What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/what-happens-after-rich-kids-bribe-their-way-into-college-i-teach-them <comment><USER2> How dare they to demand students to actually do some studying!

Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone from an elite university to face the same issues that we at the lower universities complained about for decades. Admitting everyone and their cat to universities destroys them. But I think this is a lost cause. Popular culture has completely lost the idea that you have to work (hard) to improve yourself. Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.

<comment><USER3> The real problem is that society is more and more treating universities like companies that sell a product instead of educational institutions. The idea that "I paid for this, so I deserve it" is toxic.

<comment><USER4> It's not just an idea they keep in their heads. I've had students tell me that to my face.

<comment><USER5> They don't get it from nowhere, though.

The public transit in my city is plastered with advertisements that have headlines reading, "Get a career in X!" These campaigns are being run by every one of the local universities, and quite a few ones that are further afield, too. It seems like the only ones still advertising an education rather than an income boost are the city colleges.

Like it or not, incoming students' perception of the nature of their college education is going to be driven by the admissions office's hijinks. Faculty don't get to talk to them until later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This matches my experiences teaching at non-elite schools. Entitlement is high and professors are hired either for research (among TT faculty) or as adjuncts; the former realize that their research is important and one student making a stink can jeopardize their TT work. The latter realize that one student making a stink can jeopardize their contracts. See also [https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of- pe...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are- fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent/). So the incentive is to give the students what they want.

In addition, in most schools no one knows what a given set of admins will do or whether admins will back faculty. So what are professors incentivized to do? What are admins incentivized to do? Particularly in an age where accusations of impropriety are common and can also sink or stymie careers. The number of tools students have is large; the number faculty have, small.

All this is also compatible with _The Case Against Education_ : [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against- educatio...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education- bryan-caplan)

<comment><USER7> The issue of administrators who repeatedly side with students even in absurd situations seems to be slowly reaching awareness.

There's a good short video here that explores what's been happening at Yale:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM)

Trigger warning - it has clips of students attacking professors and acting in ways that are completely delusional. I found it almost physically hard to watch and from the comments, seems I wasn't the only one.

In a scene where a professor is literally surrounded by students yelling at him and having meltdowns, it's shown that one of the adults at the back of the group is an actual university administrator: he watches passively and does nothing to intervene. The presenter argues the problem is that the administrators are often just as extreme as the students and benefit from cowtowing to almost any level of immature nonsense because the students demands inevitably translate into growth of administrative departments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You'd think a 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student coming from an elite magnet school, with a parental income of $250,000+ is smarter than the poor kid from rural Idaho that lacked such opportunities.

The poor rural kid from Idaho may not be admitted to MIT, Duke, Berkeley, ivies and may not look as good as that 1500+ kid, but you surely will miss kids like: [https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom- mueller](https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller) that would have been successful at an MIT or Caltech. While the 1500+ kid might have gotten that score due to SAT prep, they may not actually be that smart. The Idaho kid could be much more intelligent, but since they're coming in with fewer AP courses and fewer ECs, they wouldn't pass the sniff test.

<comment><USER9> > 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student

What does that mean for people unfamiliar with US school system?

<comment><USER10> 1500: SAT Score of 1500 (of 1600, puts them in the 99%-ile)

4.0+: 4.0+ Grade Point Average (D=1 grade point A=4, Advanced Placement courses [AP] are +1 on the grade point so you can be over 4.0 on a 4 point scale.)

12+ AP: is they've taken 12 or more Advanced Placement courses, which are in theory equal in rigor and difficulty to college level courses.

Basically means they spent their entire high school taking as many of the hardest classes they can, and earning an A in all courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm in my 40s and went to one of them Ivy schools. There were legacies. There were affirm action kids that clearly weren't at the same level as others.

But I didn't mind. They all studied hard, and harder than others because they knew. They knew how they got it, and they knew that even smart kids flunk out.

IMHO, this is more of a broader trend that has more to do with poor parenting.

I went through schooling systems in HK, Korea, America at very different ages. Parents didn't dare meddling with how teachers taught. Teachers were the rule of law.

Got B+? Well, tough shit. Did you take advantage of all the professor and teacher assistant office hours? Yes? Sorry but maybe you're just not as good as others taking the same course. (My own experience taking Comp sci 100)

</comment><comment><USER12> The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining). Anyone who's ever taken a class with one of these professors should know what I'm talking about. Watching them teach is like watching an expert tradesman craft some product and finely adjust their inputs and technique as they go in order to get the desired result. They seem to be able to teach their selected content to the student equivalent of a brick.

It's the professors who are interested in doing all the other things professors do but regard teaching as a chore that have problems with under- performing students. They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) and it shows when the lower quality students fall through. That doesn't mean they're not good professors, they just aren't good teachers. I've known some really great professors that I would never want to take any class from because they didn't prioritize good teaching and likewise sucked at it. Undergrads and these professors would probably be happier if schools relaxed the teaching requirements for this group but that has other trade-offs.

As the price of college has increased the amount of extra work (office hours, Q/A sessions before major tests, etc.) professors are expected to do to prevent the customer from failing and having to spend thousands to go around again has increased with it. This is independent of student quality. The author sounds like he/she is annoyed with the new normal and is blaming it on the few people who bribed their way in. In reality student performance in any given class is going to depend mostly on how much they care. If you're teaching some elective that checks a certain box for a large group of undergrads and sounds like it's easy but is really a lot of work you're gonna have a lot of students barely passing, even the smart ones because your class simply isn't a priority for them.

These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.

<comment><USER13> > They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less > important to them)

To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?

<comment><USER14> That's because tenure is a tool for research, it exists to ensure a certain level of freedom of research. For every n researchers who use tenure for slacking off or pursuing a crackpot idea (those two are indistinguishable from the outside) there will be one who makes a valuable contribution that would have been impossible without the freedom granted by tenure.

Granting tenure has many downsides, but there is also possible upside which is why tenure exist. But that upside is exclusive to research, it simply does not exist in teaching. Don't get me wrong, it's great when tenured positions are held by people who are also good teachers and many are, but it would be wasteful to base selection on teaching. If you want to improve teaching, create better teaching positions outside of tenure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am a highschooler who is interested higher-level theoretical computer science and math. I am motivated to get into a good college because I want to have good educational foundations and the opportunity to meet professors involved in the research areas that I am interested in.

Seeing the college admissions bribery scandal outraged me. Society pressures people my age into getting into a good college as an indicator of worth. Before the controversy, I had already felt cynical about the whole culture of test prep and ungenuine ECs. I feel as though society pressures other teenagers and me into not being true to ourselves, and living our own lives, but instead doing things just for the grades or the attractiveness to college admissions officers. When the bribery became known, it bolstered my belief that elite colleges are places of classism, dishonesty, and phoniness. The girl mentioned in the article who said that she was going to party instead of study is especially a slap in the face for me.

Therefore, I have a conflicting view of elite colleges. On one hand, I greatly admire the professors who work at the colleges, and respect the colleges as places of research. On the other hand, I have a cynical view that elite colleges are a place for social prestige. I had wondered if there was a conflict between the interests of the professors, who would like passionate students, and the interests of the admissions officers, who, according to the scandal, maintain a class barrier by taking bribes instead of admitting students egalitarianly.

This article solidified my thoughts that there is a conflict between the interests of professors and admissions officers.

</comment><comment><USER16> This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted.

Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair.

Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.

<comment><USER17> > This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many > applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with > (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The > winners are admitted. > > Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of > racial bias, and hard to call unfair.

That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.

<comment><USER16> Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.

<comment><USER17> Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really enjoyed this article, but I want to point out something:

> to regard themselves as customers who are always right

I encountered a lot of awful professors in college. (A private, 2nd tier school.) Some were outright incompetent, and others adversarial towards their students. The admissions process also portrayed the school as career prep, not education for the sake of pursuing knowledge. The disconnect at times between how the experience was marketed, versus what the professors wanted to do, was shocking.

The reality is that a college education is expensive, and ultimately funded by a customer, either the student or the student's parents. Quality must be demanded by the paying customer.

Or, to put it mildly, when every student is a customer paying a quarter million dollars, they need to be treated as such. That doesn't mean fabricating grades, but that does mean going the extra mile to please someone who ultimately is funding your paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER10> Who is more guilty? The parents bribing their way in, or the schools for not sufficiently policing the gate keepers?

The author claims that blowing the whistle is not an option faculty is ready to take due to the risk it brings to their career, but I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.

<comment><USER19> >I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.

How do you know they didn't? Six months ago, would anyone have listened to them? The answer is no, because we all already knew about the sports and 'legacy' students.

<comment><USER20> Sports and legacies are different. They bring money, and lots of it. New buildings, better facilities, better equipment, etc. Thousands of other students benefit if I admit the daughter of a philanthropic billionaire.

These "lesser nobles" who just give some women's sports coach a bribe, or pay to get a higher SAT score are doing nothing for any of the other thousands of students. It literally _ONLY_ gives _THEIR_ kid a leg up.

<comment><USER21> For that matter, the "greater nobles" would just as soon bribe their way in over paying millions in "philanthropic" gifts. The only way you could ever get these incentivized donations would be if bribery is not an option or too risky of an option.

If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.

<comment><USER22> > If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester > and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to > be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so > be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal > practice of exchanging a service for money.

As a European outsider, this has already happened. The fact that Americans aren't outraged about the ridiculously high price of a US university degree is mind boggling

<comment><USER21> Americans are outraged at student loans instead of tuition because you don't notice the price you paid until you have to start paying off the loan. In an ideally rational world student loans would not be a problem because students would only take them on rationally, but as it turns out extending credit is just asking them to make decisions they never would otherwise.

<comment><USER23> As an older Millennial (with no student loans) I don't think that's quite accurate.

I distinctly remember a student seminar at high school where they talked about college and how to pay for it. What was drilled into us, over and over, was "not to make a decision based on sticker shock" and that "student debt is the best debt; better than a mortgage even!" And that career earnings with a college degree would melt any debt away without much fuss.

I sure hope Gen-Z Americans aren't getting fed the same misinformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We are dealing with the path of least resistance and the natural flow of entropy.

It seems naive to believe these institutions are not businesses at the end of the day.

To change people wanting a degree for degrees sake due to the institution, then you have to add weight to the knowledge that comes with the degree (or detection of it).

I have an assumption that won't scale and you will question if it's as big a problem as it feels and what change can be controlled on a weak-link biased system.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am curious if any of this would happen in my own country — The Netherlands. I would think not, but then again, neither did I know about US universities.

<comment><USER26> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.

<comment><USER27> Not being able to survive the vacuum of space is a basic human condition, too. Yet we developed space suits that allow ourselves to operate in there.

>> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.

Over the past 20 centuries we saw enough events that implied literally killing those who were abusing their positions of power, and I am pretty sure poor people are absolutely capable of doing so again today.

History is periodic, but lack of ethics isn't a basic human condition.

<comment><USER28> Nobody is killing anybody. We need a peaceful, sustainable solution to let those who abuse power fall and those who have the good interests of people at heart to rise.

<comment><USER29> That's what they want you to do so they can maintain power. The threat of violence is what keeps people in line. Don't like it? Go talk to the police about it (you know... those people who use the threat of violence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Impeccable timing. Haven't read the article, but want to say something. i was watching a regional film 2 days ago. The plot starts with a doctor doing wrong surgery to hero's father and so he loses his father. The doctor, apparently, bribed himself into the university for studying even though he never gets any qualifying results in the entrance exams.The story goes on and questions the audience in the end, will you risk with your own life or your loved ones in the hands of them?

Don't know if there is any governance or other controls in U.S. uni's but that's not how it should work. Isn't it discouraging one way for a student who earned it after hard work, compared to the one who simply enters a uni just because he was happens to be born to a rich father. Don't want to question the morality or ethical side, but it just doesn't feel right and should be handled in someway. may be more stricter exams etc. But I don't think that's practical either as they can easily workaround the system same way.

</comment><comment><USER31> Open source knowledge, remove impediments from those who want to better themselves. Decrease the irrational social value of a degree.

<comment><USER32> I think that much of the social value of a degree is the demonstration that you can overcome impediments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _> They can't do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well._

I assume this means 'do well in class', however I think the article itself points out the real, genuinely valuable, thing the students learn:

 _> In comparing stories, we have also found that such students strive to "work the system", using university procedures to get the grades they desire_

Like it or not, this is how many people find success. Rich, poor or in between.

I think that a lot of this behaviour is deplorable, but I can't deny that it requires some type of intelligence and work. It's just not the type of smarts or ethic that most people value.

Perhaps after hundreds of years of this 'privileged kid games the system' dynamic, it's time to embrace that and use it as leverage to encourage the students towards more generally accepted modes of effort.

Or maybe not... the school's are already teaching them to be successful. Maybe this is a question of ethics, not education?

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't call that success, unless parasites are successful. At the end of the day, we need people to do real work and produce real results. You can't "game the system" into building a good road or writing a good operating system or growing healthy food. These people leech off of others who are doing the real work and they drag down everyone by accumulating resources without providing real value in return. Like any parasite, they should be removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There's a follow-up piece with responses from other professors here: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college- brib...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-bribery- scandal-professors-respond-to-our-anonymous-column)

</comment><comment><USER36> Can't the labor market do anything about this? I wouldn't mind implementing changes to resume review that deprioritize degrees from "elite" universities. I'm sure I'd miss some legitimate candidates, but how much of a problem can that really be considering the cheating that pervades these schools?

<comment><USER37> The labour market has already responded to this, at least in computer science: you need to do coding challenges in many / most job interviews in parts because a degree, even a good degree from a top school is no longer strongly predictive of your coding ability.

<comment><USER36> True, but that's still a surprisingly progressive stance. Not 18 months ago I got rejected after crushing the interview because "no one at this firm would vouch for someone without a college degree". This still happens to me now as often as when I began my career in the early 00s.

<comment><USER37> Unfortunately, this also happens, but I think it is an orthogonal issue.

Degree / No-Degree is not a filter I apply personally, but I can see why some companies use it. When you get 2000+ applications for a position, you need to filter out almost all extremely quickly. Just because there are many charlatans with a degree, doesn't mean no-degrees are perfect ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If someone wants to donate $70 million and maybe their kid gets a free pass into the university, I think that's a win-win.

Presumably that $70 million is being used to provide a tremendous amount of resources for everyone who attends the goal. A lot of kids get full ride scholarships on the back of that $70 million, or a pretty sweet new building gets built on the campus.

Obviously there's a trade-off in fairness and at some point ($7 million? $700k? $70k?) you look at it and say, no that's not worth taking a spot away from another student.

Bribery obviously is a different matter, because the gains aren't going to the university and therefore the students in any form.

<comment> La-ang So ethics have a price? Meritocracy should be bought and sold?

<comment><USER26> Well there isn't a meritocracy to begin with, so that's not the choice we actually have here. But no, I'm not a purist, I think as a practical matter the majority of choices we make have externalities or trade-offs and sometimes you weigh the good versus the bad.

Society is certainly worse off as a whole by not taking the $70 million donation and maybe there's one rich kid who doesn't get in.

Obviously this approach has its limits and can go terribly wrong. Would you let one die to save a billion? Would you shoot down a plane that's been hijacked?

I don't think it makes sense to be moral absolutists when the world is filled with practical choices that have to be made that will save some people and hurt others.

Is it really _ethical_ to fail to provide full scholarships to let's say 1,000 students because 1 student's application got fast tracked?

My two cents are that "legacy" students are real (probably pervasive), and so is the benefit to pocketing their big fat donations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The big problem with universities is that a lot of the work required is just tool. Uninteresting, time consuming, somewhat out of date.

And the professors have the worst attitudes. "This is how it is, deal with it".

</comment><comment><USER39> Didn't faculty used to run the Universities? When they abdicated that job to administrators, they sealed their fate.</comment>


Bcrypt password cracking extremely slow? Not if you are using hundreds of FPGAs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ScatteredSecrets/bcrypt-password-cracking-extremely-slow-not-if-you-are-using-hundreds-of-fpgas-7ae42e3272f6 <comment><USER2> Does argon2 suffer from the same vulnerability?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems that bcrypt, scrypt and Argon2 are all designed to slowdown attacks on specific hardware platforms. All run relatively slow on GPUs so they all work. The blog covers how to overcome this using FPGAs, specifically for bcrypt. The same might also work against scrypt and Argon2 _if configured parameters are in favor of FPGAs_. If parameters exceed the specs of FPGAs, they will be slow as well. So depends on the configuration of the algorithm.</comment></comment>


Blood money - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/21/blood-money/ <comment><USER4> Mark my words, this will blow over in a month or two and we'll forget all about it, like we always do. Softbank has a lot of sweet, sweet petro-dollars to wave around.

If you are really opposed to the Saudi regime, I'd posit that the most effective thing you could do is create a bullshit startup and get them to invest, and then frivolously waste their money.

<comment><USER5> >the most effective thing you could do is create a bullshit startup and get them to invest, and then frivolously waste their money

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to employ against a regime perfectly willing to violently murder people.

<comment><USER6> The most effective way to affect the change in KSA is to block KSA's citizens access to the non-KSA. It is that easy. The KSA is stable because its princess and princesses and its middle class enjoys unrestricted access to the West. For that they are willing to compromise with those that would stone women and cure homosexuality with whips.

Block that and KSA will fall apart within months as having hundreds of thousands of dollars means nothing if there's no access to Gucci purses and houses in London.

<comment><USER7> What replaces it if it loses stability or falls apart? Would it not be replaced by a government dominated by the people engaged in behavior you detest? It seems more likely that enacting more freedoms would instead result in civil war dominated by those who are more repressive, and likely the domination by the princes aligned with those perspectives.

Instead, we see a slow progress which is painful, but may be the best that can be hoped for.

<comment><USER8> Why would it lose stability and fall apart? Saudi Arabia is about as stable as bad places come, which is what makes it is so terrible. This is exactly the sort of country you should pressure to reform. Otherwise might as well just come out and say that it was all just an excuse to freely meddle with countries we don't like.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it would, but that is what the parent comment suggested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recognize that the author is using the term Blood Money like Blood Diamond, as a way of saying that the investment dollars are tainted by violence. But the term Blood Money already has a meaning in English, which is a payment to settle the feelings of a family for the loss of a loved one, and prevent revenge. It's not very common among northern Europeans, but is part of the culture of Arabs and, supposedly, Sicilian mafiosi. The US paid lots of blood money over the years to attempt to quell vengeance for collateral damage or incorrect targeting, and even in some cases for legitimate killings of battlefield opponents.

<comment><USER10> > But the term Blood Money already has a meaning in English, which is a > payment to settle the feelings of a family for the loss of a loved one, and > prevent revenge.

This is incorrect; "blood money" is an established English term for money that has been metaphysically tainted with blood. (Compare, among many others, Judas' refrain in _Jesus Christ Superstar_ , "I don't want your blood money", referring to the 30 pieces of silver the priests pay him for betraying Jesus.)

The English term for money paid to settle a death is "weregild".

<comment><USER11> The concepts appear similar, but "blood money" has been in use for a long time:

> Blood money is from 1530s; originally money paid for causing the death of > another[1].

[1] [https://www.etymonline.com/word/blood](https://www.etymonline.com/word/blood)

Also:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_money_(restitution)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_money_\(restitution\))

<comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_money_(restitution)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_money_\(restitution\))

> Blood money is, colloquially, the reward for bringing a criminal to justice.

> A common meaning in other contexts is the money-penalty paid by a murderer > to the kinsfolk of the victim. These fines completely protect the offender > (or the kinsfolk thereof) from the vengeance of the injured family. The > system was common among Germanic peoples before the introduction of > Christianity (weregild)

The concepts of "money you pay as a penalty for killing someone" and "money a third party pays you as a reward for killing someone" aren't really similar in the slightest.

<comment><USER11> The very first sentence is:

> Blood money, also called bloodwit, is money or some sort of compensation > paid by an offender (usually a murderer) or his/her family group to the > family or kin group of the victim.

<comment><USER10> Given that the page primarily defines "blood money" as "the reward for bringing a criminal to justice" as well as being weregild, it doesn't seem like strong evidence that weregild is the primary sense of the word. (Strong evidence for that would be hard to find, as it isn't true.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have very little sympathy for these companies getting called out. Many of them gleefully throw themselves into the political arena when they can capitalize on things like pride or international women's day for cheap progressive points and some marketing exposure yet shirk away from the conversation about where they get their investment money from. I would say this is a nice lesson for a lot of marketing departments. If you're going to interject yourself, as a company, into the political arena, you have to be all in otherwise you will get called out like this eventually.

<comment><USER13> > _If you 're going to interject yourself, as a company, into the political > arena, you have to be all in otherwise you will get called out like this > eventually._

A company selectively interjecting itself into the political arena highlights its hypocrisy, but any company having a significant public impact should be getting called out regardless of their actions in other spheres. Ethics are not an opt-in.

<comment><USER14> Can't a company just do what's best for itself and it's shareholders? Why does every organization need a moral/ethical complex which caters to the issues of modern day?

<comment><USER15> Companies exist to serve society, not the other way around. Corporate charters are granted by governments, from the people.

<comment><USER14> Ok I'll bite, so if your company is based in Saudi Arabia you have to be okay with killing journalists because the charter was granted by the government?

<comment><USER16> I mean... you don't have to _feel_ okay with it, but if you're paying taxes, you're certainly complicit in it _on some level_. Similar goes for Americans and the Iraq War.

In the old days, in some countries, we had a device for changing the government when it did stuff you didn't want to be complicit in. I think they called it an "election" ;-). Now, _admittedly_ , even if I take a very broad array of American political parties, from the Greens to the Libertarians, their spectrum on foreign policy still ranges from bloody-stupid to fucking appalling, so I don't entirely blame actively anti-war Americans for the anti- war movement's failure to stop the war.

But that's _because_ the democratic system has decayed to the point where, if you don't want today's fresh new war of choice, you're left choosing between two irrelevant third parties, one of whom puts forth a candidate who doesn't know where Aleppo is, and the other of whom are outright tankies on foreign policy and may be paid by Vladimir Putin.

<comment><USER14> Does knowing where Aleppo is help American citizens in any measurable way, shape, or form?

<comment><USER16> Yes, but I'm not going to debate this, because I'm already appalled that this comment got +3 while my remarks on the Bayesian brain theory in another thread were ignored.

#MakeHNTechnicalAgain

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I find an article like this, what is supposed to convince me to spend the time to read it? The title communicates almost nothing and there's no subtitle. The author starts off with a (boring) vinette and knowingly teases the actual topic: "Needless to say this article is about Saudia Arabia." But there are thousands of journalist writing thousands of articles about Saudi Arabia right now.

Is the idea that I would know the author's name and just trust them? (Surely no one loves _everything_ TechCrunch puts out generally.) Or that I'd get linked to it on social media from someone who's taste I really trust?

I'm just honestly confused why a column like this doesn't have such a bad bounce rate as to induce a different writing style.

<comment><USER18> If article titles were crafted to convey the topic and thus only attract people interested in the topic they'd be as good as useless.

Instead they use bold, non detailed, titles to attract readers that might not even care about the particular subject (but will click to see what the "blood money" are about).

Isn't that the whole idea behind clickbait titles?

Bounce rate after reading some of the article shouldn't really concern them, as long as people click on the article and the banners have been displayed.

<comment><USER17> I understand they want clicks and the general incentives for clickbait, and thus why the title might be a tease. But they also need to keep people on the site to view and click on the ads (especially near the bottom). So, for instance, why not tease more with a subtitle? Maybe the idea is that, empirically, the small fraction of people who will trudge through the article to find the mystery topic, for whatever reason, nevertheless stay for long enough that total ad exposure is higher. So the bounce rate is high but outweighed by these outliers.

It still doesn't help me understand their motivation though. Like, there are a thousand news articles each day that begin with an intro thats indistinguishable (information-wise) from this one. Why read this one?

<comment><USER19> I think it's just laziness/the economics of web content. Stuff like this usually gets pushed live more or less as soon as it's written and (maybe) checked for spelling errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you had an offer from Slack, would you seriously turn it down because they have Saudi money via Softbank if it was otherwise your top choice?

<comment><USER21> I'm in the late stages of the interview process for a heavily SoftBank-funded company that would otherwise be my top choice, and I'm strongly considering turning them down because of that. So if you want a definitive answer, ask me again in a week.

<comment><USER22> If you turn them down for that reason, will you state is as the reason? Otherwise, it doesn't seem nearly as effective.

<comment><USER21> I agree, and yes I would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone have any guesses about what exactly the Saudi plan was when they killed Jamal Khashoggi?

Surely they knew if they got blamed for the murder, it would cost them much more in damaged relationships than it could possibly gain in eliminating a critic. And surely they knew a disappearance of a journalist seen on camera entering their consulate won't be ignored.

Sorry for a slightly off topic question.

<comment><USER24> I'm guessing the crown prince was upset with his journalism, I don't think a deeper reason needs to be found.

From inside the bubble of absolute power (when you have already killed and tortured dissidents, rivals and potential threats) adding this journalist to the kill list probably didn't seem like such a big deal. He was apparently surprised by the reaction to the whole affair. [https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/22/saudi-khashoggi- claims-...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/22/saudi-khashoggi-claims-fall- flat-riyadh-blindsided-bolton-in-moscow/)

<comment><USER23> According to that article, MBS "[...] was really shocked that there was such a big reaction to it. He feels betrayed by the West. He said he would look elsewhere and he will never forget how people turned against him before evidence was produced".

Indeed at this point the evidence against MBS is only circumstantial, so that would be a reasonable point to make in a court of law. But in the world of politics, there's no presumption of innocence because common folk don't much care for that, and politicians and activists need to build upon popular emotions while the issue is hot. Is MBS so naive as to genuinely expect the population of the West to ignore the very strong circumstantial evidence? Or for the politicians to ignore the popular opinion and wait for hard evidence (which may take months, years, or decades for all we know)? Or is he just leaking this message to create an impression of innocence?

Also, the two parts of the statement are somewhat in conflict. Is he shocked by reaction or is he shocked of being accused without evidence? If he is shocked by reaction, it suggests he thinks the killing isn't a big deal, which implicates him even more.

If MBS wasn't involved. I can imagine two scenarios.

1\. There was a general guideline to reduce regime criticism by any means necessary. Some officials decided to follow that guideline by demonstrating to the critics that can be killed at any time (note that they didn't just secretly assassinate Khashoggi making it look like an accident; they did in a way as to set an example). Wouldn't be the first time nor the last. But if that was the case, why didn't Saudi authorities quickly identify those responsible, and try and execute them? They can explain to the world they punished them because of their horrible acts. Internally, to their loyal followers, they can explain that they were executed for being total idiots who acted in a way that caused SKA irreparable harm and undermined MBS reputation in the world.

2\. The powerful enemies of MBS did that to undermine MBS, and MBS cannot do anything about it because his power is limited. That would be consistent with MBS being outside the palace, and the King giving him more authority over the ingelligence services. However, if that's the case, why wouldn't MBS just say precisely that? The only downside is that he would admit weakness, but it seems like he has nothing to lose at this point, if people in his inner cirlce are basically trying to destroy him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's missing is the ability for people to easily know where the line is, and where people stand related to said line; they might be on the other side of the line simply due to ignorance or circumstances, they need the work to survive.

We have to draw the line (and show who is on which side of the line), so people can choose/decide to hold that line with their actions - to hold the people in nations who are in control accountable, towards peace and for justice. Who's being accountable, and who isn't - who is purposefully not being accountable, who is espousing ignorance or laziness as justification?

These organizations, the employees and leaders of these organizations - <USER2> certainly could take a stand and voice their concern, however why aren't they: looking at the story of a dead journalist is all you need to reason why they don't and how they don't want to end up themselves - so they've trapped themselves from action, at least publicly; whether they do anything privately that is significant or indirectly enough to support the cause of peace and justice, we may not be able to see or know.

<comment><USER26> We need a database of "lines".

The challenge is, Line Space is probably impossible to be adequately parameterized, with anything less than Turing complete parameters.

So the database would have to be a database of code, which describes people's "lines".

In order to put a front end on that you need to solve End User Programming (EUP) for some subset.

<comment><USER25> Interesting line of thinking.. I'm not sure the system needs to be perfect but almost-perfect. The importance is to track and manage the bigger systems and revenue systems. Sure, you're missing potential smaller transfers that that fund people to do abuse, however then you can have other mechanisms in place to manage that abuse.

<comment><USER26> I don't think so, I think a simple federation, like the email system would suffice.

I don't believe any active management is needed at the system level. If anything you can just let people to do marketmaking around what are essentially structured ethical insights as a commodity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Blood money? Take it. Seize it. I wonder why, AFAICT, the Magnitsky Act allows for freezing, but not seizing assets? Surely mass murderers should get worse financial treatment than say people who happen to be near a drug deal.

<comment><USER28> Who is going to do the seizing, when the government itself is involved in the sales? The article specifically mentions arms deals to the Saudis, despite everyone knowing what those arms may be used for in the end.

<comment><USER29> This is what should be scaring people. SA is not giving the US money out of the goodness of their heart, they are playing a long game. They eventually want to be powerful/influential enough to control international politics, rather than being a by-standard.

We know that their government has no respect or appreciation for Western values. Yet our companies and governments will gladly take their money and provide them with weapons and investment opportunities which increase their wealth, technological understanding, and military power; knowing that SA is aiming to turn on us when the opportunity arises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Funny having this read on my screen while I was also reading this: [https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/mosul-moria- air-s...](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/mosul-moria-air-strike- killed-family-181021211409973.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Of course, foreign capital inflows are hardly unique to Silicon Valley tech. Dodgy capital finds its way wherever speculation and money laundering are to be had. Real estate is a huge example. We have known for a while that some of the priciest real estate in the world in cities such as New York and London is due to capital inflows from the Middle East, Russia, China, India and other places where people have made enormous fortunes through illegal or semi-legal means. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. There's a difference between selling drugs on the street and creating a narco-state. If you want to see the first narco-state of real estate, move to Vancouver, where Chinese capital has turned the city upside down.

The fact is that dodgy capital inflows are central to every speculative bubble: real estate, bitcoin, Uber for X, you name it. Who else has the money to throw around?

I feel like we are at the beginning of a sweatshop moment for finance. Way back when it became known that kids were slaving away to produce your shoes, there was a global outcry and enormous pressure put on companies such as Nike to improve their operations. Did that save the world? No it didn't, but it changed the way outsourcing was implemented.

Similarly, we need to change the moral landscape of finance. I don't mean the radical solution of socializing investment or samizdats that people write in secret communist pamphlets. I mean raising the bar for the mainstream - <USER3> it impossible for otherwise profit minded people to take certain kinds of money.

<comment><USER32> If you want to see something even more scary... go look at the amount of money given by these countries to U.S. politicians. Now legally you can't receive foreign money for a US campaign. The money comes in as gifts to non-profits and foundations owned by/supporting/supported by US politicians. Saudi money is one of the biggest.

And if you typically align with the Democrat side, don't think it is just Republicans taking it. You will be shocked. Start with Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign. The money went to the Clinton Foundation. The list keeps going and it is on both sides.

<comment><USER33> Do you have a source where we can go look this up? All I found was Trump made such a claim, but there's no proof either way.

[https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2016/jul/07...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2016/jul/07/fact-checking-donations-clinton-foundation/)

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure what source should be considered authoritative, but here are some numbers from from the New York Times:

 _The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton's time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria._

 _Saudi Arabia has been a particularly generous benefactor. The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Donations are typically reported in broad ranges, not specific amounts.) At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary- clint...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton- presidential-campaign-charity.html)

Edit: Reading the politifact.com link you provided, I now see that it makes a very similar claim. While there is legitimate doubt as to the exact number, it seems wrong to say that there is "no proof either way". Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are looking for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'll never ever understand the point of the "yes, but this" way of criticise on something.

It always looks to me like when you are arguing with somebody that is thinking exactly like you, but you don't get each other because wording. In which way the fact that people are raising their voices as a consequence of the brutal murder of this journalist make Yemen people less important? And most of all is this really matters?

I think this situation is slightly different and worth of notice, because is not just a murder, is a way for UAE to show off power and give a notice to all the other dissidents that they can reach them and get along without any consequences. This is a threat.

</comment><comment><USER36> Saudi is powerful because of the reliance on fossil fuel. Any way to decrease dependancy on fossil fuels, both from governments and from individual citizens, will prevent situations like this.

</comment><comment><USER33> The blood money isn't Saudi money in tech. That's oil money. The actual blood money is the Saudi money for American weapons that will be used to kill Yemenis (Yemenis today maybe Iranians tomorrow).

And there's Trump telling us not being blood sucking arms merchants would be bad for the U.S. because we'd be giving up a lot of money! The right thing to do, per POTUS, is to take the money and ignore how the weapons are being used.

There's the blood money. Money for the blood of Yemeni civilians.

</comment><comment><USER11> For those curious, Saudi sovereign wealth investments include:

* Magic Leap

* Tesla

* Lyft

* Uber

[https://www.cbinsights.com/research/saudi-arabia-pif-tech- in...](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/saudi-arabia-pif-tech-investments/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Unrelated, but I couldn't help but notice the new UX changes with techcrunch.

Once you finish reading the page it adds a grey transition background color

</comment><comment><USER38> While we are finally beginning to call out Saudi money, shouldn't we start doing the same with the China money? As far as oppressive regimes go China isn't any better - just ask the Tibetans, the uighurs, controlled media etc.

<comment><USER14> Let's just call out all the money until we don't do business with anybody. So much for being global citizens.

<comment><USER39> I hope at this point you're looking at the replies and realizing that your nihilistic, cynical viewpoint is in a very strong minority.

You can take the money, but you can never say that nobody told you there would be repercussions.

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with having a viewpoint that's in the minority?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Isn't blood money what makes the world go round? Seems like it at least when you look around.

</comment><comment><USER41> > _This was before Russia was the democracy-manipulating enemy it is today_

Ugh. It's like millennials woke up yesterday and said to themselves "Wait a minute. We have rival countries that don't have our best intentions in mind??"

Did our generation just skip world history classes in high school or something?

<comment><USER42> It's a new age where corporations are in it to make the world a better place and governments are here to serve the people.

Or that seems to be what everyone on reddit under the age of 30 thinks.</comment></comment>


Why is it cloud everything now? - <AUTHOR> http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-is-it-cloud-everything-now.html?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d697884bb5d0d3f%2C0 <comment><USER2> This is what "cloud" means to non-techies near enough to tech to have heard the word (I've asked):

"If my computer, or server, or laptop dies or really slows down, everything keeps working just fine because there are lots of other computers that remember what the other lost and they start working as soon as I need them."

If you look at it like that, all of a sudden all these marketing buzzwords start making sense.

"Private clouds" = "Oohhh, like normal clouds only just for our company"

"Clouds as a Service" = "Oooohhh, like normal clouds only someone does all the hard work"

"Blah Blah clouds" = "Oooooohhh, I really like Blah Blah, so this must be like normal clouds only Blah Blah"

All just different ways for heavenly angels to make sure things still keep working after a disgruntled employee drop kicked a server or your laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> ""If my computer, or server, or laptop dies or really slows down, everything keeps working just fine because there are lots of other computers that remember what the other lost and they start working as soon as I need them."

See that actually kind-of makes sense in a scenario like a desktop virtualization. When Microsoft talks about "to the cloud" with photo editing for example I wish they would just say online backup, why confuse people with to the cloud?

<comment><USER3> Because it's not an online backup. The canonical version of the photo now lives on in a remote service, managed and maintained in perpetuity by someone else. The user's local computer has become just a cache.

This a fundamental shift in how people use computers. I think it's reasonable to assign that shift a label, and that label has turned out to be "cloud." (No argument that the term is overhyped and overapplied.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It started in the tech circles as a word to describe a remote blackbox service. Now it's become a buzzword and buzzwords sell magazines, seminars, conferences, and contracts. Before cloud, it happened to e-commerce, WWW/Internet, multimedia, digital, robot, and automatic. Right now the meaning of 'cloud' has been blurred but within a few years, it will start to mean something concrete again. Give it a few years to find its niche definition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I would have thought once gone it never returns. Any examples of words or phrases that have come back to a niche definition?

<comment><USER4> All of the examples I gave: e-commerce, WWW/Internet, multimedia, digital, robot, and automatic. They started with a specific meaning, then became overused, and now are back to meaning something specific. Think about to 1995 and remember how multimedia was overused all the time, ever where. Now it means something specific once again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> because...

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion - Larry Ellison

</comment><comment><USER6> Google found a way to more-or-less reliably process Big Data using commodity hardware and an underpinning of failover logic.

Everyone wanted to beat Google. The first step (a fallacy) seemed to be to copy their way of doing things. So started "cloud computing".

Of course most of the players that tried bastardized the whole thing immensely.

At this point the original cloud model of computing (very thinly interfaced, commodity hardware as a foundation for scalability) was bastardized into a sludge of "outsourced administration", "throwing more servers at the problem", and "shoving traditional product models into datacenters and hoping they'll magically work at massive scale".

And that's why cloud computing today is meaningless.

Wait a few years until the companies that "just don't get it" die out, and cloud computing will be taken back as a legitimate description of a technological approach much like AJAX.

</comment><comment><USER7> "To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming up with "informatique en nuage," which literally means "computing in cloud.""

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125544523318682497.html>

...

"About 18 months ago, Bénédicte Madinier, head of language development at Mr. North's General Delegation, was on holiday when she read a magazine piece about cloud computing. "I realized it was pretty important," she says. The 59-year-old quickly sent a request that the expression be sped through France's translation and definition system."

</comment><comment><USER8> Misuse aside, cloud computing (storage or otherwise) is in its infancy so everyone is trying their own take. Its real use will become apparent. In the 1980s everything had a clock in it because suddenly LCD screens were small enough to put a clock into anything the size of a pen or bigger. Now we've moved on and realised that it's not /clocks/ we wanted to be small, but chips. We'll move on from 'in the cloud' but in its wake will be left something useful.

<comment><USER9> And as clocks started showing up everywhere, that transition to and from daylight savings time became very annoying as we had to manually adjust a dozen clocks.

I was in college shortly after the digitization of everything started (Caltech, class of '82). I took a course in digital logic. I don't remember the name of the textbook, but I remember the last chapter (or perhaps it was an appendix) and the TERRIFIC advice it gave--still relevant today.

The title was "The Engineer as Dope Pusher". It talked about how engineers want to do fun things, and so if not careful will end up pushing things into products that don't belong there, because the engineer wants to play with them. For example, suppose you are an engineer designing the timer for a dryer. On the one hand, you can use the common mechanical timer, with the circular dial. This thing is cheap (because they've been manufactured essentially unchanged for decades and so the process is highly optimized), and it is reliable (again, decades of experience have worked all the bugs out), and consumers all know how to use them.

But you've been reading about these new-fangled micro-controllers. Those sounds a hell of lot more fun than a 50 year old mechanical timer. If you go with a micro-controller, you'll get to play with something new. You'll get to write software. Maybe display the time remaining with an LED progress bar, and you can do some neat animations on it to signal completion. Maybe implement a bunch of different drying modes.

Never mind that your fancy micro-controller based dryer interface offers no advantage at all to the consumer or the manufacturer. Instead, it costs more for the parts. It involves many more parts--the micro-controller logic board, a power supply, the progress display, the input buttons whereas the old mechanical timer was two parts (the timer, and the dial). The parts are more expensive. It is harder to assemble them. The consumer knows how to use the old system--the new system will probably require them to actually read the manual (oh, someone has to write a new manual). The fancy system might also be less reliable (more parts to break, and the manufacturer does not have experience with running digital electronics in the environment of a dryer).

Software engineers in particular have a tendency to become dope pushers, from what I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As everyone else is saying: it's a buzzword. :-)

Re "private clouds", though: While many of them are just P2V projects as the OP said, some organizations are using them in "cloud-ish" ways in the sense of dynamic provisioning and resource allocation. In a large company with many quasi-independent units (such as various R&D groups, a group running production simulations, etc), I've seen "private clouds" allow a generic infrastructure to provide dynamically-sized resources to those varied groups. No one department has to maintain hardware; each one can still exert a large amount of configuration control without consulting central IT for more than resource allocation; and it's all "in the family", so there are no security concerns.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Micrososft "to the cloud" commercials really drive me nuts (as much as I currently enjoy working this phrase into conversation as much as possible). They could make an argument about providing higher reliability, protection against data loss, etc. But them seem to prefer to just sprinkle "cloud" pixie dust on otherwise ordinary computing tasks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why? Because it's a buzzword now, that's why.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it just means "remote" now, the way people use it.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Wil.i.am, what do you think about the cloud?"

The "cloud" has no meaning anymore, it's as useless in description as "web 2.0".

</comment><comment><USER15> the blue is the new pink.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well at least it's less annoying than the 'cyber-everything' meme from the 90s and the oh-ohs.</comment>


Why I'm Switching from VSCode to OniVim 2 - <AUTHOR> https://seanchen1991.github.io/posts/onivim2/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a really good licensing scheme.

About Onivim. Well, not quite sure if I would use it over VS Code.</comment>


A Kaggler's Guide to Model Stacking in Practice - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kaggle.com/2016/12/27/a-kagglers-guide-to-model-stacking-in-practice/ <comment><USER2> One thing I've found useful on Kaggle is to measure the correlation of different models and then use that combined with the CV performance of each model to weigh the contribution to an overall ensemble.

(Note this is slightly different to the stacking in this post)

</comment><comment><USER3> How did you plot the predictive region fills in ggplot2? The code for that isn't in the repository and the packages don't expose the region information.</comment>


Programmable inpluse watch checks into Facebook places - <AUTHOR> http://androidcommunity.com/programmable-inpluse-watch-checks-into-facebook-places-20110301/

<comment><AUTHOR> Talk about FB addiction... It's actually something that RunKeeper integrated for the NYC Marathon last year, automatically checking you in at various milestones.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the easiest way to do browser-to-browser link sharing? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HNers,
Every so often, I find myself trying to forward an interesting link to my co-founder -- usually, it has something to do with our business, something I wouldn't want to share with the whole world. Plus, in most of these times, my cofounder is sitting right next to me.
I find it ridiculous that the only way I can share links with my cofounder in such situations is to either use email or to resort to using something like Google Wave (or now Convore). Am I missing something? Is there a better way to deal with this problem?
If I can't find a simpler way to get around this problem, I am thinking of writing a set of extensions to enable this browser-to-browser link sharing. Would any of you be interested?
Hope you leave a comment.
Cheers! <comment><USER2> I use diigo and firefox extension, has a feature to bookmark & send to a friend. I used to delicious and just tag a friend, before the great exodus :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shameless plug: <http://pushbrowserapp.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Instant Messaging? Like Google Talk or Skype?</comment>


Yays - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bahlaouane-Hamza/Yays <comment><AUTHOR> Desktop player which let you collect & save your favorite youtube music links in one place</comment>


Face of 9,000-Year-Old Teenager Reconstructed - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/archaeology-agvi-greek-stoneage-facial-reconstruction/ <comment><USER2> Is the jawline a Greek thing or a thousands of years ago thing?

<comment><USER3> They suggest in the article that is a "thousands of years ago" thing, which makes sense; tough living would have favoured tough-making DNA.</comment></comment>


Iris, concurrency library for C (NSOperation, Twisted deffereds, and CCR in one) - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/chergert/iris

<comment><USER2> A link the the project README, which will tell you what you want to know since the github description is almost useless.

[http://github.com/chergert/iris/blob/00ba89e06cf457ec5b8f241...](http://github.com/chergert/iris/blob/00ba89e06cf457ec5b8f241addee982dd2317808/README)

<comment><USER3> The README is displayed on the linked page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> one thing that i am kind of curious about is: why not use event-based (epoll/select/poll) libraries (libev, libevent etc) and create a message passing model on top of those ? the message passing could be done with either protocol-buf style messages or xdr-encoded ones (asn.1 totally sucks)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is nothing preventing Iris from working with libev or libevent.

It's primary focus is how to handle work after your event loop. For example, you can saturate your network card on very little use of a single cpu. Iris focuses on how to efficiently use the rest of those cpus for processing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should also add that messages are ref-counted. The only time they will be serialized is when passing between processes or hosts (which I haven't written yet but is a goal).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your first computer? - <AUTHOR>

It's always neat to hear people's stories of their first computer running on some 4 or 8 bit processor. <comment><USER2> I won't link it here (my site is visually SFW, but deals with NSFW content regularly), but I recently wrote an article containing the story of my first computer (you can find it with a search for Women in Technology BlueWinds if you're interested).

I was too young, I don't remember much about the computer itself - but it had a big TURBO button on the front which could switch it from 20 to 40mhz. Turbo indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> TRS-80 Color Computer (4K Memory, cassette drive storage, television monitor)

</comment><comment><USER4> Tandy 4000. I think it only had 128mb of ram and an 8086 processor.

</comment><comment><USER5> 286 512KB RAM, 32MB HD, 1x2.5" floppy, 1x5.25" floppy

</comment><comment><USER6> 486dx33 purchased in germany made by taiwan

</comment><comment><USER7> Packard Bell 486 DX2-66Mhz 2400 Baud Modem

</comment><comment><USER8> PC Intel 80386SX, 41MB HD

</comment><comment><USER9> I had an Apple IIe(2e).

</comment><comment><USER10> Gateway 486/33DX.

</comment><comment><USER11> Atari 800XL 64k

</comment><comment><USER12> loaned - TRS-80 Model I

owned - VIC-20

</comment><comment><USER13> TRS-80 Model I

</comment><comment><USER14> C-64 !</comment>


Ask HN: So is it easier to raise money than find a job? - <AUTHOR>

So I moved back to the Bay Area two years ago.  Since then, I've been trying to either raise an angel round or find steady work.  Every start-up claims they're hiring.  In my experience, however, that's just not the case.  During this same period of time, I've witnessed no shortage of half-baked ideas raise all sorts of money.
But I understand the business aspects of why raising money is easier.  Hiring people means expenses for recruiting, training, payroll liabilities, and legal issues if the employee doesn't work out.  Raising money on the other hand is much more straight-forward; investors cut a check and the exact risk is the potential of losing the investment.
So my question to all of you is: Can we just conclude that its easier to raise money than find a job? <comment><USER2> It does feel that way. I started interviewing recently (I'm an experienced dev) and it feels like the interview process is screwed up across the board. Back in the day, Microsoft used to have the most grilling process. A full day with 5 interviews. These days, multiple rounds of phone interviews seem to be table stakes.

Perhaps I should look for angel investment ... it can't be more annoying that writing yet another linked list traversal ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I know this sounds a bit uncouth, but maybe the problem is that you're not good enough to work at many of the startups that are hiring?

The kind of ROI that a startup needs to get out of their first hires is immense. They need people who could have been founders but are willing to work as engineers. Many people may just not have that level of value.

<comment><USER4> I can understand why a good and experienced Engineer would become a founder of a startup. I do not see why a good and experienced Engineer would become an early employee of a startup, when they can get paid better and treated better for less work at larger corporations. As an employee at a startup, you get most of the downside, and very little of the upside that you would get as a founder. Really? as an Employee, you are far better off with a larger company.

Most startups offer some token stock and below-market wages. As such, they are competing, usually, for inexperienced Engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd suspect that there are lots of places in the country far less cool that the Bay Area that would offer someone talented a job. It's just that they're not in the Bay Area. Way easier to find a job than to get funding.

</comment><comment><USER6> Without a track record of success I'd question that it's that easy to raise funding. It might help if you explained your experiences with startups that are hiring.

<comment><AUTHOR> I said "easier", not "easy". In my experiences in attempting to find steady work at start-ups, the founders are consistently so busy keeping things from falling apart that it seems like they have attention deficit disorder. Also, early stage start-ups frequently don't fully understand what jobs they need to fill or why. Finally, most early-stage start-ups don't consistently have enough money to pay full-time employees.</comment></comment>


Look Out Android and iOS, Here Comes Alibaba's Aliyun - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/look-out-android-and-ios-here-comes-alibabas-aliyun/

<comment><USER2> Slightly less content-free post here: <http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/07/alibaba-mobile-os/>

The only technical facts from either seem to be "runs Android apps" and "based on Linux", which makes it seem like this is just another vendor-skinned Android build. It certainly looks Android-y to me.

My prediction is that, like most of the bargain basement Android devices, it will be crummy. Although probably crummier than usual if they've thrown away the default Google UI and replaced it with a budget-developed vendorware skin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat more content on the Wired post, true, although I was kind of put off by Wired's report calling Alibaba an 'obscure' company... in any case, both appear to be sourcing their information from this Penn Olson post from earlier this month:

[http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/07/14/aliyun-alibaba- mobile-o...](http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/07/14/aliyun-alibaba-mobile-os/)</comment></comment>


Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Search Quality - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html <comment><USER2> > When an engineer gets a new idea and develops a new algorithm, we test their > ideas thoroughly. We have a team of statisticians who look at all the data > and determine the value of the new idea. We meet weekly (sometimes twice a > week) to go over those new ideas and approve new launches.

This line has to make a lot of search startups more comfortable. In one sense it's scary that Google has so much manpower behind keeping their results high quality. But it's quite clear that they cannot adjust on a dime and try wild new ideas. This is where the agility of search startups can try out different approaches that might not "maintain quality" against legacy search results. It makes them a bit more iterative and hopefully some startups will make some interesting leap to get even better results.</comment>


Internet Explorer with WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/ie/

<comment><USER2> Internet Explorer 9 is a fast, sturdy and very responsive browser. After mocking the product, and never really using it for over a decade, I am almost tempted to about to make it my default. Never ever thought I'd think of it as something clutter-free and reliable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well played sir, well played

</comment><comment><USER4> Ahhhh, now I get it :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it. A gray empty screen?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you're using the browser in question

<comment><USER7> I bet he's just trying to troll the troller :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see what you did there :P

</comment><comment><USER9> Too... much... Irony!

</comment><comment><USER6> IT'S A TRAP !!</comment>


Scientists use the Tokyo Skytree to test general relativity - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-04-scientists-tokyo-skytree-einstein-theory.html <comment><USER2> There is something that has always bugged me about the space curving analogy and how it relates to relativity.

Gravity in a multi body system or in special cases of a two body system, has counteracting forces. If you found the Lagrange point between a binary black hole system, you could stay there. Or if you hollowed out the core of the Earth, you would float because you are being pulled in all directions at once (essentially the 2 body problem doesn't "behave" for concave objects or distance less than diameter).

Is time slower or faster at the Earth's core? Is it slower or faster at the Lagrange point of a three body system?

<comment><USER3> In the limit of weak gravity, gravitational time dilation depends only on the gravitational _potential_ , and not at all on the local gravitational field. So going down to the center of the Earth just has the opposite effect of going up to space, i.e. the clock will run slower. Nothing special happens just because the field happens to cancel out. The equivalence principle essentially tells us that local gravitational field values don't have meaning, anyway.

<comment><USER4> You are claiming you can distinguish between freefall inside the center of the earth, from freefall traveling between the stars, solely by the effect on time dilation?

<comment><USER5> Yes, one can measure the difference in gravitational potential between two locations by comparing clocks. This is precisely what was done in the Skytree experiment.

<comment><USER4> By definition in free-fall there is no gravitational potential!

<comment><USER5> Of course there is. The gravitational potential does not depend at all on the (non-relativistic) velocity.

<comment><USER4> How would you measure this gravitational potential?

<comment><USER5> For example by comparing two extremely good clocks. Or the same way the earth's gravitational potential is mapped - by measuring the relative height and the gravitational acceleration in many points and numerically integrating along the way.

<comment><USER4> I feel like we are speaking different languages - you are in free fall.

There _is_ no gravitational acceleration to measure. It's zero.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free fall means.

In the absence of other forces, a body in a gravitational field experiences a _constant acceleration_ that only depends on the strength of the field. In the _accelerating reference frame_ of the object, there are _no net forces_. You could for example measure the gravitational acceleration of earth by jumping from a plane and measuring how fast the ground is coming towards you.

<comment><USER4> You are inside a box, you do not see the ground, so how can you use it to measure anything (to measure "how fast the ground is coming towards you")?

Time dilation of a clock does not depend on the clock being able to reference some external object, like the earth. (I do recognize you can not measure time dilation until you compare to some other clock.)

So, let's reframe with a thought experiment and maybe you can answer:

A clock in the center of the earth, and a clock dropped from a tall tower on earth (ignore the rotation of the earth). Each clock sends two laser pules, exactly 1/100 of a second apart toward the other clock.

(The falling clock sends its pulses moments after being dropped, so it has essentially zero speed relative to the clock in the center of the earth.)

The partner clock then measures how far apart in time it received the two pules.

After that we collect the reports from the clocks and evaluate.

Will the two clocks each report the same time interval?

For an even better experiment lets add a third clock, this one resting on the surface of the earth.

<comment><USER5> Now you are confusing a number of different things.

Einstein used a free-falling sealed box to derive the equivalence principle. This does not imply that any free-falling system is a sealed box. Thinking about clocks makes absolutely no sense without having a way of comparing them.

In your example, the clock in the center of the earth will run slower than the one falling from the tower due to gravitational time dilation. Note that Einstein's "light clock" thought experiments do not capture this effect, since it stems from General Relativity, not Special Relativity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a question for all the physics nerds here: The surface of the Earth is not quite flat. When you consider the sheer radius of it, it can be approximated as such, but it isn't. Do geographical features (massive mountains and deep oceans) impact the gravity of Earth, or are they truly irrelevant?

<comment><USER7> Yes. In the experiments in our lab, we are sensitive, through gravity- gradients, to the annual variation of the water table in the hill adjoining the instrumentation.

Viewed another way, the hill beside our lab deflects the direction of "down" by about 50 nanoradians for every meter you move vertically in the lab. (If you kept the hill, and got rid of the earth, a satellite would orbit the hill.)

The really crazy thing about the experiments described in the article is that they depend on the difference in _potential_ , which is much harder to estimate. As these clock-based experiments reach still-higher sensitivities, we're going to see improved and interesting tests of gravity emerge alongside the increasingly-difficult problems of time-transfer at these levels of precision.

<comment><USER8> This was really interesting to read, thank you. The "a satellite would orbit the hill" and " direction of "down" parts of the comment, in particular, really helped understand/visualize what you were describing. Also, I immediately went into the next room and told my wife about it, because I thought it was that interesting. Thanks for chiming in.

<comment><USER7> Thanks -- it's so cool!

(We care about this difference-in-the-direction-of-down because we need to lock one of our turntables to "local vertical" with nanoradian stability. It was initially a surprise, before my time, when it was realized that it was impossible to do so simultaneously for two sensors on the same turntable but at different locations on the turntable axis.)

Also, if you think that's cool, depending on your latitude, the "down" you experience doesn't point in the direction of the center of the earth. The earth is rotating, so there is a substantial centrifugal contribution to the acceleration you experience. Off the top of my head, I believe the effect here in Seattle is about 14 milliradians. It is zero at the pole and equator (the apparent centrifugal acceleration makes you effectively lighter!), though :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> General info is available here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation)

</comment><comment><USER10> Does time run faster at night time when you are further away from the sun?

</comment><comment><USER11> > The scientists from RIKEN and their collaborators took up the task of > developing transportable optical lattice clocks that could make comparably > precise tests of relativity, but on the ground. The ultimate purpose, > however, is not to prove or disprove Einstein.

What they are testing is their ultraprecise clocks, not the theory of general relativity like the headline says.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but all of these things are always interlinked. It's entirely possible that the first deviation we ever find from general relativity will come in the form of just trying to make better and better clocks, but then finding some funny systematic effect that prevents different atomic clocks from properly syncing up, and then ruling out all other explanations. This kind of discovery is not without precedent in physics.</comment></comment>