Forget Bribery – The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-28/admissions-bribery-scandal-pretending-degree-has-value-is-a-scam <comment><USER3> I've come to believe that many degrees are overrated, including my own CS degree. I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time. While I don't like bootcamps, there is no reason why there are no IT trade schools. Maybe two years long. No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc. Not a degree, but a trade school. Hell, my plumber makes more than my wife and I together. He specializes in installing tankless water heaters. He makes a mint.

I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments. I've worked around people from some of these places and almost to a man, they reeked of one-upmanship, my father knows..., I know..., oh, you went to <insert no-name university> while glancing down their nose at you.

I worked with a guy like this at UUNet who went to Brown. He thought he was the cat's pajamas and everyone should defer to him because he went Ivy League. Oddly enough (sarcasm), his mistakes were often corrected by those who attended the no-name schools. He never saw the error of his ways. Daddy, after all, was a prominent attorney in the DC area. Why this guy went IT is a mystery. He would have been a better fit with the other sharks and scammers in DC or on Wall Street.

<comment><USER4> > I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.

I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.

> Not a degree, but a trade school

So, only directly applicable skills, no theory and nuts-and-bolts fundamentals? Sounds far inferior to a bachelor's degree.

The software field is known for being open to talented autodidacts, in a way that, say, bridge engineering is not. That doesn't mean it makes sense to dismiss the benefits of quality formal education.

Someone with a decent bachelor's degree in computer science will have a depth and breadth of knowledge _far_ in excess of where they'd be if they'd spent that time teaching themselves web development on the job.

> No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc

Here in the UK, a STEM degree is quite 'pure', and you aren't expected to study topics like philosophy. That doesn't mean there's no value in studying them though. If philosophy struck you as a complete waste of time, then either it was taught badly, or you failed to make the most of it.

<comment><USER5> >I sincerely doubt it. For learning the _non-practical_ fundamentals of, say, computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a university.

I think you kind of just made the point. Why would I pay for something that isn't practical?

<comment><USER6> Because what may prove practical over a long term may not do so in the short or medium term.

And because what counts as "practicality" changes as people progress through their careers, but the foundations required to meet each new standard of what counts as practical often remain the same (or change less).

<comment><USER7> That's perhaps the key point. I have engineering degrees (not CS) yet I work for a software tech company and do a lot of things that are much more about a broader liberal arts education and extracurricular activities than they are about specific technical courses I took. And, even when I did work as an engineer, it mostly wasn't in an area where I directly applied coursework.

<comment><USER5> And my business courses have helped a lot more in both undergrad and as an MBA dropout.

Most of us are working to increase business value for companies - either by making them money or by saving them money. They could care less about "Cracking the Code" and LeetCode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Today, degrees are a way to communicate and verify to others that you have generated and currently possess some amount of intellectual and social capital, which in the right situations can be converted to financial, political, and other hard forms of capital.

The recent scandals don't necessarily indicate a degree don't verify capital stocks, but it does clearly demonstrate the divide between those who have capital and those who do not, and the myriad methods capital perseveres in self-preservation. And as these loopholes will most likely remain open in one way or another, it will continue to teach this lesson across generations.

I think this, and numerous other blatant shows of power, underline just how important it is to federate capital across class boundaries and prevent capital concentration. The "old boys clubs" care about your pedigree. The SME CEO cares about putting food on the table for his/her family and his/her employees, and cares moreso for your merit. Greater capital distribution leads to stricter capital verification (yes you are smart in practice) due to the decentralization of trust, greater alignment between merit and success and exercise of existing talent surpluses, and higher societal cohesion due to greater class turnover.

</comment><comment><USER9> Education has value. Degrees are merely a conveyance of an education. The educational institution is an indicator of the educational rigor. None of these are perfect indicators.

If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle- of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's perception of reality for a really long time.

Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite schools but I doubt it.

<comment><USER10> So it sounds like you're saying the real scam is pretending that degrees have value?

<comment><USER11> It can become a self-fullfilling prophecy: if most people believe that degrees have value, then the people who compete for those spots at "elite" colleges will go up, then the pool of high quality candidate goes up. Because the elite schools have the pick of the litter, the chances that their student body and thus their graduates will be successful goes up. This reinforces the perception that the degrees have value and the cycle repeats. I think an accident of history has started this cycle and it's going to endure for quite a while. It's akin to Silicon Valley: engineers think that being in SV helps them be successful and join the next rocketship. Startups get drawn to SV because they think SV is where the magic happens. Because the pool of talent and opportunities meet in SV, it reinforces the perception that SV is magic.

<comment><USER12> I think you hit on the way economists define "value"; value is derived from people believing something is valuable. Take gold or diamonds for example, which were highly valued before they even had industrial usages. Yes, both are pretty and are rare; however, there are many other equally pretty/rare things that weren't valued as highly. The only value they had was from perception, and that made the value real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you haven't yet, you should read _The Case Against Education_. Though be forewarned: if you work in most of the education-industrial complex, the book may make you want to quit. [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case- against-educatio...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against- education-bryan-caplan)

<comment><USER14> I also strongly recommend Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" [1]. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but Illich makes a very good case for looking at Government's support for higher education as basically a regressive tax on the poor, as they (meaning the poor) attend university at a much lower percentage compared to the middle and upper classes of society but they still pay for the government's support of said universities (through direct or indirect taxes, and nowadays by being financially forced out of residential areas located close to good schools that are seen as gateways to prestigious universities attended by the children of middle- and upper-class people).

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

<comment><USER15> It can be argued that the percentage of the poor who attend university is high considering the percentage of taxes that they actually pay ( compared to those who earn more than them)

<comment><USER14> That's why I added the indirect taxes thing, which generally it's a regressive and largely unescapable tax on the poor no matter what the Government decides to do with the money.

Also, if I were to be a marxist (which I'm not, quite the contrary, even though I do have a genuine admiration for Marx's thought) one could say that the well-off have myriad other ways of "taxing" the poor which don't necessarily involve direct monetary transactions, like asking those members of the poor class (not sure what today's equivalent term would be) to work on top of their agreed-upon working hours with no monetary compensation (I have a feeling that the poor are a lot more likely to do over-time without compensation compared to Silicon Valley people or to big-firm lawyers).

<comment><USER16> That last part is obviously untrue. In general, poor people do not work long hours.

In general, corporate management employees work very long hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Caltech argument in this argument doesn't take into account that Caltech is a very small school. They enroll around 200 new undergrad students a year which is about 1/10 the number most Ivy league schools admit. I think this is the primary factor why you don't see many big name Caltech grads, there aren't as many of them. Especially when you are comparing Caltech to ALL Ivy league schools grouped together.

<comment><USER18> This, and the fact that they're a technical school by nature. Politics and business garners more news cycles than hard science, and hence skews peoples perception of the prestige of a university or success of their alumni. Look at the number of Nobel prizes per capita and Caltech blows Harvard out of the water. 17 Nobel prizes over 22k living alum for Caltech, versus 48 over 371k for Harvard. Even if you only look at financial success, CalTech still comes out ahead in both early and mid-career ([https://www.payscale.com/college- salary-report/bachelors](https://www.payscale.com/college-salary- report/bachelors)). They should try comparing to a state school with similar academic focus and ratings.

TL;DR: Small school focusing on low-visibility fields is a poor comparison.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. Seems like the author was not qualified to write this article in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a shame this piece doesn't function as much more than a Caltech/MIT endorsement.

I dropped out and hate the system as much as the next guy, but to pretend that degrees have _literally_ zero value and exist purely as a wealth transfer mechanism is a bit shortsighted. The author discredits MOOCs in the very same breath, but forgets to mention that thousands of companies are only using a degree as a baseline and all it would take is for HR to start accepting a slightly different piece of paper.

There will always be an Ivy club, fraternities, secret societies, and so on. Flood the market with Ivy degrees and the social elite will pick something else. But those are pretty small factions if you think about _everybody else_ , at the University of Nowhere Special.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not > graduate many future elites

> As long as Ivy League alumni occupy positions of power, academic credentials > will remain costly and scarce. Ongoing credential inflation is not evidence > of a bubble about to burst, but a reflection of how successful the elites > are at convincing the greater populace that degrees are valuable.

The underlying implication of the article doesn't seem to be hit home. If "good" schools don't produce rich powerful/people, but "name" schools do, that's because there is heavy corruption by the established elite to favor their alma mater's to make sure their degrees remain valuable - is I think a core tenet of the article.

</comment><comment><USER21> Degrees themselves may not have much value, but the value of the degree is that employers can use them to offload discrimination to schools.

Through disparate impact legislation and jurisprudence, employers can only consider job applicants on narrow grounds. Schools have much more leeway to admit/deny admission.

An employer would probably get sued for using IQ tests because blacks and hispanics tend to do poorly on those tests. However, the ACT and SAT are highly correlated with IQ and schools can and do use those to make admission decisions. An employer that wants to filter for smart people would be well- advised to hire from schools that only accept cognitively gifted students.

You can't refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't speak well, but you can refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't hold a degree from an institution that refused to admit Jamal because he didn't get a high enough score in the English section of the ACT/SAT.

<comment><USER22> Harsh but true. Requiring advanced math classes as a gatekeeper for comp Sci is also massively exclusionary and totally pointless because the vast majority of programming jobs require no math at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "When something is both expensive and of no practical value, it's clearly intended as a means of wealth transfer."

Interesing, I had the same thought about expensive artwork.

</comment><comment><USER24> A four year degree is now seen as the educational floor by most employers. Heck, even police departments and many certifications are requiring you have a four year degree (any degree will do). I think this trend is wrong headed, but at the same time how do we change organizations to train on the job. It is just a simple, and lazy, filter.

<comment> rooam-dev Train on the job. Easier said than done. How would you know if the person is even trainable? A degree should (not that ti does in many cases), but it should. Like a driver's license.

<comment><USER25> It used to be the norm. Most people didn't go to college, they got jobs and trained on the job. Most people were trainable just fine.

I don't think people have changed __that __much in the last few decades. Hell, in the last few millennia.

Most people who don't appear to be trainable are actually just assholes who want to make everyone else around them do the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tell that to the many tech and other companies who only want to recruit from what they see as the "top" schools. If you don't come from that tier, you are locked out of many, many opportunities -- you can be better at your job than most but without the ivy league degree you are nothing.

</comment><comment> B-Con The face that it _can_ be used as a social signal doesn't mean it is exclusively used so.

> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of > higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that > massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete > misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.

I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the class is worthless".

Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre- planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books _in general_. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework, etc.

The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self- motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of university. That's not for everyone.

> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not > graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic > fields, but don't tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.

A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical engineering background _at all_? It's a silly comparison.

Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200 students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.

> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their > children, but that doesn't guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more > reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through > a name-brand, exclusive education.

> Jared Kushner's father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with > a $2.5 million charitable contribution.

When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?

<comment><USER27> These are all good points. Also, I think another point often missed in the discussion around social signaling is that certain schools create a higher opportunity for a reference check. Upon reviewing a candidate early in her career, if she went to X, I know someone who graduated the same year, I can ask that friend/co-worker what that person is like. I think this is especially beneficial when someone doesn't work at a large company their first job out of school. It is less about the school name on the diploma, and more about obtaining an additional reference firsthand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The xITs are known for doing math and science courses. Those kinds of things tend to show quite easily who is putting in the effort, at least in my experience. For one, you tend to get asked things that require knowledge of a specific model eg thermodynamics, and very often you're asked to calculate specific numbersa and mentioned very specific keywords. I've sat in tutorials with professors where the other student literally did not know anything and it was embarrassing.

Chances are of you found the number you understood at least something about the model. And if you showed your working out, which is always a good idea, you provide more quite specific evidence.

In stuff that's more essay based, the weak can hide and the strong can be mistaken for middling. Essays can be long but still formulaic: talk about the question, mention the main things people have suggested about it, pros and cons. There's a lot of permutations of arguments that are valid, making it hard to disqualify someone who has mentioned a few relevant things. But also hard to make someone stand out, because people know the answer required is a bunch of bullet points, and if you just fire enough bullets some will resemble a smart answer. I've sat in essay subject tutorials that went perfectly fine for everyone despite very little prep having gone in.

Back to the article, naturally you don't want to buy your way into a degree that you have no hope of completing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a similar but different vantage point. I didn't go to University and only took a handful of personal interest college courses completely unrelated to my vocation. However, over the years I have _taught_ courses (most of which were written by me) at a number of universities and colleges. These students were _smart_ and driven to get where I was in my career, so I was continually reminded of the irony.

On the same side of that coin, I also taught technical subjects for a certification I never bothered to acquire. The students often asked why, and my tactful response is that it would have been a conflict of interest, and not at all that I couldn't see the value outside of checking off a box for the headhunters... Too many highly certified people with zero experience and near- zero skill, I'm afraid to say. Certs simply do not replace a good technical interview.

I also employed a PhD for 3 months. He was brilliant but so stubborn and opinionated I had a hard time justifying the expense of keeping him on board. He could barely function and kept trying to steer the company. Thankfully he eventually screwed up bad enough I had a nicer sounding reason to turf him.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The author highlights that none of the students attempted admission to Caltech or MIT. Going further, I would venture that none enrolled in a science program but opted for a standard liberal arts/communications program. If you tailor your course choices such programs are pretty hard to flunk out of as opposed to science programs where the moment of truth hits during the first calculus/physics/chemistry exam.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, if you ask the average guy on the street which is the better school, Yale or MIT? They're gonna say Yale. If you ask the average guy which is better, Stanford or CalTech? They're gonna say Stanford.

We, on HN, might think MIT is better than Stanford, but outside of the bubble, believe it or not, there is an entire world of people who never even heard of CalTech. A world of people who have no idea what MIT is.

There is no point in using something for conspicuous consumption, unless that something is actually conspicuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Of coursemodern universities are a scam. Maybe that's not true for a small % of students (those going into academia, for example), but in reality I'd wager all my money that the majority of students would not end up better in life attending university than doing sef learning online.

Most students don't build a big social network in college. Most students don't take away meaninful thoughts from university. Most students probably don't even end up using the discipline or domain knowledge they acquired for a significant part of their career.

If all universities produce for people is a piece of paper that says "this person MIGHT be able to do the job you want done" (and let's be real - <USER2> many people do you know got a college level job simply by flashing their degree?) then there's absolutely no reason that degree comes with a 6 figure debt. That's something we can cut down to low 5 digits easily. The problem of course is universities only have the incentive to charge more for the same product because no one's demanding they do anything of value.

</comment><comment><USER4> Much-needed Outline link: [https://outline.com/WV9say](https://outline.com/WV9say)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm hiring people like for last 10 years or so. Long ago I understood that degree doesn't mean anything. Be it CalTech, MIT or school I never heard of. Probably, because I'm not google and can't give away half a million salaries to the super top notch high achievers.

For me degree is only an indication that person has grit, and dedication to spend 4+ years on something rather hard and boring. Which is a good thing. I can expect that person knows that sometimes work is a boring grind, just as Uni taught. However, learning programming by themselves require quite a dedication too.

I hire regardless of degree, but I do take a closer look during probation period how candidate handles slower more boring tasks.

So far, I didn't see much correlation between years spent in academia and long term productivity.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ahh, a nice anti-education rant for HN to do the usual anti-college back and forth. Bonus points for focusing on technical schools as good, because you can actually get a job.

Ban the humanities, right?

I liked school. It was valuable. I have a better job because of it. I didn't spend absurd amounts of money to go.

<comment><USER34> What about opportunity cost (re: absurd amounts of money)? Do you have a better job because of all the things you learnt or because you went to school and got a degree? Do you mean valuable as in it got you a better job or in what sense?

<comment><USER35> As someone who is happy they went to college despite it not directly helping get my current job, I believe it was valuable in that it made me more open to new things, better at developing relationships, and exposed me to different points of view. Worth the financial cost? That's certainly debatable, but it was ultimately my decision to go and keep going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > As any remaining illusion of a college meritocracy swirls down the drain, > there remains one school where students are still admitted based on > unadulterated academic aptitude: Caltech.

[Citation needed]

<comment><USER37> [https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/12/09/why_caltech_is_i...](https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/12/09/why_caltech_is_in_a_class_by_i/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd certainly take issue with the opening paragraph of the article to the effect that "Older readers know how the leading American universities, which had risen to world-class status by the 1930s and 1940s, were upended by the traumatic campus events of the late 1960s and their aftermath." There's no doubt that US universities had risen in quality during the early part of the 20th century but they were still outclassed by institutions in Europe in most scientific disciplines. It was the advent of WWII and the destruction it visited upon Europe as well as the massive spending on R&D during the early stages of the Cold War that propelled US universities to the heights they enjoy today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> In my grandfathers time, compulsory schooling finished at 12. By my fathers time it had risen to 14. By my time 16, commonly rising to 18.

I think we are simply seeing another generational rise.

And why not - human beings one big advantage is our brains - and training our young to use that advantage as best we can is the single best ROI we can make ( _).

Will it cost us? Yes. Will it benefit us. Yes.

(_)there are many others as my socialist soul will tell you)

</comment><comment><USER39> Ironically, the current US Secretary of Education and her obsession with over- funding unregulated charter schools seems to be building a future where the only people in the country who will be allowed a chance at any education are the ones whose lives are paid for regardless of not even doing the work.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think employers and graduate schools have raised the stakes around GPA to be too high. Here's a thought experiment, should employers just punish prospective hires who have above a 3.9 GPA without demonstrating exceptionally difficult coursework?

To me, this is similar to Lebron James trying to go 3/3 from the field with 2 assists and no turnovers. Anyone with that high of a GPA in my mind did not seek to challenge themselves through taking the most difficult subjects, i.e. they maximized credentials over learning. Elite schools then become worried that students won't get the best jobs, so they add easier classes to ensure GPA averages stay similar to comparable schools. Overall, this produces a worse "real" educational outcome. Companies should start asking interviewees with a 4.0 GPA, "Why didn't you challenge yourself?" Medical schools should add 0.5 points to biomedical engineering degrees, etc. I think these actions have a much higher correlation to grade inflation than a couple students getting accepted due to a large donation.

</comment><comment><USER40> Truer words have never been spoken: "Forget Bribery. The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value".

I particularly like their solution: Increase enrollment to point of where it inflates away their value. The intrinsic value would still remain, but the bragging rights will fall away.

</comment><comment><USER41> Clearly this depends on the degree field, and the job.

Just because some company has now decided minimum wage jobs should require a degree doesn't mean a degree is valueless, it simply a stupid requirement (like requiring 10 years of nosql experience or whatever).

And yes, there are degrees that have much lower economic value - and it's an idiosyncrasy of design that leads to identical costs.

But there are real cases where degrees matter. For example large scale engineering - you want to employ people who know what they're doing at a very core level. So they need to have been taught those skills, and they need to have a way of showing that they have been taught them, and that they actually did learn: a degree.

For many things apprenticeships would also work, but note that most apprenticeships do result in pieces of paper (journeyman, etc).

Do I think my CS degrees are necessary in of itself? No. But I learned a lot while getting it, so it's nice to have an public record of that.

<comment><USER42> > But there are real cases where degrees matter. For example large scale > engineering - you want to employ people who know what they're doing at a > very core level.

There's no other way than a degree to prove competency here? It's not like a civil engineer gets her professional accreditation and the next day is signing off on a bridge, all their work is still thoroughly reviewed.

Take for example the bar exam, if a person can pass that why can't they practice law? I find law perhaps to be the most egregious in gatekeeping.

A degree really doesn't prove much other than memorising topics years prior and plenty of people come out of University quite clueless about the job they are expected to do. A lot of the real learning occurs when they actually work.

<comment><USER41> To be clear, when I say degree, I mean any piece of formal paperwork that indicates mastery of a skillset - in my first post I mentioned apprenticeships, but there are all sorts of degrees, certifications, and diplomas which all serve the same purpose.

Yes, but if you're an employer you want some basis for knowledge of competence. For CS or whatever you can often look at their prior work, for physical engineering, or chemistry, etc, there isn't an equivalent.

As for Law: there are a number of legal professions that don't require passing the bar exam, so having a signifier of knowledge is useful. As for pass the bar but no degree: I don't know enough about law to have a real opinion, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that amount of education require to pass the bar exam seems exceed that required to get the degree.

And you are right, lots of people come out of university who are completely clueless, but for any position where it isn't possible to have a prior example of skill and knowledge, you need to propose an alternative to a "certificate of knowing stuff" that isn't simply a different form of the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I recently saw it suggested that college admissions should operate on a lottery basis (beyond baseline academic requirements). That would surely help with socioeconomic diversity.

</comment><comment><USER44> _When something is both expensive and of no practical value, it's clearly intended as a means of wealth transfer._

Now that's an interesting thought, referring to ivy league degrees.

</comment><comment><USER45> Educational institution scam need degrees. Educated degree holder want recognition and be respected. No matter how he get the degree.

</comment><comment><USER46> private colleges/schools should be nationalized.</comment>


The 25% Discount that Cost Us $12,000  - <AUTHOR> http://groovehq.com/blog/discounting

<comment><USER2> Really interesting story, haven't kept up with the series but definitely shows that "discount" customers are much different than "full price" customers in some cases.

I have to comment, I went to the home page and had a hard time figuring out exactly what they do. I spent maybe 30 seconds on the page and ended up almost leaving.

Turns out the letter from the owner at the bottom really nailed it home and I think might even be what our company needs right now.</comment>


Biologists observe a lizard lay eggs and give birth to live young - <AUTHOR> https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2019/04/03/which-came-first-the-lizard-or-the-egg-three-toed-skink.html <comment><AUTHOR> I feel like this might an April Fools day prank. Can any biologist confirm?</comment>


Police ticket supporters of Emily Good for parking 1/2" too far from the curb - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/24/rochester-police-use.html

<comment><USER2> Video here <http://thedailywh.at/tag/emily-good/></comment>


Russian ads, now publicly released, show sophistication of influence campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-ads-now-publicly-released-show-sophistication-of-influence-campaign/2017/11/01/d26aead2-bf1b-11e7-8444-a0d4f04b89eb_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Washington Post: Lawmakers release a sampling of Russian Facebook ads placed during and after campaign_</comment>


Many .gov domains fail to resolve without www. - <AUTHOR> http://fda.gov/

<comment><USER2> actually, the domain does "resolve". it's a web server configuration issue.</comment>


Particle Accelerator That Can Fit On a Tabletop - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130620132412.htm

<comment><USER2> UT press release for those that don't trust SciendeDaily [http://www.utexas.edu/news/2013/06/20/particle- accelerator-t...](http://www.utexas.edu/news/2013/06/20/particle-accelerator- that-can-fit-on-a-tabletop-opens-new-chapter-for-science-research/)

This opens up the possibility for a huge number of measurements and experiments that would be too expensive to do at a national lab.

</comment><comment><USER3> My dad worked on the first accelerator lab at UT many years ago.

He tells this story about someone accidentally accelerating a mass on a prototype rail gun in the basement. Someone got a unit conversion wrong -- it went through about 5 walls before it got stopped by a lot of dirt.

So my first reaction to undergrads with high energy accelerators is: what could possibly go wrong? It still sounds mighty cool.

<comment><USER4> "So my first reaction to undergrads with high energy accelerators is: what could possibly go wrong?"

I have some experience in that matter, so I can tell you what might go wrong. Back in the mid nineties, I was an undergrad and working on my first startup. Part of the project was building a 200 keV accelerator (much lower energy than than the ones in the article, but still high enough to get into trouble with).

The first big problem was the high voltage. Getting shocked by the 30,000 volt ion source supply was damn painful: it felt like hitting your finger with a sledgehammer. I only got a shock from the main supply once; for about 15 minutes I kept asking the other guys, "Am I dead? Are you sure I'm not dead?". It wasn't actually as painful as the 30kV supply. It was never hard to be safe with HV when everything was working properly - it was when things broke or two guys were trying to fix something at the same time that accidents happened.

As you might guess, we didn't have a lot of 'adult supervision'. We learned as we went along. Once we had a bit of a fright when we got the accelerator up and running. Spence, the part-timer old-timer engineer who would help us out on many things, showed up with a Geiger counter and showed us how much radiation was coming off the device. We learned a lot about radiation safety and shielding that week. I wonder how much exposure we would have received if Spence had not interceded.

And then you can get into free neutrons, and activation, and all sorts of other things. It's a real education. If you ever talk to one of those kids who make Farnsworth fusors, they end up going through the same learning curve. Luckily they have a bit of a community around that now, so they can share knowledge and not kill themselves too easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can pick up a much lower energy electron accelerator if you're willing to go dumpster diving for a CRT, right? Obviously there's a huge difference between what you can do with something like this vs. the energies in a CRT vs. CERN or a national lab, but it's interesting that the technology was so widespread.

<comment><USER6> True, but the energy in the electrons is so low you can barely make phosphor glow. When you get GeV electrons you can make x-rays, and with x-rays you can do many interesting things.

One of the more interesting things you can do with a table top particle accelerator is kick start a Thorium reactor. There is a team in the UK doing this [1] but with a much bigger accelerator.

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2001548/Elec...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2001548/Electron- Model-Many-Applications-Technology-save-world.html)</comment></comment>


Commentary on Grothendieck-Serre correspondence - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila/grothendieckcircle/corr.pdf <comment><USER2> _In the fall of 1958, Zariski invited Grothendieck to visit Harvard. He was pleased to go, but made clear to Zariski that he refused to sign the pledge not to work to overthrow the American government which was necessary at that time to obtain a visa. Zariski warned him that he might find himself in prison; Grothendieck, perhaps mindful of the impressive amount of French mathematics done in prisons (think of Galois, Weil, Leray...) responded that that would be fine, as long as he could have books and students could visit._

<comment><USER3> Grothendieck is such a fascinating character. There could be a movie about him – though one can imagine how much he would hate that.</comment></comment>


Motorist who sat in passenger seat of Tesla on UK motorway banned for 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5668459/Motorist-70K-Tesla-autopilot-moved-passenger-seat-banned-18-months.html <comment><USER2> While it's sort of understandable that the slightly schizophrenic Tesla marketing vacillates between proactively touting the "autopilot" feature, while reactively pointing out the small print that the driver is in control, and it's actually just adaptive cruise control / lane assist like any other, there"s no justification for the autopilot engineers to believe the hype.

There is absolutely no reason why if no driver interaction ( hands on) is detected, let alone no driver in the driving seat (!) that the car shouldn't come to a safe stop. Anything less is a critical engineering failure.

<comment><USER3> Coming to a stop on a motorway mid-lane is probably among the most dangerous things an autopilot system could do.

IIRC, Tesla dings occasionally if it detects no hands are on the wheel and slowly decreases speed.

<comment><USER4> _Coming to a stop on a motorway mid-lane is probably among the most dangerous things an autopilot system could do._

You're replying to someone who specifically said coming to a "safe stop" and not what you're saying.</comment></comment></comment>


The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-for-being-skeptical-of-moral-outrage <comment><USER2> What's the right amount of moral outrage? Gedankenexperiment. Install a moral outrage volume meter on our species, dial the the calendar back ten million years, and play it forward with various outrage volumes. Plot moral outrage volume against H. sapiens biomass in the present day. I'd expect a mass of zero grams at volume zero and zero grams at volume eleven (say, by definition), and an inverted U curve in between.

So lacking the time machine and the outrage rheostat, how do we discover the correct amount of outrage? Do we have too much or too little now, and how can we tell? I can't even guess.

<comment><USER3> Your assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the whole a good thing. No other species requires it.

The proper null hypothesis is that it does nothing.

<comment><USER4> > Your assumptions seem unlikely. There is no proof moral outrage is on the > whole a good thing. No other species requires it.

I don't see why that's a compelling argument; no other species requires written languages either, but I think on the whole it's been a pretty good investment for ours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "What the researchers found is that participants' expressions of moral > outrage were mostly independent from their empathy for the victims of the > transgressions. What triggered moral outrage in their study was whether a > particular behavior seemed intrinsically wrong—that is, wrong even if it > didn't harm anyone."

This is one of the problems with moral outrage in today's internet context. It's easy to stir up outrage over very little, and then snowball that outrage into a huge debacle over something that ends up being distanced and deceptive. We can just point a finger at someone and assert they are morally guilty without hesitation as long as enough of our peers support it. This is a system like 1600s Salem where someone could point a finger and say "She's a witch!" out of speculation.

Turns out people still love a good witch hunt, and the media/Twitter is the reverand pointing the finger at the supposed witches at a whim. We think we've come a long way over 400 years, but it turns out human emotion doesn't change that quickly.

Another issue with moral outrage is that once the charges are dumped on the "guilty" party it's very hard to disprove them to the public; plus there is little retribution on the party pointing the finger to begin with. How many of those "witches" were actually witches? The internet "trials" of today are about as vigorous as the witch trials back then.

I can understand why "moral outrage warriors" do what they do; they are driving away immorality and threatening forces from society and protecting and preserving the peace. Yet it turns out the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We are at the point where there is not even reaction to action, we have reaction to supposed action.

</comment><comment><USER6> You lost me at vituperative. I hate smartest guy in the room syndrome.

<comment><USER7> Vituperative? That's a pretty common word known by most well-educated people. I definitely hate thousand dollar word syndrome but this isn't really it.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/](https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/)</comment></comment></comment>


Thinking Is a Powerful Tool, but Also a Burden - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/is-thinking-an-evolutionary-mistake-8ceb2cd693c5 <comment><USER2> The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth -Soloman

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the quote!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ah Medium has turned into a paywall for content they didn't even create. Wtf?

Here is a workaround.

[https://outline.com/qeuupx](https://outline.com/qeuupx)</comment>


Why I think "Draw Mohammed Day" is a bad idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/05/why-i-think-draw-mohammed-day-is-a-bad-idea/ <comment><USER2> As I hinted at in another post, I think the campaign is trolling using a lame excuse.

The free speech / censorship argument really doesn't hold water for the South Park episode. Comedy Central/Viacom is a corporation. They can choose to show on their air time whatever they want.

If you get killed because you drew Mohammed, then,

1) you totally had it coming

2) you were a victim of a criminal offense (poor you, you're dead now)

3) but, SURPRISE, your free speech was not violated! (remember, the goverment is the only one who can violate your free speech rights)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, really?

 _If you get killed because you drew Mohammed, then, 1) you totally had it coming_

I think we have a reasonable right to expect not to be killed for being rude/offensive. There are lots of rude and offensive people in the world - they don't deserve to die!

<comment><USER2> Legally, you do have the right not get killed. That's not what I'm talking about. If I punch you in the face, and you attack me back, then I had it coming, regardless of what the law has to say.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Inbox Zero worth it? - <AUTHOR> I've been doing Inbox Zero for a good year. (Archiving or actioning emails once or twice a day). Not sure if it's worth it. I feel I am spending most of my day archiving emails instead of just glancing the overall view and picking what to work on. I also feel it gives the wrong sense of dopamine as you are getting most of it when you reach Zero instead of when you are getting actual work done. Curious to hear anyone thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> I used to keep that up and thought it essential to survival, but I lost the battle. Instead, I've created alternate methods to make sure I don't miss the important stuff. I use Polymail for most of my email which allows me to snooze emails for a few hrs, days, a month, etc. and resurface them as if they were new at a better time. I also file away very important emails into folders / tags depending on the system so I can find them more easily.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got introduced to this in my first week at Google and using this for multiple years now, with multiple work accounts and multiple personal gmail accounts. (multi inbox, labels, filters, aliases, etc)

Can't think of going back tbh, really like it. One think I'm doing is checking emails quite a lot instead of just once/twice a day tho.

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess it depends on how many emails you get? I receive one or two a day that need actioning and can jump on them pretty much immediately. Everything else is unsubscribed or filtered out by rules so I don't even see them. Works well for me so far.</comment>


The Blockchain Solution to Our Deepfake Problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-blockchain-solution-to-our-deepfake-problems/ <comment><USER2> I don't see how a blockchain helps with problems arising from deepfakes. What's key for the solution is signing the content on the physical device, aka public key cryptography. To my understanding, a blockchain solves the problem of agreeing on a temporal order of events (eg. transactions), which I don't think is critical in the case of deepfakes.

<comment><USER3> Temporal order is absolutely critical in determining the truth of an event, as deepfakes could be used after the fact to distort the facts and mislead a viewer. Blockchain allows for the use of public key cryptography with a guarantee of the time in which the video/document/etc was created.

<comment><USER2> If we trust the device manufacturer to only sign genuinely recorded videos, couldn't we also trust them to sign the videos with a correct timestamp?

<comment><USER3> Where would manufacturers store and display these timestamps? Would each manufacturer host their own proofs, or share a database together? Who would pay for that, indefinitely? The economic reality is that no one would ever pay the costs for such a ledger of all video timestamps. This is where blockchain is necessary.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Debunking Daniel Tammet - <AUTHOR> http://infopractical.livejournal.com/77298.html

<comment><USER2> In a previous life as a math nerd, I used to do memory and mental arithmetic tricks, so this post rings true -- i.e, these calculations are all in fact easy to do with practice, even if they might not appear to be so at first.

It appears that the only way to make math cool is by focusing on the least useful part of it, and further, by giving it an aura of mystery by making exaggerated or false claims, when in fact the purpose of math is to clarify. Sad.

In this vein, see also my deconstruction of Arthur Benjamin's "mathemagics" performance: <http://arvindn.livejournal.com/82413.html>

<comment><USER3> I thought Art Benjamin's performance was obvious, but he does it under the guise of a "magician," so I would cut him some slack. After all, everybody knows magicians are entertainers. It's hard to be impressed when you can quickly deconstruct the process though.

I was quite impressed by the Tammet documentary, but your analysis is pretty stunning. I actually took everything from the original video at face value, perhaps because I _wanted_ to be amazed by synesthesia.

I won't call it BS just yet -- there could be the possibility that the shape transformations he "sees" are the result of using algorithms in a subconscious manner, the clues of which only manifest themselves like play-doh imagery. It is rather suspicious that after the high-profile reports, there haven't been other publicized and scrutinized reports further documenting his abilities.

In any case, thanks for supplying a kick of realism back into the picture.

<comment><USER2> Whoa.. I think you've got me confused with the person who wrote the Tammet article?

<comment><USER3> Oh dear, HAHA, you're right! I was thrown off by "see also my ..." :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote a couple of short math books on a related topic: <http://hilomath.com/>

They're different in that they focus on more abstract math - algebra and calculus. In other words, how to solve algebra equations mentally, and how to do calculus operations mentally. Most books I've seen about "mental math" are actually about "mental arithmetic". While I personally see value in it, there is more to math than that.

Actually, I'd love any feedback people may have - both from an educational standpoint, if you have taught algebra and calculus; and from a business standpoint - the two math books are the two products I have now, and I'm thinking about how to better monetize it all, perhaps developing a larger study course kit. Thanks in advance.

(By the way, let me say right away that I'm not claiming to be unusually talented at math, because I'm not... just a typical engineer. Probably most people with an engineering or hard science degree (mine is in physics) will not find much new in the books. I just examined how I and some others solve algebra and calculus problems mentally, and attempted to explain how to replicate it.)

EDIT: see also <http://blog.hilomath.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Still, those kind of "tricks" are great to teach schoolchildren, IF it gets them interested in mathematics.

For example, it is actually not that hard (just takes practice/time like everything else) to multiply random 3 or 4 digit numbers: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system> (great story behind it, as well)

</comment><comment><USER6> Rapid calculating has about as much to do with real mathematics as double- entry accounting has to the Tao, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what this fuss is really all about.

<comment><USER7> Agree. There are some areas where numerical affinity is correlated to actual work being done, say in number theory, but I've seen professional mathematicians stumble over much lesser calculations. Without detracting from the auteur's own talents and achievements, it is of note that he teaches middle school math and is not working on actual research problems.</comment></comment>


Super-solid helium state confirmed in beautiful experiment - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/researchers-find-super-solid-by-looking-at-a-normal-solid/ <comment><USER2> I've always been curious -- how can two helium atoms enter the same quantum state when their constituent particles can't? What is happening to the spin-1/2 electrons, for example?

<comment><USER3> This may be a bit mangled from the last time I took a relevant class, but my recollection is that the "real" reason electrons can't share the same state is that they're what's called _antisymmetric with respect to exchange_.

In general, most particles are fundamentally indistinguishable: if you swap two of them you haven't really changed anything. This leads to most particles being either _symmetric_ (bosons, integer spin) or _antisymmetric_ (fermions, half-integer spin) with respect to exchange. If _symmetric_ then the wave function doesn't change at all; if _antisymmetric_ then exchange reverses the sign of the wavefunction. If we have two electrons in the same place, and arbitrarily swap them (which we're allowed to do since they're identical), then we've reversed the sign on one of the wavefunctions. But since they're in the same place, the wave functions cancel. This would violate conservation of energy, so isn't allowed; instead, we just never let them occupy the same state in the same place, and call it the Pauli exclusion principle.

While a single electron has half-integer spin, a He-4 nucleus has integer spin, so is symmetric to exchange, and it's wavefunction doesn't cancel if you have two in the same place.

That was probably horribly oversimplified and unrigorous, but there's a bit of relevant discussion (in bra-ket notation that I can't really read) here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle#Conn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle#Connection_to_quantum_state_symmetry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Key part:

 _At the lowest temperatures, the flow rate of helium-3 stopped decreasing. It didn't exhibit super-solid properties, but it also stopped behaving like a normal solid. ... The researchers were not at a low-enough temperature to expect a helium-3 super-solid. But the temperature was low enough that maybe, just maybe, some pairing was occurring, which was allowing some super-solid properties to start to become apparent._

So it's a tantalizing glimpse of the possibility of super-solids, but not yet a hard proof.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit better than that from my reading: that quote's for He-3, which we don't _expect_ to show any supersolidity (it's a fermion) unless the He-3 nuclei start forming pairs (the pair would have integer spin) -- which isn't really expected until even lower temperatures.

The key part of this experiment as far as I could tell was that at the same temperatures He-3 showed _decreasing_ flow rate with decreasing temperature, He-4 showed _increasing_ flow rate with decreasing temperature. This is exactly what we'd expect since He-4 nuclei are bosonic, while He-3 nuclei are fermionic. That's pretty good IMO</comment></comment>


From now, ReactOS can fully build ReactOS (after 21 years of project existence) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/HeisSpiter/status/1002880397103988737 <comment><USER2> Great news!

</comment><comment><USER3> QuineOS.</comment>


Machine Learning: A Summary on Feature Engineering Using R Language - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/microsoftrservertigerteam/2017/03/23/feature-engineering-using-r/ <comment><USER2> _Over fitting_ can, indeed, be "fitting the data too perfectly"; e.g., Lagrangian interpolation where have some X-Y pairs and want a polynomial in x that fits the X-Y pairs. How does that work? You can derive it for yourself: For each of the X-Y pairs, write a polynomial that is zero at all the X points except the one pair you want to fit perfectly and then add all those polynomials. Done. Presto. Bingo. "Look, Ma, fits anything perfectly!" (as long as all the X points are distinct). "I should be able to find a polynomial that fits points from a square wave!" Yup, but graph the polynomial and see what it does away from one of the given X points -- the graph _goes wild_ , that is, shooting off to plus or minus infinity and appears nearly to get there.

But in linear fitting, _over fitting_ is simpler: There, of course, do get a linear function which doesn't _go wild_. And the function can fit the data nicely. The usual problem is that the coefficients in the linear function are not unique.

</comment><comment><USER3> What they describe is actually (very) shallow feature engineering and these methods have been used for decades. These techniques can hardly help in really difficult data analysis tasks where abstract features need to be either manually defined or automatically mined.

<comment><USER4> Yeah! And they use "feature engineering" where "feature selection" would suffice. The hard part of feature engineering is usually not selection, but creatively generating features based on expert knowledge, etc. Also, something like a wrapper would be an overkill if you had roughly, #data/class > #features and used a relatively overfitting-resistant classifier like SVM, regularized regression, etc. (more rigorous statement of this would involve VC-dimension).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does this paragraph even mean?

"On the same note, though perfectly correlated variables are redundant and might not add value to the model (and if removed, would be computationally efficient), a high-variable correlation could have additional information to add. In other words, two variables that are not correlated could still be of importance to the model. When in doubt, it's safer to train the model and observe it's performance."

The "In other words" part seem to talk about uncorrelated variables while the sentence before that talked about highly correlated variables. I always thought to discard one of two variables that were highly correlated.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm not sure either, that seems to be an editing mangle.

The bit about "it's safer to train the model and observe its performance", though, is reasonable advice. The main problem with multicollinearity is that it gives you a model with poorly-defined coefficients - that is, their standard errors are high. That's a big problem if you're coming at the problem with a statistician's mindset and trying to come up with a parsimonious model with statistically significant parameter estimates. If you're just going for the best predictive model you can get, though, then you don't necessarily care about super tight standard errors on all your coefficients, so it's not such a big deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A colleague of mine is quite happy using caret for streamlined feature selection [http://topepo.github.io/caret/index.html](http://topepo.github.io/caret/index.html)

<comment><USER8> Is there a Python equivalent of this package?

<comment><USER9> The closest equivalent I can think of is scikit-learn [1], which also gives you a unified way of using many different algorithms. I wouldn't say the two are really equivalent but both are excellent and a joy to use. One major difference is that, as far as I know, caret is mainly a standardization wrapper for other R packages' functionality, while scikit uses its own implementations.

[1] [http://scikit-learn.org/stable/](http://scikit-learn.org/stable/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> See ISLr (linked in OP's post) for a good exploration of feature selection [http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems specific to Microsoft R or can I install the MicrosoftML package in regular R and/or use it under Linux? I really wonder what MS's investment in R means for the future of R.

<comment><USER12> They're just trying to not lose in the ML space that's all. Wants people to use their cloud server.

Just cause it's specific to microsoftR and the package doesn't mean those algorithms are own by microsoft. You just have to google other packages that have those algorithms. All of them are just statistic... R have tons of statistic package more than Python. I will be highly skeptical if you can't find a LDA, PCA, etc.. in a package somewhere.

The only important part here is the technical knowledge of what it are these algorithms for and when to use them and when not to.

<comment><USER11> MS has a history of "embracing" technologies. The arrogance is visible in the title that doesn't mention it's specific to MS R.

I didn't say you can't do this with standard R. I didn't say they invented or own anything.

<comment><USER12> > MS has a history of "embracing" technologies.

Are you kidding me? You're telling me they're embracing it and not trying to get into the ML share or playing catch up ever since Hadoop came about?

> This seems specific to Microsoft R or can I install the MicrosoftML package > in regular R and/or use it under Linux?

You asked a question and I provided an answer. Just cause you didn't like it doesn't mean it's not an alternative to Revolution R. You're just taking it as if it's some attack on you, grow up. I'm stating that if it's not possible then you can always find package for it. They're statistic algorithms that you learn in stat grad courses and R is a statistic language. So you can find it if you can't use Microsoft stuff. So you don't have to worry if it works or not.

I also don't get this fascination on this library. You can just use packages that is agnostic to what R version (R Revolution microsoft or regular R).

They're trying to sell their version of R and hopefully their cloud stuff like Azure.

> The arrogance is visible in the title that doesn't mention it's specific to > MS R.

I have no idea what that mean.

All the mx prefix functions are Revolution R only.

<comment><USER11> I didn't downvote your comment but I don't understand what you're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> a table of similar function using R and the other R: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/microsoft-r/scaler/compare-...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/microsoft-r/scaler/compare-base-r-scaler-functions)

</comment><comment><USER14> Somewhat related: adding features based on trending concepts [http://184.108.40.206/recommend/datasets/](http://220.127.116.11/recommend/datasets/)

<comment><USER15> That looks interesting, but without any additional details, or even other pages on the website it is difficult to consider using it.

<comment><USER12> Seriously, it's just use these data too! They'll help your models. Nothing about how these features were selected what algorithm used.

<comment><USER15> I don't trade, so they won't help my models.

I'm interesting in how they are made though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> glad to see young kids studying!! Hope you continue to take on more advanced projects!!!!</comment>


Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive - <AUTHOR> https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/?page_id=747 <comment><USER2> KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them.

Side effects of playing KSP include:

\- getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics

\- finding yourself reading up on actual math to better understand what's happening with your rockets (and how to build more efficient one)

\- no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics

(RE the last point - after _Gravity_ , _Interstellar_ , _The Martian_ and _The Expanse_ series, getting basic spaceflight wrong should no longer be accepted in popular media. Looking at you, makers of _The 100_.)

<comment><USER3> The game also has a horrible habit of turning people into arrogant know-it-all armchair rocket scientists.

> _no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused > by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics_

Oh boy, this again. Are you not able to watch movies with guns because Rainbow Six taught you how guns work and now you're just too woke to suspend disbelief?

Something about this game causes people to feel the need to signal all their knowledge of science by putting down things for not being pure enough.

<comment><USER4> Don't be so flippant. It's not exactly controversial to say that trained musicians will suffer more when listening to bad music, so why would it be different for _any_ other skill?

One of the main gameplay mechanics is all about understanding orbital physics, and fiddling around with that for tens if not hundreds of hours will leave anyone with a grasp of it on an intuitive level.

Once the brain is that trained, is it so hard to believe that the process can take on an aesthetic experience? Ant that seeing it done wrong is like a false note in music?

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but I've got hundreds of hours of KSP under my belt and thought Gravity was fantastic. I'm a proud science and gamer geek, but feel that the urge to nit pick is the scourge of the geek community. I'll happily engage in a conversation about the compromises made in Gravity, it none of them spoiled the movie for me and I'm very glad it exists. If it makes movie goers more interested in Space and feel positively about space research and exploration, that's a wonderful thing.

<comment><USER6> I think they were saying that Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and The Expanse are all _good_ examples.

<comment><USER7> I'm confused about this too. _The Martian_ (at least the book) has good science throughout. But in _Gravity_ , the space shrapnel is moving much faster than the ISS, yet has the same orbit as it. I don't think that's possible, from what KSP has taught me.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it has the same orbit, I think it has a crossing orbit inclined relative to that of the space station. Imagine a belt of debris, much like the rings of Saturn, with the ISS on an orbit that passes through the ring twice on each orbit, on opposite sides of the planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully the game will be better off under Take-Two (I am not familiar with their past treatment of indy-like games like this)

I have read several stories online about how poorly SQUAD treated the core development team of KSP: [https://www.develop-online.net/news/squad-devs- blast-kerbal-...](https://www.develop-online.net/news/squad-devs-blast-kerbal- space-program-studio-for-high-crunch-and-low-pay/0220059)

<comment><USER9> $2400 sounds incredibly low even in PPP terms for Mexico.

<comment><USER10> That does seem impossibly low. I happen to know that electronics manufacturing techs in Mexico (assembly line work) get the equivalent of $50/week for the lowest rung. To pay the same for high-skill developers/content-creators seems like something has been mis-communicated or maybe a typo.

Kerbal Space program has been doing well. I wonder who, exactly, has been raking in all the cash?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kerbal Space Program is a game that we're quite lucky to have. No microtransactions, no DRM, just sciencey goodness.

Except for those making it, who Squad apparently didn't bother paying anywhere near what they were worth.

<comment><USER12> Its likely the lack of excessive monetization and the lack of pay to developers are not unrelated.

<comment><USER13> This possibly isn't the least hard to read sentence I have read :)

Easier to read and hopefully captured what you were trying to say:

> Reduced monetization likely reduced developer pay.

<comment><USER12> A more accurate rephrasing would be:

The lack of effort toward monetization likely is an effect of the same cause as low developer pay.

I was suggesting that the two were linked, but not suggesting the specific causal link from monetization to developer pay of your version.

But you are correct that the original was unnecessarily elliptical.

<comment><USER14> I'm almost certainly in the minority, however, I do so enjoy pedantry. "Everything in its right place."

<comment><USER15> HN survives on pedantry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope this goes well. I would love to see a remake that retains the exact same gameplay with more modern graphics. Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes.

I also have heard the rumors that the team was not treated well, and that the game was never really the focus of the company. I think it may have been a side project of one of the developers on a totally unrelated product (ie. not even a game).

<comment><USER17> >Hopefully all the people who paid for the current in-development version are not left high and dry in terms of updates and bugfixes.

How long is a developer expected to keep improving a game? Maybe it is the old console gamer in me, but it wasn't that long ago that a game developer was done with a game when it was released. This game has been public for 6 years, been on Steam for 4 years, and been out of beta for 2 years. I don't get how customers can complain about a lack of commitment to the game especially considering the low price the game was usually offered at. I wouldn't blame Take-Two one bit for trying turn a bigger profit with more paid content or a complete sequel.

<comment><USER18> It's an interesting balance. On one hand, games were historically 'dead' at release. On the other, they were at least theoretically _done_ at release. That's no longer even a goal for many developers today - features get deferred, and players get used as a massive QA team.

KSP as it first hit Steam was fun, but obviously incomplete. KSP 1.0 was viable as a finished product, but had obvious, planned upgrades unfinished. After-release support was pretty obviously planned from the beginning.

As for how long, though, I don't know. I'm exceedingly happy with the KSP I got for my money, and unlike some games they could have quit support before now without upsetting me. So as long as Take-Two keeps a decent business model, I'll happily pay for further content.

<comment><USER19> > features get deferred

It's actually the opposite, bug fixes get deferred in favor of more features. Fixes make your player base happy, but they already paid and are therefore not worth any more money, new features drive sales.

<comment><USER20> Mojang is particularly aggravating about this. They spent like a year completely reworking The End and adding hang-gliders or whatever, and meanwhile furnace carts have been broken for like three years, and the fix is apparently like a dozen lines of code or something. In fact the entire mine cart and track system should be overhauled if they're really serious about improving the game - but instead they just keep adding more stupid shit nobody asked for.

Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

<comment><USER18> > Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something > because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the > course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

I've never seen most of Minecraft's newer stuff for this exact reason. I played enough to get pretty deep into FTB and the other large mod packs, and pretty quickly realized modders put out both content and bugfixes faster than Mojang itself. At that point, you might as well just consider the 'real' game a particularly shoddy branch of mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top of HN at all, actually, unless they're about John Carmack writing one.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I'm surprised Factorio hasn't surfaced more frequently on HN. The game's automation play is just as addictive and creative, and it runs on Mac and Linux.

<comment><USER23> The people who have found Factorio have yet to come back from playing Factorio. Their children miss them.

<comment><USER24> So true, I spent about 150 hours on that game in 2 months and apparently that's pretty light compared to a lot of people (probably explained by me not being a gamer and this being the only game I've completed in the last decade other that Leo's Fortune), I launched a rocket and have since uninstalled it. Fortunately I found the latter stage of the game such a trudge that I've got little inclination to go back to it - although I think 0.15 will solve many of my gripes so I'm avoiding reading about it for now.

Factorio is nicknamed Cracktorio for a reason :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Shameless self-promotion, but together with some friends I wrote a book for O'Reilly Media on KSP!

Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest- Program/...](https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest- Program/dp/1491913053)

O'Reilly: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do)

Safari: [https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-kerbal- pl...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-kerbal- players/9781491913475/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I just logged into my account and grabbed the installers and portable zip files for the last 2 versions. Just in case, take-two's influence somehow breaks the KSP experience I've come to love and enjoy.

<comment><USER27> I mean, you should have done that when many (most?)of the core staff left. Or the lead dev before that.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I should have. But the staff shake up didn't really make the headlines enough to get my attention. I didn't know it occurred until weeks later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Video game company acquisitions can be brutal. I hope everything goes well for the team now and several years in the future.

<comment><USER29> I think most of the team actually left after 1.0 was finished. They got sick of working for Squad. I think Squad was never a particularly good place to be a game developer, and they realized they should probably cash out now.

<comment><USER30> The ones that were weren't fired and replaced with Mexican "interns" working full time for $200 per month.

[https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program- deve...](https://www.destructoid.com/former-kerbal-space-program-developers- slam-studio-for-poor-pay-and-crunch-time-359507.phtml)

I wonder if Take-Two Interactive considered the morality of acquiring a company that paid slave wages. Maybe they should change their name to Take-Two Thousand Annually.

<comment><USER31> Take-Two appears to have purchased the KSP _property_ , not Squad, the original owning _company_.

<comment><USER30> What is your point?

<comment><USER32> Well, you asked:

> I wonder if Take-Two Interactive considered the morality of acquiring a > company that paid slave wages.

But they _didn 't_ acquire the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whats next? Dwarf Fortress acquired by EA?

<comment><USER34> I know The world has been odd for the past year, but I assure you that we aren't in the EA buys DF time line.

We may be in the DF eats EA timeline though.

Edit: I wonder what the Adams brothers would do with "fuck you" money

<comment><USER35> >I wonder what the Adams brothers would do with "fuck you" money

If EA bought Dwarf Fortress then they would move onto their next game:

"Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter III: Simulation Hypothesis"

Some say we already live within it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I hope they won't fuck up the game. As a side note I didn't suspect there was that much people working on this game.

<comment><USER37> is this por guy getting downvoted for giving a reality check?

have you noticed in the last six month they managed to add just internationalization and the console port didn't move an inch ahead with people totally unable to enjoy the game since release because of the save corruption?

right now there are only newbs and modders left in that team, none of the core team is there and for the most part they're barely getting by in maintenance mode. notice how few of the long standing issue ever got resolved?

btw, asking some real question here, what will be of this now? [http://archive.is/aPSX7/image](http://archive.is/aPSX7/image)

<comment><USER38> The core team left because Squad was a terrible place to work, hence the dismal development pace. The optimism in this thread stems from the fact that Take-Two will hopefully be better and attract talent back to the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I await the release of Grand Theft Planet.

<comment><USER2> YouTube delivers:

[https://youtu.be/zszJRsGzo9A?t=124](https://youtu.be/zszJRsGzo9A?t=124)

(also good from the very beginning, though content warning: dank themes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Hopefully this means things will "improve" without turning the community into a sterile, lifeless environmemt, but we'll see. Maybe not much changes, maybe they take the IP and run with it. Who knows.

Must say it was weird to stumble on this news here on HN first instead of on the KSP forum (where admitedly it was posted first); guess it's been a busy morning and I just missed it.

<comment><USER41> Mostly, I hope they mostly improve the game. Not remake it, re-think it, re- purposed. Just clean it up, make some UI improvements.

If I were to make a big change, it would be to add a stand-alone server. Not necessarily multi-player, but just something I can leave running and attach to. I have an itch for real-time missions (days and weeks long), plus I'd like to run multiple scenarios at once.

I guess what I'm saying is I hope Take-Two doesn't lose the _spirit_ of the game. It has let us ground-bound wanna-be rocket scientists the opportunity to play.

<comment><USER40> Agreed.

A stand-alone server would also be great for those of us that run the game with a different integrator (such as Principia for n-body physics). I too like real-time missions, at least short duration ones, and recently flew Vostok 1 in near real time (though less successfully).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Congrats KSP team! Hope this next adventure is unlike my adventures with Jeb.

<comment><USER43> Read up on the reality of the KSP team. It's not pretty.

<comment><USER42> Assumptions outside of scientific contexts also aren't pretty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have a good (bad) feeling that this change will likely mean that, sooner or later, Linux support will be dropped.

/bet me it won't...

<comment><USER45> Isn't Linux becoming more and more compatible with modern games/development?

<comment><USER46> The problem isn't, and has never been, linux being compatible with games or with their development. The problem is game developers not making their game compatible with linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I stopped playing KSP due to the microstutter issue (ostensibly due the to garbage collector) fixing that would make the game playable again.

<comment><USER48> It's fixed for the most part as of 1.2. There also the MemGraph mod that allows you to give more memory to the game so the GC doesn't fire off as much.

<comment><USER47> I ran into it post 1.2. I can try the MemGraph mod though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well, out of the big gaming companies, Take Two is the best one to get acquired by. Let's see where that leads.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm just glad that Microsoft didn't get this one. I bought it within the early access period, so I actively contributed to the development. I hope/expect to see some franchise spin-offs with the Kermans <3

</comment><comment><USER51> I've had so much trouble playing the port on console. I know it was made by a contractor but ugh. I want to love this game but it's total masochism to play on console right now. Hopefully this leads to something good.

<comment> amiga-workbench Playing it with a controller must be like pulling teeth! KSP isnt really that entertaining for me without mods to expand the gameplay either.

<comment><USER51> It's actually fun enough to suffer quite a bit, but yeah, watching people with mods on PC makes me very very jealous!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It seemed something was up when a few devs went to valve.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why do they always say "nothing will change"? Of course things will change. That why someone acquired them, to change something.

And why do they always say the acquisition is good for the community? I count meself to the community, yet I didn't receive any six to ten digit payouts from the sale. Why should it be exciting for me?

</comment><comment><USER54> Come on co-op mode!

</comment><comment><USER55> this is awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it? - <AUTHOR> Have been working with Java, Scala and Ruby backend with some front end experience (Basic JS, HTML CSS).  I now have an opportunity to work in depth on front end engineering.<p>The front end landscape has always seemed quite messy and fragmented to me, and honestly a bit scary too.  I am fine with taking the leap of faith, but wanted HN community's opinion on whether it would be an enlightening experience.  Is there something like "too late to move to front end"? <comment><USER3> I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare.

Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and an unhealthy worship of Google and Facebook.

No offence intended to Javascript programmers -- I just don't like frontend development.

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It sounds like you've gotten into a field that you always held a misplaced disdain for, you've discovered that it was harder than you thought, and now you are blaming your tools.

<comment><USER5> "Hard" or just frustrating? I have found the latter to be true. You're not solving difficult technical problems; you're fighting your tools and figuring out the quirks of the hundreds of abstractions and third party libraries you rely upon to make widgets do their thing.

<comment><USER6> Hard isn't the right word. Unnecessarily complex is more accurate.

What I've seen in js mirrors a lot of what I saw in php 10 years ago. JS is now the easy language to get into, and so it has the most inexperienced devs with the least access to greybeards to at least show them what to avoid. The result is people who don't quite realize how insane the whole toolchain is. I've got a setup at work that makes make seem like a friendly dev requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams.

Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre- emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more.

This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects.

The pace of the ecosystem in recent years and the immense amount of legacy code (10 years+) that doesn't scale to growing teams/projects is a problem everywhere you look.

The good news is companies looking to bring their front-end up to date are facing the same foreboding sense you have that comes with the unfamiliar.

Fragmentation is coalescing around major frameworks and fringe features from a few years ago are standards today.

It's not too late, understanding the tooling is critical (end-to-end IDE through to the browser and beyond) and will provide you with a solid basis. Follow this up by reading the APIs of major frameworks then pick one (any one, it doesn't matter) and build something with it.

<comment><USER8> You should take the advice of this comment. The reason there are many moving parts is that the space is retooling to push the limits of what is possible. If you enjoy learning and solving problems, it's great.

<comment><USER9> They hardly make anything that was not already possible with PHP and its tooling 10 years ago.

Well, maybe there is more animations, more tracking and slower initial page loads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have 10 years of experience and still think of yourself as "a backend guy", you're doing something massively wrong.

No offense. Your skills should be applicable across the board. You either have a confidence issue or haven't developed skills that are in line with your experience.

There's no reason for you to not be able to " move to front-end ", although I don't get why anyone would want to do that. It's an undocumented mess, dominated by hipsterish framework cults.

This is going to be offensive to the front-end crowd, but if you need a new framework every other month, at some point you have to realise that the underlying technology is garbage and needs to be replaced.

I've gone through the react tutorial multiple times and I still don't get it. I don't get how to build it (webpack info npm or whatever), I don't get how to do things because there is no documentation. And that's not because im slow. Yesterday I picked up ethereum from scratch, evaluated three of their languages and deployed my first smart contract on a 4 hour train ride. And ethereum isn't exactly well documented either.

But try googling react api and enjoy the non-results. Impossible to understand unless you're part of the cult. Requires full immersion. Front-end seems to have gone full retard and citizens of the internet know to never go full retard.

Nothing compares to the mess that is front-end development.

<comment><USER11> I have no clue what you're talking about re docs - i went from zero front-end experience to having a working spa with router and redux and material components in like 2 weeks after going through the react training tut and abramov's redux videos on egghead - maybe you're the one that's not good as you think. people dramatically exaggerate how "messy" the react ecosystem is. you can figure everything out by using chrome dev tools with the react and redux extensions and a little chatting on #reactjs. but whatever more full stack jobs for me I guess.

<comment><USER10> you needed

\- the react training

\- abramovs redux videos on egghead

\- chrome dev tools

\- chrome react extension

\- chrome redux extension

\- a chatroom full of experts

that kind of confirms that the docs suck.

i'm not competing for "full stack" jobs. enjoy 'em.

<comment><USER12> Gosh, you sound like there's nothing to learn on backend.

Seriously, maybe more humility will help you improve. Frontend is super easy to learn for beginners (anecdotal evidence of me and like 4 other friends/guys I know). And MDN is vastly superior to e.g. python docs I've encountered so far, or heard/seen from my python friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frankly asking here about frontend is a bit pointless as it's too fashionable to bash it.

It'sof course not too late, actually situation is now pretty stabilized ... There are 4 major frameworks (React, Angular2/4, Ember, Vue) with lots of traction, the "mess" everyone is talking about is just pointless obsession over HN/reddit news, I never got what are these people talking about. Actual (you know, the ones that do it instead of "trying it" and then bashing it forever) frontend developers don't switch frameworks often. If they're skilled enough they can branch out, because concepts are very similar (ok React is a bit more ... different) and field is of course young so what was great 6 years ago isn't favored today. But situation from 3 years ago (Angular1, Ember, React were the biggest ones IIRC) was actually quite similar ...

Of course it depends on your priorities, and you haven't stated many of them. E.g. I like super quick prototyping and testing stuff on frontend, something hardly achievable with Java / C++. But maybe I'm just unaware of some tools, I just "tried" it, as many people here "tried" frontend :D

</comment><comment><USER13> From my very limited view in my opinion it's not worth it. There is an abundance of new frameworks and libraries and everybody wants to go for the "new cool thing". Things break a lot, things change fast and you need to always learn new stuff which are not necessarily better. It seem annoying and overkill to keep up with everything in the front-end world. Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there.

<comment><USER8> Why give throwaway advice? "I don't really know the space, but here's what you should do..."

<comment><USER13> Did I say I don't know the space? Does it sound like I never did front-end development? You should learn how to parse properly. I tried it, it sucks, and that's why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I should warn you that employers tend to look at front end skills as an excuse to pay you less.

The upside is that they're much more transferable between companies. Everyone wants to hire experts in their current back end stack, but everyone needs CSS & JS.

</comment><comment><USER9> Terrible idea. Stay away from that.

Everything is changing every year, pushed by young people who have no clue what they are doing and don't care about hours and work conditions.

Meanwhile, companies exploit them as much as they can to make new products and get all the returns of their work.

You have access to a much broader set of jobs with Java and Scala.

</comment><comment><USER15> Should you gain more experience with front-end, especially Javascript? Yes.

Should you change career paths to front-end? Absolutely not. Front-end is just that; web development. With Java and Ruby experience, you're not stuck to just web development but can branch off into other fields much easier.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it worth it?

From a financial standpoint, it depends. The range that is front-end covers a vast range of talent. A person could be labeled front-end while theming WordPress websites, while another person is also front-end working on a large product where engineering practices are important. In that range, the pay is going to greatly vary: $30k - $250k.

From an enjoyment standpoint, it too depends. If you enjoy solving user facing problems, then front-end is your thing. It isn't just about how to you retrieve the data, but how does the user interact with querying and then reading the results.

The front-end landscape does appear scary, but you need to realize that you are seeing a much wider landscape than you are with Scala and Ruby. Compare the front-end landscape to the data storage landscape. You got MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Redis, Mongo, Solr, Active Record, Datamapper, Hadoop, etc. If you tried to master all of it and follow every new library that came out, you would go mad. So you focus on a certain area while occasionally looking around. Do the same thing for front-end. Do you want to be working on large- scale applications, then focus on things like React and TypeScript - <USER2> meant to solve large-scale issues. If you want to make brochure websites, then focus on jQuery and CSS.

</comment><comment><USER17> Front-end is fast moving indeed. I don't have any definitive answers for you, other than to say that in the front-end vs. back-end equation, front-end is lot less stable and is going to require more time keeping up with new developments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, there's a new shiny framework every other week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The demand for skilled Front-end engineers have gone up. Looking at the responses from this post you can see that a lot of back-end engineers find it hard to tame the beast that is Javascript & this mis-understanding has slowly turned to hate. Thus while they run away from it, this leaves an large opening. Let's face it the bulk of services we use now live on the web and Front-end is going to be around for a long time. Someone has to take on this task, this is why over the years I've personally seen front-end engineers earn the same as back-end engineers I don't have the statistics but I know folks personally. As people run away from JS this creates a demand for front-end heroes willing to take on the ever changing landscape turbulent but necessary. For crying out loud you are reading this comment on a page.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sure, it's also what we call a fullstack developer ;)

<comment><USER20> +1 to this.

Where I am from "Front End" is still seen by HR as the guy who slices PSD templates into HTML layouts and they pay accordingly.

Calling yourself front end is doing yourself a disservice especially since you have all those years of experience in back end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A bigger question would be are you willing to take a step back. In your previous role you were probably fairly senior developer. Moving to the frontend you'll probably be more junior are you okay with that change?

</comment><comment><USER22> I've never understood the split between front end and back end.

Whenever I've assigned web work to developers I assign in terms of functionality and they write front and back. I think this is quicker than trying to communicate between two teams.

But to answer the question, why not. Then you're a full stack developer.

<comment><USER23> This is like saying you never understood the split between a carpenter and a welder, when both are involved in producing the finished product of say, a cabinet.

Sure, for simple enough projects a single person can do both, but doing that severely limits your potential scope.

For more complex projects, it's more convenient to have someone who specializes in carpentry provide the specs for what the welder needs to provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> ITT: Lots of front-end bashing and humour.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm a back-end Java/Scala dev too with a bit of experience in front-end tech (mostly for our internal data management web app) and honestly, I find front- end stuff awfully tedious and messy.

It seems to me to be a spaghetti nightmare of brittle frameworks build on top of a teetering stack of already brittle frameworks and badly designed languages (looking at you JS), made worse by the almost hipster-esque obsession with jumping on new frameworks every 6 months that seem to offer nothing but a reinvention of the wheel.

And don't get me started on Electron.

From my own personal experience I think learning a bit of front-end stuff is valuable, but I'd stick to being primarily a middle/back-end developer. That's where all the interesting stuff happens anyway.</comment>