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I'm not sure, but it may be referencing the old Germanic weregild.

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


Interesting, I've never heard about that. Thank you for the link.


I'll second your recommendation to not buy these glasses. However, you don't need a miracle or replacement eyeballs. Gene therapy has already been shown to work to cure color blindness. Dr. William Hauswirth at the University of Washington did that in monkeys back in 2009, and currently has a grant to trial a gene therapy to cure achromatopsia in humans, though I have no idea how that is going. I'd guess color blindness will be curable in my lifetime.


I saw an article about nano particle injections that could allow the eye to see in infrared. I would hope colorblindness would be trivial if they could allow infrared vision but I am unsure of the challenges. [1]https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/a-nanoparticle-injection-i...


This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college? Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant?


I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate.

And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.

Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.

Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).

Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.


No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.

Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.

I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.

There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.


> No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.

A student's behaviour can generally get them kicked out of a university, despite not being convicted by a court of law. Just like you can be fired from your job, without a jury-of-twelve-peers conviction, if you've broken your employer's code of conduct.

So, no, the dean's job in this case is to not to simply grep through the list of state felons, and match them against the student roster. There's broader discretion in the kind of censure that private individuals need to apply, that does not begin and end at the courts.


If, as other commenters have said about their schools, there are double-digit numbers of administrators making over $1m, why not just cut their compensation to near that of lecturers?


> Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?

Among other reasons: It takes an entire team to manage the lifecycle of grants, it's too much work for a single person to accomplish. In addition to the work needed to apply for a grant, there is also mandatory reporting and compliance to that needs to be completed. Additionally, a dean doesn't have the capacity to bind the entire university to the terms of a grant (nor the awareness to safely do so), so you run into problems with interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly encouraged.


That can be fixed by making sunset clauses automatically require a few things:

1. Must be voted on alone. That is, no sneaking it into another bill, or into the budget votes.

2. Each renewal requires a higher percentage of yes votes than the last time until 100% is required. To my recollection, there's never been a time when the Patriot Act received 100% approval.


On its face, this sounds great. However, there is nothing to prevent a later amendment then removing one of these requirements, as unreasonable or outdated because of the new way the law is being used.

To law makers, nothing about a law is immutable. Which is the crux of the problem, really. You can't prevent bad actors from messing things up unless you don't do it in the first place.

There are benefits, clear and strong, for several of these laws when they are first prepared. It's the fact you can't rely on anyone down the track not to abuse it that's the problem.


I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.


In 2015 I was writing a brand new web frontend for IE 5.5 on a mobile device with something like 240x360 screen dimensions (I forget the details now) for one of the most valuable companies in the world. We had complete control over the devices the users used (the company gave the users those devices). Admittedly, plans were in place to upgrade those devices, but it was still a fair bit out. I left before that happened.


The swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.


That is not what that study says. Yes, cloth masks are not as effective as medical masks. But the study does not compare cloth masks with no masks. The three groups in the study are:

> medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing).

Yes, the cloth mask group had more infections than the medical mask group and the control group. But the control group included wearing masks as usual. It does NOT say cloth masks are less effective than nothing. "No mask" was not studied. Cloth masks might be less effective than wearing no mask (I personally doubt that), but this study didn't say anything about that hypothesis.


That's true so long as everyone is dependent on each other. If, everyone is dependent on one country, that doesn't hold

China has a near monopoly on a lot of production. Countries that depend on them certainly won't go to war with them, but that doesn't hinder China from starting a war with those countries, and even gives them an advantage. And it doesn't stop dependent countries from warring with each other and that could even be beneficial to China.

N.B. I use China as an example only. Replace China with any country that might have a near monopoly on production of some kind. The point I'm trying to make isn't "ahhh China scary", it's that interconnectedness may only prevent war if it's actually interconnected, and not a monopoly.


Trade goes both ways. The seller of goods is just as dependent on the exchange as the buyer. Nobody stays in business going to war with their customers. And there are truly very few products that cannot be sourced from alternates given a little time and money.

I think the "global interdependence reduces war" hypothesis is pretty strong.


Money is fake in a way that physical products aren't. So the parties have very unequal bargaining positions, the one with the "real" stuff (products) can walk away much more easily than the one with the "fake" stuff (money).


Oracle certainly seems to disagree here.

And if the seller is a monopoly on a critical good while the buyer is a tiny fraction of their business, the relationship is asymmetrical and the seller won't suffer nearly as much from a war.


Maybe. But it also seriously helps to avoid being distracted. I live in Seattle and drive to my parents house in Vegas, almost always driving I-90 -> I-82 -> I-84 -> I-15. Washington is great. Hardly any billboards. Oregon and Idaho are about the same. Driving through Utah is awful. Billboards everywhere some of them are brightly lit and flashing. I feel much more distracted by them.


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