Good catch — to clarify, I have 10+ years of experience in AI/ML and full-stack engineering overall, and about 4–5 years working hands-on with modern Generative AI systems (LLMs, RAG, multimodal models, and agent frameworks). Thanks.
it doesn't quite work that way. Once you do this what you call "work", you can't just extricate yourself in the middle of dealing with complicated situations or drop things where others depend on you. So it's still work in the sense that you can't just literally do what you want the way you do when you lounge around your house.
the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation, not just time and half on tests. If you had carpet replaced in your dorm because it gave you an allergy, it would be included. So, this is just an article that is just flat out bullshit.
> the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation,
The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.
Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.
25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:
> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.
Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey.
This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:
> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-profit institutions, 7% at for-profit institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.
it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?
this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.
the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case
it's on their website. Along with all the other details.
where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.
And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.
The Atlantic journalist talked to Stanford Professor Paul Graham Fisher who was co-chair of the university’s disability task force, so I imagine they either got it from him or someone else at the school.
They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.
The number isn’t sourced. But the article does say 24% were receiving academic OR housing accommodation. So 38% registered disabled but only 24% receiving any type of accommodations sounds suspiciously like bullshit. It would require people registering and not using the thing they registered for.
But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here.
Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.
There are any number of reasons for that to be the case.
1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.
> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.
Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.
you are talking complete nonsense, sorry. Nobody pays full tuition at Stanford unless you are rich, it's literally free for families making less than 150k a year.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.
N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.
It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.
Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.
You are nitpicking. By that logic, since we can never know the precise number because that number is always moving, we simply don’t know what the number is and all this is moot.
and so who owns the shares of "corporate america"? Newflash: Teachers' and firefighters' and cops' pensions are all invested in "corporate america". As well as pensions of union workers. As well as 401ks of all the other middle class people. Come on.
"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
To me that just reads like following the gamblers fallacy. Just because you already threw a bunch of money into the pot doesn't mean you have zero choice but to keep playing until you likely lose it all.
How many American teachers or firefighters would trade their own kid's job away to a foreigner in exchange for some hypothetical marginal increase in 401K returns? Not many. The only Americans who like that deal are managers who care more about their headcount than they do about their countrymen.
you keep thinking about it in Soviet zero sum terms. First of all, the foreign engineer doesn't disappear if you don't give him a visa, he or she just works somewhere else and still takes your kid's job away. Secondly, it's not a zero sum game ! that's the most important thing to realize. Number of jobs is not fixed ! it's not a fixed pie! you are on hacker news. A startup forum. And you are talking about number of jobs as a fixed pie.
1) India does not meaningfully compete with the US and never has. We are not going to actively harm our own people now to stave off some imaginary future threat.
2) Tell that to the 100K+ unemployed Americans in the IT space.
Oh now they care about teachers, firefighters, cops and puppies? Is that what this H1B is about?
> American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
What are you even talking about? Being able to hold more tokens that can buyback the products of the asset class does not make for a "rich standard of living".
Having to run gofundme's for medical care is not "rich standard of living".
Them trembling on every unscheduled meeting with their boss is not "rich standard of living"
if you are going to argue that Americans don't have a rich standard of living, that is just an absurd argument. It's obvious to anyone who has lived or worked somewhere else.
you don't believe it why ? you look at American education system and you think it produces multitudes of talented engineers? is it so inconceivable that we need a lot of smart people and we don't produce enough of them locally ?
So let's have a thought experiment. We can agree, even if the US primary education system is crap, that the university system is world class. After all, people wouldn't come from other countries to study abroad in the US if it were not competitive.
So our CS graduates take the same courses, study the same material, and pass on the same grading scales as these international students from countries like China, India, etc that have come to attend American universities. Therefore it seems unlikely that they are categorically incompetent due to a flaw in their education, even if we make some allowance for them not studying as rigorously as their international peers for whatever reason.
However, if the news can be believed, we're now seeing a significant number of CS graduates who are unable to find employment. This is coming on the tail end of a bunch of highly publicized layoffs.
The notion that there "Aren't Americans to do these jobs" just doesn't track. I'm sure that there are lots of corporate executives who are saying that there aren't enough qualified Americans to do these jobs, but they're saying that because it's in their best economic interest to say that, not because it's actually true.
there are too many CS grads without experience who are not very good. We have world class universities, by no means that implies that every new CS graduate is world class. A median CS graduate most likely cannot pass a basic interview in CS
I’m incredulous you’d expect otherwise? This is clearly pandering favor with a certain demographic, in a way that didn’t upset the big money going to Maralargo.
Why would they intervene with outsourcing the jobs instead of H1Bs? And more importantly, how?
There is no way around it, you either outsource or lose (and they already outsourced almost all factories). Companies will move HQs to India and "outsource" some operations to the US.
