kiwih

As an academic and regular submitter to arXiv, this is an eminently sensible policy. I like that it's per-submitter and not per-author, that means that the big labs with large collaborations shouldn't be terribly put out (more authors = more submission budget).

I hope something like this could also be adopted for some of our larger conferences - the absolute limits on co-authorship are what seem to cause the most grumbles.

The good news is that you're likely paying a fraction of a cent on your taxes for my particular cousin alone. The good news is that fraction of a cent allows her family, including me, to be productive members of society. If your family, or even you yourself, become handicapped - perhaps through a sickness or an accident - we will be happy to return the favor with the fractions of a cent of our taxes that would go to you. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we all benefit when the least amongst us are well looked after.

That's one anecdote, here's another: I live in Australia. My wife and I have both used Medicare multiple times - in fact, we've never used our private health insurance (despite the government requiring us to have it). Medicare delivered my child safely via C-section, and saw them through all their important health checkups after. Our total out of pocket was a couple of hundred dollars for some early extra ultrasounds.

As for disability, my cousin is on NDIS. She is severely mentally handicapped - despite being 22 years old, she has the mental age of a 4 year old, and she will never improve upon this. Her NDIS plan makes sure that she is cared for and looked after while her parents go to work. In fact, NDIS even found her a "job" to give her purpose, she is able to sweep a local mall daily.

Now, are there flaws with both Medicare and NDIS? Of course! NDIS is filled with corrupt providers and a hopeless bureaucracy. It would save a lot of money if the state just managed it directly and had the providers on the books instead of enriching pointless middleman businesses. Medicare, meanwhile, would probably do better if I didn't have to waste a portion of each paycheck on a private provider there's no point in using. I'd rather just pay that portion as extra taxes to better fund the hospitals that the private insurances send you to anyway if your job is too complex.

If you aren't convinced of Australia as an example of actually a relatively good system, I'd encourage you to live in the US for a while, and try it out there. I lived in NYC for nearly four years and had a few health scares. Nothing was ever scarier than the bill :-)

Often kiwis can afford it but just choose not to. My own parents are well off and yet still have an absolutely freezing house all winter, it drives me crazy. Just put on a sweater, and another one over that, and a blanket....

I was just recently awarded tenure, in a faculty of engineering, at one of the top universities in Australia. If you're in engineering at least, I think it's an extremely exciting time to be in academia as AI is rewriting the rules of the game - both in the research domain and in the education pedagogy. I can say quite honestly and literally I wouldn't want to be anywhere else (and I have had multiple head-hunting offers!).

I am an academic at a big Australian university. I can't disagree more with this article. Students are not just machines that convert ideas to papers (and nor should faculty), they are one of the true joys of academia in the first place.

Unfortunately, as other comments here have pointed out, the incentive structure for academia right now is misaligned, leading some faculty to focus just on publish or perish. This is a huge shame on so many counts.

My hope and also slight expectation from the AI era is that academic writing becomes so commodified that we see a total devaluing of papers as a metric, even in prestige venues. Perhaps this would help the community find better things to focus on.

There's a drinking game which I guess is inspired by this game, which I believe is called "Pizza Box" (at least that's what everyone I ever met who knew it called it).

You start with an empty pizza box, and you need a large coin (the Australian 50 cents works well) and a sharpie.

Play progresses around the circle of players. Each player must flip the coin into the box. If they intersect no other circles, they draw a circle around the coin with the sharpie, and then write a rule into the circle (Whatever rule they come up with must fit legibly). They can change any aspect of the game. If you intersect with a circle, instead, that rule is activated. Just like 1000 cards, that could impact everyone, just you, whatever...

We usually got to a point where someone added a circle to "end the game", which then people might aim for - but usually only after a couple of hours of merriment!

Hi HN,

I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming!

Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an in-house social media platform, set in a fictional country, with the goal of swinging a simulated election.

This was done to both raise awareness that such kinds of AI-powered campaigns are possible, as well as build a rich environment and dataset for red-team blue-team R&D in future.

So that we could tune every part of our system, we built everything from the ground up - including our own social network (based on early twitter), our own news websites (built with Jekyll), and our own multi-agent framework for simulating NPCs (built with too much spaghetti Python).

The whole game is multiplayer, so every player and team was competing against every other player and team interactively to try and sway the NPCs in their direction.

We had 277 students from 18 Universities across Australia sign up to play, and ended up with 42 teams on the scoreboard. Our final prizegiving event was yesterday, and the team from QUT - all freshmen/first years - took the win (of AU$5,000)!

Overall we had such a blast running the event, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Already we are helping Day of AI Australia produce their own open-source version of the game for high schools in Australia, and for future CTNs starting next year, possible collaborators from two overseas universities have reached out to discuss running a joint international event (really hoping we'd be able to do that).

Strange question - has the "submitted at" times been edited on this post and all the comments here? I swear I read everything on this submission, including the comments, several days ago, but nothing here is longer than a few hours.

Actually, google search agrees with me - if you search for the title here + hackernews, it says that it saw this post and several of the comments 6 days ago (apologies that I can't link to the cache as this is no longer a feature of Google).

Why are all the post and comment times here saying less than a few hours ago?

I left US academia for Australia in 2023 and have never been happier - I'd be happy to talk to you about the changes I encountered if you'd like!

Not always one for pithy remarks, but the quote from George Orwell seems prescient here: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

I'm not American, but FTA it sounds like having a politically biased NARA director could have some interesting consequences for the formal parts of all y'all future electoral matters.

I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into other areas, security, operating systems, embedded, etc., and in those specialties may need assembly for more modern CPUs.

We have found that when needed, students pick up the newer/more advanced assembly languages (e.g. ARM, x86) fairly well, so we believe the early and universal introduction to MIPS does provide benefits.