspapers anymore, but my local paper (San Jose Mercury News) is definitely guilty of this. Nearly every Apple product launch is front page news, and almost always glowingly positive. Other valley companies? Not so much.

</comment><comment><USER30> A product launch _is_ news, especially when it's something as absurdly popular as the iPhone. People lining up for days in advance, that kind of thing, is newsworthy, regardless of how you feel about the news cycle and advertising.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's obvious people go crazy for anything new Apple launches thus you as a blogger would be foolish to not write about it... Further it's obviously newsworthy.

Apple brought forth the smartphone revolution ( nailed the execution and others since copied). Also they have created other things like Siri (others copied their execution too). Thus it's no surprise millions are extremely interested in what new tech they'll be releasing.

For me though the iPhone 5 isn't too exciting... Nothing revolutionary or profound. Personally i was hoping they'd add a QR scanner to the built in camera.

<comment><USER32> Apple did not create Siri; it was an acquisition. However, Apple should get credit for bringing it to a wide audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> news corporations are just a proxy for what the public wants to know about. The news consumers (aka the market) dictate the type of news publishers report. Obviously we currently put a higher premium on covering apple launches and political conventions. If people did not want that, they wouldn't pay attention to those news outlets and subsequently those news outlets would either go under or change their coverage trends.

<comment><USER3> This is a preposterously naive understanding of how the news business works. Customers dictate what gets produced--no question--but so do a variety of other market factors. Namely, what is cheap and easy to produce for publishers. In the case of Apple news, these factors create a wicked cycle. Users click on shiny gadget stories and the news doubles down on such content because it's a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper to send a reporter to Cupertino than it is to send them to Baghdad.

ALL news can be made to be interesting and exciting. The problem is that the pay-per-pageview model heavily incentivizes blogs to grab low hanging fruit instead of doing the real (and often expensive) work of making the important news readable.

<comment><USER33> I disagree somewhat. It is true that certain news can be prohibitively expensive and/or completely barred by the country or another country however for the most part news that people care about enough to purchase and read will be obtained by a news publisher of some sort. We have already seen different business models develop to deliver news that would have been too costly to hire a team of dedicated reporters (e.g. Huffington Post). The fundamental rule of a free market _should_ make news outlets proxy's for the consumers interests. This site in particular hosts numerous ideas where the current offerings do not match the consumers needs (sometimes due to market inefficiencies, sometimes due to new tech, sometimes due to new business paradigms that circumvent current legal/political impediments, etc). If the news industry is delivering news that is a hybrid of what the public wants and what is cheapest to report then inevitably there will be a business model that will spring up to deliver a better solution that optimizes for what people want and delivers it in a cost effective way.</comment></comment></comment>


Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamiebegin.com/high-iq-will-kill-startup <comment><USER2> IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life.

It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and self centered attempt to compare yourself to others and come out on top.

When these goals are achieved, rarely does anyone publicly say that it wasn't worth it. It's like a bad marriage rotting from the inside. No one wants to admit to being a fool. So stuff like this propagate, it's a beautiful lie. Rather than think of how awesome your life will be if you just work a little harder and achieve success, you might as well be talking about how great heaven will be as long as you follow some arbitrary religious text.

It's like you think someone out there is keeping score, and it's all some type of game which you can win. We came from nature, and in nature, nobody keeps score. Animals live and die on the basis of stupid luck all the time. On your death bed you probably won't be looking over your life and decide whether it was worthwhile or not, and give yourself some report card on it. Instead you more likely won't even remember more than bits and pieces, and then eventually die and forget it all.

The hero in the story is an Israeli soldier who decided to risk his life over a few dollars in his pocket. To do what, prove he was macho? He was really stupid in my book. And we're supposed to, according to the author, look up to this man? Train all our lives as a knife fighter, so we, too, can take dumb risks and be lucky enough to not get killed doing so? What if it went the other way, and the soldier friend was hurt or killed? Would the author still be putting him on a pedestal as he does so?

I'm not saying don't try. Just make sure you are enjoying what you are doing, first and foremost. If you're not happy, either motivate yourself in a positive way, or let it go. It really isn't worth it.

<comment><USER3> Being poor completely sucks. Watching your cat die from cancer that you can't afford to treat sucks.

The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. Not to compare yourself to others.

Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to becoming rich. People are unlikely to get rich by doing work which satisfies. But if they make it, then at least life won't suck anymore.

<comment><USER4> Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex).

Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food, health insurance, and minor luxuries.

<comment><USER5> > It can't buy you love

Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less.

Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish things, but sadly this just is the way it is.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. However, in a day and age where (in the Western world, anyway) women no longer need men overtly for financial support, social recognition as mating currency is just that--social recognition. It can be, and very often is, orthogonal to wealth. Witness all the young women in love with crappy DJs, self-styled pseudo-unemployed hipsters, no-name sidewalk band heroes, stoners, and a variety of Bohemians that a conservative dad would call losers or starving artists--er, artistes.

Financial and career success is definitely one way to up your mate value, though it has more resonance once women get out of their twenties. It's not the only way. When you're young, particularly, it may not even be the best way. Vide all the fairly intelligent guys with steady, well-paying jobs (very much so, by the standards of median American household income) that nobody pays attention to, really. The broke dudes that know how to put out their plumage and leverage some other, more conspicuous cultural archetype get much more play.

I'm not a washed-up, embittered MRA or PUA guy, btw. Just playing Devil's Advocate. :-)

<comment><USER7> There are far more women than well off men.

The real issue for most men is time. A 20 something working 60 hour weeks spends far less time 'playing the game' than a DJ etc. Also, relationships take time if your doing a start-up 'on the side' it's going to play hell with most relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Years ago I was traveling to Oakland for business. My flight was delayed so I hit the magazine store. Bought some gaming magazines, business magazines and one copy of Havard Business Review. There was an article in it that caught my eye, "Why do dumb people succeed more in business than smart people."

I dont remember exactly the title but it was an 8 to 10 page article that went into detail comparing high IQ people to average or low IQ people and why people with lower average IQ did better in business. The article was filled with graphs and case studies and was very interesting.

But the last paragraph really summarized it best, "Smart people consistently over analyzed risk and talked themselves out of taking risks while someone with a lower IQ didnt even think about the risk and jumped in with both feet and took chances."

It gets back to the saying "No risk / No reward".

I remember that article to this day and always do a gut check when it comes to evaluating new risks. Sometimes I second voice my old European grandfather who was all about hard work in a different industry but his life lessons hold true.

Turning off the brain chatter and clearly evaluating a situation is critical but it s very hard because intelligent people, and humans in general, like to avoid risk and the temporary unpleasant pain that accompanies it.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if such studies are susceptible to bad stats of confirmation bias as many business studies are.

What I mean is whether they had proper controls to assess whether _each_ average person is more likely to succeed than _each_ "smart" person given the same scenario.

If they instead took a bunch of successful people, figured out that a lot of them weren't that "smart", then it could be the product of there being a lot more average than smart folk. In other words, "smart" doesn't _guarantee_ business success such that all successful businesspeople are IQ gods, but we all knew that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to startups, when first reading it few years ago.

> _The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been > as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been > able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage > (...)_

You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particular tool, you're safe, even though you have no idea how to use it. If the first time you discover how the tool works is in a dangerous situation, you'd likely be much better of if you didn't have that tool in the first place.

I applied this lesson many times in my life. For example, after a theoretical worplace safety course at my job I realized I have no clue how fire extinguishers actually work, so I bought one and fired it outside in an area where it wouldn't disturb anybody. And now I know how extinguishers behave and what to expect from them. Another time, a friend of mine was planning to buy pepper spray, because she was often returning late at night from university. I told her to buy two cans, because just having a spray will instill a false sense of confidence in her. We used up the second spray for "training", for her to see how it actually works, so that in case of real danger, she wouldn't have to worry about how to use the gas and how it actually works.

<comment><USER11> That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated -- obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time.

I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?

<comment><USER12> Success is predicated on serendipity. Chance favors the prepared mind. Be prepared. Make your own luck.

We can't control what happens to us, but we can try to make the best of what comes instead of falling to the worst.

<comment><USER11> Yes, no question. In fact, some amount of the sentiment you espoused is considered such airtight good advice that it has been built right into law. Universal education, for instance. No one seriously thinks everything taught in grade school is so essential that if you forget even one fact, guaranteed disaster follows. Clearly, the guiding principle is to teach a little of everything, under the theory that it's inherently good to be prepared, and even if you only retain 50% -- so what.

I think it might be literally impossible to totally reject what you said, in the sense that you could probably die if you were 100% against preparedness. So, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> aka _the tortoise and the hare_ ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare)), or, for a more topical treatment _determination beats intelligence_ ([http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html), [http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html))

It's universal.

e.g. I'm not supersmart, but maybe halfway between supersmart and average - enough to have glimpses; to know what I'm missing; that my reach exceeds my grasp. I breezed though school, undergrad, honours, masters. The game was how little work I could do. But at PhD level I wanted to do world-class work, and so glimpsed ideas I couldn't effortlessly "just grasp". I kept trying to "just grasp" them in different ways...

Now, finally, I'm attempting to build up my skills, one higher-level at a time. It's ughhh because it makes me feel really stupid... but that's just because I am. At least, relative to the task. I'm making progress. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

The common wisdom is that less intelligent people hit this barrier earlier, and (if they want to) learn the skills to overcome it when younger. They are net better off.

<comment><USER14> Also, The Curse of the Gifted

[http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3](http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr- sharing.php3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221756)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I take issue with the assumption that you're not a success unless you're a VP at a consulting firm. In particularly the assertion that the other engineers in the story -- who for all we know may have preferred to remain in their roles -- have suffered some terrible fate that we need to be warned against.

<comment><USER16> It's funny because my dad's idea of success is owning a company and making a lot of money.

I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave away at work.

<comment><USER17> Or own a company / work harder and save the additional cash, then retire at 40?

<comment><USER16> Yep and your kids are teenagers and you missed their entire childhood because you were at the office. No thanks brah.

<comment><USER12> Are teenagers such terrible people?

After the 350 diaper, the deep emotional rewards start to have diminishing marginal utility. Work/Life balance is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey, since no one else is bringing up the "citation please" criticism of the post, I will. Sorry, but it's just a dumb thesis, asserted in utter confidence. The evidence to support it would be something along the lines of an inverse relationship between a measurable aspect of intelligence and a measurable aspect of startup or other life failure.

Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists.

Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being "successful" in business is generally hard.

But it's the internet, you can say whatever you want!

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. It would have been helpful to be more specific about what is meant by "intelligence". I get the sense that it is referring to knowledge and/or aptitude.

2\. I think the message is, "Intelligence isn't enough. You also need perseverance to succeed." I don't know if the implication is if those two conditions are necessary, or that they're sufficient, but it sort of felt like it was saying that they're sufficient. The examples seem like they were making the point that, once you add perseverance on to the intelligence, you get success.

Anyway, success is obviously more complicated than "intelligence" \+ perseverance. I'm sure the author knows this, but the article seemed to oversimplify things, and didn't try to really break success into its components.

<comment><USER20> 1\. IQ

2\. Think he meant necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like how some people do this IQ tests and brag how smart they are. The intelligence do not come from how you solve a test, or what degree you got. The intelligence is art of using a brain in a smart way in my opinion. Your tool is your brain. You can put it in to the rest, you can let it do the job, or you can actually test drive it and push it as hard as you can.

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me a bit of a steve yegge quote.

"Having a good memory is a serious impediment to understanding. It lets you cheat your way through life."

This also reminds me quite a bit of the famous conversation between Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds about "the curse of the gifted."

</comment><comment><USER23> "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

<comment><USER12> His reminds me of the horse in _Animal Farm_. His mantra was "I will work harder" , and he worked himself to death in support of the crafty manipulative pigs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The more I think about this and reread it, the more smug and self-serving it sounds, and the more difficult it becomes to believe that this manages to pass for a gem of wisdom and sage advice. It is nothing but a negative stereotype of people with high IQs as being essentially lazy and entitled. What motive is there to stereotype people with high intelligence? It sounds like sour grapes. Couldn't it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn't good; lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn't been the go-to slander because it has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here's a one-word rebuttal: doctors. We adopt stereotyped beliefs simply because of how they make us feel. Ordinarily, intelligent people would seem to make a poor target, because it's a group that, by definition, is distinguished by superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It's not so easy to identify who around you might be in this group, and to attack it, you would seem to have to admit being less intelligent. The built-in requirement to demean your own intelligence along the way could almost just poison any possible benefit of stereotyping. But -- I'm not familiar with the name Max Klein, and it's such a combination of common names that it's almost ideal for being impervious to Google. From context and clues, though, I gather that this person must have achieved some amount of fame due to some startup-related achievement. I speculated in another comment that if anything could confer a license to feel superior to practically anyone, it would be having a successful startup. Who wouldn't want one, and by virtue of having it, in a way you are smarter than PhDs and Nobel Prize winners. The source largely makes no difference, though. You can judge a piece of writing completely on its own merits. This particular piece of writing falls apart under closer examination.

<comment><USER24> You are over analyzing this. The author isn't deriding those with intelligence, he simply said it can sometimes provide a false sense of assurance. He also implied that in a start up, hard work matters more than raw intelligence, but intelligence can provide some advantage.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure if I'm reading too much in, or if most people miss what it actually said and mentally insert platitudes. Even if it hedges all of its statements at some point and ends on a perfectly nonoffensive note, it still seems like a mediocre essay, because then it has absolutely nothing to say and uses a lot of words to say nothing.

"Your IQ will kill your Startup" sounds like bold language to me. At the very least, there are overtones of anti-intellectualism. I don't see why HN is receptive to that.

<comment><USER24> I definitely agree with you that the title is over the top (a little click- baity). I think the tone of the actual essay is more reasonable.

While it may a somewhat mediocre piece, I didn't see anything to indicate anti-intellectualism. However un-original, the main idea is important and worth being reminded of (at least, I enjoyed the reminder). I think the last two paragraphs sum it up well.

<comment><USER11> I guess you have to read between the lines just a tad to see it the way I do. In fact, you have to do it rather literally, because some of the irritating message that I read into it I'm basing on the fact that certain things were left out that I think virtually any other author would have included. There are at least two ways to read something like this: 1. You could look exclusively at the words that are written and attempt to take them entirely at face value. I say attempt, because I'm not sure there necessarily always is a face value: sometimes the writer just can't figure out what he actually wants to say, and when you read the piece, it's nothing but a disconnected jumble of sentences. Some sentences seem to be going somewhere, but different sentences are in conflict with each other about where to go, and the piece ends up going nowhere. So what's the face value? I think most people are charitable and will insert their own message when there isn't really one there, and they actually seem to do it unconsciously without being aware that they made up their own message. I think that's what most people do with something like this. 2. You could, instead, read it as if you were standing directly behind the person as they were writing the essay, looking over their shoulder, trying to figure out what's going on in their head. For better or for worse, I'm inclined to go to #2. At least, I will go there at times when what I'm reading seems incoherent, and I find myself more interested in the person writing than with the message they want me to hear.

I could go on and dissect the whole essay, paragraph by paragraph, reporting what the motivation seems to be there, and I wouldn't necessarily mind. But HN comment threads have a way of trailing off, and sometimes you end up talking to yourself... so I try to cut my comments off ahead of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the things a good University program does is take someone to past the limits of their natural intelligence. Running into the wall is one of the rites of passage of figuring out how to work. For me it was electromagnetic field theory, that crap kicked my butt! But getting through the class on additional study and work was pretty important for me.

<comment><USER11> And, years later, slowly but surely, you've managed to rack up a breathtaking point-score in your HN karma account. That electromagnetic field theory work must have instilled you with tremendous karma. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus your efforts higher.

<comment><USER27> I guess that works, but then the point of the article is that someone who doesn't have a ladder but trains to climb the cliff face will eventually beat someone who only knows how to use their ladder.

<comment><USER11> The point had to do with knives, not ladders. If you have a knife and you're well-trained in knife skills, and your adversaries are all armed only with ladders, you are easily going to win that fight. I think that's the point he was trying to make.

<comment><USER28> The point was to emphasize how ladders are clearly superior to knives, or even sticks. As has been demonstrated in literature[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4&t=3m13s)

<comment><USER11> Jackie Chan is the obvious and only exception to the rule. He could kick anyone's ass with a ladder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The bit about clever people who have always found it easy to achieve rings true when you are working with training teachers.

They have problems with the teaching sometimes. These problems are not easy, scalar or well defined. There are no 'textbook' solutions. Some cope with the messy reality well and some don't.

</comment><comment><USER30> Good article and reminder of how it is. To learn from our failures and hardships is where we grow the most.

IQ is only few percent of the total intelligence. But most people seem to see it as 99% so often.

It also comes down to so many other factors such as the environment we are brought up in, which affects our intelligence. Intelligence is not some blueprint we have from birth I learned. But very much our mental outlook on life as we progress. Those who feel intelligent due to high IQ makes me wonder how intelligent they truly are.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are- funda...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are- fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a- fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> The title of this post

> Your high IQ will kill your startup

is too strong to be correct: The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to being correct.

In more detail, the OP essentially assumes that an intelligent person will try to 'coast' or 'relax' and depend just on their intelligence instead of working hard, learning more that is important, and doing the actual work needed for success. This assumption need not be correct in all cases, and my experience indicates that it is significantly wrong.

Why? The OP mentions early school where intelligent people do well easily. Well, then, commonly they also get motivated to continue on in school. By the time they get to some junior/senior level courses in their major, to courses in graduate school, to the published peer-reviewed papers as background for their research, and to their Ph.D, research, they necessarily will have plenty of opportunities to encounter material where they have to work their little fingers, toes, and tails off. E.g., in computer science, if really intelligent, then jump all the way to tenured full professor in one stroke, just settle the question P versus NP. So far apparently no one has been intelligent enough to solve that problem.

I've seen plenty of really intelligent people work their fingers, toes, and tails off in graduate school. Net, there are plenty of challenges in graduate school strong enough for the most intelligent people to have to work their fingers, toes, and tails off with levels of hard work that would compare with hard work from anyone from a galley slave, a dirt farmer, etc.

Often, including in parts of school, intelligence alone is not enough, and plenty of intelligent people are smart enough to see this point. And, in cases of work challenges, since their pride from their intelligence is being tested, usually in a sense that is at least semi-public and, thus, visible to others from whom the person wants respect, they are motivated to do the real work needed for success.

While the OP is claiming too much, it is possible for intelligent people to fail and for various reasons quite different from what the OP explained.

<comment><USER32> > The claim of "will kill" is claiming too much; 'might kill' is closer to > being correct

You're right, and we applied your edit. That was a bit of linkbait that snuck through. So is "your" in the title, for that matter, but we'll leave that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not everyone has a "I just moved to a foreign country and have to make a living somehow" moment.

Any __specific __advice for a person who found school easy and now has problems challenging themselves further in live?

<comment><USER34> Move to a foreign country without much cash for a summer or so. Hopefully your employer is accommodating; if not, find a good story or line-up a new job. It's an incredibly liberating experience. Puts a lot into perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is true, but precisely because it is true, at the top of every game everybody is reasonably hard working. And among these hard-working people other factors start to decide again, and a very important factor is talent.

So if you compare yourself to the guy who watches TV all day, of course hard work is the main thing. But if you compare yourself to fellow enterpreneurs, Phd studentst, hackers with great github repositories, or guys who work long hours at their workplace to advance, who maybe does not watch TV at all, talent matters.

<comment><USER12> At some point, you hit a region where access to capital and powerful friends is the difference, not talent. For example, Larry Page and Zuck had wealthy investors and access to enployees who were more talented than themselves but accepted a lower share in the conpanies they built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I can't help but have heard this story before, perhaps by an HN user in another thread in the past. Didn't the Ofer fellow end up dieing in a robbery further down the line?

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a nice counter example to this. I've travelled extensively in South and Central America. I met a guy who had been robbed twice in Rio, one week apart, by the same guy, at the same time in the evening, in the same place.

I also had the feeling though that some people are just magnets for trouble.

Personally, I always travelled with two wallets. One real one stashed in belt and the other with 10 USD in it. People will walk away 99℅ of the time with the $10.

</comment><comment><USER38> Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the thesis.

<comment><USER39> I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it.

Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from useful information.

First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are "lucky".

Another huge aspect of this is self-identity. If you think you are supposed to be a consulting VP, then you can be. Most people don't think that.

Another huge aspect of success is advantage. This can be in the form of a social network or just having a slightly well-off uncle to give a loan at an important time. Or it can just be physical health.

When it comes down to it, circumstances play a larger role than I think most people in our current structure want to believe. This is not a machine that rewards merit.

There is also a strange focus on the individual in this mindset.

But I go back to the belief that innate intelligence differences between humans are generally not nearly as great as we think they are. I also think that often circumstantial difficulties can be overcome, if there is enough perseverance. So I think one of the most important factors may be identity. In other words, who do you think you are?

<comment><USER40> If someone is mugging you with a knife, guaranteed he never took the time or the expense to learn how to properly use his weapon. Or he wouldn't have any need to mug someone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Plenty of people are not 'intelligent' and have no motivation.

Dinner with 'vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world'.

That sounds like something out of:

"Intelligent?!?! Read TOP 10 things that you are doing wrong right now!"

</comment><comment><USER42> With odds at one in 176 million the only people who succeed in winning the lottery are those stupid enough to try.

</comment><comment><USER43> To sound intentionally arrogant and possibly ignorant, this whole write-up is captain-obvious material.

<comment><USER44> Yes I thought everybody knew by now that intelligence is pretty much insignificant when you're up against somebody with years of experience at something.

There was even a very popular pop psych book about it that everyone has read (Outliers).

Your high IQ might get you good grades in elementary but gaining _skill_ (which is what you're all talking about) is done through practice.

<comment><USER45> but there is also this: [http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours- myth-practi...](http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth- practice-predicts-only-12-of-performance.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This article is more about perseverance and hard work then it is about intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER46> What high IQ?

</comment><comment><USER47> Reminds me of the military.

</comment><comment><USER48> Good article.

</comment><comment><USER49> The point the article makes is well understood and valid: even if you have the potential, if you don't work hard to use it, you won't develop the skills and discipline for success. All right.

But we don't need to cast failures and flaws as the result of "high intelligence". Just a few days ago we had an article about the "curse of smart people". It feels like a bunch of people patting themselves on the back and telling themselves "oh, we're so intelligent, this is why we failed".

If intelligent people are so prone to failure, what is the purpose of measuring intelligence? Being stupid is bad, being average is bad, now being smart is also bad! Congratulations.

Part of the problem is the ease at which we proclaim ourselves "very intelligent". Being good at school is not a sure sign of high intelligence - school is an artificial environment that values short-term memorizing of facts, over critical analysis and independent decision-making. You won't go far in life with that, but maybe you'll do well in quiz TV shows. Solving "missing piece" puzzles also isn't a sign of high intelligence. All those are just a small part of it.

Can't we agree "intelligent" is the skill of _setting good goals_ , _achieving them_ , and making _good decisions_ in light of limited facts, limited time, and some stress, because _that 's what life is_, and move on to strive (and possibly measure) for that.

<comment><USER50> Can't we agree? with redefining what intelligent means on the basis of your reasonably well written discussion post? NO, we can't agree on that at all.

Your post is thoughtful and well meaning, but intelligence means... well I'm not an expert at defining it (I know my limitations, learn from me), but the people who are experts at it have devised tests for measuring it, and it's extremely well documented, and measurable, and if you have it you score high on IQ tests, and if you don't you don't.

I have it. It's been measured. And I know it when I see it in other people, and always have, even before it was measured. If we sat down to play a new board game that neither of us had seen before, I'd most likely learn it quicker and start kicking your ass sooner.

Does that guarantee success in my life? no. Does it give me some potential? yes. For some of reasons that you give. You wrote a good post. Just don't try to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a compliment paid to a different set of people. And while we are at it, can we stop saying that people are beautiful on the inside? "Beauty is only skin deep" is an expression because that's what the word means.

Yes, I'm aware that it is in the nature of language that words evolve and humans like extending the meanings of words and making analogies and metaphors, and that it can have perfectly understandable meaning to say that people with "emotional intelligence are beautiful on the inside", but that doesn't redefine the words nor rename the concepts.

/rant

<comment><USER49> > _Just don 't try to redefine the word intelligence just so it can be a > compliment paid to a different set of people._

I believe the word "intelligence" should pay a compliment to those people who life pays compliment to, in terms of their ability to find solutions to real world problems, and carry out their execution. If we can't do that (and I'm not saying we can), then measuring some idea of "intelligence" and assigning a flat score to it is counterproductive.

How quickly one picks up on board games... I don't know. Maybe it matters. Maybe it means something. What if those who pick up on board games slower are building a much deeper model in their mind and can reach deeper insights than their opponents? Would speed then be a misleading indicator?

Take me, I pick up on new things _slower_ than many might. But over time I get a much better idea about it and become frustrated with the superficial way my peers see it. Am I stupid, am I smart? Who knows. Sometimes gaining _too much_ insight is actually _harming_ performance for real world problems. Sometimes it helps. I'm neither ashamed nor proud by this arrangement. I just have my dials set this way.

Is life like a big logical puzzle? Shouldn't we judge people by their _life_ performance if it is? Should we _not_ judge people by simple puzzle games if it isn't?

Lots of questions, and if you dig deeper, you'll find the experts don't know much better than us after all.

The way we measure intelligence is much like we measure candidate performance during job interviews. It's full of "experts" with recommendations, and yet the questions and challenges have little to do with the actual job, or the job performance of the candidate when hired.

<comment><USER50> We can judge people on life performance, nobody has any problem with that.

Why do you want the word for successful life performace to be intelligence?

or to put it another way, the article you are responding to is making that point that high IQ people aren't always successful for some reasons. How is the point the author is making enhanced by changing the definitions? if intelligence means that your company will be successful, how will the OP write his article to make his point, because his point would still apply. Are you proposing another word?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is that so many not-smart people (Spiegel, Duplan) are getting funded and it's generating such a slew of crap companies that the rising generation (Millennials) may have lost the knowledge necessary to build good ones.

Then I RTFA and found that I agree, wholeheartedly. The metaphor he gives is of an overconfident assailant who has a knife, but is untrained and is beaten by a bare-handed opponent.

Correctly, we assess our enemies in office politics as being stupider. That VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) doesn't know what a monad is. He probably couldn't write a for-loop to save his own dick. Those bikeshedding "big picture guys" who "do product" aren't intellectually sophisticated people. All that said, they continue to beat the piss out of us in the game of office politics. They do nothing but, somehow, get paid twice as much and get to make a lot of decisions that we ought to be making. As a group, we have to stop fucking moping, figure out why, and change it.

Too many software engineers are so self-congratulatory about their intellectual ability, and too easily swayed by bullshit perks, to realize that they're actually getting robbed blind by jerks in The Business who aren't nearly as smart (they don't have the knife) but who've been training at social machination and in dominating other people for as long as we've been studying computers.

We have to stop thinking it's "dirty" or undignified or unprofessional to "get political" and figure out a way to get our due. We have to stop putting our heads in the sand and saying "I just want to code". We are a hard-working group (even the smart ones work really hard) but we need to accept that some of that hard work is going to have to involve learning CS 666 (software politics), as ugly as the skill may be, and playing to win, to fucking demolish our enemies instead of having them defeat us.

<comment><USER52> The logic in this comment doesn't really work for me. I like to code, and am thankful that my company enables me to do it most of the time instead of dealing with a bunch of non-coding issues. I really don't want to learn office politics, "play to win" (win at what? I already won), "demolish my enemies" (what makes them my enemies? If they weren't around I'd have to do more of that non-coding crap work) etc.

Quoth Tao of Programming, koan 7.1:

A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"

The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"

<comment><USER51> _I like to code, and am thankful that my company enables me to do it most of the time instead of dealing with a bunch of non-coding issues._

I understand this, but I think that you'll eventually get bored if you can't get a sense of progress out of your work. This requires that you pick your tools and problems. If you're lucky enough to work in an open-allocation environment, and if that persists for 40 years, then that's great and you'll never be bored or frustrated.

However, most programmers want their work to be progressive: bigger challenges, more interesting problems, high-impact opportunities. This'll inevitably put you on the battlefield with _status quo_ rent-seekers who hate you just for improving things. Even if you're not a threat to them in anyway, they'll hit you preemptively, just to prove that they can.

 _I really don 't want to learn office politics_

I understand. Who does? How many college kids say, "I want to get out there and be a private-sector politician"? Probably very few.

It's a shitty game. It shouldn't exist. But it does, and the only way we can hold it back is if good people are willing to join the fight, and able to win it.

 _what makes them my enemies? If they weren 't around I'd have to do more of that non-coding crap work_

It's not "programmer good, business bad". There are good businesspeople and bad, turncoat programmers. What makes the bad guys bad is not what they do, but the mentality. The bad guys are the ones who see us as overpaid cost centers and peasantry. Decent people managers and entrepreneurs are worth their weight in gold, but very rare: maybe 10% of the tribe.

A good manager knows that his job is to be a "sheep dog". His role is to protect the people doing the work, from assaults on all sides, so they _can_ do the work. Whether it's an executive trying to squeeze employees or a low- level employee being a toxic jerk (i.e. making sexist remarks, insulting others' work) a good manager fights that. A _bad_ manager thinks that his reports exist to serve him and that it doesn't go both ways.

<comment><USER11> The most obnoxious boss I ever had was a fellow programmer, and the problem wasn't that he was a turncoat. He was just obnoxious. I think you could take the problem you're describing and generalize it to any manager-managee relationship, and it reduces to simple bad management. Some managers will be attentive and make positive contributions, others will be inattentive and destructive. The latter style is self-defeating, and that's going to be hard to get away with forever.

<comment><USER51> I don't know this person, but did you ever think that his obnoxiousness is the result of a broken culture of anti-intellecutalism, recklessness, and machismo that emerges naturally in a world where programmers are business subordinates, as opposed to one in which we are autonomous professionals who are sponsored rather than traditionally employed or managed?

It's not like obnoxious bosses have a tribal affiliation to "managers" versus programmers. Sure, there are some who consciously think that way, but I don't think it's the norm. The insufferable management consultant fuckheads who comprise MBA Culture don't have any conscious allegiance to "MBA Culture". They have an entitled way of thinking, for sure, but and some executives do think tribally, but I don't think that a mentality of conscious allegiance among and to "business people" is the norm.

<comment><USER11> The boss I'm talking about is a special case and one-of-a-kind as far as I know. He also happens to be foreign-born and from a country that I don't know much about. But he admitted once that his friends had nick-named him Eeyore on account of his not-so-sunny disposition, so I think being obnoxious was/is a cross he has to bear alone.

I'm too far removed from corporate culture right now to really feel what you're saying. But Zed Shaw seemed to have similar gripes and he is very funny. I'm sure you know of him, but if not, look him up.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if my comment was downvoted because I made him sound as if he was cursed with some condition outside of his control and that's all. I feel sorry for people who have self-defeating patterns of behavior that cause them problems -- even if I, myself, could not stand to be around them, because I don't believe anyone would willingly choose to have problems. This boss may well have even been in that category. Who knows. But in point of fact, his behavior was frankly abusive, vindictive, and bullying toward me, and he would throw demonstrative fits of temper and behave in ways that I've never thought possible to get away with in a workplace, all the while being very personal and spewing pure hate. When this type of person is your boss, it only makes it so much harder to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm s glad to see an article like this on HN, as opposed to articles that attribute success to massive amounts of luck.

<comment><USER54> As far as I've experienced, both are required.

<comment><USER55> My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both, he was also very lucky.

There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> As someone with a high IQ, I can't help but agree with this in its entirety. For those who thought this was too long, I can summarize it as thus: "Don't overthink things, and refine your brain power. An unrefined brain is a useless tool, no matter how smart you are."</comment>


Galatea - <AUTHOR> http://pr-if.org/play/galatea/ <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone wants to play a game that's also incredibly artistic, play this.</comment>


How to write a spelling corrector (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html <comment><USER2> I know a spelling corrector is not the same thing as a spelling checker, but this is too good an opportunity to pass to promote Martha Snow's hilarious poem 'Spell Chequer':

Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no It's letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing this.

I found it difficult to parse the initial couple of lines because I was constantly attempting to read by attaching meaning to the spellings: "Eye halve" is a bit frightening in that sense. But then I realised I can read the text as sounds and almost ignore the spellings. Listening to what the sounds made in my head allowed for a much faster pace of comprehension because I didn't have to keep correcting myself.

This poem demonstrated for me that it is possible to read and listen simultaneously, and that I don't usually do that. It seems that it would probably add to the experience of other poems to read them in this manner.

<comment><USER4> I think this is how _all_ poems should be read, and I didn't realize until just now that I automatically did that.

<comment><USER5> There is apparently a big divide between people who subvocalize when they read and those who don't. Those who don't tend to read much faster than those who do which is why speedreading techniques tend to focus on eliminated subvocalization. The problem is that people who subvocalize tend to need to do so in order to understand the text.

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

<comment><USER6> I wonder whether the people who _do_ subvocalize when they read tend to be better at writing poetry (or songwriting, or just writing beautiful prose.) I would expect that they'd have been subconsciously training themselves to the "feel" of good meter.

<comment><USER7> There might be a correlation, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule. I've been told that my prose -- and poetry -- is good, and I definitely don't subvocalize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While doing a bunch of research on exactly this problem space recently for a project, I stumbled onto this improvement on the Norvig corrector idea [http://blog.faroo.com/2012/06/07/improved-edit-distance- base...](http://blog.faroo.com/2012/06/07/improved-edit-distance-based- spelling-correction/) that's one of those things that's so deceptively simple you kick yourself for not thinking of it: it turns out you can model the same "generate all the variations" effect but generating only the deletes, rather than also the insertions and substitutions, if you symmetrically apply the same transformation to the lookup side. So if your dictionary contains "cat" and you want to match queries for "cast," rather than adding "cast" to the corpus, you drop the s (and every other single letter) on the lookup side instead, and still match. Turns out it's much faster and, requires a much smaller index, and as a bonus, doesn't tie you to a specific alphabet like Norvig's approach does.

<comment><USER9> Here is the link to the SymSpell Github repository: [https://github.com/wolfgarbe/SymSpell](https://github.com/wolfgarbe/SymSpell)

An here a benchmark between Norvig's spelling corrector, BK-tree and SymSpell: [https://towardsdatascience.com/symspell-vs-bk- tree-100x-fast...](https://towardsdatascience.com/symspell-vs-bk- tree-100x-faster-fuzzy-string-search-spell-checking-c4f10d80a078)

<comment><USER8> Ah should have shared the repo, and thanks for publishing it! We're experimenting now with adapting this idea but using a directed acyclic FSA to store the index-time variations instead of a hashtable like in your version, with the idea that we might be able to search for all of the query-time variations in a single pass rather than one at a time (as for obvious reasons they'll be textually similar to one another so there should be some shared work between the lookups).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has been an area of interest for me as part of working on Typesense[1]. If you are looking to implement spelling correction, you cannot but not stumble on this excellent post by Peter Norvig (most of it written on a bored flight journey!).

While it's clever and concise, in terms of raw speed, indexing your vocabulary in a Trie, and then doing a traversal on it using a Levenshtein distance is way faster[2]. By using a trie, you eliminate lot of unwanted look-ups that Peter Norvig's brute-force approach takes.

The other interesting thing for me personally about this problem is that there is a statistical angle as well. You will often find words that are of the same edit distance from a given target word -- you will need to rely on some form of "popularity metric" to rank those tied corrections. E.g. how many times did people type this word and then change it to another word - that's precisely the kind of data that Google has and which makes its search suggestions and spell checking so intuitive.

[1]: [https://typesense.org/](https://typesense.org/) [2]: [http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=114](http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=114)

<comment><USER11> >indexing your vocabulary in a Trie

fst (finite state transducer) is even smaller. And for some languages like portuguese where a lot of suffixes are extremely common, the size reduction is dramatic!

>The other interesting thing for me personally about this problem is that there is a statistical angle as well. You will often find words that are of the same edit distance from a given target word

Indeed.

[http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~klinden/pubs/PirinenLrec2010.pd...](http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~klinden/pubs/PirinenLrec2010.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spelling correction rather than spell checking and suggestions really bugs me. As soon as you have a somewhat international audience (and given that this is the internet - you probably do) or have any non-English content, automatic correction can be an actively user-hostile "feature".

Especially on search engines, sometimes I am searching for words in another language, mixed-language results, or even doing an intentional search for misspelt words. In my native Dutch his first example would already cause problems: "spelling" means the same as in English, but "speling" means margin/give (the noun) and I wouldn't want one to be auto-corrected to the other. The fuzzy search for names on Facebook makes the search pretty much worthless especially in case you have an unusual variant of a common name in your search - you can be sure the actual person you're looking for is listed after half a billion bogus results.

The whole trend of second-guessing the user and saying "you tried to do A, but we assume you meant B, so we're gonna do B instead" is one of my biggest pet peeves.

<comment><USER13> Not only there. Automatic word replacement is my absolute least favorite iOS mobile feature. I cannot tell you how many times I painstakingly, painfully thumb typed exactly what I meant just to have it changed out from under me. And I have gone back to see nonsense messages where I know I didn't type what was sent. Very frustrating.

<comment><USER14> I think this could be corrected if the spell corrector factored in the time taken to write the word out. If the user takes longer than average to write the word they are probably deliberately spelling it out, compared to just mashing the screen to get the words through.

<comment><USER15> Throw RNN at it, like this toy example [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/) and make it figure out which spelling correction is the most probable.

You could even train it on past messages making it more tailored towards particular user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The unit tests worry me:

        assert len(WORDS) == 32192
        assert sum(WORDS.values()) == 1115504
        assert WORDS.most_common(10) == [
         ('the', 79808),
         ('of', 40024),
         ('and', 38311),
         ('to', 28765),
         ('in', 22020),
         ('a', 21124),
         ('that', 12512),
         ('he', 12401),
         ('was', 11410),
         ('it', 10681)]
        assert WORDS['the'] == 79808

Those aren't testing the file open, or Counter, or read, but instead are tightly-coupling the tests to the exact corpus. The code really should have not hard-coded the corpus, and the tests should have supplied a smaller corpus of known length where each word's frequency+probability was obvious from inspection.

There's another overfitted test just before this:

        assert Counter(words('This is a test. 123; A TEST this is.')) == (
               Counter({'123': 1, 'a': 2, 'is': 2, 'test': 2, 'this': 2}))

What is this verifying? We know how a Counter works, we don't need to test it; and the previous test already established the correctness of words().

I see a lot of junior engineers following this style of tightly-coupled, overfitted tests, and seen how a few years of growth can lead to tens of thousands of tests whose primary value is to provide Amazon with a predictable stream of AWS revenue (as we run all th tests) & make the engineer feel better for writing tests.

<comment><USER17> This code is not written for production, it's just written to make you understand how the basic of this technology works. So I would say the unit tests have the exact same purpose: make the reader understand what the functions are doing (and not a real unit testing).

Since you speak of value, the value Peter Norvig is trying to provide is making readers understand the principles, he's not trying to provide some monetary value. So I don't think your criticisms apply here, those tests fit the purpose very well.

<comment><USER16> > _the value Peter Norvig is trying to provide is making readers understand > the principles, he 's not trying to provide some monetary value_

I think he's trying to show _how to approach solving this kind of problem_. Juniors will copy it, and will then write tests in a business-logic environment which have dubious value.

The code shows how to solve the problem very well. The tests do not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a really good introduction to some natural language processing concepts, and the code as other people mentions is very beautiful and easy to read too.

Just as a curiosity: I once did some text correction applied to tweets, using word embeddings (word vectors, word2vec), which are a language model too. In real life contexts, where you don't limit yourself to a dictionary, it's really interesting because word vectors can include many foreignisms and other "incorrect" words that you might want to keep in the text.

The article also mentions edit distances, the distances between words (in this case, the "incorrect" word and its possible corrections). In general, algorithms are based on common errors at the keyboard. Missing or adding a letter, transposing two of them, etc. Algorithms like Damerau-Levenshtein (pretty much the one applied in the article, even though it's not explicitly mentioned I think, and there are many variations) keep it simple by doing this, but it's interesting to notice that you can also fine-tune distances by considering which keys are closer to other keys in the keyboard (it's easier to accidentally type "a" instead of "s" in qwerty than "u"), but when doing more general text correction you can also use phonetic distances or even more sophisticated techniques like finite-state transducers that apply language- specific rules to suggest corrections. (I know the article is only meant as an introduction, but thought someone might find it interesting)

</comment><comment><USER19> I always wish I could just plugin a Google spelling check API into things like Microsoft Word instead of using the inbuilt ones.

i.e. the amount of times I cant spell a word, and MS Word has no idea what I'm trying to say, so I "copy and paste" the wrong word into Google and it instantly knows what I meant and shows me the correct spelling.

I appreciate part of that is probably related to my previous searches on Google and it guesses based upon my history - but I'd be ok with using this for "good" like my spell checking.

<comment><USER20> You could make a very simple AutoHotkey script to do this.

<comment><USER21> ...or a Word macro that you assign to a toolbar button, that takes the currently selected word and 'googles' it for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A couple of years ago, Emily Short made an "interactive fiction" game [that's what they call text adventures these days] with letter-removal as a major mechanic. It's called Counterfeit Monkey and it's a lot of fun. [http://emshort.com/counterfeit_monkey/](http://emshort.com/counterfeit_monkey/)

Install one of the interpreters at the bottom of the page, then download the "story" file and open it in said interpreter.

<comment><USER23> it is an extremely fun game!

especially for all the oldheads around here, if you ever played Zork or Hitchhiker's Guide or whatever, give it a shot. it's the same style, just as funny, with helpful features to make it far less frustrating than the old games could be, and it really takes advantage of not having to run on a TRS-80.

<comment><USER22> Here's her blog post about which interpreters to use to play the game. (Spoilers in the comments but not in the main post.) [https://emshort.blog/2012/12/31/counterfeit- monkey/](https://emshort.blog/2012/12/31/counterfeit-monkey/) Also there's a cheat/hint guide [PDF] [https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit- monkey...](https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey- puzzles-and-toys/).

There's a spoiler-filled post about the design of the puzzles here. [https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit- monkey...](https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey- puzzles-and-toys/)

It won Best Game, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, Best Individual Player Character, and Best Implementation in 2012! [http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Counterfeit_Monkey](http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Counterfeit_Monkey) There's a nod to this game in [https://xkcd.com/1975/](https://xkcd.com/1975/) Right-click the image, go to games -> advent.exe and start exploring :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I started a project to implement Norvig's corrector in different languages: [https://github.com/jmoy/norvig-spell](https://github.com/jmoy/norvig-spell)

Had a pleasant surprise when Matthias Felleisen responded to a request on the Racket mailing list and practically rewrote the Racket version.

Also got to learn about the HAT-trie[1] data structure.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT- trie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-trie)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish articles about NLP wouldn't assume by default the language to be English. Many points of this article can also apply to other languages, but may require some more thought. Either other languages should be mentioned, or the title should be "How to Write an English Spelling Corrector".

<comment><USER26> The assumption is about the audience, not the language.

The author is an English speaker, internal to an English community, writing about spell checking.

Its unreasonable to wish every group on the planet to factor in the concerns of every other group, or add their group identifier to everything they write.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article doesn't mention it explicitly, but this is a nice example of how using Bayes theorem helps you ignore the hard-to-compute normalization term of the input space. In the article, this is the P(w) term of

P(c|w) = P(c)P(w|c)/P(w),

where c is a correction, and w is the original word.

The author does implicitly talk about this when he explains that P(c|w) conflates the two factors, but it's also not that hard to see that getting a handle on P(w) -- the probability space of misspellings -- is harder than getting a hold of P(c) -- the probability space of actual words, and Bayes lets us get rid of the former during optimization.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here is Rich Hickey's port of this Norvig exercise to Clojure:

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/N...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Examples/Norvig_Spelling_Corrector)

<comment><USER29> It turns out Hickey added some functions to Clojure to be able to write that code. Nothing wrong with that -- they're useful functions! -- but I found it kind of amusing. It can be good to be a king.

<comment><USER28> I don't see any functions in that code that wouldn't have existed in Clojure 1.0. It's all pretty standard Clojure stuff, very basic 'for' constructs and generalized lazy sequences with 'range' and others.

Which function were you thinking were explicitly added to the language that are in use here?

<comment><USER29> "Along the way, Clojure got subs(tring), slurp (a file), max-key and min- key..." at [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/YDQdmAsUaFU](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/YDQdmAsUaFU)

<comment><USER28> Thanks, that is definitely interesting. We have Norvig to thank for every-day Clojure functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty?"

Outside ;)

<comment><USER31> Nice catch!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer:

\- Couldn't determine the exact date of that article

\- Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12453535)

I really enjoyed the code, it is incredibly clever and idiomatic.

<comment><USER32> You should check out more code by Norvig then. He has many Python notebooks and, as you say, writes very beautiful code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a spell checker for my undergraduate to help with automation research back in 2011, it allowed the researcher to do things like insert words that would show as incorrect when they were actually correct, and see if people would notice with varying levels of difficulty. The idea was to try to measure how some automated systems can improve or reduce net performance.

I actively tried to avoid using libraries, and ended up writing most of it in vanilla JavaScript - including a bunch of DOM manipulations, which was suicide at the time. I even wrote my own XML-based DSL for defining the input text.

Would have loved to actually follow through with the research but phd's don't pay bills.

</comment><comment><USER33> I see where Norvig gets his reputation for writing readable code. I don't know that I've ever had so little difficulty understanding somebody else's code.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks for sharing! I just started researching how to analyze text for a project. I am tasked with analyzing content to see if they match my client products or something similar. Matching my the product name is easy, but matching by similar is what's throwing me off.

Is there an api service for these type of text analysis?

</comment><comment><USER35> > I thought Dean and Bill, being highly accomplished engineers and > mathematicians, would have good intuitions about how this process works. But > they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something > so far outside their specialty?

That kind of speaks volumes about modern academics.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've used [http://php.net/manual/en/function.pspell- suggest.php](http://php.net/manual/en/function.pspell-suggest.php) in one of my projects. It's simple and scalable;

</comment><comment><USER37> What I would like to know is why the spelling correction suggestion of Apple iOS are so bad. Why can they get along with this ? I used to disable it.

It can't even make a suggestion when there is only one missing character.

<comment><USER38> I turned off Autocorrect in short order when I had an iPhone for this reason (and others). Now, my Android speech recognition - which seems to be getting worse lately - pulls completely incorrect spelling from thin air constantly, sometimes not even giving me the proper spelling in the 'correction' drop-down list.

I'm tempted to wonder whether speech-to-text is actually saving me enough time after all the fixing I need to do now to be worth it. It's more than a little frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a great technique to know. I've used a variant to segment Twitter hash tags into meaningful words, which is a surprisingly hard thing to do.

<comment><USER29> He has that covered too! [http://norvig.com/ngrams/](http://norvig.com/ngrams/)

But yeah, I tackled the same problem (for Flickr tags) and did not at first use the "obvious" algorithm; I did something slower and suboptimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> No PEP8! Code rejected </sarcasm>

Most elegant code I've actually seen, and can see the lisp thinking apparent on the style.

</comment><comment><USER41> This has been my favourite Python program for many years.

I also recommend his Sudoku solver: [http://norvig.com/sudoku.html](http://norvig.com/sudoku.html), and his XKCD regex golf code: [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313....](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb).

</comment><comment><USER42> Can mods add (2016) to the title?</comment>


How to avoid(or stall) someone from pirating your android app? - <AUTHOR> https://www.simform.com/blog/how-to-avoid-reverse-engineering-of-your-android-app <comment><AUTHOR> Android privacy is a huge concern, with almost all apps in the store being vulnerable to it. It gets expensive (often useless!) to implement a new anti- piracy measure. The common advice found on the Internet is to always implement anti piracy measures that are not too time taking to implement. So, here are some of the anti-piracy measures that you can implement easily in your app.

PS: Psst!! What other anti-piracy measure do you guys use in your android apps? Would love to learn more about them.

<comment><USER2> Ask users to sign up on web first with their email id's. Log that info, and when the open your app, ask them to use the valid credentials again. They can obviously save the log in info.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if that drive users away? Wouldn't that hurt an app business? :)</comment></comment></comment>


A JIT Smalltalk VM implemented in itself (2011) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UGt6lNNixs <comment><USER2> Would certainly be an interesting lecture, but the quality of picture and sound is terrible. You can hardly read or understand anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a talk by Javier Burroni & Gerardo Richarte. More Information is available at [http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit- Jit](http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2010/Talks/Jit-Jit)

In 2011 they gave a talk about garbage collection at the same conference also on YouTube [http://esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2011/Schedule-And- Talk...](http://esug.org/wiki/pier/Conferences/2011/Schedule-And-Talks/GC-in- Smalltalk) They ave also been involved with Squeak

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks interesting but to my knowledge it still hasn't been publicly released. There still isn't a lean systems-programming Smalltalk around which is a shame.

Since I like Smalltalk and I also happen to do some of the things they created Bee Smalltalk for in the cybersecurity domain, I have to admit there are far better languages suited for such problems today than Smalltalk.</comment>


Ask HN: Browser based mobile design tool? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for HN community to help on this. As always, appreciate your effort in advance.
I am looking for tools similar to strikingly/webflow where I can create a screen and export them as html/css. I tried the both, but strikingly doesn't satisfy what I am trying like creating most of html components unlike their specific range of elements. Webflow seems to be still in beta mode, where I cannot edit the template and put some other html components. Thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> After googling some time, I found couple of sites in the same area and thought could be helpful to fellow hn'ers. Codiqa, Appery.io. Thanks.</comment>


Intel's e-DRAM Shows Up in the Wild - <AUTHOR> http://chipworksrealchips.blogspot.com/2014/02/intels-e-dram-shows-up-in-wild.html

<comment><USER2> note - this is from February. those chips are in lots of places right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is Crystalwell, right? Which is shipping in some laptops to power the embedded graphics.

</comment><comment><USER4> What does this look like from software? Is there just 128 MB of RAM at the start of memory that's unusually fast, or something else? Do kernels know about it? What do they do with it?

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if in the future we'll have motherboards with two cpu-like sockets, except the other has an e-dram only chip. I assume the performance is better than regular dram.

<comment><USER6> Future is uniform SOC where some features are disabled depending on price.

<comment><USER7> By disabled, do you mean the same processor design being binned into varying qualities of chip? In that case, it seems much more cost effective, and environmentally friendly, to send out chips with bad sections disabled at a lower price rather than to chuck them out.

<comment><AUTHOR> More like 'disabled by scoring a large 'X' with a laser across the die for those features that are to be disabled'.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but only for those chips who would be binned in the high-end and go unsold.

And you can just design a couple on-chip fuses that can be broken in early stage testing. No need for lasers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should handheld computers for 2010 census counting cost $2600 a piece? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120724139336586845.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news

<comment><USER2> I find it astounding that data input devices cost US$2600 each. I find it astounding that manual processes would add US$3 billion to the US$11 billion cost. That's about US$46 per person.

I bet you could do it cheaper with punch cards ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith> ).

<comment><USER3> They should just buy a bunch of iPhones (or iPod Touches) and a team of programmers to build a program using the new SDK. Its reasonably location aware, has mapping, has everywhere internet, is reasonably robust, and is super intuitive. Plus, the census folks could listen to music while walking around.

The numbers they use always baffle me. How can anything cost $11 billion dollars let alone just counting people?

<comment><USER4> Its the 10 x 10 x 10 rule.

An individual is 10 times more effective working alone than working as an employee. An employee is 10 times more effective than a government bureaucrat.

So:

An individual could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $100,000.

A private company could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $1,000,000.

A government agency could produce a surprisingly accurate count for $10,000,000. (The rest of the billions are earmarks that have nothing to do with the census.)

I won't mention the UN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen No.</comment>


An ELance for high-end, professional services. - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/collaboration/expertbids-online-labor-platforms-go-niche/

<comment><USER2> I must say that I found the post amusing for a company that bills itself the Elance for high-end, when the first post's I saw where:

 _I am in need of a designer to develop my company website. Currently we are operating without a website. Budget: Under $1,000_

 _I am looking for a web designer to build a basic 5 page site for a debt reduction service. Budget: Under $1,000_

It kind of looks like the same need a Facebook clone for free junk to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> by definition, a high end professional services firm/contractor will probably not require an Elance style of job board site to find work. Simply word of mouth and/or reputation will be enough</comment>


Show HN: Beep – Record, post or share audio messages with each other - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beep/id881685070?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys!

First time posting here, but I wanted to share something that me and a friend of mine have been working on for a while now, and we're looking for some feedback so that we can make the app even better. So please go ahead and give it a download, try it out, and let us know what you think!</comment>


PacketZoom - <AUTHOR> https://packetzoom.com/ <comment><USER2> Some cool, overdue ideas here. They update TCP for the mobile age, with speedups for almost every client. Mobile towers can be very hot, oversubscribed and dropping packets. TCP responds by slowing to a crawl. packetZoom responds and adapts so your downloads are near full speed regardless of network conditions.</comment>


How not to use lambdas in Python - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/e000/1023982

<comment><USER2> Glorious. And they said that Python wasn't a functional language. :3</comment>


Tesla Motors named in fatal bike crash suit because of new car smell - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25076376/tesla-motor-co-named-fatal-bike-crash-suit <comment><USER2> > It also contends that the Tesla in the crash was "defective and unreasonably > dangerous when used in a normal, intended and foreseeable manner," according > to the lawsuit.

Yes, because a driver falling asleep behind the wheel is how a car is normally intended to be used.</comment>


How to Make Plastic - DIY - <AUTHOR> http://howtomakestuff.com/2008/09/11/how-to-make-plastic/

<comment><USER2> _No chemicals are involved in transforming the potato into a good plastic replica._

Nonsense. A potato is made of chemicals, and the ingredients they list, including vinegar and glycerin are most certainly chemicals. I know they're trying to say that none of the ingredients are very dangerous or hard to come by, but it's just silly to describe a chemical reaction and say the reactants aren't chemicals.

<comment><USER3> Phrases like that, and the ever-repeated-in-advertising line of "... and it's all natural, so you know it's safe!" have always bugged me. More-so the natural==safe connection, though. This, in a world that's _clearly_ out to kill us and eat us.

<comment><USER4> Your reply should always be: "You know what else is natural? Ergot. Arsenic. Anthrax. Malaria. Batrachotoxins (poison dart frogs). Vitamin A (you can O.D.)"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out Thomas Thwaite's TED Talk on "How I Built a Toaster from Scratch"

He mines ore and creates his own steel, copper, and plastic. It just goes to show how much specialization and trade is required for the simplest of modern technology, and how interconnected our society is.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...](http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch.html)</comment>


Ask HN: HTML/JS Standards Question - <AUTHOR>

Nearly everyone (except maybe my coworkers) knows that web standards dictate that lower case HTML tags must always be used. But the question is, why does the JavaScript method .tagName return the object's tag in UPPERCASE?
Good Code:
<div id="welcome">Hello</div>
Bad Code:
<DIV ID="welcome">Hello</DIV>
JavaScript:
document.getElementById("welcome").tagName;
For both, the code would return "DIV" and not "div". <comment><USER2> HTML is not necessarily case sensitive, you can use upper or lowercase tags in HTML 5, and perhaps others. With that in mind, the tags should be normalized when querying what an element is (hr == HR == hR == Hr). Uppercase was chosen:

[http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/apis-in-html-documents.html#apis-in-html-documents)

"These attributes must return element names converted to ASCII uppercase, regardless of the case with which they were created."

<comment><AUTHOR> While it doesn't break a page visually, uppercase HTML tags restrict a page from validating properly?

<comment><USER2> "HTML" in this context is meaningless. Are you talking about XHTML, HTML4, HTML5 or what? ;)

It depends on the doctype and namespace. In XHTML, an uppercase HR is technically meaningless, since it is case sensitive. In HTML5, it is not case sensitive so hR should be valid, according to the spec.

Citation: "In the HTML syntax, tag names, even those for foreign elements, may be written with any mix of lower- and uppercase letters that, when converted to all-lowercase, matches the element's tag name; tag names are case- insensitive."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> .tagName evaluates to the name of the HTML 4 element, and names are written all-caps in the HTML 4 and older specifications. All-caps is convenient because you can write about, for example, the A element by just typing its name. The standards committees renamed them to lowercase for XHTML and HTML 5, because writing about 'a' elements is _ever_ so much more consistent. Morons.

P.S. In HTML 4 and older, tags are case insensitive. And practical browsers will accept both cases for the foreseeable future.</comment>


Can you identify some article(s) that had a huge impact on your generation with respect to computing? - <AUTHOR>

For me, one such article is this:
Exploring the Mandelbrot set
AK Dewdney - Scientific American, 1985
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/navigation/ideas/articles/mandelbrot/index.shtml <comment><USER2> I don't recall what where I first read about it but Zero Knowledge Proofs[1] had a huge impact.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof></comment>


Papers on MapReduce algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://atbrox.com/2010/02/12/mapreduce-hadoop-algorithms-in-academic-papers-updated/

<comment><USER2> FYI, Norton Internet Security blocked this page on my Windows Vista box:

"Suspicious Web Page Blocked

You attempted to access:

 http://atbrox.com/2010/02/12/mapreduce-hadoop-algorithms-in- academic-papers-updated/

For your protection, this web page has been blocked and submitted for review. Visit Symantec to learn more about phishing and internet security. "

YMMV.

<comment><USER3> Please let me know if you figure out the reason for that, so we can fix it if it has any actual problems.

(note: I wrote the posting)

<comment><USER2> It appears to now load fine. Unclear why it occurred before, but is now off the NIS list.

<comment><USER3> thank, perhaps it was due to an unusual traffic spike for a small site and that the words malware, spam and botnets occur in paper titles on the page?</comment></comment></comment></comment>