Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48493723

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and so many others predate Gmail by years.

> Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s.

One of them. People still used non-browser apps for all kinds of things: Media consumption (people didn't watch movies on Youtube), Office (Google Docs was very much a niche thing for many years), photo-editing (lots of pirated versions of Photoshop/Lightroom years after the iPhone release), etc.

Most non-mail, non-social media, non-shopping stuff people do on the web these days was a dedicated SW from the vendor in those days. Want to make a photobook? Download this Windows binary and set it up there. It will then communicate with the server for the order (no browser utilized).

> at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though).

Spring chicken! My first online experience was on a 340 baud modem :-)

It stalled before the rise of PC-as-Internet-portal.

I bought a high end PC in 2003, and 5 years later the PCs were not much faster - probably not even 2x. Around 2008-2010 was when most people started using PCs as a way to connect to the Internet.

It stalled because scaling got a lot more challenging. Not because of lack of demand.

That's like saying that if Nvidia performs way better than an index fund, then the index fund will shift to consist only of Nvidia.

In any given year, there are plenty of index funds that outperform the S&P 500. They don't freak out over it.

S&P 500 is volatile over 5 years - I'd argue even over 10 years (see the charts at https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-i...). The whole point of investing in it is for much longer windows.

So yeah, perhaps after 10 years they'll change once they'll see other index funds doing better, and have data to back up that in the long term, early inclusion didn't hurt.

I can believe it, but I don't know if it's true. Obviously not true in the US.

The same downsides as not having giant private companies in your fund.

Ha Ha Ha! Cute you think society cares about reading abilities!

I mean, OK, you are expected to be able to do basic level reading. But, say, reading something independently to learn something? Even when I was in university 20 years ago it was a struggle to get people to read.

When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".

Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.

People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.

If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.

As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:

1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.

2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.

3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".

Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.

That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]

Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?

I wrote more about this about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065640

[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?

[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).

I tire of hearing this.

We definitely knew better. I definitely did. Lots of people who did not opt into these services did. We were not silent about it.

Everyone else just refused to listen. Willful ignorance is how they got there.

I repeatedly said "standard course", which implies it is a commonly taught course (be it upper or lower division). In my undergrad, Analysis I, II and Abstract Algebra I, II were upper division courses. In the engineering departments, stuff like Electromagnetics I, II were upper division.

Anything that is not an elective (and even some popular electives) were standard courses.

Now I'll grant that in CS, some material like machine learning changes rapidly. But in most engineering, very little in the undergrad material changes. Even my semiconductor courses in undergrad haven't changed much in decades.

So yes - for most of those classes (and that means the vast majority of undergrad engineering) classes, the curriculum is relatively standard.

> Now you expect the professor to not only come up with new test material, but also extensively calibrate it before students take it, maybe for a 15-hour per week class (3 hours of teaching + 12 hours of studying), with maybe 15 students?

First: In my very average undergrad university, professors were always careful not to reuse old homeworks/exams. It wasn't a huge burden. Professors who don't do this (e.g. most professors in top universities) signal very clearly their lack of interest in pedagogy.

Second: You want to do a curve on <= 15 students? Are you aware of basic statistics and the problems you get with small N? Are they using a normal distribution or one that is more appropriate for small N?

And as I already said, for a lot of electives where the material isn't standardized, professors lean towards lenient grading. They offer those classes because they want people to take it, and grading via a curve discourages it.

> since you mentioned an Intro to Analysis course

That was an upper division course. Yes, I know some universities have it as a lower division, but many (most in the US?) treat it as upper division.

> BUT these are also usually weed out classes, with the idea that they only have N spots for students to proceed on to the upper division course, so curving serves an actual purpose that is aligned with the intended result.

It was not a weed out course. Neither my undergrad nor grad math departments had weed out classes. I saw that concept only in the engineering departments. My EE department had only Circuits I, Circuits II and digital logic as "lower division". Circuits II was the weed out course, and you were not allowed to take anything else (e.g. E&M, Electronics, etc) unless you got a B or higher.

I'm still not getting it. For a standard course, the criteria for what is "good" vs "great" should be pretty clear, and it should be independent of your peers. You have a syllabus, and a set of abilities for each grade level. If you hit those targets, you get the grade. If half the class gets an A, then it means they're pretty smart, or you did a great job in teaching. Of course, there's the chance the class was too easy, but you can always fix that.

No, I don't see why you're stuck with old test problems. For standard engineering classes, there's a huge (almost infinite) set of problems one can create.

For smaller classes, grading on a curve is even sillier, as the variance is always higher when the population size is small. For example, a lot of my small classes consisted of highly motivated students (all "A material"), because they're usually obscure electives where the content is challenging. You then pointlessly penalize students who sign up (just like they do at work). In fact, my professors were usually much more lenient on small classes for this very reason (i.e. lowering the standard needed to get an A).

I once took an Intro to Analysis course. It was moderately challenging. I got the highest score in the class, and my grade was A-. Everyone else got B+, B, or lower. A friend of mine (who didn't take the course) got really upset that I didn't get an A (or A+) given that I was the top scoring student.

But I knew my level of understanding/performance. It wasn't that great. I felt even an A- was too high a grade for me. And the teacher did a pretty good job in teaching. Why should I get a higher grade just because the other students were worse?

You should be graded by how well you know the material - not how well your peers don't know it. I'm always grateful both my undergrad and grad professors didn't curve on a grade.

In my first company, I had 4 different jobs. It was a common adage: Go into a low performing team that does simple work and you'll get promotions much quicker than in a high performing team doing challenging (but fun) work.

It was right. I had 2 "dream" jobs where I did cool, challenging stuff, but where everyone was more than competent. They turned out to be career killers. The promotions I got were all in the other 2 jobs where I did boring business logic coding, and where my peers were barely competent (one had trouble navigating directories using the command line).

That's what happens when you grade on a curve. Smart people begin to work on boring stuff, and not the real challenges.

For personal stuff this release is not noteworthy.

If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.

If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".

They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.

Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"

If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.