academia_hack

Really good point. I think at a macro level it makes a lot of sense to do that and if Harvard were a state run institution the government should definitely try to share the benefit. To some extent this is what the use of national entrance exams in many countries (e.g. China, India, Kenya) do, with varying degrees of success.

The problem is, Harvard's incentive is to make a university which is best for its students - not society as a whole. They'd rather scoop up the cream of the crop in terms of affluence+intelligence and then leave the dregs for everyone else. Legacy admits are one tool they use to do that.

I sort of suspect the abolition of SATs serves a similar goal, where a university class can be curated on more than intellectual merit without articles like OP's getting published calling them out for it and the equity arguments universities have made for doing so are either facetious or misguided.

Something of a hot take, but I'd contend the Legacy admissions are there to the benefit of the people who earned their place!

As someone who got into an "elite" university despite not coming from an "elite" background - the Legacy admissions are the reason people like me got the opportunity to integrate with people who otherwise wouldn't have given me a second glance. Being in a study group with a prince, going to a club with an heiress, or sculling with a billionaires' kid is not an opportunity most parents can give their children outside of sending them to a place like Harvard.

It's horrible that the world is so fixated on status, but you don't get to choose what game you play always - just how you play it. Ingratiating yourself with a Fortune 100 CEO's son can reap many orders of magnitude more benefit than being surrounded by randos who are better than him at calculus.

The value prop of a place like Harvard isn't that they're particularly good at teaching, it's the idea that, as a sufficiently smart and lucky regular person, you might have a shot at getting into an otherwise exclusive circle. No guarantees, and may people can't crack it (or choose not to, because it feels so slimy) even when given the opportunity - but Legacies are part of Harvard's value proposition.

> only seemed to make people buy more tangible goods to hold on to.

In an inflationary market it makes a lot of sense to buy today what you can't afford tomorrow.

International law is not the same thing as the EU dictating laws that they want to apply internationally.

It think it's totally reasonable to say that you didn't vote for any EU legislators, couldn't even if you wanted to, and they have as much right to tell you what to do as the Kremlin does - zero.

If your own elected representatives want to enter into an enforcement or reciprocity agreement with the EU on this matter, that's fine, but until then extra-territorial regulation of technology is a pretty clear moral overreach.

Completely agree. I'm not sure who benefits from locking people in cages when their ability to roam free doesn't endanger anyone's safety. Ban her from owning equity in any business if you need to avoid repeat offenses.

If the purpose is retribution or deterrence there are so many cheaper and less cruel ways to achieve those ends than taking decades of life and handing hundreds of thousands of dollars to prison industrial complex: caning, banishment, compulsory face tattoos of shame, whatever. The only reason we have prison sentences for crimes like this (along with most property and drug crimes) is so we can torture people without having to look at it directly. I wonder what society would be like if juries had to personally flog each person they sentence, or execute them at the date of (life_expectancy-sentence_years). The way we deal with crime in America today is sanitized barbarism, but if you peel back any layer of the justice system it's pretty easy to see it for what it is.

There might be some distopian way of doing this using biometrics and cryptocurrency. Submit your "human hash" (e.g. some set of cheaply collectable and individually unique biometric signatures) and receive one USDT or similar fixed value digital currency. Then just slowly allow people to register ownership of their dollar as/when they decide to collect it. This only gets to people who can get access to a computer and the crypto-dollar is functionally useless to most of them but it's pretty cheap to distribute. The biometrics bit may also be literally impossible - no idea what the state of the art there is like.

100 years ago, you could have just set the money on fire and had a pretty similar net effect (reduce the money supply, increase the value of the remaining money for everyone else). There are some caveats. Money burning benefits aren't distributed evenly - rich people gain more than poor people since they have more of the remaining money. You also have to already have at least some money to benefit from it.

Still, it's possible the low overhead and fraud risks of burning money compared to distributing it might make it a more cost effective way to equitably distribute the $8 billion globally than any other route.

Modern finance is unfortunately more complicated. Burning money doesn't necessarily have any impact on the value of money.

I've been in almost this exact same situation with a slightly smaller team and "only" about $5 million running through the tangled web of php.

We did a complete rewrite into a Django application, it took 2 years and untold political pain but was absolutely the correct choice. The legacy code was beyond saving and everyone on the team agreed with this assessment - meaning our political battles were only outward facing.

In order to get support, we started very small with it as a "20% project" for some of our engineers. After level setting auth, cicd, and infrastructure stuff, we began with one commonly used functionality and redirected the legacy php page to the new python-based page. Every sprint, in addition to all the firefighting we were doing, we'd make another stealth replacement of a legacy feature with its updated alternative.

Eventually we had enough evidence that the replacements were good (users impressed with responsiveness, upgraded UI stuff like replacing default buttons with bootstrap, etc.) that we got a blessing to make this a larger project. As the project succeeded piecemeal, we built more momentum and more wins until we had decent senior leadership backing.

Advocating for this change was basically the full time job of our non-technical team members for 2 straight years. We had good engineers quit, got into deeply frustrating fights with basically every department in the company and had rough go of it. In the end though, it did work out very well. Huge reduction in cost and complexity, ability to support really impactful stuff for the business with agility, and a ton of fulfilling dev experience for our engineers too.

All this is to say, I understand where everyone warning you not to do a rewrite is coming from. It's a deeply painful experience and not one to be embraced lightly. Your immediate leadership needs to genuinely believe in the effort and be willing to expend significant political capital on it. Your team also needs to be 100% on board.

If you can't make this happen and you're not working on a business which does immense social good and needs your support as a matter of charity, you should quit and go somewhere more comfortable.

Helped lead a team that moved a huge decade-old internal amalgamation of php applications to Django around 2014. It was a nightmare that took almost 2 years, but the end result was orders of magnitude more maintainable and stable.

A lot of this has to do with terrible "DevOps" practices the org had previously. No version control, all devs coded with vim over ssh directly in production (same username+password for everyone), people just sort of patched bugs randomly whenever they felt like it, dozens of different out of date versions of the same dependencies were imported from random directories with cryptic names like "deps2", etc. Honestly, it's a testament to the versatility of php that the house of cards was able to stand for so long.

Moving to python (mostly so we wouldn't be tempted to copy any of the legacy code directly), starting from the ground up, and being deliberate about having "adequate" if not "best" practices was a huge improvement and totally worth it. Once auth, permissions, and infrastructure was squared away (probs 6 months to reverse engineer the existing home-made rbac system and figure out how to simplify it and migrate hundreds of users!), we went one feature/page/sub-application at a time through the php codebase and either rebuilt it, eliminated it, or merged it with some redundant similar feature elsewhere.

Politically, it was really hard to convince leadership this was worth the time since the end result was functionally identical to the start (with some minor UX improvements). It was worth it though. We went from dedicating something like 60% of capacity to random support and bug fix nonsense, to less than 10%.

Basically, it can pay off but for any non-trivial system it will be expensive and politically difficult to justify for a long time. In dire straits it can save your product, but definitely don't be tempted to swap languages because of tiny performance upsides, marketing hype, or boredom.

I left academia for industry a few years ago and still get hassled every week or so for help with open source code I published in conjunction with one of my papers.

My other papers, where I provided no artifacts, generate an average of zero support emails a year but are cited just as much.

The emails are often from first year PhD. students and are vaguely accusatory, along the lines of: "We're having issues replicating experiment X and wanted to give you a chance to correct/review before we publish on it." The cause of the issues is, 100% of the time to date, people not reading documentation or having more than a superficial understanding of the topic. However, I feel compelled to respond so that my old lab doesn't get dragged on twitter or at some conference over something that isn't true.

I barely got paid to do this sort of work when I was in academia and certainly don't now. If I could go back in time, I would have kept my research closed source. The personal benefits are essentially zero and the world would get along just fine if I had never written any papers, so the altruistic reasons aren't terribly compelling either.

The phrasing in the press release makes it sound like this is some sort of intrinsically grave offense, but it's quite possibly an innocent mistake. It sounds like this guy's colleague switched companies from one where they were cleared to one where they were not, but they continued to communicate about classified stuff.

Maybe that meant Unkenholz emailed a PDF marked TOP SECRET to his colleague in order to help some foreign entity harm US interests (obviously a terrible thing to do and worth being outraged about). But it could have also been him sending an email along the lines of "What SD cards did you order for [classified widget]? We're making more of them and I want to be sure I get all the same parts that you did for the prototype?"

Both cases violate the letter of the law, but locking a human being in a cage for a decade or more over the second one seems like a horrific misinterpretation of the concept of justice. Wish the press release was clearer on what side of the line this case falls on.

Definitely go to MIT. You'll hear a lot of advice about not paying a fortune for private universities when affordable state schools are just as good. This advice makes really good sense for most people, but MIT and Ivies are clear exceptions. Where cost ends up being the right thing to consider is at schools that don't make US News top 20, or in fields where you'll never expect much career income.

So long as you don't get distracted by the freedoms of university, MIT will pay for itself many times over. It's an unfortunate reality that there are prestige doors everywhere and merit only gets people so far. MIT will blast those doors wide open in fields like VC, consulting, and academia.

My MIT friends seem to largely have been underwhelmed by the quality of instruction (as with students at any university), but the career opportunities the brand and connections have opened for them have been enormous.

One caveat I'll give here is to be honest about your academic ability. The worst ROI by far is flunking out of MIT and other $$$ elite universities. MIT is actually pretty generous about how they treat freshmen, but you should 100% focus on ensuring that you can pass (or ideally excel at) your classes. Depending on your educational background, you may never have been properly challenged before and it can be a bit of an adjustment. In my experience the easiest techniques for doing well at top universities are sobriety, 8+ hours of sleep, strategic course selection, and tutoring at the first sign of trouble.

Plover was great when in university and taking lecture classes. Let me keep up with lecturers and gave me a fun activity (learning steno) to keep me awake during boring lectures. Utterly useless for note taking as transcripts are really not great to study from, but what I'd do is come back at the end of the week and re-read all of my transcripts to create little study guides. Ended up working really well. Main downside is I didn't have the money to buy a chorded keyboard and steno on a normal laptop is really hard.

For me it's always an optimization problem between weight, GPU, battery life, and cost. Generally, doing better in any one of those dimensions trades off with the other three.

It's really just a very slow, very inefficient and very public, database with an audit log of hashes keeping track of every change made. Everything else is just fluff/hype around that idea.

China absolutely has designs on Mongolia. The whole existence of the modern Mongolian state is a mess of cold-war / world war 2 geopolitical compromises that left basically no one happy. If Sino-Russian relations cool, or the climate of Mongolia itself warms, it could quickly find itself in an awkward spot between two notoriously bad-faith superpowers and with essentially no alternatives to vassalage.

If you actually read OP's link, the charges seem to have nothing to do with the fact that these individuals once worked for the US gov. Instead, the US federal government seems to be asserting that knowledge of offensive security tools and practices in Cybersecurity consultancy is somehow ITAR restricted in the same way that a weapon blueprint would be. That strikes me as absolutely preposterous and I'm disappointed the defendants settled rather than pushed back on obvious federal overreach into the lives and careers of private persons.

He's building an ASAT weapon. The debris story is just PR spin.

If they can make this tech viable, DOD will buy it as an ASAT weapons capability with essentially a blank check. Debris removal is a fantasy veneer slapped on to space weapons development for investors.

This is only half true. Many of my Chinese friends, especially affluent ones who have spent time abroad, both know and hate what Xi is doing to their country. Behind closed doors and or while walking in parks in Shanghai and Beijing I've spoken with people who still mourn friends lost in Tiananmen, who found Xi's removal of term limits deeply unsettling, and who dream of religious freedom in Tibet and Xinjiang.

China is full of a great many intelligent and aware people who are working hard to reclaim their country. Lots of the most progressive folks I know are working within the government, making day-to-day decisions as low level bureaucrats to dull the sharp edge of totalitarianism wherever they can.

Perhaps a modest number of Chinese people genuinely don't care much for anything other than stability and profit. However, the heart of China still beats for independence and many good people are waiting for their chance to reclaim the country.

This is awesome! I'm still afraid that one of my friends will go on a Minecraft binge (or idle in a farm) and drive up the costs beyond the $13/month or so I pay for VPS hosting but I think this approach would objectively be quite a bit cheaper for the casual vanilla SMP server I run for a dozen or so folks. Anyone know how to estimate the "worst case" monthly cost for this config?

Edit: Just saw that the GitHub includes a link to an AWS calculator. Looks like a month of continuous usage caps out at $40-ish. Not too bad since my realistic worst case is probably more like 8/hrs per day rather than the full 24.

I think the knowledge that the set is countable and can thus be counted is, as you say, quite obvious. However, actually counting it or generating the complete set is terrifically hard in practice. There are many more illegal positions than legal ones (I suspect, would be curious to know if this is actually the case). Moreover each legal position may be the result of thousands of games played legally or thousands of games played illegally. Computers historically haven't been able to enumerate this set, or judge from a position if it is conclusively legal or illegal since the complexity of that question is immense. We're on the cusp of being able to do that and I think that's what makes this project more than a trivial exercise in counting countable things.

I don't think it's 250 seats, but 250 employees. Lots of fairly low tech businesses (such as restaurant or retail chain or universities) may have less than a dozen docker users but still cross that total threshold.

This is a fair point, although not in great alignment with many of the norms that keep society working outside of tech.

However, don't all (or nearly all) licenses imply restrictions of some sort? Do you think code should just be released CC0/Public Domain or are certain restrictions (like copy-left) worth the cost?

This is true in a technical sense. Restrictions on commercial use are incompatible with a very specific interpretation of what "free" means. I could also invent a definition of freedom that was contrived to be incompatible with copy-left licenses and then write a post about how those aren't "truly free" either.

I'm not terribly convinced this legalistic nitpicking is really the right discussion though. I think the real questions here are normative. If I want to share my code freely with hobbyists and individuals, while ensuring that Amazon can't just steal it, pervert it into something I hate, and then borrow my own reputation to help them sell it, is it morally bad to add a license that stops this behavior?

From a developer's perspective: Why should code be 100% Certified Free™ instead of 95%, or even 50%? Is it a moral imperative to make code truly free, or an aesthetic ideal? What harms come from a CC-BY-NC license relative to MIT and why do those harms matter? I think answers to these questions are much harder and more interesting to come by than splitting hairs over the semantics of freedom.

In my experience, even the worst parts of Croatia are safer and have more responsible cops than the sketchy parts of any mid-sized US city. Young people are fluent in English, along with most well-off middle-aged folks who know enough to consume the internet/English movies and television since Croatian isn't a hugely used language in media. Elderly people who don't live in touristic areas may know very little English but it's rarely a problem.

Yeah. The quality of life available in many of these major Balkan cities is on-par with anywhere else in Europe for a tiny fraction of the price. You can find lovely flats in the urban center Sofia, Bulgaria for less than $500 pcm, pay basically no local taxes, access the quality of music/museums/restaurants you'd expect in any other capital city, use a solid public transport system, and get healthcare that beats the USA in both quality and cost. Add in a gorgeous countryside, safety orders of magnitude better than major US cities, and decent English skills among the younger generations and it's a very easy place to pass a year or two. Something to consider for retirement too. Trying to convince my parents to give that a go, since they'd be able to live like kings on their modest savings rather than developing ulcers from constant fear of retirement ending healthcare mishaps.

A less cynical view is that it keeps the military industrial complex healthy and robust in case an urgent need (e.g. WWII) arises. I'd much prefer to just hand cash to Raytheon for that and not have them shoot anyone though....

Some years are fine, just subtract the earned income exemption and move on. Others are nightmares.

Unlike in America, where there are accountants lurking around every corner, the tax code here is very "simple" (the vast majority of people probably never fill out a tax return in their lives). This means accountants charge like you're some sort of multi-millionaire business owner (since that's who their clients typically are). My last quote to get US & domestic taxes filed here when I was a grad student was $6,000 on a total income of <$50k. My situation wasn't that complicated - I had 2 part time jobs, won a competition prize for $20,000 and sold some stock.

I just did my best to file on my own. I probably got something wrong since it's crazy confusing. Prizes are tax-free here, but taxable in the US and not typically "earned income" but are maybe covered by the foreign income exemption or a dual taxation agreement (since I did have to report it to the taxman here, the tax rate was just zero). I literally couldn't afford to figure out how much tax I owed and to who - nevermind the taxes themselves!

Hopefully the IRS doesn't care enough to seize me the next time I visit my family. I tried my best, but that doesn't necessarily mean much in court. I think a lot of the problem is with the American tax code in general, but American accountants know nothing about the tax code here so I can't just ring up H&R Block and ask them to file over zoom (I've tried). Meanwhile, the only accountants who know about American taxes over here are specialist catering to the millionaire expat market. An hour of their time costs more than I earn in a week.

It's so irritating to be an American that has moved overseas. Basically the only country in the world that charges taxes on money you make and spend somewhere else, just because of where you were born. Thanks to IRS regulations, 90% of investment firms will just reject me outright rather than deal with the paperwork. Getting someone to help file my inordinately complex taxes costs thousands of dollars more than I actually pay in tax. I can't have a proper retirement account here since America doesn't recognize the local pension providers, so my government mandated pension is deducted from my salary here and then also taxed as income in the USA. If I ever want to leave, the IRS charges a small fortune for the privilege of not being a citizen too.

I'm sure there's a small number of rich people gaming the system, but for the vast majority of expats the citizenship-based taxation system is almost cartoonishly cruel.