High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/103091/high-end-art-is-one-of-the-most-manipulated-markets-in-the-world/ <comment><USER3> Art is extensively used to, _ahem_ , conveniently move around large sums of money [1]. It is difficult to differentiate unusual prices due to money laundering from unusual prices due to manipulation.

[1] [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art- proves...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves- attractive-refuge-for-money-launderers.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> The biggest issue in the art market is transparency and it continuously amazes me that governments allow it to go on because at minimum, a lot of tax money is lost. The fact that this sector is so under-regulated enables the opacity, making it a great avenue for money laundering and fraudulent behaviour including forgeries (enabled not just by forgers but some dealers), inaccurate reporting (flawed stats), price manipulation, collusion (at all levels and between individuals and organizations), etc. Buyers often never know whether they just overpaid or underpaid or what the current value for a piece is. Change is most possible (and has been occurring in fragments) in the primary art market vs secondary (resales, mostly of dead artists).

BTW, for those implying artists benefit the most: galleries often make the bigger share of any sale they're involved in, with commissions ranging anyhere from 50-70% or more. Plus, auction house premiums are often at least 20%, leaving less of profit for seller (after subtracting original purchase price).

<comment><USER3> > _a lot of tax money is lost_

Art sales are taxable.

<comment><USER5> Yeah and you buy a piece for $1m and sell it for $1.1m to the guy who wants to "donate" it to a non-profit for a tax write off of $10m, offsetting his tax bill on something much larger.

It's a vehicle for tax write offs and laundering.

<comment><USER6> I never understood how this works. If you donate $X to charity, you reduce your taxable income by $X but now have $X less. If you paid your tax on $X, you would still have $X-Y. How can the former approach save you any money?

<comment><USER5> > If you donate $X to charity

When $X is $REAL_LIVE_MONEYDOLLARS, yes.

When $X is $ARTWORK_THAT_I_CLAIM_IS_WORTH_10M, which I bought for not 10M but 1M, but got "appraised" at 10M, what did I just do? Pay $1M for $10M of tax writeoffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My wife works in the high-end art and auction world.

I always joke that artists are the most extreme capitalist you will ever find. This is a world where a dinner table can easily be sold for 1$mio because it's owned by some famous person. Pretty fascinating world.

On a slightly different note. This is also the reason why I think cryptocurrencies/tokens are going to be doing just fine. Humans very rarely exchange and value based on utilitarianism alone.

<comment><USER8> My whole attitude towards cryptocurrencies changed when I realized that intrinsic value literally didn't matter to the global rich, they're not interested in growth or value at all, only in security, and they'd be willing to pay a premium to store their wealth if it only means that they can control the risk.

Crypto can provide them with precisely that. The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The _resilience_ of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.

Techies can make a nice side income arbitraging the scrambling of the global elite for a safe haven. It's the new Cayman Islands bank account, only now it's math keeping the filthy government's hands off your money, not the flimsy sham of sovereignty.

<comment><USER9> > They're...interested...in security, and... [c]rypto can provide them with > precisely that.

20% of all bitcoins have been irretrievably lost [0] and 7% have been stolen [1]. If I was the global rich, I'd rather hide gold bars in my mattress rather than put it in Bitcoin if my goal was just security.

[0] [http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost- bitcoins/](http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/) [1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-bitcoins-have- been-s...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-bitcoins-have-been- stolen-2014-3?IR=T)

<comment><USER10> Also, Bitcoin is 15x more expensive than gold to store securely: [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-15-times-more- expensi...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-15-times-more- expensive-130000674.html)

Edit: for large institutional investors in a trust fund

<comment><USER11> >Also, Bitcoin is 15x more expensive than gold to store securely: [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-15-times-more- expensi...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-15-times-more-expensi..).

This is only the case for this particular trust fund. You can secure your coins for free on your own.

edit: downvoted for stating a fact? really?

<comment><USER10> Didn't mean to leave that out. Added it in

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people tend to dismiss the wide-range manipulation of high-end art as an irrelevant problem that only affects millionaires and a tiny subsection of "commercial artists". A point worth making is that more often than not, it is taxpayers who end up footing the bill when public museums purchase wildly expensive work whose price has been driven up by the processes described in the article.

While museums may get a discount for being important "taste-makers", I can't believe that that makes up for the crazy overvaluation.

This alone should make the case for better regulation as difficult as it must be across international borders.

<comment><USER13> So lets stop making museums buy overpriced art then.

So while it is nice for the public to be able to see a certain original, I can think of millions of better ways to spend that money and then just see a replica.

<comment><USER14> I spent 4 days in a row at the Met last week and I still want to agree with you. Museums are _mostly_ a delicacy. The Louvre was built for artists to study other artist's work. That's tremendously not how we use museums. Medium is valuable for study, yes, but I didn't learn anything last week. I just saw evidence of it in bare vision.

But I am torn, because the more privately funded museums seem to be more prone to skewing history. I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Manipulation _is_ the game they're playing, that is the whole market. Fuzz your eyes to abstract the details of the art pieces and only look at the social structure around it, and that's all the information you need to predict demand.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. Art is the product for which the value is most close to being completely made up of perception - the artist's brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't make myself outraged about rich people throwing money at each other. If there was no art, they'd find another excuse. It's not like that money would go to saving lives.

I'm also not outraged about few artists making a living from all this money flying around. Artists aren't entitled to rich people's money, it's a side effect of the game.

The only thing I'm outraged about is when the elite starts foisting ugly art on the poor, by putting it in public squares and government museums and textbooks. No matter how advanced your taste is, it's a brute fact that the poor don't enjoy ugly art. So these actions amount to taxing the poor in favor of the elite, which is immoral.

<comment><USER18> Considering most artists are pretty poor, the link between wealth and taste is a bit strenuous.

I personally know quite a few people who have little income, but enjoy life by engaging with the kind of art you seem to dislike. Some have consciously made the decision to forgo a career, earning just enough for their minimalistic lifestyle, and spending lots of time on experiences. Others are poor against their will, yet still interested in art.

So, no: it's not a "brute fact". Art isn't even measured on a scale of beauty vs. ugliness–that's "design" maybe. Good art almost always upsets some people.

The art you may think of as universally appreciated was almost certainly deeply divisive when it was created. Those dutch still-lives, for example, are full of sexual innuendo, including prostitution, incest, or homosexuality. Picasso was the target of Nazi sabotage because they considered abstract art elitist. Andy Warhol was shot and almost died because his art had become some woman's paranoid obsession etc.

<comment><USER17> Do you have an argument why making people upset (e.g. by ugliness) should be the criterion of good art?

<comment><USER18> It's not required, obviously. But art as its commonly understood (and specifically protected in many countries' constitutions) functions as one of the mechanisms of a "civil society", much like journalism, unions, religions etc.

In that sphere, i. e. politics (broadly), there are no crazy new inventions that make everyone happy. Science can find a cure for AIDS and nobody will complain. But politics is to some degree a zero-sum game, where a finite amount of "power" can only redistributed.

Almost any change will therefore have opponents: the sexual revolution frustrated catholics, #metoo unearthed buried guilt etc.

"Ugliness" really doesn't play into it. Every city has places far uglier than any piece of publicly displayed art I can think of. More often, it's the actual idea that freaks people out: The holy Mother Maria spanking the infant Jesus[0] is not too bad on the eye, but it's a really strange idea[0] (From the 1920, by the way–shock value isn't a new idea).

The Nazis hated Picasso not (just) for his _Guernica_ , but because they abhorred uncertainty, subjectivity, and doubt. That's why they rejected his (and most other) abstract art. It's also why they really didn't like relativity and quantum physics: it's possible that they missed their chance to get the atom bomb first because they had aesthetic objections to this "strange new relativism".

[0]: [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2e/8b/96/2e8b9610aca3535a8d6b...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2e/8b/96/2e8b9610aca3535a8d6b9fdee80b7a88.jpg)

<comment><USER17> I agree that art is communication, but not all communication is art. To me, good art is a message that relies solely on argument from beauty to prove its point. So any art that looks ugly to someone is self-defeating in their eyes, because it throws away its only weapon.

The artists that speak to me most (like Pushkin, Orwell, Hunter Thompson, Andrew Hussie, davesecretary...) are keen observers of their time and have strong opinions, but they play fair in a sense. They make their points of view aesthetically compelling and stop there. What they can't say with beauty, they don't say at all. Anything more forceful is closer to a Fox News editorial than to art.

<comment><USER19> > any art that looks ugly to someone

> Orwell, Hunter Thompson

Orwell looks ugly to _someone_. Hunter Thompson looks ugly to _someone_

Remember Room 101 in 1984? Have you read "Hells Angels"? These aren't uncontroversial works of "beauty".

You are mistaking your personal aesthetic judgement for objective standards.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure we disagree?

My original comment said public art that looks ugly to many people is harming them, so elites should stop pushing it.

Then Matt said art shouldn't be concerned with beauty. I disagreed, and argued that artists should try to express their ideas with beauty. That standard (whether the artist tried to achieve subjective beauty) is actually objective. For example, we know that Hunter Thompson tried to create something beautiful according to him. After all, many other people found his work beautiful, and that can't happen by accident. Another example of such attitude in modern art is Rothko. I'm not a fan of his paintings, but he clearly went to extreme lengths in pursuit of beauty, and I can easily imagine how someone could fall in love with them.

Compare that to many artists today who don't try to express their ideas with beauty. They explicitly say as much. Read Matt's comments: beauty is merely "design", winning power games is what matters... That trend is causing the current wave of public art that looks ugly to almost everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is bizarre.

High-end art prices aren't "manipulated" in some kind of nefarious way, they're just highly illiquid and complicated. The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between galleries, but there's no evidence of that.

The author makes the argument that more transparency would lead to lower prices... yet simultaneously implies prices are lower than they ought to be: "One of the worst things a dealer can do is over-price a work because they can't lower the price when it doesn't sell."

And anyways, I find myself sympathizing far more with artists than with the rich buyers here -- making a living as an artist is already hard enough! Why would we want to _lower_ what they can make? And for buyers who want less expensive art, there's _tons_ \-- just don't shop at Gagosian!

Finally, the article seems to imply that art is subjectively bad now ("rape of dismembered corpses"), but that lowering prices would help fix that. That doesn't follow at all, and modern art on the vanguard is _always_ considered "bad" by the majority at its time -- whether Monet or Pollock.

For anyone interested in details of how the art world really works and why, I highly recommend "Seven Days in the Art World" by Sarah Thornton.

<comment><USER21> > The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between > galleries, but there's no evidence of that.

I would say that a gallery bidding on an auction because they have an interest in increasing the transaction price of pieces being sold by an art dealer connected to them is a textbook example of collusion (as opposed to bidding because they want to own the piece).

As usual free market fundamentalists will disagree that this is wrong in any way.

<comment><USER22> Furthermore, restricting future sales to a buyer because you don't like that they sold the last one sounds pretty anti-competitive, especially when you consider that usually a gallery has a temporary monopoly on an artists works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found this contradictory. Galleries set prices, but

"desirable collectors are well educated consumers and won't blatantly overpay."

What are collectors educated in, exactly? Is it reading the collective market and understanding the pricing signals it generates? Is it marking new art to this market?

If the latter, how does that work if the art has no intrinsic value?

<comment><USER24> There is also another effect, which I call recursive over-valuation.

The "high-end" art collectors tend to be extremely wealthy, and - with of course some exceptions - wealthy people are wealthy also because they care about money.

So, imagine that you are a wealthy art collector and you have just paid - let's say - 100,000 US$ for a painting by an "emerging" artist.

It is only human to show off your new painting, and the people you frequent are likely to be also wealthy and art collectors.

So, if you have a name as an art collector, that painting soon becomes in your elite a "set point" for the value of the new artist work.

The year later, a gallerist that is selling at 115,000 US$ another similar painting of the same artists can well say "Last year TheOtherHobbes bought a similar one for US$ 100,000, and you know him, he wouldn't pay that kind of money if it hadn't this value".

And this sets a second precedent, and it goes on.

BTW it is all in your interest to "defend" and "promote" the artist (because you defend your investment into it) even if the painting is awful.

In a couple of years this way you will be able to re-sell the painting for - still say - US$ 200,000 while having - besides the profit - reinforced your fame as good investor and educated art expert, capable to see the potentiality of the artist ahead of all others...

<comment><USER25> Sure but this dynamic is always true for all markets for things. You're just loosely describing a Keynesian beauty contest.

At the core there's still someone or some group of people making some kind of fundamental aesthetic valuation. It's really more the severe lack of liquidity and impossibility of commoditizing of the market that creates the effect you're seeing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This makes me think of an episode of the short lived Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert engineers the perfect piece of art (a Blue Duckie).

It becomes highly popular and the rulers of the underground art world (I think it included a still living Michelangelo or DiVinci) kidnap him and tell him to cut it out.

</comment><comment><USER27> In short, there is no objective way to value art, so galleries charge as much money as possible for the art.

The author of the article is somehow either confused or offended by this.

</comment><comment><USER28> shocked that this doesn't mention taxes at all.

if you donate a piece of art to a museum, in the US you can deduct its "fair market value" from your taxes. so if there's a way to drive "fair market value" up higher than what was paid, say if a few comparable artworks sell for an inflated price, everyone can donate to museums and effectively realize some profits without crashing the market by actually selling their art.

</comment><comment><USER29> While I feel I've seen enough evidence to suggest that galleries are used to launder/manipulate the market, this writer's reasoning seems problematic. Her whole argument starts from a place of misunderstanding art entirely:

"You'd think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be remotely successful? Yet these paintings were classified as desirable by the art market."

aesthetic value != "a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall"

and further, a corpse can't be enjoyable to look at?? (Picasso's Guernica, Caravaggio's Death of a Virgin...)

That'd be like saying the movie market is clearly manipulated because Blair Witch Project is the most successful indie of all time.

</comment><comment><USER8> The objective of any industry is to collect power and influence for itself. Collusion is the natural state of affairs once people with power and money start entering the arena. Once you've exhausted the income opportunity that a single firm can offer you, your priorities change. Mere cash grabbing won't move the needle anymore.

What you want to be doing at that point in time is move up the value chain so you can capture a healthy percentage of the entire market. Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark, of course while you take your cut. You see it in every creative arena. Musicians open record labels, actors open acting schools and talent agencies. Career trajectories differ, but the principle remains the same. You move up the value chain.

Once you've mastered selling shovels to the prospectors, then you have to learn how to control value itself. There is no intrinsic value to products of human creation, so that value has to get created somehow. The making of the value sausage is often really, really dirty. But as long as humans want it, then there needs to be a price attached. And that price has to be arrived at somehow.

<comment><USER30> "Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark"

This is not generally the case in art. While there exist informal "artist run spaces" set up by struggling young artists, it is unknown for an artist to become a prestigious commercial gallerist. It doesn't happen. Setting up a gallery primarily requires capital, and only secondarily involves artistic judgement.

Damien Hirst is the only partial exception I can think of, and he was also involved in coordinating group shows in temporary industrial spaces early in his career, so he has always had an interest in staging exhibitions. His London gallery is definitely not about making sales or supporting emerging artists, though. It's a status symbol.

There are a few ways of looking at the art world that explain why artists don't become gallerists. One thing is that gallerists/curators are "cultural intermediaries" rather than creators. It's a different talent. Artists are sometimes asked to curate but they don't get involved in setting up galleries or publishers. It would be like an actor setting up a chain of cinemas.

I guess the phenomenon you perhaps have in mind of movie stars becoming producers differs because producing is still a creative activity.

There's a book called "Art World Prestige" that does a sociological analysis of what goes on -- all the things that are specific to the art world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _You'd think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall._

Considering a lot of the art collectors buy is immediately whisked away to temperature-controlled, pitch dark warehouses where it can be kept safely until it's put back on the market a decade later, I really wouldn't expect the value to be related to what the art looks like _at all_.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. It's not. It's the history of it that matters.

<comment><USER32> The history of an artistic work relies on its aesthetics though, surely?

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily. I don't have an aesthetic fondness for Klimt's _Lady In Gold_ [1]. Its history, however, is fascinating.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch- Baue...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Bauer_I)

<comment><USER32> But, the original creation is centred on aesthetics for most (historic) works, no?

FWIW I love Klimt, Lady in Gold isn't my favourite but she's grown on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A story I heard is that it's very useful for tax cheating. You want to pay someone a lot of money ? "Sell" them high end art cheap. Nobody questions if art suddenly sells for 40% less or more, and then resells after a few years for 4x or 5x it's original amount. Of course, not entirely risk-free.

Same goes for things like some watch brands and a few other things.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is tangential, but if you're looking for an oldschool history channel style documentary of a reclusive artist, this video on Henry Darger was fantastic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjCS_u3Sgpg)

</comment><comment> d--b > You'd think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value.

This is just plain wrong. Not only does the author not understand art at all, but he also doesn't understand basic collecting.

Following that judgment, people collecting post stamps are just morons, cause a stamp that's been used can't be used again and so has 0 value - <USER2> perhaps its aesthetic one, which is not huge...

</comment><comment><USER35> There is a fascinating book on the topic of pricing art [0]. It was an eye opening study for me.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Prices-Contemporary- Princeton...](https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Prices-Contemporary-Princeton- Sociology/dp/0691134030)

</comment><comment><USER36> F For Fake is a great movie/video essay by Orson Wells investigating the work of one of the most notorious art forgers of the 20th Century. Fascinating story worth seeking out. The full film is on youtube at the moment, as well as Filmstruck.

<comment><USER37> It's a brilliant film not just because of its subject, but because Wells uses the structure of the movie itself to say something about the world of forgery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The opening paragraph's assumptions imply that the history of art is meaningless. This is ignorant of the entire evolution of the discipline.

</comment><comment><USER39> Art is just good provenance - If you attach provenance to anything it becomes art.

</comment><comment><USER40> Perhaps a (2013) in the title?

</comment><comment><USER41> Off-topic, but:

      > If an owner sells a gallery's art, then the gallery will often cut her off from future purchases

I don't understand why some authors default to female pronouns in such cases, given English has a gender-neutral one ("them").

Is this a political statement? It just appears childish to me and makes the article look less professional.

<comment><USER3> > _given English has a gender-neutral one ( "them")_

I use "they" and "them" as gender-neutral singular pronouns. There is disagreement on this choice of style. Alternating between gendered pronouns seems to be the preferred alternative to the last decade's (s)he he/she garbage.

<comment><USER42> Eh, I still prefer "(s)he" to ze/hir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > You'd think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture > you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be > remotely successful?

Cannot the author imagine a person who would find a dismembered corpse to be aesthetically pleasing and relaxing? If so, I don't think that person with such low empathy should be a journalist.

<comment><USER44> Art is not utilitarian. Art doesn't have the function of being hanged in a wall or maximise good feelings. That's just a low trick to make common people buy it.

Art is (self) expression.

<comment><USER45> > Art is not utilitarian. Art doesn't have the function of being hanged in a > wall or maximise good feelings.

The sentiment can be appreciated, but as a general statement I believe this is false. As an example: when new hotels are built, they are commonly outfitted with a collection of original art consisting of pictures and sculptures. This is certainly done to a large degree due to the utility of the art, which serves to make the hotel more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Would you argue that decoration for such a purpose does not constitute art?

<comment><USER44> No, I'm just saying that art is not _made_ to be hanged in the walls and maximise good feelings but is _sold_ to be used like that. And only a subset of artworks are suitable to be sold as original decoration.

I'm not a seller but I believe is way easier to sell something with a clear function than the opposite.

<comment><USER46> _I 'm just saying that art is not made to be hanged in the walls and maximise good feelings_

Would you also accept the corollary that any object specifically made to be hung on wall to maximise good feelings cannot be art?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Simple Data API for Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.everyoneapi.com/

<comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/DoerrfeldBill/status/497821022985674752](https://twitter.com/DoerrfeldBill/status/497821022985674752)

</comment><comment> dj-wonk My first impression is this: I can't tell what this service offers, even after digging around for over a minute.</comment>


Experiences Of A Newbie iPhone Developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/15/experiences-of-a-newbie-iphone-developer/

<comment><USER2> Great article, finally some commentary on the "other" side of the AppStore's hit-driven economy. Just about every aspect in this article I can attest to having delt with. We're having modest success but we've got a long road ahead of us. Criticism aside and to Apple's credit, this is the most fun i've had in a while — it's an great idea-to-consumer sandbox that can be piloted by a very small and agile teams.

 _The iTunes App Store is a weird, wonderful and ever-changing beast. If a developer launches an app and leaves it alone expecting it to earn money, it won't._

This is what I keep telling people looking to enter the market. You really need to go in with long expectations and commit to your vision. It can be a reality but there's no easy gold, it will likely be fool's gold for 80% of those looking to make money. My advice to indie's is to partner up and don't quit your day job just yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try selling downloadable software:

1) People often do not balk at paying $5 for it. Substantially more, usually. (There are all sorts of business models but common wisdom among a forum of sellers I'm on is that $20 is about the lowest you'd want to ever sell software for.)

2) You get to choose your customers. You could choose, for example, people with a pressing problem who are willing to pay for a solution. (I suppose you could do that on the iPhone too, but you'd have to deal with a distribution scheme which rewards mass above all other things.)

3) Other people will make fantastically more money in software than you can ever dream of and it will _never hurt you in the slightest_ because you do not compete with them for resources, attention, or customers.

4) The sales curve generally goes up over time, as you get higher search engine rankings, learn how to market, update your product, and have growth from customers rebuying the product and recommending it to your friends. This is a sharp contrast to the typical game or iPhone app sales curve, which one can simulate by plotting Wile E. Coyote in the seconds after which he steps into open air.

</comment><comment><USER4> "At this point, we had read a few App Store Cinderella stories, and decided to file them under 'unachievable'. In the 'possibly achievable' file were the accounts of a plethora of developers making a little pocket money from their efforts."

"We are starting to make money, almost enough to provide us with a basic salary each."

Another honest account of the real iPhone app bazaar. +1 win for 'possibly achievable'. Cheers to Noel Hartshorn and Dennis Harrison for sharing their excellent, still on-going story. My expectations for my first iPhone apps will be to sell in the double-digits to non-family, non-friends.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's an additional lesson here too: Writing about your experiences is a great way to simultaneously educate others and promote your product. (The author didn't mention the app's name in his original write up, but its all but guaranteed to be the first question in the comments and if you're lucky, the editor will also add a more prominent note.)

This article will probably do more for their product than all the marketing they've done so far. Win win :)</comment>


Don't Be Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/dont-be-google/

<comment><USER2> Someone I know who works at Microsoft interviewed for a position at Google. This person is at a moderately senior level position at MSFT. He was recommended by his old manager who is currently at Google. Apparently, you can refuse the phone screen and you would be called on-site automatically. This person hasn't really written any code that I know of for years, but was able to get an ex-manager to fight on his behalf even after being (correctly) rejected by the Google interview process. Now I'm not sure how many have sneaked in..

<comment><USER2> Also all these Microsoft folks are so good at politics that the average googler will just be cannon fodder! Think Crossbows vs pitch-forks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> All those Microsoft folk at Google...I'm surprised. I would have thought Google management had more sense than to concentrate that much of a decidedly foreign culture in their company.

I've been mostly ambivalent about Google, but I'm leaning towards increased wariness.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is more of a jab at Microsoft than anything, since the articles main argument is that Google is the new Microsoft because Microsoft employees work there... Give me a break.

<comment><USER5> Sue, but jab at the old Microsoft. The new Microsoft is ironically more like the old Google, except Microsoft builds more polished products. (like outlook online, office online)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's weird that they lead off with Android sales. Android sales aren't a 1:1 comparison with iOS sales. Google makes money on services, not devices. And they don't own the supply chain like Apple does.</comment>


Musk praises China, says the U.S. is full of 'complacency and entitlement' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-china-rocks-us-full-of-entitlement.html <comment><USER2> US citizen here: and totally agree. It's just too bad the fine people in China have a crazy regime lording over them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Musk seems to have handled China quite well so far, with Tesla's gigafactory in Shanghai, which is also the first fully foreign-owned such venture allowed in the country. An alignment of interests no doubt.

I think he also appreciated the Chinese attitude of going for it and making things happen quickly once the decision is made, which seems quite similar to his.</comment>


Ask HN: What convinced you to apply for the current job and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> When I was finishing up uni I realized I either had to turn the technology I was working on in to a job or find a job. So I started my company. It's been almost 20 years now. Still having fun, traveling the world, doing interesting work.

</comment><comment><USER3> My future boss read my blog post and sent me email.

Email went to spam folder.

Once a week i checked spam folder and found that email.

3 months later I moved from Canada to USA and the rest is history :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I was unemployed. They were hiring.

</comment><comment><USER5> The job, no provable skills.

The department within that job a better work/life balance and an actual interest in what it does.

</comment><comment><USER6> Remote

</comment><comment><USER7> It was in a product space I liked and they offered me lots and lots of delicious money</comment>


Eventsourcing and PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://blog.eventsourcing.com/eventsourcing-postgresql-f63b3fef8f83#.eckklnc3k <comment><USER2> Having a plenty of experience with ES and CQRS, the approach they are using doesn't feel right, and even the performance is terrible comparing to other naive implementations, IMO. The best explanation for the feeling I have is - "To choose a RDBMS and then to do your best to limit the functionality you can use - that's a hard one"

<comment><AUTHOR> What exactly doesn't feel right for you?</comment></comment>


The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics - <AUTHOR> https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ <comment><USER3> "Let's be clear on this point: ancient and medieval warfare was mostly about sieges." I also learned years ago that when medieval battles actually happened, the goal was to rout the enemy, not actually fight them and kill each other.

I find these points illuminating because it reminds me that people back in the day were not primitive idiots. There was a very sensible logic to how they waged war. Ultimately, everyone back then wanted to live comfortable long lives like we do.

<comment><USER4> Mass killings of troops certainly happened: Hannibal's famous "Battle of Cannae" actually destroyed an entire Roman Legion (70,000 killed, 10,000 captured out of ~80,000 troops). They were just very rare.

Another point: After losing so many troops in a singular battle, the Romans changed their tactics. Instead of grouping their entire army as a massive 80,000-man strong Phalanx, they split up their armies into smaller groups, so that their eggs weren't all in one basket anymore.

Hannibal's trick to encircle and kill many roman troops in a single battle was never going to be repeated: the Romans learned of their mistake and made the necessary reforms to protect their troops.

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

The Battle of Cannae would go down in history as a military example of how to line up all your troops for potential slaughter. Future generals and tacticians would forever know of that battle and how to avoid those conditions.

Most generals and soldiers would seek a battle of annihilation: if destroying the entire enemy force is possible they will attempt it. The problem is, its very, very difficult to achieve in practice.

As such, simply routing the enemy, is sufficient for most military goals.

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

<comment><USER5> To be clear, the key word in the quote above is _medieval_. He specifically says large battles were far more common in the ancient world:

> Pitched battles were far more common in the ancient world (think Persia, > Macedon, Rome, etc) – this is a product of the larger size and greater > organizational capabilities of those armies.

<comment><USER6> Isn't it kind of a useless distinction? I mean it's not like there are so many periods of pre-gunpowder history. We have ancient, medieval and that's it -you could add bronze age but we have so much less records-.

The whole "battles were rare, sieges where common" is a trope I believe some YouTubers started, but I don't think there's any solid pattern. Ancient armies pillaged the countryside to provoke encounters. Steppe peoples did pitched battles all the time because they didn't build walls. Medieval Europe may have had more sieges than battles because of religious homogeneity, but you can see how that model falls down soon in the thirty years war: if you don't engage the enemy they'll loot and pillage you to oblivion. Your people see how you are unable to protect them and desert you.

<comment><USER7> No, there is a very clear difference between warfare in the classical and medieval eras (in the West), and it dovetails with the collapse of large-scale political authority and the ability to muster large armies.

Another distinguishing factor is the widespread building of castles. During the classical era, fortifications were _less_ useful because there were powerful states that could capture them anyway. But when even the nominal king or emperor had trouble mustering a force of fifty thousand men, the castle vs. the siege (and the raid) dominated most warfare. During the classical area many of those same places would have been sparsely populated, and certainly not well fortified.

<comment><USER8> Castles were less useful because you didn't need internal military structure to defend against the people from one province over. Roman cities for 100s of years didn't upgrade their city walls, even communities in Gaul stopped living in hill cities and so on.

Defensive structure really only made sense in specific border regions. There however large empires certainty did invest in such defenses. Border cities that were ready to be under siege and that could host an arriving army.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly OT:

I'm surprised that more sophisticated management of supply lines never seems to have caught on much in RTS games. The basic practice still seems to be that logistics are handwaved away and your units just spawn wherever you want (or where your factory is) provided you have enough money in the bank.

I could imagine a game quite fun where you actively have to transport troops and resources to the front and where building, running (using automation) and defending/attacking supply lines is integral part of the game. I guess the result would be something like a cross between Command & Conquer and Factorio or Transport Tycoon.

The handwaving of logistics can also lead to some surreal moments in RTS single-player campaigns when the hero characters somehow manage to bring huge armies with them wherever they go, even if the story establishes that a place is difficult to get to even as a small group.

Kudos for Blizzard and the design of the Zerg here, which turns that kind of awkwardness into an actual part of the story.

<comment><USER10> Sid Meier's Colonization has this, to a degree.

1\. Gold can only be used to buy from European powers. You can't buy goods or units in America, you have to physically move them there with ships or wagon trains.

2\. Civilians and combat units are the same. Any civilian can pick up a musket and become a soldier.

3\. Defeated units don't die. They rout and are "demoted": a dragoon loses their horse and becomes a soldier, and a soldier loses their musket and becomes a civilian.

4\. You can build roads and temporary colonies. Each colony has free storage space.

My favorite tactic was to build a siege camp near the enemy colony, connect it with my colonies with a road, then use it as a supply base. I'd just spam dragoon attacks for as long as I had spare horses.

I'm sure this wasn't the optimal strategy, but it worked on "easy". More importantly, Colonization seems to be the only game where this is at all possible.

<comment><USER11> That sounds amazing. I never really got to play Colonization but I pored over it a lot in magazines.

<comment><USER12> These days it's pretty much abandonware, or $2 on Steam at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whether I agree or disagree with them, I find this kind of analyses of fictional battles very fun to read. And this particular blog seems to be full of fascinating articles (I recommend the one about how a "medieval/fantasy" battlefield ought too look like after a battle -- spoiler: most depictions are inspired by the aftermath of WWI battles; battlefields after medieval battles would look pretty much unspoiled).

A few years back there was a humorous review of the Battle of Hoth from "Empire Strikes Back" that was pretty cool: [https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of- hoth](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-hoth)

<comment><USER14> Be sure to check the ones about Paganism/Polytheism! The mind-blowing thing about paganism is that unlike the 3 major religions of today, it didn't start with a holy book (orthodoxy), but with rituals. It's like a caricature of scientific method. We did so and so, and the harvest was good. Therefore, the ritual works. There is little point in learning who exactly the gods are or what they think. The important thing is not offending any of them, knowing which is responsible for what, and making deals with them. As long as the (sacrificial) ritual seemed to work, it would be repeated with the slightest detail. If it didn't, they would experiment. They were very open to change in practice, because with no word of god to rely on they knew they could only take imperfect glimpses into nature of gods.

<comment><USER15> Ann Leckie's fantasy novel _The Raven Tower_ is set in a world where such pagan gods are real, and dives right into a description of how human tribes will spend generations _training_ them to respond favorably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Jut in case anyone doesn't do the date-math/scroll down past the comments, all 5 of the following blog posts are finished and linked to half way through the comments (ctrl+f: pingback).

<comment><USER17> Parts II-VI:

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of- gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part- ii-these-beacons-are-liiiiiiit/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of- gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part- iii-having-fun-storming-the-city/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of- gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/31/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part- iv-the-cavalry-arrives/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of- gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part- v-just-flailing-about-flails/)

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of- gondo...](https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part- vi-black-sails-and-gleaming-banners/)

<comment><USER18> Highlight of part three for a logistocs geek like myself: Romans and Greeks had standardized ammunition, not just rocks that happened to lay around. _That 's_ how you build empires! And roads and aqueducts, of course...

EDIT: While the siege of Helm's Deep was perfectly done in the film, the Siege of Minas Tirith feels more like Holywood, very well done Hollywood but the difference between the two is deffinitely there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems the author also missed the fact orcs are perfectly alright with cannibalism, which further alleviates the supply problem, perhaps even to the point of not requiring the supplies at all (a few thousand orcs eaten along the way wont make much difference). I doubt this has much precedent in history.

<comment><USER20> It does remind slightly me of Amundsen's approach on his south pole expedition of killing dogs and feeding them to the men and the other dogs.

Lord Curzon was rather rude to him about it.

<comment><USER21> But to be blunt: who was Lord Curzon?

<comment><USER22> Some British official. Probably best known as a namesake for the current eastern border of Poland (known as Curzon's line), of which he wasn't an architect or proponent.

<comment><USER15> In popular culture "Curzon" is probably most familiar to _StarTrek:DS9_ fans as Curzon Dax, the predecessor of the Jadzia Dax. [https://memory- alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Curzon_Dax](https://memory- alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Curzon_Dax)

(The character - a diplomat - was very clearly inspired by Lord Curzon.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Operations is the level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight when I get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting at all?)._

The USMC calls that "campaigning". See MCDP 1-2 [1]. Campaigning is about which battles to fight and where. Strategy includes economic and diplomatic issues, but campaigning is purely military.

Military history can be divided into two parts - before machine guns, and after machine guns. Before machine guns, bunching up was good tactics. After machine guns, it was terrible tactics. Too much of WWI was about learning that the hard way.

[1] [https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201-2%20...](https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201-2%20Campaigning.pdf)

<comment><USER24> > Military history can be divided into two parts - before machine guns, and > after machine guns. Before machine guns, bunching up was good tactics. After > machine guns, it was terrible tactics. Too much of WWI was about learning > that the hard way.

Terribly good point! I want to refute you, but I'm not really coming up with much. Automatic rifles are just devastating. How did you come to this conclusion?

<comment><USER25> > but I'm not really coming up with much.

War elephants are a _slight_ exception - the best tactic against them seems to have been spreading out and killing the driver with arrows or javalins - <USER2> it's less that bunching up was bad tactics and more that it wasn't enough; phalanxes could _repel_ elephants fairly well, they just weren't good at actually taking them out of the fight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The posts on sparta are a joy to read as well

[https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt- sparta-p...](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part- i-spartan-school/)

<comment><USER27> They are how I discovered the blog. Eye-opening.

<comment><USER24> Yes, it was a heck of a good dive! The conclusion, extremely briefly, is that Sparta is to be learned from, not emulated. The gist of Sparta is less like a well balanced, yet brutal, place, and more like an extreme version of the Lord's Resistance Army of central Africa, only with more rape and child abuse. If they were around today, we'd 'liberate' them in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> " _Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. ... The larger problem is terrain – we've seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn't exist._ "

Er, hatetobeapedanticfanboi, but...

There is a road north-south through Ithilien, and also a road east-west from Minas Morgul to Osgiliath. Where they cross was marked by the headless statue of the king. Frodo and Sam couldn't use the north-south road because of the large number of troops moving on it, including those moving up from the south to attack Minas Tirith.

" _BOOK NOTE: In the film, Jackson has split the host of Mordor into three groups (the fleet, the Haradrim and the Orcs) each of which moves and arrives as a single unit. As discussed above, this is insufficient to resolve the overwhelming logistics problems of such large armies. However, the books largely resolve this issue._ "

Sigh. Pedanticfanboimode wasted.

" _Naval supply, by riverboat or by ship, is far more efficient than overland supply (moving supplies by water is roughly twenty times more efficient than moving the same supplies by land in the pre-modern era)._ "

I want the reference for that.

From part II:

" _As Clausewitz says (drink!), "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is hard."_ "

Yeah. A Clausewitz drinking game.

[Edit] " _Book Note: In the books, Denethor is nowhere near this stupid (this will be a theme)._ "

I'm glad somebody else saw this. Jackson _really_ screwed up the plot arcs of the humans in the movies.

<comment><USER29> >I want the reference for that.

Another post [0] says that "The usual estimates for transit costs derive from Diocletian's Price Edict, a late Roman law setting standard prices for things, including transport."

[0] [https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii- real-c...](https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-cities- have-curves/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good quote:

> One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote > L. P. Hartley, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently > there." What I mean by that is that so much of how we assume all societies > work and all people think is just how our society works and we think. > Properly done, the study of the past can disabuse us of this silly notion > and show us that smart people in different times and different places did > things all sorts of different ways. But this lesson is ruined if we > construct caricatures of the past wherein people living long ago were just > big stupid brutes with big stupid weapons.

</comment><comment><USER18> just finished the first post. All I can say is well written and to the point! Logistics is totally underrepresented in history (infrastructure and the like) and especially military history. When it comes to the annoying "relaibility" discussions around WW2 tanks on Youtube I just wished some would explain the basic principle of RAMST, Reliability-Availability-maintainability- Supportability-Testability. Yet, nobody seems to get it. Military historians remain historians, and RAMST is more of an engineering discipline and fanboys don't want to. And I guess modern day professionals in that field are just to busy with modern day systems to actually worry about the old stuff. I know that I were during my short stint in that field.

<comment><USER30> Have you watched many of Nicholas Moran (The_Chiftain)'s videos?

He likes to comment on the ergonomics of operating and maintaining tanks. But he also discusses why the USA mainly build medium tanks during ww2, and how and why they were more maintainable than their european contemporaries. (An ocean away from their factories, they had to be)

<comment><USER18> Sure know his videos! It really shows that he has some operational experience. Something others covering the same subject don't.

What I am missing is an detailed view on that aspect from true, modern day experts. But for that you would need more than one person to cover it in a meaningful way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't recommend enough this book which retells the story from the position of Mordor. It made me always remember how genocide, politics and bootlicking can be turned into heroic stories by victors' propaganda.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm reminded of Mercedes Lackey's magically dwindling army in the Storm trilogy; where millions of invading soldiers turn into tens of thousands without much casualties. Also, I guess I've gained a bit of appreciation for WWI English officer training; apparently it was good enough to make Tolkien invent proper campaigns.

Heck, I'd like to see someone compare 14 day campaigns from WWI that Tolkien could have known about and see which one he reproduced in his books.

</comment><comment><USER33> Next up: How Gondor won despite a complete lack of air support (see: winged wraiths) and superior enemy armor (see: Mumakil).

<comment><USER34> Flying wraiths lack firepower, so they provide no real air support. Just fast transportation/communication.

<comment><USER35> Strafing runs in WW2 were almost completely ineffective but all infantry were reporting huge morale loss when they were happening.

<comment> saiya-jin Strafing was quite effective against vehicles, trains, landed aircraft etc. But yes against infantry it didn't make much sense, something about going too fast in shaky airplane trying to hit tiny ants running randomly left and right because they noticed the plane well before plane noticed them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Orc supply logistics is eased somewhat by the ability of the Orc armies to eat the defeated and if required, each other. In the latter case the strong orcs eat the weak, preserving the elite and veteran parts of the army. There is a strong hierarchy within the various Orc subtypes, and an argument could be made that the Orc army marches as its own supply.

<comment><USER37> I don't think the book mentions any green, fertile farmland in Mordor, nor do the movies show any.

So even if the Orc-eats-Orc or Orc-eats-Man "supply" might work for a short campaign, the biomass must come from somewhere, initially.

<comment><USER36> Book explicitly mentions slave farms in the East.

But yes, cannibalism and human forage is not sustainable, but might stretch a 10 day supply to 15.

<comment><USER15> I think it's great slave farms in Southern Mordor, around the inland sea of Nurnen. [http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/n/nurn.php](http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/n/nurn.php)

(There may also have been farms in the East that I'm not remembering. The East was definitely under Sauron's thumb, although perhaps not so firmly as he would have liked.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Advancing JavaScript without breaking the web - <AUTHOR> http://christianheilmann.com/2015/03/09/advancing-javascript-without-breaking-the-web/ <comment><USER2> > That's why it is good practice to not rely on JavaScript, but instead test > for it and enhance a markup and page reload based solution when and if the > browser was able to load and execute our script. This is called progressive > enhancement and it has been around for a long time.

ONLY only for webSITES not for webAPPS. For Webapps I pretend js-disablers don't exist. For something like a blog, news site, etc yes it should work without JS but if one more person tries to tell me to support people with JS turned off in a webapp I'm going to blow. I simply can't be asked to push the envelope AND support people living in the dark ages. This was fine when we just used JS for some client-side validation or the like but now I'm working with drag/drop interfaces, maps, ajax, single-page apps, and more. Those simply DO NOT HAVE non-js fallbacks without writing shit load of duplicate server-side code. Now node.js may offer a way around this (render on the server-side the same templates that are on the client side) but I'm still not sure how you are supposed to replace a auto-complete dropdown for something like tagging friends or just sending a message to a friend on facebook...

If there are enough people to justify making a non-js version then great, here is an IDE, get started, do it yourself I'll even put a link to your site in my noscript tags. I'm past using JS like a little sugar you sprinkle on at the end of a project, it is integral to most of what I write.

Please show me a company (not Google/FB/etc) that supports a non-js and JS version of their site (A site that is interactive, not a blog or similar).

<comment><USER3> But is it people's fault you are misusing document markup and scripting languages to build GUIs?

<comment><USER2> I don't see it as misusing anything. Has the web changed drastically in the last 10 years? Yes but just because we are using it differently doesn't mean we are misusing it. I'd argue that HTML5 and ES6 push the web even firther into webapp territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > There is no progressive enhancement way around this issue, and an opt-in > string doesn't do the job either. In essence, we break backwards > compatibility of scripting of the web. This could be not a big issue, if > browsers supported ES6, but we're not quite there yet.

This post misses the single most important tool for users (to help them try syntaxes), framework developers (to help them be more productive and consistent), and standards developers (to get feedback):

Transpilers.

Because much of ES5 is reflective (and ES6 even more so), it makes a great target for the translation of a new syntax into old syntax. This cycle of reflective-api-to-new-syntax is exactly what Yehuda is talking about in his post [http://yehudakatz.com/2013/05/21/extend-the-web- forward/](http://yehudakatz.com/2013/05/21/extend-the-web-forward/).

The impact of transpilers on ES module syntax, ES classes, and ES promises as been amazing. You can see the same thing happening with decorators/annotations today- real world use in TypeScript is influencing the discussions of TC39.

> The current support table of ECMAScript6 in browsers, parsers and compilers > doesn't look too encouraging. A lot is red and it is unknown in many cases > if the makers of the products we rely on to run JavaScript will take the > plunge.

I disagree in the strongest terms. ES6/E2015 is a _huge_ amount of changes, and browsers have been driving the discussion and implementing items as they have stabilized.

<comment><USER2> >> The current support table of ECMAScript6 in browsers, parsers and compilers doesn't look too encouraging. A lot is red and it is unknown in many cases if the makers of the products we rely on to run JavaScript will take the plunge.

> I disagree in the strongest terms. ES6/E2015 is a huge amount of changes, > and browsers have been driving the discussion and implementing items as they > have stabilized.

Agreed, I've seen a lot of progress on this front.

Also

> Transpilers

YES, we use babel (6to5) where I work and it's awesome, hook that up with some source maps and you get to write AND DEBUG in ES6. I don't plan on ever going back, my new personal projects all use babel now, I'm already living in a world of ES6 (well for things supported by transpilers and polyfills)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > A broken down escalator is a set of stairs.

Sorry for the convenience.</comment>


Michelangelo: Uber's Machine Learning Platform - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of LivingSocial. For years, LivingSocial was like a mini black hole of really good startup-like talent in the DC area.

But when you have that many smart people under one roof, you have to keep them busy. So you get these kinds of reinventing-a-beautiful-wheel projects. Not knocking the quality, just knocking the growing distraction and temptation to build in-house rather than use existing tech.

LivingSocial had such good quality output, but they were all over the place. They had to keep all those productive people busy after all. And the best way was to keep churning out new products.

<comment><USER3> I agree. "Keeping them busy" also raises an uncomfortable question: if Uber and other valuable Unicorns can be executed 99.999% with 25% of the engineers they hire, do they need the next 75% of engineers?

Even considering crunch-time and potential diversification/expansion, full- time employment of non-critical engineers is obviously inefficient. And, as Uber proved, politically toxic and consequently harmful to the productivity of the business.

More pressing is the existential tension underlying this quandary. That our economy will generally and increasingly forgo the skilled and unskilled labor provided by our society.

Framed concretely: one day, we may define a "10x engineer" as an engineer who can send ten other engineers to the soup kitchen.

I'm still looking for a well-thought-out solution.

<comment><USER4> This is not really new; just think of all the stuff that came out of AT&T labs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any ML-as-a-service platforms that offers something comparable to what Uber has here? And importantly, do you actually like using them?

That is, suppose I'm willing to do the following:

* Send said service a firehose of data

* Write code for feature selection, data cleanup, transformations, etc. -- i.e. the sort of code you'd expect to find in a data scientist's Jupyter notebook.

* Specify the type of ML model and parameters I'd like to experiment with.

Is there a service that handles data warehousing, serving up predictions via a REST API, deployment of new models, reporting model performance over time, and general scaling issues? I know it's possible to set up a large portion of this using AWS services, but ideally, it'd be nice to have something with a Heroku- like ease-of-use, but for ML.

<comment><USER6> Disclosure: I work for Google. Google Cloud does this with Dataflow and ML Engine in a fairly simple way, and the internals are open sourced as Apache Beam and TensorFlow so you can migrate to other platforms if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this thing is used for Uber Eats in Singapore... Because I use User Eats all the time, the estimated time is MASSIVELY inaccurate. It's not even within 30% to be close to actual time.

The estimated time is always less than the actual time, but every minutes the estimated time re-adjusts. By the time it's actually delivered it's about 15 to 20 minutes more than the original estimate.

Note: I'm just complaining because the article uses User Eats as an example and as a service I use often I wonder if this ML Platform is used at all...

<comment><USER8> Maybe they trained on global data and it biases against sample portion of the dataset that represents Singapore?

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't the ML learn to that times differ globally tho?

<comment><USER9> Only with the right models and features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This solves a real problem. ML pipelines are complicated, and often involve multiple languages and platforms (just as described in this post).

But.. there are existing solutions in this area. Notable Luigi[1] (from Spotify) and Airflow[2] (from AirBNB) both seem to have a lot of overlap with this.

I'm most familiar with Luigi, and it does many of the things that are listed here.

Some of the model visualisations look pretty nice, and don't come out-of-the- box in the other platforms.

So I'm not really sure what makes this unique.

[1] [https://github.com/spotify/luigi](https://github.com/spotify/luigi)

[2] [https://airflow.incubator.apache.org/](https://airflow.incubator.apache.org/)

<comment><USER11> What? Luigi and Airflow are ETL frameworks. They express dependencies between tasks, schedule their execution, and that's about it. Model storage and versioning, feature definition and extraction (batch and real-time), model deployment... Luigi and Airflow do almost nothing described in this post.

<comment><USER10> They do model/feature storage and versioning just fine. Or at least Luigi does - I use it daily.

And feature extraction and modelling is my main usecase. It works really well, across Spark, Scikit and R, saving data in HDFS.

Some examples:

[https://blog.dominodatalab.com/luigi-pipelines- domino/](https://blog.dominodatalab.com/luigi-pipelines-domino/)

[http://blog.richardweiss.org/2016/10/13/kaggle-with- luigi.ht...](http://blog.richardweiss.org/2016/10/13/kaggle-with-luigi.html)

[https://github.com/Atreya22/luigi_rosmann_sales](https://github.com/Atreya22/luigi_rosmann_sales)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it does all those things, as long as you write all the code, set up all the systems for it to interact with, and manage all the logic yourself. That's like saying Python does all those things.

<comment><USER10> It's not exactly clear that Michelangelo does anything different?

A quote:

 _We provide containers and scheduling to run regular jobs to compute features which can be made private to a project or published to the Feature Store (see below) and shared across teams, while batch jobs run on a schedule or a trigger and are integrated with data quality monitoring tools to quickly detect regressions in the pipeline–either due to local or upstream code or data issues._

That certainly sounds like you write code to run inside the containers. The deep integration with the standardized feature store etc sounds nice, but not radically different.

 _we created a DSL (domain specific language) that modelers use to select, transform, and combine the features that are sent to the model at training and prediction times. The DSL is implemented as sub-set of Scala._

So this is pretty much the equivalent of Spark Dataset API, or maybe the RFormula stuff in Spark ML[1] except in Scala right?

[1] [https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml- features.html#rformu...](https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml- features.html#rformula)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _For every model that is trained in Michelangelo, we store a versioned > object in our model repository in Cassandra.._

> _For important model types, we provide sophisticated visualization tools to > help modelers understand why a model behaves as it does, as well as to help > debug it if necessary_

How is this done - what serialisation format (pickle, pmml,etc) is being used? And more importantly, how are you tracing into the model ? It looks like this is a Spark based framework

<comment><USER13> It's probably being "serialized" as a JAR file which just contains the code you call into. That was Spark's online deployment story last I heard, and jives with them saying the library mode has a Java API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> SAP has Leonardo. Uber has Michelangelo. Who has Donatello and Raphael?

<comment><USER15> Personally i don't get the obsession with ninja turtles.... /s

<comment><USER16> Funny you thought of Ninja Turtles, I was thinking Renaissance artists.

<comment><USER14> Then this Epic Rap Battle of History is for you (salty language warning):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZ5V9rT96M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZ5V9rT96M)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I expect this will be an unpopular opinion, but a proliferation of frameworks does not create value for anyone besides the developers employed in making it.

Sure different frameworks handle different uses better than others, but it doesn't change the fact that in a given genre (machine learning, web frontend, ORM, etc.) that there is a lot of duplication going on.

If you want to look cool and impress people, make a tool that doesn't exist, develop a new algorithm, or contribute a great feature to an existing framework.

<comment><USER18> That's how I feel about most projects I see on here. Toy languages are my personal pet peeve. So much talent being wasted on useless projects. I'm not really one to speak - none of my projects make a substantially positive impact on society, but they have their niches.

<comment><USER19> Do you really feel this way? It seems like a pretty strange world view to think that someone posting a thing they built on a site called hacker news implores you to judge their talent as being wasted, or their project as being useless.

Not only does it seem wrong to judge things people post here that way, anyone out there doing good work knows that the path to doing meaningful work begins with "useless projects."

<comment><USER18> The reality for the people who post on here is that most of us aren't doing anything truly substantial. I include myself in that group. You can believe your IOT AI messenger bot is going to revolutionize an industry, but the more likely situation is that it doesn't. That being said, such a project is not something I'd consider useless, but it's in the same range as the things I do consider useless. Take toy languages for example: could it revolutionize software development? Maybe. Will it? Almost certainly not. How many languages are commonly used in software engineering, and how much ability have you gained by doing it?

It's not for me to say where you apply your time and from what you get your enjoyment from, but I do believe there are objectively more important problems that could be solved. There are plenty of problems out there that need to be solved, and engineers here have the capability to solve them -- I think it's fair to say we're more well equipped than most to solve some of the largest problems humans face.

Here's a quick list of problems that are worth solving (in my opinion), vs. things that are figuratively _useless_ :

\- Rising global temperatures will disrupt agriculture and food supplies, how will we farm when desertification consumes the croplands?

\- Thousands of people walk by homeless people on the street every day, if a small portion of those people stopped and engaged with the homeless, how many lives could be improved?

\- Children in third world countries struggle to receive proper education, how can we reach them and improve their education?

\- Governments around the world are failing to represent the needs and desires of their people, what can be done to help governments succeed?

\- Growing levels of automation are replacing a staggering number of jobs, and if the growth continues, the _great_ depression will be ahead of us, not behind us.

\- Global financial markets are controlled by companies which you and I have no say in, yet they hold most of the worlds wealth.

In contrast:

\- I want X programming language that does Y because Z doesn't do Y, in all likelihood, I will be the only one who ever uses this language, but it'll be a personal accomplishment.

\- I don't want to leave the house or stop working for half an hour to make a meal, how can I improve/speed up the time it takes for me to get a meal from my favourite restaurant?

\- Making X sucks, I want a robot to do it

\- Bad AI for X

\- IOT for X

\- Framework for X

\- Uber for X

How often do I see the latter vs. the former? Imagine if you saw FOSS projects attempting to solve problems on the first list as often as you saw projects attempting to solve problems on the second list. I truly believe the world _would_ be a better place if that was the case.

I said earlier I'm guilty of this myself. I build consumer facing supporting software for entertainment media. I like what I do, but I don't think I'm contributing much to society, and that makes me uneasy.

<comment><USER20> > Take toy languages for example: could it revolutionize software development? > Maybe. Will it? Almost certainly not. How many languages are commonly used > in software engineering, and how much ability have you gained by doing it?

Maybe revolutionizing the world is not the point. Maybe the people who create toy languages gain a deeper understanding of some issue from pursuing the project. Maybe sharing it helps others discover that deeper issue or hidden complexities and elegant solutions. Or maybe they are just an inspiration and serve as a reminder that everything that exists is built by humans. Everything can be understood. There is no magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be more useful to publish anonymized datasets, if they got any useful data.

</comment><comment><USER8> A random idea: in this article, they talked about a Feature Store shared across teams. Feature extraction also seems a major bottleneck in their modeling. It seems a very natural and valuable thing to have a platform to share "generic features".

Yann LeCun said once a deep neural network predicts many targets, say 1000 classes in ImageNet, it is possible for the model to learn quite generic features. So it makes sense to pre-train on a large amount of data and a reasonable number of targets, and then share the learned feature extractors with others.

Could this be a business? Or a community? Thoughts?

<comment><USER13> Pretrained models for generic things exist publicly, e.g. models trained on ImageNet, or pretrained word vectors.

Not a whole lot of general use in having a feature extractor tuned to Uber's data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am surprised by this - h2o.ai seems to have many if not all of the features of this, and is open source.

"Specifically, there were no systems in place to build reliable, uniform, and reproducible pipelines for creating and managing training and prediction data at scale. Prior to Michelangelo, it was not possible to train models larger than what would fit on data scientists' desktop machines, and there was neither a standard place to store the results of training experiments nor an easy way to compare one experiment to another."

Seems like h2o.ai fits a lot of that bill.

<comment><USER23> Something else that throws me off on this:

My team's experience with MLlib has been bad. Especially compared to H2O Sparkling Water.

Anyone else on here find MLlib to not be as good as advertised? I was surprised to see Uber using it.

<comment><USER24> Spark is good if it fits your use case (or if you can make it fit your use case). We have definitely found that scaling can be a real issue though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "subscribe for updates" modal is extremely distracting. It has a long lag before it repositions at the top of the viewport, at least in my browser.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is Michelangelo the name of their previously published paper "Scaling Machine Learning as a Service" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708761) , or is this something separate?

<comment><USER27> Yes, it's the same platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > batch jobs run on a schedule or a trigger and are integrated with data > quality monitoring tools to quickly detect regressions in the > pipeline–either due to local or upstream code or data issues

I'm curious what tooling they're using to ensure data quality, in particular time series data.

</comment><comment><USER29> So I have seen this Michelangelo pop up in other articles.

The key question is? Is Uber going to open source it? If not, why bother writing articles about the specifics of their platform?

<comment><USER30> PR & attracting talent? Though open sourcing would be great and do the same thing, but more so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't seem to be an open source project, unless I'm missing something. It's kind of a show-and-tell basically.

</comment><comment><USER31> Describing your ML platform is nice. Open sourcing it would have been nicer.

<comment><USER32> Former Uber engineer here.

I don't think you would find an incredible amount of use from an open-sourced Michelangelo. The biggest advantage that Michelangelo has for Uber is that it is easy to integrate into all of Uber's other tools.

Depending on what your machine learning needs are, you could get pretty far with just Spark + MLLib, and wouldn't need any of the customization that Michelangelo has on top.

<comment><USER33> Why make all that noise with a detailed blog post then? If it's a custom-fit internal tool, then good for you, the rest of the world doesn't care. Each company has internal tools and stuff.

<comment><USER34> There is the sharing of ideas. Maybe they couldn't open source it, but were given permission to publish about it. Google never opensourced some of their greatest contributions, just the ideas behind them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> TLC anyone ?

<comment><USER36> What is TLC?

<comment><USER37> An autocorrect of tldr

<comment><USER38> I prefer to think he likes a hug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So, what? Uber is now the new IBM Watson consultancy?

<comment><USER32> Former Uber engineer here.

I don't think Uber is anything like IBM Watson, mostly because Uber uses machine learning to solve business problems for its own products--not for other companies' products.

Most large companies that use machine learning in production will have something similar to Uber's Michelangelo. For example, Facebook has FBLearner Flow[1]. Catherine Dong recently wrote a TechCrunch article describing this broader industry trend[2].

[1]: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072626246134461/introducing...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072626246134461/introducing- fblearner-flow-facebook-s-ai-backbone/)

[2]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/08/the-evolution-of- machine-l...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/08/the-evolution-of-machine- learning/)</comment></comment>


Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/tens-of-billions-of-potentially-habitable-earth-size-planets-in-our-galaxy-say-astronomers

<comment><USER2> >One in five stars in our galaxy like the Sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life

That is a considerable claim that jars with most of the astronomical data I've seen. 1 in 5 is far more probable, perhaps an order of magnitude more probable than I've previously heard.

Does anyone have studies that corroborate their claim?

[EDIT] Later in the article data is cited that more closely matches what I've heard.

>Independently, Petigura, Howard and Marcy focused on the 42,000 stars that are like the sun or slightly cooler and smaller, and found 603 candidate planets orbiting them. Only 10 of these were Earth-size, that is, one to two times the diameter of Earth and orbiting their star at a distance where they are heated to lukewarm temperatures suitable for life.

It makes for a much less sensationalist title, but it seems to have more research behind it.

Over all, I would question the method that caused them to arrive at the 22% idea. I'm not sure that they are accounting for the missed planets correctly; if they are, I would like to see their estimates corroborated.

[EDIT 2] Thank you, Tuna-Fish. Typo corrected.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > astrological

UGHH. Astro _nomical_.

The previous studies have mostly been lower bounds, not attempts to estimate the most likely count. We are still essentially terrible at locating earth- sized planets in earth-like orbits, we are much better at finding larger planets in closer orbits. Because of this, most of the planets that we do find are larger and/or closer, however, this obviously should not be used to deduce that most planets are larger and closer.

This study is using honest statistical analysis to estimate the likelihood of earth-like planets from the data available.

<comment><USER3> Psychics at Cal Tech...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3DoDMfDa_Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3DoDMfDa_Q)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my mind, Fermi's Paradox looms very large.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox)

<comment><USER5> Honestly, I've come to disagree with the "paradox". The ability to send physical evidence of other intelligent life is based on a certain speed limit of the universe. So that doesn't serve as much of a lack of evidence. Habitable planets are too far apart for much interstellar travel to occur readily given that the speed limit is c.

Beyond that, the power of a radio signal is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and we have things like magnetic eddies at the edge of our heliosphere, so it might just be incredibly improbable for any civilization to have generated the types of signal creation that we would pick up.

In the hypothetical/fantastical, other advanced civilizations might have long distance, superluminal communication technology, but that's not something our civilization could actively intercept.

tldr; I don't buy Fermi's paradox.

<comment><USER6> The Fermi Paradox doesn't necessarily say that intelligent life doesn't exist. The impossibility of interstellar travel is compatible with the Fermi paradox.

The point is that _if_ interstellar colonization is possible, the age of the universe practically _requires_ galaxy-wide colonization as an inevitability. Yes, it would take millions of years to colonize an entire galaxy. Tens of millions, even.

Guess what? 10 million years is only 0.1% of the age of the universe. So if _one_ civilization develops interstellar colonization, they experience geometric growth and claim the entire galaxy.

So either there is no civilization that has a 0.1% lead on us (which is statistically absurd if Earth-like planets are common) or interstellar colonization is impossible.

<comment><USER7> It goes beyond that. Even if interstellar travel is not plausible, you'd still expect to find solar systems completely transformed by intelligent life (think Dyson spheres, although maybe not so extreme). If interstellar travel were merely supremely difficult, then you'd expect regional clusters of stars exhibiting these properties. These would be bizarre astronomical oddities that we'd have likely noticed by now.

<comment><USER5> I'd still maintain we simply can't detect it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've seen this reported as 2 ([http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/04/planets- galax...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/04/planets-galaxy-life- kepler)) and 8.8 ([http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/study-88-billion-...](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/study-88-billion- earth-sized-planets-20780752)) billion this week. Anyone know why the wildly different numbers being reported for the same research?

I'm also curious about Earth-sized moons around gas giants in the habitable zone.

<comment><USER9> Don't Earth-sized moons of gas-giants have a few others problems? Less consistent weather patterns due to a more complicated relationship with the sun, stripping of the atmosphere due to gas giants gravity, and crazy huge tidal forces from the same.

<comment><USER8> I'm not an expert, so take these with a grain of salt.

There are plenty of spots on Earth with unusual weather patterns (not to mention extremophiles). I'm not sure what sorts of weather changes a gas giant moon would see but I'd imagine they're surmountable via evolution.

Titan has a nice atmosphere, so it's possible for a gas giant moon to retain one. Gravitational force diminishes pretty quickly with distance, so if a moon's a reasonable distance from the giant it'll likely be fine there.

Tidal forces give Io troubles, but the other moons of Jupiter seem to be fairly stable geologically.

<comment><USER10> Tidal force can be a blessing instead. Some says that plate tectonics plays a vital role in making Earth a habitable planet. It requires continuous source of heat from inside, which is supplied by radioactive elements[1] on Earth, but in a gas giant moon, tidal force could play the same role.

[1]: (Off-topic) The fact that our whole planet's life basically survived thanks to the gigantic amount of radioactivity buried inside, hot enough to keep the whole planet's core molten for 4.6 billion years, gives me endless amusement whenever I see someone ranting about how radioactivity has no place in nature and is a deadly scourge we're inflicting on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I submitted the actual study for this yesterday and got no traction :\ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6679443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6679443)

</comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately every single one of them is unreachable within several lifetimes. We're going to be pretty much trapped in our solar system until we try to solve some of the more difficult problems.

<comment><USER13> We're (other people, not me) at least working on it.

[http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year_Starship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year_Starship)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than- light](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light)

If they're successful and you warp to a planet that's 100 light years away then warp back, I don't know how much time would have passed on Earth though.

<comment><USER14> Depends on their velocity. Assuming a warp of 95% the speed of light, then ~640 years (~320 years one direction). See:

[http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html)

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31105/how-to- calc...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31105/how-to-calculate- time-dilation-in-approaching-speed-of-light)

[http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/HEP/QuarkNet/time.html](http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/HEP/QuarkNet/time.html)

t / 2 = 100 / (1 - (0.95 * c)^2 / c^2)^(1/2)

Where t is the time for a one-way trip and c is the speed of light.

<comment><USER15> That's not how Alcubierre-derived warp fields work. The time inside a warp bubble is predicted to remain synchronized with the time in the originating frame. Thus, if your warp bubble goes at .95c, it'll take you 105.26 years one way, 210.52 going there and back.

And I'm sceptical of your calculation, anyway. From Earth's unchanging perspective, if your are going at .95c in a conventional manner relative to Earth, Earthlings will see your trip as taking the same 210.52 years. Time dilation will only affect the time that passes for the people on board, which will make it seem _shorter_ , not longer. So, really, if your warp drive can't break c, it's better from the passengers' perspective not to use one. This is explained in the StackExchange article you linked to- you put the factor of gamma in the wrong spot ([http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31105/how-to- calc...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31105/how-to-calculate- time-dilation-in-approaching-speed-of-light/31132#31132)).

<comment><USER14> I was assuming conventional propulsion at 95% c. An Alcubierre warp field would be ideal, assuming the problems can be overcome:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Difficulties](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Difficulties)

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4960](http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4960)

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708](http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708)

I'd enjoy seeing your calculation of the number of years that would have passed on Earth for a round-trip of 100 light-years out.

<comment><USER15> You've seen it. 210.52 years. The passengers on the ship should only experience 65.7 years- (210.52)sqrt(1-.95^2). Hence the famous twin paradox- the twin who goes on a relativistic trip comes back younger than the one who stayed behind. What you calculated was how much time would pass on Earth for a trip that took 100 years and 100 light-years _from the perspective of the people on the ship_ , which is not generally what people mean when they say that a star is 100ly away.

<comment><USER14> I found the source of my confusion.

The post I replied to stated, "I don't know how much time would have passed on Earth though." You stated I calculated "how much time would pass on Earth."

The OP was wondering, "if a person on a ship visited a star 100ly away, how much time would have passed on Earth when they returned?"

However, the OP was wondering about time frames in terms of a warp drive, rather than a conventional almost-light-speed drive. Take my upvotes. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1/5 seems to be the accepted number doing the rounds, but there must be other factors to consider too - I'm sure this number is still overoptimistic?

For example..how many of these habitable exoplanets also do the following earth things

1\. Rotate around their axis as opposed to having one side facing the star.

2\. have a stabilising moon to stop them from wobbling about.

3\. Also how many of these exo solar sytems similarly have heavier elements and have evolved from spent star dust - using spent supernova explosions? To have enough water you need H and enough O

Some other important considerations that should perhaps be factored in?

The Earth went through a couple of "snowball-earth events" which resulted in a healthy % of oxygen being made available in the atmosphere.

We also have an outerlying and right-sized Jupiter to sweep away most of the asteroids and space debris.

Even with all the luck in the world, intelligent life only involved in the last million years of our 4 billion year plus Earth history... and we needed an asteroid, the right size again, to wipe out the dominant dinosaurs so that the evolutionary stage was set for our homo sapien species.

How much of this is repeatable?

We may indeed be the only intelligent life in our galaxy.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious as to what is next, now that Kepler is dead what do we do to substantiate this data further?

My impression is that there is not much more we can do to confirm outside of the statistical models giving us probabilities, it would take some much more advanced detection tech (or traveling there) to get further, which means we might be stuck at this point for a little while.

<comment><USER18> I guess pointing even more antennas to a star which is detected to have earth- like size and location (SETI like programs). With even larger telescopes - checking the light spectrum of the planet reflected light for chemical check of the planet (reflected light spectrum can show what the source is made from, to some extent).

<comment><USER7> We'd have to find them first.. Kepler was aiming at a distant part of the galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> But let's say what we really hope for is true. What if we somehow discover that a large number of these planets are teaming with life ? What then ? How would that help us ? Spiritually, economically ? Wouldn't that make us feel even less significant ?

I'm just wondering, why are we hoping there is life out there and what would we do if we find it ?

<comment><USER20> Hopefully, we'd get a little attitude adjustment, question religion more and work together as a human race in the newfound awareness of our place in the universe. Perhaps also work towards actually surviving as a race for a while instead of selfishly exploiting every resource before others do.

<comment><USER21> It'll revolve around the Native American Experience, hopefully minus the conquest and genocide, more likely as a pattern than an anti-pattern.

In the long run, some high school sports teams controversially named after the aliens, some B-list movies, some academic interest, and that's about it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I look forward to the discussion revolving around the concept of ten billion inhabited worlds colliding with the prevailing HN wisdom that the only place to do tech in the known universe is SV.

That's nice that you want to do tech, but if you stay on flyover Tatooine you'll never work on anything more modern than a moisture vaporator, better boot up the x-wing and fly to SV back on old Earth if you want to get paid to do stuff with jquery.

<comment><USER22> Yes, Tatooine under Pootine really sucks, doing even jquery in the Valley beats it by orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This raises the obvious question .... Where _is_ everybody?

It's like we were born on the Marie Celeste; a place that should clearly be brimming with intelligent life, yet appears (on the face of it) to be an empty desert.

The more we learn that the extent to which the galaxy is chock-a-block with habitable worlds, yet apparently devoid of intelligent life, the more I get a truly creeped-out feeling that we are living in some horror-movie galaxy where _something_ is killing _everything_.

<comment><USER24> I sometimes think the answer is both boring and sad: everybody is just really, really, unimaginably, far away.

Even if we manage to continue for another 10,000 years without causing our own extinction, will we come up with anything capable of moving people even 10% of the speed of light? If we do, will we bother to go to the stars?

<comment><USER25> That. Why did I have to scroll down so far to find exactly what I was thinking all the time? I mean, I absolutely love Asimov and Mass Effect but they are entertainment stuff. The distances we are talking about here seem to be completely beyond everyone's mental reach. Even _if_ we could upload ourselves into spacepods like Kurzweil suggests (or for that matter could just UDP our souls out into space) we would not break the speed of light - which makes interstellar travel possible but only in a very constraint range feasible. Plus the problem that during the four years it had taken me to get to Proxima Centauri, humanity on earth will probably have seen centuries pass...

<comment><USER23> I think we just have to modify our brains to think a little bit longer term than we do right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This news reminded me of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode about the Drake Equation ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation)) that I watched as a kid. It is really an improved estimate for a couple of the terms.

That segment of Cosmos is online: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlikCebQSlY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlikCebQSlY)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Where is everybody?"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox)

</comment><comment><USER16> re: my previous post - I realize that 1/5 is for "potentially habitable" ... but I was thinking too far ahead. What I was trying to get at is what factor would we then need to multiply it (ie., this 1/5th) with to make intelligent life a mathematical/chemical/biological certainty - as we know it here on earth, for example.

Was what happened on earth - us - a unique fluke - would intelligent life still come about if reran the whole thing 1000 times, even here on earth, where it was almost an after-thought?

Are there other pathways - sliding doors - that would still have brought about intelligent life here on earth?

What if we didn't have a magnetic field or if there was no Ozone? - that was another thing I left out before.

We may be a fluke - the end result of a set of rare and unrepeatable circumstances?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm only surprised that astronomers haven't concluded this long ago... Speaking of which, there has been a lot of these new astro sightings this year. Did they do something to the Kepler? I thought that spacetelescope was abandoned due to technical problems. What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Confirming a Kepler planet requires observing multiple transits of the planet, so it takes several years if it's an Earth-like orbit. On top of that, the analysis and confirmation and peer review take time.

Incidentally, Kepler's been partially revived - they're going to point it somewhere else that doesn't require the reaction wheels to stay stable.</comment></comment>