WBrentWilliams

I look at this issue and see a market failure. Maybe it is not corporately profitable to provide the pile of services that a population aging in place need (welfare checks, transportation, food, housing...) but it should be possible to build the infrastructure to create the raft out of parts of a solution. Maybe a mix of formal (paid-for) and informal (volunteer, value-add) services. I see this as a necessity for people that do not at the moment face this "cliff". After all, spouses die, children leave and/or live far away. Any person in a stable situation at the moment could easily find themselves in need of these services.

Works better when the hanging '/' is removed.

https://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy

I'm saying that you can be admitted without test scores. You leave money on the table when negotiating the bill when you do not take the test. Opting not to take the test could be an optimum strategy if you already know that the offered awards will not apply to you.

The English language has a plural "you". The word "you", in this case, means "anyone who applies for admission". I said nothing about increasing or decreasing your chances of admission.

Cute. Disclosure, I make the data (transcripts, test scores) flow to decision makers as part of my day job at a Big 10 University. We just went "test optional".

I view "test optional" as a signaling exercise. In brief, how closely can you read the instructions and infer what you are not being told? The key is "test optional". If you sit for the test, you get more than just admissions, as merit-based financial awards are unlocked. The University Admissions does not require a test, but many of the donor contracts that fund scholarships do require those tests.

My instruction to teach the generator. Basically:

1. Here is what the generator produces.

2. Here is why you will fail if you rely on it.

3. Assignment: Write a better essay using [these listed points] than the AI.

4. (extra credit) Write an AI that produces better output.

I put the burden on the educational system in terms of a challenge.

Disclaimer: I work for a university where I routinely route testing inputs to systems and people to make admissions decisions.

Teach the generator via an in-class markup of the output. Challenge the students to out-produce the AI.

There are testing systems that already use AI to grade essays via a first pass score before passing over to a human grader (who might be overworked). Better to open discuss the AI grader and how it works than act shocked that smart students will game the system.

Going meta (note the lack of capitalization and insert your own joke here) I would say that the stress of running comments on your own blog, in any form, costs more most of the time as compared to sending the comments to places like HN, Reddit, and the like. I can see where size of concern means that you engage and host comments on your own site. However, it also seems to be that running a comment space in service of sharing something made and/or selling a product is the equivalent of painting a wall a nice, pristine white in a highly visible and accessible place and then getting mad at that same wall getting tagged with graffiti.

In other words, I am sorry that the Ron Glibert got burned, and I sympathize, but it seems to me that YouTube (where the video is hosted) runs a perfectly serviceable comments site that you can turn on and off. No need to run your own (unless you want to).

On paper, SCotUS _can_ be held accountable by the public through their representatives. The process is called impeachment. The house _can_ impeach a sitting Justice, and the Senate _can_ vote to remove them from office. This currently is unlikely, but the it _is_ possible.

The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible.

The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.

My careful reading of the facts (disclosure: my daytime gig is making the wheels in a university's student records system whir)

* Forgiving student debt is an endless political cycle, promising to piss off anyone who has either paid off their large debt without forgiveness (raises hand - five figures (think 1990s luxury car) between my wife and I) or didn't acquire the debt in the first place (self-funded or scholarships).

* Standardized test scores going away: Read the fine print (I implemented this policy in code). The test scores went away for admissions. You can get in without standardized test scores. However, public and private scholarships are still tied to standardized test scores. Funding agreements (I was involved in maintaining the university's implementation of these) from private donors or public sources have mostly not been altered. Rhetorical: Are standardized tests really going away?

* Tech hiring without degrees: Culture and HR fit is important here. Does HR, protecting the company from itself, quietly screen and discard resumes without necessary keywords? This is an effective way to remove non-degree holding candidates.

* Alternatives: Yes, we (in the United States) do need them. We have needed them for at least 30 years. Politically, all we ever really seem to get are NEETs and High-Schools-With-Smoking-Areas.

I like that Mr. Altman's thinking of alternatives. Please share them. I want to see a successful implementation. My job, and the way I define it, relies on making it possible for as many to dream as possible. I support widening the number of paths to dream as possible. I believe that this is not a zero-sum game.

As for price, there is already an economic force that will cause interesting swings ahead. In my circles, it is called a demographic cliff. My university is already seeing it and has made short term changes. I foresee many small universities and colleges closing and merging. Eventually, when shrinkage cannot happen any longer, the price of services (tuition and fees) will be lowered. Just in time for the current administrative overhead to retire.

I think the problem is the word "free" in open source. Along the axis of freedom, this is a strength. You can read the source, figure out how it works, and adapt it to your uses. Or, as my senpai (pity English doesn't have a single word for "talented co-worker that demonstrates the ideas you haven't thought of yet) puts it, "I can read the source for a feature I like, and then I know how to do it, and I can avoid the features I do not want." This isn't copying, this is studying. You read the source to understand, then write your own implementation that better fits your use case.

However, there is another axis to consider: In English, "free" also means gratis. This means that no one with recognized authority is enforcing a shift of resources in exchange for using the code as written. Yes, you can ask for resources, and there are many ways to do so, but without enforcement, you get the most common behavior of "thank you, I will" and all the attendant problems, be that of pushing the license to limits, finding loopholes, to lack of funding, dead projects, to (possibly) self-interested actors placing features in open source that they can later exploit because no one really audits the code (See also log4j. I am not saying that a government placed something exploitable in the code. I am not saying that a private actor did so. I am saying it is interesting that a piece of widely used infrastructure has had an exploitable feature for so long).

Criticism aside, how does one provide freedom to learn and explore while curtailing the free rider problem?

A first-generation solution: Sell copies of your source code for the resources you need to maintain it. One example would be to make the source available once money has changed hands. You cannot stop the buyer from turning around and giving the source away for free: Once you have made a sale, you have made a sale. That particular copy of your source has created all the profit it will create.

A second-generation solution: Sell future updates. This is an idea I have been playing with, in terms of a business plan. Your source is free (both gratis and freedom) and you sell tokens. The tokens are capable of being purchased separately. Tokens can be exchanged for votes to determine which new features are developed and which bugs are fixed. They key is in selling the tokens.

For me, it comes down to the right tool for the job. Excel (strictly speaking, spreadsheets) is very powerful. It is a grid-based visual programing environment that has an interface simple enough to be groked by its original target audience: accountants and file clerks.

What that means to me is that I use excel for "toys" (small data set analysis, rough charts) and ephemeral-yet-shared lists where it is easier to say "evening batch tab, line 3" to communicate which job needs to be updated than try to communicate the same thing in a written request or pull a database table report.

I use R where I need more power: automated reports, automated statistics, and more complex analysis where the paradigm of textual code fits better than the paradigm of a 2D grid. I teach R (or python) when I want to give someone more reproduceable tools than a "magic" spreadsheet that, under the covers, is really a contraption held together with sticky tape and positive thinking.

We can, and should, teach both. Ideally side-by-side with a constant stream of "why are you doing task X this way?" that is largely missing from formal education.

An alternate take is that, from a certain point of view:

1: Cancer and heart disease are the leading causes of death in Rich Countries, specifically the US [1]

2: Your chances of dying from either cancer or heart disease, given no other incidents claim your life first, asymptotically arrive at 100% [2]

So, yes, cancer is not infectious, but our bodies are prone to two classes of diseases (neither cancer nor heart disease are actually a single disease, but more correctly disease families) that have environmental and hereditary causes. Our tools for treating both are crude, but getting more and more effective year-over-year.

By advocating against the state-of-our-current-art in treating either disease (informed criticism is fine, and in fact, encouraged), the end result is that many people suffer and die when they could merely suffer, then live years of their lives before succumbing to a relapse or other causes of death. Perhaps the headline is hyperbole, but the argument is analogous: By advocating against chemotherapy and replacing it solely with a hard-to-follow diet and exercise regimen, the cull of older people dying from treatable disease can look something like the cull of younger people dying from preventable disease due to advocating against vaccination against infectious diseases.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800750/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2016/16_0211.htm

The important thing to remember is that everything of substance has already been written up and will be read by congress members and their staff. Keeping that in mind, the more important object is to make use of the five minutes of microphone time.

I think studying how other people have effectively used their five minutes in instructive. I'd start with the testimony of Fred Rogers where he gave a Senate statement on PBS funding: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fredrogerssenatetes...

You would have a point if # apt-get required registering a credit card number. Last I checked, it does not. True, apt is a pedantically-speaking economic marketplace: a true free market. It is a free market based on ideas, usage, and popularity. It is not a market based on directly moving funds to the software creators.

GNU encourages software creators to sell their software for as much money as they can make while using their license. What I am playing around with as a thought experiment is a method to create a market that trades the scarcity of a software writer's creativity for money.

And yes, the attempt would probably fail spectacularly. Anyone who wants to attempt to execute on my idea is free to do so. Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive.

As a friendly pile-on, yes, you do have to agree to the terms of the GNU license or cease using the software. That's in black-and-white in the text of the agreement, along with making the source available and releasing changes to the source code under the same or later license.

My hypothetical model is choose not to do GNU's marketing. Frankly, they do a good job of it without my help. However, I cannot hide the fact that the software is GNU licensed. The EULA-style pop-up approach is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but presenting the license before download is vitally important.

I've been kicking around a business plan idea for about seven years: A software marketplace for items under a GNU license. The key: I neglect to put that fact in the marketing.

The full license is posted with the software download, via a pop up EULA-style window before the download proceeds complete with an "I Agree" nuisance button.

The market starts with a price discovery model where I suggest a price and allow the person pay whatever they want. After some data gathering, I simply obfuscate the "pick-your-price" mechanism.

Yes, this is a bit of cherry-picking, where I employ some dark patterns. My reason for this thought experiment is the crux of this article and discussion: How do you explain software in the English language for which the rights of the end user are enshrined while leaving a profit-path open for the creator? My reply is: You don't. You focus, instead, on making the process of obtaining the software as friendly and service-oriented as possible.

I wonder how spectacularly this idea will fail?

Down here in the ignored bottom of the comments, all I can really say when it comes to juggling family and any other activity (job, interest, hobby...) you either do it or you do not. All I can tell you is the how of what I do.

I set a goal and found time. I found 30 minutes every morning. I make it a point to have slack time (hence, answering this post and reading Hacker News...), but I target about 90 minutes a week on whatever single project I choose for the week.

Looking this over, I'd say that the controlled environment had more to do with the reported weight loss than the diet. Specifically, the observation that the people in the study lost weight on the baseline diet before going on the carbohydrate restriction.

Anecdata: I lost quite a bit of weight on a version of the low carb diet: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I went on it for health reasons. Specifically, I was trying to manage a digestive disease by diet. I went off the diet during an extended flare after changing physicians for treatment (my old physician left practice). The diet and the flare dropped my weight to unhealthy levels. I am now under treatment that has my symptoms under control.

I am back on the diet because my weight has gone a bit too high. I, personally, find it easier to restrict my calories by removing grain-based carbohydrates. This will vary from person to person.

That precisely illustrates my point. See also, Agile as it is currently practiced in many companies. Politics, in any form, is a very rough game.

Historically, worker-owned cooperatives did get much mention. The ideal of early labor organization was that the workers should own the means of production. This was exactly why early labor disputes were so bloody: the owners of the factories and mills saw the organized labor movement as theft. That is, organized labor was threatening to "steal" what they "built". Yes, the quotes are mine, because my own viewpoint is one of symbiosis.

The biggest problem is not that a worker-owned coop doesn't work. They do. The problem is one of primate social hierarchy. That is, "someone has to be the boss".

If all the students do is take this "bootcamp", then yes, they will be short-changed. However, if these students already understand that they need the four-year BA/BS certification to get past HR and are either getting that education concurrent or already hold a BA/BS and are looking to jump from whatever they studied into becoming a developer, this program is quite valuable.

My point is that if the antecedent is already acknowledged, I have no problem with this program. I work for a university as a developer. The shop is split with about 60% coming to development from other fields. These developers are quite consistent at delivering product on a timely basis with good support and bring a much needed broader background in terms of understanding and implementing the requirements of various scholastic departments. This broader base and ability is something my organization would not have if we were to insist on just hiring Computer Scientists and/or Electrical Engineering candidates.

I would hope that would be the ultimate goal. However, that might not be possible without at least some VBA work. Experimentation will have to be undertaken.

The real question is how do you sell the ClojureScript "macro" to an end user that, ultimately, doesn't care how the answer in the spreadsheet is arrived at, so long as it is correct.

I'll leave the article as-is. This isn't the first article to grace HN that stated that Japanese companies tend to be slow adopters. What I want to know is why the highlight on human traffic signalers as an indicator of how "backwards" the culture is technologically.

It seems to me that if the goal is not just public safety, but to put a human face on law enforcement, a human traffic signal is exactly what is required. True, a robot can do the job, but a robot would be ineffective at the task of humanizing the reasons behind the laws and in providing assistance to people who need it.

I go a step farther. In my state, there is no requirement to join a party to vote in the primaries. Instead, you simply pick a party for which to vote. I believe the only rational choice is to say "Give me one ballot for each party," which gives close-to-stacked-rank voting for the primary.

I still show up for the primaries, as I want the chance to choose who I vote for when I get to the general election. However, such a system makes it impossible for me to consider political office (beyond school board) as my primary declaration is a matter of public record, meaning that I would not pass any test of party purity.

What I really want is stacked-rank voting in the primaries and in the general election. I think it would be interesting to see how the general public, used to a Coke vs Pepsi choice, handle a spectrum of choices where you don't have to Pick Only One.

Interesting reading. I think the intellectual mistake the author made is in thinking that one's political dogma (and therefore party affiliation) should not change over time because the party does not change over time. That is, the idea that a political party is the manifestation of an unchanging view.

The fun revelation is that business dresses itself up as conservative, then pursues its own ends of profit. That's the entire definition of bourgeois. It is worth highlighting as in many ways, the free software movement is a very conservative one, from the point of view of the way code was shared in the beginning of its history: That is, you asked the programmer who wrote the code you were interested in for a copy and usually got it gratis as the money was made in selling the equipment. The change of label to liberal-radical came later when business started to realize that software, itself, was a sell-able product.

The point I'm making is that choosing a side in any two party system is always artificial. Any party affiliation should be viewed as one of convenience. This explains why Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and why both Paul politicians aligned with the GOP.

From my standpoint, the only winning play for the individual is to decide what is important to yourself, acknowledge that it will change over time, and remember not to get caught up in the game being played. Your "side", or party affiliation, in fact, should change as your interests change.

In other words, don't be proud of your party, and don't overly-identify with said party.

Let me answer that with a statement and an anecdote.

The statement: The proportion of costs I outlined, from my point of view, have always been true. I finished my first degree in 1997.

The anecdote: All the professors in my computer science program (I'm not going to name-drop, but I had some great teachers that insisted that I learn scheme, then Java, then C, then assembly) either had no required text or gave syllabi that referenced several versions of their listed texts. The context was that we were free to get the best deal possible on the texts.

I like the way that these articles and the comments ignore the elephant in the room: The cost of living while attending college.

Here is a data point for my local State University. I happen to work there, so I can verify that these numbers are pretty much correct. You can pay cheaper rent, but you'll pay back the difference in car mileage and/or roommate drama.

Tuition is (roughly) 40 percent of the cost. What really drives up the student debt is the cost of living. If we really wanted to do something about student loan debt, I think we'd do better to apply the same political pressure to the cost of living as we do to the rate of tuition.

Indiana University [1] Tuition: $10,388 Room and board: $9,794 Books and supplies: $1,230 Transportation: $1,030 Personal Expenses: $2,096

[1] http://admissions.indiana.edu/cost-financial-aid/tuition-fee...

I think the whole problem with the smoking debate is that neither side (pro and anti) are willing to embrace harm reduction, even though the market has introduced many methods to use nicotine and/or tobacco that, to one degree or another, do in fact reduce the harm caused by the manufactured cigarette.

The anit-smoking side views harm reduction as a movement that is completely against their efforts. To the anti-smoking side, vaping is the same as {cigarettes, cigars, pipes, shisha, snus, ...}. The anti-smoking side's stated agenda is absolute eradication of tobacco use in any form, and they've hit all fronts just short of prohibition.

The pro-smoking side take a small-l liberal view: People should be able to use tobacco. Their problem with harm reduction is that harm reduction is also against their stated goals. While the pro-smoking side will happily embrace vaping, they view it as yet another way to enjoy tobacco.

In the meantime, people like their vices. As an exercise, re-write the Economist article, but substitute "alcohol" for "tobacco". As I recall, there was such an article posted to HN that showed how journalism colors the perception of drugs by writing about alcohol use as if alcohol was a new drug, not a very old one.

Back to my point on harm reduction, I believe that sooner or later a stasis should be reached. Harm reduction will be embraced by both sides. I believe that the only way to reduce the negative effects of any substance use to a society is to teach the risks and the safest way to use the substance. I think that the end result will be an open market where the suppliers of the substance will sell their product in any way they can and a corresponding social pressure that pushes users towards more acceptable (less harmful) practices while supporting programs that allow for self-selected cessation.

Very true and so very close to what I think is Microsoft's true motivation: Office. Viewed through the prism that Office is Microsoft's cash cow and the criticism that the Office version available online in browser is limited, like Google Docs is limited (there's at least one feature that doesn't work given a large enough set of features from Word...), asm.js makes perfect sense.

Perhaps Microsoft will tier their products in a different way. A Office 360 subscription (or whatever it is branded) will get you access to Office, running in a browser, under asm.js. Perhaps they'll do something different. Sooner or layer, however, the Microsoft embrace of this technology will be monetized.

There are side-effects. Microsoft can sell tools that now run a tranpiler to put executables on the web. They might or might not use LLVM to that end.

This development means that asm.js has become a defacto standard. It is too soon to tell if this will be more widely adopted, as defacto standards fail al the time. I think, however, that this one will stand. Quite likely we all are now going to be freed and constrained by small design decisions made long before this adoption came to pass.