johnnybgoode

Wow, years later, even after her de facto demotion at Google, people still think she's some kind of product genius?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028615

This is a hilarious situation.

Proof that I agree: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788702

I hope you're still here!

  > Can you name some ways to actually do this? I'd love to hear about them, but have never actually seen a system like that.
  > Even if there was though, before you go yanking money out of the system, you should actually try to replace it.

One example of something like this is simply universities 100+ years ago, when not everyone was encouraged to attend university. We all know about places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. I see no reason more variety is not possible.

And you're right, replacing it would be hard, but one reason for that is all the money going into the system. What you're asking me to do is sort of like starting a car company while General Motors is being bailed out by the government. Still possible, I suppose, but more difficult when the other guy is being subsidized.

  > Recently a lot of academics have been pushing for open journals, even going so far as to boycott closed ones. Even this is fairly controversial. :(

  > Sold by whom? Guidance counselors? Other students? I don't believe I've ever met a professor who thought that all, or even most research, is life-changing, or even very interesting. I just don't buy that you heard that from a reliable source.

  > It's not only about privilege: schools are known by foreigners as a system that allows them to get to the US. In order for this transition to be effective, you'd have to supplant the educational system, then get everyone to know about your alternative system.
  > And besides that, the institutions that do the hiring are incredibly biased towards American schools.

  > Oh man, I'd really love to believe that, but I just don't see it. Science is still pretty much a communal affair, and the mere availability of knowledge does not make science happen. You need a robust social framework to evolve it. I just don't see that in libraries.

It looks like this whole story was manually pushed off the HN front page for some reason (or it was flagged and the sorting algorithm takes this into account?), but I just wanted to say while I'm here that I was really glad to read this particular subthread.

  > What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?

  > Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.

  > Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

  > This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

  > You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree

  > yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.

  > That's not what I'm claiming.

  > If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting

  > the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP
  > immediately assume assume the OP was one

We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education.

Agreed. I was giving possibilistic the benefit of the doubt. If some need access to a lab to fully learn a subject, that's something that should be addressed. If not, great.

  > terrible article
  > Awfully muddled thinking
  > right-wing propaganda
  > laughably poor argument
  > propagandist rant

  > First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".

  > Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?

  > And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.

  > Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

  > Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

  > would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades

I agree hands-on learning in a lab is important. I'm not suggesting everyone should stop this and only read books instead. But learning in a lab doesn't need to be tied to a $100,000-$200,000 four-year university degree program. As a society, we should be able to make this much more accessible. (I don't mean we have to literally put labs in libraries. I mean everyone should be able to learn this way cheaply, in the same spirit that a library makes information accessible for free.)

CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors.

You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.

To be perfectly clear, I'd love to cut military spending, bailouts, drug war spending, etc. This article was about a state funding issue, but I'm fine leaving that aside, since ultimately it's all government spending.

In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research.

I don't mind admitting some useful things have come out of universities. But this doesn't mean we need to continue propping up the university system as it exists today. You admit it has many flaws. There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research. They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no reason they have to resemble the current monster.

True, most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless, but that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big.

Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe the research done in universities is all useful.

People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries?

Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration. If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges, people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.

The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them.

As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay off really pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning very much.

The top story on Hacker News right now, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607217 (also the link I start the post with), explains one of the problems with doing that. As many important functions move online, the library is one place someone without a computer and computer skills can use to gain access to the online world.

Libraries also provide a meeting place for the community, access to librarians, and many free classes.

I do agree it makes less sense now for libraries to have large physical collections. The shift to an online library seems inevitable there. But access to this from local libraries is still important.

Thank you, and I agree with you. I'd hope nearly everyone agrees with what you said.

The way I see it, libraries are so incredible, and so important, that even the mighty university should be cut before libraries are.

Respectfully, I don't think I've done what you say I've done. I say "they're not the same thing" because, as I said in the post, a lot of people lump them together as "investing in knowledge for society" or the like.

I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.

While this post focuses on universities and libraries, and I'm serious about preferring university cuts to library cuts, obviously there are plenty of other things that could probably be cut first.

Yeah, it's hard to attack libraries. They're one of the best examples of a truly equitable program I can think of. I'd much rather cut even university funding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608264

I'm not trying to be pedantic here. If this actually did get blown up the way I describe, it'd be indicative of some serious problems in journalism today.

I really hope this works. It'd be fantastic to see this become a reliable way to fund new adventure games, especially if they're from Tim Schafer.

Is this a defense for Android's poor responsiveness (often blamed on a lack of hardware acceleration), or is there some other context I'm missing?

Doesn't this make Android look even worse? I.e., "Android already has hardware acceleration but still doesn't seem to perform very well" means any hope of flipping some magical GPU acceleration switch and instantly fixing the problem is gone.

I'd be curious to learn more about your thinking on this. A few years ago you were heading in the other direction -- i.e., you were talking about how people could or should start companies at younger and younger ages.

pg, May 2005: "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?"

pg, now: "Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22."

It seems this logic can be extended to say people should wait even longer. Someone with a few years of experience at 26 should be able to do a better job of starting a company than someone at 22.

So I'm interpreting this as a major change in your thinking. It certainly isn't a crime to change your mind; I'm just curious about how and when it happened.

I don't think you understood my post at all. Instead it looks like some Mac fanboy(s) somewhere made you angry, and you're responding to me as if I'm one of them.

Since it obviously doesn't come with OS X, in a very important way the IdeaPad doesn't match the Air at all. I know I'm not alone when I say I'd gladly pay a lot more than $100 for OS X over Windows.

I understand Lenovo can't just include OS X, so is that why we are so willing to give the product a good review? Why is this the consumer's problem? The bottom line is that for most consumers, the Air with OS X is a much better buy than this IdeaPad. Isn't the point of writing reviews to help consumers make the best decision for them, not to assign "effort" grades to OEMs?

Edit: Here is an example to illustrate what I mean by "effort" grades. In at least some parts of the US there is a practice of assigning grades in physical education classes based on how much effort the student has given in the class, instead of how well they actually perform. The rationale is that it isn't fair to penalize someone for not being born with certain physical gifts.

If you review laptops this way, then you won't penalize Lenovo for including Windows instead of OS X, since that is beyond their control. [1]

My point is this doesn't make sense if you are actually trying to help someone pick the best product. If you're picking players for a professional sports team, you don't want to use those "effort" grades alone to do it. So I have a problem with all these reviewers who grade PCs on a curve, as Gruber would likely describe it. Granted, that would make a lot of review sites pretty boring as Apple wins comparison after comparison, but isn't it more important to be accurate than exciting, especially when you're trying to help someone decide how to spend $1000 or more?

[1] Then again, shouldn't Lenovo be penalized for not having a good OS of their own? Or is that expecting too much of them?

Leaving aside the arguments about prostitution for a moment, I think it's fair to say that a number of these women (not all) are uncomfortable with being prostitutes and are only doing it to pay for college. College is expensive largely because it is essentially the policy of this country that everyone, especially women[1], ought to have college degrees. We've seen how student tuition rises along with student loan limits; we've seen how students tend to go to college somehow no matter how expensive tuition is, how much debt they're getting into, or how important the degree is.

In these terms, far from being contrary to the spirit of universities like MIT, this type of prostitution arrangement service is in keeping with the proclaimed importance of college education. I.e., going to college is considered so important that many female college students are now willing to prostitute themselves (something most of them would not ordinarily do) to make sure they can keep attending.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611440

This is one of those things that can amuse, impress, and horrify you all at the same time.

The first thing listed under "Requirements" is "Bachelor's degree in Computer Science", which you would certainly not need to perform this job.

My dream would be to be able to decompile JS into CoffeeScript, so I could make changes in either form. That would probably be difficult to do for some of the more advanced features, though.

Exactly. Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580721.

I suspect you don't really care about our answers to your title question, and you just wanted to post the link and a quote from this paper. All of which is fine with me, by the way!

I'm not so comfortable with making a similar statement about medicine because the rites of passage are implicitly set by government regulation rather than market forces. It's not as if I can start-up a certification program for high-end health professionals which will compete with the AMA's MD designations.

I understand what you're trying to say, but I think this applies to law as well as medicine. The ABA has government-granted privileges, too.

I am not a fan of Google at all, and even I must admit the ad was pretty good. I'm interested in what's behind this reversal, though. I read that Larry and Sergey had previously vetoed any kind of Super Bowl advertising. I think albertsun and others here are right -- Bing is now a serious competitor.

Actually, Alan Kay appears to be a big fan of the iPad concept.

From Janko Roettgers:

I interviewed Kay late last year, and while he didn’t mention the tablet by name, he did share a story about the unveiling of the iPhone, to which Steve Jobs invited him in early 2007:

“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.”

Guess about how big the iPad's screen is?