Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present | Hacker News Reader

Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

nytimes.com

124 pointspseudolus141 comments

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia.

Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students.

Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don't care, it will be hard to justify spending 10x on a residential experience.

With live teaching going the way of life musicians 100 years ago, we can expect similar effects- fewer better teachers, and better access to them.

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th centuries (Bologna will be 1,000 years old in 2088, within the lifetime of some now reading this). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...)

Curricula, degrees conferred, methods, organisation, associated attached sport and medical industries, and defence and research programmes ... are largely newer. Starting with the Humboldtian reforms in Germany in the early 19th century, much of what we now think of as the modern universiy started taking shape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...)

In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained. Mediated education, whether through old low-tech such as books, or high, such VR headsets, may have their affordances, but simply cannot match the full immersion of simultaneous group presence. More so for tacit knowledge in which simply ingesting words is not sufficient, where hands-on experience is required, and equipment, facilities, and materials needed.

There are several fundamental functions of the universiy which seem unlikely to vanish. Education; credentialling; open research; establishing curricula and pedagogy; relations with culture, industry, and government, document archival, basic research; keeping aging academics off the streets; and serving as transition institutions four young adults entering the world, all remain. No doubt individual campuses or systems will collapse, and many revered traditions will be abandoned, at least temporarily.

How this is accomplished given a few months, or years, or decades, of endemic disease, is a challenge. The institution's seen worse.

> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction.

I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected.

The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with prerecorded videos and other asynchronous methods only as a supplement, seems to have been correct. Live online classes, it turns out, are often just as interactive and engaging as in-person classes. Some teachers even report that their students participate more actively and thoughtfully in discussions online than they do in the classroom.

There are still many unresolved issues, of course, including how to conduct tests fairly; how to enable more informal mingling among students; and, perhaps most difficult, how to teach subjects that require physical equipment or in-person interaction, such as laboratory chemistry, nursing and medicine, performing arts, etc.

But the fact that many subjects can be taught satisfactorily online upends one of the fundamental assumptions of higher education: that teachers and students need to be in the same place at the same time to have high-quality interactions. If they haven't already, forward-thinking universities will soon start taking advantage of this opportunity to create well-planned, rigorous degree programs open to anyone in the world who is qualified and has a decent Internet connection. Even if the coronavirus crisis ends and people can travel freely again, such programs should still be able to succeed.

That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live?

Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos.

Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...)

How do you handle that? Did it just work?

Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.

> How large are the classes you are teaching live?

My own classes are not very large: I am teaching two undergraduate classes with about 17 students each, and one graduate seminar with nine students.

The graduate seminar feels closest to an in-person class; it helps that most of the students leave their cameras on and that I have taught most of them before. For undergraduate classes, we have been asked to let the students leave their cameras off (out of privacy considerations, and because some students have metered Internet access). It's frustrating for me not being able to see the students' faces. I've adapted by having them submit questions and comments through an online form, which I then respond to through Zoom. It's less conversational, but the exchanges seem more deliberate and focused. I hope that next semester, if we are still teaching online, we will be able to ask undergraduates to turn on their cameras most of the time.

We don't yet have comprehensive data on students' reactions to online classes. That should be available in a few months. A preliminary survey suggests that most, though not all, prefer live online classes to prerecorded lectures, and that a significant minority prefers online lectures to in-person classes. The ability to ask questions more easily in large online classes is one reported advantage for students, as is the convenience of being able to participate from home without having to commute to campus. (My university is in central Tokyo and not many students live near campus; most would normally be commuting by train, often an hour or more.)

The biggest complaint we've heard from students—and it's been heard at other universities in Japan, too—is that the students are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of schoolwork. One reason seems to be that teachers are assigning more homework than usual, perhaps as a way of getting more feedback from students. Another may be that the students, because they cannot see how seriously the other students in the class are studying, are working harder than normal out of fear of being outcompeted. Lockdown fatigue is no doubt another factor. As a result, the administration has asked teachers to be less demanding.

There's a lot of trial and error going on with online classes, and I'm sure many improvements still need to be made. But considering how inexperienced we were with online education a few months ago and how little time we had to prepare, things are, as I noted above, going much better than expected.

I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recordings). At the end of the semester we gave a version of the usual student eval. Half of the faculty on the committee had taught sync and reported that their student evals thanked them for doing that and said it was much better. The other half of the faculty did async and said their students thanked them for doing what they did.

I did async and my students were clear that it was better for them, that they had other classes where they had to lose time at work to attend, etc., and async was so much better.

We saw the same effect in the feedback we got from a survey of all faculty, so it is not just the people on the committee. I perceive that it is like on class evals where there is a tendency to get pretty much the same scores on each item, even on an item such as "Returns quizzes promptly" where you can measure whether that is true, because students really only have one thing to say and there is a tendency to just say the same thing on each item. (My speculation that in this case students recognize that their teachers did a lot of work to turn the course on a dime, and students did a lot of work also, and there was an in-this-together sense that they wanted to express.)

Unfortunately, universities in the United States have unique problems. In much of the world, higher education is a largely government-supported thing. However, in the US, over the past fifty years or so, even nominally government-run institutions have become increasingly dependent on student fees (primarily tuition, but also lodging fees) to meet their expenses. If students stay away, or even stay remote, the schools may lose so much cash that they're no longer financially viable. (This in an environment where a number of smaller schools were already on the edge -- in Massachusetts, two reasonably reputable private universities, Wheelock and Mount Ida, were recently forced into mergers, and a third, Hampshire College, is on the ropes.)

Here's an overview from a few months ago -- but with recent elevated COVID rates in heavily populated states (Florida, Texas, California) calling the wisdom of reopening in doubt, the worst-case scenarios described here are looking a lot more likely then they were in it was written: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/...

> In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained.

Citation needed. I view today's colleges (including the university I attended) as little more than a racketeering scam. "It'd be a shame if you didn't pay us $200K and didn't get a degree, no employer would take you seriously".

Most of the stuff I use on a daily basis I did not learn in the college, and there's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the 6 years I've spent to get my masters degree would be better spent advancing my career, if I could have that choice. In my field, however, you can't have a career if you don't have a degree, even if you learned little to nothing of relevance getting that degree. It's basically a racketeering scam where you pay "protection money" to get a degree, without which you can't be considered by an employer. As a hiring manager, I've lost count how many times I interviewed fresh grads who know very little and have little to no usable skills. Whoever makes through and manages to acquire actual skills does so in spite of, not thanks to, the best efforts of their professors.

I could (and arguably should) have added "gatekeeping" as another function of the higher-education system, a role that manifests in multiple ways: admissions, graduation, faculty, curricula, publications. Whilst fixing a few typos I thought of adding that but enough time had already lapsed that it felt like a stealth change of excess magnitude. Consider it added here.

What you call a racketeering scam ... is an argument with merits, but it also reflects another persistent pragmatic informational reality: assessment costs of complex informational goods, such as highly-trained higher-education graduates, are high. Universities effectively play two simultaneous roles: both shaping and measuring (and certifying) educational accomplishment. The flipside of this which you note, is a perennial HN favourite topic: how broken the tech hiring process is from both sides. For the employee and for the employer. At another level, it's the problem faced by both VC and founders in startup launches, and for users and marketers in product. Branding, reviews, resumes, certifications, and other shibboleths serve as information-simplifying mechanisms. See Akerlof's "Market for Lemons". Discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895171 and in context of hiring here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290

The resulting process remains ... highly frustrating and unsatisfying. For me as much as anyone else. But it's another of those persistent behaviours that is too enduring to be dismissed lightly. A classic case of Chesterton's fence.

On low-student:instrctor ratio in-person vs. large-scale, mediated, remote, independent, or other instruction: I wish I did have a good citation, I really don't, other than repeatedly encountering the claim as a simple statement of fact in my reading on educational methods: that one-on-one tutoring remains the gold standard to which all other instructional methods are compared. Hopefully someone with better familiarity with the field than I can substantiate this. Example citation in the opening of "Automated facial affect analysis for one-on-one tutoring ..." (https://inc.ucsd.edu/mplab/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011...) expressed as accepted fact, and in numerous Google Scholar cites: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="one%20on%20one%20tutor...

Reasons are various, but I think the real key is that educational systems aren't merely informational delivery systems, but tune what's being presented, closely and constantly, to how it's being received. This is a point lost on advocates of technologically-mediated educational methods dating to textbooks, audio-recorded lectures, filmstrips, instructional videos, educational software, and remote learning. Efficiency-minded public education administrators implementing 300--1,000 seat lecture halls with overflow televised satellite sections have foundered on this issue. My own experience has shown the distinct qualitative difference between large (100+ seat) lectures and more intimate sections of ~30 students, or more rarely, seminars of 8-15. The amount of focus and attention instructors can offer smaller groups, the personal relations formed, and interactions among students, are far stronger in smaller groups. Size isn't the only factor, but it's a major one.

The matter of what feedback is or is not perceived in online discussion is also huge, addressed in another current HN thread on "The Silence is Deafening": https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728212

Thinking of universities as nothing more than skill factories is another long-standing flaw, and neglects the role of employers themselves in mentoring, training, and development. See the classic divide between the liberal and servile arts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038380

I've addressed ancillary elements of my own uni experience some months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20959811

> Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time

It's as though, if you concentrate a lot of smart and well-meaning people in one place, they make a great institution!

Maybe not any particular university, but the idea of elite, sequestered scholarship itself has long outlived neoliberal capitalism.

It was never about money. Moneyed interests expounding on the future of the academy are always dead wrong.

Finding other smart and well-meaning people and coordinating with them to meet at the same place is not trivial though.

In the history of universities, what is "neoliberal capitalism" and what does it have to do with it?

I think the persistence effect comes about from stronger and more complex dynamics than just "a lot of smart people".

I think you might be underselling the total paradigm shift that is the internet.

Nothing that came before it really compares when it comes to impact on education, except for maybe the printing press, but in many ways that probably strengthened university's grip on education. The internet does the opposite.

I'm going to suggest that the Internet is centralising rather than decentralising information flows. Not necessarily around the University, nut in direct contrast to the liberation many early tech visionaries advocated.

Much as the liberation of performance art from the confines of the theatre stage didn't result in a completely decentralised entertainment industry, but in the megacluster industry geonym of Hollywood (with a few culturally-defined satellites such as Bollywood).

> This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia.

God I hope you’re right.

Many universities are certainly going to have problems but it's hard to see an event that causes problems for a single semester (or maybe two) being an extinction event.

Nowhere in your comment I see you mention that elite institutions are mainly research institutions that do teaching kind of as a side job. In fact, several of the best researchers working at universities are horrible teachers.

However, if you want to be at the cutting edge of your field then that is where is at.

On what do you base that opinion? I did a MS and PHD at Stanford and was blown away by how good the profs were and how hard they actually tried to teach well. I don't agree at all with your thinking. Perhaps you need to be a bit less general and more specific about what school you are referring to?

I didn't attend an elite school, but OP might be referring to undergrad education at places such as UC Berkeley?

The impact the coronavirus has on the ~250 R1 and R2 research universities is going to be very different than the effect on the ~4000 other schools. Although the research universities dominate the conversation around academia, they only make up a small fraction of the total number of schools.

I heard a story about a famous stem researcher. In class, a brave student asked a question. After glaring at the student, he slowly responded "I came here to teach. I didn't come here to answer questions".

That department has been reformed thankfully.

I believe you're referring to lectures rather than a university degree. The arguments you're making are no different than the ones made by people saying traditional colleges would be gone in five years once MOOCs arrived. It's possible that things will change in a major way, but simply being able to watch a lecture from your home is neither new nor a substitute for a traditional four year college. (And note that the in-person lecturing part is actually really cheap - much cheaper than the same lectures online, and only a tiny percentage of the cost of running a university.)

Small liberal arts colleges may be extinguished but the major universities will live on. The sciences, medicine, and engineering fields still require facilities and equipment beyond the reach of the individual, particularly for cutting edge research. I could point to universities with their own wind tunnel for aerospace engineering, their own research and teaching hospitals, their own small silicon chip fab and so forth.

Exactly. But most students don't need these resources, and most current teachers don't work at these institutions

OT: which schools have their own fab?

> Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name

Also, their brand names may be tarnished. For example, Yale and Stanford are named after men who abused black and brown people. If the Universities decide to no longer honor these men and remove their names from the university, they will have lost a lot of the brand that they built up over many years.

There's no Adolf Hitler university. There was a time when lots of us people, especially Jews, would but buy a Volkswagen. Today nobody cares. People are not going to UConn over Yale because of the name

Jeez. Little Leland Stanford Jr. must have been a real terror before he died of typhoid at 15

You'd think so, but a surprising amount of students are still attending. What else would they do? Most can't get a job. They can't join a program like the Peace Corps. Anything beyond those two options requires a degree of self confidence and financial independence that most students don't have. Colleges are offering a pretty mediocre proposition but there aren't many other options.

Presumably Americorps is still functioning. Be a contact tracer in your gap year.

It's an interesting parallel to musicians but I think we are far from the tech actually being good enough to scale that well. The problem for most courses is not recording the lectures, it is trying to replicate the one on one (or small group) time available with at least TAs, if not professors. This does work decently well over Zoom for an existing class, where the course staff is selected based on the ~# of students enrolled, but I don't see how it would work for a more broadly taught online class.

I got free access to a MOOC this summer that usually costs money just to view (HMX), and even at that scale the course forum is low quality and the "assignments" that have open ended questions just give you an automatic check mark, so you get zero feedback on your thinking. It's a solid class still and I'm enjoying it as a for fun learning experience, but it is not even close to what I would want out of a subject I am more seriously studying.

Anyway, I think a large part of that is just the lack of interaction with anyone trained in the material. Maybe I live in a bubble, but the best advice I got as a frosh at orientation was "if you only go to one thing in person, make it office hours", and I think many of my friends would agree.

You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.

This is not correct. Major R1 universities have grants and endowments as their primary source of income, but the vast majority of schools do not fall into this category. All liberal arts colleges, religious colleges, for-profit colleges, and most state colleges (i.e. non-R1 universities) desperately need tuition to pay the bills.

As long as employers require a degree, universities will not die.

Scott Galloway of NYU called it, and has been increasingly louder about it.

Like he says, it seems like this is the turning point for many middle-tier universities. Once you start viewing colleges as brands and luxury goods, especially the Stanfords and Harvards, it becomes clear there’s a massive revenue shortfall for them.

>This fall, I’m scheduled to teach MKTG-GB.2365 (Brand Strategy) in KMC 2-60 Tuesday nights at 6-9pm. It’s not going to happen. The room would normally be filled with 170 full- and part-time MBAs looking to garner the skills to build economic security for themselves and their families, and improve the world. Mostly the former. However, a room full of 170 NYT subscribers, sitting elbow to elbow, spells one thing — recurrence. So, while Liberty University will likely welcome kids back to campus, I speculate we, and anybody else that does not have their head up their a, will not. https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed

As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an answer. But, as a person who recently bought their first home in the area, I'm pretty bummed at the prospect of the local economy collapsing.

We’re moving to Boulder next month. With houses starting at $800K and larger houses going for $1.5M+, it seems like the local economy must be driven as much by the tech companies that flocked to Boulder bc of the school as by the school itself.

I've lived here for about 30 years and I really doubt Boulder would last long without the university. And when I said "home", I meant condo, not house. The average tech employee in Boulder is still a long way away from house ownership in town. The real estate prices are not primarily explained by the tech scene.

Usually, the tech companies in college cities are driven by university graduates. It is not hard to guess what happens after a while.

Boulder at least is relatively well to do and has close economic ties to Denver, a lot of other college towns would be economically worse off if college stayed close. Lafayette Indiana (Purdue) and Athens Ohio (OU) come to mind, although there are others.

I think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples.

Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non-students. It is the largest employer in the metro, but the large factories in the area employee far more in total. It's probably a lot more like Boulder than you think. Boulder is an hour from Denver, but Lafayette is an hour from Indianapolis (a larger city than Denver) and an hour and a half from Chicago.

Ohio U is an R2 school with around 30k students in a metro area of around 30k non-students. It's nowhere near any large city and doesn't have more than a small handful of other medium-sized employers.

The economic effect of no students on campus for a year would look vastly different between these two cities.

So it is not about education, just about the money. When people started to call college education a massive scam I disagreed, but I start to understand some of their points.

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative. If online testing could vouch for a person in the same way that universities do, it could open the doors to world-class opportunities for the entire world, cheaply.

Online tests are wide open to cheating if they aren't taken in person. Hybrids exist (take online test in a testing center, e.g. AWS certifications), but aren't all that useful for the slums of Bombay.

And in a way Google is already doing this in person with their interview process: they ask obscure questions aimed at knowlege gained in a computer science degree (or by good test preparation).

taking tests in a testing center is actually pretty viable and scales well. This is primarily how all those international students from developing countries write GRE, TOEFL and end up coming to study in the US.

Proctortrak.

It’s not a perfect solution (and I despise it), but it does resolve a lot of those issues.

I have heard from people (and read accounts from people on HN) that companies use all kinds of software that does this during remote interviews. Recording the screen, turning on the camera to watch the interviewee, etc.

I doubt the main problem is ensuring integrity, it's that it's hard to test knowledge and capabilities reliably, and that's already a hard problem regardless of where the candidate is.

Exactly. If a single test becomes important enough, it will be very heavily gamed. Conventional education avoids this somewhat, because there are so many models by which you are measured against, over a very long period of time. This makes conventional education much harder to game.

You need a system that encourages people to optimize for maximum problem solving ability, but a formal grading scheme encourages people to optimize for that instead. This is the single biggest problem with online classes and is why online degrees are not considered as highly as in-person ones.

I mean, cheating is pretty rampant even at places like Berkeley or Yale.

But colleges aren’t about testing, but educating. Taking people who can’t pass a test, and turning them into people who can.

The test is merely to help discern how good a job the schools have done.

The etymology of educating is to “lead someone out of” something - namely ignorance.

There are a lot of people who are capable of self educating and removing ignorance from their lives, but don’t have the means to pay for the fancy universities and prove their capabilities, which is what in the end certificates do. They provide a baseline, a level playing field if you will.

There are many more people who would buy a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education than the reverse. Universities put a lot of effort into stopping people fraudulently claiming to be graduates but ~no effort into stopping people from attending classes without paying for them.

Universities are about a combination of education and certification but the certification is overwhelmingly what people pay for.

It would be transformational if firms would be okay with some of their team working in a different timezone. It's hard to collaborate when you can only meet in the evening for one worker, and early morning the other. I don't know if there's any logistical solution to this.

Replace Tibet with Bolivia and the point still stands.

It's done on large scale: just split the projects into teams and each team can be on a time zone, so intra-team communication works well and inter-team is done as much as needed.

This is how companies have offices across the world, more and more in low cost locations. It this is what you want ...

And then you get what you measure for: people that can pass some very specific test. Not good employees, I guess.

I’m an adjunct prof at a middle tier college. We have a couple classes planned to be in person for fall. I highly doubt it. Plus a majority of the student body is foreign and can’t even travel to the USA. Essentially I’m sayin RIP to middle of the road universities. Guess I need to start looking for another side hustle.

I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?

Could you post the link to the degree that you're taking.

I hope the education is free. Because without the human presence, paying $250,000 USD for a university education sounds like a ripoff.

Even with the human presence. There's so much unneeded bundling - these campuses have turned into prestige factories.

As opposed to which exactly the year and country?

As opposed to which... What? Colleges used to manufacture knowledge.

They still do manufacture knowledge. This part was always by employees.

Then, the prestige it sells, is probably not all that legitimate.

Is anyone genuinely paying a quarter of a million dollars for a degree? That seems extreme even for a non-scholarship medical doctorate degree, let alone a simple data-science degree.

I'm a current college student, and my school costs about $80k per year, counting tuition, room & board, supplies, etc., before financial aid. That would be $320k for 4 years, well over a quarter of a million.

I'm personally getting a significant amount of financial aid, so that it will end up costing much less than that for me, but I know people who are paying full price.

EDIT: I'm an undergrad at a 4-year university.

Obviously I believe you if you're saying that, but I've heard that nobody really pays these full sticker-prices and everyone's really getting some kind of aid unless they're literally a billionaire - is that not the case?

I don't think so? I did a lot of tax work for VITA and met a lot of parents. Mostly low income and low-middle income got full scholarships and grants but if you're middle class it highly depends on the institution. The larger schools with huge private endowment do cover a lot but a public school like any in the UC system? Nah. It's basically all loans which have to be paid back.

*My knowledge is limited to California in the United States. I know there exists programs in Georgia and other places that do cover full rides but I think they are anomalous and not the rule.

Typically, in the Ivy League / Stanford, a one-child family with annual income of over $150k to $200k (depending on the school) will pay full tuition. Really. And incomes of less than $65k-ish get you a free ride. Details vary.

This happened with my family. It was especially bad because earning $150k total for a household near an expensive urban area leads to purchasing power basically the same as a family with $65k household income in suburbia or small towns. Without adjusting parents income for cost of living (factors the kids in question have no control over), it’s totally unfair.

This has a lot to do with “last place aversion” - the people making $150k near SF having to pay full price for their kid (who probably worked their ass off) to barely scrape into Stanford are (rightly or wrongly) going to be totally NIMBY / selfish in terms of voting and policy when it comes to the $65k families from far away whose kids can pay much less than half for Stanford, say.

Maybe go to a cheaper school?

Whether it’s right or not, prestige and notoriety of a college count for a huge amount in employment and earnings. Why should my family not get that chance if they worked just as hard to earn it?

Not really. Most studies show that what college you go to only matters for a few professions.

Way back when I graduated, 3 years in, I was making just as much as people that went to prestigious schools for my same area (computer science) and I paid less for one year of college than they paid for four - and no debt.

If I were graduating today and wanted to work in Big Tech, I would spend six months to a year preparing for white board interviews.

Especially in tech. What college you go to only makes a slight difference and that’s only for your first job. Being able to do algorithms and data structures is the great equalizer for Big Tech.

https://www.collegechoice.net/will-what-college-i-attend-mat...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-highe...

It looks like you quickly copy/pasted some articles from a Google search, but unfortunately your linked articles don’t back up what you say, rather they only indicate it’s somewhat complicated.

For example from the first link:

> “ However, another expert, this one from The Atlantic, says that where you go to school does matter, and he also has a study that backs up his point of view. There are institutions, especially ivy league schools and those with name recognition, that can improve someone's earning and employment potential, especially in the cases of graduate work. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, both someone's grade point average and their school of choice are determining factors in their earnings.”

which includes embedded links to The Atlantic and NCES research on it.

You also are confusing the question of whether school choice at large is correlated to earnings vs whether specific schools produce graduates who earn more, which is a different statistical question.

Consider from here:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/14/how-much-mor...

> “ The median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate 10 years out amount to well over $70,000 a year. For graduates of all other schools, the median is around $34,000.

But things get really interesting at the top end of the income spectrum. The top 10 percent of Ivy League grads are earning $200,000 or more by the time their 10-year college reunion rolls around. The top earners of other schools, on the other hand, are making just a hair under $70,000.”

It’s not too related but I also disagree hugely with you about algorithm hazing trivia in tech hiring. It’s not correlated with career success and it is used to play politics to do gatekeeping on the candidate pipeline (eg Steve Yegge’s classic on interview anti-loops).

I’ve been a senior architect and engineering manager for a while. I have never noticed any correlation between people who whiz through algorithm interviews and people who are effective at achieving business outcomes and project success once in the role.

On a tech site I’m talking specifically about tech jobs. If you are making only a median of $70K after spending tens of thousands of dollars at an Ivy League school. That’s not actually a good investment.

You can make $70K graduating from your run of the mill state school as a an enterprise CRUD developer in any major city in the US that’s not on the west coast.

Other studies have shown that there are no difference in salary between people who were accepted in an Ivy League school and didn’t attend as those who did go.

Also, in tech, you can make $200K within two or three years easily - regardless of college you attended.

I agree, and actually submitted tweet on HN a while back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19687593

Whether it is correlated with outcomes or not, is irrelevant to the fact that you can get into big tech by being able to do algorithms and make $200K relatively early on in your career.

I personally didn’t “get into a FAANG” by doing a whiteboard interview. I got in as a “cloud consultant” where I had to have a history of achieving business outcomes.

You simply aren’t engaging with the conversation in good faith. The same strata apply to tech jobs. If the median is say $120k, you’ll see the same doubling of median for Harvard grads, or close to it.

It seems like you’re deliberately trying not to engage with the point of the article, and instead trying to claim some bizarre specific standard of tech salaries you are making is supposed to be comparable to the data from eg the Boston Globe article (which explicitly refutes the point you’re trying to make).

Anyway, I can’t help you if you have your mind made up and you’re reading confirmation bias articles as tea leaves.

No. I’m saying in tech, whether you or I agree with algorithm type interviews. They are the great equalizer.

If you are applying for your standard CRUD jobs where you go to school isn’t going to matter. They are in my experience going to ask you techno trivia and may have you doing coding problems slightly above FizzBuzz level of complexity and are going to pay you the same regardless. The interview is the equalizer.

If you are applying for a company that wants “smart people” (tm) like the Big Tech companies and the big tech wannabes, algorithms are going to be the great equalizer.

We are on a tech site with plenty of people who work or have worked for BigTech. Almost all of the people here know how interviews and hiring works at Big Tech. Many know how hiring works at your standard CRUD jobs.

I have experience with both.

I usually think of the opposite affect, someone making double money in San Fransisco pays the same price for what they order on amazon as someone working and living in a cheaper market. Also cars, airline tickets, vacations, etc. Cuts both ways, I guess.

My two cents: I'd blame San Fransisco, they are the ones with the weird housing market and shouldn't make others subsidize things around their propped up property prices.

I don’t think you’re right about that. Groceries, supplies, movie tickets, restaurants, fuel, transit, medical & dental resources, rent, and so on are all much more expensive in the city. The fraction of things you get on Amazon or through other means that allows paying a low competitive nationwide price is pretty tiny and doesn’t really offer any meaningful advantage to city dwellers.

But on the flipside, state and federal taxes collected from city dwellers do heavily subsidize much more expensive infrastructure and operations costs in suburban and rural areas.

So rural residents get safe roads, remote snow removal, remote power lines, heavy freight supply shipping, equal prices for US mail shipping, school systems and so on, despite not having their own tax base capable of actually sustaining all the costs.

Basically, middle class and upper middle class urban workers subsidize pretty much everybody else. Any richer and you have access to tax avoidance resources and lobbying, and poorer and you consume much more in government resources than you pay in, especially in rural areas.

> I don’t think you’re right about that. Groceries, supplies, movie tickets, restaurants, fuel, transit, medical & dental resources, rent, and so on are all much more expensive in the city. The fraction of things you get on Amazon or through other means that allows paying a low competitive nationwide price is pretty tiny and doesn’t really offer any meaningful advantage to city dwellers.

It's primarily the discretionary, high-tech, and expensive items that are cheaper in a high-cost-of-living place. Want to buy an iPhone or a Tesla or an expensive camera or something like that? Those are all less expensive relative to your income in high-CoL places. Plus, interest rates from savings accounts and many retirement accounts are the same nationwide, meaning that having more total money is advantageous.

Inflation is faster in some urban centers though, so fixed interest rates are disproportionately bad for those urban dwellers. While that interest rate might grow your larger starting pile of money faster than it grows someone’s money in rural Nebraska, the gains are eroded more quickly so they don’t translate to purchasing power.

In those cities, your money has to grow fast or the loss of purchasing power is huge.

So I wouldn’t say nationwide interest rates are definitely an advantage for people with bigger starting piles of money in urban areas. It’s complicated.

It's not the case. It would be true to say that no one pays full price unless they have a lot of money. Harvard, not unrepresentative of other top U.S. schools in this regard, says that 55% of their students receive financial aid [1]. I infer that 45% are paying the full price of around $80,000 per year [2]. (Some of these 45% are doubtless funded partly by non-Harvard scholarships.)

Playing with Harvard's "Net Price Calculator" [3] makes clear that non-millionaires, let alone non-billionaires, may be asked to pay full price. A lot depends on the number of children, the number in college, and accumulated wealth (excluding retirement accounts and home equity).

Harvard students who receive federal financial aid pay (or their families pay) around $15,500 per year on average [4], which suggests that the distribution of payments may be bimodal: a lot of families pay $80,000 per year, and a lot pay a lot less.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid

[2] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

[3] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...

[4] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-Unive...

> non-millionaires, let alone non-billionaires, may be asked to pay full price.

People with under $1 million in net worth are very unlikely to pay full price at the wealthiest US colleges. Unless they have huge income but no savings. By “millionaire” do you mean people who earn a million dollars of income per year?

To take the Harvard example you linked to, a family with $500,000 in assets (not including equity in their primary home; for many families home equity is a majority of their net worth) and $120,000/year income will get about 2/3 of college costs paid by financial aid.

A family with $1 million in non-primary-home-equity assets and a $150,000/year income will still get 1/4 of college costs from financial aid.

What do they teach there for 320k?

Seriously, I do pay like 4.5K USD after conversion for 7 semesters of CS at weekends - 4 days / month and I cannot imagine that

My whole country pays 0 while the price if you repeat a year is 1200€

Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life.

It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?

But an educated population is a net benefit for a society so you’d have to factor the societal benefits as well.

In the US the professors appear to often work a lot closer to free than the administrators do anyway.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp some nice numbers here

The place I went, quite a few years ago, now estimates undergraduate total costs (per year) of $25K, 60% of which is room and meals. That is, total tuition and fees is around $10K.

I don't really see the point of pointing to total costs and saying "look how expensive college is". You need food and shelter anyway.

No but that won't stop people from parroting it. Student debt is fairly light, the catch is that you have to actually make money. It's hard to be sympathetic when someone takes out a 40k loan to major in a topic that has a non-insignificant chance of paying peanuts. I think that's mainly a problem for millennials though, Gen Z had demonstrated a higher degree of pragmatism when choosing careers.

Looks like a high-end MBA is only $150k.

It seems the Data Science degrees are the biggest ripoffs.

Isn't that the average debt a medical school graduate has? Of course that includes all expenses, not just tuition.

The numbers are crazy, but the degree is worth millions, unless they change their mind and don't practice or something.

In medicine, people are regularly paying even more than that. Med school tuition is in the $60–70k/year range for four years. A top undergrad institution is around $50–60k/year for four years. Since med school admissions are so competitive, many students actually get a master's degree before applying to med school, which is another ~$60k/year for 1–2 years. In total, you're looking at $400-500k or even more in select cases.

The numbers vary depending on if you're paying in-state tuition or getting other scholarships, but the numbers above are pretty typical outside of those caveats.

I am a researcher and a lecturer in a Swiss university. Switzerland is famous for being expensive, and the reputation is well deserved. However, the price of education for our students is about $1200/year. Which includes famous schools like EPFL (where Scala was born and still developed) and ETH (which contributions to computer science are too many to mention here). The students can e.g. collaborate with CERN researchers as part of their projects. For $1200/year. Available for everyone regardless of their nationality.

The best part is that for many master degrees and some bachelor degrees you can study remotely while living in your own country, only coming to Switzerland once or twice a year.

I don’t know why there are so few American students studying outside the US. (We do have some Canadian and Australian students though).

Be careful in your assumptions here. Online degrees still carry a huge negative stigma with them (which is interesting given that all students in the current cohorts at normal universities will have had several semesters of remote learning). Signalling of the college brand is also largely underappreciated by online students. You're getting a degree for a fraction of the cost of an in-person one, but it may or may not also carry a fraction of the job market value.

Note: I do not know which school you are referring to. It might be Berkeley's $70k+ degree or one of the many lower-tier schools, so YMMV.

I believe they're specifically talking about data science and fields related?

I'm a prior software development manager and degrees in general in this kind of field don't carry much weight outside of academic hires and very select companies.

While some companies or hiring managers might frown upon this it doesn't matter if there is an active hiring group that doesn't put any weight on them.

I guess one could argue that the ones who frown upon the degree pay more competitive but I've only found the opposite to be true with my experience.

(I'm ignoring FAANG because they're so unique that they're an exception to everything in the "real world")

I'm specifically talking about data science as well. My experience has been pretty much the opposite of yours. Data science boot camps and online programs have been cranking out grads for a few years now, so the base credential isn't all that valuable anymore. The big companies I work with are specifically looking for traditional degrees from Top 20ish colleges. On the other hand, it's probably quite different with smaller companies and especially non-unicorn startups.

wow, berkeley has a $70k online DS program??

Does your comment change re: stigma if OP was in fact talking about said berkeley degree?

I believe it's actually about $76k. Yes and no. The brand recognition is certainly more valuable than getting a degree from a cheap school and would open more doors, but I believe that like many schools, Berkeley still distinguishes the degree as different than if you got it in-person. In this case, the degree name is different even though it doesn't say "online" anywhere, so it will depend on whether the hiring manager is aware of its online nature or not.

I personally don’t get the appeal of hiring someone that did a DS degree. Most of the data scientists I know are phds or former post docs in math, physics, statistics, or neuroscience. I feel like as long as these fields keep producing too many graduates then it will be hard to get into the field.

So many of these teachers have become unqualified to teach remote classes since they can't adapt to virtual engagement to help students succeed. They don't answer emails, don't chat, leaving students lost. You get more from a youtube video in many cases. Remote teaching has made these teachers lazy IMO.

I agree, based on this:

My high-school aged son was taking two in-person community college classes this last semester.

When the SIP hit, his Spanish class just "ended". Nothing online, nothing from his teacher, it was just over. His math teacher worked diligently to keep things going, and I could see the adaptations the math teacher attempted to evolve his efforts with the unexpected conditions.

If the CC is only online in the fall, we'll find something else for him. I don't think v1.0 of online CC is worth spending my money on, based on the v0.9 beta.

I’m not sure it’s fair to characterise a change in circumstances as severe as what we’ve just been through, and the results of remote work, as a v0.9 beta. MVP feels fairer, and even that feels like a stretch for a lot of places.

Possibly -- but where a CC has a lot of adjunct profs, not staff, I'm not sure they're going to solve a lot of their issues over the summer.

Perhaps at a University, where tenured staff.. and those in the tenure-track, are likely to take the changed circumstances as a mandate to adjust and adapt.

One consideration we've had is signing him up for classes, and making a determination pretty quickly about how online-instruction ready the instructors he ends up with are. If we can drop enrollment for no, or little, $ outlay, we may give it a shot.

But our alternative -- returning to a tutor we used some time ago -- could be a more secure option, unless he's booked full. Which could be the case.

But with remote classes it becomes easier to find out which teachers are lazy... One of my son had a great remote teacher... not so much for my other one.

Yep. And I also was able to see first hand some of the issues my kid frequently told me about when they were doing in-person classes at school, like how much classroom time was wasted due to behaviors by the same kids day after day. It makes a strong impression when you see for yourself the same kids every day unprepared and being disruptive. In addition, I also noticed what a drag the weak students were on the rest of the class. I ended up withdrawing my kid from the school.

As former teacher: teaching is hard, and teaching remotely is harder.

Maintaining classroom order is a big part of the job. How are you going to do that remotely?

When I say maintaining order, I’m not even talking about discipline. Think Roberts Rules of Order. Just coordinating discussions in a meeting of 30 people.

Teachers are taught to engage students, and get them to engage with each other.

Just look how fast a HN comment thread can go off the rails.

College currently sell an "experience" with clubs, restaurants, football teams, fraternities, housing, a nice campus with trees and lakes, etc. This isn't free. It has pushed up the price of education.

If education turns remote, I would expect prices to fall (and layoffs for the administrative staff), unless a similar experience part can be replicated online (which I strongly doubt)

This is the exact opposite of work vs remote work: if WFH becomes the default, I would expect wages to rise, as the most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

> most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

Will these expenses be as tax deductible for WFH employees as they are for business? Is live/work zoning common?

If working from home becomes the default then wages will fall because employers will be able to select employees who live anywhere. Working in a physical office constrains the labor supply to workers who live nearby (or are able to relocate).

This could work both ways. Workers have more options for employment meaning they can jump to a higher paying job without having to uproot their life.

It will fall for people living in high cost areas like SF and NYC, but it will rise for people living in low and mid cost areas like Dallas or Cleveland because now companies in SF can easily hire the best developers in Dallas cheaper than average developers in SF by paying them more than the average Dallas rates.

> This is the exact opposite of work vs remote work: if WFH becomes the default, I would expect wages to rise, as the most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

Pocket lint compared to the unavoidable costs of employing someone in terms of monetary and in kind compensation and taxes. Knowledge workers are a lot more expensive to employ than the ancillary capital that goes along with getting the benefit of their Labour.

This is good. I think the commoditization of college had profound negative effects on society. Historic trust in the academic system was abused in order to, at best, sell degrees to people who were unqualified for them, and at worst, to indoctrinate two generations of children (anything outside of STEM is heavily politically slanted - it's the long march through the institutions that the infamous Weather Underground spoke of).

If intelligence (and general ability) is truly normally distributed then you cannot award degrees to the majority of the population without lowering historic standards.

You make a lot of good points here. What is expected of students in University these days is a joke compared to historical standards. Ironic given the more demanding job market expectations.

I suspect there will evolve a hybrid model:

- a small number of elite institutions will offer largely the same product they do today, possibly in lower volume but even higher price. Some lectures will be online, combined with in person recitation, lab etc.

- these same institutions’ lectures will be available online, perhaps for free or paid. Why get a lecture from state U when you can get the MIT lecture?

- local third parties will offer the recitation, lab etc. Perhaps you’ll go to a completely independent one, perhaps you’ll attend one that has licensed the GAtech name or has some sort of reciprocity deal in order to proctor exams and such.

- the networking value of school attendance will vanish except at the elite places.

- a few professors, the ones actually presenting the lecture, will earn a living wage, or perhaps even a significant wage. Everybody else student-facing in this ecosystem will earn adjunct/ post doc barely-living wage.

- even the recitations could be conducted online, perhaps by third parties in India who can explain the material just as well or better than someone local. You could be getting 1:1 instruction his way.

Let the students network and collaborate with each other. Classes and office hours can be done online. Value of universities is primarily in peer interactions.

Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have. Extend that to degrees and that's the stigma you have to deal with when trying to get a job. Telling an employer you got your degree remotely V the in class person, who are you gonna hire?

> Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have.

I certainly agree with this (people aren't that stupid). But schools like Stanford and USC have been doing online MS programs for decades. As far as I know they are are just as valuable to your resume as an in-person MS from the same school.

The value is in the fact that your average student simply doesn't have the self-motivation to do fully-online classes (we certainly have been seeing this problem in the last few months). This is why they primarily have been for working professions part-time in the past, that's a group and mode of learning where people actually get it done.

I’ve benefited immensely from online education, but it’s not a substitute for an in person liberal arts education.

If you tell someone you got the online masters from Georgia Tech, no one would look down on it. I can’t speak for other online masters.

https://omscs.gatech.edu/

I’ve been in a position that was involved in hiring.

I’d count an open university degree as equal or better than most universities.

Anyone who can work full time, study for a degree and often manage family life is worth a good look all other things been equal.

> Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have.

I think one question worth asking is what would happen if we blended both? Would it be possible to have a community college charge community college prices but work off of other peoples' excellent material? Imagine a CS 101 course where the lectures, problem sets, and tests were from MIT's Open Courseware, TAs were on site to hold sessions and help you, and a domain expert or professor was providing supplementary material and answering questions during recorded lectures. Sure it wouldn't be a stand in for MIT for many reasons, but it would probably give you a better education than most schools for a fraction of typical mid tier school pricing.

The value of a university education (in many fields, anyway) is in the degree. It’s the signal to employers that you made it. People who drop out in 4th year, even if they’re only one credit away from receiving their degree, are worth far less in the eyes of the employer, despite having passed all but one of the same courses as a grad. This isn’t what you’d expect if every course a person passed contributed a bit of value for the knowledge it imparted. Nope, for the employer it’s all about who crossed the finish line and checked off the box.

Not everyone is in a position to do it. And I don't know what the position of universities in deferring will be at this point. And obviously gap year options that are constructive/interesting are way limited at the moment.

But I'd have to seriously consider if it makes sense to enter a university as a freshman in September. Especially given a non-trivial possibility of things blowing up mid-semester with all sorts of attendant costs.

Obviously a really really tough decision. And this will probably result in a lot of students not entering or completing college which, despite some of the common wisdom in tech, will probably lead to some pretty severe downgrades to lifetime career opportunities and income to many.

I have two daughters in college.

My older daughter just graduated in mathematics / machine learning from UCLA. Online classes were mostly ok, though there were some comical situations where the professor taught the whole class with his microphone on mute.

Her exams were really rough, though. The math professors were unwilling to make any accommodation for the virus. While in quarantine with demonstrations and national guard soldiers literally across the street, she was taking exams. Everyone had 24 hours to take the exams, so they made them extra hard. They graded on a curve, because taking that away would be sacrilegious. So you have a choice, either spend as much of 24 hours as possible on the test, cheat (like some groups of students did), or get a bad grade. And then she had three exams in the same 24 hour period. The goal of testing should be to ensure that you know the material, not this competition shit.

My younger daughter is studying at USC. She came back to Taiwan last semester, so she hasn't needed to deal with the virus. Online classes have been pretty chaotic, though. Watching async videos has actually been a plus, but the mandatory discussion sections at 3 AM have been rough. It would be nice if they would just open one up in Asia timezone. Especially because students from China are now blocked from going back to the US.

USC was planning to have everyone come back on campus next semester, but just canceled because their opening plan was rejected by LA government. I am happy that she will be safe.

Universities are really worried about their business model, and are willing to have people die to preserve it.

I find it odd that even now, after all that's happened in recent months, and with the reserves of cash that some of the elite establishments (in the US at least) are not taking advantage of online degrees.

To give you an example. I am planning on starting a degree in October. I'm 45. It will be through the Open University. It will cost about £6000 to complete the degree.

I looked at a ton of Universities in the UK and their online offerings are abysmal. there are some in Europe that look ok but the US ones are in the $30k+ price range...

If I thought that Yale, Harvard etc. would do an online degree for a fraction of what an actual degree currently costs in person, I would jump at the chance... who wouldn't want that on their CV?

With the resources they have they could easily extend their degree programme to the rest of the world via online learning. Same lecturers, same material.

Instead, they're sitting on their hands while their entire foundation burns...

I agree with one of the other comments that this could be the beginning of the end for the bricks and mortar universities

A big part of the brand/prestige of Yale and Harvard is the exclusivity.

Valid point but there are hundreds of other institutions that don't have that exclusivity that have very little to offer when it comes to online learning.

From what I can see, the OU is miles ahead.

> What [the students] might not expect: a lack of professors in the classroom.

Maybe they might not expect it, but will they mind it?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, really interesting what will happen to higher-ed.

I’m currently a graduate student at a public research uni, which I imagine are the type of uni’s that may struggle (cause it’s not like ivy tech or other elite schools, may struggle to tract people if they start competing online only).

Another interesting factor are the increasing amount of bootcamps like Lambda and others offering technical education for the low. I wonder if companies like those will try to expand to other less technical subjects.

Think future higher-ed will be up to the experience and faculty, also makes you kind of worry about these public research institutions if tuition starts drying up.

Full professorships, irrespective of institution eliteness, are a tough job to get. If I were the provost, I'd just sack the folks who refuse to show up to work this fail. Most of them would be very easy replace (certainly if you value teaching skills over research skills).

Furthermore, the health risk to professors is much lower than it is to primary school teachers. 20 year olds can wear* masks for 45-90 minutes at a clip, 2nd graders won't be able to do that for six hours straight.

* or legally forced to, as they are adults.

As recent weeks have shown 20 year olds will be going to bars and parties and seeding new waves of infections. The vast majority of people in their age group have negligible mortality risk, and high incentives to socialize after being stuck at home with parents for months on end. The faculty on the other hand are in the demographic where COVID is a death sentence.

And when they don't die, it can ruin their academic & intellectual lives by making them long-term ill & disabled, including neurologically. Some of the lingering symptoms are nasty.

This is the con of universities. The only way to justify the tuition is face-to-face teaching and to have access to all those amenities.

Once you remove those students would be asking for price reduction.

https://archive.is/D6RKy

Administrative bloat and lax student standards should be geared up for older students and retraining during structural changes happening in the economy (right fucking now)

Sadly administrators have no skills to retrain people.

Recently I read a post about education that was quite resonating. Universities have historically been "hard to enter, but easy to exit", meaning it's really difficult to get in but about the only thing that matter is getting in and no one really cares what your grades are if you are from Stanford/Harvard et.al.

On the flip side, med school or west point are less about getting in but more about exit value. It's not really that important as to whether you got in but whether you graduated from West Point. West Point / Navy Seals can essentially double the class size without losing any credibility. I think higher education is going in similar direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com