The Economist's US college rankings - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university <comment><USER2> The concept of studying in Higher Education for more opportunities, job stability, and income during one's lifetime is not to be dismissed.

That said, if the predominant value of education is in the pursuit of money, then I think using the Brookings Institute model (which The Economist references) that includes two-year and vocational education entities is a much more pragmatic and practical approach. That is, if money is the goal, only focus on money as the outcome. Conflating money with prestige is, to me, foolish. A University is a prestige degree, insofar as there's a pursuit of knowledge, in theory, to produce a well-rounded, educated person...in theory.

I say this as a graduate of two generally highly ranked Universities, who occasionally gets the feeling that I'd be making more money if I'd taken my education budget, got trained in HVAC service/repair/sales, and started my own company.

<comment><USER3> Even if the predominant value of education is the pursuit of money, the Economist still has the more useful model. It allows you to differentiate between schools whose graduates make money because they are full of people who are going to try to make money, and schools that make money because the school brings something to the table that helps its graduates above other options.

Look at CalTech for example. It does well in the Brookings model because it attracts a lot of people who want to be engineers. It does poorly in The Economist's model because its engineers are not making as much in 10 years as would be expected given a variety of factors that they control for. (Now that said, CalTech may be hurt because they graduate a lot of people who take side tracks through grad school and presumably would make more 15-20 years out. But you have to work with the data you have, and all they had was 10 years.)

Now if I'm a student planning to go into engineering, the Brookings model merely confirms that I'm making an excellent choice. The Economist's model suggests that if I'm capable of going to CalTech, maybe that is not the best school for me.

<comment><USER2> After reading through your response, I believe you missed my point. What I was referring to is that for a large population of potential students - those who wish to simply make more than if they do not go to a higher education program - going to a two year or vocational path school is exceptionally smart. Leaving that out of consideration is...not smart...highly biased...as in, how many readers of The Economist would consider sending their kid to become a diesel mechanic?

From the research I've absorbed over the years, students that can afford to go to prestige universities often come from well-to-do, college educated families - these are high indicators of future success. For a much larger swath of the population that is trying to advance their stake in life, they are first- generation students, and often not well-served by taking on debt and attending a large University environment. Thus, many Universities are, practically speaking, very bad at ROI for a large contingent of students who simply want to make more money - vocational training? An excellent prospect.

What remains to be seen is how much more earning potential there is in professions that require vocational training to be licensed or successful (i.e. welding, machining, air traffic control, plumbing, electrical contracting) as the generation currently working retires / dies from the workforce, thereby spiking demand, and in fields where a "traditional" University degree are, well, useless.

<comment><USER3> Read the article again. The Economist controlled for a variety of factors. Family socioeconomic status was among them.

That said, one of the shortcomings of their metric is that they _only_ had data on students who took out federal loans. How predictive this result is for others is open to question.

<comment><USER2> Well, then, it's even more glaringly bad-form to leave out two-year and vocational schools from their approach then, if socioeconomic status is a factor, now isn't it? My perspective is yes, it's bad. It seems we'll just keep talking around each other, but I'll stand by my thumbs up toward the Brookings version and give the hairy eye to The Economist's method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This tool would be a lot more useful if it allowed for filtering by chosen course of study. For example, University of Washington has a median earnings that is slightly below expected, but I can pretty much guarantee that their computer science graduates are earning well above median.

<comment><USER5> That was my thought too, to make a simplistic example if a university had both say an engineering school and an art school, it might presumably do worse than a university with only an engineering school. So this metric might favor smaller, focused schools which happen to concentrate on education areas with high median salaries...

<comment><USER6> > So this metric might favor smaller, focused schools which happen to > concentrate on education areas with high median salaries...

I don't think that part's necessarily true. If a school focuses on an area with high median salaries, the model will take that into account in the predicted salaries, so the school will have to have even _higher_ actual salaries than typical for the field (and its input demographics, SAT scores, etc.) to get a positive value-add. See Caltech for an example of a STEM- focused school that does badly by this measure: from its SAT scores, demographics, and heavy concentration of STEM majors, the regression analysis predicts that it should produce graduates with a median salary of $82k. But the actual median is $74k, so its value-add is taken to be -$8k.

Some of the schools that do well are in areas with poor salaries, but score highly because they do better than you'd expect (or than the model would expect, anyway) for that area and student demographics. Otis College of Art and Design has a predicted salary of $29k from the regression analysis, but actual median is $42k, so implied value-add +$13k.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, having gone to Caltech, I suspect that its extreme focus on STEM research actually hurt it here. Mostly because that focus results in a very large portion of undergrads going on to grad school (much larger % than any other university), and grad students don't earn very much.

<comment><USER8> Hi there, Mike! Care to expound on any solutions to make Tech more industry oriented? Are there things you'd rather have been exposed to more in your undergrad education given where you're at now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something feels "off" about a methodology that basically ranks all of the "top" state schools as poor values.

Take the top-3 state schools in Virginia (by most other rankings, that's UVA, W&M, and VT). All three are nationally recognized. And all three are competitive that you need very good grades and a solid set of extra-curricular activities to be accepted.

UVA ranks the lowest of the three, yet has the highest actual earnings. VT is ranked significantly higher with the middle earnings value.

What does a student do with this? Cost of attendance at the three is similar. Should they attend VT with it's higher ranking, despite lower average earnings?

Similar comments can be made about UNC-CH, UW-Seattle, UT-Austin.

Also lacking from this analysis seems to be the loan burden borne by students. Georgetown and Villanova both rank very high in this list. But, both are insanely expensive to attend. Even with high actual earnings, it could take a decade or more for many students to pay off a potential six-figure loan.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the Economist's ranking can be used for choosing which school to attend. It tells you how good a job schools do at boosting the earnings of the people who attend there---conditioned on who attends. In other words, they tell you how much the school does for a typical member of its student body. But if you're not representative of that student body (and you certainly won't be representative at many of the schools, especially the outliers!), this will not tell you how much the school would do for you.

<comment><USER9> I guess I just find it extremely hard to believe almost all of the nations "top" state schools have a negative impact (actual earnings less than expected) on the students that attend.

Maybe I need to dig into the source of the expected earning figures. I'm definitely biased to some degree, being a graduate of one of the state schools with a poor ranking - I'm sitting here wondering where else I could have gone to get a better value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Income is a poor measure of college education. The problem is that the valuable benefits of college are difficult to quantify; income has importance and is quantifiable, so I understand the temptation to use it as a metric, but it doesn't represent of the values of a college. It's like using the number of lines of code as a metric to represent the value of a piece of code - it's quantifiable, significant in some ways, but not representative of the code's value.

I much prefer the Times Higher Education model, especially their reputation survey. They survey 10,000 tenured and published academics worldwide, using what looks like well-designed methodology [1]. These are people in a position to have expert knowledge about the qualities of various universities. Yes it's imperfect and those people have bias too, but I can't think of a better model:

[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university- rankin...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university- rankings/2015/reputation-ranking)

One excellent alternative is Washington Monthly's rankings. Their approach:

 _We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country)._ More here:

[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings-2015...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings-2015/national- universities-rank.php)

\----

[1] [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-reputation- rankin...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-reputation- rankings-2015-methodology)

</comment><comment><USER12> The methodology feels odd. The results are essentially just errors in their prediction model. They're assuming that the model errors represent the school's contribution to median income. They're also assuming that those contributions are normally distributed around zero with constant variance.

I understand why they made those assumptions but they're almost certainly not true, which isn't exactly ideal. Then again I can't quickly think of a better way to do it without more granular data. Maybe use a mixed effects model with multiple years of data from each school....

</comment><comment><USER13> There seems to be a major issue with cost-of-living adjustments as well. Several rather obscure California colleges are highly ranked, and I assume this is because both wages and costs are higher in California, where many of their graduates stay after college.

<comment><USER14> I'm not so sure. My generally-highly-regarded college in California (bay area, no less!) is almost bang-on average ($-33) despite being in a very high cost of living area.

<comment><USER14> To reply to myself, the comments include this mention from "DR" of The Economist:

\----- Geography (both city and state) are variables included in our model. Colleges in the Bay Area are not rewarded for the high salaries available there--they have to surpass a higher "bar" of expected earnings. That is why our eighth-ranked college is in West Virginia, and the ninth in Laredo, Texas. \</comment></comment></comment><comment>

Now, I don't know how they compensate for this. Cost of living at the place where the student ends up? Or where they study?

If you study in a high cost of living area but move to Podunk, Iowa, your return will be far lower than expected, if they're only controlling for CoL at the college's geographical location.

If they control for CoL at the student's new home, then okay.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Brookings study [1] mentioned by the the Economist offers this interesting analysis:

 _1\. Graduates of some colleges enjoy much more economic success than their characteristics at time of admission would suggest. Colleges with high value- added in terms of alumni earnings are often focused on training for high- paying careers in technical subjects. ...

2\. Four college quality factors are strongly associated with higher earnings for alumni:

Curriculum value: The amount earned by people in the workforce who hold degrees in a field of study offered by the college, averaged across all the degrees the college awards;

STEM orientation: The share of graduates prepared to work in STEM occupations;

Completion rates: The percentage of students finishing their award within at least 1.5 times the normal time (three years for a two-year college, six years for a four-year college);

Faculty salaries: The average monthly compensation of all teaching staff

3\. Value-added measures are fairly reliable over time. ..._

(Personally, I think the most valuable things gained in college or in any education don't happen to have much monetary value.)

[1] [http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2015/10/29-earnin...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2015/10/29-earnings- data-college-scorecard-rothwell)

<comment><USER15> > (Personally, I think the most valuable things gained in college or in any > education don't happen to have much monetary value.)

Well, someone does, because they're charging for it.

<comment><USER11> > Well, someone does, because they're charging for it.

Good point; I should have said, I don't think they are things that earn you money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, I'm glad my shitty school beat Yale (almost last) so handily. Really, I don't think they could have come up with a worse metric. If you simply took each school's equivalent of this:

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

...and just sorted it by # of entries, you'd have a far superior list.

</comment><comment><USER17> So basically, the methodology is that they do a very complex analysis of the student body to predict what their average earnings would be if they went to "college in general" and then compare that with what the graduates actually make.

There's one thing that jumps out at me when I see the actual rankings:

At least three of the eight schools that received a perfect 100 score -- W&L, Babson, and Bentley -- have a very, very high number of students who go to work for lucrative family businesses immediately upon graduation. In the case of W&L (which provides a great liberal arts education mind you) it's mostly southern good ol' boy/girl types. At Babson / Bentley (which provide great undergrad business educations), a huge chunk of the student body are the scions of the economic elite in developing countries, who are getting schooled up so they can be ready to be put in charge of something at a young age.

My hunch is that the Economist's "expected earnings" methodology wasn't granular enough to take these idiosyncratic attributes into account, and that its r-squared of .85 might not be a rigorous number.

<comment><USER3> Note that the data set they had only includes students who got federal loans. I strongly doubt that students who go to work for lucrative family businesses immediately upon graduation will be in the data set.

But having classmates who look like that seems to be a really good economic choice! Which is a factor that is not apparent in normal college rankings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is hilariously bad. Schools that produce academics as opposed to those who go into high-paying professions are penalized, when in fact (at many of the top institutions) producing academics is one of the main goals.

<comment><USER19> This is not bad. It is simply one of many possible ways to rank colleges.

<comment><USER20> But it is a serious flaw in the methodology. It says nothing about the quality of education or the boost in earnings that a college will provide, _if you are specifically going to a school to do so_. At the very least they need to somehow account for individuals that go to the top schools but aren't looking to go into lucrative careers.

CalTech is a common example being cited here. It is basically impossible to deny realistically that going to CalTech is a great way to make a lot of money. But it is in the bottom percentages of these rankings, likely because so many CalTech alumns go into academia.

The metric is supposedly showing which colleges can potentially increase your earnings the most, but it just isn't doing that. It's a great idea, it just hasn't been implemented fully.

<comment><USER8> I think the money thing is paralleling something else entirely - given the supposed caliber of student that comes into Caltech, is Caltech really making them better scientists than if they had gone elsewhere (or at least better scientists than they were turning out in the 1970s). That to me is a open question.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but Caltech students have some of the highest rates of going into academia. Which pays well on a general scale, but compared to where engineers and developers go onto it drags the stats down.

They do admit that the metric only gauges financial success and is imperfect when it comes to accounting for alternative priorities. But do you seriously believe that CalTech provides one of the worst "financial bumps" even accounting for the quality of their admissions? I find it incredibly hard to believe.

<comment><USER8> It's not at all clear that every Caltech student is going to be an engineer or developer. Recall Jim Simons getting booted out from Princeton because he sucked at programming?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This analysis doesn't make any sense to me. Even by their own intent (i.e., best added value based on salary), their methodology is nonsensical.

For example: Why should CalTech get hurt for being near L.A.? They're basically arguing that you're better off going to a school in the middle of nowhere because "hey, for being in such a crappy location, you did pretty well!". In an _absolute_ sense you are better off going to CalTech, it's just that they might not leverage their advantage as well as some other schools.

Not that they even show the last point -- it seems unlikely that the true model is linear (I'm guessing they used linear regression). For example, if the true model is closer to a sigmoid, then schools at the high end suddenly get unfairly penalized and schools near the low end get unfairly boosted.

Finally, the statistical indicators are equally misleading. I can obtain an R^2 of 1.0 just by including indicators I[is COLLEGE_NAME] for each college. While that might not give you significance, the point is that getting good prediction is meaningless.

I think what they really want is to restrict to predictors about the students. So, given that you're a straight A student with a 2400 SAT score, what would you expect to make coming out of each school? This at least tells me something about the added value to _me_ of going to a certain school. (This approach is still prone to bias, but in the opposite direction -- there's a chance that the straight A student with a 2400 SAT score going to community college may have been smart but unmotivated, which might correlate with lower salary.)

Edit: Here's another concern. They're claiming to have a model for "expected" earnings:

earnings = A * (college covariates) + b + error

but they can't distinguish between _model error_ (i.e., error because their model is misspecified) vs. the school variation that they are trying to capture.

<comment><USER22> > They're basically arguing that you're better off going to a school in the > middle of nowhere because "hey, for being in such a crappy location, you did > pretty well!".

Well, no, not exactly. It's a subtle distinction, but what it's actually ranking is how well that school _exceeds expectations_ , not _best outcomes_. This is not necessarily a list that will give a student the best school to go to, but rather (what it says on the tin) a scorecard for how well those schools are doing, given their resources.

<comment><USER21> That's my point -- who decides what _expectations_ are? Their results are incredibly dependent on the model specification. I imagine if they changed which indicators they used, the results would vary widely.

Here's another way to see my concern. Suppose you had a classifier that achieves 1.0 R^2; then since it _perfectly_ predicts each school's expected value, it'll assign each school a score of 0. I'm pretty suspicious of an approach where the results get worse with better predictive power.

Even if you want to do "exceeds expectations", I think you shouldn't include variables that are school specific, only variables that are student specific. In other words, for _my_ expected outcomes, which school is best?

<comment><USER23> > Suppose you had a classifier that achieves 1.0 R^2; then since it perfectly > predicts each school's expected value, it'll assign each school a score of > 0. I'm pretty suspicious of an approach where the results get worse with > better predictive power.

If I'm understanding correctly, that result would indicate a world where the college you attend has no effect on your earning power. ie. choose any college you want, because you'll earn the same amount regardless of which one you choose.

This would only apply to colleges that people in your demographic group actually attended though. If the dataset doesn't contain any information about people like you who went to Harvard, then maybe Harvard would indeed increase your earning potential if there was a way for you to actually go there.

<comment><USER21> I'm not saying that each college you attend has no effect on earning power. It's just that I can perfectly predict the effect of each college on your earning power. Does that make sense? If I have an oracle that tells you

"if you got to Harvard, you will make $80,000, if you go to MIT, you will make $86,000",

and the oracle is exactly correct, then under this model, The Economist assigns every college a score of 0.

<comment><USER24> I think you are missing the key ingredient in the analysis.

The Economist is attempting to build such an oracle via statistical regression. HOWEVER, the Oracle is intentionally limited in _input_ to a specific list of things: SAT scores, sex ratio, race breakdown, size, public or private, earning power in the city where it is located, etc.

The things that are _omitted_ constitute the actual value the University brings to the table: quality of teachers, instruction, organizations on campus, etc. (1)

So however far off the model is for two given Universities must be explained by all the missing inputs, i.e. largely how "good" the University is.

If the Oracle was able to perfectly predict your earning power given that limited set of inputs, then it would basically mean that a University is completely defined by SAT scores of students, sex ratio, race, etc. and there's absolutely no value they add or subtract beyond that. That was be a very, very interesting result. But you can see why it's unlikely.

Hopefully this makes sense?

(1) Of course it's possible that there are factors like "how many trees on campus" or "how many vowels are in the name" which might also affect earnings. But we can probably agree that it's less likely to be important than the aforementioned ones ("quality of instruction", etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know of a good diy college ranking system? One where you can pick that factors that actually matter to you. I'm always happy to see options other than U.S. News but I'd love to be able to tweak the algorithm myself.

I think these one size fits all rankings are all flawed by their inherent nature.

<comment><USER26> I made a simple DIY ranking system using the same College Scorecard data last week. Here you go: [http://bsudol.com/1PUPohk](http://bsudol.com/1PUPohk)

You can select which variables are important and how much, and it generates a top/bottom 50 list.

This was inspired by this article from NPR ([http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/21/441417608/the- new-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/21/441417608/the-new-college- scorecard-npr-does-some-math))

<comment><USER27> Submitted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480851)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If I were a prospective student interested in making a lot of money out of college, surely I'd still just follow this very simple model:

Take all the schools I could get into, look up their actual median earnings, and go to the one which is highest (let's ignore issues of cost of attendance).

If it turns out that the one which is highest isn't ranked high on this particular list, I don't see why that would suggest I still shouldn't pick that school. Imagine these are my options, for instance:

(A) A school with expected earnings of $90k and actual earnings of $75k.

(B) A school with expected earnings of $50k and actual earnings of $55k.

(B) will rank vastly higher than (A) in this study, but I'd pick (A) over (B) every time if I just wanted money.

In short, I don't actually see the value add here from this list. How am I supposed to act on these rankings? How are these rankings supposed to change any idea I might have about which school I should attend?

It seems if you want to know which school to attend based on earnings we already have much more reliable data for that: actual earnings data.

<comment><USER29> The problem with your method (which this analysis is attempting to although may not actually correct) is what if the difference in the actual earnings between the schools is due to quality of the students admitted into the school rather than the increase in the students earnings that the school causes. For example, if your options are

(A) A school that admits 1000 people with IQ of 200 who go on to earn an average of $100,000 and 100 people with IQ of 50 who go on to earn an average of $1,000

(B) A school that admits 100 people with IQ of 200 who go on to earn an average of $1,000,000 and 1000 people with IQ of 50 who go on to earn an average of $10,000

(A) has median earnings of $100,000 while (B) has median earnings of $10,000, so by your criteria (A) is much better. However, (B) has much better outcomes for both groups of students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > _" The government generated the numbers by matching individuals' student- > loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to > compare pupils' qualifications and demographic characteristics when they > entered college with their salaries ten years later."_

So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of money, and the schools that have the lowest expected student contribution.)

> _"...based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a > university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, > and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere."_

If we are only to look at financial incentives, a more reasonable analysis would be to compare the expected future earnings _distribution_ as opposed to just a central tendency statistic like the median.

<comment><USER31> > So the dataset excludes students who do not apply for loans? (i.e., this > analysis penalizes schools who admit the folks most likely to make lots of > money, and the schools that have the lowest expected student contribution.)

It penalizes (or at a minimum, undersamples in a nonrepresentative way) schools with their own, non-loan, aid programs.

This probably very badly hurts schools like Caltech, since it means that there (unless Caltech no longer has the essentially full-coverage need-based aid they had when I went -- unsuccessfully, I graduated elsewhere) they are _only_ counting people who are making the unwise choice of taking loans when they have no need given their current resources.

That this will skew the data badly should be obvious.

<comment><USER8> Axlines were suspended some time ago, I think they are still proactive with need based aid but I think with their tuition skyrocketing they can't possibly be as gracious as they once were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am a proud alumnus of Rice University and I see that it is on page 64, fifth from the bottom. Also, even more surprisingly, very near the bottom is Caltech.

This is obviously wrong. If their methodology says that Caltech is in the bottom 2% of US colleges, then one concludes that their methodology is worthless, or at least that what it's predicting is not very closely related to the quality of the education provided. I suspect that many Caltech undergraduates decide to pursue grad school and academia, which is not an especially lucrative career, and which is probably not highly corrolated with political leftism or "reefer madness".

I can also tell you that my friends at Rice who were looking to make a lot of money after they graduated, by and large succeeded.

In summary: Bullshit.

<comment><USER33> > _This is obviously wrong._

"The analysis goes against my gut feeling, therefore it's wrong."

Did you bother to read the article?

 _The Economist's first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its graduates earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere._

That's what they did, and those were the results. They even say it's debatable. Using a different analysis or metric, the results would be different.

> _In summary: Bullshit._

As opposed to the anecdotes regarding your Alma Mater and rich friends.

<comment><USER28> I think he has a point, though. This study doesn't seem to control for an incredibly important variable: student interests.

If one school tends to attract students interested in making a lot of money, and another school tends to attract students interested more in academics and graduate school, can one really conclude that the former adds more value? Perhaps, but certainly not without taking into account the different student interests and inclinations towards money-making.

They do control for field of study, but I don't think this is sufficient. A school that attracts a lot of STEM majors who go to graduate school instead of industry is pretty much going to get destroyed in this study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would be very cool if you could sort by percentage differential between the over/under and expected earnings. I think sorting by that parameter would produce some really interesting results.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. Ranking by raw dollar values means that schools in very expensive areas (or that feed into very expensive areas) will have exaggerated scores and end up either really highly ranked or really low.

Another interesting study would be to see whether a child's college attendance correlates with a better or worse standard of living from their parents'. Maybe look at Father's salary at age 30 and child's salary at age 30, and see if the attended college is significant. The question being: If you're born rich, you tend to stay rich, and if you're born poor, you tent to stay poor. Does college choice matter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Going to plug Professor Lauren Rivera's book again. [1]

It stresses how school ranking are part of the system reducing economic mobility.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691155623/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691155623/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0691155623&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwocfberkele-20&linkId=3TSKTACWO3KICFOR)

</comment><comment><USER37> My university asked for my earnings only one time. The categories maxed out at 70k+. They might be higher on that list if they took a more precise survey.

<comment><USER10> The data used here does not come from the universities, but from the government. Specifically, from matching federal student loan applications (from the Department of Education) to tax returns (from the IRS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The data makes more sense if you sort by expected earnings or median earnings and then compare within localized clusters of universities. For example, MIT and Caltech have similar expected earnings, but MIT wins on median earnings.

</comment><comment><USER39> Would love to get hold of csv or api to see state wide university data.

</comment><comment><USER40> If a college has a huge communications program and a smaller engineering program, it would be ranked less because of pay disparities. This methodology is simply inaccurate

</comment><comment><USER41> i tried to look up several four-year U.S. institutions just now, including one major research university, and none were in the list.

from the article, apparently they excluded universities when the scorecard dataset was missing one or more factors; it would be useful if the tool at least showed the university anyway as a placeholder and indicated what data was missing.</comment>


20% of Yelp reviews are fake - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/20-of-yelp-reviews-are-fake-2013-09-24 <comment><USER2> 20% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews.

When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast.

When you combine that with organizations like Blackwaterops.com (my old company) that used to do 1000s of reviews a day. 20% is really low, and wrong.

<comment><USER3> Just out of curiosity, do those "reputation management" companies realize that in serving their clients by making fake reviews, they help destroy end- consumer trust?

In many ways, it's the old SEO argument all over again - gaming a system to increase ratings eventually erodes trust in that system, making those increased ratings less valuable. At the same time, refusing to game the system means your business loses potential eyeballs/customers/etc, so one is left with the old rock vs hard place situation.

<comment><USER2> I don't do reputation management anymore. Now I build tools to do real reputation analysis, and fight the very things I used to do. I'm like Darth Vader in the last few moments of his life... Only I plan to live a long while.

At Stremor.com we have technology that "breaks" SEO so we have better search results at [http://www.samuru.com](http://www.samuru.com) than you would have using link authority. We have tech that can detect writing styles to tell that 6 reviews all came from the same person. We can do this for things like YELP or Amazon product reviews. We also do this to detect web content that was a Paid Review.

<comment><USER4> so can I pass Samuru a link to a particular Amazon product and it'll tell me how many of the reviews have a similar writing style therefore possibly being fake?

<comment><USER3> That would be an interesting service to provide. More data points for companies (x people were interested enough to check reviews with us) and end- consumers get a better feeling for the reviews. I'm not sure how you'd turn a profit with it, unless the data points for companies prove valuable enough. I also don't know how you'd keep from turning such a service into yet another system to be gamed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 20% figure represents the percentage of filtered reviews on Yelp. These are reviews that Yelp finds suspicious enough to not publish. Some filtered reviews may be fake, and some might just be false positives. Similarly, Yelp's filter might miss some fake reviews, and end up publishing them. (See [http://www.yelp.com/faq#filter_wrong](http://www.yelp.com/faq#filter_wrong)). I hope this makes the distinction between fake and filtered clear.

Our main goal with this paper was to analyze the economic incentives behind review fraud, and for this we used filtered reviews as a proxy for fake reviews. bobf provides a good summary of our key findings so I won't repeat them. For those interested, you can read more here: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2293164)

<comment><USER6> Wow, that is _dramatically_ different than what the headline suggests. The "20% are fake" headline implies "20% of _visible_ reviews", but instead I'm hearing you say, "20% of reviews are killfiled before visibility."

<comment><USER7> That's exactly my read.

And, it's not just the headline. Consider the following:

> _A Yelp spokeswoman says its software helps filter many fakes before most > users get to read them._

When combined with the headline, that really makes it sound like two discrete groups: the fake 20% that make it to Yelp, vs. the "many" that are filtered before making it to Yelp.

The difference is so vast that the headline now feels like link-bait.

<comment><USER8> yelp!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Argh, I am so sick of seeing this article. From the _study_ , 16% of all Yelp posts are _identified by Yelp as fake_ , _hidden from view_ , and _not counted into a business 's average score_.

This tells us _nothing_ about the percentage of non-removed Yelp reviews that are fake, because all non-removed reviews are assumed, in the data, to be real.

This is linkbait and a complete misrepresentation of the data.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with you about the title of the article, it is not true at all that "all non-removed reviews are assumed, in the data, to be real." In fact, in our analysis we explicitly allow for the filter misclassifying reviews (that is to say filtering real reviews, or publishing fakes.)

<comment><USER9> Sorry about my imprecise wording. I wasn't intending to criticize your study, which did acknowledge potential misclassifications (and was very interesting and deserves attention on its own merits).

I'm criticizing MW's interpretation, which assumed that your proxy was very accurate in terms of providing the proportion of fake reviews, but went on to imply that your proxy was highly _inaccurate_ by talking about fake but visible reviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion here about the accuracy of the 20% figure, but that actually doesn't seem as important as the other findings from the research this article cites ("Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud", [http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf](http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf)).

The interesting points from the research include:

1) Low ratings increase incentives for positive review fraud, and high ratings decrease them.

2) Having more reviews reduces incentives for positive review fraud.

3) Chain restaurants leave fewer positive fake reviews.

4) Businesses who have "claimed" their Yelp page have more interest in Yelp and therefore are suspected as being more likely to commit review fraud.

5) Negative fake reviews are likely posted by competitors, and show little correlation to changes in average ratings over time.

6) An increase in competition encourages negative review fraud.

<comment><USER10> I would call all of those points extremely obvious and hardly worth a whole study.

If you have low ratings, of course you're tempted to get some fake positive reviews. If you have a lot of reviews, adding a few positive ones will not affect the overall score much--it's a drop in the bucket. Chain restaurants, well, everyone knows what McDonald's is, what would they gain from posting fake reviews?

Businesses that claim their Yelp page have more interest in Yelp? Shouldn't it be the other way around, businesses who have decided they're interested in Yelp will claim their page? Claiming your Yelp page is a sign that you care; businesses that do not care about Yelp will not commit review fraud.

Who else would post negative fake reviews but competitors? I guess reputation management companies could post negative fake reviews in an attempt to drum up business.

An increase in competition encourages more negative fake reviews? I mean, if a business has no competitors, who has an interest in posting fake reviews? This ties to #5, where competitors are the ones who post negative reviews. More competitors, more fraud.

<comment><USER11> It's nice that these points seem obvious to you, but until you have data and a sound statistical analysis, people won't have any reason to believe them. Lots of "obvious things" turn out to be true, but lots turn out to be false too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whenever my dad and I are looking for a place to eat I pull up Yelp. He grumbles about the possibility of fake reviews, but I tell him that as long as you look at the sample size (n=25 or more is usually safe) then you shouldn't have a problem. I've found amazing restaurants (and many other services) through Yelp that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Sure, there have been times where I've eaten at a highly-rated restaurant and thought to myself that there must have been some positive review fraud at work. At the end of the day I have tried something new, and I still have my whole life ahead of me to try other things. Nothing is forcing me to go back to said restaurant. And I generally leave a review questioning the merits of the establishment.

The positives of Yelp outweigh the negatives and the NYC regulation is a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER13> Here we go, a good example of an astroturfing comment about Yelp on HN.

<comment><USER14> Dunno about that, but it would certainly be part of the 20% of filtered reviews if it was a review on Yelp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone really go by the star ratings on Yelp? I read the reviews but I don't pay any attention to the overall ratings. One of my favorite places to go is a 2-star, and our local Outback is rated a 5.

Plus with the fact that there's no standard, some people rate everything a 4 or 5 star while others reserve a 5 star for the best places in the area (or even the genre) to eat.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I know is true: I've reviewed many places, yelp 'filters' my reviews as fake even though they are legitimate. So 20% of the ones they don't filter are fake, but several of the ones they do filter aren't fake? Sounds like the site is just fake.

<comment><USER17> Same here for some of my positive reviews. My one negative review? Went live and stayed live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yelp exists basically because it shows up in Google search results.

Google should be promoting sites that provide value to their users.

Considering the quality of Yelp, I really don't think they should be showing up in the search results.

However, it would take a huge culture change at Google for Yelp to stop showing up in search results, IMO. Even if the quality of their reviews continues to degrade.

</comment><comment><USER19> I run a small review site and have to deal with issues surrounding fake reviews all the time. Every now and then someone makes a rookie mistake and it gets picked up by my system and automatically filtered but as the years have gone on, I've found people are becoming better at gaming us.

I believe there is value in reviews, especially at a local level; I've found out about some really great local businesses based on the reviews but I'm so tired of people trying to game us. I'm tired of business owners who would rather argue with me for months on end and threaten legal action to have a totally legitimate negative review removed, or have their friends post glowing reviews, rather than just providing a good service and recognising they can't please everyone.

I wish there was a sure fire way of determining a persons intention when they write a review but it's impossible, so this problem will remain unsolved.

<comment><USER20> Make it more _expensive_ by having video reviews? I suspect people are better at detecting lies in people than they are in a block of text.

I guess this is what YouTube is for...

<comment><USER19> Not a bad idea actually but even at that, there are plenty of video reviewers getting paid to review things and one could be none the wiser.

<comment><USER21> I would never sit around to watch one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was offered a hotel discount if I posted a (good) review for the place. Just another source of biased commentary.

<comment><USER23> You could review them and say they offered a good discount with everybody saving face and you between the lines writing that the discount was the only thing worth mentioning about the place ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another problem I've seen with Yelp is reviews that aren't actually for the intended place. My father-in-law owns a few restaurants. One of them has >300 reviews (solid 4 stars), but shares part of its' name with another restaurant with >1500 reviews (3.5 stars, with a heavy downward trend).

Most reviews posted for his restaurant are either 4 or 5 stars, with the majority of lower reviews referencing the other restaurant either by name, menu items, or decor. I'm not sure if the issue is one of UI design, mobile app, or poor search handling - although I heavily suspect search is the culprit.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to address these mis-posted reviews, that I've seen. I would love to hear any suggestions that would help though.

<comment><USER24> Change your name. Seriously. Even without Yelp, you don't want potential customers hearing via word of mouth about how bad your restaurant was when it really was the one down the street.

Names are relatively cheap to change and if you select a name that is related (like say, shortening it or incorporating part of the old name in the new one) and communicate what is going on with regulars, you'll limit any short-term decline in business.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but I don't foresee it happening. They've been there for >10 years, and have been very successful. The name isn't actually similar, and they're in very different parts of the city. There generally doesn't seem to be any real confusion except for a few Yelp reviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Actually, that's far far smaller than I expected. That means that 80% are legit?

<comment><USER26> That depends on what they consider "fake". It looks like "Operation Clean Turf" only considered reputation management companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've found that Foursquare has a higher signal-to-noise than Yelp for restaurant reviews/tips.

<comment><USER28> I find the same thing. I think the difference is that since 4sq is soliciting tips instead of reviews, they're harder to convincingly game. If I'm looking for a restaurant in an unfamiliar city and see "definitely try the squash risotto with balsamic drizzled" that means a lot more to me than "everything here was yummy!" Without a star rating to game with 1- or 5-star reviews, there's less noise to sift through.

That said, I assume that their 0.0-10.0 ratings they introduced a few months ago are basically random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _" There is one site where users share opinions with greater transparency than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world's biggest social-networking site prohibits the use of fake names."_

Uh, I don't really think Facebook's real name policy has any effect here (it's policy is actually a lot weaker than Google in practice afaik). I do think people share their real opinion on Facebook more often but I think that's because of Facebook's huge audience. People basically want to share their real opinions with their real friends (not necessarily their friends there under real name). And people don't really have that many opinions about just plain products. And when people do, they mostly feel kind of sleazy sharing those opinions with the world for commercial purposes. Facebook is always trying to get people to integrate their socializing with advertising/commercial- recommendations but it has been unsuccessful and would probably start to truly lose users if it really forced people's hands.

The problem is most people care so little about the products they buy that they'd rather not write a review. That's unlikely to change.

</comment><comment><USER30> My father-in-law is a veterinarian, and he got a call one day from a Yelp advertising sales person, who made it clear that if he didn't buy advertising from them, negative reviews would start showing up. So I just treat Yelp as legal extortion.

</comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately, not to use Yelp as a business is not an option according to [https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions](https://biz.yelp.com/support/common_questions):

 _I 'm a business owner and don't want my business to be listed on Yelp — can I have it removed from Yelp?_

 _Consumers have the right to talk about what they like (and don 't like) about a meal they ate, a plumber they hired, or a car wash they visited. We don't remove business listings, so your best bet is to engage with your fans and critics alike, and hear what they have to say._

</comment><comment><USER32> anyone who considers this news hasn't hang around freelancing sites. You can pay $10 for 20 yelp reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> The real news is that NY state is prosecuting fake paid reviews as fraud, the WSJ is reporting on it, and that HBS released a study with quantification of it. Also, this is another sign that the "Wild West" days of the Internet have ended.

<comment><USER32> "20% of Yelp reviews are fake" is what is being presented by the author as 'real news'.

If he wanted to go your way as the 'real news' he would have headlined it sometime like: "NY state starts prosecuting fake Yelp reviews" or something along those lines.

<comment><USER33> Two days ago

[http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/24/new-york-uses-fake- yogurt-...](http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/24/new-york-uses-fake-yogurt-shop- to-catch-fake-online-reviewers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I recently posted 2 reviews on Yelp (I'm not very active on it; this was probably my 2nd and 3rd ever). I gave rave reviews for both. One is filtered, one is not. I see a 50% failure rate in filtering, from my extremely small sample size. Oh, and one of them was in NYC (the non-filtered one). The filtered one, well the chef knows who I am, since I said the same thing to him at dinner that I posted in the review.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately that behavior pattern is exactly one that abusive users exhibit as well: innocuous review, long delay, glowing review of "target" business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It doesn't matter. Over time, the value of all un-curated reviews approaches zero. One of the oldest review platforms, IMDB, being the prime example of this.

I don't often agree with Nicholas Carr, but in this particular case, the wisdom of the crowds fails miserably, with or without astroturfing.

</comment><comment><USER36> > There is one site where users share opinions with greater > transparency > than Yelp or Google: Facebook. The world's > biggest social-networking site > prohibits the use of fake > names.

Facebook isn't that transparent. You can't scrape Facebook.

<comment><USER37> And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that 20% of Facebook profiles are fake. About 80% of the friend requests I've received over the last year have been from people I don't know; the majority of which are clearly bots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Anyone want to speculate on what percentage of Angie's List reviews are fake? On one hand you have to pay to leave a review. On the other hand, Angie's List gets paid if a business registers twenty fake accounts to post fake reviews.

</comment><comment><USER39> Flagged - The headline is VERY misleading. Read the comments from the co- author. 20% of reviews are voluntarily filtered by Yelp. Though the issue is certainly real.

</comment><comment><USER40> I predict that more than 20% of these comments will think more than 20% of reviews are fake.

</comment><comment><USER41> Lol and what about Amazon?!

</comment><comment><USER42> 20% seems surprisingly low.

</comment><comment><USER8> You do all realize this is major publicity for yelp, right? yelp!

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow. Only 20%?

</comment><comment><USER43> If you want to write a good fake review, make sure you trash the place on small things first.

small bar...lighting was too low...but great food and service

;-)</comment>


HN: If your CEO can't use your product, your company is doomed - <AUTHOR>

No exception, whatever your CEO might tell you. <comment><USER2> Is this directed at a specific company, or are you just stating this generally? Some details as to why you believe this might be nice.

Suppose I'm the CEO of a company that makes fighter jets for the military...

<comment><USER3> If the CEO can't use the product, they need to rely on others to - 1.) Communicate accurately the state of the product (is it good, why is it bad) 2.) Also communicate effectively both down (employees) and outwardly (partners, press, customers) the product direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not a big fan of the "rely on others" argument. There is only one maestro is a orchestra. Obviously, a good maestro with bad musicians won't be heard for long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually, if you are making fighter jets, and if your CEO isn't a retired ex- air force brass, then you'd better be damn sure that your sales force are. I can't imagine an ex-newspaper tycoon having much luck selling fighter jets to the Pentagon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point as well. The problem is that too many exec thinks that they do not need domain expertise because they can "rent" it.</comment></comment>


Mistakes Entrepreneurs Will Make In 2013  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/01/15/8-major-mistakes-entrepreneurs-will-make-in-2013/

<comment><USER2> Although I don't have any qualms with the subject matter, the manner in which articles like these are presented make me wanted to gag. They are obviously titled and worded to attract link-bait attention.

Don't tell me what mistakes I will make. You don't know me or my business, nor can you read the future. Why not, "Potential pitfalls to avoid as an entrepreneur in 2013".

</comment><comment><USER3> Link bait.</comment>


US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths - <AUTHOR> http://cepr.net/press-center/press-releases/report-finds-us-sanctions-on-venezuela-are-responsible-for-tens-of-thousands-of-deaths <comment><USER2> It is easy to be shills for Marxism and blame the United States, but such blame is hollow. Venezuela is in its dire condition because it, like its Russian, Cuban, and Chinese allies, is led by a Mafia pretending to be a government.

I hope Mauduro's government can follow the Soviet path and fail, so the Venezuelan people may have a chance to establish self governance instead of a dictatorship.</comment>


Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret - <AUTHOR> https://www.toptal.com/cross-platform/haxe-language-cross-platform <comment><USER2> We used Haxe for a while at my last company for a cross-platform engine that would actually run well on web (browsers couldn't yet handle "real" Unity WebGL builds at that time).

While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline and available tools for OpenFL / Haxe games was lacking at best.

On the plus side being able to fork and fix issues we ran into was a game changer over Unity IMO.

Not sure if the ecosystem has evolved / improved on the build and tooling fronts in the last 18 months since I last interacted with it directly, but that would be the one word of caution I'd offer to anyone after they read this article. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get a little dirtier than usual if you really intend to ship on both web and mobile.

<comment><USER3> OpenFL's matured a bit since then and I quite like it personally, though I should point out that OpenFL is simply one of many libraries, and the rest are worth checking out, too! OpenFL's probably the most well known but the ecosystem has a lot to offer beyond that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest thing that interests me about Haxe is it is rare to find a high- level language with a sophisticated static type system and familiar syntax. This is why TypeScript is so much beloved, but Haxe has some awesome features TypeScript lacks, like a pattern-matching switch statement (with guards), and array comprehensions.

<comment><USER5> And don't forget the macro preprocessor, it's made life a lot easier for me in so many ways. Syntax sugar, automatic asset inclusion, compiling tasks, and much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used Haxe years ago to make Flash games and tech demos [1] (probably only works with Chrome these days). At the time it was the only free way to create Flash games (at least using an actual programming language) but even when Adobe released some free tools, Haxe was still not only much faster as a compiler but it both produced faster code _and_ provided tools for making things fast (e.g. `inline` wasn't just a hint, if the compiler couldn't inline a function it would error out - and inlining made a difference at the time).

Eventually i lost interest in Flash and moved on to other things. I thought about using Haxe for making HTML5 games (when those were new), but unlike Flash gaming that was huge, HTML5 gaming never took off and was almost entirely about mobile games that i never cared much about. Also Haxe's JavaScript output at the time had some significant overhead that i found it simpler to just write JS directly.

I've been subscribed to the Haxe mailing list for the last 10 or so years, mainly to take a peek at what is going on and sometimes try a new version (sadly it seems Haxe is sometimes breaking backwards compatibility and often found the code needing changes), but that ended recently with the mailing list shutting down. Since then i had no other contact with the language at all.

Although sometimes i see people writing "one-to-many" transpilers, thinking that this is a neat new idea, while i'm in my corner muttering something along the lines "Haxe did that a decade ago" :-P.

[1] [http://runtimeterror.com/tech/demo/flashdemos.html](http://runtimeterror.com/tech/demo/flashdemos.html)

<comment><USER7> The mailing list has been decommissioned in favor of the Haxe community site : [https://community.haxe.org/](https://community.haxe.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using Haxe over a decade, and it's really a shame it doesn't get more attention. The language is amazingly productive for game development, although lacking the GUI tools of Unity.

</comment><comment><USER9> It might be time to try Haxe. I've always wondered why it doesn't get a lot of buzz around it. It seems like a genuinely good way to achieve "write once, run anywhere."

It's always interesting how the chicken-and-egg problem applies to programming languages.

<comment><USER10> Its a nice language though some of the output is weird. Like I did a PHP target as a test and I think I did a print statement and it added a lot of code in there when i was expecting a simple echo or something. So it can have its downsides depending on what you do. Definitely curious where it stands for Mobile though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder, did you have the "dead code elimination" feature enabled? (Just throwing it out there. I haven't tried transpiling to PHP with it myself. :) )

<comment><USER10> Not sure, this was many years back but if it wasn't a default it's very likely I didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used Haxe and NME years ago to build an Ouya (RIP) game. I was coming from actionscript and it was a delightful language. Glad to see it's still evolving. That game project was a blur of haxe, java, and c++ due to Ouya's infancy and haxe could handle it all. I was impressed

</comment><comment><USER12> Popular Ludum Dare contestant 01010111 has made some slick 48-hour games in Haxe.[1] Even winning the compo once too.

From what I've seen Haxe has a lot of great features for individual game developers to be expressive.

[1] [http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/01010111/](http://ludumdare.com/compo/author/01010111/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to chime in and add that I've had to rebuild an entire Visual Programming Language (think Scratch, but free of text) to migrate away from Flash. I picked Haxe, and it has been a solid language+compiler for what I needed (transpile to JS, and now my code runs on any modern browser).

</comment><comment><USER14> Like I did a few years ago, I quickly browsed through some of the sites and didn't find solid quick start stuff needed to get me (a haxe noob) to go further.

For a 'mature' platform looking to get more attention I would have liked an easy step-by-step demo 'hello world' for a haxe -> android target.

But, I couldn't even find much in the way of haxe-for-dummies that specifically address the android target.

<comment><USER15> Oh, but, if you have wine or some virtualization software you can run quickly get started using 'haxedevelop'...

I guess it's not that multi-platform, after all.

<comment><USER16> Sure, or vscode, vim, IntelliJ, sublime. There are a ton of options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is haxe used for anything other than games? The userbase seems to have a focus on flash, games etc.

<comment><USER18> I've used it for web (my failed startup was in Haxe, my side projects still are mostly Haxe).

To be honest these days I mostly just use it as a "better JavaScript" because I'd prefer my backend to be NodeJS rather than PHP or Java or sone other Haxe target. But I really do prefer it to JavaScript, even with Babel and Flow and ES6 and all the things to modernise Js.

<comment><USER13> Same here. It's a "better Javascript" for me as well. My constraints force me to use JS for what I'm building, and Haxe does a great job of insulating me from having to write and maintain a large codebase in JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been using Haxe for a webgame project and thus far have been blown away by the functionality and features available as well as the community.

</comment><comment><USER19> The language is awesome, heavily inspired by EcmaScript4 / ActionScript3.

</comment><comment><USER20> Amanita Design should have used Haxe instead of dead Adobe Air for their games.</comment>


Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing? (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://waitbutwhy.com/table/why-is-there-something-instead-of-nothing <comment><USER2> I struggled with this--then I realized the question is flawed. The question presumes the default is _nothing_.

What if the default is _everything_?

In other words, there's no reason for the universe to be any one thing, including "nothing" so it is simply everything--every possibility that could be, is. Every combination of matter, every type of rules, or sequence of possibilities that can be, exists, all in infinite quantities. We just happen to exist in one possibility with conscious matter able to observe our small corner of the infinity of possibilities.

<comment><USER3> > What if the default is everything?

said slightly differently, maybe the default is "anything"

if there is no reason for there to be "something" then there is also no reason for there to be "nothing"

and (please correct me if i am wrong) it seems that according to quantum physics, the default state of space is just random noise

so i would aslo concur, its a flawed question starting from an unproven premise (default = nil)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are trying to answer this question with our minds, so how we think about the question and if it can be answered will depend on how we think about our minds.

If you take the scientific position that are mental processes are the produce of material brains produced through natural forces, you will believe our thinking is limited in power, like anything material. And that being the case, at some point the mind will run into questions it cannot answer, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing would seem to be that sort of question. And if you think of the problem that way then you will just accept the mystery and go on to thinking about matters where your mind might make some useful progress.

If you think our minds are the product of a God that understands everything, but made human minds limited, then you will also accept the mystery.

On the other hand, if you hold, as in Platonism or Hindu mysticism, that the mind is non-material and one with the Infinite, then you will likely believe that humans who grow spiritually enough can at some point come to understand why reality exists.

I think the waitbutwhy guy is philosophically in the first position but hasn't thought it out logically yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Marvin Minsky had an interesting take on this. His attitude was that ours is one possible world, but that possibility is all it takes. Imagine a computer program. It executes, it processes data and it produces output, but running the program doesn't change the fact of its existence, or its result. Given that program and input the output was always going to happen, simply instantiating it didn't change anything about the program or it's behaviour. So with any universe, a possible universe simply exists.

Personally I find the zero energy universe concept pretty interesting. It turns out that the net energy of the universe is probably zero. This is possible because gravitational energy in the curvature of space is negative. If this is true, and it seems it is, then in terms of quantum mechanics there's nothing to stop the universe from emerging from a net zero energy random fluctuation. But then a fluctuation of what? Well quantum fields are simply probability distributions. Maybe everything in the universe simply boils down to the possibilities expressed in a set of consistent probabilistic mathematical structures.

</comment><comment><USER6> As it says in the article, it's _the_ question. But a clue is that to even ponder the question, there has to be something. If there really was _nothing_ , you wouldn't have noticed.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Why Does The World Exist?" is a fun book-length tour of the various ways people try to answer this question.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think it's necessarily a given that nothingness is even an option.</comment>


Our Alien DNA - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygrail.com/Essays/2014/7/Our-Alien-DNA <comment><USER2> Interesting read from a historical perspective, but the idea of a message hidden in DNA is far fetched to me - DNA is subject to the effects of evolution and mutation which seem to me would make any message unrecognizable after a billion years.

<comment><USER3> Presumably, a sufficiently evil entity could Reed-Solomon or otherwise erasure-code a message that could survive a long time.

But yeah, the analyses listed in the article are laughably naive.</comment></comment>


Learn to use Awk with hundreds of examples - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processing/blob/master/gnu_awk.md <comment><USER2> I would also recommend the good awk blog post series of Jonathan Palardy:

      * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/
      * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-1/
      * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-2/
      * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-3/

<comment><AUTHOR> glanced a bit, looks good.. will add it to further reading section, thanks :)

has some minor issues though

> modern (i.e. Perl) regular expressions

nope, supports only ERE.. doesn't have non-greedy, lookarounds, etc

> $ cat netflix.tsv | awk '{printf "%s %15s %.1f\n", $1, $6, $5}' | sed 1d

could have just added NR>1 condition..

<comment><USER3> Not to mention that awk takes filename arguments, so this is an egregiously useless use of cat.

<comment><USER4> From the second post,

> Alternatively, awk '{print $2}' netflix.tsv would have given us the same > result. For this tutorial, I use cat to visually separate the input data > from the AWK program itself. This also emphasizes that AWK can treat any > input and not just existing files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use sed & awk all the time. It is an invaluable tool while debugging issues, extracting fields from log files etc. I am not dissing python or perl, I use python extensively as well. But while you are in the middle of an incident, hard to beat a quick oneliner, like this random example.

awk -F":" 'BEGIN{total=0}{if($3>240)total+=$3}END{print total}' /etc/passwd

<comment><USER6> >>> I use sed & awk all the time.

Me too. For example, number of unique IP requests in a log file in milliseconds ;)

$ awk '{ print $1 } ' caddy_log | sort | uniq | wc -l

But rarely compose my own from scratch. It's mostly copy paste. And store in admin bin for future use.

<comment><AUTHOR> No need so many commands :)

        $ cat duplicates.txt
        abc  7   4
        food toy ****
        abc  7   4
        test toy 123
        good toy ****

        $ awk '!seen[$2]++' duplicates.txt
        abc  7   4
        food toy ****

        $ awk '!seen[$2]++{cnt++} END{print +cnt}' duplicates.txt
        2

<comment><USER3> On a large file with many duplicates, seen[x]++ can overflow, unless you're using GNU Awk with bignums (gawk -M).

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a good point

I'll add a note, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While we're on the subject, let's not forget to avoid parsing HTML with regex: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match- open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags- except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454)

<comment><USER8> Generally good advice, but can be OK in specific situations where you have a known HTML structure and are just scraping some values out of it. This is not so much parsing HTML as it is matching the patterns of the values you want to extract.

<comment><USER7> the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮omes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> awk1line.txt is the original and still one of the absolute de-facto best awk references with examples:

[http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt](http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt)

<comment><USER10> The best reference is "The AWK programming language" by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan.

<comment><USER11> Which is available at the archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/pdfy- MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7](https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering:

Does awk really provide that more value over sed while being easier or faster to use than a fully-fledged scripting language (thinking of perl, python, etc).?

(and yes, one may argue that awk IS a scripting language, I'm not disputing that, just asking)

<comment><USER10> AWK is a programming language. In the AWK book by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan, towards the end of the book they implement an arbitrary assembler, the virtual processor and a virtual machine for the machine code they just invented to run. They also implement a relational database management system in AWK, as well as an autoscale graphing solution.

I myself have implemented XML SOAP command line client, a backup solution, a SAN UUID management application and an automated Oracle RAC SAN storage migration solution, a configuration management, and an Oracle database creation / management applications in AWK.

Usually I develop a thin getopts shell wrapper around an AWK core. Works every time, the executables are on the order of a few KB (the largest so far, the XML SOAP client is 24.5 KB) and they all run like a bandit. Memory requirements are miniscule. Dependencies are minimal: the only external dependency so far in my software has been the xsltproc binary from the libxslt package.

AWK is easier to use than Python or Perl, and is much faster than either of those. Typical code density ratio of Python versus AWK is 10:1, sometimes more. This means that if you have a 650 line Python program, you can implement the same functionality in about 280 lines of AWK, and the program will be far simpler. I've once collapsed a 280+ line Python program into a simple 15 lines of code in AWK.

AWK is an extremely versatile, powerful programming language.

For even more speed, AWKA can be used to transpile AWK source into C and then it will call an optimizing C compiler to compile it into a binary executable. Typical speedup is on the order of 100%, so if your AWK program ran in 12 seconds, it'll now finish in six.

<comment><USER13> """Typical code density ratio of Python versus AWK is 10:1, sometimes more. This means that if you have a 650 line Python program, you can implement the same functionality in about 280 lines of AWK, and the program will be far simpler. I've once collapsed a 280+ line Python program into a simple 15 lines of code in AWK."""

How does this work? I am not saying it can't be done, but the main benefit of Awk seems to be quick one-liners, which are possible because you get "records" (splitting on whitespace) and lines (splitting on newline) and looping for free. But for larger programs, this easily translates to Python; just call readlines(), loop over it, call split() on each line. I would think that at this point, Awk doesn't have much of an advantage anymore... but apparently your experiences are different. What are some Awk constructs that would take a lot more code in Python?

<comment><USER14> Every pattern being matched to every line can be a big win in more complex processing. This is a simple but familiar example:

         seq 1 30 | awk '
         $0 % 3 == 0 { printf("Fizz"); replaced = 1 }
         $0 % 5 == 0 { printf("Buzz"); replaced = 1 }
         replaced { replaced = 0; printf("\n"); next }
         { print }'

Note that the awk script is far more general than the typical interview question, which specifies the numbers to be iterated in order. The awk script works on any sequence of numbers.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but as zephyrfalcon said, that maps onto a series of if statements in python. No 10:1 magic anywhere.

<comment><USER14> The "series of if statements" also has to read the line, split it, and parse an integer. To behave like the AWK script it also has to catch an exception and continue when the input cannot be parsed as an integer.

Go ahead, write the Python script that behaves exactly as this AWK program does. It will likely be 4x as long, and that's because the number of different patterns and actions to take is quite low. More complex (and hence more situated and less easy-to-understand) use cases will benefit even more from AWK's defaults.

Moreover the pattern expressions are not constrained to simple tests: [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Pattern-O...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Pattern- Overview.html#Pattern-Overview)

They can match ranges, regular expressions, or indeed any AWK expression. They can use the variables managed by the AWK interpreter: [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Auto_002d...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Auto_002dset.html#Auto_002dset) (NR and NF are commonly used).

Actions one-way or two-way communicate with coprocesses with minimal ceremony: [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Two_002dw...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Two_002dway- I_002fO.html#Two_002dway-I_002fO)

All of those mechanisms can be done in a Python script, but they add up to a lot of boilerplate and mindless yet error-prone translation to the standard library or Python looping and conditional logic.

<comment><USER15> > The "series of if statements" also has to read the line, split it, and parse > an integer

All of which are built in functions...

> To behave like the AWK script it also has to catch an exception and continue > when the input cannot be parsed as an integer.

Not quite sure what behavior you're referring to here. When I tested your script, it happily treated "xy" as divisible by 15.

> Go ahead, write the Python script that behaves exactly as this AWK program > does.

      import fileinput
      for line in fileinput.input():
        replaced = False
        if int(line) % 3 == 0: print("Fizz", end=''); replaced = True
        if int(line) % 5 == 0: print("Buzz", end=''); replaced = True
        if replaced: print();
        else: print(line, end='')

> Moreover the pattern expressions are not constrained to simple tests

And none of these, except maybe for the range operator, are particularly challenging for python.

<comment><USER14> 1\. Your script crashes when it is given input that does not parse as an integer. The awk script does not. In this way, the awk design favors robustness over correctness, which is a valid choice to make at times.

2\. How would you modify it so it parsed a tab-delimited file and did FizzBuzz on the third column? With awk it is a simple matter of setting FS="\t" and changing $0 to $3?

3\. How would you modify it so instead of being output unmodified, rows with $3 that are neither fizz nor buzz output the result of a subprocess called with the second column's contents?

Now you might say that this is all goalpost-moving, but that's the point. AWK is more flexible and less cluttered in situations where the goalposts tend to get moved, but where the basic text processing paradigm stays the same.

<comment><USER15> 1\. Sure, it's a valid choice, and one that can easily be reproduced by python:

      def intish(str):
        try:
          return int(str)
        except:
          return 0

Can python's default be reproduced as easily in awk?

2\. You'd insert field = line.split('\t') at the beginning of the loop and then refer to field[2]

3\. os.popen or subprocess.run

I buy the "less cluttered" argument when the problem matches awk's defaults. I vehemently disagree with the "more flexible" argument. A problem perfectly suited to awk can easily turn to a poor fit with the addition of a single, seemingly innocuous requirement (e.g. in your subprocess example, log the standard error of your subprocess into a separate file).

<comment><USER14> So what does that look like in your program? With respect to failing fast and verbose error reporting in AWK, it's as simple as

         !/^[0-9]+$/ {
             print "invalid input: " $0 > "/dev/stderr"
             exit 1
         }

at the beginning of the script. None of the other actions need to be changed; but with your implementation, all of the calls to "int" need to be changed to "intish".

I've got the following script (I stopped playing games with line breaks):

        #!/usr/bin/env gawk -f

        BEGIN {
    	FS = "|"
        }

        $2 % 3 == 0 {
    	printf("Fizz")
    	replaced = 1
        }

        $2 % 5 == 0 {
    	printf("Buzz")
    	replaced = 1
        }

        replaced {
    	replaced = 0
    	printf("\n")
    	next
        }

        {
    	system("cal " $2 " 2018 2> errors.txt")
        }

Which can produce the following output:

        $ ./script.awk <<EOF
        > thing1|0
        > thing2|3
        > thing3|7
        > thing4|13
        > EOF
        FizzBuzz
        Fizz
    	 July 2018
        Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
         1  2  3  4  5  6  7
         8  9 10 11 12 13 14
        15 16 17 18 19 20 21
        22 23 24 25 26 27 28
        29 30 31

        $ cat errors.txt
        cal: 13 is neither a month number (1..12) nor a name

\- What does the equivalent program in Python look like?

\- How many characters does it have with respect to the number of characters in the awk script? (259 with shebang).

\- How many characters would need to change to split by "," instead? (1 for awk). (You can achieve this in Python, but you'll end up spending characters on a utility function.)

\- How many characters would need to be added to print "INVALID: " and then the input value for lines with non-numeric values in the second column, then skip to the next line? (55 for awk)

Character adds/changes are the best proxy for "flexibility" I could think of that doesn't go far afield into static code analysis.

I love Python and don't think awk is a good solution for extremely large or complex programs; however, it seems obvious to me that it is significantly more flexible than Python in every line-oriented text-processing task. The combination of opinionated assumptions, built-in functions and automatically- set variables, and the pattern-action approach to code organization, all add up to a powerful tool that's still worth using in order to keep tasks from becoming large or complex in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are the best stories on HN and why i subscribed here in the first place. I have often seen awk used so many times on SO but I've always put it up for something later to learn. Finally today I have some basic understanding of awk and this is really great stuff! I did get by with Perl but this is definitely more handy and the example approach to teaching it makes is super easy to understand!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> awk is what got me into web programming around 1994. I was working at a GE subsidiary and all the documentation for the RTOS I was working on was printed in huge binders from actively maintained Interleaf documents. Once I found the SGML source documents on the server it only took a few hours to learn enough awk to convert the SGML into a fully interlinked set of HTML documents with a table of contents. Granted SGML to HTML is not that hard but it was fun and useful and much nicer to search as opposed to laying out a bunch of binders on my cube's desk.

</comment><comment><USER18> Commands like cat, cut, sort, uniq and awk are still pretty relevant nowadays. Even on huge volumes of data.

<comment><USER19> Especially on huge volumes of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I still use a little sed once in a while, but Perl has replaced most of the tools like awk for me.

<comment><USER21> The advantage of awk is that it is faster in some cases and a little more convenient for simple command-lines due to automatic field splitting. The disadvantage is that it swallows errors silently even more than perl (I think).

<comment><USER22> Awk is also a part of POSIX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 20 years ago when Python was not pre-installed on most systems, the awk/gawk used to be my Swiss army knife. My first real programming job was translating 1000 LOC awk program into C.

The syntax was simpler than ed, and getting combination of grep, uniq, cut etc correct.

I call it "Excel of the command line"

<comment><USER24> It's still extremely useful for those of us in industries where change comes veeerrrryyyy slooowwwly. For instance, most production servers I work with are still on Python 1.5.2 if they have Python at all - but awk, that I can depend on!

<comment><USER8> Except is it gawk? The gnu enhanced awk is not universally installed, so for best portability stick with standard awk.

<comment><USER24> Almost certainly not!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Definitely check out the rest of that repo as well; it's a gold mine!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is also available the source code[1] of the original awk, "The One True Awk" as Brian Kernighan refers to it at his Princeton webpage.

[1][http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/)

</comment><comment><USER26> See also the GNU Awk manual (currently Edition 4.2, Oct 2017)

GAWK: Effective AWK Programming

[https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.pdf](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, nothing beats it for being complete reference as well as tutorial

I added references to it throughout the chapter

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> TXR Lisp Awk macro: [http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr- manpage.html#N-000264BC](http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr- manpage.html#N-000264BC)

Has analogs for all salient POSIX Awk features and most GNU Awk extensions. (Of course, not semantic cruft like the weak type system, or uninitialized variables serving as zero in arithmetic.)

Plus:

* You can embed (awk ...) expressions anywhere, including other (awk ...) expressions.

* You can capture a delimited continuation (awk ...) and yield out of there.

* It supports richer range expressions than Awk. Range expressions combine with other range expressions unlike in Awk, so that you can express a range which spans from one range to another. Also, there are variations of the operator to exclude either endpoint of the range: rng, -rng, rng- and -rng-.

* You can "awk" over a list of strings, possibly an infinitely lazy one.

        1> (awk (:inputs '("a" "b") '("c" "d"))
                (t (prn nr fnr rec)))
        1 1 a
        2 2 b
        3 1 c
        4 2 d
        nil

* It has a return value: whatever the last :end returns, or else _nil_ :

        1> (awk (:end 42) (:end 43))
        [Ctrl-D]
        43

Build a list from the first fields of /etc/passwd:

      1> (build
           (awk (:inputs "/etc/passwd")
                (:set fs ":")
                (t (add [f 0]))))
      ("root" "daemon" "bin" "sys" "sync" "games" "man" "lp" "mail"
       "news" "uucp" "proxy" "www-data" "backup" "list" "irc" "gnats"
       "nobody" "libuuid" "syslog" "messagebus" "avahi-autoipd" "avahi"
       "usbmux" "gdm" "speech-dispatcher" "kernoops" "pulse" "rtkit"
       "hplip" "saned" "kaz" "vboxadd" "sshd" "oprofile" "ntp" "lightdm"
       "colord~" "whoopsie" "postfix")

Type conversion of fields (which are just strings) is achieved by an elegant operator _fconv_ which takes a condensed notation such as (fconv i : r : xz) which means convert the first field to integer as a decimal integer, the last field as a hexadecimal integer and the fields in between as reals. The xz means that if the last field is invalid, it gets converted to zero rather than _nil_. These letters are just the names of lexical functions available in the _awk_ scope, rather than built-in _fconv_ behaviors.

</comment><comment><USER27> Kernighan and Van Wyk, "Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages" (1998)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000829071436/http://inferno.bel...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000829071436/http://inferno.bell- labs.com:80/cm/cs/who/bwk/interps/pap.html)

AWK, Perl, Tcl, Scheme, C, Java, Limbo, Visual Basic

What if k scripting language was included in those experiments?

[http://kparc.com/z/bell.k](http://kparc.com/z/bell.k)

k3:

1\. "Basic Loop Test"

       \t 1000000(1+)/0

2\. "Ackermann's Function Test"

       \t {:[~x;y+1;~y;_f[x-1;1];_f[x-1;_f[x;y-1]]]}[3;7]

3\. "Indexed Array Test"

       \t x(x;|x:!200000)

4\. "String Test"

       \t f:{(x>#:){(i _ x),(1+i:_.5*#x)#x:,/("123";x;"456";x;"789")}/y};do[10;f[500000;"abcdef"]]

5\. "Associative Array Test"

       \t {+/("0123456789abcdef"16_vs'!x)_lin$!x}40000

6\. "File Copy Test"

       `f 0:(30000 _draw 300)#\:"king "
       \t `f 0:0:`f

7\. "Word Count Test"

       \t (#:;+/(+/1<':" "=)';+/#:')@\:0:`f

8\. "File Reversal Test"

       \t `f 0:|0:`f

9\. "Sum Test"

       `f 0:100000#,"-123.456"
       \t +/0.0$0:`f

Source: [http://web.archive.org/web/20010501041644/http://www.kx.com:...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010501041644/http://www.kx.com:80/a/k/examples/bell.k)

<comment><USER28> From what I know (which is not well sourced), the big problem with K is that it didn't have an open and accessible interpreter for a long time, and that hampered adoption. I know 5-6 years ago I was interested in it, but couldn't find any interpreters that were free for non-commercial and commercial user (it was mostly work related interest), and didn't stumble across Kona[1] at the time. Not it's on my list of languages to look into again, but that's a long list.

1: [https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona](https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which browser for web development and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Chrome as it has excellent dev tools and a large market share. Then manually check in Safari, Firefox, iOS Simulator during development. Then BrowserStack for quick spot checks. Then check on real iOS/Android/Windows devices in our device lab as emulators are bad at replicating the true user experience (animations, click areas, godawful plastic trackpads on cheap Windows laptops, etc).

Cross-browser testing is hell and responsive has made everything multiple times worse for the amount of manual grunt work that has to go into every non- trivial custom web project. Greatly envy non-web developers who can build an interface once and it's done.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of them. Because inevitably you're going to have a user on IE6 on Windows XP that the app doesn't work right for and you'll end up supporting it because management doesn't want to lose a customer. Ideally you'll want to be working with IE9+, Chrome ~48+, Firefox ~40+, Safari 9+ to ensure modern compatibility.

<comment><USER2> This is where clearly specifying a browser support list at the beginning of a web project (or regularly updating one for long projects) helps to set those expectations.

We have a list updated quarterly based on browsers with 5%+ market share that is baked into any requirements that clients sign off on, with additional time/money required for supporting anything outside of the list.

Saved our bacon many times when it turns out the client is using a 9 year old Firefox browser they refuse to upgrade, or it turns out one particular branch office is still stuck on IE8 (true stories...)

<comment><USER4> Completely agree with this, we tend to state that we will support the latest version and two major previous versions and if any other support is needed we can accommodate that at an extra cost which some of our clients have refused to pay.

For development purposes I use Chrome for work stuff and Opera for personal projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Firefox Developer edition - it's dev tools are amazing and rival or surpass Chrome for anything with the possible exception of the performance tab, which Chrome still has a edge in.

Then, using your analytics package (which you have, correct?) You run testing either on actual hardware, or something like Browserstack for everything else in descending order of popularity by unique visitor.

Really, you have several different rendering engines and JS engines in play at any given time - and it's helpful to have an agreed upon support model in place prior to starting development. Generally speaking, support anything with 5+% in the past 90, and make a argument for not spending time supporting things below that without very good cause.

<comment><USER6> I've always used Firefox and enjoyed Chrome for a bit due to coworkers claiming how much better it was but after Firefox Developer Edition I went back and still haven't looked back. Unless I need to test Chrome specifics. Definitely Firefox Development Edition with Firefox Containers is the best combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am a professional webdeveloper for many years and IMHO the best way is to look in your tacking tool and test in everything which has more than say 5% of your traffic in the last months. Browser usage varies strongly from the type of customer you have.

</comment><comment><USER8> Firefox, because I like it as a browser. Plus its Javascript error messages are often more illuminating than Chrome's.

Also, cross-browser compatibility is important to me, and I figure all my colleagues test stuff in Chrome and will complain about stuff that doesn't work there. I can't tell you how many Firefox-specific bugs I've found in our site.

The tough part is finding someone who will regularly check stuff out in IE or Edge, if you don't want to be spinning VMs up and down all day every day.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll echo what some of the other posters have said about it depending on what your users use and that it is important to set expectations and CYA.

I did find this article[1] on using chrome and workspaces as an IDE of sorts. I think its kinda nifty.

[https://y6326.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/basic-setup-chrome- de...](https://y6326.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/basic-setup-chrome-developer- tools-as-ide/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Primarily Chrome, because their dev tools are amazing. (To be fair, I haven't touched Firefox in some time.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Edge, so you can be rebellious. It has good debug tools too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very glad I didn't see any "Safari" in here.

<comment><USER5> Only use Safari when isolating specific bugs in OSX or iOS that are not reproducible in Firefox or Chrome</comment></comment>


Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-51043828 <comment><USER2> > "It's the concept of maintaining country - central to everything we do as > Aboriginal people. It's about what we can give back to country; not just > what we can take from it."

Aboriginal practices should not be romanticized. There is evidence that it actually had severe environmental impacts, in particular shortening Australia's monsoon season and lengthen the dry season: [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/did-australian- abori...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/did-australian-aborigines- change-weather). There is also evidence that they caused the extinction of the Australian megafauna: [https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate- australian-mega...](https://phys.org/news/2017-01-humans-climate-australian- megafauna.html).

<comment><USER3> Yep, it's the noble savage fallacy [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage)

<comment><USER4> The article is about controlled burns.

What's the name of the fallacy where you dismiss something that has has been successful for centuries or more just because it doesn't have a Latin/Greek- derived name granted by a European?

<comment><USER5> I agree with the criticism, and disagree with your counterpoint.

There is no evidentiary record of this being "successful for centuries." After all, there are no written records.

On the face of it, if you start a fire in a bushland which is 100s of kilometres in breadth, how are Aboriginal people going to communicate and control such a blaze? They don't have access to:

\- water pumps \- hoses \- irrigation \- telecommunications \- horses

There's some mythmaking going on at the moment in Australia about this.

I find it hard to take the claims at face value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In general a lot of Australian forest does need to burn, we know this. Record drought and record high temperatures over the past few years created the catastrophic fire conditions we have seen this year. Controlled burns cannot be carried out when conditions are dry and hot - the fire gets out of control. Thus there have been very few burns of this nature over the last several years.

Climate change means it's getting more and more difficult to carry out these type of controlled burns for forest management in general. Our fire seasons are longer, hotter, drier and more dangerous, and these types of burns can and do get out of control.

<comment><USER7> The purpose of a controlled burn is to remove underbrush and create gaps that an uncontrolled fire could not cross, right? Wouldn't it be possible to archive those goals without fire? (e.g. just going through the forest and clearing underbrush manually)

Of course some fires are still needed, e.g. to trigger fire-dependant seeds.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps we could introduce a non indigenous animal to do it for us, Australia had some experience in this area :)

<comment><USER9> The kicker is that grazing animals could do it but aren't done that way very often in practice. Not without environmental costs of course.

<comment><USER10> Also, there is significant political opposition to this, specifically in the Victorian highlands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, no and no. Being ignorant is one thing. Deliberately maintaining it and event romanticizing it is a heinous crime at best.

</comment><comment><USER12> Agreed, we have so much to learn. [https://youtu.be/_tOkb1y7hEs](https://youtu.be/_tOkb1y7hEs)

</comment><comment><USER13> This should be a much larger part of forest fire conversations.</comment>