That Old College Lie - <AUTHOR> http://www.democracyjournal.org/that_old_college_lie.html# <comment><USER2> At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future. Think of the many anecdotal home school success stories. (Of course there are also home school disasters.) This would be so disruptive to the current education and government institutions that I don't see it coming about soon. Primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities can still be education providers, but they would have to radically shift how they function.

<comment><USER3> _At the end of the day, personalized education, in many forms, is the future._

I think that'd be a pretty disastrous future; the purpose of "higher education", if it's to continue in any organized or disorganized form, is not to be personalized. The purpose is twofold:

* Give the students a common background of ideas and basic knowledge of their culture.

* Through study, discussion and debate of those ideas/culture, give them the ability to absorb and critically reflect upon arbitrary information.

In other words, there's a reason why, if you look at the bits which make them up, the terms "university" and "diversity" are practically antonyms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc. when thinking about higher education.

Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large division I teams do no pay for themselves.

Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for 'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding university sports.

Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.

</comment><comment><USER5> I too think there's a problem with higher education but I am doing something about. More details here on HN when ready.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?

<comment><USER4> Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly corrupting influence on the university.

EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility.

<comment><USER7> > Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in > large part, from student fees and the general academic fund.

Citation or definitions needed.

For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets.

The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports.

Yes, including the newish football stadium.

<comment><USER4> Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures.

Your perception is almost entirely wrong.

<comment><USER7> I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports.

And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some thoughts:

1\. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education.

2\. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable.

3\. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is _not_ the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions _while_ slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable.

We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work.

4\. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it.

Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.

<comment><USER9> _College is different. You're paying up-front for professors you've never met and degree programs you probably haven't even chosen yet_

A little initiative, and this doesn't have to be the case.

<comment><USER10> College is also a great time to figure out what you don't want to do. While some people already know that they want to be a Pediatrist at 16-17 when they are researching college, others might _think_ they want to be a (insert career) but they have limited experience actually interacting with that field.

Some of the smartest people I've known going to the Ivy league schools seemed to change what they wanted to do while there, or got their degree and then did something completely different- realizing that they enjoyed learning about the subject but didn't want to work in the field. It isn't that they didn't have initiative, but figuring out your entire life at 17 and researching/meeting every professor for every college that you're applying to is both time consuming and expensive.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure it's so productive to get caught up into the rat-race to get into a good school. After all, there is a tremendous amount of emotional energy and effort expended by a great many people to this end. What if the lion's share of that energy could be devoted to substantive work? Ok, so many will claim that a lot of the things that they did in High School to pad their resumes were also "substantive work." Let's be real about this, though. By "substantive work" I don't mean educational opportunities, or some sort of scale model preparation or role-playing for what you might do in the future, I mean actual value-added, getting paid for it in the market work. What if even half of that which is just "preparation" could be harvested as real work?

I'm sure that this would result not only in increased productivity of the economy as a whole, but it would also result in _superior educational experiences_.

Also, there is no reason at all why this has to be structured in a way that gets in the way of "figuring out what I want to do." In fact, I'll bet that actually doing work will provide better information on which to make those decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If everyone knows that what is happening is wrong, then why doesn't anyone fix it?"

This question is hogging me for the past couple of years or so. I find it impossible to answer.

<comment><USER12> You just need to step back and look at the incentives. The vast majority of college students are there to be "certified impressive", and socialized to cooperate in the workforce, NOT to learn. If learning were the goal, the system would look radically different. As it stands, students get their certification, employers get their pre-socialized workforce.

The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire. Unfortunately for those of us who would like to see the system improve, the required level seems to be dropping as technology allows corporations to automate a lot of tasks, and make other tasks nearly fool proof (think customer service flow charts).

For those roles that require actual acumen and responsibility, training for those will continue as it has since time immemorial: passed directly from family member or family friend to eager young adults, which is a primary force creating and maintaining class boundaries.

<comment><USER13> The one problem is the professors think that college is for learning.

I'm one of those in college solely to get "certified impressive".

<comment><USER14> In my experience most professors think that college is for funding their research.

<comment><USER15> Professors don't collect money from undergrads to pay for research; they collect grants to fund themselves, their students, their labs, etc. They spend a tremendous amount of time and energy writing these grant proposals and submitting them to all the right people.

The reality is that most Research Professors (not all professors are on the tenure track, after all) are more motivated by research than by education, because they have to be. Nearly everything is stapled to #/quality of publications. If you don't like that, you'll have to revamp the whole system.

Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand. Add on to that that the professor has likely been researching an offshoot of this topic for years or even decades and you don't exactly have any motivation for the professor to put himself out there for the student.

If you want a professor to really care about you and make an active investment in you, you have to engage with him or her somewhere outside of class. The best way to do this is through research. If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well.

<comment><USER16> "Besides, as much as we glorify it, teaching students sucks. Students do the bare minimum it takes to get the grades they want, and exhibit next to no real interest in the topics at hand."

Teaching students sucks _when students aren't engaged_. It sucks to teach students who don't actually want to learn something; they just want to fulfill a requirement, or put the class on their CV. You're exactly right to say that "If you want to put in your minimum to get your diploma, you're going to get that professor's minimum as well."

That is, when teaching sucks, it sucks because students are participating in the exact same behavior that colleges are: bolstering their perceived reputations. Students do this because they have been taught (by colleges and the schools that prepare them for college) that reputation is what counts. So, if you fix the reputation-seeking system, student and professorial engagement in learning should increase, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 > percent of adults with bachelor's degrees are proficient in "prose > literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for > example.

Well shock and awe, people can't do a college compare and contrast assignment after they leave college. Just ask them what's different in the articles.

> More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can't calculate the > cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.

A skill that isn't strictly needed if those people can use a calculator, it's good enough. Stop measuring how effective school is by having people retake tests they took in school.

<comment><USER17> I think you're missing the point by a wide margin. Determining the difference between two articles and ordering supplies are two very common tasks -- if people with a college degree lack the ability to do them, we really are in trouble.

If they were testing something that was obviously very college-centric but not a commonplace in a regular job -- say, integral calculus -- I would agree with you. However, if someone graduated with a degree in physics and they couldn't do calculus, I would say there was a problem also. It sounds like they just tested the bare minimum of skills.

<comment><USER18> I work in construction and I work with guys who haven't graduated high school, but they can easily perform the basic arithmetic required for the latter of the tasks, and they're frequently doing the former when discussing everything from radio stations to movies and video games.

For anyone who graduated college and can't accomplish these thoughtless tasks, all I can say is that they wasted way too much money to essentially get dumber than your average high school dropout. Similar procedures can be performed for a much more reasonable price and involves taking a hammer to the flattest part of a persons skull . . . although I'm unsure even a major concussion and amnesia could make someone dumb enough to forgot how to do 1 + 1 + 1</comment></comment></comment>


A fully functioning PC port of Super Mario 64 has been released online - <AUTHOR> https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/a-full-mario-64-pc-port-has-been-released/ <comment><USER2> Hi there. First of all, apologies for the privacy invasion. (I tried to contact you via Github but I'm not sure if you've seen my message).

I was sifting through posts on HackerNews on the book, Building Git (by James Coglan) and I stumbled upon your thread. I am currently a student, with no source of income at the moment. However, I have a deep desire to understand the internal working of Git. In fact, I'm already more than halfway through ProGit. But the lack of proper guidance/book is hindering my progress to build the same model from scratch.

Hence, I would be extremely delighted if you could share a copy of the book (if you still own it). I promise to pay it forward.

Let me know if this would be possible. My email id is firstname.lastname@example.com.

Let me know if I should take down this post! In any case, thanks for helping people out!

Looking forward to your response!

</comment><comment><USER3> The source code leaks are the real story. I believe this release is a proof of concept of the creator's capabilities with access to the console source code.

'According to various sources, over two terabytes of data was allegedly leaked onto the anonymous forum 4chan over the weekend, including the original source code for Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii.

'The data could, in theory, be used to create illegal clone hardware able to run software and operate exactly like the original systems.'</comment>


ISP Bandwidth Caps are Really Rate Hikes - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ICringely+%28I%2C+Cringely%29

<comment><USER2> As a Canadian who went through the debate here, I can say that caps and rate hikes aren't the same thing. The psychological impact on the average internet user is very different, and so online behaviour will be impacted in a different way.

Paying 40$ a month instead of 30$ for an unlimited or very high amount of data means you'll grumble a bit, but you'll still do whatever you did before.

Going from a very high cap or unlimited to a very low cap + expensive additional data means you'll very probably try to restrict your data transfers and do whatever you can not to exceed your cap.

You don't have a sunken cost like with a normal rate hike..

<comment><USER3> What's surprising to me is that, at least with Comcast, there's simply no way to get the cap-free service I had before. I don't have the option to pay more to remove the cap (other than paying per gigabyte over the cap, which is silly).

<comment><USER4> Business service?

<comment><USER5> Yes, but it's expensive. I pay $89 + $10 for static IPs per month. The data rates I get: 50+Mbps/6Mbps. I torrent tv shows and I've never noticed any problems seeding. My downloads usually start out at 3-5MB/s, and drop down to 2MB/s. Clearly they are throttling the downstream, but I can live with that rate.

EDIT: I don't know what the advertised rates were, but they were less (20/5?).

<comment><USER6> e40, what's the name of your plan? I can't seem to find rates like that on their site, the 50/20 plan is for 280 dollars.

<comment><USER5> On my bill it says: 16m Business Class HSI Preferred, for $89.95. The 5 static IPs are $9.95.

I don't remember there being a specific name for it.

I would not be surprised if they don't offer the exact thing anymore.

My advice, get some relatively low speed (16Mbps) and hope it's much higher, like I got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I don't argue with the title of the article - bandwidth caps really are just a way to deal with infrastructure costs by passing it on to some consumers - the use of IP transit as a reference for an ISPs cost of service is inaccurate.

IP transit costs are what a carrier or ISP would pay to get traffic from their main datacenter/CO in a given metro area to the Internet. This is an operating expense and is a drop in the bucket compared to CapEx they spend on the last mile.

The cable operators and mobile carriers are freaking out because they are constantly pouring money into nodes splits and QAM carriers(cable) or radios, backhaul, and spectrum(mobile). These are the real money pits of their businesses and their motivation to enforce data transfer caps, throttling, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why ISPs aren't offering _some_ benefit to their users when they introduce these transfer caps. Why not add caps to the lower plans and lower the price as well? If it's true that the vast majority of users don't get anywhere near the caps, then this would be beneficial to most users.

For heavier users, offer a plan with no cap (or, say, a cap 10x larger) and higher speed, and charge more for it. I think power users would be much more accepting of a price increase along with higher speeds than a simple addition of caps to all plans with no price change.

<comment><USER8> In the US, cable companies are often monopolies in providing broadband internet. They get away with offering mediocre product and poor service simply because there are no alternatives.

I've had the backwards situation where it was cheaper to buy basic cable TV + cable internet than stand alone cable internet.

It would be foolish of them to offer a cheaper, limited cable internet plan when they can make everybody pay more for their standard, unlimited (that is not unlimited) plan.

<comment><USER3> From my small town of 10,000 people, to my college town with 100,000, to my current home in San Francisco, there has always been at least two broadband providers: usually the local cable company and AT&T DSL. Perhaps this isn't the norm, or perhaps two companies with completely separate local infrastructures isn't enough competition.

<comment><USER9> DSL is not good competition for any reasonable cable internet service. In Pittsburgh Comcast's $60 a month service is 5 times the speed of the $25 a month 1-3 mbps DSL service offered by Verizon DSL. The DSL connection is barely enough for reasonable quality video streaming, but it's not enough if you want to have two people use pipe at the same time. FIOS does provide decent competition but it's availability is limited.

<comment><USER10> You can get two lines and bond them.

<comment><USER11> That's about as useful as taking two slices of bread, gluing them together, and declaring the result a complete bakery. You'd have to get _ten_ bonded DSL lines to compare with the speed of a cable modem in my area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The default 2Gb wireless internet cap from Verizon is pathetic.

It is even more pathetic with their 4G network advertisement. All it takes is 1(maybe 2) HD movies from Netflix to hit a monthly cap.

<comment><USER13> the 2-5 GB caps are for wireless networks, aka 3G. How often do you download HD movies onto your phone? In the very next sentence it mentions 250 GB for desktop connections.

<comment><USER12> Netflix client has been out on Android phone OS for awhile and is quite popular.

[http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=pla...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=plans)

Default data plan for smart phone is $30/mo, capped at 2Gb/mo, on a 4G network.

Their maximum cap is 10Gb/mo for an outrageous price of $80/mo.

It is evident that the whole point of 4G network for Verizon is to bring their customer to the monthly cap at a blazing speed and start over-charging them by $10/Gb as soon as they can.

<comment><USER14> Ya know, I can't help feeling that this quote is apropos:

"Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy." --Louis C.K.

It used to be the case that you couldn't get ANYTHING approaching 5mbps download speed in your home. Now we regularly get 15, 25, and even 50mbps download speeds.

You also couldn't get decent wireless data. Remember EDGE? 1xRTT? Try streaming Netflix back then.

I remember Airphone and using a MODEM to get 9600bps data so I could send an urgent IM and followup email via the Airphone on a flight to a co-worker. Now I can get GoGo inflight internet pretty regularly. I'm looking forward to my next transatlantic on Lufthansa when I can have access to the Internet for almost the entire flight.

Need high-speed internet out in the middle of NOWHERE? You can get two-way high-speed Internet via satellite for a very reasonable sum.

It's all amazing and nobody is happy.

I've spent the past 20 years working in the Internet industry for almost EVERY major ISP out there. It's quite disheartening to see your router capacities double every two years when you're locked into a 7-year depreciation cycle for network hardware. Ditto for long-haul transmission.

This wireless is different? Maybe you weren't there for the tower space leasing negotiations I witnessed. You think broadband is expensive? Try sticking 3 antennas along with hardline 150' up a pole and tell me that your broadband is expensive when you see the monthly bill for tower leasing for a SINGLE site.

WOW.

The long term trend for high-speed internet pricing is DOWN. We get more and more downstream and upstream capacity per dollar with each passing year. Wired AND wireless. What was once IMPOSSIBLY expensive is only going to get less so in the future.

I used to pay $12.80 PER HOUR for 1200bps access.

BTW, You're Welcome.

Too expensive? Don't pay it. I think you can still get a 56kb modem on Ebay. Dialup ISP service is something like $7.95/mo now.

And that's in 2011 dollars.

<comment><USER11> _Ya know, I can't help feeling that this quote is apropos:

"Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy." --Louis C.K._

Whenever this point is raised, I always argue that human progress depends on the amazing becoming commonplace, luxuries becoming essentials, etc. If we were always walking around being bewildered by everything, we'd have no reason to improve.

<comment><USER14> My main point was to illustrate just how far we've come in absolute terms.

My second point was to point out that there are real reasons why the assumptions made about what broadband "costs" aren't really relevant to what you "pay" for it.

Without putting too fine a point on it, CAPEX on equipment/fiber tend to be dwarfed by the OPEX of leasing and labor costs associated with running a telecomm business for profit. Somewhat distended depreciation schedules mandated by GAAP compound the problem of removing obsolete assets from production networks and replacing them with newer equipment.

BTW, pricing for "Internet" has been "metered" almost from the beginning of commercial availability. UUNET did 95th percentile pricing for almost all of its dedicated access customers because that was the best way to tie consumption patterns to bandwidth availability.

If bandwidth seems expensive now, it's only because you've been paying for it for a very, very short time.

<comment><USER11> My first encounter with the Internet was on a 10hr/mo. dial-up connection with a 14.4kbps modem, and I'd been using BBSes before that. I definitely appreciate how far we've come :). Still, ISPs have reached the point where they're holding back technological progress to satisfy their own ends. Municipal fiber projects and independent ISPs often don't impose the same restrictions as the monopoly players, which suggests that it's possible to run a network without, for example, forcing Netflix to pay an extra fee on top of its existing bandwidth payments.

So does the extended depreciation force equipment owners to pay the taxes they would've written off for the extra years if they just disconnect the equipment and let it sit in a closet?

<comment><USER14> How many municipal ISPs are there? Municipal fiber companies?

Careful. I used to work for a municipal fiber company and they are FAR from being the best group to build the kind of Infrastructure we need. Don't even get me started on the problem of politicizing the communications infrastructure of a city.

The only path forward is for us to get some real competition between the cablecos and the telcos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for those normalized graphs. Really gives a striking visual rebuttal to ISP's baseless claims.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone feel that the new white space standard (up to 22Mbps over 12,000 sq mi; 802.22) could be a game changer?

Original article was posted here yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814917>

_Cross-posting my question from this thread:_

Is this spectrum encumbered by any regulations that would prevent an enterprising individual from leasing some land near a backbone connection and setting up a startup ISP?

Would LOVE to see the regional cable monopolies face real competition. 22Mbps is about 30% more downstream and 4000% more upstream speed than I get from Time Warner Cable in NYC.

<comment><USER4> 22 Mbps _shared by hundreds or thousands of customers_ is much worse than cable or DSL. You can already do ~100 Mbps at decent range in 2.4 GHz using Ubiquiti or similar equipment; there are dozens of WISPs doing this and if they're lucky they barely break even.

<comment><USER16> Thanks Wes - If I understand correctly, it's the density of end-points within range that would determine whether the economics are favorable.

Wondering then, what is the use case for this new standard? Only very rural areas?

<comment><USER14> No. You're missing the point ENTIRELY.

As average bandwidth consumption PER ENDPOINT increases and moves from very bursty to somewhat constant bit rate, the effects up the cost chain start to chip away at the design parameters that went into building the infrastructure we're going to live with for some time. Replacing that infrastructure is costly so pricing pressure is used to delay that replacement event. It's all about ECONOMICS.

This is the case whether we're talking about urban or rural areas. It's definitely more acute when we're in a rural area, but the first-mile is only part of the cost of delivering b/w. The rest of that cost is driven by indirect factors.

Case in point: a very recent government regulation resulted in a network upgrade that cost $71 million in new hardware ALONE. Add in the labor costs associated with testing and installing all of that hardware and you're somewhere north of $100 million. That "upgrade" added not a single bit of capacity to the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cringely doesn't mention ISPs' claims that they will increase the caps every year. I'm willing to wait for them to renege before breaking out the torches and pitchforks.

<comment><USER17> And if they reneg, are you going to be able to get enough pitchforks to make a difference?

<comment><USER4> No, which is why Cringely's rant is pointless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish it was just a rate hike. Instead, you are often simply cut off with no recourse for exceeding the cap. You _can't_ pay more and get more.

If you're not granny checking her email and facebook, you're not welcome here.

I think its more about quietly but forcefully sending the message that your internet is not for tv.</comment>


The STEM Crisis is a Myth - <AUTHOR> http://m.spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

<comment><USER2> "Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren't working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available."

Yet another article that hinges on the critical mistake that seems to underpin all these anti-immigration op-eds: that all workers trained in x are interchangeable.

Any programmer knows this isn't true-- that there is a huge difference between great programmers and people who are merely trained in computer science. And that there is a genuine shortage of the former in former in Silicon Valley.

Incidentally, the Economic Policy Institute is not merely "liberal-leaning." It was created by labor unions to spread precisely this sort of message.

<comment><USER3> Money matters. I'm almost certain you know of people working in other (non programming) fields that _were_ good programmers and if offered a 250K salary they would go back to programming, but they won't for a 120K salary. Employers need to stop whining and pay more.

Edit: I can think of plenty of people (most former coworkers, actually) that work for the Accentures and IBMs because they got, among other things, more pay by working as a program manager. And they would love to leave that job and work as a programmer if they could get paid the same and not worry about their job being outsourced.

[http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2012-H1B-Visa- Sponsor.aspx...](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2012-H1B-Visa- Sponsor.aspx?P=1)

<comment><USER2> No, actually, I can't think of one person I know who left programming because it didn't pay well enough.

<comment><USER3> We must be living in different worlds then. I've seen many people leave programming to get a job in program management because those jobs a) are not easily outsourced and b) get healthy pay increases each year.

<comment><USER4> and perhaps c) are considered careers for people older than 35

just wondering, when an engineer is promoted to manager, is he no longer a STEM worker? and isn't he no longer employed in the field of his educational background?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Submitted four weeks ago under canonical URL with more than 100 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6305671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6305671)

And I think patio11's top-level (and apparently highest-karma) comment in the earlier thread covers the most essential issues. People in STEM occupations with strong skill sets are still in very high demand, while possibly there are a lot more people with STEM degrees but weaker skill sets who wonder why they have trouble finding jobs.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link. Excellent comments there.

Too bad that HN can't dedup canonical URLs properly. It wouldn't be that hard - just analyze the title, domain, URL, samples of the article.

pg: maybe crowdsource development and start accepting pull requests?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prices for all goods and services are determined by supply and demand. The best ways to increase supply of labor is increase wages and on the job training. This will send a signal to potential workers to seek work in the field. The government does not need increase subsides to wealthy industries with special access to non-immigrant guest workers and free training programs. Business can solve this "problem" with good wages. Every business complains about paying for talent, and workers always want a little more. They can both set the market rate for wages which will determine supply of labor.

</comment><comment><USER8> From the article - _To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers [...]_

Or to put it another way: there is no shortage of applicants, but there sure is a shortage of good ones.

<comment><USER9> That is the impression I have always gone away with when this subject comes up. Companies don't want STEM workers, they want the "top 1%" of STEM workers. There is a shortage of them, but training more people in the field will not necessarily increase the suitable labor pool.

<comment><USER10> I also find that a lot of the problem is that many companies want a _ready_ STEM worker. In other words someone who can get up and going immediately. Business plans require it but such a person is specialized and cannot have got up and running without dabbling in the field either alone or in another job. So you get a lot of able STEM workers not well honed in any specialty and get rejected for a big job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My girlfriend graduated valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA majoring in math and minoring in physics, including completing a 4 month internship at NASA, and she has been unable to find a job related to either of those fields for over a year now. Every job she's looked at/applied for requires 1-2 years of experience or more education. To live and pay off debt she taught herself HTML/CSS and some web programming and has been working freelance. She'd still love a job in math or physics. She might go back to school, but is hesitant to go into more debt without knowing she can get a job in her field of study. Everyone told her in college that she would have no problem finding a job studying math/physics.

<comment><USER3> So put your business guy hat on, who only cares about the bottom line. You could train her for 2 months or so and she might work out, or you could do a temp hire from an outsourcing company. Which is less risk, easier and gets results sooner?

I don't agree with that kind of thinking but that's basically what is going on. What about the long term for that organization, community and country? The business guy is not thinking about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Duplicate (mobile version) of an earlier submission. See the earlier discussion at

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6305671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6305671)

</comment><comment><USER13> Actual research on the topic instead of punditry. A good article that will sadly sway no politician.

<comment><USER14> but he concludes stating that giving everyone a grounding in STEM is a good idea.

Insisting there's a shortage is an economic method to inflate study in that area. How would he rather things change? I sure hope it's not "You need to take a heap of courses you're not interested in because maybe it will help you later"

That's the same line someone gave me with art and literature courses. I am not fond of that person, BTW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a minor blind spot of the often repeated but completely false claim that there are no STEM jobs or STEM activity of any sort outside SV/Manhattan, so its perfectly statistically possible for a shortage of STEM grads willing to for for $7.25/hr in SV/Manhattan to exist, therefore "the entire nation" has a STEM shortage, although solely in two relatively microscopic geographic locations. I assure you there is NO SHORTAGE of qualified STEM folks in, say, Wisconsin. Qualified STEM folks willing to work for $7.25/hr? Yes. Qualified STEM folks willing to work at Starbucks and sling coffee? Yes.

Another tangent on the topic is "real STEM" work vs business successes. You don't exactly need Knuth to implement "We're gonna serve ads to IRC implemented over SMS reimplemented over a smartphone app" "We're going to implement an online workforce automation website for middle school girls by making a database of peoples friends and then they can play virtual farm games with each other and then we'll sell ads and database dumps". What I'm getting at, is if you want to implement the great wall of china, your limit is always going to be logistics issues relating to grunts with shovels and wheelbarrows, not PHD level theoretical civil engineer problems.

So add some geographic concerns, and add some discussion of real STEM vs grunt labor type of tasks to the in a previously STEM-ish field.

Other than those two mostly untouched topics, its a good article with no obvious mistakes in what topics were covered.</comment>


Is Ethical A.I. Even Possible? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/business/ethics-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder.

AI only introduces a new danger, but at the current complexity of AI I don't think its any more significant in effect than the other ethical problems we have. In fact, many misuses of A.I are based on the uses, not the AI itself. I don't think linear regression is inherently an immoral tool either if we're going the "this tool is too dangerous to use/allow access to" route. Until we have anything close to AGI, AI is a tool only as ethical as the user of the tool. That's the real issue here.

We absolutely do need regulation, but I'll be damned if 10 people with power in any government understand AI well enough to regulate it. Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. The FCC is a great example of a place we should have had the model for decades.

<comment><USER3> I think AI is especially important for it to be used ethically because it has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically

<comment><USER2> > [AI] has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically

Does it?

At a personal level, I'm much more scared of a bad person with a gun and access to me than a bad person with an AI and access to me. It's more important than the ethical use of a teacup, but certainly rivaled and beaten at a micro level.

At a macro level I think your argument has more ground to stand on when it comes to things like improved efficiency of mass surveillance, but how much of that is AI part rather than the mass surveillance part? What immoralities are enabled/accelerated that could not be done without AI? In the end I'm just as concerned about mass surveillance as I was before. In a practical sense, even if somehow passed laws limiting AI, do I really think that a government performing mass surveillance in the shadows is going to follow those laws when AI is a concept anyone (with the know-how) can implement? I don't think AI's power/capacity is as high as people think, it just tends to fit well with some very bad macro level ethical actions to enhance them.

I'm not sure I'm convinced either way yet, but the claim of "unrivaled" made me immediately skeptical, at least considering the AI of this decade(s). In a hundred years you're probably right with the unrivaled part, though atom bombs and the like are probably close seconds.

<comment><USER4> AI is about scale. You can achieve similar terrible results by using, say, Mechanical Turk system with additional error checks. That scales too.

The other thing AI is about is cost and perhaps secrecy. Turk system requires many people who need to be fed, that puts a pretty high low bar on price. It also requires disseminating data to many agents, each of whom could leak it.

Being more accessible means more Bad Guys (unethical actors) using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in reading more about the subject of AI and Ethics or AI and Fairness, I kindly suggest this reading list I've been working on for a while: [https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading- lis...](https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-list)

There are also other topics but it's intended as a primer for engineers interested in understanding the social problems created by new technologies.

<comment><USER6> I'm kicking myself that I never thought to use GitHub to put together a reading list. Great idea.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, great idea. The thing that's missing, though, is that you can't easily leave a comment on each of the listed items. That makes it a sort of one-way piece of information. Perhaps a wiki would be better (?)

<comment><USER5> True but you have the issues and the PR. The format for sure is not intended for casual discussion but at the same time there's plenty of space to discuss improvements and bring criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ethics is subjective. If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on.

The article mentions trying to have a human enforce ethics, but then that person has to be an example of ethical excellence; something you can't test for. And in the end, they say every man has his price, so no. I don't think "ethical AI" is possible. I think "ruthlessly efficient AI" is the goal. Maybe it should only be used in situations where ethics don't matter

<comment><USER9> Ruthlessly efficient AI is the next "big stick". Nuclear weapons brought us _relatively_ close to world peace (after burning up hundreds of thousands of people and scaring the whole world shitless) maybe ruthless AI can do the same. I'm not particularly eager to see what an AI arms race and cold war looks like though.

Things are decent enough right now, it could be a lot worse; do the upsides of creating ruthless AI justify the risks? Is it an eventuality anyway? At this stage could we conceivably prevent it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> First we'd have to make an ethical society...

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, was just looking through the glassdoor reviews at the company in the article,Clarifai.

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review- Clarifai-R...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai- RVW23884886.htm)

Seems like an awful place to work. They have a role I was about to apply to in the bay area. Looks like I'll avoid this place.

<comment><USER12> Wow this one is good [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review- Clarifai-R...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai- RVW23794922.htm)

Fun fact, they hired an ex trump org assistant to be his new assistant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon- benita-23703449](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-benita-23703449)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For this I usually think that complexity in general is dangerous when our ability to apply our own value systems degrades past a certain point. For the 2008 financial issues we had a few financial products like subprime loans where the reasoning and economics behind these were complicated enough that most couldn't effectively regulate or understand the implications of their use.

I suppose when enough things go wrong with a complex system it's like having runtime errors popup that you can debug against and get a better understanding of what you created, but that first execution is just dangerous enough that you wouldn't want something that's complex enough to be doing anything important. Then again, we might not think something is complex enough until we start running into the "unknown unknowns" of real world usage.

Maybe a somewhat subjective qualifier for what's "complex" could be developed and then the ethical question is "is due diligence being taken to reduce the risks inherent in this complex system?"

</comment><comment><USER14> Universally ethical A.I.? No. But then neither are humans. So I refuse the idea that always ethical A.I. is a goal that disqualifies A.I. as being useful.

Government arguably should be an expedient (this is Thoreau's argument anyway), and it's possible A.I. could be at least a more consistent expedient that also commits to ratting itself out anytime its ethical programming is substantially altered. That isn't at all how humans behave, they can't be programmed this way.

Merely having A.I. that concisely points out the competing ethical positions on an issue, would be an improvement to word salad propaganda; propaganda is a significant impediment to both ethical and critical thinking, so an A.I. that were to score statements on a propaganda scale would itself be useful.

[https://propagandacritic.com/](https://propagandacritic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> (Throwaway in case this is crank science.)

Neural nets are inspired by human neural structures. Training is in some ways similar to human learning. Genetic algorithms especially in simulated worlds are directly inspired by the biological evolution in the real world.

Is there any chance that the resulting algorithms themselves (the AI) shall have any ethical rights or significance? Especially once it exceeds in complexity the human brain.

The reason I ask is that it is an ethical question about AI (and therefore on topic), but I don't know how to think about it and hope others here might share some insight.

<comment><USER16> Really that's more about the effect on us and the systems of society than the intrinsic nature of rights of the AI. Having things that seem human or capable of human insight and yet making them slaves may demean us all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We humans have a multitude of competing ethics in the form of religions; we can't even agree on which one is the right one; programming ethics into AI is going back to that chicken-and-egg problem, requiring selecting which philosophical system is the right one. We can view competing religions as optimization algorithms where the best one for given state of world is winning, pressuring other ones to evolve or die off. Would we need competing, multi-GAN style AI "religions" all times at each other's throat as well?

<comment><USER18> There is nothing inherently ethical about any religion. They have some ethical concepts in them that might be universal like don't kill but they are easily overridden by don't kill fellow believers. Similarly there is nothing ethical about any society other than within the small confined system of a certain ideology which validates its own ethics. At the end ethics is just a game we play and we can teach computers to play similar games with a certain set of rules. That does not in any way mean that a computer will be ethical, only that it can be taught to observe the norms of the ethical games played by the society it serves using a rule based system that is applied to certain final actions that it has computed it should carry out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a work of fiction (the name of which I unfortunately do not recall) that tells tales of war machines, hard-coded with the rules and conventions of war, coming into conflict with their own angry and frustrated operators.

I love the concept of AI that could be not just super-intelligent, but also/instead super-moral. I hope we can find the inspiration to bring some of that concept into reality.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ethics in AI makes me think of [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Voliti...](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ethical yes, whether those ethics are in alignment with humans is another question.

</comment><comment><USER22> (Criminal|Unethical|Bad) for one is (hero|ethical|good) for another.

</comment><comment><USER23> First things first. What do we mean by "ethical"?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is an ethical hammer even possible?

<comment><USER25> A, the old "it's how you use the tool" chestnut.

Only some tools are inherently abusable -- something that has been expressed in lots of forms, from "the medium is the message" critique of TV/internet/etc, to the gun control debate ("guns don't kill people, people kill people" etc).

<comment><USER24> I think you are missing the point, the argument is AI ethical isn't the same as can AI be ethical.

AI is a tool, and while you can say some tools are easier to abuse than others it has not baring on their ethics since tools have no ethics to begin with.

And the leverage or force multiplication you get from a tool is directly tied to how easily it can be abused but also to how useful it is to you in general.

Is a gun less ethical than a siringe because it can be used for violence? How about siginges fuling the drug epidemic?

Are nukes less ethical than conventional weapons?

Were the looms that the luddites seek the destroy unethical because they put people out of work?

Should we consider combines and modern agriculture unethical because they drastically changed the balance of power of various nations?

Ofc not as all of these arguments are silly and flawed once you actually begin to deconstruct them.

This has nothing to do about gun control I have no problem controlling guns because I don't want to get shot and if someone does break into my house I prefer them not to be armed.

I also prefer the police not to be armed at all times because I think that it's just as important not to bring a gun to a knife fight as it is the other way around if you don't want to escalate things.

I have no problem of regulating the application of AI when necessary.

However it does not mean that I think that it has anything to do with its ethics but with ours.

Some uses of AI could be deemed by society to be unethical for the same reason that society deemed that harvesting the organs of a random person to save 5 people is unethical because people wouldn't be able to function knowing that they might be harvested at any moment.

So if we bring this back to AI it's not that I would think that say an AI run mass surveillance system is unethical because I'm not sure if the AI can make ethical decisions I would consider it unethical if society wouldn't be able to function well under it.

<comment><USER26> Though I agree in principle, I think tools can't be considered in isolation, but rather in the context of iterated game theory.

Is Instagram inherently evil? Obviously not; but through the lens of pre- existing human social dynamics, including status competition, mating drives, social signaling, etc, the capabilities introduced by that particular tool almost inevitably lead to the perverse incentives of lifestyle facades, "influencers", Fyre Festival, etc. Do we have to do these things? Of course not. But it's naive to not think about the "realpolitik" scenarios, and what could be done to mitigate them, rather than assuming perfectly ethical and rational actors.

What makes AI even more complicated than previous technological changes to our game landscape, is the potential not for new tools, but for new _players_ : at best, these artificial players are proxies for each of our interests (though see the side effects of "flash crashes" from high-frequency trading bots); at worst, we may have to contend with vastly intelligent new players with emergent interests of their own, which we can't necessarily predict. While I don't think it's inconceivable that A.I. will always be subject to human understanding and control, we're in such new territory that that's fundamentally an assumption (see the arguments from Bostrom, etc).

<comment><USER24> AI isn't s player it's as dumb as a rock. The players are still humans that build, maintain, operate and can switch it off.

<comment><USER2> AI today is that dumb, but I think the parent comment is discussing a theoretical AGI nearing or possessing consciousness. A bit irrelevant for today's moral conversation on AI but a very interesting one down the line if we ever do get to that point.

<comment><USER24> Let's have this talk in 3 centuries then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paywall bypass: [https://outline.com/VBgvaj](https://outline.com/VBgvaj)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's time for a Butlerian Jihad

<comment><USER11> best comment of the day on hn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> const not_evil = true;

</comment><comment><USER30> Removes paywall, and reduces page load 91% - from 3.93MB to 349KB, uses zero JavaScript: [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215)

<comment><USER31> How apropos to post that in a thread discussing ethics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> No. And if you think yes, you are probably deceiving yourself about your own ethical abilities.

<comment><USER2> What is unethical about a farmer using AI to figure out the best arrangement of his crops to maximize the food he produces, maintain his land quality, and minimize his environmental impact?

<comment><USER33> I mean, the short answer is if all of the constraints and inputs to a problem are known, you don't need an AI at all. There is a guaranteed optimal crop arrangement, and the model to produce it would be purely based on natural sciences only - physics, biochemistry, engineering etc.

AI is only required when there is some unknown, ambiguous, adversarial, or otherwise non-existent input or constraint. AI (or indeed any intelligence) is only useful in situations where there is "bias" (in the data science sense), inference, preference, and extrapolation being used to make decisions in an unknown space.

And it's precisely in these areas where ethics can be part of the "weights" given to those inferences and preferences.

<comment><USER2> Would weather patterns / trends not qualify a need for AI in this context? What about prediction of food demand by type for the upcoming year? Those are the big unknown inputs an AI could pretty easily morally aid to here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Ironcast.tv Still a Thing? - <AUTHOR> I see that there are pre-orders left, but the email on their website bounces, the linkedin they link 404s and there's not much on their other social media, and the website seems to have a lot of little unfixed problems with scrolling despite how simple it is. Chances are they're just heads down building a product, but I had questions and it feels a bit dead so I can't tell if they're still in business or if the kickstarter went under or something? I ask here because I've seen several recommendations for them from the HN crowd, but as far as I can tell there's nothing to recommend yet and no release date. If anyone knows the details, let's hear em; thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Nevermind, they finally fixed their email aliases (sort of, it still bounces, but someone else gets it and responds) and they told me it's a dumb TV (I wasn't sure from the website) and it's likely being released sometime in August 2021.</comment>


Lenovo Pre-installed malware - <AUTHOR> http://www.myce.com/news/lenovo-laptops-come-with-preinstalled-advertisement-injecting-adware-74290/

<comment><USER2> Forum link where Lenovo employees confirm the issue:

[https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Security-Malware/Potentially- Un...](https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Security-Malware/Potentially-Unwanted- Program-Superfish-VisualDiscovery/m-p/1860408/)

And here's the money quote about the malware:

"Superfish Inc aka VisualDiscovery aka Similarproducts application will hijack ALL your secure webconnections (SSL/TLS) by using self signed root certificate authority, making it look legitimate to the browser"

<comment><USER3> That's pretty amazing. Does their SSL MITM proxy even validate the certs they are rewriting, or are all these Lenovos completely open to MITM? (And the certs are marked "all purposes", does that include native and java code signing too?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why would Microsoft even allow Lenovo to license OEM Windows if they treat customers to an Out-Of-The-Box experience like this? No wonder macs are popping up everywhere I go...</comment>


MacRuby 0.6 Official Release - <AUTHOR> http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/04/30/macruby06.html <comment><USER2> "In this release, we believe that MacRuby is now stable enough to consider using it to develop Cocoa applications."

"This release also passes about 85% of RubySpecs..."

Those two things seemed a little contradictory to me at first. But then I noticed the part about macruby apps being able to compile to machine code, so I guess what they mean is that if your app is stable in macruby, it will be stable when you ship it, even macruby isn't fully compatible with ruby yet.

Definitely looking forward to playing around with it.

<comment><USER3> Ruby the language is pretty gigantic, so there are a lot of hard-to-fix corner cases. IronRuby, IIRC, passes 85% or so and just hit 1.0 and can run Rails. So most Ruby you write will run on this, but it is possible to break it.

<comment><USER4> well... just because 85% of Ruby runs, doesn't mean that 85% of your usecases are covered. Unfortunately for me, a variety of rubygems that my apps and libs depend on break with 0.6, even things as lightweight as Addressable.

Still lookin' forward to more macruby though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm still waiting for the MacRuby/GCD Rack-compatible webserver they mentioned awhile ago, supposedly called "ControlTower".

<comment><USER6> It's available in the svn repo.

<comment><USER7> True, but you probably want to wait for the official announcement. There's a decent amount of churn at the moment...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice, I am curious how it will benchmark against Ruby 1.9.1 for some of my libraries. Anyone run any benchmarks yet on their code?

<comment><USER8> I am dissapointed: tried running it on a utility I wrote for crunching Wikipedia text (lots of string operations, some file IO) and it is so much slower than Ruby 1.9.1. I stopped the benchmark after 5 minutes (same test took about 70 seconds with Ruby 1.9.1). Then I tried a simple string manipulation benchmark, and it ran about 3 times slower in MacRuby.

Using Cocoa classes in MacRuby is great for Mac development but (apparently) really slows down string operations.

<comment><USER9> As I understand it, the focus up 'til now has been correctness and compatibility rather than performance / efficiency. It seems a bit early to jump on them for that (though the speed hit you mention is surprising). That said, I'd expect things to pick up speed once the next-generation compiler Laurent mentions in the blog post is ready (and when the RubySpec needle moves closer to 100).

Regardless, the team has made a ton of progress since the last release. Here's looking forward to the next.

<comment><USER10> There has been work on performance; in a lot of cases, MacRuby _is_ faster than YARV. Just, not in this case, with strings. Thats mostly because strings were just redone to use NSString's internally, so there hasn't been as much work done on them as there has in other parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know how this differs from the Ruby that is a native part of OS X 10.6? Is it just a newer version?

      MomBook:~ hackermom$ ruby -v
      ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 173) [universal-darwin10.0]

<comment><USER12> It uses the Objective-C runtime, including "native" objects (strings are NSStrings, hashes are NSDictionaries, etc.). It generates native code (using LLVM) rather than interpreting. It has a more sensible syntax for making Objective-C method calls. (And more.)

<comment><USER10> Also might be worth noting: MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9, not 1.8.x. Any benchmarks done should be compared against YARV, not what comes with OS X.</comment></comment></comment>


I wrote a book teaching developers how to create an App's Back end in 12 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/appwrite-up-and-running/ <comment><AUTHOR> I created the backend for my app in 12 minutes it deals with users, database and storage. Then I decided to teach people with a book.

Website: [https://leanpub.com/appwrite-up-and- running/](https://leanpub.com/appwrite-up-and-running/)

Highlights:

\- Aimed at people who have previous web and mobile app experience. \- Working wiht a Free open source app development platform. \- Readers are encouraged to create something following the book's project. \- Platform introduction so they can create backends for any kind of App. \- Instructions on how to self host the backend server. \- Includes source code.

If anyone has ideas of how to reach people who are getting into webapp or mobile app stuff and struggling with backend programming, would love to hear them!</comment>


Its Official: We are Burnt Out - Productivity Drops - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/10/markets/thebuzz/index.htm

<comment><USER2> _So what's that mean going forward? Hopefully, businesses are getting the message that it's time to slowly, but surely, bring people to work._

Or that it's time for American businesses got their heads out of their asses and maybe give the four day work week a look at. Employees from country to country have all said in agreement "I get so much more done" with that format.</comment>


What A CEO Does - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-ceo-does.html <comment><USER2> The interesting thing about this is that it boils down to sales. The CEO sells/evangelizes a vision internally and externally. The sell the idea of working at the company (recruiting). Early they sell the dream to investors and the earliest revenue deals (whatever they are). Later, their sales efforts might be limited to bigger deals/partnerships and recruiting other leaders for their company.

I wonder how many founders on Hacker News (who are aimed at big growth) want to be this type of CEO. And I wonder if there are any other types of CEOs at the top. I've never met any.

<comment><USER3> You're looking at it through your own prism. Selling is just a _prerequisite_ (along with multiple other skills), it's not the most important part of being a good CEO.

Discovering the _right strategy/vision_ of the company is not a sales job. Communicating it to people is though.

Choosing the _right people_ to hire isn't sales either. Convincing them to join is though.

I think it's very harmful to boil down the role of a CEO to merely salesmanship. There's so much more that matters at least as much.

Thought experiment: Where would Steve Jobs be now if all he had was his master salesmanship, but none of his design and product skills?

<comment><USER2> Your examples illustrate my point (which was not that being a CEO is MERELY salesmanship, but that it-- in terms of time spent-- is mostly salesmanship.) Of course it'd be silly to say that it's merely salesmanship. If I had a crappy vision and I was an epic salesman, I'd be a pretty lousy CEO, right?

In all of those tasks, how much of your time are you spending selling? Discover/find your vision, spend the rest of your career selling it. Deciding who you want to hire and the persuasive dance (where you have to persuade them that working at your company is a good idea AND sell them your vision to boot!) takes a lot more time.

Steve Jobs is a great example. As product-focused as he is, what % of the time do you think he spends tinkering or wireframing? I'd wager he's selling/reinforcing ideas for most of his day. Steve Jobs is different because he spends 99% of his sales time selling vision/product ideas versus all of the other types of persuasion he could engage in. Oh, and because his ideas are unusually good. ;-)

edit: I'd add two things. Once, I've run 2 different companies for about 70% of my 13 year tech career and two: I really don't enjoy sales as much as I enjoy other work tasks. So if I am looking at it through my prism, it's the prism of my experience.

<comment><USER3> You don't discover your vision in a month and then spend years selling it. You spend years discovering what your idea should be, refining the idea, making the idea happen, and selling it.

Selling is just a _single_ component. If you had to single anyone of them out it would be "making the idea happen" and most of that is not selling, it's a thousand concrete decisions and problems to overcome about the product and marketing.

Hiring is even less about salesmanship. Convincing someone to join (or not) takes weeks at most. Finding the right people and making them effective takes months or years.

I think outsiders probably have a very skewed perspective on Steve Jobs and most other CEOs because we only see them when they're selling. To outsiders it looks like 100% of their time is spent selling, so it's natural that people think that's primarily what they do.

What you don't see is how Jobs is spending his time during the 364 days before a Stevenote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From bitter experience, I think the statement about setting "overall vision and strategy" should have a qualification so that the vision and strategy stays in place for at least as long as it takes to actually build something and deliver it to someone who uses it.

If your company "vision and strategy" changes more frequently than a development team can react then you are doomed.

<comment><USER5> That's one reason why a business must have a competent CIO on the management team.

Sometimes you can let the apparent changes ride, since they are politicing between other senior members of the team; sometimes you can simply say, "No"; and sometimes you must explain the cost of what will be thrown away, how it will affect morale, and how long pivoting the team, re-motivating them, and delivering will cost.

You average CEO, finance, marketing, and sales honchos will not understand these things without an interpretation into their language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A former colleague of mine used to say that their role was to "align individual goals with corporate goals."

<comment><USER7> For that to work properly, the CEOs goals have to be aligned with the companies goals in the first place. Like founder-CEO, not like Bank-CEO with no interest in long-term outlook of the enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Determines a vision and strategy..."

...and for this nebulous MBA speak, gets paid 40x as much as the people who actually do work.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's not always 40x. Here in Norway, it's more often 3x-5x (except in the largest companies.)

And don't knock the value of determining a vision and strategy: people don't just wake up in the morning knowing what they should be doing at the office today/this week/this year. If you don't think a clear vision and strategy matters, just ask Yahoo.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad it's like that in Norway. You're a lot saner than most countries. Here in America 40x is closer to the mark. And i'm not knocking the _value_ of thinking carefully about the next step. That's an obviously important thing. I just don't see why someone should be paid so much more to sit around thinking about the next step than the people who actually _implement_ the "vision."

<comment><USER10> I suppose it's for the same reason that buildings are attributed to architects, and symphonies to composers, rather than to builders and musicians.

<comment><USER8> Having spoken to actual CEOs, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put them in the same class as famous architects and composers. The latter are identifiable, and to some degree quantifiable, skillsets that require training and a certain degree of talent. I'm not so sure you can say the same thing about being the guy who makes sure that cross disciplinary paradigms for excellence synergize with the vision's core values.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cross reading: [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz- eval...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates- ceos/) [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be- like-...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/03/14/notes-on-leadership-be-like-steve- jobs-and-bill-campbell-and-andy-grove/)

</comment><comment><USER12> See this is why your CEO needs to be technically competent to some level. If they are hiring and setting the vision for the entire company, you can't build a good product if you don't have the basic technical understanding yourself.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well.. I do that and I also code.

<comment><USER14> <joke>Well, you need to delegate the coding part then.</joke>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A CEO goes out and find the money to keep the executives happy so they go out and make the business work.

<comment><USER16> The CEO also makes the executives get along to work together effectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Steve Jobs has been listed as the #1 CEO in the USA. He seems to be doing a great job on 1 through 3, and has #3 particularly in the bag. He may do other things as well, but you couldn't say he has in any way shortchanged any of these three jobs.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not going to comment on the content of the article, but I'd like to take a second to point out how clever the writing is. I like how the first paragraph tells you about what you're going to hear: it's something special from the real world. Then he talks about getting his start in, lets say, the mid 80s. About 25 years ago. Then we hear of another VC, very experienced, that's 25 years you know?

A nice way to say, "I'm experienced, listen to me." He's probably right too.

</comment><comment><USER19> 4\. Come up with pithy slogans that will impress your underlings.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was under the impression that a CEO:

Gets rewarded when their company does well.

Gets paid off when their company does badly.

(Golden parachutes: [http://www.economist.com/node/16685706?story_id=16685706&...](http://www.economist.com/node/16685706?story_id=16685706&fsrc=rss))

<comment><USER21> Those are things the company does _to_ a CEO, not what a CEO does.</comment></comment>


AT&T Closing DC Comics If 5th Gen Reboot Fails - <AUTHOR> https://cosmicbook.news/att-closing-dc-comics-5g-ethan-van-sciver <comment><AUTHOR> Seems kind of short sighted. The books keep a solid core of fans engaged and act as the creative engine from which the other IP (movies, tv, etc) stems. It would be better to view the publishing arm as either a loss leader or a marketing expense.

<comment><USER2> Yes. It's a shortsighted company at the reins, with no real understanding of how to take advantage of what they have.

Disney seems to be the only American company that understands the value of storytelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, even their theme parks: Contrast to something like Great Adventure, and (one) major difference is that each of their "rides" isn't just, say, the application of inertia to the human body-- instead, each ride tells a story. To cliche, they are not rides, they are "experiences". Disney gets this.</comment></comment></comment>


Vuestic admin – trending Vue 2 admin dashboard template - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/epicmaxco/vuestic-admin <comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the wonderful support! Our projects is trending and we're really happy!</comment>


The choice for Theora, by Fronteers - <AUTHOR> http://fronteers.nl/about/theora-choice <comment><USER2> Mostly summarizing Mozilla's position (probably for the benefit of the original dutch audience) and adding their support.

Two minor mistakes/omissions:

* Opera has been clear from the start that their support of Ogg Theora is ideological not financial, i.e. they believe in W3C promotion of open standards

* Safari can play HTML5 Ogg Theora if you install the Xiph Quicktime component: <http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/>

They could have mentioned the Java fallback for Theora on IE and Safari (if they don't have the plugin) but it's only recently been rescued from clunkiness by some Wikipedia funded work so I can't really blame them:

[http://www.kaltura.org/project/HTML5_Video_Media_JavaScript_...](http://www.kaltura.org/project/HTML5_Video_Media_JavaScript_Library)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like to hear pro Theora stories as much as the next guy, but the copy:

 _...We, Fronteers, the Dutch organization for front-end web developers, are increasingly being looked at to provide guidance..._

Is a little hard to take.

<comment><USER4> Point. The equivalent dutch phrase didn't really have a good translation, and that sentence thus came our rather tortured. Let me see if I can make that a bit more palatable.

Edit: I turned it into "Fronteers is increasingly being looked at to provide best practices". It's still not quite what I meant to say, but comes closer.</comment></comment>


Neo4j 1.4 M05 - Autoindexing, REST Paging, Cypher aggregates - <AUTHOR> http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/06/neo4j-14-m05-kiruna-stol-midsummer.html

<comment><USER2> I cant help myself but Neo4j is just awesome :)</comment>


Jack Dorsey's Lunchtime Tweet Reveals Square's Total Lack of Female Interns - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2012/07/jack-dorsey-tweet-square-lunch-no-female-interns-07032012/ <comment> jack-r-abbit Jeezus, this topic is getting old. Everyone run out quick and crucify him because Square doesn't have any female interns. He must be the devil dressed like a man ready to squash all the women. _eye roll_

He even said "we made offers to female candidates & they chose other opportunities for various reasons. We continue to make offers". But that wasn't even good enough. He was asked if they dug deeper into reasons. Wait.. what? So now if you make an offer to candidates and some turn it down, you have to dig deeper into why they turned it down? Rubbish. Clearly they found interns that accepted the offers so I don't see why they would have to spend that much time trying to figure out why some did not. You do that if you are having a hard time finding people to accept... but it doesn't appear to be an issue here.

</comment><comment><USER2> So, a female designer, a female community manager, and a female editor are commenting on the lack of female interns at Square.

Gee, maybe if more women went into engineering instead of going into design, community management, or editing, Square could find some female interns.

There are 13 interns in the photo. Given the number of women who go into software engineering, finding a group of 13 being all male is not at all out of line.

<comment><USER3> Are those 13 all software engineering interns? The coverage I've seen doesn't say how many designer interns, community manager interns, or editorial interns Square has. I'm honestly interested in finding out.

Not to mention that in nearly 3 decades of software engineering, I can't think of any team of software engineers that size that I worked in that didn't have at least one woman in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife works for a fashion related magazine. There is one man on a staff of over a hundred people. I've never seen an article about why this is a problem. Should it be?

<comment><USER5> Yes.</comment></comment>


Lavabit accepts Bitcoin now - mike-cardwell Noticed in the Lavabit thread the other day that some people were complaining about the lack of a Bitcoin option and the amount of info you had to give up to sign up to Lavabit. Looks like they support Bitcoin now and don't require as much info for signup:
https://lavabit.com/want-lavabit.php
Just something I noticed. <comment><AUTHOR> one of the primary reason I said Nah was the info and lack of crypto payment option.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm going to pay with tumbled Bitcoins since there's no zCash, or Monero option</comment>


'Rosetta Stone' Of Bacterial Communication Discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090707093619.htm <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the article fails to make clear what contribution these researchers made.

As the article states, quorum sensing is not new (I learned about it through HN some time ago, via this video [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bac...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html)).

The researchers claim to have discovered the "common root" of all quorum sensing, which they dub "sensing potential." However, their definition of sensing potential essentially devolves into a restatement of quorum sensing. The closest they come to identifying a mechanism is stating that the volume ratio of bacteria to environment matters. This in itself is hardly a breakthrough, and certainly does not describe a mechanism, an analysis, or an analysis framework (all terms thrown out in the article).

I'm guessing the fault likes not with the scientists, but with the writeup. It reads more like business journalism than like science-- a breathless announcement of some undefined boundless potential, couched in terms that make it impossible to understand just what is new, useful, or remarkable.</comment>