Georgia Tech professors revolt over reopening, say current plan threatens lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.gpbnews.org/post/georgia-tech-professors-revolt-over-reopening-say-current-plan-threatens-lives-students-staff <comment><USER2> I'd add that Georgia Tech is asking for Out-of-State and International Students to come in on July 24-26th, which is 2 weeks after the announcement was made (very recently). Which seems kinda absurd.

>If you have secured, or expect to have secured your visa, and plan to enroll for the fall semester on the Atlanta campus, you should plan for in-person, residential instruction.

>You will be asked to arrive in Atlanta between July 24-26 and be required to follow quarantine guidelines.

>Per guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, any individual who is traveling to the U.S. from an international destination should quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, monitor their health, and practice social distancing. This guidance should be followed by students planning to live in either on-campus housing or private housing located off-campus.

<comment><USER3> and also effectively binds them to this process because now you are making people fly domestically or internationally on very short notice...and will look ridiculous if they cancel that a week or two later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in a Georgia Tech Facebook group and this has been a really controversial issue, particularly among international students. They only provided 4-6 weeks notice before reopening, so not only is flying risky, it'll be expensive too. To make matters worse, some classes will be offered online, but students won't know if it is until after the semester has already started.

<comment><USER5> Did the students fly to their home countries?

<comment><USER6> They moved online after spring break. Many students went to their home countries and were asked not to come back for the remainder of the term.

<comment><USER3> and the online transition was bungled when the state university system overuled GT's president and insisted they stay in person, then changed their minds.

So campus went from 'we are coming back after break' to 'online after spring break' to 'coming back after an extended break' to 'online after spring break' in something like 96 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am a Georgia Tech faculty member. I've been reading this thread and considering how to respond, and decided I should be transparent. There are a lot of things being discussed here and I don't think I have the bandwidth to respond to all of them but I'm happy to try and answer some questions. No clue how to verify this but happy to do so non-publicly.

<comment><USER3> I'll add a couple other notes...

It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of Georgia.

Basically, GT is in the same boat as many other places...working on the assumption that students will pick the university with in person or take a gap year before doing online. So everyone, to some extent, is bluffing each other. Now it's a race to see who admits they were wrong first. You are starting to see it (or have already seen it) from private universities mostly because they have total control over their financial state and (in some cases) an immutable reputation that won't be damaged (think: MIT, Harvard, etc.) by being conservative. For everyone else, it's a crap shoot.

<comment> blaser-waffle > It's interesting to see GT's experience here get picked up specifically and > I think partially its just randomness, partially the other issues in > Georgia, partially the particular failures of GT/the university system of > Georgia.

It's a tech school, and this is a tech blog, plus GA (as a proxy for the south in general) has a lot of the COVID and has not done a fantastic job managing outbreaks. Makes sense it's a source of scrutiny.

<comment><USER3> When I say picked up I mean by the general media.

Yes HN is tech focused....but the GT specific story has been reported by a number of news outlets while similar stories at other universities have not. It started with a story in the local press, and has ballooned. There are other campuses in Georgia where faculty are doing similar things with no/little coverage. Obviously GT is more well known...but there is an element of commenting on all of Academia via proxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the current numbers in the US, it does not seem likely that you can reopen universities in any kind of safe way. Anything that puts a lot of people into small rooms is problematic, and I really can't see anything that is close to the regular operation being possible in the fall.

The only way to be able to reopen inherently risky activities like this is to suppress the virus sufficiently that you can handle the remainder with mask mandates, contact tracing and prohibiting mass events. I'm in Germany where the number of cases is drastically lower than in the US right now, and I doubt we'll be able to reopen universities fully in the fall. With the dramatic numbers from the US right now, it does seem extremely unlikely that they could be controlled enough in the fall to make any kind of reopening safe.

<comment><USER8> or, just let what will happen, happen? i hear a lot about case numbers, almost nothing about mortality rates

<comment><USER9> I think you missed the whole reason to "flatten the curve". The hospitalization rate is the problem, not mortality rate. 20-30% of people who get the virus end up in the hospital since there are no known treatments available. For now, if we have hospital capacity you're very likely to survive COVID-19. If we run out of supplies and overwhelm the limited medical staff the mortality rate is going to skyrocket and we will run out of places to store the dead bodies.

<comment><USER10> _20-30% of people who get the virus end up in the hospital_

That's way too high. According to [https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page), 0.65% of New York City residents have been hospitalized for COVID-19. Antibody tests show at least 20% of NYC residents have been infected, so the hospitalization rate is more like 3%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In some universities in Spain, they have mandatory antibody tests, and they divide students in 3 groups: the ones with antibodies, the ones without and sick people that can follow the classes online.

To enter the buildings in the campus, you need to get a "passport", after completing antibody test and lots of questions... Some preconditions, like being asthmatic disqualifies you (so you need to follow classes online). Also, they have several new rules, like using only stairs to move across floors, minimum distance, thermal cameras, etc.

It's a new world in many aspects.

<comment><USER12> Reading this, I can't believe how far behind North America is with respect to this virus. When it comes to day to day life, we have very little new, quality information compared to March.

I'm not saying what Spain is doing is great, but it feels like an iterative step to remove a few top layers of anxiety

<comment><USER13> It's been fascinating in a dark way to see how cultural differences from place to place are translating into vastly different responses to this situation (and vastly different outcomes) from country to country and from state to state within the US.

How often do we get to see the entire world deal with the same problem at the same time for such a sustained period?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel for the students, but reopening the school for in-person classes makes no sense.

If a student flies home, they face one day of risk. If school reopens for in- person classes, then they'll face hundreds of days of risk.

That single day of flying may not even be as risky as a single day of classes (never mind hundreds of days of classes), because not nearly as many people fly these days due to fear of the pandemic.

Also, if classes reopen, many of the people that get sick (who'll be far more numerous than those that get sick from flying a single day) will spread the sickness to others, causing way more knock-on effects than those caused by a small number of students flying one day.

<comment><USER15> The risk is so incredibly low thought, especially since most of these students will be under 30! There is something important about in-person classes you don't really get online and I'd hate to be forced to be online only.

We've lost a whole year, to a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as anyone thought it'd be, and it will likely die, or we'll reach herd immunity, long before any virus can be safely manufactured.

I feel like a lot of this is fear, hysteria and an completely inability for humans to properly assess risk, mixed with just a plethora of bad and conflicting information.

<comment><USER16> As somebody who is just wrapping up university, got the coronavirus, and know other young and middle-aged people who got the coronavirus, the virus can both be super mild and super aggressive from one person to the next.

I was mostly physically fine but I was miserable for the entire time I had it. One other person who got sick went from that same mild shitty experience I had to not being able to breath in a matter of hours.

Older people get it worse but from what I've seen and what I've heard from a family member(they work with COVID-19 patients), it's basically a coin toss whether somebody ends up asymptomatic, gets it mildly, or gets it absolutely brutally.

Another thing to consider is that universities will still have to deal with students going out and getting absolutely tattered at bars and parties. We've already seen smaller incidents of this resulting in an explosion of cases. Knowing how university culture is, things will get bad very quickly.

Even ignoring the party culture, students will come to class sick out of fear. I've felt bad doing this in the past but the unwritten expectation for classes with attendance is "show up unless you literally can't walk". If you actually reach out to the prof, they'll tell you to stay home but most students will just assume the worst and try to show up.

Sorry for ranting a bit but I just can't see universities safely opening up with how the culture is at the moment. Online courses are not nearly as good in most cases (and I say this as someone who generally prefers online or recorded lecture courses) but it'll be a disaster to have in person courses with how things are.

<comment><USER17> I am trying to understand this comment in this context. The commentor above you talks about the statistical fact that cases under in younger people are not only rarer, but very low chance of getting hospitalized, and an even lower chance of death.

You then respond with an anecdote of experience talking about the potential outcomes of this virus. Why exactly is this? Of course there are terrible potential outcomes in everyday actions we take. We might face a car crash, we might get hit by lightning. Why should we treat this matter any different than that?

Only difference I see being is that this is infectious, and with the professors usually being of older age, there should definitely be some protections in place. But lets at least shift towards talking about being infectious, and not talking about plainly getting COVID, because the implications of that are on complete different scales of magnitude depending on your personal charasterstics.

Also, you seem to talk in your latter parts of the comment about things that are not set in stone. E.g. Class attendance could be made nonmandatory and not affect grades. Also, parties could on campus could be restricted.

<comment><USER18> > commentor above you talks about the statistical fact

No, the commenter above talked about the "risk", and cited that one fact. Both of you are forgetting that sick people are infectious. We're trying to control an epidemic here, not save the lives of some particular GT students. If they get sick they'll make others sick. One of those cases might be your grandfather.

<comment><USER17> I am not sure if you read my comment through. I mentioned sick people being infectious, and urged the discussion to move towards how sick people infect others, and how long they are infectious.

I would love to learn more about how sick people transmit the disease, and when are they the most "infectious". I have heard something related to a period of few days before showing first symptoms, but I have yet to discover more indepth discussion around it.

For example, its pretty hard for me to undertand how you can be "very infectious" when you do not exhibit symptoms such as coughing or sneezing. Would love to learn more!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> anonms-coward Makes a lot of sense. Professors of high age are at very increased risk. Students fit in tight spaces would for sure include asymptomatic careers. And any hope of expecting an entire student community to take utmost caution is simply futile.

</comment><comment><USER19> I assume this is a $ issue for them, they won't be able to charge what they normally charge for online classes so they try to bring people in somehow edit: normally charge for campus

<comment><USER20> Kind of on the right track. As a student myself, we have realized the value of a college education comes from the on campus environment. So, if it's online, we will take gap quarters/years and universities will receive $0.(I am planning to take Fall quarter off because online is not worth it)

<comment><USER19> please explain this to me how the value comes from the on campus education?

<comment><USER21> I'm no longer in school (graduated a while ago), but I would make the same decision as the person you are responding to. What I liked about school was the social aspect that made learning easier/more enjoyable. It was nice walking into the library and recognizing a face from class to chat about what was taught. It was nice running into somebody while walking to class to chat about what was going to be taught/what was taught.

There is a spontaneous social element to the learning process that I believe can't be replicated online.

<comment><USER22> While that aspect is nice, I firmly believe that basically any college class can be aced by attending lectures and more importantly, reading the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reopening universities and colleges is also a major threat to the entire community. Here in WA over a hundred students tested positive this week after partying at their frat. In Alabama, students are intentionally trying to get infected. This will happen en masse if universities open their campuses and those infected will spread the infections into not only the immediate community but also the ones that many of them traveled hundreds of miles from to attend university. It would be pure madness to reopen or to pretend like university students will social distance and wear masks.

<comment><USER24> Here's a pretty good thread from a professor arguing that the Alabama story is very likely made up: [https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269](https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1278703871053963269)

But I totally agree that the entire premise of colleges trying to function as an on-campus institution is absolutely absurd until there's a vaccine.

<comment><USER15> > until there's a vaccine

Why do people think we're getting some magic vaccine? Gavi/Gates have pushed this "18 months" bullshit, where they're developing some magical vaccine for a family of viruses that's never had a vaccine before, and every previous attempt has been met with either bad immunopathic responses or immune enhancement syndrome[0].

Vaccines takes decades to develop safely, and the techniques being proposed now have never led to a vaccine that made it through clinical trials before.

There is no vaccine coming in any reasonable amount of time. The 100+ companies are take a lot of WHO/government money, and who knows if they'll actually produce anything.

Safe vaccines for new families of viruses take a decade. There is still no vaccine for retroviruses (herpes, HIV, etc.) It's straight up Gates pipe dream to think a safe vaccine for this can be made in a year.

[0]: [https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of- hon...](https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of- honor/#vacinations-should-not-be-made-in-a-year)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Board of Regents are political appointees so I'm not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I'm generally not a fan of blanket shelter in place rules on freedom grounds, but the science is clear on the positive benefits of masks [0]. And there isn't really a down-side.

[0] [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)31142-9/fulltext)

<comment><USER15> There are a lot of downsides if asymptomatic spread isn't really true (the WHO said it wasn't and then walked it back .. reading a lot of the studies, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest there is little to no asymptomatic spread; and the push to say otherwise is very political).

Masks are very bad psychologically. They cause judgement and distrust, plus they're a pretty useless placebo effect. This virus is clearly no where near as dangerous as original made out to be, and I the normalization of the mask directly lead to an increase of violence during the recent riots all around the nation. They have the potential to lead people to take more risks and do things they wouldn't normally do[0].

It's absurd to think masks don't have any downsides. They certainly do.

[0]: [https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/](https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/)

<comment><USER26> Your link is vaguely Freudian storytelling, evoking a sort of secular spirituality more than anything resembling objective science. Here's a sample:

> The wearing of a mask, under conditions in which an individual is aware that > their face is no longer their 'face', will lead to a transformation away > from the usual 'self' through a self-attributional process.

Whatever the negative consequences of that self-attributional process, nurses, cleanroom operators, and countless others who routinely wear masks seem to have gotten over it, and to enjoy basically normal social interactions.

You didn't quantify your claims as to the dangers of the virus, but ~0.3% of NYC--of the total population, not those confirmed or estimated infected--is dead from the coronavirus. Treatment has improved (no early ventilator use) since then, but that's a rough lower bound for the IFR. Herd immunity should come much sooner than 1-1/R0 of the population due to heterogeneity, but even a lower bound for IFR times a lower bound for total infected is a lot of dead people.

Finally, the case count is increasing. So regardless of whether the people spreading it are truly asymptomatic, misattributing light symptoms to allergies or similar, or aware that they're seriously sick but going out anyways, they're out there spreading. A mask seems likely enough to help in all three such cases to be clearly cost-effective to me.

Have you tried wearing a mask? What bad experience did you have? Some of the fabric ones are near-impossible to breathe through (especially the handmade ones in that pleated pattern everyone seems to have adopted). Lighter cotton or surgical-style seem fine to me, and are widely used here in California--and have been widely used in East Asia for decades--without obvious negative consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just to contribute. I have student visa and the "problem" is that with our visa (F1) we are not allowed to have online classes only. We have to attend class for X hour every week. This or we lose our visa. It's an immigration problem.

</comment><comment><USER28> I sure hope we as a society figure out a way to make college campuses (and physical presence of students) largely unnecessary eventually. I don't expect it to happen in a year, but in-person lectures seemed ridiculous to me 25 years ago, and they seem even more so now when there's abundance of tech and anyone can record 4K videos of arbitrary length. Most of those lectures also sucked ass, since they were slow-moving, but if your attention lapses for like 3 minutes of a difficult lecture, you're lost for the rest of the lecture and there's no way to rewind and listen again. That's not to mention the time spent writing on the chalkboard and speaking - you could take in the same amount of information from a book at easily 3-4x the speed, leaving more time to do practical work that actually helps build the skills.

Of course one still needs to be able to go to labs if one is doing research, but those could be bolstered by not investing in auditoriums, halls, cafes, and other physical infrastructure.

It'd also be great (in the US) to shut down all the sports programs. They're like this weird benign tumor on the side of large schools which costs money and does not provide educational value.

</comment><comment><USER29> A well designed online course needs online tested milestones, segment by segment. Student get an online automated test. What he gets wrong creates a fork to an online module to teach that item. Fail again = re-teach in a different way. Repeated failmode might attract an online human to step that person along. Then back to the lessons. This is just smart teaching programs do. Labs can be done youtube style, but need careful design to deal with each possible fork in the road where a student can get off track. Some people might not be smart enough for complex abstract stuff - I have met and failed many 'memory machines' \- students who can read and repeat everything they see, but are unable to use the knowledge in a novel way that has not been worked out in examples before.I used to tutor goofs like that in Engineering Physics at U of T. They had near perfect recall, but off the beaten track they could not solve new problems. Weekly problem sets were made to make them fail. They fought back with study groups - I was always in demand to help. In the end they failed the problems exams or at year end in the exams because they were basically dummies with near total recall.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's wild is Georgia tech has a very successful online master's program that apparently everyone forgot about because it could be a great starting point to do everything online.

<comment><USER31> Online degrees that are marketed as online degrees carry a stigma among employers, because they are perceived as being lower quality than not-online degrees, and the stuff of diploma mills.

My final semester will be entirely online, but I couldn't care less, since my degree isn't an online degree.

<comment><USER32> Georgia Tech issues the same diplomas for their online and offline masters degree programs.

<comment><USER33> Please do expand. It's apparent from this list[1] that GaTech differentiates traditional from online.

[1] [https://www.gatech.edu/academics/masters-degree- programs](https://www.gatech.edu/academics/masters-degree-programs)

<comment><USER34> [https://omscs.gatech.edu/explore/faq/admissions](https://omscs.gatech.edu/explore/faq/admissions)

>Your diploma will read "Master of Science in Computer Science," exactly the same as those of on-campus graduates. There will be no "online" designation for the degrees of OMS CS graduates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Faculty were already feeling anxious about the upcoming fall semester, GPB News was told, but a recent decision by the Board of Regents and state university system to not require students wear masks in classrooms sent faculty over the edge."

Allowing a gathering of 10+ people in an enclosed space without a mask sounds like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER15> It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way out. Let's stop the mass hysteria

<comment><USER36> > It's been going on all around this country for over a month now. I think > it's safe to say this thing was an gorse overreaction and it's on its way > out. Let's stop the mass hysteria

Not based on active hospitalization counts in the current hot zones... complain all you want about test numbers not be comparable day over day, but I haven't seen anyone explain THAT away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Title: "Georgia Tech Professors Revolt..."

Reality: Georgia Tech Professors release a not-even-strongly-worded letter [1] to express their alarm and recommendations, a letter that doesn't even mention actions they might take if those recommendations are not followed. I guess this counts as a "revolt"?

1: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntd...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjyLGfLIncWtm8fntduj3mMhZhhGtF2khGYHNJdZIXu1xBhg/viewform)

<comment><USER38> If you want to see some more direct anger, as well as some indications why they may not be taking that much public action, you can read some more here: [https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21](https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1279070755888738305?s=21)

<comment><USER37> I always thought the word "revolt" implied at least _some_ kind of action rather than mere anger. The instant burial of my comment seems to indicate that the word's definition must have changed recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This sounds like a plot to deal with faculties top-heavy with senior tenured profs - who will be on that top rung of risk in the death lottery = save Georgia Tech a bundle. Prove me wrong!

</comment><comment><USER39> Recent and related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726410)

</comment><comment><USER40> Taking a look at excess mortality:

[https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality- covid](https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid)

(scroll down to the Economist graphs)

It would appear that the worst occurred in the April timeframe (Europe, New York), and that we've mostly reached a point of no excess mortality at this point.

However, if another wave were to come through, the graphs are pretty sobering.

For 65+, excess deaths peaked at 35k/week extra

For 45-64, excess deaths peaked at 2.5k/week extra

For 15-44, excess deaths peaked at .8k/week extra

So, most students returning is a negligible risk, but for some professors, it could be daunting, if there were to be another wave.

<comment><USER41> You mean another one than the one currently happening in South America, India and the US?

Also, it is not just deaths. The less at risk groups infect others, that can be more at risk.

<comment><USER40> It's unfortunate that the excess mortality is not a metric that is rigorously collected at this time. As a result, it lags quite a bit. We'll know in a week or so how June looked.

You're right that it is not just deaths, but morbidity. Someone who gets on a vent due to covid may never regain the life they had previously.

However, we've learned a bit since April. Wearing masks works with social distancing, but requires administrative enforcement.

Sweden has kept their schools open during this time (through high school) and offers an interesting point of comparison. It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them. The main problems they've had are in the immigrant communities (220% higher rates of covid) and in elder care facilities.

<comment><USER42> > It hasn't appeared to cause any problems for them.

By which you mean, it is neck-and-neck with the United States and Brazil in daily cases per capita, and is soundly leading both countries in deaths per capita?

Their strategy of 'isolate the vulnerable population and do little else' worked great, except for the part where it hasn't worked at all because... The vulnerable population is getting sick and dying.

<comment><USER40> If you look at the linked data, you'll see that Sweden reached zero excess mortality by the end of May. This is a very good indication that their approach is working as they expected it would. Their execution has not been perfect, but they've been transparent about that and are working to address the known issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Everyone in the USA will get C19.

So what's the argument here?

They will overload the hospital system?

The very few (at a university) who might die, might get a extra year of life by the university lockdown for longer?

Where they wait for the non existent vaccine or treatment (many years away at best)?

Do they have an actual exact reason other than a wishy washy _fear_?

What mathematical model do they hope for by delaying?

</comment><comment><USER44> Fuck Georgia tech.

</comment><comment><USER45> Reopen for the students, have those at risk work remote or lecture remote.

We can't assume a vaccine will be developed, so we need to act accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER46> To make a political post even more political...

Do American university staff belong to unions? Including the faculty?

Hopefully this can be resolved with words, but striking for better working conditions has a very long history.

<comment><USER47> I'm not aware of any faculty unions representing professors. There are some academic student employee (inc. grad students) unions and a handful of postdoc unions.

<comment><USER3> some faculty are unionized (I know of at least a few where the faculty are all NEA members)

Additionally there are not-officially recognized groups such as AAUP (American Association of University Professionals) that represent faculty issues.

<comment><USER3> clarifying my own post...because my language may have been confusing

faculty actually refers to the body of faculty at a university or in a department as a whole...when writing to certain communities

What I meant was that certain universities have the whole body of faculty unionized

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Air Force Academy has already re-opened with next semesters' students already there. They are marching socially distanced and with masks and elevated hand washing.

On a side note - several USAFA cadets committed suicide due to lockdown- induced mental health issues a few months back... so it's pretty safe to say that the cure is more deadly than the illness (at least currently... 0 cadets have died from covid-19 while 2 have died from suicide).

<comment><USER49> [https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket- in-2019/](https://www.airforcemag.com/usaf-suicides-skyrocket-in-2019/)

> A total of 137 Airmen took their own lives in 2019—a 33 percent increase > from the 103 suicides in 2018 despite service efforts to tackle the problem.

I'm not sure you can conclude much from two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What is not discussed there is that all these professors signing the document expect to be paid the same as last year.

One might argue that if the lectures are online then the tuition (and professor pay) should be proportional to the value they produce - and that can't possibly be the same as last year.

<comment><USER51> [I attended GT for Computer Science and signed one of these petitions]

This comment seems to misunderstand professors and universities. Instruction is a relatively small part of professor responsibilities. Most tenured professors will teach perhaps one class a year, some one class a semester. Some do more, though often by choice and at least at Georgia Tech, much of the undergraduate instruction is done by lecturers, who are not tenure track faculty.

So the value they produce won't decrease by much. In fact it might actually increase. Georgia Tech is, and has been, one of the leaders in online instruction through the OMSCS program. This allowed professors to be in many ways more valuable and teach more students per professor (with an increase in TAs).

My experience is limited mostly to the College of Computing, but some courses taught by other Colleges (notably gen-ed physics I and II in the College of Sciences) have been optionally taught in mixed online form for years (I took an "inverted" Physics course where the lectures were online in 2014). This allowed in-lecture time to be much more tailored to specific student questions.

So there's no a priori reason to believe that online instruction is less valuable. (This isn't the same, by the way, as the opinion that university education that is completely online is as valuable as in person, there are environmental factors that are advantageous for in person experiences).

There are some classes and subjects where this doesn't always work (Engineering courses often need specialized equipment for more applied course), but these aren't the majority of classes, and forcing a CS professor to lecture in person when the same course, often taught by the same professor, already exists as a MOOC is ridiculous.

<comment><USER19> nahhh this is the same as the opinion that online university education can be equally valuable as in person. It jus got exposed now for anyone still having doubts

<comment><USER51> I don't disagree with that. In fact, I said as much when I stated

> This isn't the same, by the way, as the opinion that university education > that is completely online is as valuable as in person, there are > environmental factors that are advantageous for in person experiences

But that has nothing to do with professor salaries. A professor's value to a student is about the same whether they're lecturing in person or through a screen. The rest of the system however has less value to the student. But that the university can't provide as much value doesn't impact the professor's value. So if you're looking at this from a value-driven economy, the professor's salary shouldn't change, the university should profit less from the Prof's labor because the university is providing less value-add over just the professor.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A simple front-end framework with editable examples - <AUTHOR> http://nx-nxframework.rhcloud.com/ <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval?newsfeed=true

<comment><AUTHOR> and then follow up with this: St Paul's protesters urged to remove tents (by City of London Corporation) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- london-15532692></comment>


Beautiful Simplicity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/beautiful-simplicity.html <comment><USER2> This reminded me of a clever way to do key exchange with $0.40 of electronics (rather than quantum computers) that Schneier blogged about a few years ago:

<http://www.schneier.com/essay-099.html>

Relevant bits:

 _Alice and Bob have a two-wire cable between them, and two resistors each -- we'll say they each have a 10-ohm and a 1,000-ohm resistor. Alice connects a stochastic voltage generator and a resistor in series to each of the two wires. That's the setup._

 _Here's how they communicate. At each clock tick, both Alice and Bob randomly choose one of their two resistors and put it in the circuit. Then, Alice and Bob both measure the current flowing through the circuit. Basically, it's inversely proportional to the sum of their two chosen resistors: 20 ohms, 1,010 ohms or 2,000 ohms. Of course, the eavesdropper can measure the same thing._

 _If Alice and Bob choose the same size resistor, then the eavesdropper knows what they have chosen, so that clock tick is useless for security. But if they choose a different size resistor, the eavesdropper cannot tell whether it is Alice choosing 10 ohms and Bob 1,000 ohms, or the reverse. Of course, Alice and Bob know, because they know which resistor they're choosing. This happens 50 percent of the time. Alice and Bob keep only the data from the clock ticks where they choose a different size resistor. From each such clock tick, they can derive one secret key bit, according to who chooses the 10-ohm resistor and who the 1,000-ohm. That's because they know who's choosing which and the eavesdropper doesn't. Do it enough times and you've got key material for a one-time pad (or anything else) to encrypt the communications link._

</comment><comment><USER3> _Turns out that the things that you learn as a child affect the rest of your life._

I grew up in a house with lots of kids and lots of discipline. Everything had to be in the right place. To this very day, I am the most organized person I know.

You'd think this would have led to a career in the military, but it didn't. I became a data base administrator and programmer. I've been hashing since I was a toddler but didn't know the name for it until I became an adult.

<comment><USER4> Alternate hypothesis: personality is highly heritable. [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&v...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psych.umn.edu%2Fcourses%2Ffall06%2Fyoonh%2Fpsy3135%2Farticles%2FJang%2520et%2520al_1996.pdf&rct=j&q=heritability%20of%20personality%20traits&ei=EoekTJ7VOoXElQfBpo38DQ&usg=AFQjCNEZAi2UNq6UC081rln0OuyvcpyFIg&sig2=IQpXtu5t-wxHDghvAZ3QqA&cad=rja)

<comment><USER5> I didn't read thoroughly, but it looks like they were studying twins who had been raised in the same home, and finding big correlations of personality attributes. ("Participants were volunteer twin pairs [...] eligible if they were 16 years old or over and raised together in the same home.")

How does that prove that genetics (as opposed to identical age, same family, similar relationship to the family, close contact with each-other, etc., not to mention similar interpretations of the meanings of questions on a personality survey due to shared environment) was causal?

<comment><USER4> You sure didn't read thoroughly; the next sentence after that one explains it.

They were comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins, which allowed them to measure to the extent that they were similar because of being raised in the same family at the same time. Comparing monozygotic twins raised in different families is another way to measure hertibility. Both have their issues, of course. But measures of the heritbility of personality generally do hover around .5 _+/- .1 in other studies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wiring a lamp in this manner is illegal in some countries. One of the off positions delivers line voltage to the lamp, making it less than idiot-proof.

<comment><USER7> How exactly? If you deliver line voltage to the lamp, it is on and lights.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Carter system ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Carter_syste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Carter_system)), but the system in the article is the common system ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Common_syste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Common_system)).

<comment><USER8> I voted you up because you cite such a good source, but please note that the diagram in the article shows one wire between just the lamp and the switches, i.e. the Carter system. The common system would have an unswitched wire to neutral, as shown and described in the wikipedia article you cited.

<comment><USER7> The way I see it is that the article simplifies by just saying "lamp" for the lamp and mains, because the only relevant part to the article is the switching part. For it to be the Carter system, the mains live (hot) and neutral have to be connected to a pair of wires in the switching part.

I think the article does not mention the mains details because the neutral wiring never even enters the switch, as in the switch on the wall which he unscrewed as a child. Perhaps the diagrams would have been a bit better if the bottom part was

        +---Lamp----Mains---+

instead of just

        +---Lamp</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+

<comment><USER9> The point the ancestor is making is that it's common practice to switch the neutral instead of the mains.

<comment><USER10> Really? In North America, black is hot and white is neutral, and you always switch (and fuse, and breaker) the black wire.

"A neutral wire is the return leg of a circuit; in building wiring systems the neutral wire is connected to earth ground at least at one point. North American standards state that the neutral is neither switched nor fused. The neutral is connected to the center tap of the power company transformer of a split-phase system, or the center of the wye connection of a polyphase power system. American electrical codes require that the neutral be connected to earth at the "service panel" only and at no other point within the building wiring system. Formally the neutral is called the "grounded conductor"; as of the 2008 NEC, the terms "neutral conductor" and "neutral point" have been defined in the Code to record what had been common usage. [1]

Hot is any conductor (wire or otherwise) connected with an electrical system that has electric potential to electrical ground or neutral."

Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_North_Amer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_North_America#Terminology)

<comment><USER11> I think they meant it is not uncommon for someone to mistakenly rewire a switch so that the neutral line is switched.

In high school I worked in a hardware store (where I first learned how a 3-way light worked) and you would be surprised at how often someone would want to return a light switch as faulty after they incorrectly wired it. The symptoms were always the same. They turn the breaker back on after replacing the switch and either the breaker trips immediately, or the light is on and when they flip the switch the breaker trips. Inside the switch box they would connect white to white and black to black (because that is always the way to hook-up wires, right?) and then hook white to one side of the switch and black to the other. God only knows how many switched the white wire and were happy they "fixed" the switch -- until they try to unscrew a broken light bulb.

Here are many more examples: <http://thereifixedit.failblog.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the end of the article:

 _PS If you need a bit more beautiful simplicity go and read about NAND logic and realize that they are all you're ever going to need._

A wonderful demonstration of how this can be done can be found in the "The Elements of Computing Systems". Homepage: <http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/>

This course will show you how to build a simple but modern computer stack starting with nothing but simple NAND gates. Make sure to do the exercises and be prepared to invest a lot of time if you buy this book, otherwise you'll just waste your time.

I consider TECS and Charles Petzold's "Code" to be the most approachable books for those who want to understand what's really happening "under the hood" of your computer and can't recommend them highly enough.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am a bit disappointed by the two-switch solution: it seems to waste a lot of cable.

No idea if there is a better way (except for using small microcontrollers).

<comment><USER14> It does not. For a typical cable you will have the two wires inside: "hot" wire and "neautral". To connect switches you would use the same two-wired cable, only hot and neautral wires would change their roles depending how the switches are set.

<comment><USER15> It does waste wire. The run of cable from power source to the first switch will only use the "hot" wire. The neutral wire will not be connected. The run from the second switch can have its neutral wire used, but unless there happens to be a good path to ground at the point of the second switch, there will need to be more cable run for that path to path to ground.

So assuming strictly 2-wire only cable, there will always be waste. Fortunately for the world someone long ago noticed this, and they sell spools of wire. These spools of wire and electrical conduit are used by electricians to great advantage for keeping wasted wires to a minimum. (Also, it is arguably safer to have no runs of "unused" wire just sitting there, because of potential for mistaken "bare hots" or accidental misuses of the wire causing shorts and fires and whatnot).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> NAND gates is what neuromorphic engineers use to build circuits that can compute and end up emulating the function of an integrate-and-fire neuron.</comment>


Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design - <AUTHOR> https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/72876.html <comment><USER2> This article has a huge cultural blind spot. What about Asia? Probably most of the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia. Arm, originally from the UK, is now Japanese owned. ATI is Canadian, which also doesn't get a mention.

When it comes to programming languages, C++ and C# were both created by Danes, although they were working in the US at the time. Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

Personally, I think it just invalidates the whole argument of what is American and what is European. Creation of modern tech is a global effort. If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blogpost author/submitter here.

It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.

I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android. These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to comment or judge.

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but I don't.

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating, but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have never tried it myself.

There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to address.

<comment><USER3> > Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured > in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Top Personal Computer Vendor in 2019 by Market Share is Lenovo[0]

Top Mobile Phone Vendors by Market Share in 2020 Q1 is Samsung, Followed by Huawei [1]

Top Games Console vendor is Sony [2]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors)

[1] [https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market- share/vendor](https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor)

[2] [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nin...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nintendo- Number-Spot-Sony-2019-Game-Console)

<comment><USER4> Playstation is pretty much American. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, its a division under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a subsiadry under Sony Corp America. Both the PS4/pro and PS5 were American designs led by Mark Cerny

<comment><USER3> Followed by Nintendo, running a Japanese OS on Japanese Hardware to play Japanese developed games. Have you not noticed the popularity of the new Animal Crossing during quarantine, or the outsized impact Nintendo has had on Western pop culture?

<comment><USER5> The switch hardware is pretty much a Nvidia Tegra X1 reference platform.

The last mainline console they designed was the SNES, albeit they've been designing almost all of the mobile consoles.

<comment><USER2> Mobile consoles such as the DS, very close to being the best selling console of all time? 154 million to the PS2's 155 million. The Gameboy is number 3 at 118 million.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_game_co...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_game_consoles)

<comment><USER5> Sure, but the example give by the OP only listed a Switch game.

And the Switch represents them getting out of the hardware market entirely by converging their mobile and home console lines and going with an Nvidia designed machine for both.

Like, the Switch literally has the same RAM chips as the Tegra X1 dev boards. That's normally something that you'd swap out just based on your purchasing department's relationships with the chip vendors more than anything else and you almost never see those carried over.

<comment><USER3> Did you know that Animal Crossing is a series of games that run on more Nintendo consoles than just the Switch?

<comment><USER5> > the new Animal Crossing during quarantine

Which, last time I checked is a switch exclusive game.

And my point anyways, is that Nintendo hardware isn't Japanese designed anymore. Which is objectively true.

Their software is great though, and is Japanese designed. Their OS reminds me a lot of Fuchsia, but actually completed and shipped.

<comment><USER3> Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and claiming that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware design is how you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put them in your back pocket.

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Lite+Teardow...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Lite+Teardown/126223)

I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.

<comment><USER5> > Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and > claiming that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware > design is how you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put > them in your back pocket.

I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.

> I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is > without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the > truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.

Here you can see the Samsung K4F6E304HB-MGCH chips being referenced for the Jetson Tegra X1 developer board.

([https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r24_Relea...](https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r24_Release_v2.3/Tegra_Linux_Driver_Package_Release_Notes_R24.2.3.pdf)

Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company, so their chips being in there doesn't make it any closer to Japanese hardware.

<comment><USER3> > I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as > the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.

It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the case with the OS they're using.

> eSOL, a leading developer of real-time embedded software solutions, today > announced that its µITRON 4.0-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS) > and exFAT file system have been adopted in the Nintendo Switch™ game console > developed by Nintendo Co., Ltd

[https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html](https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html)

> Supported CPUs are numerous. ARM, MIPS, x86, FR-V and many others including > CPUs supported by open source RTOS eCos and RTEMS, both of which include the > support for µITRON compatible APIs.

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

> Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company,

This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"

<comment><USER5> > It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be > hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a > stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. > Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't > seem the case with the OS they're using.

There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC. The closest you'd be able to get would be running the games in an emulator.

> uITRON stuff

Their OS really isn't uITRON derived, but I can believe they took the exFAT stack from there.

You can see the shape of the OS here, and it's pretty different from uITRON. [https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC](https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC) There might be a compat layer in the driver process for the exFAT driver though. They threw in a FreeBSD kernel space compat layer for their IP stack process for instance.

> This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"

That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.

<comment><USER3> > There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are > compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that > the games are tied specifically to this SoC.

You're missing the point. If they can port a third party x86 game using a notoriously janky decades old game engine to ARM then they can easily move to using a different SoC if need be.

> That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the > switch is Japanese hardware.

You were being pedantic about what is and isn't hardware engineering. You can't just sell a bare PCB with a SoC on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to be a list of things that Europe used to have. Here's some counterpoints that you might be thinking of:

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British. (Also has an ARM CPU, and often runs Linux, sometimes with a web server. Nifty!)

<comment><USER7> > The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

> The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).

> The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.

> Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.

True

<comment><USER8> The CPU _implementation_ is done by Qualcomm, Apple, and the like. The CPU _design_ is done by ARM, predominantly in the UK. The fact that Softbank (Japan) owns ARM has no bearing on where and who is doing the actual technical work.

<comment><USER7> Not true - just look at the latest chip from Apple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13)

Yes it uses the arm instruction set, but it was completely designed by Apple. This is identical to Intel using the same 64 bit instruction set as AMD... you wouldn't say AMD designs intels chips though.

<comment><USER9> Apple is largely an exception in the crowd of ARM SoCs manufacturers, though. A lot of companies just implements ARM cores, with their additional magic in other bits of the SoCs. The fact that Apple does it does not mean that ARM does not do any design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I grew up in Germany during the home computer boom in the 80s and there was a definite anti-computer vibe at the time, my classmates thought I was contributing to the destruction of the high culture that was so superior to the US. Even though there were many cool platforms I think ultimately the pro- tech and pro-business atmosphere in the US drove the smaller competitors in Europe out of business.

Which isn't to say that European companies aren't strong in some areas. Here at hp we love STM32 micros (French/Italian), German robotics and automation equipment, optical equipment and of course ARM, which is a direct outgrowth of the pioneering European micro culture.

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised and disappointed that was the prevailing culture in Germany, which is famous for its engineering culture; I guess that's limited to mechanical engineering?

The British microcomputer boom had a huge boost from a classic "dirigiste" state direction, involving the BBC producing a TV series to educate the public and a matching computer to work along at home with. That led to Sophie Wilson being hired straight out of Cambridge to produce it, and ultimately to ARM.

<comment><USER12> 100% - if you look at the landscape now, everything digital is still pretty much new and not working ("Das Internet ist für uns Neuland" in 2013).

Broadband is worse than in other countries, government interaction is pretty much non-digital and other things (there recently was a big thread about a government game development grant that was so startup-adverse that the person telling the story was lucky to not have been bankrupted) and it goes on and on. Also remember all the pixelated houses in Google maps? I wanted to look something up yesterday, image was made in 2008 and everything is pixelated.

Despite working in tech I don't see Germany in any sort of leading role in anything digital or IT and this won't change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Ada, the _fast_ type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the > market.

Well, Ada was the language of choice of the US DoD from 1983 to about 1994. And it's only dead if you ignore the millions of code lines (old and new) produced in aerospace and defence.

> The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, ... Largely dead.

Well, Pascal and it's decendants (Delphi, etc.) are still in wide use with good tool support; obviously not in the author's field of sight here either.

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices ...

Sunk by an American u-boat in the prime of its life.

Asians or Europeans are also behind many so-called American inventions. Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

<comment><USER14> > _Anyway, I don 't understand what the author is trying to get at._

It's about paradigms in technology deployment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When focus is quality, quality rises and costs fall. When focus is cost, costs rise and quality falls. William Edwards Deming, an American, said that.

Whilst a lot of what Liam wrote rings very very true (I'm not Amercian either) I think it's slightly more nuanced. Windows Phone is a great example. Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead. Same with the Compaq IPaq. It too was American and amazing.

I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died. Apart from the iPaq, some highlights in the mobile space alone are the Nokia 9000 Communicator, the Nokia E90, the Nokia N900, and the best device (my opinion) I've ever experienced, the Nokia 1520.

Interesting that we as humans so often base our decisions on emotion rather than logic. I now use an Android phone and no longer bother with mobile apps. That sense of awe and wonder has been eviscerated, eaten up and spat back out.

Today's tech is throw-away. Watches, thermostats, tablets, light bulbs... Delivered by Amazon this morning, in the trash this afternoon, making space for yet another smart but shitty light bulb tomorrow.

I miss that child-like sense of excitement and wonder tech used to instill in me...

<comment><USER16> > Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile > phone OS of ever.

I don't think that's a correct assessment for most Americans' opinions towards Microsoft.¹ I also don't think that's the reason Windows Phone never took off. When compared to iOS and Android, Windows Phone just didn't have the app ecosystem to compel people to buy them.

1 [https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech- survey...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech- survey-2020-trust-privacy-security-facebook-amazon-google-apple)

<comment><USER15> I believe the assessment to be true. Windows Phone was doing really well in Europe. It was Americans who refused to write those WP apps that were so desperately wanted.

<comment><USER17> Not even refused to write, refused to let them operate. Microsoft would have made apps for the major online services themselves, if they were allowed to. For example, they created a fairly decent Youtube app themselves but Google, owner of both Youtube and Android, simply refused it access to Youtube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > And I think a big reason is that Europe was poorer, so product development > was all about efficiency, cost-reduction, high performance and sparing use > of resources. The result was very fast, efficient products.

While Europe is poorer, the issue is not a focus on fast/efficient products... rather that US companies have access to incredible amounts of "dumb money" via pension funds that they can use to simply flatten (or buy up) any European competition. Either via outright price dumping (Uber), via lobbying efforts (Microsoft), by marketing (Apple) or by having access to _way_ more R&D resources than European companies (Apple again).

</comment><comment><USER19> A professor in my grad school told me once "In US if you try to create a business and you fail, people will think you're entrepreneurial. In Europe they'll think you're incompetent".

</comment><comment><USER20> Ocaml - France? Erlang?

A heartbreaker for me is Mozart/Oz (Germany?) .. wish it was developed/used/taught more .. "pickling" (in python) came from M/Oz.

</comment><comment><USER21> His examples have so many mistakes, it's hard to take anything in this seriously.

\- Ada (French). Ada is not french, it was developed for the US DOD. I also wouldn't call it dead.

\- Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon: ... garbage collected ...: Neither Pascal nor Modula-2 are garbage collected. Modula-2 and Oberon are probably dead, but Pascal in its modern iterations is very alive and still widely used, apart from having a significant legacy.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, a fast garbage-collected compiled family

Pascal wasn't garbage-collected, was it? At least not in the original form.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Ada, the _fast_ type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the > market.

Isn't this language used in the Eurofighter Typhoon?

<comment><USER24> I thought Ada was still fairly widely used in aviation software in general. Perhaps not in new designs?

<comment> non-entity From what I've seen in job descriptions for various defense related positions Ada seems to be written in as a small "nice to have" and makes me imagine most of it is maintenance or being replaced (probably by C++ too lol)

<comment><USER25> Not much Ada was written in the first place. The reason you see it in job requirements is because inertia and it's easier to slap those three letters in there than it is to try to explain to someone that there is no reason to require it on the job postings. Imagine if a bank listed Cobol on every single tech related job posting, that's basically what defense contractors are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I do have anecdotal evidence for this (probably incendiary, but certainly not intended that way) point of view: Europeans tend to love creating and mastering complexity; Americans at their best despise complexity and produce simple approaches that cover most of the use-cases. (Also, the author doesn't mention the HP 200LX PDA - a full DOS box, CGA on which I have running a C compiler, scheme48, RF design s/w and much more. Still works great. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX))

</comment><comment><USER27> Europe seems to me to have good intentioned laws and norms that stifle computer related companies. 1) Very strong privacy laws and culture that make it difficult for startups to thrive 2) Business and bankruptcy structures that aren't as friendly to investors 3) More sensical valuing of companies and higher risk-aversion

<comment><USER28> This thing of running a company into debt while growing userbase until someone figures out how to make money out of it is certainly not part of the culture.

That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing. I certainly remember uploading videos to both platforms.

<comment><USER29> > That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in > popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing.

YouTube was flaming out until the boardroom backscratch between Sequoia and Google bailed them out.

YouTube was burning several million dollars a month on bandwidth and was facing down billions in legal fees--both of which were rapidly increasing. It was going to be bankrupt before the buyout. The buyout meant that Google could subsidize YouTube for a very long time.

It's also not at all clear that we wouldn't be better off if YouTube had actually gone bankrupt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the oversight in this article is the survivor bias regarding American designs. There were plenty of those fast, efficient designs from American developers but they too died in the avalanche of big-team giants.

<comment><USER31> I also think it severely underestimates the advantage of having such a large internal market.

Having access to a large internal market allows you to grow to a fairly large size while still only serving that internal market. Then, when you want to expand abroad, you're likely in a much better financial position to take on the expenses of dealing with lots various local laws and regulations.

<comment><USER32> > having such a large internal market.

... (I would add to your statement) with a large amount of median disposable income. Adding to this, a large numbers of consumers who have access to consumer credit and are far less reluctant to purchase on credit than other nations.

A lot of countries have a large internal market but not all of them actually have the purchase power or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the US market.

<comment><USER33> > or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the > US market.

Moving from the west coast to Germany was definitely a fair amount of culture shock there. Americans love trying out shiny new things that are weird or different, my experience has been that Germans are much more cool to that kind of thing. They're simply less interested in novelty for novelty's sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Use the most minimal, close-to-the-metal language that will work.

What? Javascript/Electron is super popular, way more popular than close-to- the-metal languages for desktop applications.

<comment><USER35> Not sure. I saw a lot of industrial applications and they're all native. No Electron there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There seem to be a lot of supporting arguments (look at all these dead projects he deems to have been fast, elegant, and efficient, also, hey, my current toys are not made for me to play with like I used to be able to, and the battery life sucks). But what is the actual thesis?

It seems like he wants hacker toys and is unhappy that everything is built for consumers now. I can't get anything deeper out of it.

The EU vs. US/Asia thing just seems like a weird proxy for saying real techies don't like extruded technology product but it's what the market asked for and now we have lots of it.

<comment><USER37> What makes you think the products he mentions were "hacker toys"? They were consumer products just the same.

<comment><USER36> Some of them were consumer products. But they lost out (probably) because they were more like something a technical person would want and less like something made for a consumer.

Would you frame the reasons they failed differently? If TikTok users and gamers needed long battery life and elegant scripting tools we would have them. But they don't.

<comment><USER11> Psion in particular had a huge business following. Mind you, so did Blackberry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There is much truth told but

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices, the company who > popularised first the cellphowe and then the smartphone? Now rebadges > Chinese/American kit.

As someone who paod a lot for these early smartphones (N80, N800) they were highly inconsistent. Maybe ahead of it's time but when the iPhone hit the market Nokia quickly lost it's share for good reasons.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think there is an interesting question here but I'm not sure I follow the train of thought.

First of all, I doubt that whatever happened relatively recently with regard to certain design choices in hardware and software is related in any way to how different implementations of BASIC fared against one another in the 1980s. Regardless of the conclusions, there are simply too few people involved in making these choices now that also know what the situation was then.

As a matter of fact, one of the perpetual problems in the field seems to be that so many already identified problems with certain design choices and solutions to them are being forgotten, and have to be rediscovered again by every new generation of programmers.

And I'm not sure how all this can be framed into the Europe vs America debate: most of the big things happen in the US. Arguably, having a huge single market and less regulatory overhead helps but it's also because this is where the financing is. However, there are people from all around the world working on these things, so to what extent the final outcome can be called "American" is debatable. The founder of Commodore himself was a European Holocaust survivor. And we really have to be careful lavishing praise on "elegant" and "efficient" European products lest we forget about whom to hold responsible for monstrosities like Systemd. Could it be just that we tend to remember the most succesful products from the past, and those originating outside the US had to meet a higher bar to become so?

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that at some point while stuff in Europe was still being "built to last," American businesses have already been discovering the allure of planned obsolescence. This would pertain to the hardware side of course. As far as the software is concerned, I think everybody just got lazy the moment they could get away with it due to the rapid advancement in hardware performance. So from the era where you could have Jet Set Willy or Dynamite Dan (platform games with dozens of levels) fit in 48 kB, we've now "developed" ourselves into a corner where even winver.exe (a program whose sole purpose is to display the Windows version and an "OK" button) takes more than this (56 kB on my system).

While I concur this outcome is not desirable, I can't really agree it happened because of "moving close to the metal." On the contrary, I think this was only possible because of moving away from it, one layer of abstraction away at a time. To paraphrase the quote attributed to Churchill, BASICs of the future will no longer call themselves BASICs but I think if a BASIC was being invented today, it would look like another JS and it would be part of the problem, not the solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Blogpost author/submitter here.)

It's a fair cop. It was only a blog post, dashed off on the basis of a FB comment that grew overlong. :-)

I do not have a coherent thesis that I was expounding; it was merely a passing thought.

I find it interesting, though, how the computer market has developed in my lifetime -- I first touched a computer keyboard in about 1981 and owned my own a year later.

In the early 1980s there were dozens of different manufacturers of almost- totally different and incompatible systems, and it was quite normal for the larger developed countries to have one or more indigenous computer makers, often with their own architectures. Most used one of a small number of CPUs, yes, and those CPUs were mostly American, yes, but I knew of English, Welsh, French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish makes of computer, to pick the first few to come to mind. I'm sure there were many more.

Now I live in the former Communist Bloc, I've also learned of hordes of Sinclair clones and other copies of Western home computers that thrived over here, often after they were dead and gone from their homelands. I covet a Didaktik Kompakt. :-)

By the 1990s things were starting to consolidate but there was still a lot of variety, and major innovations came from other countries -- as other commenters note, from Denmark, from a Brit at CERN, from a Swedish-speaking Finn, etc. As I said in the piece, I used a Finnish cellphone with a British OS, and so on.

But when the world market consolidated down to a handful of companies and technologies, the winners were pretty much all American. The European software luminaries relocated their and often became American.

And yes, I think the overall design ethos has changed as a result, and I find that interesting. I have rarely seen it discussed. I often see people bemoaning modern bloatware, but I rarely see analysis of why and how it happened. This was my 2¢ worth on the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Also not to forget: American business culture is focused on achieving your yearly bonus, means achieving your goals, means delivering the product you promised.

Many European places are focused on quality and feature richness. That produces delays and budget overruns.

As a consequence, American products are often first to market, get the attention and the money. And often, they just buy the competition who has not made it (European or not).

(and this is not only true for companies but also for managers within the same multi-national company).

<comment><USER41> I've never seen such an incorrect statement in my life — have you ever been to Europe?

<comment><USER42> You mean products in Europe are not focused on quality and just garbage both in sales and time to market?

(I don't necessarily think that)

<comment><USER43> "Products in Europe" is ridiculously broad.

<comment><USER40> I agree to that. It is too broad what I stated.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Updates on Apple appstore hack - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/07/04/appstore-hack-itunes/

<comment><USER2> Wow,

While Apple isn't the only company subject to fraud, this might change the perception that the App Store's walled Garden is safer than the wide-open Internet.</comment>


China Will Launch World's First 'Unhackable' Computer Network - <AUTHOR> http://interestingengineering.com/china-worlds-first-unhackable-computer-network/ <comment><USER2> Lol this is just asking to be broken. Like a child being told you can't they just want to do it.</comment>