Sleeping with Your Gadgets On - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/sleeping-with-your-gadgets-on/ <comment><USER2> _How to block all blue light from your devices_

I can't help but think 'turn them off' is the most obvious answer here. The author seems to think he _needs_ the iPad/laptop to fall asleep. Well, that's simply being untruthful to yourself. It's just a habit, and with some correct training (and eventually even seeing a psychologist) he can replace it with another, probably healthier, habit. Like reading a book or meditation.

<comment><USER3> He tried removing it entirely, he mentioned reading in the post. Why isn't it ok that he found a way to get to sleep easier with his devices?

<comment><USER2> Because in my opinion (solely based on intuition and vague memories of things read in scientific articles on the matter), as a solution for sleep problems, it's still inferior to just turning them off.

I know he mentions books in the articles but put them away because they either were either too exciting or too boring. To me that sounds like not having tried hard enough. As I said: replacing such nightly habit with another one isn't easy.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I get why reading a book is so much worse than a reading on an iPad. You mean because of the backlit screen?

<comment><USER3> Blue light. It's the whole reason f.lux and blue light filters exist, and why the Kindle Paperwhite is such an amazing device: front-lit with no blue light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to this article, today I learned that there's a name for the thing I have, "delayed sleep disorder."

I became an entrepreneur at age 22 not because I wanted to change the world, but because I just wasn't able to wake up early enough for a "real job." I figured there had to be a way to make the same amount of money I was making at the time, but keep my own hours. I always tell people I have "vampire hours."

I'm 38 years old now. I typically go to sleep around 4am+ every night and wake up around 11am or noon. I usually don't take meetings before 1pm and have unknowingly designed my life and career around this disorder.

I was also diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, which, according to Wikipedia, is linked to this sleep disorder.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder)

<comment><USER4> Be careful diagnosing yourself on the internet. There are a variety of things (some with cures!) that can make it hard to fall asleep or wake up. I'd strongly suggest seeing a specialist if you aren't sleeping well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have flux on my desktop, but I'll be looking for a filter for my iphone. (Edit: I like the orange glasses idea better.)

Here's what I do: an alarm goes off at 10:30pm and I take melatonin. If I actually shun devices, I can eventually sleep. But my brain is curious and wants to browse. I try to tell myself that I can in the morning. That sometimes works.

Lately I've been tracking my sleep with "sleep time". I also have a folder of sleeping and hypnosis apps that I cycle through. They talk me through relaxing muscles, calming my thoughts, deep breathing, binaral beats... I've sleeped better lately and actually look forward to it some.

Also exercise seems to help, if I do. (Edit: I'm enjoying the other tips here, thanks.)

<comment><USER7> When I was following the starting strength program I was asleep before my head hit the pillow - if you're thinking about following a heavy weight, compound exercise program this is one of the nice benefits. A 2 times body weight dead lift is a very effective way of feeling exhausted.

<comment><USER8> I can vouch for deadlifts putting you to sleep as that is part of my regular routine. 30-40 reps of Turkish Get-ups at 25% of your body weight is also very effective.

[http://stats.preenandprune.com/](http://stats.preenandprune.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For blocking blue light, instead of filtering the devices, just filter your eyes:

[http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fo...](http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fog/dp/B000USRG90/)

I've been wearing those for ~2 hours before sleeping and they work very well.

<comment><USER10> These probably work wonders on your sex life too.

<comment><USER9> heh. my fiancée jokingly refers to me as "nerd bono"

(she also has a pair and wears them)

<comment><USER10> Hahaha cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm asleep in about 10 minutes and so can you: \- no computer, tablet, tv 60 minutes before the bed.. \- no lights in the bedroom \- breath-in & breath-out while counting from 100 to 1

:)

<comment><USER12> What happens if I don't fall asleep at 0? Will I die? Will I get a BSOD?

<comment><USER13> You carry on into negatives. Eventually you'll get to -32,768, and then you can start again from 32,767 - assuming you have a 16 bit brain that is. God help you if yours is 32 bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In a similar vein, I've had problems sleeping all my life. The easiest solution was exercise, I began rollerblading to/from work as well as pretty much everywhere (~ 15-20km per day). During that period it never took more than a minute or two to fall asleep.

Now I live in a city with laws against roller blading in the street and cobbled pavements, so once I again I'm insomniac.

I shall try the articles suggestions

</comment><comment><USER15> What would work just as well for the author would be simply listening to audiobooks.

He says "For me falling asleep takes a cooling down period where my mind slowly disengages. That's why watching old TV shows is so effective; it gives me something to focus on without letting me really engage."

You can get the same effect by listening to an audiobook, without having to worry about the glow of a screen at all. I use a cheap dollar-store speaker tucked under my pillow, where the muffled drone of the book is still distinct and listenable, but just soporific enough to lull me to sleep. The only thing to remember is to set a timer so it turns off, rather then continuing on for hours and potentially waking you up again.

</comment><comment><USER16> What helped me was stopping drinking coffee. Even one cup in the morning. Two days of headache, two weeks of not being focused and suddenly I can actually fall asleep at 11pm.

Before that my brain was too alert up to ~1am.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _That's why watching old TV shows is so effective; it gives me something to > focus on without letting me really engage._

This is what I've been doing for years, there's probably about 20 films that I must've seen dozens of times each, and a few TV shows that I know and like enough to be able to watch time and time again without needing to focus on exciting plot twists because I already know them. Works really well for me, but this is the first time I've come across another person doing the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> "LPT: Have sleep-onset insomnia (difficulty falling asleep)? Stop thinking with words and think with images instead."

[http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1uy56a/lpt_have...](http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1uy56a/lpt_have_sleeponset_insomnia_difficulty_falling/)

I'm not sure if there is any evidence backing this up. Trying this myself didn't work too well because my eyes tend to seize a little bit when I try to 'think with images'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on finding something that works. If you ever want to try reading again, try rereading books. It works pretty similarly to how old TV shows work for you (at least for me). As long as you stick to simple to read books (stuff designed for young adults but still interesting to adults works well: Ender's Game, The Hobbit, The Phantom Tollbooth, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER19> A blue light is also good for dealing with jet lag. Here's one from Philips that has a rechargeable battery and is portable:

[http://www.truesunmedical.com/blue-light/53-philips- golite-b...](http://www.truesunmedical.com/blue-light/53-philips-golite-blu- sad-light.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been a f.lux fanatic for a long time. Recently, though, I've been getting headaches that seem to be relieved by turning it _off_. I think it has something to do with getting a variety of color input rather than mostly red or mostly blue, but an expert I am not.

</comment><comment><USER21> I find my solution more practical -- I flip the devices onto my desk face down/put into sleep mode

</comment><comment><USER22> There are mentions in this article of tricks that may or may not work for you, but in any case, do try F.lux if you haven't already. It's very, very great when working late on the screen.

<comment><USER23> Lux for android is a great, (paid) automated solution

<comment><USER24> Twilight (color adjustment is in the free version) works nicely too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So why not just get blue blocker glasses so you don't have to filter everything in the house individually???

</comment><comment><USER10> On your mac you can use alt+shift+dim to get 4ths of the normal box.</comment>


Luigi – Python based ETL - <AUTHOR> http://luigi.readthedocs.org/en/stable/ <comment><USER2> Title is slightly misleading, per the documentation:

"The purpose of Luigi is to address all the plumbing typically associated with long-running batch processes. You want to chain many tasks, automate them, and failures will happen. These tasks can be anything, but are typically long running things like Hadoop jobs, dumping data to/from databases, running machine learning algorithms, or anything else."

Especially mind the "These tasks can be anything" part.</comment>


How to Get a Job in Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.deepgram.com/how-to-get-a-job-in-deep-learning/ <comment><USER7> TL;DR: Deep Learning will become a commodity. Software will eat Deep Learning too.

I'd like to clean up a bit the air from the hype fog:

DL is giving amazing results only when you have big sets of labelled data. Hence it will be much cheaper for companies to buy Google/Microsoft Vision/Audio REST APIs rather than paying the costs of: cloud + find data + deep learning experts. So, I don't think we will see a massive growth of DL gigs.

e.g. Google Vision API: [https://cloud.google.com/vision/](https://cloud.google.com/vision/)

Except those areas where your own CNN implementation is needed (automotive, industrial automation), Deep Learning will be another "library" in the ever increasing Software Engineering mess of gluing many open source libraries and REST apis to get something useful done. You need 1 guy training a Neural Network for every 100 software monkeys maintaining the infrastructure complexity. There are now many Software Engineering jobs because it's hard to glue and maintain publicly-available code to solve some specific business problem.

I think the the same applies for many Data Scientist jobs, which are these days more about fetching/cleaning/visualizing data than making machine learning on it.

<comment><USER8> Just to give a different perspective. We are an on prem shop that sells to banks, telcos etc who can't use the cloud for compliance reasons. We make it work by doing other things people need in those environments well. One example is my willingness to do an install via dvds rather than "the cloud".

We mainly do fraud detection and security related work. We have also seen operations workloads (forecasting when machines are going to break or preventative maintenance) Most of our core business isn't even CNNs.

One thing that's missing from the narrative is that researchers who vision and speech because it's "pretty" and you can demonstrate results on a large feature vector. It's also very relatable for normal people.

Most of corporate america (not silicon valley) has more traditional things like time series data. Not images.

I would say here that deep learning use cases aren't explored by most people and that there are other areas besides what the marketing with self driving cars is perpetuating.

The other thing I would add here is when companies get bigger they typically need to take core competencies like vision and speech in house. It can be hard to justify outsourcing your core business to google as you grow.

This trend however might change over time. I would love to hear contradictory statements here.

Disclosure: I am a deep learning founder in the same batch as the authors of this blog post.

<comment><USER9> If you were to use deep learning in-house for smallish problems, would you still use tensorflow plus a batch of GPUs, or something different? I can't take stuff to the cloud for regulatory reasons, and in order to contract w/a startup like yours, I would first need to make a case for it (with useful examples that just need to be improved)

<comment><USER8> I am the wrong person to ask. We compete with tensorflow going after the larger scale stuff where hadoop is a requirement and the cloud is a swear word.

I work with .net and java shops where running on windows is a requirement and hippaa is considered "lite" and they dont know what a gpu is.

Despite the marketing noise that is still most of the world.

Look no further than another comment that showed java job postings vs machine learning.

My biased comment out of the way: if you can convince ops on why you need this deep learning thing then be my guest. Their first question to you is probably going to be: Does dell/hp sell this as a reference box?

It mostly comes down to roi and what your existing stack is.

My job is hard enough as it is. If you can convince IT to allocate an r&d budget be my guest. That is more or less our specialty. Email is in profile if you want specifics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am curious about demand for this skill in the market.

But I just don't see it - machine/statistical/deep learning gigs just seem really rare.

I know this isn't a great metric, but searches on Indeed.com:

      "deep learning" - <USER2>
      "machine learning" - 9,762
      "statistical learning" - <USER3>
      java - 72,802
      javascript - 43,785

Same searches on LinkedIn:

      "deep learning" - <USER4>
      "machine learning" - 6,952
      "statistical learning" - <USER5>
      java - 43,845
      javascript - 30,818

Even the "machine learning" search on Indeed, with 9K+ results has 1300+ from Amazon, followed by a much smaller number (in low hundreds each) from Microsoft, Google, others (including some that look like staffing companies).

Even on HN's who's hiring Sept 2016 thread phrase counts: 14 "deep learning" 79 "machine learning"

I completely agree with the idea that being able to use some deep/machine/statistical learning is going to be a toolset that data hackers need to have. I even think that there is a bit of the "build it and they will come" magic waiting out there.

But I think the best way forward is to be working in data and figure out how to generate value with deep learning - this will be _much_ more productive than trying to seek out a deep learning gig in terms of promoting deep learning in the workplace. Heck, that's a suggestion I would be wise to take myself . . .

<comment><USER11> You can't only look at demand. You also have to look at supply. Most machine learning engineers have a masters at least (many have a PhD), and almost all 'scientist' positions require a PhD. Of course there are fewer deep learning jobs available than front-end developers. That doesn't mean they're not highly coveted.

As an example, one of Fei-Fei Lee's recent grad students got multiple job offers upon graduating, one for more than a million dollars a year: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is- on-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-to- control-artificial-intelligence-and-techs-future.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER12> That $1m offer refers to Andrej Karpathy. He's the Jeff Dean of Machine Learning these days.

<comment><USER13> They are certainly great within their fields, but one thing Kaparthy is particularly good at is social media. While in grad school he was quite active both on HN, Reddit, and Twitter. He had fantastic blog posts that made difficult subjects seem comprehensible. Perhaps it's just part of being part of a younger generation, but Jeff Dean doesn't share that feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My question is, it feels like machine learning is reaching its "Rails" stage. You can implement the latest Bi-directional NN or LSTM-RNN using a high level API that already sits on top of another high level framework. Even beyond the core setup it will do the peripherals - smart initializations, anti- overfitting, split up your data, etc.

Do people who implement (albeit real, useful) deep learning systems, but who have no formal machine learning background, who don't really know much or care about implementing derivatives or softmax functions because the frameworks abstract all that away - are these people getting offered jobs?

<comment><USER15> Am I the only one who feels like all that math is required in order to properly implement an ML system? Bugs in ML systems are insidious and tricky, often difficult to find and manifesting in unexpected ways based on subtle issues in the underlying data or mathematics. Having a ground up understanding of why things work the way they do is a requirement to reasoning through all the layers of the system to find and fix issues.

Maybe someday all of that will be abstracted enough that you don't need to know math to do ML (like how now you generally don't need to know machine architecture to program), but how soon will that be?

<comment><USER16> It might be some time before it's abstracted enough. For example, there's software packages for Finite Element Analysis, but if you don't know the underlying math, you can't do anything more complicated than the basics. Plus, if there's a problem without that knowledge you can't really debug it. I'm guessing ML will be like that for a while. If you want to do something simple using a package is fine, but as soon as something goes wrong you'll need that knowledge to figure out what's happening.

For example, for a while there's been work on doing sentiment analysis using machine learning and they typically train them on a data set of movie reviews. It turns out that as soon as you apply that trained system to anything other than movie reviews the actual results are quite poor, but you might not catch it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My advice:

Do not label yourself as a data scientist or machine learning expert. Go for the domain, i.e. become comfortable with the actual data and the methods used there:

\- predict land use in aerial imagery - become comfortable with photogrammetry, geography, etc.

\- predict biological tissue(s) - become comfortable with specific branches of biology or medicine

\- predict $something_relevant

I actually stole this advice from the epilogue of some text about programming, and it really stuck with me. Otherwise your expertise is just too generic and you compete with a big pool of people who call themselves machine learning experts, because they can write a for loop in Bash.

</comment><comment><USER18> >Speaking of math, you should have some familiarity with calculus, probability and linear algebra

Curious to know if anyone has had success learning/re-learning these as a mid-20s or older adult who works fulltime, and if you could potentially provide a list of books/courses to go through. I personally never learned anything past geometry (in high school). The most advanced math class I took in college was College Algebra. That means I never learned trig or anything past it (so no calc, linear algebra, or probability), and I'm sure most people on HN surpassed me math-wise sometime in high school :)

I've been able to skate by with my embarrassing lack of math knowledge/skills as a developer, but I feel like it's only a matter of time until the mathematical steamroller becomes a serious threat career-wise and I get crushed.

<comment><USER19> It's totally possible. Which isn't to say that it's easy. If you go down that road, be prepared to sacrifice your social life for several years.

The most frustrating thing will be going through basics that don't seem connected to your eventual goal of ML; this is potentially a long phase.

I'd recommend Khan Academy for the math basics. Schaum's Outlines series for lots of worked problems. I'd recommend Strang's MIT OCW videos and books for Linear Algebra. I first learned calculus from an economics book, probably best not repeated ;). Bishop's PRML book is a good source on probability, Bayesian stats and machine learning.

I did a part time MSc in applied stats while working full time. Even in the MOOC era, there's nothing like real exams to focus your efforts.

<comment><USER20> Khan Academy is a great place to start. I second that recommendation.

Although I was pretty confident in my maths up through basic calculus, I began fresh earlier this year starting from pre-algebra on their videos and problem sets.

I took the approach of looking at the mind as a muscle and if I had taken a long break from lifting, I wouldn't jump right back in lifting the same weights. The analogy isn't perfect, but I feel like it helped to reinforce the old basic neural pathways in order to prime my mind for more difficult topics.

EDIT: Also the achievement points aspect helped as a learning tool as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "A job in deep learning".

It is highly unlikely that you will get a job in which you exclusively use deep learning alone, and not any other ML/AI technique.

Once you learn DL, then, "congratulations... here are 100 other topics you might need to know about before getting a job". [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/tutorial/machine_learning_map...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/tutorial/machine_learning_map/)

<comment><USER22> I disagree. I think we might soon be at a point where someone might be able to get a job just knowing how to use CNNs well. Why do I think this? Well .. CNNs have basically licked the problem of image classification. They require a lot of trial and error. So .. I can totally see people packaging this up (e.g. NVidia's DIGITS or TStreamer), and CNN skills become sort of like Word/MS Office for some industrial applications. These people won't get paid 500K .. more like what web developers make. Just my personal opinion.

<comment><USER23> I think you're right that the barrier is a lot lower now that there is a somewhat successful blackbox abstraction.

In the past you need to know that to recognize lines: hough transform, recognize polygons: line simplification, recognize face: cascades, etc etc.

Now? You can almost just feed it arbitrary labeled training data and do well without any sort of feature engineering. Just another api to glue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> i just want to be a software engineer without having to continually burn away evenings and weekends studying the latest shiny, continually for the next two decades, just to keep my career afloat. is that even an option anymore?

<comment><USER25> Stick to understand fundamentals and the cruft on the top layer is easy to grok. Getting good jobs is about who you know most of the time, so just keep a network happening.

Don't read too much hacker news, it kind of becomes stressful and I would try enjoy your weekends, don't worry too much about the market, a lot of good people just burn out and have breakdowns by trying to understand all that's going on and become useless anyway. Just know the basics well and learn what you need to _in work hours_ , make time.

What I'm finding is that in the end, most of the good / important stuff ends up condensed into a nice O'Reilly (or similar) volume that you can read at you leisure' later on when the hype has evaporated. If you invest yourself too much in the latest tech constantly, you run the risk of it being redundant / replaced anyway.

<comment><USER26> > What I'm finding is that in the end, most of the good / important stuff ends > up condensed into a nice O'Reilly (or similar) volume that you can read at > you leisure' later on when the hype has evaporated.

If you are okay with median compensation and median project importance (internally and externally), then sure, wait a couple years when the interest has died down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > I built a twitter analysis DNN from scratch using Theano and can predict the > number of retweets a tweet will get with good accuracy

I imagine a product like this could actually charge a fair bit of money helping companies and people improve the 'virality' of their tweets.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is just a nit, but Andrej Karpathy was never a professor at Stanford; he received his PhD from Stanford and now works at OpenAI.

<comment><AUTHOR> good catch. fixed it

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This should be titled "How to Learn Deep Learning".

"How to get a job in deep learning" would include:

\- What specific topics will be asked during interviews

\- What the interview question format is like

\- How to prepare for the interviews

\- How to get interviews without a PhD. What do you need to show competence in your self learned skills?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are definitely great points. Most companies looking for DL/ML talent aren't interested in setting up HR hoops for the applicant to jump through.

They want to see if you did cool stuff before you applied for the job. If you didn't then you won't get an interview, but if you did then you have a chance no matter what your background is. Of course, the question of "what is cool stuff?" comes up. If it is building small projects with a a little bit of success, that probably won't do it (it might work for larger companies, or companies that need light ML/DL performed). But if it is "built twitter analysis DNN from scratch using Theano and that can predict the number of retweets a tweet will get: here's te accuracy, here's a link to a my write up on it and here's a link to github for the code.".

Edit: added words similar to this at the end of the blog post.

<comment><USER30> > So even if you're a beginner with deep learning, you're welcome to apply for > one of our open positions

Statements like this contradict what you are saying here - to really build a model that predicts number of retweets based on the content of the message (not something like the average number of retweets this user has) is very non- trivial. If your threshold of a side project is publishable [1], it is an unrealistic expectation.

[1] [http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/miles/papers/icwsm11.pdf](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/miles/papers/icwsm11.pdf)

<comment><USER31> Speaking for the other side, the point is not that you achieved the accuracy but it is understand how you thought about the problem. The ability to decide on a useful hypothesis, formulate the problem around it, and have some way to measure your progress is very very valuable from the employer's perspective.

<comment><USER30> Sure, my point was more that this can be demonstrated by a much simpler project. How many candidates have you seen who haven't had a deep learning job before complete such a complicated project?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you:

\- have good problem solving and coding skills \- spend a month or two learning how to build networks using good libraries

Then you will be able to get a good result with the Twitter task I pointed out. It takes being able to work input data correctly, think about what matters and what doesn't, then synthesize using readymade DL tools, usually in python. None of that is complicated esoteric neural net stuff, it is just motivated problem solving.

I'll add that as a big point — you should be able to code, problem solve, and be motivated.

<comment><USER30> The important part to mention is that the expected completion time of your project is 1-2 months. I have extensive ML experience (no deep learning though), and I think this project would take me at least 2 months to do well. This is a long time, especially for a beginner side-project. It is good to tell people to do side-projects, but suggesting projects like this is de- motivating for beginners. If someone on your team (who is presumably an expert already) does this side-project I'd be very interested in the results, and on how long it took them - it would make a good blog post. Your proposed beginner side-project should be less complicated than a published paper with 200 citations (the paper didn't use a nn).

<comment><USER26> Everyone thinks they can download tensorflow, hook it up to some stock market or Twitter api, hack a system in a week, and become a ML engineer. It is simply not this simple. It takes many months or years to achieve this experience.

Sometimes software engineers need to accept they aren't the smartest ones anymore. This is why they can't get the "smart" and "cool cutting edge" ML/DL jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You may not need a PhD or tons of experience to _learn_ Deep Learning, but what about the gap between that and getting a job?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are a great software engineer that can solve hard problems yourself, and then you add to that real experience solving your own nontrivial problems with DL, then people will hire with no questions asked. The reason is that not many people have experience in DL. So companies need to get good engineers that have the problem solving mindset and motivation+creativity to learn new frameworks and lick the problems they face in new awesome ways. Industry is dying for people like that.

If you are that type of person then you can kill it with just a few weeks of hard study on your own.

<comment><USER26> > If you are a great software engineer that can solve hard problems yourself > [...] then people will hire with no questions asked.

False. Being a great software engineer is not enough to get a job in deep learning. For the same price, or a little more, you can hire an "expert" scientist or engineer with a PhD in CS/stats/ML.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Should probably say "you'll get an interview". I think you snipped out something pretty important though. The fact that you have done something nontrivial with DL is actually a big tell for the employer. If you just 'want to learn more about DL because it seems interesting' then employers aren't interested. But if you say "I am a good engineer and I have already done something nontrivial" then you have a much better chance of getting an interview and then the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is applied deep learning. There's a ton of jobs available for taking someone's library on GitHub and applying it to a bunch of data. But other than DeepMind, FAIR, Google Brain, Open AI, Vicarious, and Microsoft Research, who is hiring for theoretical machine learning? That's what I'm interested in — developing better algorithms that eventually approach AGI.

<comment><USER13> Allen Institute for AI and many other smaller companies depending on how left field you want to get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why is the Machine Learning subreddit so toxic?

<comment><USER35> There's so much hype. It's attracting masters of the universe type people that would otherwise be you'know, at Goldman Sachs or something

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> just wrote a blog post that I think a lot of folks will like if they are looking for a job in ML/DL.

Would love to hear if I missed something!

<comment><USER30> One minor point is that you don't mention some fundamentals of the machine learning process, like making sure to evaluate your models on a different data set than you used to train your models.

Another point is that this article is really about how to learn deep learning, not how to get a job. I would really like to see some evidence that: "The good news is that basically everyone is hiring people that understand deep learning." Most data scientist jobs I have seen don't require or use deep learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true I didn't mention this but I was hoping the coverage in the related links would be sufficient. I would loved to have had a section that points out some basic tenets though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 1st sentence should be: 1\. Be a fuckin math whiz.

Had it been, i would have clicked the back button.

<comment><USER37> Take a look at the primary algorithms used commonly in AI today - <USER6> exceeds high school level math.

I posted about this earlier today but ML really should be demystified. You can write a lot of commonly used algorithms in 100 lines or fewer. The math is not complex. If you can get past the notation and buzzwords like "deep learning" (it's an artificial neural network, itself a grandiose term) you'll see it's not as daunting as most think.

The reality is _most_ "data scientists" will be working on implementation rather than creation. They'll be working on data sets and error analysis, not creating the next buzzword-laden algorithm.

<comment><USER38> Most ML algorithms can be treated as an optimization problem.

Convex optimization is not high school level math.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Successful startups that didn't come from top-tier Universities - <AUTHOR>

Reading about startups I always have the feeling that most of the "hyped" startups come from the Ivy League so sometimes it seems like it can be very difficult for someone who didn't come from that circle to succeed, specially in the Valley. Can you give any examples (or are you an example) of a successful startup that didn't come from a topnotch university? Would you mind sharing some of your story, the problems you had to deal (if any) for not being from a top-tier university? <comment><USER2> Youtube: Chad Hurley went to Indiana Uni. of Pennsylvania. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim went to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Yelp: Jeremy Stoppelman went to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Slide: Max Levchin went to University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Foursquare: Naveen went to Worcester Inst. and Kings College. Dennis Crowley went to Syracuse and Tisch School at NYU

Tumblr: David Karp never went to college.

Actually, I would say that there would very little correlation between going to an Ivy League/ top 10 school and building a company. Most people at such schools are more are interested in getting into Investment Banking, Consulting, Pvt Equity jobs than building companies. Going to a good college would a weak variable, if relevant at all, when deciding on the probability of future success for a startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> There have actually been a few academic studies on this topic by Vivek Wadwha and the Kauffman foundation:

"An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won't increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur."

"In other words, 81% of the tech company founders came from "regular" schools. To make my colleagues at Harvard feel better (and to keep my job), I'll acknowledge that the Ivies represented 8% of the sample even though those schools only graduate 1.6% of American students."

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/got-degree-envy-no- worries-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/got-degree-envy-no-worries-you- can-still-make-it-big/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Look @ both sides of the data - how many startups fail that come from top tier schools?

I think top tier schools push people towards leadership and entrepreneurship and that is what causes them to start so many companies – not because they are genetically better or something you have no control over. It is all up to the individual. Don't be deterred. Being successful is a personal choice (often a hard one).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answers!

I always felt that top-tiers had an advantage because of their networking (with those same finance guys who can easily introduce them to a Ron Conway or a Peter Thiel)

I know it might sound like a silly question but sometimes you need to hear that other people that didn't come from the top also got there so you can keep on moving on. Again, thanks everyone for the answers!

</comment><comment><USER5> Few billionaires on this list that dropped out...most didn't go to top-tier universities <http://www.twincommas.com/billionaire-college-dropouts>

</comment><comment><USER6> top schools does not equal to successful starups; idea + drive + timing + general business sense (ie know ur market, thinking outside the box, calculated risk taker, etc) are some of the qualities I equate to with successful startus; don't know if top tier schools offer such courses? lol

<comment><USER7> Good point. You become an Entrepreneur, it just happens; you don't go to a business school to learn that. It's more the Risk attribute that takes you there and timing as you said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> great companies are built by great minds. They are all across the world; they may not even have a completed degree.

Stay with right people, build the right communities around you. Its a long term journey. You will be definitely part of something big!

</comment><comment><USER8> Steve Jobs. Yes, Apple still believes that it's a startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple

</comment><comment><USER10> Grooveshark: University of Florida</comment>


Show HN: Juicy Tag – Connect all your social media profiles with one link - <AUTHOR> http://www.juicytag.com <comment><USER2> Not clear from the landing page what this actually does. Enable people to follow me all at once? Provide aggregated analytics?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's basically a flexible landing page that you can link to in your bio on social media. When you click on the link, you get three options which all deep link to your respective profiles. Thanks for the feedback! I'll make it more understandable ASAP.</comment></comment>


How Evan Moran replaced CSS/HTML/JS with OJJS - <AUTHOR> https://www.codefellows.org/blogs/interview-how-evan-moran-invented-ojss <comment><USER2> This concept of 'JS all the way down' is what hooked me on Titanium Mobile (crossplatform app framework) as soon as I started using it. It's a much lighter cognitive load, since I'm not constantly switching between varied featuresets and syntax of templates/HTML/CSS/JS.

One of my favorite features, is that any piece of the app can instantly become a reusable, extendable module for another app. Since it's 'just JS' it always ports. In this way I share UI widgets between web apps and mobile apps.

Generated CSS and HTML should be syntactically perfect, and JS has much better error handling than either CSS or HTML. With those traits, the resulting code can be better than a human could write on their own.

The concept of JSON syntax for DOM creation has been around a long time -- HAML, JsonML, jQuery... And although the JS syntax can be verbose, CoffeeScript object notation is available, and quite similar to HAML and SASS.

I hope we see a lot more of this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little confused. Didn't ExtJS, Dojo, various jQuery plugins, etc do this same kind of thing years ago? And didn't we kind of find out that JS + CSS + HTML was acually a pretty nice separation of markup, formatting and functionality?

<comment><USER4> The separation is definitely still a good thing -- OJ isn't trying to break it! The only difference is now some of that separation can be done in code. Think separate functions or js files. One that creates the site and one that styles it. The separation doesn't have to be a completely separate format, it turns out functions are quite good at abstraction=)

That said almost every example on the site is just creating HTML and JS (not CSS), so it would be very easy for you to use OJ to create everything and then style everything with .css files like you always have. So use it however you want, but please don't think it is trying to force markup and formatting together!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone made a todomvc implementation using this?

</comment><comment><USER6> 'Instead of the word 'replace' let's use "abstract away"...'

<comment><USER4> Ok, good point, I probably could have responded better=).

What I was trying to say was that a lot of people focus on OJ's ability to create html/css and think that that is what it is for. They think that that means you can't CSS the way they are use to: with a designer created .css file. This isn't the case!

Instead OJ is about making reusuable website objects -- check out the plugin page: [http://ojjs.org/plugins.html](http://ojjs.org/plugins.html). You can make a YouTubeVideo in one line, but, just as importantly, the OJ plugin lets you change the video's volume or pause and play. In short, OJ creates web building blocks that can live edit what they create.

<comment><AUTHOR> Evan, is it fair to say that it takes it a step toward Object Oriented web dev?

<comment><USER4> That is a good way to think about it. As programmers we are used to objects that give us methods and properties to change them. A Form object should have a submit function, a Table object have a addRow, removeRow function. OJ does this for the web.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HealthKit – Apple stole our name - <AUTHOR> http://blog.daemonl.com/2014/06/healthkit-apple-stole-our-business-name.html

<comment><USER2> Ah, the one who "invented the entire *Kit Naming Scheme" "A Few Years ago".

Unless that actually predates the origins of technologies like UIKit, WebKit and the like, I'd think about revising that article so as to not make it look stupid and uninformed.

</comment><comment><USER3> HealthKit is just the name of the library. Health is the name of the app. Good luck with you lawsuit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt there'll be a lawsuit - more of an SEO battle... which doesn't look particularly good for HK the First.

<comment><USER4> Or they could keep the domain and ride the windfall of traffic that will come from all the Apple generated interest.

<comment><USER5> I'd just optimize the hell out of that site for conversions. Open the floodgates!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850456). Since it's not clear which is the best url, we'll add this link to that thread.

</comment><comment><USER7> "It looks like no one ever registered the buisness [sic] name or trading name in Australia"

Move along - nothing to see here.</comment>


The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_kryptos

<comment><USER2> The reason the code's not broken - because the CIA don't need it broken. This is what happens when the CIA needs a code broken: <http://xkcd.com/538/>

</comment><comment><USER3> What I can't crack is how this ended up in Wired magazine twice!

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh god please make it stop.

Kryptos : Cryptography :: Astrology : Astronomy.

<comment><USER5> "Sanborn [the artist] named his proposal after the Greek word for _hidden_."

<comment><USER4> It's not Sanborn's fault, I know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's because CIA sucks at cryptanalysis. NSA on the other hand...

<comment><USER7> I've heard the NSA's got a computer or two that work reasonably well on stuff like this...

<comment><USER4> That's like saying the NSA's got a computer or two that would work reasonably well at solving the Saturday New York Times Crossword Puzzle. I'm sure they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it used a one time pad properly, it's in theory uncrackable.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad>

 _If the key is truly random, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret, the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy_

<comment><USER9> Or if he made a mistake (because he has no idea what he is doing), it is uncrackable.

<comment><USER10> When I was a kid, I had this idea that I was excited about, that I'll write meaningless codes in pieces of paper and strategically place them to drive people who try to figure out crazy. People just didn't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, if Yahoo ever decides that a strategy for distracting Google is needed, we now know how. Plop one of these down out the front of Google in the middle of the night. By mid-afternoon the next day, the Googleplex will no longer be functioning :-)

<http://xkcd.com/356/>

</comment><comment><USER12> The last part is probably a Tara Ploughman quote.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe the entropy/ structure ratio for the last block of stuff is such that there are multiple valid looking decryptions?

</comment><comment><USER14> I bet it's gibberish, like the artist was giving the spooks something to work on besides world domination once in a while.

<comment><USER15> The artist has done other sculptures that have been solved, and the first 3 parts have been solved. So I doubt it is gibberish.

If you are interested you might check out Elonka's website: <http://elonka.com/kryptos/>

She's given talks all over the country on Kryptos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anyone ever decides to make a list of the top 10 perfect examples for an HN article, put this on there.

<comment><USER17> Why? I don't think I learned anything from that article. Trying to decode an artists random encoding seems like a huge waste of time to me.

<comment><USER16> Of course. If it seems like a huge waste of time to you, then is must be the same for everyone else as well.

First, Sanborn didn't create a random encoding. He worked with a renowned CIA cryptologist to come up with this, so there's a rhyme and reason.

Second, it's the _idea_ of it all, the effort it takes to break a code and figure out its innards. To me, that counts as one of the perfect examples of hackerdom.

<comment><USER17> I just don't see the use for it - presumably one could create a random number generator to generate all sorts of codes, and have all hackers be occupied indefinitely? There are so many open problems whose solution would actually increase the body of human knowledge.

Still, if you want to play, play. It probably is a good problem to practice cryptography with.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China jails man 13 years for running porn Web site - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/06/AR2010020603305.html <comment><USER2> I had a coupe of graduate student roomates from the PRC in the late '80s and one of the most intersting things they told me was that accusations of sexual infractions had replaced execution by starvation as the state's main tool for controlling the population.

Before the free market in food was established, if you got on the wrong side of your block committee or village equivalent, they'd just stop issuing you ration coupons; no muss, no fuss on their part.

So every time you hear about a PRC crackdown on "porn", expect that there's a hidden agenda behind it that's used to zap "enemies of the people" who have nothing to do with porn.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting bit of information, but wouldn't that strategy cause people to become thieves instead of starving themselves?</comment></comment>


Twenty Dollars Per Gallon: How the rising price of oil will change our lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/14/20-dollar-gallon-business-energy-oil.html

<comment><USER2> For a more critical and very thoughtful (if somewhat vengeful) look at peak oil and what it implies, see The Long Emergency and A World Made by Hand, both by James Kunstler.

His book on suburban blight, The Geography of Nowhere, is also fascinating.

<http://kunstler.com/></comment>


Universities are broke – let's cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/21/universities-broke-cut-pointless-admin-teaching <comment><USER2> I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over- employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3 could realistically be done by 1.

However it's also important to recognize that not all of the runaway growth of University bureaucracy is due to poor management or redundant workers; expansion of IT infrastructure and increased regulatory requirements - especially for public institutions - demand more labor. These are the obvious culprits, but beyond these, because the modern University has become far more than just a place of higher education and has come to resemble a miniature city, it is expected to serve the diverse non-academic needs of tens of thousands of students, in addition to more traditional academic needs. Counseling and advisory services, recreational activities, food service, engagement and diversity programs, ubiquitous computing, etc. all add to the University's bottom line. Universities fear that if they were to stamp their feet and refuse to supply these amenities in the name of keeping down tuition, matriculation rates would decline as students would seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Add to this the fact that Universities receive no penalty from the market for continually increasing their prices. Because student loans are available to service ever increasing tuition costs, and students pretty much need to go to college to succeed in the 21st century, demand for college education is highly inelastic. What economic entity wouldn't raise its prices if it knew demand for its product wouldn't suffer?

In a traditional market, as one supplier increases price, competitors enter the market offering lower prices. This doesn't happen in the market for higher education because the value of a University is largely tied to its prestige, and prestige cannot be easily generated by competitors. We bemoan the high cost of University education then mock the University of Phoenix and similar offerings. Market dynamics are the guilty party here.

<comment><USER3> > Universities fear that if they were to stamp their feet and refuse to supply > these amenities in the name of keeping down tuition, matriculation rates > would decline as students would seek greener pastures elsewhere.

I find this so fascinating. In a normal market, demand is driven by differentiating factors, and I imagine paying for a reduced set of services could be wildly popular. I certainly never took advantage of most of the services I paid for in college—I was too busy with school.

Meanwhile, schools appear to be in the race for positioning schools as anything _but_ a place to get a degree.... which is the entire role of college in society today.

I would quit my job and finish my degree tomorrow if there was a "no bullshit, we'll just get you your degree as fast as possible" option. But all I see are residency requirements, tuition that appears to be at least an order of magnitude more than what my professors cumulatively make from teaching me, etc etc. Very disheartening to someone who loves the culture of academia.

And don't forget, they STILL make you buy textbooks and allow the profs to pocket the profits.

<comment><USER4> Also, consider that the desire for greener pastures is a very top-down cultural thing in the US, that's not always true world wide (though, it increasingly seems that way.)

By number of students, most higher ed institutions are community colleges, which are (for the most part) low on the BS and extra fun. For profits, and a growing number of 'bootcamp' type schools also fit in this area.

However, 4 year schools (starting off with good ol' Harvard) completely dominate the idea of what higher ed is like. Employers still revere 4 year degrees and a "big name" still has its advantages. Many students grow up thinking that's the only/right/best option for them - so between dozens of essentially equivalently good schools (i.e. The "Top 50", and arguable the top 100-200 too), students pick on factors other than learning.

A few months ago, 538 wrote a fun piece called "Shut Up About Harvard", which is worth a read. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about- harvard/](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/)

<comment><USER5> Here in the UK my wife has degrees from 4 universities - from middle ranking to prestigious and by her accounts by far the worst teaching was at by far the most prestigious (and we are talking about a world top 20 institution).

Having worked in academia this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

NB I know these ranking schemes are pretty dubious.

<comment><USER6> I also have a degree from a prestigious university where the teaching ranged from mediocre to good. IMO, the quality of the teaching (or lack thereof) was secondary to the fact that the academic bar was set significantly higher than at most other institutions and that I was surrounded by the caliber of classmates who had both the aspiration and capability to excel.

<comment><USER7> I have to agree. I went to a top 10 UK university which was very much focused on research. The teaching was okay to poor but the level you had to meet to pass the exams was high and I did project work with some of the brightest people I've met who pushed me. I saw some of the work my peers were doing at other universities and it was a walk in the park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work in post secondary administration, so I think I have some perspective here. Part of the problem, at least in the US & Canada (Where I live) is that post secondary institutions are positioning themselves less and less and places to get an education and more and more as places to go for an "experience." Its no longer enough to provide a quality education, universities now are selling themselves on their facilities, their "student life" and all the other intangibles that are secondary to actual education. This leads to all the administrative bloat we're seeing as now that many schools are functioning more like glorified 4 years spas they have to have departments filled with staff to plan events, throw parties, Snapchat sports games, provide "save spaces," etc.

I haven't been in the sector long enough to have a real handle on when or why this shift happened, but from my perspective its the primary driver of the increasing administrative bloat. Schools are competing more on the intangibles, and so they need to invest more into these areas, which means more staff and more overhead.

Personally I think the whole university model isn't long for this world though as there are plenty of ways competency can be signaled apart from a fancy foil-stamped piece of paper and eventually when the costs of university education don't provide a positive return over any reasonable time horizon students are going to start looking for alternatives en masse and the market will innovate to meet that demand.

<comment><USER9> This is the view of people who have not really looked at university budgets. "experiences" are cheap compared to headcount. Buildings and experiences are mainly funded by outside donation specifically for the experience or building. People do not often donate to "expand salaries and headcount for faculty and administrators".

The result is that students pay for headcount and donors pay for experiences. It isn't just administrative headcount, it is also teaching headcount. If you want a low price, you cannot have a $200,000 a year professor teaching 30 students and doing some research unless the research is funding their salary.

We need to lower the cost of colleges in the United States dramatically and that means tough choices, but it won't happen until we reach the point where student loan defaults are so prevalent that the federal gov can no longer subsidize them.

We have a crisis on our hands and our politicians are talking about lowering the cost of borrowing by 2%, and making colleges "free". They are not interested in driving down the real cost of an education.

<comment><USER10> On the research point, why are research and teaching commingled? Both are important, but it seems that they require very different skillsets. Would we be better off filling universities primarily with people who love teaching, and are great at it, and having some other kind of institution (or some separate division of universities) do the research? Is this heresy?

<comment><USER11> IIRC there's a fairly strong correlation between content mastery and teaching ability, even at the high school level, far more than the correlation between level of teacher training and teaching ability.

Obviously there's other factors (effort, as you point out).

Though I think it's partly an artifact of the days when an undergrad degree would bring students to the leading edge of research, so there was simply no- one else qualified. There would have been a lot more synergy when researchers were explaining cutting edge ideas to students (it still happens a bit, but it's the exception rather than the rule).

<comment><USER12> >Though I think it's partly an artifact of the days when an undergrad degree would bring students to the leading edge of research, so there was simply no- one else qualified. There would have been a lot more synergy when researchers were explaining cutting edge ideas to students (it still happens a bit, but it's the exception rather than the rule).

Yes, that was my suspicion too -- historically, students were only going to those lectures where they were actually interested and which they were much closer to the level of the lecturer. In that case, the bottleneck isn't "ability to be a good explainer to novices" but "ability to answer arbitrary questions".

IOW, it looked more like grad school today, where the good researchers naturally are a better fit for teaching, and don't mind it as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution but clearly many people are making big money in this business at the expense of students. The federal loan programs certainly don't help either. Allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would also lessen this money feast for universities. Alas, no solution looks in sight so I do my part in keeping money away from these money furnaces.

<comment><USER14> When student loans were able to be discharged in bankruptcy, it was popular to declare bankruptcy on graduation. By the time they saved up enough for a down payment on a house, the bankruptcy will have fallen off the records, so effectively they got a free education (not the ideal mechanism for doing so, better to give people free education upfront).

Maybe there is a middle ground where student debt is not easily discharged, but can be in some cases (eg: graduated 10-20yrs ago, could never find a steady job).

Ideally we as a country should decide to make trade schools/college free (or at least give people $10k/yr towards tuition). This would not be a huge increase the in budget as we already spend ~$10k/yr (depends on state) to send kids to high school.

<comment><USER15> All student loans should be subject to income-based repayment. They can still be very difficult/impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, but you shouldn't have to make significant payments on them unless you're actually making decent money.

<comment><USER16> This is how it works in Australia and it works very well IMO.

It also indexes with inflation so that there isn't a major stress if you graduate with a low paying job and work your way up to a higher salary.

This does mean its everyone's lowest priority to pay off, but you can't reasonably avoid paying it other than not making an income.

<comment><USER17> It works exactly like this in the US. People who aren't currently in college just aren't aware of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City. 35 acres. 2,700 people on site. None are students. None are faculty. No teaching or research will occur there. It's _all administrators_.[1] "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development", says Stanford's FAQ. ("Development" in university-speak means fund-raising, not building construction.)

Now that's management bloat.

Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members.

[1] [https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/](https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, who needs the Library and Archives? The book conservation lab is one of the things in the RWC location, that's clearly overhead that's totally not needed! Buckminster Fuller's models? Let 'em molder.

<comment><USER20> Today, a library fits on a hard drive.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but university libraries also do a whole lot more than just manage books. The library at the University I work for has computer labs, GIS labs, a makerspace, 3D printing, electronics fabrication, photography and video studios, plus a hundred other things. All of those take staff.

<comment><USER22> FWIW, that's not what most people mean by the term "library".

<comment><USER21> It is in the context of university libraries. Nowadays these sorts of services are common at bigger schools, and they are managed by the library.

Libraries at universities have always offered more than just buildings full of books. My point is that there is a lot more to managing a serious library than just cataloging books. Trained librarians especially do a lot to directly contribute to research by connecting researchers with the right sources of information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of:

(Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) )

And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.

<comment><USER24> Now that's a business model screaming for disruption.

<comment><USER25> When people talk about "disruption of education", they usually mean either online courses or boot camps. I think that's unfortunate. There are huge benefits to learning stuff the traditional way, by taking a class in person, on a schedule, with a curriculum and a teacher and an exam at the end. There are also huge benefits to hanging out with working scientists and picking up their enthusiasm. These are the important things about attending a university, and they aren't even that difficult or expensive to set up! Can we get that kind of "disruption", please?

<comment><USER26> The only benefit I see is the piece of paper I'm going to get from the university at the end of my wild ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The pointless admin is from services given to the students. Universities (that aren't household brand names like the Ivys) compete on services and facilities. And because most students are young and using other people's money (their parents or their future selves) they will choose schools not because they have the best deal educationally but, because they beautiful grounds, newer, swankier dorms and all of the social clubs and facilities for those like sports fields, etc.

It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things.

It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.

<comment><USER28> Yes. It's not unreasonable to cite this as an example of capitalism functioning normally. Competition produces extra money for institutions that are covering their core missions (one hopes) and also virtue signaling that they're super successful and wealthy.

You could call it greed, or simple self-interest: if the administrators have correctly perceived that the insanely wealthy will only make gifts to institutions plated in gold with peacock feathers, then their personal feelings about gold and peacock feathers are irrelevant: they can seduce the wealthy, or not, and they can win the gifts, or not.

Definitely worth study, and definitely an interesting study in perverse incentives. After a point, nothing is valued BUT gold and peacock feathers because they're so inextricably a part of doing business. And it's certainly not aimed at the students. It's aimed at the impossibly wealthy, who wish their gifts to be associated with institutions that are absurdly swanky for the students. What the students want doesn't have anything to do with it, it's purely for donors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Obligatory:

> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic > organization there will be two kinds of people:

> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. > Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, > many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even > some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union > collective farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples > are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of > education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters > staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep > control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions > within the organization.

[https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm)

<comment><USER30> All I remember of Jerry Pournelle was his monthly piece in Byte Magazine, describing his adventures with a computer that never seemed to completely work.

<comment><USER31> Some of my favorite SF is stuff he wrote with Larry Niven: Footfall, Inferno, Lucifer's Hammer, The Mote in God's Eye (and The Gripping Hand)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> People are happy to claim they want to downsize university administrations when the appeal is voiced like this, but another kind of editorial that pops up just as frequently in the opinion press later, they will be just as enthusiastically demanding more counseling for students in emotional quandaries, more university-mediated internship opportunities, more officials providing sexual assault prevention training, more recourse to resolve student-advisor disputes in a way that shifts the power balance towards the student, more varied dining options and a plethora of other goodies that can mostly only be realised with more and/or more powerful admin staff.

</comment><comment><USER33> About five years ago, the president of my university proudly announced at a Senate meeting that they had appointed a new Director of Sustainability, to help ensure that the university's operations were sustainable.

I asked if, in light of the increasing administration headcount, they thought appointing a Director of Sustainability was financially sustainable.

They clearly didn't get the message; while that particular Director has moved on to other things, there is now an Office of Sustainability with about a dozen people.

</comment><comment><USER29> In an administrative heavy organization every problem seems to be answered with "how can we add more administrative layers, processes, and backroom deals to satisfy x group (management, media, special interest groups, voters, etc) that something appears to be being done?" rather than asking "looking at all available options what is the best way to resolve this problem (inside and out of government)?". Basically a "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" type of thing.

This is the difference between group A (admins) and group B (engineers, teachers, etc) in Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. The former is often presented as a clever talented group of smart people who savvily work the system in TV shows like House of Cards but I question the utility it really offers the world when the ROI is so often questionable.

I'm curious how much of this modern dysfunction in modern governments (not just in the US) is due to the fact politicians are now almost entirely career politicians who spend their formative years in this insular world. The majority coming from the same private schools and 90% of them with law degrees. Rather than in the past, such as the founding fathers, who were businessmen, writers, and intellectuals first embedded in the real world who then went into public service.

The same analogy applies to Universities with administrators being raised within the system rather than the teaching staff intimately familiar with the front-line realities of the organization.

[1] [https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm](https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm)

<comment><USER34> This is what happens to software development within large corporations. Developers are being managed by a bureaucracy that doesn't have a clue about software development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Whether it's a university or a government or any other bureaucracy, the money eventually flows to the top. And the top tier of employees have no incentive to remove their own livelihoods.

Thinning the waste at the top is a great idea, but never gets done unless a bigger bureaucracy makes it happen.

<comment><USER36> MY favorite are the exorbitant salaries paid to sports faculty, even when the sports program is loses money.

<comment><USER20> The universities that have highly paid coaches are the ones with premier, highly successful programs and earn way more from ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and merchandise than the coach is paid. It's like any other business (and it most definitely _is_ a business), you need to pay well to attract the best talent.

<comment><USER37> If this article ([https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the- ma...](https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-madness-of- college-basketball-coaches-salaries/475146/)) is any guide, the money made by the athletic department mostly goes to the athletic department and not to funding anything else useful.

<comment><USER20> I would agree, but dispute the claim that athletic scholarships are not "useful." Most collegiate athletes do not progress to professional careers in their sport. Their education (at least in theory) prepares them to be contributors to society after they graduate.

Athletics is an "auxilliary enterprise" at most educational institutions. It's self-funding, thanks to alumni donations and a few high-revenue sports (basketball and football for most, maybe hockey in some areas) that fund scholarships in all the non-revenue sports like rowing, golf, track and field, etc.

People like to gripe when the football coach makes more than the university president, but the football program funds that, scholarships for the players, and much more.

<comment><USER38> > Their education (at least in theory) prepares them to be contributors to > society after they graduate.

That assumption seems to be in doubt.

[https://www.sbnation.com/college- football/2014/7/9/5885433/n...](https://www.sbnation.com/college- football/2014/7/9/5885433/ncaa-trial-student-athletes-education)

[http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/](http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/)

[https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/vvan54/how-much-is- a-d...](https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/vvan54/how-much-is-a-degree- worth-to-college-athletes-not-much)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/sports/13cnd- auburn.html?m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/sports/13cnd- auburn.html?mcubz=3)

[http://www.npr.org/2012/11/17/165345780/online-courses- keep-...](http://www.npr.org/2012/11/17/165345780/online-courses-keep-grades- up-athletes-in-play)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Kind of unrelated, but I am extremely disappointed in how much 'giving back to local communities' has been abandoned by modern universities, in favor of their massive administrative payrolls.

What used to be a core tenant of thought, is now a dollar figure. If you live in the state, you get a discount. End of story, obligations fulfilled, full stop.

But it's not a commitment or a central belief. No university will open its facilities to community members. No stage will be available for public performances, no instruments or machines will be made available for inquiring minds, no local organizations will spend more than a few hours on campus for a field trip.

Providing those things would cost money, sure enough. But they used to be part of a university's mission. Some of the older ones still enshrine the ideal in their mottos. That should mean something. It doesn't.

<comment><USER40> Do you have evidence of this? I'm just curious because I see all sorts of university events open to the public. Both in public and private universities. There's musical performances, special events (like physics students hosting solar eclipse day and providing hundreds of glasses to the public), theater performances, sporting events (for a low cost), donations to local charities and events, etc.

<comment><USER39> Just anecdotal evidence - I guess I see what you're describing as part of the student experience. Other people are allowed in, which is nice, but those things are done for the students' benefit.

I mean that no university I've dealt with in any capacity, (which, okay, is only about a half-dozen,) has shown even the slightest interest in educating their local communities. That 'commitment' begins and ends with a discount given to a handful of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How?

I've been hearing variations of "universities have too much administration" for at least a decade. I still haven't heard any solutions that aren't ridiculously expensive or already being implemented (and failing). Except, of course, for the solutions like "make it impossible for most of the people who currently attend college to go to college" which are approximately as politically viable as making French fries illegal and which furthermore do not really seem to have any mechanism to fix _administrative_ costs other than "market voodoo".

One thing that tends to come up repeatedly when these discussions do reach a modicum of depth is the persistent gaming of the university rankings system. Universities game the ranking system by e.g. encouraging students to apply who are not likely to get in so that they will appear to be more exclusive. It would be nice to improve university rankings so they can't be so easily gamed, but will this actually make a significant difference? I'm not convinced yet that rankings actually have that large of an influence on university policy, in the first place.

The need for universities to police student behavior is another unfortunate situation. It's my understanding that federal cost-cutting is basically behind the moves on the government's part to implement policy by way of schools' enforcement of student misconduct. An honest politician should be able to fix this by allocating money for the government to do what it should have been doing in the first place, but increasing spending is very hard these days...

</comment><comment><USER42> As one of the 'pointless' admin staff at a British Russell group university, the article seems to be overly hammering home the authors point which has to be partly to do with the book 'Bullshit Business' that he's trying to sell. I don't deny that there are issues in the university system here in the 'United' Kingdom, but I feel he's overhyping issues to get clicks and sell his book.

As several previous commenters have noted, we have a some what dysfunctional market, where most universities charge the same fees. For students you're still picking based on courses and reputation. You can't really pick a cheaper 'no-frills' university. This marketisation has leeched into the central university services, where we're turning everything into a product to sell. Not much of a market when academics have to use us. We are very cheap, it's not like we've got to make money. Obviously if you got rid of that, you'd be able to remove some staff. You'd still need quite a few to meet the legislative demands which are required of universities these days.

There are definitely some truths in the article. Not everyone needs to go to university. Certainly there are some students who are getting massive amounts of debt for very little gain. Universities do chase various league tables and other such measures (some imposed centrally) which does require lots of data gathering. Large amounts of data require staff to deal with that data. Students do really like shiny new buildings, so universities go on building sprees. Again a poor NSS (national student survey) can potentially reduce students and thus income. But to be fair, you'd want things to be nice when you're paying £9k per year for your fees alone.

REF and TEF aren't well liked by academics, so I'm quite sure a lot of them would be happy if they were dropped. It's unsurprising that the article is penned by an academic and one of his main suggestions is the dropping of REF.

The USS pension scheme deficit is probably misleading. If you want some detailed reading around that, then Mike Otsuka's articles are good - [https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka](https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka)

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this true in the US, in general? My alma mater has a circa 9 billion dollar endowment... yet it still sends me sob story letters soliciting donations.

<comment><USER44> Mine too. They should be issuing us dividend checks, not asking for donations!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It seems increasingly likely to me that the whole academic model is on the verge of existential crisis, and headed towards profound transformations. I'm curious to see where this leads. Hopefully someplace better than before. (I shoul mention I'm a PhD student)

</comment><comment><USER46> Probably the best deep dive I've read on the cost of higher ed was published a few years ago by Robert Hiltonsmith. This addresses US universities and colleges as opposed to UK, so the issues may not be one to one and the data is a little dated (published in 2015). Still, a worthwhile read.

[http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder- my...](http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-myth-and- reality-crisis-college-affordability)

</comment><comment><USER47> I worked at my university after graduation for 2 months (as an employee; well funded project). A project that should have had no more than 4 developers had 3x that many. Tool 2.5x as long to finish (I left in the middle). Crippling, dysfunctional politics, lunch meetings with stake holders, useless field trips. I think everyone involved knew what was going on and didn't care.

</comment><comment><USER48> I have actually had an idea related to the sort of debt had to be taken by American university students for their academics.

Why not use a mixture of blended learning and Coursera, where students pay not just professors but also industry folk for cutting-edge knowledge but also open up a marketplace for Youtube tutorial people to do physical workshops in their cities that can be charged and move onto a sort of Airbnb for education and workshops? I feel a lot of straight-up learning can be gained and the 3% charged per workshop will go towards scholarships. For people who think you would be paying high prices per lecture/workshop in this model, a university student has already been paying about $50 or more per lecture.

Instead of basically physical/manual admin systems in individual centralized universities, you have decentralized software system managing schedules and booking workshops/lectures.

Just an opinion and thought I've been having, any feedback welcome.

<comment><USER49> You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests.

I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top universities do a better job of this. From that perspective I think the main advantage of the sorting is that it is easier to teach if your students fall into a narrow band of ability

<comment><USER50> It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one:

You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework.

I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.

<comment><USER51> very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment.

I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.

<comment><USER49> HackerNews is selection bias central. I suspect the overwhelming majority of college students don't even know the term "problem set" :) Most of it is, read this book of literature and write something showing you both read it and have absorbed the latest fads in college politics and art criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This article is purportedly about UK universities, but half of the evidence quoted is from studies of _US_ universities. So no matter how strong the evidence, it's irrelevant.

The second half of the article is prescriptive but short on details. What does it mean to require "people to fully carry out their own fanciful ideas"? Does it mean that someone who decides the trash should be collected every other day rather than every day, should actually collect the trash?

Like many people, I'm attracted by headlines which align with my own biases. But my level of bias here is unchanged after reading the article!

</comment><comment><USER53> The problem in the UK is there is no significant competitive pressure. What would help is separating the teaching from grading, just as it is in schools.

Right now an employer has to consider a degree from Oxford Brookes in a completely different light to one from Oxford University. If they knew the students were graded in exactly the same way then it could really shake the system up.

<comment><USER54> I'm not a fan of that, it's adds huge drag to any change. Want to add a module on deep learning that you also want to test? Now it needs to be added by a country-wide exam board. Want to add something on cognitive neuroscience to the standard "AI" degree? Only if everyone can teach it.

Given how regularly things are messed up by the boards on simple GSCE level questions covering far fewer subjects, I'd not like to have that applied across everyone.

<comment><USER53> I'd be interested to know how much variation there really is, when visiting universities with my children the options looked remarkably similar.

There might be some drag on creating new courses but there could be huge savings as well.

One thing I'm sure is the academic community wouldn't like it, it would need to be forced on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The university I go to is now run more like a business, with top-down leadership. Questioning the higher-ups is apparently grounds for firing.

The disgust with the administration has gotten to the point that few recent graduates plan to donate, ever. Tuition is so high that it feels like they already got all the money they deserve.

</comment><comment><USER56> In addition to this article, from the vlog "Plunging Enrollment at Mizzou" <[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc>](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc>):

      They can't pay all of the administrators that they need.

_need_

Also consider that the bennies at de facto government jobs are also higher than market rates (e.g. contribution to retirement schemes, insane types of paid leave) and it's funded with your taxes or government debt (future taxes).

The FA also addresses the politicization of college education which wasn't my point but interesting nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER57> Administrative bloat isn't just a problem at the University level, but across all levels of education in the US.

<comment><USER58> The article is about British universities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The admin is not useless. It's tasked with gobbling up as much cash for the endowment as possible.

</comment><comment><USER60> "For instance, before introducing a new procedure they would need to eliminate an old one."

If someone wrote a tech article suggesting that companies should require removal of a line of code for every new line introduced, do you think that article would make it to front page of HN?

<comment><USER61> For the analogy you're drawing to really hold, we have to picture a computer where the bytes get a lot of work done on their own and our code merely exists to slow down and redirect their efforts (in other words, a negative and a possible positive). If you were concerned with the fast, efficient operation of the computer then you might indeed want a rule like "one in, one out" for lines of code.

<comment><USER62> When space was limited in game cartridges in the past I can imagine such a rule actually existing in a real buisness setting.

One line of code in, one line of code out. That would lead to some really weird software, and it would take longer, but it would probably improve the software in some metrics like performance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> > In some courses, like business administration, students' capacity to think > got worse for the first few years.

That's what I suspected for quite some time now :D

</comment><comment><USER64> Maybe they can start by getting getting rid of the NCAA (private corporation) siphoning billions from colleges and universities.

<comment><USER53> The article is about British universities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I agree. We could start by dropping Politcal Correctness, safe spaces, etc and embrace Free speech, with the assumption that truth will always win in the long term (ex: heliocentrism). This means the painful process of letting the opposition speak, which is lost on the current generation.

</comment><comment><USER66> Just use Udacity or Coursera

</comment><comment><USER67> My University, Huddersfield, isn't broke and is debt free to boot.

> In addition to the Creative Arts Building which opened in 2008, a new £17 > million Business School opened in 2010, followed by the £3 million Buckley > Innovation Centre in 2012, the £22.5 million Student Central building in > 2014, and the £27.5 million Oastler Building for Law and the School of > Music, Humanities and Media, in 2017. £5.5 million invested in University > Campus Barnsley.

> The University now attracts students from more than 130 countries. With an > annual turnover of approximately £150m each year, it estimates it is worth > £300m annually to the local economy.

And yet there is rabble rousing concerning the Vice Chancellor's £337,000 salary

[http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire- news/universit...](http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire- news/university-huddersfield-vice-chancellor-sees-10775384)

</comment><comment><USER68> We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.

<comment><USER69> Not sure why you are getting downvoted, perhaps the word "pointless". But certainly there are administrators on the public school payroll who's job is ensuring regulatory compliance and collecting/filing the evidence of compliance, and that function did not exist years ago.

Now, whether or not that is "pointless" is a debatable. The laws were passed in the first place to cure some perceived ill. It's fair to have an ROI discussion around that.

<comment><USER70> If it _is_ the word "pointless", I bet your parent used it as that's the phrase that's used in the submission title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> What part of this is due to over-regulation and grant requirements? Seems huge.

</comment><comment><USER36> Extremely unpopular opinion: Let's cut both the extra admin, and excess tenured professors. In fact, the entire tenure system should be completely upended. At my alma mater there were a lot of professors who didn't have enough students sign up for their classes, or their field of study was phased out, or reduced. Instead they sat around doing "research" and when they were forced to teach, quite a few openly expressed disdain for teaching.

<comment><USER72> As a tenure-track professor, obviously I'm biased, but tenure doesn't mean you don't have to work. Professors still have to pull their weight around the university and department. If nobody takes their classes or they aren't bringing in research dollars, that would be a problem that would be brought up in their performance appraisals.

The vast majority of tenured professors make about 1/2 to 1/4 of what their value is in industry, and at research institutions most work 60+ hours per week. On average, I work far harder now than I did as a PhD student or when I was in industry.

An interesting alternative tenure are renewable five year contracts, which are used at some teaching universities and some prestigious research institutes. About a year before the contract expires, a professor at these places has to document their successes and convince the institute to renew their contract. The idea is that a professor basically would be "going up for tenure" every five years (but not receiving it, just getting their contract renewed for 5 more years). If they start getting lazy, their contracts don't need to be renewed. Going up for tenure requires putting together about 100-200 pages of documentation describing your research, pedagogy, service, etc.

<comment><USER73> What impacts can performance appraisals have on a tenured professor? Is it possible to be fired or have your salary severely cut simply from poor performance?

<comment><USER20> Almost never. You'll get fired if you sexually harass a student, but not for performance in the classroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Wall of text warning.

<comment><USER75> It's this crazy thing called an "article."</comment></comment>