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The article says nothing about English language skills. It says:

'University officials have described the unwritten policy as a prudent response to the current uncertainty facing Chinese and other foreign students when they apply for visas to study in the United States. “They are telling us that these foreign students may not show up if we offer them a position,” the faculty member says. “And that could jeopardize our research.”'

My wife teachers in universities in London, and the issue of Chinese students turning up with little or no English is real, often having paid for someone else to take the required English language tests for them. She has had students write their essays in Chinese and then just copied and pasted from Google Translate, generating utterly unintelligible dross. But that is definitively not the explanation here - this is all Chinese students, proficient in English or not.


To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.

I needed a good laugh today and "reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters" gave me it, so: thanks!

For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.


Site is down for me. Archive link: https://archive.is/jf3HW


Probably not down, but blocked by your ISP. Try a VPN. Same thing happens here.


Yes, blocked. This is what I see in germany without a VPN

https://notice.cuii.info/

"Their buisness model is based on copyright infringement"

Well, where to complain that Anna's Archive ain't a buisness?


Aamzingly, I don't even get this page. I just see the default "this page is not available" from my browser. I'm with Vodafone, and I wonder if it is legal to pretend a site doesn't exist without notifying me.


Pretty sure it's DNS level block. So just using private DNS would be enough, no need for full blown VPN. It's just that VPNs also usually use their own DNS instead of the ISPs.

I recommend NextDNS or similar to bypass those DNS blocks and also block ads at a very deep level that works ok mobile and even inside apps.


I'd rather complain why somebody decides for me where what websites I'm allowed to open


Ironic. But its working for me.


I love this, thank you for a good belly laugh.


"now that we ourselves have become a resource to extract"

I take your general point, but I'm interested in what you mean by "we" here - the general population or HN readers? People have been a resource to extract from since the beginning of farming, and particularly so since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is perhaps that the attention of rich, western people is being exploited now and is causing this particular concern. Read any first-person accounts of the industrial revolution and the idea that this is anything new falls apart.


To take the rbg metaphor further, it should really be a "gamut" rather than a "spectrum".


"Spectrum" works too in that if you take white light and split it in a prism, it is spread out into its separate but overlapping components of light at different wavelengths.


Good luck finding magenta there. RGB is not modeling the monochromatic light spectrum.


Perhaps "big ball of mud"? "mess"? "cluster f*k"?

Arguing relevant metaphors in HN?! A new low...


If this is a new low, that's news to me.

The top comment chain on the front page 'Plane crashed after 3D-printed part collapsed' is nothing more than arguing about metaphors. This happens all the time in just about every story.


From your link:

Making Privacy Work

Make sure to address the elephant in the room - privacy. Consider installing electrochromic glass panels that switch from clear to opaque. Or take inspiration from Japanese architecture with sliding wooden screens that double as art pieces.


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