Ksplice: Rebootless Linux kernel updates - <AUTHOR> http://www.ksplice.com/ <comment><USER2> I always wondered why nobody has made an Erlang-based server OS yet. It seems perfect because from what I have seen you can make code changes in realtime. That's just my opinion though and I haven't learned Erlang so I'm not gonna be doing this myself any time soon.

<comment><USER3> The awesomeness that you'd get from an erlang kernel + OS has already been achieved in lisp OSes, such as the stuff from Symbolics.

It's possible, it works, and it's _totally cool_ but worse is better ( <http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html> ) and the brain-deadedness of the UNIX/POSIX way is about as bad (good) as it gets.

This, to me, is a reason to admire the Windows NT kernel internals... someday it too will be eaten by UNIX and people will look back on Windows for the novel features that it has and wonder why nobody brings them back.

<comment><AUTHOR> _people will look back on Windows for the novel features that it has and wonder why nobody brings them back._

I don't know what bizarro future you envision, but I hope quantum states dictate I don't end up in _that_ parallel existence..!</comment></comment></comment>


Best Landing Page Ever? - <AUTHOR> https://fibery.io/anxiety <comment><USER2> If you keep reloading the page it shows different landing pages - "connect", "freedom" that are a bit more positive :) It is an interesting idea.

The tool is written in Clojure. They picked it for its power and expressiveness to efficiently reflect the flexibility of the app. I think they can use this fact to attract startup founders and tech guys, particularly those who read Paul Graham's essays.

</comment><comment> java-man Hilarious!

Make sure to click on "I don't get it, explain differently" button at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER3> But we have mortgages... Show mercy

</comment><comment><USER4> This sound like crap! Sign me up.</comment>


Comparing the compilation speed of C, C++, D, Rust, and Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nordlow/compiler-benchmark#sample-run-output <comment><AUTHOR> \- DMD compiles D without templates 10.57 times faster than C, thanks to DMD's backend.

\- DMD compiles D with templates 1.93 times faster than C++.</comment>


How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.elidedbranches.com/2017/01/how-do-individual-contributors-get.html <comment><USER3> This article really underlines how important it is to work at the _right_ place early in your career, or else you'll get railroaded by bad habits and judgement reinforced by a lack of guidance if you're not an intuitive wunderkind with discipline. I'm 4 years into my career and I sense more than ever that I still fall into these traps.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your statement, but I would change it to the _right team_. Even great places have teams that aren't high performing, and landing on one of those can hinder your learnings/career.

<comment><USER5> (and vice versa)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's also very important to realize that sometimes the feeling of being "stuck" is just generalized anxiety, impostor syndrome, lack of clear success criteria for your role, or some other composition of any number of myriad contextual factors in play.

The idea that one should identify these time-sinks, and then that's the end of the road, is such a manager-centric lens on this. When your final output is just written feedback for someone else, I guess it's possible to stop here and still fulfill the letter of your job duties.

<comment><USER7> So Camille's book and other writings give a lot more context on this - <USER2> are things to do as a manager _iff_ you have identified that getting an IC "unstuck" _is_ the limiting factor for them to be able to reach success criteria, for them to see their own success made incontrovertible in the team's eyes and in their own. Saying a manager's "output is just written feedback" does the role, and her take, a disservice - her very first chapter describes good managers as ones "who care about you as a person, who actively work to help you grow in your career." So take the post as what it is - one of many tools in a toolkit for being an effective leader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not just developer thing: IMHO, it's universal condition.

IMHO, productivity tools should do more to help us stay on task: they should help with all aspects of cognition - from capturing ideas, to making plans, to making good on those plans. Fundamentally, productivity tools need to evolve to help us deal with the emotional components of 'getting unstuck'. It's the biggest problem, at least for me.

Which is why I'm currently stuck myself :) I've _almost but not quite_ finished an MVP of a task management tool that addresses those things, via techniques taken from CBT and DBT therapy. I'm 80%-90% from a public release, having just brought in a designer to help make the MVP more attractive and building an approachable FTE for someone who's seeing this for the first time.

If anyone is interested, the first draft of the landing page is at [https://catchthinkdo.com](https://catchthinkdo.com) . I'm not opening signups yet, but if anyone is interested, let me know here, and I'll ping you when I actually launch. Fwiw, I'm not planning on charging my initial users, in perpetuity.

<comment><USER9> > IMHO, productivity tools should do more to help us stay on task: they should > help with all aspects of cognition - from capturing ideas, to making plans, > to making good on those plans. Fundamentally, productivity tools need to > evolve to help us deal with the emotional components of 'getting unstuck'. > It's the biggest problem, at least for me.

I've not seen any good solution (technological or otherwise) for meaningfully sorting all the information you've captured and prioritizing. There are plenty of ways to capture well (Org Mode!). In my experience, the _more_ you capture, the _worse_ things get. Until someone can come up with a scheme (need not be technological) to handle all that I've captured, /and/ in a manner that doesn't consume time, then you've got a solution.

One common approach is to timestamp things and just let anything beyond a certain date expire if you've not "handled" it. I honestly did not try it - probably should. The main concern would be that expired things will recur in my brain again and be captured later - over and over - a problem in and of itself.

<comment><USER10> I have to agree. I haven't found major improvements in projects/life goals via higher quantities of data capture, but I have found them through better-tuned filters, queuing and signalling.

With respect to stuckness, I have a kind of rule of thumb for everything creative now, which I can phrase as "underachieve twice over". The first time I capture somewhat less than the essentials of the thing I want to address, but require at least one; the second time(third, fourth, etc.) I plow forward and build another iteration on that, adding more of the requirements.

It's not different from estimation or calibration in any other sense, it's just that there is an element of following through on a bulk of knowable, ordinary work in order to collect the important data, instead of sitting there perplexed and avoidant when I don't instantly understand the whole of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "While almost everyone has some areas that they get overly hung up on, some people also get sloppy instead of getting stuck"

So true

</comment><comment><USER12> This sounds exactly like how I get stuck. As the sole developer on a team of pretty much all biologists, all of these things come into play constantly. Especially that bit about the last 10-20%.

<comment><USER13> You know what they say: the first 80% takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% takes the other 80% of the time.

<comment><USER14> Well, they usually say it with the figure being 90% ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety- ninety_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMHO it is very useful to be able to recognize why you are stuck on a thing yourself, too. There are different flavors of stuck - in my comics work, the resistance I feel when I need to sit down and do some serious plotting is different from the resistance I feel when I need to go design some stuff, for instance.

The sooner you can recognize exactly what flavor of stuck you are, the sooner you can switch mental gears into dealing with whatever needs to be done before you can progress.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is so important. Anyone with goals of being a "10x developer" (whatever that is) also needs to focus on being 0.1x stuck.

<comment><USER17> The 10x developer - individual contributor -is not quite a unicorn but so close to it it might as well be.

The best way to be a 10x contributor is by having a team under you.

<comment><USER18> The best way to be a 10x developer is focusing on the right work. If we take the 80/20 rule to be true (20% of the work delivers 80% of the value), that means the person who is working on the valuable 20% gets 16x more value from each hour they work than someone who is working on the less valuable 80%.

<comment><USER17> The developer - the individual contributor - rarely gets to decide what the "right work" is in any large organization.

<comment><USER18> Then choose the right job.

<comment><USER17> So which job do you know of where the developer gets to prioritize what to work on over the business people?

When that happens you end up like Google and have a new failing chat app every week or like the 1990s Apple with research projects that never ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get stuck on stuff like this constantly, and both the symptom and cause lists feel very accurate.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice list. I almost want to pin it in front of me. It should include reading HN.

<comment><USER21> Yeah seriously. First tendency of mine when stuck? Mess around on the web on SO or HN, get sucked into some rabbit hole that is no longer about what I was stuck on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm still amazed at how tech culture seems to think that avoiding your weaknesses altogether is unambiguously good. Maybe to some extent makes sense, but as a blanket rule surely it just develops learned helplessness in people?

Note this is a general comment, the article itself didn't say that avoiding your weaknesses come what may is a good idea.

<comment><USER23> Avoidance as a compensation strategy for weaknesses isn't particular to just tech culture; it exists in pretty much every discipline.

I've taken the opposite approach: from what I went to school for to how my career has developed, I've generally made choices that allow me to capitalize on my strengths while shoring up my weaknesses. And along the way I've recognized that such an approach in itself is a strength of mine, as not everyone that attempts to do so can be successful at it.

It's also a meandering path to success. At least from a professional standpoint, it's far more straightforward to avoid your weaknesses and hone your strengths. And such specialization is embodied in the organizational structures of most businesses.

<comment><USER24> "Challenging yourself" is risky and no guarantee of self improvement though. You can spend a lot of time thinking something is hard, when really you're just in a bad environment.

<comment><USER23> Precisely. This is part of what I meant by being able to take this route is a strength in itself. It takes a high degree of situational awareness and a significant amount of self-awareness to be able to suss out the differences between environmental factors and personal, and take deliberate action to maneuver yourself into an environment where you can be successful as-is yet still work to strengthen (or at least blunt) your weaknesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The primer reads to me as "Things maximizers do"[0]. I'm left to wonder if developers with a satisficer bent get stuck at all, or in those same ways.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximization_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximization_\(psychology\))

<comment><USER26> Maximizers and satisficers use approximately the same approach with a different threshold for the amount of the possibility space they are willing to search through (let's call it p).

Let's eliminate the extremes:

p = 0 is a blob who just doesn't do anything.

p = 1.0 only ever keeps looking at new possible options. Since the space is almost always infinite, this approach never terminates.

p = 0.01 just does the first thing that comes to mind

p = 0.99 spends an very, very long amount of time evaluating options

People tend towards different thresholds. But the right p value depends on the context. Sometimes the first thing that comes to mind--the naive approach, is in fact the right thing to do. If you're building something lower level that will be built upon later and difficult to change, more caution is often warranted.

The approach through the possibility space also matters--identifying the places to explore that might reveal the most risky aspects of the problem quickly is a skill developers build over time (often via past mistakes they later regretted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a really useful framework. It's pretty obviously useful for providing peer feedback, but it can pretty easily be used for self reviews or for identifying strengths and growth areas. Bookmarking for the future.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cached: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wkT294...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wkT294QCcR4J:www.elidedbranches.com/2017/01/how- do-individual-contributors-get.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> you could follow everything in this article but without sponsorship from upper management you're not going to move past the staff level

</comment><comment><USER30> Individual Contributors here can also be Junior Engineers. I know I used to, and I see other juniors now do the same things

<comment><USER31> "Individual Contributor" is Silicon Valley jargon for "anyone who's not a manager". So it covers everyone from fresh grads to research fellows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very useful, thank you. But... Sidetracked by refactoring and testing? C'mon... The rules of profession for programmers include the rules of TDD. If you do TDD correctly, you cannot be sidetracked by those, because this is your main job. Production code is mostly written by the IDE, by pressing Ctrl-1.

<comment><USER33> Okay, so what would you call someone who delivers half of the functionality they're asked to deliver, but has instead created a _very_ robust test suite?

<comment><USER34> An attempt at reframing a discussion, usually.

A robust test suite implies an exercised implementation.

<comment><USER33> I'd call them an underperformer. At some point it no longer is your job to reframe a discussion, it's your job to write code.

One tends not to make money off a reframed discussion, and besides, programmers often have a _very_ poor view into the rest of the business, so a programmer taking it upon themselves to decide how the business should be run is a programmer who will find themselves without a job after a short while.

<comment><USER34> I think I was unclear. I was not referring to a hypothetical developer. I was characterizing your caricature as that reframing of the discussion because the way you're approaching this verges on disingenuity.

<comment><USER33> Ah yes, taking a comment not about you and making it about you. This feels like a productive way to handle online conversations. I'm sure you're going to be a productive person to engage with...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This all seems like an incompetent manager complaining about their IC working on quality-of-life things instead of 100% focusing on getting tasks done for the manager.

Should be titled "How IC's avoid being commoditized task monkeys."

This isn't to say at all that these points don't have a lot of merit when working within a "task monkey" org structure...

<comment><USER35> I don't like appealing to authority, but I'll make a note for you that Camille Fournier is conventionally a pretty accomplished engineering manager and leader, and her blog Elided Branches is full of tons of what I find to be really well thought out advice from both sides of the coin. It might make more sense to consider this post not in isolation, but in context of her previous posts. Certainly, this could be understood to be building on her previous thoughts there. But, you know what? As I've written this comment, I've realized that I do agree with some part of the spirit of your comment. I'll take a stab at addressing what you're pointing out:

While I think that this post is meant to be a map for managers or tech leads, I find its conclusion to be unfortunately lacking:

> Noticing how people get stuck is a super power, and one that many great tech > leads (and yes, managers) rely on to get big things done. When you know how > people get stuck, you can plan your projects to rely on people for their > strengths and provide them help or even completely side-step their > weaknesses. You know who is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who > hates that particular challenge just as much as you do.

> The secret is that all of us get stuck and sidetracked sometimes. There's > actually nothing particularly "bad" about this. Knowing the ways that you > get hung up is good because you can choose to either a) get over the fears > that are sticking you (lack of knowledge, skills, or confidence), b) avoid > such tasks as much as possible, and/or c) be aware of your habits and use > extra diligence when faced with tackling these areas.

To a manager that is actively interested in mentoring and growing their engineers, this is horrible advice, frankly. It's horrible because it's essentialist, and it's not going to help you as a manager. The obvious first answer is "it depends" and "get more detail" \-- rather than resigning yourself to the current state of who "is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do" it is better to figure out why things are a certain way for a certain individual getting stuck.

Is it specific to them? Are there team to team dynamics getting in the way? Is a particular manager not integrating well into the rest of the org, and so their team takes the heat? Is another individual contributor within the org or team stonewalling them, perhaps unintentionally? Are the requirements unclear, changing, or in need to refinement?

Without understanding this underlying context, it's impossible to get a sense for the institutional foundation your report or colleague is develeoping, evolving in, being rewarded and punished in. It's perhaps the most important part about developing an effective response as a leader -- you need to figure out the extrinsics that are shared before you can untangle that from the intrinsics, or you'll probably risk conflating the former with the latter.

Perhaps, though, these kinds of utopian organizations exist where every problem an IC encounters is due to a lack of development or intrinsic ability that they must either work past or accept, and these other kinds of things I've pointed out never occur. I've certainly worked at smaller organizations where, due to sheer lack of complexity, these things aren't as big of a problem. But, at larger orgs, these things have always become an issue. As such, a huge amount of this blog post could be distilled into the values and skills of prioritization, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and communication. If you notice your teammates or reports having these issues, you should figure out which of one of these things you can help them with. This is mentorship work and coaching work -- it's high effort, high nurturing, high reward work. Once people feel supported and safe, they become orders of magnitude more effective at self-debugging any of these lower level issues she points out.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for replying earnestly to what was probably an overly emotional and flippant response to this article from me to begin with.

I couldn't possibly agree more with your description of subjective management, and the underlying context questions to explore with each subject individually. IMO, people management is literally the most subjective generally-applied skill on the planet.

The reason that I came off like that in my initial comment is that the article gives me (an IC) the feeling of a manager expressing frustrations with ICs, in a way where it's mostly that the person seems to be frustrated that ICs are actually individual humans with subjective interests as well as competencies. The list seems to be pointing out areas where the "human" parts of curiosity, teamwork, and creativity poke through cracks in systems designed to treat the ICs like interchangeable parts. It's _literally_ generalizing as the thesis of the article itself.

It also comes off like it's written for other managers or tech leads to read in a sort of "virtue signaling"-ish tone. It's a list of high level vague points designed to land emotionally with other middle manager types. The only thing this seems to be telling me as an IC is that my feelings for how to add value are mostly wrong and I should just shut up and do what my manager says, because my assigned tasks are far more important than anything I could come up with on my on which to spend my time.</comment></comment></comment>


Find a Computer Job in Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united-states/washington/king/seattle/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very much a Work In Progress.

If you have any additions, comments or corrections please mail them to email@example.com

If you have a LOT of additions, please permit me to send you an OpenOffice spreadsheet that I've already set up.

I will of course put this all into PostgreSQL but I have never designed a database schema in all of my days, so I've been working out the schema design in my spreadsheet.

While I have managed to come up with several ways to automate most of this, I have as yet been doing all the research and HTML markup completely by hand. While pleasant work, it is quite tedious and time consuming.

As a result I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.

I also have pages with actual payloads for Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington and Santa Cruz, California.

My original research technique is lucidly explained in the Santa Cruz page but does not work at all anymore, as hardly anyone ever puts their street address on their business websites!

Over the weekend or so I'll start coding up a Bot that does most of the heavy lifting for me but even so it won't be foolproof I will have to clean up the data quite a bit by hand.

In the long run I will permit anonymous visitors to suggest new entries with the aid of a Captcha as well as manual moderation.

I contemplated allowing each individual employer to register so they could maintain their own entries but in the end decided against it, in part because I'm not really a web developer, and in part to keep a lid on spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have posted about 28 links on my Seattle page, but I have about 120 more in an OpenOffice spreadsheet. However I haven't been getting much sleep at all the least three weeks to I better get some Zs before my eyeballs both start bleeding.

I have a total of 27 separate OOo Calc documents, one for each of the countries I've researched so far. My United States spreadsheet is the most extensive, with a couple dozen states and a couple dozen cities. My Canada spreadsheet has most but not all of the provinces, and most but again not all of the larger cities in the provinces I do have.

I decided the other day to give our friends in Ukraine a leg up, as I know very well that they're heavily into software development, but could only find just one employer, in Kiev. However I have some connections so I will track them all down Real Soon Now.

Please understand that much of my Global Computer Employer Index site consists of mere placeholder pages, so I could work out the overall web design, the directory and document heirarchies, the navigation and the user interface.

I think I've finally got a handle on that, and just now uploaded a new revision, which has quite a lot of work on the navigation, eight or so new countries, many new cities and a few new US states.

I added placeholders for a dozen or so cities in Los Angeles County, as I asked my friend Sari Gennis, a really high-end animator - she was the Art Director for FernGully - to pass my LA County page's link around among her colleagues. I wanted them to see that there really would be something there.

I've had my Santa Cruz County, California page online since 1997, when my former employer Live Picture announced it was moving from scenic, pristine Scotts Valley to San Jose. For most of us LP employees that would mean a treacherous, potentially deadly commute over the Santa Cruz Mountains via Highway 17, so I developed my first software employer research techniques, threw the page up on my site, then quietly passed the link around among my coworkers.

:::: [http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united- states/californ...](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united- states/california/santa-cruz/)

This had the eventual result that some complete stranger emailed to inquire as to my favorite restaurant, then a few days later I received a $100.00 gift certificate, as I had enabled him to find a new coding job!</comment></comment>


Facebook launches FQL-like extensions to Graph API. - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/field_expansion/ <comment><USER2> Looks good, though it still looks like there is no way to sort results like FQL's ORDER BY command?</comment>


Tech Journalism is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://stupidiswinning.tumblr.com/post/33563734252/journalism

<comment><USER2> This piece understates the problem, if anything. A lot of "journalism" today consists of regurgitating press releases rather than actually _reporting_ on _issues_. And a lot of tech journalists have journalism qualifications but no tech -- gone are the pioneering days when the magazines found it easier to pick up techies and give them the basic training in journalism to communicate what they understood.

Consequently we find product reviews that are checklists of features, composed by writers who lack all insight or understanding of the subject. And outlets all-but-plagiarizing each others' regurgitated press releases.

(The disease isn't universal, of course. Some sources -- for example, anandtech.com -- get pretty close to the old-school hardcore reporting from time to time. Others actually cover industry movements from an informed perspective. But the drive to get eyeballs on ads is inimical to insight; it encourages facile, superficial, and above all speedy publication with a smattering of titillating headlines to draw the readers in. And it does us all a huge disservice.)

((Disclaimer: I spent years doing this for a living. I also have a CS degree, circa 1990 vintage. I may be viewing the old days through rose-tinted spectacles ... but I don't think so.))

<comment><USER3> I'm a tech journalist -- I write for both TechCrunch and Wired Enterprise. I didn't write either of those pieces mentioned, but like many other tech journalists you'll find plenty of re-writes in my portfolio.

I'm speaking for myself and not from either company. But I can tell you though everyone in the industry is aware of the problem and trying to get away from re-writing to produce more original content.

The problem, as I see it, is that volume drives most online publishing. Making money depends on having updates throughout the day. That means every writer needs to post something every day -- usually more than one thing a day.

Even though most of these quick hit stories don't get many pageviews individually, they add up, and occassionally even a quicky will become a "blockbuster" that gets a huge number of pageviews. Original stories get a more consistently high number of hits, but they take much longer to produce.

I'm not sure people appreciate how much time it actually takes to write this stuff. Even doing quick hit journalism takes time. For example, I spent a couple hours this week on a post about Solr 4.0. It's short, and it's based entirely on the announcement/feature list but it still took a couple hours to write.

I have a bunch of original stuff I'm working on, but quick hit posts cut into the time I spend on those stories. At least part of that is a time management issue on my part -- and I'm a slower writer than many of my colleagues -- but I expect that juggling the needs to publish daily with longer form work is an issue for many tech bloggers.

(You should also not underestimate the amount of time we spend filtering information and looking for new -- e-mail, briefings, competitors sites, Twitter, etc.)

Anyway, I think things are slowly changing for the better thanks to reader demand for better content. But there's also a need to balance completeness of coverage with original work.

It's funny that Wired was singled out because I think they/we actually have a really good original content to re-write ratio (though yeah, Wired's always been known for sensationalist headlines). TechCrunch and Business Insider both have lots of original content as well. Because BI does so much volume I think people overlook the original stuff.

Another note about rosy retrospection: I don't want to defend the rewrite churn, but I do want to point out that even most daily newspapers have a significant amount of non-original content. Instead of re-writes though they tend to rely on newswires and syndicated columns and comics.

Re-writes aren't just done to get a quick post, they're also done to point readers to stuff they might not otherwise read -- as jbrodkin points out, not all TC readers read TorrentFreak. There are otherwise of getting this sort of stuff out -- like maybe just doing a linkblog that points directly to a story run elsewhere. In some cases it's possible to just call the original source and get the story so you don't have to link to/re-write a competitor's work -- I do this when I can but it slows things down (example: my story on Elbrus Technologies for Wired ran two days later than all our competitors because I waited for people from the company to get back to me instead of just basing my story on the EETimes report).

So yeah, it's getting better, everyone's worried about it but it's not simple to fix.

<comment><USER4> So, what you're saying is that TC has the same people working on rewrites _and_ features? Doesn't it make more sense to give the busy work to interns and let the higher paid journalists do original content?

<comment><USER3> That's no differentiation -- there's just writers. I can't speak to why that's the case -- maybe because they don't want to make anyone be the person who does nothing but crap work. I don't think anyone sets out planning to do a bunch of rewrites anyway. In my experience it just sneaks up on you "Oh, well we should probably cover this and I need a post, guess I'll just do this real quick." That's just my experience, but there's certainly no one at TC telling me to do rewrites. I guess there's also varying definitions of what constitutes a re-write -- I don't actually always depend on a press release or anyone's else's coverage for every news short news story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a tech journalist (for Ars Technica) so I figured I'd weigh in. First of all, I totally agree that there is tons and tons of awful tech journalism, and I regularly make fun of it. But I don't think all of these examples are quite so terrible.

The Wired story has some interesting comments from a very important person in the tech world. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it seems fine to me.

I'm not a TechCrunch fan, but this particular story relays some interesting information that people might not have read if they read TechCrunch instead of TorrentFreak. I've quoted TorrentFreak in some of my own stories, it's often a good source. There are so many worse examples from TechCrunch that could be used to make the case against tech journalism, but I'll just point out one: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that- coulda...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-coulda-been/)

Agreed on the BI and Mashable examples. Funnily enough, the Mashable one could have been good if it showed the actual evolution of Windows user interfaces rather than stupid illustrations of people sitting at desks.

If anyone wants a great parody of awful tech journalism, I suggest following this person on Twitter (I especially love the picture, which is a parody of the guy who started Mashable): <https://twitter.com/nexttechblog>

</comment><comment><USER6> Ninety percent of everything is crap. [1] That's a bad starting point. Add to this the fact that free publications on the web have a strong incentive to maximize their income via ads, and what you get is a crap-fest of sensationalism. Good tech journalism exists, but it's somewhat rare and sorting through the crap to find it is rather fatiguing. It's also unlikely to show up on TechCrunch.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law>

<comment><USER7> _Good tech journalism exists_

Are unpaid comments and blog posts, however, not asymptotically approaching/surpassing their quality?

What about signal/noise ratio?

<comment><USER8> S/N on comments goes down as soon as the thing becomes popular, am insightful comment is as likely to appear on slashdot, on a wordpress install or on TC, if it's n a popular topic.

And no blogger can reasonably write often enough on an array of subjects wide enough to keep the level of a news site, unless she takes in some other authors, and at that point there is not a lot of difference.

Also, there are still many sites that are widely above 90% of the blogs, such as ARS o the reg.

There are many interesting tech blogs (acangiano's is one :) ) but they don't fill everything that tech journalism should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Verge, The Next Web, ArsTechnica, and other sites produce lots of high- quality tech journalism regularly.

It's true there's a lot of crap out there, but this has always been true in the journalism world. And it's true that many sites have dubious practices that are 100% for reasons that don't matter to readers, like advertising and SEO. But is that the journalist's fault -- or the system's?

I speak to editors and writers regularly as part of my work at Parse.ly, and many of them are extremely worried about being "dinged by Google". They also hire experts who read the tea leaves on declarations from Matt Cutts and the Google search team, hoping to come up with a strategy that will make Google treat their site as one of several "blessed" domains.

Why? Showing up well in SERP pages or Google News can often be the difference between an article that fizzles and one that garners thousands of eyeballs.

The problem with SEO isn't that some editors/writers do it. The problem is that it works. And, it often has nothing to do with the quality of your content.

It's like complaining that public stock markets are "broken" because some companies goose accounting numbers to look better to investors (e.g. Groupon). Yes, some do, but not all companies. No system is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER10> What sucks is that a lot of good places like The Atlantic and Wired are also applying their brands on link-laden blogs with no editorial standards whatsoever. It's short term gains at long term losses to their credibility.

I would like to start a curated list of high quality journalism sites with a policy of delisting the sites that go The AOL Way, given sufficient evidence provided by users. It would be awesome if we could remove the profit motive from stooping to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

</comment><comment><USER11> When press is free, it's not free press anymore.

If a website is not behind some kind of paywall, he lives on ads and must enter the crazy linkbaiting/SEO dance.

</comment><comment><USER12> Y'know how "work expands to fill a vacuum"? Well in media noise expands to fill bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER13> This isn't necessarily unique to tech journalism, and I highly recommend giving Flat Earth News[0] a read for a greater insight into the commoditisation of news (amongst other things), and churnalism.

I guess it's more noticeable to us within tech, because HN generally aggregates a fair amount of content from TechCrunch, and Mashable, and so on, and it's not unusual to see four or five links to these things every day.

A solution is to post and upvote the original source where possible, and hope it attracts more discussion than the churn does.

[0] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning- Distor...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning- Distortion/dp/0701181451)

</comment><comment><USER14> Not all tech journalism is created equal - or for the same audience, for that matter. @sarahcuda at <http://pandodaily.com> is leading a hard battle to remain an unquestionable source of original content, investigative reporting and industry insights unseen elsewhere. Pando should not be placed in the same platter as TC, BI, Mashable or the likes. In my opinion, Pando is to tech, what The Economist is to business, or The New Yorker is to culture.

<comment><USER5> Either you work for PandoDaily or this is a very elaborate tongue-in-cheek comment. I'm certain you're the first and last person to ever say "Pando is to tech, what The Economist is to business, or The New Yorker is to culture."

It's just a spinoff of TechCrunch in both its origins and content. It's like the Joanie Loves Chachi to Happy Days.

I'll just assume you're joking.

<comment><USER14> Sorry to disappoint, I wasn't joking. Nor am I in any way associated to Pando, Sarah, or anything related to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Amen. Not to mention most Tech sites make no attempts to do investigative reporting.

What annoys me most are the "news" posts about startups that throw around all these insane numbers that aren't even remotely realistic. Six months later people are surprised that the company is "pivoting" or is nearly bankrupt.

More often than not they simply wait for the next press release by X company and present it as if its hard hitting news then move on to the next post.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have to admit that tech journalism is good in some aspects - especially if the journalist conveys a good point.</comment>


MIT's Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges <comment><USER2> As a Senior House alum and former instructor at MIT, what bothers me the most is how MIT is teaching horrible standards of ethical behavior through their actions.

Improper use of metadata to track down individuals in a confidential survey about mental health and substance abuse would end a scientist's career. MIT did it.

Collective punishment of a group for the actions of a few is an educational and social antipattern. MIT did it.

An "end justifies means" mentality is a classic tool used by the strong against the powerless. MIT embraced it.

Removing completely innocent people from their homes and their supportive social structure, while MIT's right, would face justified outrage in any public context.

Using these tools on anyone, let alone the students you thought brilliant and worthy enough to admit, teaches a mindset abusive of power and lacking in humanity. A mindset that is all too common in our society.

MIT has plenty of honorable and fair people. If they didn't know enough to stand up for Senior House specifically, why didn't they stand up against the tools that the administration used that they know are wrong?

I have found "we teach as we live, we live as we teach" a pretty powerful and positive philosophy.

<comment><USER3> What happened to the MIT Administration? Ever since Aaron Swartz death, it seems the administration of the school has been corrupted by some influence.

My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.

<comment><USER4> Undergrad students are a nuisance for a school like MIT nowadays. These are giant research corporations masquerading as academic institutions.

<comment><USER5> This is unfortunately too close to the truth. While there are still many who enjoy teaching and guiding undergraduates, a Professors life is consumed by first, the pursuit of tenure and then the pursuit of more and more research funding for projects (not to mention doing the actual research). In that context, issues with undergraduate administration seem like an unsavory part of their jobs: often, offering very little in returns.

<comment><USER6> Professors aren't the ones dealing with undergraduates, it's the administration. The administration is answering to the MIT Corporation and the Board of Directors, whose interest has long become to grow the "investment vehicle" (endowment, professorial industry nexus, bureaucracy, etc.) through commercial and real-estate ventures, patents, and the cultivation of the brand. Students, graduate or undergraduate, and their lives are all nuisance, and you can tell from how they are treated in financial transactions relative to the aforementioned beneficiaries on whose behalf the Institute truly works.

<comment><USER7> You must have had a different interaction with the MIT Corp: I've found that they have nothing other than the best interests of MIT at heart. Most of the members are alums, and several of them have made very significant donations (with not a whole lot of recognition imo.)

I'm not saying the MIT Corp hasn't made mistakes, but I've never questioned their motives for doing the right thing.

<comment><USER6> I don't even think you are contradicting me here. It's just that "MIT" has grown to be a lot lot more than educating its students (for better or for worse), and its ... "interests" much more varied as a result. After all, the students are there for a few years and then leave. Who are the real long-term stakeholders here? As I pointed out already, it's the bureaucracy, the professors, all the commercial interests wanting in on the MIT pie, and an institutional leadership interested in all the powers that accrue to overseeing a larger endowment with a greater capital return.

How MIT's immediate neighborhood has developed into an unlivable office park is a vivid example of what I say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As college morphs into High School+, and society extends their definition of 'childhood' to cover up to age 25, steps will be taken to destroy the autonomy and personality of these 'children.' Children are entitled no rights, no difference of opinion from them is respected, and any degree of control over them, no matter how extreme, is always seen as warranted.

<comment><USER9> That argument makes sense as they mailed the kids parents; when universities are all about recognizing the students as adults.

<comment><USER10> Isn't America the place where in some states it is a criminal offence for 21 year olds who serve in the military to consume alcohol?

<comment><USER11> 18 for military, 21 for alcohol. It's ridiculous, yes.

[https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/26/1398179/-18-year- ol...](https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/26/1398179/-18-year-olds-to- fight-and-die-for-your-country-but-you-have-to-be-21-to-have-a-beer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > five minutes later they started emailing our parents—and

> then all undergraduate parents

Can somebody explain why the University would email the parents? What do they have to do with it? The students are of age, right?

<comment><USER13> The parents are paying the bills.

<comment><USER14> That's between us and our kids. At Illinois orientation this year, they were super clear with us: your kids are 18, adults, and they're our clients, not you; if you call us with questions about them, we're unlikely to answer them, and in some cases legally can't.

That felt right.

My kid's college calling me about other people's behavior in a dorm? That feels very, very wrong.

<comment><USER15> This. My parents paid for much of my education, but got information about my academics through me. I allowed them to access my grades because it was often easier than any alternatives, but actually stopped doing that after they got worried about some things without context. I, and I think they, would have been surprised and appalled if my school had emailed them about the conduct of other students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the paths to success other than a handful of narrowly prescribed routes. I wonder how many of the greatest minds of our generation are flipping burgers or making coffee.

<comment><USER17> I was chatting with a guy on the plane the other day who was bemoaning the disappearance of old-school BBSes and rise of homogeneous social media sites. I think my answer to his concern and yours are the same:

There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits).

Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.

<comment><USER18> Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.hackthebox.eu/en](https://www.hackthebox.eu/en) is one

There's also [http://3564020356.org/](http://3564020356.org/) (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)

<comment><USER19> I tried hackthebox.eu... [https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg)

<comment><USER20> I think that is what you are suppose to see.

<comment><USER17> No, there is an actual landing page. Might want to follow up on that via the provided instructions if you're getting that page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the actual story here? "Four students tried to buy cocaine" isn't the story. That happens all the time, at every college, in every other MIT dorm, and in most city high schools.

<comment><USER7> > _What 's the actual story here?_

Not sure of the context of your question exactly, but a quick summary for non- alums: MIT has had a dorm system for many decades where students choose where they are going to live. This tends to aggregate similar personalities/lifestyles into various dormitories. Senior House was a dorm with a reputation: It tended to attract a personality that might be described as "edgy", and was perceived as a place with higher-than-avg drug use. It has had that reputation for decades.

The current MIT chancellor looked at GPAs and other metrics and decided that Senior House was under performing and perhaps harmful to students. She put the dorm into "turnaround", and when that didn't pan out, she evicted all of the undergrad students. It is now a grad dorm.

[That last paragraph reads like a corporate action, a similarity that has been noted by others.]

Many alums have noted the administration has been trying to disperse Senior House for decades (I saw it in the 90s), it looks like Chancellor Barnhart was the executor.

<comment><USER14> So if that's it, this is just a numbers story. MIT is an extremely selective school. They're loathe to reject 92% of their applicants only to send people they accept to a dorm that increases by double digits the likelihood that they'll fail. The dorm is a support system for the colleges; the colleges are not support systems for the dorms. When that problem persists for years on end, eventually it becomes the administration's job to "solve" it with finality.

There's a story to write about how a relentless focus on academic performance starves out countercultural values, and probably another to write about how dispersing a 15% increase in failure-to-graduate-rate just hides the problem numerically.

But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.

If all that is true, my major critique would be that MIT themselves seemed unable to be adults about the whole thing. They should have just set a deadline and a specific performance metric, with a clear up-front warning that missing that metric would mean closing the dorm. No interviews, no notes to parents, no "cancelling the steer roast".

<comment> g-clef Thought 1: Correlation/causation. It's not clear if the house causes the higher likelihood of failure or if the folks who are more likely to fail are drawn to the house. I can see arguments for both.

Thought 2: I don't think Wired is trying to write a story about intrigue as much as using the Senior House story to illustrate the larger trend of universities becoming more homogenous.

Writing a story that says "Universities are getting boring. 3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's some quotes from people" is going to be, frankly, boring to read. On the other hand, a story that says "3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's the story of one of them" is going to be much more compelling. It makes the story more personal, and therefore easier to understand and relate to.

<comment><USER14> Right, but the same correlation/causation problem recurs for the "homogenizing" narrative if all that's really happening here is that administrations won't tolerate dorms freighted with double digit increases in dropout rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Senior House alum here...

You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what?

You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate.

MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called.

I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.

<comment><USER22> Considering that students are more akin to customers than worker bees, the obvious questions to that line of reasoning are:

What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric?

Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate?

And the more general elephant in the room:

What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?

<comment><USER23> MIT tries to select students who will make it through MIT, and then get them through. If you get in, you have a 93% chance of graduating. That's an unusually high success rate for a serious engineering school.

(That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.)

There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> (Throw-away for obvious reasons).

MIT alum (<10 years) here. While i didn't live in senior haus myself, I lived in a dorm very much related to SH, had many friends there and overall jolly time (^^).

One thing under-emphasized in all these SH shut down stories is the "rampant" drugs availability across the dorm. For non-MIT folks: SH was the go-to dorm to acquire any drug you wished. If you went to their parties (steer roast being the main one), kids were rolling on all sorts of substances (outside, inside, in their rooms, everywhere), and anyone with half a brain could get their fix. And, imho, this was not a "small minority"...

Now, the twist here is that all their (official) parties had campus police all over, and they knew exactly what was going on in there. Oh, and did I mention the MIT president's residence was right next doors (across a fence)?

So as long as the flow of substances into the dorm was somewhat monitored by the campus police, with them being (theoretically) able to track & control the environment, all was fine.

Fast forward a couple years, students are getting stuff on silk road with bitcoins, anonymously from unknown sources. Campus police loses their control, and even worse, this may leak to city/state/federal cops, which is obviously the last thing MIT (or the cops) want.

Seems like a non-unreasonable decision (from the administrator's POV) to shut it down. You obviously can't admit the years-long substances-situation publicly, but it just-so-happens that it correlates negatively with graduation rate/GPA/you name it. Boom, easy, done.

Now, don't get me wrong, I had a great time at SH, and would prefer to see it stay there. But please stop romanticizing how MIT was going against disadvantaged students, minorities, etc.etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> >> Registrar data showed that the hall's graduation rate was lower than any dorm on campus—21.1 percent of Senior House students were failing to graduate, versus the campus average of 7.7 percent. In addition, the email cited data that suggested higher-than-average drug use in the house.

So perhaps these kinds of people have a lower graduation rate. By spreading them around campus, they will probably be less happy. So the questions are: what if any effect will that have on their graduation rate? On their happiness?

<comment><USER26> It'll diffuse the negative effect throughout so it won't be visible to MIT detractors. The happiness is likely inconsequential.

I speak strongly and pessimistically about this because of some very fresh in my mind experiences from my university, where I watched drug abuse (and some far more heinous acts) be covered up and untreated as long as they could be by staff, and then pushed under the rug after kicking out the students who likely could have been helped earlier with tactful interventions (of which dissolving the house/support structure in OP certainly is not). The incentives at many universities are heavily misaligned to what I believe we'd like them to be.

[Edit] As a postscript; I'd add in a ramble, as there's another thought weighing on me: (as there seem to be two stories here, "are we properly helping students" and "what's happening to the heterogeneity of universities")

My own undergrad would have been remarkably less positive if I didn't have my own groups of "outsiders" to associate with, whom I'll openly admit likely correlated with increased drug use, dropout rates, and lower GPAs, as a side effect of being composed of students who might have different priority systems, not as some corrupting effect. Without these groups I likely wouldn't have landed a majority of my professional-life jobs, I wouldn't have shared in a vast amount of their knowledge and experience, and I would have lost both many good friends, and likely my wife. In the decade since then, I've seen a "real world" in which I've been told to my face, "we avoid hiring nonconformists". And while I can understand the "business justification" for that, and the university changes, I have some fear for what will be lost resulting from a push to dissolve these pockets.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps its a problem of empathy? Many of the Professors and Administrators I've come across are, to use the article's crude term, egg-heads. They have not experimented with drugs or alternate lifestyles; or perhaps have had bad experiences with them. They are usually socially "upstanding" people: married, with mortgage, spouse and kids. So they just can't see why a place like Senior House would exist; they can't see the purpose of leaving alone an environment which, however disgusting it might feel to them personally, seemed to have provided a lot of comfort to a lot of students from different backgrounds.

A college education is much more than just graduating and getting a piece of paper. The metrics for measuring progress are really fucked up IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Once could argue that it is a good thing that old rebel spaces are closed as those places have a tendency go stale and turn into a cargo cult shadow of itself the more it's legacy is celebrated.

The world don't need more safe-spaces where a bunch of well of kids can pretend they are changing the world, without having to deal with the fact that the movement's they pay homage to have been pacified and subverted since at the first Clinton administration.

The wealthy left leaning demographics that dominate the press have always had a strange counterproductive relationship with a glorious past it was not a part of to the point where half of them don't even realize they ran a Goldwater republican for president in 2016 and lost to Donald the foreign policy moderate baboon because his brand of dementia was less scary then Clinton's brand of dementia to the general public.

<comment><USER28> From your comment, you appear to have no personal experience with Senior House. Your comment thus comes across as incredibly misinformed and naive. Senior House was not a place where people pretend they are changing the world as the article made emphatically clear. Many of the world's greatest technologists were taught and inspired at Senior House to pursue their life's work. This has absolutely nothing to do with Hillary Clinton despite the tired attempt to frame everything as Trump vs. Clinton. You are minimizing the loss of a truly creative and ingenious community in an attempt to advance the same old political argument.

<comment><USER27> But the greater narrative pushed by wired have pretty much everything to with the great battle for the future of America's history.

It's not about Trump vs Clinton it's about yesterdays failed rebels failing to let at new generation emerge as it's own thing and that's universal for both parties, and not even confined to just America. Whatever senior house was 10 years ago it cannot be 10 years from now because the world aren't static so maybe it had to go to give way for something new the alumni have no right or reason to expect to be a part of.

We are turning into a society of loud senior citizens and subdued youths because of the reverence today's youth are told to have for the communities that were created by past generations despite those communities failure to tackle that many big problems head on and that's a dangerous thing to have because it cannot lead to anything but cultural stagnation.

<comment><USER28> Thats not what happened here. Current and former students are overwhelmingly united on the same side. The administration misused some voluntary response data as a pretext for shutting down a community that they didn't like. There are no loud senior citizens subduing youths unless you mean the administration. Au contraire, the students and alums were fighting together to prevent Senior House from being replaced with a generic dorm with no community spaces that will lead to cultural stagnation and isolation.

Do you see how you're still trying to force a narrative that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation?

If we have to force a political analogy, a better example would be if veterans and current military personnel banded together to prevent closing an important base that had produced tons of great ideas, high ranking generals, etc. because the Trump administration decided there was too much risky homosexual activity and partying going on.

As an aside, your blanket classification of MIT alums as "yesterdays failed rebels" is comically inaccurate. Lawrence Summers lived in this dorm for crying out loud.

<comment><USER27> the reality of the situation is that a dorm was closed by the people whom it's financial viability depended on because it never grew into something fully independent, nor into something that the people running MIT's budget found especially useful.

Already there we have a narrative break, sure a lot of people who's identity have gotten mixed with a particular community feels they lost something but that don't mean society did. And the fact that one of the people responsible for tanking the US economy lived there don't actually change anything.

This debate is classic and symptomatic for any kind of bohemian community, who always have a super important pedigree until it have to be quantified at which point the super important narrative kind of falls apart, and this is not a isolated case every city on every continent have it's Senior House.

The problem is that your asking people to fight for something utterly insignificant(more of a local petting zoo then a civil rights landmark) as if it had an impact on the battles worth fighting which it frankly don't.

Yes there is a trend on the way towards the institutions to stop financing and sanctioning counter culture but again what good is a counter culture that only exists when it's sanctioned and financed by the establishment?

<comment><USER28> Its a college dorm. It was never meant to be "fully independent" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a dorm being "sanctioned and financed by the establishment." MIT made a decision to cover their own asses in case anything went wrong in the dorm as they've been doing since famous hazing / suicide cases happened in other dorms / living groups fifteen years ago. More college- bound eccentric geniuses will end up considering other institutions of learning if MIT's campus becomes devoid of spaces that they find inspiring, creative, fun, etc. Luckily MIT still has some solid living groups despite this but removing two undergraduate dorms in quick succession will definitely have an effect.

Society doesn't know enough to judge whether they lost something. That doesn't really matter ultimately as MIT is the one that made the decision. If MIT could have gotten everyone in the dorm to sign a legal waiver then they would have been more than happy to let it stay.

You say the people running MIT's budget didn't find it "especially useful". It is a dorm that houses people. Its not like the option is to have no dorm. They still need a dorm. It was a specific cultural purge to shield legal liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps because we now see childhood as extending much further, and college as more an extension of highschool? I mean, you stay on your parents health insurance until 26, and most students are having the bills largely paid by parents. According to this report, its 41% parents/relatives (savings+loans), 34% scholarships, 25% students (income/loans). So 75% of the tuition is the University and the Parents, and that's not even counting all the other sundry expenses.

[http://news.salliemae.com/files/doc_library/file/HowAmericaP...](http://news.salliemae.com/files/doc_library/file/HowAmericaPaysforCollege2016FNL.pdf)

That and we now are emphasizing college as a must-have entry to getting a legitimate career, so we have to make it prettier and more mainstream since huge masses of people are willing to spend large amounts of money. Decades ago, it was for the few who wanted to pursue higher education out of genuine pursuit of knowledge, and was much less expensive.

<comment><USER30> I have to disagree specifically with health care costs... the way the system is structured, with the costs involved, decent healthcare for most sub 26 year olds would break them financially... because the healthcare system is broken, not because the young people are. As a parent with a 17 and 19 yr old, I'm happy I will be allowed to continue my children with decent healthcare at a time when the system is so screwed up, and they will be primarily students in university and grad school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Barnhart told the student newspaper The Tech that "we received highly credible reports of unsafe and illegal behavior in Senior House."_

Yep. Sounds like every dormitory at any university. All they had to do was look.

This whole thing reads like the playbook of how to use the mechanisms of bureaucracy to build a palatable pretense for unpopular actions.

<comment><USER31> My undergrad randomly assigned students to freshman-only housing. 100% turnover in every freshman dorm every year. It took 36 hours from student arrival to the first hospitalization. Was that "dorm culture"?

You're exactly right about bureaucracy - as long as your standards are sufficiently overbroad, all the actual decision-making happens via selective enforcement.

I suppose the best question to ask of a story like this isn't "why?" but "why now?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Remember kids: the administration doesn't care if you blow your brains out -- they just care that you don't do it on campus.

There's a reason I always told people to seek help off campus.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the trend at MIT is not just about dorms. It's about groups that are too independent, too strong-willed, or just too different getting hammered down or spit out, in favor of corporate-friendly programs and people that are more willing to toe the administration's line and/or promote its designated priorities.

The quirky but long-lived program I took part in recently had its leader of 10+ years dismissed, with the program merged into another new group. This was a huge loss, as this person (himself a graduate of the program) carried a great deal of institutional knowledge. Because there is no shared classes or overlap between graduates from different years, he was key to enabling cultural continuity. He is not being replaced.

I don't believe this is an isolated incident. I've seen it happen recently in another non-academic unit at MIT, where a high-profile leader was abruptly shown the door. This person was doing really wonderful things in many areas that (in my opinion) greatly benefited the institute. I doubt his replacement will have the same mandate.

Then there's talk of Walker Memorial being transformed (what will happen to WMBR or The Muddy?), the news at Senior House, and collaboration with the Skolkovo project, a startup hub established by Russian pols and an allied oligarch and "co-managed" by MIT in return for a reported $300 million (0).

Finally, let's not forget MIT's poor treatment over the years of risk-taking researchers, activists, and students such as Andrew "bunnie" Huang (1), Star Simpson (2), and Aaron Swartz (3).

Of course, there are still fantastic people and groups thriving at MIT and doing great things. But I see many signs that the institute continues to drift toward a more corporate/legalistic environment that emphasizes established measures of excellence (rankings, acceptance rates, numbers of graduates, published papers, alumni donations, corporate partnerships, etc.) while sidelining or shutting down quirky departments, campus groups, and personalities.

0\. [https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the- skolkovo-...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo- tech-city-will-produce-its-great-leap-forward/)

1\. [https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking- hardwa...](https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking- hardware.html)

2\. [http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html](http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html)

3\. "... e-mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence — even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly — before a subpoena had been issued." [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside- stor...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-story-mit- and-aaron-swartz/YvJZ5P6VHaPJusReuaN7SI/story.html)

<comment><USER34> This is so sad. I found the quote "one way to destroy a culture, with lots of white paint" very poignant. Institutions everywhere increasingly seem to want to just make everything bland and safe.

<comment><USER35> I also find that its is not even individuals in the institutions but somehow the collective that causes this. I do not think this is the end of such places though as this kind of stuff has happened before and I think people will always find and make new spaces to make their own culture, the destruction of such places seems almost inevitable as they gain more and more notoriety.

<comment><USER13> It's also likely that these sorts of places will move off campus if there is truly a need for them. There are plenty of well-off alumni of Senior House, and erecting a building and maintaining the culture of Senior House off campus is something they could do if it is really that important to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The way they use privacy rules is incredibly cynical. Whenever it's something they want to do or something they want known they can slice through red tape with ease. If it's something they don't want to talk about their hands are suddenly tied.

</comment><comment><USER37> It might be interesting to compare Senior House to fraternities and sororities that are off campus and have their own buildings. If they were off-campus perhaps they wouldn't have been shut down?

(Not that I know anything about it.)

</comment><comment><USER38> As someone who made a decent career for himself in tech without having been given a four year party immediately after high school, I am having a hard time seeing what I should be objecting to in this development. As far as I know, all of these students are welcome to roast a steer as often as they'd like after college, ideally on their own property.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is why no institutional embrace of weirdness or "diversity" will ever be sufficient. Institutions don't value difference; they see it as a threat. What we've accomplished by celebrating weirdness and diversity is that our institutions see it as a _positive_ threat, like a company sees another company's cool product as a threat. Instead of stamping it out, they copy it or acquire it. And of course once it's in house, it gets controlled, improved, enhanced with the "competitive advantages" of the institution, etc. Stunted and erased, in other words.

The irony of today's institutional elites patting themselves on the backs for bringing the counterculture into boardrooms and college administrations is such a cliché that even David Brooks has written about it, but somehow it's impossible to see when you are part of it. We are easily fooled by the fact that we are all intellectual and spiritual _heirs_ of the counterculture. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us very much about ourselves. Elites can't regard themselves as permanent revolutionaries simply because they employ the same tools and rhetoric to maintain order as they did to create change. But just like successful revolutionaries patrolling the streets of a police state who can't help seeing their guns and spies as tools of liberation, college administrators can't help seeing their administrative initiatives as caring and supportive. They think they are helping these students by erasing an environment that is associated with self-destructive behavior and lower metrics of student success. Their suffocating, stodgy oppression is phrased in the progressive language of their hopeful youth. Instead of seeing "alternative" students as a source of evil, they see them as providing great value to the institution and deserving the greatest support and care, which _just happens_ to be exactly the same action that scratches their administrative itch to snuff out difference. They took the lesson of their revolution -- care for vulnerable people and nurture change -- and they systematized it and made it part of their institutions. Now, in order to safeguard that change, they have to guard their system against threat. Appreciation for difference and capacity for change are baked into the system, so anything that doesn't fit must be something else.

I'm not saying this kind of thinking is always bad. It is necessary for democracy, for example: you institutionalize one kind of change (transfer of power via elections) and delegitimize others (coups, for example.) I'm just saying that perhaps they should be a little more honest about who they are. They're the wielders of institutional power, looking to improve the world by pushing their control from 90% to 95%, 95% to 98%, erasing one island of nonconformity after another.

But this sounds contradictory to them. They are the champions of nonconformity. They are going to rescue nonconformity from these harmful conditions and help it thrive. Plus ça change....

</comment><comment><USER40> Ricketts wasn't shuttered, just put on notice.

</comment><comment><USER41> the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?

<comment><USER42> A former housemaster at Senior House, Jay Keyser, wrote a memoir (Mens et Mania), in which about a quarter of the book was about how much he loathed the place. While reading it, I imagined a version of Animal House where Dean Wormer had to live with the Deltas and try to do research while a toga party was going on around him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How could Steer Roast be cancelled? Based on my understanding of the article, Steer Roast is a 3 day party. Can't the students (18+ adults) just rent a campground nearby and have it there?

<comment><USER7> Steer Roast was one of the more insane events on campus. Certainly you can throw a party anywhere, but student-organized parties probably wouldn't happen far away; There is barely enough time for logistics while handling MIT's course load.

Apocryphal story: In 1987, MIT made Playboy's list of Party Schools. [1] Sounds crazy, right? The backstory: The writer/reviewer was in Boston, and somebody convinced him to check out Steer Roast. Around day #2 of party, the writer asked somebody was it like this all the time? To which the resident said yes, interpreting "this" to mean Steer Roast as opposed to the more general party atmosphere of MIT.

[1] [http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party- college...](http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party-colleges/)

Edit: I should mention that the actual picnic (Sat afternoon) is an event that alums/families/profs used to show up. Eg. Doc Edgerton was a regular, and really seemed to enjoy himself the years I saw him.</comment></comment>


Space-Filling Curves in Geospatial Applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.ddj.com/184410998

<comment><USER2> It's always nice to learn something I'd never even heard of before that's so simple. The article is about how you can use a neat trick (space-filling curves) to turn a multidimensional search into a set of one-dimensional searches, which could come in handy in many areas, not just geospatial ones.</comment>


Elon Musk says Apple is the 'graveyard' for fired Tesla staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/09/elon-musk-apple-graveyard-fired-tesla-staff?CMP=ema_565a <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10359038)

</comment><comment><USER3> "But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough."

We can only hope.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't Tesla notorious for underpaying?</comment>


Show HN: Nameof Operator for Modern C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Neargye/nameof <comment><USER2> This is a good use of the more modern C++ features such as string_view, constexpr and template metafunctions such as decay and enable_if.

I do wonder how much this would impact compile-times if used moderately in a large code-base.

<comment><AUTHOR> In our project, NAMEOF_TYPE and NAMEOF almost do not add time relative to the entire project. But NAMEOF_ENUM can add a couple of seconds to large enums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is similar to the C preprocessor trick _STRINGIZE_ :

      #define STRINGIZE_DETAIL(x) #x
      #define STRINGIZE(x)        STRINGIZE_DETAIL(x)

<comment><USER4> It probably uses stringification under the hood, but then relies on constexpr to "canonicalize" the name (removing everything before the dot, template parameters etc).

<comment><USER5> From cursory reading, it seems it doesn't, at all. It uses compiler-specific predefined values __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ (gcc, clang) or __FUNCSIG__ (MS Visual C++), and doesn't work on other compilers.

It also has to do work to extract the function name from the char arrays/C strings that those macros expand to.

Reading answers to [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4384765/whats-the- differ...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4384765/whats-the-difference- between-pretty-function-function-func/26907887), it seems it would have been easier to use the __FUNCTION__ in gcc, but I'm not familiar with that (or the other predefined values) at all, so who knows?

<comment><USER6> Actually, __FUNCTION__ won't work as it _only_ expands to the name of the function, not any templates or arguments.

It's actually a pretty clever way to automagically deduce not only names of variables but also of enums :). Too bad it's most likely not maintainable in the long run as compilers probably change what their __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ (or equivalent) macros expand to in new versions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually check the newest versions of compilers, and if the behavior changes, then I update the code

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice work, and the header is nowhere near as complex as I had feared it would need to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> With features C++17 this header looks not so terribly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what including and using this does to compile times. Nothing good, I suspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, not so much about the whole big project. May add a few seconds to the compilation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> nameof_enum doesn't work with GCC :(

<comment><AUTHOR> New version supported GCC >= 9

<comment><USER9> Awesome :)</comment></comment></comment>


Their Mothers Chose Donor Sperm. The Doctors Used Their Own - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/health/sperm-donors-fraud-doctors.html <comment><USER2> I finding it interesting that no one would have known if it weren't for modern tech. The doctors felt very safe about what they were doing. I wonder how the doctors felt when they were discovered?

Lawmakers don't need to make a law against it they just let the children sue for back child support. That will stop the practice real quick. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> A new law is going into effect on Sept. 1 in Texas that makes a doctor criminally liable for using a sperm other than that which was bargained for. It seems to me that collecting the evidence on this could take a long while, if the Mom of the newborn has no reason to suspect the doctor of doing shenanigans. I haven't checked what the statue of limitation is yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> "In June, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario revoked the license of a fertility specialist in Ottawa, Dr. Norman Barwin, 80, and reprimanded him for repeatedly using the wrong sperm — including his own — in artificial insemination procedures over decades."

Perhaps the system could benefit with a modest amount of regulation?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> paywall breach: [http://archive.is/a2Rnn](http://archive.is/a2Rnn)</comment>


Overview of Inverse Kinematics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/unity3danimation/overview-of-inverse-kinematics-9769a43ba956 <comment><USER2> I mean.. it describes that Inverse Kinematics _is_ and _is used for_ , but literally none of the math that makes it work. More than a little disappointed.

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks for reading. There are a TON of ways to implement Inverse Kinematics, and I'm going to cover the most popular ones in coming articles. Do you have any preferred animation techniques you'd like me to cover? All of my articles will be available here: [https://medium.com/unity3danimation](https://medium.com/unity3danimation)

<comment><USER4> I'll make a plug for software I wrote based on sequential quadratic programming. It performs significantly better than inverse Jacobian methods in the presence of high-dof and joint limits. Here's a link to the software and paper: [https://bitbucket.org/traclabs/trac_ik](https://bitbucket.org/traclabs/trac_ik)

<comment><USER5> Very interesting.

What is the best IK algorithm to implement in JavaScript given that it has to be small enough to download but also robust and fast and probably something one can implement without spending too much time on it? Probably an impossible question... but I figured I'd ask in the hopes there was something easy and obvious here.

<comment><USER3> FABRIK: [https://medium.com/unity3danimation/create-your-own-ik-in- un...](https://medium.com/unity3danimation/create-your-own-ik-in- unity3d-989debd86770)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a good intuitive explanation of IK meant for someone who is doing 3d animation or modeling. Maybe not for somebody who would be actually developing kinematics, for whom an overview of the matrix math is needed.

Given that, I still cannot understand WHY they use these user-unfriendly terms in animation and 3d modeling.

Yeah, I developed inverse kinematics and coded them up. But even then we spoke in terms of world coordinates vs. joint coordinates.

Joint coordinates -> you are specifying joint angles -> forward kinematics

World coordinates -> you are specifying a point in world space -> inverse kinematics

Really it is unhelpful to use the terms IK/FK with end users like animators and artists.

<comment><USER7> >But even then we spoke in terms of world coordinates vs. joint coordinates.

World vs. joint coordinates might also generate some confusion, since joint coordinates are "world" coordinates too. And you can refer to the coordinates of a joint using "world" coordinates, which someone could easily refer to as a "joint coordinate". Of course, you can formally define exactly what these terms mean, but then you've lost all of the advantage of using common terms rather than more formal terms since you've replaced the common meaning of those terms with a formal one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review My Site - Studylance.com - <AUTHOR>

Hello all,
I submitted my site a few days ago for feedback but didn't get too much response, so I thought I'd try one more time...
If anyone has any feedback its much appreciated, both from a design/usability standpoint and a coding standpoint too.
Is it clear what you have to do as a student/tutor?
Many thanks!
The site url is:
www.studylance.com <comment><USER2> This is extremelly useful for math and physics students who generally can't make an income through the web unlike IT students.

I believe it can succeed, one thing to watch: Keep your site SPAM free, Ban the people asking for very hard and long questions and giving few money for it. Also ban users who bid on every question and they are unable to reply.

If your site continue with high-quality, it'll attract a lot of other people, high-quality also (smart)

Good Luck with it!

(Edit: you forgot the about page)

</comment><comment><USER3> Your "about us" page is full of lorem ipsum. Doesn't inspire much confidence in the company...

<comment><USER4> Worse, the lorem ipsum isn't aligned with the rest of the elements on the page. ;) It isn't even doing its job!

Also: your teachers have areas of "expetise". Normally I strive not to flame people's spelling, but when you're building a site to sell expertise to people...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: <http://www.studylance.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't like my password, but I have no idea why. All it will tell me is "Enter correct Password. ". Maybe some hint on why my password doesn't meet your password constraints?

Edit: Apparently I can't have an exclamation point in my password. That's absurd.

</comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I think the idea is pretty neat. The website looks pretty good and for general answers I think this model may work. That being said, if a university student posted an assignment question on here and then answered that question exactly as on an assignment, that is tantamount to cheating. I know when I was in university(which wasn't too long ago) my professors were on top of plagiarism and such, and tend to watch for these type of things.

With a site like this, it doesn't stay a students best kept secret for long and once the cat is out of the bag its only going to cause trouble for students using it.

That being said, its a pretty good idea, I'd be interested to see how this pans out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Your UI focus is wrong. For instance, on the question page the main things are category, post date, number of bids. These elements take up as much height space as the question itself. The question is also in a textbox which I have to scroll to read. The focus should be on the question (which should just be in a div). Right now it looks like an accessory instead of the focus.

BTW, out of curiosity... was this built with asp.net mvc?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think design/usability are acceptable. At least i can understand it after playing with it for less than 1 minute.

The only thing that you need to be careful of is probably a market-risk. This type of site is platform model and usually run into chicken-and-egg problems, therefore, takes longer than you imagined to take-off.

Overall, the idea is great. It certainly has potentials. Keep it going! ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> You should probably do it in US dollars rather than British sterling.

Firstly because more people know dollars, but also because it's a higher number, which I'd think would attract more answers; £10 vs $16…only to Britons would they seem the same amount.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice site, I will definitely be giving it a try.

My only design complaint so far is the green on blue buttons at the bottom of a question ('Ask Student a Question', etc.).

</comment><comment><USER12> i like the logical separation of the page using light colors. I think, although you may be tempted to add more rows to the "top tutors", it looks good as is at the moment - may be couple of rows more. The pound sign beside the top-tutors is very 'diggy'. may be small image size? may be you should think those rows in terms of reddit-like than digg.

..and could you share your web-framework/db/architecture details?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why use this when I can type my question into Google and get ranked answers from answers.com?

But I do like the design and interface, a lot.

<comment><USER4> Heh. Because the answers that come back from answers.com won't be the answers to your specific homework problems. ;)

Or has Google gotten that good, while I wasn't looking?

[attempts to cut and paste equation from a question into Google to see what comes back]

Um, is there a reason why I can't select the text of a question on this site we're reviewing? Is this a bug, or is it some sort of "feature" that just _happens_ to drive me right up the wall?

Anyway, the answer is: there really are a hell of a lot of pre-solved equations out there in the Google database. So maybe you're right. But I suspect that, even if the answer is out there in Google, there's still value in the service of locating that answer and presenting it to the questioner on a doily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you name studylance.com competitors?

</comment><comment><USER15> Are you Felix.f on the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> No that's someone else...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> is that a bookworm holding a cigar?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well spotted, you passed the studylance test.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Closest thing to Firebug for IE? - <AUTHOR>

What's the best Firebug-style tool that runs in IE? I'm using "IE Web Developer", which is grotesquely bad. There must be something out there that makes testing in IE bearable (preferably IE6 and up). <comment><USER2> Firebug Lite: <http://getfirebug.com/lite.html>

They've gotten it to come further along than I expected it would ever get.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. Also, it helps to dynamically load jQuery into the page so you can use its CSS selectors, etc. from the Firebug lite console.

<http://www.command-tab.com/2008/03/13/jqueryize-bookmarklet/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.debugbar.com/>

<comment><USER5> DebugBar is awful

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Visual Studio 2008 with client-side debugging is pretty darn good. I use that along with firefox/firebug and have found the two to be comparable. Microsoft has done a pretty good job with the javascript debugging.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you install visual studio express 'web developer' package, which urged strongly to install microsoft sql server and some large dot net package, you can debug javascript fairly nicely:

[http://www.berniecode.com/blog/2007/03/08/how-to-debug- javas...](http://www.berniecode.com/blog/2007/03/08/how-to-debug-javascript- with-visual-web-developer-express/)

I use a combination of this and firebog lite, but neither is as good as firebug or safari's web developer tools.

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft Script Editor (if you primarily need JavaScript debugging). Unfortunately, it's bundled with MS Office - go figure. [http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/01/howto_de...](http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/01/howto_debug_jav.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> IE Web Developer toolbar for DOM / CSS inspection and tweaking, and MS Script Editor (from MS Office) for JS debugging. Wireshark for net requests dumping.

But of course Firebug is much easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> Developer Tools for IE8 with IE8 put in IE6/7 rendering mode?

<comment><USER5> This is my recommended choice. While IE8 Beta 2 is pretty buggy, and I'm not sure it can match IE7 rending mode with 100% accuracy, its by far the best available option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This one is not bad...

<http://projects.nikhilk.net/WebDevHelper/Default.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER12> XRay for some rudimentary placement information: <http://www.westciv.com/xray/>

</comment><comment><USER13> It may very well be Firebug on Firefox.</comment>