Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/23/why-are-working-class-kids-less-likely-to-get-elite-jobs-they-study-too-hard-at-college/ <comment><USER2> Working class kids also benefit more from studying than high-SES kids, so as life advice this is kind of dubious. If working class kids don't study then they're still not going to get into college based on their grades/SATs/writing, whereas for wealthy kids they're already going to be fine even if they don't do a ton of work.

Also, given that the school system in part exists to screen out working class kids from elite jobs, if these kids actually started getting great grades and captaining the crew team or whatever then colleges and companies would just start selecting for other things.

<comment><USER3> This story was more revealing to me on another aspect. Why don't working class kids grow quickly in a fast growing company than a elite class kid? even though the working class kid probably knows more from a depth perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Why are working class kids unlikely to get elite jobs?"

Because they don't have rich dads who'll get their rich friends to give them the jobs ..

<comment><USER5> That's really all it is. Me and a couple others were the only "outside" students to get internships at a big bank. Rest of the interns had parents working at the firm. They all went on cruises and to their multi million dollar cottages every weekend. It was like some weird sick incestuous extended corporate family.

<comment><USER6> There is nothing weird about it, it's incentives: parents are always going to be more interested in their specific children than in the more generalized problem of maximizing the value of the company they work for. Particularly in the world of high-end banking, which is extremely competitive to get into but, at the end of the day, not particularly challenging for a reasonably smart person, we should expect rampant nepotism.

And so we find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Look, this is the Washington Post reporting this story, not the San Jose Mercury or the Boston Globe. It's written by, for, and about the self-styled power 1%.

The only reason it has anything to do with the rest of us is that the guys on the college beer-drinking team, including the one who barfed in the laundry machine I was using in the cellar of the college dorm, went on to get one of those so-called power jobs. In case there's any misunderstanding, this was Yale.

I like my job. Software's been good to me. I just washed those clothes again. They can schmooze each other all they want; it keeps them busy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think these kinds of articles miss the point. Colleges and employers choose admission and hiring criteria specifically to favor the upper class. This isn't out of malice, and for the most part I think it is unintentional. The people at the top simple favor other people who are like them --- just as all of us do.

If lower class kids started excelling at the sort of social activities and extracurricular activities which help one get ahead, the criteria will wind up changing. Again, not out of malice or spite. Its simply a function of human nature to form groups and favor those from your group.

<comment><USER9> Harvard is quite public with the fact that they reserve 30% year for "legacies". They don't even bother with the veneer of meritocracy. Just keeping the unwashed peasants away, you know

The Economist has had a couple of articles on how social mobility in the US is waay lower than it used to be and is now lower than in many European countries...

<comment><USER10> If they wanted the peasants away, they wouldn't charge zero tuition for peasants and keep 70% of the seats open. The legacies pay tuition for the peasants.

<comment><USER9> Affluent families also pay full tuition everywhere else, without getting special preferences.

Long story short - most colleges are about quotas these days, not pure meritocracies. But at least there is an egalitarian thought behind minority/diversity quotas.

There is nothing egalitarian about "legacies".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chasing after elite jobs seem like something of mug's game to someone who wasn't born into them. Entrance into the upper echelons of American society isn't impossible, but the odds are sure as hell stacked against you.

It's illustrative to consider an example: working and middle class Asians. It's almost a truism at this point that, while they're good at getting good educations and jobs, they almost inevitably end up hitting a wall ("the bamboo ceiling"). And it's almost as if it's by design. Society told Asian kids that they have to study and get good grades to get ahead, so they did. Too well! So the rules changed, and then they had to have extracurriculars. And they did that too! Piano, Academic Decathlon, tutoring, tennis, violin... they aimed for what were seemingly all the good extracurriculars and excelled in them. But then certain gate keepers were like, "whoah, way too many Asians are getting in. Gotta change the rules again!" And so that kid with a perfect GPA, great test scores, even some research experience, and on top of that does pretty well in both cross country and piano (albeit not nationally ranked) gets kicked to the curb because he's too "cookie cutter." The new criteria are "extracurriculars, but make sure to do something that makes you stand out and be super unique!"

So now that's the new publicly-stated resume to optimize for. The right activity to do, as it turns out, is "do whatever only the already-elite have the resources to do." Elite gatekeepers have a set of signifiers for entrance into the upper class for one and one reason only: to keep out riff-raff like you. Any entry criteria that would change the cultural and literal complexion of the upper class too much is, ipso facto, a bad criteria for entry.

And consider the best case scenario: you do get in. But even then, you're still an outsider. Hell, you didn't even go to Andover or Exeter! And you didn't even travel internationally for the first time until you went to college? Back to the fields with you, peasant!

For most people, aiming for professional, middle-class jobs seems the most realistic goal to aim for. Ain't a bad lifestyle at all, if you can accept it's silly to try to win a game that's designed to make you lose.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but test scores are not necessarily an objective measure of how good an employee is going to be, unless their job is going to be to take tests. They're a proxy.

Suppose student A has talent 100, and student B has talent 90. Student A puts in a normal level of effort, and scores 100. Student B dedicates all of his time to studying, goes to cram school, etc., and also scores 100. Now they look the same, but A's higher talent of 100 is still going to give them an edge on the job. If you're trying to figure out the candidate's talent, what do you do? You have to look beyond test scores.

Basically, at some point putting too much effort into it is a way of gaming the system, since you're optimizing a proxy instead of what people are really looking for; and changing or expanding the proxy actually makes selection more accurate.

<comment><USER13> I'm getting downvoted, so let me explain. The test can not distinguish between him and student B and anyone above student Bs level. If you raised the ceiling this would solve the problem.

Though you should note, SAT prep has a negligible effect on scores. Intelligence, sadly, is mostly the result of genetics and non-shared environment, with an emphases on genetics. Our inability to admit this would be hilarious if its results weren't so tragic.

Raising the ceiling would also help with the Ivy-league's insane penchant for passing on some of the most able students. Scott Aaronson had perfect SAT scores at 15 - this was back when the SAT was much harder. In his words:

I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I've learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every "top" college in the United States, and then, ten years later, getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager [...] I was a narrow, linear, A-to-B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence: the exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way.

With a higher ceiling, sufficiently high scores are impressive enough on their own. I don't care about those institutions, it's Princeton and Harvard's loss. And Cornell's gain! But it's an insane way to do admissions and it has a real cost on kids. I have nightmares about promising programmers and mathematicians being forced to practice piano instead of doing what they love.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If this is about the sort of elite jobs I'm thinking of, isn't the point to tell people what they want to hear so they have an excuse to do what they already wanted to do?

That would mean they have to be people worth listening to, and that this has to be for reasons other than scientific competence.

So I'm thinking that having the "right" social background probably would be an important factor in job performance (as would being highly paid). But only if it's not made explicit, since political incorrectness is also important for image.

.

Also, focusing on the very few "best" jobs seems a bit silly. Why not look at what's in the top quarter or third, and how to make those more accessible?

</comment><comment><USER15> The same general principle applies to organizations.

For example, employees who spend most of their time doing a good job will by definition have less free time to promote themselves politically within the company. If management is not of sufficient quality to resist it, the perverse endgame for this dynamic is for the hardest working individuals to be mismanaged by their less knowledgeable peers, who spent more time working the system (and were thereby promoted).

<comment><USER16> This is true if you assume that people spend 100% of their waking time working.

But it's possible for someone to spend the working day self promoting and their nights working. This kills the social life

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I realize publicizing winners keeps casinos in business, but how do B. Clinton and B. Obama fit with this, in contrast to the Bushes? They studied hard AND played the social game. But I guess President isn't really an elite job, since they're beholden to the real elites who didn't have to study for inherited power and influence. I'm not trying to make the case the game isn't rigged, only that it can be hacked.

<comment><USER10> The President is "elite" by any reasonable definition . amd Barack Obama went to Harvard Law, which is OPs textbook example of an elite position.

The key is that Obama and Clinton were selfmade, while Jeb Bush plowhorsed through life doing what he was told and riding the Bush family name train. (GWB actually worked a bit harder -- at politics -- to be the leading Bush of his generation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We plebs are fully aware that the odds are stacked against us. I don't expect it to change soon, if ever. And if anything, it just makes us harder than our marshmallow-like upper-class counterparts.

Yeah, I want to be successful and make "fuck you" money; but that's not the only reason I study hard.

Pleb power.

<comment><USER19> Rich kids have to constantly compete with each other for status, this is very much like water polo. It's pretty nice and eye pleasing above the surface, but the stuff underwater, that's not so nice. Yet that's something you have to be adept at too to win.

So, in less metaphorical terms, rich kids learn soft power (social) skills. They are little politicians, backstabbing scummy princesses. This comes very hand for them later in life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think a big part of it is that the expectation is that college/university is training you for your career. It's not. University especially, is learning for learning's sake. Why do companies care about a degree then? They want you to show you can learn.

In the same way, extra-curricular activities show that you care, and that you're motivated. Same with dressing well, and learning how to interact with people. If all you have are technical skills, you're this centuries' version of a factory worker. You can be a cog in the wheel (maybe even a moderately well paid one), but nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if there's a market for a Pygmalion- type service to help lower middle class kids learn the kinds of values and behaviours that will let them fit in a bit better with those higher on the food chain.

<comment><USER22> Of course there is. But the goalposts will move as soon as it makes a difference.

<comment><USER21> You say that like upper class people want to exclude lower class people just because. Instead I think they're just happier hanging around with people they can relate to.

<comment><USER9> No, they want their kids to stay in the elite. Because elites, by definition, are small, they need to keep out everyone else. The goalposts are there just so that there is an illusion you or I can get in. And, on rare occasion we might - you'd better be super pretty/handsome so you can marry in.

Another way to become part of the elite is through entrepreneurial success. I am surprised noone brought it up, given it is HN.

Having said all that, why would one obsess about joining the elites. I am perfectly fine being (upper) middle class.

<comment><USER23> _> >Having said all that, why would one obsess about joining the elites. I am perfectly fine being (upper) middle class._

Indeed, and Notch pretty much confirms what I already believe it to be like way up at the top:

[http://recode.net/2015/08/29/minecraft-billionaire-markus- pe...](http://recode.net/2015/08/29/minecraft-billionaire-markus-persson- hates-being-a-billionaire/)

I found it really insightful, especially the part where he tried to take care of people but they all ended up hating him regardless. Makes me wonder if a lot of rich people actually did care at one point but were typecast as villians no matter what they did and they eventually just give up.

<comment><USER9> I don't remember the exact numbers, but they got something like 300K or, so, he got 2.5 billion. They didn't think it was fair as they put a lot of work into it ( perfectly legal, though, he owned it)

<comment><USER23> If I worked at a start-up that got sold and I walk away with even "just" 100K I'd be very happy. I wouldn't worry myself about the billions someone else got; especially when those people were part of the original founders carrying the core risk. Fun tech jobs, six figure salaries, flexible schedules, and at least in the San Francisco Bay Area working at a start-up is barely a risk if you're developing skills & connections for the next job.

And then they complain they didn't get more than 300K when the company sold..... people need to broaden their perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> -> _get jobs at top ranked law firms, banks and management consultancies_

The _elite jobs_ do not interest me at all. Maybe that's my working class mindset.

</comment><comment><USER25> How elite do you want to be?

I've had three bosses in the last year. I would not have traded places with any of them. Not for any amount of money.

There's not a sum of money you would pay me to be a professional ass-kisser. Oh don't get me wrong, I'd take the money. I just wouldn't kiss any ass. Then you'd fire me, and I'd consider that a fair trade.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are people gaming the system by having merit or by simulating merit? If the latter then the hiring process needs examination (best people are not getting the jobs). If the former then the question becomes - how can applicants acquire those personal skills they need in the absence of an elite college education?

<comment><USER27> "Are people gaming the system by having merit or by simulating merit?"

In every single "meritocracy" I've ever seen, more of the latter. Whatever the system is, people will game it. Most especially, people at the top will redefine the metrics to favor those they've already decided should join them. That's the way it works in these elite jobs, but we in tech are hardly any better. Big companies, big foundations, etc. all exhibit the exact same behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> also they don't have elite friends and family in high places

one cannot underestimate the power of these social connections

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't study hard? So, that's how George Bush got his elite job.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Bush's seemingly low culture is very much an act, one he learned in 1978 after getting stomped at a West Texas congressional election by Kent Hance, who successfully used rural populist rhetoric against the relatively yuppie Bush.

<comment><USER30> I've heard (and believe) this too but does anyone have any decent sources for it? I find the portrayal of Bush in the media interesting as while he played the fool regularly, there's no way he got to POTUS without being a smart operator.

<comment><USER31> I read a lot of reports that people who met W Bush were surprised by how intelligent/sharp he was. The media looks for gaffes for ratings, but gaffs have no bearing on intelligence. Once the "Hur hur Bush is stupid!" angle gets traction every minor mistake is seen as damning confirmation. Bush also made many terrible decisions, but that doesn't mean he was stupid. Probably just unprepared and blinded by ideology.

<comment><USER32> >I read a lot of reports that people who met W Bush were surprised by how intelligent/sharp he was.

So did I. They were virtually all from ideological supporters. I don't remember an opponent ever saying it.

> The media looks for gaffes for ratings, but gaffs have no bearing on > intelligence.

Most gaffes actually went unreported. He made them nearly constantly if he wasn't following a script. At some point his handlers cottoned on to this and after that you very rarely saw him speak in public without a script.

And yes, it demonstrates a very real lack of intelligence. Bush was not a smart man.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Controlling a 2D Robotic Arm with Deep Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.floydhub.com/robotic-arm-control-deep-reinforcement-learning/ <comment><USER2> Nice! As you go from 2D to 3D what are some unique issues you are expecting to run into?

<comment><AUTHOR> What's nice about the move is that the reinforcement learning algorithm doesn't fundamentally change. The action and state spaces will be larger since a joint has more degrees of freedom in 3D than it does in 2D so learning may take longer so we'll need to also increase the size of the replay buffer and the episode length.

I'm planning on writing a followup post on 3D so stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the author reads this we've used VPython for simple simulation visualizations such as this and it has worked great both inside and outside of Jupyter notebooks.

[http://www.glowscript.org/docs/VPythonDocs/index.html](http://www.glowscript.org/docs/VPythonDocs/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll check it out thank you for the note!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is so inspiring! Have you ever thought of implementing such a thing in ROS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to collaborate on it if you like, shouldn't be too hard

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mark (the author) is working on yuri.ai ([https://yuri.ai](https://yuri.ai)), a deep reinforcement learning platform for games. Drop him a line or sign up if you are interested!

<comment><USER6> That's an unfortunate name. (Try Googling "yuri ai" without quotes)

<comment><USER5> Haha its a Command and conquer reference I believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting to see a plot of the error compared to the analytical solution as it trains.

<comment><AUTHOR> The analytical solution wouldn't involve any training, you'd solve a system of equations where position of the finger is equal to where the goal is constrained by the equations which tell you how an arm moves.

The advantage of the RL approach is that it doesn't need to know how an arm moves but then involves some training.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I meant compare the RL version as it trains to the analytical version.

It's certainly neat that inverse kinematics can be learned from zero knowledge, but I would have a hard time trusting it to operate a real arm in an industrial setting.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'd be entirely right not to trust it as it is in an industrial setting. There's been some research around safe exploration that would add additional terms to the reward function to do things like punish flailing around and such but I haven't experimented with those techniques myself.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ambient/Instrumentals: Sample of my bros music creations on SoundCloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/10/03/ambientinstrumentals-sample-of-my-bros-music-collection-on-soundcloud/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ron has created hundreds of instrumental tracks, many of which are fun off tempo midi dedications to old favorites: pink panther, fat albert, giligan's island, star wars, etc.

If you like any and he doesn't mind I'll setup sound cloud to enable mp3 downloads.</comment>


Ditch the Kindle - <AUTHOR> https://rempel.world/posts/kindle.html <comment><USER2> So, you like a physical book...buy/check out the book. No one is stopping you. I love my Kindle for a number of reasons, but #1 is probably because I'm out of shelf space. I recently just threw out a number of books during a remodel. They were out of date tech books, so I didn't bother donating them (I didn't want to taint any-one's education with C++ pre standardization or JavaScript from 1996)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, Ray, that was short, but pointless.</comment>


How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - <AUTHOR> http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

<comment><USER2> I pay my due respects to all programmers if this article summarized what you have all went through.</comment>


Philippines drugs war: The woman who kills dealers for a living - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37172002 <comment><USER2> It's scary how easily people can be convinced to value human lives so little and throw away several hundred years of social evolution.</comment>


Learn Node.js – my free JavaScript book - <AUTHOR> https://learnnodejs.dev <comment><USER2> Awesome. Pretty cool you're giving this away for free - thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you =)</comment></comment>


Hooray: Experimental JavaScript micro-library for treating objects as arrays - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bluzi/hooray <comment><AUTHOR> Horray! is an experimental micro-library that lets you treat objects as if they were arrays. Note that Horray! extends Object, which considers a bad practice, and therefore it is experimental and not recommended to be used in production.

</comment><comment><USER2> Don't really see the point of this</comment>


Stream Control Transmission Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol <comment><USER2> SCTP was implemented in Java7 and I considered using it then to use one connection, get multiple streams without head-of-line blocking. Never did get real opportunity to use it. SCTP wasn't widely adopted.

Now we have HTTP/3 (QUIC) which solves that and more.</comment>


Why we can't wage war on drugs - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/we-cant-wage-war-on-drugs/ <comment><USER2> I checked out the moment the author drew a kind of strained equivalency between illegal amphetamines (i.e., meth) and modafinil and _caffeine_.

I'm all for ending the drug war as we know it, but I don't find this kind of thing helpful. Is a very technical way, he's right: the overall picture of what drugs _are_ and what they _do_ and why some are judged "bad" and others not is a nuanced, historically literate view. And almost completely irrelevant.

Being high on meth is a completely different phenomenon than being stimulated into wakefulness. The former can cause people to do really stupid and dangerous things, not to mention the physical destruction it wreaks on the human body. The two are really incomparable in practice. IMO, policy arguments out to focus on the ill effects of the "drug war" itself, not the technical equivalencies between drugs to which most people will not assent (including me).

<comment><USER3> Dose and scale of usage are kind of important factors here...

If people are chewing coca leaves is that really very different from caffeine? No, probably not. So then...what if they are doing very small amounts of cocaine or amphetamines? Is that very different from caffeine?

I'm guessing most of the problem with drugs actually comes very simply from the abuse of drugs.

<comment><USER4> Excluding outright poisons (which none of the narcotics are), everything is ok in moderation. Trouble is, many things are too enticing to keep using moderately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is beautifully written.

"As drugs have swirled into this kaleidoscope of lifestyle and consumer choices, the identity of the 'drug user' has slipped out of view."

This perfectly sums up the situation in my opinion. Many people still, regrettably, automatically associate drugs with the "classical junkie", while forgetting that they themselves are drug users, of a kind or another.

Not mentioned in this piece, but I believe there exist escaping habits incredibly akin to drugs, with effects at least as damaging, or I suppose, as good too. One only needs to look at chronic social networkers, obsessed reality TV show watchers or compulsive buyers, to only name a few.

Any attempt at suppressing these behaviors therefore seems utterly pointless, push on one end and it'll come out of the other.

One might think that helping people realize self-worth and be critical, through (actual) education, would be the answer, but one may dream...

</comment><comment><USER6> I love this: "A cup of tea is psychoactive, but we would only call it a drug if we wished to make a point."

</comment><comment><USER7> If people want to get high, they will find a way. For me, "Jenkem" is the ultimate argument ender

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

Fermented human waste in tupper ware in the sun for a day or two. How can you fight a war against that?

Instead try some other approach to education, management, and social state that reduces the number of people who feel driven to this in the first place perhaps.

<comment><USER8> But jenkem was a hoax, as your link tells us...

<comment><USER9> Usage in US was hoax. Jenkem isn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why TensorFlow instead of Theano for deep learning? - <AUTHOR> I am an average solo user / applied researcher using Windows locally with a GTX 1070 8GB and looking for speed and documentation first, so Theano is way ahead in these departments. That said, we are also told TensorFlow is the next big thing because of scalability (?). TensorFlow works under Windows with Anaconda and Python 3.5 through Keras as well, so I have it available indeed and can try the benchmarks. Where do we stand, really? Thanks. <comment><USER2> TensorFlow automatically discovers and uses GPUs and multiple cores, and I'm assuming Google is working on better supporting multiple GPUs, which currently requires hacks/tweaking to get speedups (it's easy to 'use' them)

TensorFlow is a platform "winner" and approx 100% of all innovations will quickly be ported to TensorFlow - TBD which of the others will "keep up" with innovations as they continue to come out.

other recommendations:

\- by default, TensorFlow allocates 100% of GPU RAM for each process. You'll want to control this: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34199233/how-to- prevent-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34199233/how-to-prevent- tensorflow-from-allocating-the-totality-of-a-gpu-memory)

\- Keras. yes, this. Dramatically reduces code by 2-10x, without loss of control AFAICT.

\- cloud hardware. Pretty quickly, you'll want to scale and run multiple tests at once, and e.g. quickly backup & copy data, replicate system images, etc. I use Google Cloud Hosting and it's much easier (and cheaper) than AWS. Haven't tried Azure but heard good things. At least once, Google's internet bandwidth has saved hours waiting for data transfers.

<comment><USER3> Your comments are mostly valid, but I disagree about Keras. Although it's marvellous for patching something together quickly, if you want to branch out at all then it quickly becomes an absolute mess.

Far better, in my view, is to work with the newer Estimators API. It is almost as fool-proof as Keras, but instead of trying to be a framework as such, the Estimators/learn API essentially just wraps up some of the boilerplate that you need with raw tensorflow, and internally looks fairly similar to the code you might write yourself. Consequently, it preserves the composability of TF far better than Keras.

<comment><USER2> I'll try it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone who loves the Lisp concept of "code is data" will love TensorFlow.

Instead of coding imperatively, you write code to build a computation graph. The graph is a data structure that fully describes the computation you want to perform (e.g. training or inference of a machine learning model).

* That graph can be executed immediately, or stored for later.

* Since it's a serializable data structure, you can version it quite easily.

* You can deploy it to production without production having to depend on ANY of the code that _built_ the graph, only the runtime necessary to _execute_ it.

* You can run a compiler on it (such as XLA or TensorFlow's built in graph rewriter) to produce a more efficient version of the graph.

* In some circumstances, you can even compile the runtime away, producing a single .h/.o that you can link directly into e.g. a mobile app.

It's a beautiful and highly useful abstraction that allows TensorFlow to have both a great development and production story in one framework. Most frameworks only have a good story for either development or production.

If you are a machine learning researcher who doesn't need or care about deploying your work (i.e. mostly publishing papers), you may not want the overhead of having to deal with building a graph, and may prefer something that computes imperatively like PyTorch. If you are building products / services that use ML and developing/training your own models (as opposed to taking pre-trained models and using them), there is really no credible competitor to TensorFlow.

Disclaimer: I work at Google. I spend all day writing TensorFlow models. I'm not on the TensorFlow team nor do I speak for them or Google.

<comment><USER5> > If you are building products / services that use ML and developing/training > your own models (as opposed to taking pre-trained models and using them), > there is really no credible competitor to TensorFlow.

MXNet has amalgamation [http://mxnet.io/how_to/smart_device.html#amalgamation- making...](http://mxnet.io/how_to/smart_device.html#amalgamation-making-the- whole-system-a-single-file)

CNTK provides a managed ("evaluation") library solution to deploy your models and embed them in C, C++, C#, Python, and even an experimental Java version. [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive-toolkit/CNTK- Eval...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive-toolkit/CNTK-Evaluation- Overview)

How's that not competitive to TF? MXNet's approach is a bit unwieldy, yes, but seems easily streamlined. And CNTK's deployment method looks perfectly fine. Note I haven't checked other DL libs, but it seems unreasonable that Microsoft and Amazon have no "competitive" solution for deployment.

<comment><USER5> I also completely forgot about Caffe(2), which I recall to always have been the most easily deployable library, and possibly DL4J.

[http://www.cio.com/article/3193689/artificial- intelligence/w...](http://www.cio.com/article/3193689/artificial- intelligence/which-deep-learning-network-is-best-for-you.html)

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I built dl4j and will be highly biased.

A lot of what we see is deployment to production. We are embedded in a few apache projects now as well as other "enterprise" suites like knime.

The reason for this is simplicity and integration with the JVM as well as supplemental addons for things like ETL (see: jdbc, hdfs, kafka,spark,..) as well as what I think is the easiest way to do both multi threaded model serving and data parallel training (parallelwrapper and parallelinfernece).

We also made things tunable from the JVM (eg: You can configure cuda, native cpu variables, blas libraries,..) from the JVM.

We import python models as well.

We aren't heavily used in the research world but are used at scale (especially in china).

Something we will have coming up is also the ability to import tensorflow models (right now we have keras 1 and need to add keras 2). The only thing we are missing and finishing out now (among other projects) is autodiff. We will have a lot of the same properties as the other "computation graph" frameworks like TF,theano,pytorch.

I'd also note we have a chainer/pytorch like cmpgraph api built in to our neural net dsl already.

Next release we will also have our new parameter server using aeron. Aeron is miles ahead of GRPC([https://github.com/benalexau/rpc- bench](https://github.com/benalexau/rpc-bench)) being used in the low latency/quant world as well as being the default transport for akka now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've moved over to Tensorflow from Theano around a year ago. I'm a Software Engineer on the team and here's what I think are advantages from my POV:

1) Transition was fairly straightforward, both APIs' interfaces are more-or- less similar and share some design characteristics.

2) Having said that, TF's API is easier to use and without a doubt a lot easier to read.

3) Consistency: Deploying Theano in different environments surprised me on several occasions with different output compared to the training environment. TF is more consistent on this front (never had such issues).

4) Running multiprocessing with Theano + GPU is a disaster (due to forking) so I end up having to create process pools before initializing Theano. No such issues with TF.

5) TF provides many helpful operators (such as queues and batching ops) as well as monitoring tools (Tensorboard) and debugging tools.

6) Its development is extremely rapid, new releases every couple of months with a lot of improvements and new features every time.

In short, TF is what Theano should have been. A lot of new papers are being developed in TF as well so it helps to understand it.

<comment><USER8> > 6) Its development is extremely rapid, new releases every couple of months > with a lot of improvements and new features every time.

How stable is the api then?

I think google is a bit notorious for this (e.g. Angular vs Angular 2).

<comment><USER7> All changes are very well documented for each release [1]. The biggest changes I've seen were, as expected, upgrading from 0.x to 1.x which were mostly function attribute names changes that were made to comply with numpy's attribute names (a welcome change). They did provide tools that automatically convert 0.x code to 1.x so that was helpful.

It is not necessary to upgrade if you're satisfied with the current version and I sure won't deploy a different version to production than training. Upgrading is mainly worth it if there are performance improvements or new features/tools that make a big impact (and those are the changes we're mostly interested in and look forward to every release).

[1] [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fortunately, it's not an irrevocable decision like choosing a JavaScript framework. With deep learning you spend a lot of time considering a small amount of code.

We use several frameworks because sample code from different papers uses different frameworks. It's not that big of a deal.

</comment><comment><USER10> The main reason to bet on TensorFlow is that it seems to have by far the greatest adoption of all frameworks, as evidenced by github statistics, HN polls, and other surveys:

* [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/765212287531495424](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/765212287531495424)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391744)

* [https://github.com/aymericdamien/TopDeepLearning](https://github.com/aymericdamien/TopDeepLearning)

<comment><USER11> Selection bias could mean that you're substantively wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When it comes to scalability, Apache MXNet ([http://mxnet.io/](http://mxnet.io/)) is actually the best choice. Multi-GPU support and distributed training on multiple hosts are extremely easy to set up. It's also supported by Keras (still in beta, though).

</comment><comment><USER13> TensorFlow is better for deployment. Pytorch is better for research. Theano/Keras is simpler to use and a little faster than TensorFlow

<comment><USER14> "PyTorch is better for research" is a weird, unsubstantiated statement. The fact is that few serious researchers use PyTorch (and even those complain about it). It's mostly grad students in a handful of labs. The only researchers I know who use PyTorch have been from FaceBook, and that's because they were implicitly forced to use it (PyTorch is developed by FaceBook).

According to [https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers- institutio...](https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institution- stats-bad8d2943f5d) , 3 of the top research labs in the world are DeepMind, Google Brain (and the rest of Google), and Microsoft Research. Let's see:

* DeepMind: TensorFlow

* Google Brain: TensorFlow

* Microsoft Research: CNTK

Ok, so what about academia? The top deep learning groups in academia are:

* Montreal: Theano

* Toronto: TensorFlow

* IDSIA: TensorFlow

So, what about the greater academic research community? Maybe we could get some data about who uses what by looking at the frameworks cited by researchers in their papers. Andrej did that: it's mainly TensorFlow and Caffe. [https://medium.com/@karpathy/a-peek-at-trends-in-machine- lea...](https://medium.com/@karpathy/a-peek-at-trends-in-machine-learning- ab8a1085a106)

<comment><USER15> Few people use PyTorch largely because it is relatively new (0.1.12). It even doesn't have distributed training capabilities (coming in 0.2). Your arguments don't say anything about frameworks themselves. It is unfair!

When people say PyTorch is better for research, they mean it is more flexible, and it is easier to implement non-trivial network architectures with it, such as recursive network, which is a cumbersome task for TensorFlow. MXNet's documentation provides a good overview to these two different styles ([http://mxnet.io/architecture/program_model.html](http://mxnet.io/architecture/program_model.html)).

<comment><USER14> All of these frameworks are "relatively new". TensorFlow: 1.6 years. CNTK: 1 year. PyTorch: 0.5 year. Are they really impossible to compare?

> When people say PyTorch is better for research, they mean

That's not what "people" say. They tend to say the opposite. Maybe we can ask OP what he meant when he said it.

> it is easier to implement non-trivial network architectures with it, such as > recursive network

It is interesting that you mention recursive networks. There are only a few dozens of researchers who work with recursive networks, and they are all accounted for, we know what tools they use. They use Chainer and DyNet.

<comment><USER16> With all due respect you don't appear to know much about what you are commenting about. There is a huge community of research and applications around rnn and all other architectures. Pytorch has an extremely vivid and fast growing codebase, across all neural architectures and applications, it's remarkable actually. One reason might be because it is simple an effective, including easy debugging. Another is because research now is much focused on new possibly complex and exotic architectures, new optimizers, inner guts and behavior understanding, including theoretically. And it appears pytorch makes that easy. Don't throw it away too fast as a DL enthusiast :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An observation when taking a step back: The discussion about deep learning frameworks seems almost as complicated as the Javascript framework discussions a couple of years ago. Google and Facebook pushing their own frameworks (among other participants) also adds to the deja vu!

Why is the choice of framework such a big deal? Is it unreasonable to expect someone well-versed in one framework to be able to pick up another reasonably fast _if /when collaborating with someone proficient in the latter_ ?

<comment><USER3> To answer your first question, I actually don't think it's a big deal.

It may become important if you end up having a ton of models running in production that need to be maintained and further developed, but in general for new applications I would say that substantially less than 5% of your time would (should!) be spent actually writing any code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One other benefit with TensorFlow is that transitioning to cloud based processing on Google Cloud / Tensor Processing Units is seamless. It will turbo charge your training when compared to typical GPU performance.

Disclosure: Work for Google Cloud

<comment><USER2> Any ETA on those TPUs? Stop teasing! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Have you considered using Pytorch? Actually, many in the DL community thinks it is the next big thing as it is more intuitive and dynamic than Tensorflow.

</comment><comment><USER20> What's the best thing to build when starting TF? Like, the todo list of TF?

<comment><USER21> Tensorflow has a nice introduction tutorial using the MNIST dataset for recognition of handwritten digits.

Creating a small neural network and training it over the MNIST dataset is like the 'todo list' starter project of this kind of frameworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I found this to be informative - [https://svds.com/getting-started-deep- learning/](https://svds.com/getting-started-deep-learning/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Here are some reasons why TensorFlow might be better:

* more widely used, more example code

* developed by a bigger team, likely to improve faster

* easier to deploy

* training with Cloud ML

* better support for distributed training

* no compile time (this can be long especially for RNNs)

</comment><comment><USER24> Tensorflow might not be the fastest in terms of computation speed, but it can be used from research to production with Tensorflow Serving.

As such you won't need to implement/convert your model in another format for usage.

</comment><comment><USER25> tensorflow has tensorboard, a great application that allows your to explore your models in depth. it makes neural networks less of a black box.

</comment><comment><USER26> Over 60k stars on github for TF. It won.

<comment><USER27> If people weren't lemmings, that would be a valuable indicator. But, it turns out that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Personally, I use a combination of Tensorflow and Appex frameworks. I find Theano simply lacking in features.

</comment><comment><USER29> r/Machine Learning

</comment><comment><USER30> Use a AI program to answer that question!

<comment><USER30> Wouldn't it a bit reasonable to be able to use an AI program to tell which AI program is the best? That would be a some sort of Turing test by itself? And if not, so much for AI?</comment></comment>


The Coronavirus Is Forcing Techies to Work from Home. Some May Never Go Back - bra-ket https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/the-coronavirus-is-forcing-techies-to-work-from-home-some <comment><USER2> There's two things I want to point out here. Firstly, maybe I'm the exception rather than the rule, but I don't have a massive battlestation PC at home (nor the room to get one) so working from home means working on my laptop and constantly struggling for screen real-estate.

Secondly, large corporations seem to function via rules that are completely immune to reality. Every 10 years or so Intel will not only insist everyone is in the office, but will look at relocating teams into their head offices for any given project - literally giving the people the option "Hey! I hear Gdansk is lovely this time of year". This sort of organisational bullshit from large companies isn't going to go away. However, you can look at the opposite side, I know people (not engineers) who work at companies where they hot-desk every day and the office is only provisioned for 70% of staff to turn up on any given day because they're too cheap to actually provide everyone a desk.

I guess what I'm saying with that second point is that for most large businesses these choices are going to be more about corporate bullshit than some sudden epiphany that working from home is great.

<comment><USER3> My employer provides me (and other remote employees) all the equipment needed to work from home. Laptop, Docking Station, Monitors and Keyboards.

But you are right about the corporate BS.

<comment><USER4> You still need space to set it up. I have a large "battlestation" desk with multiple monitors and a nice chair at home but not everyone wants (or should need to have) that.

<comment><USER5> I'm fortunate enough to have the space in my 3/1 1140sqft SV home for a desk and desktop computer and the like. Basically, it's giving up a bedroom, although of course the computer does not take up the entire room. Thankfully, we don't have kids, so it's not an issue, but it's a non-zero cost, particularly if you're renting.

OTOH, of course, someone will come along to point out that you can afford 20 spare bedrooms if you work remote and can move from SV to a farm in upstate NY.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked for a company that was forced to go all-remote due to problems with our office space. I thought it would prove to management that remote work was a net win for everyone. I expected both productivity and employee happiness to increase.

I was wrong on all counts. The problem is that you can't suddenly transition people to WFH and expect them to figure it out right away. This doesn't resonate with 20-something developers who spend much of their home time glued to a computer in a quiet room, but it will resonate with the parents who have kids at home.

In our case, productivity fell immensely in certain teams and departments. People scrambled to find quiet space at home where they could hide from young children. Others struggled to work efficiently with purely digital communication. A surprising number of people couldn't handle being productive without the watchful eye of their manager. Some people tried to take vacations and respond with one-liner emails from their phones. Some of us were more productive, but it wasn't anywhere near as uniform as I expected.

I'm concerned that this sudden, forced WFH environment will hurt perceptions of remote work more than it helps.

<comment><USER7> This is valid, but I wouldn't be living in Seattle if it wasn't for Microsoft.

Small house sizes wouldn't be an issue if I was living basically anywhere else.

If this situation continues maybe I'll try to transition to full time remote and go live somewhere quieter?

<comment><USER5> I don't know. Low density housing is not JUST an issue for commuting, it's an issue for access to all services. But of course, commuting, with everyone traveling at the same hours, is the #1 bottleneck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the sake of The Universe, please set a good precedent by being highly productive during this time!

<comment><USER9> Suddenly forcing non-remote workers to switch to remote work overnight is not going to produce great results. By the time the workers get the hang of working remotely effectively, their bosses will have already decided that it is a bad idea.

<comment><USER10> Is that what I'm missing? I find that a lot of the people here love working from home, but whenever I do it as a one or two day off event, I find that I'm not terribly productive. Do you need time to settle into it?

<comment><USER9> Imagine having only ever used Windows as an OS. Then one day someone hands you a Linux machine. You try it for a day or two, but then go back to Windows. And then you wonder why your coworkers keep saying how great Linux is.

<comment><USER10> As someone who develops on the Microsoft stack, I don't dream that, I live that. But great analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Arthur C. Clarke predicted that computers would usher in an age of telecommuting more than 50 years ago: [https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/arthur-c-clarke- predicted...](https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/arthur-c-clarke-predicted- future-of-remote-and-flexible-work-1964/)

As with most predictions, there's a difference between predicting something existing at all, vs. predicting normalization/ubiquity; so there's a sense in which he was accurate, and a sense in which he missed the mark.

There are a million little reasons why physical proximity still makes a difference to company culture and human behavior, so some amount of that will always be with us. But I think it's fair to say that while we'll partially regress to the mean after Coronavirus blows over, the rate of WFH-friendliness will end up being significantly higher. (Depending on how long the scare lasts, the necessity of distributed-first culture changes might even grease the wheels for hiring remote workers, leading to secondary effects on the labor market.)

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone who has worked remotely full time for years, most often not in fully-remote teams, I've been having a lot of fun watching my coworkers make the adjustment. We had a meeting today with 18 separate people or groups of people, which is far more than I've seen before. It actually went pretty well, but there were definitely some moments when people had trouble deciding who should speak next or had to ask for something to be repeated because someone's internet connection glitched at a bad moment. Over the next week or two I expect that our internal chats will be super-active, and I'll get more VC requests than usual. I just hope people remember this when it's over, maybe having a bit more empathy and/or sticking to the generally better habits developed during this experiment.

</comment><comment><USER13> After a narrow escape from a Milwaukee cubibicle 8 years ago, I've been remote working for nearly the last 8 years.

If you're making the transition, I put together a few of the most helpful things I've learned over the past decade. Hopefully it's helpful - [http://woven.com/blog/remote-work-guide](http://woven.com/blog/remote-work- guide)

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand this HN obsession with remote work. Productivity wise, sorry, we are social species. Labor rights wise, yes it's good to be away from the boss but you are also away from your coworkers.

Basically, rather than ending up with a utopic remote work coup d'etat into some sort of of distributed co-op, I imagine programming becoming yet another gig work job. And if tons of people do move to lower cost of living areas, well, wages will go down. (You need the majority/expectation of non-remote work to prevent that.)

If power is what you lack, household cost cutting in the form of remote work won't get you there. Put solidarity before your individualist paradise.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, we'll find out first in tech. Most US coronavirus cases are in Silicon Valley and the Seattle area.[1]

[1] [https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/](https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/)

<comment><USER16> another rendition of this John Hopkins map [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a manager of a new team, I'm a little scared about being available to help my new-hires acclimate to the tech stack and culture without proximity.

We're getting ahead of additional Coronavirus impacts now, though, by establishing team chat channel and expectations for virtual presence and having discussions about how to maintain software engineering productivity on a remote laptop. Next thing on my list is to establish team culture of it being okay to quickly jump on a VC for high bandwidth information exchange and leaning-over-the-shoulder type stuff.

I see a lot more written communication in the future, too.

<comment><USER18> Group transparency and face to face pair time is critical. Your new hires need to be able to feel comfortable asking stupid questions in Slack channels full of smart people.

<comment><USER17> I've heard this referred to as "situational awareness" and "psychological safety". The former being aware of what your team is up to (and everyone being in that state); the later feeling like you ask a question without someone judging you or the team just generally treating you as a whole person.

<comment><USER19> This is very important. I hang out in programming communities focused on helping others and way too often I see people asking perfectly valid questions filled with apologies and guilt over not knowing something. It's a bit sad honestly, but it's nice seeing them open up after you help tem figure it out without judgment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The biggest thing with working from home is that you have to actually WORK. For most companies, that means being available and doing "work stuff" during work hours, and that's not just some stupid rule that incompetent management made up.

Almost all jobs require coordination with other people, and you need to be available to address clients' needs when they expect you to (i.e. during business hours). You can't have meetings or other coordination if everyone is on their own schedule.

The only jobs that might not need this are developer jobs where you just need to commit your code at the end of the day. So if your vision of WFH comes from this perspective, you're in the vast minority of the overall workforce who can operate this way.

Too many people think that WFH means you can set your own hours, watch your kids, have the TV on, go to the gym, run errands, etc. If you have a well established track record, then maybe you can do one of those things in a day, once in a while, but people without the right work ethic will fall off the wagon pretty quickly and ruin it for everyone else.

Especially in a case like COVID-19, people working from home may be stuck with their kids and other family who are also forced to stay home, making it more difficult to establish good habits.

<comment><USER21> > The biggest thing with working from home is that you have to actually WORK.

Quite true. I can be at the office and not get shit done all day and it looks like work. I can be at home, kill it, and even save the company, and it still doesn't really look like work.

Wally would never work from home...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Many roles in finance require you to be in the office because of regulatory reasons, like recording of communications on trade related issues. Banks often don't allow the use of mobile phones on trading floors too, and working from home for certain functions is just not allowed.

<comment><USER23> I've had a much different experience at 2 very large asset managers, and one pretty large hedge fund.

They all have strict security, but we can remote just fine. My phone has a locked-down VPN set up so I can communicate by phone, slack, and email, and I can remotely log in to my computer through Citrix. My previous companies have had similar set ups. I was involved in the portfolio management and research side of things, and this was true for all of my colleagues.

Remote access to Bloomberg terminals works fine through these solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They'll go back.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems, historically, that once workers gain rights in times of crisis, they aren't keen on giving them back. For example, in Rwanda it used to be taboo for women to work, but once the Rwandan genocide happened they were forced to let women work because of an absence of capable men. 26 years later and it's the country with the highest percentage of women in the workplace. Once people are forced to see how nice things are a certain way they don't usually want to go back.

<comment><USER26> I think we might actually see labor tensions around this issue. All the big companies seem to be adopting WFH, but the ones who aren't are going to run the risk of conflict and unrest.

There was a lot of talk when Kickstarter unionized about how tech employees don't need similar protection relative to the dangers workers faced during the first mass waves of unionization. I think that calculus might change in cases where workers are forced to expose themselves and their families to a pandemic because their bosses value butt-in-seats over employee safety.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. I'm very aligned with that talk - I was and remain skeptical that a union would be good for me - but if my bosses don't start recommending WFH within a few days I'm going to be pretty frustrated.

<comment><USER26> Unions can have their downsides, but they're also one of the few ways that workers can fight back against dangerous workplaces and expose those conditions to the public.

This is happening right now with the nurses' union in California, who are exposing the CDC's stonewalling and failure in testing for COVID-19 and the danger this is posing to everyone:

[https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/N...](https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/NU- Quarantine-RN-press-conf-statement.pdf)

<comment><USER28> I got a message recently from the (public sector) union I belong to, talking about response and precautions due to the epidemic, and there was not one word about trying to get permission for employees who can work from home to do so. They only talked about those who are required to deal with the public.

While it certainly seems reasonable to prioritize those at the most risk, on the other hand, in my brief experience with a union, it almost seems like they tend to prioritize problems they can't solve and ignore what can actually be done.

Laptops are standard-issue in my agency, so it seems like if the person at the top ordered it, essentially everybody could work remotely for the next month or two.

<comment><USER26> Have you spoken with your rep? It is the case that a lot of these issue do require a bottom-up push, even when having unions.

<comment><USER28> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really like my workspace even though it's open, although I suppose I could get five monitors for home. I'm interested to see if I get more productive with more focus time.

</comment><comment><USER30> Some of us like the office...

</comment><comment><USER31> s/Techies/students/g

s/Work/Study/g

</comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea of work in a way, but I also think the in person connections are valuable. Maybe a company could have a hybrid of that idea, allow people to work at home but also have a office that's sorta more like a co-working space but open to their employees only.

Then another thing that's lame about remote work is you have to limit the location people can work remotely due to employment regulations, so if your company is in California you aren't allowed to hire someone from Ohio without doing a bunch of extra paperwork and expenses. I got a job offer for a company in San Francisco but wasn't sure about it 100% or if it'd last so I thought trying remote would be interesting and then transition but the HR person told me no even though she was interested in me. But I guess they didn't want to register in other states, paying taxes in multiple states, payroll, some states require worker comp and probably applies if you work from home even, etc as it would create a bigger Nexus for a company with a handful of requirements for a state the HR person has never even visited or has an address in the state even (so they have to pay for a virtual office service, a agent for the company in the state and add extra costs and administration since some states won't accept a out of state address for some paperwork). So many companies unless it's already big with locations all over the US rather just deal with a single state for now... Then businesses large enough to meet the requirement have to file equal opportunity reports, what location do you put down? Someone's house (then fill out a separate form for every house - <AUTHOR> 50 employees is 50 locations if no office in the area they could visit?), the virtual office address or what? Sounds like some say the office they report too, but if you worked remotely for a company in California from Ohio where they don't have a brick and mortar regional office seems to complicate things. Maybe in that case you report to their California office even if you never fly to or visit California? Seems like the laws were written never considered the possibility of working remotely and different answers depending on who you ask.

But the whole remote thing can get even more confusing, like apparently if you work for a company in New York remotely and a few other states they wants you to pay income taxes even if you never visited the state due to them considering it telecommuting even if you never psychically commute there, so double taxes even though your state will let you credit taxes paid to others, I expect NY would be much higher... Plus there's conflicting info and other things if you look up this type of stuff.

Someone lived in Tennessee and was found to owe Taxes to New York. [https://www.biglawinvestor.com/new-york-telecommuting-tax- pe...](https://www.biglawinvestor.com/new-york-telecommuting-tax-penalty/)

> If you work remotely for a company based in New York, Delaware, > Pennsylvania, Nebraska or New Jersey, even if you physically never step foot > in those states, you may be subject to state income tax in those states.

Which doesn't make sense according to what the HR person said, if they had to setup in your own state to hire you wouldn't it credited as payroll taxes in your state instead of New York? Then if you lived in Ohio full time and tried to claim New York taxes as a credit for working full time, I wonder if that's a huge red flag as they'd probably assume you psychically commuted instead of working remotely. Especially if you live in a lower tax state where due to the credit given to higher taxed New York so you ended up owning nothing to your state, paying all your income to state not close enough to commute to everyday by car.

Then I know Delaware is popular for incorporating too even if a company puts their HQ in California... Surprised everyone at the GooglePlex in California isn't considered to be working remotely in Delaware?

Then some states say you owe taxes just for checking email while waiting in the Airport during a layover, so some companies track where employees are and pay taxes in multiple states, but some companies aren't capable enough to deal with this stuff since the big assumption is a employee is just staying at one location and seems like a grey area. So technically if you send your employees to a conference or trade show in another state, opening up another can of extra compliance, however I feel like a lot of companies probably just ignore this unless they make it a regular thing.

Then remember seeing if you are a contractor like a plumber, a business and employee is expected to file and pay taxes in every single city they visit a customer so that can add up too - but not every state allows cities to tax people and some have proposals to simplify this. Some contractors might visit a city one off if they aren't big enough but I guess some might just limit their service area but I know we had a roofer come from a hour away once, and tons of little small cities in between. So if a one off job, and then some cities expect you to keep filing even if zero and not all cities even put the forms online. I know one idea was to just let the state administer the city taxes as part of the regular state tax forms, then the state would forward the money to each city what they are owed and take a 1 or 2% cut for doing it, but cities wasn't happy with this idea and rather do it themselves. Then in some states like Michigan, was reading tax software won't even handle cities.

Confusing stuff... I guess this is something you'd have to probably hire a knowledge HR person to help you deal with this stuff, but who knows if the know all the little details when dealing with multiple states. I guess for a single person it's not worth it, so easier just to tell someone from Ohio no if they aren't willing to move to California right away. Seems like every states have stuff like this, be cool if some state encouraged fiber internet, remote work and relaxed regulations for remote companies - I guess instead people are forced to move even if they could work remotely technically but can't due to the bureaucracy and red tape burden getting in the way. So sounds like states will end up losing both residents and income instead of making some money they make zero. Same with how some affiliate programs banned people from Ohio participating, sending them a email with a short notice to stop sending traffic. However I guess the larger corporations like Google probably can hire people remotely nationwide since they are big enough to handle the extra burdens imposed by every state where they have people working remotely. Then cities and county has extra stuff too... Also wonder how OSHA works with remote, if you are on the clock and run to the bathroom in your house and ended up tripping and stubbing your toe... Is that a accident report just as if you worked from the office? Then what about the employment posters if working remotely - and even some cities have their own too... I guess make them available on the internal website maybe as I doubt someone would hang those on the wall in their bedroom. but another thing to monitor and keep up to date across all the locations people work remotely from. Also looks like some states even require you to reimburse them for internet access, but some make you track what's person or business? Sounds a bit annoying but might be a good perk... Free internet from your company if you work from home!

Maybe the tech and culture isn't holding back remote work, but the government putting all these artificial limitations. I wish we'd have some modern tax reforms and even take advantage of tech. My favorite idea I've had for a while would just cut all payments for a flat tax, sorta like how PayPal takes a transaction fee for every payment. Have the gov take a transaction fee and have some agency that's responsible for redistributing it to states and cities, so as a business it'd be super simple.

Stuff like this is a bit discouraging, you'd think 2020 remote work would be easier. As someone who dreams of a startup, I think making a MVP/prototype and seeking investors to relocate to a bigger city, renting office space would be the best path and just hire people locally would be simpler. Unfortunately I feel it's a disadvantaged though since talented people all across the country or even world that could be a good fit but can't just easily hire them remotely due to all the red tape. Just seems crazy if you hire someone remotely from across the country, you have a pile of regulations to follow like a brick and mortar business locally would. So I could see why a business in California would say no to wanting to deal with hiring people remotely, they have so much stuff in Ohio to deal with just for one person. Seems easier to just say no or require relocating to where the company is located. Just seems like the ways the regulations are or read doesn't really consider remote at all. Not sure if places would embrace it, seems like remote businesses would cut down on things like property taxes too... Why cater to Google across the country when you could try and force them to build a local regional office?

</comment><comment><USER33> Working from home is the worst. My team is already making plans to work together off site at a bar/cafe/etc until we get back into the office.

<comment><USER34> Contradicting the very idea of staying the f away from people till the big wave of infection passes, bravo.

<comment><USER35> You can look at it that way. Another way of looking at it is if my company (or the government) refuses to let me access my office, I should not be obligated to work. Do factory workers have to take home textiles and sew them from home? (I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised if some places tried that.)

<comment><USER36> >> You can look at it that way. Another way of looking at it is if my company (or the government) refuses to let me access my office, I should not be obligated to work.

In that case the company should not be obligated to pay you. There's a good chance your employment contract contains a clause allowing your place of work to change at any time (within a certain distance of where it is when you join).

<comment><USER35> > In that case the company should not be obligated to pay you.

Perhaps not, but in California the company is _never_ obligated to pay you except for labor you've already done.

> There's a good chance your employment contract contains a clause allowing > your place of work to change at any time (within a certain distance of where > it is when you join).

In California, you don't have an employment contract period. Even if you did, I doubt the requirement to (for instance) maintain an Internet connection at your home so that you always have the ability to work from home would be an enforceable clause.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker vs Engineer - Know The Difference! - <AUTHOR> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hacker-vs-engineer-know-the-difference/ <comment><USER3> The term 'Engineer' is so widely abused in many parts of the world (such as the UK, where I live) that I may be msinterpreting your use, apologies if I am.

I believe there's a fundamental reason there's distance between the two. I'm on to my second degree in Engineering at the moment but I remember back in my undergraduate days.

One thing you realise quickly when you're learning alongside mechanical, civil and electrical engineers is that if you get it wrong, people die. You can't afford to do quick solutions and fix it later. You have to get it right first time or lives could be at stake.

You could kill several people with any one of the dozen or so robots we have downstairs and poorly written software. When you realise that, it changes the way you program.

<comment><USER4> I think that the definition still works - you just need to go farther down the scale towards pure engineering, and you start running into things like anti- lock-brake sensor programming, bridge design, refinery design, etc. The constraint "no failure whatsoever" is a pretty hard constraint, and while it may limit a lot of options and take more time and care, it would let you pursue perfection and responsibility to a degree not possible with regular business apps.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I had a boss who liked to bitch about how NASA can do all this great stuff that works the very first time. I told him we could too if we had millions of dollars, and accepted the fact that it would take a long time to deliver even relatively simple components. And of course _nothing_ would touch the running system without weeks of QA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In startup world, the difference is:

Hacker: beta is out the door in a month, features get tacked on every 2 days in the middle of the night, million users in a year, $100M exit in 18 months, anyone who sees the code would cry.

Engineer: can't release the beta because no proper QA cycle, no features can be released until the beta code base has been refactored with proper unit tests, less than 2000 private beta users after a year, $10M series B round after 18 months to keep the company afloat, everyone cries when they see their hacker competitors' new automobiles

<comment><USER4> Mixing metaphors from the post a little bit, but yes, in the startup world, if you take time to engineer before you have a proven product, you'll get squashed. On the other hand, with a proven and successful product, if it's poorly engineered, it will be too expensive to scale or modify. Different situations, different priorities.

<comment><USER7> What this says to me is that:

        hacking: 0 < version <= 1.0
        engineering: version > 1.0

In other words, as soon as the product is "established" as a pile of hacks, all hackers should be taken off the project (temporarily) and a complete white-room rewrite should be done by a team of engineers, with one of the criteria being "to closely match the original product as possible while creating room for future expansion."

Then, the hackers (now known as "R&D") can have at the new codebase, but in a distributed SCM way--a hacker can only work on their branch, and any approved branch must be white-room redeveloped by an engineer before being put into the clean code-base.

...or, "What I Would Do If I Ran Some Sort of Military Project With Unlimited Funding and No Time Constraints"

<comment><USER8> "a complete white-room rewrite should be done by a team of engineers"

NO! NO! NO!

Never allow your engineers or anyone else to do a full rewrite of anything that currently works and serves the needs of your users. While they're busy rewriting (and it will take SOME TIME) you're not pushing out new features and your competitors are (remember Lotus 1-2-3?). And if you are pushing new features while your engineers are doing a rewrite they will NEVER catch up.

The solution: Make sure your application has tests from the start (and don't allow any excuses for not writing tests) and you can slowly refactor and rewrite small parts of your app, one bit at a time.

There are some exceptions to this, some companies have managed to successfully rewrite their software from scratch. But consider that a statistical anomaly and don't try to replicate it (and chances are it was rewritten by a team of super hackers, not a bunch of engineers trying to find the most perfect, scalable solution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would suggest that hackers and engineers need not be mutually exclusive. One could assume either role, depending on the needs of the situation.

<comment><USER4> True, for any given project you need some of both. The whole post made so much sense when I was dealing in the abstract, but when I got to the end and had to tie it to development, I realized I had painted myself into a corner. I'll go back and clarify.

Thanks!

EDIT: I expanded the last paragraph to clarify that point. I think it makes more sense now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can we all stop pretending software development is engineering? For chrissakes.

We don't build bridges, we make valuable things people will give us money for. We solve problems. We respond to rapidly changing, conflicting requirements.

How many suspension bridge projects have turned into skyscraper construction projects over the course of two months? Now, how many web startups have radically changed their idea? Flickr started as an online game, you know.

I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who calls themselves a "software engineer."

<comment><USER4> I tried to convey the idea that it was a continuum between hacking and engineering. "Software engineering" is a lot closer to hacking than it is to hard engineering like chemical, aeronautical, or civil. It doesn't have the extreme safety requirements of building a bridge or a rocket booster, but it does have constraints on development cost, time, and performance that you can blissfully ignore in exploratory hacking.

<comment><USER11> With all due respect, your assertion that software engineering lacks extreme safety requirements is false. Like any engineering discipline, software engineering is applied to both safety critical and non-safety critical domains.

When I was in school this article[0] was required reading. Your life and safety depend on software engineers every time you dial 911, ride an airplane, etc. Not everyone is writing Facebook applications :)

[0] <http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf>

<comment><USER4> It's hard to make definitive statements about field as huge as "software" or "engineering". Yes, there are areas of software with high requirements for safety (avionics), performance (air traffic control), etc, just like there are areas of engineering that don't have them (improving the manufacturing process to make toothbrushes cheaper). I'm using it in the statistical general sense, sort of like "Men are taller than women." More software gets written for business apps than anything else, and the strict safety requirements aren't there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Note that this doesn't mean that an engineer is any less creative than a hacker. On the contrary, the constraints provided by the engineering problem can provoke more creative and original thinking than that of the original invention._

Take a look at that quote and then read this article: <http://alistapart.com/articles/oncreativity>

Hacking is not necessarily a very creative endeavor. Instead it is more inspiring.

<comment><USER4> That was a great article (especially in conjunction with what I wrote) and I think you might have inspired another essay from me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it interesting that you talk about how engineers can be creative, but then end the piece with an comment that engineering _"feeds my family"_ , as if it were an otherwise shameful thing to be doing.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. In any case, sometimes I'm a hacker, sometimes I'm an engineer...but I get _really_ annoyed when people think I should act a certain way because of my current job title.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the job title things was just an excuse to introduce the continuum - <USER2> purposely picked engineer instead of software engineer in the rest of the post so I could talk about in terms of actions instead of titles.

About the "feed my family" - when you're on a forum like this one where so many of the people are young single guys sacrificing all to follow the billionaire/world domination dream, it's _not_ sexy to say you make decent money fixing bugs for an app that helps gazillion dollar companies make more money. I get to do some cool stuff (that I probably wouldn't be doing in my own projects) and facing different constraints, and I do it while doing a good job providing for my wife and kids. No shame in it at all, it's just atypical for Hacker News.

<comment><USER13> I understand. I'm not sure why that caught my eye, but if I had to guess, it's because it was the one bit of wishy-washy-ness in otherwise solid writing.

I was right there with you on the Ikea metaphor, and thought you were doing a great job of defending the creativity of the lowly engineer, but then you seemed to go apologetic at the end. I hope you don't think I'm arrogant, if I suggest that you cut that bit out. ;-)

<comment><USER4> How about this:

"Right now I'm a software engineer (really, it says it on my business card!) and it has been good to me. I get unusual technical challenges that I wouldn't have come across in my own projects, and unlike the "friend's couch and ramen" startup life, I can feeds myself and my family and live comfortably."

<comment><USER13> I like it. Sounds much less defensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, a hacker is basically a scientist? Cool.

<comment><USER4> When I talked this idea out in my head, it was originally "Scientist vs Engineer", but I changed it to Hacker for the article because of the kind of people that read my blog.

<comment><USER14> It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the kind of people who used to go into physics now hack. After all, I have a phd in physics, and I find hacking to be really fun...

<comment><USER15> This comment is very, very interesting... I keep reading about physics people who now are running 2.0 companies and that kind of stuff. But my question for you is: don't you miss science when working on a 2.0 environment? Or how do you correlate one subject with the other?

<comment><USER14> Yes, I miss practicing science a lot. It was a blast to do (I did theoretical work, which included a lot of computer modeling). But really, being a scientist is a frame of mind. Being a practicing scientist is a different story.

I don't consider mine a 2.0, incidentally.

<comment><USER15> Thanks a lot for your interesting reply, I was very curious about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Help this #OpenData survey to find key drivers in software - <AUTHOR> Yeah, yet another survey, but this one is short (only 10 questions) and all the results (along with raw data) will be published for everyone to use #OpenData
Please take 3-4 minutes to fill this short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/XWYWXXG
It is designed to get software community's opinion about key drivers in software.
Raw data and results will be shared on github: https://github.com/aliostad/KeyDriversInSoftwareSurvey <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the survey. And bear in mind after all it will be your data :)</comment>


Laminated linen, the ancient world's Kevlar, protected Alexander the Great - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/linothorax-alexander-great-armor.html

<comment><USER2> Really, thinking of this as linen armour is the wrong way to do it. Rather than linen armour, which is glued together, it is glue armour, which is scaffolded by the linen. Like modern laminate materials, the weak point is not the binder but the substrate; in this case it is the glue itself that would provide protection. The linen, being flexible, holds all that protection together in a useful non-rigid crystalline form that retains maximal coverage.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it is the opposite.

Think of a Formula 1 car: it is strong because it is made of carbon fibre, not because it is made of glue. Carbon fibres have 5 times the tensile strength of steel. They are spun into yarn, which is woven into cloth, layered into a mould, and held rigid by plastic resin. All the strength comes from the carbon fibres.

In the case of this armour it is the linen which provides the strength, not the rabbit glue.

"Linen is among the strongest of the vegetable fibers, with 2 to 3 times the strength of cotton." Wikipedia.</comment></comment>


Life lessons from the very wealthy - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/7-life-lessons-from-the-very-wealthy/2011/06/15/AGxw6aaH_story.html <comment><USER2> I'm not from the US, and so I only follow this from a distance, but:

 _Taxes for the top 2 percent are very likely to go higher_

Is this actually true? Obama couldn't get support to rollback tax cuts on the rich - is he really going to be able to increase them now? I believe Republican policy is to cut taxes on the rich (?)

 _In the United States, the very rich hold most of that wealth in dollars, which are worth increasingly less._

This isn't true either is it? Firstly, don't most of the rich hold their wealth in investments (eg, shares), which might be denominated in US Dollars but are relatively immune to long term changes in value of the dollar? Secondly, (despite all the talk) actually hasn't been any significant inflation in the US. (I'll happily concede that the US dollar has deprecated against other currencies, but that shouldn't effect the _domestic_ purchasing power of the rich _that_ much - even allowing for outsized impact due to imported luxury goods)

<comment><USER3> Yeah; I almost stopped reading the article because the introductory paragraphs (which you are citing) were rubbish.

Now is a great time to be rich in the US.

<comment><USER4> Not to spoil your fun but it's always great to be rich.

<comment><USER2> _it's always great to be rich._

To be pedantic - the French and Russian (and many other) revolutions didn't work out great for the rich.

<comment><USER5> They didn't work out so well for the poor, either.

<comment><USER6> Let's not conflate the French and Russian revolutions - they have absolutely nothing in common. And yes, the French revolution did work out very well for the poor, eventually. It was at the root of the development of modern democracy in the Western world.

<comment><USER2> _Let's not conflate the French and Russian revolutions - they have absolutely nothing in common._

I have issues with the word "absolutely". They had quite a lot of common - both were about overthrowing a system of government based on birthright, and the participants in the Russian revolution certainly tried to learn from the French revolution.

(One could argue that the Russian revolution was actually better for the poor in the short term than the French. Serfdom was immediately abolished, and it got them out of WW1. War had the biggest impact on the poor)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Money provides a different scale of experience, but doesn't actually have an effect in the intensity of happiness. True happiness is about managing your progression so you don't become adjusted to a lifestyle, no matter the scale. Humans adjust to almost anything, as a survival mechanism. The act of experiencing the present infinite moment can always offer enough richness for a human. This is why you can live a satisfying life whether you have everything or nothing. In the end, you must have power over your consciousness. You must be prepared for any situation, so you must learn to manage what you have at a small scale in order to manage what you have at a large scale. Just like in business, flexibiity and adaptability are most important.

</comment><comment><USER8> "4. Watch your lifestyle leverage, especially early in your career."

This is so true. Living way below your mean is so important as that's a great way to gain financial independence to have the freedom to pursue what you love to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Being smart is good but being lucky is better."

This article is actually good.

<comment><USER9> "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity."

<comment><USER10> I was in music school for a while; a guy asked if it was better to be lucky, or talented. He answered, "the more talented you are, the luckier you get. The more you practice, the more talented you get."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Misses several important ones:

\- It's good to be the king

\- Money doesn't buy happiness, but carefully spent, it can buy several happiness factories.

\- Little people don't understand me.

<comment><USER12> What do you mean by little people. Curious. Literally little or small minded?

<comment><USER13> Presumably the same sense as meant by Leona Helmsley:

"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leona_Helmsley#Tax_evasion_conv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leona_Helmsley#Tax_evasion_conviction)

<comment><USER4> I find that most people who make their wealth through their own work don't have this kind of attitude.

Of course, I don't know any people worth a few billion, only paltry millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know if Tech companies do similar things to what banks and law firms do in terms of golden handcuffs?

<comment><USER15> Absolutely, only it's more subtle. When you work at a company that feeds you gourmet lunches, does your oil changes and laundry for you, arranges shuttles from your apartment to the office, etc., you begin to feel like you couldn't possibly live any other way.

That is the dark side of perks.

Another way to keep people stuck is to pay them too much, much more than they could ever earn elsewhere. They will then rationalize that they are doing it just for the money, which leads them to hate their job, even tho they will not leave (because of the money). Then you see worsening politicking, squabbling, dark humor about "at least it pays well" and general "acting out."

I saw both of these in action at my last real job, at a tech co. you've heard of. The wild parties, the liquor cabinet, the gourmet kitchen, the rooftop deck in TriBeCa, and more importantly, the excessively huge amounts of profit- sharing... it was like geek summer camp, until it turned into a teen drama because of the "poor little rich boys."

I knew I could never work at another place after that, because (in most ways) it was just so great. We were all spoiled rotten.

<comment><USER16> You seem to be talking about different things.

I read "golden handcuffs" as extending a line of credit to employees to support and _encourage_ living beyond their actual means. This is very very different from being pampered and spoiled as you describe.

<comment><USER17> A line of credit? Never heard of that. Golden handcuffs are generally in the form of deferred bonuses, vesting periods, etc.

<comment><USER18> This is much more common in finance and legal firms, where much of the upside accrues to partners in the firm, and the junior people work long hours for much more modest compensation. But they're loaned money in order to get a jump start on the lifestyle that their more senior colleagues enjoy, putting them in hock to the firm. If they were to leave to join a startup, for example, they'd have to pay it back in a lump sum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From what I've found with a quick search it seems like most held wealth is earned rather than inherited. Does anyone know if this is accurate, and what the typical 'pre-earnings' demographic background of the very wealthy is in the U.S.?

<comment><USER20> Anecdotally, it seems that practically every billionaire in the US comes from an upbringing in the comfortable middle class.

This is basically what we'd expect, given that:

a) Folks who become rich are generally pretty darn smart.

b) People who are smart generally have smart parents.

c) The vast majority of smart people are in the comfortable middle class. (Not the poor, since they're smart enough not to be poor, but not the very rich, because statistically there ain't that many of 'em)

Therefore, if you're rich you probably had comfortably middle class parents.

<comment><USER21> Careful with the "smart enough not to be poor" claims, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I know some wealthy people and the first three points seem pretty spot on. I wonder what the last four points were. I think I'll flag articles behind pay- walls from now on.

<comment><USER23> I just clicked the Print link and went straight to the full article:

<http://goo.gl/E5FyA>

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I know how to get around them but I just don't think I will bother anymore. There is so much information out there that is just as interesting and freely available.

<comment><USER24> There's no paywall at the Washington Post...

<comment><USER25> No, but you need to create an account to keep reading. Annoying, at any rate.

<comment><USER26> That's odd, I just clicked "next page" to read the rest and I don't have an account there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> money can't buy accomplishments

</comment><comment><USER28> This really shouldn't be on HN, guys.

<comment><USER29> If you don't think something belongs, flag it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Work is the process of exchanging your time for money."

I never want to "work" in an organisation where this is true.

<comment><USER31> Then start your own business because that is true for 100% of the business. But they do spend a lot of money to make employees feel that they are very valuable and their work is worth a lot and they are adding a lot of value etc. Watch the move Matrix to understand the philosophy.

<comment><USER32> You spend even more time in exchange for money when you start your own business. The real fix is to do what you love because then work never feels like work.</comment></comment></comment>


Telescope Building with John Dobson (2014) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snz7JJlSZvw <comment><USER2> I built a nine inch "Dobsonion" type scope many years ago, whch incorporated many of his ideas, and have spent countless hundreds of hours since observing the heavens and the amazing objects that can be seen from my own back garden. About ten years ago I met John Dobson at a small meeting. He was a nice guy with an infectious enthusiasm. One of these days I'd like to have a go at "pushing glass" and making my own mirror, rather than purchasing one as I did the first time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I owned a 12 Inch Dobsonian (design named after John Dobson) telescope (Skywatcher Collapsible Dob). I don't have anything to contribute other than that as a life long amateur astronomer my first view through my telescope (and then at a later point, through a 24 inch Obsession) were amazing. And his design allows the building of affordable (well, not in the case of the Obsession, but in the case of most consumer 6-16 inch telescopes) telescopes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many astronomical telescopes are exquisitely engineered bits of equipment.

Dobson created very simple, elegant, cheap telescopes. This video is him showing how to build one. He has a bunch of useful hints and tips. And it's just nice to hear him talk about it.

(About 5 minutes into the video you see him banging nails into wood with his tool glass!)</comment>