To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/ <comment><USER4> _News from 2029:_

Skylynr, the 'Uber of nanoassembled highrises', last night replaced 44 San Francisco Victorians with apartment buildings.

Reached for comment, SF's Planning Department said the overnight construction violates a city moratorium, to study displacement issues, now in its 14th year.

The Board of Supervisors plans to address the issue in an emergency session next Tuesday. A Skylynr spokesperson says over 4,000 new residents, in the nearly 2,000 new apartments, will be registered as voters on the San Francisco Department of Elections blockchain before that meeting.

By November, over half the city's voters may be residents of the on-demand skyscrapers popping up across the city, most built by Skylynr or its competitors Instatower and Zipartments.

<comment><USER5> I believe William Gibson described something similar to the self-building towers in his book Idoru[1]. I think they were called nanotech buildings[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru) [2] [http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83)

<comment><USER6> Additionally Neal Stephenson describes vertically extruded nanotech buildings in "The Diamond Age".

<comment><USER5> I haven't read a sci-fi/cyberpunk book in a long time, I think I'm going to pick this up. Been meaning to read more of Stephenson's novels

<comment><USER7> One of my favorite authors! Reading The Diamond Age right now as a matter of fact. Favorite of his is probably Anathem or Seveneves.

<comment><USER8> All of those have been in my kindle over a year. Need time to read.

<comment><USER9> Find a hammock in Nicaragua. Worked great for me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need.

> Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize > making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don't. The less housing > we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we > decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are > continuing to choose the interests of those who are rich or who already own > their homes over the interests of the struggling middle and working classes.

<comment><USER11> If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.

<comment><USER12> Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.

Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.

<comment><USER13> You own your land not the conditions that surround that land.

<comment><USER12> That is true, and nobody claimed otherwise.

But I can have the _desire_ for the conditions to stay the same.

<comment><USER14> We have a way for you to express that desire. You can buy the surrounding properties and keep them exactly the same.

See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.

<comment><USER15> Or you can vote municipalities that best aligns with what you desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just a reminder that the growth rates for SF, SV, Seattle, Portland are all pretty puny compared to the growth rates of, e.g. Detroit at its peak. Hell they're not even that crazy compared to growth rates those cities have handled before.

People just aren't interested in any perceived threat to their property values so they're strangling growth based on an entitlement mindset. No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a _right_.

<comment><USER17> > No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right

Doesn't increased density help property values? If I can build a high rise on your 1 acre plot of land, its value should go up.

<comment><USER16> Depends! Increased density should drive up the price of land.

However, if you are in a neighborhood of single family homes and a huge multi family building is constructed on your block, your home price will go down because there will be enough supply to meet demand, taking pressure off the single family homes.

If you are in an already dense city and regulations are relaxed so that more high rises can be built in more neighborhoods, the price of your condo all else being equal will be lower because there will be more supply. The land price may well go up but your individual apartment would likely be worth less.

<comment><USER18> _a huge multi family building is constructed on your block_

which is why NIMBYs should at least be in favor of gentle density - <USER2> and triplexes, small walk-ups, etc. But they fight those like the end-of-days too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know we'd all love to fix the bay area housing problem here. The most obvious answer is to increase the supply. But, fixing the zoning laws and allowing developers to build isn't the only thing that's standing in the way. The problems are too numerous to fix: NIMBYs sueing developers, CEQA, Proposition 13, AND don't forget about the underlying labor cost (all our middle class people's aren't going to come back, after having been forced out). The bay area has forever lost it's ability to produce cost effective housing. One article I read, said that San Jose rents would have to increase another 25% to 4.75$ per sq foot, just to allow developers to break even on high rise construction! This points to some serious fundamental problem with our economy here in the bay area and it's not going to fixed with just one or two adjustments to the above reasons. We've kindof Venezuela'd our bay area economy here.

Edit: here is the link (4.25 - 4.75$/sq foot to build in San jose!): [https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs- co...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs-could-hamper- bay-area-residential-towers/)

By all means, let's work to fix the problem. But, for anyone who wants to get cost effective housing in the next 30 years: I'm sorry to say it, its time to bail out. We need to start lobbying software companies to get the heck out of the bay area and CA in general.

Let's get Elon musk to build one of those hyperTubes to some city like Austin, Denver, Albuquerkee, or madison, WI. maybe some of us could commute in for 4 days a week or something.

<comment><USER20> High-rise construction is expensive, but high-rises aren't necessary for density. Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient, especially when you don't require 1-2 parking spaces per unit.

The reason why we get too many high-rises and too few low-rises is because of regulatory burden. In particular, the long, drawn-out, and capricious manner in which the laws are administered and challenged. In that kind of environment high-rises become more common simply because of the economy of scale--a high- rise developer has resources and the wherewithal to see the project through where developers of smaller developments do not.

The most important thing for commerce and especially real estate development is consistency and predictability. Proposition 13 and the cost of labor can be dealt because they're known quantities. Zoning boards and CEQA[1] are the real killers as the unpredictability compounds, many fold, the nominal regulatory burden.

[1] Compare NEQA to CEQA. The Federal NEQA law isn't much of an impediment to development anymore because an efficient ecosystem has developed--specialized assessment agencies that do the work quickly and cheaply, and relatively efficient administration of the regulatory regime. The cost of a NEQA impact statement is a known quantity and is easily budgeted. By contrast, under CEQA it's much easier for NIMBYs to challenge impact statements, which means the time and budget required for getting over the CEQA hurdle can be indefinite.

<comment><USER21> >Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient

And also tends to be drastically worse build quality and sound isolation. Given a mid-rise or a high-rise built in the same year, you definitely want to live in the high-rise, all else being equal.

Higher quality multi-family buildings that middle-class people could see themselves living in would go a long way towards changing public opinion. Unfortunately, our multifamily housing stock is bifurcated between shoddily built crap for the poor, and ultra-luxury high-rises for oligarchical investors. If people don't want to live in a building themselves, it's harder to accept its externalities for the benefit of others. Most people _do_ live in apartments as students and young adults, and they'd never go back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Or Google, Apple, Facebook could grow the next 200,000 jobs somewhere else?

Everyone talks about housing affordability and NIMBYs and we get into class warfare and home-appreciation snobbery, but the simple thing I can't understand is how will the area's transportation infrastructure scale up? There's no credible solution.

<comment><USER23> This. If Silicon Valley is full, then don't move there! Live somewhere else, your wallet and your sanity will thank you!

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't work for Google."

<comment><USER23> Google has many offices in other states

<comment><USER24> They do. And I literally live around the corner from one. But the position they're looking at me for would still require me to move to Mountain View.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The headline could also be re-stated as "To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 2% per year".

Using a long time period will give you large headline numbers.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is often missing from this discussion is financialization of housing markets. As long as housing units are chips for a game among banks and wealthy patrons it is not clear we will be able to build enough homes to satiate artificially inflated demand.

<comment><USER27> This. This. This. This. This.

Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis":

Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes, thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for residents of the city.

This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purchased an incredible amount of inventory over the last decade and it has remained vacant / unused.

Of course we need more building, that's obvious. But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation. I have yet to hear a constructive argument for why that shouldn't be banned at a constitutional level. Housing may not be a "right" per se, but it's certainly in the communities best interest to use available housing for that communities interest, not the interest of wealthy foreign investors.

<comment><USER28> You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.

<comment><USER29> I've been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What is far more likely is that people will simply leave the Bay Area, and demand will fall. It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities than it is to convince a bunch of NIMBY boomers that other people need places to live, too.

<comment><USER24> "It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities"

Wouldn't it have been done by now if that were the case? Yet SF is still the Mecca for the tech and startup scenes.

<comment><USER30> Network effects are powerful. But beyond the original secondary tech centres of Seattle, Boston, and NYC, there are now thriving tech scenes in all sorts of smaller markets--Portland, Denver, Austin, etc.

It's easy to see every major tech company having a base in SFBA for the foreseeable future, but it's also easy to see being a working programmer living in one of those smaller markets and actually being a homeowner being a much bigger thing going forward.

<comment><USER24> Given how hostile most of those companies have been to remote work, I'm not too optimistic. I hope to be wrong, though.

And while those other cities do have some tech scene, it's still nowhere near that of SV, and that's still the first choice of most developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The entire current population of the bay area (~9M) would fit within 165 of the 10,000 square miles of the CSA, if built at Parisian densities. That is less than 2% of the land.

This is what boggles my mind: despite such a minimal land requirement, nobody in the entire fucking region will budge. Put it somewhere else, they say. It has become a game of musical chairs where nobody gets up for the next round.

State intervention is the only thing that will solve this problem.

<comment><USER32> Or, as the calculus on living in the Bay Area shifts [0], top tier talent starts to direct itself elsewhere. This stems growth in the Bay Area since founding successful companies in lower cost areas will be possible, housing investment slows as a result of that, and the market naturally cools down a bit [1].

[0] Don't fool yourself into thinking that only people without the income or capital to live well in the Bay Area would leave it. There are intangibles (culture, traffic, distance to skiing, etc.) that, for _some_ people, are non- optimal. For others, it's perfect. That's okay, humans are a varied lot (and it's a good thing).

[1] Nothing major, it will remain expensive due to geography and talent/creativity/capital density.

<comment><USER33> It's not really about tech companies, although the tech companies don't help. Contemporary conversation about Bay Area housing always makes it sound like some impossible dream that is hampered by hordes of techies. It seems to me that most of those concerns are red herrings; it's actually about zoning, local opposition, and government incompetence. The other HN comment ITT summarizes it pretty well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> An amazing amount of land opened up in the Bay Area that could have been used for housing developement with the closing of many military bases (The Presidio, Treasure Island, Alameda Naval station, Concord Naval Base, Hunters Point) and the closing of salt production in the South Bay. While a few of these areas are finally seeing some construction[1] 20 years later, the density is often low and the amount of acres set aside for green space seems excessive to me. Treasure Island, for instance, is 465 acres with 300 of those acres as parks. Cargill handed over 15,000 acres of salt ponds to state and federal agencies for wetland restoration in 2002. No housing planned. For comparison all of San Francisco is 30,000 acres.

[1][https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction- devel...](https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction- development/these-5-decommissioned-military-bases-are-the-bay-areas-biggest- development-opportunities-74375)

<comment><USER35> Salt ponds being turned into natural wetland is a HUGE win for the environment, particularly water quality and fisheries. Being entirely mud, they are literally the worst place to build in an earthquake-prone region.

"Affordability" just means a balance between jobs (which produce people needing housing) and the supply of houses. There are TWO ways of fixing supply and demand problems like that. It is insane that the city of Cupertino has allowed the construction of offices for 26K jobs but only has housing for 58K people. It is insane that Mountain View has allowed the construction of offices for 30K jobs but only provided places for 77K people to live. Those two cities and others collect all the sweet revenue and burden the rest of the Bay Area with costs of housing and commuting.

Rather than insisting that cities must build housing, we should insist they balance jobs and homes. I'm angry that my home town, Fremont, had a plan to reserve space for both homes and jobs, but is forced by the state to accept home construction and we have no money to build the schools needed to accommodate the new population.

<comment><USER36> Fremont's jobs/housing ratio is 1.44 which is larger than the regional average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Someone who recognizes the opportunity to develop tech centers between the coasts is going to cash in big. Zappos and Tesla seem to have had their fingers on that pulse by settling in the Reno/Sparks area.

<comment><USER24> For the past 20 years or so, every state has tried doing just that. Very few have been anywhere near successful, and those that have end up with housing problems similar to (maybe not as severe as) SV.

<comment><USER37> Difference being, Silicon Valley was not entirely booked up until recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> \- World population goes up

\- Global amount of wealthy people goes up

\- Demand for a spot in a city goes up

So if you extrapolate this 100 years, you will end up in a situation where even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.

<comment><USER39> This reminds me of the joke, "If our daughter keeps growing at this rate, she'll be 12 feet tall by age 18"

<comment><USER38> Sounds dumb but consider the evolution of world population over time:

\- 1950: 2.5 billion

\- 2000: 6 billion

\- 2018: 7.6 billion

<comment><USER39> I don't mean to be dismissive of your general sentiment, I think we agree - <USER3> just think your example is a bit superlative.

I think when viewing exponential trends we need to consider the maximum 'carrying capacity' \- typically when something is growing exponentially there is some latent 'available energy' that is being consumed to fuel the growth. Once consumption reaches parity with that energy production - growth may continue for a bit longer as 'excess reserves' are drained, but a trend reversal becomes inevitable.

> even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.

In your city example, I'd argue that once a city is too expensive for any 'regular' person it will create a negative feedback loop: if unable to source enough labor to satisfy the service demands of the wealthy residents, those residents will begin leaving, reducing housing prices until the problem is at least somewhat mitigated.

<comment><USER38> Except that in 2118 those wealthy residents may not need less wealthy residents because of automation.

<comment><USER39> Interesting point. I'm skeptical, but certainly plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Let's not forget this article from a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501)

The great irony is that there are plenty of people in the SF bay area who think Tokyo is more expensive than SF just like it was decades ago, even though it's not true anymore.

<comment><USER41> Tokyo is still very expensive relative to Japanese incomes. Is it more expensive than SF on an adjusted basis? Hard to say, but it's not as clear as you're asserting.

If anything, magacities like Tokyo and London show us that you can build like crazy, and still end up a very expensive place to live.

<comment><USER42> here's a thorough cost comparison breakdown: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/in/Tokyo](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo)

rent in particular is drastically less expensive

<comment><USER41> Again: _you can't just compare rent values without adjusting for income._ Japanese people aren't earning San Francisco salaries.

The number you want there is the the one that says Tokyo is 10% cheaper than NYC. That's the adjusted number.

Say what you will about rent, but "10% cheaper than New York" is nobody's definition of cheap.

<comment><USER42> the tool has all that in it

according to it, salaries in SF are ~66% higher than Tokyo and rents are ~300% higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How much of San Francisco's billion dollars of debt would be mitigated by tax revenue associated with a 50% increase in taxable population? Would the tax revenue over 20 years make up for the infrastructure buildout costs and the legal costs of fighting NIMBY folks to increase density?

</comment><comment><USER44> It's the same all over the world. Politicians seem to have too close ties with developers and real estate investors and they put unhealthy zoning laws in effect to drive prices into absurd regions and boost tax income as well. People should contact their representatives and ask them to change this. It worked in Span (admittedly, they overdid it), it would work anywhere.

Unfortunately, there's no easy workaround for the situation. Perhaps an "Uber for commuters" would work, together with some sort of coordinated purchase/rent of affordable housing in areas ~1 hour commute from those chokepoints? (i.e. get 100 people to move to a small village together, then fill 2 busses every day with commuters to SF).

<comment><USER12> Are you sure that the zoning laws are driven by developers and real estate investors?

In most Bay Area cities, they are the wishes of the residents who do not want more development.

My neighborhood in Sunnyvale was recently rezoned to be single story only and that process is entirely driven by the residents, not the politicians. It was the 25th neighborhood in Sunnyvale to do so, and it cost around $200 per resident to file an application. No a single resident was against it.

<comment><USER45> Palo Alto has a 50-ft building height limit. The height of greed, that is!

<comment><USER12> 50 ft is plenty, 3 stories, and has little to do with greed.

The new zoning rules in our neighborhood limit height to 17 ft.

And greed wasn't the driving factor either.

People are much more concerned about the new neighbor tearing down the single story house next door and building an ugly two story McMansion from which you can look straight down in their garden/pool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It sounds like a small problem if all tech companies want to stay in a small geographical area and if they work with each other to resolve it... They should look at what China is doing if they need ideas.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hey maybe some other parts of the world need populating too. This obsession with location location location is quaint to me in the age of telecom. Maybe the Bay Area is just Done. It'll turn into every other Rich Person Town and the people who need to get real s __* done will go somewhere else.

Legacy industry is no excuse to keep cramming more people onto a tiny peninsula in California. It sucks for people in the middle and lower involved right now but honestly I encourage them to move at all costs.

The writing is on the wall.

</comment><comment><USER48> I would think this could be solved by allowing remote work when viable, and making sure there is plenty of internet in rural areas. I would love to live on 5-500 acres somewhere and work on the porch. There's plenty of land to go around; we're just stuck in the 20th century way of thinking about work in a digital age. Strange.

</comment><comment><USER49> If 60,000 people continue to move from there to Texas every year then 20 years from now when the area has lost over a million residents the housing prices might well flatten organically. This madness is causing housing prices to climb in Texas though.

<comment><USER50> Tell you what, we'll send all the jerks to TX and keep the non-jerks ;-)

<comment><USER51> Then there wouldn't be anyone left.

<comment><USER52> But I was told Austin is the SF of Texas?!!?!

I used to laugh my ass off at ignorant Californians that would say that. It's still fucking Texas.

<comment><USER53> It's not a _terrible_ analogy though. I haven't been to all the major US cities but I got a bit of a Portland vibe from Austin. It's definitely not what I expected from my first time in Texas (I'm a West Coast Canadian).

<comment><USER50> Let's not get into the usual culture wars here. My comment was meant as a joke. My apologies if it offended anyone. Live and let live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Or worded another way: If Bay Area Housing grows slightly more than 2% per year the affordability crisis will be solved within 20 years. ( 1.5 __(1 /20) ~ 1.0205 )

</comment><comment><USER55> And the freeways can support this how?

<comment><USER56> We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway use, and permit more scalable transit.

Run BART the short way between SF and SJ, build _many_ clusters of high density along heavy transit routes. Let the current freeway dependent population continue to use them, but build housing so that people can get to jobs without using single-occupancy passenger cars.

<comment><USER57> They need to assume people will use transit and also roads, and increase the capacty of both. The capacity of the bay area road network has been systematically decreased over the last ten years, even as the population has grown.

Also, compared to most other places, traffic laws out here are ridiculously inefficient. For example, light cycles that include a "yield on left turn" step and then skip the left arrow if the lane has cleared are incredibly rare. Also, instead of "left lane fast, right lane slow", the law is "use whatever lane you're comfortable in".

Simply ripping out the "improvements" made in the last decade and bringing traffic laws in line with the rest of the US would increase road capacity by double digit percentages.

(The lack of progress on public transit is also embarrassing, especially given the tax and income levels around here)

<comment><USER56> I agree, and my phrasing was imprecise; we _do_ need to assume that roads will be used to some degree, but we also need to allow for types of living that don't use freeways, or even perhaps allow living without a car.

Right now local regulations require large amounts of parking, which means large amounts of the most valuable space devoted just to cars, and forcing people to pay for the car. If you're forced to pay an additional 10% in rent to cover the space used for parking, then you're probably going to get a car.

If people were allowed to make the decision to not have cars and reap the financial benefits, we'd see a bigger shift.

As it is, car use is regulated into the way that we build things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chroem- The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines. The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same coin.

<comment><USER58> Forcing people to live near transit is a good thing. The problem is thebat are doesn't allow building dense hosuing near transit lines (common sense!) and so very few people can actually let people live near transit.

<comment><USER58> *the Bay Area not "thebat"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Are there studies that explain the cause of high house prices and what can be done?

<comment><USER24> Lots of people want to be there, and not enough housing is being built for them all.

It doesn't help that a lot of the people moving there, are doing so because of high tech job salaries, meaning they're more able to absorb the high rent costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Build up, it's the only solution.

</comment><comment><USER61> Good luck with that

<comment><USER56> I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Bay Area needs a regional government that can supercede tiny municipalities. Wise governance is impossible with lots of small outposts preventing sensible planning for the region, because they are only interested in advancing short-term interests of a small number of people. Democracy does not function well in that environment.

If the Bay Area doesn't step up to do that, it's likely that the State of California will have to start implementing policies, and that's not going to be as good as a regional government and planning.

<comment><USER62> The housing situation is a California wide problem. The bigger government is the first one messing up housing.

<comment><USER56> I agree that it's a California wide problem, though I think the cause is slightly different in different parts of the state. What do you mean by:

> The bigger government is the first one messing up housing.

Do you mean that State policies are the ones messing up housing? I think that Prop 13 and CEQA get named sometimes for stopping housing development, but a far bigger hurdle are the local zoning policies, and the veto power of local communities.

Are you suggesting something like a state-wide policy of by-right development for plans that meet local code and zoning regulations? That would definitely help reduce building costs, but it won't be enough to allow the amount of housing that is suggested in the original article.

<comment><USER63> Seconded opinion for strong regional government with zoning control. If the property owner fiefdoms aren't going to address the problem, it's time to take solving that problem away from them.

To give an example of how bad this is, the city of Atherton has sued Caltrain 7 times over the electrification project, the latest one related to (wait for it..) the use of 5 45 foot poles instead of 10 35 foot ones. [https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and- ath...](https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-atherton- cant-reach-a-deal-on-electrification-poles)

And this despite the fact it comprises less than a mile of the track and doesn't even stop at the Atherton station during weekdays.

How can anyone expect this problem to get any better without major changes to zoning control and major revisions to the property tax/rent subsidies? I'm not holding my breath, and neither are all the other people that are starting to think about leaving.

<comment><USER64> Wait, the fact that local residents can't even use the big ugly mass transit line going through their neighbourhood is meant to make them somehow more sympathetic to it?

<comment><USER63> As I understand it, there is discussion to start using the station again after they finish electrification, which of course assumes the town doesn't try to stop that somehow. It will also reduce air (and probably noise) pollution to nearby properties, because the trains will no longer be running huge motors spewing massive amounts of diesel exhaust while flying through the town.

None of that matters. Atherton is the wealthiest zip code in the country, and is comprised completely of high-end houses and mansions owned by the super rich, most of whom couldn't care less about mass transit or regional growth issues. They've got theirs, the hell with everybody else. Their strategy for keeping it this way is to fight all change, even if it's mutually beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> If this is true then I think the Bay will need to let go of it's ideas towards rezoning. Deregulatory zoning adjustments just won't be able to stimulate this level of building.

Why not just build out and do greenfield development but put some mandatory density requirements in place for new building?

<comment><USER66> I think it's time for eminent domain. Local landowners are using their wealth and political influence to deprive others of shelter for personal profit.

The federal government forcing the sale of land for high-density development would probably be enough to spook landowners into seeing reason.

<comment><USER67> That makes no sense at all. It's gov't policies that created the high prices. So the gov't then turns around and says "we're taking your property because the price is too high"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because big dense cities like NY are affordable?

<comment><USER68> Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn) != NY. I wouldn't call it "cheap", but there are plenty of places in NYC where one can rent a bedroom for under $1,000 a month easily (and maybe closer to $500/m in some places). That, coupled with not having a car, actually makes quality of life very good if you're someone who seeks out city living.

I know plenty of people that make $30k-$40k/y in NYC and can afford to live in Bushwick with a few roommates and live nice lives. Single train commute into Manhattan, plenty of things to do that don't cost a lot of money, no need to worry about a car, etc.

Edit: a lot of people are replying that having roommates isn't tenable for $x or long-term. I agree, and I don't think we disagree.

Solving a housing affordability problem for people making $15/h starting their careers is part of the overall picture - housing available for people at every income level. An experienced worker with a family won't be looking to live in a 3br apartment with two roommates, but that same 3br apartment that was affordable can also house a family of 4 with two wage-earning parents.

NYC is _filled_ with people in all sorts of jobs who, because there is housing stock available in many levels, can afford to live alone, with a family in an apartment in Queens, or in a house in NJ.

It's not panacea - transit is not as reliable as I wish it was, goods are expensive, but it works for a lot of people

<comment><USER69> > live with (...) a few roommates and live nice lives

Those two together don't compute for most people. I'd say only a minority of people are fine with living permanently in a dorm-like environment. Historically, having to share a house/flat with strangers has always been a sign of poverty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> inb4 The Seasteading Institute builds "New San Francisco" off the coast</comment>


Reimagining the PhD - <AUTHOR> https://nadiaeghbal.com/phd <comment><USER2> As a PhD candidate right now, after having spent seven years with an M.S. and doing "independent learning" and thinking that it was giving me the same growth- I can tell you right now that it isn't the same. This may vary for different fields of study, and it may vary for different people, but I think my experience will hold true for most people.

Spending time doing independent learning, even if you have given yourself some structure, misses some of the important things you get in a PhD program. Your advisor guides you, but they also challenge you. They hold you accountable. Some people may be able to challenge themselves, but most people don't have the necessary experience to know the difference between a "cool hack" and novel research. Your advisor has more experience and can tell you what is worth pursuing. Plus, to complete a PhD you have to do _all_ the requirements- even the stuff you don't like. A self-structured independent study program is probably going to be light on the stuff that you don't find fun.

There are a lot of downsides to doing a PhD, and I'm not saying that it's for everyone. Independent study is fine. But I'm going to look skeptically at anyone who thinks their own independent study program is the equivalent of a PhD. I would probably be less skeptical if their independent study resulted in publishing a few peer-reviewed journal articles. The title of PhD doesn't just signal that you are capable of learning, it's also a signal that you can work within the current research environment, have your work accepted by other experts in the field, and in general just do a bunch of "intangibles" that aren't signaled by you working on your own.

<comment><USER3> You seem to have had a very successful PhD experience. You write approvingly of your advisor, acknowledge the ways in which the program benefited you, and have respect for peer-reviewed literature.

That being said, I'm not sure that your experiences are typical. HN regularly has commenters and posters that have been disappointed by their forays in academia. One recent example was posted only two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833)

I imagine that a good PhD program is, by definition, likely to be beneficial. Probably above "independent learning" by leagues. However, it's worth considering what an average-case or worst-case PhD program looks like. Those may not compare as favorably to "independent learning".

<comment><USER4> The other link is about "philosophy PhD". This seems to be the big difference -- when I talk to non-CS PhD students, they often seem to have much harder time and worse conditions that CS ones.

My theory is because of all the opportunities. At least in CS, there is no problem in finding the job with "incomplete phd", and such jobs usually have a much higher salary than PhD stipend. This means that if you don't like PhD, you just leave -- and income increase associated with such action makes it really simple.

From what I understand, this is not the case for non-CS PhD specialties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny how experiences can differ so much -- academia really varies a lot. There's all this talk about what a PhD really means as a credential, while I've never thought about it that way.

In my corner of physics, a PhD just doesn't work as a credential: it cannot be used to impress anybody in industry because my field has no near-term applications. What matters is the PhD _process_ , a period of relatively stable funding where you can focus on learning and research without interruption. Some people even fight their advisors to get their PhD _degree_ later, because it marks the end of that stable period and the start of the rat race for postdoc and faculty positions.

In other words, the value of the PhD is entirely in the space it gives you to think about something you love. Bickering over who deserves the title of PhD seems to miss the point.

<comment><USER6> even this can lead to problems. i entered my phd after working in the field for several years as a research scientist. because of my experience i have been put in charge of internships, advising many masters students, organizing workshops, etc. all on top of the research im supposed to spend my time doing. this is all okay i suppose, because i've been able to be a very productive phd in addition to everything else ive done. but my phd compatriots have a lot more time in their days to pursue their interests in comparison to me. i hate it when people say a person is "too old" to do a phd, but I think there is a place where you may be too experienced and it would be better to do a phd in another field you find fascinating but have no experience in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cambridge awarded Aubrey de Grey a PhD in biology based on his book on the mitochondrial theory of aging.

Both Cambridge and Oxford will consider works of their former undergraduates for PhD's, and arrange formal defences.

This seems like an entirely fair system. Some people end up doing real research without having participated in a PhD program, and it seems natural to then let them defend that as a thesis.

<comment><USER8> As far as I can tell a European, and more specifically UK, PhD is a rather different animal than a US PhD. Much shorter elapsed time for a start.

I suspect that most people commenting are assuming that the system they are most familiar with is universal, including the author of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My favorite story about researchers getting by without phds is about Lars Onsager, quoted from his Wikipedia article

At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph.D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935.

</comment><comment><USER10> At least one famous research university states that (1) a Ph.D. requires the student to write a dissertation; (2) a _dissertation_ is an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication; (3) the dissertation will be judged by a committee with the chair and the majority outside of the student's department; (4) there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D. Individual departments may have additional requirements, e.g., qualifying exams.

More generally a common statement of work being worthy of publication is that it be "new, correct, and significant".

Good research universities insist that their new assistant professors be actively publishing. Since not all of those professors have much success publishing, there do tend to be openings.

In some fields, people with good publication records can find jobs.

Some of what helps for a career as a professor: (i) Have teaching well enough organized that can do well teaching large, popular sections -- this teaching _productivity_ helps the finances of the university. (ii) Be able to get research grants -- this also helps the finances of the university. (iii) Get a reputation as a leader in a popular field and, thus, contribute to the reputation of the university, which helps the university get gifts and, thus, also helps the finances of the university. (iv) Be successful at producing Ph.D. students that get good jobs. (v) Do well serving on committees. (vi) Don't be mean to students. (vii) Avoid politics and _hanky panky_.

For the OP, she (a) is finishing a book and (b) has been successful getting research grants. If the book can be judged to have content that is "new, correct, and significant", then she will have met the requirement "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". In that case she may be well on her way to a Ph.D. in some good research universities.

There is an example: In the field of computational complexity in computer science, an algorithm that has polynomial time complexity is regarded as a _good_ algorithm. This definition was from J. Edmonds. IIRC he had been a graduate student at the University of Maryland, left for a job, and published his research on network flows. The story is that, then, some of his former professors at the University of Maryland approached him and suggested, essentially, that if he took his papers, put them in a stack, and put a staple in the upper left corner, then they would accept that stack as his dissertation and grant him a Ph.D.

So, the story in the OP is not a fully new or strange as a way to get a Ph.D.

Colleges and universities like their professors to have Ph.D. degrees if only because that helps with accreditation.

<comment><USER11> > if he took his papers, put them in a stack, and put a staple in the upper > left corner, then they would accept that stack as his dissertation

When I was finishing my PhD, my advisor pulled out his dissertation to show me what it looked like. It was literally his papers sandwiched between the covers.

(Edit: formatting)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that's kinda how it works.

If you're lucky you publish 2 - 3 papers in your PhD career along a similar topic. Stick those in and coheretize them with an introduction and a conclusion.

Those whose fields are less productive or who are in groups which don't publish very much will have a harder time getting their final bit written...but it isn't exactly supposed to be easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A PhD. simply is recognition from an accredited institution for research work you have done. It used to be quite common for people to get one towards the end of their careers: you'd work your entire life as e.g. a teacher and then write a dissertation on your learnings.

Albert Einstein was not even working for a university when he developed his general theory of relativity. That only happened after he published some ground breaking papers while working as a patent examiner (1905). The university where he studied a few years earlier wasted no time awarding him a Ph. D. for that.

The point is that a Ph. D. does not have to be a prep school for wannabe researchers where after a few years some committee decides that you've done at least the bare minimum but an acknowledgement that somebody is a researcher by their peers for work they've done. Many universities have honory doctorates for this but focus too much on nurturing their own students to a PhD. instead of reaching out to their former students and looking at what they have done.

E.g John Carmack dropped out of college but his work in 3D algorithms and moving that field forward technically is undeniable and I can't really think of many people more capable of speaking on that topic authoritatively. I could imagine that being worthy of a PhD. Likewise there are many others that busy themselves with OSS work, standardization, ground breaking algorithms, etc. that are producing lots of written work, patents, standards, etc. that are recognized authorities in their fields that don't have PhDs.

I happen to have done a PhD. the more conventional way (i.e. straight after my Msc.). Since getting my PhD. 16 years ago, I've gradually moved away from doing research. At this point, I've not published anything in ten years and would definitely not call myself a researcher. I can't deny a certain level of impostors syndrome. I'm certainly no Albert Einstein.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a way to get PhD in Mathematics for a working individual, without leaving the job?

Suppose, I have a solid dedication, can allocate time for studying at home (20-30 hrs / week), have passion and brains for research.

1\. Are there any universities that support distance PhD in Pure Maths? Also, I can visit a university regularly (a few times a year).

2\. Or is there a way to do research somehow independently from a university (for my maths I do not need Hadron Collider), but have a mentor, reviewer (I can pay for their service)? Or work collaboratively within a group? Can such research, if it is on the level of PhD, allow some institution (Cambridge?) give me a PhD degree, as a rule not an exceptional case?

<comment><USER15> And what is your motivation?

If you want to learn mathematics, you don't need to have PhD. If you want to go through the academic career line, you need to dedicate much more than part- time-job equivalent.

<comment><USER14> 1\. I want to work in industry in research departments and deep tech products. For most positions, having deep knowledge will not be enough and PhD grade is expected: to pass the filter.

2\. I want to explore some topics in depth, contribute, and get regular feedback, mentorship - basically, have an advisor.

I do not want to stay in university, fight for places there, I do not need grants - I want accredited expertise that can open some doors.

It seems like there are quite a lot of people in similar situations, and despite all the progress in online education, increasing academic requirements from many employees, requirements for life long learning our advanced education system cannot support different paths to accredited degrees and research.

<comment><USER15> 1\. If you goal is to work in industry, don't do pure mathematics PhD. What works, and is doable in 20-30h/week is doing an applied PhD in an area related to your work. I know quite a few people who did it with great success. (Quite a few friends, and some accomplished people like [https://ruder.io/.](https://ruder.io/.))

Also, as a person with PhD - spending 4-7 years in an irrelevant field is going to seriously hurt your industry career. (I speak as someone with PhD.) Yes, PhD is worth something - but it won't come in the place of experience.

2\. For the second, you need time. On their side, even if they don't need to provide funding, they invest their time. Talk to people at a local department. You may impress them enough that they are going to work with you unofficially - but the bar may be high.

For later - what is the exact area you are most interested in?

<comment><USER14> Thank you for your answer and advice!

In pure mathematics - I found most interesting topics around algebraic topology. Next year, I plan to look into homology. These fields also have computational aspect and some applicability outside of pure maths: computational homology and Topological Data Analysis.

This autumn, I finally looked a bit into category theory (applied) using this good book: [https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory- Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory- Compositionality/dp/1108711820), and, unsurprisingly, found it exciting.

Regarding PhD in an applied area: I tend to agree with you, and also keep thinking about focusing more on computational / applied mathematics so that my studies could be somehow related to my work. My tech focus at work is around data processing: with interest in distributed databases and computations.

Heh, I see that distributed systems, algebra, topology, and categories are similar in mental representation in my head, they cause same kind of excitement when I study them: visualising, analysing, and playing with the systems of structures, connections, defined rules and operations :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a PhD. A PhD is just a certification that you have depth and breadth around a topic at an expert level. An expert of a topic is someone who has the skills and knowledge to evaluate someone else's work on the topic, and who can themselves do novel work on that topic or nearby.

As with all certifications from dog-training to fighter jet pilot, PhD certifications have both false positives and false negatives. Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. But the reason people insist that you get a PhD is because they don't want to get into the whole argument of whether you really are an expert. Otherwise, there is no reason to get a PhD. If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you.

<comment><USER17> _If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you._

Dude, chill, you can just be an expert on a subject without giving a damn about what other people think. It's an option. Give it a try _

<comment><USER18> It really sucks to be an expert but then not be able to get others to take your expertise seriously. We can do a lot of things on our own, but we're all social beings who do need to interact with others around us.

It does really suck to be an expert but then be ignored or shunned by the people you consider your peers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This isn't reimaganing, this is about increasing the number of people with PhDs, which is surely a step in the wrong direction. PhDs are an incredibly wasteful endeavour, consuming huge amounts of time and human spirit for unclear benefits, under circumstances that invite exploitation.

In case you can't tell, I'm currently trying to finish my dissertation.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this thing is the key:

> "As an independent researcher, you don't have those constraints, so you can > focus on creating whatever artifacts you think will best reach your target > audience (which might also mean academic papers, by the way!). I was mildly > afraid of GitHub when I started, but I learned that open source developers > use GitHub repositories for discussions, so I published some of my work that > way. (A few other examples I like: Nicky Case publishes her ideas as games, > and Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak are writing about quantum computing > in an interactive readable format designed to improve retention.)"

We can redefine progress. Current academia is conservative, at least when it comes to what counts as work and progress, what as a distraction (sadly, almost all didactics and outreach counts as "distraction" for researchers).

Personally, after (kind of) leaving academia, I can focus much more on various media that wouldn't be recognized.

</comment><comment><USER20> A PhD is not required to do research, nor does research necessarily lead to a PhD. A PhD is ultimately like any other degree: a school programme where, at the end, some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field. Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own. (I have a PhD myself and I encourage everyone who has the opportunity to undergo formal schooling, but I'm well aware that not everybody wants to.)

There is one part of the article that is a bit confusing:

> I was also told by one professor that it'd be "expected" for me to join > faculty full-time after getting a PhD, which made me uncomfortable, because > I knew I didn't want to work in academia long-term.

Maybe some context is missing, but I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would believe this statement. A professor may train dozens of PhDs over his career, and if all were expected to join faculty, then the resulting exponential growth would cause the working population to be pretty much entirely university faculty.

<comment><USER21> Maybe some context on my end is missing — but isn't the last paragraph basically describing the current problem with academia? That's exactly what people are being trained for, there is just not enough demand for PIs / Professors so bright-eyed optimistic researchers end up getting left up sh*t creek without a paddle after four to six years.

<comment><USER20> Can't speak for everyone, but for my PhD I was trained for doing research. What else would it be? That kind of research is (presumably) also useful in R&D positions in industry, and I certainly see most of the PhD graduates here eagerly hired by companies with advanced products. Actually, what I was _not_ directly trained for is exactly what you need only in academia: writing grants, managing small teams, supervising students, and so on.

<comment><USER22> The thing that killed the appeal of academic research for me was that I found I was playing the "publish or perish" game too well an it was actually making me (as someone observed at the time) "hyper cynical".

I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.

<comment><USER23> What about working on stuff that no one will care about in the immediate future for various reasons, but that you definitely consider important to study?

<comment><USER22> Don't get me wrong - I _loved_ the area I worked in, I think I just saw a bit too much of how the sausage is made in "big science" projects and I got rather disillusioned by the approach that seemed to be required to succeed at a "management" level in academia and decided that as a long term career goal it didn't interest me at all.

NB It probably didn't help that I spent 6 years working on symbolic AI at the start of the 90's at it was becoming increasingly apparent to me (correctly as it turned out) that this fundamental approach didn't really work no matter how fascinating it was.

<comment><USER23> I get what you're saying. Pure math is much more palatable. Less "big science" and more individual/small-team work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems to me that there was a time that a lot of the Software Engineering work was contributed by Universities. Operating Systems, Databases, Compilers, Networks, etc. Examples that come to my mind are UCSD Pascal, Unix Berkley, Ingres at Berkley, Kermit Project at Columbia. I don't see that any more. You should be able to get a PHD by designing and implementing a state of the art piece of software. Even google was started as part of a research project I think.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know the author is well intended and in the end it's her opinion after all. But many of the points she raises are naive when viewed from the point of view of someone who is inside academia. Someone going through a PhD could write a wildly different opinion. In the end it's opinions all the way down, but if you want to "re-imagine" this whole thing you need to start with a much broader vision.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article reminds me of the book "How to get a PhD" by E. Phillips and D. Pugh.

A PhD program is a training process on how to become and independent researcher. * Just like the word "theory", the word "research" has different meanings in academic and non-academic settings. A research work in academia is an original contribution to a specific field that meets certain criteria of: writing and technical rigor, objectivity and completeness. It is the community of that field who judges your work on these criteria. * What constitutes a research question is a hard problem (you need to compute your cost of opportunity: time, complexity, resources and impact) that only comes with experience. Choose badly and you might end up empty-handed after many years of work. At the beginning you rely on your advisor for guidance on this but with time you begin to smell the low hanging fruits and proceed with certain "independence".

Regarding the article, it is not clear whether the OP made a comprehensive review on the relevant and related literature. Without that, no research question can even begin to be formulated. No research is completely isolated from what has been already done and it is the job of the student to identify where it "fits". If it is really a completely novel subject then I would strongly discourage the OP from working on it if she were to do it in the context of a PhD program, for her own good and sanity.

Of course, this is not to say that her work has no value (it might have even more value that what she could have done in academia) but that is not the point. It does not mean either that academics are the only people who can do research. It means that you cannot obtain a PhD without the guidance of someone who has gone through the process of obtaining a PhD and has many years of independent research experience.

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't it also a bit more strictly defined in angelo saxon countries?

I had the impression, in Germany it's "research some stuff" and you are basically left on your own. Other countries had a real program, that was like a master program just more research related.

<comment><USER28> Exactly. In Germany there is no "grad school" or "grad students". You get hired directly by a prof to work in their department as a researcher/research assistant ("scientific employee/colleague") and indeed "research some stuff", work on industry collaboration projects, supervise student theses and so on. If you can publish a few papers about that stuff at relevant places, you can write it up and defend your thesis.

There's no "program" to speak of, no bureaucratic application procedure, no handholding.

But the differences start even earlier: in Germany even bachelor and master students are supposed to be rather responsible individual adults, than in Anglo countries. For example it's largely up to students to attend lectures or not, there's little homework, little to do during the semester. You can decide to take or drop courses deep into the semester, then take exams. If you prefer to work during most of the semester and cram everything into the exam period, it's up to you. The opposite is called "verschult" ("schoolized") and has pejorative connotations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A PhD is intended to demonstrate that a person is capable of pursuing a course of research within a field of study, and has a mastery of the existing knowledge and pertinent skills/methodologies.

Unfortunately, in some fields, the PhD has sadly become a form of lazy gatekeeping, and reimagining the PhD in those cases may just be a matter of waiting for the old guard to step down.

In some other fields, the PhD is probably ripe for reimagining, but "independence" might not be the right lens through which to think about it. For example, it would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be physicist to independently build a large hadron collider to do their research with. The institutions that make those sorts of resources even possible are inherently large/complex, and in those cases the PhD is a less sad and lazy form of gatekeeping (i.e., you need to do a set of progressively more complex stuff under the tutelage of someone more experienced before we let you touch all of our big expensive things).

In yet some other fields, which may be younger, have less of an established orthodoxy, and lower overhead to participate in (e.g., the economic/anthropological open source software type work the author does), it seems totally reasonable that a person could develop and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities on their own and without a formal course of study. In such fields, the concept of the PhD doesn't seem as ready for reimagining as it does retirement.

<comment><USER30> Yes, a Doctorate of Arts in Software Development would be more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Love the citations at the end of the blog article.

Getting a PhD was a waste for me, but I loved it anyways. It's been a liability for my career and it cost me ~5 years of income. I am older than my managers, and just a misfit overall.

Why did I leave academia? Well, there was this recession you see...but that was just the first part of the problem. A huge issue was how long it takes to get hired anywhere unless you're some top notch Harvard guy, it sucks, especially when you're broke. Then there was the realization that I could immediately see 2X the income just being a software engineer with evenings and weekends to myself pretty much.

Once I did the math, my academic career was immediately over. Broke, mentally exhausted, five years behind in income, not politically aligned with typical far left policies, sick of the campus lifestyle (beer, no parking, broken glass, property crime).

For me, it was called "growing up" to leave academia. I loved writing papers and articles and was getting into books, but it just didn't pencil out as a career goes. I think only independently wealthy or perhaps the really elite Ivy League types should even bother.

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried getting a PHD but it was just too much, the lecturers weren't friendly, there was little return value. Of course, I went for PhD of contemporary philosophy, but I expected way more. Philosophers just hate each other because they're close minded and believe only in themselves.</comment>


JPMorgan Hires Cyberwarriors to Fend Off Data Thieves and Foreign Powers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/jpmorgan-hires-cyberwarriors-to-repel-data-thieves-foreign-powers

<comment><USER2> >The military orientation of JPMorgan's security team leaders may incline them to see the involvement of governments and spies when companies face a range of threats, many motivated purely by profit, says Brendan Conlon, who spent 10 years in computer network operations with the NSA and now runs Vahna, a security firm in Washington. "It's like groupthink," he says.

Not only the cultural pre-inclination but also the political cover it gives to JPM to claim a nation-state bogeyman, instead of copping to having a flawed organization.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been saying for years that there is a huge and growing market for a Blackwater style cyber firm.

There's only so much that JPMorgan can do legally, and I'm sure they're already into some gray areas.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't help but think these straight-laced, shirt & tie, crewcut environments aren't attractive to the type of diverse skillsets they really need.

</comment><comment><USER5> and who are we hiring to defend us from JPMorgan?</comment>


Authful – An open-source API for Two Factor Authentication - <AUTHOR> http://authful.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Blog post with more information: [http://blog.mongohq.com/two-factor- authentication-made-authf...](http://blog.mongohq.com/two-factor- authentication-made-authfully-easy/)</comment>


Frame-Based Editing - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenfoot.org/frames/ <comment><USER2> Just to add to this discussion, some quasi-related links with regard to visual presentation of code:

• Experiments in Code Typography (McDirmid, Microsoft) [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/liveprogramming...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/liveprogramming/typography.aspx)

• Typography of Code (MAX 2010): [https://youtu.be/mG0lyGekGDs](https://youtu.be/mG0lyGekGDs) (alternate recording: [https://youtu.be/r2JePjrDggE](https://youtu.be/r2JePjrDggE))

• Elastic tabstops: [http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic- tabstops/](http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/)

Of course, there's also numerous projects with more significant visual representation, like Blockly, Scratch, flow programming, etc. And, of course, real-time feedback/simulation is another arena of usefulness e.g, [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/smcdirm/managedti...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/smcdirm/managedtime.aspx), Bret Victor's works, etc. But, I digress.

<comment><USER3> Also Haskell Ligatures [https://www.google.com.au/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms- android-...](https://www.google.com.au/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-hms- vf-au&source=android- browser&q=haskell+ligatures&gfe_rd=cr&ei=mqxSVbn_FqTu8we5roHoBw)

<comment><USER4> Ooo, nice! I've hacked unicode to do my own ligatures in a custom editor, but I dream of doing a custom font like this (but in a San Serif proportional way).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first time I heard about this approach was Boxer: [http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Boxer](http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Boxer)

Some more info here: [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4695](http://lambda- the-ultimate.org/node/4695)

Paper with some screenshots: [http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/20reasons.pdf](http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/20reasons.pdf)

And another more contemporary document: [http://www.pyxisystems.com/file/BoxerStructures.pdf](http://www.pyxisystems.com/file/BoxerStructures.pdf)

It goes beyond framing a bit, making things like variables concrete (they are actual boxes that contain a value). But it doesn't do full Scratch-style pluggable programming, the statements are still text, as in "Frame-Based Editing".

<comment><USER6> Yes, and the remark at the post's bottom, "Structured editing wasn't actually a bad idea, it was just poorly executed." seems oblivious to Boxer -- I found it usable enough (and inspiring).

diSessa's book [http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Minds-Computers-Learning- Lite...](http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Minds-Computers-Learning- Literacy/dp/0262541327) has more on the philosophy and the experience with kids using it. The writing style's a bit of a slog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This goes back a long way, to, at least, a Cornell system circa 1980. It's usually been a teaching tool, for students having trouble with language syntax.

LISP used to have very structured editors. One of the features of INTERLISP was that you could select a subexpression and pull it out as a function. A call to the function, with the correct parameters, then replaced the function. Conversely, you could select a function call and have it expanded in line. These were safe operations; they would not change the program semantics.

That's the key. The editor understood the semantics of the language, not just the syntax, and only performed safe transformations. This sort of thing is useful in program maintenance; when faced with a large function, you can safely break it apart into smaller ones.

C++ could really use a tool like that. It would be very hard to write. The tool has to perform only valid transformations, so it needs to know the language.

<comment><USER8> This is the next phase of revision control, where tree transforms are stored in an edit list in the log.

We will start to tag actions like we label commits. Transforms will be parameterized so we can pull them into our tree, merging them with our own transformations.

If you use an IntelliJ product, you can put the carat inside an expression and iteratively expand the properly bounded selection with alt-up-arrow

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found writing in Lisp dialects enjoyable after having used mainly C and C++ for (too much) years partly because it was easier to reason about the syntax, of course also for the obvious paradigmatical reasons. Slurpage and barfage, splicing, enclosing and other functions that editors provide really mean you are no more editing code on a textual, but rather structural level, and what makes this effective is the beautifully simple way Lisp programs are expressed. Coupled with the concise recursive representation of algorithms, ordinary functional programming goodies (map, fold, etc.) and the powerful macros, it feels like it completely redefined 'coding' for me. I wouldn't go back if I had the luxury of having such a choice. So anyone who finds this frame-based concept attractive will probably like Lisp's s-expression syntax and paredit mode in your favorite editor.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was thinking the other day, after reading the post about the Unison project, that graphical editing could be a really neat idea - "there is no syntax, you manipulate the AST directly" kind of thing. Then I started to try to flesh out how such a thing might actually work and I quickly realised that it offers zero benefit over editing standard Lisp syntax with paredit. They're equivalent.

<comment><USER11> Keep fleshing it out - indeed use your experience with paredit to guide you - the benefit would be that people who don't necessarily know emacs etc can suddenly write lisp the way it was supposed to be written. Imagine if you were new to programming and something like that was the tool you were given?

<comment><USER10> New to programming? I've been coding since I was 12 and only recently have I become confident in the procedure to exit emacs.

I shouldn't have said paredit - I thought it had become a general term (is there one?) Most of my experience is with Cursive's 'Structural Editing' (sounds general, but is it?) features, and that's what I had in mind.

I wouldn't give a newcomer emacs (or vi) but I would give them the concept of paredit. The problem with that is fundamentally the keyboard, and it's a problem for the more seasoned of us too. I would kill for a programmable numpad-sized keyboard with removable caps that can be labelled _by design_ so I can have a physical button for the operations I perform most often. I know similar things can be achieved with midi pads, but they're far from perfect. Programmable, configurable keyboards were a thing when I was at school (around the tail of the BBC Micro era) - where did they go?

<comment><USER11> > I wouldn't give a newcomer emacs (or vi) but I would give them the concept > of paredit.

This is exactly what I was suggesting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I designed Java curriculum around Greenfoot for a few large summer camps and education programs in Silicon Valley, but have since turned away from the platform completely because of how it limits students from developing games independently on their own. When they realize how much more involved it is to write similar games in Java, they stick to the confines of Greenfoot, where flashy images and motion are easy to implement. Since then, I've realized it's more useful to have students implement a game like Flappy Bird with Java's native functions for drawing ovals and rectangles, rather than by explaining how to do it with Actors and Worlds.

However, it is an extremely effective way to get students _interested_ in Java, and that is often the most important objective.

<comment><USER13> I've helped teach a few camps myself and have similar opinions. Alice allowed for impressive graphics but not a lot depth to the programming (at least the early version we had at the time). Building Pong level stuff from more primitive capabilities in real Java was just as rewarding and develops skills that are a lot more directly applicable elsewhere. Learning Java by making Minecraft mods was really interesting: the initial learning curve is a bit steep due to the messy working environment, but it very quickly leads to more advanced topics as the students want to enhance the behaviors of existing creatures, add new graphical effects, or do something that requires extending the protocol for communication between the client and server. If Minecraft were open-source and the codebase was cleaned up a bit, it would be an _awesome_ teaching tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm having trouble seeing how this is different from Lisp's S-expressions. Is it basically paredit for blocks and logical constructs in a non-lisp context?

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting approach.

I agree with the premise (code is structured, and shouldn't be handled as flat files). I've played with the idea of using my own card-tree editor as a LISP editor before: [http://blog.gingkoapp.com/features/gingko-as-a-lisp- editor](http://blog.gingkoapp.com/features/gingko-as-a-lisp-editor)

It's an avenue I definitely want to explore.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's an interesting idea. I wonder if something like this could be rigged up in Visual Studio, maybe using Rosyln?

<comment><USER17> That's what I wanted to ask, is there anything like this for Visual Studio? It gives very subtle hints, but I would love something like this.

<comment><USER4> Not that I know of, but I personally use "Tiny Braces" coupled with "Editor Guidelines" to get the visual appearance, at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks neat. But I was bummed out by this: "Frames are useful for statements, but they get unwieldy if you were to use them for expressions." I'd love to see an approach to this that works for languages that don't have a statement / expression distinction.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it sounds like what they really mean is "we want our frames to be course-grained, because they are still a bit awkward to work with".

You can reflect the entire AST in your structure editor, so all text is parsed (just identifiers, or perhaps keywords). But then since basically all editor actions involve manipulating frames/ast nodes, you need to make the UX extremely smooth -- shortcut keys for high-level actions alone won't cut it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See also the work of Dave Winer in using outline to edit code (e.g [http://scripting.com/stories/2012/01/23/codeNodetypesInWorld...](http://scripting.com/stories/2012/01/23/codeNodetypesInWorldOutlin.html) )

and [http://leoeditor.com/](http://leoeditor.com/) to edit python code as outline

</comment><comment><USER21> In my first programming module we used a language called Sense, which was a visual drag-and-drop block editor. I sometimes imagined an editor that used plain text but showed what block you were in visually.</comment>


In Baidu maps, China is always at the centre of the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6551094571357601792 <comment><USER2> "The Middle Kingdom" \- naturally it would be in the middle.

'China (Chinese: 中国; pinyin: Zhōngguó; lit. "Middle Kingdom"), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), ...'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China)</comment>


For startup, analyzing data is the next big thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/for-startup-analyzing-data-is-the-next-big-2073824.html

<comment><USER2> Sure, data is there; tools are there; interest is there; but I'm always wary if skills are there.

We teach computer science, math, statistics, and machine learning but there is no good data mining class. Data mining is about being cunning. Sometimes quantile bootstrapping will work, other times you need cross-validate L1 radial support vector machines with non-linear feature selection. Good dialog with domain expert, broker, game designer, or medical doctor, will save you weeks of work. This is what is so hard to teach ... and we are left with practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed. We did a little PR experiment for the holidays where we offered to analyze your Email data for 2011 and the response was enormous: <http://yearinreview.toutapp.com>.

Big Data is great and all, but the companies that can make meaning out of data are the ones that will win.

</comment><comment><USER4> Social games already know this. Most people would be flabbergasted by what the big guys know about their players.

It's really like a money-printing machine when you have the data and tools to analyze it.</comment>


Scaling at 2am with EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerdashery.com/2008/03/scaling-at-2am-with-ec2.html

<comment><USER2> This is a little embarrassing to admit, but after codepad and this post, I think I'm developing a man-crush on Steven Hazel.

</comment><comment><USER3> EC2 definitely proves itself to be the bestest way of doing what this guy is doing. I wish I had something cool to do with EC2, but alas, I only study math as a graduate student. Maybe i'll get some sweet computational stuff I'll need doing, and farm it out to EC2.

</comment><comment><USER4> EC2 is kinda cool, BUT

* No static IPs - wtf? So email meant for my email server might later end up at someone elses machine :/

* No reverse DNS - So my machines look horrible.

Once they fix those 2 things I'd try it again.

<comment><USER5> EC2 wasn't really designed to be used for public-facing services that require static IP addresses or reverse DNS. Developers are shoehorning public-facing apps on to EC2 instances anyway, and it's great that EC2 provides the flexibility to allow that... but that never was its intended goal.

If you're worried about incoming mail, why not just use a service designed for it, like fastmail.fm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool, but how much pays for EC2 and how monitze his site?

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's just supposed to be (really) cool. Certainly it recommends sah extremely well if he's looking for work or, say, funding.</comment></comment>


Trying to be creative in a 'Dilbert' world - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/15/living/corporate-creativity-office-workers/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 <comment><USER2> The idea is quite interesting. I love the idea of virtual economic systems.

It's a little strange, though. He doesn't look at all like the average nerd as he describes himself.</comment>


Why I don't want Zooomr.com to relaunch - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/zooomr/why-i-dont-want-zooomrcom-to-relaunch-262585.php <comment><USER2> Wait, he doesn't say why.</comment>