Average Global Temperatures since 1850 - <AUTHOR> https://kyso.io/KyleOS/temperature <comment><USER2> I think humans are generally bad at prevention of and good at reaction to catastrophes.

The next 50 years are going to be interesting... let's hope we leave the world in a manageable state for future generations.

<comment><USER3> Adapting to catastrophes has literally evolved for millions of years. Species that couldn't adapt to change - died. The ones that survived didn't survive because they successfully prevented a catastrophe.

<comment><USER4> Would you say there has been any other species we know of that was able to cause, perceive, predict, prevent, and react to catastrophes before? We seem to be unique in that we can prevent and react to catastrophes, even ignoring that we can also cause them.

<comment><USER5> I am not sure whether this is true but aren't people saying that dogs and other animals can sense incoming earthquakes etc. and will get anxious/try to GTFO?

<comment><USER6> Isn't that simply because they can hear very low sound frequencies which often come shortly before an earthquake? The technology we have now is far superior at predicting such events using geological vibrations and weather data etc (which still gives quite short warning times, but still).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the raw data, I wonder how accurate it is for the early days? Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy?

I'm not questioning the data per se, as you can tell from looking at 2000 up to today that the median is rising.

I'm just a bit surprised by the accuracy in the late 19th century. I expected less.

<comment><USER8> > Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit > in accuracy?

No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that.

This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to _know_ this, from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just _assume_ it. But that's what these folks are doing - waving their hands and just _assuming_ that the errors mostly cancel out.

To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually cancel each other out after all.

> I'm not questioning the data per se

You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or just pretty much made up.

<comment><USER9> I'm familiar with the blog posts you have been reading on this topic, but its really not so easy to dismiss the data. The hypothesis you would need to accept, to believe the surface temperature record is not accurate, would be the systematic error is consistently measuring things a little bit warmer over time. If you wanted to prove that point you could try to find some mechanism that would explain it.

But the problem is many _other_ measurements confirm the surface temperature results. Air temps agree with ocean temps, various proxies agree with those (ice extent and mass for example, are declining as would be expected with a warming trend)

Now, does 1800s temperature data have large errors? Yes, and those are reflected in surface temperature reconstructions by large error bars.

You are not the first person to be convinced that climate data is bad, some very smart people have felt that, and got funded by the koch brothers to do it right, and they did an excellent job, but got the same answers NASA, NOAA, and other groups did:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion- of...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate- change-skeptic.html)

<comment><USER10> It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted.

[https://realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/20...](https://realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/2018_03_20_05_20_11.png)

Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer.

You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable.

Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 [https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/...](https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/NASA_Fig._A_2001vs2016.gif)

1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.

<comment><USER9> There are over 5 different groups that have done temperature reconstructions, including a climate skeptic funded by the Koch brothers. (Berkeley Earth) They all get the same trend. You would be suggesting that all of these groups, including the Koch brother's funded one, are all making the same fraudulent adjustments. That seems unlikely. This would included three groups from the USA (Nasa, NOAA, Berkely), one from the UK, one from Japan, and possibly others.

As well, the fraudulent activity would be going on with satellite based reconstruction, deep sea temperature measurements, ice extent and mass measurements, all being done by other groups in various ways.

If you _really_ feel that this is what is going on, it is possible to do your own reconstruction from raw data. The raw data, unadjusted, is freely available. If you pick a time frame to look at, where you have a few hundred stations randomly distributed around the globe, that are not changing during that time period, then you don't have to do any adjustments to the data at all. I've done this before, pulling raw data into MySql and analyzing it. You get limited to smaller chunks of time, but I got the same trends all of the professional groups got in that time period. This was something I did years ago, to try to cut through all of the rhetoric that one can read on the internet.

<comment><USER8> I probably wouldn't call it fraud (others might, though) as much as I would call it scientific incompetence in general (it appears that many "scientists" these days, across a number of different fields, are actually quite bad at doing science; this probably isn't a new phenomenon, though, there's just a lot more of it these days), mixed with generally crap data, mixed with bad statistical methods (there's been a lot of talk about problems with this lately), mixed with an overwhelming need to get your papers published _by doing whatever it takes_.

Having read scientific journals myself on and off for several decades now, one of the things I've noticed is that once a paper gets published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, then that opens the floodgates for other related papers to get published using related data and related methods. And that's true even if the original paper used _highly questionable data_ and _highly questionable methods_ , as so many do these days.

The reality of scientific publishing today is that scientists need something - anything - of theirs to get published in order to build and maintain their professional reputations. And journals need something - anything - to publish; usually something provocative, too, otherwise nobody would bother paying the high fees that they charge. So a lot of what they publish is just their version of clickbait.

Funny you should mention Japan: Back when I did my deep dive, one of the cities in Japan (Tokyo, I think it was) was being held up as a worst case example for warming. And if you looked at the raw temperature data, the warming there was kind of scary enough as it was, but in the adjusted data it was just horrific. And I thought to myself that one of two things was going on here: Either the level of warming that was being claimed to have occurred there didn't actually occur, or that it puts lie to the notion that humans and flora and fauna can't readily adapt to such warming. After all, it's not like Tokyo is an apocalyptic dead zone or anything, now is it?

As to the raw data itself, the last time I checked the raw HadCRUT3 data that I used in my deep dive was no longer available (I kept running into broken links and such), and this data had only been provided under duress in the first place. I didn't really strain any muscles trying to look for it again, though. Nor did I originally have much luck trying to find similar data for HadCRUT4 (again I didn't look too hard), but I have seen passing references to it being out there somewhere.

And by "raw" I mean the data as it originally came in from the various temperature stations, without being manipulated in any way except maybe to get it all in a common format for easy processing. But apparently what I call "raw" and what some other folks call "raw" can be quite different things.

And unlike your situation, when I looked at the HadCRUT3 data (at least the version that existed at the time; I know they made some changes to it afterwards) what I found there was appalling. So either massive fraud was going on at the time, or (more likely) they had just allowed their computer algorithms to run amok on it without really quality checking the final results.

As to stations "not changing during that time period", I forget the details but you should be aware that some folks (not me) have gone so far as to track down a few such stations (those which were well-documented and well- maintained, but with no documented moves or changes), only to find that the algorithms had made adjustments to them anyway! As for the local station that I used, the adjustments were such that it made it look like this station had shifted from condition A to condition B (that it had moved or whatever), then shifted back to condition A, then back to condition B, and so on, and that it shifted by exactly the same amount every time, too. Then rinse and repeat, every few years, which is hardly a realistic scenario.

BTW, all of those changes were _warming_ changes, too. There was never a cooling change that I saw, at least not for my local station nor the handful of other stations that I also checked. The most that I saw was those periodic shifts back from the "adjusted" (warmer) data to the "raw" (cooler) data.

I did that deep dive about ten years ago, BTW, and the local data set I used went back to about 1870 or so - a solid 130+ years of data. I know a lot has changed in those ten years, but I don't know that much has really changed for the better concerning the data or the algorithms being used to process it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The increasing of the global temperature is really dangerous and humanity seems to do nothing.

It is like a human body if its temperature changes a few Celsius degree from its normal temperature, it is the fever. If the person has a fever and it increases a few degrees, it might mean the death of the person. We are killing The Planet, it is a Climate Crisis.

<comment><USER11> It is obviously not the case that 'humanity seems to do nothing'.

The United Nations have the IPCC working on the issue and their reports influence national policy in many countries. There are the Kyoto and Paris agreements that are based on the details from the IPCC reports. Is the world doing enough? No, I don't think countries are doing enough, but to say humanity seems to do nothing is patently ridiculous.

<comment><USER12> The problem is that is too little too late.

If I get sick, I cant just solve my problem with some ibuprofen.

Solving climate change requires a major overhaul in culture, lifestyle, expectation, technology and politics.

We did it before, mostly in War situations, I do not understand why this is different.

<comment><USER13> People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to deal with this problem. I agree with you though. I don't think we're willing to do what is necessary to avoid serious catastrophe. We've done a good job demonstrating that for 50+ years so far.

<comment><USER14> > People on HN hate it when you say we have to change our whole society to > deal with this problem.

We obviously don't have to change our whole society to deal with that problem.

1) I've been told that renewable are now grid competitive in cost and the power system is switching over to them naturally.

2) At any point we could go nuclear - even the most pessimistic anti-nuclear activist would have to admit that the risks from nuclear power are localised and that the raw volume of pollution rounds to 0 compared to what we do now.

It would take a couple of breakthroughs in battery technology to solve the transport problem and the whole thing might get solved in the background without much more serious effort. Most people wouldn't even notice.

<comment><USER15> You'd be surprised how much anti-nuclear activists would disagree with your second point. I'm sure I know a couple that would rather watch the world burn than vote for someone that will build a single reactor.

I think once an issue like that becomes a left/right black/white thing all logic just goes straight out the window. You can't even say the word nuclear without hearing a cacophony of statements about the price of nuclear vs renewables, as if those claims don't need any actual numbers to go along with them.

<comment><USER16> When you break it down, for California (a relatively sunny place) it would take more than $3.63 trillion dollars to be 100% renewable.

[1][https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709](https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY?t=709)

<comment><USER17> No it wouldn't. The assumptions made in that video are ridiculous.

You don't need to have storage for all your solar; you turn other sources off when you have excess supply. Or you can switch them off simply by _covering them_. Batteries are not the only form of storage. Hydro exists and is in use already. You are allowed to import electricity. There are other renewables besides solar and wind. etc etc etc...

<comment><USER16> I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic. You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.

Other sources can be hard/impossible to stop.

Batteries are the only form of storage that's scalable. Hydro exist, but you can't expect to just add another hydroelectric dam, whenever your solar overwhelms your current capacity. Hell even storing gravitational energy probably requires frankly massive amounts of development.

You are allowed to import/export electricity, but the assumption is others will have similar power sources, no? When there is the excess sun in one area, it's either going to be excess in nearby areas (because day happens nearby at the same time). Sure, you want to export to countries without sun, but the loses are probably going to be huge (loses mean infrastructure is stressed additionally).

What other renewable resources?

\- Hydro? Destructive for the environment kills migrating fish, ruins ecosystems and not available everywhere.

\- Geothermal? Only available at a few places can possibly lead to earthquakes.

\- Bioenergy? Causes horrible air pollution.

<comment><USER17> > I disagree. Assumptions made in the video are realistic.

Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.

> You kinda need battery storage for your solar/wind.

You kinda don't. Here in Scotland, we've gone from around 15% renewables in 2007 to 70% in 2017. We closed our last coal station in 2016. Guess how many battery storage facilities we have? None. There are plans to build _one_ in the near future. And yet we have a perfectly fine and consistent electricity supply. When reality disagrees with your theory, it's your theory that's wrong.

The other obvious renewable in California would be tidal.

Oh, and you can get rid of all your hydro when you no longer have any need for water. I swear sometimes people forget what dams are actually used for.

<comment><USER16> > Nope, they're the opposite of realistic because they disagree with reality.

Or, your premises are different. From what I see Scotland derives like 90% of its power from Wind, which is possible its unique property. Another thing to take into consideration is that California has a larger population than Scotland.

But overall I get what you are saying. I still suspect going 100% renewable won't be feasible for most countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any ideas of What, WE, the individuals can do to make politician and countries change?

<comment><USER18> Stop buying stuff without thought.

I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so.

Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a ticket to some performance, _will_ make the world better.

<comment><USER19> This is a pretty good idea but it needs a lot of people doing it.

We're in the process of moving home and putting everything into boxes makes one realize how much crap one has bought unnecessarily.

We're on a relatively special case in that we've only recently moved (18 months ago) so we actually have stuff that has never been used in our current house. A lot of this stuff has been donated to charity and some tossed but still my gf wants to take some stuff that hasn't been used in at least 18 months to the new house.

I am excluding Tools and camping gear from the list. The former for obvious reasons, the latter due to having recently had a baby we've not been camping for a bit, YMMV

<comment><USER20> > This is a pretty good idea but it needs a lot of people doing it.

There is no way out of this that doesn't involve a "lot of people doing" something. Our lifestyles are just not sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If it ever gets really bad, the Earth can easily be cooled surprisingly quickly by detonating massive bombs in the right places. We're talking nuclear scale.

</comment><comment><USER22> Please, let's not go back to a debunked theory. Global Warming models did not work and we phased them out a long time ago. The real term for the past decade on climate science is Climate Change and Extreme Environment. There is a lot more data on this graph if you cross fossil data and ice sheet research.

Science is the only thing that everyone can agree with. I feel that it is our job to be accurate and not just do lazy one dimensional research. We might solve the wrong problem and just damage the environment on the process.

<comment><USER23> Can you offer a link to a light introduction to the topic and/or its data? This was my first search and I'm clearly not doing it right: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+E...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Climate+Change+and+Extreme+Environment&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYkvaRwInjAhXaLc0KHQQ9DjgQ_AUIESgC&biw=1440&bih=797)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Only going back to 1850 is exactly the kind of thing someone would do if they wanted to cherry pick their data to suit a case. You have to go back much further. It is known that at that time we were coming out of a period of much cooler temperatures. See for example the year without a summer (1816).

There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now. For example, during the Viking expansion, and during the Roman expansion. Then things cooled off - for example the Viking and Roman contraction.

If you go to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, you can see the remains of the only known Viking settlement in the new world. The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now and does not support the tree growth required.

<comment><USER25> _See for example the year without a summer (1816)._

As far as cherry-picking goes to suit a case, this also sounds like a pristine example. Even worse then what you are countering, since it is only one single year.

 _There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now._

Well, yes, but what does that prove?

 _The buildings were made with logs from trees that do not exist there today because it is cooler now_

You make this sound as evidence of something, but what? That the people shipped trees there from somewhere else? That those trees grew there but now are extinct due to some disease or bug?

Don't get me wrong, I'm open to whatever evidence provided, but if you're going to go against something at least come up with quality arguments. None of what you wrote supports a solid case against the anomalies presented.

<comment><USER26> I'm guessing it's some variation of "we know of climate change in the past that was not caused by humans, therefore no climate change is caused by humans".

For the record, we do know of at least one instance of positive climate change in the past caused by humans. Genghis Khan famously went on a huge murderous rampage (some estimate that he directly and indirectly caused the death of ~10% of the world population), causing massive forest regrowth in previously populated areas, which in turn scrubbed CO2 out of the atmosphere.

[https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match- defores...](https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match- deforestation-driving-co2-buildup)

<comment><USER25> Thanks, first time I hear about this. Interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The data are a mix of the CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature dataset and the HadSST3 sea-surface temperature (SST) dataset. The HadCRUT4 data are neither interpolated nor variance adjusted."

This is your typical half-truth (lie of omission). Even if the HadCRUT4 folks themselves don't make these kinds of adjustments, the folks who provide the data sets which HadCRUT4 is based on most certainly do.

<comment><USER27> so are you implying someone is methodically rigging up the data to show an anomaly for shits and giggles?

<comment><USER8> That's exactly what they've been doing! Or, perhaps more correctly, they've let their "algorithms" run amok without doing any quality control on the final results, thereby turning modest warming into "scary" warming. Whether this was intentional or not is debatable (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)), but it certainly looked that way to me at the time.

About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorrect statements about local heat levels made by the folks at NOAA or wherever, and then repeated (but very quickly retracted) by our own local weather folk, I went to the trouble of doing a bit of a deep dive on the HadCrut3 data sets. And what I found there was appalling. Other folks did more comprehensive deep dives and found far more problems with it than I had.

I could only do what I did at the time because some authority (I forget who) had finally forced the entire data set to be released to the public, over the strenuous objections of the folks who administer that data. Much of that data has since been hidden again, though, from what I can tell.

That was the older HadCRUT3 data set. The newest one is HadCRUT4, but I haven't done any kind of deep dive on that. (Without digging further into the matter I don't even know if there is enough data publicly available to do the kind of analysis on it that I did on the earlier set.) But other people have, and have noted serious problems with it, and have even written entire books about that. The short version, though, is that there is an awful lot of "data" out there which they're using that is mostly just made up, and what is genuine has been adjusted so much that it can no longer really be considered "data" at all.

<comment><USER28> > Much of that data has since been hidden again

You mean the datasets here? [https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/](https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/) with the data used to generate it available here? [https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station- data/](https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-data/)

What do you think has been hidden?

<comment><USER8> At the time I went back later to look at the data again, almost none of the various links on the relevant web pages still worked. Some working links claimed to link to both raw and adjusted data but then didn't actually have the raw data. Some still had things like precipitation data but the temperature data itself was now missing. Some claimed to have "raw" data but it wasn't the data I was actually looking for and had accessed in the past. And so on. I know that I saw at least one statement which seemed to indicate that the data I was looking for was no longer available for legal reasons.

"Legal reasons" was the cover they used to not make this data available to begin with, but some authority or another finally forced their hand here. It wouldn't surprise me to find that they still don't want it out there, and so it may only be available on an on-again, off-again basis, maybe only after somebody complains about not being able to get it. Nor would I be surprised to find that the data itself mysteriously changes over time, as many have claimed. I believe that they have even admitted to such - that they routinely "correct" various data sets, meaning that what you see today may be different from what you see tomorrow.

In any case, I didn't expend a lot of effort the second time around, and the first time around I was mostly interested in what the "official", final data sets were claiming about temperatures (at least at first), because that was what was being put out to the public. And after finding issues with local temps, I ultimately went out and got local data from local sources, completely bypassing the official sources. And one of the first things I discovered was that there was an awful lot of data - both old and new - that was ultimately marked as "missing" in the official records but was sitting there plain as day in the local records. I never did quite figure out what was going on there either, but I have my suspicions.

The whole process just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and so I don't generally trust anything other than the original station data from the original sources. The HadCRUT4 stuff may be a bit better; I haven't really looked into it but others have and they say it can't really be trusted either.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/with-a-3-d-printer-building-a-gun-at-home/

<comment><USER2> >I'm talking about a fully functional gun, where the schematic is downloaded free from the Internet and built on a 3-D printer, all with the click of a button.

Yes, and that is not possible at present, because it requires metal parts. The article raises some important points for the future, but the article is written as though it applies to the present.

A careful reading shows that the author tries to avoid ever saying this is a present risk, but it's also true that, taken as a whole and to a nontechnical reader, the article suggests printing a functioning gun is possible right now.

A 3D printer that uses metal, and not just any metal but one suitable for crafting the barrel of a gun, is entirely outside the consumer level of printers.

It seems the author just doesn't understand that a plastic gun can't actually be fired: "After committing a crime with a printed weapon, a person could simply melt down the plastic ...". This is not so -- without some metal parts, the first round would destroy the weapon, not the target.

The author goes on to reverse himself and say, "The basic problem is not the printing technology, but the lack of plastics strong enough for a real gun."

To me, this article is intentionally confusing, and I think the explanation is that the author is confused.</comment>


Apple now bans e-books from the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/05/app-store-rejections-tied-to-third-party-rights-infringements/

<comment><USER2> To be clear- the app rejected here was originally made available on Cydia, and is mainly used for putting your own content onto the device. In other words, the selling point is putting torrents of books onto the device, just like the main selling point of the iPod is storing 32gb of pirated music.

This still scares me, but I think it's overstating things to say that all ebooks are banned. "This category of application" could be taken to mean multiple things given the context- applications formerly available via Cydia and applications that allow you to upload your own book content are both plausible alternatives.

Once we submit Free Audiobooks in a couple weeks I'll have a more definitive data point for everyone :)

<comment><USER3> Re: 'Free Audiobooks'

I was about to set my mother up with one of the earlier librivox audiobooks apps when they suddenly changed to be streaming-only. Will your planned app cache a whole book at a time? If so, I've got two customers waiting...

<comment><USER2> Absolutely!

By default we'll download two chapters ahead, but there will be a nice big 'Download Entire Audiobook' button available. So, you'll always have three chapters available in full, and you can hit Download All to get the whole thing available offline.

No streaming available- I think it just complicates the interface and is totally unnecessary. Downloading will also be done from CloudFront, so they'll be incredibly quick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They say that no publicity is bad publicity, but Apple is beginning to prove that wrong. "Think different" indeed.

<comment><USER5> The app store whining is limited to a very small online bubble of developer websites.

People crowding the Apple stores to buy the latest iPhone/iPod/etc don't know or care. I'd be absolutely amazed if any of the constant appstore whining has any effect on sales.

<comment><USER6> Yes, developers aren't end-users.

However, developers do form an important target for a platform vendor such as Apple.

A few years ago you hardly every heard developers complaining about Apple, but with the latest generation iPods, the iPhone and the App Store, this has changed.

Over the last year or so there have been consistent and very negative experiences reported by developers across the table.

Quite a change.

<comment><USER7> I think you mean "across the board".

<comment><USER6> That works too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They are planning to do their own e-book thing with the upcoming tablet. Although for iphone and ipod the apps wouldn't hurt, they probably don't want people getting used to e-books on iphone and ipod before the tablet comes out.... ? The e-books would kill the battery on the iphone/ipod anyway. Don't think it would work. Just some ideas, don't shoot me down.

<comment><USER9> I just downloaded the free Kindle iphone app. I would think that if this were a competitive thing that they would have killed this one off first. Or maybe they're waiting until after the release of this rumored tablet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good god, when will the madness end?

"Another developer who built an e-book reader received a recent rejection along the same lines. The application might be used to read copyright infringing books, so Apple will not let it in App Store."

But couldn't OS X also be used to play copyright infringing MP3s, software and videos?

<comment><USER11> _Cupertino, CA - In a startling turn of events, Apple today announced that it has decided to stop selling the iPhone, effective immediately. When asked for more details, a spokesperson stated: "The iPhone might be used by people who buy it. This use could lead to complaints, and in the age of the Internet, these complaints could lead to bad PR for Apple. Therefore, Apple has decided that selling the iPhone is just too risky."_

<comment><USER12> The problem isn't with selling the iPhone, it's with letting people DO anything with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every day is a bad PR day for Apple lately. And it all seems to stem from the App Store.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't help but wonder if they'll let Amazon's app remain. After all, since you can send files to Amazon that are converted into their format, their app could be infringing on copyright...

While I understand the conflicting pressures Apple must be under with regards to various apps, I think it is hurting them quite a bit, but it's their own fault. Because they've made themselves the gatekeepers, it's much easier for other companies to sue them if they allow an app on that violates copyright or other laws.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think Apple is really going backwards with this move.

The platform could have been a great medium to publish (and monetize) any kind of multimedia content (everything that couldn't be considered strictly an application, like interactive fiction, comics, reference books with a customized interface etc).

From an author perspective this could have been a great medium to experiment with. Much more interesting that the kindle or simple e-book reader apps with a fixed user interface.

<comment><USER16> I see exactly where they're heading: Apple will create their own reader and Book Store in iTunes, where they'll charge content creators 30%. Perhaps if they're feeling particularly generous, they'll let you share your your DRM'd iBooks between your Tablet and your iPhone. Third-party readers are obviously a massive threat to this potential profit stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The difference between the potential of iTunes being used to access copyrighted material without payment and an eBook reader doing the same thing is that Apple do not sell eBooks.

Apple is ensuring that the apps on the iPhone make them money without any potential to cost them money. It's all upside for them.

<comment><USER18> Or, it could just be that the Apple Tablet thing, if it exists (10% probability) will read e-books (100% dependent probability), and therefore introduce a Book Store to complement the App and Music Stores (80% dependent probability, I'd say), and the iPhone and iPod Touch will inherit it (100% d.p.), and they'll want to shut out third-party Book Stores the same way they'd shut out a third-party music store (97% d.p.) and are willing to lie on rejection notices so as not to reveal their plan (20% d.p.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dictionary, e-books .. what's next?

<comment><USER4> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> so what about apps already in the app store?</comment>


Tell HN : A blog for hackdays, side projects and grassroots startups  - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, Last week I finally got my arse into gear and started a project I've wanted to do for ages www.thinkstartups.com, I want to write a blog that covers the smaller startups that normally wouldn't get coverage on TC,RWW, Mashable (Not that I don't love those blogs but they have a remit).
I also want to give coverage to weekend projects and hack days, I've entered quite a few hack days and there is so much wasted talent and code I think giving a bit of marketing to some of the apps might give the devs a bit of a push to continue it..
So check it out and if you have a project, app or bit of news just ping it over to firstname.lastname@example.com!
Would love to hear what you think :) <comment><USER2> Awesome. I think its a great idea. I've enjoyed being part of the FB group for people hacking on november / monthly projects. The more community and exposure we can build the better it is for everyone hacking on projects. Have followed on twitter, look forward to reading more.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Live Link <http://thinkstartups.com/> or you can find us on twitter at <http://www.twitter.com/thinkstartups> :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the articles you have, and the idea of covering hack days, because I am always looking for those. The site seems nice and the content is good, keep it up and you have me hooked.</comment>


Facebook: Want to see more posts? You must pay the friendship toll. - <AUTHOR> "Do you want to see more posts? The more friends you add, the more posts, photos and videos you'll see in News Feed."
If you scroll down the News Feed far enough, you will hit the bottom of the feed, as a new limit on how much wall content you can see has been established. Also, you will be greeted with the message above.
Must be a new feature to encourage more friendship. <comment><USER2> I saw my feed end for the first time in five years a few weeks ago. Once I hit the end of the feed, my inner being was filled with a sense of emptiness. Scary if you think about it. It's really no joke when psychologists say it's like being on drugs. And, as a person with ADHD, limitless scrolling is irresistible. I have taken to disabling it on most sites that implement it (either through official site settings or Firefox extensions).

As for adding more friends on Facebook, most of the lists of my friends and I are basically classmates.com 2.0. It might be because we're growing older (mid 20s), but I also feel that everyone is starting to either leave for other platforms or develop more in-person connections.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was fairly interesting that they would limit the posts you could see, seeing as this would limit time spent on Facebook but it is equally interesting that their response to this is basically "if you want to continue feeding your addiction to content, go and find more friends to add."</comment></comment>


Onyx Straps in For a Jepsening - <AUTHOR> http://www.onyxplatform.org/jekyll/update/2016/03/15/Onyx-Straps-In-For-A-Jepsening.html <comment><USER2> I just spent ~5 minutes clicking through on the Onyx site (learn, docs, blog, support, learn/FAQ, github) and still have no idea what it does.

It's a "a masterless, cloud scale, fault tolerant, high performance distributed computation system"! So it's EC2?

<comment><USER3> EC2 is a proprietary service for creating virtual machines on demand in Amazon's infrastructure, it is not a computation system. Much as a relational database system provides a framework for storing and retrieving relational data, a computation system provides a framework for performing (usually large- scale) computations, like transforming text files. It is open-ended, just as an RDBMS imposes no schema. A simple example would the processing pipeline of some web crawler.

Hadoop is one of the better known computation systems, though it does other things too (e.g. persistence with HDFS). Apache Storm is another popular computation system, particularly in the Clojure world. Onyx was created a few years ago, is implemented in Clojure, and competes with Storm (it's the first such system mentioned in the "What is it?" section of [https://github.com/onyx-platform/onyx](https://github.com/onyx- platform/onyx)).

Onyx is distributed (meaning there are multiple nodes cooperating, typically over a network), and Jepsen is a rigorous tool for testing fault-tolerance in such systems. Being masterless (no node has central authority) is valuable for fault-tolerance. It means that in the event of a network partition, either side of the partition can continue processing as normal and recover when the partition is resolved. Jepsen simulates these and other fault conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It was a lot of fun testing Onyx using Jepsen, though it did take some time to get things right. If anyone has questions about testing a distributed system in this way I'd be happy to answer them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Was bracing for something about Mary Lou Jepsen. No dice. What a drag.</comment>


Google Interview - <AUTHOR> I missed a very obvious test case in the last round of onsite interview. I realised it while going back home(the algo was correct but I forgot to place an important if check). The interviewer did not even give a hint that the solution is missing something. How much will it cost me? <comment><USER2> Maybe the interviewer hinted at it and you missed it?

Or maybe it wasn't that obvious test case and interviewer was okay with you missing it?

Interviews can't be judged by the point of view of an interviewee. Move on to doing something else and wait for the results.

All the best!</comment>


Linux totally dominates supercomputers - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-totally-dominates-supercomputers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting quote:

"Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144\. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent."

I also recommend the following keynote: [https://youtu.be/VceKNiRxDBc?t=1h3m5s](https://youtu.be/VceKNiRxDBc?t=1h3m5s)

China is putting massive investments into scientific projects. While they've completed the now largest radio telescope [1], the US has decided not to spend any money on SKA [2].

[1] [http://theconversation.com/china-completes-worlds-largest- ra...](http://theconversation.com/china-completes-worlds-largest-radio- telescope-raising-hopes-of-finding-new-worlds-and-alien-life-62237)

[2] [http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/15/no-us-role-for- no...](http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/15/no-us-role-for-now-in- building-worlds-biggest-radio-telescopecope/)</comment>


4 forgotten code constructs: time to revisit the past? - <AUTHOR> http://chrismm.com/blog/4-forgotten-code-constructs-time-to-revisit-the-past/ <comment><USER2> This article trolled me so hard that I've deleted three drafts of a response, each one expressing my astonishment in more colorful terms. Forgotten? The author cannot possibly be serious. I was hoping for obscurity and I got banality.

<comment><USER2> Ok, I recognize I've violated community norms by suggesting that this is a troll. I retract that. But what possible grounds might somebody have for saying that recursion is "forgotten". Proof by induction is highschool math -- doesn't the recursive approach naturally suggest itself for a lot of problems? I write Python all day, so stack frames are pretty expensive and I usually talk myself out of it.

And goto? "X considered harmful" is a pervasive meme. Does anybody really not know that X was originally goto?

And eval? Even if your language doesn't support it, surely the idea is obvious? "Man, I sure could get out of this tight spot if my program could write another program and evaluate it!"

Am I living under some kind of weird rock, where I find the suggestion that these are forgotten language constructs deeply disturbing? Come on, internet! Argue with me! I'm feeling punchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, other than some pedantic point about the title.

> Does anybody really not know that X was originally goto?

The original "goto considered harmful" paper was very much tongue-in-cheek.</comment></comment></comment>


Fires in California Take Down Safari Books Online - <AUTHOR> https://d1lu8vbgap5ai0.cloudfront.net/Screen%20Shot%202019-10-27%20at%2010.46.27%20PM.png <comment><USER2> Not true, because Safari is learning.oreilly.com which is still up</comment>


Academia's 1% - <AUTHOR> https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent <comment><USER2> There is a signalling/game mechanic that explains this sort of thing:

1) You have some rare ability that is distributed unevenly (Research skill, football skill) 2) There's certain brands that are imperfectly connected to the distribution of ability (Harvard, Man Utd) 3) You can hire a guy who looks to have the ability minus the brand, and he'll be cheap (Easier to lure, lower weekly salary). Once in a while, someone does this for a brand and the guy is "in". 4) Hire the wrong guy without the brand and your head is on the block. Gotta publish/win championships. 5) Hire the wrong guy with the brand, and you can point at many other coaches who did the same.

So what's going to happen? Anyone who is obviously good will get in no matter what, but the bar is extra high. And a fair number of obviously good people will also get the brand name. Everyone who is good but not great needs the brand.

Just looking at the numbers in the academia game, it looks very hard. Committees need to justify their choices, and they are choosing a very small subset of the applicants. Getting a dud on a team of say 7 researchers could be costly. You'll get some anyway (there's a HN article today about how hard it is to interview people) but you can at least pretend you did the conservative thing. Also, with a very small size the top spaces are reserved for special talents (Terence Tao article today as well). If you're on a shortlist with TT, you're not getting that job.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

<comment><USER4> > I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks > often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

Well, that's probably deceptive, as those guys are probably exceptional in other ways (publications as an undergrad, other research, etc) which takes away from their grades, or they only cared about certain classes which were important to their field.

<comment><USER5> As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10 programs I can confirm this.

My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline, worked on open source, gave talks at workshops and software engineering conferences, TAed, constructed two student led courses, etc.

It seems the most important thing is to demonstrate your ability to work as a researcher (your primary role as a CS graduate student) trumps all in graduate admissions, but that is just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER6> That's what I've heard, and it makes sense. Most specifically, to get into grad school X, you need to have one or more of the facility members in your school who are known by one or more in X recommend you with the message that you can do research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged. Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position at some even less than average school in the middle of nowhere would not have worked out as well.

And funny enough, I looked at the list of faculty at the university I was at, to see where they came from. All from high end school Harvard, Purdue, Cornell etc, just like the article mentions.

The policy it seems is hire up, graduate down. Unless of course they are in the top university then they hire from peers.

<comment><USER8> > Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting > for tenure position

That's something of a false dichotomy. I know lots of PhDs that aren't doing research or faculty jobs.

<comment><USER7> Maybe, I am in a position to interview a lot of candidates and all the ones with PhDs applying for general software engineer positions are pretty bad at software. Some fail the fizzbuzz test even. They have been working on their research project for 4 years and in that time forgot all most of the things they learned in undergraduate. Some of the ones that passed the interview were asking for much higher salaries, which we could not justify.

<comment><USER9> As someone who will be graduating in less than a year of PhD in comp sci., I would like to encourage you to not give up on all PhDs with such assumption. Like you, I am not impressed with the prospect of academia and research in general. But I honestly don't think a majority of CS phd students at decent (top 50) universities will fail fizzbuzz test as long as they have had undergraduate CS background. Some of us may fail to implement BFS/DFS/merge/quicksort during a 45 minute interview, but I think this is due to the interviewing process for tech jobs being somewhat broken (I saw my peers studying 3 or more months with interview prep books/sites and thought it's becoming ridiculous). A much better way to test a candidate would be to assign him/her a take-home assignment/project and let him/her work on it independently or along with your team, and judge his/her candidacy based on it (if your company can afford the extra time/resource for such process). I'm sure you'll notice those PhD folks from CS would not be as bad as you think they are.

In any case, I'd (for selfish reason) encourage you to be open-minded and give applicants with PhD background at least an equal chance. Personally, I never wanted a PhD, but I went for it because I needed to keep my immigrant status legal, and I couldn't pay for a master's degree out of pocket (if I enroll for a PhD program, I get a master's degree for free on the way). The downside of being a PhD student is that it is significantly more difficult for me to find my way back into software positions, which is something I wanted to do eventually; the HR usually throws away my resume with the assumption(s) that I am either only interested in research or am "overqualified" (or that I'd ask for more money), all of which are incorrect for a lot of PhD students, like me, stuck in academia for now. For all HR or recruiters reading this, I'd encourage you all to give PhD students a fair shot for the programming positions at your firms. You might find that these PhD students are more motivated or have more persistence/endurance (as most who survive the PhD experience usually have) or if you're lucky, are better prepared and thoughtful programmers.

<comment><USER10> Why is failing to implement BFS/DFS/quicksort in a 45 minute interview the fault of the interviewing process being broken?

The idea that someone has to study 3 months for an interview is ridiculous. I suppose for a PhD student I can understand as they probably need to refresh their memory, but if that's the case then you could argue they shouldn't be passing the interviews without refreshing their memory if we are talking about normal software development roles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> >You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

Then, I think we have to continue reasoning, why do those grad-students grow up and find they can only acquire tenure-track jobs by jumping to lower-tier institutions, where their own academic "children" will be considered inferior?

<comment><USER12> Because grad schools produce more (graduating students) than they consume (hiring faculty).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that much is obvious. But you would think that if a department is staffed by, say, MIT graduates, that they can do MIT-quality research, thanks to their MIT training, _without being in the geographical vicinity of downtown Cambridge_. Despite this, academic status-signaling seems to assume that the geographical vicinity is of profound importance.

<comment><USER13> Not everyone mit graduate is MIT professor good.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's possible, but when we know that many people who _are_ MIT Professor Good could not get into MIT for undergrad[1], it still requires us to believe MIT's admissions and graduation criteria for PhD students are _very_ loose compared to all their other observed standards.

[1] -- [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003)

<comment><USER6> That's frankly ridiculous, or at least the CalTech example at the end. For undergraduate study, MIT and CalTech have a strong filtering function in that you must be able to do math and calculus based physics, and, oh yeah, one "humanities" course per term. A student brilliant _only_ at math would likely fail horribly. And so a student who's brilliant at just CS might not make the cut for MIT, since MIT's EECS undergraduate program requires a minimum of both EE and CS (for better or worse, that's their view of what an undergraduate must have).

Change the domain to graduate programs and above and things are different.

While I'm at it, back some years ago last decade before MIT gained a lot of attention approximately 13,000 students applied a year for the undergraduate program. 3,000 were judged to "be able to do the work", and only from them was a class of 1,100 students constructed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was the best article, not just regarding academia, but describing the issue of privilege and its destructive effect on the "american dream" \- that I think I have seen since the 2009 crash.

We have a controversy about wealth inequality and it seems that would be a natural result of a cycle of power simply being passed down generation by generation.

I think the opposite of that, a meritocracy, is what we want - but maybe what we have is inevitable in a money and status obsessed culture. I don't know if the culture is a cause or result of the systems we have that tilt the scales so far in favor of the elite over the non-elite, but one or the other would have to be addressed in some way.

<comment><USER15> People will wax poetically about meritocracy and fairness. Then they will get children of their own and think to themselves that giving them all the advantages that they can get is their newest and most moral goal.

<comment><USER16> Guilty as charged.

But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the interests of their own children, resulting in a trend towards increasing disparity.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remember that perfect meritocracy is utopian, and can't be reconciled with fairness, so long as individuals can choose to whom they share their advantages -- indeed when we can't even all agree on what those advantages are. So we look for second best, for instance, endorsing social and economic measures that counteract that disparity.

<comment><USER15> > But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the > interests of their own children,

"But realistically, everyone else is doing it..."

Yes. I didn't have any particular society in mind. Just our own nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am a mathematics professor at an R1 university who has been directly involved in faculty searches for four years in a row.

This article is quite mistaken, at least from the perspective of an academic mathematician. (Maybe it is more accurate in the humanities.)

(1) This year, two of the three candidates whom we interviewed got their Ph.D.'s at non-top-20 universities. We made offers to both of them. One of them turned us down, in favor of a better offer from another R1 university.

The third got his Ph.D. at a top-20, but not top-10 university.

The last person we hired, in a previous year's search, also got his Ph.D. at a non-top-20 university.

(2) My own university is not in the top 50. Most of our own Ph.D. graduates, if I limit to the strongest and hardworking ones, have been successful in getting either academic jobs at good universities, or very appealing non- academic jobs.

(3) In mathematics at least, the top universities offer a _much_ better graduate education than non-top universities. For one, the absolute leading researchers are at the top universities, and there is a big gap between these people and merely very good researchers. (I say that, counting myself in the latter category.)

But still more important than that is the quality of the peer group. In grad school (at least in math) you learn much more from your peers than from your professors, and Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. attract the most talented, ambitious, and hard-working students. _That_ is why these places are so good.

(4) "Why don't prospective graduate students simply limit their applications to favored elite institutions? The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country."

Well, for one, these places all pay higher stipends. I don't know of any grad students in math at any of these places who have had difficulties paying their living expenses, except for those who were simultaneously trying to raise families.

Ambitious students who can get into elite universities, usually should. And exceptions are typically in the case of elite research groups in otherwise non-elite universities.

I am not saying that there is no privilege and discrimination in mathematics departments (the gender ratio is notoriously bad), but I find the author's criticisms off-base.

<comment><USER18> I know many biomedical faculty members in Stanfod pay their postdocs below NIH suggested levels, just because they can.

I would caution people of survivor's bias. Only saints promote people with strong different options and who act on their options. Academia is full of strong egos.

<comment><USER19> Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring.

[1] [http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html](http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html)

<comment><USER18> I heard from my postdoc friends at Stanford a couple of years ago about the pay levels. It could have changed now but I doubt it. Do postdocs at Stanford still pay tuitions? My experience is that UCSF > UC Berkeley > Stanford as far as postdocs' compensation is concerned.

<comment><USER19> Stanford has always been pretty good with postdoc pay, and postdocs never paid tuition. Pretty much all of these schools and mine (UCLA) are on similar levels. At all UC's postdocs are unionized as well given additional protections (like 1yr contracts, limits on training time, etc).

<comment><USER20> The tuition part is wrong. Stanford postdocs do pay tuition, but it isn't out of pocket. They are legally unmatriculated graduate students, so they pay some kind of tuition/registration fee for the year/quarter (I can't remember which).

It isn't something that they are necessarily responsible for, and it is a small amount. But it is paid in their name.

<comment><USER19> That's a peculiarity of stanford; but it's like $200/year. At UCLA we have something similar called an infrastructure fee which is about the same amount a year. Importantly, this is not something they are responsible for paying ever.

<comment><USER20> I think that the point is so that it looks like you are really a student for tax purposes. It is a small amount that isn't ever directly billed to you - but it does count as a taxable benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get the thing about cost of living. New Haven is not expensive, neither is NJ commutable to Princeton, nor Philadelphia. Chicago's cost of living is right at the national average. Durham's is probably below. Etc.

<comment><USER22> I am a mathematics graduate student at an AMS Group 1 public university in Chicago. The university's estimated cost of living is $16,046, but our wage minimums were significantly below this number (about $1k less) until two years ago, which was the result of over a year of contract negotiations during which we had to bring in an arbiter from the federal government because the university was not bargaining with our union in good faith. They also threatened to raise our health-care premiums and increase fees arbitrarily. The university also bans individual departments from paying their graduate students much more to compensate.

In short, our university appears to be doing everything they can to extract money from their graduate students. It is ridiculous and nearsighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti- intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team? I'm sure on Hacker News most of your know about MoneyBall:

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

Consider this paragraph, and ask yourself why the nation's major universities can not raise themselves to the same level of statistical rigor:

"The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game and the statistics available at that time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office took advantage of more analytical gauges of player performance to field a team that could better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball (MLB)."

It is in some sense ironic, and in some other sense sickening, that our nation's universities continue to hang on 19th-century views of status and credentials, when other professions, even sports, have moved onto more objective, measurable metrics.

<comment><USER24> Research isn't a competitive game with clear wins and losses. Moneyball and finding the under valued players works best in environments where you can actually prove/demonstrate they wre clearly undervalued. It's very difficult to show someone who's undervalued is clearly undervalued short of them solving a major open problem. When there is far less direct competition everything is more subjective and the prestige factor of top tier applicants shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors... What that means is something every Ph.D. from a less-prestigious institution knows all too well: No amount of publishing, teaching excellence, or grants can compensate for an affiliation that is less than favorable in the eyes of a search committee._

This is just wrong. It is possible that publishing and grants are correlated with institution rank (and teaching excellence is usually a relative measure so hard to compare across schools anyway).

It seems decades of anti-discrimination indoctrination have resulted in a situation where no argument is to sloppy, and no evidence is to flimsy, when you are arguing that discrimination exists somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> The actual paper is pretty interesting, even aside from the more political implications[0]. For faculty placement, their measure of network prestige outpredicts other network measures and other ranking systems like USNews (but still only performs modestly well).

They also released the data in the supplementals. This is a magnificent hand- curated dataset, especially because it's complete, for each discipline, and it's relatively large. Network measures suffer from sampling issues, so a complete dataset like this is awesome.

[0][http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005).

</comment><comment><USER26> The same rule holds true for jobs in the private sector: work for a high profile company (Google, Apple, Facebook, ...) and you will find doors open everywhere. Getting there in the first place is the real challenge.

<comment><USER27> One difference is that the private sector gives second chances and academia doesn't.

<comment><USER28> Or, to put it another way, there are far more paths to success in the private sector than in academia. People change careers, move upwards, downwards, sideways, etc.

Academia is much less forgiving.

<comment><USER6> In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

<comment><USER29> There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually generally happy in industry and uninterested in going back, or likely some combination of both.

<comment><USER6> " _after being very successful in industry_ "

I've heard of one example of that in the MIT AI Lab in the '60-70s, although it helped that "very successful" can equal "can pay for his research budget" ^_^. And of course there weren't many real CS graduates to turn into faculty members in the bad old days.

<comment><USER27> Back in the glory days of the 1960's you'd often see a scientist who'd made big money for a company get an endowed chair somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the reasons you want to avoid getting a "subprime" Ph.D.

<comment><USER30> Only if you care about going into academia. It's possible to want to get a PhD just to grow in your field.

I acquired my PhD a few years ago, and while I admit that it's hard to compare that to the experience I could have had in industry, I feel like I grew quite a lot and that it helps me in my current position in many many ways, only one of which is pure CS ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> [Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. [http://wstein.org](http://wstein.org)]

The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less."

Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it, and reminded myself that I was a __student __.

Also, there is a naive and incorrect (in math at least) assumption in this article that the only difference between a _graduate_ student from a top-10 university and a top-100 university is the name of the university where they graduated. There may be some truth to this for undergraduates, but for graduate students---who spend between 4 and 10 years busting their ass full- time on their research area---the situation is completely different.

The author thus seems to discount the possibility that the very best students who go to graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. are often be the best job candidates. Harvard/Berkeley/etc. gets the best potential grad students in the first place -- I was on the grad admissions committee in math at Harvard for years, and we would make offers to the top (or so) American students, and pretty much get most of them. These were extremely strong enthusiastic students who had _invested_ often a decade of their lives into mathematics already; the education these students then got at grad school was by top researchers. In research, learning from the masters is often critical to becoming one, since the habits, tricks, ideas, intuitions, etc. are very hard to convey in writing.

Also, not everybody gets into graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. via "inherited wealth". At least I didn't -- I was an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, and got into Berkeley entirely by being crazy in love with doing mathematics and also relatively good at it. The undergrad institution definitely matters in grad school admissions. However, being sufficiently good regularly gets around being from a non-top-10 university.

The article reminds me of this quote -- [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos): "André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters."

<comment><USER32> I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, but there's a tone here and in Hacker News in general that bothers me - a fierce meritocracy that doesn't seem to have a scrap of empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into the top 1%.

So if the rest of us lazy slobs in the 99% are unworthy to get into the best grad schools or Y Combinator, I'm to assume we should just find ourselves a quiet spot in the midwest in which to shoot ourselves in the face and get of your way? But then who will be around to pay the tuitions at your overpriced institutions, or buy your latest social media software?

<comment><USER33> The fact that your first alternative to succeeding is giving up entirely, I don't see how you could make it to the midwest with enough money to buy the gun you'll kill yourself with.

Resources; time, energy, attention; are limited. If you allocate resources to less-than-best people, you get less-than-best results, most of the time.

If these people are the kind of weak, selfish pricks who think that the world owes them a world-class experience just for existing, they'll give up half-way through the most difficult thing they've ever done(if they ever start), and your investment in them will be lost forever, without outcomes.

That kind of investment crashes your economy, and in the long run gets your species killed.

<comment><USER34> This is funny because, it wasn't that long ago in history, that the characteristics that made a person successful were how all about how well they could hunt. How many of the new geek kings of the startup scene, would be kings in that world? You might be successful in your niche, but never forget the sheer good luck that had you born near (spatially and temporally) a local maxima.

<comment><USER35> A friend of mine once had a conjecture that back in the day, the people who moved to the cities were the ones who couldn't hack it being self-sufficient on a farm.

<comment><USER36> That might be true to some extent but I think it ignores all of the other much more powerful motivations. Wealth is easier to accumulate in a city because there is far more specialization.

I can't be a first-rate baker and a blacksmith and a shipwright and a miner and a fisher and a farmer and and and ... the specialists in the city do one thing excellently: they bring down the cost while also bringing up quality, raising quality-of-life for people in the city. If I'm an average farmer and average blacksmith, perhaps I'll produce $10 worth of goods in an hour, $5 worth of crops and $5 worth of tools. As an exceptional farmer, I can produce $20 worth of crops, trade $10 of them for tools, and end up with $10 each of crops and tools. It's as simple as that - trading between people with different specialties / needs leaves both people better off, and you can't do that subsistence farming.

Public infrastructure in cities has also always been much better, such as roads, communication systems, police, fire fighting, etc. Trade was much easier because there were more people to trade with, a larger market for your goods. On a small subsistence farm, any excess that you cannot save or reinvest is wasted; in a city, it can be sold or traded to accumulate wealth.

There are certainly people who are attracted to the city because they can't hack it (beggars, etc.), but they are in the minority. In the modern era, something like 3% of the population are farmers, and they are so exceptionally effective (supported by agricultural scientists, robotics engineers who build automated farming machinery, etc.) that the rest of us have plenty of food, freeing us up to specialize in other things (like robotics).

I believe this cycle of technological enrichment fundamentally requires specialization. This is not to say that anyone is wrong for wanting a simpler or more communal form of living, but I doubt the motivations are anything economic. The reason that so many people end up working in cities, in factories (sweatshops) today is simple: they can accumulate more wealth specializing in even a mundane repetitive task (quickly, cheaply, and with quality) than they could by subsistence farming.

<comment><USER36> Two other points that might be worth further exploration:

* There was an article on Hacker News recently about the historical cost of clothing, how it used to cost thousands of modern-equivalent dollars for a shirt. Thus why people wore clothing until it was rags. The cost of clothing and all such goods came down dramatically due to peoples' specialization as spinners, weavers, sewers, tailors, etc. Now clothing is cheap and plentiful.

[Update: found it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950) ]

* There was another HN thread discussing the fall of the Roman empire and the "dark ages". A commentator who seemed to be a historian reinforced the idea that yes, there really was a dark ages. The fall of the empire shut down trade, which led to a marked decline in the pottery available in Britain. Previously they had been able to import plentiful, high quality pottery from elsewhere. With the fall of the empire and the collapse of trade, they began to make it themselves, and were terrible at it. Even the kings of the era had worse pottery than the common person centuries earlier. (This is more about trade than about cities, but the effectiveness of trade increases with density.)

[Update: not the HN comment I was looking for, but similar information about pottery: [http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391](http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391) ]

The power of specialization and trade

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a lot to take issue with in this article. Graduate institutional affiliation is huge because more and more research is being done by undergraduates, so top institutions can more easily pick out the best talent early. It is still true in academia that research>institution, but the latter is becoming more and more correlated with the former. Top PhD graduates come from top schools, with few exceptions (and those exceptions still get jobs). With undergraduate this correlation is weak.

Yes financial privilege is huge for getting that far, but everyone applying for an academic PhD program has spent decent time in academia and has chosen that instead of money. I've never seen or heard of someone turning down an elite academic PhD program because of a low stipend (students do use stipends to choose between similar schools). Any academic adviser would tell you you'd be crazy to do so.

Edit: This might only be true for math. In undergrad I was constantly surprised to find students from elite vs sub-elite institutions differed hugely in privilege and less in ability. In my PhD program, there was a huge difference in ability between our school (arguably #3 in the area) and nearby Harvard/MIT. While this is all anecdotal, elite academia is a small community and I've seen a large chunk of math. Ability here in math is easy to measure (if they can solve my problems and I can't understand theirs). Mathematicians keep mental rankings of other mathematicians. When you apply for graduate school and later jobs, lots of other mathematicians have a really good idea how you compare.

<comment><USER38> About being correlated, I guess it is simply not true, just check statistical models. What happens is that increasingly what is considered good research are what top schools are researching... Like String theory in Physics...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I found this the most interesting:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005...](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005/F1.large.jpg)

The top institutions producing CS professors:

MIT

Berkeley

Stanford

Caltech

Harvard

Cornell

CMU

Princeton

Yale

Washington

You have to click through a bunch of links to find the actual study:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.figures-...](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.figures- only)

</comment><comment><USER40> It is really hard to find excellent PhD students. The supply is very limited. The top schools snap them up, and there they are at graduation time.

</comment><comment><USER41> > "..a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure- > track faculty.."

I find it funny when people are continually "surprised" by the appearance of the Pareto Principle.

It is everywhere (everywhere!), and that is why you should never stop fighting to become the top 10% of _anything_ you do (that you care about).

<comment><USER42> More generally, if you distribute anything across a population in any manner other than everyone getting exactly the same amount, then it is mathematically necessary that the top N% have more than N% of the thing for any N < 100.

Most articles I've seen on any kind of inequity in distribution don't seem to take this into account, and so don't try to establish what the baseline fair distribution should be, making most of their subsequent analysis worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > the first two years of the "recovery," the mean net worth of households in > the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 > percent,

Stocks had dropped in half the previous couple years. A more reasonable metric would be a 10 year statistic.

</comment><comment><USER44> The problem with finding a job when you have a PhD that isn't from one of the top schools is an individual one.

The problem of the lack of diversity in the educations of the leaders of academia is a systemic failure that can undermine society.

</comment><comment><USER45> An interesting article. It certainly seems unfair to have such selection bias. It may be beneficial to have a standardized country-wide test which could quantify and compare the quality of PhD grads arising from universities. If an effective test could be devised, it seems that companies and universities would pay attention to it. As it stands now, no such testing exists, making universities rely on qualitative evaluations, such as reputation, prestige, and price. I think it is true in general that without quantitative ways of evaluating something, looking at price seems to be the best alternative.

</comment><comment><USER46> Important subject. Related:

Professors and PHDs on food stamps:

[http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_th...](http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_the_shocking_true_story_of_academia_in_2014/)

[http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d- s-a...](http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d-s-are-on- food-stamps)

The PHD bust:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the- phd-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust- americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/)

[http://www.economist.com/node/17723223](http://www.economist.com/node/17723223)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us- pus...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for- more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html)

The PHD glut:

[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc- res...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers- stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html)

[http://www.nature.com/news/how-not-to-deal-with-the-phd- glut...](http://www.nature.com/news/how-not-to-deal-with-the-phd-glut-1.16182)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us- produc...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-produce- too-m/)

The plight of part-time professors:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the- tall...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-tall-task-of- unifying-part-time-professors/385507/?single_page=true)

Parents, politicians, and teachers have been beating the 'ever more education' and 'more STEM grads' drums for a while. The past 5-7 years have shown that these things were not, and are not, the panacea they were promised to be. We can always pick the individual situations apart and say 'they made the following 50 mistakes, and that is why they are un- or under-employed', but if we look at the trends, we can see it's bigger than that. We have overlapping crises of credentialism; jobs that aren't there - even for many people with STEM degrees; underpaid and overworked adjuncts that require food stamps to live; people who go to school until they are in their mid-30s, sometimes later, and walk out with a pile of degrees and no marketable skills outside of academia, and cannot get jobs IN academia; skyrocketing tuitions; and an enormous bubble of debt (now over 1T.) How many brilliant people will never come anywhere close to fulfilling their potential because of all this? Not a good situation.

</comment><comment><USER47> Here's how to understand academia.

When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course, people who are academically strong tend to be socially weak when younger. Academia appeals because you're not around the "jocks" with superior social skills. Let's be honest: most people who go into academia do so because they're afraid that if they go into the big, bad business world, they'll be out-shouldered by "asshole jocks".

Here's the trap. The real world is a lot more cooperative than competitive. If you're a social "4", you do better being the weakling in a crowd of 7's (business)-- you'll rise up to that level, from exposure, in a couple of years-- than the relative leader in an ivory tower full of 2's. Why? Because social skills _aren 't about competition_; you want to be around skilled people who have your back. Those "jocks" don't out-shoulder you, because adulthood isn't middle school: they teach you how to get what you want. If anything, the worst bullies in adulthood are the ex-nerds who have something to prove.

Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him by lowering your market value as well.

Academia's appeal is that it's some sort of safe haven for the socially awkward beings that smart people usually are in their early 20s (and usually grow out of by age 25-30). However, because it's full of socially inept people who are terrible at making a case for their own value, the resource pool declines over time, and we're now at the point where the academic job market is kaputt. There are a few star professors who manage to work their way out of the hell that is academia for the bottom 99+ percent, but the irony is that to do that requires a great deal of social ability anyway.

Academia's promise is that you don't need to be socially skilled and you'll keep being rewarded for being smart. First, that's a stupid promise in the first place. Those skills aren't hard to learn (unless you have a hard neurological deficit, but that covers maybe 1% of the population) and you just need to grow up. Second, in the cutthroat environment you get amid dwindling resources and social investment in academia, it turns out that you need those skills to survive, making a joke of that promise.

<comment><USER48> Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts.

HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned- down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically, the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts!

 _note:_ i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track academic job.

<comment><USER15> I don't know about _provocative_. Everyone knows what O'Church's opinions are at this point. Can _the same tune_ really be provocative?

<comment><USER49> Just because you're tired of it doesn't mean his niche isn't provocatively positioned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


America's love of luxury toilet paper is destroying Canadian forests - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-forest-toilet-paper-us-climate-change-impact-report <comment><USER2> Surely the paper is being harvested from sustainably managed tree farms? And surely if demand for said paper decreased, to the point where the tree farm wasn't profitable, said tree farm owner would raze the farm.

<comment><USER3> most paper in the US is sustainably forested. The article overstates its case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Those Japanese luxury toilets that many Asians and some Western celebrities and rich people use might actually be the most environmentally friendly choice.

[https://www.totousa.com/products/neorest](https://www.totousa.com/products/neorest)

<comment><USER5> Heh you don't have to spend $5k. You can swap out almost any standard toilet seat for a $350 Toto Washlet to get a heated seat and heated water. They are incredible, and you're right, they almost eliminate the need for toilet paper.

Or you can go super cheap and get a $20-50 version with unheated water.

<comment><USER6> And the only reason they cost $350 in the US is due to rarity - here in Japan you can get them (with heated seat/water) from Panasonic and Toshiba for under $150

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really dont get why the west doesn't use a bidet.

Its really mind blowing to me that if someone smears a cake on your face, you wash it with soap, but use TP to clean feaces.

Why use so much paper and do so mich environmental damage, if you can just use water for a better cleansing outcome.

</comment><comment><USER8> > average four-person household in the US uses over 100lb of toilet paper a > year

Well that's super helpful. Who buys it by the pound? Sheets of paper, or rolls, yes I could visualise and compare. Not even how many football fields it covers!

Sounds like a heck of a lot. Probably.

<comment><USER9> An average toilet paper roll is 227 grams / roll [0] or ~0.5 lbs / roll. Consequently, this would be ~200 rolls, or 0.547 rolls per day.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper#Description](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper#Description)

<comment><USER10> That seems on the high side. Maybe quarter roll per day per person.

Using more than that it's probably cheaper to buy a Toto with the bidet.

<comment><USER11> you obviously don't have a wife, girlfriend, or daughters. Women use toilet paper to clean up their makeup and their _ahem_ , stains, and for a whole bunch of other things besides just wiping their butts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Relevant Scientific American article.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks- bidet...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-bidets/)

"Popular everywhere except North America, where Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper annually, switching to bathroom bidets could save some 15 million trees.... 'This also involves 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching." He adds that manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually....'

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish those sink-sprayer looking things they have in India would catch on in the west. It's like a minimum viable bidet. I thought it works better and you never run out. Maybe a slightly damp butt would be more problematic in cooler climates...

</comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone passing out bidet's for free or low costs?? Don't think so...

<comment><USER15> You can get "add-on" bidets for ~$20 which just hook up to your existing water line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since the service inception, my family has been subscribed to bamboo toilet paper from Tushy [0].

[0]: [https://hellotushy.com/products/tushy-bamboo-toilet- paper](https://hellotushy.com/products/tushy-bamboo-toilet-paper)

<comment><USER17> That looks extremely expensive for something you use every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is damn outrageous, anyone whose done any serious woodworking or carpentry knows how the price of just about every type of lumber has increased over the past few decades. Seriously, it is now becoming a scarce resource and wasting high quality wood fiber this way is just plain stupid.

Perhaps we should tax wood fiber to point of where we're all forced to use recycled stuff or we have to switch back to using old newspaper (as was the case when I was a kid). Nowadays we no longer use nasty antimony printing plates, so we've no longer any reasonable excuse not to.

Reckon, many could perhaps do with a stint in the army to toughen up their posteriors. I recall the stuff it issued was only marginally better than using leaf droppings.</comment>


Elliptic curves and their implementation - <AUTHOR> http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/12/04/ecc.html <comment><USER2> Order of a finite field very well may be 2^n, contrary to what the article says.</comment>


Giant dams enclosing North Sea could protect millions from rising waters - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/giant-dams-could-protect-millions-from-rising-north-sea <comment><USER2> From the article: "A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution."

Building these dams will be a lot easier than getting people to stop driving SUVs and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if you're serious, but transportation is only 14% of emissions. Electricity, agriculture and industry are all individually bigger contributors.

[https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas- emiss...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions- data)

<comment><USER4> Why are militaries rarely mentioned as GGG contributors?

<comment><USER5> It's hard to get data. Countries were explicitly allowed to ignore/not report military emissions by the Kyoto Accords. Without the mandatory reporting anyone trying to write about it has to gather a lot of information about the inner workings of military logistics (amount of tonnage moved by what method etc) that the government is quite reluctant to provide.

[https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse- gases-140-co...](https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-greenhouse- gases-140-countries-1445674)

<comment><USER2> It's too bad because it's got to be pretty horrible. If they could just get the data for the amount of diesel/jet fuel consumed, that would tell us a lot. The US military burned a ridiculous amount of diesel fuel in Afghanistan just to try to air-condition _tents_ in the desert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The environmental results of such a project would be devastating, and human civilization in Europe might just be better off with a 10m rise in sea levels.

</comment><comment><USER7> " The cost of building a so-called North Sea Enclosure Dyke, estimated at between €250bn and £500bn, amounts to barely 0.1% of the combined GDP of all the countries that would be protected by it, they calculate."

That would mean those countries GDP is estimated at 250 to 500 trillion pounds or 320 to 645 trillion dollars

France 2.6 trillion, england 2.75 trillion, Scotland 202 billion, Netherlands 826 billion. Or about 6.4 trillion dollars per Wikipedia.

<comment><USER8> This seems like two examples of errors converting decimal fractions to percentages in hacker news in one day.

Very roughly it looks like they should have said 0.1 or 10%.

10% of combinded GDP is very much not an easy investment to make!

<comment><USER9> Maybe they're calculating the cost over a 100 years while keeping today's GDP as a yard stick. Though nothing in the article indicates so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> There was a similar idea for the Mediterranean sea almost 100 years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa)

Edit: some grad student more recently (2014) proposed this as well: [https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar- sea.html](https://phys.org/news/2014-08-gibraltar-sea.html)

<comment><USER5> How would a complete opening be safe to traverse with a 50 cm difference between opposite sides of the dam? I'd think that'd create quite a strong current that would make it very hard to exit the Med.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Risk distribution is very bad. You have a long dam, of which a single failure at any point means flooding a lot of land. Individual dams along the coastline will, in most cases, only affect the land behind them. Plus it's easier to fix a coastline dam than one in the middle of the sea, possibly during a storm.

<comment><USER11> Actually the exact opposite is true. By picking the right places to build your dams and dikes out to see, you can reduce the total length of [all the dams and dikes], thus total risk is reduced.

An example is eg. dutch Delta Works: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works) , which (among other things) reduced the total length of sea defenses in Zeeland by 700 km.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source here: [https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de- noordzee-w...](https://www.nioz.nl/en/news/een-dam-dwars-door-de-noordzee- waarschuwscenario-voor-klimaatverandering)

</comment><comment> java-man I would like to see a failure analysis report.

<comment><USER12> Getting this passed by both the EU and UK governments seems at least as unlikely as 'turn the north sea into gigantic lake' plan failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow ecocide in Europe for only 500 billion. It's hard to imagine a dumber idea.</comment>


Silicon Bayou rising: New Orleans' drive to be the next great tech city - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/6/4391280/silicon-bayou-rising-new-orleans-drive-to-be-the-next-great-tech-city

<comment><USER2> They have a lot of competition to be the next great tech city.</comment>