What Really Happened at the School Where Every Graduate Got into College - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/28/564054556/what-really-happened-at-the-school-where-every-senior-got-into-college <comment><USER3> This reminds me of things like [https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant- programmers-program/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers- program/) and when I was (briefly --- thankfully) involved in teaching CS courses a few years ago. More than half the class clearly hadn't actually passed the prerequisites. Lots of begging for leniency and remarking, some extremely emotional appeals. It's a difficult situation because if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the _learning_ ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) I chose the latter and don't regret it --- and left that industry before long, although not before accumulating a pretty negative reputation, because my class' grades would always be a _strongly_ bimodal distribution with one of the peaks well below the failing point.

 _School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material._

Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."

<comment><USER4> > if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and > if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely > enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a > huge effect on how well they do.)

American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.

<comment><USER5> > American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in > learning ability.

No, its dedicated, depending on how cynically you view it, to either bringing up the performance of the lower-end of the distribution or to painting public schools as failing to support privatization. It is absolutely _not_ dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability, and, in fact, rather directly addresses the existence of learning disabilities.

<comment><USER4> It is dedicated to bringing the performance of the lower end _all the way up to the level of the higher end_. This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be able to learn faster.

If an innovation in education improves outcomes by 3% for stupid students and 5% for smart students (you know... because they respond better to education), that's actually a bad thing from the conventional viewpoint, because "the gap" has widened instead of narrowing.

<comment><USER5> > It is dedicated to bringing the performance of the lower end all the way up > to the level of the higher end.

No, its not. (Though if it continues without change it will probably have the effect of narrowing that gap to near zero, but largely by bringing the higher end down through neglect rather than by bringing the lower end up to it.)

> This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be > able to learn faster.

Its quite possible if you acknowledge that but then consciously plan to neglect serving the upper end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When you financially incentivize teachers to hit measurable data targets, don't be surprised when they game the system to hit those targets. The same happens in every industry and job. If I were to tell software developers that their bonus was dependent on hitting story point metrics, they would suddenly be exceeding the story point metrics I desired, despite in reality the same amount of work being completed.

The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.

<comment><USER7> Your observation is related to something called Goodhart's Law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering.

I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.

<comment><USER6> The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company.

Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.

<comment><USER8> "especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible."

That's ridiculous. Math, science, vocabulary, history, and reading comprehension can all be tested effectively, with little risk of "gaming" it.

(at least at the level of a tpyical high scholl curriculum)

<comment><USER9> Especially high school math can be gamed effectively. For "word problems" you can drill students to look for keywords and they will arrive at the right result without understanding the problem.

My wife teaches at a 4-year state school and tells me that one of her students did just that, she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next, this was chemistry, not math.

Reading comprehension is harder to game.

<comment><USER10> > you can drill students to look for keywords and they will arrive at the > right result without understanding the problem

> she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next

That doesn't sound like she arrived at the right result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A german friend of mine always used to say:"In any other mission critical profession, if you are a doctor, a craftsman or an airplane engineer, if you fuckup something too badly, you will be forbidden to continue working in your profession for misconduct(atleast in Germany). In our job, people can ruin lives, destroy whole companies and then have that seen as experience on their CV."

As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".

<comment><USER12> I think the current state of affairs is an acknowledgment of the fact that ___we don 't know how to engineer software systems_ __.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At my high school they pulled bs like this too. We all had to apply to our local community College, which had a 100% acceptance rate. They also had a 100% graduation by changing anyone who wouldn't pass to a junior.

<comment><USER14> Both sound like good ideas to me. Community college is generally better than ending your education in high school.

And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, it seems merely being accepted is the wrong metric. From the article:

 _The school district won 't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall._

<comment><USER16> It seems to me, and the part of the story that's missing, I would bet that the Administration applied on behalf of the "graduates" to the community college with a 100% acceptance rate.

I think what's most impressive is how they've convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The majority of Ballou's 2017 graduating class missed more than six weeks of > school

If not for the investigation, would anyone have ever noticed?

<comment><USER18> I doubt many would want to notice, as they are deeply invested in the school system.

<comment><USER19> What we're invested in is the idea that someone has found a magic bullet that can ease our consciences of the deep injustice done to kids in poverty. The semblance of success makes it possible to say, "well, I guess all those failing schools are failing because they're not doing what Ballou is".

<comment><USER18> Public schools are very good at the facade of success - graduation rates, course descriptions, claims of excellence, glitzy buildings, education levels of teachers, money spent, committee reports, etc. But any measurement of educational results in students is relentlessly dismissed and attacked.

<comment><USER20> I think private schools use a lot of the same signals for success as public schools, however their students are often shielded from the downsides due to circumstances out of their control (their parents/family background), and upsides amplified.

<comment><USER18> Since parents are paying the tuition to private schools, the parents are in a strong position to demand results. Having paying customers makes for a very different dynamic.

<comment><USER20> > _results_

Have you ever met a private school student who came from a well off family and their parents didn't demand "results" from them, and they still have a nice life than most people?

Because the opposite is less likely to be true for those who didn't come from a well off family, regardless of the "results".

These "results" increasingly are meaningless when most people are just prodded through mindlessly to the next step and even more so when family member / family friend was already going to give you a nice job anyways…

I guess it also doesn't help either when people increasingly conflate the "results" with knowledge or education in of itself… at best they are mere approximations, however from the article, i seriously doubt we're anywhere near the the best…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These numbers are not really that different than many underserved communities just this school's spotlight in the media makes all of this seem shocking. Also let's just be real here about the reality of future prospects among most people here in the U.S. but even more specifically the kids in the article- many of them know it just doesn't matter. Not so much that things are desperate or hopeless but the goal at the end may not seem that great so they opt to enjoy their lives in that moment. I'm afraid still this played out scapegoating is the reason collectively everyone will look at a situation like this and think "Well this is why we can't find super high achieving versions of these kids". No, they exist and also there are plenty of other situations worse than this and different groups of people involved as well. The solution is actually really simple- stop pretending to be very inclusive while actually being very exclusive. Demonstrate how education can lead to a fulfilling life to these kids. Not speeches or abstract situations but real living examples, people they grew up around, etc.. Really you can only tell yourself so much that your "paving the road" to help people that come after you until the realization sets in this will be as far they let me go and everyone like me too. Just wait a few more years like this and we will see all sorts of people "gaming" all sorts of "systems".

</comment><comment><USER22> The real question here is what colleges are admitting kids that can't read or write? Is affirmative action really so strong that these colleges accepted every kid from a HS where the average SAT score is in the 16th percentile? Or did the high school also help the kids fudge their applications?

<comment><USER23> Some community colleges (and even a few state colleges) in the USA are required as part of their charters or funding to accept any student who graduates high school in that area for at least one "trial" semester.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is crap. Here in India at least, attendance has nothing to do with college admissions.

One can study better from home anyway. Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either.

This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated.

The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least.

Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage?

The teacher ought to be sacked.

<comment><USER25> American school system is absolutely bizarre. I'm from across the pond - <USER2> probably cut 80% of classes in my last year of school ( I ended up transferring to a magnet school in 4th grade ). Most of my "will likely succeed" peers cut between 20% to 40% of the classes that year.

Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade.

If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in _all_ test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me.

Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%.

I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there anyone who actually genuinely benefits from this theatre?

<comment><USER27> > Playing by the game can have financial benefits. If an evaluation score is > high enough to reach the "highly effective" status, teachers and > administrators can receive $15,000 to $30,000 in bonuses.

Fraud can pay very well.

<comment><USER28> If their base pay is just above the poverty level, not really.

There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. _Then_ they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass.

I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.

<comment><USER19> I think it's unfair to blame the parents, en masse. Of course there are some crappy parents. But in many cases, they are just yesterday's underserved children, born into a situation where the prospects of escape are extremely slim. The cycle thus continues to their children.

If we actually care about today's children, we have to acknowledge the reality that not every parent is fully equipped to help their kids succeed and commit to trying to intervene _this generation_ , to hopefully help many future generations of children.

As a teacher in Baltimore, I met parents and guardians of just about every stripe you can imagine. Almost every one of them _wanted_ the best for their kids. A lot of them lacked the savvy, wealth and social capital to navigate a better path for their kids.

<comment><USER28> I blame the parents, even when they aren't directly to blame, when they abuse teachers and administrators for not passing their obviously unqualified child. Parents don't seem to care if their child learns as much as whether they can leave the school system.

Really though, the politicians are exacerbating the problems. Not only do they abandon communities in need, they cut education funding across the board, and then put price tags on the schools - pass students in my district or we cut the money even more. Meanwhile, they spend more on the military and kick the can down the road.

<comment><USER19> I never once had pressure from a parent of a failing student. The only time I was pressured by a parent was from one of my more well adjusted students. The "what can we do to make this B an A type thing". Most of the parents I had put a frightening amount of faith in me to open opportunities for their kid and trusted my judgment.

I also went out of my way (as is typical in impoverished schools) to let them know as early as possible if their kid was falling behind. As the teacher, it's on you to figure out how to make time to try to coach kids back on track. It's unbelievably overwhelmed to try to do this for a couple dozen kids at a time, each with unique failure patterns to address.

The pressure comes from administration, whose asses are on the line to have good looking metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Many teachers we spoke to say they were encouraged to also follow another > policy: give absent or struggling students a 50 percent on assignments they > missed or didn't complete, instead of a zero. The argument was, if the > student tried to make up the missed work or failed, it would most likely be > impossible to pass with a zero on the books.

It sounds like the grading system is broken.

Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do?

Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?

</comment><comment><USER30> The line I abhor is this...

 _" It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space."_

This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can't pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you're just not measuring the learning that's happening here.

<comment><USER31> That particalur quote is just saying that they don't uphold the commonly seen philosophy (creditted to NCLB and friends' funding requirements) of automatically failing kids who can't get to school almost every day.

<comment><USER30> Right. But it's worded very slippery. And per the rest of the article, most of the kids really aren't learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> while this may be extreme, don't think that the same types of things don't happen in more affluent schools \- special projects, make up work, multiple times to take a test, parents and administrators pressuring teachers, etc.

The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.</comment>


Breakout Companies: Get the Same Knowledge About a Company as Investors - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-spectrum/notion-breakout-jobs-memo-1-8ca346f97242 <comment><USER2> an emotional op-ed with lots of assertions but light on facts</comment>


Dissecting the GZIP format (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infinitepartitions.com/art001.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a precompressed template system I built for an old Python Tornado webserver.

The system precompressed the static parts of the template, with matches only self-referencing inside each span of static content.

The dynamic parts of the template were prefixed with 'literal' tags.

This meant that serving a gzipped stream was as simple as concatenation, just as it was for normal uncompressed templates.

It could have been a lot cleverer - it could have huffman'ed the dynamic parts, for example - but it was an easy win.

Later, our Tornado servers were migrated behind a caching proxy and the whole purpose of serving up (partially) compressed pages vanished.

<comment> cgrand-net Done that too. Kind of like userland distributed vectored IO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920822)

</comment><comment><USER2> Figure 2 is incorrectly titled "LZW compression"?

<comment><USER4> Is this a question!</comment></comment>


Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-21/nestl-makes-billions-bottling-water-it-pays-nearly-nothing-for%20%20https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-21/nestl-makes-billions-bottling-water-it-pays-nearly-nothing-for <comment><USER2> Water should have a cost when it is scarce, but water isn't scarce in Michigan. It should be free. Complaining about bottling water in Michigan is like complaining about a company compressing air.

The idea that public rights shouldn't be sold on the private market is lunacy. Nestle selling me a S. Pelagrino bottle doesn't impact an African kid getting water even a little bit. It's like arguing we should ban farming because nobody should starve.

edit:should be nearly free

<comment><USER3> No.

That is a completely backwards way to see things. Consider this: Flint, MI had a widely publicized water crisis due to cost cutting in water treatment and supply. Due to these cost saving measures, over 10,000 children got exposed to high levels of lead. Again, I repeat: this was due to cost saving measures from a financially bankrupt city/state. At the same time this happens, companies are allowed to generate _millions_ in profits from these very same resources?

You say Nestlé selling you bottled water doesn't impact "an African kid getting water", well excuse me but it very well does. If the state charged a fair price for the water, fair in light of the obscene profit they are set to make from processing that water, then those millions in revenue could be used, oh I don't know, to properly treat water so tens of thousands of children don't get poisoned, maybe.

<comment><USER4> I don't see how the Flint Water Crisis is connected to Nestle. That was a political decision from the government reeling from the fallout of the loss of US car manufacturing in the area. The company wasn't stealing the town's water as far as I know.

<comment><USER5> > I don't see how the Flint Water Crisis is connected to Nestle.

Part of the reason municipalities are short on money for their water systems, is that companies get the same water (or at least, from the same watershed) for free.

Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and every other citizen pays for water? Why can't they pay municipal rates for municipal water, like Coca-Cola and all the beer breweries do.

<comment><USER6> > Is it so wrong to ask Nestle to at least pay the same rate you and I and > every other citizen pays for water? Why can't they pay municipal rates for > municipal water, like Coca-Cola and all the beer breweries do.

Yes, it is unreasonable, unless Nestle taps into municipal supply like all other municipal customers.

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely fascinating to me how corporations can have so many tireless defenders of their rights.

I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the natural resources they use to line their pockets.

<comment><USER6> > It's absolutely fascinating to me how corporations can have so many tireless > defenders of their rights.

This specific corporation happen not to be a customer of a municipal water system, which means that that this specific municipal water system does not get to charge it.

Let me convert it into a non-abstract thing - I'm going to make an educated guess that you drink either coffee or tea. Why are you not paying for coffee or tea that you got from a place A to a municipal cafeteria that exists in the place A municipality even though you are not getting your coffee or tea there?

> I wonder if you would feel as strongly about citizens being poisoned as you > do about corporations being made to reasonably compensate the state for the > natural resources they use to line their pockets.

The citizens were being poisoned because the _democratically elected, pro people, anti-corporation government_ decided that people of Flint, MI, did not need super clean water that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> San Francisco Bay Area tap water is safe to drink and is held to a lot higher safety standard than bottled water. Also the source of most bottled-water is no different than the source for tap. Bottled-water is often priced at a 2000%+ markup.

[http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=447](http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=447)

[https://www.quora.com/Is-San-Francisco-city-tap-water- safe-t...](https://www.quora.com/Is-San-Francisco-city-tap-water-safe-to- drink)

<comment><USER8> Sure. Safe to drink but most Bay Area water tastes damn awful.

I can't stand drinking tap water in the Bay unless it is ice cold.

Some bottled water tastes bad too. Getting the stuff that isn't bottled anywhere near california always seems to taste better.

I use a 6 stage water filtration system and it is a life saver. I didn't drink water regularly at all in the Bay until I had that. Still don't drink much water at most restaurants here...

I'm not a defender of bottled water but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that all bottled water is equal to tap water. Especially SF tap water. It definitely isn't. Some actually tastes decent.

<comment><USER9> I drink several cups of water per day straight out of the tap in San Francisco, and have done so for about 6 years. It tastes fine to me, which is to say it doesn't taste like anything. I also have a water filter and pitcher that I keep in my fridge, and while ice cold water is certainly nicer, it's rarely worth the trouble for me to refill it. I'm curious why you think the water tastes bad straight from the tap, and even more curious if you would be able the distinguish it from your preferred water source in a blind taste test.

<comment><USER10> Have you ever had water from anywhere else? The minerals in the bay area water or whatever the chemical difference is makes it awful compared to tap water elsewhere.

>even more curious if you would be able the distinguish it from your preferred water source in a blind taste test.

Of course you would. Tap water isn't purified in any regard to only contain hydrogen and oxygen. It's filled with all kinds of other crap with just certain crap removed.

<comment><USER9> I grew up with well water from the Midwest, which oddly enough is claimed by many to be very tasty _because_ of its mineral content (but bad for pipes and appliances). I've also heard people say that distilled water actually tastes bad or uncomfortable precisely because it is very nearly just hydrogen and oxygen. I'm still skeptical that there's any difference that could be discerned in a blind test.

<comment><USER11> "Minerals" is a blanket category. That's like saying that you'll like flour water because you like sugar water because they're both fall into the category of carbs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The plant locations should probably tighten up their water laws so that they're getting at least something back from Nestle, but the real wrongdoers in this scheme might be the consumers ...

There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally- damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.

If Nestle didn't have such a lucrative market to fleece, Nestle's profits would be far less impressive.

<comment><USER13> > There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with > perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally- > damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better > for them.

It always seems odd that bottled water gets trashed a lot more than bottled soda, when soda is both worse for the consumer's health, and probably has a higher environmental footprint (since it's not just the water, but the water plus whatever sweeteners and chemicals get added).

True, soda doesn't taste the same as tap water, but bottled water doesn't taste the same as tap water a lot of the time, either. Some people also prefer the convenience of buying a bottle of water, and it would seem strange to say: "Hey, it's fine to buy something in the bottle if you're doing so for the flavor, but if you're doing so for the sake of convenience, that's terrible."

<comment><USER14> If every house had a Coke faucet that could supply limitless supplies of soda nearly free, your argument might be more appropriate.

You'll find plenty of people arguing against sodas in threads that talk about soda, this one, however is about the water, no one is suggesting that soda is a better alternative.

<comment><USER13> You seem to have missed the two reasons I gave for why people may want to buy bottled water. Yes, people have faucets, but the water coming out of your tap often tastes different from the water you buy (yes, it might also be coming out of a tap, but there are many taps across the U.S. with varying taste). And there are various levels of purification - if people really believe that tap water is exactly the same as purified water, then home water filters are an enormous scam. But I've never heard anyone argue that.

Another reason people might buy a bottle of water is because of convenience - if someone's taking a long drive, for example, it's easier to buy a bottle of water at a gas station and drink it periodically than pull over every time they want to drink.

The reason I bring up soda is because there's sometimes less animosity towards soda than bottled water. Some schools will even ban bottled water, but allow bottled soda[1] - naturally leading to an increase in the less healthy option.

[1] [http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads- to-u...](http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads-to- unexpected-results/)

<comment><USER14> When I lived in a house with water that had a weird chlorinated taste, I bought an under-sink filter that rendered the water tasteless. 3000 gallons per filter, or around 24,000 bottles worth. Or around a penny per gallon (including the faucet dispenser.... about a third of that for the filter only)

When I go for a drive, I take a refillable bottle with me, and generally fill it up at the hotel in the morning. Though I will admit to buying a bottled water from time to time.

But I don't think that a significant percentage of the 50 billion water bottles sold every year are going to people that don't have convenient access to tap water.

<comment><USER13> I guess this is what I don't understand. Whenever this comes up, people usually act as if bottled water is no different than what comes out of people's taps. As the conversation goes on, though, people start talking about the filtration systems they've bought, or about having the water tested.

If we all know that tap water in many cases isn't the equivalent of filtered water, or that tap water can vary from location to location, why do these conversation invariably always start by pretending that there's no difference between bottled water and water straight from someone's tap?

<comment><USER14> I live in the SF Bay area now and use no filter and the water is fine.

My parents have a well and when they were concerned with their water they subscribed to a water delivery service that dropped off reusable 5 gallon bottles every couple weeks that is still orders of magnitude better than individual bottles. (Each 5 gallon bottle replaces 40 16 oz bottles and is refilled)

One of their neighbors installed a big (200 gallon?) water tank and hired a service to refill it. My parents ultimately ended up installing a filtering system when it became clear that the well wasn't going to get better. Which would have been cheaper that the water deliveries long term, but less than 2 years later the city ended up bringing municipal water to their neighborhood.

There are lots of more environmentally friendly alternatives to single serve bottles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Long, long long article, and then:

> Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the > bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it > accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage

Right. So all this stuff about water shortages, the amount of water being used, the amount being charged for the water is meaningless. The entire article is pointless.

(I also loved the way they tried to blame Pakistan's poor infrastructure _on_ Nestlé.)

</comment><comment><USER16> The facts are scattered throughout the article but here's one of the more shocking: "In San Bernardino, Calif., Nestlé has long paid the U.S. Forest Service an annual rate of $524 to extract about 30 million gallons, even during droughts".

<comment><USER17> 30 million gallons is about 92 acre ft of water. California uses 70 million acre ft of water per year. Alfalfa in California uses 5.3 million acre ft/year. So this plant uses 1/10 the amount of water a very small farm would use. It is hard to imagine it but 30 million gallons is a very small amount of water. If the article said "In San Bernardino, Calif., Nestlé has long paid the U.S. Forest Service an annual rate of $524 to extract about 92 acre ft of water, even during droughts" people would think "That's not much".

<comment><USER18> For those like me for whom "acre ft" means absolutely nothing, it's about 5,172Hhds[1]. Just kidding, it's 1,233 cubic metres, so 92 acre feet =~ 113,500m³.

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

<comment><USER17> It sounds a bit weird but the first large irrigation projects were used for farming. When you irrigate your fields (measured in acres) to a depth of about a foot each time, it is the natural unit for large water use. Why switch?

<comment><USER18> Who the hell would "irrigate" their fields to a depth of 1 foot? That's not irrigation, it's a literal flood!

Unless you're growing rice in a paddy I guess?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's the problem?

I buy bottled water as a drink on the go. I'm perfectly happy drinking tap water that's been bottled. If I've got the choice between a fizzy drink or water, I usually prefer water, thanks.

When I was a kid in the 80s there used to be public water fountains, now there aren't. I think we're all a little more germ paranoid these days too, so i doubt people would even use them if given a choice to buy a bottle of water for a £1 or use a fountain for free.

I mean the guy argues against himself:

 _Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage_

The only thing I wish was better was that it wasn't plastic bottles, but I always recycle them if I can.

<comment><USER20> I take a jam jar containing tap water when out and about ('preserving jar' in US I think). Being made of glass it doesn't leach chemicals _plus_ it cleans conveniently in the dishwasher. It fits fine in a backpack and you can protect it in a sock if there's a danger of it rolling around, say in the boot of a car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Surely they pay some amount for marketing, distribution, inventory, production, capital equipment investment, etc.

And when we buy bottled water, we aren't _really_ buying water. We're buying some combination of marketing and convenience.

</comment><comment><USER22> In Germany I usually drink water from the tap, whenever in the US[1] tap water is so full of Chlorine I can't get near it. Even more repulsive when Coke smells heavily of Chlorine.

[1] I only have east and west coast experience

<comment><USER23> I grew up drinking the chlorinated tap water of New Jersey. It never tasted good. Water filtration systems, such as under-sink systems, solve that problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "with a footprint about the size of Buckingham Palace"

Not an authorised unit. See: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg- standards-conv...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards- converter.html)

1 Buck Pal area is roughly equal to 3.706 MicroWales, 77,000 sq m, 19 acres or 19 football (soccer) pitches.

</comment><comment><USER25> Or phrased another way: Consumers are willing to pay billions for nearly free tap water in bottle form. Why? Beats me.

<comment><USER26> You're buying convenience in a relatively sterile container, with refrigerated contents. Physically, that bottle of water is 99% identical to the bottle of Diet Coke sitting next to it, but the logic of _that_ product is never questioned.

<comment><USER27> That's hardly true. People criticise soft drinks all the time.

In any case, the difference between a cake with arsenic and a cake without arsenic is going to be significantly less than 1%, but I'm going to make my decision based on that less-than-one-percent.

<comment><USER13> > People criticise soft drinks all the time.

For health reasons. They're very rarely criticized for their environmental impact, when they're impact is almost certainly greater than bottled water (since they're not just water and a plastic bottle, but water, a plastic bottle, plus sweeteners and additives).

Some schools have banned bottled waters but allowed bottled soft drinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting to see this brought up again by Businessweek but this is far from news – Nestlé and PepsiCo were featured in the 2009 documentary _Tapped_ , which came to many of the same conclusions, and brought up other potential health issues with bottled water, such as the use Bisphenol-A (BPA) in bottle plastics.

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook/Goggle makes billions bottling information it pays nearly nothing for.

</comment><comment><USER23> How many people here installed and use an under-sink water filtration system or full-home system? I've been using them for about 12 years, re-filling liter-sized nalgene bottles as needed.

For a long time, I've wondered whether a filtration system in every home would change people's water consumption habits: would people still buy bottled water despite having superior-quality water available from a tap? As the expression goes-- You can lead a horse to water but you can't teach it to drink.

</comment><comment><USER30> Municipalities would do well to remove sodium fluoride & other industrial by- products...I mean "health additives"

[http://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/](http://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/)

[http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/health/fluoride-iq- neurotoxin-...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/health/fluoride-iq-neurotoxin- study/index.html)

<comment><USER31> You wouldn't believe how controversial that is in the U.S. self styled rationalists will call you a quack for even mentioning fluoride.

Meanwhile, our internal organs are getting nicely calcified like a bright, shiny american dental association smile.

<comment><USER32> Arterial calcification is largely reversible with healthy lifestyle, adequate vitamin K etc.

Unless you are talking about pineal calcification, of which there doesn't seem to be much in the way of provable negative consequences within normal ranges and is indeed mostly mentioned by new age psychedelic gurus.

And I'm not sure why we should assume fluoride is the main culprit for any of this. But sure, there's a dose-response curve for just about everything.

<comment><USER31> Have you read the Jennifer Luke study? The pineal gland is the only organ in the brain that is not behind the blood brain barrier. It is responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm. Melatonin synthesis is a core aspect of our health.

Jennifer Luke found that in gerbils, high fluoride hastened female sexual development and was associated with a diminished circadian rhythm.

Even if fluoride levels in water are "fine" (as in "deal with it.") for most people, its mass medication and there are likely people who are adversely affected by it. It's absolutely unnecessary.

[http://www.slweb.org/luke-1997.html](http://www.slweb.org/luke-1997.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> People aren't paying for the water. They are paying for packaging and distribution and its worth it. You literally can't refute this.

</comment><comment><USER34> New Zealand has some of the same issues when it comes to access. There's recently been a massive influx of foreign companies who've been granted consent to extract near limitless quantities of water from aquifers, giving back very little to the communities they operate in. Sadly there seems to be very little political will to change this.

</comment><comment><USER35> I saw the same at my hometown (São Lourenço-MG, Brazil). It's not fresh news Nestlé doing this.

[https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/em-guerra- contra-a...](https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/em-guerra-contra-a- nestle-3372.html) (pt-BR)

</comment><comment><USER36> I still don't understand why cities are giving out their water for free to multi-billion dollar companies.

</comment><comment><USER37> We have the same problem here in Brazil in São Lourenço city, near to São Paulo. Nestlé has acquired a large aquatic park and now sale the water and accelerate the process to extract water and with this eliminate the natural minerals proprieties on the water killing all the ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is because governing bodies don't want to put a price on water. Yes, there needs to be another way to ensure Nestle is not taking advantage of natural resources, but setting a precedent for charging for water isn't a great option either.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's a BBC series of documentaries called "The Foods that make billions" that covers this topic.

Episode one is about liquid gold: bottled water.

Nestlé is just one of them, Coca Cola is another one.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w8cll](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w8cll)

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a bridge to sell you.

<comment><USER32> That root of that phrase was predicated on people trying to get rich like bridge owners did in times past, although obviously was used by con artists to trick people much like email scams now.

But it is very relevant.

Privatization of public access routes is logically equivalent to privatization of natural resources, and there's no fair way to justify either, there's just the historical application of violence and subsequent commodification.

But commodification of the commons is approximately as relevant to the concept of a free market as markets for slaves... which is to say not at all, and actually contradicts it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How horrible for a company to make a good profit!</comment>


Growth hacking: unearth whats not obvious - <AUTHOR> http://www.guotime.com/2014/04/growth-hacking-unearth-whats-obvious/

<comment><USER2> "Building a useful product is easy" ... stopped reading.</comment>


Building a network capture probe with Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://enterprise.cloudshark.org/blog/2016-03-31-packet-capture-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> This marketing seems a bit too transparent. "Install our client software... on a _Raspberry Pi!_ "

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that's just a script anyone could write. Looks like it just makes one API call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> does it capture wifi, assuming there is a wifi dongle of course?

<comment><USER3> It looks like it's just using dumpcap, so yes? Whatever Wireshark can do I would suspect.</comment></comment>


Free the postcode - <AUTHOR> http://www.freethepostcode.org/

<comment><USER2> Also very relevant:

<http://openstreetmap.org/> (and <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe someone would like to write a site that allows for updating postcodes in any country? And, ofcourse, provide queries via an api.

<comment><USER4> There are various different query APIs available. Google maintains a useful list:

      http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/web/resources-non-google-geocoders

One of the major problems is that the use of the data returned by many of these services is restricted. There are a couple of entirely free solutions. For example, I put together Fetegeo <http://fetegeo.org/> to show that it is possible to have fairly decent search facilities with solely free data (though the currently available data sources all have various limitations). I keep hoping that someone will take Fetegeo and plug-in data sources like Openstreetmap.</comment></comment>


RWW Hacker Poll: Is OSX Still Developer Friendly? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/04/hacker-poll-is-osx-still-developer-friendly.php#more

<comment><USER2> I just spent $1000 on a MacBook, but damned if I'm going to spend 5 bucks on developer tools.

 _drinks 6 energy drinks a day, has 5 pages of iPhone games_

</comment><comment><USER3> Who are all these developers that can't spend $5 on a interim release of developer tools? Perhaps they should reconsider being developers, just stick with XCode 3 or wait for Lion.

So many people just seem to want to bitch about Apple because it makes them feel better about their technology choices.

<comment><USER4> I really wish the author had excluded the $5 issue altogether, because for me, it's completely irrelevant. It's all the other factors that drive me nuts.

* Download a large 4.5GB file

* Spend a decent amount of time installing XCode

* Sacrifice 15GB of disk space to an app they likely won't use

I upgraded to a 256 GB SSD in January. This means that every GB counts on my disk. I never launch XCode. There are a couple of utilities included that are useful, but I literally never use any of the XCode tools, and I have no intention of developing an iOS application.

Running DaisyDisk against my /Developer folder shows that 8.4 GB of the space is occupied by "Platforms", which contains iOS related platform and simulator files.

For developers who don't develop specifically for OS X/iOS, there is a lot of baggage here. I'd still happily pay the $5 if I could get a trimmed down "XCode Express" install that didn't include any of the platform target stuff. As it stands now, I'm afraid to delete it because I don't want to go through the hassle of downloading and reinstalling (however you do that) such a large package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Xcode is $5 on the App Store, but included in either (Mac or iOS) annual developer program's $99.

What's more, so far App Store software updates have been free. So even if you paid $5, it may be the last $5 until Xcode 5, if ever.

If you've ever had to build GCC from scratch, you'd be willing to pay $5 just for that. And Apple gives you an IDE and by far the best interface to performance tools I have ever seen (Instruments).

</comment><comment><USER6> $5 is annoying, but not so much that is going to impact my decision regarding a $2000+ purchase in the slightest.

Honestly I think they should just include an xcode license with any of the Pro models.

<comment><USER2> I suspect it will be included for free with Lion. The $5 charge is consistent with Apple's interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

<comment><USER7> It has been included for free with past versions of OS X. (And, consequently, with every Mac Apple has sold as long as the developer tools have existed.)

This might well change but we don't yet know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Initial setup is always a one time-cost, it takes maybe a day of your time to setup things on any computer (maybe it be Linux, Windows, or Mac).

The point is Mac still blends a good combination of Unix terminal, nice GUI, and less hardware problems. I have to admit though, it really depends on what type of developer you are.

I do web, so I mostly stay in the browser and the app (RoR/Django/etc), so not many issues. Perhaps other type of developers need to use Linux or Windows for their specific environments.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would cost me considerably more than $5 to download xcode over my ATT wireless connection.

It's a bit easier over my DSL, but they just started metering that really tightly as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can still get XCode 3 for free, and I believe you can also download the command line version of gcc for free from Apple. Also, there has been no indication that Apple is going to stop shipping the developer CD with every new Mac.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's rather silly how big of a deal people are making about this. IMO, this doesn't change how "developer friendly" OS X is.

There's no such thing as one set of requirements for all developers that OS X either meets or doesn't. For a specific developer, it either met or didn't meet your needs prior to this, and nothing should have changed because of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think OSX was ever really developer friendly, at least compared to Linux.

<comment><USER12> I feel sorry for everyone who down-voted me.

<comment><USER2> I feel sorry for everyone who thinks Hacker News is a good place to start OS flamewars.</comment></comment></comment>


The Reno Cure for Valentines Gone Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-reno-cure-for-valentines-gone-wrong-divorce/ <comment><USER2> There was actually a Hollywood murder mystery -- "Charlie Chan in Reno" \-- that was based on the "Reno cure".</comment>


Scale Fail: Downtime Is Sexy - <AUTHOR> http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/4692211550/scale-fail

<comment><USER2> I get the theory behind the talk and I find the idea funny. I find the talk condescending and not in the slightest funny. I find alot of 'traditional' developers miss the point and believe there being insulted and what they have been doing for a long time to be 'wrong' (in no way is it, its just not gospel) and get all protective and dismissive.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely.

He's also totally missing the marketing/social point. When a service goes down, say twitter, the rest of the internet is _deluged_ with complaints about the service not functioning.

It is immediately clear what the size and vociferousness of the service's user base is. So long as Twitter, or Tumblr, or whatever is _usually_ up, their user base is going to grow on the news of their trials and tribulations.

"Twitter is so incredibly popular that it crashes their servers all the time!"

Unless you're actually a (good) app dev, people don't appreciate that Facebook and LinkedIn face the same scaling challenges that Twitter does.

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

Second, the petulant tone of this video is really obnoxious. I also agree that his point is funny, and that the incentives are perverse, but i think he's setting up DHH and new tech as a straw man as well. It is certainly the case that chasing novelty has resulted in past lessons being forgotten, discarded and eventually reinvented, but that doesn't make everything that was done in the past _correct_.</comment>


Using Google Cloud Platform for Security Scanning - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/02/using-google-cloud-platform-for.html

<comment><USER2> Shameless plug:

If you are looking for something like this for non-Google App Engine web applications we recently launched a SaaS Web Security Scanner - [https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application- security-s...](https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application-security- scanner/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds similar to Detectify[1], a cloud based web application scanner. 'Free on a private project or for a non-profit organization.'

[1]: [https://detectify.com](https://detectify.com)</comment>


Fourier series - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/anon/pen/jPGJMK <comment><USER2> Until Kepler, astronomers believed planets to move in circular paths, but this did not match up with experimental data. So it was postulated that they moved in epicycles (circles of circles of circles ..., as pictured in this codepen) of varying radii. This model was able to represent all the data astronomers collected, but did not explain why the radii were what they were.

When Fourier Analysis became a thing 300 years later, it was shown that indeed any periodic function can be modeled with epicycles of certain radii. That this epicycle "model" actually didn't simplify anything! It was an isomorphic way of phrasing the problem, not the solution.

Luckily by then, Kepler had already postulated planets move in ellipses, and Newton proved that even this was the consequence of the law of gravity.

Occam's Razor FTW.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh, so I never though about it this way. The reason you can use epicycles to draw anything is because the trig functions form a complete orthonormal system. Because you can write a Fourier series for any piecewise continuous function, you can also draw Homer Simpson:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's another project that was posted here a while back that goes into details explaining different waveforms with examples. It's titled "SEEING CIRCLES, SINES, AND SIGNALS A COMPACT PRIMER ON DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING". It's really well put together.

[http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines- signals/dft_int...](http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines- signals/dft_introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> A great intro to fourier transforms with same type of animations: [http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide- to-...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-the- fourier-transform/)

<comment><USER6> Loved this the last(?) time a discussion on Fourier visualizations was on the front page. These visualizations really help with breakthrough moments.

I'm surprised nobody has yet linked to the video of Fourier series for drawing Homer Simpson.

<comment><USER7> posted about the same time you posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765025)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> line-o Wow. Beautiful math. Such insight. Thank you for sharing.

      var PI2 = Math.PI * 2.0;

That should be Math.TAU, right?

<comment><USER8> Javascript doesn't have a TAU constant in it's Math object (yet). He could have added it with Math.TAU = Math.PI * 2; though.

<comment><USER9> Or alternatively continued to use PI2 like basically everybody else on the globe who wants to actually use it for things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interestingly that the Gibbs phenomenon appears visually as a whiplash effect. You can see how it would only get worse as higher order terms are included.

</comment><comment><USER11> One of my favorite questions to Math Candidates, that are potential employees:

In Fourier transform, what is being transformed to what? What is wrong with how it is that it needs to be transformed?

I am amused at the variety of answers this produces.

<comment><USER12> OK, I'll take a stab:

The Fourier transform is basically taking a signal, and correlating it against sinusoids of increasing frequency and unity amplitude. Each point along the x axis of the new signal is the result of the correlation for that frequency (x being frequency in this coordinate system).

The transform is used when you want to analyse the frequency content of a signal - useful when trying to determine frequency filters or bandwidth needs to transmit the signal, for example.

Edit: (because I hit send too soon) I've always found the purely mathematical explanation to be easier to understand than explanations involving rotating circles or whatever. As a bonus, you can directly derive the formula from the description, and things like Fourier series are a logical extension.

<comment><USER13> What's awesome is that there are so many valid ways to interpret the math. My favorite way to understand fourier transforms is the linear algebra approach. You start with the fact that the best approximation for a vector in some subspace is the projection of that vector onto the subspace. This makes total sense visually. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Pr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Projection_and_rejection.png/200px- Projection_and_rejection.png) So if you want to approximate something, it's really nice if you can make it look like a vector and just do a projection.

After that you just do what mathematicians do, you generalize. It turns out that if you define addition of functions in a logical way, and if you define dot product (or inner norm) of 2 functions in a somewhat clever way, you get a vector space that you can do projections with.

The next thing you do once you have a vector space is figure out a natural set of basis vectors. For normal 2d space, we pick <1,0> and <0,1>. It turns out that you get really nice properties if the vectors have a length of one and if they are at right angles to each other. The concept of right angles can be generalized by saying their inner product is zero. At that point there's no more 90 degree angle, but the vectors are still independent in some useful sense.

It turns out that if you define "multiplication" as multiplying 2 functions together and looking at the area under them, then basically all the sin and cos waves are orthogonal. If you multiply by the right factor, you can some up with a sin wave where the area under the curve is one. So now you have a whole bunch of "vectors" that are orthogonal and have a "length" of one. So now all you have to do is measure the component of your target function along each "axis" of your set of basis vectors and you have an approximation. That projection is pretty easy. In 2d world if you wanted to "project" <5,6> onto <1,0> you'd just drop the 6 and get <5,0>. "projecting" x*x along sin(x) is conceptually pretty similar. It's just defined in terms of the inner norm from before.

One thing I've left out because they aren't intuitively obvious to me. Sin and Cos waves form a basis for continuous functions on an interval. That means that if you can use "all" the sin and cos waves in your approximation, you'll get the original function back. If they weren't a basis, then your approximation could only get so good.

So that's my POV. Every time I think of fourier transforms, I think of a little flashlight shining above a 3d vector that's casting a shadow onto a 2d plane.

<comment><USER14> Another really useful/practical thing from looking at things this (inner product) way.

You have a function expressed as a weighted sum of basis vectors in your space: e.g.

f = Sigma_n x_n e_n = Sigma_n <f,e_n> e_n

(for simplicity lets say it is self dual)

then take any approximation g = Sigma_n <g,e_n> e_n

now consider the residual:

f - g = Sigma_n w_n e_n , clearly, for some set of weights {w_n}

So this demonstrates that when you produce an error in approximation, that error itself is composed of the same building blocks (I know, this is obvious, but a lot of people miss it!).

This explains why in signal processing the Gibbs ringing effect looks sinusoidal, and why errors in approximation in Haar look "blocky", etc.

Aside: also, this generalizes nicely to Frame theory where you give up orthonormality (and hence energy conservation) but gain other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Love a gif version I saw of this recently, so fascinating.

I think this would be neater if it had a small text field, where you could put in a JS function, and it would do an approximate fourier series based off of a segment of the function.

Kind of feel like someone should make a page that fully explains all the levels of this graphic:

\- the circles let you graph f(x)=a*sin(nx+phase) (cosine on the horizontal projection)

\- attaching the circles is the same as adding, so you actually have a way of drawing out the first parts of a fourier series

\- any periodic function can be represented through all these spinning circles

</comment><comment><USER16> Woah. Where were all these cool visualizations when I was studying physics?!

</comment><comment><USER17> These kinds of visualizations are awesome; I remember a site back in the day during undergrad that helped visualize the fourier components using image processing. I learned so much more from that site than watching a professor scribble out the formulae on a chalkboard.

</comment><comment><USER18> See also [http://www.quora.com/What-is-an-intuitive-way-of- explaining-...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-an-intuitive-way-of-explaining- how-the-Fourier-transform-works)

</comment><comment><USER19> Pseudo-Mechanical representations of Fourier series are everywhere these days, it's impressive how dry college math can hide the simplicity of an 'object', composition of rotations, turned into algebra.

</comment><comment><USER20> So wavy, when all I wanted was a straight line! I'd like a series that can approximate not just the values of a function, but all its derivatives as well.

<comment><USER3> For smooth functions, the Fourier series also approximates the derivative. The waviness you're seeing here is due to the Gibbs' phenomenon, since you're approximating a discontinuous function. This is not a very tragic loss, since the derivative does not even exist where the waviness is the worst.

<comment><USER20> Ah, of course, I see. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is just awesome. Thank you so much. I really wish to view more blog posts by the author of this code. Sadly it has been published as anonymous.

<comment><USER22> It was written by André Michelle ([http://andre-michelle.com/](http://andre- michelle.com/))

<comment><USER21> How did you find it? How to verify if it is the same author.

<comment><USER23> Jumping to conclusions here but: \- André has been involved with audiotool, as joa did quite a while ago \- They are (former?) colleagues \- André has quite a background in terms of applied signal processing, harmonics etc (I believe I first learnt about Karplus-Strong by a talk he gave in Cologne a few years back)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Another, prior art, so to speak. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg)

A series of four videos detailing the operation of a mechanical computer for plotting Fourier series.

</comment><comment><USER25> So are people dropping the data- prefix in custom attributes now? e.g. input[frequency]

<comment><USER26> Doesn't seem to serve any purpose too. Simply could've used a class there. Would be interesting to know why the author did so.

<comment><USER27> Probably because there were fewer characters to type and it's slightly easier to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very cool. My only concern is if you have a screen with a lower resolution (1366 X 768), the drawer with the source code causes the user controls to be hidden, so it's not immediately obvious that those controls exist.

<comment><USER29> Same goes for if you have a bigger screen but don't maximize your browser.

Windows has terrible virtual desktop support; as a result, I don't usually scale windows to full screen so I can actually keep multiple windows straight. One of my big pet peeves is when websites don't scale well to smaller width or height (height seems to be particularly neglected by web developers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here is another version[1] made by D3.js

[1] [http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988](http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd be seriously impressed if someone could do this just using CSS.

(I was pretty impressed already, to be fair.)

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone know how they figured out the coefficients for the Homer Simpson one?

</comment><comment><USER33> This is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER34> damnit this would have been useful in my Signals I course...

</comment><comment><USER35> nice work!</comment>


Blue Screen of Death Prank - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgarrison.com/games/deflection3 Just click play and wait for the big surprise. Send this to your friends and coworkers to freak them out. <comment><USER2> Dude. You submitted the wrong link off your own site???

<http://andrewgarrison.com/games/ultimategoat/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you try clicking play on Deflection 3? If not, try it....

<comment><USER2> Heh, good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The "Press Esc to exit" message doesn't really give much away.</comment>


"God help you. You're on dialysis." - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/-8220-god-help-you-you-39-re-on-dialysis-8221/8308/

<comment><USER2> Dialysis is a proxy issue.

The majority of renal failure in the US is the result of diabetes or hypertension. The huge increase in the number of dialysis patients is overwhelmingly attributable to these two causes. In the vast majority of these cases, renal failure can be prevented with relatively inexpensive intervention to better manage the primary condition.

In most other developed countries, it is politically straightforward to spend $20,000 a year on coaxing and cajoling a patient into managing their diabetes better in order to prevent them from becoming a $70,000 a year dialysis patient. Needless to say that the benefits to this approach are greater than just a cost saving.

The United States has a quite peculiar set of popular attitudes to healthcare. It is clear that a large number of US citizens believe that healthcare ought not be a universal right, but most also find it unpalatable to simply allow people to die of preventable diseases. Consequently, cheap early intervention to preserve health is often shunned in favour of expensive, late intervention to prevent death. To my mind the most egregious example of this is drug abuse and alcoholism - huge amounts are spent on ER care for disastrously ill addicts, but little is spent on basic social work and rehabilitation.

I can't honestly say that I understand the mindset that completely opposes government involvement in healthcare, but it seems obvious to me that the current situation is the worst of all worlds - the worst outcomes and the highest costs. I don't know how healthcare became such an ideological battleground, but it's not doing anyone any good - not patients and certainly not the taxpayer. I really don't want to be negative, but I have no idea how this stalemate can be broken.

<comment><USER3> The mindset that is against government healthcare is one based on a clear conception of natural rights theory. It recognizes the validity of negative rights and the complete contradiction that is positive rights. Though most aren't against providing healthcare through non-coercive means such as private charity.

<comment><USER4> Very few people in the U.S. fully oppose a positive right to health-care though. They're against a positive right to see a doctor and get regular treatment, but are _in favor_ of a positive right to receive emergency-room care if necessary. Hence, ERs are required to treat heart-attack and stroke patients who show up on their doorstep, even if the victim is uninsured and has no ability to pay; turning them away is illegal.

So the question isn't over whether there's a positive right to health care--- almost everyone agrees there is to some extent. The disagreement is over which kinds of care are included in the right.

<comment><USER5> The deeper problem here may be though that treating an emergency patient that is dying thus requiring immediate care they can't afford could run higher costs that the appropriate preventative treatment they were unable to afford.

Morally we are obligated to save the emergency patients life but also morally we shouldn't have let their condition slip to the point it is in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a former nephrologist I feel obligated to comment on this article. So, much of what is written is true, but much is also a bit slanted too.

So, mortality rates on dialysis do suck. It's not necessarily a reflection of bad care, though that certainly happens. Once you require dialysis, that means your kidneys are trashed. They don't work well enough to function, so you need kidney replacement therapy. This generally doesn't happen in isolation. If your kidneys are that damaged, you generally have serious underlying health problems (diabetes, high blood pressure) that have also affected your brain and heart... so it's only a (short) matter of time before you have a devastating event.

There are diseases which only affect the kidneys in isolation, and those people tend to live a long time on dialysis.

The comparisons to foreign countries is always important but I feel like the article dismisses some of the country-specific factors

 _"Yet Italy spends about one-third less than we do per patient. These results reflect lower overall health-care costs and a __patient population with lower rates of diabetes and heart disease__, but also important divergences in policy and practice."_

Less diabetes and heart disease would be a huge factor in the difference in spending and mortality rates. Those are massive implications, and also indicate that their dialysis patients might be due to different (less systemic) diseases.

In the end, it's probably only one factor. I think it's likely that underlying U.S. cultural differences are another. I believe expectations and beliefs about death and elderly may be different abroad, though I don't have any citations for that. In the U.S., it's seems hard to deny people dialysis. I'd be curious what the average age of people on dialysis in the U.S. vs abroad are. I expect the U.S. average age would be much higher.

I think american families tend to want dialysis and are more reluctant to accept that it's simply the end of the line. To be fair, it's a hard decision to not accept what seems to be a life extending treatment. And it's incredibly hard as a physician to refuse dialysis to anyone, especially if the family wants it.

I also expect these same attitudes pervade u.s. trained physicians who may skirt these subjects of death more apprehensively because they also share those attitudes. The cover your ass mentality also tends to mean people err on the side of doing more, when doing less may be more appropriate.

<comment><USER7> Slightly off topic: what prompted you to leave nephrology? That's not something someone would do lightly, to say the least.

<comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236308>

Previous thread on it.

In summary, my side business (macrumors.com) became successful enough that it made significantly more than my income as a doctor. Combine that with the lifestyle of being a doctor being bad, and wanting to spend more time with my young kids. It was still a hard decision at the time due to the sunk costs of becoming a doctor but on paper it was an easy decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The pattern with the government is the same from situation to situation.

1) They make something free

2) The market for private delivery of the same thing dries up. Those few that still want to pay must pay much more than they would have before the government started giving it away for free because the market has shrunk so much

3) The same thing happens to alternatives to the thing they made free

4) Decisions are now made by those delivering the process instead of the person choosing between the alternatives. Costs and benefits are no longer weighed together or by the person that cares about the outcome the most.

5) The corporations and unions move in and start influencing the decision makers, carving out expensive niches for themselves

6) Things that truly matter but aren't profitable for the politically connected fall by the wayside

7) People getting something free put up with it because ditching the free thing for same thing done right is now a super expensive alternative

8) Delivering the free thing grows more expensive, much faster than the rate of inflation

9) Eventually the tax payers fight back and the costs of delivering the thing are slashed, along with quality. The corporations and unions have to spend and/or threaten more to hang on to their protected positions.

10) Those getting the service for free now have to spend all their time at rallies and fine tuning the stories about how badly they're being treated.

Happens with health care. Happens with roads. Education. City services. Anything they give away for free or heavily subsidized.

<comment><USER9> I'm not going to claim that undergraduate education in the US is perfect or anything, but we do have a world class education system which rivals or bests all other nations'. And on top of that, i would say that my publicly subsidized education was just as good if not better than many private educational experiences, and it was a whole hell of a lot cheaper.

And i grew up in a city with one of the best public library systems in the country. You'll still notice that it was populated with plenty of Barnes & Nobels and Borders book stores.

Oh, and i'll note that the Ambassador Bridge, the Blue Water Bridge and basically any bridge in and out of Ontario to the US are privately owned toll bridges, which charge you to travel over them.

[edited to remove pointless but cathartic ad hominem]

<comment><USER10> We're in the late phase of step 8 for undergraduate education. Let me know in 10 years if you still think everything's peachy with it. The signs of strain are already there if you know where to look, but I'm pretty sure by 2020 you won't be able to pretend otherwise. Probably by 2015. Possibly by this time next year. (Personally I'm thinking that barring a major economic turnaround we see a distinct drop in college enrollment next year.)

You also don't know which is cheaper, public education or private. You know that in a government-subsidized environment, public was cheaper to you than private, but what a freaking surprise, when you pay for public school whether you attend or not, then must pay for the private school on top of that. Of course X + Y > X... but school's only _free_ if you never pay local taxes.

<comment><USER8> The government is very adept at pointing out what handouts people are getting and hiding how much its actually costing them. And it seems to work on plenty of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This project was done by ProPublica, the nonprofit reporting outfit where I work. There's more from the same investigation at <http://www.propublica.org/dialysis> including a leaked P.R. plan drawn up by an industry group to respond to our investigation -- and there's lots more to come in the next few weeks.

<comment><USER9> what's it like working at ProPublica, and what do you do there? I've liked everything i've ever read/heard that's been produced there, and i know they've got good taste in terms of the journalists they poach from other orgs.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the kind words about ProPublica. It's exciting to be around so many talented journalists and to get to work on great projects with them.

I run a small team (five of us) of developer/journalists. We're in a new-ish field of journalism called "news applications." Essentially it means we make software instead of using words or pictures to tell journalistic stories. There are crews like ours (some bigger, some smaller) at the New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, the Guardian in the U.K., and elsewhere.

Our work includes the Recovery Tracker <http://projects.propublica.org/recovery> and the recent "Docs for Dollars" project <http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars> that analyzes payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.

You can see pretty much all of our work at <http://www.propublica.org/tools>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worked IT for the University of Chicago hospitals for a while in college, and was responsible for the systems at the dialysis center on 55th street. It was utterly heartbreaking to me; the stoicism of the patients (the vast, vast majority of whom were locals in the UofC parlance -- read, "black and poor"), the genuine hard work of the nurses and nurses aides; and just the overall sense of agony in the building. It was rough, and only made rougher because I could _leave_.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would seem that the ultimate solution to this problem would be an implantable artificial kidney. Given that the technology for dialysis has been around for so long, it's surprising that there hasn't been more progress in miniaturization over the last 40 years.

<comment><USER14> Much of these problems with artificial organs revolve around the power supply. An artificial heart is pretty easy with modern technology compared to how to power it. Same for most organs.

<comment><USER15> Dialysis also requires expensive medicine, like e.g. EPO, which contributes to a non negligeable part of the cost. The 77000 $ / patient surprised me a little because the figures I have heard in France (family members involved in dialysis treatment)are actually higher, not lower.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My First Launch Page - eFolio.me - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'm developing an early start-up called eFolio.
Not much information is available yet but, it's being developed to solve many  problems pertaining to employment.
Any feedback is welcome. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.eFolio.me>

</comment><comment><USER2> No application found...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd, it's working on my end, and another commenter's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks neat, I like the logo although the tie can be mistaken for an i! I think a twitter logo instead off the follow us text will look chic. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I tried using a tie for the "i" instead, but it seemed off for some reason.</comment></comment>