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Microsoft's motto is "Don't be so evil that the government can successfully break you into pieces". Google's motto is "don't be evil". We expect vile bullcrap from Microsoft.

Both are essentially aggregators of not-for-profit university lectures. Education is a weird thing. We don't know how to do it well, and we don't know how to ensure it is taking place, but every for-profit university (new online ones possibly excepted, I don't know) is designed to take as much money from possible from consumers who are, by definition, uninformed.

Non-profit institutions have a goal of education and/or research. For-profit education is designed to soak the uninformed, with the exception of education that is for person A, but purchased by person B. In that case, it is possible for person B to be an informed buyer.

Basically, the market for education is subject to many market failures. For-profits exploit these to the detriment of all.

Hooray! For-profit universities are almost uniformly a scam.

Social networking has consistently produced job offers for me, but I did also get one job through my undergraduate college career fair and my current academic position through ACM jobs.

It is called a Trie or a Prefix Tree, and has been (re)invented many times.

The main branch of the New York Public Library in Bryant Park.

But "rational" and "fully informed" isn't enough. If I encode prices as a 3SAT problem, then your "rational" and "fully informed" person will be required to solve a (thought-to-be) too hard problem in order to do the efficient thing.

Therefore, either you can solve such a problem efficiently (and P=NP) or the idea that all you need is rationality and information is false.

Yes. Hopstop is free but has ads.

Yes.

I have relatives who died due to a lack of health care. They felt sick for a long time, but only got treatment once the chronic problem became acute. Unfortunately, when a chronic undiagnosed cancer condition becomes acute, it means that it has metastasized and the survival rates drops precipitously. Lack of health care meant that the sick person died in pain instead of getting better early on and living for many more years. (Nota bene: this is a USA story - I am under the impression that this would not happen in basically any other western democracy)

Read the citations. Some of the results are self contained, though. (eg the one from http://33bits.org/ )

But what do journals do? I know what they did: they were clearinghouses of current scientific knowledge. Now, in the days of the ArXiv, what do they do?

The only answer I can come up with is: help academics gain tenure and promotion. Except for a few flagships (Science, Nature, Cell, etc) most journals are not current, and are not read. Issues are not received with bated breath by people rushing to find out what the cutting edge is. Instead, everyone who cares has gotten the preprints, and everyone else doesn't care.

Arguing about the profitability of journals feels like arguing about the business models of buggy whip manufacturers.

I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly around was not in any way proportional to the price levied on the journal purchasers and users.

I am very interested to hear more about the activities "behind the curtain", because (being a junior academic at a teaching-oriented institution) I haven't had any interaction with a journal publisher that provided actual value beyond providing a website for me to submit my work, and a branded stamp to certify that my work was correct. In every case, I have had to submit a camera-ready final copy that was typeset by me and typo-checked by either me or the unpaid reviewers, and at no point has anyone approached me or anyone else I know asking us to publish our work in journal X as opposed to journal Y. As far as I know, to the degree anything I have ever written has been read at all, it's because I put the PDFs online myself (technically in violation of the copyright agreement, but a behavior that seems to be tacitly accepted in practice). Of course, even after people read the online PDFs (to the degree those papers get read at all), people cite the paper as if they read it in the paper journal or proceedings...

There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. There is also no risk - the journals were set up a long time ago, and are the way they are due to inertia.

If you imagine for-profit academic journal publishers (especially Elsevier) as anything other than vicious monopolists defending their entrenched positions via copyright law and extortion of university libraries, then you have the wrong idea.

They can't even lie competently. Where are the organizations competent to run a nuclear power station? Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy. Tepco is criminally* incompetent, however, and this makes it hard to make a case for nuclear power when their gross incompetence is stinking up the joint.

* Have any Tepco execs been charged? They should be...

Two wonderful companions to this article are "Thinking Intelligence is Innate Makes You Stupid" http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-intellige... and (especially) Cosma Shalizi's article on the malleability and heritability of IQ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

We had all of: offer, acceptance, consideration, meeting of the minds, capacity, and legality. It sure felt like a contract to me.

I never asked much of it - all I really cared was that it was hosting that I didn't have to think about. Two WordPress sites, some backups of important files and the occasional scp around a stupid firewall or NAT box. And now they are canceling the lifetime service, or, put their ham-handed way: "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."

Seriously. Someone in charge of PR actually wrote down and sent out an email with the sentence "your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012."

Thanks! This looks ideal for my needs!

On a related note: where is good for hosting two small websites? I'd like to be able to log in with SSH and get an actual Unix shell (and not have to pay too much, as the websites are neither large nor popular).

I paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh.

Broken promises leave a bad taste in my mouth.

It's like math. You don't believe the difference between the best and the rest until you meet the best. It is apropos that someone linked to a Terry Tao math post in this discussion, because right now, in math, Terry Tao is definitely in the "best" category. Unless we have chased the people like him away from programming, they must certainly exist in our field as well. However, our works are largely anonymous, which means that it is much harder to tell who is the best.

But Rob Pike probably is up there.

They don't. That's why they are building a third water tunnel. For backup, and so they can do repairs on the other two.

The complexity classes that involve randomness have names like BPP, ZPP, and RP. BPP is usually the one people mean when they talk about practical problems that randomness might help solve. Although the second level of PH contains both NP and BPP, which both contain P, it is still not known if any of those containments are proper, and the relationship between BPP and NP is still open. Even more interesting is the relationship between BPP and its quantum version BQP. The Complexity Zoo has more for the interested reader... http://qwiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Complexity_Zoo

This stuff has just been in the air the past few years - Network coding ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/contentdist.pdf ) does the inverse operation to increase efficiency in Bittorrent-like distribution schemes. It is quite cool that randomness can help in both the creation and solving of these problems.

That was the first thing I noticed, too (after the J/I awfulness).

These sorts of problems will occur in any distributed system which runs at a high rate without humans in the loop. There is no chaos monkey for the stock market, and transaction rollback is available only in the most extreme circumstances.

I have yet to see a convincing rationale for how high frequency trading adds value to the system - it certainly doesn't seem to add pricing stability. Because this is hacker news, I suspect a few people reading this either work in the industry and/or have strong opinions about it, and I would love to hear why I am wrong. Because I do like it when clever computer scientists make money, and that seems to be pretty much the only social benefit of HFT, at the cost of flash crashes and things like the example above.

Those are what its advantages were. Now its main advantages seem to be: (1) Omnipresence and (2) Easy to migrate from a static site (I missed that one in my prior comment, and it's an important one - thanks!). All the others are relative to the environment of its birth, rather than today's environment.

Today we have choices other than Perl, C, and PHP - and many of those choices are free and Free and have great docs and large healthy communities and have languages and libraries with a better design. When people get good enough at programming to understand why global variables are bad, they should generally not be choosing PHP for new projects unless they need one of the above two features.

Cool, but seems unwise.

If you are smart enough to do this to PHP, then you are hopefully smart enough to know you should probably not be writing your large system in PHP. There are many better base languages, as opposed to one which has the consistency of perl combined with the string handling power of C (a mild exaggeration, but not by as much as I wish it were). PHP's main advantage is that it is installed everywhere and just works. This breaks that, and therefore renders PHP's main advantage moot.

It was, however, founded by a guy who left the human genome project and took his hard-won expertise elsewhere.

They are doing the real deal thing - for each problem, designing a language in which to express the solution, and then writing the solution. Part of the point is that the building such solutions isn't really teachable in the context of a tutorial. If a tutorial can teach it, then it's probably a pretty shallow skill, and shallow skills should get designed away into a solution-oriented programming language, and any tutorials for THAT language, etc etc...

The language they use to do that (O-Meta) is then a language-defining language, and designing THAT means balancing on a level of abstractions that is at least three levels deep, and each of those abstraction levels is hard and necessary. They achieve great simplicity by thinking damn hard.

On the other hand, the mailing list (as noted by the other respondent) is a pretty interesting place with few flamewars.