Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304017404575165730979629178.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTThirdBucket

<comment><USER2> Even if these things are mostly "obvious", it's good to hear them said and it's good that it's in something other than, say, the Chronicle of Higher Ed. But he draws some odd conclusions from his supply-and-demand argument. People grumble about the high cost as if it's greedy, overpaid professors (sometimes explicitly blaming tenure), but many if not most could make a lot more money elsewhere. I hold a PhD in computer science, have been teaching computer science at a four-year college (non-US read: "small undergraduate university") for 7 years, and my salary is $52,000 a year. I don't need to tell anyone here that I could make a lot more than that working in industry.

It's plenty to live by and I have no complaints, because I'm certainly not in it for the money; I'm stating an actual number because I want to be quite clear that tuition rates that have gone up faster than inflation for most of my lifetime are _not_ due to professorial salaries. In fact, it's hard to get a clear answer on what they are going to, although my money's on ballooning administrations that perform tasks once performed by members of the faculty but are much better-paid.

<comment><USER3> One thing a lot of it may go towards is infrastructure and expansion. I know my alma mater has always had to constantly come up with big new construction projects (new stadium, new academic buildings, new apartments, etc) because they needed something to do with all the money they were taking in. The construction seemed very clearly driven by the need to spend money, rather than the tuition being driven by the need for buildings. Providing value to students was definitely not a concern, because whatever tuition is it'll get paid - plenty of applicants were being rejected.

<comment><USER4> This may not apply to private institutions, but public schools are subject to boom-and-bust cycle of generous government funding in economic booms and budget cuts during recessions. It's easy to justify almost any project when you know that leaving money on the table means it may not be there when you do need it.

<comment><USER5> This isn't a problem unique to educational institutions, it affects most entities that practice standard budgeting. That's one reason why I favor zero- based budgets, although they have their own problems. (frequently take longer, more work, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Forgive me for my bitter cynicism (or don't), but I couldn't help but feel that the thesis of this article boiled down to the following quote: "My alma mater, Oberlin College, provides financial aid for as many as 70% of its students."

I have a sneaking suspicion that the author wrote this entire article to assert that Oberlin is a "top college." (I am agnostic / do not care at all on this matter.)

He does claim to answer the question of what your tuition money is really spent on: (a) he notes that salaries for tenured professors has increased, and (b) he addresses the fact that colleges are building fancy new dorms/athletic facilities/etc to increase student demand. Without evidence, asserts that your tuition pays for these. Without evidence, I would be inclined to believe that these are more likely to be funded by named endowments from private donors. Again, I feel that this thesis is merely ostensible, to justify his assertions about his alma mater.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article reminds me once again why I am determined never to donate any money to the school I went to.

</comment><comment><USER8> And the reason is.... _drumroll_ Supply and demand! Wow. Insightful.

<comment><USER9> "Supply and demand" doesn't explain anything until you recognize that what universities sell, is prestige.

That's the key point of the article.

<comment><USER10> I can see the opposite side too. Prestige isn't worth much if nobody willing to pay for it. But the fact is there are people willing to pay for it. EDIT: I guess that's what you're saying as well.

<comment><USER11> And why are people willing to pay for it? Because universities have marketed said prestige as something that is absolutely essential to success in the modern world. So of course people will buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How long will it be until recommendations from trusted others and work examples are accepted as better predictors of competency and success over degrees from elite schools?

I love that some fields have already overcome this bias. I'm also glad that our globalized world is quickly making this more and more of a reality.

<comment><USER13> Exactly...my startup has some funding from a great seed program to work on this. Any suggestions on what a great social recruiting web app would look like?

<comment><USER14> <http://www.groupereye.com/>

<comment><USER13> Thanks, this service seems to be more for one time projects then for recruiting though. Is there anyone trying to replace/supplant resumes (not just upload them, like LinkedIn)?

<comment><USER12> We are in the form of eportfolios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Universities need to be conservative and guard their wealth. They outlast countries. It's important they be stable, many schools aim for cheap and fast which is fine but at the first bump in the road they hit serious problems.

<comment><USER16> Why do they need to outlast countries? At that point the only relationship between University("today") and University("100 years ago") is the bricks in the building. None of the professors or students that made a university whatever it was 100 years ago remains; "greatness" is then a happy coincidence.

Why not have throw-away universities?

<comment><USER17> Because prestige is what they are selling, and prestige takes lots of time to produce. The greater the prestige, the more good professors want to teach and do research there, and the more good students want to learn there. This does influence the next generation, and so on. If the quality of people stays consistently high, the prestige remains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For most universities over the last 20 years, the number of "staff" has doubled or tripled while the number of "faculty" has remained about the same. (source: a tenured professor at a big state university). Whether this is just bloat or not is another question, but does support the argument that most tenured professors are not fat cats raking in cash from exploited college students' families.

</comment><comment><USER19> _But senior, tenured faculty at elite schools are firmly entrenched in the well-compensated professional class (top salaries at elite schools often exceed $150,000; and for scholars in economics, business and law schools, earnings can be substantially in excess of that) with superior benefits, such as university-subsided housing, lifetime heath care and seven-figure retirement accounts. Once tenure has been achieved, generally after less than ten years of work, top college teachers face no professional risk and, by and large, teach three or fewer courses a semester._

3 courses per semester is a lot of work if you're doing it right, especially when you consider the amount of time research can take. 8-10 hours per week is a good estimate of the amount of time each class takes.

Also, very few professors make $150k-- those are the stars-- and they tend to be in their late 30s if not 40s. Academic pay is 1/5 to 1/10 of what it is in other industries (and yes, it's harder to become a tenured professor than to make $1 million/year on Wall Street).

American tuition is ridiculous, but overcompensation of teaching staff is _not_ the problem. With tuition at $40,000/year for 10 classes, that's $4000 per class. If average class size is 25, that's $100k for 150 hours of the professor's work ($667/hour). So a professor is bringing in $500+k through teaching alone. For that professor to be making $65k (more realistic than the $150k figure) is not overcompensation.

<comment><USER20> Your source to show the accuracy of any of these estimates is?

<comment><USER21> which estimates are you contesting? as someone involved tangentially in academia, none of these even raise an eye brow. you might as well be asking for sources that the sun will rise tomorrow.

if you really want hard numbers, pick your favorite public university. poke around. their faculty salaries will be public record. also, the student feedback on faculty will be public record. you should be able to figure out the average number of courses taught, and the average salary in about 10 minutes after you find the relevant excel spreadsheets.

a 3 credit hour course will involve at least 3 hours of work per week (you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in). a minimum of 1 office hour per week. you've got to come up with homeworks, and grade them. even if you look at 25 students' homework for only 1 minute each, that'll take about half an hour. so it takes 4.5 hours each just to do the bare minimum possible work for a class.

google for "average college tuition" to cover that part.

what's left?

<comment><USER22> "Publish or perish."

The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part.

Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research.

From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

<comment><USER23> Professors work. A lot. Maybe not the ancient tenured ones, and not all of them, but the majority. It is far from a 40-hour job. And in the hard sciences/engineering/computer science, they could definitely be making more money in industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You can't talk about college costs and not also mention the enormous impact the college sports industry has had on transforming colleges from their academic role in society to that of being prestigious "mini-corporations."

Where is all the money going? Who's the top paid guy at university X? Oh, it's the football coach. Well why does he get to make $3 million a year while we just raised tuition 8% across the board, and cut financial aid by 20%? And that fat new sports arena which the university board of regents approved and just built for $100 million? Well, it doesn't count, because free market capitalism still applies to academic institutions—our true revenue source is selling and catering to sports fans. Professors, students, research, those are of course net losses, we just pay to keep them around in order to justify the existence of the sports team.

In a way, a University's brand, physical grounds, and costumed staff is a Disneyesque facade for the real money maker: football. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much into my Jean Baudrillard...

<comment><USER25> Football coaches are paid well because college football is a net money maker for the university--especially since they don't have to pay the athletes. If you want universities to be even more broke, by all means cut the athletic programs.

<comment><USER24> Is it a good thing that universities, who hold an implicitly benevolent, non- profit societal role, should also have such high profit margins on their "student"-players?

If the football team is bringing in the dough to fund a big chunk of the operating expenses, but aren't being fairly compensated, then the universities are exploiting those students for profit. What I don't see is how universities can use this same logic to justify using their sports teams to fund their academic operations.

This pattern sounds familiar, where else have I seen it, oh yeah: the rich should pay for the poor, because they are lucky enough to have more. (I actually believe this, and I'm just using parallel logic). A few student athletes will win the lottery moving into the pro's, so colleges "tax" athletes by not paying them, and substitute the incentive of "you might be the next Lebron." (Do s/Lebron/Google/ and doesn't it sounds eerily similar to VC startup logic?!) Then the rest of the student body benefits because the football team just paid the salary of the Poetry professor.

It might work this way, but I doubt it, although I'd love to see a study confirming how much money trickles back into colleges from their sports teams. We can just look at the larger macroscopic view for how efficient trickle down economics really is: of all the hundreds of billions given to the rich elites, how much of it trickles down to the poor? I bet the football team is keeping most of its profit, and in fact on average is a _net loss_ to its attached college.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: New embedded comments, open-source, new features, alt to Disqus and Talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments <comment><AUTHOR> So this is another online commenting system, light-weight & with some unique features for dealing with large discussions. — Yesterday a HN topic about an online commenting system, Mozilla Talk, being used at Washington Post, got lots of attention ( > 500 upvotes). So I thought that maybe now is good time to post this. (Here's yesterday's discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232147) )</comment>


Door to Hell - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell <comment><USER2> Similar but different - naturally occurring fires of Chimaera: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F)

Believed to be the origin of the stories of Mount Chimaera.

Short hike out from Cirali in Turkey on the south coast. You can extinguish a flame temporarily but it will soon re-ignite. Picture of the area here:

[http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cira...](http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cirali.jpg)

<comment><USER3> What are the stories of Mount Chimaera?

<comment><USER2> The Chimera was a fire-breathing creature from Greek mythological, part-snake, part-lion, part-goat.

Thought to have origins in the burning rocks near Cirali.

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

Apparently sailors used those flames as a form of navigation though they might've needed to have been a lot larger hundreds of years ago to be visible from that far out to sea. When I was there a few years ago, none of the flames would've been bigger than about 20cm. We could barely see them in the dark from down the mountain let alone some way out on the water.

Absolutely recommend Turkey as a travel destination by the way, and especially the boat trips along the South coast. Awesome experience cruising along by sail, then anchoring in a sheltered bay to dive off the boat, eat, visit ruins, etc.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coal mine fire burning since 1962 in Pennsylvania:

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

<comment><USER5> And one that is even older than that!

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Oklo[1][2][3] natural nuclear reactor is even stranger.

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

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

[3] [http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm](http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm)

<comment><USER7> You must've seen this on HN, haven't you? It was on the front page not few days ago.

<comment><USER6> No, I missed it then. I would assume it's been on a few times - it's quite interesting.

Not sure where I first heard about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha. 1971? I used to occasionally drive by one in Kirkuk Iraq that is featured in the old testament. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur)

It was the safest route between two of the bases we frequently traveled between, but the sulfur smell was _horrible_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating; aren't fires like these typically extinguished by starving them of oxygen, for instance with an explosive charge? Wikipedia doesn't even say if it's been attempted, and the panaorma makes the site look like it would be small enough to be feasible.. (IANA natural gas fire fighter.)

<comment><USER10> _> Derweze's large crater with a diameter of 70 metres (230 ft)._

<comment><USER11> So, cap it with concrete. It's not quite the scale of the Hoover Dam. Recover expenses later, by selling the natural gas that would've otherwise burnt off.

How many cubic meters of gas have been wasted since 1971?

<comment><USER12> I don't think this would work. you'd have to cap it long enough for the concrete to set. otherwise it'll bubble through and likely end up with a channel in the middle of the concrete that'll let the gas out anyway.

<comment><USER13> Concrete sounds too expensive anyways, just cap it with a big flame-proof tarp. Wouldn't cost more than $10k or $20k I'd imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note to people complaining about the waste of gas and CO2 emission: this is a drop in the bucket. _Vast_ quantities of gas from oilfields is flared, deliberately, continuously.

[http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring- the...](http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring-the-burning- issue)

"140-150 billion cubic meters of flared natural gas translates into 270-290 million tons of C02 emissions per year. Accounting for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions"

</comment><comment><USER15> Serious question:

Why isn't a power plant built over this?

<comment><USER16> I've been to that campfire. Turkmenistan's main non-urban tourist attraction.

First, the gas seeps up through the ground, not through a single bore at the surface. So it is hard to capture.

Second, the amount of gas coming out of that hole is simply not that enormous. Enormous by an individual human scale, but by and large, it doesn't have the same menacing quality as a high pressure oil well being on fire. You can walk right up to the crater's edge without protection, while the oil well fires radiate so much heat you can't even get close. I doubt it's a significant amount of gas leakage, compared to what the country already drills for.

It's also in the middle of nowhere. Quite literally, it's almost exactly in the middle of the turkmen desert.

<comment><USER17> Interesting OT for the non English native speaker: meaning and origin of the expression "by and large" which got me confused for a second -- [http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa- bya1.htm](http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bya1.htm)

<comment><USER18> Interesting OT even for a native english speaker. I'm frequently surprised at the origins of idioms that I use all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another fire that's been burning for over 5 decades: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire)

</comment><comment><USER20> While I find that very interesting, that hoax which I just found on the bottom of the wikipedia page made me quite lough tough... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax)

</comment><comment><USER21> Would a large fuel-air detonation above it suck enough air to put it out?

<comment><USER22> You need to cut off oxygen long enough for the rock to cool below the temperature at which the gas will ignite.

<comment><USER23> Wait for a very rainy day and do it then. Store some extra water in tanks on the sides.

Does it rain there much or is it arid?

<comment><USER24> It's pretty arid [1]. The rainiest month in Ashgabat (the Turkmenistan capital) is February, with 40 mm (less than two inches).

[1] [https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40...](https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40.252611,58.439389&hl=en&t=m&z=15)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The actual legendary one is in Norway. Around Lofoten Point. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen)

</comment><comment><USER26> Another one in India [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire)

</comment><comment><USER27> Also check out [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag)

</comment><comment><USER28> How cool will be having a bbq over there?

<comment><USER29> I imagine it'd be fairly hot actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what is the quantity of CO2 that is released annually by this crater. Must be tremendous.

I'm under the impression that whatever ways to pollute less we come up with, it will be annihilated by things like this or just sheer overpopulation.

<comment><USER31> It's probably not that much, on a global scale. What's more, CO2 is a better gas to be venting to the atmosphere than methane is. [citation needed]

<comment><USER32> Indeed, methane is at least an order of magnitude greenhouse gas as C02 : " over a 100-year period, it traps 29 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide".[0]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> On the first look it seems like a crater in Venus, Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting that it was lit on purpose by Russian petro-chemists in 1971, and has been burning ever since. The fire was originally supposed to last a couple of weeks...

<comment><USER35> I too read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Where can I get a sample "Industry Standard" convertible note doc? - <AUTHOR>

I just got a convertible note doc from my lawyer and something just doesn't seem right.  Any idea where I might be able to find a somewhat standardized convertible note doc which I can compare his doc against? <comment><USER2> Not sure where you can find a standard one, but my bet is 90% is boilerplate stuff. If you don't mind, what doesn't feel right? Did you make him explain each paragraph and reasons for it, and answer questions for you? I use attorney's quite a bit and really push them onto the hot seat, I learned early on they were quick to try and control my meetings with them which is just unacceptable to me.

I did find this with some examples:

[http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/category/convertible- not...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/category/convertible-note-bridge- financing/)

and this:

[http://www.docracy.com/2740/convertible-note-term-sheet- temp...](http://www.docracy.com/2740/convertible-note-term-sheet-template-)

Obviously I am not an attorney and I don't have any convertible notes so I can't answer from first hand knowledge but hopefully those help some.</comment>


Why do Republicans tweet so much more than Democrats? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/11/republican-democrat-tweets/ <comment><USER2> Take a look at the age distribution for Republicans vs. Democrats. In particular, you're looking for people below 40, 45, or 50.

[http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info- CONGRE...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info- CONGRESS_AGES_1009.html)

A quick reminder, for folks who are disinterested in politics: politicians are, as a group, very much not like HN members in several regards, the least of which is age. And you should see the Supreme Court...

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in online political discourse, check out this paper:

Political Polarization on Twitter [http://truthy.indiana.edu/site_media/pdfs/conover_icwsm2011_...](http://truthy.indiana.edu/site_media/pdfs/conover_icwsm2011_polarization.pdf)

and for more info:

<http://cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/truthy>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is nothing more than an interesting tidbit without knowing which tweets have the biggest impact. My guess is the Republican tweets have the bigger impact, especially with the large Palin following. Whether that impact is good or bad depends on the person.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because Republicans are always campaigning, I would guess. Same reason they are disproportionately highly represented on the Sunday talk shows.</comment>


Dell Ubuntu laptops on the main Inspiron page - <AUTHOR> http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-laptops?~ck=bt

<comment><USER2> Ubuntu is not an option on the dell.com.au website :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> :/</comment></comment>


Compiling to WebAssembly: It's Happening - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-its-happening/ <comment><USER2> Web assembly always makes me a little sad. It feels like we are going back to flash only it won't be bad this time, I promise, no really.

I always feel like the most obvious use for it is to start writing truly hateful and abusive code.

I'm sure this is because I'm getting old.

<comment><USER3> We will eventually come to terms with the fact that Flash was 15 years ahead of everything else on multiple fronts and we ought to have been just chastised the terrible developers doing awful and horrendous things with pretty technically sound software.

<comment><USER4> HTML5 _still_ isn't able to deliver the quality interactive experiences (Games) without applying a lot more effort. Even "simple" things like cross- browser low-latency sound effects are still difficult.

Flash presents a single platform with a single vendor that can innovate as quickly as they like. The web platform is inevitably cumbersome and slow in comparison -- over a decade later they're still playing catch-up.

I'm looking forward to WebGL ads that eat battery life with excessive shaders.

<comment><USER3> As a strong supporter of open source, doing a comparative analysis of HTML5 and Flash, I have to admit that private enterprise was able to kick the ball forward so much faster here ...

I remember watching a vector animation version of a "tell-tale heart" in flash in 1998. On a 28.8 connection it played smoothly full-screen on a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of ram. I remember clicking the play button and having it just miraculously starting to play without any wait, streaming down and uncompressing in real time. I was floored by it. 12 years later I was invited to watch a spiderman animation demo using HTML5 ... there was a 30 second load time, the framerate was probably 1fps, the audio didn't work, the content didn't render properly ...

It's like how Microsoft was able to pull off nearly everything we could do today by shoe-horning their activeX technology into ie3. Just load a bunch of cab files and drop them into the page like OLE components and bam, you got just about everything. The interactivity could bootstrap - that is, not need any extra plugin and you could engage with the other content on the site using vbscript or javascript interfaces in a two-way manner. It was pretty nice.

Netscape retorted with their JVM integration but it just wasn't the same ...

<comment><USER5> If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like the modern trend, and I like it. I'm going to compare this to the recent developments with OpenGL and Vulkan. With OpenGL, you ship textual source code for your shaders written in GLSL, and you have to hope that the compiler on your client's machine does the right thing! With Vulkan and SPIR-V, the compiler is taken out of the equation, and you can use whatever language you want to write shaders, validate them ahead of time, and ship the validated binary blobs to the client. Incidentally, I'm looking forward to WebGL 2. I really miss being able to use texture arrays, integers, and instancing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Web browsers are turning into giant, poorly designed operating systems. My current operating system can already run binaries, this is reinventing the wheel in a massively over engineered way.

<comment><USER8> And I don't understand why. Take the two most popular mobile platforms, iOS and Android: people there routinely download and install new applications and typically never interact with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Instagram via their browsers. Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is cross-platform and easy for users to use. My own preference would be something based off of Nix so that you can avoid many problems related to library versions and whatnot, but anything where a user could be pretty much guaranteed that if he clicks "install", he'll be able to use his application in the next couple of minutes.

<comment><USER9> > Why should the situation be different on the desktop? I feel that the > efforts should not be going into making the browser into an OS that can run > general-purpose software, but rather getting a packaging system that is > cross-platform and easy for users to use.

Cross platform is a red herring. The iOS and Android app stores are not cross platform. Ease of use is also increasingly a red herring. The Windows and Mac app stores have been around for a long time and are quite easy to use. Yet they have not ushered in a shift away from Web apps on the desktop.

I think we should be looking at why Web apps have been successful on the desktop rather than pretending they have no advantages.

<comment><USER7> > I think we should be looking at why Web apps have been successful on the > desktop rather than pretending they have no advantages.

I think there is a perception of "try before you buy" with web apps that is appealing. Even when apps/programs are free, you feel like you are giving something away by installing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the recent press tour about Swift, Apple seems to be really gung-ho about people using Swift everywhere.

Since Swift is built on LLVM and there's direct LLVM support for WebAssembly, I wonder if Apple will get behind WebAssembly so they can get Swift in the browser.

<comment><USER11> If I'm not mistaken Webkit is implementing experimental WebAssembly support. It appears to be the only implementation being worked on upstream out of all the major browser engines right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there (or are there any plans to add) a WebAssembly -> asm.js compiler, so that I can write some code by hand in WebAssembly and still get it to run fast in old browsers? Or are there features of WebAssembly that would be impossible to add in asm.js?

The reason I ask is that asm.js is really painful and cumbersome to write by hand and wasm seems substantially nicer, but I only have small bits of numerical hot loops which I want to use wasm/asm.js for, and I have no desire to bring a bunch of code written in C into my little project.

<comment><USER13> Yes there is. That's the wasm2asm project Alon mentioned in the post.

<comment><USER12> Whoops, I read right past that line. :-) Thanks, I'll take a look.

For anyone interested, the code is in wasm2asm.h: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/blob/master/src/wasm...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/blob/master/src/wasm2asm.h)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds like an odd question, but I honestly need somebody to explain this to me...what is the motivation behind the modern trend to put _everything_ on the web? Is there something you get by running your program from a browser that you don't get from downloading and running an elf or a text file, or is this entire trend based around appealing to users who don't actually know how to use their computers?

<comment><USER15> It's the current fad. But nothing new. Since the beginning of computing the tides go from thin-clients and fat-clients back and forth. Currently fat- clients are en-vouge.

<comment><USER16> And here I was thinking (mobile) apps were the current fad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Exciting stuff. Just further solidifies in my mind that C/C++ is one of the few languages that will run _everywhere_.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does code written in WebAssembly have access to the DOM somehow? How will that work?

<comment><USER18> In the current proposal there is no way for WebAssembly to directly access the DOM (or any other "Web API" objects).

Basically you will need to drop back down into javascript and handle that there (basically how asm.js does it now).

But there is a proposal to eventually integrate direct DOM access into Web Assembly, but that's for after they get it up and running.

<comment><USER19> If they wanted to do it right, then an HTTP requests itself should serve a compiled HTML binary based on an AST. The binary version of HTML.

<comment><USER20> I would consider that the worst scenario. If each website was its own binary application it would undo the open source aspect of websites (even though that's only partly true today due to all the obscured javascript). But maybe that would actually be desirable for all companies which rely on advertising revenue and want to prevent any modification of their web content (such as removal of ads). It'll be interesting to see how the web develops in the future. WebAssembly definitely seems to give more control to the author.

<comment><USER19> Just because it's a binary AST doesn't mean it's closed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> WebAssembly lets people write in C++, Ruby, Python, etc and for that code to work in the browser like Javascript does at the moment. Am I correct?

<comment><USER22> Mostly. The initial target is C++ and similar languages, and it will not have DOM access, but using suitable libraries (libc, SDL, etc., for example emscripten's) you can write a normal C++ program and have it run in the browser.

You can also run Ruby and Python in the browser by just compiling their C or C++ VMs. But that won't still work "like JavaScript" \- their objects won't be native VM objects in the browser, it won't use the browser's GC, they won't be observable in the browser's debugger, etc.

So far all of that was already possible, and done, with asm.js.

In the future, it is a goal to work to do GC object integration, so that something like Ruby or Python could actually compile down to something with native VM objects, and that would also allow calling DOM APIs directly. (This will likely still require a compiled VM, though.)

<comment><USER23> Its worth pointing out that it would hardly be practical to expect users to download the code for the entire Ruby VM (and libraries) when they visit your web page.

<comment><USER24> Depends how you look at it.

If you're using a web _page_ that is mostly just a CRUD app, sure, no-one will wait around for that, but if you're shipping a version of IPython that can run in the browser, I think people would be pretty happy about it as long as the blob can be cached and hopefully shared between sites since it's on a shared CDN.

<comment><USER22> I think you're right. While downloading a VM doesn't make sense for a small site, for many cases it could. There are also fairly compact VMs for some languages. And WebAssembly will make the VM download substantially smaller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anybody know if there are plans for an API for garbage collection? The WASM spec as it currently exists seems to be only useful for non-GC languages, and it would be a shame if we ended up shipping a new GC implementation for every page that we load. Perhaps something that would allow compilers to tap into the native JS GC?

<comment><USER26> What would the GC scan? What do pointers look like? At the assembly layer, you have the flexibility to not have a C runtime (and therefore no C stack), and you might be doing fun things like having tagged pointers that the GC would have to know about.

In short, the WASM layer is IMO the wrong layer for GC. I think the closest- layered applicable solution is caching & pinning guarantees for common libraries, which may already be addressed by the same solutions for common JS libraries (use a common CDN & let the browser caching keep it pinned).

<comment><USER27> The GC would scan whatever the program told it to scan, by using its API, like the Boehm GC library: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector)

I think it only makes sense, seeing as interaction with the native JS VM will be inevitable for a long time.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps then you should just use the Boehm GC library then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So does it just do what NaCL was already doing, or at least is the objective the same?

I'm more worried about more specific things like hardware access (GPU, mouse inputs, networking, windowing)

It seems wasm runs at native speeds and take full advantage of optimization, but can it really be a solution fits all? There must be some things wasm can't do. And so far, since JS did almost everything, I don't see the point of wasm if it can't do what other language can.

<comment><USER22> The main difference is that NaCl used a plugin API (PPAPI). WebAssembly, like asm.js, can access JavaScript, and so it has indirect access to DOM APIs, with no new powers over the existing web.

The main point of wasm, from my perspective, is startup speed. wasm will allow much smaller downloads of large codebases, and much faster parsing (due to the binary format). For small programs this might not matter, but for big ones, it's a huge deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hi Alon,

thank you for sharing. I am a Computer Science Master student and i would like to contribute to the development. The git looks really full and i don`t know where to start.

<comment><USER22> Which area were you interested to contribute to?

For Binaryen specifically, this bug could be a good starting point: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/issues/2](https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/issues/2)

Other issues in the tracker there as well.

Bigger topics are to make progress on wasm2asm, and to start an implementation of the current binary format (link is in the design repo), which Binaryen needs to support.

<comment><USER30> ok. Thanks, i'll have a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So the current toolchain involves using emscripten to generate asm.js and then using binaryen to convert asm.js to WebAssembly. Unfortunately emscripten depends on a fork of LLVM (FastComp), with no plans for a proper LLVM asm.js backend.

Are there plans for a properly WebAssembly LLVM backend that does not depend on forking LLVM (like emscripten)?

<comment><USER32> Yes: [http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm- project/llvm/trunk/lib/Target/We...](http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm- project/llvm/trunk/lib/Target/WebAssembly/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there any progress on making the compilers utilize the js gc instead of including their own entire runtime?

<comment><USER34> This is largely blocked by the ecmascript committee's incredible slowness in introducing key features like Weak References, but it will happen eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does this mean anyone can write Python to wasm converter then run it on browser, looks like LLVM backend?

<comment><USER6> Someone could write a "PyWasm". You could then ship your Python code as a wasm blob, but you'd have to include all of the standard library parts which you use, which are probably significant. The library could be a separate resource, so clients can cache it separately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm very interested in compiling Go to WebAssembly. Based on what I read, it seems that so far you can primarily try it with C/C++ code.

If one were to build a Go -> WebAssembly compiler, what are good routes to take? I can see there's going to be multiple possibilities.

<comment><USER37> Will be a huge pain in the ass. Go's compiler uses Plan 9, and WebAssembly uses LLVM.

<comment><USER38> There is llgo[1] which is an implementation of go on top of the llvm toolchain.

But if I'm not mistaken, WebAssembly won't accept just any llvm bitcode. It's similar to how emscripten will work with the bitcode that clang outputs, but not other llvm compilers like rust or ghc.

[1]: [http://llvm.org/svn/llvm- project/llgo/trunk/README.TXT](http://llvm.org/svn/llvm- project/llgo/trunk/README.TXT)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Cool, but why not just use, you know, Java bytecode? Existing toolchains, compilers, runtimes, virtual machines could all be reused I'm sure. Actually there are a hundred different great virtual machines that could be used... Why, yet, another?

<comment><USER40> All the compiler backend/code generation is using LLVM, and the VMs are all pre-existing (JavaScript with some extensions), so there is a huge amount of existing code being used here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I see WebAssembly this way:

WebAssembly is to JavaScript what WebGL is to Canvas

</comment><comment><USER42> My experience is that the barrier to entry for JavaScript is not that it's a new language, but that you have to learn async thinking and are restricted to a single thread.

Does WebAssembly address either of those points?

<comment><USER43> Regarding threads, I don't think so. And even if they would address threads, then there's still the problem of a shared address space between threads to be solved, and the implementation of mutexes, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm hoping for a day where I get two threads in my JS runtime. Now that would be nice...

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm sorry, but I'm not following. What's the problem this is supposed to solve?

</comment><comment><USER46> WebAssembly sounds interesting, you could use it to write little apps that embed into a page.

And call them "applets". Nobody's ever done that before, right? :trollface:

</comment><comment><USER47> Finally! Maybe now someone can build a web app that enhances the reading and discover of documents. Each browser could be a repository of text files, each with an address, so you can have words in the text pointing to another document's address.

</comment><comment><USER48> I suspect too many web applications are going use WebAssembly to obscure their code and the way they work, thus making it impossible to learn by studying their code. As someone who learned programming mostly by looking at other people's code, I'm afraid the web will change in a way that would make it a lot harder to do so.

<comment><USER49> Do you really read other people's minified/obfuscated js?

<comment><USER48> It was far less common to minify JS code when I started doing that, but yeah, even now I much rather have minified JS code than no code at all.

<comment><USER50> So decompile or disassemble WebAssembly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> YES YES YES!!! OMG! THANK YOU <3 <3 <3 I've been waiting so long for this! Maybe my dream of running native Lua on the browser will come true? Will I already be able to run Lua's interpreter now? :D :D Gonna look deeper into this as soon as I have time, omg so excited <3

<comment><USER52> The Lua interpreter was one of the earliest test cases for the C++ to JS compiler.

[https://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html](https://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html)

<comment><USER51> ohh!! I know this project! I thought it had nothing to do with web assembly, thank you for the heads up</comment></comment></comment>


6buk copies Fiverr, but charges $6 instead of $5 - <AUTHOR> http://coding.pressbin.com/101/Why-change-the-magic-number-to-6/

<comment><USER2> I beg to differ. Arbitraging is valid when you deal with free market rules. Fiveer is not a mere tool, it's a cool idea that is now being copied. if 6buk will succeed it will be because it will manage to be "cooler" and more innovative, not because of Arbitrage difference. (Unlike ODesk,Elance,guro which are outsource platforms and you can definitely use arbitraging there).

Hence, here the name of the game.. is being different. Foursquare is a good example, there are many location based services and they have been here for long much before foursquare. But the whole fun, mayorship, badges, etc. made it the fun product that it is today.

Bottom line, Fivver is about being "Fun" and not "cost-effective"

Cheers

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not knocking arbitrage as an abstract concept.

But in this case, 6buk is clearly stealing from Fiverr -- the "featured" image is a prime example.

It's also not making any sort of effort to be "cooler" than Fiverr -- its entire business model entails scraping Fiverr's content, presenting it as its own, and hoping no one is the wiser.

It's one thing to copy-cat a concept -- look at Groupon and LivingSocial and all the other deal-a-day sites.

But imagine if every day, LivingSocial sent out the same exact deal that Groupon was offering, but for $1 more. And imagine if LivingSocial also stole design elements from Groupon's site.

You're cool with that?</comment></comment>


A hidden history of evil - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html

<comment><USER2> pro-red mis-disinformation.

<comment><USER3> Huh? Did you read the article? By my reading, this article is concerned that we are not paying attention to the historical record from the Soviet era and suggests that there is a lot to be learned from studying that record.</comment></comment>


Google's Head of Quantum Computing Hardware Resigns - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/googles-head-quantum-computing-hardware-resigns/ <comment><USER2> Given the direct quote

"Since my professional goal is for someone to build a quantum computer, I think my resignation is the best course of action for everyone,"

The way I interpret this is that Quantum computing is just some pipe dream that Google isn't taking seriously. This man intends to build a real device and either he doesn't have faith Google will allow him to make one or has any intentions of making one.

+1 for the Google Graveyard

<comment><USER3> That was my interpretation as well. The bizarre bit in the opening paragraph about Sundar saying that quantum computing will magically solve climate change is so baffling and stupid I'd probably want to quit after realizing that was my boss too.

I once worked as a developer for a massive trillion dollar tech company, but the company was terribly dysfunctional and never did any real work, so when I quit I joked about how I was quitting to get into software development. Sounds like the same situation here.

<comment><USER4> > Pichai said the milestone affirmed his belief that quantum computers might > one day tackle problems like climate change

Not sure why the quote is problematic. Is modeling complex systems not a good application of quantum compute? Or is the view that climate modeling is an already solved problem?

<comment><USER5> Better models won't solve anything. It's the streetlight effect - easier to build quantum computers than change the collective behaviour.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Martinis is a serious loss to them. He is a top-tier scientist that gets stuff done. He is responsible for the most successful demonstration of the power of quantum computers to date.

I suspect he wanted to continue to do the requisite science needed to build _useful_ quantum computers, and Google began to gesture Martinis into turning it into a cloud business, following Rigetti, IBM, and Amazon. Despite the continued rapid progress, quantum computers are still too small and too noisy to solve non-toy problems, and there's plenty of science & research to do to break that barrier of obvious utility.

If my suspicion is correct, you'll see Google's quantum effort turn into a marketing campaign with fancy cloud APIs that don't serve anybody good, except bored executives who are desperate to make a mark for themselves.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how much of his team will follow him. You need someone like John when building a quantum computer and there's not many like him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me a bit of how disconnected IBM's marketing for Watson was from the reality the engineers saw on the ground. I wonder whether it's some sort of consequence of scale and maturity that companies fall into that pattern.

<comment><USER10> Leadership gets comfortable. Comfortable leadership has no incentive to rock the boat or strive when failure is possible, and the cushness is put at risk. Good people leave, mediocre people stay but it takes time for Rome to crumble. The cycle repeats.

Think Innovator's Dilemma [1], but at smaller scale.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Martinis has always been quite honest about what their technology can and cannot do. Probably too honest for the Google managers.

</comment><comment><USER12> John Martinis taught me physics and analog electronics! He was a great teacher: friendly, smart, and a top notch scientist to boot. All the better for UCSB that he'll have more time to be on campus.

</comment><comment><USER13> And simultaneously doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why can't we use quantum computing itself to determine the best way to build a quantum computer?

<comment> photon-torpedo We can, just need to invent time travel first.

<comment><USER15> No we don't. We can invent time travel later.

"What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? It doesn't matter!"</comment></comment></comment>


Dell just unveiled its China-only smartphone "Mini 3i" (the first pictures) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/17/dell-just-unveiled-its-china-only-smartphone-mini-3i-the-first-pictures/ <comment><USER2> That's a pretty high res screen for a phone, I'm really surprised by that.

Even the 'smartphones' usually have pretty crappy screens.

<comment><USER3> I agree, once screens hit 640x480 I believe the smartphones might start being capable of replacing PC's, but at present they're either a keyboard with a crappy screen, or a crappy screen.

Also one of the key things that has driven PC sales for the longest time is video games, yet the phone market hasn't grasped this, and despite nvidia releasing a mobile chipset for cellphones a few years back, I've never seen a big phone carrying it. I mean look at the sheer sales of the DS, all a developer has to do is stick a $200 phone into a DS and you've got the best selling product on the planet for $400.

<comment><USER2> > all a developer has to do is stick a $200 phone into a DS and you've got the > best selling product on the planet for $400.

Of all the ideas that float by here I think this is one of the very best.

Nintendo making a handset, it's totally logical.

edit:

<http://wii.ign.com/articles/762/762064p1.html>

[http://daemon619.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/nintendo-wii- ph...](http://daemon619.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/nintendo-wii-phone.jpg)

<comment><USER4> I doubt Nintendo will release a phone, but I do have long thought that they will add Kindle-like functionality for online gaming in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Smartphones have already been outselling laptops for a while now. Not at all surprised to see PC manufacturers jump in.

</comment><comment><USER6> Shouldn't it be embarrassing for Dell to release a phone that looks like a poorly made iPhone? Have they no shame?</comment>


What's New in JMS 2.0, Part Two—New Messaging Features - <AUTHOR> http://oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/jms2messaging-1954190.html

<comment><USER2> Why not just use AMQP instead?</comment>


Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/facebook-horizon/ <comment><USER2> "Because everyone is going to be able to create their own... spaces... Horizon is going to have this property where it grows and expands and gets better and better over time." \- Zuckerberg keynote (1)

In related news, a high-ranking Facebook exec revealed that Zuckerberg had been planning to name this massively multiplayer online experience "Myspace".

After heated internal discussions, Horizon was chosen as the brand name for Zuck's vision for "the future of computing", as, well, it seemed somewhat less played out.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOJ8KE5g6kg&t=45m01s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOJ8KE5g6kg&t=45m01s)

<comment><USER3> Haven't watched the keynote yet, is this a renaming or expansion of Facebook spaces (already a VR world where you connect with your friends) ? Or is it something new entirely? And do you need a fb account to go to Horizon?

<comment><USER4> > As part of the launch, Facebook will on October 25 shut down its existing > social VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms, leaving a bit of a > gap until Horizon launches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see a decentralized version of this - VR instances run on individual or group-owned servers that perform the bulk of the environmental simulation and rendering for clients, and have some sort of intercommunication protocol. Once we have high-res environments and fluid UIs to use them, I really want to create my own virtual space, share it, and experience others' spaces, I just don't necessarily want Facebook controlling it.

<comment><USER6> Have you checked out JanusVR? It's pretty much what you're describing. Its web client, native client, and server are all open source. Anyone can create worlds and host them like you would any other website, and links between sites are represented as portals.

For a sampling of some of the worlds people have built, check out [https://vesta.janusvr.com/](https://vesta.janusvr.com/)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thanks for sharing! So what are the features a big company like Facebook can offer over e.g. JanusVR? Asset generation? Network effects? Does JanusVR have anything like a killer app?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, is this the REAL reason for Libra coin?

Create a virtual world that completely mirrors the real world, and that world will need currency and economics at scale too, why not use an alt coin as it's base?

<comment><USER8> Second Life 2.0

<comment><USER9> Reminds me more of Ready Player One

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why are advertisements for big tech companies always so... cringey? What target audience responds to this kind of marketing?

</comment><comment><USER11> I love my Oculus Quest device and some of the experiences that you can buy for it are very compelling (eternal thanks to the developers of Vader Immortal) but, I just don't see much fun in VR for huge numbers of participants.

I helped build a VR racing system at SAIC in the 1990s that had two units, each with full motion, haptics in steering wheel, and it's own Reality Engine graphics display. Racing against one other person was lots of fun. I may be having a failure of imagination here, but I just think I would enjoy Horizon, as it is described.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone else find those avatars really creepy? They look like the characters in those weird CGI kids cartoons.

<comment><USER13> Its for many reasons: 1.It scale better: less memory/rendering time. 2.It allows low-end hardware. 3.It appeals to children(probably a huge chunk of audience). Facebook isn't going the Second Life route(visuals-first,scripting, limited capacity servers), they're making something that is essentially a casual/social videogame with VR and scripting added - and capable of hosting hundreds(like VRchat).

<comment><USER14> VR causes development issues in children (especially for eyesight). Facebook _really_ likes the game of poking the bear, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would be very careful anything that Facebook does after hearing they former bosses whistleblowings.

VR is interesting but I'm not ready to sacrifice my privacy for that.

Sorry Facebook, just to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would I use this over the existing product, VR Chat: [https://www.vrchat.net/](https://www.vrchat.net/)

<comment><USER17> It doesn't have to be either-or...any game / app / service can, and should, have competitors.

Plus, the article provides a lot of comparisons to relevant services that help differentiate Horizon in the marketplace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mixing Facebook trolls with VR sounds like a very, very bad idea.

<comment><USER19> It could never be worse than VR Chat.

(as far as trolls go, I mean. I love VR Chat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "We've collected your personal info. Now let us keep collecting your interactions, so we can really know you."

</comment><comment><USER21> They should have named it OASIS...

</comment><comment><USER22> second life gets a second wind

</comment><comment><USER23> Ah crap, I wanted to build something like that. Oh well...

<comment><USER9> You can still do it. Make it open source too.

<comment><USER24> Its called Mozilla Hubs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, Facebook finally read "Snow Crash", I see.

The Black Sun comes to life!

<comment><USER26> That book also featured crypto-currencies which is of course another thing Facebook is dabbling with. And it had a plot that featured vastly diminished US government marginalized by commercial burbclaves and other corporate entities, which seems to be exactly why governments are anxious to block Libra and worried about companies like FB having valuations exceeding the GDP of most countries.

I recently re-read Snow Crash. I love that book. A lot of that stuff looks a lot less like science fiction these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seek don't simulate.

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks like the new Google Lively.

And no one will use it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook Home

</comment><comment><USER30> Please no.

</comment><comment><USER31> Here's hoping that nobody named Ted Faro is involved.

</comment><comment><USER32> For a company with the resources FB has, it's remarkable how out of touch they are.

<comment><USER33> I think you are underestimating the appeal of being able to watch movies or tv shows with a friend or loved one in VR.

<comment><USER34> Obviously I am as well.

Sounds like watching a move or TV show while being on the phone to a loved one.</comment></comment></comment>


Kaiser Permanente's New Med School Will Waive Tuition for Its First 5 Classes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/health/kaiser-medical-school-free-.html <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that medical schools aren't accredited until they graduate their first class (after 4 years), and during that time their students _don 't_ quality for private student loans, so they have to take out private ones (i.e. worst of both worlds).

Offering free tuition to their early classes has the double benefit of free tuition _and_ the avoidance of an unusually shitty loan situation for their students. Given the fact about accreditation, I think a program like this should be standard for new medical schools.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not a first to offer free med school tuition, but the best reason I can see why Kaiser would do this is self-preservation. Get students in the door with free tuition, put them to work for free with immersions in Kaiser institutions, and then put them in residencies in Kaiser hospitals. It's like an educational corporate town. A private company is keeping a stronghold on their huge healthcare network and establishing a medical school is a great way to support their own interests. I don't believe a private healthcare company is going to offer a no-strings-attached free lunch.

Removing Kaiser from the situation, what would the sentiment be if Amazon or Google bought up a small college and started their own university where cirriculum was based solely around AWS or Google Cloud? Where students worked on projects to directly support the shareholders and business in exchange for a piece of paper. It seems like a better deal for the company than the students.

Not to say the students aren't good or qualified. They could be damn good doctors. Only time will tell.

<comment><USER4> It is a rarety now but there was a time when employers offered tuition reimbursement programs for higher education. Graduate programs such as business schools are really expensive, but were economically feasible if an employer covered the cost. This wasn't a free lunch program. Employees needed to stay with the firm for at least X years immediately following completion. You have to do whatever possible to keep the ship afloat. You also can't leave without incurring steep financial penalties. However, if you love your job and where you work, this is such a luxury to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Even middle-class families are finding medical school hard to pay for"

Why should families be paying for this at all? Shouldn't I be able to fund my own education, especially higher degrees? Most parents don't expect to still be shelling out 10s of thousands of dollars to their 26-year-old offspring. It's insane how normalized these astronomical tuitions have become.

<comment><USER6> It often doesn't make sense to have one generation investing their money and paying taxes on the gains, while another is paying interest to a bank.

If they're going to get excess earnings one day as an inheritance, it may make sense to give while alive. Especially if inheritance taxes may be involved (and who knows what rate they may be in 30 years).

Unless that kind of leverage makes sense, and sometimes it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Presuming Kaiser and NYU clearly communicate their offers, these are great opportunities for people who choose to be considered for these programs.

> "Kaiser Permanente … is following the New York University School of > Medicine, which announced last year that it would eliminate tuition for all > current and future students."

</comment><comment><USER8> KP raised my already insane Obamacare premium by almost 20% this year though.</comment>


Sara Chipps on Building a Hardware Company - <AUTHOR> http://rocketship.fm/episodes/ep-125-sara-chipps/

<comment><USER2> Big fan of what Sara's building with Jewelbots, looking forward to what's next.</comment>


Insect collapse - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems <comment><USER2> It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors.

This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them.

Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.

<comment><USER3> For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.

<comment><USER4> But even that is misleading. A small fraction of humanity has been living really well.

And it's increasingly apparent they have been able to do so by essentially pushing the costs of their actions to future generations.

<comment><USER5> "living really well" is highly subjective,

>5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data.

Per [https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now- have...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have-a- mobile-phone-connection-according-to-gsma-data/)

That alone should be an indication people are living quite different now than just 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late.

Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care.

And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered species list as of about two months ago [1]. Go figure. When do we do something?

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes- risk...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/11/14/giraffes-risk- extinction-animals-listed-critically-endangered/)

<comment><USER7> > When do we do something?

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

<comment><USER8> When it significantly impacts the daily lives of _uneducated Americans_.

Educated people around the world already want to do something. Uneducated people outside America already want to do something (because their governments are on board.) It is uneducated Americans -- and their president -- that is going to do us all in.

This means the survival of the planet depends on our ability to communicate with and convince uneducated Americans. That's hard. Al Gore tried long ago with his movie.

<comment><USER9> It's sort of delusional to say that un-educated people and Trump are the problem. Educated people have vastly huger carbon footprints than non-educated people, thinking globally. Is it the poor people in Africa and Southern/Southeastern Asia that are to blame, or is it the rich people who literally use 10X or 100X more carbon emission in their daily lives? What about the historical emissions of our ancestors - I know mine as an American/WASP are HUGE considering all the cars/planes/meat that have been consumed by my ancestors. Compare that to a line of subsistence farmers in other countries. While I believe in climate change, it doesn't matter, I'm still on the hook for FAR more historical emissions than those un-educated people.

Carbon emissions are going up globally, carbon emissions went up in the USA, slightly different political environments won't change the reality that the vast majority of people, societies, and companies have done far less than they need to already. We can't fool ourselves into thinking a democratic presidential win in 2020 will stop this crisis, it simply won't be enough by any rational view of the emissions already out and coming out every day. Even the favorite policy of democrats/progressives, the carbon tax, got voted down in multiple progressive-state reforanda.

In summary, it feels good to point the finger of blame at the current political regime, but the reality is very little is being done anywhere except for pockets of hope like Norway, California, Iceland, Hawaii, which are NOT enough to balance out historical emissions and rising emissions in China, India, etc.

<comment><USER8> > _Educated people have vastly huger carbon footprints than non-educated > people, thinking globally._

But the resistance to doing something about it is not coming from educated people, at least in the US.

Regarding India and China, their governments are on board and they are making progress: [https://qz.com/india/1475736/india-is-now-a-world-leader- in-...](https://qz.com/india/1475736/india-is-now-a-world-leader-in-renewable- energy/) [https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china- renewable-energy-superpower)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The guardian links to a study of a nature reserve in australia. The abstract is terrifying.

\</comment><comment>

Aim We characterized changes in reporting rates and abundances of bird species over a period of severe rainfall deficiency and increasing average temperatures. We also measured flowering in eucalypts, which support large numbers of nectarivores characteristic of the region.

Location A 30,000‐km2 region of northern Victoria, Australia, consisting of limited amounts of remnant native woodlands embedded in largely agricultural landscapes.

Methods There were three sets of monitoring studies, pitched at regional (survey programmes in 1995–97, 2004–05 and 2006–08), landscape (2002–03 and 2006–07) and site (1997–2008 continuously) scales. Bird survey techniques used a standard 2‐ha, 20‐min count method. We used Bayesian analyses of reporting rates to document statistically changes in the avifauna through time at each spatial scale.

Results Bird populations in the largest remnants of native vegetation (up to 40,000 ha), some of which have been declared as national parks in the past decade, experienced similar declines to those in heavily cleared landscapes. All categories of birds (guilds based on foraging substrate, diet, nest site; relative mobility; geographical distributions) were affected similarly. We detected virtually no bird breeding in the latest survey periods. Eucalypt flowering has declined significantly over the past 12 years of drought.

Main conclusions Declines in the largest woodland remnants commensurate with those in cleared landscapes suggest that reserve systems may not be relied upon to sustain species under climate change. We attribute population declines to low breeding success due to reduced food. Resilience of bird populations in this woodland system might be increased by active management to enhance habitat quality in existing vegetation and restoration of woodland in the more fertile parts of landscapes.

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00578.x)

</comment><comment><USER11> This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid- ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth".

When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit.

And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

<comment><USER12> I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it.

I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the issue.

My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.

<comment><USER13> I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today.

Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet.

It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c)

<comment><USER14> I think you vastly over-estimate our power.

If the oceans die through acidification and pollution, and all of the insects die we will die as well.

<comment><USER15> Yes, we'll die, but only 99.99% dead. The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of humanity, and will continue on and rebuild. It sucks, but so did the millions of years of animals murdering each other just so that I could type this and you could read it.

<comment><USER11> > The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of > humanity

I wish I could believe this, but I don't. The cycle will repeat as the collapse passes out of living memory. We will have lost civilization by then, the only records that remain will be the trash heaps that we leave behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.

<comment><USER17> That's because it's an alarmist piece which aren't too difficult to find in The Guardian. They do sell papers after all.

I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like "ecological Armageddon" really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?

<comment><USER18> That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?

<comment><USER19> Anthropocene extinction. I'm sure the ecosystem will finally stabilize with a fraction of current amount of species. It so far always did in the past.

EDIT: I did not make up the term. The term Holocene seems to be more current (but also more obscure). See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)

<comment><USER20> Right, but having your species single-handedly cause a mass extinction event on a scale not seen in 250 million years and having it happen in the span of a couple centuries (which is like a millisecond in geological time) seems like a _pretty big deal_ to me. Like the biggest of big deals that we've ever lived through. This is a "there is a three mile wide asteroid inbound that will hit the earth in 80 years" kind of big deal.

<comment><USER21> A couple centuries? The insect collapse (from the various articles I've read) is something that happened in the past couple decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Speaking as a farmer..We should return half the earths landmass to nature. We must change how we grow food. We must even reconsider our 'food for survival and fuel'. We can all do without pork and HFCS and kale to live. We can't live without this planet and it's natural systems sustaining us. We should waste less. Use less fossil fuel. Every time I hear another VC flog their investment with the tired old line 'we must feed 10 billion by 2050', a chill runs through my spine. And another species inches closer to extinction. We have a population problem. Not an environmental problem. All this 'innovation' is enabling our addiction to procreation. .. all our traditional and modern methods of Ag and producing food + having breached the carrying capacity of the planet so long ago , we are losing this battle of species survival ...with willful ignorance. It's all very disheartening.

<comment><USER23> But 1/2 of the world is already wilderness.[1]

I think people underestimate just how big Russia and Canada are and the fact that for most the part, they are completely undeveloped.

[1][https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/12...](https://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/120402_global- analysis-finds-nearly-half-earth-still-wilderness.aspx)

<comment><USER5> I think they meant more along the lines of

"We should take half of the 17,235,800 square kilometers of cultivated land in the world and return it to nature"

Or even

"We should take half of the 1,549,600 square kilometers of permanent cropland"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those who haven't done so, the Pulitzer winner "The Sixth Extinction" is well worth reading. We are on the cusp of popular culture realizing the world as we know it is coming to a close and we are probably half a century beyond the point where our ingenuity or actions can do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER24> The growing body of anecdotal evidence, including the disappearance of insects at the bottom of the food pyramid in more than one area, suggests that it is now _too late_ to reverse these dramatic changes to the earth's biosphere and humankind's ability to extract food from it.

Let us hope that as these dramatic changes start affecting more and more people in concrete ways, we, human beings, will search for and develop technological solutions that will allow us to survive and thrive in a changing environment.

<comment><USER25> It's an interesting position we've put ourselves into, at least in the US. Half the population in denial that anything is wrong, the other half convinced the only solution is conservation.

Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying. But I expect it will get pretty dire before enough people across the spectrum get on board.

<comment><USER24> _> Eventually we're going to have to engineer our way out of it, or die trying._

Exactly. That's a much better way of putting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The data underlying this study were taken most recently in January 2013. I wonder why it took almost six years to publish the results? Given the catastrophic nature of the findings, six years seems a long time to wait before publication.

It's hard to replicate this kind of data six or seven years out. If someone repeats the survey this year and gets different numbers, it can be discounted as an anomaly. It would have been better if the study could have been repeated right away: in the same year, or in the following year.

Also, the authors are overwhelmingly biased in favour of climate change as the cause. This is mainly a bug count. How hard is it to count the bugs and present the data and the analysis, leaving speculation about the cause to the discussion? I have to be very suspicious of a study that starts off implicating climate change instead of following the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is "we need more money to study this".

It does not make much sense to try so hard to fit climate change to the curve of this data. If it turns out that something else is operative, such as pesticide use, or the unusual solar minimum, or the unexpectedly rapidly diminishing magnetic field, then we have missed an early indication of something huge.

There is overwhelming evidence that humans are screwing up this planet, but no matter how politically correct and funding-expedient it may be to nail everything with the climate change hammer, it's not really how science is supposed to work.

It's hard to lay an insect apocalypse at the door of a 2C change in temperature. Measuring the temperature of a whole planet is hard. Pons & Fleischmann had trouble measuring the temperature change in a beaker and look at the stupidity that occasioned.

Lister & Garcia mostly rely upon increased variability in the weather to make the connection, but the fundamental mechanism is never explored. It's pretty hard to swallow that all the insects in a tropical rain forest died because they were a little too warm a few days out of the year.

Climate change has become a religion, and, like a religion, it makes a lot of money for its practitioners.

If 98% of the bugs in Luquillo are dead, then we are likely in dire trouble. If true, this finding is way too important to screw up with curve-fitting.

</comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat related...

The other day I was annoyed at my allergies, in winter, with snow coming down and reflecting on how I never had allergies until around 30 a few years back. Bees. Bees dying. Bees eat pollen. It seems many of my friends have far worse allergies than previously...

What if we are already seeing consequences of insects dying off, like bees for example. I need to find time to try and see if there is good data on allergies, if there has been a general increase, and how it matches up with bee die off and pollen count. Is it possible that bees not being around to use pollen, has caused pollen count to go up on average, which is causing more allergy issues with humans?

And what happens if mosquitoes start dying off, we have chocolate because mosquitoes are one of the few pollinators that can pollinate the cacao tree due to the small size.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER27> I heard that pollen are more aggressive in areas with high emissions - on a reputable German radio show. This could be one reason for worse allergies, especially when you add in lifestyle changes such as moving to a city.

Personally, I could not remember a situation where I felt this could be true.

<comment><USER28> Urban planning is a factor too. Someone decided that trees dropping fruit everywhere was messy, so urban planners made a blanket recommendation to only plant male trees. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical- se...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism- cultivates-home-grown-allergies/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster:

Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.

<comment><USER30> That's a great quote. Very similar to: "The avalanche has has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately pointing out the obvious - that the destruction of our ecosystem is a direct result of the massive overpopulation of humans - almost always results in denials and rationalizations. Those who prefer to keep their heads in the sand about massive overpopulation wave their hands and attempt to rebut the problem with two absurd arguments.

First, deniers say that people who have been warning about overpopulation for centuries have always proven wrong. This flies in the face of all the evidence, such as the article being replied to. The verdict is in, there's no disputing the damage that has been done. The insects, the birds, the fish, virtually all large mammals (and most of the smaller ones).

The Second response deniers go with is that "we can solve the problem of overpopulation with new technologies". The damage is done! What's left of the environment is being destroyed right now. Talking about solving the problem of overpopulation by developing new technologies is like talking about inventing new ways to fight fires as you watch a building burn down in front of your eyes.

This is obviously not to say that we should be killing people off or forcibly sterilizing people or any of the feverish rhetoric used by those who don't want to face reality. It means that if we as a society want to continue to live on the planet earth we need to start having a conversation about what sort of population the earth can sustainably support and what sort of policies we should enact to reach that massively reduced number at some time in the future (which hopefully isn't too late).

</comment><comment><USER32> Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate.

This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high.

The second surprise is that we are not winning. [...] Even in our most grievous offenses against her, as in the present epidemic of habitat destruction and species extinction we are being defeated, for in the long run we can less afford the losses than nature can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale.

The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could somehow magically adapt to managing planetary-scale populations (let alone the vast network of ecologies hosting them).

The story of human 'progress' or 'destiny' is a religious myth. Amusingly, it is held with particular vehemence by many technologically-inclined atheists without a shred of irony.

<comment><USER32> I read it more allegorically than that.

Being at war with nature is a good metaphor for our behaviour, because we seem determined to completely vanquish it and bend it to our will.

Of course it's a bitter irony that if we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves (because as you say we come from nature). I think that's implied by the passage.

The way we interact with nature is different in kind from other species, not just in scope.

For humans, it's not enough to take , say, just the fish that we need. Because of money we take _all_ the fish we can get and then sell them. What doesn't sell is thrown out.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's certainly the standard narrative - Berry isn't as counter-cultural as he thinks. He's just the mirror image of convention, but that buys in equally to the false nature/culture dichotomy.

We don't 'interact' with nature. There's no getting outside of it to do the interaction. When we 'take more than we need', we're acting exactly as a hominid with tribal cognitive & affective adaptations that have been turned to extended purposes in a global context would act. In other words: evolution in creating H. Sapiens has explored an area of state space that will result in large-scale ecological collapse. This is unfortunate, from our present-day point of view, but it is not unnatural.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Watched this the other night: [https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/...](https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2018-2019/de- aarde-draait-door.html) It's from a Dutch broadcaster, but most of the program is in english. Very pertinent, disturbing and the questions it lays on the table unsettling.

</comment><comment><USER34> Evolution will ultimately prevail; it just may not include us. In all eras of mass species die off, eventually new niches created new opportunity. Even with idiot humans messing up stuff, in a long enough timeframe, evolution will eventually route around us.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Our world is dying.

<comment> King-Aaron The world isn't, but the ecosystem that allows us to be alive appears to be.

<comment><USER35> To me, that's the "our" in "our world".

<comment><USER36> If life started on the Earth, then we are just part of a process of a particular rock floating in space. There is no 'our' world and it is not dying.

<comment><USER37> Are you objecting to "our" on the grounds that we didn't build it? Because most people use "our house" to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only what they built.

<comment><USER36> > Are you objecting to "our" on the grounds that we didn't build it

I'm objecting that we own the Earth and that somehow we can kill it.

> people use "our house" to mean the one they occupy, not limiting it to only > what they built

The Earth isn't being occupied by us, we are simply part of the Earth. So I don't mind the use of "our", but implying that we are killing the planet is the bit I think people should take a step back from and think about.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'Our' doesn't connote ownership. Our families are not owned by us.

If anything the relationship is the other way around: we belong to the world that has formed us.

> implying that we are killing the planet

That would be a meaningless assertion. We our killing our world, which is a network of evolved complex living systems, not 'the planet'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We are making the world into farms and monocultures. A very brittle arrangement.

</comment><comment><USER39> Someday, we will realize that it's too late. There only will be regrets. Meanwhile, we just have to ignore it and complain about stupid stuff. That's humankind.

</comment><comment><USER40> How do we know that global warming won't ultimately lead to a better future, all things considered?

Why is all the focus on what can go wrong?

Serious questions, not trying to be cute.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Puerto Rico rainforest? You mean the same island that got hit by a massive hurricane last year?

</comment><comment><USER42> It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something.

It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.

<comment><USER43> Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?

<comment><USER42> I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.

<comment><USER43> HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.)

Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

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


Snapchat adds free phone number verification to its list of SDK perks - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/23/snapchat-adds-free-phone-number-verification-to-its-list-of-sdk-perks/ <comment><USER2> > Login Kit is going to power really creative, unique experiences and that's > going to be the value for partners.

This is a truly hilarious---nay... _ridiculous_ \--way of describing "our login sdk also handles stuff like phone number verification".

</comment><comment><USER3> Can Snapchat survive in a world with TikTok? I'm genuinely curious what folks thoughts are.

Everyone I know that uses Snapchat has migrated to TikTok, but I personally have limited insight into these dynamics. From my perspective, even though the sharing dynamics are different, TikTok seems to capture and hold much greater attention.

<comment><USER4> I'd say they can -- especially with the Gen Z group. Snapchat is used to produce videos, images, and texts for either: all your friends (stories), a select subset of your friends (private stories), a subset of that subset (subsequent private stories), specific friend groups, etc.

With TikTok, you're publishing to the world; with Snapchat you're publishing to your world.

<comment><USER5> well said -- There's a fundamental difference in TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc and Snapchat. Snapchat is heavily focused on private (one person, small private group) content in contrast with the other networks which mostly focus on public content.

<comment><USER6> > Snapchat is heavily focused on private (one person, small private group)

Private secondary Instagram accounts (finstas) for smaller circles and Instagram's "share only to 'close friends'" features are taking a lot of that Snapchat market over.

<comment><USER5> I still don't see Instagram used as a replacement for text messaging like Snapchat is for many people (again, just my experience in the college-age demographic). Snapchat themselves don't seem to want to be a messaging app though, probably because the path to ad revenue and real profitability is in an algorithmic feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really hope that Snapchat can build out this platform. I love their core services (chatting and stories), and would trust them significantly more as a sign-in partner compared to Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER8> Why do you trust them more? Is it just because of their relatively small size compared to the big players?

Personally I wouldn't touch that company even with a barge pole. Their business model is no different than the big players, except their ads seem to be even more noxious than those peddled by the big players. Google & Facebook have a wide range of ads, both good products as well as trash, while Snapchat seems to be very focused on trashy clickbait with little valuable content.

Their privacy situation is also a major problem and is not GDPR compliant (not saying the others are, but that still doesn't excuse them with breaking EU regulations).

They are extremely hostile to third-party developers with significant obfuscation efforts around their private API. They are very likely to "pull a Twitter" when it comes to restricting access to their currently open APIs and leave developers stranded. Twitter also used to be very friendly towards developers, before abruptly shutting down most of their APIs and rendering products built on them completely useless (or neutered beyond any significant value), sometimes destroying entire business built around their platform.

Their lunch is also being eaten by Instagram, which puts them in a risky position with regards to profitability and increases the likelihood of them doing something nasty to try turn the ship around at the expense of developers who committed to the platform.

<comment><USER9> I'm not a huge Snapchat fanboy, but some of this doesn't make much sense.

>their ads seem to be even more noxious

I don't think I've ever seen an ad in Snapchat. It's all buried in the Discover page that nobody uses anyway. As opposed to, ahem, Insta which injects an ad into every story you view.

>They are extremely hostile to third-party developers with significant obfuscation efforts around their private API.

That's kinda, you know, the _entire point_ of their app. It's all geared around ensuring the user's privacy -- ensuring snaps are ephemeral, not stealthily recorded or captured. Of course they're jumping through hoops to defend their private API.

>a risky position with regards to profitability

Is it? [https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/snap_inc/SEC/sec-s...](https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/snap_inc/SEC/sec- show.aspx?Type=page&FilingId=13887415-236005-251545&CIK=0001564408&Index=12200)

<comment><USER8> > I don't think I've ever seen an ad in Snapchat. It's all buried in the > Discover page that _nobody uses anyway_ (emphasis mine)

But isn't that a bit of a problem when it comes to ads where you _want_ people to see them if you want to get paid? So they're bound to increase their ad intrusiveness at some point and with the quality of ads in there I'm not sure people will put up with it.

> It's all geared around ensuring the user's privacy

Security by obscurity doesn't really work though, it's always going to be a game of cat & mouse and leaks are bound to happen. On the other hand, their current approach of obfuscation prevents a lot of valid & non-malicious use- cases like desktop clients, scheduled posts, etc.

> Is it?

Instagram still seems to be crushing them when it comes to active users, plus Facebook has the ability to run it at a loss for an insane amount of time if they wanted to, letting the competition (such as Snap) starve to death.

<comment><USER10> > Security by obscurity doesn't really work though

Obscurity is a completely cromulent, and actually decently effective (as _clearly_ evidenced by Snap), stage to a defense in depth architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unless you're building a social app for the connected youth, I can't imagine a more negative signal for a mobile app than to be associated with Snapchat. Even Facebook can be quite dubious, but at least they have users in all demographics.

<comment><USER12> why?

<comment><USER11> It's not associated with anything serious as a brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I'm seeing here is that if an app has the Snapchat SDK I won't install it or will delete it. I have no interest in sharing my phone number with Snapchat.</comment>