Times Higher Education 2009: Top 200 World Universities - <AUTHOR> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Rankings2009-Top200.html <comment><USER2> A British newspaper produces a ranking where 4 of the top 6 universities are British. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER3> The submitted link currently isn't working for me after repeated attempts (too busy?). Is this link

<http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings>

a path to the same ranking list?

<comment><AUTHOR> Checked it. It works for me.

The other link you suggest, is not working for me!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh come on, this is ridiculous. There are 11 Dutch universities in there (out of 16), but only 10 German universities (out of 383) and 4 French universities (out of at least 85)?

<comment> barry-cotter Might be ridiculous, might not. French general universities are cookie cutter, they're al meant to be more or less equivalent. The Grande Écoles focus on one specific subject, so they get _hammered_ on rankings, but they are all excellent in their fields. There are no great German universities, full stop, for the same reason as in France, and tehy don't have a GE equivalent. There are some departments in some universities that are world class, Karlsruhe in CS, Saarbrucken in Computational Linguistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, UofT (where I go) would be way the hell up there if the people that went here actually liked going here. I'm a Math Specialist and Computer Science major and I love it.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, no school spirit, and how does U of T lose marks on international students? I don't really see how the student population could be more diverse.</comment></comment>


All youtube videos have zero dislikes. Google screw up? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I have a video on youtube where is shows 15 likes and 1 dislike, while the page of the video shows 16 likes and 0 dislikes. Looks legit, all videos seems to have 0 dislikes.</comment>


Fiverr: What Amazon's Mechanical Turk Should Have Been Like - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiverr.com/

<comment><USER2> Let me briefly explain the difference:

With mturk, you have work you want to get done, and people go look through the HITs for things that fit their abilities.

With fiverr, you have money you want to spend, and you go looking through things people imagine someone might want to pay them to do.

I've used mechanical turk for annotating a training set for automated classification. I cannot imagine what I would use this service for. Claiming this is what mturk should have been assumes that mturk sucks because all the tasks people want to get done are boring.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Two separate concepts. The only link is paying someone for a service. However, I've only spent 5 minutes on the site, and I've already spent $10.

I'm already hooked...

<comment><USER4> I'm curious, what did you order?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's nothing like MT, but it's a fun site. A friend of a friend contracted someone on fiverr to design a logo for a project he was working on. I saw the logo the fiverr person produced, and it was the lamest thing I'd ever seen. Which you'd expect. But still. Funny.

Fiverr's quirkyness reminds me a bit of <http://highdeas.com/>

(OT: my favourite highdea was this: [http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_...](http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_device))

</comment><comment><USER6> The title of this HN post should of been: "Fiverr: A couple useful services and a lot of dumb ones, both for $5".

</comment><comment><USER7> My experience with fiverr is so far positive, I've set a Gig there some weeks back: I'll tweet about your service to my 18000+ followers (I follow less than 70 peoples) for $5 , it works really good for me: I'm $525 richer since then, but the most important thing, I've learned to deal with customer support, you can't imagine how peoples act even if they just pay a voucher for a service (I guess even if it's free), so no matter what they pay, and how great the ROI is, they will still ask for more, some poeples actually behave like they just hire you full time for $5 , that's the best thing I learned from it (customer can be really rough), and it also helps me validate an experience about twitter advertising and followers behaviour (a couple of peoples complained about the ads, and 1 or 2 unfollowed me, but otherwise, all ok)

I can recommend the service, but you really should know what you are paying for , it may have some Value if you really know what you are doing and you could have a lot from $5 , if you're lucky.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure about the MT analogy, but it is Fiverr is a neat concept. Hopefully you can keep the spam down and signal-to-noise ratio up. Also keep improving the reputation system, perhaps with some stats and percentages and filtering and sorting. Would like to be able to favorite people as well (or maybe you can already and I didn't notice the feature).

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a different site than Mechanical Turk. I go to MT to fulfill a need. Fiverr seems like a place I'd go to if I had money to burn on something random.

<comment><USER10> Talk about money burning a hole in your pocket. Here is a listing:

"I will plant a tree in my backyard for $5"

Thanks, but no thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 'I will send a torrent of undirected twitter/facebook spam on your behalf for $5'

</comment><comment><USER12> Very useful site. I just found something I was looking for. Lets see how it works out.</comment>


PHP 7.0.0 Beta 1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://php.net/archive/2015.php#id2015-07-10-4

<comment><USER2> I'm looking forward using it. Especially function return types and the reported performance improvements are going to be interesting. I think the people behind did a great job with PHP 7.</comment>


Inside IBM's cognitive chip - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110818/full/news.2011.486.html

<comment><USER2> There are enormous benefits for any architecture that puts the memory adjacent to the processing units on the same chip. You eliminate the latency of registers to L1 memory to L2 memory to main memory giving enormous speed improvements. For example, consider a simulation where many cells are hidden from a point of view (graphics) or are slowly changing. An on chip network of simple processors and memory could quickly identify the cells that were probably going to change in this iteration. An attached array of more powerful processors could do the heavy duty processing but using fewer of them.

Some people I know got a 100x improvement in image processing by using a chip with a network of simple 18bit floating point processors to eliminate hidden elements in an image. The reduced set of cells could be processed in real time.

There is room for lots of interesting products on a budget smaller IBM's, although it is hard to do hardware with the budget of a YC startup.

<comment><USER3> I don't suppose that network of 18-bit CPUs was a GreenArrays GA144, was it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The press release seems to have more information. <http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss>

"One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses."

I'm more curious how one would actually program such a chip, and considering the amount of memory required to parse through a learning dataset, how they interface between external and internal memory. I can't believe it would be a matter of compilers, or what would be the use of the new architecture, especially as they claim it as a departure from the Von Neumann paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd be very interested to know more details about the structure of the RAM units. (Neither the original article nor the IBM press release at <http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss> talk much about it. The videos on the SyNAPSE website are also pretty distilled.) A biological synapse does, in a sense, serve as one of thousands tiny memory units on a neuron. But they are more capable than a single bit. A packet of neurotransmitter released into the synaptic cleft does activate the synapse, but the synapse itself (technically, the post-synaptic group of neurotransmitter receptors) responds in a graded (i.e., a non-binary) manner, strongly dependent on a) its recent history of activation, b) other synaptic activations in the vicinity, and c) and the local biophysical environment. I think I'd want at least 8 bits for the signal amplitude plus a few more to store some associated state variables.

I'd guess that the IBM team would have to replicate a lot of that "hardware" to get the emergent behavior of a piece of cortex. I do know that computational neuroscientists have struggled for the last 15 years or so get reduced neuron models (i.e., point neurons with a small number of rudimentary synapses) to even crudely mimic full-featured neurons. It looks like this group recognizes this issue in that they are already starting with many hundreds of synapses.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a processor inspired by brain hardware will be most likely very efficient in the tasks a mammalian brain is good at (pattern recognition, pattern completion, pattern separation, etc.), but will concomitantly be worse at things that a standard serial instruction processor excels at. I'd bet that the IBM folks are looking to merge a cognitive processor and a classical processor into a single unit.

Also, I know very little about compilers, assembly language, and other close- to-the-metal issues, but it appears that this processor would be _very_ different to program.

<comment><USER6> The processor would be no different to program than what we know, they haven't invented a new computational paradigm, it's still turing machines.

Just to illustrate your point about the intricacies of simulating synapses realistically, and to show how far this is from actual biological systems, here is a model of a single NMDA receptor: [1], It requires 26 floating point numbers just for the state-change rates and 20 floating point state variables. And that's just to simulate a single receptor!

[1] [http://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDb/showmodel.asp?model=502...](http://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDb/showmodel.asp?model=50207&file=\\NMDA_Mg\\NMDA_Mg.mod)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's been another submission regarding IBMs new technology, with a lot of good comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898229>

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. TLDR:

1\. RAM is no longer seperate from the CPU, the RAM transistors are intermingled with the CPU transistors in the same silicon, all interconnected in what sounds like a kind of neural mesh.

2\. Computational units are the 'neurons', RAM units are the 'synapses'. RAM units send signals to CPU units causing the latter to perform simple computations, the result of which is sent to other RAM units, which in turn send new signals to other CPU units, etc. etc.

3\. Primary benefit is decreased power consumption (no electricity wasted shuttling data back and forth across a memory bus), and improved performance on certain types of algorithms like pattern recognition.

4\. Probably won't be as good as contemporary CPUs at other tasks though.

<comment><USER9> Those points above (except for 4) sound an awful lot like Chuck Moore's GA144 chips, based on his individual F18A computers (GA144 = 144x F18A computers).

<http://greenarrays.com/>

<comment><USER3> I wrote a software simulator of a single F18A once to learn more about the architecture- those things are seriously well designed, and full of interesting design decisions. If anyone is at all interested in CPU architecture they should do themselves a favor and sit down with the F18A manual: [http://greenarrays.com/home/documents/greg/DB001-110412-F18A...](http://greenarrays.com/home/documents/greg/DB001-110412-F18A.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you think these chips are cool, you should check out Kwabena Boahen's:

<http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/goals.html>

They're capable of complex network simulations in real-time, with control over ion channel tuning.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am curious of the information architecture.

"The main benefit is decreasing power consumption. Because the memory and computation are intermingled, less energy is wasted shuffling electrons back and forth. "

</comment><comment><USER6> This is no more cognitive than any artificial neural network we have until now. The only innovation is lower power consumption. So, it's just a power- friendly artificial neural network simulator. I would really like to see details about the abilities of these processors (why aren't they available anywhere?). When they say "programmable synapses" do they mean they have a programmable weight? Real synapses are not nearly like that, with very intricate computational abilities that come from the dynamics of presynaptic release and postsynaptic binding. How are they going to simulate something like this: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5999/1671.short>

"Cognitive" sounds just like marketing fluff here. Scientists should not adopt this marketer-speak.</comment>


Show HN: Moon – a tiny 6kb Javascript library inspired by Vue.js - <AUTHOR> http://moonjs.ga <comment><USER2> Are these types of frameworks basically just performant Marionette+Backbone? I always struggle to find a difference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Moon is faster, only 6kb, has a more powerful templating engine, and a much simpler API. On the other hand, Marionette is a MVC library, and has more functionality.

Moon is just a view library, the other parts can be added in with moon-router [1] and moon-ssr [2].

[1] [https://github.com/KingPixil/moon- router](https://github.com/KingPixil/moon-router)

[2] [https://github.com/KingPixil/moon-ssr](https://github.com/KingPixil/moon- ssr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had a very quick glance but it seems that RE:DOM is smaller, better documented and more mature (but probably otherwise similar). [https://redom.js.org](https://redom.js.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but Moon's goal is to have syntax similar to Vue's, and as a result, requires an HTML template compiler, Javascript expression compiler, directive compiler, and different component logic.

RE:DOM doesn't have any of these, but only has a virtual DOM engine (which Moon has as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Demo doesn't work on my iPhone 6 on iOS 10, I just get the template string

<comment><USER5> I wonder what Safari's problem is?

It works just as well as Vue on my Android in Firefox, Chrome and even the Android Browser.

<comment><USER6> > I wonder what Safari's problem is?

I wonder that a lot about Safari, particularly mobile Safari.</comment></comment></comment>


The New Bond Market: Bigger, Riskier and More Fragile Than Ever - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/1irbv0z <comment><USER2> This is all you need to take away from the article...

> Bond mutual and exchange-traded funds now own 17% of all corporate bonds, up > from 9% in 2008, according to the ICI. In periods of market stress, more- > concentrated mutual-fund ownership tends to mean larger price drops, the IMF > said last year.

It used to be the case that stocks, bonds and other commodities like gold has inverse correlations. Or in other terms, when stocks were down, bonds and gold were up....

This lead to the Efficient Frontier from Markowitz where you would choose a risk level you were comfortable with and then build a portfolio of "uncorrelated assets" to get you optimum return for your risk level.

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientfrontier.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientfrontier.asp)

The issue now a days is that this no longer makes much sense as when things go wrong everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1. Or in other terms, when the shit hits the fan, everything (Gold, stocks and bonds) all go down together.

TL/DR the old advice about investing in both bonds, stocks and gold for diversivication of risk is at best much less pronounced than it used to be and at worst just bad advice as they are now positively correlated.

<comment><USER3> "everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1"

Nonsense. Evidence : [https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-class- correlations](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-class-correlations) ( 2009-2015 time period )

Example: VTI and TLT (total stocks vs. total bonds) has -0.34 correlation.

<comment><USER4> Sure - for the 2009-2015 time period.

But the claim was not "everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1". The actual claim was "when things go wrong everything is correlated almost to a degree of 1". Look at the data from 2008, not 2009-2015.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset- correlations?s=y&n...](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset- correlations?s=y&numTradingDays=60&endDate=12%2F31%2F2008&timePeriod=1&symbols=VTI%2C+TLT&startDate=01%2F01%2F2008)

Correlation = -0.49 for 2008.

<comment><USER4> I see. So in 2008, what seems to have happened is a flight to safety, and therefore bonds and the stock market were very much _not_ correlated.

I stand corrected.

<comment><USER6> You can't use a treasury ETF as a proxy for the whole bond market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why isn't the fact that lots of baby boomers are getting older and retiring or getting close to retiring any part of this story?

If bonds are the safer choice for retirement investments (compared to stocks, while cash makes no interest/dividends or gains in value, these are the only 3 choices), then clearly lots of older people who are retiring are going to be buying into bond funds. Hence, huge upswing in bonds held by ETFs and mutual funds, since that's mostly what working-class people have access to through their employers or in their other reduced tax retirement accounts.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Let's keep this really simple. Since the financial crisis, how much more dollar-denominated debt is out there in the world."

That was Rick Santelli on CNBC an hour ago. Here's the video:

[http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000422916](http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000422916)

As the global economy slows, borrowers will cease to earn enough to service their debts. And the amounts are astronomical: $57T new debt at 17% debt-to- GDP ratios.

Link to McKinsey GI report on "Debt and (not much) deleveraging":

[http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/debt_and_n...](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/debt_and_not_much_deleveraging)

</comment><comment><USER9> > Bond mutual and exchange-traded funds now own 17% of all corporate bonds, up > from 9% in 2008, according to the ICI.

Purely an unintended consequence of the Volcker Rule. Banks were penalized for holding corporate bonds, and needed to sell them somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> > In the U.S., household, corporate and government debt amounted to 239% of > gross domestic product in 2014, the Bank for International Settlements > estimates, compared with 218% in 2007.

I am not an economist, but it seems to me that if you're going to write an article suggesting that the bond market is "intimidating," "vulnerable as never before," and "increasingly subject to volatility," you would not want to conflate personal credit card debt, junk bonds, and other private debt instruments with what is widely considered the single safest investment in the world, a bulwark of stability in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008 — U.S. Treasury bonds.

Given the spike (now receding) in the U.S. budget deficit since 2000, it seems likely a big portion of this supposedly alarming bond growth is in Treasuries, no?

<comment><USER11> The only "bulwark of stability" is cold, hard cash. The US government may not default, but that does not mean you will not lose money. If you bought US bonds at a high price/low yield (like right now :-)) chances are you won;t be able to sell before maturity because the price will go down, and if you hold them to maturity, the inflation will eat the measly return US bonds offer right now.

<comment><USER12> and if you hold cash, as you mean, the physical asset, it costs you money. (bank vaults arent cheap) so no only does inflation eat away at it, so does the monthly cost.

<comment><USER11> True, with cash you also lose to inflation but cash is 100% liquid, bonds - much less so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> are people worried about bond market liquidity?

<comment><USER14> yes. The constant threat of a big dominating presence of the authorities in the market, causes two-way flows to decline. You cannot rely on your macro skill set anymore to analyze the market direction, as anything you do is subject to policy maker event risk. Therefore faster money (read, speculators), who are the major providers of liquidity, stay away. It doesn't help that banks' risk taking, historically a big source of liquidity too, has been curtailed by regulation, but that is not the only story. It's also about the drunken elephant stomping all over the market known as QE/zero rates policy. So paradoxically, as the stock of bonds is ballooning, the liquidity is shrinking.

It was always the fact of course that the front end of the yield curve had policy event risk in it, but then you also had the shape of the curve which the market could use to intimidate the policy maker (too steep = a signal that the market was unhappy with policy). Today, the Feds have decided not only to guide the short end, but also to put the rest of the curve where they want it, and that's the underlying source of the problem.

Basically, the market is rigged. Nobody likes to bet in a rigged market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Bond mutual and exchange-traded funds now own 17% of all corporate bonds, up > from 9% in 2008, according to the ICI. In periods of market stress, more- > concentrated mutual-fund ownership tends to mean larger price drops, the IMF > said last year.

This is way better than 17% of all corp bonds being controlled by hedge funds. Being levered money, HF selling would be way more disruptive to the marketplace than mutual fund selling.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems financialization is coming to its peak. What new tricks will capitalism come up with to continue 'growing' at an exponential rate?

<comment><USER3> Doesn't all growth have an exponent?

<comment><USER17> Your comment was meant to be witty, but is actually just uninformed. Exponential growth is a well-defined mathematical concept [0] and distinct from other formulas of growth. And, to specifically address your comment, the exponent in exponential growth is time, so no you cannot just dismiss it as being "some exponent".

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Basic_formu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth#Basic_formula)

<comment><USER3> Physics is not financial economics.

<comment><USER17> I truly do not understand your argument. First, nothing in my comment alludes to physics, except for maybe the involvement of time, which I can assure you is _very_ much a concept in financial economics.

Second, financial economics is in no way unfamiliar with exponential growth. For instance, the compounding interest formula:

        p-next = p-start * (1 - rate) ^ time

<comment><USER18> I think you mean "(1 + rate)"...

<comment><USER17> Yes, of course. Thanks for the correction. Looks like it's too late for me to edit the original.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good documentation, ReadTheDocs and Markdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectclearwater.org/good-documentation-readthedocs-and-markdown/ <comment><USER2> FYI: If anyone is interested in following along how markdown "conquers" the world of writing not just documentation but also books, notes, talks, etc. You're invited to follow along on the world's first markdown news channel @manuscriptsnews -> [https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews](https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews) Cheers.</comment>


Le Paper Globe: a do-it-yourself terrestrial globe - <AUTHOR> http://joachimesque.com/globe/#1 <comment><USER2> EN link also available: [http://joachimesque.com/globe/index.html.en](http://joachimesque.com/globe/index.html.en)

<comment><USER3> Site read my Accept-Language heading perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice! I'll have to try this out when I get home.

</comment><comment><USER5> very cool ! what are some of your ideas on customization?

your ancestry/family tree overlayed?

travel logs?

historic airline route maps?

Early explorer journeys?

WW2 troop/invasions?

starmaps?

</comment><comment><USER6> great activity to do with the kids!

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh, beautiful!

Can it be done with hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball? It may get more rounded, but probably harder to assemble.

<comment><USER8> It works rather well with triangles: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map)</comment></comment>


Building, and Losing, a Career on Facebook - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/02/03/512473383/building-and-losing-a-career-on-facebook <comment><AUTHOR> I have sympathy for these folks. The internet opened up wide worlds of possibilities for one person businesses, especially because of the wide reach.

But when you build on someone's platform, you play by their rules. The first thing I'd do if I had a significant FB following would be to drive folks to my website so that I could begin to own the relationship, rather than FB owning it. Hopefully these stories will circulate and cause current FB entrepreneurs to do the same.

<comment><USER2> In the early days of the wide public internet it began with walled gardens like AOL.

They're bad for users, but they're great for the gardener. Looks to me like Facebook is a new way of making a closed ecosystem of posts, accounts, and so on, aiming to grow to encompass shopping and all other functions so you don't need to leave.

Their corporate policy tends to block some of the weirder and more deviant things that make the Internet the Internet. It's a shame.

<comment><USER3> The early internet needed AOL.

Do you remember what the alternative was? You be really chaotic nerdy and use Lynx, Usenet, BBS to find what you want? So that you can write it down on a txt file just to remember to check it again later or store it for later?

No one's got time for that.

AOL was the rubber floaties around your arms as you first took a dip into cyberspace. AOL scoured, organized, and packaged the internet into consumable portions and served it up for 50 hours a month.

This walled garden idea only makes sense when what is outside the wall is better than what's inside the wall. And even back then it took awhile before you made the jump from AOL wrapped MSIE to paying for Netscape.

The world always needs malls. That's just how humans socialize. When the deep web gets colonized, it too will inevitably get its own mall. Facebook put together that mall now, it serves as land lord and it polices itself somewhat to the extent of not pissing off its users to the extent of serving its own needs.

That's not a very hard intuitive idea to pick up. Piss off Google, get delisted, and poof, same thing. Piss off Ebay, get banned, and poof, same thing. Piss off Uber, get blacklisted, and poof, same thing. Piss in the community pool and get kicked out.

So here's the big so what: saying screw it and doing it yourself is also really, really hard. Try to match up the vanity facebook numbers yourself on the wild wild web. Explain to the average person how to buy a domain name, setup web hosting, login to FTP, setup a blog, add content, add social sharing plugins, comments plugins, recommendation plugins, then convince millions to pay attention without the benefit of a push-pull network in effect.

That's not even what the writer's intent is with this article. All of that has been stale since the IPO days. We're way past the IPO days--Facebook is a great walled garden. We're also way past the privacy days--privacy is dead.

We're now at the part asking: is Facebook a public utility or not? Does it want to be? Does it want to be treated as such? Does it deserve to be treated as such? Will it then kowtow to serve the public as such?

That's what all these recent #facebook posts are really wagon circling around. Wondering out loud why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president with the dawning of the realization that as a corporate master, he doesn't have to to be presidential.

PS: The internet at 100MM people was pretty f-ing great. But the internet at 7B scares the living bejesus out of me. But I'm not going to be running to declare make the internet great again. There is no shame in this. Just rational and pragmatic decisions to be made to keep going forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> > why Zuckerberg doesn't want to run for office as president. He doesn't have > to to be president.

Reminds me of the scene in snow crash with a vastly diminished POTUS.

<comment><USER3> When will the clock reset and kids grow up to remember something besides 70's pulp scifi as a reference point to what dystopian future was suppose to be like? Maybe something good will come out next year.

<comment><USER4> Considering George Orwell's "1984" hit the top of the Amazon bestseller list a little while ago, I think the classics are here to stay.

That said, no one's stopping you from "resetting the clock" yourself. If you were to write some decent dystopian-future novels, I know a few people (including yours truly) who would appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Moral of the story: Don't sharecrop

Building something on the web on your own platform means you own it, control it, and are not beholden to anyone or any company provided you are reasonably within the law.

Building an app for iPhone? You're sharecropping. Android App? Sharecropping. Facebook? YouTube? You guessed it.

My friend Ryan Bates build railscasts.com but has been on hiatus for almost 4 years. Even so, his site still has value, and at any time he can pick it back up again and start rebuilding. If you love freedom, I don't know why you would pour your life, mind, and skill into anything that's sharecropping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. The trade-off that might cause one to "share crop" (which is a great analogy) is the reach one can get. It is a lot easier to build an audience on Twitter or Facebook than on the open web, because that is where the people are. Building an app for the iPhone or Android markets? That's where the people are (though fewer folks install apps than in the past).

The key is to know that you will be forced to transition off that platform, and to build for that day. (Instagram lived through this, meerkat did not: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks- ins...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-instagram- friend-finding-api) )

<comment><USER6> There's no trade-off. You can use platforms like facebook or twitter to increase your exposure and reach, but make sure the real content is either hosted on or duplicated on a site you control. That way, if one platform decides to kick you off, you're not completely toast.

Unfortunately, that's not an option for iPhone app makers. Those people (and their incomes) are at the mercy of Apple.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't FB specifically reward users who use its native (captive) tools? If so there's a reward to being a sharecropper and thus there is a trade off.

Agreed that Twitter does not have such tools.

<comment><USER8> FB certainly shows posts with photo and video uploads attached to more users than text and link posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook is comparable to opium in the 18-19th century. Dictated by powerful organization, some considered it harmful but most considered it normal, addictive in nature, and people consuming it wastes precious time. In no way I am saying facebook equals opium, just pointing out some aspects of it is potentially dangerous to our generation (So as many other stuff, e.g tobacco, alcohol, etc).

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree with other commenters that we should post our original content on our own domains. That is what I do and then use social media platforms to point back to my domain.

That said, even with some danger of depending on other peoples platforms, there is a revolution happening that involves platforms that connect creators and users/customers.

I depend on Leanpub and Amazon to publish my eBooks and as a new business I am implementing mobile apps for both Apple's and Google's platforms. In the antifragile sense (from Nassim Taleb's book by that name), even though access to one of these four platforms might go away, access to each being fragile, spreading out over four platforms hopefully makes my business antifragile.

<comment><USER11> >post our original content on our own domains

I don't have $50,000 to buy a memorable, pronounceable .com off a squatter.

Like San Francisco real estate, domain names work for the people who were lucky enough to get them while get getting was good. The rest of us are screwed.

99% of the value Facebook provides is a "DNS" for real names which resolves collisions nicely using your social graph (i.e. it knows which John Smith you mean).

<comment><USER12> I've bought many memorable, pronounceable .com domains and never paid more than $12.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely.

(It is pronounced "ziff-skick-squirtle-ubb-liorate" not "ziff-skick-squirtle- oob-liorate" isn't it?)

<comment><USER12> I mean 2 very common English words put together.

For example I just thought of 2 common arbitrary words, tried them, and it's an available domain: roundwagon.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _blocked from Facebook after using its messaging tool to share sensitive > photos_

A few months ago there was a report (that got a won't-fix response from the bounty programme) that images shared privately over messenger are accessible by API if a guessable ID is known.

That's one thing, and obviously conversations are not encrypted, but now the above quote - not only are they insecure, but they're actually being actively snooped on.

I've nothing to hide, etc. - but I'm talking to my friend; not to Facebook - and it's from my own country's police service that I've nothing to hide, not some private-sector company in America.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a society we are going to have to figure something out: if intellectual property has value, then content contributors are adding value. That means kicking them off is depriving them of the value of their labor.

In the public sphere, we would say they are being deprived of property without due process. In the world of private companies, there is no such protection. For one thing, all the mechanisms we create to ensure due process, ability to appeal, know the charges against you, and seek redress... those cost time, effort, and money.

Platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube/Google occupy an interesting space. They sometimes act like common carriers and most users implicitly assume the company doesn't meddle or play favorites. False. The companies can and do play favorites (who supplies the highest quality impressions? who has the best conversion rate? who pays back the most in ad dollars?)

Contributors kind of just assume they have some property rights in the things they create. False.

Contributors assume they have some means of redress when an unjust action occurs. False.

The "sharecropping" analogy is apt, but even sharecroppers had better contracts than content creators today have!

Historically, whole systems of government have been tried and replaced to work out fair and just (or at least acceptably unjust) systems. The European revolutions of the 1850's were largely about land use conflicts. Part of the French Revolution was about the conflict between renters and landowners.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's pretty crazy that it took that long (and pressure from a very public entity like NPR) to get this lady Facebook access again.

"Move fast and break things", indeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, after two behind the scenes Facebook contacts at that. Seems like Facebook would benefit by putting a better process in place, though of course we don't hear about the reinstatements where everything went swimmingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >So Nyaira decided to share the photos with him on Messenger (Facebook's private chat tool).

>That was a big mistake. Almost instantly, Facebook's computer software deactivated her.

I thought Facebook was using the Signal protocol from Open Whisper for Messenger, so that even Facebook cannot access the content.

Are pictures/attachment in clear? Or was it the previous version? What's the situation today?

<comment><USER18> E2E encrypted chats aren't by default. But they did achieve what they planned - you thought they were because you saw it mentioned sometime somewhere, but didn't look into the fine details. When reading headlines, a person might memorize "facebook encrypted chats available", but the devil is always in the details.

<comment><USER17> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is imagining humans to be useful in a way I wouldn't expect. You have a guy who posted a lot of paid ads despite warnings, and a woman who genuinely did post child pornography. Do we really imagine that reaching a human would have somehow changed the outcome?

They definitely did violate the rules, so I imagine the call center employee would just confirm it, tell them as much, and hang up.

<comment><USER20> In the second case, at the very least there were rational, honest reasons for her doing so, and a human being is at least capable of discerning context and making a judgement call, even if it's just to kick the issue up the chain to someone who has the authority to rule on the issue.

<comment><USER19> Sure, it's _possible_ for a human to make such a judgement call, but most of the time call center staff are going to be working from a script and trying to get done with your call as fast as possible.

There's not going to be a path on their script for "was indeed child porn, but it seems okay", except perhaps for account theft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well written article and actually impressed if they made the guy prove his income.

</comment><comment><USER22> "meme-maker"

[A Tirade Filled With Seething Rage]</comment>


How to Price Your Product or Service-To Avoid Killing Your Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.erica.biz/2012/pricing-strategies/

<comment><USER2> Guilty as charged: sometimes (depending on what the item is), I can be a super cheap bastard .. maybe too frugal. A poor startup founder can't be spending money like water :)

I've run into many startup founders who try to sell me something that (1) Is not big enough of a pain for me to want to pay to solve and (2) I'm not fully convinced that the "buy from someone else" option is better than the "build myself" option.

It's an uphill battle for them, and I tell them I just might not be in their market. p.s. Granted sometimes I err on being too frugal and just need to outsource more, but the person selling to me is just fighting an additional layer of objections, at their expense :/</comment>


Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/your-idea-sucks-now-go-do-it-anyway.html

<comment><USER2> Great overview of two ideas that wouldn't have gone anywhere unless the founders got started somewhere. Good motiviation!

<comment><USER3> Yes, but too bad no one ever writes blog posts about the millions of bad ideas that just turn into other bad ideas. That's the narrative bias in action.

<comment><USER4> There's always a cynic, huh?

I think the point of this article is not that all bad ideas turn into good ideas or good companies, just that many good ideas and companies started out as bad ideas. So if you have an idea and you're not starting because you don't think it's good enough, that's a lousy excuse.

What's your solution: continue with the Eeyore routine and never start anything because there are millions of failures out there?

<comment><USER3> The purpose of the comment was not to be cynical, but to poke a hole in the logic of the article. Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so when we cannot predict the success of startups, we look at already successful startups, analyze their history, and create a story for why they became successful while others did not.

In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed.

<comment><USER5> _Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so when we cannot predict the success of startups, we look at already successful startups, analyze their history, and create a story for why they became successful while others did not. In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb._

I agree with the premise of your first two paragraphs, that often people will try to explain situations without being a participant of those events while decisions were being made. However, you have not shown that this premise applies to this article, which is a "logical hole" in your own statement. In fact, the stories mentioned by the blogger happen to be well known to be accurate, straight from the mouths of the founders of those companies.

 _I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed._

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article. The author says a friend wants to start a business but is waiting for a perfect idea (and logically believes the audience of the blog may as well.) So he suggests that he go for it anyway, and adjust his idea as he goes. He then gives examples of companies that kept changing their ideas as they went along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a good post.

This reminds me of something I used to think in my creative writing classes: you're a real writer when you're prepared to say "this is how bad I suck", and put your work out there anyway. I met so many people who called themselves "writers", but if I asked to read something they'd written, they hadn't produced a single complete work they'd call their best effort.

Once you really put it out there, for all to see, you have to let go of your fantasy about how great you are and confront the reality that this really does represent you as a writer.

It's so similar with code and programmers. There are so many people who like talking about what it means to be a programmer, what it means to write code... but you aren't a real programmer until you put something out there, warts and all, and say "yep, this is my work, for better and for worse."

</comment><comment><USER7> Basically, it doesn't matter what direction you're going when you try to climb the hill; it just matters that you're _building momentum_. Once you've got that, anyone (a VC, for instance) can point you in the right direction, and you'll be an instant success; without it, even the best idea will get slogged in a Sisyphean cycle of bad implementations.

</comment><comment><USER8> um...bad ideas isn't one big contiguous space. there are good bad ideas and bad bad ideas. good bad ideas are those where you are trying to solve a problem or do something fun, but your execution isn't that great. bad bad ideas are those that invent a problem that doesn't exist and then solve it (watch infomercials).

<comment><USER9> But I would have thought that the MoneyBeamer example from the article (becomes PayPal) would classify as a bad bad idea going by your definition, and yet...

I think that the important thing is that you need to build the full widget, even if it is a bad idea. At some point during widget development, you'll nearly always have to solve a problem that could be applied to another domain with more success.

<comment><USER8> I think the core idea was just to make money exchange easier via electronic means. their implementation was a good bad idea. But I think it depends on how much resources you are going to commit to it. building a widget = no risk. starting a company based on moneybeaming was a bigger risk. With cheap implementations you can afford to play around with bad bad ideas until you at least get a good bad one. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Worth it just for the screenshot of Game Neverending - never saw the genesis of Flickr before, only read about it.

<comment><USER11> I was actually one of their alpha testers. It wasn't that fun. You'd basically go around to trees and collect different colored paper. If you got enough reams of blue paper you could trade it in for red paper. Then if you got enough red paper you could trade it in for purple paper. That's all there really was. The game might have gotten better when it went into beta, but I think I stopped playing with it long before then.</comment></comment>


Wage-Slaves - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/17/wage-slaves/ <comment><USER2> Whether "millennial hipster game developers" are actually lazy or not seems to be besides the point. Hasn't it already been consistently proven that working more than 45 hours is much less productive than a steady 40-45 hour work week? What's the actual business justification for that besides massaging egos or trying to enforce some masochistic culture?

</comment><comment><USER3> The author may call it thought provoking but i feel there are some quite dangerous ideas in his mind and a severe lack of perspective.

While saying he hates wage-slaves, he seems to treat everyone under him like a slave.

This pdf on the website is kinda scary, i couldn't help but to feel offended: [http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...](http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pdf)

Also, using the word millennial just tells me you are a grumpy old guy yelling at kids to get off your lawn.</comment>


Iceland makes blasphemy legal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33378778 <comment><USER2> In Ireland blasphemy was made a crime in 2009! There was a provision in the constitution that mandated it be defined but politicians never got around to it which kind of left it an open ended question but decided it would be a good idea to follow through on the provision and define it.

Atheist Ireland campaigned against it as Ireland as it was being introduced as Ireland was clearly becoming more secular and non religious and yet we were introducing religious laws and leaving its Catholic past behind.

It was controversial internationally because Ireland is an advanced Western country and then Pakistan literally lifted the wording straight from Irish law and implemented in their own law which granted the action some legitimacy.

That said the law actually has no teeth and was challenged by Michael Nugent of AI who released 25 blasphemous statements to show that he'd never be convicted. [http://atheist.ie/2010/01/25-blasphemous- quotations/](http://atheist.ie/2010/01/25-blasphemous-quotations/)

Its an interesting selection as Jesus and Mohammed, the Pope and a slew of comedians, politicians and creatives are quoted.

<comment><USER3> Ireland held a "Constitutional Convention" to consider this and a bunch of other changes. They decided to introduce referenda on some of them, including removing the requirement for blasphemy to be illegal. So far they've held referenda on reducing the age at which a person becomes eligible to be president (result: rejected by a large majority) and on permitting same-sex marriage (result: accepted by a sizeable majority). There is not likely to be a referendum on blasphemy until after the general election in 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meanwhile New Zealand will put you in jail for offending someone on the Internet:

[http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11473545)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I've lived here all my life and I didn't realise this had been passed.

"A new offence will now be created of sending messages or posting material online that were intended to cause harm, and did so."

Really worrying, that. If I were to say, "NZ's National Party government is really shitty, and everyone reading this should not ever come to NZ, ever!" and people listened, does that mean I just caused... harm to a political party? It's so vague and stupid it's not funny! Ahhhhh!

EDIT: If anyone is interested in a write up about this; [http://aardvark.co.nz/daily/2015/0702.shtml](http://aardvark.co.nz/daily/2015/0702.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Germany we have this law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#Germany)

</comment><comment><USER7> Kind of crazy that it wasn't already legal, to be honest

<comment><USER8> Not the same thing, but I'm always perplexed that the normally free-expression country of Germany prohibits Nazi symbols and salutes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a)

You'll even go to jail if your DOG does a nazi salute!! [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dogs-nazi- sal...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dogs-nazi-salute-lands- owner-in-jail-for-five-months-766438.html)

<comment><USER9> When something can't do any good to anyone, but rather the contrary, it makes sense to forbid or restrict it.

<comment><USER10> Do you really believe that?

"Can't bring any good to anyone" is such a low bar for making something illegal. I understand restrictions in the case that an action actively hurts someone, but only permitting actions that the government deems good is a worrisome trend.

Even if an action appears to do some small harm, I would argue it is often more harmful to ban it. A ban suggests enforcement and punishment, and in marginal cases, the cost of banning an action can be greater than the reward of its absence.

Finally, some people believe that the ability to determine for oneself whether an action is good is a benefit in its own right. I for one would much prefer for the government not to tell me with such absolute certainty the morality of my expressions.

Just my personal stance.

<comment><USER9> > Do you really believe that?

I do, but it's not important. I was trying to state the average point of view of European countries.

> "Can't bring any good to anyone" is such a low bar for making something > illegal

Perhaps the wrong wording, but by this I meant "obviously" bad actions. Driving while being drunk doesn't right away cause harm (if you're lucky enough), but it is dangerous and therefore unacceptable. Hate speech doesn't cause direct harm because "that's just words after all", but hatred is dangerous and spreading it is considered not acceptable by a majority of people.

> I for one would much prefer for the government not to tell me with such > absolute certainty the morality of my expressions

Individual rights and the rights of the People are in conflict (e.g. the right to go naked versus the right not to have to see you naked). In democratic countries, it is solved by letting the people vote laws to strike a balance between the two. At least in theory, it's not the government that tells you what moral and what is not: it's the people around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shouldn't it be "Iceland abolished blasphemy" ?

<comment><USER12> No. The act of blasphemy has not been abolished, but it is no longer a crime.

Blasphemy is subjective. What is blasphemy to one person is common sense to another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Aha, Britain demonizes Iceland because it allowed to hunt for banksters in 2013. And UK banksters are the most notorious.</comment>


Where to start a company: Berlin vs London - <AUTHOR> http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/entrepreneurship/where-to-start-a-company-berlin-vs-london.html

<comment><USER2> He is really forgetting about Stockholm. There was an article on HN before talking about this: [http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/20/why-tiny-stockholm-has- the-...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/20/why-tiny-stockholm-has-the-most- stunning-startup-ecosystem-since-tel-aviv/)</comment>


Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students' Essays - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa7dj9/flawed-algorithms-are-grading-millions-of-students-essays <comment><USER3> > Utah has been using AI as the primary scorer on its standardized tests for > several years. "It was a major cost to our state to hand score, in addition > to very time consuming," said Cydnee Carter, the state's assessment > development coordinator. The automated process also allowed the state to > give immediate feedback to students and teachers, she said.

Yes, education takes time and costs money. Yes, not educating is both cheaper and faster. Note how the rationalizing ignores the needs of the students and the quality of the education.

I live in Utah and my children have been subjected to this automated essay scoring here. One night I came home from work and my son and wife were both in tears, frustrated with each other and frustrated with the essay scoring which refused to give a high enough score to meet what the teacher said was required, no matter how good the essay was. My wife wrote versions herself from scratch and couldn't get the required score. When I got involved, I did the same with the same results.

Turns out the instructions said the essay would be scored on verbal efficiency; getting the point across clearly with the fewest words. I started playing around and realized that the more words I added, the higher the score, whether they were relevant or grammatical or not. Random unrelated sentences pasted in the middle would increase the score. We found a letter of petition online for banning automated scoring for the purposes of grades or student evaluation of any kind. It was very long, so it got a perfect score. I encouraged my son to submit it, and he did. Later I visited his teacher to explain and to urge her to not use automated scoring. She listened and then told me about how much time it saves and how fast students get feedback. :/

<comment><USER4> Frankly, I can't believe what I am reading. The idea that some "AI" grades essays automatically is idiotic and has nothing to do with education. Where is the place for discussions? Where is the place for ideas confrontation? Where is the place for writing style development? How this AI is supposed to grade things like repetitions (that can be either good rhetorical tool or a mistake, depending on context), etc?

Who the hell came out with such an idea. I would even hesitate to use "AI" for automatic spell checking as it is sufficient to give some character unusual name and it will be marked as error.

My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some software that will generate essay that Utah "AI" likes.

<comment><USER5> _My guess is that soon or later people will learn how to game that AI._

Already been done. [http://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo- grading/babel...](http://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo- grading/babel-generator/)

Here's a sample essay that is complete nonsense and got a perfect score on the GRE.

[http://lesperelman.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/6-6_ScoreI...](http://lesperelman.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/6-6_ScoreItNow_2015_Feb20.pdf)

<comment><USER6> The final paragraph from that example is steaming gibberish that nobody could mistake for English:

"Calling has not, and undoubtedly never will be aggravating in the way we encounter mortification but delineate the reprimand that should be inclination. Nonetheless, armed with the knowledge that the analysis augurs stealth with propagandists, almost all of the utterances on my authorization journey. Since sanctions are performed at knowledge, a quantity of vocation can be more gaudily inspected. Knowledge will always be a part of society.Vocation is the most presumptuously perilous assassination of mankind."

Yet the robo-scoring acclaims it as:

* articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task * develops the position fully with compelling reasons and/or persuasive examples * sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically * conveys ideas fluently and precisely, using effective vocabulary and sentence variety * demonstrates superior facility with the conventions of standard written English (i.e., grammar, usage, and mechanics) but may have minor errors

Any teacher faced with the requirement to use such tools would be better placed instructing their class on civil disobedience.

<comment><USER7> The let me posit another idea...

There's 2 ways of finding out these artifacts of AI essay grading: pure luck, and being able to afford extensive test-prep (rich).

The luck one can't be accounted for. So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI grading is to find and escalate rich people.

<comment><USER8> > So I im lead to believe that the purpose of these essays and their AI > grading is to find and escalate rich people.

Well, of course. How many poor people are allowed to decide what is good for children's education?

<comment><USER7> The standard US response is:

'There's a reason why they're poor. Better pull themselves up by the bootstraps."

Mixed alongside with poverty stricken neighborhoods are the primary funding, resulting in poor school systems. And those students obviously wont have the money or the access to get the test-prep needed to "succeed".

It's all too laid out to be accidental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.)

One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?"

It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.)

She saw answers that would make you weep.

"My daddy touches me."

"I haven't eaten today. I don't know when I'm going to eat again."

Stuff like that.

And my mother was going to be the only human who ever saw their responses. Their teacher had no chance to see their responses, just my mom.

So she goes to her supervisor and asks, "What can we do to help these kids?"

The supervisor said there was nothing you can do. Just grade the answers.

<comment><USER10> Some of these will be 100% true as well. But don't make the mistake that there are no kids who go for shock value or are wantonly manipulative when they know it can't come back to them.

So how many are true and how many false? I have no clue. Literally none. And no it doesn't make me feel any better about the screams of existential agony even if that were a low percentage. Could be high too.

<comment><USER11> For the not eating, it's pretty easy to get data. It's like 1 in 5 children live in food-insecure households in the US and maybe 1 in 20 of those very insecure, so not eating before school provided lunch is common enough that if you're grading tons of papers you'll run into kids like that.

<comment><USER12> It could also be a student suffering from anorexia nervosa, which the confessional aspects of the essay would fit well with.

<comment><USER8> I'm confident that your example would of a less percentage than those mentioned in dmoy's comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.

<comment><USER14> In a forum of CS people I'm surprised this is one of the top opinions. Our field is full of super surprising results like this -- that you don't have to actually understand the text at beyond basic grammar structures to reasonably accurately predict the score a human would give it.

Like this kind of thing should be _cool_ , not insane. I mean wasn't it cool in your AI class when you learned that DFS could play Mario if you structured the search space right?

<comment><USER15> I came first in English for my school, many moons ago. Leading up to the finals, I regularly finished ahead of the hard core the English essay people, generally to my amusement. My exam essay responses were generally half the length (sometimes even shorter) than the prodigious writers. Although I've an ok vocabulary, I always made sure I made the right choice of word to hit a specific meaning, rather than choosing words with a high syllable count.

I'd find it highly interesting to see what kind of result I'd get using an automated system.

Why?

Because, I once asked a teacher (also an examiner) why I got good grades above the others, and the answer surprised me: my answers were generally unique /refreshingly different, to the point/ not too long and easy to read.

I suspect with this new system, I'd be an average student. It'd also be interesting to find out, several years down the road, if the automated system could be gamed at all -- I suspect it could, and teachers would help students 'maximise' their scores as a result of that.

<comment><USER16> It seems plausible that, under this system, you would eventually have learned to write longer essays. To my mind, that would be a school teaching you to be worse.

In fact, throughout the article I kept being surprised by the idea that long is good. When writing, I tend to prefer being brief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unlike a multiple choice test where the primary audience is automated graders, the primary audience for an essay is other humans. If even Google and Facebook with their billions of dollars and billions of posts worth of data, still cannot always understand the intent and purpose of written content, what hope do these algorithms have?

If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should be dropped from the tests. Otherwise, we are missing the whole point of essays which is to communicate effectively with another human, not just match certain text patterns.

<comment><USER18> If it is cost-prohibitive then then maybe we should adjust the economic model, not abandon the measurement.

<comment><USER16> Sure, have less essay test questions, and start grading them for content not form.

If you want to grade on form to test the ability to write correct rather than coherent sentences, make those separate questions, and mark them so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "In most machine scoring states, any of the randomly selected essays with wide discrepancies between human and machine scores are referred to another human for review".

And "between 5 to 20 percent" of essays are randomly selected for human review.

So the takeaway is that if you're one of the 80-95% of (typically black or female) people who the machine scored dramatically lower, but are not selected for human review, your education future is systematically fucked and you have no knowledge of why or how to change it.

Absolutely reprehensible. Anyone involved in the creation or adoption of these systems should be ashamed.

<comment><USER20> The thing is, you could be similarly screwed by a biased human whose grading is not checked by a less biased human.

At least the machines offer the following hope: even if unbiased humans are rare among paper-grading teachers, those humans can be used to train the machines, so then bias-free or lower-bias grading becomes more ubiquitous.

Basically, the system has the potential for systematically identifying and reducing systematic bias. A computer program can be retrained much more readily than nation-wide army of humans. Humans can be given a lecture on bias, and then they will just return to their ways.

<comment><USER21> AI has a lot more potential for bias than humans. It depends on the input data which is likely heavily biased based on other data set results like face detection. It will only amplify any small bias present in the data.

<comment><USER14> It's amazing to see how the general opinion of CS people has _completely shifted_ in the last few years from "algorithmic scoring is important in removing the bias from human graders" to the exact opposite.

<comment><USER20> If we can quantify the bias in the machine, that gives us an opportunity to close the feedback loop and control the bias.

The bias comes from the human-generated training data in the first place; the machine isn't introducing its own. For instance, the machine has no inherent concept of disparaging someone's language because it's from an identifiable inner city dialect. If it picks up that bias, at least it will apply it consistently. When we investigate the machine, the machine will not know that it's being investigated and will not try to conceal its bias from us.

On the other hand, eliminating bias from humans basically means this: producing a new litter of small humans and teaching them better than their predecessors.

<comment><USER21> If...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Personal anecdote;

I remember taking a standardized test, can't remember if it was SAT or CSAT (Colorado pre-SAT test). This was at a time when I'm confident that humans were the graders.

I started with an intro that would be appropriate for a standard 5 paragraph essay; i.e. the thing you write when you don't know what you're talking about and you're just following a format.

In the third paragraph I took a leaf from family guy, and just interjected "WAFFLES, NICE CRISPY WAFFLES, WITH LOTS OF SYRUP." for the next page and a half, I berated the very foundation of the essay prompt, insulting it the way only an angst ridden early teen can.

... I got a 98% on the essay.

Fast forward several years. I write an essay for for an introductory college course final. My paper is returned to me with a coffee stain and a "94% - <USER2> work!" note scribbled on the top. That note was scribbled by a TA that would turn out to be my girlfriend for 2 years. One night in bed, she tilts her laptop to me, showing an article that I used as the central theme to the above essay; "can you believe this?"

"Are you joking? Of course I can believe this, it was the subject of the essay you gave me an A on 2 years ago"

She admits she didn't read past the first paragraph of anything she grades, and just bases grades on intuition based on how articulate the essays are at the outset.

...

The point I'm making:

Does AI suck at judging the amount of informative content in a student essay? YES

Do humans suck at judging the amount of informative content in a student essay? ALSO YES

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great example of why it's grossly irresponsible for members of the ML community to talk about how AGI is just around the corner. In addition to the fact that we have no idea whether this is true, it primes a naive public for believing that technologies like this are worth the tradeoff.

"People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world."

</comment><comment><USER24> I imagine that any student that experimented with the form of the essay or wrote an exceptionally well argued piece in simple language would not have their test graded appropriately either.

Any essay writing test which could be adequately graded by a machine is not testing anything of value.

Edit: I'll further add that as soon as people's careers depend on a metric, the metric becomes useless as a metric, because it will be gamed and manipulated by everyone involved. Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student's writing ability.

<comment><USER25> _Almost nobody involved is incentivized to accurately measure student's writing ability_

It's the same reason you see keyword posters in math education. "Together" means "plus", that kind of thing. It's completely worthless, except for one- step problems, and even then it doesn't always work. What is happening is collusion between teachers and testmakers. You can't teach understanding, but you can teach test-passing techniques because the way the test is set permits this.

You see the same thing here, in English you can get away with not teaching quality writing if you teach techniques to score well.

<comment><USER14> I feel like the mistake is assuming that essay writing is about the content. It's just a thing to give the student something barely non-trivial to write about.

When your essays are graded they're marked down for mechanical and wording problems. There's really no point in trying or grade 'good ideas' on a subject piece you had maybe 10 minutes to skim.

<comment><USER25> _a subject piece you had maybe 10 minutes to skim_

That's a travesty, and you know it because when the kids are in college and they have as much time as they like to write their assignments they all use the wrong words and then misapply them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To me this brings up the absurdity of having essays on standardized tests. What about an essay is standardized? It's a totally nonsensical premise.

This always gets made into some kind of techluminati conspiracy for the machines to ingrain structural racism whereas it's pretty clear all the algorithms fail to do is improve an already bad situation stemming from a flawed premise.

<comment><USER27> A number of states found out their schools were graduating students who genuinely could not read or write effectively. If you want to quantify that, you're forced to test it somehow. How would you test writing ability without asking them to write something?

<comment><USER26> Reading comprehension with simple factual questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any state that relies on the AI as the primary grader does not understand the current state of AI.

It would make sense to use the AI as a first pass, and then not _randomly_ grade the essays with a human, but specifically choose all the essays that are on the cusp of the pass fail line. Then use all those human generated scores to update the model, especially if someone moves from pass to fail or fail to pass. Then maybe throw in a few of the really high and really low outliers to make sure _those_ are right, and throw away your entire model if the human scores are drastically different (and obviously don't tell the humans what the computer score was so they have no idea if they're reading a "cusp" essay or an outlier essay).

But putting the educational fate (and therefore future earnings) in the hands of an AI is unconscionable.

<comment><USER29> But I bet the company took the decision makers to a really nice restaurant _nudge_ _nudge_

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think machine learned grading of papers is insane, but at the same time I don't think we should be training or encouraging students to speak in AAVE (as the article suggests).

I think the right approach for machine learned systems is to automatically "whitelist" essays rather than "blacklisting" them. Students in the middle of the distribution of essays aren't really interesting, so whitelist them, give them a pass. Those at the extremes can be either exceptional or terrible, but usually terrible. The judgement of those at the extremes should be decided by a human, not a machine. You wouldn't want to blacklist the Einstein of essays because he did something genius that is indistinguishable from insanity.

However, I think there are some essays that can automatically be blacklisted. For example, those with:

1\. Plagiarism (perhaps human moderated)

2\. Extremely low word count

3\. Extremely high count of fake words

And at the end of the day, these essay assignments aren't there to judge whether a student is the next writing sensation; they are given to judge whether the student can write legible sentences and words, to ensure they are prepared for the future. So perhaps it is at least possible to automatically blacklist on sentence structure and spelling (you should just lose points for invalid structure or invalid words, you shouldn't gain points for big words or complicated sentences). To make this fair, the student should be informed of this requirement. If they are informed and still fail, then they need to be remediated. If we discover that a disproportionate number of minorities are getting blacklisted, then we should investigate why the school is failing to teach them proper sentence structure and spelling, not pretend we can change the world to make AAVE an acceptable dialect of english in the workplace.

</comment><comment><USER31> The underlying problem is that reading essays with a careful critical eye is _not_ scalable. But another issue this highlights is the complete misalignment of incentives of the people who greenlit the adoption of this technology. Because educational outcomes are much harder to evaluate over the course of a bureaucrat's tenure than budget sizes (longer time horizon and many exogenous variables), there is a natural inclination to make decisions that reduce costs as long as they don't have any _obvious_ (to them or their superiors) adverse outcome for students. This is a pretty low bar, especially so given that most bureaucrats do not have the background necessary to evaluate technical solutions.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've heard stories from others in the industry of companies using tools like this on their _human-facing_ documentation and requiring a certain score from them. Imagine using Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checker, not being able to add or override its decisions (without following an extremely lengthy and bureaucratic process), and being required to have less than X "defects" per 100 words. Naturally, this results in documentation that is perfectly grammatical and free of spelling errors, but verbose, full of unusual phrasing, and next to useless for its actual purpose of informing a human.

Grading students' code using a machine is not such a bad idea in contrast, because in that case there is [1] no exceptions possible in a programming language, [2] the machine (compiler) has to understand it anyway, and [3] it does save time verifying correctness. But communication in a human language really needs to be assessed by humans. Anyone who thinks "AI" can accurately assess human language is either severely delusional, or trying to make $$$ from it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am working with reducing the time teachers spend on exams and assessments. I have access to a cleaned and manually scored dataset of 550k essays that is exponentially growing. Looked at creating at a model based on this dataset to automatically score essays with NLP parameters such as grammar, structure, spelling, word complexity, sentiment, relative text length etc.

The problem that I encountered was actually how to apply it in a useful way, since the problems mentioned in the article are quite obvious when you design the model.

Options that I saw:

1\. Use it as autonomous grading with optional review by the teacher, see the linked article for the problems with this.

2\. Use it as a sanity check on the teachers manual scoring, but it would not reduce the work load and probably just undermine the teacher.

Do you have any suggestions for how such a model could be applied in a practical and ethical way?

Had some thoughts on how to measure actual knowledge about a subject, but that would require a massive knowledge graph which would introduce a huge amount of complexity just to see if it would be a feasible approach.

<comment><USER34> Here are some thoughts: 1\. Instead of grading, maybe you can use it for training, tutoring. If a student is learning to write essays, I'm assuming it's hard for them to get any feedback. 2\. But then there's probably not enough money to be earned there.

One trick might be to write an independent AI to summarize the essay back and see how closely it matches the essay title. This might weed out gibberish essays with sound English sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Such a stupid application of technology. It looks as if learning is completely out of fashion nowadays.

First of all, complaining about minorities getting lower grades because their English is not as sophisticated as that of others is the inversion of the idea of teaching. That feedback is actually great. We have machines that can give that feedback (e.g., grammarly)? Then use it to make everyone's writing better. Grades are just a measure of the success of learning, after all. I never got why one would not allow a student to repeat a particular test as often as they like, tbh.

Second, grading essays this way is a clear violation of the idea of teaching. _What_ do you want the students to learn? Structure? Knowledge transfer? Grammar? Writing an essay is such a complex task it is a really too broad goal. And then naturally grading becomes quite difficult.

</comment><comment><USER36> While this is already terrible, I'm aware of a few project that are trying to do the same with scientific literature. Basically they are trying to train models for scoring literatures based on their quality, novelty and what not. At the current rate and state of AI, I cannot ever imagine this is going to work.

It was a few weeks ago that someone shared "The Dark Age of AI" on HN [1]. I think we are promising way over what Drew McDermott thought we would not going to promise. This is to the extend that we are applying AI on assessing Art, Creativity and even quality and novelty of Science, something that in a way we don't even understand (or trying to understand) ourselves at the time that we are publishing it.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20546503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20546503)

</comment><comment><USER37> Grading... algorithms... for essays? How/why is that even a thing? That's absolutely insane. You can't grade someone's writing skills using algorithms. That is totally counter to providing a proper education. My mind is officially boggled.

</comment><comment><USER38> Quality of educational is proportional to quality of evaluation.

Evaluation of how well someone follows arbitrary language conventions is worse than useless.

I only got to university English 101 outside of some technical writing in the engineering department, but I have to say none of my education in writing was worth anything past elementary school. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things to teach and evaluate, to be fair, but I feel like I am missing a huge chunk of my education and general ability because of it. I can't write or form an argument particularly well, rambling on HN and the like is the closest thing to education I have had.

Prescriptive language rules are not entirely useless. That is the best you can say about them.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would like to see how it scored on essays by great writers. "Sorry Mr Tolkien, I'm afraid you have to go to community college first."

<comment><USER40> In my state, it's going to be "Sorry Mr Tolkien, but we eliminated all of the departments that are not STEM enough."

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm normally pretty open minded but this is just stupid. AI is nowhere near literate enough for this task. What kind of world is it when humans create merely for the consumption of machines. The product of our creativity deserves better.

I would support any student who refuses to consent to their work being used in this fashion.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wish this machine bias wasn't always presented in such divisive terms as race and "disadvantaged groups". It can affect anybody. If you happened to develop a writing style that looks like typical bad essay writers' style, then you could be hurt by bias in the grading.

<comment><USER43> If an image processing algorithm fails to recognize black people or worse, profiles them, how else should this be described but in terms of race?

If you don't talk about the actual problem, how can you possibly expect to solve it?

<comment><USER42> There are many classes of people who have problems of discrimination. Short, ugly, ginger, etc. The intersections of all those classes are so numerous that everybody will have some disadvantage. But it won't be apparent unless you define their class and measure it.

<comment> crooked-v That's just substituting in smaller or harder-to-define minority groups, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> From the article: " _All essays scored by E-rater are also graded by a human_ and discrepancies are sent to a second human for a final grade. Because of that system, ETS does not believe any students have been adversely affected by the bias detected in E-rater."

<comment><USER45> Also from the article:

> Of those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human. But in > the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students' essays—it > varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly selected for a human grader > to double check the machine's work.

So that applies only in a minority of cases.

<comment><USER44> Oops, my mistake! That's worse than I thought!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > the engines also focus heavily on metrics like sentence length, vocabulary, > spelling, and subject-verb agreement... The systems are also unable to judge > more nuanced aspects of writing, like creativity.

This reminds me of a wonderful essay/speech by Stephen Fry on the harm done by pedantry. I also feel that schools focus so much on a single structure of essay writing and similarly take the joy out of language.

[https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY](https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY)

</comment><comment><USER47> This is a natural development of industrialized education. Treating children as individual thinkers would require for more resources and manpower than our system would like to provide.

</comment><comment><USER48> Bringing SEO mentality to standardized testing what could go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER49> Absolute garbage. Kids would be better educated by reading and posting on HN than they would by attending English classes in one of the states that uses these tools.

</comment><comment><USER50> Here's a thought: if classwork and homework is getting so overwhelming that teachers can't possibly grade all of it, then it's overwhelming for the STUDENTS too, and they shouldn't freaking be assigning so much busywork. You don't need a 5 page essay to determine whether a kid has read a book. You can figure that out really quickly in a classroom discussion without anyone having to lift a pencil.

<comment><USER51> > Here's a thought: if classwork and homework is getting so overwhelming that > teachers can't possibly grade all of it, then it's overwhelming for the > STUDENTS too

There's no necessary connection there, especially if one of the reasons that teachers are being overwhelmed is that the teacher/student ratio is increasing.

> You don't need a 5 page essay to determine whether a kid has read a book.

No, you need it to determine whether a student has (1) read and understood a book well enough to apply structured thought to the contents and (2) has developed the writing skills to write a 5-page essay.

Determining whether a student read a book is rarely, on its own, of significant interest in school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Reminds me of the plagiarism checker they had at my partners university, they would check identical words on specific subjects... Meaning every word in any order, so naturally there is a high % of overlap not only with quotes but also the words used regarding the subject, the teacher would take this literally as "you did not write this yourself" if 10% of words would be similar.

Don't think anyone passed that class.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can't believe that anyone would try to automatically grade essays. This is either deeply cynical or astonishingly dumb.

</comment><comment><USER54> Good lord what a terrible design. Rather than determine if the writer has a coherent understanding and a complex prompt, the system grades based on writing patterns. This is actually my biggest fear of AI. Deploying wide scale systems like this that have very clear flaws

</comment><comment><USER55> I live in Poland and it is the first time I hear about it.

I am absolutely apalled.

Not even at the idea of grading by algorithm, but by the fact that many, many people had to cooperate to make this happen.

</comment><comment><USER56> You say "flawed algorithm," I saw "easily exploitable by intelligent students."

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't even think _I_ would be qualified to grade essays, let alone an algorithm!

</comment><comment><USER58> Teachers talk back and even may unionize! Crappy AI is cheap and can't unionize.

</comment><comment><USER59> It seems like these accumulated errors in the educational system and filters needed to get through it would create a market inefficiency that could be exploited by a firm willing to ignore degrees, grades, and test scores and judge for themselves whether a candidate can do the job they're being hired for.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why are we even bothering to discuss this on this site?

Wouldn't it be better and less biased if we each wrote our own AI systems and had them discuss with each other instead?

(And we should publish our training data as well, of course)

</comment><comment><USER61> Why are algorithms grading essays in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER62> The sooner we get it out of our heads that this education system of ours is a meritocracy the closer we'll get to actually creating a quality universal system.

</comment><comment><USER63> What are teachers but flawed Algorithms?

</comment><comment><USER54> It is becoming increasingly evident that the hubris for implementing AI is what is going to ruin everything.

</comment><comment><USER64> Because a (likely unsophisticated) algorithm is grading the essays, there's probably a deterministic method to do score well.

This seems like a terrible idea.

It's not a stretch to imagine the opportunity for nefarious behavior this allows - think of the recent college admission scandals, and how happy they'd be to have a guise of algorithmic indifference'.

If used long-term, it could offer a big advantage to the wealthy in other avenues. Another hypothetical, probably not far from reality: the algorithm becomes solved (almost or completely) by some premier 'tutoring' company. Said company can charge a pretty penny given its stellar track record, offering yet another hidden advantage to the wealthy/elite.

<comment><USER65> Surely there's a deterministic method to score well on the math questions?

<comment> crooked-v An essay is to a math problem as a proof is to a grammar problem.

<comment><USER65> There's definitely a deterministic way to score well on HS level proofs. Also, I think you are overestimating the requirements for an essay on a standardized test.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TikTok to open $500m data centre in Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53664997 <comment><USER2> _...slated investment into the country of around €420M (~$497M), according to a blog post penned by global CISO, Roland Cloutier._

 _..."This investment in Ireland… will create hundreds of new jobs..._

Even at 999 new jobs, that is $420k per job.

These statements need to be clearer. They want to setup in Ireland to minimise tax, not to create jobs.</comment>