Save the Libraries. Cut University Funding Instead. - <AUTHOR> http://jbgst.tumblr.com/post/17854375085/save-the-libraries-cut-university-funding-instead

<comment><USER2> This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN.

 _Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher._

This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.

Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.

The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.

 _Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans._

Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.

 _Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views._

I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

 _Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people's prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity._

This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do _not_ have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero- sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects _at the expense_ of others.

I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > terrible article
      > Awfully muddled thinking
      > right-wing propaganda
      > laughably poor argument
      > propagandist rant

All of the above were unnecessary. I'll address the rest of your comment now.

      > First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".

Typically, when cuts are being made, people across the political spectrum prefer to cut services for the middle class before cutting services for the poor. Most people agree that cutting services for the poor is a last resort. I am not arguing here that this is necessarily correct or that you have to agree, but that is the reason for the emphasis on "serving the poor" when discussing cuts to government programs.

      > Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?

Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?

      > And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.

They are part of the same system. The connection between the increase in student loan limits and the increase in student tuition has been noted many times. See elsewhere in this thread.

      > Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

In addition to what monochrome and yummyfajitas have said, anywhere you look, you can find job listings for relatively simple, entry-level positions that unnecessarily require university degrees. Ever since we started pushing the idea that _everyone_ should go to college, we've seen a signaling arms race where you'd better get a college degree or face being passed over for someone else who did -- whether or not the job really needed someone with a degree. This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

      > Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

      > would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades

You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.

<comment><USER2> Hmm. I think is a poor article because it lacks depth and simply makes a bunch of assertions many of which don't even follow from the premises in the article itself. I might have refrained from saying so explicitly had I thought you were actually interested in exploring the question and were gathering information, but it seemed to me that you've made up your mind and are working backwards from your conclusion.

You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.

 _Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?_

My understanding is that tuition is rising _because_ of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?

Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

 _This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off._

This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

 _Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point._

No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.

 _Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already._

yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

 _You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system._

That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.

If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.

I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.

[1] [http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem...](http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplement/affordability_1.shtml) [2] [http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida- college-u...](http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college- university-students-to-pay-8/?partner=RSS) [3] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board- approv...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approves- tuition-increases.html)

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?

I take it you've agreed universities are skewed towards the middle class and higher in terms of direct enrollment (and this is easily verifiable). To counter this, you talked about _indirect_ effects:

      > Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.

How can you prove this? I don't think it's possible, but if you can I'm all ears.

      > Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

I'm claiming _one_ of the reasons university tuition is being increased is that we're in an environment where degrees are seen as being necessary, whether or not they are. In other words, degrees are being treated as an _inelastic good_. Therefore students are willing to pay whatever they can afford. As student loan limits increase, what students can afford to pay increases, so tuition increases as well. If even part of the tuition increases come from this, and your college president is making $1 million/year, I think it's fair to call that waste.

      > This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

It's a product of the system we live in because we created and subsidized that system. Lowering the subsidy is the first step to solving the problem. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608680>

      > You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree

This is completely false. I did not say anything of the kind. In fact, I'm making the _exact opposite point_ , so now I'm wondering if you understood what I was saying at all. I said universities are "fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value".

      > yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

No, I was referring to this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608628>

yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.

      > That's not what I'm claiming.

No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades".

      > If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting

Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article is, at best, heavy on the hyperbole and at worst factually wrong. The first sentence is:

"So, California is cutting library funding instead of, you know, anything else."

The state budget has forced cuts in many departments. We're talking a $12 million cut to libraries. Higher education has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars.

The article then goes on to claim that higher education serve poor people " _at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all._ " The next sentence says " _Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher._ " If not all university students are middle class or higher then it is benefitting lower class students. Why say " _if at all_ " when the next sentence implies that some poor people are helped? Does the author want professors to be poor? Of course most professors are middle class or higher. I expect all of them to be.

Then there is this statement: " _The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary._ " This sentence, together with the sentence before it, suggests the author thinks this is a bad thing. Some students fail out of engineering. This is a good thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of work.

Libraries should be open for everyone. Universities should not grant degrees to everyone. The functions of libraries and universities are disparate. It's fine to think one is more important than the other. It's sloppy to not take into consideration the differences in focus between the two entities.

</comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't have learned necessary hands-on chemistry and biology from a library. Good technique can't be read about; it must simply be learned in the laboratory from repeated mistakes. After the hand-holding freshman year, half of the chem/bio curriculum is dedicated to working independently, in the lab, under time constraints and pressure.

Theory can be learned from a book, but it's not necessarily easy for everyone. Only highly-motivated self-learners can teach themselves a subject, and then they must take on the additional work required to cut through "information space" to find exactly the texts they need. I don't think even a quarter of university students today have the capacity to learn in this manner, completely detached from the university system.

CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors. Outside of a few IRC channels, they don't even exist for chem/bio. (You can't cite databases--they are too complicated for new learners.)

If we want a more autodidactic society, a lot of changes have to be made to early childhood education. Additionally, we have to provide a lot of tools (guided curriculum to keep learners on track, etc.) to support this manner of learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the same spirit that a library makes information accessible for free.)

 _CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors._

You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.

<comment><USER5> _People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge._

They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz.

What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge.

We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education. This is the main thing that will allow innovation in education - people need to buy the credential, and since it's bundled with education, they have no choice but to buy unnecessary education.

<comment><AUTHOR> _We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education._

Agreed. I was giving possibilistic the benefit of the doubt. If some need access to a lab to fully learn a subject, that's something that should be addressed. If not, great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Proof that I agree: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788702>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good article. Unfortunately while reading it, it's difficult to ignore the fact that neither of these should be cut at all before cuts are made to overseas military campaigns, CIA, war on drugs, DHS, corporate welfare, cronyism, etc. etc.

<comment><USER7> Except the article is about a state cutting library funding. While California likely sends a fair amount of tax dollars to Washington, D.C., I'm fairly sure their state coffers are directly funding military campaigns and the DHS.

* Edit: grammar

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a lot of the argument for public funding of universities (and for K-12 education, even) is that public goods are created by having a highly educated population (workforce, voters, etc.)

To the extent that university education produces private goods (specific career training, credentials, etc.) there is a lot weaker argument for public funding.

The argument for public funding of universities is mostly not about it being a social safety net or producing equality of opportunity, at least not before the early 1990s or so, so that university students are generally from middle class or higher isn't as relevant.

<comment><USER9> Ironically, what do the best libraries traditionally contain? Works created by highly educated individuals.

Yes, you will always have your pulp fiction, but if a library's job is to disseminate knowledge to the masses, doesn't that make libraries reliant on a source to develop that knowledge?

<comment><USER10> True... that would be relevant if the world began and ended on the borders of california...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the skyrocketing costs of university education, I would think that there was a lot of waste to be found there.

Still I agree with another commenter. The real issue is why we spend so much money subsidizing corporations as well as our foreign adventures and the drug war. All of which are not sustainable in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hate to break it to you, but Universities also employ a LOT of trade workers as well, it's not all academics and students. I think it would be fair to say that cutting a similar amount of funding from the california university system would result in a similar number of janitorial, HVAC, maintenance, landscaping, administrative, _librarian_, technology support, and other job losses.

Sure, cutting something as important as state libraries sucks, but you'd be pretty naive to think that shifting the cuts to any other sector wouldn't result in the same amount of job losses.

</comment><comment><USER13> Libraries have a short life left. I don't know many people who go to them anymore considering the vast amounts of information on the Internet and now eReaders.

Libraries may offer other services than just the loaning of books and dvd's but in that case community centers will appear or other businesses to fill those needs.

I know some people don't have access to the internet or a computer but that is changing. I don't think libraries will disappear overnight but they are going (as we know them).

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm confused as to the popularity of this article, given California has cut funding to both universities _and_ public libraries. It's not a zero-sum game; usually funding for both public goods follow hand in hand. Not to mention _university libraries_ , a class of their own.

</comment><comment><USER15> I feel like access to people in the field is _much_ more valuable than access to books on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's been reported that a key factor in the rising end-user cost of State college tuition is that states are already deeply cutting this funding.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, higher tuition is exactly what I wanted. There's a reason state schools are so much cheaper than private: _state funding._

As much as I love libraries, I hardly visit one thanks to the thousands (millions?) of public domain books I can get _free_ straight to my Kindle. The only thing I would want to visit a library for would be books like O'Reilly books, but my college pays a subscription to Safari Books that allows students access to literally thousands of such books completely free; O'Reilly, Apress, etc. so my thirst is quenched for now. The beauty is that as soon as a new book is published, it's on the site. And there aren't HTML3 books from the 90's still wasting (virtual) shelf space like my library.

Random thought, but that could be the future of the library. What if a little bit of tax money went toward an online directory like Safari Books instead of a huge expensive library building? Always updated, easy access, and a much wider selection? I'd go for it. I guess baby boomers wouldn't though.

<comment><USER18> >state funding

Indirect state (and federal) funding, in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans, is one of the reasons tuition is so high in the first place.

If student loans weren't so plentiful colleges wouldn't cost 10-50k a year, because no one would pay.

<comment><USER19> Some more parts of the equation; deregulation, unemployment pressures, some job degrees aren't helpful, heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education.

<comment><USER17> _"heavy cultural emphasis on degrees to be successful, culture of short-term thinking and lack of financial education."_

Wow, I'm glad there are others that realize this. I guess hacker news would be the place to find independent thinkers like yourself. One other I would add is:

Lack of school counselors, teachers, parents, etc. that believe entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

<comment><USER18> >Lack of school counselors, teachers, parents, etc. that believe entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

Excellent point. Since kindergarten, when I tried to sell some crafts I made during play time to the other kids, I've been pulled towards entrepreneurship, but going through school you are eventually led to believe that running your own business isn't an option.

It's not that anyone ever sat me down and told me that I couldn't be an entrepreneur, but it's never discussed as a possibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like this whole story was manually pushed off the HN front page for some reason (or it was flagged and the sorting algorithm takes this into account?), but I just wanted to say while I'm here that I was really glad to read this particular subthread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it really worth comparing them so simplistically? This is a point-of-view from one side, pointing at a few flaws (of many, ignoring the positives) of universities, and a few positives (of many, ignoring the flaws) of libraries.

'Comparisons are odious' as they say....

</comment><comment><USER9> _Yes, university funding has already seen some cuts, but I'd rather see more cuts to universities and fewer cuts to libraries. They're not the same thing._

Of course they are not the same thing. So why are we comparing them as if they were? Rather than identifying a library's strengths and comparing that directly to universities, you should identify a library's strengths and a university's strengths, and compare the two sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Respectfully, I don't think I've done what you say I've done. I say "they're not the same thing" because, as I said in the post, a lot of people lump them together as "investing in knowledge for society" or the like.

I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure if universities should have their funding cut but libraries seem very foolish to keep funding. Wouldn't it be better to invest all the money currently spent on libraries in to an online library? Imagine the amount of information we could have easy access to?

<comment><AUTHOR> The top story on Hacker News right now, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607217> (also the link I start the post with), explains one of the problems with doing that. As many important functions move online, the library is one place someone without a computer and computer skills can use to gain access to the online world.

Libraries also provide a meeting place for the community, access to librarians, and many free classes.

I do agree it makes less sense now for libraries to have large physical collections. The shift to an online library seems inevitable there. But access to this from local libraries is still important.

<comment><USER21> They should at least reduce the size, eliminate the books and just have computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good point. UCLA and its ilk are famous enough, it'd serve the public much better to fund public services like libraries.

</comment><comment><USER23> Libraries are also a great place to apply for jobs or file your taxes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> While this post focuses on universities and libraries, and I'm serious about preferring university cuts to library cuts, obviously there are plenty of other things that could probably be cut first.

<comment><USER24> If there are plenty of other things to cut first, why are we comparing the two? Why not complain that they should cut something else instead of universities?

I know the answer to this, and it makes me a bit sad. It's easy for Americans to resent their university system because, at least in CS, it is arguable that they don't actually need it. In some cases, it even _hurts_ American kids. But before we all jump on this bandwagon (again) let's consider that we are perhaps being a bit myopic.

In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a _tremendous_ amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research. What would the world be without transactional databases, A* search, quicksort, cryptography, the idea of programming languages and so on _ad infinatum_. I could probably fill up literally a whole book listing the things in CS that were invented at Universities. There are more for other fields. You might contend that they all would have been invented eventually, but the question still remains: what would the world look like if universities had not been around to foster these ideas? New ideas need friends, and Bell labs can't employ _all_ the geniuses.

I know, I know, you might contend that most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless. Unfortunately, you'd be right. But remember, that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are _really, really_ big. Not just in universities, either: ideas produced by universities (for example, the ones I listed above) have changed the way that the world operates at a fundamental level, and they continue to do this. And when people come to universities and engage in work related to it, they carry it home, they carry it to their job, and they carry it out of the country. This is the way the world works. I know HN hates this opinion, but it is true.

The other thing I want to mention is that the _vast_ majority of these life- changing ideas come out of _American_ universities. This is a truly global system now. People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries? The simple and fact of the matter is that not all talented people are born in the US, and American universities are a very important gateway to get talented people into the US. In contrast, the library system is a purely domestic product for the public that happens to be inside US. I know that you think that universities don't "help the poor", but consider that this is really only true for the domestic poor. They are an irreplaceable resource for the poor outside. I'm not pitting "our" poor against "their" poor, but it's just something to think about.

The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them, since they do exist, and people clearly mostly do not.

The bottom line is this: your points all have some grain of truth to them, or they are true outright. But when you don't bother to examine _why_ this system exists to begin with before you state that another systems should be preferred, you are undermining your own point in a huge way. In particular, to say that we should toss an incredibly important and _global_ system for some domestic system that people don't use is utterly wrong. That all said, the correct answer is: cut neither, and instead cut part of the military.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be perfectly clear, I'd love to cut military spending, bailouts, drug war spending, etc. This article was about a _state_ funding issue, but I'm fine leaving that aside, since ultimately it's all government spending.

 _In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research._

I don't mind admitting some useful things have come out of universities. But this doesn't mean we need to continue propping up the university system as it exists today. You admit it has many flaws. There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research. They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no reason they have to resemble the current monster.

 _True, most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless, but that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big._

Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe the research done in universities is all useful.

 _People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries?_

Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration. If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges, people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.

 _The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them._

As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay off _really_ pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning very much.

<comment><USER24>
      > There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research.
      > They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated
      > with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no
      > reason they have to resemble the current monster.

Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that. Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it. And that will take time and money, and you will have to convince great scientists to make the switch, in spite of the fact that they will probably have less money, less resources, and spend more time doing something other than interesting research in order to build said system. That's all _really_ hard.

Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(

      > Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe
      > the research done in universities is all useful.

Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.

      > Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration.
      > If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges,
      > people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.

It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.

And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools. I work for a reasonably prestigious lab, and the people in charge are (charitably put) deeply suspicious of research from Chinese and Indian schools. When given a choice, they will hire a PhD from an American school almost always. Exceptions include University College at London, Oxford, Cambridge, Utrecht, etc., but it is a vanishingly small list, and even they I would say are much less likely to be hired.

      > As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people
      > won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But
      > as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay
      > off really pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of
      > university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning
      > very much.

Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you're still here!

      > Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that.
      > Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it.

All I'm getting at here is that today we have a single university system that generally operates a certain way (a policy that everyone out of high school should enter one of them, and at each university, students attend four years of classes graded A-F, then potentially attend grad school, and the university also houses researchers/professors), and there's nothing intrinsic to learning or doing research that requires all of these things. In other words, there could conceivably be a variety of different institutions that lacked one or more of the characteristics I mentioned, but it's hard for that to happen when the current system is so fully entrenched and subsidized. We could see more research-only labs, more teaching-focused institutions that have their own unique approaches (a la charter schools, Montessori, etc. in K-12), more institutions that integrate learning and research in a different way, or other arrangements I haven't thought of.

One example of something like this is simply universities 100+ years ago, when not everyone was encouraged to attend university. We all know about places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. I see no reason more variety is not possible.

And you're right, replacing it would be hard, but one reason for that is all the money going into the system. What you're asking me to do is sort of like starting a car company while General Motors is being bailed out by the government. Still possible, I suppose, but more difficult when the other guy is being subsidized.

      > Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(

Yes, this just shouldn't be controversial at all. In the context of a library, where the whole point is that everything is open, it certainly wouldn't make sense.

      > Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.

I'm sure most professors are aware that not all university research is useful. But in principle, every Ph.D. thesis is supposed to be original and worthy of publication. We know most of them aren't really so great, but in theory they meet a certain standard. When you hear people push for more govt. funding for university research, you won't often hear them say most of it won't be useful. And anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people who are urged to get a Ph.D. without regard to the usefulness of what the student would be doing.

      > It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.
      > And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools.

What I mean is that if we had, for example, plenty of world-class research labs that were able to "hire" people into the country as easily as universities can admit foreign students, they'd still want to come. The bias you mention is understandable, but someone who'd worked in an American research lab wouldn't be affected by the "foreign school research" problem.

      > Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.

You're right that it's often important for people to do research together. I'm just saying there are other ways to bring people together for science. Will your average local library suddenly become a major scientific center? Probably not, but I can envision something like a modern-day Library of Alexandria where great research happens, and I could see something like that being better than today's universities. Why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's really not that difficult. Adjust the income tax brackets and raise the rates. Oh yeah, and go flush your disgusting self-serving libertarian/objectivist philosophy down the drain, too.</comment>


VMware woos power users and IT pros with Fusion and Workstation upgrades - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/vmware-woos-power-users-and-it-pros-with-fusion-and-workstation-upgrades/ <comment><USER2> Any updates on the gaming front and 3d performance? I see nothing which is sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Are startups too safe? - <AUTHOR>

Is joining a startup risky? I would say no.
http://www.quora.com/Engineering-in-Silicon-Valley/As-an-employee-of-a-early-stage-software-startup-what-are-the-disadvantages-if-the-startup-fails-after-1-2-years
Conversely, is joining a startup financially rewarding? Probably not.
http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-startup-could-make-me-a-millionaire-in-four-years-if-I-got-hired-as-an-employee-today
So are startups too safe now? <comment><USER2> Your "sources" are quora discussions that requires login w/ Facebook/etc. No thanks. It's a bit of a wasted post here. No one without a quora account can join your discussion, and the link-bait title just pushes a lot of folks away. I have to think that, if you actually wanted discussion, you would've listed more of your own thoughts. You only listed two that I see: "I would say no." and "Probably not."

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally I have joined a startup and it depends what actually you want from your job. I mean if you want to be financially strong job then joining start might not be a good idea but if you want your growth and enhance knowledge there is no better option than start-ups. Start-ups sometimes also turn in to huge money if they investors or fund raising.</comment>


Show HN: Jenx, an OSX client for Jenkins CI Server - <AUTHOR> http://urbancoding.github.com/jenx/

<comment><AUTHOR> Our latest side project: we built this notification app using MacRuby. The tooling has a little ways to go, but it was generally much nicer than using Obj-C.</comment>


Why Psychological Safety in the Workplace Is Important? - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychreg.org/psychological-safety-in-the-workplace/ <comment><USER2> Why a question mark is needed at the end of this?</comment>


Lenovo only made about $250,000 on its deal with Superfish - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/27/lenovo-got-very-little-from-superfish-deal/

<comment><USER2> The company wouldn't be the primary beneficiary. It's the high level manager / executive that came up with the idea, probably got a good bonus for it, and more importantly had something to point to if asked to justify his position. Ultimately, this is where all the hare brained schemes for things better left alone arise from.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like such a small amount of money to betray your users for. They are paying a much higher price for that now, no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow.. This might go down as one of the worst decisions of the decade.</comment>


The Selective Laziness of Reasoning - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12303/full <comment><USER2> After reading the abstract, I was thinking to myself, 'to get a disagreement rate like _that_ , how can you possibly present a subject's own argument to them and have them think it was someone else's? Wouldn't they remember?' and was expecting some very clever experimental manipulation or condition.

Nope:

> However, for one of the syllogisms (the manipulated syllogism), instead of > being truthfully reminded of their previous answer, participants were told > that they had given an answer different from the one they had given: either > the valid answer (if they had answered invalidly) or the most common invalid > answer (if they had answered validly). Their own previous answer, and the > argument that justified it, were presented as if they were those given by > another participant. The external features of the presentation were strictly > identical to those of the other four syllogisms (see Fig. 1 for an example > of both conditions).

</comment><comment><USER3> This explains half the comments I see these days on HN. More concerned with defending their point and criticizing people who disagree, than a genuine attempt at finding something actually true.

<comment><USER4> Every so often, in places where I can be seen as the sum of my history (especially places with reputation scores), I create a new account with zero history. It stops me self-censoring on the basis of not wanting to damage my own reputation.

It's ridiculous; it's a line of text on a screen, and everyone here is a stranger, but I still feel myself caring. Can't stop caring, but I can start from fresh every so often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <snark>

Wait, there are people who still treat single arguments as reliable guides to truth?!

</snark>

<comment><USER6> How else would you try to persuade someone if not with an argument?

<comment><USER5> With experiential and statistical evidence, of course.

<comment><USER7> Experiential and statistical evidence presented in a summary meant to convince a person of something would be known as an argument.

<comment><USER5> Hold on. Turn this around. You just read an entire paper about how arguments are completely unreliable, to the point of causing you to contradict yourself, and your response is to argue semantics and declare, "Hey, arguments are great! Let's put more things in the 'argument' category, and spend _less_ effort trying to figure out more reliable and accurate ways of reasoning! Yay arguments, and by entailment, yay self-contradiction!"

What the hell?

<comment><USER8> Meanwhile you, who argues that arguments are useless, are arguing.

On the internet, no less!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full

<comment><AUTHOR> "Although selection would plausibly have favored neurocomputational machinery that automatically encodes an individual's sex and age, 'race' is a very implausible candidate for a conceptual primitive to have been built into our evolved cognitive machinery. During our evolutionary history, our ancestors would have inhabited a social world in which registering the sex and life- history stage of an individual would have enabled a large variety of useful probabilistic inferences about that individual. In contrast, ancestral hunter- gatherers traveled primarily by foot and, consequently, residential moves of greater than 40 miles would have been rare (16). Given the breeding structure inherent in such a world, the typical individual would almost never have encountered people sampled from populations genetically distant enough to qualify as belonging to a different 'race' (even assuming that such a term is applicable to a nonpolytypic species such as humans, in which the overwhelming preponderance of genetic variation is within population and not between population, and at most geographically graded rather than sharply bounded) (17, 18)."</comment>


'Serial': inside a podcast phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/aeb8d37c-7af1-11e4-8646-00144feabdc0.html <comment><USER2> Who would complain about a new outlet for long form investigative journalism that's actually massively popular? This podcast is as great as the commentaries/communities that treat it like Game of Thrones are shallow and stupid.

Are there actually people who think that good journalism that gets too popular becomes bad in some way or is this just a way to generate a "hot take" story?

""I'd rather disappoint many, many people than make some conclusion just because I've got to make . . . a satisfying story," she told Slate's Mike Pesca. "I hope that's not where I lead all of my listeners but . . . I don't know."

If she doesn't provide one, argued Pesca in the same interview, "the internet will rise up in a collective wail" and he pleaded with Koenig to reassure him that Serial would not "wind up being a contemplation on the nature of truth"."

Here's the better story, hopefully shithead narcissists like Pesca don't ever try to follow Serial because they would turn it into an exploitative farce.

<comment><USER3> > shithead narcissists like Pesca

Please don't practice this kind of invective on HN. It weakens your comment and degrades the threads.

<comment><USER2> That's fair. I would remove that first word in retrospect given the norms of HN. I believe that just came out while considering someone demanding the public exploitation of a young persons murder for his amusement.

Please mentally substitute "emotionally crippled" for my colorful language.</comment></comment></comment>


The Periodic Table of Elements in HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://disrupt.famo.us/periodic713c/

<comment><USER2> Who's Michael Arrington? Didn't know he was an element. And who or what is Ravikantium?</comment>


10 Crowdmaps Bringing Transparency to the Arab World - <AUTHOR> http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/10-crowdmaps-bringing-transparency-to-the-arab-world

<comment><USER2> Cool! Nice to discover Syria Deeply, very cool approach to documenting the conflict.</comment>


Developers, what makes a local meetup worth attending? - <AUTHOR>

So, I've been running a local meetup loosely associated with front end development for coming up to two years. I'm very aware that there are quite a few developers locally who have never attended despite it being free and fairly up to date.<p>What would make you want to attend an evening meetup on a weeknight? <comment><USER2> Where does it happens?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its in Ipswich, Suffolk in the UK, we meet once a month near the town centre in one of the university buildings. Could I have picked a better location?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Understand how good a leader you are - <AUTHOR> http://managerassessment.teambit.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks

I'm Alex, one of the creators of Manager Assessment and co-founder at Teambit.

While building Teambit, we've stumbled on tons of research about what makes a good leader good. But unless there is an established culture of feedback in your team, it's hard for a leader to assess how well you are doing.

Manager Assessment is a short, research-backed questionnaire to help each team leader understand how good they are at their job and what areas they can improve.

Take an assessment, share your results and tell us what you think. We are all ears

You can read a bit more on what the assessment is based on here: [http://help.teambit.io/what-research-is-the-manager- assessme...](http://help.teambit.io/what-research-is-the-manager-assessment- based-on)</comment>


Ask HN: Which GUI database client do you use? - <AUTHOR> Hello all,
Even though I'm pretty comfortable with cli clients for most of my daily tasks, when it comes to database queries' results visualisation I need some sort of table interface which I can easily interact with.
In this domain I find sequel for Mac my favourite. But it only works for MySQL databases.
Do you use GUI clients for database interaction? If so, which ones and what features do you like in which of them and what would you improve?
Best regards! <comment><USER2> For MySQL I use sequel.

For SQLite I use whatever pops up as my autostart app. I have like 4-5 free ones installed but they are all so basic and feels very bare after using sequel. Recently I have been quite satisfied with one named "Base" and I am thinking of buying it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dbeaver</comment>


Behind the Technology That Makes Facebook 3D Photos Possible - <AUTHOR> https://www.alanzucconi.com/?p=9493 <comment><USER2> Related note, this reminds me of [https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossView/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossView/)

Also, the video explains visually how it works, from research paper directly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=221&v=OlgVoplUJ8...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=221&v=OlgVoplUJ8g)

Parallax effect, there is a good video for showing how this is done on webdesign by using blender to explain it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln5BWnYMSQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln5BWnYMSQA)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very impressive!

Does this only work for multi-camera devices that store both photos at once? (Such as iPhones)

<comment><USER4> This doesn't require multiple cameras at all. It requires multiple (>1) photos of the same subject/setting from slightly different angles. If you have a subject that is moving fast you need a higher shutter speed and a quick succession of photos in order to build this but it's doable. But as you allude to ideally you could take the photos precisely at the same time using multiple cameras. It's really not that much unlike how The Matrix effect was done really.</comment></comment>


Book Excerpt and Interview: The Joy of Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/the-joy-of-clojure

<comment><USER2> I have been curious about Clojure for a while. I have the Manning MEAP for his book and I have watched Rick Hickey's introduction videos. My first impression is that is a very well thought out language; my biggest concern is the performance benchmarks : [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clojure&lang2=scala)

Clojure seems to be consuming more memory and is generally slower by significant margins compared to Scala ( or java). I would be interested in hearing from anyone using this in a high performance mission critical application like in a bank or in financial services ? What was your response time like under heavy load ? How did you justify this to your management?

<comment><USER3> UPDATE: This post by the fellow leading the Clojure Alioth effort shows that the JVM _GC settings_ are probably off for some of the benchmarks, <http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/8de18e3719aa376a>. This shows just how early days it is for Clojure microbenchmarks :)

Those are benchmarks for Clojure 1.2.0. The Clojure 1.3.0 alphas introduce quite a few things that specifically make numerical code quite a bit faster as well as boosting overall performance.

Being competitive with Scala and Java is a real goal for Clojure so expect the performance story to continue improve for some time.

While I don't know of any real-world Clojure cases for mission critical applications - Clojure has been run Azul boxes where the GC is collecting some like 6gbs a sec. Turns out that only takes up about 6% of CPU time. So I think Rich is onto something here about the memory cost of immutable data structures in high performance code and the incredible guarantees of the JVM's GC.

On Alioth microbenchmarks you probably won't see those benefits.

<comment><USER4> Notice that the other JVM language implementations haven't tried to reduce memory use by tuning JVM GC settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The excerpt is at [http://www.infoq.com/resource/articles/the-joy-of- clojure/en...](http://www.infoq.com/resource/articles/the-joy-of- clojure/en/resources/JoyofClojureCH09.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know or have an estimation of when your book will be printed?

<comment><USER6> According to <http://manning.com/fogus/> in January 2011.</comment></comment></comment>


Calling Bullshit - <AUTHOR> https://www.callingbullshit.org/ <comment><USER2> Slightly more informative description of what they're about than the book page [https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/course-calling- bullshit-...](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/course-calling-bullshit- interview-carl-bergstrom/)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, didn't know what to post, I just found them via a local news site.... [https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2...](https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018761053/carl- bergstrom-how-to-spot-bs)

<comment><USER2> I only listen to Kim Hill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found the video course quite interesting. Interesting they directly call out startup culture as promoters of bullshit</comment>


HTTP 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-04 <comment><USER2> Oh wonderful, it appears to use SPDY-like header compression. Why don't we just create a new compression algorithm and predefine common HTML tags and words to improve compression of the response body too! But we shouldn't base it on any known compression scheme and only use it for the case where the content length is less than 220,498 bytes but more than 8,494 bytes to optimize the behavior of today's more common MTU settings for PPPoE in Scandinavian countries minus of course the most common size of compressed headers today. It will be particularly optimized for the kind of responses Google sends back to minimize their own server load and common adwords will of course be included in the predefined list of compressed tokens.

/sarcasm

What happened to simple protocols? Seriously, per-hop flow control (which works best with which of the dozen version of TCPv4 or TCPv6 flow control?)? TCPv4-like framing with weird limits (16383 bytes)? Keepalives/Ping? Truly ridiculous specialized compression for headers which ignores the role of HTTP proxies? QoS?

Why not just implement the whole protocol over a raw IP connection and stop pretending like we're operating in layer 4+? I get that multiplexing is difficult without flow control, but good lord does this thing look overdesigned for what few benefits it offers over HTTP/1.1.

<comment><USER3> I can't help thinking some of the pain could be resolved if we had a reliable datagram protocol between UDP and TCP. Delimiting a TCP stream to create a messaging protocol is already suboptimal and error prone, and it's the root cause of the head-of-line blocking problem experienced by HTTP ('fixed' in SPDY).

<comment><USER4> There can be no new layer 4 protocols due to NAT. You have to use either TCP or UDP.

<comment><USER3> So we can move from IPv4 to IPv6 but not introduce a new transport because of NAT? Hmm...

<comment><USER5> The IPv6 transition is not going that much better than SCTP. So many people have v4-only home routers that they have no plans to ever upgrade.

<comment><USER6> Most people have a free router from their ISP, the ISP will just send out new ones

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I understand the motivation to going to a binary protocol for a SPDY inspired HTTP 2.0 but I would have liked to see an ascii based protocol similar to what jgrahamc proposed last year [0]. I thought it was a much cleaner protocol to read and understand, and much more in tune with what the web is supposed to be. Why not keep the clever binary stuff separate in SPDY, endorse it though the IETF and keep HTTP ascii?

[0] [http://blog.jgc.org/2012/12/speeding-up-http-with-minimal- pr...](http://blog.jgc.org/2012/12/speeding-up-http-with-minimal- protocol.html)

<comment><USER8> This idea is bad for a couple reasons.

First, ASCII is inefficient. People don't interpret HTTP, computers do. Web servers and browsers. People only look at HTTP when they want to troubleshoot without any tools. With real tools, you can find out what's broken much quicker. And there's plenty of things you can miss without a real HTTP interpreter. Most hackers prefer to think of themselves as wizards that can spy 0's and 1's and tell you what the weather is. It doesn't make for a _better protocol_ , though.

Second, we can already break HTTP responses up in multiple parts, using a novel idea called "multipart". It sucks and nobody has used it since HTML/JS found new ways of providing content. [http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html](http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html)

Third, it's a hack. If you want to improve the protocol, improve the protocol, don't just hack onto it to make it do what you want. I could make a horse and buggy go 60mph, but would it be a good idea? How about just designing a better buggy that is intended to go 60mph?

Fourth, fixed-length records are the _wave of the future!_ It solves crazy problems like header injection and request integrity checking. Moreover, it makes for simpler, more efficient parsing of requests.

Fifth, redundancies introduced from the beginning of time need to go away, like terminating every record with "\r\n", or passing the same headers on every single damn request when once should be just fine for a stream of requests. Little inefficiencies like this don't go away if you just hack onto the same old protocol forever.

Sixth, the flow control improvements can make different applications more efficient by both not having to hold state of where and when traffic is coming and improving flow across disparate network hops.

Seventh, as to a general question "why use binary when we can compress stuff", what is smaller: a string of bits, or a compressed string of digits? Add to this that every header could have a 32-bit identifier (4 bytes) and you've got more efficient compression than gzip. Of course, most people would argue that you don't save enough time or bandwidth or cpu cycles to make a difference, but it _would_ make for easier-to-write parsers, which would make working with the protocol in general more attractive. But then you have your binary- detractor-wizard-hackers and the whole conversation becomes an infinite loop.

<comment><USER9> The same arguments can be applied to HTML, CSS, JSON, RSS and so on. I fail to see the crucial difference between those and HTTP. Or would you say the web as a whole should be binary?

 _Fifth, redundancies introduced from the beginning of time need to go away_ I wholeheartedly agree with this, but it doesn't automatically warrant binary encoding.

Human readability is a huge bonus in any protocol or format. Not because normally people read those protocols, but because people read ASCII and therefore they have good tools to work with ASCII.

<comment><USER8> ...? Seriously? You don't see the difference?

HTTP is a layer 7 communication protocol. HTML/CSS are markup languages for designing an interface. JSON is a data interchange format. RSS is a content syndication format.

They are all wildly, vastly different. The only thing they have in common is they're all ASCII. If anything, you're making my argument for me: a communications protocol is not a format for displaying documents, it is a language for communicating machine instructions to network applications. Historically they have always been binary because _it works better that way_.

Your argument that "people can read ASCII, so ASCII is good" leaves out a couple points. Like, human beings do not read an HTTP statement, go into a file folder, bring out a document and present it to their computer. It's the other way around.

Really this just reflects a strange phobia people seem to have. Like your brain is tricking you into thinking you'll lose something by not looking directly "at the wire".

When you look at HTTP headers, 90% of the time you're actually looking at a pre-parsed, normalized set of fields. If you look at a raw packet dump, the whole message may not show up in one packet; you may have to reassemble it, which means parsing. If you have multiple requests in one connection, you have to find the end of the last request, which means seeking through the stream; seeing requests broken down individually means a tool already parsed them. Firebug and wireshark and other tools all take care of the automated, machine- operated work for you.

And what's left? What do you have to do with HTTP, really? Apache rules? They'd stay human-readable. Application testing? We use proxies that handle it, and APIs for client/server programming. Firewalling? Handled by tools and appliances.

Stop giving me the blanket "ASCII is great for everything" excuse and tell me one thing, one single thing, that only humans are able to do with HTTP using their eyes without a tool. But you don't have to, because that's impossible: HTTP is _not for humans_.

<comment><USER9> _Apache rules? They 'd stay human-readable._

I look forward to servers having different text representation of the same binary headers in their config files.

 _tell me one thing, one single thing, that only humans are able to do with HTTP using their eyes_

You're missing the point.

No one writes HTML manually anymore either. People generate it using tools (string processing tools in a language or templates) and read it using browsers. Heck, even Notepad++ is a tool, but a generic one.

If you want, you _can_ generate all your HTML using DOM. But almost no one does that, because DOM tools are clumsy, while text-based tools are easy to use.

<comment><USER8> You're actually still arguing for my point instead of against it.

If no one writes HTML manually anymore, then we have no need for it to look like English when the computer interprets it! We can compile the HTML down to bytecode and have it be interpreted much quicker by the computer, which won't have to do the job of lexing, compiling, assembling, etc. Here, two steps would be eliminated immediately, resulting in increased speed and more efficient storage and transmission: [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/#Main_flow_examples)

For that matter, if it's generated by tools, and we use programs designed to interpret and decipher and color-code it, all of that can happen without it being in English!

On top of that, you missed when I said HTTP is a communications protocol. Ever seen the movie The Matrix? Know how the sentinels would sometimes look at each other and make scuttling noises, then shovel off somewhere? They weren't speaking English ASCII. They were speaking a binary communications protocol. Know how I know? BECAUSE MACHINES AREN'T HUMANS! It would be absolutely moronic for them to speak English to each other. It would be like dogs saying the English word "bark" instead of just barking. Completely unnecessary and crazy. But that's what an ASCII communications protocol for machines is.

On top of that, there is no benefit, not one at all, to humans being able to read it when tools already exist to interpret and display it even more human- readable than its natural state. We squish and compress and strip HTML and JS already just to make it more efficient, and then undo the whole process just to read it. It's insane.

<comment><USER10> So you really think we'd be here today if instead of HTML, CSS , Javascript, JSON, XML we had a web based on bytecode formats?

The web is _made_ by people, not computers. Open an ubiquitous text-editor and you can start working on something right away. If you have to download a dozen different compilers and IDEs to do that, it's definitely not the same.

<comment><USER8> "The web" is actually just a collection of hyperlinks, applications that parse markup and document storage and retrieval services. You don't see code. You see pictures of cats. And you never, ever need a text editor to use it.

Face it. Your love affair with ASCII is just that: an emotion.

(As to your original question: humans haven't needed to program in binary or assembly for decades. That's what so great about computers: they do the hard work for us, so we don't need to type everything manually into a text editor. Is that such a hard pill to swallow?)

<comment><USER10> You're completely ignoring the fact that the web began as (and still is, in part) a collaborative tool and _publishing_ platform. Text-based formats played an immense part in that, geocities, the rise of personal publishing, blogs, these would not have happened without them.

Yes, binary is more efficient, but then tell me why is JSON the most popular data interchange format on the web today?

<comment><USER8> Because XML, the preeminent human-editable data interchange format, sucked balls. It's only superseded YAML because it can be stripped of whitespace and it has the word "Javascript" in it.

<comment><USER11> binary formats sucked so much, that they had to invent XML and it was a much better way to start the interaction era, were services talk to each other without having to read a 30 page spec just to understand how to write the right payload for the interchange format used. Let alone the byte order...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At first glance, the spec appears to be re-implementing a TCP stack inside a TCP connection...

<comment><USER5> Yes, the reason is that starting a new stream multiplexed inside an already- open TCP connection is faster than starting a new TCP connection. Attempts to improve TCP itself are slowed down by slow uptake of new Windows versions.

<comment><USER12> That's not true. HTTP/2.0 (or at least the successor to HTTP/1.1) has been discussed for over a decade, there have been many OS releases since then!

Inventing a whole new protocol to overcome a TCP deficiency is IMO a terrible motive...

<comment><USER13> These guys have something to say about that: [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with- quic.htm...](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with-quic.html)

A new protocol that runs on UDP precisely to side-step slow TCP changes.

<comment><USER3> That's great, but it means it'll always be a userland library rather than a OS supported networking protocol... which means the API will never be a defacto standard akin to the BSD sockets API. The reference implementation is also in obtuse looking C++... which will hinder bindings to other languages.

In short, don't expect to see this outside of Android or Chrome.

On the plus side, this is exactly what UDP was for in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to Google for ruining the internet standards in an official way, without strong proofs of big significant improvements over the simpler past protocol.

<comment><USER15> Don't confuse the cart and the horse. The IETF standardization process has never been less relevant than it is today. The reality of deployment of a "next-generation HTTP" involves two things, neither of which the IETF has any say in: (a) whether anyone can improve HTTP as it runs between a mainstream browser (or some as-yet unforeseen browser replacement) and a content serving backend in a way meaningful enough to drive adoption, and (b) buy-in from the major browser owners.

That's the way it's supposed to work; the horse is meant to drag the cart. The RFC database is littered with cart-led insurgencies that went nowhere. If binary HTTP is one of those, it'll join them as a historical curiosity.

<comment><USER14> My fear is that now that Google controls a significant part of HTTP traffic, plus the _client side_ of the story (Chrome + Android), it is in a condition to force things in one way or the other...

<comment><USER16> Do you think Google is now in a better position to force things in one way or another than Microsoft was in the 90s?

<comment><USER17> It's in a similar position. And see how that ended up with Microsoft — we're still suffering the consequences.

<comment><USER18> I'm actually kind of OK with XMLHttpRequest.

<comment><USER19> I am quite sure Microsoft views it as huge mistake on their part. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well this is clever:

" HTTP/2.0 enables a server to pre-emptively send (or "push") multiple associated resources to a client in response to a single request. This feature becomes particularly helpful when the server knows the client will need to have those resources available in order to fully process the originally requested resource. "

If someone asks for your HTML, might as well send them the CSS, JS, and images it is going to use. Would cut down on requests. Only thing more efficient than compression, is not having to ask in the first place.

<comment><USER21> It also complicates caching: do you cache the response by request, or cache the resources individually by update time (or whatever)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I still feel like this is just being rammed through far far too fast. SPDY might well be the right way to go, but it's only been deployed for a small number of very large sites for a couple of years at this point. It was a foregone conclusion when the schedule was announced for http2.0 that it would be spdy, because only spdy has demonstrable value in production. There was no time for anyone to come up with or evaluate an alternative. But on the other hand, there hasn't been near enough time to demonstrate that spdy is good _for the whole internet_ , which is what blessing it with the http protocol name implies.

And I just don't see why it _should_ be rammed through. SPDY has a connection upgrade path, that afaik is largely unchanged for http2.0 anyways.

<comment><USER23> > because only spdy has demonstrable value in production.

What demonstrable value? Google has _never_ compared it to pipelining and when Microsoft did so they found it about the same and sometimes slower.

There is next to zero value in SPDY over pipelining across several connections. It's just complicated for no good reason.

<comment><USER22> I think you're seeing a defence of spdy in my post that isn't really there. By value I mean simply that it is at least functional. Any alternative proposal, given the short proposal cycle, would not even have that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source code & issues tracker: [https://github.com/http2/http2-spec](https://github.com/http2/http2-spec)

Wiki: [http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/](http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anybody summarize the main differences between this and the older versions of HTTP?

<comment><USER25> Current version of HTTP was devised by engineers. The new version is devised by an advertising company/NSA puppets.

<comment><USER26> If you're a proponent of engineering then why are all your comments on the matter vague and/or emotional?

<comment><USER25> I feel it's necessary to remind other posters who we're dealing with. The Google problem should not be ignored, every engineer in that company is now suspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "PRI * HTTP/2.0\r\n\r\nSM\r\n\r\n"

Ah, so every HTTP 2.0 connection has PRISM in it.

<comment><USER28> It started out as "FOO ... BAR" but that made the header an odd number of bytes long. In the previous draft it was "FOO ... BA". It was briefly "STA ... RT" which made too much sense to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You still can't self-sign certificates and rely on certificate pinning for transport security without domain verification. With all of the security concerns people have with governments logging all unencrypted internet traffic, I was hoping HTTP 2.0 would require or at least optionally allow self-signed cert TLS for every http: connection (with no UI indication to the user that they are secure) and require CA-signed cert TLS for https:

We're also still stuck with DEFLATE, which is vastly inferior to modern compression formats like LZMA.

<comment><USER7> Encryption is only half the problem, authentication is the other. Self signed certificates don't authenticate the web server and allowing them would open the web up to MITM attacks. What we need is some form or decentralised certificate authority, i have no idea how that could work though.

HTTP allready supports LZMA, its just the browser and web servers that dont. If a browser sent the header:

      Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip, lzma

instead of:

      Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip

and the server supported it, it would "just work". Unfortunately none of the major browsers or server have implemented it.

<comment><USER30> _What we need is some form or decentralised certificate authority, i have no idea how that could work though._

DNSSEC could be used to distribute certificates: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS- based_Authentication_of_Na...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS- based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities)

<comment><USER31> Isn't DNSSEC still have centralized certs for the tlds?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Going to binary seems kind of silly at this point.

HTML is text. Javascript is text. XML is text. JSON is text. SVG is text. CSS is text.

Is it really worth the complication to save a few bytes on HTTP headers when you're just going to shovel out inefficient text data in most cases anyway?

I don't understand why they're trying to shove this down everybody's throat as a new version of HTTP.

There are a ton of ports besides 80. The better thing to do, IMO, would be to make a new protocol on some other port and add it to their browsers.

<comment><USER33> According to the shills employed by or rooting for Google, here on HN and elsewhere on the internet, it's not silly: It is _paramount_.

See, it allows the request for www.google.com, including all of Google's tracking cookies, to fit inside one TCP-frame, causing a 5ms improvement in load time, and Google has evidence that this means they make more money.

Never mind the open, exploratory nature of the internet and how text-based protocols was what made the internet into what it is today. We're going to throw away all that which the internet has taught us about that because Google says we should.

This thing is fucked up beyond belief.

Edit: found a link to the IETF discussion about this:

[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2013JanMar/...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2013JanMar/0254.html)

It admits in plain sight that the only thing they care about with HTTP 2.0 is solving Google's massive-scale issues at the cost of everyone else:

> I finally admitted it was a dead end. At the moment the challenges consist > in feeding requests as fast as possible over high latency connections and > processing them as fast as possible on load balancers

A good, open, self-documenting protocol didn't suit Google, so let's throw it away. It's a "dead end", after all.

Jesus christ these people need a bitch-slapping.

More emails on the subject can be found here:

[http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?keywords=&hdr-1-...](http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?keywords=&hdr-1-name=subject&hdr-1-query=The+use+of+binary+data+in+any+part+of+HTTP+2.0+is+not+good&index- grp=Public_FULL&index-type=t&type-index=ietf-http-wg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34>
      Only implementations of the final, published RFC can identify
      themselves as "HTTP/2.0".  Until such an RFC exists, implementations
      MUST NOT identify themselves using "HTTP/2.0".

Here we go again - as with -webkit in css, expect 'HTTP/2.0 DRAFT' or similar to be the new http 2.0.

<comment><USER35> I think in the real world its not "HTTP/2.0 DRAFT" but "SPDY".

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This makes it easier for web application designers, but is less optimal for those publishing static pages, which are actually the mainstay of the web.

Further, it's less user-explorable, which further distances the web from access by the everyday tinkerer as opposed to the professional with lots of time to explore.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this a proposal to reimplement (badly) TCP inside of HTTP ? So we'll have a TCP stack running on top of a TCP stack ?

Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.

I predict that this will lead to unexpected performance problems due to collisions in Tx window size between TCP windows and HTTP 2.0 frames.

</comment><comment><USER38> I really disliked the following part: _A client MAY immediately send HTTP /2.0 frames to a server that is known to support HTTP/2.0, after the connection header. [..] Prior support for HTTP/2.0 is not a strong signal that a given server will support HTTP/2.0 for future connections._ (Section 3.4)

That means, whenever you open a new TCP connection to a http2 server, you must start with HTTP/1.1 and perform the Upgrade negotiation anew.

Making the spec require HTTP2 support on all servers of a cluster if at least one server supports it would have been much better, performance-wise. The only reason I see why they kept it is transparent proxies (if your browser is using an explicit proxy, it should be able to figure out if the proxy supports HTTP2).

<comment><USER8> Browsers already send HTTP/1.1 by default, which would be rejected by HTTP/1.0 servers. HTTP/2.0 would be rejected by HTTP/1.1 servers and the browser could retry, or it can try for the Upgrade.

Either way, with time, we can change the browser to behave differently based on the number of servers supporting that protocol, the same as with HTTP/1.1.

<comment><USER38> Yes, but storing "supports HTTP2" for a given server for a given time after connecting to that server and negotiating the upgrade would also do the job.

One of the problems with HTTP 1.x is that it is stateless - every time you want something from a server, you treat it as if it is the first time you talk to it. I understand this is by design, but as a consequence we are transmitting all the same headers to the server all the time... which can be mitigated with HTTP2, except that we still need to do that (send all headers) _and_ the HTTP2 upgrade, every time we open a new TCP socket to that server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hmm... I have a few scripts that do something like:

        header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' 400 Bad Request');

Since I'm using SERVER_PROTOCOL, if I upgraded Nginx and it started to send HTTP/2.0 traffic to the server, would I need to rewrite this line? How would I send a specific status code using the new binary protocol?

<comment> iso-8859-1 Just use

        header("Status: 400 Bad Request");

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> HTTP/2.0 should be SIP because of similarities and also integrated session management. Not some _application_ layer _binary_ protocol to spy on people even faster. Yeah baby :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> Hope http 2.0 is the new ipv6 !

</comment><comment><USER42> Totally superficial but why do I have to type http every time? Why can't it be h and hs (for https). Quicker to type.

</comment><comment><USER43> Most of the complaints are around the ascii vs binary. Can we just make it accept both and move on?

</comment><comment><USER25> Given the close relationship between Google and the NSA, I suggest they are removed from the IETF until further notice. I would trust Microsoft more than the snake oil Google produces.

No surprise they've opted for a binary protocol rather than ASCII, anything to reduce transparency

<comment><USER44> What close relationship between Google and the NSA are you referring to?

<comment><USER25> Google providing direct access to their servers and infrastructure. Every Google service was open to the NSA; GMail, Google Drive, Google Talk, you name it.

<comment><USER44> And the evidence for this is?

<comment><USER25> Please read the leaked information from Edward Snowden. I don't wish to paraprase the last few weeks of news for someone.

<comment><USER44> It's a rhetorical question. None of the leaks provide any evidence that Google actively cooperates with the NSA in any way. No evidence of equipment at Google data centers, no evidence of any kind of remote access for the NSA, other than the already existing legal channels.

The claim that Google had foreknowledge of PRISM, or worked with the NSA to build some kind of firehose for them is unsupportable given what we know, and is pure speculation on your part.

Thus, the claim of close cooperation with the NSA is frankly, ad hominem.

<comment><USER45> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Given what's come out about the NSA, it's much more plausible to assume that Google is cooperating with them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>