microarchitect

Fair enough, but they also have much "better" researchers than most other universities. My hypothesis is that if you tried to scale the IAS model to researchers outside the top 1%, it would be less successful.

I suspect the reason for this is that cross-pollination of ideas that you get from working with other researchers and graduate students, combined with the clarity of expression and understanding you're forced to acquire when teaching undergraduates is the reason why research universities have been so successful in advancing human knowledge. This isn't to say there is no place for other types of research institutions. However, I am skeptical of unsupported claims that there are "better" means of advancing human knowledge that are structured very differently from a research university.

A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.

Instead, it’s the politics, the inefficiency, and the in-bred hostility towards change has driven these incredible people out of academia.

Good luck getting politics out of human systems involving more than a few tens of people. It's just inevitable.

I don't know what he specifically means by inefficiency and in-bred hostility. One form of inefficiency I can think of is the constant grant writing professors have to do. But then this is just a product of penny pinching politicians and our anti-intellectual culture. I am not sure how academia can fix this.

I have no clue what he means by "in-bred hostility". I'm not the most sociable person in the world, but the number of positive interactions I've had with other researchers is vastly outweighed by the few negative interactions I've had with academic jerks.

The title of "academia eating its young" suggested me to the lament of many in the biomedical fields who seem go from postdoc to postdoc for years on end because permanent faculty positions are few and far between. Again, this is a direct result of the shrinking levels of funding going into research and higher education. This isn't academia eating its young, it's our society eating academia.

I would guess that the person in this case involved got on the wrong side of a important political or bureaucratic entity and they pulled strings to make sure the discretionary powers were used in specific ways after filing a "bogus" complaint. If the police were behaving honestly, they should have told the complainant to bugger off, but because there were important people showing "interest" they didn't.

My guess is that this sort of thing is really nothing unique to India. It's just that the people who exploited in such ways in the US (to pick a familiar example) would likely be poor immigrants, young black males etc. who lack the connections required to get their stories heard. Perhaps one important difference is that politicians seem to have a lot of leverage over police authorities in India.

I can't believe you're being honest here. Counting just the last couple days, terms I've seen useful ads are: "trek stores near <where I live>", "glue for wood", "coach usa" and "shuttle lga". Also for the vast majority of terms in my search history, which happen to be arcane technical questions, I don't see any ads at all.

I doubt it but even if one charitably assumes that the OP meant professional interactions with women, isn't your reply assuming that the isalmon's assertion is a valid one? What reason do you have to believe that women don't mean no when they say "no", especially in a professional context? Do you really subscribe to the (IMHO rather sexist) view that women say no but don't mean (with the implied subtext saying that men don't do this)?

I have been discouraged from helping people, mostly for the reason that it could turn out to be more trouble that it's worth, but I have never been given this reason. Also, your explanation makes no sense from a theological perspective. I've always been taught that helping people will earn you karma, so it's in your selfish interest to help those in need.

What would you do? You can't magically produce houses, schools, hospitals and other basic infrastructure to service several hundred million people. Forget that, I doubt you could engineer an efficient distribution system that just provides these people with nutritious food. Keep in mind these people are distributed across a fairly large country, belong to many different religions and speak hundreds (possibly thousands) of different languages. The majority of these folks are illiterate, and the overwhelming majority have no education beyond high school.

If you think you have a good solution to the problem, I am all ears, because I've been thinking about this for a long time and I can't see one.

To me, Google falls squarely in the disruptive and hard category. I mean no disrespect to Zuckerburg, but there's a reason Google was founded by two Stanford PhD students and not a bunch of bored undergrads.

I find myself not as bright as those who I have seen being very successful. I still try to do as much as I can, hoping that my efforts will be enough.

I didn't get into the IITs after my 12th and thought myself not smart and hardworking enough to do well at an IIT, leave alone at research. Many years and plenty of twists and turns later, I'm now a graduate student at a well-regarded and extremely selective US university. I have a small number of papers, some of which even get cited every now and then (!) and a couple of patents. The main thing I learned from all this is that in research it's not very important to be smart, because I see people smarter than me all the time, what's important is to actually like what you're doing sufficiently that you enjoy thinking really hard about it.

lack of research output may be because the brightest of UG students get into US universities where there are better research groups and opportunities. Or may be because other engineering colleges from where the PG students have completed their Undergraduate programs didn't offer as much as IITs (or US universities do).

There's a combination of factors here. Many good students do choose to go the US/Europe over India and I can sort of see why they do that. Life, in general, sucks a little less here, the professors are little better, opportunities are a little easier to get, and of course, a good job after graduation is significantly easier. I studied at IISc and got to know quite a few faculty there and at a couple of IITs. I feel that the Indian system is improving rapidly and there are many good professors who are doing excellent research at IISc and the IITs. Having said that, I think that some things are still harder to do in India, and some professors are still very mediocre and some still harbour rather regresive views on how research should be done. A generation or two from now I expect things will be a lot better.

It is unfair to compare IITs with other institutes, there are a lot of factors at play. Sure, we want high paying jobs - but if they are available who won't? Think about the socio-economic pressure on the students as well. For a middle income family most salaries that are offered to IIT graduates will bring about a significant change in lives of these students as well as their families. It might be a different case in US (and other countries) but a lot of us face these issues. I was lucky that I don't, but I know many students with parents who will feel happier if their child settles down with a high paying job and not pursue higher education for another 2 - 5 years.

This is an excellent point.

We're still at that phase in our development where it's more important to ensure economic security for oneself so that one is guaranteed a reasonable standard of living. Foregoing these "high-paying jobs" and doing research, in effect, means accepting a significantly lower standard of living and it's completely unreasonable to expect people to do that in a still-developing country like India.

My understanding is that the main concern here are chips in COTS equipment bought from countries that are considered by some to be untrustworthy.

They do seem to be more concerned about chips the US buys from certain other countries than about the likes Intel/AMD building in backdoors.

EDIT: I should also mention that this is not just a concern of the american defence. I'm aware of the indian govt also funding this sort of research with similar motivation. However, in this instance, the professor was trying to attack the problem through the lens of formal techniques. I think the idea was to prove that if the chip interacts with the outside world through these limited set of channels then you can't sneak data out through some sort of covert channel hiding in the "regular" communication. The specific concern here was about routers/switches and the like equipment sneaking sensitive data out of a secure network.

I submitted the about page because the two key claims that you make: (1) you only need a few bits of information to identify a person uniquely in the whole world and (2) this information is becoming easier and easier to obtain - both make a lot of sense to me. Your about page does an excellent job of communication these two points and I thought it might interesting food for thought for HN.

I'm wondering whether much as we'd all like to have privacy and anonymity, these could be goals that might be impossible to achieve in the future. I'd like to hear what your thoughts are on where, we as a society are heading in this context and whether it's unrealistic to expect that conventional expectations of privacy will continue to be fulfilled in the future. Perhaps, we should accept that the privacy battle is lost and try to other solutions to the problems that privacy was solving?

My point is: (1) this is not an issue we can decide without looking at the data and (2) making a claim one way or another without carefully looking at the data is not justified.

You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.

Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?

My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?

Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.

This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.

That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.

If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.

I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.

[1] http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem... [2] http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college-u... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approv...

First, this is the same argument that many creationists, followers of intelligent design and other religious nuts use to discredit evolution. In fact, if you look up the wikipedia page for Expelled: No intelligence allowed, you'll see that the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP and in fact, my instinctive response when I read this bit, thanks to having heard this so many times from creationists was to immediately assume assume the OP was one. I didn't want this to color the rest of my response so I decided to ignore this bit.

Also, it's seems like flamebait to me. I suspect the OP threw it in there to antagonize those who disagreed with that idea while simultaneously enlisting the support of everyone who was once slighted for his/her political views by a professor.

Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding? I must be missing something because this makes no sense.

Also, the OP's made a very broad claim that most university departments are rife with ideology and hostile to conflicting views. You are referring to some instances of ridicule relating to the specific subject of political views, which is a much much weaker claim.

PS. I believe there's research that shows that the political leanings of professors has little effect on the political views of students. And I'm sorry that you were ridiculed and I think this is unacceptable behavior.

I agree there may be an argument to be made that in cases, under certain circumstances, provided you can measure certain variables, the best action that results the "most public good" would be reducing university funding. If that's what you want to argue, then you'll need to do the legwork of gathering data that supports this conclusion.

The OP has not done that and is not even attempting to do so. He's made some overly simplistic arguments against university funding that are utterly lacking in depth.

EDIT: Can the downvoters please explain themselves?

I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value" which is different from your claim that you can't do some things of value that without a degree.

In any case, none of this is an indictment of the university itself. While I agree that it's possible that some of these professions might be better served with looser guidelines, I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion.

I'm not sure what you mean by "crowding out of R&D investment". If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

I'm not disagreeing with this statement of yours, but I hope you realize that you're arguing a much weaker and better articulated position than the OP. If the OP is suggesting that we re-examine how federal grant money is allocated, I would consider that a defensible position. But he's clearly not saying that and has chosen instead to launch a broadside against the university institution and seems to have no evidence backing up his assertions.

Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.

This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.

Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.

The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.

Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.

Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.

Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.

I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.

This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

The thing is, a modern solver like Chaff [1] is actually quite easy to implement and might be good way of showing off your programming language's elegance and efficiency.

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~chaff/publication/DAC2001v56.pdf

I suspect you can innovate quite a bit on the HDL front and then doing everything server-side should really give you a cost advantage as well. I can also see the open source aspect of this taking off - a high quality of library of plug and play cores that can be seamlessly integrated into your designs might prove to be a significant competitive advantage.

I'd be interested in a break up of admission statistics, SAT scores, race and family income for the Ivies. because I'm not entirely convinced that just because SAT scores follow family income in the general population, the trends are exactly the same among admitted students.

I worked for a semi-dysfunctional semiconductor company and so I think I have some perspective on what it takes to "fix" a company like Yahoo.

I think the biggest reason a company becomes like Yahoo has less to do with senior management and more to do with the fact that the company is filled with low to mediocre quality middle managers and employees. Mediocre managers aren't very good at their job, so it seems like they make up by playing politics. Once politics is rampant, what gets done is not what works the best, but what helps you or your team get ahead in the political game. At this point you start bleeding talent because good people prefer not to work in an irrational workplace. You also lose the focus and initiative you need to keep a successful product successful.

The worst part is that there's nothing you can really do to fix this. You can try to fire the bottom 10%, but if you only have a problem with the bottom 10%, you're not yahoo. You probably need to fire the bottom 50%, but then you wouldn't have enough personnel to keep all your assets going AND some of that 50% would also be good employees who lost out in the last edition the political olympic games.

Any well-intentioned change in process or product focus by top-management will also inevitable morph into something completely different thanks to your low-quality middle managers who won't understand what you're trying to do, but will understand that they need to step up the politics to keep their jobs.

I guess the point of my rant is that a big company is like an emergent system and you can't really fix a dysfunctional emergent system by changing a small number of things that are part of that system.

My question is this: let's say everyone with access to the internet used your site and reported all the bribes they paid, how will this help change the situation?

Similar logic applies to your example of people doing "meaningless work". There are lots of those in India as well. I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs. Life as a greeter at a mall or a lift-operator is way better than life as a struggling farmer. And this doesn't even consider all the second-order benefits these people enjoy. Life in a big city means better education, more access to information, more opportunities, all of which almost certainly guarantee a much better life for their children.

This was a bit of a rambling post, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that both comparing unemployment rates as well as comparing the types of employment on offer are too simplistic to make any useful judgments about an economy. I think some aggregate quality of life measure is what we really need to look at.

I don't want to start a political flamewar on HN, so all I'm trying to say is that there are valid reasons to believe what davidw believes and he shouldn't at least be downvoted for it.