Ask HN: What about computers or software would you teach to urban 3rd graders? - <AUTHOR>

I've been joking about coming in and teaching them hash tables (using something like filing cabinets). I think they could grasp it, but I don't think it's interesting enough to grasp the students. <comment><USER2> I see a few suggestions for languages. I would avoid languages; instead, go with something like the Scratch project if you want to demonstrate concepts programmatically: <http://scratch.mit.edu/>

I recently researched languages for a programming curriculum that was to be taught to Latino high school students, and concluded that Scratch was the best choice. My reasoning is that most students you teach at such a young age will never pursue programming again, and bombarding them with the syntax that 'practical' languages use quickly leads to frustration. I'm sure a lot of people here will say, "I learned such-and-such at such age," but this is a self-selecting group for interest and natural ability in programming. Given a choice between high-level languages, you can choose Alice, Greenfoot, Stagecast, Lego Mindstorms, etc. but Scratch is the clear winner.

In terms of high-level concepts, I think understanding the logic behind software third graders use every day is important. Talk about how Internet requests are routed and returned; how social networking software interacts with a database; how cell phone calls are made; how keyboards poll for input. Understanding these algorithmically requires no programming expertise and not even a lot of expertise on your part to explain. It's simply a matter of breaking down the problem and thinking about it systematically. Your example explaining hash tables with filing cabinets is fantastic. Sorting can also be explained with filing cabinets. There's also the classic "how to teach a robot to make a PB&J sandwich," of course, to get their thoughts flowing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestions! I think "how social networking software interacts with a database" might be a little over their heads -- most of them don't have computers at home and are too young to be using social networking software anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Third graders are 7-8 year olds. They are probably reading Beverly Cleary's Ralph and the Motorcycle. Their ability to comprehend negative numbers does not yet exist (for the vast majority of them).

At this age, children learn best with a story. They can follow a clear linear path from beginning (statement of characters), through their problem, and unto conclusion. If you want to have an impact beyond having everything go over their heads, make a show and tell (everybody loves pictures and something to look at), and if you want to wow them, show them something they haven't seen before. That part won't be hard. Let them touch it, if you bring something in.

Explaining anything more abstract than locations will probably fly over their heads. Sure, some are precocious and will grasp a hash table, but any collection of children, especially urban kids, is bound to be difficult to get them to understand anything more complicated than a toaster.

My suggestion is to start with something physical, like a breadboard if you have one, and show how changing wires can influence the lighting of LEDs.

Doing this will be far easier to capture their attention than something like decomposing the web stack in a console (which is fascinating if you have the background to appreciate it).

</comment><comment><USER4> I think I would approach that with a game or something very visual (see Processing?), and work with them in defining what things they want to see happen in terms of instructions or pseudo-code.

For example, you could start with the idea of a game like a simplified OutRun and brainstorm about what should happen. Well, you want to be able to change lanes, right? You would want to have cars coming your way, the speed increases as you go, etc. so that you end up with a list of things to happen that can be translated into code that does what they wanted to do.

I'm not sure this is a great example, but in principle, it would be to make them walk through the idea of defining what should happen in a program. To me, I don't think that the language matters, I don't even think that they really have to interact with the language at all or a very simple and specific language. What's important is to understand the process of: this happens ("I press the left arrow") so that happens ("the car moves to the left"), from which you can introduce conditions, loops and more.

As a starting point, you could also ask them about what software they use often and see if you can build something very simple around the same core concept.

</comment><comment><USER5> Start out with a simple game, like hangman or something else w/ clearly defined rules and gameplay that mostly depends on guessing. Have people play it a few times, and then have everyone come up with and write down the rules. Emphasize the writing things down formally part, since that's the most basic type of programming. Have them play the game again, but this time using the rules they defined. You could give out awards for the kids who find errors in the rules. Try a different game (tic-tac-toe? rock paper scissors?) and repeat the exercise.

Once they've figured out that, give them a bare-bones vocabulary (eg something like python, but don't tell them it's a programming language) to write the rules in.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's about how old I was when I learned BASIC. You probably don't want to teach them something really specific - but something like a simple example of programming would pique the interest of any student that was so-inclined. That's my recommendation. Maybe a little Ruby or something?

</comment><comment><USER7> Teach them how to make a game of some sort. Something really simple like hangman in BASIC would teach them a few different things all at once and still have a fun result.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you really recommend BASIC? That's what I learned in, but I really feel like Python is just as intuitive -- and if they stuck with it, useful.

<comment><USER8> Why not JavaScript? It requires no command line knowledge and runs in any modern browser. They can create games, easily install libraries or frameworks by including another JS file, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Enterprise Model of Pepper, SoftBank's Robot, Will Cost $440 a Month to Rent - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/30/pepper-earns-its-keep/ <comment><AUTHOR> 'The robot will come with applications for office reception and customer interactions and greet shoppers, tell them about products, and entertain them by performing or playing games, all while recording data about their reactions.'

Sounds like mainly targeted at entertaining humans who are waiting ? Maybe a dog could do the same, or is that too old fashioned thinking ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: What costly inefficiency do you see at work? - <AUTHOR> I'm 95% curious, 5% hoping some HN reader gets a startup out of it. <comment><USER2> Countless AWS instances with less than 1% utilization costing millions of dollars a year. It's easier to raise more money than try to fix it, so it just keeps getting worse.

Focusing on pumping vanity 'growth' metrics when our product has negative gross margins. We have no idea if anyone likes using our product or if they're just using us to buy dollar bills for $0.97. However management is ego-driven (we're going to "change the world") and it's easier to raise another round than to make a profit.

<comment><USER3> The first one is even valid on a personal level. (well at a smaller scale). There was a big thing on NPR a year ago about this, what they called "zombie money" or something like that. I know I have various AWS/DO/Heroku/Namecheap/GApps/Dropbox accounts that I've been paying for for years and haven't canceled "just in case". Granted I've cleaned up a lot as it used to be 2-3x that. I have to imagine I'm not the only one.

This is actually possibly a good problem for a real startup. Though somewhat technical, there's certainly quite a bit of tedium there, per [http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html), so it's potentially really profitable.

<comment><USER4> Do you see the work being converting standard EC2/Heroku/DO... servers to lambda/cloud functions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Government: money expires after two years. Which means that if you come in under budget, you have to find something else to spend the money on - which is sometimes needed infrastructure, like upgraded computers, but is more often whatever happens to be in stock at Supply. Or you dump it on a contract with a services contractor with whom you already have a contract vehicle in place. Or you lose it. But you can't save it. You can't hold onto it to do more work on the project after the two years is up.

You also can't extend the deadline for project completion in case of unforeseen events. If you run out of time, but not money, you just have to stop, because the money evaporates.

<comment><USER6> A friend of mine was a radio tech and he was ordered to put in a 1.2mil PO for a new transmitter because a wire was frayed. They could have just replaced the wire for 20$, but then they would have lost that 1.2mil off the next year's budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations. IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done. There are tons of startups that are meeting this need (generally referred to as "dark IT" or "shadow IT").

More power to you if you find yourself actually meeting business needs over the company's own internal programmers and systems folks.

I am, of course, trying to effect change from within the org I am employed by.

<comment><USER8> Corporate IT is a disaster. So many people responsible for only one thing, causing them not to think outside their box. Going from one conference call to the other without any dedicated focus on the project. Instead of getting an application live in several days, it costs months. Slow communication, cheap outsourcing so in the end you need to do constant hand-holding to complete installation of an web application.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

<comment><USER9> Absolutely, the more layers the worse it gets. It's a version of Chinese whispers/Telephone where not only is confusion added at each stage but huge amounts of time delay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Spending more money on AWS services than we'd spend hosting them ourselves, spending more time beating our head against insufficient documentation of proprietary Amazon services and wrappers compared to their corresponding open source technologies, spending more time debugging and on general uncertainty, spending more time waiting for responses from another company, having to stop what we're doing and handle backward incompatibility on Amazon's schedule instead of our own, spending more developer hours and fewer sysadmin hours on managing and debugging services instead of more sysadmin hours and fewer developer hours on our own services. (Developer hours are more costly and scarce.)

<comment><USER11> I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person making the accusation, in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and requires updating as time goes on. Amazon normalizes those costs and provides the billed entity with semi-predictable costs on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.

<comment><USER12> Good accountants can amortize the costs of servers (etc.) just as well as AWS can.

> Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.

And it will still probably be cheaper to host your own, with one caveat: if you have wildly varying traffic loads, AWS' autoscaling is hard to beat. The reality is, though, most companies don't have traffic loads which vary enough to justify the extra costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seen it at previous work places. Focusing too much the agile boards and not enough on engineering. Then hire expensive Consultants because you're hitting the wall.

<comment><USER14> I've seen this many times. I think it usually comes down to whoever designed the initial architecture. If you have a bad foundation there's no saving you. Many times the architect had political influence and overrode general censuses.

I worked a project with a public company that had a 1:1 dev / scrum master ratio. Then they brought on consultants for a straight week for full time training to fix the lack of progress. You can't make these things up..

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Putting product in charge of engineering instead of making is a partnership.

Then not holding product accountable for an inspired roadmap that is delivered 2 months into the half.

My team is working way below peak efficiency for 4 months a year as a result. The engineers are super unhappy about this but there is "nothing to be done" according to my boss and his bosses boss.

<comment><USER16> Do we work together?? /s

But yes, the amount of reversions, refactors and plain jane "we gotta rebuild this" has lead to some real fatigue at least from me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Our department gets a few thousand projects a year (work in large format printing). The amount of repetitive steps that each project share is simply mind boggling. By writing 10 or so scripts, was able to shave department labor hours down by 14%.

Excel... how people use excel and the amount of waste that happens just because they don't properly know how to use 'vlookup' or 'if' simply just boils my blood.

<comment><USER18> Excel is the universal format for the enterprise.

Need to share a screen shot of your error? Paste it into excel.

Project management? Excel.

Database of assets? Excel.

Transactional information? Excel.

Incredibly complex, multi page calculations? Excel.

Kill me.

<comment><USER19> I once saw a very detailed Gantt chart in MS Project detailing 6 months worth of lies about various projects would deliver.

My colleague nudged me out of a stupor as I stared at the overhead projection. "Its Excel!" He whispered. "What are you on about?" I said. He was clearly mad. "The chart! He's done it in Excel". To my horror I began to see. This wasn't MS Project at all. It was subtle because the cells were so small they were almost no bigger than a pixel. I gasped and almost took the presentation off course.

It was like a mosaic. A feat. I've never seen anything like it since. Still baffles me how much effort he must have put in and the pain he must've felt every time that crappy plan inevitably moved to the right.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure if we should commend, or condemn Microsoft for making a application that is so easily used by less than savvy end users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ironically, it sometimes seems the biggest inefficiency is the millions of incompatible never-finished initiatives to remove costly inefficiencies.

<comment><USER3> No startup idea here (well, other than becoming the outsourcer for the 1,000,001st), but seems like good ground for an xkcd or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Internal transaction costs. My company has dozens of different offices who each invoice each other, sometimes in circles. We need to make internal markets easier to operate

</comment><comment><USER21> Disposable utensils, cups, etc. in the break room and kitchen.

But i'm kind of a dirty hippie.

<comment><USER22> My office just got rid of these and I've been grumpy about it. I didn't consider the environmental angle though, assumed it was just corporate greed.

<comment><USER21> The only downside is that, at least once, some hapless intern is guaranteed to load the dishwasher with hand soap. I don't know why, but there's always one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Buy don't build" becoming such an embedded piece of wisdom that there are literally a half-dozen COTS appliances that do the same thing, but not inventorying them, to the point that you might have just one or more likely zero people using them. Literally no one watches our DLP tool, but we keep paying for it.

It's basically a field day for consultants and for appliance vendors. I'm not a huge fan of NIH but it's really demoralizing to see money get spent on toys that immediately get locked up in the attic.

</comment><comment><USER24> Meetings - I think anytime someone mentions they won't be able to get things done because of meetings, they should reassess if the meeting is needed at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> The most costly inefficiencies I've seen are companies / organizations that are wrongly constituted to begin with.

For example, when you have a division of larger company that really should be its own company. But, no one's allowed to talk about that because "that's been talked to death already" and the show must go on, etc. Or because no on really cares (or bothers to think about things on that level) basically.

<comment> a-priori This is a sign that you're working too far down the hierarchy. Problems like this can always be solved, if indeed it's a problem, if you go high enough up in the org chart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the major causes of inefficiency is bad management--the cause behind many of the responses given here.

Incompetent managers up the chain don't have a coherent vision that moves us forward. They spend most of their time playing at politics, trying to look good, maintaining the status quo, and/or attempting to coalesce power/status. Even good managers get caught up in this game. It seems to be the nature of the system.

On my team, for example, we have too many projects, projects taken on for the wrong reasons, and projects that don't fit our team's skillset. Most of those projects aren't managed well or even managed at all.

Old projects molder with no real plan for fixing them, so we spend inordinate amounts of time on every change. New projects are announced with someone claiming that they'll be "easy", but there's no plan and things don't get done or they get done badly. Sometimes I sit here in pure bewilderment wondering what the point of it all is.

Is there some way a startup could tackle organizational/social issues? That seems like an interesting idea, but I can't think of how it might work.

<comment><USER27> I believe the future of companies will be internal startups vying for investment dollars. With disruption challenging even the most traditional and stable industries, we'll think back and muse to ourselves as to how political and beauracratic we were.

That being said politics will always exist, but not the debilitating level (IMO) to which we've seen in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Politics.

Using the too expensive AWS and Google Cloud where DO would have been totally fine.

People who can't admit their mistakes or even blame others for theirs.

Bad architectural decisions.

Kubernetes instead of Docker Swarm for small clusters without any traffic or just plain Docker.

Expensive Github instead of free Bitbucket.

Asana, Jira, Pivotal Tracker instead of free Trello.

Slack.

Self-hosting of non-core tools.

Team retreats nobody wants.

Team events nobody wants.

Team members with weak communication skills.

Teams which are not synced, where some come after lunch and some finish few minutes later.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hiring consultants to absolve management of accountability for decisions.

<comment><USER30> My favorite is management hiring management consultants. Isn't that the whole job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Competition. A lot of people generally like to harm their colleague's odds of success - they pass accountability, responsibility, work, force them to attend more meetings, force them to use more communication software. Basically trying to look good by making someone else look bad.

It would be very effective if everyone worked together towards a common goal. This really isn't an issue in fast growing companies but the slower the growth of a company is, the more destructive competition sinks in.

</comment><comment><USER32> Mandated technology decisions. Strap in for a dozen man-years of technical debt on a platform your team doesn't understand but now must debug.

</comment><comment><USER33> Building the main campus in SF Bay then formalizing a location pay differential, then SF Bay staff pestering the distributed talent to move to SF Bay and fly to SF Bay for every team bonding/etc until they quit or move to SF Bay (and then quit as they actually need double the salary just to get back to their previous standard of living.)

</comment><comment><USER3> At big companies, just communication between departments. Startup idea: a "heroku" for enterprises, where companies own their own "heroku", and each division/group provides a "plugin" that they manage. Would make things much more consistent among departments, and integrating solutions so much easier.

<comment><USER34> Convox[1] does somewhat of what you're asking for. The simplest way to describe it is a roll your own PaaS.

[1] [https://convox.com/](https://convox.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Jupming on every framework as soon as it comes out - instead of stabilising technology to meet business needs

</comment><comment><USER36> Not to start a flamewar, but... Cramming expensive engineers shoulder to shoulder in a giant distracting concrete box of an open office, yards from the sales team yammering on the phone all day.

</comment><comment><USER37> builds that take longer than 2 seconds

</comment><comment><USER38> Being unwilling to spend money on good tools, forcing everyone to work around the failings of sub-standard free tools. I'm talking about you, TestLink.

</comment><comment><USER39> Putting product in charge of engineering, or engineering in charge of product.

Or engineering or product in charge of business.

</comment><comment><USER40> people not doing work

<comment><USER41> Does reading HN at work count?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hacker News

</comment><comment><USER43> Meeting up in person (mostly-remote company)

</comment><comment><USER44> Undocumented legacy systems.

</comment><comment><USER45> Union

</comment><comment><USER46> The great cycle.. lets not code too much ourselves, lets only be experts at our domain, lets use librarys. The librarys fail, they do not deliver the expected performance, they cant be customized or are suddenly not maintained and we can not port our whole ecosystem.

Lets write most of our code ourselves, get independent from external actors, but we are slow now, glacial and distributed to reinvent a lot of wheels, while others outpace use in our domain. We should use more librarys.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sales force.</comment>


Windows 8 won't kill the desktop, but don't worry — we're still screwed - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120497-windows-8-wont-kill-the-desktop-but-dont-worry-were-still-screwed <comment><USER2> He has no points at all.

The entire article is either hate-based linkbait, or came out of his own misunderstandings of Windows 8, Metro, and the Desktop mode/app.

If you want Desktop mode, then select it and use it as default on bootup. It's not going anywhere. Otherwise, use Metro.

You can't (or wouldn't want to) run VS.NET and build applications, create Office Documents, edit video, etc, in Metro and/or with the touch-interface on a tablet.

That's because Metro is for average CONSUMERS doing average tasks (email, youtube, twitter, games, etc), it's not for PRODUCERS.

We will still have the desktop and keyboard in 10 years because it's the most productive way for us to use the computer. And there is money in it. For everyone.

And the author is completely out-of-line to assume that the Metro UI/style has not been constantly tested for the last 2 years to fit the consumers' expectations, needs, and to solve their pain points.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been playing around with the 8 Consumer Preview at work for a while, and really I don't have anything to complain about yet. I ended up liking the Metro UI more than I thought I would - it's just like the start menu now in 7. You know something is in there. Type a few letters, hit enter, and go.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth due to the death of the start menu is going to be loud.. I really hope Microsoft writes these off as change aversion (which they really should).

<comment><USER4> agreed. I think it's even a little faster than the old start menu. I feel like the entire OS is more keyboard friendly in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Calling the above "ugly" isn't fair. It's not ugly. It's what happens when > Ugly and Stupid get drunk and make a baby inside the Fukushima safety zone

It seems to me that the article is full of hate. The author really miss the Start Menu.

<comment><USER6> Touch/tablet devices are going to be a big part of the future, if not the biggest, and these new UI's are designed for our interaction with those devices. That's all cool.

However, "working" on a tablet or touch device is simply not going to happen. Sure you can type an email or something similar but loads of people who do their day to day "work" on computers will not be able to be productive on such UI's.

E.g. programmers, video editors, architects, designers, writers, editors, etc, will be annoyed by the obtrusive land grab of screen real-estate and clunky metaphors. When you do "precision work" you require a totally different approach, aka the traditional desktop.</comment></comment>


Brings TypeScript to Tailwind CSS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dvkndn/typed-tailwind <comment><USER2> Wow, interesting. Could you please share more insights about why and how did you implemented this? What is the most challenging problem you got? And why would you think a typed system over a CSS framework is a good idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> I really enjoy the static typing TypeScript brings to JS, and it always annoys me that I can't have the same in CSS. When Tailwind makes utilities-first CSS great again, I see that's when I can fill the missing piece and finally bring types to CSS!

The core functionality is not really hard, thank to PostCSS. The most challenging problem is to decide whether to go with run time or compile time implementation. I chose run time first because I think:

\- It's easier to prove the idea to others (can even make a website to do so: typed.tw) \- It's easier to try (you can throw it into most existing build system)

But at the end of the day compile time is still better so I'm actually working on a webpack loader right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> By the way, what the hell is the $() thing? Why would we need that?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many reasons actually:

First is because I don't want to return a string as soon as you apply a value like "textRed()", because it prevents chaining, or I need to add those methods to the String prototype (right?). Therefore, when you call "textRed()", it just updates the current instance.

Second is that I actually wanted to use `[Symbol.toPrimitive]`, because it allows keeping the instance but still returns a string when expected (e.g. inside a `className` prop). However, TypeScript hasn't have good support for it yet ([https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/4538](https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/4538)) so we still need an explicit method to convert the instance to string.

<comment><USER2> Does $() a semantics requirement from TS/JS? Any chance for a better/meaningful name?

<comment><USER3> $ is just an ordinary JS name. It almost, sort of makes sense here in the builder because $ is also the Regex symbol for "end of string". But other names could be possible, they just likely won't be as short to be meaningful.

(`buildString()` or `toClassnames()` are two common forms of names I've seen in these sorts of "fluent" APIs for finalizers/builders.)

<comment><AUTHOR> `toString()` actually works here :D</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Go-fuck-yourself; make your code build, forcefully - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adamryman/go-fuck-yourself#ugh <comment><AUTHOR> Bonus fact.

`go-fuck-youself` is great for developing `go-fuck-yourself`.

All you got to do is:

        $ cat howto.md | gophersay
         </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
        // get updates
        go-fuck-yourself get -u github.com/adamryman/go-fuck-yourself
        // make updates
        go-fuck-yourself build github.com/adamryman/go-fuck-yourself
        // or
        go-fuck-yourself install github.com/adamryman/go-fuck-yourself
         </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
           \
            \
             \   ,_---<comment>~~----._
          _,,_,*^____      _____``*g*\"*,
         / __/ /'     ^.  /      \ ^@q   f
        [  @f | @))    |  | @))   l  0 _/
         \`/   \~____ / __ \_____/    \
          |           _l__l_           I
          }          [______]           I
          ]            | | |            |
          ]             ~ ~             |
          |                            |
           |                           |

And bam!, your new version of `go-fuck-yourself` will build!

~~Plz give a star if you dig~~

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm getting some sort of resource allocation error, I think it's requesting that I get fucked, but it has no more fucks to give.

:P

<comment><AUTHOR> Make sure you run

        go-fuck-yourself build code.go

As it is a wrapper around the go command.

Though it will only try 100 times. As some code will never build. And currently has a bug when you have multiple syntax errors on a line it can delete the wrong lines. I know how to fix it, though it is low priority, if someone makes an issue, I will get around to it though.

</comment></comment><comment> surrey-fringe rood</comment>


What we're doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66M yrs, scientists say - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/21/what-were-doing-to-the-earth-has-no-parallel-in-66-million-years-scientists-say/ <comment><USER2> > ... and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong > acidification of the oceans.

This is the part that I'm worried about. Regardless of what happens to global _temperature_ or _climate_ , the damage we've done to the oceans is insane. As Alex Cannara explained[1],

        In 150 years we have brought the chemistry of oceans to
        a point not seen in 300 million years.

He is referring to the large shift in ocean pH caused by our release of over 30x the amount of carbon than the ocean can sequester. This is particularly bad problem because the process that sequesters atmospheric CO2 is based on marine life shells/skeletons being sinking and ending up as limestone.

We have already disrupted that process, with some areas (such as the north Atlantic) are already seeing species starting to fail from the acidity. At some point in the next few decades, the pH will be sufficiently acidic that CaCO2 becomes soluble and any species with a shell goes extinct. Never mind the massive food change disruption, this stops the main CO2 sequestration process.

I don't think we can stop this; it's already too late. While there are ideas about how this could be fixed, we aren't going to accomplish any of them. So maybe we should start getting ready for another event like the Permian–Triassic (P-Tr) extinction.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtQxF_3BSxQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtQxF_3BSxQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> James Hansen is somewhat controversial, but this paper has been reviewed and accepted for publication in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and it's very serious: [https://app.box.com/s/i4u002tbpcvkamj9wq4n8t1u8wxsjhis](https://app.box.com/s/i4u002tbpcvkamj9wq4n8t1u8wxsjhis)

I'd summarize but anyone interested in the near-term (this century) effects of climate change and already on HN should be willing to read the actual paper.

<comment><USER4> I'm not familiar with Hansen, can you give an idea of how he's been controversial?

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the next-day response, went to bed shortly after posting that.

Long story short, this paper received a lot of press attention when it was published to the ACPD last summer for discussion: [http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/whiplash- warnin...](http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/whiplash-warning-when- climate-science-is-publicized-before-peer-review-and-publication/?_r=0)

Which led to a fair number of climate scientists upset about what they saw as the press reporting on preliminary results. It's linked in that article but the key point is that Hansen has spent the last ~10 years calling out what he sees as a reticent attitude among climate scientists towards (what he feels is justified) alarmism: [http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/2/024002/fulltext/](http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/2/024002/fulltext/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, good to be able to put this and the author in some context, though the science should stand for itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you take the title completely at face value, it seems like an absolutely obvious statement. At no point have there been this many humans on the planet, so of course there is no parallel to what we're doing.

<comment><USER6> We went from less than 5 million humans on the planet to more than 7 billion in 10,000 years. That's a 1,400x increase. So yeah, we're pretty much already breaking all the rules. What's one more. We will pay for it, but we'll deal with it how we deal with these sorts of things, as problems to be solved. And we'll find solutions, but the Earth will be a totally and irreversibly different Earth. Less life, less biomass, more difficult and unhappier place. But we'll make rhetoric about how everything is much better than it used to be, and prescribe more and more drugs and alcohol to help people deal with it. It's how we live, how we have lived... it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

<comment><USER7> A little late, but is this any worse than humanity going out in a blaze of hedonistic glory?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect this is why there is such a push for space travel these days. Those with the means will journey off to some habitable place or one they can make habitable, and leave everybody else behind in the toxic wasteland. All those sci-fi movies might be predicting the future of planet earth; they have before.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great news but somehow presented in a negative tone. The slow (4000 year duration) PETM release had no lag before temperature increased. Our release is much faster and according to the article, the faster the release, the greater the lag. So we should expect to see a lag. I wonder how long - hopefully on the order of magnitude of the duration of the last release - 1000s of years or perhaps the current release - 100s of years.

The problem with climate change isn't what it might change into, but how fast it happens. It's quite already to have a change slow enough for societies, farmers, migration of species and geoengineering technology to adapt. We don't need enough time for evolutionary adaptation because we've actually got considerable control over our environment, unlike all species before us.

<comment><USER10> But if you're not feeling your current effects until 1,000 years in the future you may be completely screwed before you end up doing something about it.

<comment><USER9> Why would it happening later be more trouble? At best we'd see it coming and have 1000 years to prepare. At worst it'd happen just as suddenly as people already expect it to. In either case, we'll probably have better technology to manage it in 1000 years than we do today.

<comment><USER10> At worst we wouldn't do anything for 1,000 years because there's been little effect. In the meantime we've built up another 1,000 years we're going to have to deal with, which might be impossible at that point.

In comparison, if we instantly felt the effects we could obviously see we're causing specific problems, and react appropriately. With the lag it's a crapshoot and deniability can creep in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds really scary!

I think it's a safe bet we'll use up all the fossil fuels we can find, and release the carbon into the atmosphere, regardless of the carbon taxes and cap and trade. And even after that, we'll continue to boil water with nuclear rods to generate electricity with tons of heat waste. Where does all that go?

The best we might hope to do is somehow capture the carbon in the air and put it back underground... trees and seaweeds seem to do that. And then we mighy try to capture all the plastic we dumped in the pacific ocean...

Seriously doesn't think make you think twice about the future for our grandchildren?

<comment><USER12> We are a fairly intelligent species capable of doing great things when motivated.

My bet is we can do a lot to slow the damage and then reverse it.

Things like this give me hope: [http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/print/volume-16...](http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/print/volume-16/issue-5/bioenergy/a-new- win-win-co2-eating-microalgae-as-a-biofuel-feedstock.html)

<comment><USER13> I might be misunderstanding that article, but it sounds like the company captures the co2 and then converts that to fuel. Then they sell the fuel, which I assume will be burned.

It definitely reduces total co2 released, but sounds more like recycling than actually improving the existing problem. Did I understand that correctly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe we'll get lucky and the fossil fuels will run out before we make the planet completely uninhabitable.

<comment><USER9> Are there any serious predictions that the planet will become uninhabitable, even a little bit? People can live in a huge range of climates, far more extreme than global warming predictions. Plants also grow well in high temperatures and with artificial irrigation, don't require regular rainfall.

<comment><USER15> Parts of the world currently inhabitable will become unlivable. In particular, Dubai, which is one of the most inhospitable places I've ever been on earth (combination of humidity + high temperature) - becomes lethal by 2100 in some projections - [http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/27/world/persian-gulf-heat- cl...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/27/world/persian-gulf-heat-climate- change/)

Hot temperatures are much more difficult to handle than cold temperatures for humans. With proper clothing/goggles/face masks, I've been downright cozy at -43 celsius in northern British Columbia - spent hours completely comfortable. In Dubai, on a hot, humid day in September, I can manage maybe 15 minutes of exertion before I have to escape back to air-conditioning.

<comment><USER16> So a city that runs on oil revenue and has literally no natural attractions becomes the equivalent of death valley. Meh. Let's pick a different worst case scenario...

<comment><USER17> Not just the city. Pretty much all of northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula become uninhabitable. Can you find another 17839048.21 km² to replace it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I and others succeed in getting ourselves cryogenically frozen in a couple tens of years, then we'll be able to come back (unfrozen) in a couple hundred years and say "wow, they were right".

<comment><USER9> What makes you expect them to be right instead of wrong? Couldn't you also wake up and say "wow, they were wrong"?

If you know they're right, then everyone else can too and there's no need for anyone to worry about what's right or not.

<comment><USER19> If you accidentally thaw in a couple of decades then they were definitely right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't say "we", say "a few very wealthy and powerful individuals who do not represent anyone other than themselves"

<comment><USER6> I used to blame the rich, but the fact is that they are through Capitalism only feeding human desires. In this case I think it's not them, it's human beings with unlimited desires and all these other behaviors tuned for maximum exploitation of the environment, combined with a highly efficient system which encourages just that. People in general are to blame for the way we are acting on this planet. Creating more and more people, being irresponsible, etc. We all do it together, every time we do anything we are partaking in the human conspiracy to destroy the environment, or as we like to call it the economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What we need is some effective marketing against the causes of climate change. People don't watch documentaries, people don't read studies, truth is to to really make an impact you have to use the same shady tactics politicians and media outlets use, it's sad but that's the way it is. For example we need to start calling all companies associated with coal extraction climate- terrorists, we need to commercials of averages Joe's grandchildren being slowly roasted alive (movie-like not any gore. As a fear inducing warning about climate change over the next decades). All the hate people have for Mexicans and Muslims should be redirected to oil companies, to coal mining companies, to stop government subsidies for those, for their employees. To do anything that increases the price of dirty energy sources and related practices, then after the price is higher than the alternative capitalism should take care of the rest.

<comment><USER22> Guilting people into reducing emissions has been ineffective. Better would be to embrace geoengineering.</comment></comment>


Privacy project uses cryptography to reduce shared info - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11948500 <comment> mike-cardwell The trouble with systems like this is that as soon as it becomes used by a lot of people, the value of being able to put false data on one becomes very very high.</comment>


Ask HN: What UI tools do you use and what are their pain points - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm currently doing Startup School 2019.
I'm working on Skelet, a desktop app for web developers to help them design their User Interfaces and export the code to their favourite framework directly.
My first task obviously is to talk to users and I would like to know what are the tools you use, if they are adapted to your workflow or if they generate lots of frustations.
I have a small landing page : https://skelet.app
My apologies if its not adapted to your device as it was quickly put together to gather feedback.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I do it by hand,

some pain points,

1\. hard to make sure a design looks ok on different screen sizes.

2\. hard to create layout in some cases (vertically centralized, for example)

3\. hard to make sure a design looks consistent with different browsers.</comment>


Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-acm-ieee-computer-architecture-conferences-ccd61169370d <comment><USER3> They seem to summarize it in paragraph four, though I am not clear on what this really means - I think it is that certain authors are able to be "top ranked" and get limited review from colluding peers who may also be co-authors on the paper, but removed themselves to squeeze through review faster and avoid future flags for "conflict of interest"

 _" There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other's conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other's papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion."_

Also see the link in a sibling comment for what seems to have kicked this all off: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336)

<comment><USER4> peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and double-blind to reviewers and authors. however, the conference organizers themselves know who the reviewers and authors are, and the conference management websites are set up to avoid assigning reviewers to papers where they have a conflict of interest with the author.

this is usually something like: anyone whose email address has the same domain as yours, plus anyone you have coauthored any paper with, both of these going back a few years. If you are ethical you will report any additional conflicts that this doesn't catch.

so if a cabal wants to make sure they can positively review each others papers, they have to make sure they don't trip those automated filters. this means they must have been at separate institutions for a while, and must avoid publishing any papers together.

then, during the review process, they can "bid on" (put themselves forward as a reviewer for) each other's papers and ensure they give only positive reviews.

<comment><USER5> In small fields, it's sometimes really not very hard to guess who are the authors, just given the topic and what papers they cite. Even with double blind.

<comment><USER6> You can often guess who the reviewers are as well. The most obvious tell is "also cite paper X" which is their own 99% of the time.

<comment><USER7> I don't think this is true from my experience. I've been on several program committees, and have managed a couple as well. Usually if you're above the first-level reviewers (e.g. senior PC, track chair, PC chair), you can see the actual author names and reviewers.

Most of the time when an author later says (formally through the review system, or informally in casual conversation) that "I know it's this reviewer who asked me to cite their own paper" they are wrong. Their main evidence is that the reviewer asked them to cite two papers that include the same author.

But of course I can't tell them otherwise because of the confidentiality, so they keep on believing that, perpetuating the myth. Perhaps someone can aggregate some statistics on this, but I genuinely believe that authors suggesting their own papers only about 20% of the time, and when they do it's because their paper was highly relevant.

<comment><USER8> I agree, in my experience the request to add citations is usually because there is fairly obvious context missing, and the reviewer wants to make the connection/comparison is made. Sometimes it's the authors own papers, but that's selection bias at work - if they didn't work in the area, they probably wouldn't be reviewing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like the (sad) background story is here : [https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind- th...](https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-the-suicide- phd-candidate-huixiang-chen-236cd39f79d3)

Posting here instead of a new submission

<comment><USER10> That suicide is so unfortunate. As someone who was a PhD student, I understand the perceived gravity of the situation for him. It's unfortunate he had nobody to put it in perspective.

This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that's not an advisor you want anyway.

Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor's portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).

A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.

<comment><USER11> "academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small"

<comment><USER10> Mmmm. Is that a reference to Billions or did they lift it from somewhere else?

<comment><USER12> Google "Sayre's Law"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fraud?

Are you kidding me? I have publication in MICRO with a very famous institution in US. (Top 20).

You know how my professor published his paper in MICRO? Relationship! Relationship! Relationship!

As a graduate student coming from a third world country, I totally lost my hope on the system when I saw a venue as famous as MICRO, is only based on relationship.

Don't judge me, who can I report it? I am graduate student, means losing my supervisor means losing my visa. I am even posting this via anonymous account (thats how scared I am).

<comment><USER3> That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD - though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university with a group that had already published in that publication before.

With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing, submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of what to prepare for.

I was really pleased with that whole experience because it felt like there were very distinctly _not_ gatekeepers in that field. It could very easily be that there are not really any professional stakes in the field I studied in, so maybe that makes a difference.

My team was all researchers, not tenured faculty, and we funded ourselves with government grants.

With all that said, it's really helpful to get a different point of view - thanks for sharing this, and sorry for the trouble you experienced, nobody should be put in such an awkward position.

<comment><USER13> I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science.

And the only reason I left my home country was because I _wanted_ pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful)

But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).

<comment><USER14> You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from time to time.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for those kind words. I really needed it. A honest person to talk too.

You can imagine how much of a shock it is to my believe system to come from literally other side of the world, in hope of doing genuine research, and turns out, it is based on lies.

<comment><USER3> I ended up dropping out of graduate school, but the advice I was given before entering was this:

Choose your advisor, not your area of focus.

Your advisor single-handedly decides how smoothly your PhD will go, and once you have your PhD, you can decide where your career goes.

Obviously, area of focus does determine a bit of your future, but within that area, optimize for a helpful advisor.

Also, I am sure your university has resources, and ways you could report this behavior, but it's often very difficult to unseat/challenge university faculty, so I totally understand an unwillingness to act. I agree with the other commenter: finish what you started, get out, and focus on doing good work.

<comment><USER15> > Choose your advisor, not your area of focus.

Absolutely this.

Worked on my master's dissertation with my initial supervisor. He went off to try and find funding for a year or two to get me to come back for PhD.

Turned up, he passed me an ACM magazine article and asked me to have a look and see if anything stuck. Got hooked. He knows I like weird and trippy stuff ;)

I'm in a bit of rubbish situation as he left his position here for greener pastures. Totally fair decision on his part from what I've gathered of the back story

Now supervised by someone else and it's just not the same. Have to go over old ground quite often.

So yeah, choose your supervisor wisely. If they "get you" then they'll get what you're interested in. Then they'll be able to _work with you_ find an interesting area to study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I want to point out that, as far as I can tell, the advisor is still active at the university [1] and even presented the questionable paper at the conference [2]. This is pretty disturbing and I haven't found any more info on what the school has done outside some vague internal investigation [3]. Does anybody know if the university is actually conducting a thorough investigation and whether or not it's ongoing?

As a PhD student, this is disgusts me. I've witnessed my share of awful, exploitative lab situations but this takes the cake. It seems to me that most of the time, professors only receive soft punishments (e.g. people in the department warning prospective students to think twice about joining a lab) unless the incident draws enough bad press.

[1] [http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/](http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/)

[2] [https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458](https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458)

[3] [https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa](https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa)

<comment><USER17> There's also hard evidence of misconduct in the conference review software, which directly contradicts the "investigation" from the conference chairs: [https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249](https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Read the alleged response by Tao Li to the original accusations against him: [https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is- threaten...](https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is-threatening- insiders-on-behalf-of-university-of-florida-3fa1cb16de68)

This is a really shocking threat: he's saying that his school (the University of Florida) will take legal action against people making good-faith allegations of academic misconduct against him, because they have unspecified "ulterior motives."

How is this attempt to silence people an appropriate response to the death of one of his own postdocs? At the very least, the University needs to say whether it finds these threats acceptable and whether it is actually considering legal action.

<comment><USER19> That is completely believable actually. Legal threats are very effective at silencing whistle blower reports. The response in these cases is that the faculty (head of the research group and the Dean) suffer reputational damage equivalent to the misconduct penalty of the offender. That is, exclusion from research (including supervision, presenting at conferences), retraction of their publications, demotion or termination. Without this, the old boys network will have its way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably.

Perhaps that's no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.

<comment><USER21> Current U.S./Europe academia seems unable to change from within. It lives on government money which it itself controls and distributes to those who "play ball" \- the others are pushed away. The only way a change can happen here if academia-independent people control and distribute money to individuals who showed talent/potential/results in the past. It will take massive outside interference to fix or supplant the corrupt system.

<comment><USER22> That's not quite how it works and in my opinion not the main problem. Take for example DARPA grants, they are controlled by outside people and I don't think it works. You essentially have a "case worker" often with little understanding of the field pushing in some direction. Moreover the amount of admin around these grants is staggering.

The root cause of the situation is that there is not enough money in the system and compared to previously more money is distributed by competitive grant processes. This results in a couple of things.

1\. The cutoff (reviewer mark) where grants get funded or not is completely arbitrary, because it is in the flat part of a arctan or logit type curve, so small differences or luck can me you are able to do your research.

2\. Competition therefore is fierce.

3\. To balance the odds you have to write a lot of applications (academics now spend most of their time either writing grants or administering their grants, not doing research.)

4\. It encourages incremental research, because non-incremental research implies high risk, but no one can afford the risk to fail, because having a significant reduction of publications reduces you chances of getting grants in the future (see 1.). Once you get some gap in your funding its almost impossible to get back.

5\. This disadvantages women who want to have children.

<comment><USER21> Yeah more university/grant administration of the current sort is not the right way to go. They have too much power already.

Established elder scientists with little bias and little incentive to corrupt the country education/science system should be in charge, not administrative pencil pushers. Maybe hire some outsiders and set up some kind of independent commission of renowned scientists and budget planning/audit people to maintain oversight of the supported science groups.

But lack of money isn't really part of the problem, there is lot of money there and it often goes to waste. Putting in more isn't the solution - <USER2> would just amplify the current situation.

The fact there is competition for money isn't a bad thing. In theory it keeps people engaged and working efficiently. The problem with the current competition is that people are judged by their willingness to play ball, by flawed citation metrics, publicity, imaginary department points and relationships. Not by their originality and weight of their scientific contribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a time when the main purpose of a conference were academic exchange and moving forward a scientific field, there was little incentive to engage in fraud. When, as is standard practice today, your scientific career hinges on how many papers you published at top venues, the story changes drastically.

Accounts of how groups of inter-connected high-profile researchers game the review system for their own advantage are deeply concerning.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking at the screenshots ... "video recognition in future 5G technology". Is that just straight up word salad? It sounds like the industry horseshit I hear in snippets ... "the convergence of machine learning and IoT". Does the phrase "video recognition in future 5G technology" have _any_ meaning whatsoever?

<comment><USER25> You are missing "cryptomining lidar focus" .. might add more legitimacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This was one of the reasoss for me to drop from graduate and quit my research assistant job.

I was working on a paper along with a professor. We sent a paper for review and one of the anonymous feedback from one of the reviewers was something like "these (a couple related papers to our subject) also would make good annotations". My professor said "this person is probably writer of those papers and asks for annotations for a good review". I was quite shocked how casual when he was talking about this

</comment><comment><USER27> some of us made a big effort to get anyone at the IEEE or ACM to care about this ISCA'19 incident. The initial investigation by Torrellas was run mostly by ISCA insiders with conflicts of interest, and mostly seemed to be a stall tactic. They did eventually open a new investigation.

ISCA'20 should really have been cancelled until this was resolved.

See a timeline of our attempts to get anyone at ACM/IEEE to care: [http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html](http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html)

<comment><USER28> I am wondering if the NSF program officers responsible for overseeing the grants should be contacted as they would be in power to make the University and the PIs accountable and/or start their own investigations.

They can be easily found in grant webpages, eg [https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713](https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713)

<comment><USER27> The program officers were contacted, leading to the OIG being notified on 6 December 2019 and supposedly an investigation was openened, but we have not heard anything back since then.

<comment><USER29> I just want to thank you for your actions and ask if you have any advice for career paths to do something about this type of academic bullshit. My GF is currently pursuing a PhD in biochem but very interested in pursuing science policy so that she can do something about all the injustice one witnesses as a graduate student.

As someone who received both their B.S. and M.S. at UIUC, I'm honestly disgusted at how various professors and administration have handled certain incidents that my friends have been part of

<comment><USER27> there's really not much one can do. In Comp Arch, most of the honest people left the field years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action.

It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to mess up your life.

It's interesting you mention UIUC, as traditionally that was the source of a lot of suspect papers. It was a running joke about the "coincidence" of how many people with UIUC connections managed to get papers into ISCA each year.

<comment><USER30> is this true? Can you expound on this? which suspect papers are there?

I know there are a lot of solid professors in UIUC like Joseph Torellas, Sarita Adve (C++ consistency models), Vikram Adve (who is the adviser of Chris Lattner - creator of LLVM). This is really bothersome and I hope it's not from one of those professors.

<comment><USER27> well let's take Torrellas. Check out the two papers at ISCA'20 with him as an author.

Both use modified "cycle-accurate" simulators for the results. For now let's ignore all the issues with the accuracy of these simulators.

Let's validate how "solid" the work is. Drop an e-mail to Torrellas and ask for the code they used so you can see if you can reproduce their work. Hopefully things have changed and they'll send you the code but in my experience they'll just say no.

So they got two papers in which are unverifiable, and none of the reviewers ever saw the code involved. This bothers some people, but it's not unusual at ISCA.

<comment><USER30> > ewers ever saw the code involved. Thi

There are a lot of papers in ISCA that are based on cycle-accurate simulators. It has been like that since forever. How else would you evaluate new non- existent architectures that are bleeding-edge? FPGA? Most can't even afford that. Not to mention it's just not possible in a lot of cases. I agree with you that some work should be verifiable but your accusation is weak for this part. Maybe the community can push for verifiable work before getting published in ISCA since it is such a prestigious conference.

If you don't want cycle-accurate simulator based papers, you'd have to eliminate a large variety of body of work only possible with this approach. A lot of techniques in modern processors have seen their start in processor/system simulators and most of them are probably not cycle-accurate.

<comment><USER27> > If you don't want cycle-accurate simulator based papers, you'd have to > eliminate a large variety of body of work only possible with this approach.

yes. Most "cycle-accurate" results are garbage. Do you show error bars on your results? Can you? Did you run on a variety of independently implemented simulators and show the results on all of them? Did you run the full reference inputs to SPEC all the way through? Why not?

The answer seems to be that it would be hard. But guess what, science is hard. Try complaining to a biologist sometime about your architecture paper that took so long to write, where you gathered all the results 2 weeks before the paper deadline.

It's fine if you come up with a new idea and run some simple proof-of-concept runs to show it might have merit, but don't pretend the results from an academic simulator hacked together by a sleep-deprived grad student have any real world merit.

<comment><USER31> omg running ref spec on gem5 fs mode...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This behavior should be particularly unacceptable in computer science journals. One of the main results computer science give to society is creating secure systems to protect and exchange information, and the fact that a double blind peer review system for a conference that basically deals with the construction of safe reliable systems was broken shouldn't be taken lightly.

<comment><USER14> Come see what's happening in medicine and be really appalled...

<comment><USER33> I do wonder if medicine can compete with the various conferences in support of social service programs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Conclusion: 99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can cause serious, repeated damage."

Precisely how is this ratio determined?

Given the unreproducable results and plagiarism that we've learned about in recent times I believe there is a lot more fraud than can be accounted for by "the dishonest 0.01%."

<comment><USER21> Maybe the absolutely worst are the 0.01% (or more likely, 1%). But the problem is more broad. There are different ways of corruption, making up word salads and fake results on one hand, or engaging in low effort repetitions with little to no questioning of the prevalent methodologies/theories of du jour, to fixing language in grant proposals/reports to get more money. When all these add up, I think 0.01% is likely the portion of the completely honest hard-working people in academia.

<comment><USER35> It's more than 0.01% honest/hard-working people. You have:

* Grad students who will never make tenure.

* Lifelong adjuncts / post-docs who are staying there because they won't play the game.

* Older faculty from a different era.

* Etc.

It's enough that at this point, I find all research from my alma mater suspect unless I've personally reviewed it or know the PI personally. But there's a pretty large honest portion too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36>
        There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work
        on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers
        with each other so as to keep out of each other's conflict lists
        (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily
        give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future
        papers)

is this normal ?

<comment><USER37> Well, no, that's why this publication is a strong assertion of unacceptable fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It is worse in humanities. Many university presses won't dare to publish books on themes that are antithetical to the dominant theories and/or paradigms. Being part of the dominant clique is necessary to publish books there.

</comment><comment><USER39> " _Here is what I heard from an award-winning professor about what happened. The professor has first-hand knowledge of the investigations and has communicated directly with the investigators, but wishes to remain anonymous:_ "

If no one is going to publish names, nothing is going to happen.

I've seen fraud at IEEE ICDCS '98, but that conference was a mess, and smaller IEEE regional conferences are sewers, but nothing especially improper.

</comment><comment><USER40> The paper file listing [1] from the PC in question shows predictable [conference][year]-paper[incrementing-number] file name pattern. Rather than "insider help" [2], could this be explained via a "leaky endpoint/api" that got scraped?

I hope I'm missing something.

[1] [https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.pn...](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.png)

[2] Quote: "HotCRP does not show you your own submission even if you are a PC member, so how did the de-anonymized reviews and PC comments for Huixiang's paper end up in his laptop? An insider help seems likely."

<comment><USER7> It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or area chair if the conference is big enough, and often even senior PC members (the metareviewers). All they have to do is perform an export and put it on Dropbox or Google Drive.

<comment><USER41> It has been confirmed that the reviewing system in question is HotCRP, which is a very battle-tested system that is unlikely to have these issues.

There is a comment from Eddie Kohler on Twitter which implies this was not a leaky endpoint problem. You can see this thread for more details: [https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20](https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is really sad for a great community like SIGARCH. They need to clean up; rather, they are sweeping things under the rug. Let's hope other communities can learn from their mistakes.

<comment><USER35> This is the tip of the iceberg for SIGARCH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not directly related, but the "sign in to medium.com with Google" dialog on the top right corner with my account name on it is really freaking me out.

<comment><USER44> It's an iFrame hosted on Google servers, so medium does not directly have access to the iFrame contents. But it is still irritating.

<comment><USER43> It's the other way around that I'm concerned with; Google tracking which Medium posts I read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Does anyone know which other SIG is implicated? Or where I might be able to find out?

</comment><comment><USER46> Honestly that's how I figured it worked anyway. Popularity contest. Even the less significant confrences seem to just be platforms where "influencers" (Twitter verified personalities in leading roles at popular tech companies with barely any code in their repos) scratch each others back and swap followers. It was always my understanding that confs were a place for networking with other people just for that purpose. Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast and all the serious confs are on the west coast.

<comment><USER41> I believe the author of this comment is referring to industry conferences. Please note these are very different from peer-reviewed academic conferences.

In CS these academic conferences are held in many different locations, and many (most?) top researchers are not on Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why don't we require CS research to be reproducible? It's a fricken computer program. (or should be!)

We also, in machine learning, never truly examine results for basic statistical significance. It's often rather "I got this number higher".

I struggle to have even basic trust of academic CS results, unless it's backed by a major private company research (Google research) or academics I know and trust well.

</comment><comment><USER48> Did anyone think this wasn't happening?

Science operates as a priesthood more than anything. Universities orginally emerged out of schools for religious instruction, to train Catholic clergy, and I'm not sure how far we have come from there. There is the same two-faced rapprochement between the highest ideals and the lowest behaviours. The high priests just wear jeans instead.

<comment><USER41> This comment is not very helpful. Many scientists are doing their best to improve the world by publishing their research to the public. They are doing so, at least in CS, at a substantial pay cut compared to industry.

You can see the efficacy of modern science by the real and impactful discoveries in machine learning and related fields made over the last 10-15 years.

<comment><USER35> It's like police. Good ones do good, and bad ones do harm.

You'd expect the good ones to be pro-reform, but there apparently isn't enough pro-reform in academia to have reform.

With that, less and less good will happen, and more and more harm.

<comment><USER41> There's a lot of room for improvement:

\- grad student stipends are negligently low, making it difficult for students to complete their PhDs.

\- many journals in CS are not open access despite the authors and reviewers not being compensated for their time. I think pre-print servers and the ability to publish work on your own website has really improved the state of CS research over the past 5 years. In the past, the official policies of many top conferences stated that a paper would not appear in the proceedings if it had been published to your website or a pre-print server. This policy has now been dropped (or is not being enforced) by almost all top CS conferences.

\- it can be difficult to resolve a conflict with your advisor especially if they have tenure. Tenured professors enjoy significant faculty protection (though maybe not to the same degree as police). Often the most productive avenue for a student in this case is to quietly switch advisors. This can lead to entrenchment of toxic faculty. At my alma mater I can think of a professor who was notorious for having none of their students graduate - they all either left academia or switched advisors

It's certainly an imperfect system and I'm sure folks can point out other flaws in the comments. There is a lot of room for reform in these and other areas. For example the lack of transparency in this case makes the entire academic community look bad for no good reason.

However I do think that folks on HN (on average) have an overly negative view of academia, some of which may not be based on an accurate understanding of its good parts. For example peer review, despite its many flaws, turns out to be very valuable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of spurious science has been published in pre-print form and on Medium, only to then be rebutted and rejected by scientific venues with a robust peer-review process.

<comment><USER35> Well, I had a great time in my Ph.D program. My advisor was the very model of caring about students and integrity. I did good research which I was proud of (but which had very little impact since at the time I didn't know how to sell / position it well) I see the upsides of a functioning academia.

My cynicism doesn't come from a lack of understanding of the academy or the good parts of the academy. To the contrary; it's based on:

1) Seeing the upper levels of the academy (which are often incredibly corrupt, although this is well-hidden from students).

2) Seeing enough cases handled to know that cover-ups are much more common than resolutions.

3) Seeing many students get abused, and seeing the impact fake research has on the real world.

The lack of transparency makes academia look bad for perfectly good reason: there are huge amounts of money flowing into pockets corruptly at elite schools, entire academic careers build on academic fraud (which is /not/ the same as legal fraud), and there's enough rot in the system that it's hard to reform. The higher you go, the more rot there is.

Appearances to the contrary, students are university customers, and faculty are employees. The power legally rests with the administration and the board. The rot persists since the people benefiting set the rules. If I'm the president of a school, and a reform would put me in jail, or even make me lose my million dollar salary, why would I listen to student protests? Faculty protests carry a little more weight, but not enough, and enough faculty are corrupt themselves that you can't build a united front for reform.

Regarding peer review, the system is entirely bankrupt. There are no incentives to do a good job. Anecdotally, most reviewers skim papers; no one reads them, and certainly no one checks the math or replicates the results. Less anecdotally, when people have looked at data, it's no different from a die roll (NIPS did a proper evaluation of peer review).

Regarding grad student stipends, the basic deal is good on paper: freedom to pursue intellectual interests, quality mentorship, and a quality education with basic living expenses covered (on the taxpayer dollar). This seems like exactly the right thing. It breaks when universities break their side of the bargain, with the taxpayer dollars and charitable donations go to faculty clubs, yachts, and vacation homes, internal power dynamics forcing graduate students to be treated as cheap labor rather than as students, and competition forcing widespread academic fraud.

<comment><USER41> One of my friends leads artifact evaluation for USENIX Sec. It's an emerging but I think valuable addition to the peer-review process in CS. There's been a growing movement, which I very much like, for improved reproducibility. Here's an example from NeurIPS: [https://towardsdatascience.com/reproducible-machine- learning...](https://towardsdatascience.com/reproducible-machine-learning- cf1841606805)

^ As you know, many areas of science have a reproducibility crisis including psychology and medicine. I hope this will go a long way towards addressing some weaknesses in peer review in CS. For myself, I try to be thorough when refereeing papers. Anecdotally I know some more busy academics farm out their reviews to their grad students.

I had a largely positive experience in grad school also thanks to my excellent advisor. Although I can say that my ~$25k/yr stipend made it difficult to live on without the additional scholarship money that I earned, and even then...

I agree with you that there absolutely needs to be more transparency in many aspects including complaints about advisors, and investigations into dishonest publishing behaviour like in this case.

<comment><USER35> I think we're long past that point. We need to realign incentive structures and see wholesale change. You'll never see quality peer reviews on an honor system, with no incentives to do quality. The basic concept is broken. It's much better to let people publish as they do research, and have post-hoc reviews, revisions, and discussions.

And for transparency, I'm not going to trust any research out of MIT research until MIT openly gets rid of NDAs and non-disparage agreements. Just no. Yuck. And that includes the chains of corporate walls MIT has built up to hide stuff.

I won't trust MIT research until I can file a public records request, and get records. I should be able to discover conflicts-of-interest, financial arrangements, and all the other messes MIT gets itself into.

I won't trust MIT research until faculty meetings are subject to open meeting laws, and the public can sit in on them and understand how decisions get made.

I won't trust MIT research until data, source code, and papers are out in the sun for public review by anyone.

I won't trust MIT research until I see bad actors getting disciplined and these things publicly discussed.

Until then, unless I know something at MIT isn't corrupt, I'll just assume it might be. I won't trust Stanford either. Too much stuff is simply fabricated to tell a good story. Heck, I won't trust a lot of the elite academy, since I assume it's just as bad. Things get a little bit better one tier down, but the rot is starting to seep in.

MIT CSAIL just shut down its main mailing list -- thousands of people -- since people started discussing institutional corruption.

Footnote: I had no problem living on my similar stipend. I paid for one bedroom in a four-bedroom apartment, ate cheap food, and didn't spend much otherwise. My university

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Dear Scientists,

I'm very curious - why you stress so much about publishing in that Elseviers, ACMEs and so on ?

It's unhealty.

First: there are so called "home pages" \- instant publication ! I belive every univ have such infrastructure for their stuff, possible students too...

Not every paper is ground breaking discovery and not every paper should be published in international and GLOBAL "jurnal".

But if you realy insist then: let say USoA with 50 states so at least 50 universities... Then, if you want to publish collect, let say every half of the year, papers (eg. in Tex format) in your department, compile them into YourUniversityDepartmentYearNumber jurnal, print 50 of it, glue stamps and post to 50 libraries. Done.

Include cdrom.

Also you could do zines. With it's own domain name. Easy.

Good content will bring readers.

Do not forget about ToC, with urls.

But it's not recipe for all diseases you have there.

You need to step back and evaluate.

Also don't allow yourself to be morphed into asholes and in two generations you will be deans and proffesors.

And some environment are just viperies, move out of there !!!

</comment><comment><USER50> Certain news and social media sites have expertise in detecting voting rings. Maybe they could help...

</comment><comment><USER31> i would like add some discussions. when i say "i", you can either read "i" as i am a pc or external reviewer, or maybe im a grad student.

1\. i dont want say anything which gets me trouble, but hotcrp was set up wrong by the chair in that year ISCA. i know pc members were able to download the whole paper submission list. i personally saw _all_ papers and _all_ reviewer comments on anything i did not submit. it is likely that everyone had access to this, because i am not a "big players" in this field. i really doubt i had some special access because i have no relationship to the chair that year.

i still have all the papers from isca19. i should not have these, but i just got them from a normal download (no enumeration or guessing urls).

2\. point 1 does not excuse leaking, just made easier. instead of calling all pc friends and asking them to call their pc friends, you just need to call one pc friend not on your submission. he could see it.

3\. good luck getting tao li. hint: did he fund anyone in the past who was investigating him? did he fund anyone who reviews his papers?

4\. the tao li story is deeper. a) there's race issue. because it's easier to manipulate people if your business is being a chinese -> usa faculty pipeline. and once people go through your pipeline, they are even more likely to keep it going! b) if you think the paper push is bad, wait until the details of how he actually treated his students come to life. hint: some things advisors do to students in china is immoral, but tolerated. those things are illegal in usa.

5\. this is bigger than tao li. you will never get rid of the cliques, but it's at point that i don't even want read the papers anymore. why sell my integrity for grants, when i could get industry money where at least the product shows the work is not crap?

6\. if you want to know some worst players, i heard they are upset they are not in micro2020 reviewer list :p. of course it's not a completely good reviewer list, our community is too small!

7\. i hope one day we can honestly talk this out. i would like to tell pressuring stories :)

<comment><USER30> > ld years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to > let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the > student suicide happened it was like a call to action.

> It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups > have less power to me

Why don't you start it here? Since you are already anonymous anyways?

<comment><USER31> seems you wanted reply to another person

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The bigger question is, what do we do about it?

It's inevitable that when you do research on a very niche topic, you'll probably know a lot of people who are qualified to review your paper.

How do we prevent this kind of corruption when the communities are so small?

</comment><comment><USER52> And this is exactly why I turned down a Ph.D. and always thought the community of academia (CS academia in my case) is one big pile of circle-jerk and shitty politics..

</comment><comment><USER53> Is there a summary of what the fraud was about? Was it about publishing certain researchers' work?

EDIT: Thanks, I skimmed too much.

<comment><USER54> > There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common > topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so > as to keep out of each other's conflict lists (to the extent that even if > there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to > prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before > submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other's > papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give > high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC > discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the > issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty > claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they > find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate > that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such > collusion.

Verbatim from the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Collusion and fraud can be easily determined using graphing algorithms. I'm surprised they don't use that to determine fraud for things like this at the ACM/IEEE.

<comment><USER41> Can you please explain?

In CS conferences there is generally a small pool of reviewers for a paper in a given sub-area (ex at a conference on systems some people might focus on file systems). These reviewers tend to review each others' papers since to be a reviewer you also must be an active contributor.

I don't see how any algorithm might detect this pattern of fraud without taking into account the merit of the papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> A few bad apples spoils the barrel.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have always imagined higher level academia would be rife with inner circle politics (corruption).

<comment><USER58> "higher level X would be rife with inner circle politics" \- sadly seems to be in line with human nature.

FWIW, anecdotally, in my interactions with academia involved parties have mostly been surprisingly respectable - which is more that I can say for industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> For doing research in academic, where are the funding from? It's impossible that government could fund every project in states.</comment>


Show HN: A lightning fast personal website built with Next.js - <AUTHOR> https://jdnordstrom.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Job hunting during a global pandemic is not easy. I send out 5 applications a day with a custom cover letter and hear back on 1 out of 10, usually a rejection, not even a phone screen. Available, qualified candidates are on the rise and hiring freezes abound.

But amidst all this craziness, the last thing I wanted to avoid distraction. I needed a project to continue growing as an engineer and doing what I love-- coding.

I recently spoke with a friend from undergrad, Jared Gorski. We talked about web development, his work at Liferay, my work on Nautilus (a dev tool that visualizes Docker Compose instances). He also started sharing with my how he recently updated his website to improve speed. After our conversation, I checked it out and was inspired. I had already been thinking about SSR (server side rendering) and how to leverage it. Thus, the mission to build this website was born.

I would love any feedback from the Hack News community on the site. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> Wouldn't the fastest web site consist of static HTML files? I don't see anything that needs React or any rendering or build step. Writing JS that does nothing more than put HTML in the DOM seems like a Rube Goldberg contraption for a site with static content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. I actually wrote about this as I reflect on building the website. Next.js pre-renders the static files at build time, so JavaScript isn't building the site on the client side or even on the server side. You get the benefit of writing in React (DRY, modular, and JavaScript focused) over just writing HTML.

<comment><USER2> You have to weigh costs when talking about benefits. In the case of a small site with static content, you could write it with no JS code at all. The React code arguably makes it DRY and modular and all that, but unnecessarily. Now it's an order of magnitude more complex, with dependencies and a rendering step that don't need to exist at all.

DRY, modular, etc. are not blanket principles that one must honor at all cost, in every circumstance. They are ways to simplify and organize complex code bases. Not making the code base complex in the first place takes first place, though.

Brian Kernighan wrote "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." The best way to control complexity is to eliminate it, and not introduce it in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> The rendering process happens at build time, so the extra step on rendering isn't affecting performance in production ([https://nextjs.org/docs/basic- features/pages#static-generati...](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic- features/pages#static-generation-recommended)).

And it allows me to dynamically "fetch" my writings as I add more. I don't have to create a whole new html file. I simply write a markdown file, add it into the repo on github (I use slackedit which syncs directly to the github repo), then the website gets rebuilt with HTML, and then deployed.

Making the code base more maintainable and better suited for my purposes.

On the other hand, I do agree with you. React is a bit heavy weight for a static website. Next.js still ships the whole react bundle in production. So, while time to first paint is the same speed as a simple html, js site, the time to interaction is much slower and the network load higher.

Trade-offs for sure.

<comment><USER2> I do something similar to publish my site/blog. I write in Markdown, then push to GitHub, which converts the Markdown to HTML and serves it through GitHub pages. I have my own URL but the site actually runs on GitHub. There's a build step but it's handled automatically in GitHub. I'm just writing Markdown.

[https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

That way I'm just maintaining a repo of Markdown files, though I could write HTML files too.

My site is "lightning fast" except for the cursed Disqus plugin, which I want to remove.

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


Super Explorer – 2D tile exploring game in Racket - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/technomancy/super-explorer

<comment><AUTHOR> Firing up the game is as simple as cloning with git and then:

`racket super-explorer.rkt`.

For mac users, racket is available via homebrew; another option is to download and install DrRacket from racket-lang.org and augment $PATH with:

`export PATH="/Applications/Racket v184.108.40.206/bin":$PATH`.

[http://download.racket-lang.org/](http://download.racket-lang.org/)</comment>


H2O 1.4.0 released with support for forward secrecy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kazuhooku.com/2015/07/h2o-version-140-released-with.html <comment><USER2> Wow, this project is moving fast:

* Support for the PROXY protocol

* Support for cache-based and ticket-based TLS session resumption using Memcached (and forward secrecy)

* Experimental mruby Handler

Embedding mruby is an interesting choice. Is anyone known to be using this in production yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment.

I doubt if anybody is using the mruby handler in production, considering the fact that functions necessary to modify the requests in the handler was committed this week :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting .. I would love to see LuaJIT integrated with this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you still use libuv? I recall reading about removing that but did not see it happen. Just curious whatever happened with that decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Libh2o (the protocol implementation) support both libuv and evloop (our tailor-made event loop).

The default event loop of libh2o is libuv, since libuv is popular and has bindings to other protocols (which you would need if you want to implement an application using libh2o).

OTOH the standalone server uses evloop for performance.</comment></comment>


The long-term harms of Internet advertising on users: Pandora's field experiment [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.wired.com/story/pandora-learns-the-cost-of- ads-a...](https://www.wired.com/story/pandora-learns-the-cost-of-ads-and-of- subscriptions/)

"...However, its 21-month time frame and scale-almost 35 million users-make it unusual and notable. The authors write that the effects took almost a year to be realized, and a month-long experiment would have underestimated the long- term effects of the increased ads by a factor of three.

The authors divided the Pandora users in the study into nine groups that were served different numbers of ads; some groups received twice as many ads as others. Consistently, the study showed that as the number of ads increased, users listened less. Serving one additional ad per hour resulted in a 2 percent decrease in average listening time and a 1.9 percent decrease in the number of days a user listened. The results were consistent across age groups, even though middle-aged users listen more hours than younger and older ones."</comment>


Event sourcing, CQRS, stream processing and Apache Kafka: What's the connection? - <AUTHOR> http://www.confluent.io/blog/event-sourcing-cqrs-stream-processing-apache-kafka-whats-connection/ <comment><USER2> Such a neatly elucidated article Neha! We have been building an event sourced architecture for our app, using kafka streams, since a month. This article has validated everything we planned out for our app. Thanks!</comment>