Very good work for a high schooler, but explaining backpropagation and cross entropy loss is typical of ML paper-mill, though the feature extractor is interesting. These results really call for more domain-specific analysis to reach any significance deserving of headlines.
We don't. To be fair, it was a "science and math competition for high school seniors". If it wasn't, it would be just some paper on arxiv, and nobody would be reporting it. And for sure the guy who did this kind of research wouldn't be awarded $250K for it.
So, uh… yeah. That's it. A guy was chosen by the jury as the winner of highschool-talent competition and won $250K. Good for him.
The 3rd place is a proof for some Ramsey-like problem it seems, though.
Most archival astro data have a lot of junk in them. Most of it is not worth the time of serious astronomers, because it's all rather inconsequential or incremental finding the Nth example of something rather than N=1. A good project for a high schooler as an exercise and signaling, but ultimately nothing will come from this work.
Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
Maybe I’m cynical, but whenever I read about a high school kid making a science breakthrough I assume this is what happened (based partially on personal experience):
- the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application
- PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
- kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
My assumption is always, a bright high school student has an impressive science fair project, but science reporting is terrible and misinterprets it as something more than it is.
(Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a younger person using AI)
Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got less rigor than a graduate-level project.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
yeah, the hard part about this issue is that the kids that do the project are generally super smart. this situation ends up hurting three groups:
- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV
- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them
- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
Or, he goes to the polytechnic high school that’s right next to Caltech (half a block from the astronomy building no less) and getting research experience there is much easier than a regular high school.
Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did was cold email professors so any kid around here with some initiative and smarts can get connected.
And indeed, that's exactly what happened [0]: the kid in the OP was in a rigorous research program for high schoolers, which connected their talents to PIs who could nurture and support them. GP shouldn't reactively tear down the success of exceptionally talented kids because of their own unfortunate n=1 life experience.
The criticism is of the spin in these articles. The experience these kids get is great, it should happen more. The articles always spin to get your attention, and the subject matter is fascinating, but it can be presented with less spin.
And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
Not all high school educations are created equal - See Carmel High School (Carmel, IN), New Trier High School (Winnetka, IL), or any other High School in a densely high wealth area.
Pasadena school district spends $28K / student for their total $390M expenditures across ~14k students in 2023-2024 school year. I would bet dollars to doughnuts it's $30k+ per high school student since they are more expensive.
This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
The schools studied in that paper are free, or close to free. Not $50,000 per anum
And I don't think OP was suggesting it's the quality of education that affects outcomes in attendees of expensive private high schools.
Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.
The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
I'm going through this now, a few years ago I heard that "research" with college professors was key - I ignored it because I thought it was performative and unlikely that any decent professor would want to waste their time. The kids that had their EDs accepted to Ivys at my daughter's school all did research with "professors" that were parents or friends of parents. It explains a lot of what I see of our graduates from "top" universities we hire from.
Whenever I see any front page OP I assume HN comments will dump on it, even one about a high schooler winning a science prize with a genuine scientific discovery. I hope you don't treat your own and your loved ones' news and accomplishments the same way.
Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
I live in a town with a few big pharmaceutical Co.s, and the local high school has several national science fair prizes (more than one would be very unlikely). All the kids that won prizes had parents working in R&D at those Co.s.
Mentorships are simply how most junior scientists get started. Even in grad school, most students initially take on projects their advisors have pre-qualified as interesting.
To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a university or have wealthy parents.
I was an undergrad, not in high school, but I basically designed and ran a project that led to a major publication that a useless postdoc who was foisted onto the lab leader for political reasons took credit for an "kindly" gave me last author on.
Later, when I was in my own PhD, my adviser wouldn't let me continue MY OWN RESEARCH because it might "look like" I was stealing his work, so I had to invent a different thesis topic.
The above was in CS, this is more STEM BTW -- it's perfectly possible to develop a new computational technique to "discover" 1.5m new interesting things in an existing data set -- it's impressive, but it's not on par with say, a botanist cataloging 1.5 million new flowers.
I would certainly believe this could be the case for this or the kind of science work that would be good for an application. Including this field.
There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
This is one of the lesser bad-professor archetypes (the personal errand slaver) that surprisingly exists in real life. And much worse archetypes also exist and persist.
Like many professors behaving badly, you'd think they'd get exposed and corrected. But grad students and postdocs (in a position to know what's going on) don't want to throw away their careers. They need the recommendations, they need to not be seen as damaged goods from a bad advisor, and they need to not have sketchy university administrators getting rid of the messenger. And if admin assistants notice, they probably need the job, especially if their kid is getting a tuition deal because the parent works at the university. To a bad professor, the environment is like a heartless business, only less accountable.
When a friend was telling me about this brand new grad student, who'd be working with professor X, I said "Oh, no..." and that X was bad to students (which I knew from one of their students). Friend, who was from a prominent academic lineage, immediately responded crossly, that I shouldn't say such things, hurting people's reputations. Soon after, friend came back and apologized, that I had been right, and the student realized their terrible career move, getting that advisor. Friend later connected some prospective student to me, to warn them about a different bad (worse) professor in the whisper network.
But universities have terrible institutional memories, with students always leaving. So a bad professor tends to persist.
Though, occasionally, you'll hear of a bad professor from the whisper network leaving their job, without explanation. So presumably a wronged student or staff finally sued.
This is true of a lot of experiences in life though and isn't necessarily bad.
e.g. let's take a corporate example:
- New software is written to solve a problem
- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem
- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.
- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work
Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
this example isn't a great example for the academic situation given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep your job.
imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering for a different career.
when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not saying that that's what happened in this case, but it is something that happens), you're hurting an early-career scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to contribute to the field.
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
Admissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic is for high school students to have their startup company “acquired” by their parents’ friends company, where the acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring the kid for an internship.
It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
it went far beyond those 'research paper because I have a good dad' or 'I had a few startups and some even got acquired thanks to my dad's friend'. The math competitions hosted by MAA, the CS Olympiads called usaco,etc are all full of cheating these days for a better college application. People will do whatever it takes to cut in line now.
They're not. For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
> For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I might add) the idea that there's any cheating or subversion going on whatsoever.
The people you're responding to are making far better points than you are.
just google for 'maa math cheating', 'usaco cheating',etc.
there are official statements somewhere that you can probably dig out too.
people were selling the answers before the test for $5 on discord.
my kids are taking these exams, and it saddens/discourages them so much as their classmates are bragging about those $5 answers and got super high scores.
it's a public scandal, just that the media paid no attentions, so far.
This isn’t evidence but this was a well known issue even in the 90s and 00s. If you were a judge at high school science fair competitions (or a parent kid for that matter) you could easily tell which projects were actually done by adults. The complexity of the project, the equipment it would need, and the displays would give it away.
Sometimes they do all the operations by themselves. Finally, this is a race about who can find a scientist to design the best "research project" for their kids.
I am no expert, and I am not sure what is meant by "nepo", but that seems like a
wild mischaracterization or exaggeration.
Is there evidence?
It seems obvious that parents can increase or decrease the odds of someone starting a career in an "elite" field requiring advanced education like "Science", but I interpret your comment as suggesting that most scientists got their job by means of daddy donating to a university or some other silly fantasy.
Btw, nepo is broader than "my dad donated". Most (all?) worthy positions in academia depend more on who you're friends with than on talent just by itself.
"worthy position" could only mean a relatively senior position, so the scientist would have already demonstrated success via publications, and having friends would of course be expected and required in a collaborative line of work. But hiring at that level would be done by a committee, not simply by a personal friend. If that is "nepo", then the term is meaningless.
But that really has nothing to do with the original gripe about "day zero", which would generally mean getting into a masters or phd program, or perhaps an undergrad research project, where grades and standardized test scores get someone in the door -- social skills sufficient to hold a brief conversation about a science topic would be a nice bonus, but not really necessary.
By worthy position I was thinking of something as simple as "not a temporary contract", I wasn't clear on that, my bad.
And I confirm my previous statement, the immense majority of people who go on to take senior positions, particularly at big institutions, are made from day zero.
That is an extremely cynical view, and it does not fit with reality.
There is no mechanism where little Timmy gets a free ticket to be a university professor in science.
People who manage to make a career in science usually follow a specific educational path that includes a phd and postdoctoral research. No one would claim it is completely fair because there are many things that can block or hide that path (family situation; life events; lack of encouragement from teachers; being born in the wrong country; etc.). However, the system does not otherwise care about your background in any meaningful way.
You should consider the dark implications that you may be pushing misinformation that could discourage people who are gifted or intellectually curious and motivated from trying to improve the world by doing science.
Grade inflation hurts the students who actually deserved 'A' grades.
But if you are making consequential decisions (like admission or hiring) based on a metric or signal that's been gamed to death, then you have to be a realist.
From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."
That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
The post you were replying to is about privilege, then you defend with:
"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"
Being handed things because your parents have money VS being handed things because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity couldn't be more different.
Learn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated" roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor), buy rural Indiana land, build your own private observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the crushing burden of the academic grinder.
Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
You can't do private research because most astronomy is really data- and compute-heavy astrophysics. Optical searches are fun and everyone loves new comets, but comet hunting isn't academic science.
Interestingly, when hunting on a computer or some new celestial object gets "hunted" by university astronomers, they call it "research" and don't smugly dismiss it as just some fun that can safely be gatekept from being called astronomy.
As always, when working outside the system, it should be expected that semantics will be used against you, but if it's your interest, it needn't stop you nor need care about such unpersuasive arguments.
Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks onward to the world.
There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."
The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
Rosalind Franklins contrabutions are vastly overestimated in an effort to “correct the record”. Her data was very valuable, but she didnt make the insights.
Nobody denies that someone like Matteo is extremely privileged to have been born in the wealthiest country in the world, attend one of the best public schools in that country, and therefore be exposed to a research program that connected him to the Caltech professor that made his work possible.
That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
The default narrative is "hard work and talent should be rewarded", but the reality is "hard work and talent are only rewarded in very unusual and strictly rationed circumstances, and most potential is wasted."
The waste is caused by unexamined political friction. There has to be a hierarchy of opportunity, because some kinds of people have to an easier time of it than other kinds of people.
American capitalism makes a lot of noise about social mobility but does almost everything it can to prevent it in practice.
Occasionally people still make it against the odds, but the point is the odds are there for most of the population. People who beat them rarely get the kind of media support this story offers.
If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.
This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.
His phone call could have been placed by anyone. The question is, was his success mythological, or was it because he was the sort of a man who was willing and motivated to place such phone calls?
To get the internship Jobs had to know about HP, and to live close enough to HP - in a relatively privileged part of the country - to make it a possibility.
Compared to Rest of US, never mind Rest of World, only a tiny percentage of twelve year olds had those two opportunities.
I read it was in the phone book. If you’re too young to have experienced this, it may surprise you that phone numbers were typically publicly listed in books that were mailed out annually, in those times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
> The post you were replying to is about privilege
The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.
I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.
This thread had me a bit confused, then I realised the discrepancy. Your objective isn't to label the high school kid as privileged to remove respect for his work. It is to highlight the privilege to others that don't have the same privilege, who may see this as what success looks like, so the discouragement of not being able to do it (no access to GPUs) isn't attributed to a lack of their own ability or intelligence but something outside their control (privilege).
The kid in the article had a big brain to begin with, and there were ample buffs at his disposal, so he got to speed run his interest because he was lucky enough to be born in the right zip code. It doesn't diminish his work at all. (And it is also true that there are plenty of rich failsons and faildaughters who get slotted into birthright CEO positions without ever knowing adversity.)
I like Finland's approach: they have no private schools [1], which means rich kids go to the same public schools as poor kids (or their parents fly their kids out of the country). This means there is a much greater likelihood of advanced resources for smarter kids. But Finland also doesn't have the radical wealth disparity that we have in the US.
You triggered an old memory of mine in high school of when I ran for class president in senior year and campaign spending was capped at $100 dollars and someone else flagrantly violated campaign finance rules and spent at least a thousand dollars primarily distributing pencils that would go on to litter the campus’ every corner.
Yes. It was a close friend who told me he wasn’t running prior to the nomination deadline. I had done some strong analytics and figured I had great odds. Then I learned, from the dean, that he was running. He split my vote. I learned a lot about life from that experience lol.
Here is the paper
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
Very good work for a high schooler, but explaining backpropagation and cross entropy loss is typical of ML paper-mill, though the feature extractor is interesting. These results really call for more domain-specific analysis to reach any significance deserving of headlines.
The article didn't say how accurate the predictions were. Too bad, that's the important part.
Because there is no admitting what was found were predictions. Millions of entities, that will take years to verify the data.
The interview is funny: when the winner was asked how he did it: I took that NASA database, and made the computer think...
No more concrete. Oh yes they said AI and infrared, he even used infrared.
The second paragraph of the article contains a link straight to the paper, which is open access.
All they know is his gut says maybe.
More behind-the-scenes info could be provided by HN's @JustinSkycak:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JustinSkycak
Here's a blog post of his talking about Matteo among other things:
* https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
> potential
As in, not validated?
How do we know this algorithm is any good?
We don't. To be fair, it was a "science and math competition for high school seniors". If it wasn't, it would be just some paper on arxiv, and nobody would be reporting it. And for sure the guy who did this kind of research wouldn't be awarded $250K for it.
So, uh… yeah. That's it. A guy was chosen by the jury as the winner of highschool-talent competition and won $250K. Good for him.
The 3rd place is a proof for some Ramsey-like problem it seems, though.
Most archival astro data have a lot of junk in them. Most of it is not worth the time of serious astronomers, because it's all rather inconsequential or incremental finding the Nth example of something rather than N=1. A good project for a high schooler as an exercise and signaling, but ultimately nothing will come from this work.
Is this important? I see we have a model which has not found anything officially, has been validated by no one nor has the science reproduced.
Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
AI is great!
Maybe I’m cynical, but whenever I read about a high school kid making a science breakthrough I assume this is what happened (based partially on personal experience):
- the lab PI has a friend who’s kid needs to put together a college application
- PI asks their postdoctoral to tee up a project for the kid.
- kid does the last 2% of the project but gets all the credit while being unaware of how much background legwork was needed to get them there. Postdoc gets nothing.
My assumption is always, a bright high school student has an impressive science fair project, but science reporting is terrible and misinterprets it as something more than it is.
(Also: "Kid outsmarts stuffy professionals" is an evergreen journalistic subject, and don't dismiss the political angle of sowing distrust in "establishment" scientists in favor of a younger person using AI)
Not that young people can't do big things but it's probably got less rigor than a graduate-level project.
Don't get me wrong, this is a really cool idea and it sounds like he did a great job. I don't want to be unjustly dismissive. These stories come up all the time and they usually don't amount to a whole lot- like most research.
yeah, the hard part about this issue is that the kids that do the project are generally super smart. this situation ends up hurting three groups:
- postdocs that are in a precarious career position are being forced to give up a bunch of work "for free" that they cant put on their CV
- the bright kid is often given a skewed perception about what working in science is like and they will be disillusioned when the handholding stops and they have super-high expectations placed on them
- depending on the how the press frames it, the public either gets a story that's anti-intellectual "never trust the experts" OR some feel-good fluff about some savior-savant on the horizon. neither is useful science reporting but good for clicks.
Or, he goes to the polytechnic high school that’s right next to Caltech (half a block from the astronomy building no less) and getting research experience there is much easier than a regular high school.
Looks like he went to Pasadena High School though. When I did a bit of aerospace research at Caltech in high school all I did was cold email professors so any kid around here with some initiative and smarts can get connected.
And indeed, that's exactly what happened [0]: the kid in the OP was in a rigorous research program for high schoolers, which connected their talents to PIs who could nurture and support them. GP shouldn't reactively tear down the success of exceptionally talented kids because of their own unfortunate n=1 life experience.
[0] https://www.justinmath.com/math-academys-eurisko-sequence-5-...
The criticism is of the spin in these articles. The experience these kids get is great, it should happen more. The articles always spin to get your attention, and the subject matter is fascinating, but it can be presented with less spin.
And frankly any kid deserves praise for doing the unglamorous work that this takes. Very few can be arsed to put up with the extra work that it takes to do anything worthwhile, we are a nation getting lazier every day.
> exceptionally talented kids
Good euphemism for wealthy parents
$50,000 a year high school tuition can make anyone exceptionally talented
Pasadena High School, where Matteo went to school, is public.
Not all high school educations are created equal - See Carmel High School (Carmel, IN), New Trier High School (Winnetka, IL), or any other High School in a densely high wealth area.
While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically there has been significant avoidance of its public schools by affluent residents: https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-data-f...
Pasadena school district spends $28K / student for their total $390M expenditures across ~14k students in 2023-2024 school year. I would bet dollars to doughnuts it's $30k+ per high school student since they are more expensive.
The data says this is not true. Quality of education has almost no effect on lifetime income outcomes when you control for initial test scores.
Do you have a source on this? That’s really interesting if true.
Sure. There are many studies but here is one.
Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer (NBER)
This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17286/w172...
The schools studied in that paper are free, or close to free. Not $50,000 per anum And I don't think OP was suggesting it's the quality of education that affects outcomes in attendees of expensive private high schools.
There are very similar studies for private schools, can't find this second
Sadly, I thought the same… Pasadena? Hmmm…
Regardless of whether there is something rotten here, I think they should in fact focus on the science and not the person behind the science. And that gives the young person some cover too.
The article says that The Astronomical Journal did just that: talked about the discovery without focusing on the age of the author. I think I prefer that.
I'm going through this now, a few years ago I heard that "research" with college professors was key - I ignored it because I thought it was performative and unlikely that any decent professor would want to waste their time. The kids that had their EDs accepted to Ivys at my daughter's school all did research with "professors" that were parents or friends of parents. It explains a lot of what I see of our graduates from "top" universities we hire from.
Throw a $250,000 incentive into the mix and you're almost guaranteed to get less than honest work.
Whenever I see any front page OP I assume HN comments will dump on it, even one about a high schooler winning a science prize with a genuine scientific discovery. I hope you don't treat your own and your loved ones' news and accomplishments the same way.
Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
you're right. i'm clearly morally deficient because i've let my own (not at all idiosyncratic) personal experience color my opinions.
I live in a town with a few big pharmaceutical Co.s, and the local high school has several national science fair prizes (more than one would be very unlikely). All the kids that won prizes had parents working in R&D at those Co.s.
My assumption is most Science Fairs are based on Dad and Mom’s contribution, and things like this are filler for elite university applications.
The one thing that suggests this might be legit is that Pasadena has an elite Math High School. https://www.mathacademy.us/
If a college senior could pull it off, perhaps a properly educated high school junior could too.
Mentorships are simply how most junior scientists get started. Even in grad school, most students initially take on projects their advisors have pre-qualified as interesting.
To make high school-level competitions more fair, we should likely prioritize access to researchers for all smart, hard-working high schoolers rather than only those who are nearby a university or have wealthy parents.
Or maybe it's the other way around?
I was an undergrad, not in high school, but I basically designed and ran a project that led to a major publication that a useless postdoc who was foisted onto the lab leader for political reasons took credit for an "kindly" gave me last author on.
Later, when I was in my own PhD, my adviser wouldn't let me continue MY OWN RESEARCH because it might "look like" I was stealing his work, so I had to invent a different thesis topic.
The above was in CS, this is more STEM BTW -- it's perfectly possible to develop a new computational technique to "discover" 1.5m new interesting things in an existing data set -- it's impressive, but it's not on par with say, a botanist cataloging 1.5 million new flowers.
I would certainly believe this could be the case for this or the kind of science work that would be good for an application. Including this field.
There are of course probably fields where there is ~no grant money, thus barely any research. Einstein noted we only know .001% of what there is to note of the universe, and even then he was probably embellishing in the favor of knowledge.
I would also expect by the time you are a postdoc you are totally indoctrinated in your field in a way a high school student would not be. Standing on the shoulder of giants might not always be an advantage, if the giants have been whispering in your ear what to look at, whispering in your ear what they think is true, whispering in your ear what they think reality is, and all your fellows have been listening to whispers from similar giants.
Better than the postdoc I knew who was driving his PI's kids to football practice every day.
This is one of the lesser bad-professor archetypes (the personal errand slaver) that surprisingly exists in real life. And much worse archetypes also exist and persist.
Like many professors behaving badly, you'd think they'd get exposed and corrected. But grad students and postdocs (in a position to know what's going on) don't want to throw away their careers. They need the recommendations, they need to not be seen as damaged goods from a bad advisor, and they need to not have sketchy university administrators getting rid of the messenger. And if admin assistants notice, they probably need the job, especially if their kid is getting a tuition deal because the parent works at the university. To a bad professor, the environment is like a heartless business, only less accountable.
When a friend was telling me about this brand new grad student, who'd be working with professor X, I said "Oh, no..." and that X was bad to students (which I knew from one of their students). Friend, who was from a prominent academic lineage, immediately responded crossly, that I shouldn't say such things, hurting people's reputations. Soon after, friend came back and apologized, that I had been right, and the student realized their terrible career move, getting that advisor. Friend later connected some prospective student to me, to warn them about a different bad (worse) professor in the whisper network.
But universities have terrible institutional memories, with students always leaving. So a bad professor tends to persist.
Though, occasionally, you'll hear of a bad professor from the whisper network leaving their job, without explanation. So presumably a wronged student or staff finally sued.
This is true of a lot of experiences in life though and isn't necessarily bad.
e.g. let's take a corporate example:
- New software is written to solve a problem
- It kind of works. At least, well enough that it's less of a problem
- An intern comes along and is told to make it better. They have nothing else to do so they give it their full attention for two months.
- Software runs 5x faster. Intern gets hired for doing such great work
Who should the credit for this? The person who originally solved the problem? or the intern who made it 5x faster?
At some point, does it matter? The original writer probably got credit for solving the problem and the intern got hired. Basically, everyone got some kind of benefit.
(This being HN, I am SURE there is going to be a debate about the above...)
this might be bait, but i'll bite.
this example isn't a great example for the academic situation given the way "getting credit" works and how important it is in academia. getting credit for your work in academia isn't just about ego, it's the currency you use to get and keep your job.
imagine if in software land you had to periodically assemble a list of your lifetime accomplishments and you were getting stack-ranked against every other dev in existence. if your list is found lacking, you have to leave software engineering for a different career.
when work gets moved from a postdoc or gradstudent to serve as a vanity project for a connected high-schooler (i'm not saying that that's what happened in this case, but it is something that happens), you're hurting an early-career scientist that is actively contributing to the field in order to support a kid that "maybe someday" will start to contribute to the field.
Yeah, it seems like so:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
Sounds like Dr. Kirkpatrick should have been a coauthor.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? I'm asking out of genuine curiosity
Admissions manipulation games are very common. Another tactic is for high school students to have their startup company “acquired” by their parents’ friends company, where the acquisition price is some token amount in exchange for hiring the kid for an internship.
It can be really hard to judge these situations without getting the person in a 1:1 interview. Some times you meet someone with an extraordinary high school claim who can talk your ear off with impressive detail and deep understanding. Other times you start talking to someone and realize they don’t even understand their own topic beyond surface level understanding necessary for talking to a newspaper journalist.
With a claim like this, I’d be looking for interviews or online discussions. Usually the young people who are actually accomplishing amazing things are super excited to talk to the world about it. If anyone can find this person engaging in online forums or posting about progress on the build up, that lend a lot of weight to the claim.
it went far beyond those 'research paper because I have a good dad' or 'I had a few startups and some even got acquired thanks to my dad's friend'. The math competitions hosted by MAA, the CS Olympiads called usaco,etc are all full of cheating these days for a better college application. People will do whatever it takes to cut in line now.
How are the Olympiads full of cheating? I only participated in one but there wasn’t any room for cheating.
They're not. For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
> They're not.
Evidence for this claim?
> For some odd reason, the comments on this post are full of bitter people who cannot possibly fathom that brilliant young people not only exist, but also achieve amazing things on their own merits.
As opposed to you, who's up and down the thread making unsubstantiated claims and engaging in emotional manipulation to try to discredit (without evidence, I might add) the idea that there's any cheating or subversion going on whatsoever.
The people you're responding to are making far better points than you are.
just google for 'maa math cheating', 'usaco cheating',etc. there are official statements somewhere that you can probably dig out too. people were selling the answers before the test for $5 on discord. my kids are taking these exams, and it saddens/discourages them so much as their classmates are bragging about those $5 answers and got super high scores. it's a public scandal, just that the media paid no attentions, so far.
Other than personal experience of having my PI tell me to hand over my own almost-done experiments to his friends kids?
This isn’t evidence but this was a well known issue even in the 90s and 00s. If you were a judge at high school science fair competitions (or a parent kid for that matter) you could easily tell which projects were actually done by adults. The complexity of the project, the equipment it would need, and the displays would give it away.
This is how it works 99% of the time
This is the standard for getting into an elite school. Just getting good grades and generic "activities" hasn't cut it for twenty years or more.
They live in a completely different world from the rest of us and they hate us for it.
Sometimes they do all the operations by themselves. Finally, this is a race about who can find a scientist to design the best "research project" for their kids.
Totally agree. Most careers in Science are nepo since day zero.
I am no expert, and I am not sure what is meant by "nepo", but that seems like a wild mischaracterization or exaggeration.
Is there evidence?
It seems obvious that parents can increase or decrease the odds of someone starting a career in an "elite" field requiring advanced education like "Science", but I interpret your comment as suggesting that most scientists got their job by means of daddy donating to a university or some other silly fantasy.
>Is there evidence?
No evidence, I'm obviously lying ...
Btw, nepo is broader than "my dad donated". Most (all?) worthy positions in academia depend more on who you're friends with than on talent just by itself.
"worthy position" could only mean a relatively senior position, so the scientist would have already demonstrated success via publications, and having friends would of course be expected and required in a collaborative line of work. But hiring at that level would be done by a committee, not simply by a personal friend. If that is "nepo", then the term is meaningless.
But that really has nothing to do with the original gripe about "day zero", which would generally mean getting into a masters or phd program, or perhaps an undergrad research project, where grades and standardized test scores get someone in the door -- social skills sufficient to hold a brief conversation about a science topic would be a nice bonus, but not really necessary.
By worthy position I was thinking of something as simple as "not a temporary contract", I wasn't clear on that, my bad.
And I confirm my previous statement, the immense majority of people who go on to take senior positions, particularly at big institutions, are made from day zero.
That is an extremely cynical view, and it does not fit with reality. There is no mechanism where little Timmy gets a free ticket to be a university professor in science.
People who manage to make a career in science usually follow a specific educational path that includes a phd and postdoctoral research. No one would claim it is completely fair because there are many things that can block or hide that path (family situation; life events; lack of encouragement from teachers; being born in the wrong country; etc.). However, the system does not otherwise care about your background in any meaningful way.
You should consider the dark implications that you may be pushing misinformation that could discourage people who are gifted or intellectually curious and motivated from trying to improve the world by doing science.
this kind of cynicism hurts young people who actually do good work on their own though.
Grade inflation hurts the students who actually deserved 'A' grades.
But if you are making consequential decisions (like admission or hiring) based on a metric or signal that's been gamed to death, then you have to be a realist.
This is spot on! Mostly, kids do less than nothing, their parents do the rest!
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American kids are super smart
I don’t know if the comment really adds to the conversation at all, but surely the comment should just be “kids are super smart”, if anything
I thought for a second the title was new Epstein files...
$10,000 to $20,000 in GPU costs over a couple months. I had $20 per week in highschool. Benefit of being rich is you are awarded opportunities.
From the paper [0]: "The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech."
That GPU was first released in 2018, and can be had for ~$1500 today. The computer as a whole sounds exactly in-line with what a lab would have as an old spare machine. The student is lucky for sure to have access to such an institution, but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:
"I would like to acknowledge and thank deeply my mentor Davy (Dr. J. Davy Kirkpatrick) for introducing me to astronomy at IPAC and providing guidance throughout this project, aiding in data analysis and the collection of known objects for the test set."
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6
The post you were replying to is about privilege, then you defend with:
"but it's not like he had rich parents who casually handed him $10-$20k. Much more likely he got access to Caltech resources because his exceptional talent caused a professor to take interest in him:"
These two things are effectively the same.
Being handed things because your parents have money VS being handed things because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity couldn't be more different.
>because you've prepared yourself for the opportunity
Hmm, so, there's a teenager that loves astronomy and is very clever but he lives in rural Indiana with some parents who neglect him.
(Or any third-world country around the world; or even worse, a war ridden place).
How do you suggest he should prepare for this kind of opportunity?
I'm not detracting from his merit, but 99% of this outcome is due to being next door to Caltech and sympathetic to its faculty.
You don’t choose what you want, you choose what you can have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_educat...
Learn to be a roofer, make bank (I paid my ~"uneducated" roofer like $5k for labor alone for ~48 hours of labor), buy rural Indiana land, build your own private observatory, enjoy doing your own research without the crushing burden of the academic grinder.
Astronomy is one of those fields where amateurs make new discoveries quite frequently.
You can't do private research because most astronomy is really data- and compute-heavy astrophysics. Optical searches are fun and everyone loves new comets, but comet hunting isn't academic science.
Interestingly, when hunting on a computer or some new celestial object gets "hunted" by university astronomers, they call it "research" and don't smugly dismiss it as just some fun that can safely be gatekept from being called astronomy.
As always, when working outside the system, it should be expected that semantics will be used against you, but if it's your interest, it needn't stop you nor need care about such unpersuasive arguments.
Being adjacent to wealth is a privilege. Zip code is a better predictor of a child's success than any other metric.
Because that's the hard part. Any asshole can discover something new, that alone doesn't mean much. Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, but that was the easy part and didn't even barely merit her being credited-- the hard part is being proximal or in the nexus of power and being able to get the views and looks onward to the world.
There are a gazillions of children capable of discovering things. What's important is to be the child with the social proof to get it published or actually keep the credit. That's highly valuable because having powerful friends/family is what helps fund, support, and continue research. A nobody can safely be discarded, rob the credit, then use the powerful to keep funding your friends -- in fact this might be even better for "science."
The whole point of getting a PhD is to rub robes with the upper crust, get the contacts, perform the slave labor for the powerful, and become enrobed with the social proofs. If you just want to discover things, you don't need academic credentials, but you can sleep soundly knowing the information will get out there you just have to give it to someone credentialed to take the credit.
Rosalind Franklins contrabutions are vastly overestimated in an effort to “correct the record”. Her data was very valuable, but she didnt make the insights.
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Nobody denies that someone like Matteo is extremely privileged to have been born in the wealthiest country in the world, attend one of the best public schools in that country, and therefore be exposed to a research program that connected him to the Caltech professor that made his work possible.
That privilege may well be a necessary condition towards being able to publish a paper that shows extreme computational sophistication for a high schooler (and indeed, IMO would be a middle-of-the-road graduate-level paper). But it's certainly not a sufficient condition, as you seem to be implying when you say that blindly giving a kid $10-$20k is "effectively the same" as having Matteo's background. If you just handed $20k worth of GPUs to a rich dilettante child, they would not be able to achieve anything close to what Matteo accomplished.
This isn't about individuals, it's about policy.
The default narrative is "hard work and talent should be rewarded", but the reality is "hard work and talent are only rewarded in very unusual and strictly rationed circumstances, and most potential is wasted."
The waste is caused by unexamined political friction. There has to be a hierarchy of opportunity, because some kinds of people have to an easier time of it than other kinds of people.
American capitalism makes a lot of noise about social mobility but does almost everything it can to prevent it in practice.
Occasionally people still make it against the odds, but the point is the odds are there for most of the population. People who beat them rarely get the kind of media support this story offers.
If you want to believe those things are unattainable, you can, but just remember that Steve Jobs got an internship at HP at the age of 12 by calling the founder on the telephone. Literally anyone could have done that.
These opportunities come to those who seek them.
This completely ignores reality. Jobs was a one-in-a-billion. To pretend privilege doesn't exist by invoking near mythological probabilities perpetuates it.
His phone call could have been placed by anyone. The question is, was his success mythological, or was it because he was the sort of a man who was willing and motivated to place such phone calls?
To get the internship Jobs had to know about HP, and to live close enough to HP - in a relatively privileged part of the country - to make it a possibility.
Compared to Rest of US, never mind Rest of World, only a tiny percentage of twelve year olds had those two opportunities.
Opportunity is everywhere.
Steve Jobs' adoptive father was acquaintances with HP employees. That's how he got the founder's phone number.
I read it was in the phone book. If you’re too young to have experienced this, it may surprise you that phone numbers were typically publicly listed in books that were mailed out annually, in those times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
Are they the same as receiving $20,000 in AWS credits?
> The post you were replying to is about privilege
The comment explicitly made a claim of $10K to $20K in GPU costs, which was unfounded and false.
I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege any time someone young does something impressive. Access to a strong GPU wasn’t the deciding factor that made this kid able to do this work. It could have been done on an average GPU at slower throughput.
>> I’m tired of the hand-wringing over privilege
Your discomfort doesn't make privilege go away. The fact that he even could afford a GPU seems to go over your head.
EDIT: Ok, so he didn't own a GPU and borrowed a PC from CalTec. That does not change the argument. On the one hand, I'm glad there is so much alignment on this issue, on the other hand its sad how hard people fight against privilege. I get it, for a long time I thought privilege was some whiny liberal thing. Through my decades I've seen over and over again the patterns of who wins and who loses, and privilege appears the same way bent spacetime makes gravity appear. People like the old me want to fight about how privilege/gravity is a myth. I'm terrible at arguing this, but I hope those of you fighting this concept acquire empathy and realize that not everyone has your advantages (and you may still be struggling too, that does not go away or get diminished, btw), and that the majority of that disadvantage is systemic, and intentional.
The computer used for this paper contains an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 22 GB of VRAM, 200 GB of RAM, and a 32-core Xeon CPU, courtesy of Caltech
OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the argument.
He used a Caltech computer.
OK, so wealth adjacency. My oversight doesn't change the argument.
This thread had me a bit confused, then I realised the discrepancy. Your objective isn't to label the high school kid as privileged to remove respect for his work. It is to highlight the privilege to others that don't have the same privilege, who may see this as what success looks like, so the discouragement of not being able to do it (no access to GPUs) isn't attributed to a lack of their own ability or intelligence but something outside their control (privilege).
Precisely!!!!
The kid in the article had a big brain to begin with, and there were ample buffs at his disposal, so he got to speed run his interest because he was lucky enough to be born in the right zip code. It doesn't diminish his work at all. (And it is also true that there are plenty of rich failsons and faildaughters who get slotted into birthright CEO positions without ever knowing adversity.)
I like Finland's approach: they have no private schools [1], which means rich kids go to the same public schools as poor kids (or their parents fly their kids out of the country). This means there is a much greater likelihood of advanced resources for smarter kids. But Finland also doesn't have the radical wealth disparity that we have in the US.
[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/finland-no-fee-paying-schools...
The high school he goes to has a $50,000 yearly tuition.
Please stop repeating this lie. He went to the public Pasadena High School.
,-!--
You triggered an old memory of mine in high school of when I ran for class president in senior year and campaign spending was capped at $100 dollars and someone else flagrantly violated campaign finance rules and spent at least a thousand dollars primarily distributing pencils that would go on to litter the campus’ every corner.
Did they win the election?
Yes. It was a close friend who told me he wasn’t running prior to the nomination deadline. I had done some strong analytics and figured I had great odds. Then I learned, from the dean, that he was running. He split my vote. I learned a lot about life from that experience lol.
why would one throw away pencils?
Why would any one dump a load of tea in the bay?
to be a terrorist, obviously
Most school students these days never have to write anything.
Where is this number from?