noodlesUK

I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems are in East Africa and similar contexts.

The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.

As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.

I find this absolutely hilarious. If you’re a gerontology lecturer in Michigan, look out!

There are actually situations where U.S. citizenship can be a requirement, e.g., cleared jobs but there needs to be a really good reason like not being able to obtain clearances.

Malnourishment is a big part according to the WHO [1]

I’m no expert but I also suspect access to medical care is also a big part, as typically only active cases spread the disease. If you are symptomatic and get some antibiotics, you might not spread it to very many people. If you’re symptomatic and go without treatment for ages, then you might spread it to loads of other people.

As we learned during covid, small differences in R value massively change the prevalence over time.

TB is almost the archetypal disease of poverty.

Living on top of each other, especially in childhood & adolescence, combined with other environmental and health factors explains almost all of it. If you’re malnourished and your immune system is in bad shape, you’re at risk. If you have HIV, you’re at risk and so on.

I think that in your case you've correctly observed that it would be nearly impossible to commission or otherwise fake your particular dissertation/project because of its experimental nature, and that you were called to a viva.

There are certainly similar projects being completed by students every year, and doubtless those students are not cheaters, but for each dissertation like yours, there are probably 10 or more projects that are not collaborative and have no artefacts or supporting evidence other than a written report. Such projects are fairly easy to commission. For a reasonable price (potentially thousands of dollars) you can pay a poor research student in the same field as you to churn out a mid-tier dissertation. This can be detected with a viva, but the academics need to be very confident before accusing someone of cheating. More often than not, you can get away with it and just get a not great grade.

I think that in general the natural/formal sciences don't suffer nearly as much as social science and humanities do, simply because exams and labs tend to highlight irregularities, and cheaters are less likely to be drawn into "hard" fields. However, it still exists in every field.

I think this varies dramatically from subject to subject. CS students at my university probably had overall 70% weighting on invigilated exams, but classics or business students probably had only 20% weighting and far fewer exams.

Did your high school not have any kind of summative homework?

In many places, particularly in the U.S., there are few invigilated exams, and quite a lot of your overall grade will be comprised of coursework. This, combined with the inexorable advance of digitalisation of education has led to where we are now.

Certainly once you get to university level, there are projects which simply take too long to be done in the classroom, such as a dissertation or final report. These projects have always been vulnerable to commissioning rather than plagiarism, and you’d be appalled to realise how common it actually is even in higher prestige places. LLMs have simply lowered that bar to make it even more common.

This is a genuine problem, and people are more sophisticated cheaters than you might initially think.

Fellow UK person - the style of exam that you describe is pretty hard to cheat unless you can find another person to go in your place. I think various institutions have tried digital invigilation but have had little success (and I think this is just a bad idea anyway).

However, you also mentioned a final project. You’d be shocked how much commissioning exists where people have their projects produced for them. I’m not talking an overly helpful study group, I mean straight up essay mills. Tools like ChatGPT make the bar for commissioning lower and cheaper. I don’t know how you can combat this and still have long-term projects like dissertations.

I think regional airports are great, but I don’t think they can meaningfully compete with intercity coaches. It will never be financially viable to price a commercial flight on a small aircraft at the sub $30 point. I also don’t think the interchange network can possibly have the same level of coverage.

It needs to be possible for people to use public transport to get around, including between smaller destinations, otherwise you’re just completely abandoning the population who can’t drive.

Yes, but it’s only an 8 week window and there’s no dispute arbitration process, which is actually bad for merchants too.

This is largely true, and it’s codified into law in some places (see s.75 in the UK), however I would say that the protections provided by most major banks on debit card purchases are actually pretty good. The chargeback process for most issuers is very similar or the same. You should use a credit card because you have stronger legal protections, but it’s not like most banks will screw you just for using a debit card.

Ultimately the semantics of instant push payment transfers are pretty different from card purchases.

Chargebacks for instance are a key protection which I have made use of multiple times. There’s no such option available with bank transfers. The card networks are typically the ones who handle dispute arbitration and various other issues between merchants and card issuers/cardholders.

Those kinds of features mean that people are comfortable using their bank/credit cards, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be okay if someone steals the card or a merchant makes an error or defrauds them.

There are all sorts of protections available to merchants like card holds which make buying a hotel room much more seamless.

I think it really depends on what the hobby is.

If you’re into an individual sport and you have private lessons, which are more common than you’d think, you’ll easily blow thousands of dollars per year just for half an hour or an hour per week. Almost anyone who is beyond a fairly recreational level in tennis, martial arts or fencing will be spending thousands per year.

On the other hand, 3.9k per year is a massive amount of money to spend on cheaper hobbies like hiking or painting.

It also depends a lot where you live, HN is very US centric and is full of people who are earning big money at tech companies there.

I think that's a totally reasonable compromise which would reduce abuse both by employer and employees. However actually determining what a specific job role entails is quite complicated. Take a look at the SOC codes in the US or NOCs in Canada. Even if you figure that out, auditing people to make sure their day-to-day matches their notional job code is pretty hard.

I think that we should entirely abolish programs like H1B that leave people tied to a specific employer for a long period of time (and similar visas like the SWV in the UK).

These programs mean you have literal second class citizens in a the workplace who desperately need to avoid losing their jobs for fear of their life being completely upended. This disrupts the labour market and internal corporate culture significantly. Instead we should have work visas lead to permanent status much faster, but give them out more sparingly.

So how does this work? Is it the same as the kind of phase cancellation that you often see with two speakers playing the same tone, but just with lots of elements (and an ultrasonic source)?

Not parent - I don’t know anyone who’s been a victim of it, but here’s some reading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husband_stitch

From a practical perspective, what protection does the use of a fido2 PIN provide here? Is the EM side channel exposed without knowledge of the PIN?

In any case this is a tremendous attack, good job!

FYI there’s a typo in one of your image assets below the fold on your landing page - under the subscription optimization tab, the failed payment, recovered payment mockup says “paymet” rather than “payment”.

Product looks cool in any case.

I think when considering proposals such as this one, it's important to first consider what the purpose of university is. To many people, universities are just another kind of school. To others, the research mission comes first, and teaching students is a second order effect. This is codified in the mission statements of various universities -- for instance Caltech's: "The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education."

This proposal would tie the existence of a program and its associated research directly to the employability of the (mostly undergraduate?) students. Presumably entire disciplines would be slaughtered overnight, and not just the ones that right wing commentators like to go on about. You could kiss goodbye to essentially all arts education, and most niche sciences like Archaeology. You'd then massively shift to vocational degrees like engineering, law and medicine.

I think that one issue that has been identified is that the federal government is underwriting a whole bunch of student loans that will likely never be paid, and universities are not incentivised at all to keep prices down. Employability is somewhat orthogonal to that.

You also have to deal with the millions of people who already have these loans, who undeniably need bailing out at least somewhat.

It would be good if people would universally use any of the extant tools for citation management. It’s not a problem in CS and associated disciplines but in the humanities and social sciences a shockingly large number of researchers don’t use tools like Zotero and Mendeley. They just keep notes and copy/paste entries in a bibliography.

I only have experience of the university side of EdTech, but in my experience people were extremely interested in anything that would make it easier for lecturers to do their jobs, improve student experience, etc.

What they weren’t interested in was anything that changed the general dynamic of the university or replaced their core business.

Marking tools, stuff that helps deliver lectures, anything of that variety was all in-bounds, and lots of departments were happy to explore new things.

What would not sell was anything that required selling directly to students, because they simply won’t spend the money.

I think this depends wildly on which jurisdiction you’re in. It’s pretty easy in the UK to just use FreeAgent or Xero to handle accounts and you can get to grips with the basics by just googling around.

In the U.S., it’s fairly easy too if you use quickbooks or similar, but the IRS is much harder to deal with than HMRC, and is much more of a punitive organisation.

However, having an accountant to talk to can give reassurance that you’re not going about things extremely stupidly.

The moment you start doing business in multiple jurisdictions (in the U.S., this includes multiple states), it starts to get a lot more complicated and using a professional makes sense. International tax is a huge pain, especially where the U.S. is involved.

I do think the general idea that it’s much better to try and run a straightforward business without complicated tax structures when you’re young really rings true. It’s better to focus on generating revenue than trying to squeeze out every penny of tax optimisation.

I think this really depends on your definition of EdTech. I don’t think anyone would contend that turnitin or Ellucian haven’t scaled well.

Tools that cater to the organisations that have money can absolutely do well, but trying to sell to people without the means to buy your stuff will always be unsuccessful.

Funnily enough this is actually an effective way of doing things with Meta.

See: https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas...

I hadn’t even made a single transaction before I got banned, so presumably there was something about my email address, phone number or postal address they didn’t like. I was registering in the UK with all UK details etc. something tripped, but I have no idea what. Upon contacting PayPal’s executive complaints team using details I found on Reddit they decided to do a whole bunch of KYC and reverse the ban, but they were adamant that it was irreversible when I initially contacted them using their normal phone number.

To this day I have no idea why (and it wasn’t clear to me that the complaints people even knew), just that something flagged in their automated system.

There are always false positives with this kind of thing, and you can only hope that you don’t become one. I’m lucky that it was possible to fix my issue but as automated decision making becomes more common there will be increasingly large numbers of people who are just arbitrarily denied access to services with absolutely no recourse.

This is such a common occurrence these days with tech platforms. I had a similar situation with PayPal when I opened a business account for the first time. Minutes after opening the account I was perma-banned and I was told there was no appeal. Of course, there’s always a way of appealing if you can speak to someone with the authority to fix things (as I was able to in my situation).

Unfortunately companies seem to be getting worse and worse at allowing you to speak to sufficiently empowered people to solve problems.

I hope the HN effect helps you out here and someone at Google decides to swoop in and rescue you.

If you live in America and you can’t otherwise resolve this, I’ve heard that filing a small claims lawsuit is an excellent method of last resort to get big tech to respond to you.

PressReader allows reading various newspapers (in their newspaper form), the short sub to NYT I mentioned is a bit different and gives you access to the online version.

Example for LA libraries: https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital

Your local library might have a similar offering specifically for the NYT.

FWIW, if you happen to be based in the U.S., you might find that your local public library provides 3-day NYT subscriptions free of charge, which whilst annoying is probably easier than fighting the paywall. Of course this only applies to the NYT.