Computer scientists prove that a 40-year-old algorithm is optimal - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/algorithm-genome-best-possible-0610 <comment><USER2> Am I reading this wrong? The title is wrong, right?

The paper says that if a strongly sub-quadratic solution exists than the exponential time hypothesis (that SAT cannot be solved in subexponential time) is invalidated.

That's very interesting, but _it 's not a proof_ that no strongly sub- quadratic solution exists for SED.

Note that exponential time hypothesis _is strictly stronger than_ P!=NP. Even if SAT can't be solved in poly time, that doesn't mean it can't be solved in subexponential time. There are functions that lie between polynomial and exponential...

Of course, the paper was careful to explain it, but the media summary...

Edit: I was interested to learn about the notion of _strongly quadratic_ ; there are O(n^2/log n) solutions to SED, but this paper is casting doubt on solutions with time complexity O(n^(2-delta)) for any delta > 0\. Another commenter mentioned a method to solve SED like this.

<comment><USER3> I haven't seen too many results that rely on SETH, so just did a bit of research. Ryan Williams (from Stanford) at least doesn't believe SETH is true -- here is a nice talk by him on SETH: [http://www.imsc.res.in/~vraman/exact/ryan.pdf](http://www.imsc.res.in/~vraman/exact/ryan.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Interesting to note there slide 5 -- "For many polynomial time problems, improving the best known algorithms, even slightly, implies ¬SETH or ¬ETH."

So apparently the edit-distance result discussed here is part of a history of similar results.

Edit: More detail on this in slides 11 and forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Wagner-Fischer (1970) algorithm they mention (AKA Needleman-Wunsch, Lowrance-Wagner, etc) is quadratic in time and space. It might never get any better than that in time - an improved version with linear space complexity was presented by Hirschberg in 75 - but that doesn't mean execution times can't be improved. Today there are various variations of the same family of algorithms with ever improving execution times. Some adapt the algorithm to massively parallel setups with hundreds of GPUs, others use speculative execution, some use approximations, and so forth.

<comment><USER6> > that's disappointing, since a computer running the existing algorithm would > take 1,000 years to exhaustively compare two human genomes.

I did a quick googling [1] and

> Our algorithm divides the problem into independent `quadrants' ...

> Our results show that our GPU implementation is up to 8x faster when > operating on a large number of sequences.

It's still soul crushing. Why did our genome have to be that long :(

BTW, do you have numbers for setups with hundreds of GPUs?

I'm also left wondering about results using stochastic solutions. On how accuracy and problem size relate.

[1] [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6339593)

<comment><USER7> I'm confused by this. 1,000 years seems a bit steep to me.

Suppose you have two files, `bob.genome` and `mary.genome`. Let's say they are 1gb each [1].

I think I can diff two 1gb files in less than 1,000 years.

diff(1) shows "deletions, insertions, and substitutions".

Therefor, I don't believe it. Yet. What did I miss?

1\. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much- memory-w...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-memory-would- be-required-to-store-human-dna) (Rounded up because Fermi estimation [2].)

2\. [https://what-if.xkcd.com/84/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/84/)

<comment><USER8> > diff(1) shows "deletions, insertions, and substitutions".

diff(1) doesn't give you a _minimal_ set of edits to apply to go from one file to the other, just _a_ set of edits.

<comment><USER9> Also, I think he's picturing two almost-equal files. In that case the average running time should be way lower, no? (I believe the quadratic time is worst case)

<comment><USER7> 1,000 years? Really?

Isn't it more likely that somebody misquoted "slow, like a half an hour" as "slow, like a THOUSAND YEARS"?

<comment><USER10> They're quoting exponential (2^N), not quadratic (N^2) time.

 _If on some machine a quadratic-time algorithm took, say, a hundredth of a second to process 100 elements, an exponential-time algorithm would take about 100 quintillion years._

<comment><USER8> That is yet another section of the article, the thousand years clearly reference the edit distance, which is quadratic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dick Lipton (GATech) has a blog post discussing this paper: [https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/puzzling- evidence/](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/puzzling-evidence/).

</comment><comment><USER12> Short version: computer scientists have shown that if the Edit Distance problem can be solved in sub-quadratic time, then SAT can be solved in sub- exponential time, and therefore P=NP.

<comment><USER13> Exponential time hypothesis implies P!=NP, but converse is not true. It is possible that SAT takes subexponential but superpolynomial time.

<comment><USER12> Ah, a very valid point!

This sort of thing is exactly what I love about Computer Science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article clearly states this, but the title doesn't, so N.B.: the proof is conditional on exponential time hypothesis, that SAT requires exponential time. Of course we don't know whether it does.

<comment><USER14> What the article doesn't state clearly is that this assumes the _strong_ exponential time hypothesis: it assumes that SAT cannot be solved in time 1.9999^n -- in other words that it's impossible to do better than the brute- force algorithm, which has complexity 2^n (up to polynomial factors). That's a very strong assumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's the paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0348](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0348)

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I don't understand why the MIT News article has no links to the sources.

<comment><USER13> It actually does. The link is on the right sidebar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The authors of the paper note (though this MIT News summary omits) that there is a well-known algorithm for edit distance that runs is subquadratic time. In fact, it runs in O(n^2/log^2 n) on a word RAM. It uses a method sometimes called "Four Russians" or "shaving a log".

Of course, this does not invalidate the results; I mention it only to dispel the notion that a reader may get from this MIT News summary that there is no subquadratic algorithm likely to be found.

It's also interesting reading; just Google for "edit distance" and "Four Russians" and you'll find many summaries.

</comment><comment><USER18> > But it also means that computer scientists can stop agonizing about whether > they can do better.

This is incorrect... because a "better" algorithm might have 99.9% accuracy but be millions of times faster.

<comment><USER19> That's pedantic and also incorrect. The problem of whether an exact solution can be found efficiently can be put to rest. You might not choose to use this algorithm, but that's not really the point of algorithms research. You've just picked a strawman to criticise the wording on.

<comment><USER20> I don't think so. I think he is pointing out a _really_ , _really_ important thing that many overlook because of the way we have come to teach computer science.

When evaluating different algorithms, there are lots of criteria we could use. How often is it correct? How long does it take to run? How difficult is it for people to read? How often does it use the letter "r" which happens to be broken on my keyboard?

Computer science made ENORMOUS strides by picking out a specific criterion (running time on the computers of the time) and finding a way to make it mathematically rigorous (asymptotic performance analysis, Big-O notation, and all of the related mechanisms that we learn in computer science classes). This was TREMENDOUSLY valuable, and by turning the whole power of mathematical analysis loose on the problem it formed the modern field of algorithm analysis and completely transformed how we build computers.

But we need to remember that this is base on one particular simplification of how computers work. It assumes a Von-neuman architecture where execution steps are the key criterion. We have extended this framework to consider things like parallel execution... that was fruitful also. More recently, we've been noticing that our actual machines are no longer dominated by the "steps" in the algorithm, but most often are dominated by memory usage, so we have turned the same formalism onto the use of memory -- but still (in my opinion) lack a rigorous approach for analyzing the _combination_ of steps taken and memory usage.

Even more significant is the fact that there are OTHER things we could trade off. One of those is accuracy. Look at some of the research on probabilistic algorithms: you will find that there are some incredible gains to be made with losses in accuracy that are well within the bounds of what are acceptable for most uses. Yet this isn't covered in an introductory computer science course, so many programmers are not even aware of the option. With so much of traditional algorithm analysis already mapped out by the past several decades of researchers, much of the fertile ground in the near future will, I believe, lie in investigating these other sorts of tradeoffs.

<comment><USER19> No - there are many fruitful formalisations of parallel programming (the CLRS chapter is pretty good) and indeed, of non-von Neumann architectures (check out balancing, comparison networks etc etc).

This sort of work is not reliant on von-Neumann - it quantifies the amount of work you need to do. Coincidentally, the algorithm listed parallelises very well; it has a good span.

Of course it is useful to avoid galactic algorithms, but the article is _totally_ correct. It would be incorrect to read its conclusion as anything but what it actually says. As a general principle, sure, but it shouldn't be a criticism of this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The paper mentions an algorithm published in 1980 is O( (n/log(n))^2 ), which is better than the Wagner-Fischer algorithm mentioned in the article, even if it's not strongly subquadratic.

<comment><USER22> O( (n/log(n))^2 ) > 0(n^1.99999999999999) for sufficently large N

<comment><USER21> Yes, the fact it's >O(n^k) for all k in [1,2) is why it's not strongly. It's still less than O(n^2).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The edit distance between two strings L and S, where |L| >= |S|, is at most |L|. For any number n and string W, a DFA can be built which accepts an input IFF its edit distance to W is < n. Such a DFA can be built and run in O(|W|) time.[1]

What's the complexity of a 'binary search' for the edit distance between L and S using this method? The DFA construction complexity grows very fast with respect to n, but we only need log(|L|) DFAs. And the search cut points can be skewed to amortize the growth with respect to n (i.e. first n << |L|/2).

[1] see page 63 of [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=99460367496861516...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=9946036749686151606)

</comment><comment><USER24> Well... I guess now it's up to the hardware engineers to make it faster... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is so wrong. Just because it's NP-hard (optimization problem, right?) it doesn't mean that there aren't very-very-very good heuristic algorithms that can make the search significantly faster than exponential in the vast majority of the cases. Take a look at SAT solvers and see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

<comment><USER26> Heuristic algorithms can never be "optimal". The article is precise and correct. I use heuristic algorithms for all my DNA alignment, and for all my probabilistic modeling, but I do that with the knowledge that I'm not necessarily finding an optimal solution, I'm only find a "pretty good" solution like the SAT solvers do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love 'proofs' which rely on an unproven component.</comment>


Apple nukes Facebook app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/30/facebook_apple_enterprise_certificate_revocation/ <comment><USER2> The hell is with the title? I hope someone at The Register got DESTROYED over this ABOMINATION of an article title.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had to edit the title in El'Reg style because the original title was too long "Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data"

There's really no need to destroy anyone over it. There are worse things in the world to get mad about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Main discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19035834)</comment>


Netflix Progress Prize Awarded - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/081210/aqw507.html

<comment><USER2> As per the prize rule, they are under the obligation to describe and publish their mode (as they did last time). I really wish someone would release an open source recommender package, coded in C, with PHP bindings, based on the latest / greatest algorithms, or any algorithm (just plain SVD if anything).

Interesting links (from the winning team(s) websites about their latest research) : [http://public.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/kdd08koren....](http://public.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/kdd08koren.pdf) [http://www.commendo.at/index.php?lang=0&_0=2&_1=3](http://www.commendo.at/index.php?lang=0&_0=2&_1=3)

<comment><USER3> Well I am not going to do everything for you, but here is something to start with:

[http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2006/10/netflix-prize- con...](http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2006/10/netflix-prize-contest.html)

It is a little framework I put together to play with the netflix prize framework. I implemented SVD as one of the examples.

On a side note I did think about the idea of putting together a small company that would sell recommendation systems to companies for their website. The value would not be in the algorithm, but in the ability to integrate with their software.

<comment><USER2> Very nice, I saw many Netflix Prize derived frameworks but I somehow missed this one.

Did you test RMSE of your SVD on Netflix Dataset?

<comment><USER3> Nope, it is just a stock SVD, it wont win any awards, just get the job done and be an example. There are plenty of people who have tweaked SVD up and down so I didn't spent time doing it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It may be simply mathematically impossible to get to 10 percent given the observable variables. Maybe netflix knows this and just gets synthesized research on the cheap.

<comment><USER5> I'd guess the machine learning guys by this point understand the data set at least as well as Netflix does.

<comment><USER6> The machine learning guys have only a subset of the full dataset to work with. They have to send their algorithms to Netflix for testing on the full dataset. So it may be possible Netflix knows something they don't. It does seem quite strange how close and yet how far that 10% mark has been.

<comment><USER5> Hmm. What could Netflix know, though? Is it even possible to quantify how hard it is to improve a recommendation algorithm by a certain amount?

<comment><USER4> Maybe there is an inherent noise floor for the optimal estimator for the dataset they have found or bounded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I started working on this about a month and a half ago. My RMSE is pathetic thus far(just started tweaking a kNN with Pearson correlation as a distance metric), but I don't really care. It's a great way to brush up on a lot of CompSci concepts at once you may be rusty on. Besides obviously machine learning, when you're trying to process 2 gb of training files on your personal computer, O(n) time/space complexity REALLY starts to matter, as does choice of implementation language...using mostly Python with C extensions for the heavy math right now...

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to win just so I could settle arguments by saying "anyone who has won a million dollar data mining competition raise your hand"

</comment><comment><USER9> I keep hoping someone will swoop down with a crazy solution and snatch the prize from the people trying to solve it conventionally. So much more romantic than this slog!

<comment><USER8> cool thought. any ideas what the solution might look like?

<comment><USER10> Each movie rating will be represented by a star in the sky, the constelations are the rating clusters, and on 09/20/2009 they'll align to achieve the 10% mark.

Hey, it works for astronomy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 2 years in and they still haven't given out the prize money. How's that crowd sourcing working out for you NetFlix?

<comment><USER12> Hey, it is not easy to develop a better recommendation engine. They have problems like the "Napoleon Dynamic" which is still remained unsolved right now.

Computer can only predict human behavior which is unchanging and static. But, this is always not the case.

<comment><USER11> I didn't say it was easy, I'm not sure where you're drawing that assumption from.

I did essentially say that over 2 years, I'm glad that the collective research efforts of 35,000 teams, one of the teams has seen $100k from a corporation who will ultimately profit off their research.

<comment><USER10> One of the teams mentioned in the article started they own company based on the notoriety achieved, so yeah. It seems to be working pretty well for everyone.

By the way, your post was just crawled by Google, and it probably represents a couple cents into their billion dollar quarter. How do you feel helping the big guys, huh? Working for free for the man... you're disgusting, sir!

<comment><USER11> Yes, I've been bad! I'm going to sit in time out bbs

<comment><USER12> LOL. I misunderstood what you have said. Since the code will be open sourced, it will definitely benefit thousands of companies.

In fact, there was one graduate student who was in our campus last semester was doing research in this area. He did a very good job on this. And, he won the first ACM machine learning prize for the paper. If you are interested in this area, you can actually go to the library and find out the paper. Now, I think he is now working in the Microsoft Research Team(the usual career path in our campus).

I actually did a tiny recommendation engine using one of the collaborative filtering algorithm - slope one predictor last two days. It will be up on the web very soon. I am having problems updating my server because rubygems.org is down!

<comment><USER11> It's all good, I think I need to stop hanging out on YC today. I have to catch up to Matt on this Cocoa Programming book, and then I've got a final project to prep for, and finally a meeting tomorrow with the company to talk about some marketing stuff.

Clearly YC is not where I should be right now :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/VirtuOverview.pdf <comment><USER2> Note that the key assumption for why losses are unlikely is that they make many independent trades that are each likely to be profitable.

But in real markets, outside events can suddenly make many trades all fail at the same time. This is the same reason AAA tranches of CDOs got those high ratings -- you only lose money if many obligations fail at once, but that is extremely unlikely if you think they have low correlation with each another, which was historically the case.

But in a market crash, all correlations will tend towards 1.

<comment><USER3> Not exactly, a firm like Virtu makes money due to volume and volatility. If the market goes up, they make money, if it goes down, they make money. They don't make money when they break things, or when the volume (and volatility) is low.

Source: Worked at Madison Tyler / Virtu for over 4 years, but left before their IPO.

<comment><USER4> Not sure I understand why we can assume that its all trades are entirely "independent" here.

Agree with you that HFT performance is not correlated with market direction. But given the volume of trades it would imply that many of the trades are occurring on a smaller pool of equity instruments. I'd think that given liquidity constraints and competition that there's a sweet spot in terms of number of stocks that a given strategy is actually efficient on.

So not entirely sure why we consider every trade to be iid - rapid shocks (flash crash), equity specific news etc would affect a number of trades at once changing the 51% probability?

Also does anyone know if the profitability numbers include payments to be a market-maker?

<comment><USER5> Market makers typically have a requirement to be in the market a certain (high) percentage of the time. In return, they get rebates (which can be a significant source of revenue) and protections from the exchange against overfilling. This can help them for certain shock events.

Most likely, though, their profitability % is tuned by edge and risk parameters. They can adjust size, widen out, or tighten up the spread to tune trade frequency and profitability. They are finding a sweet spot between # of trades and profitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When HFT firm Virtu went public they announced they had one loosing day in 6 years.

A physics professor explained how this was possible by using the law of large numbers and some basic assumptions.

<comment><USER6> I was offered a job at virtu, and met people who discussed this in the interview. They had backtested the model but apparently it had a slight bug. After fixing it they claimed to have made much more than the loses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Summary:

\-- Their trades are profitable f = 51% of the time, and they do N = 3 million trades per day.

\-- Their net profitability per day is thus (well approximated by) a normal random variable with a mean of f and a standard deviation of sqrt(f(1-f)/N), or 3e-4

\-- The probability of this value being less than 50% is well approximated by norm.cdf(0.5, 0.51, sqrt(f(1-f)/3e6)) which gives 2.4e-263

In other words they only expect one loss per 10^263 days, which is much larger than the age of the universe. They are actually doing much worse than expected because they lost on one day.

<comment><USER8> So something is obviously wrong with their model.

<comment><USER9> Most likely fat tails. A normal distribution is probably not a valid assumption

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> to me this is a perfect example of how incredibly indifferent capitalism can be to creating value. no one is bad here, per se, but its useless as far as i can tell, and someone gets very very rich. nothing wrong with capitalism of course, but i feel the need to keep harping of the fact that it doesn't necessarily imply anything about value or desert.

edit: every time i make a comment along these lines, its interesting to see... it seems like HN is split about 50/50 on this. is it that this point is trite? or that you disagree?

<comment><USER11> Trading firms create value by providing liquidity.

If they can buy low and sell high, they will be buying when there are relatively fewer other buyers, and sell when there are relatively few other sellers.

This activity creates value for other people who want to trade in those circumstances.

If no value was created, there would be no value to capture.

And the prima facie evidence that they are creating value is that they are capturing value from willing market participants.

This is fundamental economics.

<comment><USER12> > Trading firms create value by providing liquidity.

Obviously true when they're added to market with little to no liquidity.

But hard to see as true when you're adding them to market that is already extremely liquid. At least, it's a statement that needs some empirical justification in that case, to show that the value from marginal liquidity being added (which is tiny) offsets the waste of the incredible amount of human effort used to create it.

<comment><USER13> Just substitute "cost of trading" with "liquidity".

It's true that at this point, now that market making is pretty much all automated, there isn't much more cost to squeeze out of this component of the market. But be careful not to imply that liquidity is binary: the more liquidity you have, the less it costs to buy or sell something.

<comment><USER12> I'm not implying that liquidity is binary. I'm implying that it does not scale linearly, but rather exponentially towards an asymptote. That is, you can add as much as you want, the total amount approaches a limit.

Said a different way, with your "trading costs" substitution: If x amount of human effort is required to reduce trading costs from, say, 5% of a transaction to 0.001%, perhaps (let's assume) that's justified. But is it then wise for a society to encourage expenditure of 10x more effort just to reduce costs to 0.0001%? (This analogy doesn't really hold, because cost of trading could be 0 and there could still be 0 liquidity, just no other parties interested in buying or selling, but it still seems to point at a real issue when restricted to talking about liquidity.)

<comment><USER14> I think an interesting point you might consider -- let's suppose there is such a thing as "too much" liquidity, and as a corollary, there's a "perfect" amount of liquidity. What do you think happens when more liquidity than the perfect amount is introduced?

I think a lot of arguments which support the idea of HFT being too much liquidity seem to take, as a premise, that the extra liquidity costs consumers -- namely, non-HFT participants in the market trading against the HFTs, the "buyers" of liquidity. Does it? If you have too much liquidity, doesn't that just mean that the buyers don't buy any of it? They saw as much liquidity as they needed, completed their trades, and went home. It seems like the actual cost of too much liquidity is HFT firms which send orders that don't get traded against, so they have no benefit (to the HFT), but still have a cost (the firm has to run, after all). Yes, there's some cost to society here, in the same way that there's a cost any time someone takes on a speculatively profitable business that turns out not to be.

I'm sure there are some strong arguments you could make that HFTs are unnecessary, but the argument of "too much" liquidity always felt shaky to me (in part, because it's one of those arguments that relies on playing fast and loose with nebulous terms).

<comment><USER15> But he didn't argue we have "too much" liquidity. The argument is that we have "enough" liquidity and are now expending a huge volume of capital on a literally imperceptible increase in liquidity.

<comment><USER14> My point is that I don't think it's a huge volume of capital. The extra wasted capital here is the cost of running an HFT firm while you test your strategy (aka. see if your liquidity is valuable or not) -- if it's not profitable, it's not a huge loss (HFT firms, in the grand scheme of things, are relatively small) and the firm shuts down; if it's profitable, then clearly they're trading against non-HFTs that value their liquidity, so what's the issue here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I generally like HFT. I do not like front running or information advantages that have happened in the past.

Spreads these days are the lowest in history. What many people fail to realize is that before electronic market makers (I almost want to eliminate the name HFT), people sat in between these trades. It was slow, inefficient and they took a larger spread on the trade.

<comment><USER17> this seems contradictory to me. HFT is basically predicated on front-running information advantages. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise.

maybe you can explain in more detail?

<comment><USER13> HFT is in basically no sense predicated on front-running. Front-running is an agency problem: it occurs, for instance, when you're trading on behalf of someone else, and before you execute their orders, you submit your own orders that benefit you at the expense of your client.

The whole premise of the market is that people have informational advantages. They don't work without it. The point is that they aggregate the information of all the participants. You can call that, or anything else, "front-running", but that's a meaningless definition.

<comment><USER17> let me be more specific since I think you're misinterpreting me because I wasn't specific enough.

hedge-funds that execute a strategy based entirely on leveraging HFT as a means to take advantage of information arbitrage (such as they kind that a fund taking trade orders from its clients would have) are predicated on having that information advantage "front-running".

HFT in different contexts is just machine execution of trade orders and isn't what I was asking about.

<comment><USER13> That's not how a hedge fund works. Hedge funds trade on behalf of other people, but their clients have equity stakes in the fund itself; they're not asking the hedge fund to trade _their own positions in things_. Hedge fund customers don't inject tradable information.

The canonical example of a front-runner is a broker trading on behalf of (say) a pension fund. The pension fund wants to offload (say) all its shares in CSCO, and pays a broker to do that. That trade is complicated and will move the market. The broker front-runs by first trading CSCO for its own accounts, at the expense of its clients.

An "HFT-enabled" broker could front-run its own clients, but (a) they don't need HFT to do that; they have (relatively speaking) all the time in the world to act on the confidential information that their client is offloading a large block of CSCO, and (b) _they 're the ones complaining about HFT and setting up new exchanges to combat it_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Electronic arbitrage. Interesting, scalable with compute, and highly risky, if you aren't careful or fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know why HFT exists at all. I would just pass a law that forces a bit of random latency/noice in the market data, in the order of seconds (in a similar way as GPS has artificial inaccuracy). Normal people are not gonna notice and all this HFT garbage is completely eliminated. Win win.

<comment><USER20> I agree that it's likely not particularly useful for the market to care about things in millisecond resolution.

<comment><USER21> That's a very clever comment, but I think you should include something indicating why for those who don't know how HFT works.

<comment><USER22> If nothing else, it means that firms that can afford to collocate their servers in the cage next to the exchange's servers have an advantage over those that can't.

It seems like something like the roundtrip time for a packet from NYC to Tokyo would be a fair "speed limit" for exchanges, and ensure that all firms, globally, are on an even footing.

<comment><USER23> I think you'll find, when you try to get down into it, there's no easy way to enforce a speed limit. It's a naturally arising behaviour. You could try making a market that crosses orders every X seconds, but then you move the speed to the edge of those periods.

If you wanna slow down HFT, then kill the stupid restriction that stocks be priced in pennies. With 8 digits of resolution, HFTs would then be forced to compete on price.

<comment><USER22> That's an interesting idea. Is that rule just a holdover from the days of manual accounting?

<comment><USER14> From my own conversations with exchanges -- I think this is just the exchange appealing to layman investors. The exchange wants to appear liquid, and they like to do this by having a lot of shares on the best bid or offer. If you reduce the tick sizes, you'll definitely see fewer shares on the inside bid or offer (even though you'll see _more_ shares on the inside x% for any x, aka. you'll see more liquidity), but the layman investor (e.g. mom and pop, retail traders, people like brad katsuyama, etc.) will suddenly think you're _less_ liquid because the best price now has fewer shares.

That's, at least, the strongest argument I've heard for why tick sizes aren't reduced more rapidly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2016/press.html <comment><USER2> For those interested in the Soviet / Ukranian scientist who was part of the discovery and for whom the transition(BKT) is also named- Vadim Berezinskii

He passed away in 1980, here's his obituary: [http://ufn.ru/ufn81/ufn81_3/Russian/r813k.pdf](http://ufn.ru/ufn81/ufn81_3/Russian/r813k.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's all in Russian. Does it say why he died so young?

<comment><USER4> It just mentions a "lengthy serious sickness". Other sources (e.g. <[https://snob.ru/selected/entry/114493>](https://snob.ru/selected/entry/114493>)) mention him being seriously ill for at least three years before his death...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some will be disappointed that this year's Prize was not awarded to Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, in recognition of their work on LIGO. Ronald Drever is in poor health and there are some who fear that, despite being deserving of a Nobel Prize, he may never receive one.

<comment><USER6> Nobel's will actually directed that the prize to go "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind" by a discovery or invention. The previous-year part isn't even mentioned on the Wikipedia page. (I get that it's hard to judge.)

[https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/](https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/)

<comment><USER7> Isn't the "previous year" part usually interpreted to mean that the benefit is in the past year, rather than the work being done in the past year?

<comment><USER6> I don't know; I wondered about that too. But this proviso hardly seems to come up at all in what I read, and that's interesting -- I wonder how often unusual wills get carried out to the letter.

<comment><USER8> I believe on Wikipedia it is mentioned that the price was originally awarded soon after the discovery. However, after several occasions where a discovery awarded the Nobel price was later invalidated Kama they switch to the present practice of interpreting it as the benefits becoming clearer in the past year, rather than the discoveries.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing that out -- the relevant section is the middle: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_lag)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article:

> The three Laureates' use of topological concepts in physics was decisive for > their discoveries. Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes > properties that only change step-wise.

I've never heard topology characterized that way. Typically I think of it as dealing with connection properties—sort of a more abstract geometry where objects can be considered the same even if their shape changes; identity is only defined by which parts are connected to which.

Could anyone elaborate on the 'step-wise' change aspect from the article?

<comment><USER10> In the context of physics, topological phases of matter often reveal themselves by causing certain quantities that are usually continuous to change in discrete steps instead. A key example is the electrical conductivity of certain quantum Hall effect systems, which jumps in discrete steps (is "quantized" in physics jargon) as an ever stronger magnetic field is applied to the system in a transverse direction.

The connection to the donut/bagel thing more familiar in topology is that topology also deals with integers: a manifold can have 0,1,2,3... holes in it, that sort of thing.

One key mathematical quantity that comes up in the works of Thouless and Haldane is the Chern number [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern_class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern_class)

The reason the physics quantities jump is that the Chern numbers of certain electron bands change, and by definition a Chern number is an integer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone recommend a "cannonical" textbook that describes K-T transitions at an upper-year undergraduate level?

<comment><USER12> Thouless himself wrote one:

[https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Quantum_Mechanics_o...](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Quantum_Mechanics_of_Many_Body_Syste.html)

It doesn't assume graduate level physics.... but it may be a bit advanced for undergraduate. I can't recall.

<comment><USER13> Fixed link: [https://goo.gl/ay9KEi](https://goo.gl/ay9KEi)

Reader needs to be familiar with non-relativistic quantum mechanics + statistical mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fractioning the prize off to me seems silly. A half, a quarter, and a quarter. Why not just have three winners? Is this purely to deal with prize money distribution? Surely there's a more elegant solution.

<comment><USER15> It is according to Alfred Nobels' will. It can not be divided further than half and half of one half.

<comment><USER16> Not true.

Many times it's divides in thirds.

Here it wasn't because someone (in my opinion correctly) decided Kosterlitz and Thouless deserved less money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still remember my condensed matter professor saying "The Kosterlitz-Thouless transition is the most important discovery in physics in the second half of the 20th century". Surely partly motivated by professional bias, no doubt, but there's still merit to the claim. If you believe that "all physics is either harmonic oscillators or phase transitions", the Kosterlitz-Thouless is the first example (I believe) of a phase transition that does not contain a local order parameter. Because of that certain materials proved illusive to all mathematical models of the time.

Related: Onsager received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, also for 2D phase transitions. Trivia: Onsager was a Chemist! :D

EDIT: I believe this is the original paper: [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010/...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010/pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI, Wikipedia page about the Kosterlitz–Thouless transition:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosterlitz%E2%80%93Thouless_tr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosterlitz%E2%80%93Thouless_transition)

<comment><USER17> I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

<comment><USER18> Good. It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles, two or three links deep, to have any chance of understanding just the parts without mathematical formulae.

And before anyone accuses me of wanting to dumb down Wikipedia: yes, that's exactly what I want. Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists.

edit: I can't say it any better than this article: [https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias- wr...](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-writing- tests-show-its-too-sophisticated-for-its-audience/)

<comment><USER17> Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point.

And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.

<comment><USER18> Here's a complex biology article that contains a lot of technical terms and links, yet still manages to be readable to a general audience: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf)

I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks.

> you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point

This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.

<comment><USER19> Although even that Leaf article highlights some unfortunate Wikipedia tendencies such as the tendency to unnecessarily insert pseudo-academic jargon. Take the third sentence: "Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves collectively." With two footnotes even. This could easily have been worded as something along the lines of "Leaves are collectively referred to as foliage, as in "autumn foliage."

<comment><USER20> Except the former shows that "mass noun" is a thing. And indeed the phrase was a hyperlink to a fascinating page discussing the concept. Unfortunately, somebody took your criticism to heart and changed the page to your formulation

      https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leaf&type=revision&diff=742673936&oldid=741796479

excising the hyperlink in the process.

Your phrasing would be better were Wikipedia not a hyperlinked encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is a hyperlinked encyclopedia, it's perfectly acceptable and even preferable to use stilted phrasing when it benefits the concise exposition of related concepts.

<comment><USER20> In law school we were taught that it's preferable to use simple English phrasing--so-called plain language--in legal writing, and to avoid terms of art. But look at what that has wrought in reality--legal instruments that are dozens of page longer than necessary, more often than not with dictionaries prepended. They're more inscrutable than ever, and arguably more difficult to approach for both layman and jurist.

Archaic legal writing relied heavily on terms of art. Terms of art, IMHO, provided many benefits, including 1) concision, 2) consistency, and 3) signaling. Concision because terms of art are a way to reference more complex concepts that you don't need to spell out. Consistency because widespread use of terms of art meant that there was only one way to say something; if you used other phrasing it was presumed you meant something different than what was meant by a related term of art. And signaling because using a term of art made it clear and obvious you were referring to some concrete legal concept, even if the reader wasn't familiar with it.

Notably the shift to "plain language" legal writing did not in the least change expectations in the legal community regarding the consistency and signaling aspects of legal language. Today, instead of using terms of art, lawyers literally copy+paste whole blocks of long-winded clauses.

IMO, all three of those aspects--concision, consistency, and signaling--should likewise be emphasized in an encyclopedic text, _especially_ in the context of hyperlinked text.

Different contexts require using language differently. You wouldn't criticize a musician for using a different style of prose, right? It's not just the medium that dictates how we phrase things, but the context and function of the communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For the lazy:

> British trio win Nobel prize in physics 2016 for work on exotic states of > matter

> Prize to be shared by David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael > Kosterlitz...

> ...in the field of condensed matter physics. They discovered totally > unexpected behaviours of solid materials - and came up with a mathematical > framework (in the field of topology) to explain these weird properties. The > discoveries have paved the way for designing new materials with all sorts of > novel properties.

> Topology, which was central to this year's discoveries, explains why > electrical conductivity inside thin layers changes in integer steps. > Kosterlitz and Thouless studied the electrical behaviour of surfaces or > inside extremely thin layers (physicists call these two-dimensional > materials). Haldane studied matter that forms threads so thin they can be > considered one-dimensional.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/oct/04/nobel-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/oct/04/nobel- prize-in-physics-2016-to-be-announced-live)

Perhaps this will open up new ways to build microprocessors and other semiconductor electronics?

There's a live stream here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qpoBG5hy-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qpoBG5hy-A)

<comment><AUTHOR> 8 minute Interview with a Nobel Committee member (Thors Hans Hansson) about the prize and the science behind it:

[https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/783253434044600320](https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/783253434044600320)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best place to sell a web app? - <AUTHOR> I have a web app with 1400 users and 22 paying customers. Freemium signups are converting to paid at around a 1.5% rate. The site is 1.5 years old and is a side project. My main project has taken off so I don't have time to develop this project anymore. Any recommendations on the best place to sell a small web app? <comment><USER2> Calculate the Seller's Discretionary Earnings (SDE) and usually for a web app biz like this, you can get 1.5-3X the multiple of SDE. SDE is generally the profit after all expenses plus seller's portion of salary/bonus etc. So lets say the total revenue with 22 paying customers is $10,000/Year. Your cost to run this is $2500/Year and you also pay yourself a salary+payroll tax of say $5000/Year.

SDE = ($10000 - ($2500+$5000)) + $5000 = $8500

So you may get anywhere from $12,750 to $25,500.

Since your business is only 1.5 years old, getting a 3X multiple will be very hard. Most likely, you will settle between 1.5-2x.

Depending on the actual revenue (since you didn't disclose), you can sell it on sites like flippa.com, empireflippers.com, sideprojectors.com, 1kprojects.com etc. It all depends on the revenue.

</comment><comment><USER3> The usual places are: [http://flippa.com/](http://flippa.com/), [http://empireflippers.com/](http://empireflippers.com/) or [https://feinternational.com](https://feinternational.com).

I've also just posted something on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781447)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I'd be interested in buying the web app (if it's the one I think it is). Feel free to drop me an email (in profile).

</comment><comment><USER5> ^^Interested in knowing this answer</comment>


Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/J1NCgKQi55X <comment><USER2> Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United States.

I'll assume for the moment that Oregon's intentions are noble, and they're attempting to right this wrong. How ironic that it will achieve the exact opposite result. The old law of unintended consequences and all. Those of us who were in school in the 70s during mandatory desegregation will recall that too had the opposite effect of what was intended: instead of providing better learning opportunities for black students the white families left for the suburbs leaving the black students behind in worse schools than what they had started out with. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it I suppose.

So what is the answer? I think we really need to understand the problem: public schools are locally funded and operated and small locales can use real estate to become exclusive. The solution then is to realize that exclusivity can't be had on a large scale. You need to expand the scope of 'local' in the local school system. A good start would be to expand 'local' to the county level. While certainly there are some counties richer and more exclusive than others, they are much more homogenous than individual communities. At least it would be a step in the right direction that would better serve everyone.

<comment><USER3> > The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy.

I don't understand this kind of thinking. Perhaps it isn't what you meant. My apologies if that isn't the case. I have heard and read this kind of sentiment before.

Is the idea that the rich somehow conspire to do as you suggest?

If so, how does that work? Did Steve Jobs receive a letter once his net worth passed a certain threshold inviting him to join the various "protect the rich" conspiracies? How about Bill Gates or the many other rich folk? What's the threshold? Do people like past and current presidents of the US and prominent politicians get in on that too? D they have regular monthly or annual meetings or is it all done over encrypted email these days?

Just wondering, because that kind of thing would require planning and organization. Perhaps you have access to information not available in the open?

Would it be far more likely that there is no such conspiracy and what is happening in education is the result of other forces at play? What would happen if teachers were not unionized and had to compete for their jobs? What would happen if teachers lived in a true meritocracy without a sure protections? What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach? I'm sure this would not all the problems, but, what would happen? Why do we have a system that disallows rapid goals-oriented experiments with realistic measurable metrics and a goal to weed out those who are not serving our children?

Lots of questions. Few answers. My gut feeling is that the rich have nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. Every US President, Senator and Representative since I can remember becoming aware of politics has been talking about fixing the education system. I am sure that was the case way before I was born as well. Still, let's say that this has been part of the national conversation for, say, 50 years. Speeches, promises and more speeches. No actions. Nothing fixed.

Is it possible that they are simply incompetent or that they tell us what we want to hear in order to get elected and then the go off and answer to their own interests?

Who knows?

<comment><USER4> " What would happen if teachers were not unionized and had to compete for their jobs? What would happen if teachers lived in a true meritocracy without a sure protections?"

Incidentally, practically every teacher in Finland belongs to an union, and it's unheard of to fire teachers on the basis of bad job performance. A true rationalist looks at the empirical evidence regardless of ideological opinions. You may not "like" the fact that teacher's unions are widespread in many countries which outrank the USA in education. Sometimes the American way of firing people is not the correct fix.

" What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach?"

Now that's something I agree with. Teachers in Finland have Master's degrees, and all teachers have real-world experience by teaching in real schools ("normaalikoulut") during their studies.

"Why do we have a system that disallows rapid goals-oriented experiments with realistic measurable metrics and a goal to weed out those who are not serving our children?"

The problem is that you can't measure learning very well. Measuring test scores means that the teachers will teach the kids to do well on tests instead of learning.

<comment><USER5> He didn't specifically mention measuring test scores, you did. But is your argument that effectiveness of teachers, effective educational outcomes are unmeasurable? Then how do we know that schools aren't doing perfectly fine right now? Why is there even a discussion about improving schools?

Would it be that objective comparisons between US and foreign students is trending downward (while costs go up)? Would it be that more and more a high school diploma (then college degree) means nothing as far as employability?

Is it that the demands of modern economy is not matched up with a supply of highly skilled workers? I think these are all evidence that public education needs modified... not necessarily that someone needs "blamed" for it, just that everyone needs to acknowledge it and be supportive of change.

Now I'd argue that measuring student test scores should be one part of many that go into evaluating teachers. But above all there has to be something that we use to evaluate them, otherwise how do we know it's working... or not... or when or how to try new ideas? It's not just the teachers but the whole system that should be constantly evaluated. Not necessarily to fire someone, but to give feedback and constantly improve.

For sure it could be argued that it's not teachers themselves that are failing students, but the system is structured to be resistant to change and innovation. Metrics that should be used to guide curriculum are graduate employability, job placement, are skills being taught to satisfy the needs of the job market, what's working and what isn't etc.

Introducing some sort of competition will allow schools to figure out the evaluation process themselves. Look at places like Dev Bootcamp that claim 80% of graduates are hired with X salary after graduation. That's succinct way to measure the effectiveness of their teachers. Not that I'm saying this example exactly compares to public school or that a CS solution is applicable to the overall problem but... on a side note why isn't programming and such more prevalent in high school? There's no reason a private company can impart those skills in 9 weeks and public schools couldn't do it in a year. Maybe this type of thing has been incorporated into public schools if so disregard...it's been a while since I've been there. Generally, I think high school was an extreme waste of time in regards to what was actually learned. And then college is four more years with knowledge that itself could have been taught in high school. I tell people all the time, nothing I learned in CS major in College couldn't have been learned in high school. It just wasn't offered.

Likewise for subjects like economics, finance, personal finance, etc. Handling ones finances is something that more Americans need to learn and these lessons are not being taught early enough.

<comment><USER4> Measuring education well is a hard problem. I don't know a good solution for that, but usually schools simply use test scores, which is a pretty bad solution.

"But above all there has to be something that we use to evaluate them, otherwise how do we know it's working... or not... or when or how to try new ideas?"

You can do qualitative analysis instead of quantative. It also works when you use a test that the schools don't / cant directly optimize for, which is probably true for the PISA test.

"There's no reason a private company can impart those skills in 9 weeks and public schools couldn't do it in a year."

While I agree that schools shoud teach programming more, the Dev Bootcamp's 80% metric is not really relevant. It filters only the most exceptional applicants to the program, not the average school kid. Many of those applicants probably already know the basics of programming.

"Generally, I think high school was an extreme waste of time in regards to what was actually learned."

Most people say the same thing here in Finland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is objectively the case that our schools aren't bad in general. Not as good as Finland, but adjusted for demographics about average compared to the rest of Europe: [http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth- abou...](http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa- scores-usa.html).

You can't really compare the school systems of a homogenous country with low income inequality to one where 30% of the population is from either a historically oppressed racial minority group or relatively recent immigrants. It's especially misleading to look at school systems in urban areas, because that's where the U.S. puts most of the poor people.

That is not to say we don't have a problem here in the U.S. But the problem isn't with the education system, it's with how we've dealt with the disadvantaged in our society.

A great example of this is Chicago. Finland spends about $10,000 per year per student. Chicago spends about $20,000 per student. Chicago teachers are paid over $70k/year on average, almost double the $37k/year Finnish teachers are paid. Why does Chicago do so poorly? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it has nothing to do with money or school quality, but the fact that 86% of Chicago's students come from low-income families, and 87% are disadvantaged ethnic minorities.

<comment><USER7> Teachers in Chicago are not paid over $70k/year

[http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/the-in-box- the-7400...](http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/the-in-box- the-74000-lie/)

<comment><USER6> The link you cited is highly misleading. The Chicago metro area is a census tract of 10 million people. The City of Chicago is 2.7 million people. The Chicago school system and the Chicago teachers union disagree about how to compute the number, but CTU cites $71k and CPS cites $76k: [http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/how-much-do- chicago-p...](http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/how-much-do-chicago- public-school-teachers-make/)

Also misleading from that link: Chicago's cost of living is right around the US average: [http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/illinois/chica...](http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/illinois/chicago)

<comment><USER8> You are also required to live IN the city if you are a teacher in CPS. So you can't take that salary and escape to the suburbs after work.

<comment><USER6> Sure but the city of Chicago isn't very expensive. It's cheaper than the suburbs of say DC or NYC or SF by a good margin. $70k is a very good salary in the city. You can get a nice 2BR apartment in Lincoln Park (one of the more expensive areas) for only $1,600 per month. My studio Westchester costs almost that much!

Chicago teachers start around $51k with a bachelors. You can live better with that salary in Chicago than many Googlers earning $100k trying to live in SF...

<comment><USER9> That's not true anymore, the average 2BR cost has gone up to $1800-1900, even higher in places like Lincoln Park.

<comment><USER6> Where are you getting your data? I just moved from Chicago last year and my friends in Lincoln Park were paying around $1600 for a 2BR at Clark/Fullerton. Trulia suggests that this is not uncommon: [http://www.trulia.com/for_rent/Chicago,IL/16_zm/41.920751,41...](http://www.trulia.com/for_rent/Chicago,IL/16_zm/41.920751,41.929645,-87.651894,-87.630292_xy/1p_baths/2p_beds/1200-2000_price/x_map/#for_rent/Chicago,IL/16_zm/41.922747,41.931641,-87.652623,-87.631021_xy/1p_baths/2p_beds/1200-2000_price/x_map/)

Also, the average for places like Lincoln Park is skewed up by all the high- end housing in the area. Places like Andersonville and Edgewater are even cheaper, and very safe and family-friendly: [http://www.trulia.com/rental/3102177710-5406-N-Kenmore- Ave-2...](http://www.trulia.com/rental/3102177710-5406-N-Kenmore- Ave-2S-Chicago-IL-60640#photo-3)

Heck, last year I was paying $1450/month for a 1BR in a full-service high-rise in Streeterville with a 28th-floor view. My wife paid just around $1100 a month for a huge 1BR in Streeterville a couple of years ago. If you've got a roommate, it's totally possible to live in River North on a teacher's starting salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why Linus says that Americans blindly accept the crappiness. Perhaps they accept it because its systemic nature makes a hard thing to fix, but the acceptance isn't blind. Most smart people I know in this country seem to have had some clash with the school system in some form or another. Linus talks mostly about funding, but there's also the huge problem that schools don't seem to be teaching math and science, or anything for that matter, very well. For me personally, thinking back to my youth, I think the most important lesson I learned in school was to be cynical and not trust people in positions of authority, to go off and do things on your own instead of relying on them to catch up with you, which is a helpful lesson but probably not one that you'd want to need to discover so young.

On another topic, I can't help but think some of his description of the American acceptance of the brokenness has something to do with his setting of the northwest. When I lived in Seattle I was really shocked at how unwilling people were to question the status quo, especially when it came to things that could be changed by political action. On topics where more aggressive east coasters would loudly complain or maneuver around, apathy and letting things go as they had been seemed to be the default for most things. Of course the education problem is a national one and these latter traits are not unknown to other parts of the country. But the northwest is less cynical, and more content to let things just drift.

<comment><USER11> I didn't feel his comment was as general as 'blindly accept the crappiness'. What I read (which mirrors my own sentiment) is that it is seen as the normal and proper thing to supplement some local public services with fund raisers because they are underfunded. Firefighters breakfasts and school bake sales.

Seriously we don't pay enough taxes to cover these basic services?

<comment><USER12> If people pay a lot of taxes and still don't have enough money in the budget to finance what's important for them, maybe they should take a look into the local budget and figure out where the money went. I'm sure people of Linus' grade of brainpower could do that. There's also a chance they'd discover that some of the city workers have pretty cushy benefit packages and the cost of it is more than they though it would be. And that they may be underfunded because some of the city workers fly to global warming conferences in luxury hotels in Hawaii on their dime, that is known to happen too. I wonder if that happens in Finland.

There's a long known bureaucratic principle then when the budget is short, first thing you cut is something that the public really feels the need - schools, firefighters, police, if you can find a way to involve sick or orphans - that's the gold. Because if you cut something really wasteful, you a) admit you wasted money and b) never get this money back ever. But if you cut something that is needed or perceived as needed, you show how bad it is hurting and if the situation ever improves, you get everything back at the first chance.

Of course, the alternative of looking at the local budget is to cry for the federal government to take the money from "the rich" and give to the schools - because think of the children!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree that our K-12 sucks, but why is our university system considered good? For instance, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT/FSF, Carnegie-Mellon, UIUC, etc, have made valuable contributions to Computer Science (this is becoming less true as commercial and open-source have overtaken academia in many respects).

Is it possible that our K-12 system is broken is the reason that our kids are capable of pursuing their own interests instead of the rigor of rote learning? As a kid, I remember the easiness of school homework allowed me to spend many afternoons in IRC and learning programming on my own.

E.g, with too much free time on your hands, are you capable of thinking different instead of answering challenging homework? Not defending our K-12, just wondering how bringing in a Confucian system like Asia and Europe would affect the outside-the-box thinking.

<comment><USER14> Only responding to a small part of your argument: For every univ. that is good, there is a Univ. of Phoenix. But, for every univ. that is good you also have Bronx High school of NY... which produced 8 Nobel prize laureates, you have Stuyvesant, which produced 5 Nobel prize laureates. America is much a place of extremes -- you'll often find the best and worst from nearly every category.

<comment><USER15> This is practically the only description of America that you need, and it's only become more apparent to me now that I've left. America is obsessed with extremes.

You could add health care to schools as an example. America is the _last_ place in the world I'd want to be if I broke my arm (especially if I happened to be uninsured at the time), but probably the _first_ place I'd go if I was diagnosed with some obscure cancer.

<comment><USER16> Spoken like someone who hasn't had to receive health care in Africa. Or maybe you have. Can you tell me why you'd rate your experience in rural Angola as so good that you'd rather go there to treat a broken arm than Johns Hopkins?

<comment><USER17> He probably meant "I'd rather be in any other developed nation than the US"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great!

À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.

<comment><USER19> Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents?

Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

<comment><USER20> We have been home educating our four kids. The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc. He isn't handicapped by our abilities or knowledge because we provided him with _tools_ to learn. We've made it clear that his education is ultimately his responsibility. It is his job to learn. We serve as mentors and facilitators by providing opportunity.

The other three are on the same trajectory. I understand that you essentially discounted HN parents as exceptions, but we are also part of a broader community and I see similar results with children whose parents have no clue as to what a HN is.

None of them know haskell, but the oldest is working through The Little Schemer.

<comment><USER21> From personal experience, I would say optimizing for higher IQ at the cost of lower EQ to the extent that homeschooling makes possible is a very poor tradeoff - and it is also an extremely easy one to make.

> The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to > tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc.

FWIW, that sounds like me at 15 and I regret having been homeschooled.

<comment><USER20> At 15 I was learning how to binge drink, smoke weed competitively, disrupt class, and use my fists offensively/defensively.

So ya, I might have some advantage in the EQ department, but I regret having blown my youth in school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Rather ironic as Finland has a comprehensive schooling system he seems to be arguing for selective schools by the back door.

Though in Finland do seem to have the same rigid vocational / academic track similar to Germany where going to the wrong sort of school locks you out of or makes it very hard to go to the top universities.

And comparing his experience a tiny European country with a small and homogenous population and thinking that the USA is going to have the the same challenges or possible solutions is a bit naive.

<comment><USER23> I'm German. I'm not sure what you are talking about. You do need to graduate a "Gymnasium" (years 5-12 or 13, right after elementary school). But any "Gymnasium" will do. Every town has a "Gymnasium", you don't have to move or bake cookies.

However, the "Gymnasium" is just one three schools. Only about 30% of students attend. If your marks get too bad you have to leave for "lower" school. On the other hand it's possible to attend a "Gymnasium" of pupils of a "lower" school if they have good grades. (About 20% of my final class came form "lower" schools.)

The German system is a kind of elitist. And it's criticized that the parents income is too important. But it is elitist regarding to your marks, and not your district.

<comment><USER24> This is what tracking means -- that you get "sorted" into either they "Gymnasium", "Realschule", or "Hauptschule" track after fourth grade. However, this is not what happens in Finland. In Finland, everybody gets the same basic education until age 16, then picks either general upper secondary or vocational upper secondary education (note that vocational upper secondary education does not bar you from attending a university, despite what the GP thinks).

However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

For example, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of the best German universities to study computer science at (according to a recent ranking, _the_ best), has open admission for its CS Bachelor program.

[1] The Bologna Process americanized the system a bit, but it's still mostly about managing supply and demand. If you can't hack it, you won't graduate, but admission is not particularly selective, especially not at the Bachelor level.

<comment><USER25> > However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, > for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive > admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

Well that is because the Abitur (german high-school diploma) is regarded equally no matter which school you attended. From what I gathered the US high school diploma is worth pretty much nothing, without knowing somewhing about the school and/or a high amout of AP-classes. Compared to the German degrees, I'd argue that its actually closer to Realschule (the 10yr grade, which does not qualify for university), than abitur. (Except you are at a top-notch school and take lots of AP-classes)...

<comment> barry-cotter Don't universties and Fachhochschule discriminate between the Abiturs of different Laender? Bavaria has the most difficult and highly regarded one, right?

<comment><USER24> No, universities don't do this (though they can consider other factors, including their own admission exams, but this is rare). This is actually a problem, because the matriculation exams are not the same in all German states, so students in some states have an unfair advantage in those cases where grades matter. Supposedly, in 2014/2015 the difficulty level of the matriculation exam will be standardized.

The problem exists because traditionally, grades had not been much of a factor in admission (outside of a few restricted courses of study such as medicine). German universities (prior to Bologna) were used to running an open admission process and instead enforced selectiveness by failing those students who couldn't handle it early on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Did you know that Sweden (which included Finland) had effectively 100% reading ability as early as the first part of 18th century?

This was due to a decree (Church law of 1686) by Charles XI which required reading skill in order to be allowed to wed. There are complete parochial records ("church examination registers") to study this progress up to level of single individuals.

Surprisingly enough these documents prove that writing ability and reading ability don't need to go hand in hand which has often been thought as self- evident.

tl;dr What you don't see immediately in Finnish/Swedish education is hundreds of years of reading tradition and deep historical commitment to literacy (ability to read), quite unconnected to industrialization (unlike elsewhere), which happened rather late in Sweden and Finland.

More: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Context, pg. 28 "The history of literacy in Sweden" [http://www.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=fron...](http://www.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fi#v=onepage&q&f=false)

"The reading ability campaign in Sweden was carried through almost completely without the aid of proper schools." (pg. 42) Thus there has always been a strong component of household education.

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't find the original story I heard a couple of weeks ago (on the radio), but another egregious sign of the state of public education in the US -- people are jailed for lying about their address in hopes of getting their child into a better school.

The story I recall hearing a couple of weeks ago was about a woman who was periodically homeless and used the address of her baby sitter (or something like that) to get her child into a better school. Now she faces jail time.

Searching google for lying about address to get into a better school resulting in jail time shows that this is not an isolated phenomena.

<comment><USER28> I think you are probably talking about the story linked below. Very sad but I guess it is a form of fraud and theft.

Certainly it indicates something is wrong with our current education system but there are so much other evidence (e.g. dropout rates, test scores, college preparedness) that this is hardly news.

[http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Tanya-McDowell- sentenced-...](http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Tanya-McDowell-sentenced- to-5-years-in-prison-3437974.php)

<comment><USER27> Thanks, that was the story.

Prison time for falsely reporting an address for purposes of schooling? A sad commentary on this society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Bake-sale style funding for the military instead of for schools. That is a fantastic idea. I love it.

<comment><USER8> This bumper sticker has been seen on Volvos since the 1970s.

<comment><USER30> Indeed it has -- for those less familiar:

[http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagelarge/Bake-Sale- Bumpe...](http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagelarge/Bake-Sale-Bumper- Sticker-\(5729\).jpg)

<comment><USER29> I was unfamiliar, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can relate a story of a coworker of mine who recently moved back to Germany with his two kids after living the US for many years.

They looked at some houses and ended up touring the local school and talking to the principal. The conversation went something like this:

      Coworker: You ave a nice school.
      Principal: Thanks.
      Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
      Principal: ?
      Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
      Principal: What do you mean with "space"?
      Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
      Principal: Your kids are required to go to school. We will have space.

The question of space/waitinglists/applications/etc did not occur to the principal.

</comment><comment><USER32> SHOCKING NEWS: Ethnically and linguistically homogeneous people from tiny, frozen nation easier to educate than diverse citizens of world's most- immigrated-to nation. Stay tuned for more surprising revelations, as soon as we hear them!

<comment><USER33> Shocking news: downsides of the US being blamed on demographics and size. This satisfies the population to accept the crappiness.

I've had this conversation too many times, but I'll say it again: Americans (and all people who have not lived abroad) tend to overestimate the differences within their own population and underestimate the differences in outside populations. You overestimate the diversivness of America. This is about the point someone says something stupid like Alabama and California are as different as two different countries.

<comment><USER32> In what way did I overestimate the diversity of America? Our foreign-born population is triple that (by ratio) of Finland, and Finland's foreign-born consist primarily of other scandanavian people who are closely related (Russians and Swedes). Only 80% of Americans are native English speakers while over 90% of Finns are native Finnish.

Note that I'm not just picking on Finland here, I'm pointing out that homogeneous peoples are easier to educate than diverse peoples. Locally nondiverse areas of the USA demonstrate the same phenomenon. Portland, the place that Linus is complaining about, is even more diverse than the USA average with 14% foreign born and 20% of households speaking non-English languages. Almost any major city in the USA is going to have a far more diverse population than Finland, and you'll find that the more diverse the city, the larger its educational problems are.

<comment><USER33> Agreed, Finland is a very homogeneous country, but you just have to look across the Baltic to find a very similar country with similar immigration levels to the US (Sweden), which I happen to be from. Now the difference is what kind of immigrants the US gets versus European countries. The US has a much higher ratio of skilled immigrant workers. It's very difficult to get in to this country without a STEM master's degree, I'd know. Almost nobody moves to Sweden for the reason to work. They move to Sweden because they might be killed in their home country if they don't leave, and it's one of the few countries that can't turn away immigrants who face threats to their lives. Now look at Portland, which I also happen to live in. It might have a lot of immigrants, but come ON! Are you really using Portland as an example of a dysfunctional place? Portland? Personally, I think this is one of the best places in this country. If I'd go by the correlation then I'd say more diverse populations result in better communities, but I wouldn't go that far.

I'll admit that diverse populations do create problems, but I think it's a cop out for people to blame that for any little problem you might be facing. Man up and take some responsibility.

And this is the point where people start using size as an argument, and how states within the country differ sooo much. I've had long discussions with several people saying that New York and Texas are as different as France and Germany. Which is just ludicrous and shows how little they know about the world.

Btw, Russians and Finns are not closely related in any sense. If you said that to a Finn they'd probably kill you, just giving a heads up. Swedes and Finns are more intertwined by history and culture than related in the genetic or language sense. If you told a Finn that they're related to Swedes they might kill you slightly for that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something that I didn't understand - why Linus thinks it is completely nuts that people help finance their kids' education locally? Why the only sane thing is to give money to some anonymous amorphous central government, and then ask for some of it back to build the school and hope some bridge to nowhere or festival of cowboy poetry or some bigwig's 500K/night hotel bills don't come first? I understand you can disagree which way is more efficient - but why the local way is described as insane "to any sany person"?

<comment><USER34> I'm from Scandinavia and I think I can answer that. Over here, there's a pretty strong sentiment that having parents that are well off shouldn't give you an unfair advantage to people whose parents are less well off. Equal opportunities and all that.

For instance, in Denmark education is free, including university. You even get a monthly allowance from the state if you study.

That's probably why if you want to live out the American dream Denmark is a better place than the US to do it, because despite high taxes statistically you are far more likely to move on the social ladder in Denmark:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html>

<comment><USER12> >>>> Over here, there's a pretty strong sentiment that having parents that are well off shouldn't give you an unfair advantage to people whose parents are less well off.

This is both counterfactual (money _alone_ matters very little - worst schools routinely spend per pupil more or roughly the same as good schools with no improvement in results) and futile. Of course children of successful educated parents would be better off that children growing in broken up family with absentee parents and zero attention to their education. The only way it could be otherwise is to drag everybody down to the lowest possible level. The whole talk about "unfair advantage" sounds insane to me - why not then beautiful people or smart people have "unfair advantage"? Let's do it like in the Vonnegut's _Sirens on Titan_ (or _Harrison Bergeron_ ) - let everybody be dragged down to the lowest level, let everybody has poorest education that we can provide to everybody, let everybody be as ugly as the ugliest person alive, as weak as weakest person alive, as dumb as dumbest person alive, as miserable and sick as the most miserable and sick person alive. This is only way it can be "fair". And people seriously think this approach is not only sane, but the ONLY sane one? Just boggles the mind.

The problem is that redistribution does not solve the problem. Moreover, by becoming obsessed with redistribution solving the real problems only becomes harder. We are way beyond the stage where the money were the actual issue, all bake sales aside. The problem is much harder and has to do with the community, the general environment, the history, the social engineering failures, there's a huge mess there, but it there not because of the lack of government involvement. If anything, partially it's there exactly because of this involvement, which failed to predict the consequences.

>>>> That's probably why if you want to live out the American dream Denmark is a better place than the US to do it

Highly doubt it. Somehow where I live there's Google, Facebook, and hundreds others already done, and thousands others in the making, and in Denmark you have.... well, I couldn't name one, to be frank. Maybe there are some, but not many heard of them. Somehow Stroustrup is in Texas and DHH is in Chicago, and we don't have a huge wave of US citizens moving to Denmark to pursue their dreams.

Maybe if you move there, you have higher chance of secure mediocre living, but it's not exactly what people call "American dream".

<comment><USER35> The phrase "American Dream" traditionally has meant something much more like "secure mediocre living" than the ease of starting a multinational corporation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Linus talking about politics is... still politics, even if one happens to agree with him.

<comment><USER37> HN seems to have a soft spot for educational policy. This makes sense when you consider the importance of education for both a hacker's work and play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> One thing Linus didn't mention about Finland and education which some of you may find interesting and of note; is that the right to education is enshrined in the Finnish constitution. <http://www.oph.fi/english/education> Coming from a family of educators I can't help but think this plays an important role in cementing Finland's position at the top of the OECD education rankings.

Furthermore, being a Scotsman and understanding how the Scots have long since had a history of free universal education, I think it's fair to say that this played an important part in the industrial revolution. It's also worth mentioning that Scotland is about to have it's independence referendum next year and high on the list for those who would see Scotland have self- determination is a written constitution. The UK is an anomaly in the developed western world for not having a written constitution and many of us would like to see free universal education enshrined into our new constitution, should we vote for independence.

<comment><USER39> The right to an education is enshrined in many US states' constitutions as well. That's unfortunately not enough to make the difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Linus is correct to disagree with the Oregon bill, and it's too bad that he didn't point to an existing example in another state with some cultural similarities to Oregon. Finding out what learning environment, inside or outside school, is optimal for each learner is definitely a worthy goal, especially if means are then provided to obtain that environment. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123>

so I'm always glad to discuss how to improve opportunities for learners with other participants here. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."

[http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...](http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.html)

Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.

<http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf>

<http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html>

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two futher reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment

[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html)

and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.

[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index.html)

So Linus notes, in the article submitted here, that where he lives in Oregon, "And now, in the name of fairness, there's a bill (HB 2748) getting pushed through to make that kind of 'out-of-district tuition student' not be an option any more." That's crazy, because Minnesota's pattern of open enrollment has shown that every school district gains by enrolling as many students as it can attract, given the funding pattern here. Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detect the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and give it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.

To achieve the worthy goal mentioned in the article submitted here involves changing the incentives now operating in the school system in most countries, both as to direct regulations and as to funding. Schools should be eager to enroll new students, as a demonstration that the school is meeting learner needs, and then the schools should be rewarded for doing so.

<comment><USER41> Another Minnesotan, who also moved to Chicago and moved back when considering where I wanted to raise a child...

I think part of what Linus gets wrong is that he confuses the correlation of high-property-tax well-funded districts with the performance of the schools in those districts. The high property taxes (or property values or however the market works it out) doesn't make the schools good, it filters _out_ people who are indifferent to the school quality, and filters in people who place a high value on education. Once you cluster a lot of people with those values, the schools will be good; in part because of the peers a student will encounter, and in part because of all of the small but concrete things parents do to make the schools better.

Open enrollment without tuitions doesn't challenge that clustering. To participate in open enrollment in Minnesota, you have to really value education: you have to figure out what the school is you want to attend, you have to figure out the bureaucracy to get in to that school, and you have to provide your own transportation to the school. All those hurdles are just as good as high property taxes or high property values.

The irony is that as a result open enrollment is not as progressive as it might seem. It's something the privileged can use to fix their children's education experience without moving, or allow people to trade effort for income. But it doesn't bring the underprivileged up, because they really don't take advantage of open enrollment. Though perhaps I'm using circular thinking, as I generally consider children with engaged, informed, and capable parents as "privileged" regardless of income; and maybe I even think that way because Minnesota supports that particular lifestyle choice via things like open enrollment. It's a particular life arrangement that I didn't see much of in Chicago, and maybe that's no accident.

<comment><USER35> In the part of Minnesota I grew up in, open enrollment was mainly used to get a kid onto a different school's hockey team, if he didn't make the starting team of his local school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I live in Oregon, although this might limit some of the funding for certain schools, when I was moving between school districts for my son, I could not start him in the new school district until I was a resident. The only public school we looked at that actually followed this method was Riverdale (www.riverdaleschool.com), and it was about $3k/year. Most of the public schools won't let you attend unless you live in their boundaries.

There are a lot of public schools in Portland that have special programs, and you enter via a lottery, so that's kind of cool. However, it's my experience that Portland Public Schools are crippled vs. the surrounding suburban school districts. I don't really understand it, since PPS has a higher funding per kid. Also the facilities in suburbia (sports fields, buildings, etc.) are generally newer and bigger. If I had it to do over again, I'm not sure what state I would try and move to for education.

</comment><comment><USER43> I went to public school with Sheryl Sandberg at North Miami Beach Sr. High School. She was a senior while I was a junior. Her little brother was my lab partner in AP Chemistry.

It really was a fantastic school. Some parents would put their kids in private school but we'd always see them back a semester later when it turned out that the private school wasn't much better than the public one.

I took a look at that school recently and I can tell you that I wouldn't send my kids (if I had any) there:

[http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high- schools/florida/di...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high- schools/florida/districts/miami-dade-county-public-schools/north-miami-beach- senior-high-4851/test-scores)

</comment><comment><USER44> " _Where one of my buddies transferred to my school not because it was more convenient or a better school, but because it was the only Swedish-speaking one that taught Latin, for chissake. And it was all free, and we didn't need to have cookie bake sales._ "

UK: we have the same affluent area/good school, poor area/poor school issues in the UK. I so wish we could get to the situation than Finland finds itself in, but I doubt the government wants to _invest_ in the teaching profession to the extent required.

PS: Buildings don't matter above a certain threshold level. Shiny classroom equipment doesn't matter, just BYOD with a few loaner laptops and WiFi would be good.

</comment><comment><USER45> not on topic, but how comes any time there's a comparison of education or healthcare or overall "social health" of the northern European countries (Linus's Finland, Norway, Sweden) with _any other country in the world_ , the northeners are _always better?_ How did they manage to get so many "social" problems _so right?_ Does anyone know of a good case-study about how these countries reached their current level?

<comment><USER26> Start here: [http://www.globalutmaning.se/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/Davo...](http://www.globalutmaning.se/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/Davos-The-nordic-way-final.pdf)

Then follow up on things that picque your interest. Like social trust and Nordic social contract.

<comment><USER45> 10x kudos! really great resource to start from!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> He says he dislikes a private system but, at the same time, indirectly acknowledges that what makes the system at his district work is the fact that it is partly private. It is partly private because people actually raise money voluntarily and charge outsiders in order to make it work.

<comment><USER47> He does acknowledge that. The problem is not that empowering the community to pay for its education doesn't work; the problem is that different communities have vastly different resources to pull from, both financially and in terms of the soft assets that communities share, like social mobility, intellectual capital, etc. It's unfair because your average low-income school district can't pull off a bond issue or massive fundraiser to fund new initiatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The only thing that chocks me is that there's only one Swedish-speaking school in Finland that teaches Latin (ofc the US public system thing is alarming, bu it's nothing of a bombshell). Am I the weird guy here or ..?

<comment><USER26> No demand. Our university education is not based on liberal arts, which makes the likes of Latin effectively vanity subjects.

Also not having any Catholic tradition lessens the appreciation of Latin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes I have a feeling that the US government is so good at being politically correct that the only thing they care is being politically correct.</comment>


How not to write an API: How Amazon got it wrong - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-coding/how-not-to-write-an-api-54f9331db2d8

<comment><USER2> Their SDK's doesn't sound like human-written SDKs, I guess these might have been auto-generated.

Disclaimer: I have worked at Amazon and have known some of their internal systems. So very much likely above is the case ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> >$request = new MarketplaceWebServiceOrders_Model_ListOrdersRequest();

The underscores indicate that this was written (or generated) at a time where real namespaces were not an option.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like the API is fine. The documentation and PHP implementation are your real complaints here. Amazon docs are always utter garbage, so no surprise there.

If it bothers you so much, get a 3rd-party lib and consume the web API directly.

The real title should be, "How not to support an API".</comment>


Harvard's debate team loses to New York prison inmates - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/harvards-prestigious-debate-team-loses-to-new-york-prison-inmates <comment><USER2> A copy of the transcript with both sides arguments would have been nice for us to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes would love to see transcripts or video!</comment>


Graham, Mayer, & Kaplan on Six Twitter App Models That Stand a Chance - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/04/16/twitter-chirp-showcase/ <comment><AUTHOR> ...And by "stand a chance," I mean "stand a chance of succeeding, or getting acquired, or having a core feature appropriated by Twitter proper."</comment>