4 ms·

Maybe I'm crazy but does MIT get a disproportionate number of features on HN? For one of thousands of institutions in the US let alone the world, they're not th

• Glawen 4y ago
  Now think about what is happening in the non English speaking world which get no news at all and what do you think happens with them.
  • michaelscott 4y ago
    This is such a good point, my mind has recently been opened to how much happens in the Spanish, French and Russian speaking parts of the world that I had no idea about because it just isn't in English. Does anyone know of resources that are HN-like or could be used to fill in the gaps on interesting developments in non-English countries/regions?
    • nextstepguy 4y ago
      Four posts with NIT in the title as we speak. I never noticed.
    • assusdan 4y ago
      There is russian-speaking community https://habr.com/ https://habr.com/ which I found to be similar to HN (but less business-oriented). However, I do not know any easy way to exclude all translated from english-speaking sites articles and news to read only local ones.
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        Keep in mind that posting translations of English articles, especially uncredited, is easy karma for Russian (and adjacent) native speakers who also know English.
        • assusdan 4y ago
          Yes, unfortunately I did not found any blocklist setting to disable all translated articles.
          • throwaway290 4y ago
            I think it would be naive to think everyone would self-label translations...
            • assusdan 4y ago
              It's actually enforced by Habr rules https://habr.com/ru/docs/help/posts/ https://habr.com/ru/docs/help/posts/
              • throwaway290 4y ago
                It's in the guidelines, but not sure it is enforced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32236353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32236353
        • einpoklum 4y ago
          I wish posting translated Russian and Chinese article, credited, could be easy Karma on HN. (Not since I know these languages, but since I would like to be able to read some of those news.)
          • throwaway290 4y ago
            As a Russian, I feel like something new generally comes from English sources (not necessarily from Americans, Brits or Australians, but from people who can and choose to use English, even if they are Chinese or Russian).
    • chmod775 4y ago
      My favorite example of this is that China is arguably leading the world in AI research (at least by shitty metrics such as number of papers), yet research from there very rarely shows up on HN. It feels like any topic on here is skewed by a factor of three towards the west, and a factor of ten towards the US. You could get the impression that 80% of the world population are doing nothing of relevance.
      • arc-in-space 4y ago
        I'd believe that, frequently when looking for information on some obscure topics in AI, I run into papers or blog posts with Chinese authorship.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        Also I'm missing all the cool space stuff they could be doing and must be doing. It really is untapped market.
        • wildmanx 4y ago
          The market is tapped. Just not by the U.S. / western countries.
      • Glawen 4y ago
        This is done on purpose and it is the great advantage of being the cultural and language leader of the world: you decide what is newsworthy and you show yourself as the leader. Moreover you can claim/steal findings by translating research in English and make it known to the world.
      • marketerinland 4y ago
        I work for an AI company. And .. yeh .. the Chinese research is essentially our secret sauce.
    • Banana699 4y ago
      >my mind has recently been opened to how much happens in the Spanish, French and Russian speaking parts of the world This is a much more general and tragic insight in fact, the vast majority of human experience is not available to you due to, among many other reasons, language barriers. Consider all the songs, novels, films, music, books and stories that you will never even hear about, because they are written or performed in a language other than the ones you know. If you know a second language, consider all the times you have thought "Oh gee, this is so much easier to express than in my mother tongue" about a neat idiom or grammatical construct, and think of the literal hundreds or thousands of languages that you don't even know the names of, and how full they must be of valuable new concepts and delianations and ways of thought and utterance.
  • tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    If it's important enough it crosses over. Most of our news we see on a daily bases is pretty worthless too.
  • xiphias2 4y ago
    You can't do serious research without English knowledge at this point. Also I looked at what happens to top programming competitions winners: they are usually from China, go to the top university there, then quite often are happy to immigrate to US for a MSC/PhD.
    • Glawen 4y ago
      You can totally do serious research without English. The dominance of English language scientific papers acts as a gatekeeping much like what google and apple are doing. You need them to be known internationally, but you need to pay your dues to the committee selecting papers: you cannot go against their belief.
      • xiphias2 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand your point. I live in Hungary and all my friends who are researchers publish their research in (simple) English by default, because it just makes sense for a much higher impact than publishing in Hungarian. The language is not really a barrier for us for communicating the results.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • Glawen 4y ago
          Yes I agree that the reach of language matters. I spoke about French which has more reach than Hungarian. I guess that Russian or Chinese also have quite an impact. My post was about top journals like Nature, Science etc...
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  The blunt fact is that the vast majority of positive news is purely the result of PR organizations. In this case, MIT has a fairly good PR team. So what happen is the MIT PR org just monitors what papers MIT researchers are submitting to journals or presenting at conferences. Then the PR org gets in touch with the researchers and writes up a more accessible version of the paper on MIT News along with a press release. Then the PR guys go round to a series of their contacts in the media - places like FreeThink, Futurism, Insider, etc. They'll send out a press release which does 99% of the work writing up the article including choice quotes from the author and make themselves available for Q&A etc. Seeing this as an easy way to fill space on their website the reporters just basically copy and paste it onto their website, maybe punch it up a bit, put the website's specific spin on it etc. What this whole process doesn't involve is anyone saying "Hang on, is this actually an important or interesting story". Does this invention move forward the cutting edge of desalination? Probably not. But it does boost MIT's reputation. Which is what this article is for. MIT isn't more innovative than other institutions necessarily, but they are spending much more effort advertising their innovations.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • dalbasal 4y ago
    You are absolutely correct on the meat of this. What parent is observing is mostly a more consistent PR operation. That said, some of that is too sharp. There is some degree of "is this actually an important or interesting story." That's what the journalists/editors do. That's what the upvote button here is for. It also happens pretty extensively in HN's comments. The article itself expresses skepticism about the invention. I agree that it's not done very thoroughly, but skepticism definitely does exist in the process. In any case, it's all pretty primitive. If this invention is worth discussing, it should be discussed. This article demonstrates how lame discussing with yourself is. Where are the researchers, peers, people in the know. The subject matter here is a bad fit for factual reporting. We need subjective opinion. "Is this thing interesting?"
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    MIT is definitely among the top in the world for most impactful papers, Patents granted, Startups created, Nobel Prize winners etc. So there really is something special about it.
• otikik 4y ago
  They have more budget than entire countries dedicated to R&D (and PR). If they were not appearing at least once per month I would be asking were does that money go
  • ramraj07 4y ago
    They might spend more than many countries but do they spend more than any other university in the States? Feel like that’s not true.
• oefrha 4y ago
  Also kind of an awkward title when the first sentence of the article is “Researchers from MIT and China have developed…” Like maybe spell out the actual institution like you did MIT (it’s in the article), and don’t say “MIT invents” in the title when it’s a joint effort?
  • wildmanx 4y ago
    Indeed. The article links to the MIT News article https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpensive-0214 https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens... The three involved researchers from MIT are grad student Lenan Zhang, postdoc Xiangyu Li, and professor Evelyn Wang and "four others" which are not mentioned by name in the beginning of the article. At the bottom of the article, it's mentioned that Zhenyuan Xu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China is one of those "four others".
  • blagie 4y ago
    One of the reasons I would never collaborate with anyone at MIT is that such collaborations are rarely equitable. Institutionalized credit theft is just the beginning, but yes, if there is joint work with MIT, usually the non-MIT researcher does the bulk of the work, and the MIT researcher gets the bulk of the credit. Everyone wants to work with and associate with institutions like MIT, so MIT gets to pick the biggest fools. (This isn't unique to MIT; that's true of many of the elites)
    • wildmanx 4y ago
      Unfortunately, having a big name from MIT on your grant application as co-applicant significantly increases your chances for funding. You get the money and do the majority of the work, they get to claim disproportionately much credit for the work. Win-win? (Doesn't sound like it, but that's how it works..)
      • blagie 4y ago
        Having sat on review committees, it actually worked the other way sometimes (and usually for the ones I was on, although in some cases, it took some lobbying on my part). There was one review committee member on one committee who wouldn't accept a grant unless it had a big-name university. She was a douchebag. For the most part, people were accommodating. NSF and other agencies do have a call to this kind of outreach, and the program officer told me they often would pick a grant from a more deserving school over a big-name, even if the big-name received better reviews. So it's sort of luck-of-the-draw. If you get someone like me, MIT will hurt your chances. If you get the douchebag lady, it will help.
• spoonjim 4y ago
  Fact is, the story has better legs when it's MIT, which is one of the reasons why the top universities have a "rich gets richer" pattern. Media loves to carry stories about "MIT nerds invent something" or "Harvard students gain power" or "Princeton students do something posh" or "Stanford students start a company" which causes kids who want to do these things to preferentially attend these schools.
• spaetzleesser 4y ago
  That's how the big names get even more exposure. When something at a big name happens the headlines are "Stanford/MIT/Harvard/Google scientists invent". When it's from somewhere else it's just "scientists invent" or even worse "mechanics developed" (this happened a few weeks ago when the company ZF developed a new steering for cars). The rich get richer....
• jvanderbot 4y ago
  At certain tech labs I've formerly worked at, the MIT nepotism network is so strong it's essentially core company culture.
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    I worked at a startup where every time investors visited the CEO would drag out our MIT guy to do the demos.
• programmertote 4y ago
  When I was in grad school (University of Rochester), we had a new associate professor recruit who freshly graduated from MIT. The first thing he shared with us was how to promote/advocate your work. The slides (the materials he used) are obviously created at MIT (meaning, they are not his creation) and it seems like (again, I'm not sure) it (how to promote your work) was taught in MIT grad school (at least in their PhD programs). I wish I saved those slides. I'm not saying that promoting your work in this day and age of academia is inherently wrong (although I'd like to think if your work is really good and essential, it'll surface without needing to promote), but I am just surprised that it was taught.