Mark completed features as dead

It's the final straw that we fix typos and abusive punctuation in submission titles? That seems a bit melodramatic.

I'm surprised to think anyone didn't already realize we did this. Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?

As opposed to caring about the specifics like fixing punctuation, I think that critics don't like the authority (and potential for abuse) implied by administrators messing with user submitted text, no matter in how trivial a way.

At some point users have to decide if they're willing to sacrifice a purely democratic community if it means an increase in quality. Is the point of a social news site to make a political statement, or is it find cool stuff to read?

Edit: Maybe the admins should just be 100% transparent about everything they do; document their actions in a FAQ.

Transparency makes this a non-issue. Admin actions like editing titles should automatically show up on a log page.

The number of typical comments for a post determine what kind of people want to/are willing to comment:

0-10 comments: People who want to talk about the post per se

11-50 comments: People who want to have a conversation.

51- comments: People who want to join a mob.

Obviously, ynews is moving from the first to the second, and that changes the types of comments/people commenting/overall community.

You should have to enter an explanation when you downmod something. Then the recipients won't be left confused, and it will enforce responsible use of the privilege. I feel this is a better solution to the abuse problem than only allowing downmods for 24 hours.

Your observation would work better on your personal blog than as a story on "Hacker News".

You're probably right. No one complains when whole submissions are deleted as spams, presumably because you can see them if you want by turning on showdead in your profile. So maybe I'll add something to preserve original submission titles.

I don't think that was his point. His point was: Look at me taking wild and unsubstantiated CRAZY ideas to this here CO2 thing. And then laying out why the ideas are quite tame, substantiated, and rational after all, but due to prevailing hip culture, these ideas require a heretic to take root.

At least, that's how I read it.

Undo for voting, see reddit implementation.

Assertion: The American K-12 school system is broken in huge ways. Let's talk about it!

It's not as bad in CS. In English you have the problem of working on fundamentally bogus stuff in addition to the structural problems inherent in grad school.

I should add that anything graphics related is probably an exception to this because you need quite a lot of knowledge and mathematical sophistication to succeed in this area. A masters degree in graphics will probably help you.

I agree that it's very important to learn how to navigate the real world, but I really think there's a comfortable compromise between destroying the egos of a significant fraction of gifted kids and sending them to some exclusive school with an artificial environment. I stopped doing homework in the third grade, and scraped by for the rest of my time in the school system. I somehow managed to get admitted to university, but was kicked out after two tortuous years for failing too many classes. I pretty much had 11 unhappy years, from third grade until I got kicked out.

I always enjoyed learning interesting things, but school had nothing to do with learning. School was a place you went to maximize your GPA by doing rote busy work, and any learning done was just an accidental side-effect while pursing grades.

I never considered myself smart while in school; I saw myself as a worthless slacker with an unhealthy programming obsession. This was the image instilled in me from my teachers, school administrators, and parents constantly chiding me to do my homework. I didn't have the perspective nor the self-image to seek out the kind of help I needed. I also don't think an 8 year old should be expected to come up with theories of why he's failing in school.

The theories that the school administration came up with were just based on one observation: Jey doesn't do his homework. Solution: make Jey do his homework. There was no thought given to root causes, nor any experimentation with different strategies. It always just came down to keeping a notebook of homework assignments and making sure I did them that evening. All this bullshit just made me consciously give up on the educational system and write it off as worthless and ineffective.

I still don't know how exactly I should have been helped, but a huge problem is that the educators themselves are not aware of the pattern I was exhibiting. It's well documented that many "gifted" kids exhibit the same symptoms: extreme abrasive cynicism, defiance and hatred of authority, lackluster school performance, and depression. Part of the problem is that these kids will be pretty rare; gifted kids are rare to begin with, and these kids form a fraction of the gifted population. There should be some effort to educate educators of this pattern, and research on what kind of help works for this population. I think any solution that would have worked for me would've had to capitalize on my high level of curiosity and harnessed it in some way. Assigning more bullshit busy work (a la AP and Honors classes) wasn't the solution. If I had a teacher who engaged me in the material, and presented material as interesting and challenging rather than as work, I think I could've done better. AP and Honors classes seem to make the classes harder mostly by increasing the volume of work. On the other hand, this could just be wishful thinking and maybe there is no strategy that could've made me get through formal education. I don't know, but I think it's worth doing the studies to find out, as I'm not a one-off oddball case.

Getting kicked out of university was the first step to recovery for me, and it's the best 'disaster' that has ever happened to me. I'm now a happy person, and really enjoy who I am and what I do. I just wish there had been a less painful way to get here. Going to public school and suffering through the crap did help me develop socially and form healthy friendships, something that I would've completely missed out on if I had been homeschooled.

"How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete [sic] with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts."

Engage his natural curiosity in the learning process. Make learning fun and a process of discovery, not a process by which a bunch of facts are memorized to appease some authority figure. My dad did this by using the socratic method, and encouraging me to ask questions. Feynman tells a similar story about his experiences with his dad in the first chapter of "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out-Richard/dp...

I just finished my PhD in CS at Georgia Tech, so I'll share my two cents on the topic. (My field was programming languages and compilers.)

I wouldn't characterize graphics as the "soundest" field. I might give that title to formal methods, where the bar for publication is often a machine-verifiable proof of correctness.

Of course, graphics is math-heavy, too. A lot of the good graphics folks I know started off as mathematical physicists.

For that matter, many sub-disciplines within CS are quite math-heavy. For my own dissertation, I developed static analyses of programs. To do so, I modeled the semantics of a programming language as a mathematical relation on machine states. I then defined new (finitely computable) relations---the analyses---and I proved these are sound simulations of the semantics relation. Plenty of math involved.

Theory folks do plenty of math on the complexity and correctness of algorithms.

Machine learning involves lots of probability and statistics.

Even the top-notch human-computer interaction people know statistics well.

I could go on. But, I think you could find a way to do some "real" math in any field within CS. (Though I've noticed each sub-discipline has its own self-aggrandizing definition of "real.")

As far as how much of the article resonated with my own experience, I would have to say not much. I had plenty of cordial debates with professors, but ultimately, we would arrive at either a theorem or a contradiction, and then the debate was ended. No feelings hurt. No ego assuaged. Just a truth uncovered.

The one part of the article that does ring true is the myopic vision of the world one receives in academia. Academia takes center stage as the noblest of all possible pursuits. The thrill of publication and peer recognition can be intoxicating, especially if you're the kind of person who is obsessed with publicly validating their own intelligence.

I'm now taking a year off from academia to work full-time for my two startups, but a part of me feels like I'm selling out by not going on to become a professor right away. My own advisor warned strenuously me to continue publishing, lest the "jealous priesthood" of academia reject my attempt to return. I know enough, though, to know that he's right. If I don't continue to publish, academia will cut me off, regardless of how might money I might make doing startups.

My parting advice to potential grad students in CS is: (1) choose a field that's growing rather than shrinking, and (2) find an advisor with whom you can develop a comfortable working relationship. After that, lots of hard work and a modicum of smarts can get you the rest of the way.

My mother is the director of gifted education in a major midwestern city's public school district. She doesn't believe in evolution.

There are quotas for minorities. Many otherwise qualified students are denied acceptance because their places are reserved. And not just a few... many.

Logistically, kids need to be bused from other schools, but transportation is uncooperative and the schools resent the hassle. There is also an additional bureaucratic and testing cost. These costs are in addition to running the programs themselves, but _these_ costs specifically antagonize other political entities in the school district.

And of course... unlike special ed, teachers resent busing away their best students. They fight over dumping the worst, of course.

Politically (within the district) gifted education is a career for pariahs. They create hassle for the "normal" (aka "real") teachers and they have no power to deter neglect or abuse. The teachers and staff in the department are paid less than require more education than "real" teachers. This drives away the best teaching talent and firmly entrenches the some least ambitious teachers within the department.

The curriculum is a petri dish of all sorts of inane pet political agendas. Especially in science and math, the teachers don't know the subjects themselves, so these subjects simply aren't taught beyond a pre-packaged lesson plan.

The consequence: the most qualified students leave the district (if they can.) Instead of integration, communities become more and more segregated. Fact is, if you don't "segregate" special resources for the best within a community, the best will leave. School districts only have incentives to reduce segregation with their local district. But segregation is inevitable, and failing to deal with it merely bubbles the segregation to higher levels.

Hence, I'm writing this from Silicon Valley and not the midwest.

Update

So nerd education is the nerd of education.

If you were a nerd in school, and you remember how _you_ were treated, doesn't that seem like a plausible extrapolation?