Sea-Thru: A Method for Removing Water from Underwater Images - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2019/11/13/this-algorithm-can-remove-the-water-from-underwater-photos-and-the-results-are-incredible/ <comment><USER2> "I really see this as a start of the artificial intelligence boom in marine science" \- first words of the video in the article.

I don't understand why to even say something like that. PR value? As I understood the paper, the presented method is very refreshingly clean of anything resembling what we call AI today. It seems to be a combination of good, old-school photogrammetry and image processing techniques - which is great, because with such methods they can actually ensure the result is physically correct.

<comment><USER3> Aside from the paper, I think one thing they're referring to is using the output (color corrected images) as input for AI. One thing they want to do is count the number of fish in an image, and know which species each fish is. So you can take pictures of coral reefs and estimate "there's 1,000 species X, 2,200 species Y". With the old images, it's too difficult to determine which species a fish is. With the new images, it's easier. So Sea-Thru is preprocessing that'll be useful for AI in marine science.

<comment><USER4> I dont have the impression it works on moving objects, since it needs multiple frames from different depths, but it could be used to count static critters... unless some kind of boom with multiple cameras at different depths is used...

also, since the technique is removing a foggy haze, it seems like this could be used for selfdriving cars, with multiple cameras along the periphery of the car, to clean the image for foggy conditions (fog, smoke, smog, ...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat! This uses Structure from Motion to compute depth to each pixel and correct backscatter for the specific distance light is traveling from the subject. Typical flat color correction algorithms can help reduce the blue tint typical of underwater photography, but it's only physically correct for a narrow distance band.

<comment><USER6> Modern Image programs have a Dehaze algorithm that already can calculate a depth map using the haze. Wonder if this is better.

<comment><USER7> Which programs? I had to generate some depth maps recently and couldn't find a good solution.

<comment><USER8> That's not what the comment above said. They said some imaging programs create depth maps, and process images based on that. It doesn't mean it creates a depth map for the user, it can simply be an internal part of the whole process.

Photoshop RAW pluging does dehazing. I don't know how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A couple of days before I saw the Scientific American article someone dropped this project in our local development group: [https://github.com/nikolajbech/underwater-image-color- correc...](https://github.com/nikolajbech/underwater-image-color-correction) the repository contains some test images, and they also provide a website to test it out: [https://colorcorrection.firebaseapp.com/](https://colorcorrection.firebaseapp.com/) that states: "This web-application features a beta version of the Paralenz color correction algorithm, which features an open-source license".

The two projects seems unrelated at first glance, but the timing is interesting.

<comment><USER10> I've skimmed the description of the repo and it does look unrelated. The paper uses depth information while the repo is focused on color balance. The paper mentions this is inaccurate way of fixing the colors as the color information changes with distance too.

</comment></comment><comment> jagged-chisel I'd love a tool to reverse this process on normal photos so I can put random family events under water without drowning the family

<comment><USER11> You can do it in Photoshop with various color tweaks, blurs, and textures. It helps a lot to "stage" the original shots for background removal (or to look like they could already be in an underwater location).

<comment><USER12> _> It helps a lot to "stage" the original shots_

In particular, a fog machine will help emulate the haze and backscatter produced by water and the particles floating in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sea-thru- brings-c...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sea-thru-brings- clarity-to-underwater-photos1/)

Original article linked in current article, has more pictures/content.

<comment><USER14> the first picture in this article is extremely blurry compared to original

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While, as explained in the article, the method was developed to help scientists and not primarily to improve aesthetic qualities, I find most of the images very pleasing.

The one thing that is disturbing though is images with visible _" horizon"_ (for lack of a better word). I find the images that look like they were taken on land but don't have a sky where one would expect it somewhat uncanny.

</comment><comment><USER16> These are truly amazing results. Very excited to see some wonderful underwater photography in the coming years. Also, the name "Sea-Thru" is cleverly perfect!

</comment><comment><USER17> I would be interested in an experiment of exporting video to a frame sequence, and then letting the software process each frame. Would it make the same decisions on each frame so that when played back as video there is no visible changes between frames? While the results are impressive for a single still, using this to see movement that occurs underwater would be amazing with the improved color.

<comment><USER18> and you could also use it to just accuracy (or at least consistency) of the algorithm. Sounds like a good follow up paper.

<comment><USER17> In the early days of VR, I did the equivalent of this test. The software to stitch stills was much more robust than the the nascent versions of software handling video. As an experiment, I ran the video through the video software, and then did the export to image sequence and had the stills software apply the same settings to the image sequence. When the image sequence was converted back to video, you could see how the stills software made different decisions for each frame resulting in a very psychedelic video. With more tweaking the trippy effect was reduced but not eliminated, and the video software was updated to become much more robust (and impressive).

As a primarily video guy, I always laugh to myself (sometimes not to myself) at the amount of effort photo editors spend on a single image. I remind them that the video world has to do that same level of work, except x24 per second multiplied by number of seconds. Photoshop is cool, but Nuke is mindblowing

<comment><USER19> >I remind them that the video world has to do that same level of work, except x24 per second multiplied by number of seconds.

While this is true, video frames only have to stand up to scrutiny for ~40ms. You can take a lot of clever shortcuts when an onlooker only has a fraction of a second to spot the rough edges!

<comment><USER17> The one crux to my argument. Thanks for knocking me back down from my high horse

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I kinda want to see this applied to the diver video. It could surface artifacts, or look surreal.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was initially disappointed by the shadows/refraction patterns of the surface waves are present in the images. Can we compensate for that?

<comment><USER22> Fun fact, those patterns are called caustics:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_\(optics\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems like it's just color fixing using stereographic distance modeling and a known reference palette. I'm not sure what is new or novel about this? Maybe it's just new to oceanographic photography?

<comment><USER24> Inventions often seem obvious or trivial in hindsight. Are you aware of this technique being used anywhere else? Because this seems pretty novel to me.

<comment><USER23> Yeah both are common in astrophotography. Color correction using a reference palette is also pretty common when doing any kind of scientific imaging, though in lab setting the distance is usually well established and not relevant.

<comment><USER25> TFA:

> Once trained, the color chart is no longer necessary. As Akkaynak helpfully > explained on Reddit, "All you need is multiple images of the scene under > natural light, no color chart necessary."

On Reddit:

> Just a clarification: the method does NOT require the use of a color chart. > That part was not clear in the video. All you need is multiple images of the > scene under natural light, no color chart necessary.

<comment><USER26> What annoyed me with that answer is they didn't explain why they needed the color chart at all. I would assume it's for training some model, which would lead to this method not working without the chart out of the box for example in muddy waters.

<comment><USER27> The chart is needed to validate that the algorithm works: you need to have known colors in the image, you need a reference. (The chart is the ground truth)

Once the chart is back to its exact color, the image can be considered corrected (at least for this distance, illumination…).

If the algorithm brings the chart back to its true colors at several distances and in various conditions, then it can be applied confidently on images without a chart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> is it physically accurate image though? I think those untouched photos are accurate same as seen by naked eye

sure it's more aesthetically pleasing, but it's already distorting reality

personally I think photos should be most accurate representation of what healthy naked human eye see, no beatification, no bigger contrast or oversaturating despite making photos more appealing. if you twist reality where it will stop, where is the border of what is too much?

<comment><USER28> > personally I think photos should be most accurate representation of what > healthy naked human eye see

Under what lighting?

<comment><USER14> no artificial lightning which would not be there just for photo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not really excited about technology anymore. But I found this absolutely amazing. The people that made the jankey whale pop out of the floor and raised billions have nothing on this. I'm not joking about how cool I think this is.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does something like this exist for over-water photography? I remember once taking a picture of beautiful scenery in the Japanese mountains, and the result was a very disappointing, almost completely grayed out image.

<comment><USER31> Shoot in RAW and adjust white balance to your taste, maybe tweak the colour space too. Professional editing software such as Lightroom in combination with high-resolution and fidelity RAWs will allow you to correct even the _worst_ pictures, as long as it's not pure white or black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The name is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does one verify if the output is correct?

<comment><USER34> She used a color chart for calibration. I think it should work, but I'm not an expert in image processing.

An alternative can be to make some similar looking objects that are like fake coral blocks and use a boat to sumerge them in the sea and compare the corrected photos with the photos taken in air before. (The wet surfaces have a different look, and it would be important to use a diffuse light instead of direct sunlight, and perhaps other technical problems for the comparison.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The branding of this is on point. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER36> Whether the modified photos look better or not is mostly a matter of taste I guess. Personally I prefer the non-modified photos for the underwater feeling they give. It's a cool technique though, and probably useful for scientific purposes.

<comment><USER37> I'd be kind of curious about the reverse filter. I wonder how some of my photos would look like if I "underwaterified" them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> r_wateralpha 0.1</comment>


Free hosting VPS for NGO project? - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/free-hosting-vps-for-ngo-project-99a4477c91 <comment><USER2> GCP, OpenShift, AppEngine, Firebase, and Heroku all have a free plan.</comment>


Ask HN: Does "Think And Grow Rich" really apply to the Software industry? - <AUTHOR>

I read "Think and Grow rich" by Napoleon Hill recently and have been trying to figure out how it could help me with building my Software business. <comment><USER2> I certainly hope so. Though Napoleon's recommendations are a very high level theory of what happens in reality. It is therefore necessary to have low level knowledge about both your own software, and the market you are trying to enter.

As most of HN will agree, there is no substitute for experience.</comment>


No formal training, guy launched 100,000 ft balloon. Took better space pictures. - <AUTHOR> http://cbs5.com/watercooler/stratosphere.balloon.launch.2.1191754.html

<comment><USER2> Watch the video, tons more information.

As someone who launched balloons like these in college, it's interesting seeing so much coverage of these projects. At the time, it seemed like a run of the mill thing to do (we did about 3 launches a year, part of a NASA program) Now it seems to be hitting the news rather frequently.

Anyways, props to this guy. Where we were at least applying knowledge from our fields to write code and create experiments, this guy did some pretty complicated stuff for not having any related background.

<comment><AUTHOR> So much coverage... yet may be skewed toward MIT and other schools. This guy got better pictures as CBS reported. Some how, wanted to point out and give this guy a little coverage. And give a pat on the back to those keep it simple. Without formal training, this hacker has a different point of view. We all benefit when we participate and try...</comment></comment>


Aventus Classic: a fully decentralised and open-source protocol - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aventus.io/the-aventus-classic-%C3%B0app-competition-is-now-live-eab54805e7cb?source=friends_link&sk=05984d863372ce65e7ac634eb5ca47b6 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, we are super proud to announce a major code release: Aventus Classic, our open-source, fully decentralised protocol for open ticketing ecosystems, built on Ethereum, that satisfies the original Aventus whitepaper.

We have made lots of innovations in our code to be able to process ~100 tickets a transaction, so we can fully service the long-tail ticketing industry! We are hosting a DApp competition and have the company Satoshi Awards already committed to DApps produced on Aventus Classic.

We are opening our codebase up to contributions from anyone and have some technical blogs coming out in the next while about some of our innovations. Looking forward to your feedback!</comment>


A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html <comment><USER2> Wow. I honestly wasn't expecting to ever see this on the front page of HN again, given the current ubiquity of 64-bit Linux. (And yes, before anyone asks, I've played around with minimizing 64-bit executables. Unfortunately they are both larger and less forgiving of tomfoolery. The smallest 64-bit ELF I've created is 84 bytes.)

Since it is here, though, I want to take the opportunity to say thanks to everyone who's expressed their appreciation of my essay. And I should note here that writing that essay, so many years ago now, is one of the better thing I've done for my career. Share what you have to learn the hard way; the effort won't be wasted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me say thanks for writing it. This easily makes the top 5 pieces of text I'd recommend anyone interested in really knowing what happens to their code needs to read, at least once.

I probably go back over it once every 6 months and it always makes me smile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875077>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68056>

</comment><comment><USER4> AFAIK even a file of 45bytes takes up at least an inode and an entire data block on disk. So on most systems it doesn't matter if the file is 4096bytes or any smaller. And if you need to send the file over the network, the source code still beats the binary in size...

<comment><USER5> Actually some file systems are capable of storing the file contents inside slack inode or directory entry space, for files that are very small.

<comment><USER4> True. There are also things like UFS fragments and ReiserFS tail packing etc, but does plain ext3 or ext4 implement any of these optimizations? I don't think so. So in the most common case nothing is gained by this optimization.

<comment><USER6> It looks like support for in-line data in ext4 is comming to mainline in 3.8:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1NTA)

As this has been discussed for quite some time, I actually thought it was already enabled in ext4 -- apparently not.

BTRFS supports "space efficient packing of small files" - by suballocating blocks. Not sure what the real mimimum size on disk for a file is though -- but apparently you can approach header+<data> size both on btrfs and ext4 (and on BSD under UFS2 afaik).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Upvoting it even though it's a pretty old piece and has appeared on HN before. A very inspirational piece of work, and a creatively fun way to learn about the ubiquitous ELF format.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Despite being a stickler for normally calling out reposts, I'm not sure I've seen this one on HN before, and it's a FASCINATING read, even if you're not into ASM.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Upon return from a system call, eax will contain the return value. If an error occurs, eax will contain a negative value, with the absolute value indicating the error."

I've always wondered about this. Why do errors always return as negative?

<comment><USER9> If I recall, DEC's VMS operating system had an error return convention where the high bit was negative on error, and the other bits meant different things: system the error occurred in, specific error, etc.

I believe it was a tradition to have a high bit indicate error at the time Unix was originated.

<comment><USER10> OpenVMS (née VMS) function calls and signals use the low bit set to indicate success, and the low bit clear to indicate failure; the condition value format.

The high bits of the condition value format can also tell you more about what component returned the error, and there were a few control flags up in the highest bits, including bit 31 (the sign bit) which inhibited message display.

Somewhat unusually, the low three bits of the condition status value are used to indicate varying levels of success or failure; the success (0b001), informational (0b011), warning (0b000), error (0b010) and severe/fatal (0b100) errors.

VAX had the BLBS and BLBS instructions for testing and branching on the low bit, too.

These success- and failure-testing instructions were separate from the BEQL/BEQU, BNEQ/BNEQU, BGTR/BGRTU, BGEQ/BGEQU, BLSS/BLSSU and BLEQ/BLEQU that looked at whether the signed or unsigned value was positive, zero or negative, or zero or greater, or zero or less. A condition value that had been displayed or otherwise inhibited was switched to a negative value.

Yes, VAX had a lot of instructions.

This usage of the low bit also led to the semi-inevitable "Success on VMS being odd" in-joke.</comment></comment></comment>


Political Aspects of Full Employment (1943) - <AUTHOR> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html <comment><USER2> Employment isn't the end goal. What we want is to provide people with the access to goods and services, and employment is a good proxy that is easier to optimize for. Also, for what it's worth, we already live in an age of full* employment in the U.S. and so far we're yet to see that the "maintenance of full employment [causes] social and political changes which [gives] a new impetus to the opposition of the business leaders".

This essay also overlooks the problem with the government's ability to efficiently allocate capital, or to do so more efficiently than the market itself does, given that the market is ultimately self-correcting, with few exceptions that we can legislate against.

This essay is largely devoid of academic meaning. It's full of conjectures and extrapolations and lacking any bona fide empirical basis.

Not to mention it is guilty of the seemingly undying habit of the left to posit that those in favor of business hold their beliefs solely because it benefits them, and not because they genuinely want what's best for the whole of society.

<comment><USER3> How can the capitalist, a single man, who knows that no state can efficiently allocate resources also be as presumptuous as to think that he knows what is best for society?

<comment><USER2> The capitalist doesn't believe he singlehandedly knows what is best for society. In fact, the capitalist believes he alone can only maximize value to shareholders – but in doing so maximizes value for all since he creates economic prosperity through growth.

He simply genuinely believes allowing the market to operate as close to freely as possible is what generates the greatest amount of prosperity for everyone. The fact that the U.S. is the world's strongest economy by far should be proof enough, but apparently people still prefer to hate success

<comment><USER3> I am not debating the mechanism of capitalism, its ability to allocate goods and how or whether it creates prosperity. For the record, it seems to me the most natural way for humans to interact with each other.

My point is that to think that one knows what is best for society is similar to thinking that one knows how best to allocate goods. It just isn't possible to know. Any capitalist will surely agree that value is purely subjective.

<comment><USER2> But the capitalist doesn't believe he knows how to allocate capital, while the statist does.

The capitalist believes the exact opposite – that he can never claim to be a better planner than "nature itself" so we should admit defeat and let things transpire naturally while we each focus on our individual lives and businesses, which presumably we know how to live or run better than the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the best arguments against full employment that I have ever encountered was made by the German general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, who fought in both of the world wars and died in 1943. His argument was regarding his officers, but it can be readily applied to the population as a whole.

>"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

Keeping diligent idiots out of the economy by paying them to stay at home would be far more economically beneficial than a drive to bring about full employment.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's a good analogy. Maybe an army can't make use of every type of person (doubtful, in this context) but doubly doubtful in the economy at large where employers need many different kinds of people. Moreover, who is to say the stupid and diligent, to borrow from your quote, wouldn't do worse harm at home left to their devices?

In any event, Japan, in the 80s, was pretty much near full-employment. I don't think many economists or government officials would argue that was "bad". Perhaps industrialists who could not find labor might have thought it was "bad".

<comment><USER4> Japan throughout the '80s (and still today, though maybe a little less so) has been practicing something fairly close to what I am suggesting, by having a non-job role for the "madogiwa zoku", the window seat tribe.

They may not be paid to stay home, but they are paid to stay the hell out of the way of anything that could affect the smooth running of the business.

<comment><USER5> The window watchers is an intetesting phenomenon, and you have a point in that in a way it's like keeping useless employees out of the way. However, I would hesitate to say they are actually useless, but rather the labor market in Japan is such that it's extremely difficult for a good employable person to "hop" jobs. Once hired out of University, which is the main avenue for hiring for the sarariiman, workers have little chance to change jobs. In that atmosphere and culture, it's nigh impossible to have your window watchers go out and find a job where they could actually be productive. Many of them (most?) are able and productive but the company has moved on to other things, or refocused, realigned, reorganized and these people get trapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, the Soviet Union aimed and likely achieved full employment. Unemployment was actually a criminal offence.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's so refreshing to actually see someone dealing honestly with the fact that the interests of the capitalist class and the working class are opposed, rather than engaging in ideologies of denial (there is no working class) or misdirection (we are putting these policies in place for your benefit, not ours). You'd never see such honesty today.

</comment><comment><USER8> Site is not available

<comment><USER2> Works for me, but here's a mirror just in case: [https://outline.com/eCLpSE](https://outline.com/eCLpSE)</comment></comment>


AWS Summit 2014 Registration Open - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/aws-summit-2014/san-francisco/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're in the SF Bay Area the March 26, this one if a fun, free one day conference. I seem to recall a number of product demos, giveaways and being able to ask AWS staff as well as companies using their products (of which there are many) questions.</comment>


Huawei Won't Use Google in Its Upcoming Smartphones Even If U.S. Lifts Trade Ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/30/21115451/huawei-restore-google-services-android-us-ban-lift-first-choice <comment><USER2> That's one danger of trade bans. It can also accidentally make the other party independent of you.

</comment><comment><USER3> The headline is the exact opposite:

> Huawei says it would return to using Google services if US lifted ban</comment>


Ask HN: Is building something the best way to find a co founder?  - <AUTHOR> http://ashoknayar.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/how-to-find-a-co-founder-in-24-hours/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted your guys' thoughts on this process of finding a co founder that I documented. Fundamentally, building something small and fast is probably the best metric to test the dynamic of a team. We built <http://thestyli.st> as a test (far from what we're planning to focus on keep in mind).</comment>


Slow Science - <AUTHOR> http://slow-science.org/

<comment><USER2> Seems unlikely. You're just going to get out-competed by more aggressive profs.</comment>


Fovea detector (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM <comment><USER2> Another example: you can't see all dots at the same time: [https://twitter.com/ValakhP/status/810554137867915266](https://twitter.com/ValakhP/status/810554137867915266)

That's why _foveated rendering_ done right is one of the next milestones for VR because you don't need to render the whole screen and everything at highest definition all the time.

<comment><USER3> In my case, this image is a far better fovea detector than the propsed shader. For medical issues (high intraocular pressure), I'm used to doing field of view tests, where I have to spot very faint dots of light against uniform backgrounds, and over the years this has resulted in me being used to spotting small variations (either in brightness or movement) in the "outer" part of my FoV.

Long story short, I don't see a sharp edge where the stars don't rotate in the shader, but on the "static" image I'm aware that there are dots that I'm not seeing (most I can get to see is 4 at a time by looking at the diagonal crossings).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I bring the screen closer to my face, the area where I can detect the movement becomes larger. Far away from my face, I can see only a few spinning. If this area corresponds to my fovea, wouldn't I expect the opposite? Perhaps larger spinners can be detected father away from the fovea?

<comment><USER5> If you move too far, the movement becomes too hard to detect even by the fovea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The page says "Works better in full screen mode" but I find the opposite, as full screen just made everything bigger, therefore more detectable by non- fovea cells.

</comment><comment><USER7> If one of them is not moving, would it be noticeable?

<comment><USER8> If it's in the center of your field of view, yes. Less so for those in your peripheral vision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice!</comment>


An Open Source A&Q System - <AUTHOR> http://www.osqa.net/

<comment><USER2> As much as I kind of like the idea, the inevitable result is going to be hundreds of these sites on the internet, packed with advertisements, with people asking questions, not getting any answers, and somehow always managing to be the top google results when I'm trying to figure something out.

</comment><comment><USER3> That design looks exactly like stackoverflow.</comment>


Apple and AT&T signed five-year iPhone exclusivity deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/10/confirmed-apple-and-atandt-signed-five-year-iphone-exclusivity-de/ <comment><USER2> Wow, I haven't seen the Cingular Wireless logo in a while. Talk about getting acquired and floating into obscurity.</comment>


Show HN: Tounat - Airbnb for finding guides for your trips - <AUTHOR> http://tounat.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We have built this website at Startup Weekend event and I want your feedback for both the idea and the site for further development. Thanks in advance! You are awesome :)</comment>


Over 750k applications for US birth certificate copies exposed online - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/09/birth-certificate-applications-exposed/ <comment><AUTHOR> How many of these are "accidental", meaning, how many S3 bucket leaks have used incompetence as a disguise to transfer or sell sensitive data and provide a plausible excuse?

<comment><USER2> I don't want to think about it.</comment></comment>


How much does it cost to build a home in Silicon Valley? (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.themiyoung.com/single-post/2016/11/03/The-Guide-Costs-of-Home-building-in-Silicon-Valley <comment><USER3> Had a chat with our insurance agent recently; she wants us to increase our insurance coverage on our home in old palo alto, which is currently calculated based on $350/sq.ft. rebuild cost. She said that clients in the burned-out areas in Santa Rosa were being quoted much higher rates, and although she admitted that was partly due to a large number of people competing for contractors all at once, she believes $450 is a more realistic replacement cost basis.

That would be also based on replacing the existing structure, which is single- story, no basement.

What almost always happens when an older house is sold in this area, is that the property sells for between 1M and 2M, is immediately scraped and replaced by a two-story-plus-full-basement (with home theater and au-pair apartment), which then sells for 6M-8M with a profit of circa 1.5M.

<comment><USER4> So based on that rate I should be able to easily purchase my ~550 sq. ft. apartment. In fact the payments on a 30 year mortgage would be about $1300/month. Clearly the problem is the price of land, made even less affordable because of density maximums. If the price of a lot could be split over 6 people, a lot more people could afford to purchase a house.

<comment><USER5> Yes but your nimby neighbors won't allow it. Also high end homes and condos have higher profit margins, this is because finishing costs are cheap relative to sale value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm missing something but it looks like she omitted general contractor fees unless she rolled them into the sq/ft cost. Not that most people are qualified but I know people who GC the projects themselves to save a great deal of money. It's worth calling out as it's own item...

I found an up and coming architect so my design fees were substantially less than my GC fees... by about 8-10x.

<comment><USER7> Square foot costs are only given by a GC, so that's already included.

> I know people who GC the projects themselves to save a great deal of money.

Do not do this unless you know what you're doing. One bad contractor (and you will be hiring many) can trash the whole project. The value of the GC is that he brings a stable of quality contractors that he knows and works with.

I've gone both ways, it really depends on the situation.

<comment><USER8> Any advice on how to find a good GC? All the people I know who remodeled their home seem to have horror stories. A couple of them ended in law suits with the GC.

<comment><USER9> I had good luck. As mentioned above, finding a good GC is not easy because they do not advertise. It is entirely word of mouth.

I live in the pacific NW where there are a lot of old craftsman style homes. High quality woodwork details is the theme.

I started by calling high end custom furniture shops and asked them if they could do built in cabinetry work. They did not, but they recommended a number of woodworkers that moved on from furniture into contracting (carpentry, custom window sashes, storm windows, etc...).

Then, I asked them what GCs they have worked with in the past and which they would recommend.

A few names came up often, I spoke with them, picked one, and was really happy with the work.

I guess the tl;dr is, good GCs use highly skilled subs, so find the subs then ask which GCs they recommend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always wondered what software developers make in the heart of silicon valley. I see some things that basically say 'more than Portland but only by maybe 50% or so', which means perhaps $180K or so? Nobody is buying a million dollar house on that kind of income, but in Portland (where I think houses are pretty expensive) someone making $120K wouldn't have any problem buying a perfectly fine place, even pretty close in to the urban core.

Maybe I'm getting my numbers from the wrong place.

<comment><USER11> Senior should make 175-200k base plus 100-200k in RSUs per year rolling - <USER2> is if you get a good initial grant and keep getting good reviews by year 4 you have staggered vesting that nets that amount. At 300-400k per year you should be able to live a good lifestyle while saving for a house.

Really senior engineers can certainly make more; 500k for a top 10% performer.

For reference I just got my tax statement for last year and I'm over 300k.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's what a typical software engineer makes. A Level 5 SWE at Google makes that. But that is far from representative of the vast majority of SWEs.

More likely, you can afford a $1m mortgage on a double income of $150k which, IMO, is a lot more common.

The reality is that a lot of people (single and married with kids) rent with the hopes they will be able to afford a mortgage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure what I am supposed to do with the extra 3500 square feet there...

<comment><USER14> Movie theatre, grand dining room, home gym, steam room, VR room, office, woodworking shop, wine cellar, etc. The possibilities are endless.

<comment><USER15> Not to mention living with all of your extended family under one roof, starting a church or homeless shelter or disco club, stockpiling enough food to outlast a zombie uprising, or displaying your collection of luxury cars you never drive....

More seriously, in general single-family houses should be on the order of 1000–2000 square feet. The rest is typically a complete waste (nobody I know who has a 4000+ square foot house actually uses most of the space – people with real on-site wood shops etc. put them in a separate space detached from their home, not in spare bedrooms), and serves to isolate households from each-other, force a car-centric lifestyle, drive up housing costs for everyone and force people working essential menial jobs to live far away and commute long distances, cost much more public infrastructure than denser alternatives, etc.

I have a several rich programmer friends (early facebook or whatever) who bought outrageously large houses in Silicon Valley as a status symbol, but work all the time, eat out every meal, and only go home to sleep. What a tremendous demonstration of unthinking excess.

<comment><USER14> I don't know about you, but 1000-2000 sqft for a single family home with an actual family in it is downright cramped.

You could turn a garage into a wood shop though if you don't have a particular need to store your car in a garage.

The point of a large home is to turn it into your own personal oasis where you can spend days at a time without ever really needing to leave, and without feeling bored. The thing is, many people just don't know how to live in a big house, because they spend so much time in cramped quarters until they can afford a home. A big house is all about features. Every room is an opportunity to have a space dedicated for something, if not for sleeping. Mindless excess is dumb, but thoughtful excess is amazing.

<comment><USER15> Um... I grew up living in a maybe 1100 square foot house with 4 people and occasional extended guests. It was a bit tight maybe (e.g. 2 kids in one bedroom, some contention for the one bathroom), but "downright cramped" is an exaggeration. I currently live with 3 people in a 1200 square foot condo and it seems plenty spacious. 2000 square feet should be enough for a family of 8 or something.

My godparents' family lived with a dozen people in a few mud-brick + straw roofed rooms probably totaling 500 square feet, plus some outdoor space between buildings. Now that's cramped.

> _The point of a large home is to turn it into your own personal oasis where > you can spend days at a time without ever really needing to leave, and > without feeling bored._

In my opinion that is a depressing vain and wasteful way to live. YMMV.

<comment><USER14> A small home is an equally wasteful way to live — a waste of opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The comments in this thread focus on senior engineers, but a lot of the big earners I know in the Bay Area aren't engineers--they may be in tech, but senior BD, marketing, product, finance, legal, and especially sales people can all make well north of $300k. At my last company the biggest W2's were all sales people.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an interesting article that describes building a $2-6 million dollar house in a matter-of-fact manner. I wonder what the prospective audience size for this article is in the Bay Area –maybe less than 5000 local people are capable of affording these properties.

<comment><USER18> Don't underestimate the number of people out there who are far wealthier than us 9-5 coders—people come from all over the world to buy property on the west coast.

<comment><USER19> [https://macropolo.org/chinese-real-estate-money- transforming...](https://macropolo.org/chinese-real-estate-money-transforming- san-francisco-bay-area/) there's a lot of foreign investment and money parking happening in the Bay Area as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let me see...

I can either spend next 15 years, hoping that tech market doesn't crash again and using my SWE salary to pay off property taxes and mortgage on a crappy SV house, making rent-seekers of all sorts rich...

... or I can pocket the money, and be financially independent when I'm 35-45, and spend rest of my life with family and working on interesting open source/business projects of my choosing.

Tough one.

</comment><comment><USER21> these numbers seem wildly inaccurate

<comment><USER22> They're a little off, but not much. The problem is that most people can't build a 5k sq ft place on a 7500 sq ft lot without going down as well as up. Basements in the Palo Alto flood zones are crazy expensive to build and permit so most don't do it, opting to stick to the sq ft requirements, which on a 7500 sq ft lot would be ... 3200?

5k would need a 10k lot in palo alto. A 10k lot in palo alto goes for 3m to 5m depending on neighborhood.

So , yes, it's nuts.

<comment><USER23> In my opinion, 3200 sq ft is more than plenty for a single family (2-4 people).</comment></comment></comment>


Systemtap vs Dtrace Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SystemtapDtraceComparison <comment><USER2> I use DTrace all the time on OSX 10.5. I was looking forward to using it on my FreeBSD box but it seems the CDDL licensing is getting in the way. See here [http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/systemtap...](http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/systemtap- and-dtrace)

Anyone here have any experience with Systemtap on EC2? I've been meaning to get around to creating some new images with it but haven't yet.</comment>


Re: What You Can't Say - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html <comment><USER2> Not to be a jerk, but "[Copernicus] was forced into it, because it was the only way to make the numbers come out right" just isn't correct.

Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...

<comment><USER3> Really, Copernicus' accomplishment was that his model worked _very well_ yet left out a huge heap of _epicycles_. Heliocentric = fewer epicycles. That was Copernicus' contribution.

This pales in comparison to Kepler's "Equal areas in equal time." That observation is a very strong hint towards Newtonian mechanics and Calculus.

<comment><USER4> This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally.

In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over- fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others?

I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.

<comment><USER3> Kepler's ellipses fit the data with an even simpler model. Newton added an underlying model which could be generalized to hypothetical bodies. In other words, you could plan something like an Apollo mission with it. I doubt you could do something like that with the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or even the Keplerian model. Newton's model gave you enough insight to _hack_. And not just surface hacks, but _deep hacks_. Everything before was merely descriptive.

Newton's model also showed convergence. The way the planets moved became connected with the way cannonballs behaved. Mechanics could also subsume models of buildings and machines. Engineering and architecture were unified by Newtonian Mechanics.

It's not just a matter fitting. It's a matter of transcending current models. (Another reason to study different programming languages/paradigms.)

<comment><USER4> I think you've hit on a weakness of the whole Machine Learning paradigm. I might get this wrong, but I believe every machine learning algorithm necessarily introduces some bias into selecting which possibilities to consider, and without some kind of bias, learning is impossible.

But once you've chosen how you will bias your model, you are only going to search for solutions in the space defined by that bias. So, figuring out the parameters of the ellipses describing the movement of heavenly bodies, but not questioning whether ellipses are a good choice to begin with. There is also feature selection, how you decide which aspects of reality (or measurements of reality, actually) are relevant to the learning problem. (There are feature selection techniques, but that presumes you already have a finite set of candidate features and then determine which ones have the most value.)

It seems that, perhaps, this kind of paradigm busting discovery is out of reach of current machine learning methods, and that the kinds of decisions about what to model and how to bias your model is where humans add value to the process.

This is all philosophical bullshit at this point, but I remain curious about the relationship between learning algorithms and scientific discovery. If anyone is still reading, are there any good books on this topic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication._

For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly.

I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible.

My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.

<comment><USER6> _If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations._ \-- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)

<comment><USER7> "If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations."

I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here.

My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It took me a couple re-readings of the first page or so, because I didn't understand that these were responses to some objections you got.

I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised that noone has mentioned the case of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov here. These were borderline literary theorists that actually did have a complete nonsense physics article published.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair>

<comment><USER6> How are they borderline literary theorists? One of them has a PhD in theoretical physics, the other one in mathematics.

<comment><USER9> Maybe only sci/fi critics? Also I once tried to read their papers and it reminded me of experiences where I've tried to read lit-crit. There were some superficial stylistic similarities, between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature_

I would tend to say the opposite. Paul, you're mixing up here what I would call "savantism" with intelligence. We know that there is no true definition of intelligence, but I think whatever the definition ends up being, it has to be based more on understanding than just knowledge and mechanizations within that knowledge. Who would be more afraid, in your scenario, between the physicist and a Cantonese scholar?

 _if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military_

Exactly. So it's not about dismissing Socialism (especially since all modern countries operate on both Socialistic and Capitalistic principles), as much as making an argument as to what the upper tax bracket should be. And for that, I would look at companies that have tremendous bonus systems. (I won't exhibit the obvious.) Are they more productive? Do they take more risks? What are the benefits and consequences of those risks? Personally, I'm not as concerned about the marginal incentive between $10 million and $1 billion as I am that a society, as a whole, functions, and doesn't degenerate into something "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

<comment><USER11> It's not so much what the upper bracket should be, it's about what the threshold for the bracket needs to be!

In Belgium, the top bracket of 50% starts at about 32,000 euro's. In addition to that, there's a separate flat social security tax of 13%, meaning that my marginal tax rate is about 60% - with a mediocre salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you live in Holland, that last point is pretty much a no-brainer. Politicians are constantly accusing each other of saying things that are 'not done'. We have our wannabe-Fortuyn (Geert Wilders) at the moment. Heck, a politician just stepped down for not adhering to 'the code' another sign we're not that tolerant. We're just tolerant about homosexuality and drugs.

<comment><USER13> The world mistakenly confuses us for a tolerant country: we're not. We're just indifferent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> " If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible."

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't believe the Bible to be literally correct. It's well documented. Jefferson even went as far as to create his own Bible, editing out most miracles, the resurrection, and immaculate conception.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson count as "people in 1830" in the same way that the Salem Witch Trials might constitute "people in 1692". I'm also of the opinion that you should also account for the other two points, even if to say that you don't mean to refute them by refuting the third.

<comment><USER14> I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense.

I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the reply. I didn't think you were trying to refute the other two points, but I was interested in overt clarity.

Whether or not you've romanticized, "Deist" no longer seems to be a position "mainstream" politicians can admit to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy._

semiconductors: it wasn't e-commerce plumbing driving it, but fear from Sputnik and its consequences (mobile computing ...in Minutemen). That wasn't entrepreneurship (no risks taken on behalf of "entrepreneurs") at Bell either: state subsidized monopoly which was somewhat acknowledged a little later with the babies. The Valley had its paying customers before anything to "market" (see HP f[o]unding letter).

light bulbs: that's a dead horse kicked around too often.

plumbing of e-commerce: being in the right circle helps (No Such Ancestors). Btw. Minitel "3615" was there way before on scale with the actual plumbing (net and terminal used to sell services from the armchair countrywide [amazon/paypal/etc do not serve every country either]). Also from State Monopoly. The Kahns in the USA never ran any risks.

And life in Afghanistan is as poor as it was, America has copied the Soviet Union.

</comment><comment><USER17> This was in response to one of the replies here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774> (showdead=on required to see)

Specifically, this response is what I wanted to bring up.

 _The fact that you can't say something doesn't mean it's true.

I believe this is implicit in "So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today." In an earlier version I made this point explicitly, but it seemed repetitive, so I cut it._

</comment><comment><USER18> There are largely two categories of "things you can't say", that by all "community standards" are obscene:

Prurience: [http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moder...](http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moderated/Year97/3923.txt)

Politics: <http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER19> A little more warning than that might have been nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors.

The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."

What _didn't_ happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face.

The Wikipedia article on it gives some balance.

-t

<comment><USER21> '"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."'

This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison.

If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?_

Well, actually...

<http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/>

<comment><USER23> And also:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n>

"Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung- Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For most of these points I don't even understand what he's trying to say.

<comment><USER25> Context: <http://paulgraham.com/say.html>

<comment><USER26> I find this really annoying about Paul's otherwise insightful and interested articles. Namely that he assumes you know everything he's written and when and what it was called and that you know how to easily find it so you can understand the context.

Paul, would you PLEASE date your articles (and RFS for that matter) and link to whatever it is you're talking about?

<comment><USER27> To be fair, unless someone goes and posts the URL to Hacker News or something, the only way you'd get to this post is by reading "What You Can't Say" and reading the links at the bottom. His top-level essays do have the date on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs._

I don't agree that this is the case. Many smart people don't see the need to be rewarded in a financially appropriate way. (Those that do make their way into finance or startups eventually). Look at institutes such as the CSIRO in Australia for science/technology in general or the BBC for broadcasting technology.

<comment><USER29> The BBC's a good example, how long have they been working on their own Dirac codec? That's taxpayer's money they're spending. Sure it probably makes a few geeks happy but remember - these geeks know fully well that if they tried to do that outside the safety of the BBC, they'd starve. At the end of the day, in the private sector you get stuff done because if you don't you don't eat.

<comment><USER30> You seem to be implying that the BBC's Dirac work has produced no useful results; I would disagree. Sure, it's not the format-of-choice of BitTorrent users, and it hasn't cropped up in the endless discussions of the <video/> element in HTML5, but that doesn't mean it's vanished. A subset of Dirac colloquially called Dirac Pro has been standardised by the SMPTE as "VC-2" (Windows Media Video was VC-1):

        http://sonofid.blogspot.com/2008/02/vc-2-progress.html

...and there's a company selling professional video-encoding hardware using the Dirac Pro codec:

        http://www.numediatechnology.com/products.html

Wikipedia says "Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008":

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_%28codec%29

<comment><USER31> you missed the point. in the private sector you don't need to justify costs back and forth to each other...either the product is wanted at its current production costs or it isn't. would it be used if consumers had to pay the full cost of its development? or do they only use it because those costs were offloaded to the taxpayer and it can essentially be given away?

<comment><USER29> Exactly. Could a startup get VC funding if it wanted to develop something like Dirac, which doesn't do anything groundbreaking?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Similar relationships exist in sport. Gymnasts can take up nearly any sport and excel. Swimmers can barely walk :)

Gymnasts are the physicists of movement.

<comment><USER33> It sure didn't play out that way on my high school cross-country team. We had a gymnast who couldn't even manage a 25min 5k by the end of the season and three swimmers who beat that by a big margin in the very first meet.

A lot of gymnasts made good cheerleaders, though.

<comment><USER34> Cheerleading is another very physically demanding sport. A lot of cheerleaders could easily move into other sports and do very well.

<comment><USER35> Modern cheerleading with "stunting" is basically group gymnastics. Hence xiaoma's comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What do academic economists actually have to say about the link between entrepreneurship and taxation? My impression is that new tech companies start in response to new technological opportunities and have little to do with marginal tax rates.

Hewlett Packard 1939 - Top Income Tax Rate 79%

Intel 1968 - 75%

Microsoft 1975 - 50%

Adobe 1982 - 50%

Google 1998 - 40%

<comment><USER37> Income tax rates are a red herring. In general, entrepreneurial activity is taxed as long term capital gains. You can see those rate are more attractive.

      Hewlett Packard 1939 - 63% (1 year holding) to 23% (10 year holding)
      Intel 1968 - 25%
      Microsoft 1975 - 20%
      Adobe 1982 - 20%
      Google 1998 - 20%

source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_capital_gains_tax_in_the_U.S).

If at any point I experienced a tax rate of 98%, I imagine I would not be highly motivated to earn more money.

<comment><USER36> Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.

<comment><USER38> Bad example. The Beatles only released albums for seven years, then quit.

<comment><USER36> Not exactly. Paul McCartney subsequently released 22 studio albums, Lennon 8, Harrison 10 and Starr 15. I think we can safely say that all four would have already been in the top income tax bracket from their Beatles royalties alone. Yet they were somehow motivated to continue making music.

<comment><USER39> _Yet they were somehow motivated to continue making music._

I'm sure being tax exiles helped keep their motivation up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why Paul's article doesn't have a date on it?

<comment><USER41> Archive.org goes back to 2004: [http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgra...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> French Lit is harder. Much harder per Kolmogorov complexity, but even if you're running it on monkeys, getting the _right_ answer out to the limits of evidence would be a huge work of detective and archeological and historical study far beyond the source text. You would be attempting to reconstruct someone's mind from the outside in, with very fragmentary life-logs.

IOW, French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. They just want an informed guess. In physics, this is considered the start of an investigation, not the end product.

<comment><USER43> > French Lit is harder.

What definition of "harder" are we using?

In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem.

In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.

<comment><USER42> To be 100% correct in literature you would need a time machine and a mind- reading device. To be the closest evidential approximation to correct, you would have to do your best to simulate these machines using every possibly accessible causal consequent of the relevant past remaining in the present. This is the "gold standard" but it would be technologically and financially implausible. Thus, "doing it right" is impossibly hard. Only "doing it wrong" is easy.

<comment><USER43> > To be 100% correct in literature you would need a time machine and a mind- > reading device.

Even that's not enough. It is generally agreed that the author's intent isn't binding.

There is no generally accepted definition of "correct" in literature.

One could say that the lack of "correct" makes literature harder, or one could say that asking for correct or judging it by that basis is wrong.

If you do the latter (which seems reasonable), you can't compare it with physics on the basis of "harder".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's too bad that the majority takes the moral fashions Paul talks about in these two articles so seriously. So, in the end, one can only discuss these topics with close friends, whose reaction you can be fairly sure about.

Case in point: someone's comment in a thread about suicide last night. Sure, it was offensive. And the karma drop that resulted was frightening. Which is exactly the point: if you state a certain opinion on certain subjects, the outcome is something entirely different from rational discussion.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thought experiment: would this essay be at the top of HN if Paul Graham wasn't its author?

<comment><USER7> Of course not. Neither would "Things You Can't Say".

<comment><USER4> I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).

<comment><USER7> It may have been successful (though it also tells bloggers what they want to hear, and does so with a stamp of authority --- the fact that it came from a tech/startup person adds novelty for political bloggers, and probably subtracts nothing). That's kind of not my point.

I'm actually a lot more interested in what jimbokun really thinks of the article than what Andrew Sullivan thinks about it. What's the insight you got from it? That thinking forbidden thoughts is, in fact, like stretching your brain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.

Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend.

I don't know much about French literature, but what I _do_ know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.

<comment><USER47> Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century. I think it's fair to put it into the "doubtfully useful techniques" bin, where a higher standard of proof for usefulness is required to make use of anything that seems socialist.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is the case today. Free enterprise and competition is looked on skeptically, while socialism (multiply disproved and damned by the experience of history) is gleefully embraced and readily adopted with insufficient skepticism.

<comment><USER48> Facism and national socialism killed hundreds of millions - don't confuse dictatorial societies and their losses with socialism as an idea.

<comment><USER47> See my post below, communism has always devolved into statist tyranny in every attempt so far. If a software development methodology had an equivalent track record to communism (adjusted appropriately for the subject matter) it would be far more reviled even than waterfall (if you could imagine such a thing) and nobody would ever seriously propose using it.

<comment><USER46> This isn't about communism. It's about socialism, which has an impressive track record.

<comment><USER43> While the claim that national socialism has killed hundreds of millions is an exaggeration, the actual record isn't that impressive.

Most of the hell-holes on earth are a "people's republic".

Yes, socialism seems to work in Western Europe and Japan. However, that may be more a function of Western Europe and Japan than it is of socialism. It's unclear what wouldn't work in those places.

<comment><USER46> What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system? It's not like Europe's some magical land of milk and honey.

The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.

<comment><USER49> As an aside, we don't call it socialism here. We call it social market economy. Also, true socialist parties aren't nearly as big as social democrat parties, which are more moderate.

<comment><USER46> That's understandable. There're more shades to socialism than just the one that gets used again and again in America.

It's why this entire conversation is so ridiculous. Neither Paul nor the majority of the commenters here has a clue about what they're talking about. They're spouting talking points like there's a set-in-stone socialism that all would-be socialists have to follow. I'm not at all the pinko-commie sort, but it always tickles me when this particular weakness of HN comes out. For a bunch of people who work with complex systems daily, we suck at appreciating the complexities of economic systems and we adore Paul despite his habit of oversimplifying topics to the point of satire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> "There are indeed things you can't say in Holland.

Oops, yes, I forgot about the fate of Pim Fortuyn."

I live in the Netherlands (as opposed to "Holland"), and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety.

<comment><USER50> "and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety."

It would be useful to the rest of us(who don't live in Holland) if you could explain _why_ the "rhetoric device" is "poor", "oversimplified" and "naive" (vs a bald statement that it has all these qualities).

<comment><USER51> Because the murder of one person says nothing about the attitudes towards freedom of speech across a whole country.

<comment><USER50> It might say something about countries with large numbers of unassimilated minorities (in this case mostly Muslim).

That aside, pg's point was that even in Holland (which he uses as an example of a "tolerant" country), there are negative consequences to actually saying "can't say" things. E.g: Many things about Islam and its prophet are (in practice) "can't say"/undebatable things (without assuming a serious risk of getting killed).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is This Microsoft-NBC 'Copyright Cop' Thing Bullshit or What? - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2008/05/copyright_cop <comment><USER2> The *AA don't understand technology and don't really want to. Many people think that DRM is about preventing copies, but it's actually about showing good faith. That's why they allowed Apple to use a DRM system that is much weaker than their competitors: Steve Jobs gave them the impression that he was on their side and that's all they wanted.

MS is just taking it to the next level. They promise to investigate some watermark technology (that they know won't work) and get some concessions from NBC in exchange.

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft is now essentially denying these claims:

[http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2008/05/07/just-so-no-one- get...](http://zuneinsider.com/archive/2008/05/07/just-so-no-one-gets-the- wrong-idea.aspx)

This whole idea seems a little outlandish, even for Microsoft. What executive could possibly think they would sell more Zunes from having NBC content available then they would lose from people who couldn't put their own media on the device?</comment>


Ask HN: Would a job board aggregating one language be interesting? - <AUTHOR> My idea is to aggregate Java jobs from different jobs sites. But it could be replicated for different technologies, industries....<p>What do you think? <comment><USER2> Simply put, it's a dog-eat-dog kind of business. You'll be competing with established giants like monster/linkedin/stackoverflow, niche sites, country- specific-sites, other web spammers, etc...

This bussiness has built-in churn: if you do it well, you'll loose users. Word might spread, but you'll eventually loose users.

So, if you're brave enough to do this, do it differently:

\- Build something that makes you a better $LANGUAGE developer.

\- Build something that helps you transition from $JOBTITLE to $NEXTJOB.

And put a very restricted job board on it for people that's interested in getting better at his/her job.

That brings more value and probably you can monetize it better.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess your goal is to filter job ads based on technologies and I believe that there are already quite a few ways to do that, SO Jobs for example. Maybe there's another need there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be a Java board filtered by frameworks for example

<comment><USER3> Go to [https://stackoverflow.com/jobs](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs) and hit the Gear icon next to the Create Alert button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm always browsing around SO jobs, but I also have to go to different websites every couple of days looking for new opportunities. The idea is to have a single point to search for one language specific jobs

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be just another point you'd have to check? Or do you plan on scraping the other more popular boards

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning to get jobs from the 5 or 6 most popular ones

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And which legal team do you plan to use, when you are sued by multiple job sites ?

After all, you will be effectively stealing their content.</comment>


PrePAN - Social Reviewing for Perl Modules - <AUTHOR> http://prepan.org/ <comment><USER2> This looks outstanding. The idea itself is terrific: encourage and help more people to contribute to Perl via CPAN. I would love to see a similar site for Ruby. (There are good tutorials available for making a first gem, but this is a more open chance to get feedback on actual code.)

Other things I like about it:

1\. Easy sign-up via Github or Twitter.

2\. The source code will be available on Github. (There's a repo, but so far just for issues. There's tons of Perl examples for all sorts of things, but I don't know so many examples of modern websites made with Perl. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.)

3\. Nice, clear, modern looking site.

Congrats and thanks to @kentaro[1]

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/kentaro>

<comment><AUTHOR> _examples of modern websites made with Perl_

Ones that come to mind that are on Github:

* <https://metacpan.org/> || <https://github.com/CPAN-API/metacpan-web>

* <http://www.github-meets-cpan.com/> || <https://github.com/plu/github-meets-cpan>

* <http://lmctfy.org/> || <https://github.com/nuba/Let-Me-CPAN-That-For-You>

* <http://www.stargit.net> || <https://github.com/franckcuny/StarGit>

* <http://sunaba.plackperl.org/> || <https://github.com/miyagawa/Sunaba>

* <http://explorer.metacpan.org/> || <https://github.com/tokuhirom/MetaCPANExplorer>

* <http://frepan.org/> || <https://github.com/tokuhirom/frepan>

* bootylicious || <https://github.com/vti/bootylicious>

* showmetheshell || <https://github.com/vti/showmetheshell>

* showmethedesktop || <https://github.com/vti/showmethedesktop>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Announcement on Perl News: [http://perlnews.org/2011/10/prepan-perl-code- review-and-disc...](http://perlnews.org/2011/10/prepan-perl-code-review-and- discussion-site-launches/)

      The site focuses on code review and discussions, with the
      goal of helping module authors get feedback, suggestions
      and help before they upload a new module to CPAN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also just come across this blog post by _kentaro_ (PrePan author) from last week (was on hols so i missed it till now!): [http://blogs.perl.org/users/kentaro/2011/10/introducing- to-p...](http://blogs.perl.org/users/kentaro/2011/10/introducing-to- prepan.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Despite the quality look of the site, it appears to need a little work---at least so far as the sign-up mechanism goes. The twitter approach is broken. I don't have a get hub account so I didn't test that. I also (personal preference here) would prefer a sign up without a dependency on any other service---CPAN certainly doesn't care, why should PrePAN care? Although I suppose it might have been a matter of expediency, quicker to develop or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The twitter approach is broken_

That maybe fixed now? - <http://twitter.com/#!/prepanorg/status/131677501289271296>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sign up / Sign in doesn't seem to work ATM.

<comment><USER5> Github sign in works for me (I signed up earlier, so not my first try).</comment></comment>


The economic logic behind tech and talent acquisitions - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/10/18/the-economic-logic-behind-tech-and-talent-acquisitions/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time I was a VP at a bank that no longer exists, but was prominent, and saw decisions being made the same way about whether or not to build a custom system or buy a vendor based system. Banks can gain a significant advantage over their competitors if they can build lots of great, custom stuff. Goldman has guys that build custom JVM's, for example.

The vendor based system promises to deliver some level of infrastructure and some level of completion for a project right out of the gate. It was fascinating to see the discussion happen.

The bank was considering two vendors. One wanted to sell their system for $10M and the street viewed it as having excellent quality. The other vendor was willing to sell for $5M and there was work that would have to be done at the bank to complete a lot of the project. The bank chose the cheaper vendor, thinking they could build logic to fill the gaps for less than $5M.

Scope creep eventually came in and the project turned into something that the bank spent well over $100M on. The project was not complete by the time the bank collapsed, but our new owners took the project on and spent more money on it.

$100M didn't seem to bother anyone as long as the people using the systems made a lot more than that. And to think, the decision was originally made based on whether or not they wanted to spend an extra $5M... It was said that the more expensive vendor was an order of magnitude better, so the squabble over $5M really seemed silly in retrospect.

Chris's point is similar to the lesson I learned at this bank. The lesson is that economics is a study based on relative notions, not closed systems. If you look at just the raw numbers, you might be coerced into bad decisions. I suspect we could've gotten _better_ work done if we were on the better system.

I think this point can also be observed in the sale of Instagram to Facebook. Consider the balls on that team to ask for so much money! At first many folks said, "$1B!?" But if you break it down into a percentage of what Facebook was worth _at the time_ (~1%), the numbers seems much easier to swallow.

1% of Facebook for the fastest growing competitor seems reasonable enough to me.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this confusing the point a little. There have been lots of talent acquisitions, but I'm not sure how you'd classify Instagram as one.

For example it's been 7 months since Facebook took over and its still going, also they seem committed to keeping it going. Instagram was the most likely of Facebook's 1000s of competitors to actually grow big and disrupt the market. If they hadn't bought it Google would have bought them - since they desperately want a social network that has product/market fit.

<comment><USER2> Well, my point was about how economic value is relative, which elaborates on Chris's point.

I agree, it's not the same as Chris's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Suppose you could build the product for $50M with a 50% chance of > significant delays or failure. Then the upper bound of what you'd rationally > pay to acquire would be $100M.

Am I the only one who thinks cdixon is slightly off here (except Chris with his reference to sophistication)? But what is the right way to calculate?

To simplify ignore the risk of delay for now (so 50% is risk of failure). Also assume the risk of acquisition is 0%. Then you have three outcomes: 1) acquisition, 2) internal success and 3) internal failure. In economic terms 1 means you gain $500M - X where X is the acquisition cost, 2 means that you gain $450M and 3 means that you lose $50M.

In this oversimplification I would say that the expected outcome of internal development is a gain of $200M (50/50 chance of $450M win or $50M loss). It would be rational to pay X < $300M since that would give you a certain gain of more than $200M.

Right? This is of course also lacking in sophistication but I have a feeling it touches on the angst that drives acquisition valuations up... :)

</comment><comment><USER5> The interesting part comes in when people are looking outside their core competencies. So BigCorp's M&A department is trying to evaluate the purchase price of target A based on a complete lack of understanding on what sort of effort is involved in building Target A's product. When that happens two additional 'bad' outcomes are added to the mix, first is that the company passes on the acquisition for their internal project which they spend more money and more importantly more time on, or two they over pay for something that is easier to do than they estimate. This is where people like Mark Lynch can really sell the 'value' of something like Autonomy to a company like HP which has no clue how to build something like that on its own.

Few companies internalize the opportunity cost of doing it on their own. If you take your best performers and squirrel them away on this secret project to build Capability X, those same performers won't be out in your main engineering group catching small problems that will become big problems. So engineering gets a bit more chaotic.

All in all, it is a complex calculus that I have yet to see work out the way anyone thought it would.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially, I thought Clayton Christensen makes a compelling argument that this type of analysis—focusing on IRR and returns on equity—creates an overabundance of "efficiency innovations" that liberate capital but don't really push things forward. Perhaps the wave of acquisitions is tamping down our ability to produce longer-term, "empowering innovations." ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists- dil...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma- whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0))

</comment><comment><USER7> The biggest problem now is, market capitalization is just a number on paper as it can't be converted to cash easily. So essentially they are spending cash to get more value on paper.

The only time market cap helps is when they sell their share holdings, or issue new shares. Because what they are doing is to convince people to pay more cash for a share, so that they can sell to them in someway.

Also the price-to-revenue ratio is not a magic number. It's most likely to be implied from the price and revenue rather than a valuation measure. It measures profit margin potential and growth potential. (Very) fundamentally the intrinsic value of a stock is made up of 1) risk-adjusted and growth- adjusted dividend payments and 2) cash-on-the-spot upon liquidation (so called "book value"). Price-to-revenue ratio is far less correlated with these two compared to price-to-earnings ratio or price-to-book ratio.

Acquiring a company: 1) may not help EPS (most likely hurt in the short term), 2) possibly help growth, and 3) may hurt book value. That's why for most acquisitions the acquirer's stock price is likely to fall by a small amount immediately after announcement. The exact market reaction will depend on the synergy of the acquisition, i.e. the strategic benefits in the long run (like reduced competition or cost savings).

<comment><USER8> I assume OP brought up market cap, because he assumed that the acquisition is (partly) done in stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was hoping for a bit more from this article... didn't seem to be any big insights or interesting case studies, just a common sense explanation that didn't seem necessary.

</comment><comment><USER10> Talent acquisitions, however, are not product acquisitions. The latter are easier to reason about in terms of business/economics, but the former seem a lot "squishier". "You hire an awesome team and then put them to work on something else" seems like it introduces too many variables to give you a lot of certainty about the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER11> what is the "price-to-revenue ratio"?

<comment><USER12> Stock price divided by revenue per share, or market capitalization divided by revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When considering an 'acqui-hire' where the product itself gets abandoned, another factor to consider is the value of a 'gelled team'. (I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the discussion at Dixon's original post.)

While in any acquisition there's a massive risk -- perhaps >50%? -- that the group won't thrive in the new corporate environment, they have at least, via their prior delivery of a competent product with _some_ traction, shown that they can work together to create something real.

Picking the same N number of people off the street, even N great people, might not fit together productively with even a 50% chance.</comment>