The other side of "academic freedom" - <AUTHOR> http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-other-side-of-academic-freedom.html <comment><USER2> I really wanted to get into academia because I had the perception that you got paid for thinking smart thoughts and occasionally writing about them, but when I actually tried academic research it seemed to be about 80% politics/grantwriting and 20% research delivery, so I went into private industry. If you have sufficient reputation to have a sinecure from Google, that's certainly an option for subsidizing research. Even if you don't, a lot of research in our field is not terribly expensive to do, and the materials/collaboration required to do it are within the grasp of e.g. anybody who runs a business which gives them sufficient scheduling flexibility. You can even get published in Real Academic Journals (TM), which surprised me.

<comment><USER3> Certainly, during a lifetime in academia, I have observed that the most successful professors are not the ones who work on what they like (with very few outstanding exceptions) but instead are those who learn to like what they must work on. Where 'must work on' is defined pretty much by what is described in this well informed article. The funding trends and the ability to anticipate them so as to be amongst the first in the line being the most important. Knowing the right people certainly not to be neglected. Ability to do any kind of useful or worthwhile science a long way down the list.

This undesirable trend has been lately exacerbated by the race for the funding and the attendant unhealthy over competitiveness. Academia is now a very different world to what it used to be, where a fellow would get enough ad- hominem funding, on the strength of his proven ability and membership of an elite college. Indeed, without that, the phrase 'academic freedom' has lost most of its meaning.

I believe that 'academic whoredom' would much more fittingly describe the current state of affairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who relatively recently decided to go into industry instead of academia after finishing my PhD, my reasoning was almost identical. Industry seems like a better chance to work on interesting problems and have a bigger impact.

However, I'm really regretting it at the moment.

I thought I'd at least have a say in how I approach problems, even if I didn't get to choose the problems I work on. Instead, I've literally been told, "Your job is not to do science. Your job is not think. Your job is to click a mouse. Do exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to do it. Now, stop asking questions and stop trying to think for yourself."

I realize that the people I'm working with have a _lot_ more experience than I do, but I do think there's value in considering alternate approaches to solving problems. A lot of the fault lies with me, too. In the case above, I didn't clearly communicate the business impact of what I was suggesting to my mentor. Either way, it's frustrating.

Most of it is finding the right team to be on. I still think I chose the right company, I just need to find a way to be on an R&D team. I'm under a 2 year contract, so I can't leave even if I did get frustrated enough to.

At any rate, know what you're getting yourself into. I did two internships on similar teams, but at different companies. Things are definitely done differently here.

There is certainly of lot of interesting work in industry, but it's very easy to wind up stuck doing menial repetitive tasks if you're not careful.

<comment><USER5> That's unfortunate. I'd be curious to know where you ended up taking a job. I have been surprised at how "academically inclined" Google is; however, I am sure there are groups here that have less interest in research-type endeavors than my group. Industry is by no means homogenous in this regard, which is why I decided to save that discussion for a later post.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the energy industry, rather than in software directly. (I'm a geophysist, rather than in CS.) I'm at one of the majors, but it's probably best if I don't say which one.

There are certainly "academically inclined" groups where I work. I just need to work towards one of them.

I've enjoyed all of your posts, by the way!

<comment><USER6> This varying a lot by field is a good point. It also depends on what you mean by academically inclined: are you interested in _doing_ research, in _publishing_ the results of your research, or both? In chemical engineering, for example (not my own area, but some of my family are in the field), it's much easier to find a research-oriented industry job than to find a research- oriented industry job that will let you publish openly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amusingly, I think his dig at the programming language community actually underscores something that I really love about academia and that I think is virtually unique: you can focus on things that are not immediately practical just because they're elegant or beautiful. It's awesome. I couldn't imagine much room for it in industry (although it's not entirely impossible).

Unfortunately, it also seems surprisingly rare even in academic CS. Certainly nobody I know at Berkeley operates this way :(. Maybe it's better in the mathematics department. For me, that would be the main draw to academia: being able to not worry about short-term usefulness and not needing to worry about marketing my work to the average programmer.

Besides, those "esoteric abstractions"? They solve real problems. In surprisingly simple ways. Better than existing solutions. The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. And, even so, some people are really trying. It brings to mind the usual saying about horses and water.

Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. This is just reinforced by the designs of Golang and Dart, as well as the promotional material surrounding the languages (presentations and the like). I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools.

And that is probably the main reason that I would choose a company like Jane Street over Google any day :P.

Yeah, I'm probably more annoyed by this than it's worth. It really helps to lay my thoughts down on paper, and I still haven't started that blog I keep on considering. So HN will have to be my confidant for now.

<comment><USER8> > The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they > aren't willing to learn them.

Willingness is probably not the problem. Can you provide an example of such an "esoteric abstraction"? I am pretty sure, you will get an extensive list of downsides in the comments.

<comment><USER9> Monads are a pretty general encapsulation/sequencing abstraction being useful for more than just IO handling in pure languages. Although to be fair, they are starting to show up in more mainstream languages (ie Clojure)

<comment><USER8> A Monad is just a theoretic abstraction, not a useable one. Only specific Monad instances (IO,Maybe,List,etc) can be "useable", hence "useful". There is no generic "bind" for example, it has to be implemented specifically for every Monad.

While Monads are pretty useful in pure languages, they are often over- engineering in imperative languages.

What I consider the actual point that the OO world is currently learning from the FP world is abstracting over computation. OO can abstract data and state, but computation is rarely modeled as an object. Monads are simply a pattern you can observe often, when computation is abstracted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I realize it's in quotes, but very few academics hearing the phrase "academic freedom" would think of "the ability to work on anything you like." They would, rather, think of what Wikipedia aptly describes as:

". . . the belief that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment."

I've been in academia for (including graduate school) a little over twenty years, and I've been astounded at the ways in which freedom of inquiry is threatened from without and from within. And while few American and European academics face imprisonment for their views or objects of study, many academics in other parts of the world do. And U.S. and European academics certainly can face job loss or sanction for being interested in "inconvenient" things.

I would encourage the author to confine his use of this phrase to its traditional meaning, lest anyone forget the far more important problem to which it refers.

</comment><comment><USER11> But this is all wrong. "Academic Freedom" means that you are free to publish your findings in an objective way without having to please your investors.

Of course you have to do things that are interesting and impactful and the funding is less now than it has been in the decade prior, but that is much different than saying that academic freedom means doing whatever you want. I can just imagine Michelangelo writing this blog during his agony of painting the Sistine Chapel.

</comment><comment><USER12> Two separate points:

1\. I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Certainly that's not a route to immediate promotions or status within the field, but there may be strong long-term returns to individuals who go this way and are vindicated over time.

(This obviously doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty or grad students. I'll also note that this point is a related observation, not a criticism of his argument.)

2\. This stands out to me:

 _The final (and arguably most important) aspect of being successful as a faculty member is being able to solve new problems better than anyone else in your area. It is not usually enough to simply do a better job solving the same problem as someone else -- you need to have a new idea, a new spin, a new approach -- or work on a different problem._

Genuinely new ideas are actually quite rare. Sometimes the difference between a "new" idea and someone else's discovery or implementation of that idea can be just a couple months difference! (See Steven Berlin Johnson's _Where Good Ideas Come From_ for one popular description of this.) Yet one person or group gets 99% of the credit / tenure / etc.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the comments; I replied on the blog post itself. TL;DR: Even tenured profs care about helping their students get good jobs, which means publishing in top venues.

<comment><USER13> It depends on the kind of research you do, but one viable approach in some areas (which I've seen work in practice) is just to not have as many students. Plenty of tenured theory profs out there have one, maybe two PhD students at a time. They do still need to work with that student to send the student's papers to top venues so he/she can eventually get a job, but it's a lot less of a constraint than if it's a systems-style lab full of 5 or 10 PhD students who _all_ need to be pumping out top-tier publications, and leaves considerable time to work on one's own projects with fewer constraints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > My team at Google has a pretty broad mandate which gives us a fair bit of > freedom.

The other points might be fair but this would have to be the exception rather than the rule in private industry and even Google I would image would never give enough leeway to someone to "monitor volcanoes with sensor networks"

<comment><USER5> The sensor networks research was work I did at Harvard prior to joining Google. I don't think Google is very interested in my deploying sensor networks on volcanoes, although (to be fair) I have not asked.

<comment><USER15> google.org might be, if there's a humanitarian spin on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I want to study astronomy. After first year I found it to be a dead end. So I went to private sector, got nice 9-5 job and hack astronomical software over evenings. More freedom, more money and my software is still used by thousands of astronomers.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised that we don't see more in the way of "open source" computer science research, done by unpaid volunteer enthusiasts.

<comment><USER18> It may be difficult/expensive to get to research conferences without institutional support.

<comment><USER12> It probably is, but I wonder how much one needs time at research conferences to produce interesting work.

The word "wonder" is very deliberate here: I genuinely have no idea. In English lit, my own field, access to a research library (with peer-reviewed articles and books) is far more important than conference attendance, for example.

<comment><USER13> CS is a bit different in that conference proceedings are where a lot of the peer-reviewed papers are published. E.g. in graphics, SIGGRAPH is the top place to publish, and in HCI, the same goes for CHI. So attending conferences to present papers is part of the process of getting papers published. Journals do exist, but tend to be used for big archival papers: you might take 3 or 4 years' of conference papers on a project and wrap them up into a giant 40-page journal article for posterity. But they aren't really where recent research is being published & read.

Admittedly that's less true in some areas, where journals do have a larger role. For example, in machine learning, while it's common to publish at conferences like ICML or NIPS, it's also perfectly fine to skip them and just submit to JMLR (<http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/>).

<comment><USER19> _Journals do exist, but tend to be used for big archival papers: you might take 3 or 4 years' of conference papers on a project and wrap them up into a giant 40-page journal article for posterity._

That's the polite interpretation, at least. I'd say the pattern I see more often is that _the exact same_ research gets presented repeatedly at 3 or 4 conferences before getting published as a journal paper. Also, the research was probably done by 1-3 people, but an entire group of 6-10 people will have their names on all the papers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had been thinking along similar lines in physics research as a post-doc, and wrote my experience and ideas up[0].

Then I got fired (unrelated to me writing that post:), and went in a job interview with another prof, who have read my post, and started off the discussion with that. In the end, he have seen the value, the ideals, and that the problems outlined were valid (he also worked in the Bell Labs which is one of my inspiration).

In the end I decided that instead of joining another lab, or as the OP working in the industry, I'll wing it and see if I can set up things the way I want. So now my "main job" is to do research and set up the lab I would want to work in, and get the people who are just as ambitious on board. "Tall order" doesn't even begin to describe it, let's see what happens.

[0] [http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing- bu...](http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-but-not-for- everyone/) "The Academia is Failing But Not For Everyone"

<comment><USER21> This is exactly what I'd like to do with my life if I could afford to. How is it going so far?

<comment><USER20> Working on the foundations, as I still need a few months of Taiwanese visa to be able to start my own company here legally.

In the meantime:

\- Figuring out useful products used in a physics lab that I can use for my research and sell it as well, plus other value added things (like software development, consulting) that can support the things.

\- Reviving and expanding my academic network (have researcher friends in England, India, Bangladesh, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France) and see what would fit them well too

\- Expanding Taiwanese networks for actual researchers, developers, electronics, manufacturing, via the Geek Dinner I organized and our newly founded Taipei Hackerspace, as well as friends working in the industry

\- Expanding my knowledge via the likes of $100 Startup, Lean Startup, The Art of Innovation, Losing My Virginity, ....

\- Moonlighting with a local creative firm to learn more about real business and money side, and get more professional services contacts

\- Setting up a website and prototypes in the next month or so (sooner rather than later).

If you ever wanna chat, I'm on gmail.com with the same username :)

<comment><USER21> That sounds tough but feasible. I think the consultancy bootstrap is a good idea. I'll get in touch via email, I'm quite interested in knowing how it goes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to hear the other side of this. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science right now, and a lot of the appeal of the job is the ability to get paid for working on projects that interest _me_. That said, I have a nice government fellowship for my PhD and a generous funding package from my university - if I was missing one or both, things would be harder.

<comment><USER23> This is one of my main worries about my impending graduation. Right now, I work on what I find interesting, publish when I have what I think are good results, and have not found that anyone has tried to dictate what I should be working on. Once I graduate though, I'll lose that luxury. Unfortunately I don't know of any "real-world" job that provides such freedom; perhaps grad students are only afforded it because we're so affordable.

<comment><USER24> Right. It is rather easy for someone with a CS eduction to earn ~$40k a year and spend most of the year in freedom. Just get a contracting/freelance gig. The hard person is getting $100k or $200k or more and still having freedom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a question for tenured profs, why one needs to apply for grants after getting tenured?

my guesses: to increase its own salary; to buy equipment; to support the group.

is it possible, to do research alone (maybe having one or two grad students) ?

<comment><USER26> The university takes an overhead charge on any grant money, perhaps 40% of the total. The professor can then use the rest of the money to purchase equipment (computers, tape recorders paper), pay research assistants (grad students), travel to conferences, buy datasets or software like SPSS, or pay themselves summer salary or extra salary.

If your research requires none of these things, and you have tenure and don't care about showing your field that you are capable of bringing in grant money to help fund your department, then you don't need to worry about grant money. This is probably less than 1% of the tenured professors.

It also has to do with ego; your peers will know who is bringing in the big grants and who is not.</comment></comment>


The Art of Making a Nixie Tube [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA <comment><USER2> This is really cool. I've been enamored with Nixie tubes since I was a kid, and I finally got my hands on some surplus CCCP tubes and started a project with them. I'm keeping somewhat of a diary of my progress with photos and videos in this collection of tweets about the process: [https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121](https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121)

<comment><USER3> Heh, reminds me of when i first found out that the spare tubed a musician friend of mine kept around for his amp was CCCP stamped. Given that we are both old enough that we grew up during the tail end of the cold war, that seemed somewhat like consorting with the enemy at first glance. These days i wonder how much of the cold war, particularly after Stalin's death, was a massive US propaganda creation.

<comment><USER4> > how much of the cold war, particularly after Stalin's death, was a massive > US propaganda creation.

I think we can do a sort of differential analysis of the propaganda by looking at the coverage of events then and now. Back then, the USSR was repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US; and became the universal bugbear, reviled in film and popular culture.

Nowadays, Russia is repressing dissidents and engaging in proxy wars with the US, including shooting down a civilian airliner; but the propaganda intensity is much lower. Is that because Russia is nominally capitalist and run by oligarchs who park their money in the West?

<comment><USER5> Both the east and the west have supported dictators and "crushed dissidents", and if you do a headcount the results are likely to surprise you.

As for your comment about MH317, I guess we all forgot about Iran Air Flight 655 where a US AEGIS guided missile destroyer which was arguably back then (and even now to some extent) the best radar system in the world shot down an Iranian civilian flight while violating Iranian territorial waters at the time. MH317 was a pretty bad and tragic incident but frankly IA 655 was arguably worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That induction heating step is critical. Ensure you heat metal whilst the vacuum system is still pumping otherwise if you heat the metal after the tube is sealed the metal will out gas giving you bad vacuum, completely destroying your Nixie tube. It's a pleasure to see such refined work, many many frustrating mistakes were made to reach this level of refinement.

<comment><USER7> Isn't that why the getter is added?

<comment><USER8> What _is_ a 'getter' though? And what does it actually _do_?

 _EDIT - Wikipedia [1] says it 's a strip of (barium?) metal that is evaporated to react with any remaining gas/moisture particles in the tube and deposit them on the surface safely. It causes the shiny metallic film seen at the top of some tubes, I think?_

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

<comment><USER7> You are right, another article touches on this topic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's incredible to see all the different sorts of craftsmanship needed to make tubes. It would be fascinating to turn this video into a longer exploration of the evolution of each of the techniques used.

</comment><comment><USER10> Artisanal vacuum tubes are a thing.[1] There's some interest in this from the vinyl record and overpriced tube amp crowd. There are even people who rebuild old CRTs for early TVs.[2] It's a lot of work.

[1] [http://hackaday.com/2014/11/21/artisanal-vacuum-tubes- hackad...](http://hackaday.com/2014/11/21/artisanal-vacuum-tubes-hackaday- shows-you-how/) [2] [http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_rebuild.html](http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_rebuild.html)

<comment><USER11> There's no vacuum in a Nixie Tube!

That being said, it would be nice if classic tubes of yesteryear can be remade efficiently. Especially for antique radio enthusiasts.

<comment> fake-name Uh, what?

Production involves pumping down to high vacuum, heating to degas, and then refilling with neon/argon at low pressure. Granted the production tube isn't at _high_ vacuum, but it's not equivalent to ambient.

<comment><USER12> When they fill it with gas, wouldn't you say it is no longer a vacuum?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish there was a parts list for this! One of the problems that took so much effort in tube lifetimes were the coatings used. I'm wondering what types of coatings he's using. Need more info!

<comment><USER14> I'd be interested to learn more too. Old methods of tube production produced a lot of waste like Mercury and other toxic (carcinogenic) byproducts. I believe modern production methods (where they still exist) are better, and I bet this subject would make an interesting video/read in its own right.

<comment><USER13> We should connect and try to figure this out - there must be more of us; maybe even dozens!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm really, really impressed with the amount of work that goes into making these tubes and can understand why he's selling them for around $150, but what I don't get is how he can compete with the nixie tubes that go for under $10 on eBay. Are his better or more reliable?

<comment> fake-name Primarily size. The $10 ebay nixies are _tiny_.

If you can find 2-3" digit size nixie tubes on ebay for a substantially better rate then these, I'd be very, very surprised.

<comment><USER16> Yeah the IN-18 which I think is the big kind goes for like 180 bucks each.

These ones are 145 and they are stupidly (in a good way) humongous. I want to try building with these, if I'm honest, wow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've seen this elsewhere and what baffled me was the startup aspect of it all.

He spent 5 years doing this and a non-insignificant amount of money. How does he know it will eventually all be worth it?

It seems like such a baffling risky step to take.

<comment><USER18> I can't imagine him getting back money that was spent on the equipment visible on the video selling these tubes. It seems to me more like the money wasn't a problem, and he just really wanted to start making these tubes (which is awesome).

<comment><USER5> He is getting money, he started the business with a loan IIRC, he's located in the Czech Republic which means that the cost of some of those things isn't as high as you would expect.

He's selling them at around 150$ per tube, his complete Nixie tube clock sells for 1700-1800$ and he's shipping these units about as fast as he can make them.

The volumes aren't high but like with any other artisan crafted item they are making money of it.

<comment><USER18> Great to hear, after watching the video (I recommend 2x speed) it feels like he very much earned it, but starting this business with a loan, wow..

<comment><USER19> On the contrary - I recommend watching it at 1x for the pleasure of discovery. What's with the rush?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Previous discussion from around a month ago about Dalibor Farny building out his workshop etc:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12308974)

[http://www.daliborfarny.com/#about-me](http://www.daliborfarny.com/#about-me) (you might need to scroll down to the "About Me" section).

</comment><comment><USER21> > _I needed more room so I moved from the garden shed to a local castle._

I had to rewind to make sure I heard that right.

</comment><comment><USER22> Number 6 is dead on the top left tube in the observation rack.

<comment><USER16> Heh, that's a nice touch on the video if that was intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Glassblowing is a disappearing trade itself. I'm not sure what university chemistry departments are doing these days, an in-house glass shop with one if not several skilled glassblowers used to be pretty common. Likely it's cheaper now to have this outsourced.

<comment><USER24> Here's a story from Caltech:

[http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech- glassbl...](http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech- glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting to see those IKEA cutlery drying containers being used (about 3 minutes into the video). I've often seen them used for all sorts of different purposes. A very useful product.

[http://www.ikea.com/sg/en/catalog/products/70179546/](http://www.ikea.com/sg/en/catalog/products/70179546/)

<comment><USER26> Yeah, they're awesome and everywhere.

The name ORDNING means "order" (as in "the opposite of chaos", not as in "telling someone what to do"), by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That seems like a pretty expensive manufacturing process. Not very capital- intensive though.

</comment><comment><USER28> That was a really amazing video. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Glass is an amazing material because it's one of the few that I can say I know nothing about how to manipulate it.</comment>