Parents still have the ability to raise their children according to their own values, despite the most earnest and eager intentions of the dopamine-dealing crowd. That bug hasn't yet been engineered out of society.
You are right, parents can still steer their children.
But in some cases like mine, parents might not have the time or inclination to do so, for whatever reasons.
I was able to discover Pickwick Papers, Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies, Spirited Away, Almost Famous, etc. on my own. If I were young today, I don't think I would discover the right things.
Yet when we do this by, say, homeschooling, the HN commentariat piles up hundreds of comments accusing us of child neglect and a lack of concern for society.
Do they? I've mentioned homeschooling on hn before without issue. There's always knobs who can't have a nuanced view of course, but generally the discussions I've seen have tended positive.
This[1] thread has a good collection of them. Has plenty of comments in favor of course, but the negative ones are present in high quantities. There's a reason even anodyne headlines like that can get 800+ comments on HN.
I missed that one. But it seems like a lively debate for the most part rather than a single opinion pile on.
But yeah I get your point that it's like there's an unreasonable number of people who have a strong opinion on it despite having no actual experience or evidence or reason to comment. Homeschool is a small minority and the majority are biased to what they know. We homeschool 3 kids, didn't intend to to it before it happened, and I would have held some very incorrect opinions about it too, for what little thought I ever actually gave it.
That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.
Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.
I don't think that's due to following the process but rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they arise.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work. Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment into the final product. It was about the people all along.
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.
Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".
Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.
This. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.
Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with organized crime, both theft and gift-card fraud. Flock specifically advertises that Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with gift card fraud:
> The Home Depot leveraged Flock Safety’s technology to close a case involving a multi-state gift card tampering ring, resulting in fraud and property theft charges exceeding $300,000. This type of success underscores how powerful connected data can be in mitigating fraud risks. [0]
Aside from that, Home Depot has been dealing with massive, multi-state, organized theft campaigns. Earlier this month, NY prosecutors lodged 780 counts of theft against thirteen suspects who stole millions of dollars of merchandise from Home Depot stores in nine states [1].
You wanna prevent gift card fraud? Stop selling gift cards.
Gift cards are a huge fraud vehicle by their nature. Home Depot is just noticing because it fraud against them, rather than the more usual money laundering for scams. Retailers turn a bit of a blind eye, since they make so much money from gift cards that never get used or end up with leftover balances. But really gift cards are an attractive nuisance, and add no value for the (non-sucker) consumer.
And the cameras will have small effectiveness after the first few arrests anyway. "Don't let the LPR catch your car" just becomes part of the tradecraft for these organized operations. Whereas sporadic, opportunistic, individualized ripoffs won't create much of a signature in the LPR stream.
Dr. Pepper is distributed by Coke in some states/countries, Pepsi in others, and by its own distribution network in like 30 US states. A friend likened it, not without a certain verisimilitude, to the result of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.
2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.
A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.
Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat
2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos
This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.
3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper
I suspect $260mm wouldn’t just solve all those problems for a single university, but for all
Universities across the nation, assuming the software is being written with an open ethos and to benefit all universities like suggested by the OP.
This reminds me of how a small team of U.S. seniors provided WiFi to basically the entire D1 football stadium for our college (at a time this hadn’t been done before), for < $10k (we used the grant to buy whatever we couldn’t get used from various departments), had it working in what may have been a first for a college stadium of that size, only for it to be completely scrapped and the university spending tens of millions to replace it with a new commercial system that didn’t even work as well and had a higher per game support fee than the cost of running our entire system for the whole season.
Unrelated to this (but maybe still explaining why), the college president was suspected of having sent contracts to “friends” who had significantly overcharged the university for years.
It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.
I went to an Arizona university in the 90s and our class registration system was far more customizable and feature-ful than what my son lives with now. His university has half the students mine did and they, across two decades, shared a university president.
That reminds me of the Pharoh’s sorcerers in Prince of Egypt. Maybe we aren’t underestimating anything and these organizations are just dysfunctional because the federal government gives them a blank check with student loans?
WUSTL has 20,000 students and faculty. This is not a big organization. To manage that, they have over 17,000 administrators. Meanwhile, the Pentagon in 1941, at the start of US involvement in WWII, had only 24,000 civilian employees to manage over a million soldiers.
Universities will respond that regulatory compliance is more complex and costly every year, and that student services costs are also increasing continuously (and cannot be cut if a university wishes to remain competitive). They may also say that with faculty not wishing to take on administrative roles (which take time away from research and teaching and do not help with tenure cases) the university needs to hire more full-time administrators.
Some universities will also claim that the average financial contribution for students and families has not increased, in spite of tuition and fees outpacing inflation for half a century or more and student loan debt reaching $1.6T.
But any large bureaucratic organization tends to seek expansion of its staff, budget, and influence, and that is likely a core reason for the dramatic increase in non-teaching university staff.
> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).
> Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments
Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
I have some context here, as my dad used to work at a state college running "the systems". There was era of thin clients and a centralized VAX machine or similar that did all the work. I remember weekends where my dad had to work because they were "running the numbers" which involved calculating grades and producing end of semester reports and such. Somehow this took more than a day of processing for a few thousans students and ran on a big tape machine. Sometimes it would crash or something so someone had to be there to keep things moving.
I don't remember all the details, but this is what they used up til the mid-90s. By then, I could probably run something on my 486 home computer that would complete in half an hour. But there were decades of process and customization embedded in these systems.
When modernization happened, it was swift. My dad was lucky with the timing as he was retiring during the transition so even made bonus money coming back as a consultant. But you can imagine that even if the new software was pricey and not as customizable, the speed improvements and reduction in staff made sense.
Once the old staff was cleared out, there was no department of staff being paid to build computer services, only the lesser staff needed to maintain and use it. The issue was that hardware/Internet usage expanded too fast, the importance and reliance on tech grew and it became a selling point for unis to have the newest systems in place.
It makes sense now for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, as customization and cost are wildly out of balance with AI and the latent tech workforce available at every college.
I would say the blocker now is the same as what allowed creaky old systems to persist into the 90s - administration doesn't give a shit about any of this and it is only viewed as a cost center. Until differentiating through customization provides an obvious and immediate fiscal benefit to the admins themselves, most unis won't look at changing off their shitty landlord systems until they are basically forced to by the market.
I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:
1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.
2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)
Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.
For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.
I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.
Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse.
I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.
#1 has to be thought through carefully because ultimately this would involve students being able to access other students' information. It only takes one instance of stalking, harassment, etc. for it to blow up.
Theres all kinds of situations wjere students have access to other students personal info in a professional capacity. It is handled like any other situation where this is the case
To add to that, I don't see how students having access to student data is much different from other people having such access. You don't have to be a student to stalk a student: administrators and staff members can be creepy too.
Kids in the Pacific Northwest use litotes constantly, to the point of annoyance, and possibly more often than they use the straightforward positive. Everything is "not bad" or "not great" or, if really bad, "super not great." I've always taken it to be a kind of avoidance of confessing one's real feelings.
Yeah this tracks - if someone says something is “not great” it’s probably extremely bad haha. or “super cool no problems here” (there’s tear gas streaming through the windows)
The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.
The spirit of the 90s is still here. There are still many, many people who are happy to have a space on the web and share what they’re passionate about or what is in their heads simply because they enjoy the process.
It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The two things can coexist. Some people will pursuit monetization, others are happy to share for the sake of sharing.
Parents still have the ability to raise their children according to their own values, despite the most earnest and eager intentions of the dopamine-dealing crowd. That bug hasn't yet been engineered out of society.
reply