Ask HN: What will you pay for? - <AUTHOR> Yesterday, I post a list of 6 items I would pay for. I was hoping other people would chime in with problems they were having that they would pay for. So, I'm just going to ask directly: What would you pay for? Or what have you paid for recently? <comment><USER2> 1\. Grabbing data from any site by just highlighting the content and providing format rules straight to JSON. This could be a plugin for a browser.

2\. A developmental IDE that targets interactive run-time development where you see results instantly. Variables would instantly turn into scrollable bars that you can set min and max to modify a running game window. (i'm working on this idea.)

3\. A service that teaches me how to program distributed, peer to peer, or machine learning step by step in implementing useable already made tools. Not just blog posts or coursera courses how to teach yourself how to make them.

4\. An small box that you can program to respond to text with other small parts to turn lights on and off as well as other small things around the house for automation. But not be over the internet. A simple home automation by wifi sounds safer to me.

5\. A plugin for the browser that track's movements and clicks of a mouse, for later automating a specific session. Useful for automation and faking users for social sites. This would probably have to be open source since privacy is a concern with plugins that provide that much level of tracking.

6\. A finance screen that pulls off data in a more use-able way that isn't just simple stock figures but gives insight into market trends. This is a general idea, but the data needs to be useful enough. Thinknum, quantopian, and quandl.com are all decent ideas that are like "half-there."

<comment><USER3> >Grabbing data from any site by just highlighting the content and providing format rules straight to JSON. This could be a plugin for a browser

Would you pay for a service that collected sets of tags from a site and returned it as JSON? Like all the links or images or script tags?

<comment><USER4> YES.. but only if that services includes the actual crawling. otherwise, it's trivial to implement.

<comment><USER2> Do you want to work on it with me? I have an idea to make it work probably more accurate than the kimono bullshit. Add me on skype: Switch336 .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are trying to wrangle some ideas for startups or profitable side projects, I think this approach is unlikely to be successful.

First of all, you cannot reliably determine what someone will pay for by asking them directly. People frequently do not know what they want until they see it, do not know what they will pay for until they open their wallet, and are poor forecasters of both.

Secondly, my experience indicates that the cross-section of people who post comments on HN is not well correlated with you average consumer or B2B market. Or with human beings in general, for that matter. ;)

<comment><USER2> "First of all, you cannot reliably determine what someone will pay for by asking them directly."

Sometimes people do better with "forced" creativity. By asking someone this type of question it makes them think of quicker easier ways that may make their lives simpler. Which sometimes can lead to better thought out ideas.

While I agree HN's isn't the average consumer or even B2B market they are still people. . .

<comment><USER6> I think this is actually the absolutely wrong way to do it. By asking people what they would pay for, you often constrain your idea space to the space of "incremental ideas that sound good that lots of people have thought of," rather than explore the space of "revolutionary, new-market or market- disruptive ideas that most people think are stupid (without the benefit of hindsight)."

The right approach, I think, is to build a prototype and then ask people if they would pay for that prototype, rather than forcing people to imagine a product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will/might pay for an app that can hook up to my home appliances/circuits and gives me a monthly dashboard of my utility usage broken down to individual items. For example, I want to know how much electricity I used from the bulbs in my kitchen vs bedroom. Bonus if it can tell me _how_ to improve the cost by suggesting better alternatives. So if I use kitchen lights for 5 hours in a day and they are not energy efficient, give me options to save money. Kinda like a mint.com for utilities.

I will/might pay for a smart mailbox (physical not email) that can scan my mails and tell me if I have any useful mail other than junk. Bonus point if it organizes/separates the junk mail automatically in a separate bundle than my regular/good mail.

Note: You can tell that I am a homeowner. In general, a lot of home related stuff need serious fixing. So much can be done via great technology. Example: Lockitron is cool. Need more innovative things like that for home stuff.

EDIT: I edited the mailbox to physical mailbox to clarify that i m not talking about email.

<comment><USER2> "I will/might pay for a smart mailbox that can scan my mails and tell me if I have any useful mail other than junk. Bonus point if it organizes/separates the junk mail automatically in a separate bundle than my regular/good mail."

I think rabbitmq, and few other mail services may do "some" of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will pay for Craigslist style email obfuscation as a service.

 _Problem:_

I have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public.

 _How it works:_

I set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. On demand, i make an API call to your service (www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with

        {
        real_address:firstname.lastname@example.com,
        expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:00:00.000Z,
        obfuscate_replies: true / false,
        callback_url: (optional)
        }

www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com responds with either:

(A) a success message and an anonymized, temporary email address like email@example.com (the subdomain i gave you), or

(B) an error message like "no such user at that domain" or "domain doesn't exist" or something.

The email address lives until the expiration timestamp. If the obfuscated email receives a message, you forward it to the "real_address".

If "obfuscate_replies" was set to true at email creation time, then if the person responds, you play middleman for both parties and force all their emails to go through you (basically you create another obscured email for person who writes to the obscured email).

If "callback_url" was set, that means that I, the operator of www.mysite.com, want to be notified of activity at the obscured email address, so you POST activity to the specified url. That lets me do things like update activity feeds in my app for the user.

If you build this, I will pay for it. It seems to me that many other startups could use something like this as well.

 _edit: formatting and owning up that this is me re-posting this from[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024718) in hopes that somebody will build this so I can pay for it._

<comment><USER2> Like a temporary e-mail service that contacts your regular e-mail service? There is countless versions of those like 10minutemail.com or something.

This could be done by running an automated script that makes an e-mail address temporarily adds it to your site. Then another script that check's said e-mail address.

This is a problem with e-mail spam, but I think hiding your real e-mail from spambots is the main concern in this if I am understanding you right.

<comment><USER8> As far as I know, 10minutemail does not do this. I personally use 33mail for this sort of forwarding.

However these are designed around obscuring MY email address, and using 10minutemail.com or 33mail.com's domains.

I need to create emails for my customers that will forward to THEIR email addresses when another party contacts them, preferably using my own domain.

While I guess I technically could figure out a way to use something like 10minutemail and register accounts for all of the users of my site, it would probably require:

1\. the users of my site to tell 10minutemail that it's ok to forward to them (during 10minutemail's registration process)

2\. i would have to post 10minutemail.com domains as the contact info for the customers of my site, which is an undesirable UI.

If I'm missing something and I can in fact use existing services to do what I want, please fill me in, because I want this, I just don't want to build it (yet, anyways).

<comment><USER2> One issue I see arising is your e-mails that are sent back obfuscated, would have trust issues, and be marked as spam in most cases because that is how it is handled. That's the biggest issue you will have with this idea.

<comment><USER8> yes, fair enough. even without the 2 way obfuscation, I'd still pay for this.

craigslist implements something like this now. If you email a CL anonymized email address and email back and forth, you never get the counterparty's email address.

Basically craigslist just acts as a relay, so all communication actually happens between $PERSON_A and Craigslist and separately between $PERSON_B and Craigslist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. I'd pay money for software that mimicked Google+ / Facebook, but was open source and could be self-hosted. Bonus points if it ran on my Synology.

My requirements are actually quite simple. I want a place to share posts, and photos and have friends and family (predominantly family) would be able to comment on those photos and posts.

It needs to look good, minimal and easy to configure. I want to get my private stuff away from the NSA vacuum cleaner. I want to take back control.

2\. I'd also pay money for a sudo apt-get a-completely-simple-fully-featured- email-server-that-is-bullet-proof-by-default-and-the-only-config-is-a-domain- name(s). Ideally with a web interface. I'm praying mailpile.is will be that.

<comment><USER2> "I'd pay money for software that mimicked Google+ / Facebook, but was open source and could be self-hosted. Bonus points if it ran on my Synology."

I've seen some decentralized facebook type stuff on github. Problem is non- centralized social networks are hard to scale as well as a bit strange to use for people.

<comment><USER10> It's called Diaspora*, looks nice and I'm planning to make an account in there soon.

<comment><USER9> I have looked at the diaspora website. I didn't get it. I'm promise you I'm not that stupid but their website was a car crash. Why do I need to create an account with them? I want something as simple as WordPress. If buddypress wasn't so ugly it could be an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> chegra's original list is at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7125542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7125542)

1\. I need a cheap gpu powered pc, something like 300 cuda cores but with the ability to expand to 3072. I'm will to pay $1k for this plus the price of shipping.(Don't care if the parts are old) 2\. I need to dress better. A service to pick out the clothes that I wear and should buy. Willing to pay $120 per year for this. 3\. A book about how to make great conversation. The book needs to have tons of examples. Willing to pay $10 for this. 4\. A book about 1000 ways to make people laugh. Willing to pay $10 for this. 5\. A programmable human size android. That cost under $1k. 6\. Designs to said programmable android. Willing to pay $100 for that. Should be able to hook it up to a 3d printer.

</comment><comment><USER12> A career manager/mentor would be something I, as someone retraining as a developer, would pay for. Somone knowledgeable about development who helps me find jobs that match my current abilities/interests , training to increase my abilities, selks me on my abilities to companies, and perhaps provides support for things like salary negotiations and benefits.

I suppose I could get some of that from a college, if I went back for a degree in CS, but it seems like school is disconnected from so many aspects of development and industry, the tools you learn are not the tools you use when working, and it is incredibly expensive with no guarantee. I want someone in tune with how things work in the real world to help me with my career, so I can focus on being good at the jobs I get, not at being good at getting jobs.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. A web-based email client that's as good as gmail or fastmail, but open source, and runs on my servers.

2a. Document/file storage as good as Google Drive/Docs, that is open source and runs on my servers. Corresponding mobile app required.

2b. Open source cloud (a la ownCloud) with a better user interface and more features on both web and mobile (i.e.: viable as a Google drive replacement)

3\. A mobile operating system that focuses on security and isn't too information-leaky.

4\. A very nice android tablet replacement for stock headunits in cars. The key is that it should be easy to install and configure. One can create this now using torque, a bluetooth OBDII adapter, and tasker to act like a genuine headunit, but requires lots of configuration/setup.

<comment><USER14> 2a [https://www.aerofs.com/](https://www.aerofs.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A chrome extension for twitter that:

1) Tells me via a % of what type of things they post (text only vs links, vs images, etc)

2) Tweets to followers % (If someone has 10k tweets and only 100 followers, that usually means they aren't worth following IMO)

3) allows me to filter by media type on the twitter website. So, let's just say I only want to view tweets that don't have media links.

I would pay about 5 dollars for that.

<comment><USER2> Now, this is a good idea.

This could also be done as a seperate website layout:

I think it'd be great to rank twitter users based on criteria: How influential are they? What category best fits them in one word? And statistics: What % of tweets have text, links, images? Filtering by media type.

I'd also see this as a very useful tool to pay for. If nothing else by ad revenue on the website itself.

Edit: Actually I think [http://www.twitonomy.com/](http://www.twitonomy.com/) or [http://bottlenose.com/](http://bottlenose.com/) are pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem is that you can't ask people what they'd pay for and expect a valuable list.

There are plenty of things I think I'd pay for but when it comes to taking out my credit card and paying for it I find something else to distract me from it.

<comment><USER2> I read this as "People don't know what they really want something until they are shown it."

While this is true in some retrospects, it's all about solving problems. If people say "they want to solve x need for their y idea" it is essentially the same as "I'd pay for x so I can solve y sooner."

And in that retrospect these lists could be useful. You could try being less negative and think for 5-10 minutes on an idea rather then being a pessimist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would pay for a good twitter app which helps me actually read stuff. There's so much of noise on twitter that if there was a way to filter that out, it would really be nice.

<comment><USER2> Can you elaborate, based on what criteria?

For example: Only famous people? only students? only phds? Content? Only people with blogs?

Or maybe a better dashboard abstraction that can have conversations between people be easier to digest?

<comment><USER17> Right now I use tweetdeck which allows me to see everything as columns. So I can have a column for my timeline, column for hashtags etc.. But the problem is things like - [http://askaaronlee.com/how-many-times-do-you-tweet-your- blog...](http://askaaronlee.com/how-many-times-do-you-tweet-your-blog-post/). The notorious ones are inc.com, fast company or mashable which seem to repeat the same post 4-5 times a day. Plus with tools like Buffer, you can schedule those tweets to be made multiple times. What would be nice is a tool to fight back - say keep track of Duplicates and ignore them.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, that does seem like an interesting idea. I didn't think about that problem but you are indeed right. Twitter is full of re-tweets of continually the same blog post spam. I think some kind of service to monitor twitter and filter out that would improve readability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd pay for an API that could convert a twitter username or G+ id or linkedin ID to an email address with at least 20% recall, but 100% accuracy (no false positives)

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a good idea, but maybe the way to go would be to search for e-mail addresses from web-scraping?

You can put it together from google analytics + some perl regex script to just print the e-mail addresses.

Maybe the way to go would be to look for similar names on other sites as well.

</comment></comment><comment> workhere-io Email (IMAP plus a Gmail-like web interface that is better than RoundCube). Preferably hosted somewhere safe(r) than the US.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would pay for an RFID reader that I can attach to a DSLR that will dump data it reads into an IPTC field.

<comment><USER2> Mass credit card fraud?

<comment><USER18> No actually. I'm a MAM and my photographers often dump photos on my desk with ZERO metadata. I have no way of identifying everyone. If everyone had a name badge with an RFID then taking their photo would collect their name, title and company information. Also, do CCs use RFID?

<comment><USER11> Media asset manager? What industry/environment?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Orange's dominance in Africa forced Google to pay for traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/01/20/why-oranges-dominance-in-africa-forced-google-to-pay-for-traffic-over-their-mobile-network/ <comment><USER2> In Africa? Well that explains it. Many African countries actually voted for those proposals at WCIT. I think most of the media missed this, and only focused on the US and Europe rejecting the proposals and "winning", but actually almost half the countries there took the deal. That means the Internet is about to get less free very soon there, once their governments put the UN proposals into law. And part of those proposals was the "sender pays" thing. Now let's just hope the countries who rejected it this time around won't use these countries as a role model next time.

It's very likely Orange was one of the European ISP's lobbying for sender pays at ITU, as well. I don't know why Google would offer to pay them, considering Africa is going to be dominated by Android either way. Nokia's Lumias or RIM's phones are nowhere near the $50 mark Android phones have reached there, and they are going to dominate just like in India and China, where they've also almost killed Nokia and RIM from their leading positions in the past. So if Google really did this voluntarily then they weren't very smart. But I still think they _had_ to do it after the WCIT.</comment>


A survey of the current state of Golang ORMs - <AUTHOR> http://present.go-steel-programmers.org/talk-review-orms/gsp-go-orms.slide#1 <comment><USER2> I read this presentation some months ago and I chose to stay with golangs builtin "database/sql". That way I'm using the purest solution with a well designed api. If I really wanted to use a 3rd party package I would choose sqlx because it stays close to golangs official sql package and carefully enhances it.

3rd party packages come and go but "database/sql" is here to stay.

<comment><USER3> What are you even talking about.

The database is hands down the worst in the entire standard library.

Importing a package to pick your driver? Side effects much? Who needs multiple drivers in the same scope anyway?

Consistent behavior or test suits for drivers? nah... why bother.

The database API was poorly thought out. That's why most people use no sql solutions, and what tools _do_ exist for it (eg. test suites) are cobbled together 3rd party collections that have to be manually updated when a new driver is written.

I'm literally flabbergasted to hear someone singing its praises.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. sql.Open's first argument is which driver you want to use, in string format. These drivers become available after they've been imported, and the side effects seem insignificant[1]. This seems to make it perfectly possible to use multiple drivers within the same scope. The drivers themselves also seem to have several unit test files, though I can't judge on the quality of those.

[1] [https://github.com/go-sql- driver/mysql/blob/master/driver.go...](https://github.com/go-sql- driver/mysql/blob/master/driver.go#L136)

<comment><USER3> See... that's the thing. It might work. If the driver plays nicely. Or it might not. In fact, you have no way of knowing without reading the source code.

The sqlite driver used to not work with the postgres one. I don't know why. I never looked into it... but, that this _can_ happen is pretty bad, I'd argue.

Packages that _invoke code when you import them_ and require this sort of import:

        import _ "github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql"

Aren't idiomatic. They're hacks, because the database module didn't really consider how it was going to work properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've found that [https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx](https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx) (mentioned in the slides) works very well for SQL and mapping values to structs in Go. It's not an ORM though. You still write plain parameterized SQL queries, but mapping results to structs is very elegant.

The mapping process is very similar to how other packages in Go work (e.g. encoding/json), so if you already know Go it feels very natural.

<comment><USER6> Yup, totally agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still of the opinion that ORM frameworks are just too much of an abstraction away from the database.

What's wrong with just writing pure SQL?

<comment><USER8> After years of using Hibernate and NHibernate, considered best of breed and most well thought out and thoroughly engineered ORMS, I agree. They fall of a productivity cliff pretty quickly, particularly on larger projects (I'm talking things with 100+ domain objects). I've settled on:

Use CQRS (Command Query Response Segregation) and stuff ORMs where the sun doesn't shine.

Separate Update/Insert/Delete commands and queries. Commands return nothing and are assumed to work unless an exception is thrown, then the whole batch is rolled back. Queries return data. Transaction boundaries are arbitrary based on the requirement of the calling service, not the unit of work and/or session. By default all transactions are imperative.

Stored procedures, triggers and views are banned.

Commands are classes with properties attached (easy to validate, test and provide good encapsulation) and are internally represented as raw SQL with bound parameters.

Queries return enumerable lists of objects and are internally represented as a raw SQL query with bound parameters.

Everything is programmed to generic interfaces: IStorageCommand<T> and IStorageQuery<T>

That is all. I've used Dapper on .Net to do the internal representation. It is portable across non SQL stores as well and has been used to interface with cache and Redis as well.

Plus due to the loosely coupled abstraction, you can use AOP to stick read- through cache interceptors in between the IStorageQuery<T> interface and the consumer. Also you can stick cache invalidators between IStorageCommand<T> and the consumer.

Moving one of our core subsystems over to this with some careful design and DBA consultation knocked our 48 Core Xeon SQL box from 60% utilisation to 5% (mainly IOPS/storage throughput. CPU is a non issue there).

<comment><USER9> At the end of the day you're still doing object relational mapping.You just built something custom instead of using Hibernate,so you're still using an ORM.

Your domain objects are still a graph that need to be hydrated from the database. And dont tell me that writing hydrators by hand is fast and dry,especially when you have 100+ domain objects,compared to a few XML files or annotations that can later take advantage of query builders or HQL.

<comment><USER8> Fair point but it's a terribly light ORM behind an abstraction boundary that doesn't make assumptions about the type of store it is communicating with.

We don't write any hydrators. On our previous solution they are generated at compile time. Then they were replaced by runtime code generation inside Dapper.

There is no XML, there are no query builders, there is no HQL. There are too few guarantees in each of those technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, you can use a relational database as a dumb object store, but do you want to? There seems to be a great fear of SQL among programmers, which is puzzling, because the basic operations aren't very complicated.

There's an annoying mismatch between SQL and data structures. SQL's approach of making all queries a big string is a pain, especially since careful escaping is needed to avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities. However, in Go, it's not too hard to get data in and out of SQL as an "[]interface", which is a mixed array of any type. Converting that to a struct is straightforward. This comes up often enough that Go should have compiler support for struct <-> []interface. It can be done through introspection, as some of the ORMs do, but that's slow. The layout of the struct is fixed at compile time, so this can generate fast code, mostly type checks and moves. In general, we should have more compiler support for marshalling. It's done a lot, it's easy to compile, and it's slow to do interpretively.

If we had that, much of the need for the ORMs described would go away.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's worth noting that this presentation is nearly one year old.

I recently started using gorm [0] and have found that it meets my needs and works nicely, and the maintainer jinzhu has been helpful and pleasant to interact with. So with that being said, it's still an ORM and comes with the usual laundry list of caveats.

[0] [https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm](https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm)

<comment><USER12> Do you mind sharing this laundry list? Ie in summary what is wrong with ormappers?

<comment><USER13> Look for Martin Fowler's ORM Hate and the discussion around it on HN. Read the paper he links to ("The Vietnam of Computer Science"), and perhaps search HN for ORNs or your favorite particular ORM. It really is a laundry-list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just updated the go-modeldb library, for anybody who wants to use a non-ORM solution.

[https://github.com/jaekwon/go-modeldb](https://github.com/jaekwon/go-modeldb)

You can see it used extensively in this sample application:

[https://github.com/jaekwon/ftnox-backend](https://github.com/jaekwon/ftnox- backend)

But, it looks like sqlx may be a better alternative.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use [https://github.com/coopernurse/gorp](https://github.com/coopernurse/gorp) on daily basis. But I find it doesn't support Postgres array type. Do you know what ORM is supporting it?

<comment><USER6> As far as I know no ORM support arrays natively. I have a few projects made around sqlx, and I had to support arrays. So I ended up doing the support myself.

<comment><USER15> I see. Do you have it open sourced somewhere? Or do you have some references on this subject for me to explore? thanks.

<comment><USER6> I started with this Gist. [https://gist.github.com/adharris/4163702](https://gist.github.com/adharris/4163702)

But ended up with a custom type implementing Scan & Value.

Check this out: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- nuts/aPJVwRQq...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- nuts/aPJVwRQq8fg)

Good luck :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgresSQL, MongoDB"

we're just never going to learn....

<comment><USER17> Never going to learn what?

Could you please make your comment explicit?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've stumbled upon this presentation while researching about "idiomatic" Go support for Postgres 9.4's new Binary JSON type.

Any recommendation?</comment>


New – Scheduled Reserved Instances - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-scheduled-reserved-instances/ <comment><USER2> Rather than Scheduled Reserved Instances you would still be much better off using On-Demand compbined with www.parkmycloud.com

Less cost plus a lot more flexibility...</comment>


Announcing the Public Terabyte Dataset project - <AUTHOR> http://bixolabs.com/2009/11/01/announcing-the-public-terabyte-dataset-project/ <comment><USER2> "This is a high quality crawl of top web sites, using AWS's Elastic Map Reduce, Concurrent's Cascading workflow API, and Bixolab's elastic web mining platform."

so two questions. what exactly is a "high quality" crawl? and who is going to be the judge of "top websites"?</comment>


How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception and Meaning - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-links-gestures-perception-and-meaning-20190325/ <comment><USER2> I've always thought that proponents of "embodied cognition" are onto something. Like the whole field of so-called machine learning is missing something fundamental about how humans learn. This article provides a cogent explanation for what could be missing.

"When children are learning their first language, Macedonia argues, they absorb information with their entire bodies. A word like "onion," for example, is tightly linked to all five senses: Onions have a bulbous shape, papery skin that rustles, a bitter tang and a tear-inducing odor when sliced. Even abstract concepts like "delight" have multisensory components, such as smiles, laughter and jumping for joy. To some extent, cognition is "embodied" — the brain's activity can be modified by the body's actions and experiences, and vice versa. It's no wonder, then, that foreign words don't stick if students are only listening, writing, practicing and repeating, because those verbal experiences are stripped of their sensory associations."

Frankly I find this explanation very convincing. I have absolutely no idea how one would go about trying to design intelligent machines using embodied cognition. Feels like we are light years away from anything close to this, which is why no mainstream AI researchers are working on it or even discussing it as far as I know. Would love to see some counter examples if anyone is more knowledgeable about the space.

<comment><USER3> You might be interested in the work of Jean Piaget, a constructivist child psychologist. One of his PhD students was a South African scientist you may have heard of: Seymour Papert, longtime collaborator with Marvin Minsky.

There are a couple of companies working on embedded cognition but they are in stealth. Academic work in this area has pretty much faded since the late 1980s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >> (...) in Greece or Turkey forming a ring with your index finger and thumb to indicate everything is A-OK could get you in trouble.

I'm Greek. I'm not sure what that refers to. I think they mean that we use the gesture to indicate the number 0, or, more rudely, the anal orifice (often accompanied by inserting the index finger of the other hand into it to illustrate penetration).

This gesture can indeed be interpreted like that. I think those are rather obsolete meanings though. Mostly I've used the gesture myself to say "everything OK". I suppose this is the equivalent of loan words, in this case, from the more common usage of the gesture in Western Europe.

Edit: Oh. Now that I think of it, there is also a further interpretation of that gesture to indicate a tiny size. Meaning, of the human penis. It's true that its original meanings were always quite rude.

</comment><comment><USER5> "No other species points, Novack explained, not even chimpanzees or apes"

Except there are many breeds of dogs that point. True it may be partially training, but every dog I've had recognizes the significance of human pointing and there appears to be some kind of innate pointing instinct.

<comment><USER6> You seemed to have left off the second part of the sentence, which you appear to agree with

"No other species points, Novack explained, not even chimpanzees or apes, according to most reports, unless they are raised by people"

edit: I suppose the clause "unless they are raised by people" could be interpreted as pertaining to either "not even chimpanzees or apes", or "No other species", but I don't think it matters.

<comment><USER7> Do humans point if they're not raised by people? The few cases of such that I've heard about seem to be incapable of most "uniquely human" behaviours.

<comment><USER8> Possibly not, since we're pretty good at following another person's gaze instead. And different cultures point differently. I knew a guy who lived in Papua New Guinea for a while and he had to untrain himself to point with his finger. People there would just look at his finger. They only pointed with their chins.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Lua as a Serialization Format - <AUTHOR> https://mkhan45.github.io/2020/06/16/using-lua-as-a-serialization-format.html <comment><USER2> Fun fact: Lua started its life as a language for representing data like this. At first it only had lists and hash tables but over time it gained support for things like if statements and loops, to be able to describe more interesting data. Eventually it morphed into the Turing complete programming language that we know today :)

[https://www.lua.org/history.html](https://www.lua.org/history.html)

The current version of Lua still has some traces of that origin. For example, to keep RAM use manageable when parsing very large files the parser directly emits bytecode in a single pass, without building an intermediate abstract syntax tree.

<comment><USER3> Ironically, your username is one of the neatest Lua[JIT] projects I've seen. [https://github.com/malkia/ufo](https://github.com/malkia/ufo)

<comment><USER4> Unspoken HN rule #27: There's a 75% chance this isn't a coincidence.

<comment><USER5> Though the person who wrote that library has a different HN account: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643658)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't an argument for putting a Turing-complete language in your config file parser. It's an argument for documenting your config file format so your users can write scripts (in a language of their choice) to generate config files programmatically.

It seems cute to do it this way, but now you have to start talking about removing certain functions from the standard library, running the script in a sandbox, etc.

<comment><USER7> What is your opinion on config files used by the Bazel build system, written in a programming language called Skylark [1] (much like Python)? I haven't looked into it but it seems plausibly Turing-complete, or at least powerful enough to cause problems in the same way a Turing-complete language would.

[1]: [https://docs.bazel.build/versions/3.3.0/skylark/language.htm...](https://docs.bazel.build/versions/3.3.0/skylark/language.html)

<comment><USER8> For the record, Starlark has some restrictions: no infinite loops, no access to the world, etc.

It's true that computations could be arbitrary long (as with most other languages). Bazel has a flag to reduce this kind of problem (--max_computation_steps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> About 20 years ago, I used Tcl as object serialization format in a game engine, and then made the next mistake to allow injecting manually written 'scriptlets' into this serialization format (after all, serialized objects were just Tcl scripts).

These two things combined were probably the biggest software design mistake I ever made. We still have to drag a stripped down Tcl interpreter along in our asset pipeline 20 years later because it's nearly impossible to switch away (because of the manually written 'scriptlets' lurking everywhere in asset source files - of course it _would_ be possible, but it was never on the right side of the cost-benefit equation).

Never mix code and data, folks :)

<comment><USER10> a stripped down tcl interpreter is one of the tiniest and less harmful dependendencies you can have nowadays. I do not see a problem with that.

And code is data, and has always been.

<comment><USER11> Until someone sends serialized code-data like:

        for i = 1, 1000000 do
            for j = 1, 1000000 do
                for k = 1, 1000000 do
                    for l = 1, 1000000 do
                        ...

Once you move your publicly injectable data format from declarative to something else, you're in for a world of hurt.

<comment><USER12> Tcl has had sandboxed interpreters with resource limits for a long time [1]. You can even remove built-in commands (for/while etc) if you want to. You can limit the language to a purely declarative subset and selectively expose commands and resources as you wish.

[1]: [https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/interp.htm#M46](https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/interp.htm#M46)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Author is surprised by convenience of describing data in Lua. I think he's in for another surprise if he re-implements simulation on Lua side. The LuaJIT is so fast, I can just code the most naive implementation and never go back to refining it. It's the simplest fast language and to me optimal choice for fully utilizing a single CPU core.

<comment><AUTHOR> well I've been super impressed by luajit in the past but given that the simulation is pretty highly multithreaded I don't think a Lua version would do so well in comparison

<comment><USER14> It's trivial to have multiple Lua states running in different threads in the same process. Messaging and data exchange between those states is easy and LuaJIT gives you a lot of tools to make it painless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lisp programmers realized in the 70s that having an artificial division between code and data was frequently problematic, hopefully other languages continue to catch on as well :)

<comment><USER16> On the other hand, it's often useful to have data and configuration files that _aren 't_ Turing complete, because then you can safely make assumptions about how much time and space is required to load/parse them.

Unfortunately every configuration file format these days seems to add so many features that it inevitably becomes Turing-complete... the trick is finding the balance between expressiveness and halting decidability.

<comment><USER17> You might like to look into Dhall - a config language that has been careful to remain non-Turing-complete.

<comment><USER16> Wow, cool, that is a really nifty language!

I don't care for the syntax (at all) but I am seriously impressed by the careful design. I've always wondered where you'd need to draw the line between plaintext config files and executable code, and Dhall is much further into "programming language" territory than I would've expected.

*Dhall homepage for anyone else that's interested - [https://dhall-lang.org](https://dhall-lang.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried this on 1 or 2 small projects, years ago.

It was okay. It's cool that you can import data directly into Lua scripts, since Lua usually has poor library support for any other data format.

But I hit a wall with a limit on the number of tables in a file or something, that was specific to the Lua impl I was using. (Probably LuaJIT)

Sometimes I miss Lua. I think with only a few big breaking changes it could be a much better language.

<comment><USER19> I used Lua as a data exchange format for some embedded devices (software defined radios) because it played nicely with the C code and the Lua scripts we would run on the device (which served as a sort of interface bridge between hardware device drivers). The Lua binary can be compiled down to < 100kB and the language itself is fast enough for a scripting language to have been useful in this context (I don't know if that still holds today, I left embedded in 2014).

It was a really pleasant experience but we were not working with a very large number of tables. I miss Lua all of the time, too, and play around with it whenever the opportunity arises. It holds a really special place in my programmer heart, alongside lisp, C, and Ruby, for having shown me some really interesting things at the right time in my career. It's too bad it doesn't have more widespread adoption, I think a lot of people could benefit from using it for the things it's good at.

<comment><USER20> There are a number of places it's being used today. There's an nginx module with an entire web front end development environment (openresty), Cloudflare uses the nginx lua module heavily, you can develop cross platorm (ios, android, web) games in Solar2D.

<comment><USER19> I'm aware, but I've never seen a shop I've consulted for or any of my employers use it. I've tried to get it in use a few times and ultimately it went no where because I would be the only programmer in a department with > 100 FTEs who would be able to work on it or maintain it unless some others took the time to learn it. It's been a non-starter as a result.

When I ask around, I don't hear about it in use locally (edit: that's actually not entirely true, Blizzard uses it and maybe some of the other local game shops, but I don't see it anywhere else locally). I met someone at a conference a year or two back who was using Kong. That's been it. Maybe I'm just missing it but I don't really see widespread use.

<comment><USER21> It never really saw adoption outside of games from what I've seen.

Its such a simple but powerful language, has one of the best interop apis with C and I love how they approached coroutines.

It's really a shame it doesn't see wider use. We used it to ship all our game logic on the PSP, 400kb prealloc block and it worked like a charm.

<comment><USER22> It's used in CHDK, the Canon custom Firmware Project for user definable scripts [https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK](https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK) Besides this I've rarely encountered Lua in the wild

Edit: And of course in Magic Lantern, for Canon EOS DSLRs [https://magiclantern.fm/](https://magiclantern.fm/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My hobby project, a space game (Space Nerds in Space) allows for Lua scripting, and it will allow exporting (most of) the state of the game to a lua script which, when run, restores that state. Ironically, the state of potentially running Lua scripts is the main thing stopping me from being able to checkpoint the entire state of the game.

<comment><USER24> I solved the state for a Lua project of mine by replaying all external input and making the game itself only depend on that input. Of course that's not viable in most cases, but helped by built [https://geolua.com](https://geolua.com). You can restore a game from 6 years ago almost instantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My game, Shadow Physics used Lua as a serialization format as a side effect of the game initially having no level editor or level import capabilities, only Lua scripts to create levels procedurally. Copy and paste was also implemented using Lua, a fun side effect of this you could copy and paste arbitrary Lua code as a live coding technique.

</comment><comment><USER26> OP if you're the author, FYI first link to previous post ('this is a follow-up to') is broken:

[https://mkhan45.github.io/2020/06/12/Lua- integration.html](https://mkhan45.github.io/2020/06/12/Lua-integration.html)

Edit: Ah, 'Lua' should be lower-case.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I've fixed it

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is cool. Props to the author for thinking in original ways. Most people would have reached for a static solution like templating markup or a serialization format like YAML. Using a real programming language is way better.

</comment><comment><USER28> A warning: Don't think that this is a good idea. It's small, it's fast, it's elegant. But it's totally insecure.

Everybody who had access to this format can take it over. It can do far too much, that's why everybody uses JSON. It can only represent hashes, arrays, and some limited primitives. No links, no logic, no lib. But lua is far too powerful. Game over.

Lisp would be even better, btw. Much easier to parse, and much easier to avoid eval. But his idea is eval.

<comment><USER27> You can always sandbox the process if you don't trust the input. Ruby has taint checking built-in and most operating systems have lightweight sandboxing solutions. Docker is another way to go. You can just execute the script in a container and then grab standard output as the configuration.

<comment><USER29> A much simpler thing to do is to simply disable all of the standard library functions which allow i/o. Lua has functionality specifically intended for limiting the environment available to a script, and the standard library is small enough that doing this is actually practical.

<comment><USER27> I remember playing around with Lua but didn't look too closely at sandboxing facilities but what you say makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I used Tcl for that in the past. Allows for some pretty powerful configuration.

For pure "serialization", this is a bit overkill, of course.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel like the ron format is just too verbose, and JSON would be comparable to your Lua example. As long as you don't serialize stuff like polymorphic classes (and you don't have those in Rust anyway), you don't need to put the name of every object into the serialization file.

<comment><AUTHOR> I somewhat agree, but I feel that being able to do math/logic with Lua makes it superior for this use case since I'm not worried about security</comment></comment>


I do not understand your concern… - <AUTHOR> https://shitpost.plover.com/m/message-headers.html <comment><USER2> ISTR that way back in the old days mail clients displayed every header, and then they started hiding some known ones, and then they started hiding all but certain ones. Is that a correct memory?

Because that'd probably explain the mess nowadays: no-one even notices all that cruft.</comment>


What Makes Containers at Scale So Difficult - <AUTHOR> http://www.theplatform.net/2015/09/29/why-containers-at-scale-is-hard/ <comment><USER2> This is an advertorial for Mesos, which attacks some of these problems at a deep level.

It's (not yet) a full PaaS, though Mesosphere is driving there along with Docker and Hashicorp and everyone else who built parts of the solution and then realised there's not much profit in selling cogs.

I like Cloud Foundry -- which _is_ a PaaS -- probably because I've worked on and seen how that sausage gets made. But there's also OpenShift. And Heroku, which people often forgot pioneered the whole space.

The bin packing problem is hard in theory, but at the scale we're talking about, it becomes less about the perfect fit and more about the fact that keeping up-to-date information is hard under realistic conditions. You can show linear scaling for short tasks. Wait until you're running in someone's whacky private DC.

Diego (the container scheduler in the next generation of Cloud Foundry) doesn't try to maintain a perfect view of state in order to do its job. It's basically impossible to really do so. Instead it satisfices by turning container placement into an auction, then periodically goes out to sync up with reality.

If you want to play with it, the best option is to install Lattice[0].

Standard disclaimer: I work for Pivotal Labs, a division of Pivotal, which is the largest donor of engineering effort to the Cloud Foundry Foundation. So I guess my comment is an advertorial too.

[0] [http://lattice.cf/](http://lattice.cf/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not sysadmin, so, thinking out loud here: why not build software services in a way that does not require this large and sprawling infrastructure? The future could be simple binaries that run in user space and cache everything in simple data structures all in RAM. 64GB is cheap and will handle C1M easily.

I want my future server to abstract the hardware (memory, socket too), provide a few simple API calls, run my runtime (C++, rust, .NET, etc.), and then I'll build my application business logic to handle all my customers waiting on the other end of the socket.

Perhaps it the open source way where you have 40+ dependencies. I recently built my own webserver and found it very liberating.

Think outside the container.

<comment><USER4> The goal of Containers is to fully abstract the application. That can only go so far - the underlying infrastructure is still a huge part of the application. The responsiveness of a web application doesn't just involve efficient algorithms and storage calls, but also backend call latency, and transport time back to the user.

The infrastructure doesn't have to be large, but distributing parts will help the entire service stay online. Front-end nodes could be distributed to different datacenters, and back-end could also be mirrored or replicated between locations. With some kind of global load balancing, users can be routed to the nearest server for the fastest response.

The binaries have to run somewhere, either in the virtualized unit or its host. And Open Source or Proprietary, you're going to have dependency bundles - .NET, Java, etc. It might be more efficient to lump Containers by dependency so fewer of them need to be loaded by a Host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Generic containers are an awkward mid-way point between special-purpose containers (a Wordpress instance or a rails app on heroku) and an actual machine.

You get the hassle of maintaining your own instances, without the flexibility or well-defined performance characteristics of an actual box.

I just don't see the market.

<comment><USER2> The market you don't see is the market for PaaSes, which make the question of "how do I run this, anyway?" basically vanish.

Continers are the fundamental building block for modern PaaS design. There's a reason OpenShift 3 was built on top of Kubernetes, or why Cloud Foundry was built on top of a pre-Docker container system.

<comment><USER6> The one thing I can say for Docker is that before it launched, it seemed most companies using container technology were not that open about it. Docker appears to be the company that spoke about the unspeakable and caused lots of software to suddenly be developed in the open where it was all behind the scenes previously. Maybe I was just clueless, but the more Docker pushed their releases, the more other companies suddenly had all this code to release.

<comment><USER2> I think Docker deserves pretty much all the credit for making containers a mainstream concept. In particular, they tied it together the existing primitives into a uniform concept with a developer-friendly interface.

The very fact we call them "containers" is due to the analogy Docker made to shipping containers.

<comment><USER7> > The very fact we call them "containers" is due to the analogy Docker made to > shipping containers.

I don't think so. I imagine it stems from the use of that term by Solaris starting in 2004:

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

The evolution of containers on Linux was heavily influenced by Solaris. More so than it was by BSD, from what i remember.

Whether Solaris picked up the name from an even earlier use, i don't know.

<comment><USER2> Well there you go. I remember them being almost exclusively referred to as Solaris _Zones_ , but some Googling shows that Solaris Containers was used interchangeably as early as 2005. You're right.

However, Docker did deliberately make the shipping container analogy -- the name, the logo and the early blogposts all consciously focused on the similarity with the invention of shipping containers. So I was half-right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because not enough memes and hype and buzzwords.</comment>


Twilio Raises $17 Million Series C To Expand Abroad - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/07/twilio-series-c/

<comment><USER2> When are they going to get SMS enabled numbers in Canada?

I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)

<comment><USER3> A thousand times this. One of my projects is SMS heavy, and I had to switch it to Tropo because Twilio wouldn't do Canadian numbers. The developer experience has been far inferior.

<comment><USER2> The developer experience isn't even the worst of it. Try running some reliability testing. It's mind blowing how bad Tropo is and how many random hidden variables exist in their system.

<comment><USER4> Which is really sad when you consider the problem. API accepts SMS and inserts into database; workers take queue from database and action against SMS gateways (works in reverse for messages going the other way).

How can this be that difficult to do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We're in the UK and will be rolling out to the rest of Europe in the next couple months.""

Their move to the UK was very half-assed, still no SMS support for the UK... :( I hope they fix that with this new funding before they expand elsewhere.

<comment><USER6> Twilio UK SMS is in rolling beta right now. Please feel free to email me at danielle(at)twilio(dot)com and I'll do what I can to get you added, the queue is quite long so if you applied and haven't gotten that might be why. We are definitely aware of the extremely high demand for this service, not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond, and our engineers are working around the clock to get it out the door and in your hands at the level of quality and reliability our customers have come to expect from Twilio.

<comment><USER7> Are there any plans for India?

The current pricing is too expensive. Thanks for free $10 for trial though.

<comment><USER6> Right now the only plans I can share are those announced for expanding into Europe, but we're dedicated to bringing Twilio to developers worldwide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was lucky enough to sit next to Evan (CTO) at a recent conference dinner and he took the time to explain some of the complex relationships they have, or are developing, with international telcos. From our conversation it seems that most of the issues in the complaints here stem from the difficulty of setting up those relationships and the cost associated with using the existing infrastructure.

I'm not sure if anyone from Twilio can comment but maybe someone with some relevant experience can.

</comment><comment><USER9> What are common use cases for Twilio?

I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users.

My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?

<comment><USER10> It's difficult to enter the world of telecom IVR, the barrier of entry is very high, and to do anything at a large scale requires a large up-front investment.

Twilio makes telecom IVR as simple as writing a web application, and they're very affordable with no up-front costs.

I've written custom emergency notification systems, call-in contests, intelligent call forwarding systems (you could replicate Google Voice). Any phone app you can think of can be constructed.

<comment><USER11> Twillio is great for getting a small app out the door. But if you need to scale it and get any advanced form of call control it doesn't support it. It also is a lot more difficult to move away from it if you need to scale out and use other systems. With Tropo you can integrate it with Adhearsion and then as you need to scale move it to Rayo or Asterisk......and you also are not limited to the currently supported countries with Either offering. Tropo allows you to set up your own endpoint in a country they don't support and will integrate that in. So if you are in a South American country, or any place that Twillio doesn't support it is the only game in town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a good service, but unless they bring prices way down, some big provider ( _Cough_ Amazon..) is going to come in and eat their lunch. Granted they probably wouldn't offer the level of detailed APIs that Twillio does.

We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER4> I believe their exit strategy is to be acquired by Amazon or someone of their scale. They drive their entire platform on Amazon AWS and the Rackspace cloud system, and Jeff (one of the Twilio co-founders) was previously the product manager for AWS.

I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch.

Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!).

Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Twilio should take some of the money and invest it in allowing customers to send SMS internationally. There Beta has to been going on for at least 2 months?? Please Twilio. Thank you.

<comment><USER6> Roger that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Expanding internationally is a wonderful thing, Twilio will go far if they bring their wonderful API to many countries.

I just hope they take some of that investment and bring basic voice recognition to their product, and perhaps some more TTS voices (some Loquendo voices would be grand!).

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible to sign up for the beta for other european countries? I only see the UK listed.

<comment><USER6> Yes, if you do not see the country you want on the site just drop us a note at help(at)twilio(dot)com and we will add you to our internal list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congratulations Twilio!</comment>


Re: Why Nerds are Unpopular - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/renerds.html <comment><USER4> "One can acquire everything in solitude - except character." - <USER2>

Maybe this is one part of the explaination, since nerds are more likely to enjoy solitary activities.

edit : if you just want your children to avoid the nightmare you have endured yourself, they don't need to seek popularity but only respect. All it takes to earn respect is some character. The interesting part is : how to help them develop this trait ?

edit2 : I cannot find it on Wikipedia, but the extended biography of Arthur Conan Doyle might give a hint. If I recall correctly, he interrupted his studies for one year and engaged in a journey on a fishing boat who was hunting whales in Antartic (or was it North Pole ?). While it doesn't sound very romantic, it is known that when he went back from his trip, he wasn't the same man. The former inexistant shy guy (probably a nerd) became famous on the campus because of it's popularity among female students (he was known as dating multiple girls at once).

Who knows what happened during his journey, but it was definitly very formative. He didn't do any "dumb stuff" to become popular, and didn't even seek to become popular, but he just returned as a different man.

<comment><USER5> _they don't need to seek popularity but only respect. All it takes to earn respect is some character._

Where I went to high school, the way people were treated was not a function of character. Think about all the people who've been maltreated at school. Are you saying it was because they all lacked character?

<comment><USER4> Why are some teachers respected and others just get eaten alive by all their classrooms ? There is a trick beyond each illusion.

<comment><USER6> With no exceptions at my high school, the respected teachers respected their students. This appears to be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one -- there were some teachers who respected the students but weren't themselves respected (for various reasons).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the un-nerdly activities in high school had the prominence of sports then perhaps the kids who participated in them would be more popular. Think of the friday night football games - big crowds paying lots of money at the gate, football players in uniforms running out onto the field, cheerleaders - <USER3> math and science competetions - four or five kids pile into someone's dad's Suburban and drive fifty miles to sit in small windowless rooms for a few hours. (At least, that's exactly what happened at my high school.)

One way to make nerds more popular is to make more of a big deal of that kind of activity. For those of us who were high school nerds, what about sponsoring math and science competitions for high school students? I'm remembering a conversation I had recently with a friend who teaches CS at the local university. He had organized some sort of programming competition for high school students. Even $500 to be used as prize money would go a long way to enhancing the prestige of something like that and of the kids who participate in it.

PG had some good points in his essay and follow-up. The kids he's talking about aren't just some random nobodies - they're US a few years ago.

After I graduated my (private) high school spent several million dollars in redoing the football field. They even put down artificial turf. And they stopped preping kids for the CS AP test. [sigh]

<comment><USER8> If schools didn't do sports, perhaps they could focus more on academics.

Unfortunately, as you astutely point out, football and other sports bring in "big crowds paying lots of money" -- something that academic competitions can't bring in. There isn't a National Computer Science League that gets televised each Sunday. American football exists as an American high school institution precisely because mainstream American culture heavily advertises and hypes it.

I'd love to see schools make sports subservient to academics, but I fear it'll never happen purely for financial reasons.

<comment><USER9> I was a nerd in high school, and I was an athlete. Granted it was swimming in the Midwest which means practically nobody cared, but it was a sport. I would count my days on the swim team as an invaluable learning experience.

I found that I could think more clearly, could sleep better at night, and was more awake during the day during the swim season. In other words, while I was in shape and health my mental abilities and general well-being improved. I would not have really internalized this lesson unless I experienced it first hand.

Sports have a place in school. It helped me learn some social skills, the value of physical activity, and that there can be a life outside of a computer. I was a pretty good swimmer (won more than I lost), but I was by far the worst on the team. I didn't gain any popularity by swimming. This falls in line with what PG said; you have to be a _good_ athlete to gain popularity from sports.

This isn't to say that I like how important sports are in school, but they have a place. So yeah, reduce the importance of sports but I wouldn't be in favor of eliminating them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Why don't parents home-school their kids all the way through college?_

Two main reasons, from what I can tell: 1) most (if not all) quality employers require a degree; 2) parents feel (and often are) incapable of teaching advanced material.

If you're a true student of PG, you're now dying to say 'but what about being around other smart kids'? Answer (limiting our scope to high school for the moment): home schoolers are frequently around other smart kids. Home schooling doesn't mean that children are locked in their houses all day every day. Home schooling doesn't mean learning on an island. It's more like learning in a chain of islands, with frequent trips to the others. And since the parents of home schooled children are (by self-selection) those that tend to care more about their child's intellectual development (and can afford the means), the average home schooler is at least better-read (if not better 'educated') than the average high schooler.

Also, when you home school, you can accomplish things about twice as fast, which frees up the rest of your day to get your kids out into the real world (something kids locked up on a high school campus all day every day see much less often). If Johnny prefers, he could read more too (which is often the case).

 _So could high school if it were done right._

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for public schools in South Florida to get it right. They're among the worst in the nation, and given our means, I feel it would be an irresponsible choice to off-load my daughter to those places. (We cannot afford private school to the tune of $12,000 / year ... although I could argue that home schooling is better than even those places [I went to one]).

<comment><USER11> Most employers say they require a degree in the job description. It's a lie. I've yet to see any employer turn down a qualified candidate because he/she didn't have a college degree.

And while parents probably aren't capable of homeschooling their kids through college, unless said kids end up at one of the few top colleges for their field in the country, they might be better off learning the material on their own and using the extra time and money to socialize with other interesting individuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always had a hard time trying to visualise the school being described in the parent article. I had no trouble after viewing a snapshot of the characters ~ <http://www.paulgraham.com/gateway.html>

<comment><USER13> This pic reminds me of Malcolm in the Middle. Paul seems, like Malcolm, to be the nerd who could pass in other circles if he wanted to. Wonder how the reunion was?

[http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/paulgraham_2002_296...](http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/paulgraham_2002_2965033)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always disagreed article with this because I did not experience this. My high school years were not painful and were a lot of fun, even though I was labelled a nerd, curve-buster, einstein, etc.... So this is my advice from my experience. Don't try to be popular. Be friendly. Help others. Volunteer. Get Respect. Get involved in a sport. Get involved in various things with different people and you will have enough friends that being popular won't matter and no one will dare pick on you. I played soccer and later ran x-country and track, I sang, I was a scout, I was in youth fellowship, I was a mathlete and I hacked a pdp-8 in the hour between school and practice. I certainly was not popular but I was friends or at least friendly with most of the school. People knew me and I had their respect.

<comment><USER15> I find myself disagreeing as well, for much the same reasons.

However, I do think that America is unique in that the rest of the world values brains, but the US seems to instinctively distrust it.

My own totally unscientific pop psychology theory is as follows:

I lived in Germany for a few years. It is easy to sense a lot of national guilt. Dark history, I'll try to avoid Godwin. So modern day Germans are not as care free flag happy as other nations.

Now consider how patriotic Americans are. Now think about American history, there have been some great high points. But what about all the low points, just of the top of my head:

\- Pox blankets. Read up on the story of Ishi the last Yahi.

\- Slavery.

\- Vietnam.

\- Etc.

So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America? I am not saying no American should be proud of their country. In fact, I think America has done a lot good. But American pride can be complicated if you know too much. So maybe that's why there's this almost reflexive anti-intellectualism?

<comment><USER16> slavery?! every part of the world has had slavery at some point... (Most of those countries had revolutions... we had a civil war)

Vietnam? at least we have the guts to go to war. Europe didn't and they got their asses handed to them, we then bailed them out.

Pox blankets? stupid or asinine (I'm not looking it up. Your probably referring to us infecting the 'Native Americans') but I'm sure we aren't the first to do something like that.

Being an actual American... I don't see that we are all that patriotic.

<comment><USER15> Good point about slavery.

Vietnam? No Europe first. Europe didn't go to war. The Germans went to war. Most of the German war machine was on the Eastern front, you didn't bail the soviets out. And while you helped the Brits a lot, I dare you to say you bailed them out to their face.

Now on to Vietnam, who or what exactly were you fighting there? International communism? As someone who was born behind the iron curtain, I HATE commies more then any American ever will. And yet I would not drop napalm on anyone in any effort to fight commies. It is not worth it me. Obviously we disagree on that.

Pox blankets true fact. Massacres, countless. If at some point you do bother to look deep into that part of US history, you may just never look at your country the same way again.

Having been around the world and currently living in America, Americans are of the, if not the, most nationalistic of all the western nations.

Not that is necessarily a bad thing. My point is, you can and should be proud of America. But it is more complicated if you are fully cognizant of the fine details of US history.

<comment><USER17> "Americans are of the, if not the, most nationalistic of all the western nations."

Well, outside of Euro Cup finals week, sure...

<comment><USER18> A nice thing about sport is that it's a safe outlet for some of the uglier aspects of human nature. Usually, anyway. Some people end up taking it way too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was a textbook definition of a nerd: skinny, all A's, glasses, bad clothes, took college classes at night, asian in a very white blue-collar town, did all the nerd stuff (even math camp!). I went to a mediocre high school with few smart kids. Nevertheless, I was popular in high school. In fact, even as a freshmen I was hanging out with the cool senior crowd. There were many factors: I was never intimidated by anyone, I had a sharp wit, I never made others feel dumb, I didn't take any jokes personally. The big thing is body language. If you walk around like Clint Eastwood, people assume you're cool. Even when I moved to a big city, thuggish guys assumed I was one of them.

My advice: just pretend that you're cool. First impressions and body language matter a lot. It works for my friend, too. She's a small girl, but big, loud, obnoxious Wall St. traders are intimidated by her when she walks into a meeting. She exudes a self-confidence that makes them shut up and listen. If it works for a skinny nerd and a 5ft girl, it's gotta work for you dweebs, too.

<comment><USER20> At my high school, the first Friday the 13th is the unofficial Freshman Day where they pick on the Freshman. As a new Freshman, I was even more scrawny and way less confident back then but when I walked past the cafeteria, I overheard a bunch of jocks/seniors hanging out (behind me) say "C'mon. He's got to be a freshman" - I walked past with my head up confidently and didn't look back. I didn't get picked on that day - other people I knew who were of my build were thrown in trash cans, etc.

High school sucks. But then you graduate. High school is a geographic coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think Paul is missing something here, and that's soft skills. I, like him, was at the D table, and it was only much later that I realized why. I was much more interested in left-brain activities at the expense of right-brain ones. Yet left-brain skills are not necessarily smarter than right-brain skills, just as being a physicist isn't better than being a film director. The film director was probably popular in high school. The physicist probably not (and probably still isn't). And that's too bad for both. Nerds are unpopular because they're hiding in what they're good at; the same reason a cheerleader might put on makeup.

To be truly smart, you need to develop both sides, both skill sets. You should be able to dress well and yet know the Earth's distance from the Sun. The true smart is a round thing.

<comment><USER5> _To be truly smart, you need to develop both sides, both skill sets._

There is something in what you say, but I think this goes too far. Think about some of the people you're claiming aren't truly smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22>
      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
      I took the one less traveled by,
      And that has made all the difference.

      - Robert Frost

I wish I had read this in 9th grade. Should be mandatory reading (and re- reading) for all high school freshmen.

You'd still be unpopular, but you'd care a lot less.

<comment><USER23> The poem was written as a cynical comment about Frost's friend Edward Thomas who was unpleasantly bemused by it. Thomas was the first to not get the joke.

 _It is popularly interpreted literally, as inspirational and individualist, but critics universally interpret it as ironic_

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

 _Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. . . . Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid._

<http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/road.htm>

<comment><USER24>
       "Though as for that the passing there
        Had worn them really about the same,"

Those lines always bugged me. They seem to run contrary to the rest of the poem.

I guess this explains it.

<comment><USER25> i agree, i recently had this thought about that stanza that might give some insight.

"and having perhaps the better claim/ because it was grassy and wanted wear"

to me that means that like every person wants to go were many haven't...

with the addition of "though as for that, the passing there/had worn them really about the same"

i make the conclusion that because ppl want to go were many havent, the paths have worn the same because as soon as one path appears less worn, people travel on it. on that basis the two paths have worn the same.

i have no experience with poems and im just writing a paper on this one and saw this post. hopefully my insight is helpful. take care.!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to hear a good discussion about education. I'm certainly concerned about it. I don't bother with debates about public education though, because the answer is so obvious: privatization.

I have a 15 month old: [http://flickr.com/photos/abbyalexandra/2617520542/in/photost...](http://flickr.com/photos/abbyalexandra/2617520542/in/photostream/)

I think I can teach him everything he needs to know about math, science and computer science. It would make sense to do this with others, because learning is a collaborative beast.

I have more education than the majority of science and math teachers (except coursework in education itself - though I tutored for 10 years).

Why don't more adults get together in loose organizations to teach their kids? I'm talking about the technorati here, not the average person who is less capable than the teachers I've had.

Do people avoid this because of the time it would take? Do they think the socialization process of schooling is too important to miss?

<comment><USER27> I've wondered the same thing. I suppose it's difficult for people to take off from work. But if you had a group of 10 parents/20 kids, you could have each parent take one day off every two weeks to be the teacher for the day. It might work quite well. You'd miss out on the clubs, sports, field trips, etc. that are probably the best part of public school. But perhaps those could be made for with organizations outside of schools.

<comment><USER28> I've been wondering about the same thing. How hard would it be to create this group?

Practically speaking, how do you sort through the parents? Background checks? Live video feeds?

I have some time to worry about this, but I'd be very interested in the possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _Do you want to start doing dumb stuff?_

You do not have to do _dumb stuff_ to become popular. Also being an athlete or better looking than the average person does not make you _dumb_. That is simply a stereotype.

As for the rest of the article I agree with it.

EDIT: Smart kids are unpopular simply because they spend as much time as any other kid focused on what they love, and what they love IS unpopular.

And this related to what their society values. It happens that the western society largely values sports and beauty. This is reflected in models' salaries, as well as athletes' compared to the earnings of a physics' professor .

If you are from a society that values education more than entertainment, then smart kids are the popular ones.

<comment><USER30> Nowhere did he say that being an athlete or good looking meant you were dumb.

He does say it automatically makes you popular, and I'm not sure I agree with that. Better make sure you're a good athlete in football if you're south of the Mason-Dixon line.

<comment><USER29> _they don't waste their time on the dumb stuff you need to do to be popular._

This implies that people who are popular spend their time doing dumb stuff.

ANd who are those popular ones? _If you're good looking, a natural athlete, or the sibling of a popular kid, you'll automatically be popular_ .

So if people who are popular do dumb things then they are dumb , since smart people do not waste time doing dumb things.

<comment><USER31> _But most popular kids don't get that kind of free ride. They have to work at being popular._

^ The sentence immediately after the one you quoted. Being good looking, a natural athlete, or a sibling of a popular kid is a way to be popular WITHOUT doing anything, that is, without doing all the dumb stuff that all the other people have to do to be popular. Hence he's not implying that good-looking or athletic people are automatically doing dumb stuff, but rather, they get out of doing it based on their looks or athletic ability. The ugly, nonathletic people are presumably the ones who would have to do a lot of dumb things to work their way to being popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I agree with almost everything pg says there. But the assumption that it may be better in countries with centralised school systems run by PhDs is questionable. You have to ask who these PhDs are and what they got their PhD for.

In many european countries universities are a kind of extension of public school with all its flaws, only more chaotic. So those PhDs who go on to become civil servants in the ministry of education are people who, in a sense, never left school.

Their entire system of reference is shaped by entrenched ideologies, 18th century philosophy and political party loyalties. They are not researchers competent to design a modern education system.

</comment><comment><USER33> "I'm just guessing here, but I think it may be because American school systems are decentralized. They're controlled by the local school board, which consists of car dealers who were high school football players, instead of some national Ministry of Education run by PhDs."

The real difference is that most European and Asian countries use tracking ( <http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080622_paradox.htm> ). Forcing all students onto the same curriculum makes no one better off. Less apt kids don't learn the skills that would actually be useful to them. The nerds have their courses dumbed down, and earn the hatred of the kids who receive poor grades.

Local school boards do not actually have that much control. Have you noticed how schools have nearly the same basic structure everywhere? Education PHD's have an enormous influence because they control the education schools. That influence has been almost entirely pernicious. Plus they have a lot of control over curriculum requirements that come down from the state and federal boards of education. Teachers unions have an enormous amount of power and are also a national organization.

One more under-reported factor is the Supreme Court decision in the 1970's that made school discipline much, much harder to enforce. Read "The World We Created at Hamiliton High" ( [http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton- High/dp/0674...](http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton- High/dp/067496201X) ) to see the chaos that ensued as a result this "student rights" decision.

<comment><USER34> That must be why after the 9th grade my public school experience was so much better. In the 9th grade my parents thought I would need time to adjust and so didn't put me in the honors/AP classes. In later years I took honors/AP classes and did much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In my old school it was a nightmare. Im my current school its pretty good. My current school is not private, but it has a reputation of an elite school in my town. In Bulgaria after 7-th grade(when you are 14-15) you can choose to stay in your class in 8-th grade, or you can take a test and go to an elite class in your, or in a another school(your score from the test is valid in any school with elite classes) I was in an in my class there are mostly smart kids. And most of them are girls, so i haven't had any problems here, i have actually become somewhat popular because of my rebellious arrogant attitude. In my old class some off the kids had police records at 13, some are still my friends, but most of them i hate and am glad that i haven't met them in years. My new class isn't that effective at teaching, i usually read some python books in geography class(geography is so boring).

</comment><comment><USER36> "I think nearly everything that's wrong in schools can be explained by the lack of any external force pushing them to be good. They don't compete with one another, except in sports (at which they do become good)."

~70% of kids quit sports entirely before entering HS, and the vast majority of HS teams aren't even remotely good. Even on the best teams in the country, the ones that consistently get athletes recruited by top colleges and send guys to the jr. national team, the majority of the guys on the roster will still be mediocre at best.

All of the evidence (c.f. Alfie Kohn) seems to suggest that competition would only make education worse. But even if you wanted to reinterpret the data, looking to athletics as a model of success would be a mistake.

<comment><USER33> As a counterpoint, in southern California all the champion high school football teams come from the Catholic schools and small school districts outside of LA. The LA school district itself is giant bureaucratic behemoth. Despite having large numbers of players getting scholarhips, the actual football teams from LA public schools aren't that good. ( <http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080629_schools.htm> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How can you tell if you're popular?

I have fond memories of high school, but perhaps because I took just one class there while attending college classes and the local math and science center. Still, I "felt" popular at high school: people knew my name, said hi, were nice. Contrasted with my experiences at the math and science center: there folks weren't as friendly and bitter rivalries seemed to run amok.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was reading the comments on PG's original essay a week ago and was struck by how a lot of the comments show that PG is reaching a wide audience of high schoolers who know nothing about HN but stumbled across his essay and identify with it.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

</comment><comment><USER37> I've sometimes wondered how I would have turned out if I had gone to a typical American highschool - my HS experience was so different I have trouble relating to this essay, tv shows with high schools etc.

My high school was uber-immigrant (I'd estimate about 5-10% of the kids were born in Canada, everyone else being a first-gen immigrant), and groups were divided primarily by grade, then by ethnicity, religion and regionality, then by activity (drama, music, sport, math etc) so it was almost impossible to form cliques, judge cross-group popularity etc. But it wasn't that bad either, it was actually pretty easy to move within groups - got to know people through playing music, through volleyball, hanging out with the other eastern europeans etc.

</comment><comment><USER38> This high school business is all about ego. The popularity thing is just a layer on top of that. Being popular means joining in with the collective ego building. Being good at something that requires honesty (i.e. math, chess) will just get in the way of this.

</comment><comment><USER39> "They're controlled by the local school board, which consists of car dealers who were high school football players, instead of some national Ministry of Education run by PhDs."

You know what those PhDs look like Paul? They remind people of the "Nerds" that had trouble settling in. They remind people of misfits. They also remind people of the "guy who know it all but can't make a good decision".

My Business professor told me once: "The Business school taught students how to make decisions". That is something that separates business students and science students. Science students argue (too much) based on science in which sometime not applicable or whatnot while Business students make a decision.

PS: I'm from CS background.

<comment><USER40> The Ministry of Education way has its own problems, namely that these kinds of organizations aren't really interested in education per se but in social engineering.

PS I bet most of the science faculty at your school had written loads of journal articles etc. How many of the business faculty were self-made millionaires?

<comment><USER39> \- Yes, we do have journal articles (not sure if it's a lot or not)

\- Does it matter if one is a self-made or paid-by as long as you're a millionaires?

\- Does money matter much for you? Once you get 10 millions, does 100 millions matter a lot?

<comment><USER40> My point is that your science professors are very likely to be real scientists, but your business professors are unlikely to be real businessmen. Ask yourself why that might be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think that the question is about public school. I went to public high school here in Spain and I found it fine. Maybe there are more factors than public vs private.

For concerned fathers, I would recommend finding some side activity, preferably sports, that help socializing. Yes, _you_ have to put time and effort. Children responde well if it's not imposed but chosen, parents play with them and it's presented not only as a physical challenge, but also as a mind game. Sports can also be "hacked". Also there's music.

</comment><comment><USER42> "The example of private schools suggests that the best plan would be to go in the other direction, away from government control."

Charter schools (privately run, publicly funded) seem to be even worse than normal public schools. I think I'd sooner have all free schooling be federally controlled than have it all be charter schools.

The other option is to abolish publicly funded schooling altogether.

<comment><USER43> Privately run and privately funded schools seem to do the job, but only for people who can afford them.

Perhaps the solution is not to abolish public schooling altogether, but to work on actually improving it. Perhaps improving the quality of teachers would do the job better.

<comment><USER44> It's not obvious to me that improving teacher quality is possible. Is there really a large enough pool of people out there who would be good teachers, but choose not to teach?

I know it's a popular talking point by teachers unions angling for more money, but I don't think it's really a solution.

Improving the process also matters, and we even know how to do it (Direct Instruction). It is effective even when used by low quality teachers. Unfortunately, it's also dead in the water since teachers unions don't like it.

<http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm>

<http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/honestft.htm>

<comment><USER43> Well, as an example of how you might go about doing that, I remember reading an article about a study that found that bad teachers don't get better with time, but they tend to cling on anyway because they get significantly more money each year.

One of the suggestions from that article was that to improve teaching quality, it might be worth offering a flat (higher than the current 1st-year and lower than the current 10th-year) salary to encourage people to try teaching for a couple of years after uni (since the salary would then be decent right away). This would also discourage people from clinging on to the job unless they really like it.

This is certainly not a solution that teachers' unions would advocate, but I suspect it could produce some positive effects, assuming the study I mentioned was correct, and assuming part of the problem is indeed the fact that many people who could be great teachers don't bother because they pay is very bad at the beginning and they can go and be bankers instead.

Of course I'm not an expert on this, so my theories may be wide off the mark, but I don't accept the idea that the pool of existing teachers can't be improved. I suspect that one of the reasons why private schools are indeed better than public schools is precisely that they can afford better teachers.

As for teachers' unions... I have little respect for a professional organisation that works against its own professional aim. I'm sure they can be taken care of in some way or another.

<comment><USER20> In the words of a dot-com-bubble-bursting-era letter from a teacher in response to a dot-commer saying he'd just get a job teaching (as a fall-back): "Good luck!". Teaching is hard and it's keeping qualified teachers teaching that is a problem.

I remember reading an article in Time magazine "Why Teachers Hate Parents" (2005). I was fairly shocked back then to read why teachers hate their job: Parents. The article was helpfully blog-copied; it is a good read, even though it probably uses more extreme examples of "helicopter parents"

"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."

"At the most disturbing extreme are the parents who like to talk about values but routinely undermine them. "You get savvier children who know how to get out of things," says a second-grade teacher in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Their parents actually teach them to lie to dodge their responsibilities." Didn't get your homework done? That's O.K. Mom will take the fall. Late for class? Blame it on Dad."

[http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...](http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&page=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_defeat>

</comment><comment><USER45> Its not the worst in the US.

I'd say the US is pretty good. Generally ppl are left to be who they are. Its very homogeneous societies like Japan and Korea that have the worst problems. The pressure to conform is high and everyone gangs up on victims.

Its considered a huge issue that can drive kids to commit suicide.

</comment><comment><USER46> Unfortunately, most central Ministries of Education tends to be filled with politicians rather than education PhDs (or by PhDs with a mostly politics interest). Who knows if that's better than the average local school boards in the US.

</comment><comment><USER47> There are other problems with schools, such as the model of _teacher_ who _already knows the answer_ , and _student_ who must learn the material _without changing any of it_ (no attempts to improve the ideas).

Traditional knowledge has its place, but so does criticism and reasoned judgment and new ideas, and schools are not designed to facilitate the rationalist, liberal approach.

If the role of a teacher was seen as helping the student _in ways the student prefers_ , as if the student were a _customer_ , it would drastically improve the classroom aspect of schools.

There are also a wide variety of smaller problems. For example, many lessons focus on _solutions to old problems_ without enough explanation of what the problem was or why it was important to people. For someone who doesn't understand the problem situation a solution attempts to address, that solution is uninteresting.

</comment><comment><USER48> I enjoyed slapping around nerds in high school. It's good for the ol' self- esteem, and that's what's important, right?

<comment><USER49> Since many (most?) of this community are nerdy people and cannot share your experience, would you please enlighten us with your motivation for such actions? I'm interested in hearing from the other side of the aisle.

Edit: Unless you are joking.

<comment><USER50> I guess that beating nerds made him look cooler and kept the other bullies away. (Except that it doesn't work in HN)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone made a major life decision randomly? - <AUTHOR> Since there is often limited information available regarding the future success of two or more different life paths, has anyone here bit the bullet and flipped a coin or otherwise randomly chosen how to proceed in life? <comment><USER2> We almost always think we decide rationally, but frequently it's just random...</comment>


On Polysemous Mathematical Illustration [video] - <AUTHOR> https://icerm.brown.edu/video_archive/?play=2034 <comment><USER2> I can also recommend the text book on applied topology that is mentioned in the video: [https://www.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/notes.html](https://www.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/notes.html)

Prof. Ghrist is an excellent educator and has a knack for presenting complex materials in a very engaging way. His papers on computational topology are also very well worth a read even if you are not interested in topology or topological data analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> His webpage: [https://www.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/calculus.html](https://www.math.upenn.edu/~ghrist/calculus.html)

The book he mentions, Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, is awesome.

If you feel little bet insecure and lost with complex numbers, their relation to e and all the other things, just buy that book and look at the pictures. One hour looking a the pictures in the book is equal to 30 hours of studying the subject. You can use the book as a companion to any other book on complex analysis.

</comment><comment><USER4> Best math talk ever.

Mr Ghrist, if you read this comment (I hope you check HN before Reddit), you are the Umberto Eco of math.

As a way of thanking you, here's a poem which I hope you will enjoy. The poem was written exactly 100 years ago, although I'm not sure if there's any meaning in this.

      I do not crush the world's corolla of wonders
      and I don't kill
      by means of mind the mysteries I meet
      along my path
      in flowers, eyes, on lips and graves.
      The light of others
      destroys the spell of mystery concealed
      in darkness depths,
      but I,
      I with my light enhance world's secret –
      And as the white moonlight
      doesn't diminish, but shimmering
      more it increases the secret of the night,
      so I enrich the dark horizon
      with greater chills of sacred mystery
      and all that is unknown
      becomes even more enigmatic
      under my eyes
      because I love
      flowers, and eyes, and lips, and graves.</comment>