ANTHYMN by String Theory Entertainment — teach music through MMORPG - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37002837/anthymn

<comment><USER2> So I'm a bit confused by the title. Is the game going to teach people how to play musical instruments or is it going to teach musical theory?

Or, more likely, is it just a game that uses music as the power aspect for the PCs? So in the end you are still just clicking mice and mashing keybindings.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the description they provide, I think it's musical theory and composition... represented through keyboard and mouse mashing...

I didn't see any information related to unique controllers/interfaces, which would probably be pretty key to mention if that was the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> DO NOT PLEDGE!

As a developer myself I'd highly recommend running away from this kickstarter as the video doesn't show any models, no in game scenes, no UI designs and basically I couldn't find anything started aside from the video & a quick map graphic.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely leaves a lot to the imagination, but that being said I'm still backing it.

The story is interesting and seems pretty fleshed out, plus I imagine you can't get much further than the previz stage on a project of this scope when funding out-of-pocket.

Only signed up at the $20 level, but may increase for other rewards if they provide more details in the updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kickstarter is supposedly limited to US/UK companies and individuals. Are they solely Canadian or do they have a US presence as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think all you need is someone involved to have a US address and bank account to sign up for an amazon payments account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm missing something, but how is "largest" defined here? Looks like only $1,200 has been pledged so far.

<comment><USER6> £600'000, which is normally VC territory.

To my mind there is a reason for that - kickstarter allows people who really want a thing to exist to pay the amount that thing is worth to them, and then get it.

No computer game is worth $10'000 just to play. What is worth $10'000 dollars is ownership of the IP, and a share of any profits.

Maybe this is against kickstarters rules, but I'm not sure it should be. I'd happily invest my savings across a spread of carefully chosen crowd funded companies, in the hope that one out of those hundred would make good the losses on the rest.

Why is there not kickstarter style crowd funding platform for investment?

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember seeing a lot of heated debate on this topic about a year ago... part of the JOBS actin the US. I believe the SEC is currently drafting regulations on this, but haven't heard much on what that will entail.

No sign of similar legislation in Canada that I know of.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting.

A crowd equity site doesn't exist in the UK, so I presume it is a regulatory problem, but crowd loans to businesses sites do.

I wonder if a specialist 'loans to businesses' site could loan to businesses that have not started yet, with interest proportional to profit, and a fixed 'interest only' term before repayment. Trading these loans would be a problem, and they would not give control, but for a small holder they would function a lot like shares. Sounds pretty viable.

I realize there are some incentives issues here, e.g. why would the board increase profit rather than increase management pay and break even. Conventionally this is because the shareholders would fire them, and because they are more shareholders than employees. But I believe an appropriate incentive system could be done via loans using contracts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An MMORPG where everyone is playing a bard?</comment>


The 8 Craziest Job Openings in the Military-Industrial Complex - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/crazy-military-jobs/?pid=1731&viewall=true

<comment><USER2> Not really crazy. Not everyone at MS is a developer. Likewise, defense companies need a diverse range of employees as well to fully function. However, being surrounded by top secret information all the time, every employee will need to have clearance. Thus the top secret janitors and graphic artists.

Disclaimer: I live in the DC area.</comment>


The post-exponential era of AI and Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-of-ai-and-moores-law/ <comment><USER3> The "Bitter Lesson" post from Rich Sutton from earlier this year [1] seems a very good complement to this article: he explain how all of the big improvements in the field came from new methods that leveraged the much larger compute available from Moore's law, instead of progressive buildup over existing methods.

A great quote from McCarthy also regularly referenced by Sutton is "Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals", which (IMO) help picture the tight link between compute growth and AI.

It's only a few minutes read, I highly recommend it:

[1] [http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)

<comment><USER4> It could be that the slowing of Moore's Law results in a more diverse array of specialized computing hardware. After all, the resurgence of ML didn't happen because x86 got fast enough, but because video games - of all things - <USER2> the maturation of a whole new category of massively-parallel chips.

<comment><USER5> _the resurgence of ML ... because video games - of all things - funded the maturation of a whole new category of massively-parallel chips_

Fake news. It has far more to do with the rise of distributed computing than the existence of GPUs.

<comment><USER6> I don't really see this; All of the currently popular machine learning frameworks either support GPU or are oriented around GPU based execution. For most developers working on AI it is still the defacto standard.

<comment><USER7> I think.. both. Distributed computing (Hadoop) was why a lot of data got collected and made available(ish).

GPU's are the engines that made CNN's (in particular) tractable, and opened up a bunch of applications for many companies, and opened up a reasonable route to results for a generation of researchers.

<comment><USER8> Can anybody elaborate on why this is downvoted? This would be my guess as well, simd parallelism of GPUs solves only part of the challenges, you still need a general purpose data crunching machine to prepare and handle learning data.

<comment><USER9> For one GPU speedup over CPU isn't that dramatic for small to medium sized problems, e.g. MNIST or CIFAR that one would try algorithm ideas on. So I think it's a stretch to see GPU as essential to the new algorithms. On the other hand for large problems like the original Alpha Go you need to figure out the distributed computing to really scale.

This isn't to say that GPUs aren't nice. They do save time or for the same amount of time let you produce more polished results, which means in a competitive environment everyone would use them.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. GPUs are necessary _now_ , but did not originally herald the deep learning revolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article discusses one of the impacts of compute performance growth rates slowing while compute demand (training AI models) is growing exponentially.

The 'end of Moore's law' (as a measure of performance, not density) is probably the most significant "Tech" story of the next decade. Why? Because it is going to demand engineers who can write fast code over engineers who write code fast.

A lot of frameworks and abstractions will be ripped out and thrown away as 'taking too much time for not enough benefit.'

<comment><USER10> Rust will fare well. Ruby won't.

<comment><USER11> Ruby isn't in the critical path, so that's a bad example.

In general, the real issue is the layers of abstractions between the hardware and the end user. The over complicated architectures. The constant re- invention of databases/operating systems/virtual machines at each layer.

<comment><USER12> > The constant re-invention of databases/operating systems/virtual machines

I wish that were the case but operating systems and systems software in general seems to be the most stagnant field. Everyone just buys the same FLOSS stack for $0 and compatibility is king, so there's very little research going in this field and much less of it ends up in any product you're ever going to see in use.

I would _love_ to see a vibrant scene of competing operating systems and databases with fresh new ideas and research.

<comment><USER11> I meant that it is re-implemented at every layer.. Like a browser is practically an OS on its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a long time we had a situation where transistors got smaller and cheaper and faster and more power efficient all at the same through the wonders of Denard scaling and we gestured broadly at the whole thing and called it all "Moore's Law" without needing to distinguish which exponential improvement the term referred to. But in the mid 2000s Denard scaling broke down and now it looks like transistors are still getting smaller and cheaper and more power efficient but they aren't getting exponentially faster any more. So we've mostly settled on the smaller bit as being the true "Moore's Law" and that's more or less kept going but might be running out of steam. It's still very nice from the perspective of very parallel tasks but as consumers we don't see as much benefit from it in our computers except in graphics. But sooner or later Moore's Law will run out too, transistors can only get so small as long as they're made of atoms.

Luckily the laws of physics have precise limits for just how efficient computation can be, Landauer's principle, that are just as binding as the laws for how efficient a heat engine can be. Progress in engine efficiency did indeed form a converging sigmoid on what's allowed by Carnot. But we're still quite a distance away from Landauer's limit and if transistors can't get us there we have every reason to believe that other computational substrates are possible and can.

In the meantime we might be looking at an interregnum. But while AI is gobbling up computational cycles because they're available there's no reason to think that efficiency gains aren't possible - just look at the orders of magnitude improvement in training resources from AlphaGo to AlphaZero. I don't see that this should stop progress, though it might slow it.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle)

<comment><USER14> Transistors haven't really been getting smaller for the last few nodes, they've mostly just been getting denser.

AFAIK nobody currently knows how make finfets much smaller without making them awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I predict there will be much more assembly programming required in the future to squeeze out as much as performance as possible because the end of Moore's Law is already very apparent for several applications that can not be easily parallelized. It is a complete myth that you "can't beat the C-compiler" as it is claimed so often. The compiler can't know many things you know about the problem at hand. So far I have been able to beat gcc on a regular basis while just relying on x86_64 (which means using no instructions/registers beyond SSE2.0).

Right now I'm looking for a C/Shader-like language for x86_64/Linux which allows you to be much closer to the metal without requiring you to go down to the cumbersome level of ASM syntax and at the same time shedding libc and use syscalls instead (E.g. if you have specific knowledge about the data structures you want to map you can use the heap much more efficient than plain old malloc). So far I found nothing.

<comment><USER16> "Right now I'm looking for a C/Shader-like language for x86_64/Linux"

You seem like the ideal candidate for writing such a language. And the book about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> General purpose AI is not waiting for more compute power. Its waiting for algorithms that can do it.

I'm not 100% sure deep learning can get all the way there. We might need a new approach. But the deep learning leaders are taking it very seriously and making some progress.

For example, Yann LeCun is talking about self-supervised, learning models of the world. MILA (Bengio's group) is talking about "state representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment". Hinton now has capsule networks. In my opinion these types of approaches are very promising for general purpose AI.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, many ML applications are bottlenecked on availability of labels, not by compute. Especially once outside very well-defined and established task. I think self-supervised has large potential, at least in expanding ML applications towards "more general".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I predict that the slowing of Moore's law is going to make HPC and optimization in general a much more valuable skillset in the next few decades. In the past 15 years or so, we've been more or less happy to treat CPU cycles as a limitless resource, and as a result modern software stacks have a lot of fat in them. At the end of the era of free speed increases, trimming the fat is going to be a lot more important.

<comment><USER20> CPU cycles are limitless. Most of the time the CPU is waiting for the memory system.

<comment><USER21> We're talking about 16-bit floats, or even INT8 or INT4, as the basis of neural nets these days, pushing the problem back to CPU-cycles.

CNNs in particular recycle the same set of weights over-and-over again, fitting inside of the tiny caches (or shared-memory in GPUs), allowing for the compute-portion of the hardware to really work the data.

> CPU cycles are limitless. Most of the time the CPU is waiting for the memory > system.

CPUs go out-of-order, deeply pipelines, and speculative so that they have work to do even while waiting for the memory system.

The typical CPU has over 200+ instructions in flight in parallel these days. (200+ sized reorder buffers and "shadow registers" to support this hidden parallelism), and that's split between two threads for better efficiency ("Hyperthreading").

GPUs can have 8x warps / wavefronts per SM (NVidia) or CU (AMD) waiting for memory. If one warp/wavefront (a group of 32 or 64 threads) is waiting for memory, the GPU will switch to another "ready to run" warp/wavefront.

It takes some programmer effort to understand this process and write high- performance code. But its doable with some practice.

<comment><USER20> So I assume that we are talking about Moores law for cpu/gpu and not for memory.

The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models.

In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.

So I think that the nature of the current state of the art optimization alg are what matter.

<comment><USER21> > The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not > compute. Especially with large size models.

Well... everything "depends on the model". Some models will be GPU-compute limited, others will be bandwidth-limited, and others will be capacity limited.

> In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature > of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And > for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.

You should increase the size of the model to increase parallelism. Any problem has sequential-bits and parallel bits, so we can't stop the sequential nature of problems.

But the idea is to think NOT in terms of Ahmdal's law, but instead in terms of Gustafson's law. When you have a computer that's twice-as-parallel, you need to double the work done.

You can't reasonably expect things to get faster-and-faster (Ahmdal's law). Instead, you load up more-and-more work the wider-and-wider machines get.

In the case of neural nets, instead of doing 128x128x5 sized kernels, you upgrade to 256x256x5 sized kernels as GPUs get thicker.

Moore's law was never about the "speed of computers", but instead about "the number of transistors". As such, its Gustafson's law that best scales with Moore's law. We've got another 5 to 10 years left in Moore's law by the way: denser memory, denser GPU compute, 5nm-class chips (probably networked as a bunch of chiplets).

We will have more CPU / GPU power, as well as more RAM density, in the future. The question is how to organize our code so that we'll be ready 5 years from now for the next-gen of hardware.

<comment><USER20> Thank you for your insights. Good info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since AI is heavily parallelizable, it only matters that cost(as in dollars) will keep exponentially decreasing.

It doesn't matter if you can't double the transistor density of a single cpu if you can just double the number of machines. At the end of the day you still managed to double performance for the same price.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Hardware_costs) (note: in another thread someone noted that this wiki is outdated/inaccurate. If anyone have the relevant expertise they should help edit it)

<comment><USER23> Hardware Acceleration/Parallization is the next frontier. We've already seen the benefit of some pretty simple ASICs (TPU was built to be simple) as well as more general purpose accelerators. Hardware architects used to have a hard time, because often the best option was to simply wait for CPUs to get faster. Now that we've seen CPU power begin to stall it makes economic sense not only to invest in more parallel software but more appliciation specific accelerators.

CPUs/GPUs are beasts of hardware architecture, being complex mostly due to their flexibility. We can achieve higher performance with dedicated hardware (or FPGAs), and it looks like the economic reasons to do so are slowly becoming more certain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't agree fundamentally with this article. Correct details, but missing the Forest for the trees. There are too many elements at work evolutionarily speaking to ignore the emergence of God knows what. Plus our AI (not to mention our most basic computing axioms) are absolutely juvenile as we are brand new as a species to be developing anything at all that has to do with computing. That doubly goes for "AI"... whatever that means.

</comment><comment> lachlan-sneff The topic is quite controversial, but there is a path forward. There are several theoretical computing technologies that can get very close to the theoretical maximum allowed by physics (as well as being revisible), but we can't build them yet because nanofactories/molecular assemblers/whatever-you- call-them don't exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER25> It'd be really weird if we could keep expanding Moore's law and surpass the brain on a performance per watt ratio.

<comment><USER26> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The takeaway is that, even if we assume great efficiency breakthroughs and > performance improvements to reduce the rate of doubling, AI progress seems > to be increasingly compute-limited at a time when our collective growth in > computing power is beginning to falter

A similar conclusion can be made for genomics too.

</comment><comment><USER28> Modern hardware has lot to improve, memories and transmission lines have been the main bottlenecks for more than a decade now, bigger caches helped but are not enough. Solutions are being developed, like on-circuit optical fiber transmission lines, but it takes time.

</comment><comment><USER29> > A couple of years ago I was talking to the CEO of an AI company who argued > that AI progress was basically an S-curve, and we had already reached its > top for sound processing, were nearing it for image and video, but were only > halfway up the curve for text. No prize for guessing which one his company > specialized in — but he seems to have been entirely correct.

This feels a little off. To me, it feels like image has made the most progress, then text, then sound, then video.

Anyone knows which company they were referring to?

</comment><comment><USER30> Moore's law may be dead, but it is still mind boggling to project if forwards.. Seth lloyd in his paper [1] on the limits of computation, mentions in 250 years computational density will equal that of a black hole (kilogram sized). [1] [https://cds.cern.ch/record/396654/files/9908043.pdf](https://cds.cern.ch/record/396654/files/9908043.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> I am optimistic that Moore's Law will eventually recover, with a new technology, perhaps silicon-based, perhaps not. Information processing is not intrinsically limited by silicon - for example, mammalian brains are more powerful.

But that's lomg-term, big-picture. Technologies can remain stagnant longer than you can remain alive.

<comment><USER32> It's funny that the article mentions that processors have not increase their speed, and therefore Moore's law is dead. In fact, as many people know Intel has been struggling with their 10nm chip, and now with a new CEO, this might change. All other processor manufacturers are catching up and some are moving ahead of Intel. That's the whole reason Apple is trying to move away from X86 with their MACs

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, this is a bit of a relief. All of the AI nightmare scenarios (be they the Terminator kind, or the more realistic hyper-empowerment-of-a-few- elites kind) rely on that exponential growth continuing unimpeded. If there's no exponential growth, there's no runaway AI that swiftly outpaces human understanding.

<comment><USER33> Yet AI beat humans at every strategic game out there, from Chess and Go to StarCraft2. We don't have general AI, but in some fields, human understanding have already been outpaced.

<comment><USER34> Specialized fields like games aren't necessarily a problem - computers have been beating us at arithmetic for decades, and it isn't exactly world shattering.

Also, a minor nitpick: AI has not succeeded at beating the best players at SC2, though it did beat the vast majority of the ladder.

<comment><USER35> > Specialized fields like games aren't necessarily a problem - computers have > been beating us at arithmetic for decades, and it isn't exactly world > shattering.

I would argue that it is, because that's the driver for industrial automation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One factor: the computational cost of training any extremely expensive model is amortized across all uses of that model.

</comment><comment><USER37> Could it be that with Quantum Computing computational power will continue to increase exponentially?

<comment><USER38> Is Quantum Computing computational power increasing exponentially now?

<comment><USER39> Yes, we have gone from being able to factor the number 1 to being able to factor the number 2 in the last 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why can't we just have bigger dies? Same density, more transistors. If yields are too low, connect smaller dies somehow.

<comment><USER12> If you stop scaling node size down and start scaling die size up, the result will be higher prices and power consumption. If you don't mind, go buy a Threadripper or EPYC. Might consider getting multiple sockets while at it. Caveat: won't fit in your pocket.

I'm sure there'll be additional interconnect issues to worry about as the physical cluster of dies gets larger and larger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Maybe it is a good thing, so the singularity will be avoided. There is so much wrong usages of AI.

<comment><USER41> Mathematician here, I don't think the singularity as popularised through people like Ray Kurzweil would happen.

In particular, their metaphor of an "infinity" point seems to me like the incorrect application of mathematical ideas to social contexts.

I think the question of artificial general intelligence is a different question than a singularity, much like how the Chinese room addresses a different question than the Turing test.

<comment><USER42> Why is it a different question? AFAIK the assumption is that if the computer can improve itself (which it can if it has IQ 100), there is nothing holding the singularity back.

<comment><USER43> Which is dead wrong, because not only is there no usable definition of "improve itself", but there isn't even any understanding of the kinds of skills required to create a usable definition.

It's the difference between a computer that is taught how to compose okay-ish music, and a computer that learns spontaneously how to compose really really great music _and_ do all of the social, cultural, and financial things required to create a career for itself as a notable composer _and then_ does something entirely new and surprising given that starting point.

They're completely different problem classes, operating on completely different levels of sophistication and insight.

A lot of "real" AI problems are cultural, social, psychological, and semantic, and are going to need entirely new forms of meta-computation.

You're not going to get there with any current form of ML, no matter how fast it runs, because no current form of ML can represent the problems that need to be solved to operate in those domains - never mind spontaneously generate effective solutions for those problems.

<comment><USER42> > Which is dead wrong, because not only is there no usable definition of > "improve itself", but there isn't even any understanding of the kinds of > skills required to create a usable definition.

I disagree. A program improves itself when it reacts to a problem and implements a solution. Obviously that is very general, but enough. A human of IQ 100 certainly can develop software; a program of IQ 100 should be able to do the same, and then you scale horizontally.

<comment><USER44> Have you taken an IQ test? They only test a few classes of problem. Performance on these _for a human_ is deemed a workable poxy for intelligence but, for something that approaches the problems very differently, it may not be at all indicative of general intelligence. I think we probably already have reached or are near the point where we could train systems to achieve human- level performance on each of those basic tasks. We are, however, not seemingly near a humanlike AGI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder does the compute power per dollar have to level off so soon?

</comment><comment><USER46> We could make AI more efficient by switching to analog. Otherwise we're encoding the real world into digital and then back into analog again.</comment>


Who are the 99% - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/who-are-the-99-percent/2011/08/25/gIQAt87jKL_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

<comment><USER2> In the hacker community, I often hear the following reaction to this kind of story: "You got shafted by the system? I guess you shouldn't have blindly followed someone else's life script."

I'm doing well, and I can't complain. But I'm bothered by the flippant attitude toward these "99 percenters" who played the game as it was explained to them and ended up poor. Sure, for successful hackers who find their skills in demand, it's easy to say that these people are just not creative enough, that they lacked the insight to see the right path through our economic system. When your bets paid off, it's easy to criticize those whose bets didn't.

But it's unfair. Our society insistently thrusts on us a narrative that says getting an education and working hard will provide a comfortable life. And why shouldn't people be able to trust that? When the same narrative is told to us by our parents, teachers, politicians, celebrities, and just about everyone else, how can we deride those who buy into it?

The grand bargain our economic system has made with the middle class--work hard, get a degree, work hard some more, and you'll be OK--is turning out to be a lie for many people. A fair society would not put people into that position. I understand that economic fairness is not a guiding principle of our economy, but it ought to be.

<comment><USER3> The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no one person or group in charge of "society." Blaming society is the same as blaming yourself (who else makes up society but the 99%-ers?).

To me, it's disturbing that the quotes come from people who seem so detached from their own failure. I'd like to see what the majors of these people with their "advanced degrees" that can't find anyone who thinks they are worth hiring.

That said, the correct response to these folks' predicament is for them to change the culture. The best way to do that is not to stage an aimless protest, but to cut up the credit cards, get 2 or 3 jobs, and teach your children the right way to handle money.

<comment><USER2> "Blaming society is the same as blaming yourself (who else makes up society but the 99%-ers?)"

Not the slightest bit true. Economic and political power are concentrated. That's one of the main gripes of this movement. The college grads who played by the rules and got nothing for it did _not_ set the system up that way. Their plight is due in large part to the economic crisis, which is in turn the fault of the tiny sliver of the population that gets to gamble with other people's money.

<comment><USER3> What rules? There are no rules in any society that _guarantee_ success, except possibly in a corrupt totalitarian state. They had choices to make; some made bad ones that ignored the risk they were taking. Everyone in this story has racked up a mountain of debt. Why? Because they thought that's what everyone did when they went to school. If conventional wisdom is your only guide, small wonder you are blown and tossed by the wind.

What tiny sliver of the population forced them to go massively into student and credit card debt? Who promised them that they would get "good jobs" for getting "advanced degrees?" The president? Wall Street? "Society?" Seems like there's no one to hold accountable here but themselves.

<comment><USER2> "If conventional wisdom is your only guide, small wonder you are blown and tossed by the wind." This is exactly the attitude that I'm against. It may seem easy for us on Hacker News to ignore conventional wisdom. But I think it's perfectly fair that most people should be able to trust the advice that _almost everyone_ in society gives them.

"What tiny sliver of the population forced them to go massively into student and credit card debt?" The sliver that does this is the one that eats up an incredibly disproportionate amount of the value in society, leaving a smaller pie for everyone else to spend on their education, housing, food, medical care, etc.. The average middle class person has been taught and fairly believes that college is a necessity for economic security. If that can only be paid for with debt, then what is such a person to do? Be an entrepreneur? Clearly, that's not for everyone. Likewise, you can't expect all these people to just figure out what careers they can have without an education, then learn it all through self-teaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a society, we are experiencing a crisis of feedback. There are two dimensions to this crisis: a wealth gap, and a generation gap.

How does wealth make it difficult for our society to listen? An anecdote from last year may illustrate. I was around when a PAC for an automated trading firm was being set up; there was a presentation given on the purpose of the PAC (which was to make the case that algorithmic trading can be beneficial to society). Someone asked, "What do we get per dollar spent? Are we buying influence?" One leader responded, "No, we can't buy influence. But the reality is that money equals access--access to politicians so that we can have our side heard." Given the high barrier to access, significant portions of our society feel alienated from the democratic process, and Occupy Wall Street is part of our society's struggle to introspect on fundamental problems we face-- especially the broken political process.

How does age impact our society's ability to hear its own feedback? The generation gap is between the "pre-" and "post-" internet generations. By my estimation, the delineation is currently somewhere around 35 years of age. If a person is under 35, there is a good chance that he or she treats social networking tools like texting, email, twitter, facebook, reddit, etc. as first class communication. Over, and the chances are low that communication of highest import or urgency happens through these channels. The average age of the U.S. House of Representatives is 58.

The following analogy helped me understand why there is no "unified message" from protesters: "When a person has a problem, like an addiction, the first step is for them to admit the problem. The second step is to identify the problem. It's not until the third step that they try to solve the problem. Right now we need the US as a country to admit there is a problem. Then we can work on identifying it, and then on fixing it. It is no good if half of the population says "Here's how to fix the problem" when the other half is still going "what problem?" This is why it is very important to reach out to people with all sorts of different political viewpoints so that we have a better conversation when we try to figure out the cause of the problem and how to fix it." -- Granito (reddit.com)

I think we can all point to grievances or suggestions from Occupy Wall Street that are unreasonable or simplifications of larger problems. The needs that people have, however, are the more important part of this ongoing discussion, IMO. There is frustration with the processes our society has in place that give voice to the downtrodden. I think that if we keep that in mind--that we don't have to agree with every demand, but that we can agree the need for understanding and better processes exists--then there is mutual benefit to be had from this current event.

Just like a business will profit if it develops its customers, engages in their needs, and has good customer service, our society will profit by listening and understanding this new phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a problem with the premise of this article. I note all but one of these people have a degree. Someone should tell Mr. Klein the unemployment rate among people with a college degree is only 4.2% which is close to the transitional rate (the rate where you have full employment and the number only represents those transitioning from job to job). I don't doubt there are those with degrees who have found themselves in bad situations but those are the exceptions.

Almost completely unrepresented in this article are the people the system really isn't servicing. Those without a High School degree have an unemployment rate of 14%. With a High School degree it's 9.7%.

Those people are the 99%. The people who NEVER had health care. The people who couldn't afford an education even in good times. The people who spent their childhoods struggling to stay alive.

<comment><USER6> > Someone should tell Mr. Klein the unemployment rate among people with a > college degree is only 4.2% which is close to the transitional rate

This is the unemployment rate, which is different from the underemployment rate. It's quite possible a lot of these people have a job, but not one that fully takes advantage of their degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's surprising to me to see so many people who have such a poor understanding of how the world works.

 _I went to graduate school believing that there might be some financial security afforded by a higher degree, and that with that security I could finally buy my mom her own house and take care of her. Instead, I have wasted six years of my life._

I got a degree (without considering how I was going to create value for other people) and yet I'm not set up for life! Quelle Surprise!

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing I find interesting about the stories that have been getting the most circulation is that almost all of them bemoan the system, yet very few bother to outline how they plan to improve their situation.

Seems to me a few of these people are just now realizing that shuffling through the corrals of life leads you to the slaughter house.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Six years in graduate school... going into debt to get a bfa..., 20k in debt and still paying tuition..._

At what point do we say "these people just made or are making bad decisions". What job did the bfa think they were going to get? Is it the governments job to provide that for them now that they "did everything they were supposed to do and have nothing to show for it"? And if it's not the government than who?

I'm just unclear what this groups wants and how they think it should be given to them. Raise taxes on the 1% and then what? Trust that the government will create jobs for you? Raising taxes is the easy part what's the next step after that?

</comment><comment><USER9> \-- These are not rants against the system. They're not anarchist manifestos. They're not calls for a revolution. They're small stories of people _who played by the rules_ , _did what they were told_ , and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it. --

Heck, so you make a mistake and then blame Wall St, or someone extremely rich for it? If you listened to someone, and they were wrong, it's not _their_ mistake, it's _yours_.

Now you are in debt, without a home, a job and with an uncertain future. I live in a third-world country, I didn't listen to the people, I didn't listen to the society and their rules. I went and started my own consulting company, rent a flat, carrying on my studies, working and learning all day... Now I'm making a double professor salary and I'm only 20 years old. I'm the 1%.

<comment><USER10> The people who took on too much housing debt, and the banks who lent to them, were either greedy, or foolish, or a combination of the two. None of them deserve a public bailout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always been in IT, so I don't know if my experience applies or not. But in my field, I have to continuously keep studying and learning -- and that keeps my value up. I _suspect_ (and see it around me) that many people land a j.o.b. and then just coast. They don't continue to work hard (ie studying, reading, staying abreast) and then are suprised to get caught. In other words, (prior) education != marketable skills.</comment>


Marty v2, an educational walking robot programmable in Python, Scratch, and ROS - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robotical/marty-the-robot-v2 <comment><USER2> Looks pretty flexible and interesting... I particularly like that you can scale-up the complexity of the programming as you get better (eg moving from Scratch to Python to ROS)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great new version of Marty which has some cool new features like the ability to do position, tilt, proximity & force, and a built in speaker. Impressed with the shaking hands too!

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool robot on kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great update to this educational robot</comment>


Your Startup Is About to Fail. Here Are 20 Reasons Why: - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/your-startup-is-about-to-fail-here-are-20-reasons-why-26d18a2077bf#.dqcip8j76 <comment><USER2> TLDR; Click-baity post with an embedded click-baity Infographic. This one => [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*BDJfg5ExzCcmIOOYf6...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*BDJfg5ExzCcmIOOYf65vlw.jpeg)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps we need a URI schema that allows us to instruct browsers to crop the bottom 'x%' or 'x pixels' from an image when linking to it. Maybe a CSS-in-URI hack? Could make a website to do that by generating a wrapper page easily enough.</comment></comment>


Traction Tracker: Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/traction-tracker-84-y-combinator-companies-with-significant-traffic-growth/

<comment><USER2> This work lacks grounding because the measure of interest, _Alexa rank_ , is not situated in measures that are familiar.

The author, dmor, is not familiar with the semantics of the Alexa rank. Nor are most readers. We know loosely that low rank is good. But what does going from rank 1000 to 100 really mean? How hard is that? Is it a traffic increase of 10x? 100x? What exponential base does it follow?

So this chart shows the YC companies that have the largest Alexa rank delta. Frankly, the rankings look plain wrong to me, based upon what I know of these companies.

Other commentators have suggested that, given the power law distribution, we actually care about the delta log-rank. A priori, I would agree. But then we get a new ranked list, and we still don't know if we're actually learning something or our log-metric is messed up. That's actually quite pernicious, if the results look vaguely correct at a coarse level, so we trust the results at a fine-grained level, and don't realize that the methodology and results are wrong.

We're all just blowing hot air because we don't really know what Alexa ranks mean. Only SEOs who work with Alexa ranks frequently, understand the undocumented warts, and have a gut sense of what they mean, can interpret this.

But right now, we really have no point of reference and the table leaves us without having gained any insight.

Perhaps I'm actually happy that the results are so clearly wrong and not helpful. At least that way, no one will trust them. It would be much more insidious if the results were commonly thought to be instructive, but in fact were misleading.

<comment><USER3> When you don't have deep (insider) access to key metrics, you have to rely on other indicators of success. __Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi- meaningful: if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)

 __Plus, these companies are in drastically different markets. Their key metrics are probably quite different, or (at the very least) not directly comparable to growth in value / profitability.

<comment><USER2> _Alexa provides one piece of data that is semi-meaningful:_

That's my point. This measure is semi-meaningful.

How meaningful is it? Very? Somewhat? Well, we don't know.

The way you determine how meaningful it is, is by connecting the dots with another measure. For example, we have this measure that is cheap to acquire but perhaps inaccurate (Alexa). Can we connect it with another measure that is harder to acquire but more accurate (e.g. exit value)?

 _if nothing else, I'd wager it's roughly correlated (on average) with market cap and/or exit price. (dmor: this would be a cool graph!)_

I would wager that too. But we don't know until you run the numbers.

Grounding your measures is what separates cool hacks from data you can actually draw meaningful inferences from. I think dmor is trying to do something real here, which is why I think it useful to help her actually push the ball forward and really make something much more valuable.

I agree that exit value / market cap is a good auxiliary measure. I think I also suggested this in another comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies.

Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000...

I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric...

For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! And AnyPerk from an exciting 6 down to a not so cool (unless you like catches) 22 (not picking on AnyPerk, it's just the most demoted of the original top 10)

Under this change of methodology the biggest winner is WorkFlowy from 61->24, biggest loser's are Circle (39-67); FundersClub (40-68); and Cloudant (44-72)

<comment><USER3> Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it -- this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered it but was on the fence so I wasn't going to use log this first time, but it sounds like that really might be the best approach. Give me a minute and I'll make a spreadsheet you guys can check out to see if it makes more sense.

UPDATE: Here you go! [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGM...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdGMxbi1qYkdCcXVLY0lmVnk4R1FVV0E&output=html)

<comment><USER5> NewsBlur's #1 on the spreadsheet, which is crazy talk to me. I've been too busy scaling to even look at my analytics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well this is the kind of graph I dream about :) <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsblur.com#>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months (specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike upward...but if you compared January to February, you'd see a small drop downward (and that trend might even continue throughout the year...though it seems to not be happening that way between March and April).

I'm just saying this is a pretty limited view of these sites, and it'd be difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. Our traffic probably isn't growing faster than more recent YC companies, even if we show up above them on the list. We're a pretty stable entity at this point. Not to say I didn't get a kick out of seeing our numbers getting better at a pretty rapid clip, even knowing more detail about what our traffic actually looks like.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now that I am collecting the data each month.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for putting this together. Also if you can't get your hands on the data from 2012 maybe taking the launch date vs their current Alexa position and averaging this out to see their Alexa growth over their lifespan. That would be really nice to see.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think growth in Alexa rank is a good metric, because it does not measure growth as typically defined (in %age increase in raw traffic). Unfortunately that makes the entire table mostly meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see how traction relates to traffic. Traction rates to financials. Traffic relates to momentum, which is more of a measure of visitors, and not of growth. Not a bad data set per we, either. I'd love to see this type of approach done with each company's growth, but I am sure most will shy away, including the YC founders.

<comment><USER10> Traction relates to financials - citation needed

<comment><USER11> Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.

<comment><USER10> No, that is not a truism. It is a falsism if it is any kind of ism.

Instagram has yet to make a single dollar, for an extreme example, and yet nobody would argue it has gained insane amounts of traction since in the mobile photo sharing space since launch. I would use Facebook as an example, but they had small revenue generating efforts early on so it doesn't make as clean of an example.

<comment><USER11> Let me rephrase then: Not all traction is revenue growth, but all revenue growth is traction(again, by definition).

<comment><AUTHOR> Not necessarily, in fact that was was of the fallacies of the dot com bubble. Revenue is traction if it is gained at a reasonable cost. There are definitely unit economics that look like growth but come at an unsustainable cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness or sampling error.

A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs B2B companies and only compare consumer companies on traffic. Many of the companies on that list(including my company MixRank) appear to be doing quite poorly in terms of traffic until one realizes that each visitor to a B2B product is worth orders of magnitude more than a visitor to a consumer product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Splitting out consumer vs. B2B companies is definitely on my list in the near future

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google Trends can be used to get some sense of traction. eg. [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Newsblur%2C%20coinbas...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Newsblur%2C%20coinbase%2C%20PagerDuty%2C%20carwoo%2C%20Tutorspree&cmpt=q)

The problem is that the results are relative. One way would be to pick a keyword with a relatively high search volume which could be used as baseline. Another issue that I can think of is that companies named after common english words i.e. Pebble will have their results artificially inflated. This process might be hard or tricky to automate.

Growth in followers/likes/tweets/+1 counts could be used as a measure of traction.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like most of your lists and creativity, but this one isn't very helpful and it feels like you're reaching. After a site cracks the Alexa top 10,000, it becomes a lot harder to move up and should be worth a lot more on rankings.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since everyone else seems to be finding a reason to be critical, I'll just say: I found this really interesting, and I'm glad you presented the data this way so that I could make my own analysis. It wasn't to say that #1 on the list had made the most progress (although who that was was surprising) but rather than these are the companies from YC that are growing in terms of traffic. Make of it what you will.

Quite interesting that Dropbox jumped an entire spot in a month for a non- content based site.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can you sort by the delta in monthly pageviews? Absolute change in rank offers little meaningful information. (I would assume is much easier to go from 10,000 to 5,000 than 200 to 100.)

<comment><USER15> And going from 300,000+ to 100,000 is orders of magnitude easier than going from 10,000 to 5,000.

#1 on this list went from 2xx,xxx to 2xx,xxx - that could seriously be just noise in the Alexa ranking methodology. That sites traffic could have even gone down slightly and still produced that result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The spreadsheet didn't include 9gag?

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/9gag.com>

<http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/>

<comment><AUTHOR> 9gag's global traffic rank dropped from #328 to #329 in the sample period. The list does not include companies whose traffic went down, even if they are in the top 250,000 of all sites globally. I included an explanation of this in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Alexa rank is not accurate when it's higher than 20,000. If higher than 100,000 it is not accurate at all and can be gamed easily. Just get a few friends with the alexa toolbar to visit your site and your alexa rank will magically get a whole lot lower.

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be nice to see a second tab on that spreadsheet, without any filtering. In particular, I'm curious to see where reddit would rank on that list. It seems arbitrary and incorrect to consider them less of a startup than, say, DropBox.

<comment><AUTHOR> I generally don't include companies that have exited. You can view the YC index here and download the data. The April version will be out soon. [http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator- inde...](http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/the-y-combinator-index/)

<comment><USER19> Reddit unexited. They're an independent company now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, they're sort of weird edge case but I can see a case for wanting to benchmark against them, let me think about it a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel pretty good about this given that our biggest source of traffic is the Google Chrome Web Store and use of our Chrome application doesn't show up in Alexa rankings. We're fairing way, way better than Alexa would have you believe.

</comment><comment><USER21> These ranks are so high that any metric based on them must surely have a lot of noise. I guess that doesn't prevent dmor's voting ring from surfacing this post, though.

</comment><comment><USER15> These are great and I look forward to you iterating on this - but I fear your over-reliance on Alexa is producing semi-worthless results. I can go into all of the reasons why Alexa data is unreliable but I assume you already know (the big one is selection bias based on who has the toolbar installed).

If you combine Alexa data w/ data from Quantcast, Statcounter and others, it would probably be valuable. But even Alexa themselves would tell you their dataset has massive holes in it when trying to use it as the foundation for this kind of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you, and for the startup index we are now collecting 9 data points and v1 of the new one is a labor of love that I will hopefully have out in the next week or so. Iterating like a mofo :)

<comment><USER22> It's a little old, but here's some notes from Reddit and their traffic vs. numbers from Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa: [http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate- our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our- traffic.html)

From my personal experience, the numbers from Alexa are complete gibberish.</comment></comment></comment>


A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/business/pension-finance-oregon.html <comment><USER2> Re the ongoing debate here about government pay (and whether it's high or low):

I'm not super familiar with city and state government jobs, but I do know something about military and federal compensation. They frequently pay less in salary, but have better benefits. This makes it an apples to oranges comparison when trying to talk about what they pay in comparison to non government jobs.

I was a military wife for a lot of years and I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to convey this. At one time, my army spouse was nominally making about half the income of someone else close to me, but take home pay for my spouse and this other person was nearly identical and I never spent a dime on doctor's visits or prescription medication. The primary difference in our quality of life was that my husband's income supported a family of four and this other individual was single and childless at the time.

So it gets really confusing because sometimes the take home pay for government jobs is less, but the total compensation package can be better. This means that two people arguing about it can both be right and unable to see the other point of view.

<comment><USER3> My problem is that the pensions give the government a way of paying employees low and kicking the can down the road where later taxpayers bare the brunt of obligations that they had no say in.

Just pay government employees more so taxpayers, the government, and potential employees can all go in knowing the trade offs and let the employees manage their own retirement like everyone else.

Of course I don't have a problem with military families being provided cheap healthcare.

<comment><USER4> Or pre-fund the pensions at the time the employee is working. I believe there are laws now requiring this, which is getting the US postal service upset because they suddenly have to pay a lot into pension funds now instead of later.

<comment><USER5> The US postal service pension funding requirement was made purposely onerous by Congress, and is far more conservative than necessary (by design). I would recommend against using it as an example of proper pension governance.

[https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you- assume](https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume)

[https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/12/obama- administr...](https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/12/obama- administration-makes-long-desired-change-postal-service-pensions/134166/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Without actually showing some statistics on the pension payments and how the overall budget breaks down, I can't help but feel manipulated. Yes it's easy to paint an ugly picture of the privileged outliers, but I suspect the correlation between school and infrastructure cuts and money going straight into rich pensioners pockets is not _quite_ as cut and dried as NYT would have us believe.

<comment><USER7> In California "More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived." [http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis- davis-d...](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-deal/)

This seems like a pretty big budget item, especially since most CA government pension funds haven't achieved their expected 7.5% return consistently for years if not decades. Eventually the money to pay for these large pensions comes from money that would have been spent on other things.

<comment><USER8> I don't get this entitlement to retire at 55 or even 50. The retirement age should be 65.

<comment><USER9> You can't do most blue collar jobs at 50, much less 65. Shoveling asphalt, laying track, climbing on top or under heavy machinery, or chasing criminals is backbreaking work. The bodies of these people are permanently worn out by the time they hit 55.

Some are promoted into management, but most org charts are naturally pyramids, so there aren't enough of those jobs for everyone. So what to do with someone who is now too disabled for another blue collar job and is not a "competitive candidate" for a white collar job?

<comment><USER10> They just get thrown in the unemployed pool and their income average drops dramatically with severe ripercussion on the final pension calculations

I know because in europe we have an unrealistic retirement age and my father like many other lost his job in the 2008-2012 crisis. Been unemployed ever since.

What happens is that in the 50-65 braket you're a huge liability with severe productivity drops and companies tries to fire you at the first chance they get.

The european system at least has some protections against unreasonable terminations, so we aren't fully appreciating the maddnes it would be a free job market, but company closing or figuring out how to fire the old employees in masse drops huge chunks of unemployed for life into the society.

This is becoming a serious issue and it is going to peak in 20 years when all the people like me that don't enjoy full time national contracts and their protection will get past their productivity prime.

<comment><USER11> >"so we aren't fully appreciating the maddnes it would be a free job market"

Of course not, as you probably wouldn't have this weird "retirement age" thing in the free-market absent government intervention. It's almost unheard of, and I'm not surprised. Reading through this thread of all the little "abuses" and "loopholes" that people are figuring out to game the Government-decreed system of retirement is very worrying and eye-opening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My mom is a PERS retiree. Not one of the rich ones, though she did retire at the perfect moment and she has a livable retirement income.

One thing a lot of people (who do not work in gov't) don't recall is that while the economy was roaring back then, Oregonians working for the gov't went for years without so much as a cost of living adjustment. Some of the perks they got from PERS were in lieu of getting a raise. So while I think PERS made some stupid decisions, let's not all heap blame on the workers and demand they suffer now. Gov't work pays crap and part of the benefit is supposed to be a little more long-term security.

<comment><USER13> For the most part, government work does not pay poorly.[1] For example federal employees without advanced degrees earn a lot more in government than in the private sector: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/powerpost/wp/2017/04/25/federal- employee-pay-benefits-ahead-of-private-sector-on-average-cbo-concludes/)

[1] I'm willing to entertain the idea our economic system as a whole undercompensates secretaries and overcompensates executives. That's a different issue.

<comment><USER14> Mentioning federal employees in a discussion of state/local employees is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Please provide sources to counter the assertion that state/local employees often get large pensions in lieu of salary.

<comment><USER15> The median annual cash compensation for a teacher in my kid's public high school district in Illinois is six figures.

I know that's _not_ true of teachers in other states; Oklahoma teachers look like they're getting shafted.

But in Illinois, where we have a public pension crisis, I don't have trouble coming up with evidence that public sector employees did _not_ make cash comp sacrifices for their defined-benefit pensions.

<comment><USER14> What were the teachers in Illinois making a couple decades ago?

<comment><USER15> I'll ask my mom. I'm much much more concerned with current comp than comp 2 decades ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pensions are going to become a hot political issue as they become more and more unsustainable. Even Illinois, one of the most liberal states in the US, elected a republican governor four years ago in large part because he promised to tackle the state's pension crisis.

<comment><USER5> It should be noted that Illinois' republican govenor ran on pension reform, then to everyone's shagrin, attempted to break unions. He made no headway on either issue, and is now running against a billionaire Democratic challenger who is expected to win.

<comment><USER16> It's impossible to reform pensions without reducing government union power in states like California and Illinois.

<comment><USER14> It's impossible to reform pensions without paying private-sector market rate to state and local employees.

"Unsustainable" pensions are a politician's way of punting the issue -- rather than hit the budget _today_ by paying market rate, they promise far above market rate later on when some _other_ sucker is in office. And everybody -- including the people whose taxes will end up paying for it -- falls for this over and over and over.

<comment><USER17> Compensation is a vector. Government employees are much more difficult to terminate than their counterparts in the private sector. That is, government employees are compensated in part in strong job security.

<comment><USER5> That's a problem with at-will employment law though, not government jobs. Government job security should not be considered compensation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the root of this is a nexus of bad incentives, bad accounting, and bad predictions about the future.

\- You have politicians who are in charge of everyone's budget, wanting to show results before the next election. You don't want taxes to go up immediately, so you do a deal with the workers to pay them later. On the worker side, if you have a final salary scheme (or max salary), and you've had colleagues you've worked with for decades, well why wouldn't you promote them?

\- The "pay them later" will require you to pay them more, because we all discount a dollar tomorrow over a dollar today. We might not be around, money might not buy the same, and we generally find it hard to put off anything pleasurable. So we need more tomorrow if we're gonna do that deal. A lot more.

\- Bad predictions also come from bad incentives, not just bad accounting. It makes it a lot easier to suppose your investment will make 2% more each year, and this internet bubble is the perfect "evidence" that it might happen. Bad predictions will feed back into bad accounting.

But as for the article itself, aren't football coaches the highest paid staff of any organisations that have them? Even the military? I understand the NYT wants people to read their articles, and thus has humans in the pictures instead of pie charts, but it's the pie charts that tell you there's a problem, not the people.

</comment><comment><USER19> I mean, the obvious solution is to move to purely defined-contribution plans and haircut the existing people down to actual returns on invested balance for them.

But I have to imagine in a lot of cases that would lead to people being impoverished later in life, which is not especially humane.

<comment><USER20> is it humane or an entitlement? most people in the private sector work their whole life never get anything remotely close to a pension

secondly, its just an intergenerational wealth transfer. another excess of the selfishness of the boomer generation. Who will pay the price ... the school kids getting a crap education in 35 student classrooms in crumbling buildings in a towns who's infrastructure is going to literally fall apart in 2 decades time from zero maintenance. Ah well at least we kept the promises some corrupt politicians made in the 90s to well-off gov workers.

<comment><USER21> >an entitlement

It's compensation earned in exchange for labor under a negotiated agreement. The fact that the check is separated from the labor by years rather than days doesn't suddenly make it "an entitlement."

The time to complain about entitlement, selfishness, and intergenerational wealth transfer was when we were promising those pensions, not now that the bills are due.

<comment><USER22> True, but one approach that might help is paying generous pensions come after basic services, education, and pay for active workers. Versus them coming first then saying "gee no money for pencils at school" is just wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "So, when lawmakers required government retirees to pay Oregon's 9 percent income tax, as everybody else did, they also increased pensions by 9.89 percent, giving retirees extra money to pay the tax with."

Government workers are certainly in a special privileged class.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article doesn't tell the whole story. Yes, PERS is a problem in Oregon. However, some of the anecdotes of counties cutting services are not related to PERS. For example, Josephine County, next door county to mine, has the lowest property tax rates in the state. Property owners in the county have repeatedly rejected tax increases to pay for basic services like the Sheriff's Department, and as a result have experienced some of the cut backs described in the article. This is not a result of PERS contributions.

<comment><USER24> Well if PERS was not there, that money would have been available to pay for Sherriff's department. Just saying lets tax them is not always the solution.

<comment><USER25> That doesn't follow. Funding for state pensions comes out of a separate "pool" from local government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a 20 something reading articles like these it is incredible to even imagine having enough trust in institutions to basically turn over my future. I wouldn't trust anyone but myself to control my savings and retirement. This is obviously part of a larger trend that we've seen playing out over the last 50 years, and I'll be interested to see how it continues to play out [0]. It seems difficult to imagine a society that can function cohesively when individuals can't trust the institutions we spend such a huge portion of our lives supporting (through time and tax dollars).

I hope to have the chance to reverse this trend in my career, but I have no illusions that gaining this lost trust will come easily.

[0] [http://www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-in- gover...](http://www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-in- government-1958-2017/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Pension spiking should be prohibited and all existing instances of same should be rolled back.

</comment><comment><USER28> Defined benefits plans, ie pensions, should be outlawed, as long as they have any component that must be paid by taxpayers. For the most part, pensions are Ponzi schemes and require more and more employees to enter the system to pay for those on the pension. If you're talking about a private pension system that can collapse, then that's okay, but if it's a government pension that can keep taxing people because their benefits are too lucrative, those should definitely be outlawed, especially the ones for Congress.

</comment><comment><USER29> The PERS systems are adapting to greater longevity. As actuaries learn that people will live longer in the future, they are getting systems to dial back their pensions. In Washington State, the most expensive started working before 1972, and some state employees are now offered only a 401K. That said, there is also a challenge that when the market booms, "surpluses" are drawn out. When the market crashes, it's hard to make up for the missing investment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like pensions should be based on base salaries rather than overtime or clinic pay or licensing deals. I'd hope that the medical center and the university bear most of the burden. The police and fire fighters are a different issue in that the county, city or state governments bear the burden. Without raising taxes it's difficult to solve these issues. Single payer would help though.. it would reduce the medical costs.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want to see pension data from California, it is available here. [https://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/all/](https://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/all/) There is a bunch of one time payments near the top but some below that are some making quite a bit in retirement.

</comment><comment><USER32> What's the chances of retroactively lowering pensions?

1\. Progressively lower pensions. Skim off the top earners.

2\. Create projects for the community and declare that the saved money will be used for those projects for better optics.

This won't lower trust in government pensions by that much because this is just correcting what is seen as "unfairly high" pensions.

<comment><USER33> Here's the other option. Pay the promised pensions and inflate them away. Since this is a growing national problem, I'm guessing that solution has at least been considered.

<comment><USER34> Not politically feasible. Older citizens tend to both have a lot of savings, and vote. They would not allow this to happen.

<comment><USER35> Inflation isn't something you can vote on, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's seems like there should be a cap on state pensions of $20,000 a month. $20k a month should be plenty to support a family even in ridiculous California and New York.

<comment><USER37> I think a cap on private sector workers income would save more money, there are many more of them and many of them have unimportant jobs. If the government just capped their incomes at 100K a month we could pay off all national debt in months.

<comment><USER38> >If the government just capped their incomes at 100K a month we could pay off all national debt in months.

The government would be quickly replaced with one who would undo this change. Nobody would support it. This is so ridiculous I think you're trolling.

<comment><USER21> That may be true, but if the .1% of households making more than $1m/year can obviously and unquestionably overthrow the government, we may as well dispense with any pretense of democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What a pathetic ploy to divide the working class against each other. The reason states are short on cash is the race to the bottom we've all been participating in since the 1980s when government policy and general economic policy moved from focusing on keeping the middle class healthy to massive tax breaks and cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

For the last nearly 40 years every state has been playing the game of trying to attract corporations with massive tax breaks against the promise of jobs. Then a lot of the time the promised jobs never appear. Meanwhile the state is still out millions or billions of dollars in revenue.

Corporations and the wealthy can afford to hire lobbyists to write favorable policies. Working class people cannot and have been eating the brunt of all the tax breaks the rich and powerful and connected have received.

Maybe a handful of people in some states have abnormally high pensions. That's not the source of the problem. Those pensions were solvent until they were treated like a piggy bank by corrupt and bought politicians.

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure why this is so heavily down-voted. Pensions are surely a problem, but they are clearly a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue that states miss out on when they let corporations pit them against each other in race to the bottom behavior.

<comment><USER41> Not sure why it was downvoted, but my bet is this that you insist in: _Pensions are surely a problem, but they are clearly a drop in the bucket_

Pensions are NOT a drop in the bucket by any measure. Maybe for the USA they're less important. But for the rest, safety net is most of a country expenses. Then you add that population in the first world tends to shrink and the model in most countries where current workers pay for retired ones... and you have a very serious problem.

<comment><USER42> That was my fault as well. Pensions are almost a form of a Ponzi scheme. They all will eventually collapse. Corruption in pension administration is also rampant.

<comment><USER39> Pensions are not a pyramid scheme any more than any other form of retirement fund is. Give me a break.

<comment><USER43> There is one retirement fund that isn't a pyramid scheme: the kind where the retiree saves in his own account and faces investment risks like everyone else. Forcing taxpayers to shelter you from risk is slimy, even if you have a "negotiated agreement" signed by some politician.

<comment><USER39> You realize 401k programs at most companies are treated as a pool just like pension funds right?

The difference is politicians had domain over the pension funds and decided to "borrow" from them and make them insolvent. The workers are not the ones to blame, the politicians who thought using the pension funds as a piggy bank are. Stop blaming the workers. They didn't cause this problem, and they paid into those retirement funds.

The politicians who caused the problem are the ones who want you to blame the workers, stop being their patsy.

<comment><USER43> >You realize 401k programs at most companies are treated as a pool just like pension funds right?

That's false. One of the requirements of a qualified plan under section 401 is that the employee has a nonforfeitable right to plan benefits: [https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan- sponsor/401k-plan-...](https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan- sponsor/401k-plan-qualification-requirements)

The corporations who tell workers that the corporation can take money out of employer 401k plans without authorization are trying to scare the workers, stop being their patsy.

>The politicians who caused the problem are the ones who want you to blame the workers, stop being their patsy.

The workers should have known that future promises to pay which would drive the government into insolvency were promises made in bad faith. This doesn't absolve the politicians of their sins, but the workers are not innocent lambs either.

<comment><USER39> Again you keep talking like insolvency was inevitable. It wasn't. It happened because politicians misused the funds.

I'm bored of arguing with you though. It serves no purpose because you are just regurgitating right wing talking points.

<comment><USER43> Anyone who could count new hires and had access to an actuarial death table would be able to determine the size of the problem, even 30 years ago. I apologize if that kind of thinking is probably boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well, cutting the top out of this seems like the obvious solution. Pants-on- head to give an Oregon coach who's been funded by Nike to collect a multimillion pension.

<comment><USER45> It does seem reasonable that there would be a cap, but I wonder how much cutting the pensions of a few thousand highly paid retirees will impact the budget.

<comment><USER46> If we assume that the average pension of those with a pension over $100,000/year is $200,000 a year, and cut those down to a cap of $100,000/year it would be $200,000,000/year in pension reduction. With a $2.5 billion/year spend on PERS [0], that is not an insignificant amount on the entire burden of the pension system, even if it is off by an order of magnitude.

[0] [http://www.pers.ms.gov/Content/Supplemental/persfacts_figure...](http://www.pers.ms.gov/Content/Supplemental/persfacts_figures.pdf)

<comment><USER47> If you assume the average for those over $100k is $17 billion, capping it at $100k would save the entire budget many times over!

$200k is a completely arbitrary assumption. And if your cost savings are off by an order of magnitude, it _is_ basically insignificant, at <1% of the budget.

If you can wave a wand and reduce benefits, targeting only the top 2000 is probably not the most effective use of your magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I guess I'm one of those .04%.

<comment><USER49> .04% of what?

<comment><USER33> The .04% of people who announce they are in the .04%. It's a very select group with an unusual hobby.</comment></comment></comment>


The Art World's Mini-Madoff and Me - <AUTHOR> https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/inigo-philbrick-art-dealer.html <comment><USER2> The best thing about this article are the comments, which are obviously written by the "mini-madoff" himself. So yeah, read the article first and then read the four comments, three of which are ostensibly from different accounts but all obviously written by the subject of the article. It is pretty funny, actually because in those sock puppet comments he comes off as exactly the same person described by the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems more like a former lover complaint than a serious article on how f-ed up the contemporary art market is (and I'm pretty sure it's f-ed up).

> I expressed my incredulousness at the very thought — who over 8 years old > plays checkers

From time to time I tend to forget how Anglo/US-centric most of the people who write in English are, it's almost like the rest of the world doesn't exist. And the answer is "yes, there are millions of people playing checkers even though they are over 8 years old"

</comment><comment><USER4> The fact that everything was fine and dandy while all the valuations were going up reminds me of this sama post: [https://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and- government](https://blog.samaltman.com/growth-and-government)

...for more than one reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> My painter friend told me that the art market was sketchy as hell, but I must admit even this article surprised me. I have a hard time feeling too bad for anyone in this story.

</comment><comment><USER6> This just goes to show, once again, what a ridiculous clusterfuck of greed and outright criminiality this "industry" is.

And I was worried about my little manifesto [1] being too straightforward. Time to spice it up, I guess.

[1] [https://binnedart.com/about/](https://binnedart.com/about/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Scammers scamming scammers, what could be more delightful to watch? But sadly this is nowhere near Madoff's heist, it had a promising beginning but the protagonist soon got sidetracked by drugs and a lavish lifestyle. Why is this even news? This is the price of doing this type of business

</comment><comment><USER8> > There is an adage with which my father frequently admonished me as a child: > You can lie as much as you like, but don't believe your own lies.

Strange advice to give a child.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes "you can X as much as you like" is a rhetorical device and not literally endorsing X. It frequently is used to juxtapose a bad thing with something worse that you might not have thought of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> *...and I

<comment><USER11> "..and me" is correct in this case, since "me" is used as the object of the phrase.

"..and I" would be suitable as a subject, for example: "The art world's mini- Madoff and I worked together for many years."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Consequently, prices sometimes can be manipulated by the very well > connected, who would be consistently selling and reselling the same works at > increasing prices

Go ask your local fine art gallery about the prices, try to do literally any price discovery and get the avant-garde run-around and count the minutes until it gets defensive

"ah you know I'm just in finance and most of the markets I work with have other mechanisms for price discovery so I was just curious about how it works here, for this artist"

 _well you know you need to buy something you really appreciate for yourself and want to keep for decades and you need all that time for the price to appreciate_

generic stuff, but none of this answers what the market depth is now and how is standing market depth determined and what were the prior prices, or why that piece over there keeps increasing in price by 15% but is still in your gallery - is this consignment from someone you just sold it to? how come they weren't influenced by the same thing you just told me

Anyway, you can't ask it exactly like this in a casual conversation because thats just asking for defensiveness, but don't expect a transparent market. you can try asking about the art world in any cordial way you can think of and get stonewalled. You know the answers deep down.</comment>


Language Innovation: C# 3.0 explained - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.tedneward.com/2005/09/22/Language+Innovation+C+30+Explained.aspx <comment><USER2> The extension methods are very Ruby-like, which is kind-of scary. Don't get me wrong -- it's a powerful idea, but have you ever tried to get a complete definition of a class that is spread out over a dozen files in potentially a handful of third party libraries? Since MSoft also controls the IDE, perhaps they can create a single coherent view onto a class by combining the dozens of files that extend the original class into a virtual document of sorts.</comment>


Climatescape.org – Mapping the global landscape of climate-saving organizations - <AUTHOR> https://climatescape.org/ <comment><USER2> Hi all, creator here–so cool to see this on HN.

I made Climatescape after seeing dozens of people go through a similar process of cataloging interesting climate-focused companies in spreadsheets, notes, and elsewhere. The goal is to unify these efforts and provide the content free to anyone who might find it useful. The website is open source[1] and content is Creative Commons licensed.

This is really just the beginning of what I'd like to see the project become. We want to go deeper by including key org attributes like headcount, location, investments, and more. There are also plans to increase the breadth of the database by including books, podcasts, events, data sets, and other important resources related to climate.

If anyone is interested in contributing please get in touch! brendan [at] sinceresoftware.co

[1]: github.com/bloudermilk/climatescape

<comment><USER3> Cool resource! I just started down this path as a strict requirement for my next career move. It would be awesome to include job listings and requirements for people that want to find a job at a climate focused company.

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much and congrats on your new career trajectory! We'd love to integrate with some job boards in the future. In the meantime I can point you to a blog post with some great advice on this topic:

[https://medium.com/@leventov/how-to-find-a-job-in-a-tech- com...](https://medium.com/@leventov/how-to-find-a-job-in-a-tech-company- helping-to-combat-climate-change-practical-guide-e212e262a32)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the info! Good luck with everything!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like political/advocacy/regulatory should be a category. Organizations like Vote Solar, SEIA, Mission:Data, Sierra Club, etc. have most impact fighting climate change because the policies they push through have huge industry-wide consequences.

Also, for energy, how wide do you want to cast the net? Solar and wind generation is now more cost effective than fossil generation, so traditional utilities and utility vendors are now doing huge climate-change fighting efforts, just because it's cheaper. For example, GE has a solar division that is developing huge commercial projects that offset a fuck ton of carbon. Should GE be on the list?

I worry that this list is giving the impression that fighting climate chance is a selfless endeavor, when nowadays much of the carbon offset work (especially in energy) is done by established entities because it's simply cheaper and in their self interest.

Also, what about governments? Countries, states, cities, and regulators are passing more and more 100% carbon free mandates. Those are vastly more impactful that anything else on this list. Shouldn't they be included on the list?

Finally, a search or full list to Ctrl+F would be nice so I don't have to click through multiple categories to see if a company is included.

Thanks very much for the effort to put this list together, and I wish you the best of luck!

<comment><USER2> Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback.

You bring up some great points regarding categorization–choosing a sensible taxonomy has been by far the hardest part of this project so far. I'd love some help in this area if you or anyone else is interested.

> Should GE be on the list?

I've been asking myself this same question for weeks and haven't come to a conclusion yet. What do you think? How about O&G companies with big green tech budgets?

> Also, what about governments? ... Shouldn't they be included on the list?

I think this would be a very interesting data point to track indeed, though I suspect someone else is already tracking this.

> Finally, a search or full list to Ctrl+F

Agreed, added this to our backlog.

<comment><USER5> > How about O&G companies with big green tech budgets

This troubles me endlessly. My gut says no, as I can't imagine some of the largest companies in the world reorienting sufficiently, and I feel that they should quickly become sidelined as relics of a different time. But it seems unreasonable to think they don't have some value to add with the large budgets and pressure they are under.

Gladly be informed on this topic!

<comment><USER6> I argue that it does, as someone doing a search for competitors or alternatives might be caught unaware if this is a blind spot for them. For example, you have Drivy (bought by GetAround... a while back?) and yet you're missing a large portion of the CarShare landscape. Do you count Zipcar? (Avis- Budget group, but the largest player and running EVs in London). Maven? (GM) DriveNow/car2go? (BMW, and EV-centric in Europe) And that doesn't even get into smaller players like Innova (EV-focused) or BlueLA (LA-only but EV)/BlueIndy/etc - or Autolib/Cite Lib/Carma...

* Full disclosure: I'm employed by Zipcar. But I'm also an alternative transit geek in general.

<comment><USER7> I second the point that it's helpful to know the actual landscape, so the division within GE should definitely be listed. After all, if they end up contributing something positive it deserves visibility.

And your mention of Zipcar, Maven, etc makes me think it'd be great to include the entities that own or fund each organization. Definitely means there's more information to hunt down, but crowd-sourcing can lessen that pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is interesting to see a list of organizations compiled in one place, to get a sense of what is going on in the world.

But I read the headline wrong. I saw the words "Mapping" and "landscape", and was expecting actual maps. I thought I'd be looking at visualizations of where in the world each organization is having an impact.

<comment><USER9> Same here, I expected a list or map which gives an user the ability to see which organizations or projects operate nearby. It would be really cool if you could see which projects are nearby and you might be able to participate in. I really like the idea though. Hopefully your site will inspire others.

<comment><USER10> The "map" You are looking for already exists :) [https://kartevonmorgen.org/](https://kartevonmorgen.org/) [https://github.com/kartevonmorgen](https://github.com/kartevonmorgen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been looking for a curated list like this for a long time, thanks for creating!

</comment><comment><USER12> Since forestry is so big, I would suggest to keep it separate. Also broad biodiversity and nature organisations probably should have a separate category, not me under land use.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for putting this together! I've wondered before if Kittyhawk and other flying car companies count as climate-saving organizations. Flying small personal aircraft will always use vastly more energy per mile than vehicles that can roll along the ground - and even if there are no emissions in flight, the energy cost and likely emissions of making the batteries and equipment will be non-negligible.

<comment><USER2> My personal opinion is that we're not going to convince people to stop flying, so we should decarbonize air travel regardless of its relative efficiency.

<comment><USER14> We don't have to convice everyone to stop flying. We can start with to convincing everyone to fly _less_. Decarbonise in the meantime, if you can, of course.

<comment><USER15> I don't think this is a very practical approach. People both need and want to fly places. We need to accept that and find ways to make flight greener.

<comment><USER16> But the richest 10% of people are the ones who make far more than half of all flights [1]. They could certainly fly less.

[1] [https://www.inequalityintransport.org.uk/book-author/news- bl...](https://www.inequalityintransport.org.uk/book-author/news-blog/todays- transport-policy-benefits-rich-more-poor)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hi Brendan! Evan here from ClimateCareers! Https://climate.careers

My team and I are already working on the next iteration of our product, which will be going far beyond jobs. I'd love to find time to chat and explore opportunities to collaborate!

Sending you an email now :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Initially read to me as "climate escape". Not sure if intended.

</comment><comment><USER19> There should be a category for sustainability/food.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this project intentionally leaving out political organizations? Fighting the politics of austerity and capitalist oligarchy is more important than evaluating photovoltaic efficiency/viability.

<comment><USER2> We have a "Government & Policy" category that was a little light to launch with. Would be happy for you to help us fill it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Might be the mobile view, but the descriptions are both cut off and meaningless.

> We deliver when others can't. We conduct research and development, manage

Is all that is visible. It goes on to say (in the full description) that they do this R&D for clients. So like what do they actually do, beyond claiming they're better than you and me?

<comment><USER2> Thanks for taking a look. It's a laborious process to collect good descriptions for each submission–some are better than others. The text is cut off intentionally, rather lazily now, but we're planning on making it clearer visually that this is intentional and allowing visitors to expand each record.</comment></comment>


Briss Trims PDFs so They Fit Better, Are Easier to Read on Your Ereader - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5744899/briss-trims-pdfs-to-make-them-more-readable-on-your-e+reader

<comment><USER2> I know I should "just do it myself," but I keep waiting for something that can unsplit and unwrap PDFs generated in ACM double-column style with LaTeX word- breaking and turn it into an epub with graphics for the figures/tables. Trying to deal with that 9-ish pt. font is a huge pain for my old eyes. I ended up giving up on reading them on my iPad because keeping a reasonable zoom level and managing to scan down then over to the next column required the finger dexterity of a concert pianist (even on GoodReader, which is quite, well, Good).

<comment><USER3> Calibre was mentioned in the article as being able to convert PDF's into epub format. I had my hopes up for a second, so downloaded it and tried it on a textbook and a smaller scientific publication.

It threw up on both the math equations and figures. It didn't handle the general formatting of the book too well either.

To my knowledge, a good PDF->epub converter has not yet been built. Any takers?

<comment><USER4> " _To my knowledge, a good PDF- >epub converter has not yet been built. Any takers?_"

Check out eBookBurn.com, which is a site I launched last month (<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=468>).

It lets you upload pdfs and attempts to parse them into editable text.

The pdf parsing is based on my experiments with pdf-miner (<http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=343>), and while still imperfect (in general parsing pdfs is a difficult problem), it works fairly well for certain types of whitepapers.

<comment><USER5> This is a wicked cool site, but you need to put in screenshots of the input (how it went in) and the output (what the output looked like in an epub reader).

What approach do your algorithms use? Do you do recognition of title, subtitles etc based on differences in fonts, spacing, line length etc.? Or do you need to enter regexps to recognize those?

Do you recognize paragraphs correctly?

Can you filter out front- and back filler like the ToC, and extract only the 'content' pages?

If so, it's 90% of what I'm looking for and I think good enough to pay for :)

I have some notes on how to approach from when I tried to make it myself, it includes what functionality I consider necessary for a MVP. Let me know if you're interested...

<comment><USER4> I'm working on an FAQ/Help page which will show some of those features in more detail.

The algorithm I use is a variation of the code described here: <http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=343> except the output is html, not text, so that I can take account things like font sizes and paragraph breaks.

If you signup and try it (it's free for the first 3 days), you'll see that the parser renders each pdf page as text, and it's up to you to decide which range of pages you want to use in your book.

Feel free to contact me by the form on that site, and I can reply in more detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A similar tool is my own PDFMunge, previously discussed on HN here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089068> and in more depth on my site here: [http://www.felixcrux.com/posts/pdfmunge-improve-pdfs- ebook-r...](http://www.felixcrux.com/posts/pdfmunge-improve-pdfs-ebook- readers/)

But this looks quite a bit more polished and user-friendly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Clever name ... a little crass.

<comment><USER8> I thought Briss was the client app, and Mohel was server side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> PDF is ill fitted to be the format for mobile devices due to its format-for- print purpose with no text-overflow. Its time epub and mobi takes over.

<comment><USER10> Really PDF is just ill-suited for distribution of text. The only reasonable exceptions are when that text is _explicitly_ meant for printing (ala fliers or posters), or when said text is not computerized- e.g. a scan of written script that has yet to be OCR'd

<comment><USER11> Is the name of this product a commentary on those who send PDF to mobile users?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the iPad, GoodReader can do margin cropping on the fly, and remembers the margins you've set up for a document so they're reapplied when you open the document again.

<http://www.goodreader.net/goodreader.html>

<comment><USER2> I just wish it had some smarts for two-column PDFs (easily 90% of what I read). I often resize, read down the left column, then shift to the top, which moves the crop window and confuses GR horribly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been wanting something like this for ages - particularly to print ebooks and latex stuff with their huge side-margins. The basic aim is to trim all margins and print 2 pages side-by-side (landscape).

While Briss trims the margins just fine, printing the (trimmed) document as pdf(or ps) restores the margins. (Tried on okular/evince). What gives?

</comment><comment><USER8> Good name.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oy vey.</comment>