I have been bitten by this problem more than once, resulting in:

- losing some accounts forever

- losing temporarily access to accounts, preventing me to work for some time

- forcing me to go through recovery procedures with tedious docs and hostile UI, wasting my work time

I eventually found a trick: buy 3 yubikeys, attach each of them to all your accounts, have one on my key ring, one in my desk, one in my bag.

Now, the only thing google ever ask is the yubikey, no matter where I connect from, and I always have one on me. It doesn't require a smarphone, a phone number or an email.

I'm still trying to get rid of as many google accounts as I can, though. Personally, I'm very caution about any dependency on google services, and professionally, adamant to avoid dependency as much as it's reasonably possible.

I used to be a google fan 20 years ago. Between the bad user support, the privacy invasion, the decreasing search quality, the monopolistic practices, the censorship, the DMCA situation, the product cancellations, the term of use / price switcheroo and those shenanigans, they are consistently destroying my faith in them.

But they will not pay the price for it. First, they have enough money to make mistake for a long time without even noticing. Second, they will pull off a Microsoft PR stunt in 15 years, and everybody will forget and forgive.

It's like arch linux.

Everybody tells there is never a problem with it, because, well, geeks lie.

Doesn't mean it's not useful.

I have a part of the article "Why not tell people to "simply" use pyenv, poetry or anaconda" (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simply-use) talking about this lying problem.

But I probably should make it a separate article, because that's an independent issue in itself.

You have to have a system that makes sense to use them successfully. The upthread guy is talking about multiple accounts lost forever, etc. Sounds like a mess.

The same problems exist on other platforms. Ever support challenge response tokens? Lol.

Lately there has been less problems but I have no idea why.

I use it almost exclusively in Windows and ChromeOS.

OP comes up with an example of a possible solution, and you react like this is some kind of propaganda you have to fight.

It comes out as needinglessly harsh, and you can do this with any country.

I can make up a list of all the awful things about America. But that's just not the topic.

It will be buggy and slow for a few versions, and likely incompatible with addons. I'll update in a few years.

There is no difference between learning a name in history or in biology, or some workflow.

But math reasoning really filters out people in a way nothing else does.

All other topics just require memory and basic reasoning.

Even physics mostly is hard because of math. And philosophy, mostly because of jargon and references. Otherwise, if you break it down, it's not that complicated.

But you can break down a math problem as much as you want, some of them are beyond what you can do comfortably. And a lot of students reach this limit early in their life.

I see this when I play board games with people: there is a threshold of rules and calculation power above which I lose 90% of the players. They just can't enjoy it, because it requires too much effort to play.

It's similar for me and sport. I've been doing exercise all my life, but my brother will always do more, and harder, because there is a barrier after which it's just too painful for me.

Math and athleticism can be trained, but there is a hard ceiling. And even before you reach that ceiling, closing the gap gets more and more expensive for some people, so much the ROI is difficult to justify.

Disagree. I say: Bad math teachers really filter out people in a way nothing else does.

"Here is a list of rules which can be used in specific circumstances. I am not going to tell you why you would need them and the exam will feature several corner cases. Also, I will not provide any examples or detailed explanations because what would other people think of me, then?"

This is over the top, but boils down my experience starting from highschool. I was in love with math when I was in primary and middle school. I really did.

But Highschool and university killed every last bit of enjoyment I used to have.

Okay, I did really like the first 2 semesters of math. I found an amazing online class which covered the same topics we did. Finally I understood and doing the exercises with such ease felt like cheating.

But even with the best teachers for every field, math or sport will filter out people way more harshly, and sooner, than any other field.

You can smooth things out with quality teaching, but there is a human hardware limit, and you reach it sooner with those two.

Many people don't like to hear it because their ego is bruised or because it goes against the idea that "everybody can do anything".

This is wrong. Birds fly, fishes swim. There is nothing bad about either.

Shmaybe. But I doubt many people ever approach it. What they hit is, instead, a "software lockout" - a limit of the kind that some hardware vendors (such as those making oscilloscopes or farming machines) put in their products, where the hardware is already there, but its capability is restricted in software, and you need to pay to have the restrictions lifted.

If you'd seen me as a kid, you'd say I am one of those people with rather low "hardware limit" when it comes to math. But then, when I was around 13, that limit suddenly shot up so high and so fast, it may as well have disappeared. What happened? I started to learn to code, with an intent to make videgames. Eventually I reached the point when I was trying to figure out how to rotate some sprites, and made a mental connection between what I want (understanding how to implement rotating images) and what I was taught at school (trigonometry). Immediately, math switched from being something I had to learn, and became something I wanted to learn. So, what you'd think was a severe hardware limit, was actually a purely software one - and it went away the moment I found the magic unlock code (which, in my case, was "find something that makes math seem relevant and exciting, instead of a bullshit chore").

And yes, I'll admit that I do have a hardware limit relevant here - most kids do well at math without having to find a motivational "cheat code", but people like me, with impaired executive functions, can't naturally power through bullshit, and need workarounds to keep up. But this is a different kind of limit. It's also one we're getting increasingly good at understanding, recognizing and overcoming, and it teaches us that what you see as hardware skill limit, may just be a software limit induced by another problem.

Or, in short, if someone told the twelve year old me the things you wrote here today, it would have derailed my life. Fortunately, nobody did, and this lazy and dumb-ish kid ended up handling undergrad-level math perfectly fine.

I have a hard time with this mentality. I would have agreed a few years ago perhaps, and do still agree that we all have our own aptitudes, but the level of absolution in a statement like this just isn’t really quite as applicable to humans in my opinion. There are things I never thought I’d be capable of that I’ve recently begun to excel at.

What I thought was a hardware limit turned out to just bug in my psycho-software that needed a patch. Obviously at the extreme end’s of the spectrum, the human hardware limit is very real. But for most (healthy) people, engaging in most activities, I believe that any perceived immutable barriers or obstacles are almost entirely psychological.

Laws of physics are laws of physics. And biology is applied physics.

People in sport have known that for a long time. You can train as much as Usain Bolt, he still has a huge advantage.

Thinking the other human characteristics are not affected by this is weird. You will never be Von Neumann, no matter how much you spend in the class room.

It's not that training has no effect, it does, a lot. Yet this doesn't remove the fact we have a variability between individual.

And there is not a tipping point, it's a spectrum for each characteristic.

It turns out math exhibit some early barrier in that spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that.

But there is some number of seconds which 90% of people can be trained to run 100m below.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a much lower number than you think.

Likewise not 100% of people can develop the mathematical horsepower of Von Neumann. But 90% of people can attain some level of proficiency in higher mathematical concepts… how high a level would that be? Higher than most high schools aim I would suspect.

It was hard for me to accept, but I know that after many years of University math education there are things I will never be able to understand. I have had very good grades in my Masters, but I realized that I will never be able to do research in pure mathematics.

Almost every person I know struggled with math far more than I did. How would they become research mathematicians if I couldn't after years of study? The belief that secretly almost all people are better at mathematics than me, despite me trying for many years, seems utterly absurd.

Do you think I really am in the bottom ~50% of the population in terms of mathematical ability? Because I know I will never be a pure mathematician.

I don't know nearly enough about your personal background to make any sort of judgement on to what extent your success up through university came from innate "mathematical ability" versus other factors.

But I do know that making it through a Masters-level program makes you a very capable mathematician, even if were unable to start a career in pure mathematics.

You made it further along in your mathematical education than 99.9%+ of students, and I have a very hard time believing that "biological predisposition" is what's stopping many people from making it past high-school level math.

But even if I were, why did the hundreds of people I studied with in school and university fail far more than I did. No, I didn't work especially hard and often times I was explaining things to other students, it weren't the teachers, we all had the same. It also wasn't motivation, I didn't need all that much to succeed. Was it just luck that I outperformed most people given the opportunity?

The difference is not limited to the extremes. Why would it be?

Hence spectrum.

And math meet people early in the spectrum.

EDIT: thread limit reached, so I can't answer down there.

But in short, it's a HN comment, not a study. But I've been in 11 schools in my life. Some private ones with their own church inside, some for special kids, some for poor kids with a higher degree of violence.

I saw it again and again. The average math teacher is not worse than any other teachers. But the first field kids have a hard time is more often math than other fields. In fact, kids that are good at math usually can do ok in any other, even if not great. The reverse is not necessarily true.

At this point I'm just repeating the argument in the other comments.

I can think of several anecdotal counter-examples... students who seemed to have been falling behind, but with the right teacher were able to make significant improvements and become a top performer.

You can also take a look at many of the studies done on the educational gap, to see that better schooling can have a massive impact on secondary and post-secondary educational outcomes. Surely this wouldn't be the case if poor performers had some "biological limit" that prevented them from succeeding in high school math.

I told her to come to office hours and I gave her problem sets to solve, first easy then progressively harder. As she got confidence that she could do this her demeanor in class changed and in the space of a month she went from failing to a B-

After this I started asking anyone who said they had math anxiety or did not like math if they had a bad math teacher they remembered. I have asked close to a hundred people this over the last 30+ years and invariably they not only remembered the name of said bad math teacher but also relived how they were told they were dumb and would never be good at math. They stopped learning at that point.

Nonetheless math is hard because it is not an evolutionary survival skill we developed. I say jokingly that math is an unnatural act. I am not a gifted math student but I like solving problems and I would just solve every problem in the book ploddingly and stubbornly. So I dont hate math and I am not in love with it either. It is a very powerful tool for problem solving and also gives you powerful analytical capability you can use in other places in life.

Maybe that is all it takes to be a "gifted" math student?

Tangental:

I have always hated the term gifted. I will not deny there are some absolute phenoms out there in regards to any domain. Those individuals are few and far between and should be celebrated because of it. Maybe I am being semantical, but being "slightly better" does not make one gifted.

Learning a subject that is being taught to someone quicker than their peers does not make them gifted. Show me what they have created or discovered with their alleged "gift," and then we will see.

Von Neumann is not remembered because of how much quicker he learned math than others or how easy the subjects were for him. He is remembered for what he discovered and what he created -- that is what makes one truly gifted in my opinion.

If not, what makes you confident that your peers were falling behind due to some sort of innate inability, instead of as a result of compounding poor teaching or other environmental factors?

Unless you can mass edit all the factors, then it remains that some people simply cannot do math past a certain level.

But for what it’s worth, it was a very small school in a VERY poor area. (Median income probably at or below $20k / year) The teaching was actually above-average for the area, but probably below average over a national rating.

I do think factors matter in my personal anecdote of my particular high school. However my LIFE has reinforced my observations: most people are profoundly bad at math, from a seemingly fundamental level.

And I also got into teaching between dev gigs.

I have known many people, to whom mathematical reasoning comes as easily and naturally as flight does to a swallow, be defeated by literature. Every technical university in the world is brimming with bright young people who could effortlessly describe a Jacobian but would rather gnaw off their own hand than produce a response to a story or sonnet.

> And philosophy, mostly because of jargon and reference. Otherwise, if you break it down, it's not that complicated.

Quite the claim.

It's not a matter of the field being too difficult. It's a matter of personality.

> Quite the claim.

Yes. I've discussed this claim with people defending the opposite idea, and I've yet to find anybody making a good demonstration that philosophy is hard in itself.

They point that there is a lot to know. So reference and memory. Like most expertise in the world.

That texts are hard to read. So style, vocabulary. Well, not different than programming or the law on that point. They are easier than higher level math.

They say few people get novel ideas. Yes, creativity is rare, yet it's not particularly linked to the field. You need creativity to find new theorems too.

So they try to bring complicated topics again and again. Once we are done mapping the references, the vocabulary and cleaned out the awful style a lot of writers use to obfuscate their reasoning, the ideas behind are quite straightforward to grasp.

I've stopped doing it now, it takes a very long time, and it's always disappointing. It feels like debugging a program, only to realize it could have been 10 times shorter and easier to read.

> When a student who likes literature does poorly in mathematics, it is because he is not clever enough.

> When a student who likes mathematics does poorly in literature, it is because it is boring.

If you truly believe this I have nothing more to say to you.

I will not respond to your comments on philosophy, though I think they are wrongheaded, because I think your position to discuss such things is made untenable by the obvious contempt in which you hold the humanities.

However, I hated math. HATED it. Did so poorly in it through high school I ended up in college in basic algebra. It wasn't until college I found out I loved math and it was only because I got lucky and had a string of amazing professors.

I suspect this is true for other subjects as well. I also hated exercise until I discovered what I liked doing. PE teachers ruined it for me. Runs were terrible because there was no cadence. Push ups were terrible because no one checked form. The entire exercise of pre-college education is a box checking effort to get you ready for the factory. Perhaps we simply need to stop having the unmotivated teach the motivated. This goes true for research professors forced to teach as well.

Short story time: I never could memorize various geometry equations, like surface area or volume of basic shapes. Then one day while bored at my part time job, I found a paper and pencil and decided to use what I'd just learned in calculus to see if I could derive one of those equations, by leaving variables in instead of using concrete numbers.

It totally worked, I reinvented the volume of a sphere equation and ever since that day I've never forgotten it because now every part of the equation has meaning. I know why it is the way it is, and it makes sense.

This means loading the entire problem space in your head.

And this is hard.

Learning Math is just like learning a language, the issue is the script/alphabet/symbols used to communicate, its dictionary, its grammar are all complicated its hard for common people to get a grip on it.

Almost all people can follow logical sequence of arguments provided they understand the language in which they are described.

This language so far is the greatest barrier to bringing Math to public. Probably a new teaching method is needed.

No.

I know people that have been explained repeatedly with absolute patience and love that correlation was not causality, with simple examples. They agree on the moment, but wait a week and they still mix it up again and again.

That's one of the smallest and easiest logical concept to grasp, and they never integrate it.

Practically, in day to day life, mixing correlation and causality served them very well. It's actually often true. But as soon as it's on the news or a graph on the internet, it's over. Because it's abstract.

And the persons are not dumb either: they are very competent in other fields.

You just proved to them correlation doesn't imply causation in some cases, but no amount of examples will be sufficient enough to prove that is the case in all the cases. This is exactly my point.

If they have seen cases where a cause was strong correlated with some data, so as far as they are concerned, at least in that case they were logically able to conclude there was some connection.

To prove your point, you have to in some way prove a total disconnect between the two(correlation and causation), until then you really haven't proven anything substantial to them. Note you will need some mathematical formulation to do it(Symbol manipulation), which is basically learning a new language from grounds up. It could be impossible. Hence my point.

Saying math is about the language is like saying programming is about learning syntax. It is entirely irrelevant, the meaning is what is important.

It indeed is, how do you communicate meaning without words/symbols?

Make an attempt to reply to this very comment by any means apart from using words/symbols.

Yes, math is hard and definitely not for everyone, which I think is perfectly fine. But arguing that something has no use to you, because the first time in your life you actually have to engage in complex logical thinking is just lazy. The value of mathematics is independent of how hard it is.

That’s why you hear discussions about pushing algebra out, but not about pushing arithmetic out.

That’s why some schools replaced algebra with “data science”.

Abstraction isn’t easy.

But that’s precisely why math, especially algebra and the like, is so essential. It’s the only path to building abstract reasoning among students.

My guess is that answering "what am I ever going to use this for" is easier for other subjects, sometimes almost intuitive. For Maths, it needs to be defined as soon as it starts getting abstract.

"what am I ever going to use this for" is a perfectly valid question. People who are supposed to answer it should do a better job of doing so, writing good curriculum, and overall communication.

How so? What am I ever going to use my skills in analysing 20th century literature for. What am I ever going to use my knowledge about Roman history for? What am I ever going to use my knowledge about the structure of our government for? Certainly no employeer of mine ever cared, my University didn't care, nobody seems to have ever cared, except my teachers.

The question is bad because:

- People ask it, but only of mathematics

- People answer it, as if mathematics alone has to face that challenge

If school is about job training the answer is simply "because it contains the broadest possible techniques to understand the world and is vital in basically any data-based scientific pursuit and a basic understanding is needed for any trade which uses measurements". Somehow I think ancient history does not have such an answer...

You can use the same skills to spot when a news article is trying to manipulate you.

> What am I ever going to use my knowledge about Roman history for?

You can see how empires fall, and vote against those things.

> What am I ever going to use my knowledge about the structure of our government for?

Understanding why things happen around you is the first thing you need if you ever want to try and change something you don't like.

> Certainly no employeer of mine ever cared, my University didn't care, nobody seems to have ever cared, except my teachers.

You might care, though. Or you might not know what you know now without them.

Thankfully you did all those things, so now you can write a well-written letter to the correct person in government, citing the parallel problems with the current education system and the fall of Rome, and stop children being taught this stuff (-:

>Thankfully you did all those things, so now you can write a well-written letter to the correct person in government, citing the parallel problems with the current education system and the fall of Rome, and stop children being taught this stuff (-:

Okay, that was funny.

I think what you are trying to articulate is education as a hollistic system, not with the goal of expertese, but with the goal of offering some moral foundation and grounding in the world and society. But if you believe in that the utilitarian stance of education immediately becomes irrelevant and "when am I ever going to use this" becomes a non-sensical question, which misses the point.

I said see how they fall. Not every way, and not necessarily why, but how.

> then you could just teach that, the historical context would be almost irrelevant

I don't think you can see how they fall without historical context. That is the how.

> even the premise of a cyclical history, which can be broken by voting, seems completely insane

I didn't mention a cyclical history. Some things repeat, but that doesn't mean in general history is cyclical.

I don't mean to comment in a way that's too much on the nose, but I've just broken out various statements of yours and shown how they didn't follow from what I said. Spending time studying literature in a controlled environment, can help train children to read what's being said, as opposed to what they guess is being said. It's not perfect, but it can help a lot.

I've often heard it asked of languages, specifically Irish.

The main difference for me is that it's relatively easy to "fill in the gaps" for any other subject we learned from the ages of 12-18. Irish however, is niche enough - and learning resources generally technologically behind - that it's still quite tricky to self-teach or "quickly google" answers to things. That makes it unique from most other primary/secondary school subjects which are more universally taught across the world.

That said, I lean towards the other option: it's considered a waste of time, so no one puts in the effort, so it seems harder than it really should be.

The best interface does nothing. It's idle and listens. Everything automatic must be fully transparent and be opt-in. Fully explained if not self-explanatory.

User instruction beats developer assumption every single time. If the user is "wrong" as arbitrarily defined by the developer, the least they can do is kindly instruct and point the user in the "right" direction, not assume, let alone assume they know better than the user about what they want.

Not that it's not the best UI.

Nobody miss having to manually change their clock for DST or after a plane trip.

One day, the machine will read your mind, know you need some info, and download it into your brain. You will just know what you need to know without asking, as if it were obvious.

That's the best UI.

It's also the UI that will be the most abused with the most terrible consequences.

Dark patterns on neuralink are going to get, well, dark.

Now you could say that it's a management problem, that as to be solved.

But meanwhile, this is the situation right now.

And employees that are not very good nor motivated are not very productive remotely, and are difficult to manager from a distance or with time zone differences.

Nothing to do with remote. In-office companies are also filled with people who are not good nor motivated, but need to be there because they have to eat and pay rent/mortgage, and that job was their best option.

For most workers, remote or otherwise, unless they have significant skin in the game in terms of sizable equity, their job is just a paycheck and they'll optimize for doing as little work as possible, for the biggest paycheck possible.

Companies only push for in-office work to better surveil and micromanage workers, thinking in-office builds attachment to the work and workplace, not to motivate people more. You motivate people with money, equity, time off and interesting work.

A lot of those people are comfortable slacking off when noone see them, but will work when being at work.

If people are not motivated to do their job, they'll slack off anywhere, it's just that employers would rather have you slack off in the office instead.

The fact you are telling me this let me think you are coming from a theoretical perspective, but that you have not, in fact, managed such people yourself.

It would be self evident otherwise.

You can motivate and manage people effectively even remotely if you do it right, and you can also catch slackers remotely as well since all these daily standup meetings and SW tools devs are using give you a good insight into who's making progress and who's not.

If you can't manage people remotely (provided they're also of the same culture and Time zone) then you probably can't manage them correctly in the office as well.

Problems with motivation? Plenty.

But never had a problem with remote people slacking off, any more than those that come to the office every day.

Others are more productive when home, able to better focus, these are the type that never come in if avoidable.

Obviously these are the extremes, most people I've met fall somewhere in between.

Notice how slacking off doesn't really come into the picture? That's because there are thousands of ways to avoid working, and thousands of ways to make sure work gets done. Doesn't really matter where you are physically, at least not for creative and autonomous roles like engineering.

Now let's get on prison sentencing as well, so that individuals feel concerned.

Union Carbide did I think? I'm off to google it later.

And that Korean Shopping Center that collapsed.