I know that standard BYU has the lowest tuition in Utah, lower than any state school, provided you are a tithe-paying member of the Mormon Church [1]. Otherwise they have a higher tuition, similar to the in-state/out-of-state changes for most state schools. Does BYU pathway tuition work the same way?
I don't have a ton of experience with Western Governor's, but the fact that unlike many online universities they are nonprofit is a good sign. Of course, whether they have access to quality instructors is an unknown to me.
Good question: if you ask BYU Pathway Worldwide people or browse their site to learn about it, would be a good follow-up post here, to say. :) I am pretty sure I link to them indirectly above (i.e., to a page that has a convenient link to them).
(Edit: from what I have read, I don't think there are different tiers for tuition, but it is all the same. Corrections welcome. I think it is quite low, for any student, so the opportunity including for international students in lower-income countries is significant.)
And for WGU, there were praises of it on this page from former students (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719797 and Ctrl+F for "wgu"), and a relative of mine is planning to attend soon, but I can't say from personal experience. I would certainly hope they do a good job. At the very least, they are accredited and one can use that credential to earn money while continuing to learn well from many available sources (like MIT online courses, unix system documentation, etc :).
I doubt it. It seems to have been posted to HN at the same time as the blog post itself was posted. The timing of the blog post seems to have been based on when their paper went up on eprint [0]. As you can see they seem to have submitted the paper on Dec 6 (date on pdf) and it got posted to the eprint server on Dec 9 (which is the typical time frame). At the very least, zero reason for the MSR people involved in the paper to base their release date around Telegram.
The model is satisfiable where only a5 is true, anyone can run it themselves and play with it [1].
Additionally forcing a5 to be false by adding the following to the list of assertions:
(assert (not a5))
And the model becomes unsatisfiable.
Edit: Finally, to make sure there's not some possible solution where a5 is true as well as another assertion you could alternatively add this assertion:
Just my two cents: I grew up in Utah and did my undergraduate degree there. The Salt Lake Tribune is a great newspaper (I subscribed while living in the state) and it has been rough watching them downsize and lose some great staff over recent years. I am very much of the opinion that good local journalism is a necessity for holding people accountable. For example: the work the Salt Lake Tribune received a Pulitzer for [0]. Anything to help good local journalism continue and survive is nothing but a win in my view.
I’m still here and this is incredibly important for our community. The tribune is the only major news outlet not owned by the LDS church, and is an important tempering force. Over the years they’ve given up some of their autonomy due to joint operating agreements with LDS Church owned Desert News, but without them salt lake would be a large metro without a non-church controlled newspaper. Which is really strange to write down.
Salt lake looks poised to elect its first LDS mayor in something like 50 years today which I think speaks volumes to the weakening of slc secular news sources. One could argue that it’s due to the modernization of the church on some key issues, but based on the coverage of the candidates, I’m not so sure.
On a national scale, I’m really hopeful this trend continues. Newspapers do incredibly important work on “boring” local issues that no one else is able to do.
In my experience, most people outside of the USA are not very familiar with anything between NY and LA. Usually I have to tell people, I live in Oregon which is north of California. Oh, California, yes we've heard of California. I doubt the majority of the world has even heard of Utah or has any concept of where it is or that SLC is the capital of the state.
Utah... is that the place with the large rocks in the desert? Lots of mormons? It shows up from time to time. Oregon I have no idea. Only thing that comes to mind is the Oregon Trail?
> Salt lake looks poised to elect its first LDS mayor in something like 50 years today which I think speaks volumes to the weakening of slc secular news sources.
Or maybe, rather than signs of weakening secular news control, they're both signals of the success of LDS Church. Living in Toronto until recently, I have with increasing regularity, met LDS proselytizers without trying. Business hotels in suburban office parks in Florida now have their book. To me it just seems like a very successful church. It wouldn't surprise me if they were winning back the mindshare even in urban centres, given the cultural discomfort being experienced in urban North America right now.
> On a national scale, I’m really hopeful this trend continues. Newspapers do incredibly important work on “boring” local issues that no one else is able to do.
Indeed, for local publications it makes a lot of sense; though I am concerned about the potential effect it could have on some stories. For-profit news purchased directly by readers has some redeeming qualities, some of the time, in terms of incentive structure.
It feels perverse to speak of a churches success as a business rather than success through the spiritual satisfaction of its members. It belittles the "good word" and treats it as corporate decor.
The Vatican owns ~15% of the value listed on Italian stock exchanges and somewhere north of $10 billion (US) in total wealth. That's just the vatican - the largest regional subsidiaries are worth more (Catholic Church Germany is about $25 billion).
LDS has somewhere around $65 billion in wealth.
International religious organizations are absolutely businesses. Profit may not be their primary purpose, but they have their fingers in all sorts of business-like enterprises - real estate, stocks, etc.
Do you have any sources for these numbers? They seem low given the value of works of art and real estate held by the church; I'm just curious what the $10B USD figure includes.
That seems low given the amount of property they control and their international foothold, along with the amount of time they have had to acquire their wealth.
Shame on me... I didn't check the date on the source - the Vatican number was taken from a Time Magazine article from 1965. I came up near the top of the Google results and it never crossed my mind that Time published articles that far back.
Regardless of the size of the assets of these organizations, the parent's point is still valid that their success should not be measured in $s. So the Vatican has $10B in wealth, does that mean that they are successfully leading people to heaven? I say these numbers have little to do with what the Vatican exists for. If anyone in the Vatican thinks otherwise, I would say their priorities are off. (I speak about the Vatican rather than the LDS church because I know more about it, being Catholic myself.)
I grew up in Utah and was able to visit Moab many times over the years. It is a great little town and the sites and things you can reach from it are awesome. One of my favorite hikes at Arches NP is the Fiery Furnace, which is permit-controlled. I wonder if requiring permits for more of the sites would help address these issues?
Of course, I'm also a big supporter of efforts to increase the size of national parks and monuments in the state as well (despite this administration's recent efforts). Preserving and regulating more wilderness would go a long way to hopefully mitigating this overcrowding issue.
I think that permits should only be used sparingly at National Parks. For a lot of people, their only exposure to the outdoors comes from "that one family out west trip". If we want people to pressure politicians to protect public lands, the more people that feel a connection to those public lands the better.
I view National Parks as a sacrificial public land. Let them be overly crowded in order to keep all the amazing BLM, state parks, national forests/prairies, etc... special.
Fiery furnace is great! I used to drive to Moab every year for Spring Break to do outdoor sports with some friends from University, and it's a total paradise for people who want to do anything outdoors.
It's selfish and elitist to say, but I almost feel like it's better if places like Moab aren't publicized at all, and people just find out about it through word-of-mouth like I did. It takes some education to properly "leave no trace" in the back country, and I feel like that sort of works itself out when people discover the parks largely by being invited by someone who's already in the fold.
If the parks are going to be a more popular destination for the general public, then I think it is probably better to have a permit system both to regulate absolute numbers, and to require people to pass some kind of test or course about how to be a good citizen inside the park.
"It takes some education to properly "leave no trace" in the back country"
This kinda baffles me because it really should take a bare minimum of consideration. The basic rules are not overly difficult, right? Don't trample stuff. Dig a hole if shitting in the backcountry. Don't feed animals. Minimise your impact. Don't walk around playing music at everyone.
Parks have signs everywhere. Clear brochures with obvious info. What makes it so hard for people to understand and make that tiny amount of effort?
Differential Privacy is definitely an intriguing security concept. However, another recent interesting negative is that there may be a smaller performance gap between Differential Privacy and the stronger security notion of Obliviousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivious_data_structure) than previously thought.
Specifically, it was recently shown that the fastest implementations of ORAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivious_RAM) are actually in line with the lower bounds of theoretical Differentially Private RAM performance - meaning you gain zero performance advantage by using a weaker security model. Of course, it's unclear if this is true for other data structures and usages, but ORAM is a non-insignificant research area.
Differential privacy is almost entirely unrelated to obliviousness; the context of the paper you're talking about is "hiding access patterns", and yes, in that case relaxing to differential privacy doesn't buy you any efficiency benefits.
However, DP is useful for much more than hiding access patterns, and was originally developed for hiding information in statistical analyses; obliviousness cannot help you in those use cases
My reading of the ORAM paper is that it is trying to solve a different problem - namely the situation where the threat you’re protecting against is an observer in the middle.
The purpose of differential privacy is to allow one a processor to compute an approximately accurate model without ever knowing the exact details of any origin.
Eg the example for ORAM is a secure element talking to main memory, and wanting to prevent an observer from knowing the actual structure of memory being used by the SE.
This is compared to the use case of differential privacy which is an endpoint wishing to process data without ever knowing what the actual source data was. For example as deployed by Apple: many metrics are bludgeoned with noise on the customers device before being sent to Apple servers. That way (theoretically) Apple never knows exact details of user behaviour, but can accumulate enough info to make approximations at scale.
I think you've misread the paper, which is about differentially private RAM. Differential privacy (w/o "RAM") is neither weaker nor stronger than ORAM.
I don't have a ton of experience with Western Governor's, but the fact that unlike many online universities they are nonprofit is a good sign. Of course, whether they have access to quality instructors is an unknown to me.
[1]: https://finserve.byu.edu/students-parents/tuition-fees-deadl...