Universities: excellence v equity - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646985-american-model-higher-education-spreading-it-good-producing-excellence <comment><USER2> > The more people have degrees, the more employers will insist on recruiting > graduates. In many countries jobs such as teaching and nursing, which did > not require a degree 30 years ago, are now reserved for graduates. When just > a small elite went to university, plenty of decent jobs were available to > those with only secondary schooling. That is no longer true.

This is the most interesting part of the education puzzle to me. There is quite clearly an oversupply of people with degrees, both undergraduate and post-graduate, but the harsh reality is that you still _need_ one due to credentialism, the shrinking number of "low-hanging fruit" problems, and, paradoxically, the increased supply of people with degrees.

One solution from a hiring perspective is a DaaS (Degree as a Service) model such as HourlyNerd [1] or Gigster (YC15) [2] where you can hire well-pedigreed business and CS graduates as micro consultants or coders.

But in the future the biggest change I expect to see is one in the hiring attitude. As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate. I expect brand names to decrease in value as businesses and decision makers increase prioritization on demonstrated ability (Github, portfolio of work) and cost to hire, which will generally be lower for less well-branded schools and alternative methods of education, such as apprenticeships and online education.

That's just my gut feeling from personal observations. There's a good chance I'm 100% wrong and getting a branded education will be more important than ever due to the high number of candidates w/ degrees, and the increasing importance of connections and network. That seems to be they way SV is moving these days.

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

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for- developers/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/)

<comment><USER3> > _As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to > become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the > average graduate._

We agree there, but doesn't the next sentence represent a fundamental shift in thinking? I would think it much more likely for businesses and managers (particularly HR) to simply shift their signalling from Bachelor's degrees to Master's degrees rather than from Bachelor's degrees to a context-sensitive review of your body of work. It's much easier to say "I have a Master's in CS from Stanford" than it is to say "Here's my GitHub portfolio, let's talk about a few of my projects."

I'd much rather folks focus on what they've actually accomplished rather than the institution they happened to attend, but I don't see it happening, particularly from HR folks who are not technically inclined and are simply trying to get a pile of 500 resumes down to a dozen. And like you said with SV, in elite circles you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a job ad looking for someone from {Stanford|Harvard|MIT}.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a bunch of bollocks. There is no connection between countries trying to improve their research facilities and the privitisation of undergraduate education.

The latter is just more profitable and goes along with the trend to privitise all state services which has been going on for a while.

</comment><comment><USER5> To help out readers who encounter a paywall (I didn't), I'll quote two key paragraphs from the article kindly submitted here. First, not quite halfway down in the article,

"What happened in America then happened in Europe and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, in South Korea in the 1980s, and is now happening the world over. Student numbers are growing faster than global GDP. So hungry is the world for higher education that enrolment is growing faster than purchases of that ultimate consumer good, the car (see chart 1). The global tertiary enrolment ratio—the proportion of the respective age cohort enrolled in university—increased from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; the number of countries with an enrolment ratio of more than half went up from five to 54 over the period. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where "massification" is not much in evidence yet."

So undergraduate higher education enrollment is becoming commonplace all over the world. That, in turn, means that young people possessing an undergraduate degree is now more and more commonplace, so the job market has begun regarding postgraduate degrees more and more.

From farther along in the article,

"As first degrees become standard, more people are getting postgraduate qualifications to stand out from the crowd. In both America and Britain, 14% of the adult workforce have a postgraduate degree; and despite the increase in supply, the postgraduate premium has increased in both America and Britain, especially since 2000. There was a time, points out Stephen Machin, professor of economics at University College London, when a postgraduate degree depressed wages; but that was when maths PhDs worked mainly in academia, not in the financial sector."

The article, by the way, is a "leader" (an editorial) leading into a special report section in which _The Economist_ does more detailed reporting on the role of higher education around the world and its societal effects. A crucial question, which deserves more research, is to what degree attending higher education institutions actually provides education, making young people smarter and more capable, and to what degree it simply provides social signaling, distinguishing one job-seeker seeker who had wealth and leisure time to pursue a degree from another job-seeker who had fewer personal resources. It is not clear yet that postsecondary education adds as much value at the margins as primary education does. The clear development model contrast between east Asia and Africa is instructive about this issue: at independence, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African countries developed national universities and attempted to provide higher education to local elites as soon as they became independent. Many of the college graduates from those countries then became part of the brain drain of emigration to the West. Meanwhile, in east Asia the focus of national education policy was on broad access to good-quality primary and secondary education, and industrialization and transition to a post-industrial economy in those countries was built on a base of broad masses of literate, numerate workers. And, as today's article reports, in the end east Asia ended up with more young people in higher education than in Africa anyhow, but along the way everyone became at least minimally well educated. For the same number of dollars, it probably does a country more good to improve primary education for the many than to broaden access to higher education for the few.

</comment><comment><USER6> While the authors are busy jerking themselves sore over American Exceptionalism, I'm still as alienated by the rampant focus on academic pedigree and class from Americans as I was when I first learned about it. In my corner of the world, _most_ people have these considerations when they choose the school-route (or not) in life:

\- Tired of reading and writing? Get an education in some trade.

\- Want a specific job that requires higher education? Continue school and get good enough grades.

\- Don't know what you want to do? Choose one of the former based on your perceived abilities and preferences.

While there is to a degree some academic inflation, as long as there are people who are more inspired by doing hands-on work instead of becoming a white collar worker, I think things will be OK. Oh, and not having a college or university degree is not looked down upon. At all.

Only the no/low-skill jobs, with low pay, are actively avoided if people can avoid them. So we have more of the poorer immigrants ending up with those jobs.

<comment><USER7> I really don't think class and pedigree mattering is an American thing. I suspect you made the common error of pointing out something good about one of the ultra highly developed European countries, noticing that it's not the case in the poorer and more unequal US, and inexplicably thinking the US is the outlier.

Edit: just to expand on this, the problems with the US are a result of the complicated system of cultural, political, and institutional issues. There isn't a Dictator of America who can wake up tomorrow and decree that everyone will believe in some set of enlightened values. So whenever I hear "I can't believe Americans do/think/believe X, that's so silly!" from Europeans, I can't help but think it's no more helpful than "isn't it quaint that Syrians care so much about religion" or "why can't Jews and Palestineans just get along?"

<comment><USER8> The parent comment fails to rings true to me in the case of the three European countries I have experience with, the UK, France, and Portugal. All three are in many ways even more obsessed with class-based academic hierarchies. For instance, students of Portugal's oldest university (Universidade de Lisboa) regularly wear 18th century style robes and were almost universally considered to be snobby rich kids by the Portuguese people I talked to about it. Oxbridge and the ancient English public schools that feed into it (Eton, Harrow, etc) are even more pedigree-obsessed than their US equivalents. And by all first- hand accounts I've heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be filled with urban elites bound for government posts.

Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world, it's just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal points for this global obsession.

<comment><USER6> You'll note that it was grand parent that called me a _European_ and not me. He happened to be right. But maybe that should tell you something about how I don't pretend to speak for an entire continent but just my corner of it. Maybe a part of the world with 50 countries has some variety within it, I don't know.

And personally I don't identify as a _European_. I prefer _Eurasian_... ;)

P.S. English class-consciousness is a pretty funny thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> paywall

<comment><USER10> I couldn't reproduce - you can just close the modal that pops up with no adverse effects.

In any case, when an article is paywalled, you generally get around it by clicking the "web" link under the HN title, then clicking on the top result in Google.

<comment><USER11> "You have reached your article limit." Disappointing.

<comment><USER12> Delete all cookies for the site, reload.

<comment><USER13> Works in this case, won't on most modern paywalls. New Yorker for example uses Supercookies/Fingerprinting to give your UUID back to you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gene hacking for muscle growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/gene-doping-detection/ <comment><USER2> There's going to have to be a "natural" Olympics pretty soon as bodybuilding does (i.e. take whatever you want for the real Olympics). Either that, or just admit it's over and say we had a nice run.

Bob Goldman showed that it's basically going to keep happening anyway.

Soon enough, you'll be able to get Pringles with AICAR and Repoxygen "flavour" (or whatever turns out to be awesome+safe), and then it'll just be ridiculous that the athletes are the only ones not taking them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hate that all the baseball player I grew up a watching have turned out to be dopers. Nearly every baseball player I loved as a kid has an asterisk next to their records. Also, I was pretty bummed about Floyd Landis losing his TdF title.

But on the flip side I think its pretty cool. I don't really understand why, maybe just because they are able to push what is possible.

What do HNr's think of athletes doping?

<comment><USER3> I think doping is awesome, and it should be legal. Treatments that are proven safe for athletes could then be used by everybody else. I would love to never need to exercise, or sleep again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Athletes as lab rats - awesome! And they're to dumb to care.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Situation at Unbabel (YC W14) - <AUTHOR> I've been working at Unbabel for a long time as an engineer. I've seen it grow from a few dozens of employees to almost 200. I've never seen such a mess of a company and I'm afraid to work at a startup again. In 2018, we saw the first signs: engineering was being forced into working overtime, developing products without specs and doing a lot of requirement guessing. This came about because the sales team was running the company at a very high level due to the incompetence of the rest of the C-level, two inexperienced programmers with heavy egos, incapable of stepping down and hiring more suitable people for their respective jobs. Our platform had big scalability bottlenecks (Python/Relational Mongo/Roll-your-own NLP) that were being hit by clients on a daily basis and plans for refactoring the architecture were repeatedly rejected. Then, in December, a lot of VP-level people left. HR, Ops, Finance, Engineering, all gone. All because good professionals were hired to bring process and structure to the company, while having any proposals put forth rejected and scrapped. Then, in the midst of the mess caused by the lack of clear reporting or company vision, C-level decided to move everyone into product verticals, when there were not enough employees to fill all the newly created positions. Morale dropped because everyone felt they were being forced into changing teams and seats, but kept working on the same projects they were before, as there were no goals set for the new verticals. People were on their own, setting their own goals. When the morale dropped and the watercooler conversations started, some people left, others were convinced to leave, others were convincing others to leave. Meanwhile, the yes-men in the ranks were being promoted. They were friends with the right people and the company needed more managers for the newly-formed teams. In conclusion, Unbabel was a great idea very poorly implemented. I hope it's not too late to save the company now. <comment><USER2> What an accurate picture. Maybe someday more of this story will be known (as a learning). In the meantime, the show must go on - "All startups are shitshows".

"In 2018, we saw the first signs: (...)" \- this means, after Series B. More money will not solve it.</comment>


Bancor takes on Crypto exchanges with wallet that converts across tokens - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/bancor-takes-on-crypto-exchanges-with-wallet-that-converts-across-tokens/ <comment><USER2> I was hoping there would be an 'atomic swap' type app that let you swap between one altcoin to another. Hope they will do pairs with fiat so you can just cash out easily too.</comment>


50% of the online ads are never seen - <AUTHOR> http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/03/50-of-ads-are-never-seen.html

<comment><USER2> Somehow I developed a habit that I can ignore all ads on the web page without even looking at them. I think the number should be more than 50%..thats why Google is worried.</comment>


Any HN readers in Houston,TX? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN readers, I'm in search of a few good developers friends in Houston, Texas. I haven't seen much developing vs designing here in Houston, but I know it can't just be me here. <comment><USER2> I'm Elliot. I'm in Houston. What is your name?

<comment><AUTHOR> How's it going Elliot, I'm Bissoon. I've been programming in Houston for a while and interested in starting a developer co op. I'm hoping to find a few fellow developers to meet up with, swap notes/issues/code and maybe collaborate on projects with.

<comment><USER2> What kind of projects are you working on?

My email address is email@example.com.

Please email me.</comment></comment></comment>


TIOBE Index: Java Is the Most Popular Programming Language, July 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

<comment><USER2> C++ in second place and Swift coming up.... Swift will be in first place by 2016...</comment>


Anal probes are fine, if you've got nothing to hide [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://thobbs.cz/anal-probes/anal-probes.pdf <comment><USER3> _While she was standing in line, a CBP dog handler walked by Ms. Doe and hit the ground by her feet, but did not hit the ground by any of the others in the line. The dog responded by lunging onto Ms. Doe and landing its front paws on her torso._

Good grief, is _every_ LEO "investigative" technique such total bullshit? If the dogs have been trained to alert when prompted to do so by the handler, they're really just a fig leaf for LEO discretion, which is rightly subjected to strict enough scrutiny to prevent "just search the Mexican lady, every single time". If the whole ridiculous expensive exercise of training and keeping dogs is a mere detour around such scrutiny, they're working a lot harder on that than they are on any of their stated objectives. One would like to think that LEOs might occasionally use a valid procedure, if for no other reason than by mistake, but one is eternally disappointed.

<comment><USER4> I don't know what the intended meaning of _LEO_ is supposed to be in this context. Low Earth Orbit?

<comment><USER5> One of the things I love about HN is that it's such a nerdy community - <USER2> gave me quite a smile!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to have been settled. Found this:

Mention of "Doe v. El Paso County Hospital District, et al. No. 3:13-cv-00406 (WD Tex., filed Dec. 18, 2013)" at this blog, [https://holdcbpaccountable.org/category/texas/](https://holdcbpaccountable.org/category/texas/) links to "Texas Hospital Reaches $1.1 Million Settlement" [http://health.usnews.com/health- news/news/articles/2014/07/0...](http://health.usnews.com/health- news/news/articles/2014/07/07/hospital-settles-with-new-mexico-woman-over- search) (July 2014)

In particular, "Texas Tech University, which operates a medical school campus at the hospital [will pay] $500,000."

<comment><USER7> And that's good and fine, on the civil side in the specific suit against the hospital.

Unfortunately, there are some criminal statutes that appear to have been violated by all concerned and some professional medical codes that have been violated by individual doctors; There is tampering with federal evidence (prompting the dog) in order to falsify probable cause. There is also the matter of precedential rulings associated with the guidance given border control officers on how far to go.

Of five matters of concern, the _least pressing_ to us has been settled out of court without the benefit of an enjoiner against future repetition of the abuses by the hospital (in re: rules that permit participation in a kidnapping and rape of a captive). My expectation is that a $1M reward is not especially protective to the rest of us, when it's our turn to be kidnapped and raped as some kind of practice exercise of authority. I am less worried about the hospital than the men with guns and dogs, however the fact that the hospital has a goddamned specialized billing procedure associated with torture of unwilling captives of a rogue federal agency worries me.

Justice has not been done yet; Generally by my limited understanding a _Bivens Action_ is only filed when justice is limited in availability by a whole arm of the government who are denying any wrongdoing and prosecutors who are refusing to operate in accordance with their duties to the people.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash The solution quite simple: when the suspect had evidence of wrongdoing (drugs, etc), they pay for the cost of the procedure.

When the suspect does _not_ have evidence of a crime, they should be reimbursed. I am all right with a legitimate search warrant giving law enforcement the right to tear my house inside and out, but after it is established that they found nothing, I can bill them for the clean-up, as well as any lost time from work.

To me the biggest problem with law enforcement today is that there is no punishment for being wrong, even when lives and families can be shredded in the process. We have malpractice insurance for doctors, why not cops?

<comment><USER8> Erm, why should any suspect _ever_ be paying for a procedure they did not order nor consent to?

<comment><USER9> "Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating."

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Or "go ahead and search me. You'll find nothing but a bill for my next vacation."

<comment><USER3> In the context of TFA this is more like being paid for work as a sub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Most police aspirants have to be sprayed with mace before they are allowed to use it on other people.

We should require aspiring border patrol agents to undergo complete invasive searches as a part of their training before they are allowed to demand them for others.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about mace, but I have seen people claim that police who are tased before being able to use a taser are only electrocuted for a couple seconds where as in the field police usually electrocute people for much longer.

I imagine the same kind of thing would be done if they had to go through invasive searches. The searches wouldn't match reality.

<comment><USER11> _electrocuted_?!

TASERs kill a lot of people (more than one a week), but it's usually ostensibly not intentional.

<comment><USER12> I believe the technically correct term is " _electrotetanized_ " when the current does not actually result in death.

<comment><USER3> This is something of a personal mission for you, isn't it?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=electrotetanized](https://www.google.com/search?q=electrotetanized)

<comment><USER12> My personal mission is actually to destroy the word "amazing". Getting _electrotetanized_ into the OED is more of a hobby.

I don't know what's up with that fourth result, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Though Defendants conducted these searches against the will of Ms. Doe and without her consent, the Medical Center billed Ms. Doe more than $5,000.00 for its "services."

Reminds me of the bullet fees ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee)) charged by China and Iran.

<comment><USER14> it's similar to an EMT fee in that there isn't necessarily mutual consent to a contract

<comment><USER15> EMTs don't perform medically useless procedures on people who have refused them.

Also, according to the complaint, CBP offered to pay if Ms. Doe signed a consent form. This was _after_ they found nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What makes this even sadder is that it was done for what... to prevent someone from bringing controlled substances into the US? Who cares?

Yet another bullshit consequence of the War on Drugs.

<comment><USER17> >Who cares?

People who are hurt by drug cartels. It is one thing to let people grow their own pot and sell it when they are law abiding (or otherwise law abiding) individuals. But when you get drugs from the drug cartel, the harm that goes into the production makes it wrong to use. We should support legal production and importation from human sources. But we should not legalize anything coming from the cartels.

<comment><USER18> > But when you get drugs from the drug cartel, the harm that goes into the > production makes it wrong to use.

That doesn't really follow. Nazi medical experiments were wholely unethical, but it would be completely unethical not use whatever knowledge they gained to save other people's lives.

Perhaps what you meant to say is that it would be wrong to _pay_ for the drugs so the cartels actually benefit from their unethical behaviour. I agree with that, but that doesn't make the drugs unethical to _use_.

<comment><USER19> It absolutely would be unethical to use that knowledge in any way. Are u kidding, this provides a huge loophole creation of unethical research.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely not unethical. The damage is already done, and you're just doing more damage by not using it. It's irrational.

There's sufficient disincentive to conducting more unethical research by the simple fact that you'll go to jail. This wasn't a consideration in Nazi Germany.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is sadly one of the reasons that the USA is one of the regions I will never go to as a tourist.

The police has too much power.

</comment><comment><USER21> For those interested, this case seems to Still be ongoing since 2013...

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/28cbp6h0i/texas-western- dis...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/28cbp6h0i/texas-western-district- court/doe-v-el-paso-county-hospital-district-et-al/)

While it seems it was settled in July 2014, the case doesn't get closed until everything is sorted out.

So.. Yeah.. Happy Justice everyone!

<comment><USER22> Still ongoing, seemingly scheduled to go to trial next month:

SCHEDULING ORDER: Jury Selection set for 5/16/2016 09:00AM before Judge David C Guaderrama, Jury Trial set for 5/16/2016 09:00 AM before Judge David C Guaderrama, Amended Pleadings due by 5/30/2015, Discovery due by 12/18/2015, Joinder of Parties due by 5/3/2015, Dispositive motions due by 2/19/2016,. Signed by Judge David C Guaderrama. (lc3) (Entered: 04/01/2015)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's both sad and worrying what's happening with the culture of U.S. authorities. From police up to the NSA, they're all now thinking that the Constitution doesn't matter, personal liberty doesn't matter, human decency doesn't matter - it's all about the _mission_ , and the mission must be solved _at all costs_.

And if you have something to say against that, then you're the enemy of the state for trying to stop the state from accomplishing whatever mission it believes it has then.

I think this trend will stop reversing only when the people manage to elect someone that will hold accountable and punish severely any member of law enforcement or the intelligence community that breaks the law or does unconstitutional things. Until then, things are only going to get worse, and it will become increasingly harder to do something about it.

<comment><USER24> I think you should read the full pdf to understand where the problem occurred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good lord, I thought the title was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. How can this happen?

<comment><USER27> When people talk to their friends about police abuse.... their friends don't believe them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yet another example of the corruption endemic to America.

America is a police state. Repeat after me, America is a police state. The first step is to admit and state aloud the plain truth of the matter.

</comment><comment><USER29> Recent case in South Carolina:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2016/04/01/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2016/04/01/video-shows-white-cops-performing-roadside-cavity-search- of-black-man/)

</comment><comment><USER30> > Though Defendants conducted these searches against the will of Ms. Doe and > without her consent, the Medical Center billed Ms. Doe more than $5,000.00 > for its "services."

God, that is the worst thing I have ever read. Ever. They horrendously violated her and then had the audacity to charge her for it.

<comment><USER31> Reminds me of Brazil. Information retrieval charges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Some background from the ACLU of New Mexico, which filed this suit: [https://www.aclu-nm.org/aclu-of-texas-and-new-mexico-sue- fed...](https://www.aclu-nm.org/aclu-of-texas-and-new-mexico-sue-feds-county- for-invasive-cavity-searches-of-woman-at-u-s-mexico-border/2013/12/)

I tried to find an update on this case (originally filed in 2013) and only found this 2015 ruling on the defendants' motion for protective order: [http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/texas/tx...](http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/texas/txwdce/3:2013cv00406/666787/147/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I just read the entire document and I'm literally trembling out of disgust and am in disbelief that such a thing could happen in a civilized society.

So many levels of wrong.

It almost makes me want to run for office or something. If good people stand by and do nothing, no change will happen.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I usually stand up for cops, but this is asinine. I mean, how many shows do you see where they're at LaGuardia or JFK with the customs people there and they're sure a person has drugs on them? All they do is either warn them they're going to take an x-ray, or just make them take it and it will show if they have drugs on them - anywhere. No anal probe needed at all.

Why cops feel anal probes are necessary are clearly not doing their job properly when suspicion of drugs are easily settled with a painless x-ray. Even the mere threat of an x-ray to get the person to tell them the truth is usually enough to get these drug mules to confess.

<comment><USER34> Without anal probes they lose one more way to say "I can do anything I want to you. I own you." These things are not just investigatory, they're for intimidation.

Remember the woman who killed herself in a Texas jail in the last year. During the traffic stop, the cop yelled "I will light you up!" He was referring to a taser, and that was pure intimidation.

Intimidation is a technique and a feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Similar case from around that time frame - [https://popehat.com/2013/11/07/what-is-the-quantum-of- proof-...](https://popehat.com/2013/11/07/what-is-the-quantum-of-proof- necessary-for-police-to-rape-and-torture-you-in-new-mexico/)

It ticks pretty much all the boxes.

\- drug dog "alerting"

\- x-ray, multiple enemas, colonoscopy

\- completely against the citizen's consent

The major difference is that the police officers bothered to obtain a warrant(it didn't take much). The law analysis of the case was inconclusive, but the lawyers weren't really sure that the police officers hadn't acted lawfully.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is the part that is utterly indefensible:

"After the CT scan, a CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agent presented Ms. Doe with a choice: she could either sign a medical consent form, despite the fact that she had not consented, in which case CBP would pay for the cost of the searches; or if she refused to sign the consent form, she would be billed for the cost of the searches. She refused."

And the medial center duly billed her more than $5,000.00.

</comment><comment><USER37> "When Ms. Doe expressed dismay about the unreasonable searches she suffered, a Medical Center employee responded that these procedures were routinely followed when an individual is brought in by CBP agents. The employee also told Ms. Doe that what happened to her was not invasive."

</comment><comment><USER38> This is one of the reasons I will (most likely) never visit the USA.

</comment><comment><USER39> The dogs smelled drugs? You mean those dogs that are known to be trained in such a way as to yield false positives?

</comment><comment><USER40> I read about it a few years back. Has there been any resolution to this case recently?

<comment><USER21> Would you like to take a guess?

<comment><USER41> Educated: Cause 3 would be a no brainer. "WTF": Case dropped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I see what you did there with the title.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sponsored by the NSA and TSA. ~Good Day, Citizen.

<comment><USER44> Except neither of those agencies were involved in any way.

<comment><USER45> NSA feeds surveillance data to law enforcement agencies. They are culpable in the Drug War and other law enforcement atrocities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are many reasons why this happened, mainly they aer transferred to a nearby medical center which do these probes due to poor training.

and the title is just clickbait.

No it's not fine there are many laws against this.

<comment><USER46> The medical centre is in no way obligated to undertake the search though. $1.1 million is getting off easy.

<comment><USER24> They were not allowed to do that. Even in the pdf it says

"Medical Center policy L-13 on searches by hospital personnel does not permit an invasion of a person's body for purposes of a search without either consent or a search warrant."

"Consequently, the Medical Center's failure to train its personnel on the constitutional limits constraining law enforcement searches amounts to a deliberate indifference to the violation of individuals' constitutional rights"

Like I said it's a clickbait title. People are getting emotional over the title alone without reading the actual pdf

<comment><USER46> I read the entirety of the document, and I can assure you I'm pretty fucking outraged at what was done.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Banned math book - <AUTHOR> https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/07/22/banned-math-book/ <comment><USER2> In Argentina a military governor from our last dictatorship banned teaching Set theory because it was a "collectivist idea" and was "against the individual". You can learn more here (spanish): [https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=3404](https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=3404)

Specifically, they banned the book "Conceptos básicos de matemática moderna" (Modern Maths Basic Concepts) / Hernández-Rojo-Rabuffetti

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the "new math" of the 60s deserved that.

<comment><USER4> If you disliked the new math, you'll detest Linderholm, _Mathematics Made Difficult_

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3693042-mathematics- made...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3693042-mathematics-made- difficult)

<comment><USER3> I saw that a long time ago, it is hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the copyright status on this book?

It's surprising to me that a new copy still costs $150 in 2020, when it was published in 1924, and both authors passed away 45+ years ago, and are thus unlikely to be "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

<comment><USER6> The answer to this question is somewhat complex and depends on the country whose copyright laws you are talking about. Most copyright-abiding countries have adopted a copyright length of Life + 70 years, but several (most notably Canada) use Life + 50 years. However, there are a lot of exceptions in many of these countries regarding works created in the mid-20th century. The US, incredibly, has a copyright of 95 years for works published between 1924-1977, but a term of Life + 70 years for works published after that.

Since the beginning of this year, the original German edition of the book that was published in 1924 is in the public domain in the US (and most likely only the US). Unfortunately this applies only to this edition and not to any translated versions.

I looked around the front matter of the book and did not see any mention of a translator; presumably this means that Courant translated this himself. This means as soon as 50 years has elapsed from Courant's death (in 1972), all editions will be in the public domain in Canada and a few other countries (in 2023). In most other countries, this book will be in the public domain 20 years later than that (in 2043). The US is once again exceptional, where each edition will enter the public domain separately, 95 years after their publication. The English version of Volume 1 of this text in the Amazon preview appears to have been published in 1953, which would mean it would be in the public domain in 2049, well after it would be available in virtually every other country in the world.

Of course, all of this discussion above assumes that copyrights don't get extended again before these works enter the public domain. The US Supreme Court has ruled that arbitrarily extending copyrights before they expire is sufficient to satisfy the "limited Times" mentioned in the Constitution; what matters is apparently that the copyrights are set to expire at some point, not that they ever actually do.

<comment><USER7> Someone could produce a new, free version from the now-liberated original German though.

<comment><USER8> Someone with GPT-3 access could give it a go - it is able to translate, right?

<comment><USER9> GPT-3 guesses the next word or words after a given input, allowing it to write articles that make at least some sense. Translation of a textbook (especially math) would be way out of its wheelhouse.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.johnfaben.com/blog/gpt-3-translations](https://www.johnfaben.com/blog/gpt-3-translations)

Or check section 3.3 in the paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hilbert and Courant is BY FAR the best mathematical physics book in existence. No contest. Boas and all the others are good, even very good. H & C beats them by a kiloParsec.

<comment><USER11> New edition of Arfken, Weber and Harris is great!

<comment><USER12> Hildebrand "Methods of Applied Mathematics" is the most approachable math text I've read. After hearing me express confusion about various topics that my dad thought were straightforward, he gave me his book from when he was in college, and yes, things were suddenly straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the detail that Hilbert asked what a Hilbert space was. Reminded me of hearing that Planck never called it Planck's constant, either using simply 'h' or 'the constant'.

<comment><USER14> I couldn't understand the anecdote. What did hilbert think of the space? The author doesn't say anything!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm fairly sure Courant was persecuted for being Jewish. Other biographies are pretty clear on this and I can find no reference to what political party Courant belonged to in Germany.

<comment><USER16> Wikipedia has, at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Courant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Courant):

Courant left Germany in 1933, earlier than many Jewish escapees. He did not lose his position due to being Jewish, as his previous service as a front-line soldier exempted him; however, his public membership in the social-democratic left was reason enough (for the Nazis) for dismissal

<comment><USER4> Apparently one thing nazis and german communists could agree upon, both in theory and in practice, during the early thirties was that the social- democratic centrist/moderate alternative to either extreme had to be destroyed.

(I left off reading Weil around this point. I'd get back to it, but find political systems without a healthy number of major parties rather depressing subjects.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know exactly where the ban was published?

I haven't found it under either Courant or Hilbert in either

[https://sammlungen.ulb.uni- muenster.de/hd/periodical/pagevie...](https://sammlungen.ulb.uni- muenster.de/hd/periodical/pageview/2540067)

or

[https://sammlungen.ulb.uni- muenster.de/hd/periodical/titlein...](https://sammlungen.ulb.uni- muenster.de/hd/periodical/titleinfo/2539679)

(Note the font change between 1935 and 1938, clearly showing I was in the wrong on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23446057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23446057) My bad!)

</comment><comment><USER17> For anyone who wants to know more about Courant's life, the people he crossed paths with (which include some of the great mathematicians of the 20th C), and how NYU came to have the Courant Institute, Constance Reid's biography is and nice read.

</comment><comment><USER18> Initially I suspected that the most likely reason was that the _Deutsche Physik_ babble ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik)) somehow had got out of hand, but evidently that wasn't it.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is nothing compared to Hinduism's varna system(caste system), where the entire society is split in to 4 groups and learning to read and write is banned to the bottom 3 groups. Even the skills of one group is prohibited to be learned by the other.

</comment><comment><USER20> I do dislike the phrase "banned book" because it doesn't indicate _who_ banned it, which is all that matters. In this case, the Nazis over the author's political affiliation (to save you from the click bait title).

<comment><USER21> Is there another phrasing you'd recommend?

<comment><USER22> Any phrasing that includes some context: where, when, and by whom. How significant a ban is very much depends on this. I have no interest in reading an article about a book banned in Saudi Arabia, for example. Nazi Germany is not too far in the "countries in which a book being banned is utterly unsurprising" list.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. And a book shouldn't be listed as a "banned book" because one overly- cautious librarian decided they shouldn't have it in a school. You wouldn't call something "illegal" if it were illegal just in one country for a brief period of time. And 'banned' is used as a badge of honor - in this case it really has nothing to do with the book content either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We got lucky that the nazis banned and expelled legitimate science and scientists on political grounds. This ensured that their science progress stagnated thus preventing them from acquiring nukes in time to change the course of the war.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure developing nuclear weapons by any nation was a good thing. We would be better off without nuclear weapons and the MAD associated.

<comment><USER25> Hard to say, nuclear weapons have also prevented WWIII so far.

<comment><USER26> I strongly doubt that. It's the global supply chain that prevent the another WW.

<comment><USER25> You think the global supply chain is what prevented outright war between the US and Russia during the cold war?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> From the post:

 _I wondered why the book was banned. Was Courant Jewish? I'd never considered this before, because I couldn't care less about the ethnicity of authors. Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female, I just care about their content._

John, you start a post about Courant's Jewishness by denying that you have any interest in his Jewishness. This conveys the sense that being a Jew is dirty and should not be brought up in polite company. Don't do this.

<comment><USER28> " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is eerily similar to today's world, where countries like India banning apps because it started in another country..

<comment><USER30> I don't think banning tiktok because it works as spywware for the Chinese government is the same thing..</comment></comment>


Is anybody here using flow - <AUTHOR> I found this app: https://www.getflow.com/ - is anybody here using it? Any pros/cons? Feedback? <comment><USER2> Yup - I've been using it with the team for the past month or so. I like. I used to use it a few years ago (earlier iteration) with a different team but it never quite stuck, but the new version is pretty great.

There's only one feature I feel like it's missing -- the ability to write a "note" or other description of a project. Right now, you can create a project and give it a name, but there's no way to give it any details about what the project is, etc. You have to create a "task", which feels kinda like a hack.

Otherwise, thumbs-up so far...</comment>


WebSockets and Comet on the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.taskforceapp.com/taskforce-is-going-mobile

<comment><USER2> That's such a clever code maccman. Very impressive way to get around Apple's decision to disable WebSockets...

I am already using the gmail widget and its proved to be so useful. I am very pleased that I can now sync it to a mobile platform.

Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER3> Not that it's not cool and all, but long polling ajax is ancient tech, not really anything new or innovative.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, it is fairly ancient. However, the beauty is in the implementation - i.e. emulating the WebSocket API and using the same endpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "However, annoyingly Apple decided to disable WebSockets in iOS 4. What's strange was that WebSocket support was in all the previous development releases - oh well..."

Well of course they did. Background/multi task the web browser with WebSockets and you effectively avoid all need to publish to the App Store. Once a standard is chosen for displaying notifications through Javascript to the browser, there will be less and less need for a "native" apps on any platform.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure I understand you. What does WebSockets provide that would make me not need to develop, distribute (!) native iOS apps? WebSockets do not have anything to do with user interfaces, audio, OpenGL, etc.

<comment><USER3> WebGL, Firefox's new audio APIs and near infinite number of css/js toolkits are blurring the lines in all of those categories. I understand it's a ways off, but if you used nose-bleed versions of Chrome, Pepper, NPAPI, etc you can have extremely close to native capably apps through the browser. This is where I highly expect Android and Chromium OS to converge.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stocklist - What do you think about this idea? - <AUTHOR> I am working on Stocklist - stocklist.live.<p>I do follow stock market but I think what sucks about it is that one is not able to explore stocks from other countries or there is no way for me to find stocks based on themes. For e.g what If I want to find stocks or companies which are primary focused on VR? There's no good place for me to find, create and share lists like this. With Stocklist, I want people to be able discover stocks from all around the world. <comment><USER2> Looks good. The landing page explains the product well. I'm not really into stocks, or I would signup. Stupid question, as an American citizen, can I trade foreign stocks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment and appreciate the feedback. You can trade into foreign stocks as a foreign citizen yes. There are some rules you have to follow. This article provides a good guide

[https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32000/purchase-stock-in- forei...](https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32000/purchase-stock-in-foreign- companies/)

<comment><USER2> Cool, well I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interested in trying this.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to make a service like Uber, but for logistics? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I'm planning of making a platform which connects customers with transporters. What is the best approach to design the architecture? What should I keep in mind? <comment><USER2> Start with an excel sheet.. manually connect customers and transporters. Once that does not work anymore, you'll have learned how the workflow goes, and can build the app accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi,

just take the platform you're most comfortable with (Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node/Express, ASP.NET, whatever...) and implement your smallest possible product/service use cases (MVP-like) and ask your peers or future-customers to start working with it.

Then iterate though all the issues and suggestions to improve it.

First rule would be to get SOMETHING WORKING online asap.

You can go from there. When you're making money, start improving the product and the technology.

To address your needs you need to know what you need first. :)

Best regards, Steviee</comment>


Standardizing lessons learned from AMP - <AUTHOR> https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ <comment><USER2> Just for kicks, folks, let's collect all of the adjectives, adverbs and qualifiers used in this post to describe ~AMP:

        * a leading format
        * consistently excellent
        * invest strongly in ...
        * well-lit
        * user-first
        * instant-loading
        * tightly-integrated
        * highly-optimized
        * great
        * well-lit
        * great
        * well documented
        * easily deployable
        * validatable
        * opinionated about user-first principles
        * fast development
        * constant adjustment
        * more important than ever before
        * invest strongly in ...
        * engaging storytelling experiences
        * pushing the boundaries
        * deep integrations
        * well under way
        * super excited
        * instant-loading
        * well-lit
        * great
        * continue to invest heavily in ...
        * continue to innovate on ...
        * incredibly excited
        * can't wait

I'm imagining a Dilbert cartoon, where this list is a cheatsheet of things you can say about your project to get approval from your pointy-haired boss...

<comment><USER3> Text editors should have a feature to warn about a high number of qualifies/adverbs: "you are using to many qualifiers and adverbs, you may look biased to your readers, it may be a good idea to remove or rethink some of them."

<comment><USER4> I suggest everyone use one of many popular & excellent tools to check your professional articles for excessive & unnecessary words & long or hard to read sentences, for example here are some amazingly free tools I really enjoy:

Web App: [http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/](http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/)

VS Code Extension: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisth...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisthetechie.write- good-linter) (This uses open source libraries you can utilize to create your own version if you don't use VS Code)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote a blog post about these proposals a couple of weeks ago and a nice HN thread formed around it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445)

But as I said in my post, the problem with posts like today's AMP blog post is that they're too full of jargon to be comprehensible to a general audience. The Web Packaging standard is really cool, but today's blog post just linked out to a ton of web standards without defining them or explaining how they'll work in the future.

If you've got your head deep in AMP's community, this post is quite meaningful, but to everyone else, and especially to the huge community of developers who hate AMP, it reads like Greek.

It reflects a core problem with AMP's developer outreach strategy: a refusal to accept and acknowledge criticism. There are overwhelmingly more AMP detractors than AMP promoters, and the detractors have good arguments, arguments that the AMP team even kinda sorta accepts (which is why they're trying to push through these browser standards, to address the bugs).

But you'll never hear AMP technical leaders like Malte Ubl or Paul Bakaus saying, "Yes, we accept that criticism, and the problems with AMP _are_ really serious, and here's what we're doing to fix this. In the meanwhile, for many sites the tradeoff is worth it anyway."

The top thread in the HN thread was not _whether_ the AMP brand was toxic but _why_ the AMP brand is toxic. I think that if the AMP team had somebody focused on telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly, with a focus on the web developer community on HN, Reddit, Smashing, etc. it could have really helped.

Now, I think it's too late. The new Web Packaging thing shouldn't be called "AMP." The new "AMP for email" thing shouldn't be called AMP, either, because everybody knows that AMP sucks, and there's really no way to claw your way back from that.

<comment><USER6> _telling AMP 's story, humbly and honestly_

What would that look like? "We have a gun to your head"? There are some very uncomfortable truths here about Google's near-monopoly on Web traffic.

<comment><USER5> If you want the details, I did write a blog post about this. [https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without- sl...](https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without-slowing-it- down-522bc5e1e11d)

tl;dr: iframes cause all of AMP's problems, but they provide unbeatable performance, thanks to prerendering. Prerendering is faster than [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com). The Web Packaging standard will allow Google to prerender sites in search results without AMP, and without violating users' privacy.

But here's the point: most people think that Google _wants_ to host nytimes articles on google.com, to seize control of the web's traffic. They don't. They've done a bunch of work to get _out_ of that business while preserving the performance benefits of prerendering, but nobody knows that, because they talk about it in bizarre technical jargon like today's OP AMP blog post.

<comment><USER7> Why should we trust a monopolist that -- and this is totes a coincidence! -- is pushing a standard that breaks all urls to point to them? This is the next attempt after google plus or whatever their stupid social network is/was. They're basically terrified of facebook and, instead of supporting the internet, they're trying to become fb. But in your browser.

Pretending google didn't _want_ to steal all urls requires actively ignoring the last 10 years of google's corporate decisions.

<comment><USER5> I'm not telling you to _trust_ them. I'm certainly not telling you to use AMP.

I'm just saying, they've done a lot of work on this Web Packaging thing, and it's a pretty good replacement for AMP. You should check it out.

It's hard to see why they'd do all of that work of replacing AMP if your theory is right and they just loooved stealing those URLs.

<comment><USER7> Because

1 - they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar

2 - the internet isn't quite as dumb as google hoped

3 - thank god for the EU & Margrethe Vestager. Maybe we can talk her into adding a zero.

ps -- that status, as near as I can tell, of the amp url fix is vaporware. Deployed yet? Nope. So let's wait to get all triumphant until their supposed solution is deployed. [https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/01/09/google- finally-fixi...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/01/09/google-finally- fixing-urls-amp-pages/)

<comment><USER8> How so?

The user experience they wanted to achieve (provide an Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles experience on the web) was not technically possible. They added the hacks and workarounds that is AMP + AMP Cache + News carousel prerendering to Google to create something competitive.

Now they're working with the standards bodies to remove the need for the hacks they've developed. Web Packaging (for loading and verifying a bundled website - this is the preloading part) and iFrame Promotion (for 'promoting' an iFrame to the root browsing context - this is the 'clicking the search result and having the resulting page display instantly' part) is really cool and it'll be great to have this available to everyone without the downsides that Google's current solution has (URL fucking)

<comment><USER7> Weird how the technical compromises they just _had_ to make work out, well, wildly to their advantage. Better not piss off google or they break all links to your site!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, this is pretty much everything the HN crowd was asking for, right? Pull AMP apart into a bunch of web standards and switch Google search to promote any content which follows those standards rather than AMP content specifically?

Why are all the top comments so negative?

<comment><USER10> Probably because AMP should not have existed in the first place :) We already have everything we need to make fast and performant pages - we can't do it, because of marketing and trackers and spying and shit though: not technological factors, but human factors.

<comment><USER9> And yet, AMP has succeeded at getting publishers to deliver fast and performant pages where other efforts did not.

I dispute the idea that technological factors are not at play here. AMP's preloading and automatic CDN caching system have a pretty big impact on load times, and its technically-enforced restrictions on what sort of performance- impacting content publishers are allowed to include in their pages seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring pages do not become bloated.

<comment><USER11> The fact that Google Search is a monopoly is not a technological factor. Google gives preference to AMP sites on Google Search, therefore publishers must implement AMP.

I actually have a lot less issue with AMP as a technological solution, as I do with the Google's "our way or the highway" treatment of the Internet. Google uses both it's search monopoly and it's browser monopoly (and often, both at the same time) to force the entire world to do whatever Google wants them to.

Sometimes you might perceive the result to be "good", but that doesn't justify the behavior. That's why another technical implementation change blog doesn't improve anyone's mood about the whole thing: Because Malte Ubl is still pretending he's on #teamweb and not #teamgoogle.

<comment><USER9> Fair point, but that problem (at least as far as AMP is concerned) is exactly the one this blog post is addressing: Google is planning to stop pushing AMP specifically in its search results and instead push a set of open web standards which achieve the same technical goals.

<comment><USER12> Even so, I'm tired of jumping through hoops to adhere to bullshit standards that make life hard without any actual benefit. We have HTML and CSS, why do we need AMP? How does my personal webpage benefit from HTTPS? Why did they enforce mandatory HTTPS across the entire .dev TLD in WebKit, breaking my local test env, when it's only used by a few internal projects at Google?

They seem to have a vested interest in making web development harder than it needs to be.

<comment><USER13> > We have HTML and CSS, why do we need AMP?

Do you even know what AMP is?

<comment><USER12> Poor phrasing on my part. I meant that fast websites can already be built without adhering to the AMP standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant- loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel"_

Seems encouraging. Any step away from a walled garden is good.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish one day marketing, print designers and useless business architects would just step back and let me build a damn page.

No trackers, no spying, no fancy multilayered parallax video scrollers, no animated video carousels, no fucking ads, no taboola shit, no related clickbait articles, no tag cloud sidebar, no ooh-so-shiny bleeding edge web frameworks that has a lifecycle of a single year (megabytes of minified angular), no isomorphic shit, just a plain site with the relevant information and minimal styling.

<comment><USER12> We chose to use PHP for our site redesign after using React, Elm and Jekyll in other projects. It's really liberating. No spending days setting up a build/deploy process. Gets out of your way unless you actually need it. Everything including the kitchen sink included. Pre-installed on all Macs. Our designer can code and deploy changes by himself.

I used to hate PHP. Then I tried the alternatives.

<comment><USER10> It's not the framework, it's the people (and their whoring greed mixed with dilettantism). I love vue, I'm okay with A5 and react. I usually do node stuff, but php is okay nowdays, symphony is a good thing too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the point of view of a user concerned with Google's influence, this seems like a good move.

From the point of view of a SRE who would have to help configure a server side implementation of web packaging, having yet another http request/response type to build and maintain seems like a bloody nightmare. And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use? It also requires custom behavior from the client, all-but-guaranteeing it won't be broadly honored.

And ultimately, I'm confused about how this replaces, or supplements AMP.

<comment><USER16> > And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use?

It's not the first (or probably last) time that Big G's said "Do as we say, not as we do."

Heck, the blog post is hosted on WordPress instead of Google's own Blogger.

<comment><USER9> Chrome hasn't disabled OCSP. It just only enforces it when you're doing OCSP stapling with must-staple. Firefox did the same: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366100](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366100)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lots of talk and no code or proposals, in so far as I can tell.

The thing that makes the web slow isn't web standards, but too many ads and too much tracking code. If only there were a company that controlled a lot of the ads and tracking code on the web...

<comment><USER9> > no code or proposals

What are you talking about? They linked like half a dozen concrete proposals in the post itself! Even provided a dashboard so you can easily track all of them: [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web- standards-related-to-amp.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Repost:

There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package.

2017 IETF proposal by Google: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin- webpackage-use-cas...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage- use-cases-00)

2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: [https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc](https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc)

There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: [https://w3c.github.io/wpub/](https://w3c.github.io/wpub/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm wondering what happens if web packaging really takes off. Could mirror sites basically do what ipfs does, but without inventing a new protocol? Or do Cloudflare and other content networks already do everything website owners want?

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot if big words disguised as good intentions.

There's nothing fast, instant, or open about AMP.

The latest article debunking those myths: [https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the- missing-controversy-3b424...](https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing- controversy-3b424031047)

Google's fully opaque process around AMP for email (yes, it's a thing): [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597) and [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600)

<comment><USER11> The fact that Malte is still trying to call the AMP project "well-lit" is really what throws a lot of question on this blog post. AMP is not a "well- lit" project.

Why not hand AMP itself over to standards groups as well as all of the other things mentioned here? What about the proprietary GMail implementation of AMP4Email? Or the fact that none of the justifications for AMP given in this (or The Verge interview[0]) hold up as reasons for AMP4Email.

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp- accele...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp-accelerated- mobile-page-announcement-standard-web-packaging-urls)

<comment><USER9> > AMP is not a "well-lit" project.

How so? As the blog post points out, the whole thing is open-source with almost all discussion surrounding the project happening out in the open on their GitHub repo. You might not agree with the direction the project is going, but I'd say it's about as well-lit as any open source project can be.

<comment><USER21> Posting some discussions in the open doesn't make it well-lit. There are many projects following this path where the real decisions are made in private meetings by people in the controlling companies. Open washing is not open source.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, while discussing AMP4Email, it seemed that, despite being a proposal in the AMP Project, all decisions for it's implementation were already made (and committed to) by the Gmail team, it had already been "reviewed" by a security team (although any such security protections are limited to Gmail's own internal protections, other implementers are on their own), and there seemed to be no opportunity for the greater email community to comment before these things were decided.

Having it up on GitHub after that doesn't really mean much. This is the same for Android and Chrome, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm uncertain they learned the right lessons.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is anyone out there doing anything with AMP besides Google? It seems like it could be super useful for aggregator sites like Reddit. Or HN for that matter. Like a heavyweight version of OpenGraph meta tags.

<comment><USER14> The reddit AMP pages you land on from Google searches are particularly irritating. You aren't logged in when you go to them, and various UI expectations are broken. Web packaging could help here since it would remove the google url, allowing cookies/sessions to function again.

<comment><USER9> Web Packaging (at least on its own) wouldn't help with that, since the whole point of that standard is to allow content to be prefetched from a CDN (like AMP pages currently are), and CDNs can't cache content that's user-specific.

What _would_ work is serving the main content immediately, then using JS to fetch user-specific stuff after the page load.

<comment><USER12> ... and we're back to optimizing for fast delivery of the page that loads your page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are you allowed to put Google ads and tags in an iframe yet, so they don't hold up the page load?

<comment><USER6> Aren't they already async? [https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en)

<comment><USER25> Async still prevents the DOMcontentloaded event from firing, and if you can't sandbox JS into an iframe you're screwed security-wise if the linked source gets owned or turns evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Haven't tried this myself but came across this interesting AMP workaround: [https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed- score/](https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed-score/)

<comment><USER27> No technical detail, just a lead gen page. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER28> I'm glad I wasn't the only one wondering, "Ok, where's the technique here beyond just adding AMP markup in a conventional page?"

Still not entirely convinced what's supposed to work about this method.</comment></comment></comment>


ACM trying to subvert open access - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/17/association-for-comp.html

<comment><USER3> My experience of the ACM was of paying for a year's worth of the Digital Library and finding that _everything_ I searched for in my area required an additional fee. It was listed as available but when you tried to download it would hit you up for another payment. When I complained about the bait-and- switch and requested a refund they refused.

<comment><USER4> The ACM just seem really underhand in general. They kept spamming me, through several email accounts, offering me membership. Even after I joined, they still continue to spam me.

I don't think I'm going to renew my membership when it comes up.

<comment><USER3> They also stepped up spamming me from quarterly to bi-weekly. I asked them to stop - no change - so I filter out everything from them. Now they just don't exist to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not longer a member of the ACM because of their position on this issue. If you currently pay dues, take a moment to reflect on your reasons for doing so.

</comment><comment><USER6> FWIW, it's often possible to find the full-text articles on CiteSeer (<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/>) or the original author's home or faculty pages via Google Scholar.

Also, while I graduated several years ago, I still have access to surprisingly many research journals via my alumni library card. If you are or have been a student, that's worth looking into.

<comment><USER7> I used to ssh into university computers and browsed from there, so that I have the right IP address and get access to journals.

<comment><USER6> I can just sign in with my library card and read the journals on the library's web site, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why I don't really care: most of the people who benefit from academic research papers fall into one of the following categories:

        1. Academic professionals.
        2. Students.
        3. Industry professionals.
        4. Government professionals.

In all three cases, there is an entity that will gladly pay the paltry sum required to get you access to ACM papers should you have even the slightest realistic need for them. You have to work pretty hard to be in a category where the dues will be both a significant expense and not paid for by someone else.

That is, it's quite silly that the government pays for research which a private organization can then benefit from without similarly paying back for it. However, it'd be even more silly to get worked up over every minor injustice when there are so much greater ones in equally easy reach.

<comment><USER7> What about interested layman?

<comment><USER8> Not a whole lot of those doing groundbreaking work in the field. And there aren't many interested laymen. On the whole, it seems unlikely to cause any measurable harm to the future if said laymen cannot read academic papers for free.

<comment><USER7> Contrast the obsession with simplifying sign-on forms, to lower the threshold for participation in web applications.

<comment><USER8> Now contrast the simplicity of interacting with the most complex web application and the comparative overwhelming depth and difficulty of making novel findings in computer science.

<comment><USER7> I don't see the analogy.

People use quite simple tools for complex interactions with other human beings (e.g. facebook). Someone interested in research may use quite simple tools like evince to view the latest research papers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a persistent issue in all academia. I currently have access through a university, but trying to do research without someone paying your way is absurdly difficult. Of course the Internet is all about open-access, and I'm all for open-source software. It continually surprises me that academics don't worry more about this.

Aaron Swartz wrote (tangentially) about this recently: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/disciplinarybubbles>

Disciplinary bubbles and the Academic Firewall keep academia needlessly separated from the trials and delights of reality.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well it worked for me. The only reason I'm a member of the ACM is to get access to their full-text articles.

</comment><comment><USER11> Also, even when the papers are not posted on author's webpages, they are often happy to send you a copy over email.

Funny enough, I have the same issue with my old student ID -- it works to get access to those databases long after I graduated

</comment><comment><USER12> 404'ed - <USER2>

<comment><USER12> I love how someone went through the effort to downmod me because I got a 404 page lol

<comment><USER6> In what way does noting that you got a 404 contribute to the conversation?

<comment><USER12> In what way does ignoring the fact that the URL 404'ed make HN a better place?

<comment><USER7> Silence does not clutter the channel. Thus only breaking silence needs justification.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Free student analytics for teachers and districts (try a demo) - <AUTHOR> http://kiteedu.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Some info:

We're entering a private beta in about a week. The analytics portion of the application is free, but we're also building a content distribution system (a sort of iBooks for question banks and assignments). Currently we have a subscription model ready, but intend to have pre-built assignments purchasable in the store as well.</comment>