Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/07/20/online-classes-are-not-worth-cost-of-full-tuition.html <comment><USER3> A couple of years ago, I was looking into MOOCs for tech education, Udacity's nano degree in particular. I remember stumbling across a video on Youtube where some Udacity folks were discussing the merits of online education with college professors and admins.

What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class room environment with online education could be as effective, they shouted. They were obviously threatened - they did not want the world they were so comfortable with to change.

Now they are singing a different tune once they don't have a choice - not only are colleges embracing online classes, they are trying to justify full cost for it too.

College students heading into the fall semester should take a gap year. I know I would.

<comment><USER4> Except "embracing" is definitely not the right word. Very few professors I know are happy about this whole situation. Universities are begrudgingly accepting the fact that they can't have in-person classes, so they have to turn to online alternatives. Tuition can't be changed because the few costs that are being saved (facilities still need maintenance) are offset by the massive losses in revenue from student housing and the added costs in prepping online classes. Very few professors are thinking that they're delivering the same quality of education online, even though they're having to work even more to create and deliver an online alternative from scratch, plus having to teach themselves video production skills.

<comment><USER5> > Tuition can't be changed because (whatever)

Nope. What you're saying is "I cant restructure my business becasue I have high costs".

Your competitor disrupting your business could not care less.

<comment><USER6> Online courses have been around for years and they all still suck.

If anything this is a boon to colleges in the long run - it has proven, without a doubt, how much worse online learning truly is. It has been around for a decade now - and it still sucks.

<comment><USER7> > Online courses have been around for years and they all still suck.

I think this is ultimately a subjective thing, I don't really think something like CompSci (a subject most here studied) needs to be on a campus based lecture basis, but I can see why someone who needs more 'hand-holding' and wants the campus life experience would say this.

I was in an actual Science major, Biology, where your physical presence is needed for lab work as so much of it is just repeating your work (and ideally know why it failed) as experiments fail so often--the experiments are actually incredibly archaic and way far behind the Industry standards, where so much of it is actually outsourced for a reason. So watching youtube videos on distillations and titrations is just about as useful as you will never actually do that in a lab, as its a waste of man-power/labour costs. Reagents and precursor molecules are never going to be made in house by anyone, you buy them like you do bio-markers, so why bother wasting an undergrad student's time making them do it instead of teaching them how to use more modern apparatuses that are actually used in the Industry? I thin it's because that's what grad school is ultimately for and for that you have to 'pay to play' as it were.

The lectures and exams for my major, however, should have been entirely Online in my opinion; we had mainly tenured Post-docs doing research teaching our classes which was always a f'ing nightmare as you could tell they were only doing it out of obligation. The one saving race being that they did give hints as to what was on the exam when you attended which could save you hours/days of overstudying if all you did was just look at the book/slides, so I ended up creating a study group with 5 other students where we alternated going to lecture and recording it and then uploading online so we could follow along with the slides and book at home as most of us had to work. This should be the standard! Because the truth is there is simply no way to cover 7 chapters for a midterm for 3-5 lectures plus quizzes on various subjects, plus lab practicals for each one every semester and have any chance of passing those courses, and then on top of that they think you're going to retain even 20% of that information?!

It's the optimized pump-dump model of rote-learning that they're really 'teaching' which is why so many recent-grads are almost entirely useless if/when they get to the Industry for the first year or so. They're being mis- led about the expectations and working conditions of the roles they're going to fill, which is also probably why so few actually end up in the Industry they studied for.

Some of my best professors openly discussed in private how the models is incredibly broken, some even going so far as to say they wish they could get rid of the grading system entirely as its not a very good gauge as they admitted all they are really gauging is how good you are at repeating what was said to you back them without having much room for interpretation or nuance in the discussion, there is simply no time for it given all the constraints. Which incidentally is what the Scientific Model is actually operating on: self-regulating system that questions and even tries to defy conventional wisdom at every step to arrive to a viable conclusion and the cycle repeats itself never really having a 'definitive' of answer, simply a better one than the previous one. And the reality is, no one really replicates any of the peer reviewed journals and its well-documented that they do not, even outside of Academia.

I'll agree that Online learning has some disadvantages but the trade-offs are worth it, and the alternative is remaining with this perversely bloated form of indentured servitude for the benefit of very few that is gamed by those who have the means and resources to do so, be it in Enrollment or even within it.

I learned to code, albeit not very well, almost entirely from Online sources be it Coursera/Udemy for the basics, and then Stackoverflow for my questions on why things didn't work but it was enough to be able to create a fintech startup, the first of it's kind in fact, where as CTO I ultimately ended up outsourcing the work needed to better developers and I focuses on product development, UX and sales. I learned about Bitcoin/Blockchain from my deep interest in the subject of economics and Anarchist philosphy that spanned decades, which was mainly taught from Online sources and epub books. I ended up at IBM that way and saw very quickly how grad students from illustrious universities in 'blockchain like disciplines' could barely grasp something that I understood very well from my first year involved in the Bitcoin Community where we had amazing developers and cryptologists openly having conversations with anyone interested on the subject about how this tech worked and what its goals were in a complicated, but entirely comprehensible level if you were motivated enough to want to do some legwork to understand.

I think you're making a blanket statement which is more a reflection of you as an individual, as it really just depends on what subject you're studying.

For example: I went back to school for Supply Chain and Logistics and Business/Warehouse Data Analytics (most of these are Master level courses) in order to update my CV but I have already worked for several Automotive Multi- nationals in the past in this sector, so I know what actually works and what is just fluff to pad the course out to the 10-15 week requirements (depending on quarter vs semester, as I've done both) and there is 100% no reason why any of it should be done in person, at all.

I really mean no benefit of it what so ever, in fact I'd go so far as to say that if it had like designated Online office hours/chat/video conference you could sign up for and have it posted in the internal forum/discussion board for future review it would be a superior model to that of University at a fraction of the cost. I'd even pay extra for those features just so I don't have to make the effort to be somewhere during the day and choose to finish a course at my own pace in my extra time.

<comment><USER6> In general this same idea is repeated ad nauseum - "why are they not teaching things people will use in the real world." Do tell, does every software engineer do the same thing? Does every carpenter? Does every engineer? Your post encapsulates the "Silicon Valley Dream" perfectly - the dream - <USER2> you have to be asleep to believe it.

It is an infectious production-ism. A thing is only valuable if it makes money. An idea only valuable if it makes money, or produces, here, and now. And then you complain of professors who don't care - but this is the result of what you want. The professors are focusing on productivity and what makes money. This isn't endemic to the system. It comes from without.

The survivor-ship bias is just too hard to ignore. "Just get involved. Read forums, go to stack overflow, this is the true way to learn. I'm taking a business course and it's a joke to me therefore it is worthless. Just build it in your garage." Most people are not you. Most people are not people on HN. They want to have lives - not spend every waking moment learning about bitcoin. Many of them will never have any subject they love so deeply. Some will love economically worthless topics. Many just want to get a job to pay for the other parts of their lives.

> I think you're making a blanket statement which is more a reflection of you > as an individual, as it really just depends on what subject you're studying.

It doesn't depend at all on subject. There is a motivated person out there that can learn anything online - they will buy the materials, and do it themselves. Most are not this person. My statement is based on my experience as well as the fact the market has not shifted despite years of online options.

The market has already determined - the online options work best for part time learners and CV chasers (like the supply chain course. Business school in general is built for industry - industry doesn't care what you learn in it, they just want it. That is what you should be complaining about. The universities that offer it are just filling a need.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's something about being on a campus that made a big difference for me in college. Some experiences that I had that are hard to replicate remotely include:

* Group discussions in seminars. When you are in person, there's a better dynamic to holding a discussion. You can read others' body language and see when to speak up. Zoom works fine for very small groups (<7) but anything larger than that and it seems to get out of hand in my experience.

* Impromptu chats after class with professors to ask questions that I don't want to bug everyone else with. Same goes for chats during office hours.

* The opportunity to stumble upon events that you otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. For example, I'm not muslim, but I attended a series of lectures on Islam aimed at Muslim students, put on by the Muslim student association. I learned a lot there and got to speak to fellow students and learn about their views and experiences firsthand. You're not gonna find an event like that online, and even if you did, you'd have to have filtered through all the other garbage on the internet to find it.

* Playing intramural broomball after pre-gaming with my friends. Aside from good memories, the social connections you make in college are very important and can help you a lot later in life. Many years later and it's great having a network of people in all sorts of industries.

* Living in a freshman dorm and getting exposed to people from many different backgrounds for the first time in my life. If you grew up in one place, then almost by definition, you didn't have much diversity in K-12.

You can't really replicate these remotely and in my mind, these sorts of things were half the value of college for me. And this is aside from the fact that I personally find it _very_ hard to pay attention on a zoom lecture, especially if I'm sitting through 4 or 5 of them a day.

<comment><USER9> Would you really pay half the sticker price of college to receive those social experiences only, without the academics and diploma? The majority of those experiences are self-organized and don't cost the university anything. Even if that is half the value of the college experience, it's much cheaper than that. Why not live in a college town and hang around near the campus instead?

<comment><USER8> > Would you really pay half the sticker price of college to receive those > social experiences only, without the academics and diploma?

It's hard to break out the costs. When I go to a nice restaurant, I wouldn't pay 50% for the ambiance alone without the food or for the food without the ambiance. It's a package and the sum is worth more than the pieces.

I might pay full tuition for remote college if i'm in my last semester, for example. But otherwise, I don't think it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Despite all the discussion about online classes, there is one fundamental aspect of online teaching, that isn't fully 'disrupted'

Keeping students attention on the class.

Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost.

In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound.

I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education.

Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service"

I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.

<comment><USER11> I think this stems from a general disinterest of the focus issue pertaining to technology at large. I work from home and have the exact same problem staying focused on work.

Phone operating systems still treat features like "zen mode" as second-class citizens while not providing enough granular access to third party apps to implement features that encourage putting down the phone successfully. There are still too many ways to work around these kinds of features and apps like Freedom for iOS do an OK but not great job at allowing you to restrict access to apps and sites on a schedule.

<comment><USER10> There are a lot of apps that provide the zen mode.

However all of them are only as effective as the person's will to use them.

In my view, Extreme cases of Phone / Internet addiction can only be solved by physically removing the user from the device. Like you do for drugs and alcohol.

I am thoroughly convinced any other method will not be useful. Of course, I base these thoughts solely on my experience and I have been trying to do that since last one year. I have tried many apps, lots of self control and forcing myself to be away from my phone physically, only to be under it's spell in a few days. The most I held out was 2 days.

While being physically away from the phone / device is not always practical, I have found that timers for apps are slightly more effective, as they repeatedly warn and close the app.

I found zen modes to be not really effective, as they shut off everything and ultimately you end up removing them for one reason or the other.

<comment><USER11> > I found zen modes to be not really effective, as they shut off everything > and ultimately you end up removing them for one reason or the other.

I agree, which is why I argue that it should be an OS concern, not an application concern. Screen time in iOS provides some of this functionality, but it's still not powerful enough to restrict access to certain sites, and there are ways to get around the parental control modes.

The problem is that a phone is necessary in many jobs. I tried switching to a "dumb" phone a few years ago and had to revert because I needed app-based 2FA for work.

I would pay good money for a solid iOS screen time app that allows me to set profiles for work time, free time, personal focus time, etc. that only provides access to apps I truly need in a given moment and cannot be worked around. That would be such a game changer

<comment><USER12> > I would pay good money for a solid iOS screen time app that allows me to set > profiles for work time, free time, personal focus time, etc. that only > provides access to apps I truly need in a given moment and cannot be worked > around. That would be such a game changer

Does having someone else control the password work? I've also been wanting to find a solution for this on ios devices. Screen time is weak when you have the password.

The downtime mode in safari also trains you to use it, as you literally can't whitelist a website from screentime, so you have to bypass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Online courses lack class discussions that are key to making courses engaging._

This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received.

I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I am glad that my school used a meeting platform that was intended for educational use.

<comment><USER14> I'm not a Cisco employee nor am I married to WebEx in every way, but I do a mix of IT support and media production at a university and WebEx has been very useful for us so far.

From what I've experienced, Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting" where you join a conference and it's an online approximation of a conference room. WebEx has a subsection called WebEx "Events" with a few minor tweaks that make it more useful for classes or seminars.

Mainly it's just about how they set up "roles". In a Meeting, you're all mostly the same (aside from the host). In an Event, you schedule the thing, add a list of people who will be "panelists", and then they get a special password that allows them to log in with their WebEx account and join with elevated privileges.

The "host" role is still the "admin" and can change settings and assign roles. The "panelists" can turn on their own mics and cameras as they choose, and they can be given screen-share rights.

Everyone else gets a different link and joins as "attendees". Attendees can't turn on their own mics or cameras. They can post in the chat box and they can raise their hand to be given mic rights. It effectively prevents the issues of "bombing" online meetings with disruptive behavior and allows the presenters to do the teaching.

<comment><USER15> > Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting"

Zoom has the same features as the Webex Events in their zoom "Webinar", with separate logins for admins ("hosts") and panelists, q&a chat box etc.

Of course it's not free like Zoom meetings, but costs $300 or more - that's where they make their money... [https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar](https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar)

<comment><USER14> Cool, thanks for the info. We don't do as much with Zoom since our WebEx license covers Events and hosting recorded videos (among other things) but it's still good to know.

I've only used Zoom in the basic/meetings sense. Seems like a rough parity between the two (which makes sense given their origin, I'd imagine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's missing from all these online courses is a sense of community. The forums are _ok_ but they're not very vibrant.

For an example of a vibrant community, I'd look toward what video games, such as Rocket League, have created.

Players have a specific ranking based on competition stats. They level up when they when a sufficient number of games within their ranking. Progression through the game doesn't have to be a solo endeavor because players can look to the community for how to improve.

The community not on my celebrates wins and gives advice on losses, they offer free coaching that can result in paid tutoring [1].

Not only that, but on average the community members are positive and light- hearted.

I think other skill-based activities could learn a lot from how and why these communities function and incorporate those aspects into their platforms to help students succeed.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coachi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coaching_tuesday_20200721/)

<comment><USER17> No doubt that the community around courses could be improved, but I think it's also a matter of enthusiasm. People are probably a lot more enthusiastic about Rocket League than about some online degree. (Whether that's how it should be is a different issue...) Anyway, that naturally leads to higher participation in communities etc. So I don't know if online course makers even have that much influence over community building in the first place.

<comment><USER16> For sure but then the question I would have is can we take cues from enthusiasm around Rocket League and bring those into the community?

The real time ranking system I think is the root of a lot of this. It allows people to know where they stand and they can look to the community on how to improve their game.

<comment><USER18> I think a real time ranking system for students at a university that is visible by all is just going to be targeted for greedy or ambitious people looking to convert it into jobs or money. If I am in the top 10 percent of the rankings in Rocket League sure I can make a few grand streaming, but if I am in the top 10 percent of rankings at a school I can get a better job than the rest. What are the bottom 90 percent's motivation for helping people improve at that point?

<comment><USER16> > What are the bottom 90 percent's motivation for helping people improve at > that point?

I think that's a great point but one that the Rocket League community somehow solves.

<comment><USER19> With very few exceptions, everyone who plays Rocket League is playing it because they find it intrinsically rewarding. When I taught intro stats I'd guess less than 2% of my students were studying stats because they found it intrinsically rewarding. Even when you get into upper level classes, even among graduate students, the percentage who are taking a class for the intrinsic reward rarely approaches 100%.

Trying to make education more like Rocket League, ignoring the wildly divergent motivations of the people involved, is a fool's errand.

<comment><USER16> But where does intrinsic motivation come from?

What are the objective differences between getting better at Rocket League and getting better at stats?

Agreed if we don't understand or create a basic framework, trying to put lipstick on a pig and making stats look like Rocket League is dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Depends on what you think of the value of school is. Given the distribution of outcomes and skills, the effect of a degree for the vast majority in the long tail of graduates is just tribal affiliation with the people who achieve in the upper percentiles. For most people, simply paying for the credential without attending classes would deliver most of the value. Traditionally, this was known as "purchasing a commission," ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the_British_Army)), and today we do the same thing with student debt.

Online classes may be a forcing function for the discussion of how to price education, but the question itself has been the elephant in the room for decades.

<comment><USER21> Called signalling in economics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_\(economics\))

<comment><USER20> I'd argue signalling is the effect, where the tribal initiation is the mechanism and purchasing a commission is the example precedent, but we're certainly in the same realm of ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I did an online MS at Georgia Tech. I paid full price tuition for the program. Literally 3 years after I graduated, they announced a slash in price by 80 (EIGHTY!) percent. The program was excellent, and if not for my company offering to pay for it I wouldn't have considered it. I can absolutely recommend it now that it's so much cheaper, but it was also designed to be a remote program from the start.

<comment><USER23> OMSA/OMSCS worth it? I don't want a résumé item that may be considered watered down in the future.

Plus, with more self-study, can't you can get into most tech companies because they tend to be more open?

<comment><USER24> Depending on your field a masters degree in anything is seen equivalent to every other masters degree. And on the other side of the spectrum, they're not considered useful by many employers/jobs.

<comment><USER25> While the mere presence of MS on a resume may not mean much to employers, I almost think it's more important to weigh its usefulness against your current skill set. For instance, I work in tech but majored in something other than CS, and so I sometimes feel "weak" when I need to write more formal code. I'm going back to get my masters in CS so I can learn some of the foundational aspects that I unfortunately missed out on. I'm not as much concerned with fluffing my resume as I am filling the CS gaps I currently have.

Now if I did major in CS, I'm not sure I would still pursue a masters. But I didn't, so there's certainly value there for me.

<comment><USER26> This has been brought up before on HN: [https://teachyourselfcs.com](https://teachyourselfcs.com) You don't get initiated by the teachers, you get initiated by doing the practice problems so you can develop schema for what strategy works.

<comment><USER25> That looks fantastic, thank you passing this along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What's missing from this discussion is a history of Universities. In the 19th century, as a student, you paid to be tutored by a professor to pass a standardized exam. Professors were paid by for tutoring. Profs were expected to teach classes, but were not paid for it. It was a means of recruiting students to tutor. Classes were also small, more like seminars.

</comment><comment><USER28> The only thing that can really explain this is an elaborate form of price fixing between universities. If one university announced they were slashing "online-only" tuition costs, others would probably be forced to follow suit. It would be interesting to see a single reputable university drop tuition prices for "online-only", and offer automatic-transfer admittance to students already accepted into a similarly reputable school (e.g. if you go to Ohio State, you could quickly transfer to Penn State). That might trigger a race to the bottom, and reset tuition rates to what they rightfully should be.

The reduced revenue could be made up by cutting the unnecessary ivory-tower jobs, reducing the inflated exec compensation, and reducing the unnecessary $50M+ on-campus construction projects.

<comment><USER6> There's no reason for any university to do this unless they were for-profit (desperate for profits, respected) or failing (not respected).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd imagine the tuition should drop by about 30-50%, seeing as college costs are going to be dropping. I'm pretty sure _in a skeptical sense_ they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason.

and charging students more.

<comment><USER30> Tuition should drop by 50% anyway. The same schools were able to deliver the same services at that price 30 years ago. [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition- has...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has- increased-from-1988-to-2018.html)

<comment><USER31> Tuition costs are ridiculously inflated, and I'd love to see them come down, but "the same thing used to be cheaper" is an argument that doesn't work in any other field. I'd rather see a discussion of the _inflation-adjusted_ rate of increase, or perhaps some other appropriately adjusted metric; tuition numbers would _still_ look terrible, so there's no need to weaken one's argument this way.

<comment><USER30> That is inflation adjusted. Note "with all figures adjusted to reflect 2017 dollars"

<comment><USER31> Yes, you're quite right. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity I started looking at going back to school around a year ago and online is basically the only way that will ever happen realistically.

While most programs do charge a bit less for tuition, the amount of money they're charging for recorded lectures and a credential is almost comical. On top of that many programs, including some of the better looking ones (i.e. from flagship state schools) still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. There were a few programs that were cheaper, but you could tell there was a reason for that.

So yeah, no way in hell I'm paying for what they're asking considering what I'd get.

<comment><USER32> I was considering MSc EE at Boulder, but the 20k price is way off the mark, especially being used to European prices.

<comment> non-entity Oh I saw that and it looked interesting, but an online EE degree sounds fishy regardless. Particularly at the graduate level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I agree. For some degrees it's less of an issue but for areas of study like chemistry, biology, physics and many others, access to the college's physical resources like laboratories is part of what you're paying for. I don't know how you solve this problem with the current constraints imposed by COVID-19, but you can't expect these students to pay full-price for an inferior education.

<comment><USER34> You won't find anyone willing to teach several sections a day in a teaching laboratory with 24 students, the risk of infection is (correctly) perceived as too high. The market has adapted, there are kits to do experiments at home.

Research labs are much less densely packed, and in-person interaction is less. In less affected states lab-based research is starting again.

<comment><USER35> > there are kits to do experiments at home.

For high school level, sure.

But I can't see a sane way to let students handle acids like I did in chemistry labs during college, and physics labs have equipment that is too complex/expensive/dangerous to send to the students.

<comment><USER36> You can buy a lot of those chemicals in Walmart and Lows in the US (ex: Walmart usually has fairly pure concentrated sulfuric acid. Lows has most common organic solvents.) The lab equipment is also pretty easy to buy on amazon (I've bought some trying to teach myself, although I'd recommend against buying anything from China, It always seems to disappear somewhere around LA.)

There's an entire community of autodidacts that do this sort of thing at home as a hobby. They have lots of advice on PPE, materials handling, storage, where to find papers and books etc. Some of them even record experiments instead of just writing them down so everyone can watch.

<comment><USER6> This is a lawsuit waiting to happen and not everyone has the space or want to do this. Completely and utterly unrealistic.

<comment><USER36> Oh absolutely, but it's not impossible or even that difficult to set up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Offline classes aren't worth the cost of full tuition...

<comment><USER38> Classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

<comment><USER39> This.

The value I got out of university was mostly not tuition, but I think overall, (very pre-pandemic) the whole package _was_ worth it. I've learnt vastly more by reading, engaging with people, and doing both before and after university though, for much less cost.

I've also never been on a paid training or course that was worth the cost and didn't involve something above and beyond the tuition (networking, project based, access to facilities/tools/data, etc.). The only times this obviously isn't true are when you're gaining some required or coveted industry certification, and then that's only because of the value attached to it, not the value of the learning itself vs other ways to gain the same skills/knowledge.

The lesson for me has been that for any course or school there's got to be an expected benefit way beyond the perceived value of the tuition, and that most of the time this doesn't exist.

I think paid training in companies is likely as popular as it is mostly because it feels a bit like a vacation and most companies don't allow, or don't make it socially acceptable, for people to take sufficient time off for their own long term wellbeing.

<comment><USER40> Ye well the major upside with a degree for me was forcing me to learn stuff I would never have bothered with. I mean, at the time when I started in uni I had no clue where to even begin. Nowadays I would prefer reading a book rather than taking classes, but I think that is because I went to uni and learned to learn.

I feel it is the same with books on programming. They are worth reading first when you already know how to program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Online teaching works particularly well for the tutorial model, where you have a small number (<5) of students plus the instructor engaged in discussion. It fails completely for large classes. That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague.

<comment><USER41> Wow I'd argue the opposite. Large classes / lectures I didn't even interact with the professor in person, might as well just get that info online. Smaller classes I found in person discussions much more valuable.

<comment><USER34> In the large classes you still need to have tutorials, this time led by the TAs. On-line TA herding is difficult, I don't envy anyone who is doing this right now. There's also the hallway track, students organizing themselves into study groups and interest groups. Doing that on-line is quite impossible, how do you have random encounters after class?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Schools still have a very large proportion of their fixed costs to cover. Schools and their lecturers need to invest in perfecting onlive delivery.

Therefore it's not particularly realistic to expect schools to chop their top- line so soon.

This is clearly a transitory and uncertain period. With time, possibly less time than schools hope, they will be forced to adjust prices downward.

<comment><USER43> For profit institutions do not get sympathy for their fixed costs.

<comment> kube-system Most large for-profit schools are primarily online, and have long been. Huge in-person campuses are primarily public universities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As much as I dislike making students paying high tuition fees, as a Canadian, the alternative is worse I feel.

What would end up happening should tuition fees be reduced overnight:

\- Universities / Community Colleges would experience a fiscal deficit (or substantial cut to their income). Here in Canada, that means taxpayers' will be on hook.

\- Should Educational institutions cut salaries of their staff - they would risk losing their top faculty and support staff.

Just like people rush to support local businesses and local economy, they should also support their local education institutions. After all, they employ a large number of people and have a huge hand in inspiring next generation of workers and provide lots of social programs for local community.

On another note, I often see people discussing merits of University degree / Community College diploma and often point out that Computer Science degree is not worth it. I beg to differ - the Modern World owes quiet a lot to army of University / Community college graduates who have made quantum leap in civilization's advancement possible.

Just over 40 years ago, overwhelming majority of workers didn't have a post- secondary education. But since then, around the World post-secondary education has experienced a boom and we that all corners of the World has experienced substantial gains in their economic output which in turn has led to better health conditions and a better living standard.

</comment><comment><USER45> I sometimes worry that a lot of the online class feedback that while not wrong, is based on a bunch of self selecting folks who are good at / motivated to / prefer taking online classes.

If somehow we magically switched to online classes and everyone was good at making them ... I worry we'd loose a lot of people / the education quality could drop and we wouldn't know.

Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already.

<comment><USER46> > Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes > may have been lost for decades already.

For what it's worth, I probably went to about 10% of my classes in college and I got a great education (CS+math) from a combination of the course materials, exams, and working with other students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think it depends on what you think an academic degree gets you.

If you are looking for education, it may be worth it.

If you are looking for the signal to employers, it may be worth it as long as they don't water down the reputation by admitting more students and employers don't devalue it for being online.

If you are looking for connections, networking, and resume building opportunities, then it is definitely not worth it.

My problem is that the benefits I got from university were nearly all in the two latter areas.

</comment><comment><USER48> The linked article is the real interesting bit: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online- cour...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-courses- ontario-high-school-students-terrible-idea-e-learning-1.5072018)

Note that it's talking about high schools.

<comment><USER31> It doesn't seem completely apposite to me; it was written in 2019, so thinking of online courses in a situation when physical courses are _possible_ —which is, in many places, not our current situation; a significant portion of my university's classes are going online, but I don't know any faculty who would be doing it if not out of concern for their and their students' safety–and it seems to be based on a lot of opinions, not so much on studies or evidence- based conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> And here I am in Belgium, paying 2000 a year for a Masters degree.

<comment><USER50> Also, half your paycheck goes to the government and European tech salaries are nearly half that of the US. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

<comment><USER51> I mean I lived in both ca and ny and the tax rate is pretty close to European ones. When I lived in Switzerland just the federal rate was higher than my Swiss tax rate.

The big difference in total compensation after tax between Western Europe and USA is in the compensation part for people that are considered highly skilled. For example for me I get at least 2x here in CA compared to what I would get in Norway and Switzerland. In the UK and Germany the difference is even larger.

For people that are not highly skilled it is the other way round, they would earn significantly more in Europe. Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the average middle class, but personally I think it's nicer in the US for upper middle class, the top 10%.

<comment> barry-cotter > Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the > average middle class, but personally I think it's nicer in the US for upper > middle class, the top 10%.

This is a gross underestimate. One can quibble about whether the top 40% or 80% of the US is richer/consumes more than in Europe but the idea it's only true for the top 10% is delusional. Germany has a lower GDP per capita than every state bar Mississippi. The US has a higher average _household_ income than everywhere but Hong and much larger households. The US is just richer than any remotely comparable country. The countries that look similar on GDP per capita, like Norway, consume a great deal less.

<comment><USER52> The gini coefficient of Germany means that the average citizen of Germany has likely more money and a higher standard of living than the average American. Germany has far fewer ultra-rich and ultra-poor people.

Gdp per capital is misleading without talking about measures of income inequality

<comment><USER51> Yeah this is the point, life in for example Germany has a very acceptable life quality for less money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are there any schools that are opening their online material to the public? What a great opportunity to spread knowledge. With all this "defunding" talk, it's probably a good time to reassess how much taxpayer money goes to universities in relation to how much they give back to taxpayers.

</comment><comment><USER53> Good that the world has learnt from the music industry migrating from CDs to online or they'd be charging _more_ "because it's more convenient"

</comment><comment><USER54> It's a shame. I'd like to work on an online masters in engineering to supplement my bachelor's. The cost for 4 years of an online program that actually has relevant classes of interest is like $50k even with my company paying over $5k a year. That's rediculous. They try to sell it to me based off of the potential earnings it could lead to, but I'm already well established in my industry (capped out on the technical track), so the degree is 100% worthless from a career point of view. I really just want to learn new things. I'd gladly pay some money, but it is currently priced 4x higher than I can ever justify paying. So instead, I buy the textbooks and read in my spare time.

<comment><USER55> Some schools offer non-degrees and/or the ability to audit a class. I can apply to be a non-degree student at the local college. Then audit a class for free (no credit/grades). The scope of auditing depends on the professor, I've had some that will grade coursework for non-degree students, others just let them into the lectures. Total cost would be like $25 + books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The title could be misread as indicating online tuition is not worth the cost generally, which is a different matter.

The article is actually making the fair point that students paying for IRL classes are being ill-served by online replacements with no discount.

It mis-steps though in generalising to making claims more generally about online tuition; a physical university (say) panicked by lockdown into rush- providing online replacements for normal service is hardly likely to be able to match the quality of service of (decent) institutions that _specialise_ in online learning.

</comment><comment><USER57> Offline classes aren't worth the cost of full tuition either.

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) College itself is not worth the cost of full tuition. College tuition costs have increased above the inflation rate for decades to become enormous.

2) Online education can be equal to in-person education and is worth the same cost as in-person education. The overall college experience is subjective, but you can learn everything you need to from reading a textbook and completing assignments and taking tests, all of which are the same in an online setting.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm doing a research on the way students learn programming in online classes. We tried making the student interact with each others by using Zoom's "breakout rooms" feature with mixed results.

What's interesting is that while students attended to online classes way less, they understood the class content way more, because they felt less pressure and could work at their on speed.

</comment><comment><USER59> I am taking an online MBA course with my local university and there are many benefits to an online format. First, the lectures are recorded and can be rewound for future reference. This is invaluable in the tougher papers. Second, we utilise the chat function in Zoom which allows the whole class to participate in a "full duplex" fashion without one person monopolising the airwaves with a single conversation (I should mention that this technique is only used occasionally when broad input is required).

If the lecturer is facilitating properly (ensuring students are engaged and paying attention, calling upon quieter members), then the class can be as successful as an in-person one.

The only negatives I've seen are: easier to be distracted (no one can really tell you're checking Reddit), the online setting with it's mute/unmute approach sets a higher barrier to entry for participating in discussion.

</comment><comment><USER60> Many _in person_ classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

</comment><comment><USER61> It's mind-boggling how quick and drastic this shift is happening in terms of the value and importance of college education.

A gap year sounds like one solution. But chances are many of these people would have figured out something that work for them (greater impact, for less money) that others will adopt and follow.

Much of the impact will be here to stay.

</comment><comment><USER62> What's the value of an online course? The market says $0. There are plenty of free, online courses. What is the value of an online degree? Well that depends who is awarding it, but that value is unrelated to the value of courses offered. It's the value of a status symbol. Attending online courses will make sense financially only if that status symbol is really amazing, given the current prices of even cheap public universities.

If I was a student, I'd do anything to take a year off. Even at high status schools, or perhaps especially at high status schools, missing out on the socialization and experience just to get status a year or two earlier is unlikely to pay off better.

</comment><comment><USER63> If this is true then online degrees are worth less than in-person degrees.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. That is the premise I disagree with.

The general sentiment here is that people have used college as an extremely expensive social club and believe that is its greatest value. I wouldn't think of investing $100,000 of my current or future income in order to make friends or learn about myself.

I hope I'm not alone in thinking that I learned difficult material that I would not have grasped on my own and had self-improvement from meeting academic challenges under my own responsibility. Maybe this is rare, but I have directly applied my undergrad education to solving problems and used its foundation for learning more.

The social aspect of college is not itemized on the tuition statement. The cost of tuition is related to the quality of education directly provided by the school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> MOOC that have been around for years are more prepared for online classes and cheaper than any of those universities that will make you pay for maintenance of facilities that you cannot even use.

And don't you tell me that they cannot save on electricity and cancelled activities.

The price of tuition is not following any offer-and-demand, they are just using the fact that you are in the middle of your studies and you can't stop now, hope that will make people realise the kind of mafia those university are.

<comment><USER65> I think your second point is incorrect. I work closely with several universities, and the current situation has increased, not reduced, the pressure on their budget. IT infrastructure upgrades, producing training materials, the loss of rent income from university owned housing, and many other factors all combine to far outweigh any savings from not having to run the hallway water fountains.

Having said that, a university telling a student they must pay full price for less than full value is expecting the customer to essentially give a charitable donation to a business model "because we need it".

To attempt an analogy: if a grocery store had its warehouse burn down, they would not then be able to turn around and charge 10% more than market price on all of their items "because they needed it". That disaster would be a cost they'd have to absorb.

Universities are at least partially insulated from having to respond to the market like a business would, because of the high cost and difficulty of switching schools in the middle of an education. My sense is that if things can return to normal within a year, then they'll recover from this. If they can't open for in person classes for longer than that, then students will take the leap and move away from traditional universities permanently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> There should be slight reduction in tuition fees. For example lecture halls need no cleaning. However the physical buildings still need to be paid for during the pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER67> In-class classes aren't worth it either... Modern tech facilitates advances in education that haven't been taken advantage of. We need to:

* Gamify the experience * Focus on mastery * Build a community online that replaces the classroom

I'm currently working on a project that aims to do the above, but admittedly we are in the early stages: [https://classroom.qvault.io](https://classroom.qvault.io)

</comment><comment><USER68> I would think the same thing. This seems weird that Massive Open Online Courses are so expensive. I would think that having so many subscribers or a global distribution channel would enable one to drop costs significantly like one tenth of original or something thanks to the volume. In a world where workers need to constantly upskill themselves so as to stay relevant I am quite surprised why online education is being priced so high.

</comment><comment><USER69> Many college classes are lightly attended and only mildly paid attention to already. I had a professor in college who would religiously take attendance every morning then after mid-terms and finals he would show a scatter plot of attendance versus test scores. There was mild correlation, but still plenty of cases outside what you'd expect (perfect attendance + terrible scores, or low/no attendance + high scores)

</comment><comment><USER70> _in person classes_ are not worth the cost of full tuition!

education isn't paid for on a value-received basis. it's cost-plus. and shifting online due to covid doesn't reduce costs _that much_. Yes, there is some lower cost due to facilities being empty, but i'd wager that on balance, the expense ratio is actually higher.

yes, students are not going to get the same value from their tuition dollars.

</comment><comment><USER71> Online classes should be deeply discounted in most cases, and free in the others. It's time to end this college tuition scam once and for all.

</comment><comment><USER72> Most of the time online classes cost more than in person classes. This is not a factor of cost to give the class, but a factor of paying more for the convenience of taking the class online. I'm currently enrolled in a post-bac CS program that is >$500/credit hour. The on campus classes are $318/credit hour. Not all programs are like this (OMSCS comes to mind), but many are.

</comment><comment><USER73> I hope that as a side-effect of this extended remote schooling, fully-online degrees become more acceptable to hiring managers.

I'd like to finish my BSCS degree I started over a decade ago, but when you live and work in the most expensive place in America (the Bay Area), there aren't a lot of in-person options. Gotta pay rent.

</comment><comment><USER74> I just have to say, that web site has some of the most offensive features. In- article tables of links to other stories, ads up the wazoo, a huge sort of task bar thing that swoops down. What are they thinking? I didn't even read the article. I don't have TIME for sites like that any more.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm going into the final year of my computer engineering undergrad and my tuition is $1,500 cheaper than last year - $15,800 vs. $17,300. However, that might be due to the politicking of our province's government rather than any generosity on the school's part.

</comment><comment><USER76> Collage in general has never been about education. Collage is about getting a stamp on your head saying that you have been to collage. Meaning that you spend years learning a bunch of stuff and you didn't do stop shit to kicked out.

I guess for engineering where there is significant equipment necessary this doesn't hold.

But the majority of collage is pointless, all the knowledge you need is available outside of collage but then nobody can verify that you actually learned it.

This book is pretty hard hitting but it provides a lot of solid analysis about what the problem is:

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

<comment><USER77> Well at the very least you'll learn how college is spelled.

<comment><USER76> I'm not an native English speaker and I have dyslexia, there is a reason I became a programmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Most of the teenagers will not like to sit in front of a screen the whole day at home. Also, online classes will not give space for any outdoor sports.

</comment><comment><USER79> The issue is that some of the most valuable experiences and learning comes from in-person interactions with the professor in classroom and with classmates on campus. Purely online classes completely ignore this aspect of learning. Granted we can't do in-person interaction in the current environment, but surely we could give it more thought . The current online classes focus on only delivering the lecture as opposed to encourage learning.

</comment><comment><USER73> Some other countries have free college, so "worth it" is very relative.

</comment><comment><USER80> I read the headline and assumed this is about free online MOOC classes. I'm starting to think they are worth less than zero as well. So much time spent listening. Its better to get a book and try stuff yourself.

</comment><comment><USER81> In person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

</comment><comment><USER82> What's really gonna bake your noodle is the idea that remote workers are not worth the cost of full salary.

</comment><comment><USER83> Offline classes not worth the cost of tuition.

</comment><comment><USER84> I see a lot of people saying take a gap year. I'm the father of a daughter who's starting college this fall. Here are some things needing to be considered:

\- You've been accepted for this fall. The college is under no obligation to delay your start until next year, especially when there's a fresh batch of incoming students.

\- You think it's tough to enroll in classes this fall? Wait until you double the number of students all trying to take the same classes! That should be fun!

\- My daughter has 4 different scholarships. They're all predicated on her starting this fall. Take it or lose it. These scholarships are paying over 50% of all her costs. Since she's going to a State University that means I can afford most if not all the rest leaving her with a minimal amount of debt.

\- It's her freshman year. I feel more sorry for the juniors and seniors. _Most_ freshman year classes can be done online. The more advanced the class, the more you should be attending in person.

\- Silver lining - incoming freshman will have to focus more on scholastics and academics and not partying.

\- Her major, pharmaceutical drug research & development, can't be done online. Yes, there are some classes you can do online, and most of those are in the freshman year, but ultimately you have to have in-person instruction. Especially for the labs.

\- Her school isn't in one of the "hot spots" and has a governor and mayor more-or-less enforcing mask laws. The dorm housing density has been decreased by 50% - which has left some of the students scrambling to find off-campus housing. All the incoming freshman are guaranteed housing.

\- She got her dorm assignment yesterday and the steps the university is taking to keep students safe. Daily temperature checks, contact tracing, mix of in-person and virtual classes, on-campus COVID testing with 6 hour test result turn around time, quarantine dorms, dining halls are delivery only. I should mention this university has one of the best research hospitals in the country and a huge medical complex serving the public.

Finally, ask yourself this: why do you think anything is going to be any better 1 year from now? Almost every other country in the world is getting back to normal but the United States has done very little in the past 7 months and so far there's no indication that's changing anytime soon. There's no reason to believe things are going to substantially improve by this time next year unless we start taking the steps to make that so. Even a vaccine may not help as the early estimates for the cost of a vaccine is $1,000 per dose. Health insurers aren't going to want to pay that kind of money for everybody. Will the U.S. government? We blew through $7 trillion this year with very little to show for it so who knows?

</comment><comment><USER85> No vaccine = No school

</comment><comment><USER86> This may be the catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning in higher education in the US - it's insane that people are entering the workforce at 23 with a lifetime of unforgivable debt for, in many cases, worthless degrees.

</comment><comment><USER87> In person classes are with the price of full tuition eirher</comment>


The coronavirus is outlasting the stimulus - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/the-coronavirus-is-outlasting-the-stimulus-5ededaa6-235d-4693-8288-0d85231220c7.html <comment><USER2> The whole thing is fucked up.

I have to bring back every single employee to convert my PPP loan to grant and also, use it within 8 weeks. None of them want to come back, and if they don't come back they will be out of a job and they won't get unemployment.

But the business is dead. So as soon as 8 weeks are up, I will have to layoff again.

Only 4 out of 10 employees that I laid off received unemployment. 3 were denied. 3 didn't qualify.

They shouldn't have given an additional $600 to unemployed people. They should have given $1200 per month for 2-3 months to everyone. That way everyone who is employed is happy, and everyone is who is out of a job can survive. Anyone who wants to quit their job and stay home should have an option.

I am not going to bring back 2 of my employees who are above 50. I don't want them to risk their life for my business.

<comment><USER3> > "I have to bring back every single employee to convert my PPP loan to grant > and also, use it within 8 weeks. None of them want to come back [...] But > the business is dead."

There's no business, which means employees are paid to do nothing. And in return, business owners get up to 25% of the grant for approved expenses. That's the deal, and it's not a bad one.

I keep hearing phrase 'come back' in this context from business owners, and it confuses me. No one has to physically return to the workplace to be paid from this grant money.

Now, I have heard the stories about employees who 'receive more money on unemployment' than when they were working, because of the additional $600/week Cares Act benefit. With the PPP employees are paid the average of their weekly pay (PPP stipulation), or more. These individuals may certainly not wish to 'come back'.

There is also the potential awkward situation for the employer, where they have a reduced staff expected to perform some job each day. The PPP requires you to return to 2019 levels of full-time employment. Now, you re-hire furloughed employees, but they have no job to perform (because they can't do it from home or something else). How is that fair?

I get it. There are some difficult issues here, but saying simply that employees are just not wanting to come back is confusing the issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Republican leadership has said it doesn't plan to continue passing stopgap > measures to replenish immediate aid. Instead, it wants the next bill to be > more focused on ... reopening America.

So contingent on something completely impossible and foolhardy, all to appease the ego of the worst man in the country?

<comment><USER5> IMO, Trump is a horrifyingly terrible president but the desire to open things up again is a serious concern for a lot of people who are out of work and have bills piling up, it isn't just a Trump thing. What are they supposed to do? If you have a mortgage and are out of work the stimulus checks are next to worthless (in the sense that they just delay the inevitable by a couple weeks). There is a point of desperation where the risk of getting sick feels much more remote than the feeling of the walls closing in financially.

<comment><USER6> The idea that simply opening things back up means economic activity returns to normal is, in my opinion, ridiculous. People are going to continue to stay at home. People are going to continue to get sick. Acting like there's an off- switch for this that magically sets us back to a time where we're BaU that we can flip solves nothing - without actual policy makers making new policy, those people most affected will continue to be impacted in a huge way, but political leadership has no interest, especially in the White House. We're on a long, trying road, and the poor leadership is the _main_ reason.

<comment><USER5> > _Acting like there 's an off-switch for this that magically sets us back to > a time where we're BaU that we can flip solves nothings_

This is kind of a strawman argument though. I say "kind of" because yeah, there are some crazies out there saying that the virus is a plot by the government to crash the economy or some other insanity about 5g and bill gates mind-control vaccines, however, this isn't what most leaders are saying, not even Trump.

> _without actual policy makers making new policy_

Right... "a bill focused on reopening America" is literally "policy makers making new policy". Whether or not those policies will effectively address the issues at hand is another question entirely, but I don't think there is anything unreasonable about ostensibly looking towards policies that could start opening some things up.

> _We 're on a long, trying road, and the poor leadership is the _main_ > reason._

I'm in total agreement with you here and I think things are only going to get worse once the elections are over and Trump doesn't feel any more re-election pressure (yes, I'm assuming he'll win), but that's a separate issue from the stated goal of trying to get people working again.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what incentives congress has for passing policies for the executive to follow, when the executive has shown it has no problem ignoring the law and using funding passed in alternative ways.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but bucking up against an uncooperative executive is preferable to doing nothing and blaming it on the executive, that just plays right into their narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The coronavirus is outlasting our willingness to deal with it. It's not going away - though it would be wonderful if it did. There are things we can do to slow the spread of the virus even as we slowly open things back up but there are a contingent of people absolutely refusing to wear face masks and when asked to by the establishment they're visiting they've shot and killed the agent asking. It doesn't help that our leaders aren't setting a good example for others to follow. There are reasons the United States has endured 1/3 of the worldwide coronavirus deaths while only having 1/20 of the worldwide population. Is our national attention span really that short?

</comment><comment><USER9> .

<comment> saiya-jin Now imagine if they aren't so utterly incompetent as it may appear (well apart from the top guy, he is truly hopeless through and through).

What kind of discussions/meetings/decisions could be happening behind the closed doors? Interesting mind exercise, although we won't know the truth.

It seems to me a lot of folks are rather looking for a way to milk the system and the common population at any cost, anytime. Fuck tomorrow. Fuck our kids and their future. I sure hope my perception isn't correct.</comment></comment>


Jaml: Haml in Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/edspencer/jaml

<comment><USER2> I don't know if I'm the only one who finds this pattern of acting on the string representation of the function as being a bit distressing.

One the one hand it's a bit like using macros, on the other, there's clearly no first class support for it in the language, and the possibilities for breaking things horribly when your best tools are regexen seems high.

<comment><USER3> You're not the only one. This is an html builder library for Javascript, with very little to do with Haml.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haml? Looks more like Markaby-inspired to me.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. It's based on nested method calls as opposed to a tab-indented markup language. It's not really appropriate to call it Haml in Javascript at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dan Webb invented this in 2006, it's called Low Pro:

[http://www.danwebb.net/2006/9/3/low-pro-unobtrusive- scriptin...](http://www.danwebb.net/2006/9/3/low-pro-unobtrusive-scripting- for-prototype)

<comment><USER6> Dear driveby downvoter: did you even look at the syntax for Low Pro? It's exactly the same except it uses a $ so as not to pollute the primary namespace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> jaml + node.js + couchdb could make for an interesting web framework.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice! Looks like DOMPlate, Firebug's internal template system.

[http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug- tutorial/extendin...](http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug- tutorial/extending-firebug-domplate-part-v/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The fact that templates are functions that use actual parameters (rather than backdoor means like instance variables) looks to be a huge win for me.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is also baconl <http://github.com/cohitre/baconl>

</comment><comment><USER11> Why "cls" instead of "className"?

<comment><USER12> All programmers go through a phase of employing excessive brevity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i've used jTemplates (jquery plugin: <http://jtemplates.tpython.com/>) which is far easier to maintain, as it's much closer to html templating than this

</comment><comment><USER14> AppJet had this, except the tag functions were all caps.</comment>


Somebody Just Claimed a $1M Bounty for Hacking the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/somebody-just-won-1-million-bounty-for-hacking-the-iphone <comment><USER2> This is the business model of the company that put out the $1m bounty on the remote iOS 9.1 and 9.2b jailbreak:

 _Bekrar and Zerodium, as well as its predecessor VUPEN, have a different business model. They offer higher rewards than what tech companies usually pay out, and keep the vulnerabilities secret, revealing them only to certain government customers, such as the NSA._

Can anyone explain why iOS jailbreaking info would be worth more than $1m to the NSA? Also, isn't it weird that we are funding the government's ability to jailbreak iPhones? It's like a double slap in the face.

I would imagine that Apple would be willing to pay at least $5m (~0.000025% of cash reserves) in order to buy the exploit and patch it in order to protect their image as one of the last "good guys" in the fight against government surveillance creep.

<comment><USER3> Apple pays $0 for security bugs, of any severity. You probably won't even get a lousy t-shirt.

They are kind enough to credit you by name on security updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty unethical to claim this reward, IMO (if it actually happened and this isn't just a publicity stunt). The people who claimed it had to know it was going to be sold to government agencies (including potentially oppressive countries that may use this to target activists). If they didn't care about ethics, I wonder why they didn't just sell it themselves and cut out the middle man?

<comment><USER5> Presumably you don't want to call NSA/Apple, tell them what a great hack you did, and then ask them for One Million Dollars.

<comment><USER6> Why not? Is it illegal to hack your own iphone on a closed LAN? Do you have to be a startup to negotiate with the NSA? I reckon it would be worth a try.

I'm not pro-surveillance, so I wouldn't, but speaking hypothetically here.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it may be illegal. Tablets are always illegal to jailbreak. Phones are illegal to jailbreak if it allows unlocking of the phone, and the phone was sold before 2013. It IS legal to jailbreak your phone for the SOLE purpose of accessing copyright information that you have legal rights to.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking- now-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking-now-legal- under-dmca-for-smartphones-but-not-tablets/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand, if nobody knows what team hacked it, and nobody knows anything about the actual exploits, or whether the payment was really made, how can anyone prove this is actually real?

<comment><USER5> Article is based on the tweet: [https://twitter.com/Zerodium/statuses/661240316331069443](https://twitter.com/Zerodium/statuses/661240316331069443)

Welcome to modern journalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess our only hope here, then, is that at least some of those who gets ahold of the exploit accidentally triggers a crash report and autosubmits it to apple so they can fix the bugs...

<comment><USER10> Obviously the logical assumption to make here is that this isn't the only exploitable bug for this version of iOS. Many many more exist and are already in the hands of various nation state actors, possibly even common criminals.

Look at the capabilities Snowden revealed, some of them read like SciFi and NSA had them close to a decade ago. Do you seriously believe the NSA and any other similarly well-funded actor _does not_ have multiple remote exploits for iOS and if they just fix this one, everything will be alright?

There are other actors, not quite top-of-the-pyramid-NSA level, that would gladly pay a million $ for this though, and this is where zerodium is selling.

Your only hope is to assume that everything can be compromised and if you have reason to fear said compromise (some would say do it even if you don't), come up with a plan that takes that into account (risk analysis, compartmentalization, segmentation, assumption of compromise).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I missing something, or there is no link to the claimed $1M bounty "press release?"

I have been on Zerodium page, and there are no indications that this has happened. Vice.com says really nothing, other than repeating what the bounty entails, and that some "unknown group of hackers" did it.

<comment><USER12> I think it is a PR stunt, as I have not been able to find (other than the tweet) anything on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple has a few 100 billion in the bank. Why don't they pay out some money for the exploit.

<comment><USER10> Because it doesn't affect their bottom line aka they don't _have to_.

<comment><USER14> I cant imagine it will help their bottom line if we all wake up tomorrow to Rick Astley on our background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what the party is like for these guys. Like, how do you celebrate this?</comment>


Early epiphanies as a late cofounder - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jeffzchen.com/post/36985464694/early-epiphanies

<comment><USER2> I fear this is going to be taken poorly, but this really made an impression on me. This is not a criticism of the author, nor really a condemnation of the lifestyle depicted - but only an observation. I find the "Myths of The Valley" both very interesting and very frustrating. This is about the Myth, not about the author.

This reads like a religious testimony, or a classic Campbell myth.

It begins with scripture from one of the prophets, "Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded. - Paul Graham" then moves to the (self-acknowledged) epiphany where the author expresses how his eyes, once closed are now open. In monomyth terms, its a mix of "the ordinary world", "call to adventure", and "the refusal":

"I've learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence." "Until last week, I was pretty convinced that I was a lazy, talentless fuckup." "We are so good at it that we can easily convince ourselves that we are happy doing something when in fact we are not. ... Then I woke up."

We then bring in several of the common Valley mythical elements:

The "all-nighter" - "This week I worked 15 hour days and was disappointed when I got too tired and had to sleep."

The "garage" - "On day one, I ... slept in a garage next to my motorcycle.

We then have, in monomyth terms, the "meeting with the mentor": "On day two I met with one of the biggest investors in the valley."

Testimony as to how life prior seems trivial: "There's not not enough time to argue about what movies to watch or what restaurants to go to."

And the conclusion where the author warns about being led astray on the journey: "Between the time that I left Facebook and the time I joined Pixlee, I received a literal metric fuckton of advice, from respectable, well-meaning, intelligent people. I compiled all of the advice and in the end, went with my gut."

We're now at the beginning of Act II, I'm honestly (really!) excited to read the next part where we have "tests", "allies" and "enemies" and "the ordeal".

I think the whole startup experience fits with the monomyth quite nicely, and we already have a few epics coming out of the Age of the Valley - the Jobs myth and the Zuckerberg myth, among others - both of which fit the classic pattern pretty well.

Anyway, I wish the author well, it really is an amazing experience!

<comment><AUTHOR> That was incredibly interesting! The blog is mine, by the way. I'm incredibly flattered that you made such an in depth analysis; frankly I wrote it as nothing more than a happy rant and wanted to share with some fellow hackers and entrepreneurs.

I agree with the sentiment that the Myth of the Valley is interesting and frustrating. Mainly though, I think it gives many smart people a strong sense of purpose (not unlike the prophets and religion in general), and I definitely think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER3> A sense of purpose is generally a good thing. If it is determined by social pressure, conformity, uninformed emotions, etc. then it is risky. If it is determined by deep introspection in light of a well rounded understanding of human nature, then it is much more likely to last. It is difficult to be very introspective, however, without some life experience. Most people, I think, are not prone to figuring that stuff out totally in the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unrelated to the blog article, I hadn't heard of Pixlee until now. The company appears to scrape Instagram and try to measure brand awareness/usage/trends/______ by analyzing the pictures. Probably advertised as "Twitter-like sentiment analysis for Instagram." Image recognition is a hard problem. Good luck to them.

Scraping Instagram? Wow, that just gives me more pause about putting too much personal info on social networks. Will people create a startup that measures risk profiles for insurance companies based on how many beers or cigarettes appear in pictures? Or pictures that include known felons or people with police mug shots? It will be interesting to watch this space.

</comment><comment><USER5> "This week I worked 15 hour days... I believe everyone has something that will motivate them to this level"

Working crazy hours is not a synonym of motivation. You can be crazily motivated and _still_ have a life...

</comment><comment><USER6> What precisely is a "literal metric fuckton of advice"?

<comment><USER7> Well, we can take as a lower bound for information/energy equivalence as the k.T.ln(2) from Landauer's principle[1], and mass-energy equivalence as e = m.c^2; there would presumably be some inefficiency in converting energy to fuck-energy (call the efficiency epsilon), so that gives us

      information =  epsilon . mass . c^2 / (k . T . ln 2)
                  =~ epsilon * 3.13e43 bits

or about 3 billion billion yobibytes assuming peak fucking-efficiency. Bear in mind that this is assuming the advice was delivered at room temperature of 300K, which is unlikely given how hot Instagram startups are at the moment, and of course no-one should work in a vacuum, so this is just an upper bound.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauers_principle>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good read. I especially enjoy the part about smart people having an "idiot mode". I've found that some of my best ideas were derived from silly ones, and the silly ones only came about because I was with friends I could trust.

</comment><comment><USER9> How is this any different than "epiphanies as a hacker at a multi-person startup"? The post was well worded and concise, but didn't contain any insights that aren't standard HN rhetoric.

</comment><comment><USER10> _I think I can say with fair confidence that I've learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence._

\-- Isn't this a classic display of cognitive bias?</comment>


U.S. Chief Justice Says Pandemic Pierces 'Illusion of Certainty' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-23/u-s-chief-justice-says-pandemic-pierces-illusion-of-certainty <comment><USER2> _He said this year's graduates would be "probably one of a handful of the most challenged high school graduating classes since the class of 1942," during World War II.

"Today we call those graduates part of the Greatest Generation," Roberts said. "What are they going to call you?_ Your challenge is not as great, _but it's big and it's yours."_

I suspect this will be recalled as an example of counting one's chickens before they've hatched. It's not like we can say the instant crisis is past the peak.

<comment><USER3> Everyone in 1942 had a job.

<comment><USER4> But many of those jobs involved fighting in World War II, in which many were killed, wounded or taken as prisoners of war.</comment></comment></comment>


Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html <comment><USER2> I've been using Safari on and off for about 5 years now. Their book collection is _awesome_. Along with programing books, they have a bunch of great stuff on photography, business, and other subjects of interest to hackers and entrepreneurs.

Like a lot of the comments on oreilly.com, I'm not a fan of the UI overhaul, but I'm also happy to see Tim O'Reilly saying that the team is scrambling to improve the situation. When a company listens to its users, paying money for their services is much easier to justify.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's feedback in the comments now from the users of Safari Books Online and responses from Tim O'Reilly. Tim is surprised at the hatred the site is getting for it's Print Fidelity feature.</comment>


How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/how-measurement-fails-doctors-and-teachers.html <comment><USER2> My wife has a great doctor. We lost our first kid and this doctor took tons of extra time helping us in the second pregnancy. From fitting us into her already full schedule to taking 10 extra minutes in an appointment to calm my wife down.

There is nothing about the experience that could be captured in these metrics. But I can tell you that she kept my wife afloat during the bad days and probably kept her from seeing another councilor. Ultimately we had a baby girl the second time around. The kindness and as cited in the article, love, that the doctor showed us really really helped us.

<comment><USER3> Performance metrics sound like their empirically great, but as we all know, it's more complicated than that.

Personally, I've seen important programs, such as primary care-based depression screening and management that are proven to work then be turned into checklists and given to teams that are about checklist first, and less focused on mission/impact/caring. And I've seen patients respond that they are not helped. The therapeutic value of perceived empathy and attentiveness is unknown but should not be underestimated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing I am always amazed by people who developed metrics is they never seem to stop and think how the metric will be gamed and then take action to prevent this. It should be part of the development of any new metric to have a "evil" team work out all the ways the metric can be gamed so this can be blocked.

For example, it should be impossible to "teach the test" other than by teaching broadly the underlying concepts being tested. A well designed test will touch on so many concepts that only a education that is broad will work.

<comment><USER5> Why do you assume they don't stop to think about that? People who develop assessments usually think quite rigorously about exactly such problems, assuming they're following proper methods. Is it so surprising to you that this is a very difficult problem?

I would compare this to asking, "Why don't software developers think about bugs?" They do, and they attempt to handle them, but it's almost impossible to solve all such problems in programs (tests) of non-trivial size.

<comment><USER4> If they did then it would not be possible to "teach the test" other than by teaching the full subject. If there are any shortcuts a teacher can take with the class then the test is a failure.

I used to write tests all the time in my subjects and my tests could not be gamed. I would have half multiple choice questions drawn from every area we covered in the semester and half essay questions where the students had to integrate what they learned into a coherent answer. My students would ask me what they had to learn for the final exam and I would always say everything - if it wasn't going to be examined there was no point teaching it because the students won't both learning it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The irony is that in every organization, everyone knows who the performers and who the slackers are. But nobody wants to talk about that in deciding who gets promoted and who gets set aside.

A manager once told me that before the employee performance review cycle he had already decided who was going to get what raise. He'd start from that and work backwards to derive the required "metrics" to support it. The right people got the raises, and the HR department was satisfied with the scientific process :-)

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you that this is how things work, but my god this process is prone to corruption, both deliberate and unconscious. As a manager it is very hard to not reward your allies and punish your enemies and if you have a process that enables this then this is exactly what happens.

<comment><USER6> 1\. I wouldn't consider working for a boss who regarded me as an enemy. 2\. The manager also gets evaluated, and word will get around if he's promoting cronies, and if his dept gets poor results as a consequence. 3\. I mentioned that everyone knows who is naughty and who is nice. A rating system can be as simple as "who do the patients prefer" and "which teachers do the parents want for their kids". I expect that would be pretty accurate and pretty hard to game.

<comment><USER4> Walter nobody wants to work for a boss that considers them an enemy hence why there is so much politics in the workplace. Almost nobody is honest to their boss about what they think of them.

Word might get around about the boss, but when your job is on the line most people tow the line - as the Japanese say the nail that sticks out is the one that is hammered.

The problem with using metrics of what patients and parents think is this is not a good measure of what makes a good doctor or teacher. You can be an incompetent doctor with a fantastic bedside manner or a teacher all the parents relate to but who can't teach a fish to swim. The metric here is not the one you really want optimised.

On this topic I personally prefer doctors who have very poor beside manner because I assume they must have optimised competence over personal relations.

<comment><USER6> > The problem with using metrics of what patients and parents think is this is > not a good measure of what makes a good doctor or teacher.

I think it's natural to assume this is not a good measure. Let's take teachers. I don't believe a teacher can consistently fool parents into believing they've taught the kid a lot when the kid is obviously not learning. And bluntly, the teacher is supposed to be working for the parent. Why shouldn't the parents decide who they want teaching their kids?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is idiotic. If you have a problem with tests disincentivizing physical fitness, add a test for physical fitness. What's the problem?

And in medicine the problem is even more extreme, and comes down even more obviously in favor of _more_ , not less, measurement. Here's an example:

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119)

<comment><USER8> You found a singular NEJM paper by the celebrated "checklist champion" Atul Gawande for a method that applies only to one specialty, surgery. How can you be sure that this generalizes to all medicine?

Given that doctors in most other fields spend a ridiculous (by some metrics, 7:1) ratio of time doing paperwork or data entry vs. seeing the patient [1], I would suggest that there is serious opportunity cost in adding more self- measurements and checklists to most doctors' workload. Surgeons are likely an outlier that perhaps benefit most from being regressed to the mean.

[1]: [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/for-new- doctors-8-m...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/for-new- doctors-8-minutes-per-patient/)

<comment><USER7> I can be sure that it generalizes to all medicine because it's obvious. It generalizes to all fields. It's why we write unit tests. Nobody likes writing tests, but we do it anyway because they _work_. Like, really, really well. The idea that doctors would object to being asked to do the same when people's lives hang in the balance is crazy to me.

Now, it's certainly possible they're doing a whole bunch of useless paperwork. And it's certainly possible that there is too much in some areas - but that isn't a rejection of metrics and objective criteria. It's a rejection of the particular implementations of those things in particular places.

EDIT: To be clear, I think that what is actually needed is an overhaul of the tech. used to collect these metrics and fill out this paperwork. It's absolutely insane to me that doctors still use paper _at all_ , or that they have to enter the same data multiple times in multiple places, constantly. That needs to be fixed. And they need to start collecting 100x more data on their performance with 100x less friction of collection, by upgrading their technology in this regard from what was available in 1970.

<comment><USER8> I can totally understand your sentiment. I would just note that writing a unit test for a class and designing a metric that unambiguously measures good clinical care are on very different levels of difficulty. In our research group, we've tried to do some of the latter regarding infection control, and there is definitely a tradeoff between making metrics explainable in plain language (allowing mental buy-in by healthcare workers) and measuring attributable differences in performance, which usually requires a heap of tricky statistical corrections that few people can grok.

It would be a very interesting future where healthcare workers have the reams of stats that professional athletes do, and where everybody in the space is literate enough to intuitively understand each number and its caveats, like hardcore sports fans. For example, an ICU nurse is bound to encounter more hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) per week than a nurse in pre-op assessment, and so averaged cases of HAI per primary unit is the proper context for that stat, much like you'd weigh recent rushing yards for an NFL linebacker against the strength of the defenses faced. Then, managers could optimize their teams to each person's strength or weakness and/or supply training in the correct areas, much like coaches in sports do. This would be a sea change in the medical culture, though, and it would encounter staunch resistance, because some of the metrics already being pushed on doctors (# pts/day) arguably incentivize worse care.

To your last point, part of my research now is analyzing electronic medical record (EMR) data, and coming from any other field you'd be shocked at how messy it can be. In a way, this is to be expected, because the "vocabularies" for medical data are huge, and even widely used ontologies have bizarre properties [1]. I really hope that we can solve the data collection problems with better technology, but as of now, the incentives for EMR vendors to overhaul the tech is pretty low, now that most US hospitals have picked a system and those vendors have everything to lose and little to gain from overhauling their user interface.

[1]: [http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/the-16-most-absurd- icd-10...](http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/the-16-most-absurd- icd-10-codes/285737/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Whatever we do, we have to ask our clinicians and teachers whether measurement is working, and truly listen when they tell us that it isn't. Today, that is precisely what they're saying.>

The simplest solution, which very often turns out to be the most effective and least expensive solution, is to ask those personally involved in a system to improve it, themselves...if they have trouble getting started offer incentives for them to do so...

That (first) step is all too often skipped in our "age of impatience"...

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure I've understood your point, but that has some problems. My parents are high school teachers in Italy. Right now the government is requiring a basic evaluation system for teachers. Tests here are hardly ever standardized and can vary a lot; tests for things like Latin that is still taught like 100 years ago would be impossible to standardize anyway, so assessing student performance is impossible. They could not come up with some metrics for whatever reason, and now teachers have to decide these criteria by themselves. Of course nobody agrees on what such criteria should be, and those I've heard from my parents are hardly useful to improve teaching quality.

<comment><USER9> I think I understand the difficulties you identify...maybe I should have done a better job expanding upon, or explaining, what I'm advocating, which is simply the idea of "continuous improvement"...

In short, I'm in favor of involving those most closely related (those in direct contact, those in the actual environment) to what is perceived as a "problem" in devising a solution, or solutions...versus having an outside entity recommending improvements that might, or might not, improve outcomes...

Improvement is often hard, and when it comes it comes in increments...sometimes those increments are incredibly small, but even marginal improvements contribute to the success of the whole...even without "metrics" I think most teachers know, or sense, the difference in student outcomes their approaches have led to...

I'll bet (although reaching a consensus is difficult, especially across academic disciplines) that each teacher, at the end of a course, has in mind some way that their efforts could have been at least marginally more productive and could quickly answer the question, "What should I do differently next time?" ...

The best teachers do this automatically...and it makes all the difference...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bean counting is less effective if you don't know what a bean is.

</comment><comment><USER12> Being held accountable to metrics will incentivize some behaviors over others. It's not surprising that when Arts and Phys Ed are not on the test, they are dropped from the curriculum. I think student, teacher, doctor and patient happiness should be one of the key metrics that is measured and reported along with test scores and mortality rates. That would incentivize schools and hospitals to take a more balanced approach.

<comment><USER13> > I think student, ... happiness should be one of the key metrics

I have seen it first hand. Students are always happiest when a charming instructor provides bland infotainment that allows them to sustain a pretense of high achievement without trying very hard. The second hapiest students are those of mediocre teachers who give good grades to everyone so no one is very motivated to rock the boat. As a matter of fact, the teacher has to descend pretty low in terms of incompetence so the students will actually be less happy than if presented with a lecturer that knows their subject and expects them to put an actual effort in learning.

Of course, all things being equal, stern lecturers are more disliked than more relaxed instructors. This is not what I am taking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Managements often like to use 'performance metrics' and other statistics as a means of providing cover for their own decisions.

They hide behind the numbers, which they have rigged, to avoid taking any blame.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think in all these discussions of bean counters, the underlying assumptions non bean counters make is that the bean counters are trying to improve things. That, in my experience, is seldom the case. Mostly the act of bean counting is to create positions for bean counters, and insert themselves into the process. There is no end game in this, they will happily have meetings to discuss processes and improve metrics, because to them, bean counting is all there is. Without bean counting they would be unemployed. Once you let them in, you're screwed, cause they're impossible to get out.

Edit: Why the down vote? Perhaps some argument? (Oh, of course, it was probably a bean counter)

I posted this as a very real comment - once you accept that what you are doing is an item measurable by parties that aren't professionals in your field (bean counters) then any qualitative aspects of the profession are lost. Only the quantifiable is left, and because the bean counter doesn't communicate using the language of the profession - you are forced to learn their language. A language of quantifiables and reduction to line items. The rise of the professional manager who has necessarily no expertise in the field they are managing must of necessity reduce all non quantifiables to a 0 value. Thus you end up in the pickle that educators and physicians find themselves in. In the past administration was performed by members of the profession and so they could communicate using the same language.</comment>