Bad assumptions new tech entrepreneurs tend to make - <AUTHOR> http://stephencorwin.com/blog/?p=104

<comment><USER2> Seriously from all the articles I read I am an expert when knowing what not to do. So now I am looking for an article that says what to do.

The best "what to do" I read so far is <http://www.joelonsoftware.com> it lures u in as a quick fix, and before you know it , you have read hundreds of posts and have grown.

Anybody have some other good read to share?

<comment><USER3> _Seriously from all the articles I read I am an expert when knowing what not to do. So now I am looking for an article that says what to do._

 _Anybody have some other good read to share?_

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976470705>

[http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development- manifest...](http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifesto/)

<http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/>

<http://www.guykawasaki.com/the-art-of-the-start/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think those are the baby entrepreneure assumptions, but something that is incredibly fundamental is to have the _right_ distribution channel above all.</comment>


HN Salary Survey Results Visualized - <AUTHOR> https://hn-survey-fall-2014.firebaseapp.com <comment><USER2> I think some of the data in here is not quite accurate. Apparently there is a lead software engineer on $750,000 USD which doesnt seem right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree that some of the data is suspicious. I did spend some time cleaning the data, and removed any data points that looked too unrealistic. That particular one actually was discussed in the original thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573423)), and I chose to leave it in because it's definitely feasible.

There are lots of unavoidable issues with self-reported data sets, which is partially why I added the list on the right to increase transparency and let people make their own decisions about confidence in the data.</comment></comment>


Gene Therapy Makes Near-Blind Patients See by Strengthening Neural Connections - <AUTHOR> http://www.dddmag.com/articles/2015/07/gene-therapy-makes-near-blind-patients-see-strengthening-neural-connections <comment><USER3> I work in gene therapy; expect a lot of headlines like this in the coming years. We're just getting started with solving the easy-to-fix problems and disorders right now, but they're falling quickly.

Soon it'll be possible to seriously talk about improving working functionality via gene therapy-- I'd expect simple musculoskeletal augmentation first.

<comment><USER4> Could you describe a bit more about your job? I am currently in training. Any advice would he helpful. I am thinking of doing an PhD.

Edit: Let me rephrase that: can I PM you somehow for more details and questions?

<comment><USER3> I didn't go the academic science route, but I can maybe tell you a bit about some people who did/are currently. I'll start at the very end, then work backwards:

The professors: These guys lived the dream from start to finish. They now have multiple postdocs working to answer the scientific questions that interest them. The professors are responsible for fundraising and presenting the research, and are almost never inside of the laboratory. In general, the professors dictate the direction of the laboratory and have many people working for them. They make less than 120k/year even at the very best places to have professorships. They have probably worked about 20 years to get into this position, and most will hold onto it until they retire. Professors are not the workhorses of academic science. They hardly have anyone to answer to, and can disappear for weeks at a time to go to conferences in exotic locales. They take sabbaticals as needed. They will boss you around via email while on sabbatical about projects they've barely heard of. They have limitless quantities of time to spend with their family, as everything can be covered by the postdocs. The professors are elite, even the bad and underfunded ones. They have "won" the academic game, and are invested in continuing the academic establishment. The academic establishment furnishes the professor with cheap and educated scientific labor in exchange for accepting the legitimacy of the system.

The PhDs (postdocs): These are the workhorses. After five (eight?) years of grueling work to earn their PhD, they must now work for professors once again in order to build their resume before getting a professorship of their own. Many postdocs have been in the postdoc game for 5-10 years, and range in age from late 20s (rare) to early 40s-- once you hit your mid 40s, they tend to give you another job title out of pity. In academia, postdocs make from 32k-60k per year. For the most part, they have had the fire of life beaten out of them, and it shows. Postdocs are notorious for working early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays, etc. They're some of the people you see sleeping in the laboratory. They tend to enjoy drinking alcohol with other postdocs, and can be difficult to relate to on a personal level because of their jaded visage. Postdocs frequently pursue their own projects in addition to the projects handed down to them by their professor. Postdocs must churn out research papers as fast as they can manage. Postdocs tend to be pretty "laid back" about things like hygiene and manners. Postdocs are also seen skimming the abstracts of journal articles, then saying they have read the paper in order to start a conversation. Postdocs will have their name as first or second author on their papers; their boss, the professor, will also have his name on the paper somewhere, even if he didn't contribute. Postdocs spend most of their time toiling in the laboratory or office, but can sometimes escape for vacations or important conferences. Postdocs are criticized very frequently and very severely in public during their presentations. Postdocs can sometimes spend years chasing hypothetical scientific concepts with only tenuous evidence. They are the heroes of the modern scientific story, but certainly the biggest losers as well-- many (most?) do not date/marry or maintain close friendships. They are married to the science. Frequently they are sad, defective, or damaged human beings. The foreigners are generally slightly (and only slightly) more balanced than the Americans.

Graduate students: These are the other workhorses. You will start at this level. This phase will take about five years, so get used to it. You are in your early to mid 20s to early 30s at this level. The first rule of being a grad student is that your time (which is to say, the physical minutes of your living and breathing life) is worth absolutely zero. Hot new kit can do an ELISA in half the time? Too bad, you're stuck with Old Bessie until 11 PM, then you'll have a similarly avoidable problem which will hold you up until 3 AM. By the way, there's no overtime, and no pats on the back for doing anything, whether or not it's expected of you. You earn a stipend for the 80 hour weeks you pull, usually from 11k-30k. You have no say in the direction of things, and will work tirelessly on the projects given to you by postdocs and the professor. The professor is supposed to be your mentor, but you will rarely meet with him. You will take a couple of classes, but largely your time will be spent churning out work for someone else to put their name on. Perhaps you will have a project of your own that is given to you by someone else. Sometimes you will be allowed to give a presentation, and rarely you can go to a conference to do so. You will be criticized a lot. Nobody cares what you have to say. You are probably far from home and your support network. You may still find time to have a relationship somehow at this phase, but usually not. If you get a shit professor, you're going to be in for a bad time. This is the phase in which your hygiene and manners start to slip, but you still have a very long way to fall before you are at the DGAF levels postdocs and professors make look easy. Many people drop out of academic science at this level, and nobody can blame them.

That's my take on academia, having left it recently.

I don't want to say too much publicly about my job since I work with many confidential proprietary programs and technologies, but if you want to send me a PM (does this website even have that? if not, just use the email on my profile)and we can chat.

<comment><USER5> Good luck man, i wonder what the industry is doing differently than academia to speed up the process. Also what is the course of the most passionate people, academia or otherwise?

<comment><USER3> So far I'd say that academia has more passionate people whereas industry has more effective people.

I'd also say that the industry people seem to think that the passion of academics is related to their narrowmindedness/tunnel vision/stubbornness/navel gazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does the strengthening of neural connections only work with people with that specific gene? Could this be extended to other cortical visual disorders, such as amblyopia?

<comment><USER7> The protein, RPE65 [1][2] allows cells to produce a required pigment necessary for both rod and cone-mediated vision. Getting that sequence into the (correct cells in the) patient was the hard part. This particular protein helps prevent blindness in these patients precisely because their natural version of this protein is an ineffective variant of the canonical RPE65 (the sequence of the RPE65 they have is different or truncated from the sequence in [1]). The delivery via Adeno-associated virus works because the eye is special - immunologically privileged. So gene therapies work well for tissues that are immunologically privileged, or can be extracted from the body, affected, and then re-implanted (the eyes and T-cells respectively). This allows the therapy itself to avoid triggering your immune system and fighting the therapy. This is why most of the first gene therapies you will see here soon are targeted towards these two systems.

Different disorders will require addressing the truncations/deviations of different proteins. But if the delivery mechanism works properly, and the knowledge about which proteins are ineffective for particular diseases, this [gene therapy] is _the_ mechanism for curing a whole host of diseases not caused by a foreign agent. At this point, the delivery is the significant technological hurdle. Combined with the effectiveness of Cas9-genomic targeting, and the past 20 years of reading genetic code, there is a lot here to watch.

[1] the 534 amino acids of RPE65 that are required - to the bit - in order to see:

      MSIQVEHPAGGYKKLFETVEELSSPLTAHVTGRIPLWLTGSLLRCGPGLFEVGSEPFYHLFDGQALLHKFDFKEGHVTYHRRFIRTDAYVRAMTEKRIVITEFGTCAFPDPCKNIFSRFFSYFRGVEVTDNALVNVYPVGEDYYACTETNFITKINPETLETIKQVDLCNYVSVNGATAHPHIENDGTVYNIGNCFGKNFSIAYNIVKIPPLQADKEDPISKSEIVVQFPCSDRFKPSYVHSFGLTPNYIVFVETPVKINLFKFLSSWSLWGANYMDCFESNETMGVWLHIADKKRKKYLNNKYRTSPFNLFHHINTYEDNGFLIVDLCCWKGFEFVYNYLYLANLRENWEEVKKNARKAPQPEVRRYVLPLNIDKADTGKNLVTLPNTTATAILCSDETIWLEPEVLFSGPRQAFEFPQINYQKYCGKPYTYAYGLGLNHFVPDRLCKLNVKTKETWVWQEPDSYPSEPIFVSHPDALEEDDGVVLSVVVSPGAGQKPAYLLILNAKDLSEVARAEVEINIPVTFHGLFKKS

[2] [http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q16518](http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q16518)

<comment><USER3> Definitely strongly agree with delivery being the most significant hurdle. Many problems arise from difficulty delivering gene therapies via viral vectors, most notably treatment efficacy and treatment durability, which should never really be a problem because you're replacing the genes. There's also the much-feared off-target effects, which can and do rapidly and gruesomely kill people in the gene therapy clinical trials-- an eminently solvable problem given more research into the correct epitope targeting, I think.

Most of the current viral delivery vectors are shitty in a multitude of ways, but the kinks are being rapidly worked out for AAVs and lentiviruses. Crispr/Cas9 genome engineering is also a huge leap forward, as you mentioned. It's important to note that some groups were having luck with gene therapy even before Crispr, though-- imagine what they can do now, barely two years later. The door to de novo synthetic biology has been kicked open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excuse my naive questions, but this left me very curious.

1) Have we reached a phase where the difficult part is finding the genes responsible for X? With the delivery being now boilerplate code (CRISPR?).

2) What exactly are the limitations of gene therapy?

3) How does aging fit into the picture? For example, if grey hairs are the result of cell aging/damaging, will we be able to reverse/restore it?

<comment><USER7> 1) for the most dangerous of diseases, we tend to know their mechanism (gene(s) responsible), precisely because if they're dangerous then they are interesting genes and have been studied in the lab already. That's not to say we know everything - but that information about genes is currently not limiting (for the field).

2) But what you can do in a close environment of the lab with clean rooms, infinite cells, lots of time, infinite do-overs, 30% success rates, and single-cell type environments you can't do in a live body. We've taken apart enough 'cars' to know how the engine mostly works - which are the ignorable parts and which are critical. We've even practiced remaking certain parts, even being creative about making _better_ parts (synthetic bio) to upgrade the engine - however - doing all of the above on a running car that's going 60mph is a whole different story. Currently, the largest challenge is delivering your genetic payload to exactly, and _only_ exactly where you want it. Nowhere more, nowhere less, nowhere wrong, and just right. That delivery is key (and part of why Cas9/crispr is a big deal, it solves part of the problem ( _where_ in a genome)). But even if we can target where in a genome, we still need to target where in an organism, and where _not_ in an organism. Delivery is the current limitation. You are made of 3 billion base pairs of information duplicated between a few trillion cells; A 0.00001% mis-delivery rate of this absolutely stunning, perfectly designed new gene/part/function is likely unacceptable.

3) Aging is a lot of things depending on who you ask. Generally mammalian cells are designed to stop growing - otherwise you'd be a thousand-pound sphere of goop at this point rather than a well-defined human with shape. This is a good thing. But it means there are built-in limits on how many times a cell intended to divide. Imagine a book with blank pages up front and in back, where the copy machine can't copy the covers, so it always skips the first and last page. Human cells have about 60 blank pages before they start eating into the text (genetic code) at which point they hit their last life and just try to never die (senesce). There are things we can do to add more pages with genetic therapy, but you got to be careful you don't cause rampant growth (cancer). SO aging is tricky, and a huge frontier that we know very very little about (hard to do experiments where your mean time to finish the assay is 60 years). But there's nothing inherently intractable about the concept that gene-therapies shouldn't be able to affect.

Small molecules ('drugs' as you think of them), are great at killing invaders - things that are distinctly non-human (bacteria/viruses/fungi/etc.). They are not good at affecting 'disorders', cancers or other issues where your own body is over/under/mis-reacting. For that you need to change/alter/upgrade the body's own toolkit. This ability is what synthetic biology promises - <USER2> to that toolkit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a very exciting development. I had been reading recently that gene therapy had been nearly completely written off as unworkable (in regards to cystic fibrosis).</comment>


AMA: the OpenAI research team - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/404r9m/ama_the_openai_research_team/ <comment><USER2> I missed the AMA, but glad to see it here and it looks like there are some team members monitoring this thread so I'll throw some questions out there.

I did my MS in AGI at the National Intelligence University with Ben Goertzel as my outside research advisor. My thesis was to determine what were defense implications of an AGI and who was making the best progress toward actually building one.

Since then the DoD has started to take an interest in AGI, and in fact today, during my one weekend a month drill at the Pentagon, I had a great long conversation with Maj. General Seng [1] who is heading up efforts around implementing ISR systems with more autonomous capabilities and exploring how an AGI would be utilized in defense.

One of our big open questions is what's the "stack" for AGI, conceptually? I didn't come to any conclusion on this and had to make a lot of assumptions to close out the research. I would be curious to hear the OpenAI team's thoughts on it.

Will you all be coming to AGI 16 this year in New York?

[1] [http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Arti...](http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Article/108644/major- general-jocelyn-m-seng.aspx)

<comment><USER3> >Since then the DoD has started to take an interest in AGI, and in fact today, during my one weekend a month drill at the Pentagon, I had a great long conversation with Maj. General Seng [1] who is heading up efforts around implementing ISR systems with more autonomous capabilities and exploring how an AGI would be utilized in defense.

Isn't that basically the most obviously bad idea ever, so terribly stupid that there have been several movies chronicling how _massively bad an idea_ it actually is to build "AGI" for military goals?

<comment><USER4> This idea is cliché precisely because it's the most obvious course of action for the military. Don't forget that it's DoD who sponsored the previous AI summer.

Besides, if they don't do on it, the _enemy_ surely will!

<comment><USER3> Because arms races and cold wars with we-all-die-grade weaponry are an obviously excellent idea!

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scott Alexander expressed some important concerns about the project[0].

Edited:

So far they've managed to label them as "coming from the LessWrong background" and subsequently dismiss via appeal to a strawman Paperclip Maximizer. It doesn't give me much confidence in them.

Nevermind. I didn't realize this comment was not made by an OpenAI representative. Also, we could use a strikethrough formatting tag on HN. 'dang?

I hope they eventually address those points though.

[0] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be- open/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/)

<comment><USER5> To be clear, the following comment is what we wrote on the subject: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/404r9m/ama...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/404r9m/ama_the_openai_research_team/cysejas). The subsequent replies are not affiliated with OpenAI.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I missed that. I didn't notice the OpenAI flair.

I apologize for mistakenly assigning this comment to your group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Do you believe solving AI will come from a big company where the employees solving it would have little ownership of the company?

2\. Currently, there is no solid test for Artificial General Intelligence. How much of a priority is it to create one?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Answering my own questions:

1\. No, the incentive is just not there.

2\. Currently, this is my main goal related to Artificial General Intelligence. One should know how far or near they are from creating Artificial General Intelligence.

<comment><USER2> _Currently, there is no solid test for Artificial General Intelligence. How much of a priority is it to create one?_

There is of course no commonly agreed upon one, but in my research but the best one I found was the Universal Anytime Intelligence Test [1]

[1] [http://users.dsic.upv.es/proy/anynt/measuring.pdf](http://users.dsic.upv.es/proy/anynt/measuring.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does one monetize their own individual breakthroughs if they develop something groundbreaking in AI and involved with OpenAI?

</comment><comment><USER7> Any chance at asking questions here? Whoops, guess I just did...

<comment><USER5> _waves_

<comment><USER8> Do you have info materials about OpenAI I could use in AI events?

Will you work with 3rd parties to rise awareness and support, recruit talent and external collaborators (e.g. research groups)?

<comment><USER5> No particular materials right now besides the website.

We expect to collaborate with many third parties over time. We're just getting started, so not sure on the specifics yet!

<comment><USER8> Okay. May I write you an email to establish the connection? I intended to contact OpenAI later this month, but now that we're talking...

<comment><USER5> Feel free to get in touch: firstname.lastname@example.com!

<comment><USER8> I'll send you a mail tomorrow. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is anyone else irked by the questions about AGI? It's a bunch of fluff put forward by hacks. We're a long way off.

<comment><USER10> I think there are legitimate research questions and concerns about AGI; unfortunately there's also a _lot_ of fluff surrounding the area (e.g. singularity stuff, doomsday scenarios, etc.).

The way I see it, there's only one conceptual barrier to cross between current AI and "AGI-like" technology, which could be summed up as 'models which take themselves into account'.

Whilst it's trivial to have software modify itself, we don't have good models for predicting what those modifications will do (in a way which is more computationally efficient than just running them). An analogy is how encoding programs as ANNs lets us perform gradient descent, which we couldn't do if we encoded them as e.g. string of Java code.

If we find a powerful software model which allows efficient prediction with white-box self-references, then I think lots of progress will be made quite quickly.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's an appropriate multiplier for stock-as-salary w/ sm biz/startup? - <AUTHOR>

Before you give the smart response "Get it in writing beforehand," I've learned that lesson. Now I need to decide how to move forward.
I was asked to sign on "full-time" with a small business (startup?) that's been around for a few years. The deal was that I'd be paid a small fee on a per-job basis (basically a deployment to a remote job site) so that I could pay bills, while growing the company. I was also to be compensated in the form of stock. (Privately held company) I had recently lost my full-time job and had enough safety pad to take the risk, so I jumped in.
I now know I shouldn't have been so optimistic as to enter the situation believing that I'd be taken care of, and instead should have gotten things in writing before I started the work. Hindsight is 20/20. I spoke with the owner of the company about stock compensation and was asked to make a request to them in terms of how much stock I should receive at the end of the year.
I thought it would be appropriate (having committed a year or so of my life to growing, improving, and developing for this company) to receive stock at a multiplier level (that is to say, not 1:1, but more like 2:1). So I submitted a stock plan of 2x - 3x of the standard American salary ($40,000/yr) for my yearly compensation in stock, to be awarded at the end of the fiscal year.
The owners were mortified that I'd make such a request, and without responding with a "no," made sure I knew that I wouldn't be getting my request. On the advice of a trusted business friend, I'm seeking out what is an appropriate multiplier to use in stock compensation of work performed, based on my situation.
Last bit of information/details: I've literally lived the job for almost a year now. Traveling, residence, 60-80 hr work weeks, sometimes done in four days; doing marketing, developing, sales, ... as though I were the boot-strapping founder of the company. The company is privately held, and I would be diluting the stock of others by whatever I am awarded - but I would be getting less than 5% of total shares if I were to receive my original request. If income continues at its current rate (which it will at this company), I will have made less than $20k of taxable income. <comment><USER2> I'm a single founder and disagree with the other posts here that this is unsalvageable. But first things first, remember that it isn't odd for employees to own around 10% of the business IN AGGREGATE after dilution with senior non-founders taking up to 2%. Double that number if there are no outside investors, and do the math based on whatever your company is worth. Then divide by four to factor in vesting....

If those numbers don't make you happy, the problem is that your company isn't valued at the speculative 5-10 million that would make what you are asking for reasonable. Assuming the business makes 100k a year, we can guesstimate you want at least 10% of the value of the company for a single year's work. That might be fair or it might not be, but it's clearly disproportionate given the time and risk the others have already put in.

Where does this leave you? In my opinion as a business owner, the best way to get around this is NOT to haggle over the valuation of the company because you have no control over it and neither do your partners. By all means throw the ball in their court and see what they offer, but whatever they come back with remember that you can probably do better by linking your ownership to growth and the amount of new revenue you drive. This will be easier for them to agree to since they'll only give up more ownership if the company performs better thanks to your work. And assuming your work makes the company money - you will be able to push your stake in the business much higher than you would get otherwise as an employee, possibly even up to founder levels.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your hard numbers; they're enlightening to a worker-bee like myself. A few questions: "Double that number if there are no outside investors" - do you mean double the 10%, or double the 2%? (I'd like to pursue this vein so I can relate to the owner's perspective.) How do you recommend calculating what the company is worth? Assets and revenue? (Company is still trying to turn a year in the black.)

So you'd suggest that I propose a stock package based on growth of the company over a certain period? Say maybe, over the next six months (if I stay with the company), what the increased revenue is? [Or would you recommend doing that in retrospect over the last six months - to say "a growth of X makes it reasonable for a compensation of Y"?]

<comment><USER2> If there aren't outside investors and no-one is getting diluted the 5% you mention in your write-up is reasonable since there is usually around a 20% total allotment to employees. All I meant otherwise is that from the owner's perspective it can be psychologically difficult to give significant equity to a new hire if you've been running the business for several years. It is always easier to agree to something generous if it is funded out of growth and conditional on business improving generally, so arguing for conditional options or whatever based on performance can be a good way to align interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You don't need an estimate of an appropriate equity stake, what you need is leverage. Even if you asked for a single share tomorrow, it doesn't sound like they have any reason to give it to you. Find the places where the bus factor is low (a specific technology that only you hack on, something falling apart that only you can fix, etc.) and point out that the costs to keep you (in your example ~80-120k in equity) far outweigh the downside they'd be exposed to if you left. Basically, find out how much value you create, get leverage by showing them that you're a pivotal part of the business, and then approach them with an offer that balances the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, thanks for the good perspective; I have some significant leverage, as the founders don't want to do the work any more and that's one of the reasons they enlisted my help. As one with integrity, I feel it appropriate to hand-off what I've developed gracefully, and so documentation has been a big part of what I've done. I'll definitely look at the leverage side though, thanks for the thoughts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The appropriate multiplier is zero, because in this case it is time to leave and move on - there is no repairing the rift in the relationship; both sides see the other's position as outrageous and assess your role completely differently (hired help on the one hand and cofounder on the other). Finally, there is a significant difference between a small business and a startup when it comes to how closely the owners expect to hold the company (as you have discovered.)

Hindsight is the right word, because it's time to put this in the past.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Stock in a small business like this is worthless. If you are truly making less than $20K/yr you need to move on. You can make more with better benefits at Starbucks.</comment>


A Soviet-era airport, once the height of luxury, faces demolition in Armenia - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6185497/Inside-Soviet-airport-height-luxury-faces-demolition-Armenia.html <comment><USER2> Very similar vibes to the mothballed TWA terminal at JFK, and a lot of the same problems: beautifully architected indoor spaces which are way too small to accommodate the large numbers of people needing to pass through (or wait at) a modern airport, not enough internal separation to facilitate current security needs, and tons of open staircases everywhere— basically zero ability to comply with ADA or even fire regs.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_Center)

<comment><USER2> Just to follow on here, there are some much more evocative pictures of the TWA building in this Wired article:

[https://www.wired.com/2015/08/max-touhey-twa-flight- center/](https://www.wired.com/2015/08/max-touhey-twa-flight-center/)

And also on this blog, from a guy who snuck in during a layover:

[https://liveandletsfly.boardingarea.com/2018/01/25/twa- fligh...](https://liveandletsfly.boardingarea.com/2018/01/25/twa-flight- center-tour/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks really nice, but this picture is revealing: [https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1/2018/09/19/16/4396738-6185497-im...](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1/2018/09/19/16/4396738-6185497-image-a-28_1537371197221.jpg)

The bit on the left, I assume, is the modern terminal. Notice the scale. The old building is small, for modern use. If it gets preserved, they must find a way to generate some additional income, because it's probably too obsolete to do that as an actual airport.

<comment><USER4> The old building is likely small, not adapted to modern security, equipments, facilities and will cost much more in refurbishment and use. It also probably was not that well built and/or degraded for years. Just replace it, new will be better in this case.

<comment><USER5> > replace it

The movements for preservation of architecture would likely have something to say about that. A lot of people are tired of the whole demolish-build shtick, and yet others find it insulting in its disregard for what they find to be monuments. In my opinion, some of the most inspiring uses of space and architecture today are happening in ex-abandoned, ex-unused industrial buildings.

An example I've visited recently is the former Peugeot factory in Brussels [0] that is currently used for exhibitions, concerts, or just hanging out at the bars and food courts that have installed themselves there following a doctrine of minimal intervention. Shortly it will be transformed into a museum of modern art as an outpost of Centre Pompidou [1]. To quote the architects whose proposal won: "We want to radically engage with and trust what is there." That sentence pretty much sums up the trend I'm pointing out.

Another example is Rijeka, a city with a unique history, that has a heritage of an abundance of industrial architecture and very unique urban planning. Many of its industrial complexes lie abandoned, within earshot of city centre. Some of them are being brought back to life, spurred, in large part, by the European Capital of Culture 2020 that is happening there. This summer EASA took place there [1]. It used the revitalised Export building (in the photos look for the building that has "exportavo" witten on it). 600 people slept in the same hall for two weeks. I was there, it was a cool experiment.

[0] [http://kanal.brussels/](http://kanal.brussels/) [1] [https://www.dezeen.com/2018/03/23/car-factory-transformed- ar...](https://www.dezeen.com/2018/03/23/car-factory-transformed-art-museum- centre-pompidou-brussels/) [2] [https://www.flickr.com/photos/107959684@N04/sets/72157670142...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/107959684@N04/sets/72157670142948327)

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying that all old buildings should be replaced: there are a lot of good examples around, we have many here in Paris too, also thinking of the famous Saarinen TWA Flight Center (still have to see some transformation results on this one though).

However, this one, compared to other projects you mention, won't likely be usable for art or other entertainment as it is located within the airport area. It won't likely work again as an airport facility either, since too small and not adapted to modern requirements. It could maybe become a hotel like the TWA building, but that would likely cost a huge lot of money seeing the current state on the pictures, and the need has to be justified, "tourism" like for the Saarinen building won't probably be enough.

I'd be happy to argue "for" preservation, but the article does not show any viable projects either: it seems like people want to preserve, but without a clear idea about what to do with it.

On the "against" side, there are a lot of new projects replacing old buildings that have been a huge success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a westerner living in Russia, I love seeing all the old soviet stuff (despite the dark history). Ok, maybe not the soviet apartment blocks. But many of the statues and brutalist structures are very unique and I truly hope they're preserved. None of the new construction here is nearly as interesting.

<comment><USER7> I grew up literally behind the Moscow Academy of Sciences, and loved looking at that building every day.

It was also fun when they started tearing down the statues; just these huge, metal bodies and heads laying in the courtyards for us kids to clamber over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you can't readily tell at a glance whether a building was designed as a minimum security jail, you can't expect the people around it to want to preserve it.

</comment><comment> k-ian If Yerevan is going to spend a bunch of money on something architectural, it would be nice to see the Yerevan Cascade finished... it's beautiful, til you get to the top, and see a 200 foot pit...

</comment><comment><USER9> I was always surprised how little people care in Armenia about the old airport. Imagine you land in an airport that is nothing like all the other "conventional" airports with high ceilings and huge open areas. Wouldn't you want to just fly to Armenia if your experience starts in a museum like airport? Probably Armenians would not care too much to frequent in the old terminal, but it could be a nice turist attraction, no?

<comment><USER10> The people would agree with you, local business owners would agree with you, but the leaders are basically organized crime types, corruption is rampant, most money dedicated to this project would be stolen and end up in London and Toronto real estate. They also suffer from the influence of Russia, i.e. destabilize as many former soviet countries as possible in order to benefit from the chaos. That part of the world is in for a lot of trouble over the next 50 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you liked the photos, you might also enjoy this site about abandoned buildings in Japan: [https://haikyo.org/](https://haikyo.org/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is exactly the kind of thing I like to explore when travelling. Albania was amazing because these kind of relics are everywhere. There are no fences, guards, demolition or repair.

It would be nice if they could just leave it there, and let people explore it at their own risk.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you enjoy seeing old soviet architecture in disarray (and other curiosities) you may want to check out [http://englishrussia.com/](http://englishrussia.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It kinda looks like MCI in Kansas City taken to the extreme.

</comment><comment><USER15> If foreigners want to pay to fix it up and maintain, great; otherwise Armenia should destroy it and move on.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised at how much it's deteriorated in just 10 years if it was last open in 2008.

</comment><comment><USER17> Luxury and Soviet Era really don't go together. See Berlin Schönefeld for an example.

<comment><USER18> Never been to Schönefeld, but even Tegel is a bit of a disgrace for the main airport of the German capital.

There's always Berlin Brandenburg, which should open any day now.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport)

<comment><USER19> -In Tegel's defense, it was built when area was definitely at a premium, seeing as it was in former West Berlin which simply didn't have the luxury of expanding into the surrounding farmland.

The other West Berlin Airport - Tempelhof - was marvellous, though. Built during Weimar Republic years when air travel was for the wealthy few, the terminal was (and is!) as monumental as a palace.

<comment><USER20> I also have a soft spot for Tempelhof. The shape of the structure and the interior are magnificent.

[https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/im-flughafen-tempelhof- ho...](https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/im-flughafen-tempelhof- holger70/32164924)

I know that it probably wouldn't work as a modern airport but I wish that there had been a way. It's so weird and... Berlin. Love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In 10 years time these soviet-era monuments are going to be coveted and preserved.

<comment><USER22> Will we have a hipster fad of "Retro-brutalism"?

<comment><USER23> I think the Delhi metro is a good example of appropriate contemporary usage of brutalism: [https://imgur.com/a/oJm9qHy](https://imgur.com/a/oJm9qHy)

If the concrete was plastered and painted it would look bad after only a couple months in the sun and rain. (Medieval rulers had a similar idea but using red sandstone instead of concrete: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort#/media/File:Red_Fort_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort#/media/File:Red_Fort_Front111.jpg) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good riddance

</comment><comment><USER25> Off-topic, on a reasonably fast connection on a machine with Intel i7 and 16 GB of RAM, this page loads slowly and scrolling is painfully slow and not smooth. No ad blocker because this is a new machine and new setup. Of course, I will add an ad blocker extension.

<comment><USER26> Frankly I'm struggling with the fact that there are links to that fascist shitrag on the front page of HN. I should have looked more carefully.

For anyone else interested in the subject but not wanting to give the DM traffic, the discussion here is around the proposed demolition of the Old Terminal at Zvartnots Airport.

<comment><USER27> > _Frankly I 'm struggling with the fact that there are links to that fascist > shitrag_

Maybe we should gather and burn its print copies /s

It's an article. Enjoy it or not on its own merits.

<comment><USER26> It's an ad-supported site which I'd have preferred not to support. I don't want to read their 'articles', much like I don't want to click through to a breitbart article.

I guess it's all there though, I just missed it. I'll just have to be a bit more cautious as to what I'm clicking on when I'm on HN in future.

<comment><USER27> > _It 's an ad-supported site which I'd have preferred not to support. I don't > want to read their 'articles', much like I don't want to click through to a > breitbart article._

Others do, however. Are you in favor of shutting them down or forbidding links to them?

And who would determine which are OK to link to?

Some elite? Common consensus? Yeah, because either of these has worked great in the past...

Also, how about toning down the hyperbola a little ("fascist"). It's DailyMail, a known popular low-quality gossip right-wing newspaper. Hardly fascist though (except in the all too common sense of "Everyone I disagree with is Hitler").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That is a hideously ugly building.

It doesn't say "city of the future" to me, as the author seems to suggest, but city of the past. And not the glorious past or the beautiful past, but a period of architecture dominated by harsh lines, masses of exposed concrete, and the idea of architecture expressing domination over the land and over the people who used it.

Brutalism, here in the UK, is largely seen as an ugly mistake. I would categorise this with it.

<comment><USER29> That's likely subjective, as I think it's extremely aesthetically pleasing - I've always seen Brutalism as having strong links with the Bauhaus style, something else I have high regard for.

I won't argue with your city of the past argument as I'm not sure I'd term it as the dominant architecture of a city of the future, but I think it definitely has a place. I would argue against Brutalism expressing domination over people - I've always seen it more as expressing function in form, which would be the opposite. Given it's close ties to Soviet architecture I can see how a lot of the buildings built in the style would have literally been used for the oppression of individual will, however.

Also, with regards to it's opinion in the UK and worldwide, Brutalism is experiencing something of a revival:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t-magazine/design/brutali...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t-magazine/design/brutalist- architecture-revival.html)

[https://www.europeanceo.com/lifestyle/brutalisms-message- may...](https://www.europeanceo.com/lifestyle/brutalisms-message-may-be-lost- as-it-gets-a-revival/)

[https://houseandhome.com/decorating-design/brutalism- revival...](https://houseandhome.com/decorating-design/brutalism-revival/)

<comment><USER30> > Brutalism expressing domination over people - I've always seen it more as > expressing function in form, which would be the opposite

It expresses the architect's idea of function, which may or may not have anything to do with the actual users. However, whenever the actual users of a building complain about the poor UX (noise, leaks, discomfort difficulty finding things in the layout) or their feeling of unhappiness induced by the blankness, it's traditional for Modernists to tell the public and users that they're wrong. It's that elitism which more than anything else characterises the failures of Modernism, of which Brutalism is a part.

<comment><USER29> I can see how building a process directly into a building can lead to an inflexibility with changing the process.

I think the argument you're making lends itself well to a criticism of any pre-planned system.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Most time spent in development is wasted - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/04/most-time-spent-in-development-is.html

<comment><USER2> It seems very common that certain customer requirements -- we call them "checklist features" -- won't ever be used.

So when I'm deriving specifications, I always pay special attention to separating out the real needs and expectations from the checklist stuff. If you can do that well, then you can minimize the resources invested in the latter.

But for whatever reason, those items are still on their list, and we can't just omit them.

The trick is identifying which they are, and finding the minimum specification that allows it to be checked off the list.

<comment><USER3> I try to split up the work into milestones, with the most immediate, relevant ones first. The last milestone on my list contains all the stuff I never intend to implement. The boss/customer's happy it's on the list, but I know it'll get knocked off when the reality of the schedule sets in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe the axiom is that most users only use 20% of the features of any given piece of software. The counter-axiom is that it's a different 20% for each user. I don't believe there's any actively managed software out there with features not used by a single user.

<comment><USER5> "I don't believe there's any actively managed software out there with features not used by a single user."

I've seen it first hand. I've worked on a commodities app that had a way of turning deals into general patterns, which could be saved and used to quickly instantiate new deals following the same pattern. It was a sophisticated and highly capable subsystem. What do the users do instead? Copy-Paste-Edit! And that's just one example. That app has literally dozens of non-trivial features that have not been used in over a _decade_ of production use. On more than one occasion, we had discussions like: "We'll have to code up a data migration for that change, oh wait, that table is _empty_!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like this guy's approach. Simply noting that a feature is rarely used is not enough information.

For example, code for error handling & recovery is typically rarely used. For some classes of products, most users will _never_ need such code. But if you ship without it, then you're shipping a broken product. Not good.

Another example is features used only by high-end users. Something like MS- Word (also the PDF format) has some features that are really only used by high-end publishers (in the traditional sense). Microsoft (Adobe) could have left these features out of the low-end products. But that would mean multiple versions of Word, possibly incompatible formats, etc., which I think we can agree would be a bad strategy. Indeed, the success of Word (& PDFs) is, in part, due to the fact that all users can share the same documents.

That said, there _are_ some good points here. Throwing in every feature you can think of is far too common, and results in bloated messes. Indeed, Word seems to have been designed with this philosophy. I am not claiming that the feature bloat of Word is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is when you've already sold to your entire market (or close 'nuff). How do you keep getting revenue? Upgrades.

When everyone's happy, and you don't want to rock the boat with improving existing functionality (or if you don't know how), you have to add new features.

</comment><comment><USER7> \-- We know that something like 30% to 40% (some experts say 45%) of the features in a software system are typically never used, while another 20% are rarely used. That means over half the code written for a product seldom, if ever, actually executes. --

I agree, but sometimes we don't use a feature only once or twice but using it is necessary. + if 90% of your users uses only 40% of your software features, why not creating several versions (Permuim, starter...)

Another point, the most our software has features, the better repetution it would get

<comment><USER8> Yes, sometimes one specific feature can make or break a product - even if it is seldom used by a minority of it's users. For example some use cases for Acrobat / PDF rely on scripting ability (JS), but the vast majority of PDFs come without embedded scripts.

<comment><USER7> Thanks I didn't know that PDF have JS abilities!</comment></comment></comment>


10 Actionable Items to Improve Developer Skills - <AUTHOR> http://koreyhinton.com/blog/dev/10-actionable-items-to-improve-developer-skills.html

<comment><USER2> 10 actionable generalities that will improve your project.

Something new and more specific, please?</comment>


Startup pitches at GeekNRolla 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zedscore.com/2011/04/geeknrolla-2011.html

<comment><USER2> Nice roundup, good event. The Qwerly talk was not just hilarious, was really really interesting to hear their true rollercoaster ride, and see the way the changed their product over time and made it into a winner without VC (well, I'm assuming without given that they originally asked for some and got none).</comment>


Tesla Model X Catches Fire After Crashing on U.S. Hwy. 101 in Mountain View - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Sig-Alert-Issued-After-Accident-Causes-Car-Fire-on-Hwy-101-477762763.html?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_BAYBrand <comment><USER2> Looking at the Tesla (the whole front of the car seems missing in the photo), it seems amazing the driver is still alive. I can't even imagine how the tesla crashed into the meridian to cause this kind of damage...

<comment><USER3> It hit the "gore point" — basically direct front end colission with a narrow slice of concrete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like solid state batteries can't come soon enough. That said, on average Teslas and probably other EVs, too, are still much safer than ICE cars due to the engine not being in the front.</comment>


Why Python rocks for research - <AUTHOR> http://www.stat.washington.edu/~hoytak/blog/whypython.html

<comment><USER2> Python is awfully close to being a superior (and free) replacement for Matlab, but there are a few annoyances that keep preventing me from switching forever. Unfortunately, these are mostly not bugs but bad design that is believed to be correct by the core developers, so it is unlikely to ever change:

\- Matrices are a pain. The r_[] and c_[] operators could be a reasonable replacement for Matlab's elegant matrix construction syntax, but they do not work as expected (as smart hstack and vstack), instead doing something completely different and inconsistent for vectors and matrices.

\- Tensors are a bigger pain. Matlab has a very well-defined semantics for operations like permute and reshape; in NumPy these operations sometimes create just a view, at other times they reshuffle the memory contents. I know the idea was to "protect" the user from having to know the memory layout of data, but this idea is bad.

\- Ipython is great in every way except when it comes to reloading parts of your program. After any tiny change to your code, the only safe thing to do is to quit ipython and start it again. All the other options (run, reset, reload...) make some secret and wrong assumptions on what you want to reload. In contrast, this works flawlessly in Matlab.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the end, it's all about the ecosystem. Perl wins for bioinformatics because there are boatloads of scientists already using it, with all the neat libraries and resources that brings. Equally, Python wins for, say, prototyping in robotics because of libraries, support and so on.

There's nothing intrinsically science-apt about Python/Perl, but Ruby and friends can't compete when it comes to the programming environment; that's what counts.

<comment><USER4> As a language I prefer Ruby but the Python ecosystem for this kind of thing is definitely a huge advantage. You can actually do quite a bit with Ruby + GSL but it's still not really competitive.

<comment><USER3> Yep, same with me. I do prefer Ruby, but it's just not feasible at the moment. Languages that get behind in a certain area enter a terribly vicious circle: There's no scientific community backing Ruby, so why would I develop something that'd make Ruby more competitive?

<comment><USER5> I'm in the same boat and it seems like several others as well. I'm fine moving to Python for the moment, but I wonder how the Ruby community will ever know if there's enough of a demand for scientific tools to merit their development?

<comment><USER6> I prefer Ruby generally, but honestly Ruby and Python are sufficiently similar that I'd rather smart programmers put their time to good use doing something other than reimplementing Python's science libs.

I think that making some tools available in a totally different language (maybe something functional) would be much more useful, because it would allow for a very different approach to the problem if needed.

In a perfect world, we could also have the option of using light wrappers around OpenCL matrix libraries, and push the linear algebra to GPUs that eat matrices for breakfast.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. There's only so much skilled labor available for this kind of thing.

This is exactly why I'm focusing on Python lately. Ruby is a great language but I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a web guy forever. I've already done over 10 years of web dev and I'd like to try out a couple of new problem domains before I kick the bucket.

<comment><USER5> I'll have to agree as well. The only problem for me is: if not on the web, how are we going to make GUIs that aren't severely limited to our platform? Wasn't web design supposed to solve the "platform question"?

<comment><USER7> There are a number of cross-platform GUI toolkits. For instance, QT is pretty nice wherever you put it, and KDE's been putting a lot of work into making their libraries and such work on Windows.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a huge fan of Qt simply because I can't get it to feel natural on Gnome, my desktop of choice. I've looked into Gtk+, but I'm not so sure I want to commit to it yet.

Are there plans to make Qt feel more natural on Gnome and OS X?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article makes some fairly convincing arguments that Python is a more flexible tool than Matlab or Perl, but I can't help but come away with the sense that the author hasn't tried many other languages.

There are an awful lot of languages that provide iterators, a powerful set of data structures, extensive libraries and facilities for structuring and maintaining large codebases. .Net languages (maybe F# would be good for this?), Java or most of the emerging languages for the JVM stack, Ruby (which is generally considered to be "different but equivalent" to Python), and so forth.

<comment><USER9> I only scanned the article very briefly, but my impression is that the important comparison is vs. Matlab. The other players aren't really in the author's game. It's a question of the use case and the community and the library support.

In theory, .Net could displace Matlab or Python as the canonical platform for scientific researchers. And in theory Python could displace PHP as the canonical platform for classic CRUD web apps. In practice neither is likely to happen, no matter how much we might or might not wish it to.

<comment><USER10> I've been a Matlab user for 10 yrs, recently switched to python because of the increased flexibility. never going back to Matlab ever again. Python math and science libs can be a little rough around the edges, but the flexibility more than makes up for it for me.

<comment><USER11> I'm a Matlab user myself, but I try to use Ruby whenever possible if for nothing else but to just get away from all the god damned matrices. I didn't realize Python had similar capabilities, I look forward to trying it out. But does Python have "Index exceeds matrix dimensions." errors? I just can't imagine life without seeing a few of those every day. That said, the workspace is really handy, is there some equivalent GUI in Python?

<comment><USER12> Check out EPD: <http://www.enthought.com/products/>, particularly the ETS framework. It contains almost all the popular scientific/numeric libraries in python and is free for academic use (and much of it is open-source).

(disclaimer - i work for Enthought).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And the corollary: Why do researchers never respect the PEP8 when they write python code?

Yes I am a bit overreacting since the blog post is very well written and I actually agree 100% with the content. But please people: respect the PEP8 [1]. It makes your readers feel at home while reading your code. It is very important if you want to get new contributors to your project. See [2] for instance.

[1] <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/> [2] [http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/whats-the-use-of-sharing- cod...](http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/whats-the-use-of-sharing-code-nobody- can-read/)

<comment><USER14> From PEP 8:

> The preferred place to break around a binary operator is _after_ the > operator, not before it.

I'd be interested in hearing the justification for this rule. I think that leading a continuation line with the binary operator makes it super-clear that it is a continuation line. What is the benefit of the preferred style? Compare:

      if (the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10
          and this_overly_descriptive_boolean):
          do_stuff()

      if (the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10 and
          this_overly_descriptive_boolean):
          do_stuff()

To me, the first one is quite clearly a continuation line (no statement can start with "and"). The second requires closer inspection.

<comment><USER15> I would write:

      if the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10 \
      and this_overly_descriptive_boolean:
          do_stuff()

Indenting the second line of the if statement would, at first glance, indicate that it's part of the block instead. Then again, it depends. If it was the header of a def statement, I would follow the PEP, e.g.

      def __init__(self, width, height,
                         color='black', emphasis=None, highlight=0):

On a side note, I once did the "Art & Logic challenge" [<http://www.artlogic.com/>] and they use guidelines that apply to several languages, e.g. you would use the same formatting style for C++ and for Python, if at all possible. Much of it flies in the face of PEP 8.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've wasted most of my professional life tweaking various unix software to make it work. However, the typical scientific python setup proved to be too frustrating to install on OSX. The recommended solution is to just buy the Enthought distro. If I'm paying for software anyway, why is Enthought better than Matlab?

<comment><USER10> disclaimer I work for enthought

I did my whole phd in matlab.

EPD is much cheaper and is free for academics

even if it weren't free, I would use it anyways.

but it really isn't why is EPD better than matlab, it's why python is better than matlab. matlab is a domain specific application with a domain specific language. It doesn't work well with things outside of its domain.

python is a general purpose language (And as such, has good general purpose constructs) but it happens to have excellent scientific and mathematical libraries. This is useful when you actually have to apply your research and build an application.

numpy is also better for large data, because slicing arrays does not create copies of them (you can make it do so if you want to, but it doesn't by default) in matlab, slicing large arrays can cause you to run out of memory.

Cython makes it really easy to start out with python, and then optimize your code down into C.

with python you can run your calculations over a massive compute grid. Use messaging libraries like PyZMQ to distribute your data and result, and build real time GUIs to consume the final results.

\- a matlab cluster is quite expensive

\- chacko - another enthought python library which is free and open source is great for real time datavisualization, matlab does not have anything equivalent.

\- python has a large number of messaging libraries, with matlab I think you're stuck with MPI.

Matlab always made me feel limited. I would work on a problem, and then reach a point where Matlab could not do what I needed to do.

That rarely happens to me with python.

<comment><USER16> Thank you, that is the kind of response I was looking for. I will take a look at Enthought.

<comment><USER10> you WILL get frustrated by some things - some of the matrix concatenation operations are less convenient, some of the libraries are less polished, it's been worth it for me. msg me if you need help.

use IPython, not just python shell for interactivity.

also checkout 3d datavisualization with mayavi, that stuff is really awesome.

<comment><USER17> Is there a _mayavi_ tutorial somewhere? It looks pretty interesting, but I could never figure it out.

<comment><USER10> <http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2010/tutorials.html>

there was a mayavi tutorial, and the files are available at the link

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I learned Python on the fly specifically for research. I used Django to build out an enterprise reporting/analytics system to support a customer experience (survey) program for the cost of time (huzzah open source). We had bids on this project upwards of 80k. We generate ~100k surveys / month and are able to get targeted, meaningful, automated insights directly to front-line management. Python FTW.

<comment><USER19> Python + Django FTW.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Python rocks, but Python + R + bash rocks way harder for research

<comment><USER20> R is definitely powerful and a good part of any scientific data analysis toolkit.

I use python, ipython, matplotlib, numpy and R. I call my R scripts directly from python using rpy.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. I use Python for heavy shell-scripting and text-processing (though R surprisingly does have respectable facilities for all but the most overwhelming of these tasks) and R for the rest of the analysis. I've thought about switching to NumPy/SciPy as it's part of Python to integrate everything, but R's data frame, factors, and reshape, plyr, and lattice packages makes you think very differently about how to approach the data - and hard to go back to lower-level manipulation of arrays; not to mention all the stats/graphics packages which are very easy to install and apply. And documentation of its functions is superb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Python is good, you could also consider Maxima.

A single example:

f(x):= x^2+3 _x+7;

Maxima provides: Symbolic computation, blas and laplack integration for numeric algebra, 500 pages manual in several languages, a complete library for statistics, differential equation, calculus, series. Graphics with matplotllib. Also maxima language is not much complicate that python:

for i in range(10):print i_i versus for i:0 thru 9 do print i _i;

[i_ _2 for i in range(10)] versus makelist(i_ *2,i,0,9)

But Matlab libraries are greater than python and maxima.

<comment><USER23> Maxima rocks for symbolic math. I prefer it to Mathematica, which is saying a lot. In contrast, octave always feels like "almost-Matlab" and I still prefer the latter.

Also see wxMaxima, which will (among many other things) produce LaTeX for you.

<comment><USER24> If you haven't already, you might also want to check out Sage (<http://www.sagemath.org/>) It uses python to "glue" together other free math tools (e.g. Maxima) into a unified system with a nice interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not to switch from Matlab to Python, all stemming from my experience when I decided to try to switch from Matlab to Python/C

\- installing all these packages on (any) system is painful. Different versions don't play together or don't work (yet) on some platform and or architecture. This stems from my own experience of getting a version of python to work with numpy, scipy, matplotlib, opencv and PIL on a windows, mac, and linux machine. No 100 percent success yet on any platform.

\- central and consistent documentation. Even for very simple cases, I got a bit of a headache. I encounter a python print statement for the first time that obviously differs somewhat from its c printf cousin. I google "python print syntax" only to find that the first xx hits, including the official documentation, do not cover the full specification of this statement. I fear the moment I might actually need detailed information on something less trivial.

\- Numerical integration is more accurate in Matlab.

\- Visualization capabilities of matlab are more powerful. But who knows, perhaps there is yet another package floating around :-)

\- Matlab may not have advanced data-structures, but it is a rapid prototyping tool, for testing ideas. If I need to write an actual application, I will use a tool and language geared for that task.

<comment><USER10> install is painful - enthought python distribution does make it pretty painless, but its not free for non-academics

agreed on documentation

actually I think python's visualization capabilities are more powerful, have you looked at mlab? the 3d capabilities there are insane

I use python because I can do rapid prototyping, and turn it into a full application with the same code base.

did you ultimately go back to matlab?

<comment><USER25> Well, I only got it all the work ( on OS X ) like an hour or two ago, and am currently happily learning&exploring.

I wanted to venture beyond Matlab because for what I am currently doing the environment and language is to limited, yet I do not wish to prototype in C++. Python together with some libraries seemed to be a deal in heaven. I also thought it would function as a better stepping stone towards an actual application.

<comment><USER26> Installation of the PIL pre-built packages on OSX is notoriously difficult, since it relies on system c libraries to do some processing.

Moving your development to a linux machine will clear up all of those issues.

Also 'easy_install' should get you all of the packages you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Often languages are chosen based on already existing tools used in a specific research project. That's why it's good to be able to quickly pick up new languages. For example scripting languages integrated in some frameworks, like Scheme in the Festival speech synthesis system. In the end, this often results in projects involving things like Python, Scheme, bash, R and a bit of tcl ;-).

</comment><comment><USER28> _> In MatLab everything is flat – all functions are declared in the global namespace. However, this discourages code reusability by making the programmer do extra work keeping disparate program components separate. In other words, without a hierarchical structure to the program, it's difficult to extract and reuse specific functionality. _

I completely disagree. Reusable Matlab code has been my holy grail for the last couple of years. The key is to break out specific functionality as subfunctions. When these are abstracted and generally useful elsewhere, then they become new tools for the toolbox. The subfunctions also make great starting points for repurposing code. This layout results in _much less_ work.

<comment><USER29> It's absolutely true that using more functions makes your code more maintainable. It's also absolutely true that nearly every other language on the planet does this better than Matlab.

<comment><USER30> Yes; in particular, Matlab's restriction of ONE outside-callable function per file is a huge pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For those interested in scientific frameworks and existing packages: Scientific track of EuroSciPy 2010 [1]. Everything from seismology to visual programming.

<http://www.euroscipy.org/track/870>

</comment><comment><USER31> One more powerful combo is R+Java+C. UI, integration and massive data processing in Java, R for prototyping, plotting and model fitting, and C if you have numerical simulations.</comment>


Do hungry judges give harsher sentences?   - <AUTHOR> http://www.bakadesuyo.com/do-hungry-judges-give-harsher-sentences

<comment><USER2> Blogspam of: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/11/justice- is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of- judges/) which is interesting.

The work itself is behind a paywall, but you can read some of the supporting material at [http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/03/30/1018033108.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/03/30/1018033108.DCSupplemental/pnas.201018033SI.pdf) to get an idea.

I found the giant line graph problematic because of the hand waving they did to normalize when the breaks occurred during the day. It also disturbs me to see such large, high frequency variation in a line that is averaging a large number of events without explanation.</comment>


DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Network - <AUTHOR> http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/ <comment><USER2> I think labelling this as "DSLR quality images" is highly misleading. It's another interesting image enhancement technique, this time using DCNs to further predict what information isn't present or is incorrect.

However as the article says camera phones are fundamentally limited by the size of the lens and sensors, so they can never gather the same amount of information that a larger DSLR camera can. They simply can't gather the same detail and although we can get better at being able to predict detail in some cases it surely can't ever be same as having that information in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Ok, we've replaced 'DSLR' in the title above.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not completely sure i agree with this decision. You have editorialized the author's own paper title that went to a peer reviewed conference.

One may disagree with the results. But your change will not match for a straight up search for the paper title, which I think is a disservice.

<comment><USER3> Peer-reviewed paper titles are not immune to clickbait, alas. But ok, we'll put that bit back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the sample images, all I can see is that the "DSLR"-ized images look brighter and have subtly more pleasing colors. But is that all to it? Am I missing the big picture?

<comment><USER5> I agree. It looks like something you could do quickly in Lightroom. Raise the shadows, lower the highlights, set white balance. Maybe you could use the same algorithm for DSLR RAW pictures and then get real DSLR quality?

<comment><USER6> I believe the whole point of this method is it automatically chooses /how far/ to move those sliders to get closest to the result you'd expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The images were captured in automatic mode, we used default settings for all > cameras throughout the whole collection procedure.

I guess while that technically makes the images 'dslr quality', that's not how dslr cameras are generally used. Shooting in auto and doing no post processing, will never yield the results you see with even amateur dslr photography.

<comment><USER8> Consider a future where you don't have to configure your camera _before_ shooting, and instead do all the configuration _after_

<comment><USER9> For people who view camera settings as an inconvenience, then yes that sounds like an attractive thing. When using a camera as a tool, a photographer sometimes wants complete control over the capturing process. Some things you don't get to change later no matter what algorithms are involved, such as the balance between noise and exposure time.

<comment><USER10> If the camera had hardware light metre, then recorded the ambient light level as well, then wouldn't it be more powerful to be able to make full exposure adjustments after the fact?

<comment><USER11> No because the act of taking the photo freezes the exposure settings due to how photos work.

I've played a bit with astronomical photography and the amount of work to getting the signal in the picture good enough without introducing noise is quite high. (Going as far as taking pictures with the lens on the telescope to capture the natural sensor noise, which is usually good for about a few hours of use)

However, you don't get second tries on a computer. If your signal is too weak or the noise is too strong, the picture is ruined, no amount of editing will fix that.

The only solution I'd see for that is to take multiple images at once with different sensors, each using a different exposure. But that still doesn't provide a sliding scale, only a stair function of "is this close enough"?

The better solution is to take a proper light meter and properly setup the camera in the first place.

<comment><USER12> Or you can shot a several shots with different exposure simultaneously (see e. g. Light L16). It may not work for an astronomy but should work in many other cases.

<comment><USER11> That's not really a solution, especially because that requires a lens per exposure setting (you can't expose a sensor with different settings at the same time, that's basic physics). So any number of exposure levels over 2 is going to be a huge problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting part of the paper is this

 _DPED: DSLR Photo Enhancement Dataset

To tackle the general photo enhancement problem by mapping low-quality phone photos into photos captured by a professional DSLR camera, we introduce a large-scale DPED dataset that consists of photos taken synchronously in the wild by three smartphones and one DSLR camera. The devices used to collect the data are iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry Passport, Sony Xperia Z and Canon 70D DSLR. To ensure that all devices were capturing photos simultaneously, they were mounted on a tripod and activated remotely by a wireless control system_

It opens up the space for others to experiment. Who knows maybe an app for cheap smartphones that takes Pixel quality pics.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am curious what is the inference cost of doing this? How much memory and CPU performance does it take to run the trained network on each image captured by a camera. Are we talking about milliseconds and can it be run on a phone?

</comment><comment><USER14> There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this space. It reminds me of this hardware project :

[https://witharsenal.com/features](https://witharsenal.com/features)

Basically a smart remote for your DSLR camera that provides a better, AI-based auto mode than the native auto mode.

(I have no link with them, but did pre-order it on Kickstarter)

</comment><comment><USER15> The example input images are all with bad white balance or underexposed. Easy to tweak, by hand and automatically.

</comment><comment><USER16> That would be great if implemented in hardware on phones. Are there already some contacts with manufacturers?

<comment><USER17> Like those fax machine compression algorithms that end up swapping digits? Thank you but no thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> browser zooming doesn't work on the site (seems like it's caused by using viewport-relative units in css for the font size)

</comment><comment><USER19> so they created something like snapseed?

</comment><comment><USER20> iphone 3gs, really?

<comment><USER21> It's a good baseline. Almost any phone you pick up will do equivalent or better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Basically it is the same as clicking the auto buttons in Lightroom or any photo software.

Raised the exposure when needed, fixed white balance, etc...photoshop has been doing this since like 1990.

<comment><USER6> Or perhaps this can be used as a dataset to improve the auto buttons in such software.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are free phone call apps getting their access? - <AUTHOR> Surely they're not paying twilio or another similar company $0.01 per minute to allow you to make and receive phone calls... nor are they paying $1/month for a phone number that they give away for free.
How are apps like fongo and magicjack providing free phone numbers and free phone calling?
I know they are ad supported, but I highly doubt they're making over $1/user/month with those advertisements.
Or are they?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> They call it magic jack for a reason</comment>


Ten Myths of Apple's iPad: 3. It's ad-evil - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/01/ten-myths-of-apples-ipad-3-its-ad-evil/

<comment><USER2> Childish self-conscious backlash. If you take a look at the whole series, there is very little proper argument and a lot of fanboyism.

Examples: \- Flash is used for ads (which are spyware), therefore it's a good thing it wasn't included. \- Obviously nothing could satisfy Apple's competitors' pundits, who pounced on the product as soon as it was released, which is the reason for the common dissent of the public.</comment>


Ask HN: - <AUTHOR>

 is there anyway one can get the apps on android to work on windows mango?
The phone is good but the windows market place sucks <comment><USER2> No. You could probably do it the other way around (i.e. run WP7 apps on Android), perhaps, but apps for Windows Phone are heavily locked down and the APIs are nowhere near as powerful, so there'll be things you just can't do. The only solutions are to switch phone OS, wait for apps to be ported or write your own :-)

By the way, you might want to change your title so that people know what this question is about.</comment>


Emotionally intelligent dashboard signage? - <AUTHOR> http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/02/emotionally-intelligent-dashboard-signage

<comment><USER2> Over-focusing on one metric in a way that overplays its significance runs the risk of a worse result overall. Driving safely is a function of many parameters, only one of which is driving a safe speed.

In many places it's now specifically illegal to speak on cellphone while driving. But eating a cheeseburger isn't. I'm afraid that the single-factor approach to road safety ends up giving people a mental check-list to pay attention to, rather than paying attention to potential dangerous situations.</comment>


Introduction to Python Generators - <AUTHOR> https://realpython.com/blog/python/introduction-to-python-generators/ <comment><USER2> Also of note is David Beazley's "Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers":

www.dabeaz.com/generators/</comment>


Why Women Aren't Buying Smartwatches - <AUTHOR> http://www.racked.com/2016/1/12/10750446/smartwatches-women-apple-huawei-jawbone <comment><USER2> A: They're too big. Because physiology and fashion.

Women have smaller wrists on average. Women's watch fashion demands smaller watches. Men's watch fashion often includes huge or very large watches. Technology limits the minimum size of the technology, therefore it better aligns with men's fashion and their (on average) bigger wrists.... for now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because i don't want something on my wrist. Sell me a pendant or a pocketwatch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could it be the same reason I don't have one? They're bad?

Once I can replace my phone with a "watch" or some form of wrist device, then I'll be onboard.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only smartwatch I ever see women with is a white Apple sport watch</comment>


Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/02/26/exploring-logo-designs-with-mathematica/ <comment><USER2> I used <http://www.contextfreeart.org/> tool to design background pattern for one site. I'm a programmer and I always doubt when I have to design. Using generative art made me feel more reasonable about it.</comment>


At The Receiving End Of Bad UI - <AUTHOR> http://geon.github.com/Personal/2012/06/22/at-the-receiving-end-of-bad-ui/

<comment><USER2> To be fair, repeat once means repeat once. That's exactly what it says and so its what the setting does. It might help if they added a note in smaller text like they do for other settings.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does. But is much less natural than "alert twice" which would mean the same thing.

<comment><USER2> I think the problem is that they moved that setting. It used to be in the Sounds section where you would turn the alert on and off all together and then repeating was in a different context.</comment></comment></comment>