Lockheed has an opening for engineers with VAX experience for the F22 - <AUTHOR> https://www.lockheedmartinjobs.com/job/california/f-22-avionics-systems-engineer-senior/694/8842471 <comment><USER2> I worked for Lockheed Martin for more than a decade and I have many of the qualifications listed, including VAX experience and a special access clearance. Of course, Lockheed laid me off fourteen years ago and I retired three years ago, so I guess I won't be applying.

<comment><USER3> You should apply, and demand an insanely-high salary while pointing out that almost no one has VAX experience now.

<comment><USER2> When we retired my wife and I fled Atlanta at top speed. I don't know if the job is in Marietta, GA or Ft. Worth (the job listing seems to have disappeared) but I doubt if even an insanely high salary could get us to move to either of those locations.

<comment><USER3> Well, what I was thinking is that you live in an AirBnB or other short-term rental for 6 months and then quit. Some consultants work this way: only working for 3-6 months on a gig, getting paid a fortune (plus extra for living expenses because they're not relocating, just living there temporarily), and then leaving.

If the company really needs the work done that badly and there's no qualified help willing to take it full-time, then this is a viable option. If there's no qualified help and they're not willing to go for a deal like this, then the work just doesn't get done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started my career working for British Aerospace in 1989. We used VAX/VMS as our development platform (Code was CORAL 66 and then ADA). I spent some time supporting the Sea Harrier flight test operations - so I would have fitted this job perfectly about 28 years ago!).

I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus, but nothing surprises me when it comes to the use of stone-age tech in military hardware. For example, the other Harrier I worked on in the early 90s (GR-7 - same as US AV8B) still used core memory.

<comment><USER5> That's insane. A 3d matrix of ferrite rings suspended by wire would seem (to me) somewhat sensitive to vibrations or gforces.

Military gonna military I guess.

<comment><USER6> I seem to recall something along the lines of large bombers running valves as they were less prone to effects of EMP around nuclear blasts. Not sure if this perhaps something similar?

<comment><USER7> In one of the documentaries about the Vulcan raid on the Falklands (1982), one of the pilots interviewed remarked that somebody flying Avro Lancasters in WWII would have felt right at home in the cockpit of the Avro Vulcan. E.g. the navigator used mechanical clocks to keep track of when to turn, and so on.

Not sure if this was a conscious decision wrt EMP, or was it just that they were in a hurry to develop a jet bomber for delivering nukes and they reused existing stuff as much as possible.

<comment><USER8> Not in the least surprising. The Vulcan prototype, the 707, first flew in 1949. They even had a mount for the old Lancaster bomb sight - though that was mostly used for a camera.

Flight engineer and radar operator in the seats behind would have got the fancy new (for the early 50s) electronic things.

<comment><USER9> The Lancaster was loaded with the technology of the time by the end up the war e.g. they had radar navigation, radio navigation, (when it worked) a 'lock' detector for German night fighter radar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006.

There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.

<comment><USER11> I see the "there's nothing wrong with old technology" comment a lot, and in this case I disagree. There's a good chunk of this thread pointing out how hard it is to hire for this position because practically no one is familiar with these technologies. This, to me, illustrates that there absolutely is something wrong with using old technology, especially in this instance.

I will grant that there are some things that just keep working and I also would be tempted to leave them in place. But if their functioning is critical then we either need to cultivate the necessary knowledge in our organization to ensure we can manage them adequately or replace them with something that the current market of people will be somewhat familiar.

<comment><USER12> That it's (now) uncommon technology is only a small part of the hiring problem. Anyway, what's the alternative here? It is almost certainly not worth the effort to rewrite everything in today's common environment 30 years into the service life of the jet; whatever you do now is going to be uncommon again.

A bigger part of the hiring problem is aerospace software, specifically military aerospace software is a difficult field to hire for. Clearance requirements limits your pool. Building weapons of war limits your pool. Low salary compared to other software job limits your pool. Very high level of process / low velocity of shipping limits your pool. If you require experience in the environment, rather than training otherwise appropriate candidates, that's going to be a limit too, but if you work in a specialized environment, you really have to accept that you will need to train people.

<comment><USER13> Bingo.

The current hiring model of "hit-the-ground-sprinting day 1" I suspect is largely the problem here and stems across many industries complaining about hiring difficulties.

Since this "best existing skillset match" hiring model businesses have widely chosen to adopt provide little-to-no on the job training, people will inherently focus on learning the most widely adopted skills of their target market(s) to increase their odds of finding a position in the labor market. Even niche skills will typically target larger proven successful niches and not target risky niches.

As a result, your business better follow industry and technology trends as they shift or you better start investing in your employees and maintain a positive relationship so you don't lose your knowledge assets that are likely undervalued by your business.

Even if Lockheed pays me double, even triple, my current rate, it's likely not worth it for me me wasting my time investing months to years in their specific architecture and fairly non-transferable skills acquired doing so since employer/employee relationships and loyalty are dead. That's a hefty investment on my side with little investment on theirs.

No thanks. It can sit empty and their project can fail for all I care.

<comment><USER14> I was recently considering learning the SAS data stack and decided against it for exactly this reason. However, I'm not completely convinced it was the right choice. Does anyone else have experience that could shed light on this situation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative? (Reposting at the top level because it makes more sense to hopefully get more discussion)

<comment><USER16> Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall.

I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.

<comment><USER17> Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.

<comment><USER18> You are 1000% wrong. Pay scales are "owned" by the DMCA. [https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA-Pricing-Support/](https://www.dcma.mil/DCMA- Pricing-Support/)

A PhD with 20 years of experience = this pay band

You can pay your people whatever you want, but the gov will only pay your people what the DCMA says they are worth. If you pay higher, it comes out of profit (which is also metered by the DCMA) or some other source.

Source: A own a R&D engineering company that works for the DoD and IC.

I can pay a EE PhD $400k/year but the DoD will "only" pay me back around $175k for this person's time. I have to make up the difference.

Hence, for defense contractors, we "only" pay what the DCMA will let us charge.

In order, what matters are: tickets, experience, degrees, certs

<comment><USER19> Tickets?

<comment><USER20> Accesses to special programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had a job maintaining fortran code on an openVMS OS running on itanium hardware.

Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers)

VMS doesn't natively support TCP/IP, because it predates it. The VMS communication protocol was called decnet. So you can imagine that porting vms- specific fortran code to work on a modern network stack was non trivial.

Also, everyone with VMS knowledge was a hacker. No real design or plan, just go in an change a thing here and a thing there and get it working.

All that being said, it was interesting to work on an OS that is so different from linux, specifically the file system had versioning.

<comment><USER22> That's outrageous...

1\. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jerk reaction called Ada and a pile of 4GLs starting with DATATRIEVE --up until processors and RAM allowed for more productive use of more powerful "safe" language systems (Java, C#, Python, Swift).

2\. RE: ITANIUM. DEC created VAX/VMS for the break-thru 32-bit VAX-11 architecture and then ported it to its break-thru 64-bit Alpha architecture and rebranded it as OpenVMS. The Alpha chip was really powerful, but it was produced only by DEC's Hudson chip plant (which also produced the StrongARM chip whose descendants are in all of the smartphones). To address the customer need for a second supplier for that chip, DEC began to shop around the Alpha architecture to other semiconductor manufacturers. One of those was Intel --which decided not to become a second source and a little while later, announced the Pentium series that revived its ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture using patented concepts found only in DEC's Alpha chip. There was a lawsuit and the settlement was that Intel would buy the Alpha chip and Hudson plant. This resulted in the Itanium architecture, which the then owner of DEC (HP) decided to embrace for OpenVMS and its other HP operating systems. As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which was all but ready to dump the ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture (in favor of MIPS and PowerPC), pivoted with Windows NT and released full support for X86_64. Considering that Windows NT was developed by the original computer scientists behind VMS and considering the dominance of Windows on the desktop and the low cost of X86_64 hardware (due to economies of scale), it was no surprise that Itanium fell out of favor, and OpenVMS along with it (though there were many heroic efforts to "rescue" OpenVMS from that dead architecture, HP had no real interest --at least not in time).

3\. RE: VMS TCP/IP. This cracked me up. I wrote one of the first TCP/IP stacks for VAX/VMS on a VAX-11/780 using InterLAN hardware. You are correct that VMS pre-dates TCP/IP --but dude it was only by like 1-2 years! VMS was uses with XNS/ITP (upon which TCP/IP was based). TCP/IP is le grand garbage --as the entire planet knows now and DEC had bet heavily on something called OSI to replace DECnet. But some f'n jack head named Vincent Cerf created an async implementation for TCP/IP that allowed the bazillion Windows PC to hop on the Internet (what could go wrong) and that quickly became Microsoft RAS which destroyed the universe quickly. All of the stable and secure networking systems died. Bill Gates was interviewed at one point and responded to a question about what the biggest unexpected development had been with a dumb look saying he had failed to predict the sudden end of distance-and-time based pricing for data communications. So now, dude in St. Petersburg can show off his genetic superiority by hacking the microcode in the Intel Ethernet controllers in your laptop from 8,000 miles away at virtually no cost. Enjoy!

4\. VMS knowledge are hackers. This is among the most outrageous comment I've read on the Internet. VMS was all about structure and discipline. If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one! What you probably observed had nothing to do with VMS but just maintaining legacy code in general.

5\. RE: "interesting". VMS was the most powerful operating system ever created well into the modern era. You can imagine that the guys creating Windows NT at Microsoft (who previously developed VMS for DEC back East) were not being allowed to create the true successor to VMS --the idea was to get something working on small cheap PCs that would be sold to all of the small businesses, not on continuing to perfect the product of 30 years of engineering (as VMS descended from their prior RSX11 and RT11 operating systems) as they had been doing first to the 78032 "chip" and later to the Alpha processors. I think around 2015, Windows, Linux and MacOS finally began to pull away from where VMS was (back in 1990). One can only imagine how powerful VMS would have become when run on something like the MacPro 7,1 that Apple announced.

In conclusion, true industry leaders, many of whom did not support VMS back in the day (because they were forced to embrace crummy UNIX System 3, V and BSD "hacks" for lack of access to the incredible DEC engineering resources), will tell you that VMS (and TCP/IP) are stories of lost art that severely setback the pace of mankind's development. The reasons are many: Bill Gates' well known BS, Vincent Cerf's destructive efforts to advance PPP, alleged theft of intellectual property by Intel that set off the downward spiral of DEC, skyrocketing memory prices due to market manipulation and Carly "That Face" Fiorina.

Consider yoh-self schooled.

<comment><USER23> Hard to detect sarcasm or parody here, but this is a great example of someone condemning the systems which were cheap (or license-free), widely available, worked well enough for most people, and provided _huge_ benefits to millions, because it doesn't comply with his own narrow view of how it _should_ be done.

> If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even > getting a job working on one!

Exactly. A system whose priority is preventing people from ever using it.

<comment><USER24> I knew guys who ran VMS systems out of their homes, back in the 90's. It was fairly accessible.

<comment><USER25> How many of them had the manuals? Very few. The famous "Orange Wall of Manuals" was often secreted away, for the wizards to consult, but not for the masses to enlighten themselves with.

<comment><USER24> One guy, at least, had manuals. VMS also had an excellent help facility.

<comment><USER25> Oh, sure. What was the format of an executable file?

Nostalgia is a trap. Wallowing in the idealized "good old days" blinds you to the true scope of history and cuts you off from progress.

<comment><USER24> Hah. I've forgotten.

Retrocomputing is just a hobby of mind. It's fun to play around with those old systems.

<comment><USER25> As near as I could ever find, the format of a VMS executable file did not appear in the DEC manuals. I meant that as a commentary on the "VMS had great docs" sentiment.

At one point, I was convinced that understanding the format of an executable file (a.out, COFF, XCOFF, Mach-O, ELF, .com, .exe, PE, etc) was important to understanding the operating system itself. I spent a fair amount of effort and some money buying books trying to find the VMS executable file format. Couldn't find a hint.

<comment><USER22> It did, sigh. It was in the LINK'ER documentation. RSX/VMS was all about object modules being shared between concurrently running applications in separate user spaces (because RAM was crazy expensive and DISK was crazy slow and expensive).

The format for runtime libraries, executables and memory-mapped sections in general descended from the PDP11 a bit and I believe it changed radically (for the first time in decades) with the introduction of the 64-bit Alpha architecture under "Open"VMS.

<comment><USER25> Alas, the LINKER documentation ([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents.html)) I can find only includes a description of the "object language" for VAX ([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents_001.html#toc_appendix_a)) and Alpha ([https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548...](https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/4548/4548pro_contents_002.html#toc_appendix_b)). It does say that Itanium VMS used ELF format executables. So I think it's still an open question as to whether VAX/VMS or Alpha/VMS executable file format ever had documentation.

How did ELF format files play in VMS' idea of process-as-elaborate-address- sapce, where running a command involved reading or mapping in an executable, and then jumping to the entry point? Or did I64 VMS abandon the unusual VMS process model?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's the backstory: [http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100310163744/http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2000/05/moody.html)

<comment><USER27> The way that the fine article was worded, it seems that the engineering team knew that they needed approximately 1.5M LOC before they has started. How could they have known that? Or is it simply poorly worded?

> The ATF Team planned to develop approximately 1.5 million source lines of > code, across more than 20 software development companies located throughout > the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

<comment><USER28> There is a school of thought that says rather than look at the requirements and make your best guess at the amount of work needed to implement them, you will get more accurate results by making your best guess at the number of lines of code required, then using a formula to estimate the amount of work needed to write that many lines of code. I personally am not convinced this is really more accurate, but it does have serious adherents.

<comment><USER29> The variation I was taught (and it works rather well), is to look at the Requirements and estimate them in terms of T-Shirt sizes of LOC (Small, Medium, Large, XL). Then baseline your S/M/L/XL sizes into LOC. e.g., Small is 20 LOC, Large is 750, etc. From that, use your historical data (you _have_ been tracking closely how long it takes to implement a feature vs its LOC size, right?) to estimate that say, a Small feature (20 LOC) will take 2 days at a rate of 10 LOC/Day.

It takes a lot of discipline and planning, but in the end it's the most accurate method of size and time estimation I've ever seen.

<comment><USER30> I'm sure that works reasonably well in most cases, but it is a bit of a fallacy that it take a similar amount of effort to write each LOC.

<comment><USER29> You are correct. For reasons of expediency I did not mention that there's a "difficulty" factor which is usually expressed by a variable LOC/hour rate. e.g., Server backend code might be estimated at 100 LOC/day whereas code for an 8-bit embedded controller might be 10 LOC/day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of my first job out of uni, 18 years ago. I was working on the SPARK toolset, and one of our customers was the Eurofighter, who still used VAX VMS for their development.

We had to maintain an old Micro VAX box in the office to periodically test that the toolset still worked on it. I seem to remember that the massive regression test suite that would run in a few hours every night on a PC would take days on this box.

Our main worry was that one day we'd turn it on and the drive would fail to spin up. I seem to remember there being a periodic reminder to just turn the damn thing on and let it boot every so often, then shut it down, just to make sure the drive was still ok.

<comment><USER32> You should have left it on 24/7 this is what we did for our Pr!mes (a VAX competitor) disk drives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Development of F22 started in 1980's. Last VAX machines were manufactured in 2005. There is quite a lot of VME bus based legacy (but speciallized and working) measurement and test equipment still around. I have no involvement in the project, so can not tell for sure; yet would be surprised if any of this is part of the flight hardware.

<comment><USER34> Up until the mid 1990s similar machines (TurboChannel DECs) were required as personal workstations for my university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> ISTR that the avionics code is written in Ada, and runs on top of Intel i960 processors, and that the Ada compiler for that target only runs on VAX/VMS (not even OpenVMS, but specifically VMS on the VAX).

<comment><USER36> ISTR?

Anyway, the processors in the F-22A are a mix of different cores. The power supply in the Gen 3 radar used a MIL-STD-1750A processor. The PICC[1] processor modules also used the MIL-STD-1750A originally, but moved to a newer processor in a refresh (if I remember correctly). I don't know what the non- Raytheon components of the plane were using.

As for the compiler, you are spot-on. We had a MicroVAX in a vault (it was a cleared computing system) just in case we needed to recompile the embedded software for the power supply controller.

[1] Unfortunately, I don't remember what this acronym expands to.

<comment><USER37> "I Seem To Recall"

<comment><USER38> Huh never seen that before. Seems like a upmarket version of the more common (to me) IIRC (If I Recall Correctly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Did I use DEC and VAX stations? Yes I did. Would I want to relive that period of time? No I would not.

Is that muscle on my face twitching due to PTSD? Yes, Yes it is.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is surely about VME industrial bus, not about VAX processors or computers.

<comment><USER41> The only mention of VAX/VME from the job post:

> _Experience with troubleshooting equipment such as Pass1000 /5000 1553 bus > monitor, fiber-optic test equipment, digital storage oscilloscopes, and > familiarization with the VAX/VME based computing environment._

Seems apparent to me that the context is development+ATE environment; VME is likely VXI interface to ATE instrumentation. In any case, the VMS and/or VME angle to this job post is the least of any prospect's concerns.

<comment><USER42> I wondered if that was a typo and they meant VAX/VMS (DEC's OS that ran on the Vax)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> VAX? Like - what? The one introduced on October 25, 1977??

</comment><comment><USER44> Hmm, makes me wonder why I let that experience drop off my resume.

Oh yeah ...

</comment><comment><USER45> Basic Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related technical focus.

• Experience in COMM and Navigation.

• Avionics experience

• Experience with aircraft operations.

• Microsoft Office

I love the MS Office req at the end. "Yes, we see you've got a BS in engineering, you're an expert at avionics and COMM control systems, but do you know anything about MS Word?"

<comment><USER46> More like: "We ended up hiring the guy most competent at MS Word at the expense of everything else, because out of the five requirements it was the only one the managers doing the interview knew anything about".

"Johnson! We're promoting you to head technical flight operations. We can't believe the level of your MS Word skills!"

"Senator, we have no idea why the F-22 inexplicably crashed. That software was designed by the best people we could find!".

<comment><USER47> More like:

The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.

<comment><USER48> I've seen non-professional programmers write the most amazing things in VBA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> They claim this is for the F22, but I wonder if some enemy tech has been 'obtained' and they want to backward engineer it?

The wiki page shows some stats of a plane that is (publicly) 22-23 years old and VAX is 42 years old. To me, that math does not add up.

Just a curious thought.

</comment><comment><USER50> Security through obfuscation. Lockheed, good morning!

</comment><comment><USER51> Wow. It takes tens of system engineers writing hundreds of requirements to do something as crazy as write a new 1.5 Mloc software system on VAX in the 90s. Any smaller team wouldn't have considered it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Do the job requirements really need to list ms excel and office three times?

<comment><USER53> And you need to be a "self starter"....

<comment><USER54> I hate those HR phrases for reasons that I believe are my own, maybe others share them.

Sure, it's a meaningless phrase and no one is going to say, "I'm not a self- starter, I hate figuring out what to do with my time I wish someone would just hand me a list of things". Or maybe very few people are going to do that.

What upsets me the most about phrases like 'self-starter' or 'motivated' or all that other HR shit, is that somewhere, someone (or more likely several someones) sat in a room and decided, consciously, that if they didn't say those words, that if they didn't flat out state that they wanted a self- starter, then the outcome would logically be they would only get lazy applicants.

Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance.

<comment><USER55> >Phrases like that are treating the world like it is full of people who would swallow their own socks, on accident, if only we were given the chance.

I'm guessing those people went into HR and are projecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> [oops]

<comment><USER57> From right at the top of the article, in the easiest place to find: "Date posted: Jul. 31, 2018"

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I think all engineers with VAX experience are extinct ...or retired.

<comment><USER41> Hope you're prepared to swallow; I can think of several dozen _young_ engineers across 5 states (California, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey) with VAX/OpenVMS domain expertise, myself included. Legacy systems with 30-year lifecycles are a thing...they're just not what most of commercial industry is accustomed to supporting. If you think LM would have an issue filling this position internally (for the right price), you'd be mistaken.

<comment><USER15> So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative?

<comment><USER59> I don't work in the space or DC, but have worked with people who are in this industry. It's a career job usually, and many of these folks work in out of the way places. If you're pulling down $120k in some suburb of Omaha, you're doing very well.

The career path and security is important as well. A FAANG won't hire a 45 year old technical SME.

There's also an academic/industry connection. You may wear multiple hats if you're affiliated with the university, a lab, or a company. I met at least one person who was a professor at a major school, did work at a sponsored lab or think tank (ie. MITRE, RAND Corp, etc), and did some work over a sabbatical for a big name-brand defense contractor.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robocar roundup: Google accidents, Baidu cars, startups and more - <AUTHOR> http://robohub.org/robocar-roundup-google-accidents-baidu-cars-startups-and-more/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting information on Zoox, Cruise, Peloton and Baidu's plans for autonomous vehicles.</comment>


Cloud computing companies are preparing to dunk their servers in vats of oil - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/69580/household-name-cloud-computing-companies-are-preparing-to-dunk-their-servers-in-vats-of-oil/ <comment><USER2> Oil cooling in general is more useful in overclocking situations where one uses a TEC. The main problem with TEC cooling is that you can get under 0 degrees, and that leads to condensation on the logic board (not something one would want). Mineral Oil freezes at around -30 degrees C, so you can cool components below zero without having those problems. Though if you're using TECs for cooling, then efficiency isn't something that one would be interested in.

Otherwise, mineral oil needs pumps, and in general could be harder to design cooling components due to the different density of the fluid. High surface area coolers that are used with fans might not let the oil pass through fast enough to limit heat accumulation. You'd need to design laminar flow heat sinks and pumps that keep the oil flowing over the most critical parts. If one pump fails, you risk localized overheating. At least with standard fan/air cooling you can have multiple fans that keep the hot air from staying in the case (or some racks have A/C vents entering from the bottom front and exit from the top rear to keep positive pressure and continuous cooling.

The limiting factor could be logic board design to make sure there's no turbulence between the components and cooling equipment so there aren't any hot spots that could damage components. It's costly engineering and you risk starting to make or use parts in non standard sizes or designs.

</comment><comment><USER3> There may be a case for oil cooling, but this article doesn't make it; it's mostly just an ad for Green Revolution based on an outdated understanding of data centers. Facebook and others have already done away with raised floors and chillers while Microsoft has eliminated the building completely, just parking their ITPACs outdoors. I would be interested in seeing a TCO comparison between ITPACs and Green Revolution, but I doubt we'll get one.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hobbyist PC builders and overclockers have been doing this for a while. This video described the basic process of building one <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtufuXLvOok> \-- pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER5> How does liquid cooling affect the lifespan of the computer hardware?</comment>


Twitter Revenue Up 61%, but User Growth Lags - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/technology/twitter-quarterly-earnings.html <comment><USER2> I like that they identified their issues and have something of a plan to address them. However, this company still has a lot of issues as far as the stock is concerned:

\- Executive compensation is beyond extravagant. It is outrageous and borderline criminal. The CFO got 75 million in stock since last July?

\- This leads to another issue - the float is too high. This company has given away hordes of stock internally which will continue to put pressure on EPS and make the company impossible to sell if they do in fact wish to go that route. You get the feeling it's a bunch of insiders looting the vault.

\- The growth plans, although commendable, are not without extreme risk. How many users have used Twitter and are simply not interested in becoming MAU's? They say the platform is too hard for many users and the presentation needs reworking - but maybe it's the case it is too late? People tried and quit. I know plenty of people who think it's just spam and have found better places to spend their time. How does Twitter change their mind? Cultivated streams isn't a scalable business. I trust their research and analysis will help, but the "it's a long way off" comment certainly doesn't give much investor confidence. It's honest at least.

\- Who else isn't suspicious that after a really great quarter the conference call was rather negative? Bring in new board members while tanking the stock so they can get new stock grants at a low price and then proceed to either sell the company well above the bid or benefit from the rise in stock price as a result of fixing the issues? This isn't an uncommon thing and for a company that has looted investors left and right I don't blame the Street for dumping this tonight.

I'm a buyer sub-20.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to see April Fool's joke compiled online? - <AUTHOR> Tomorrow is a April Fool's and I'd like to know if there's a website that lists out the bigger pranks. <comment><USER2> I like these collections:

[http://hoaxes.org/aprilfool](http://hoaxes.org/aprilfool)

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/31/living/april-fools-hoaxes- feat...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/31/living/april-fools-hoaxes- feat/index.html)</comment>


Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/27/italian-scientist-charged-manslaughter-failing-predict-earthquake/

<comment><USER2> Inflamatory linkbait.</comment>


GitHub says bug exposed some plaintext passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-says-bug-exposed-account-passwords/ <comment><USER2> Crazy level of transparency, they noticed, fixed it and notified the users even though this was an internal leak. I bet most businesses would just sweep it under the rug.</comment>


Are ideas getting harder to find? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf <comment><USER3> I would speculate that the decrease in "good ideas" is at least correlated with, and probably causally related to, the decrease in government spending on research (2% of GDP in the 1970's to 0.78% of GDP in 2014[1]). Considering that the entire US technology industry was originally supported and sparked by government research, I would imagine that a large part of the problem is that corporate R&D is a poor substitute for the longer-term, non-profit-driven perspective of government research. Further, I wonder if, in general, lack of government-funded research leads to less competitive markets that are more amenable to established monopolists, since in that scenario, research is emerging primarily from corporate R&D departments and emerging players in markets can't compete. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I think interesting to consider.

[1] [http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for- scientific-r...](http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific- research/)

<comment><USER4> 1970 GDP in current $: just under 1,000,000,000,000

2014 GDP in current$: just under 17,000,000,000,000

Amount as a percent has dropped - but dollars spent has skyrocketed.

<comment><USER5> No. Definitely no.

US GDP in 1970 was 1.0759T. 2% of that is 21.5B in 1970 dollars. This is $132.91B in 2014 dollars.

US GDP in 2014 was 17.348T. 0.78% of that is 135B in 2014 dollars.

<comment><USER4> I pulled the numbers from here, which states that they are in current USD:

[https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...](https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_cd&idim=country:USA&met_y=gdp_production_current_us#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=gdp_production_current_us&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA&ifdim=region&tstart=30430800000&tend=819349200000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

<comment><USER5> St Louis FRED. In constant dollars, pick a year, pick 2009, pick Chained 2009 Dollars.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1)

1970 GDP was 4.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 2% of 4.7T is 94B.

2014 GDP was 15.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 0.78% of 15.7T is 122B.

<comment><USER4> I'm honestly not qualified to know which data set is most accurate; certainly the increase is less dramatic using this data set, but it still shows an increase in $$ spent over time - vs the decrease that was the foundation of the original comment.

<comment><USER5> I'm qualified. Acid test: do you really think we were spending 1/17th of research money in constant dollars in 1970?

Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in 1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has declined as well.

This is a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> Also, I think the point of the paper is that growth gets harder, not easier. From that perspective R&D spending should have increased massively in constant currency to keep pace, not decline even slightly.

<comment><USER7> Looking at it from the other side of the mirror, there's probably some other suite of factors that causes both things. Taken as a prisoner's dilemma, defecting from R&D may be perceived to have a payoff ( those engineers talk funny and cost a lot ) which saps R&D and also slows growth.

I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.

Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in large companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not that good ideas are getting harder to find, it's that poorly-funded good ideas can't compete against well-funded bad ideas.

Investors are more interested in funding terrible ideas from people they know than great ideas from people they don't know.

The market is monopolized on every side and good ideas can't compete against sheer capital.

<comment><USER9> It's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team with a great idea.

Part of being a good management team (which is what VC's are looking for after all) is being able to sell. Selling the concept to investors, selling the product to customers, selling benefits to partners. People's history, credentials, contacts, etc. are all part of how you sell.

Just think about how hard it is to determine if someone can do a specific, relatively narrow, job when hiring. Then imagine how hard it is to determine if a team can work together, be persistent enough to see things through but flexible enough to roll with the punches as needed. To assess if the team can deliver a product, manage their finances, hire a good crew, craft a compelling marketing message, sell to customers, sound good to the media, etc, etc. This is not easy. Is it any wonder that VC's put great stock in past successes of any kind?

Maybe this isn't fair. But it's how the world works. Sorry for rambling this morning :-)

<comment> aaron-lebo _It 's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team with a great idea._

This is post-hoc justification.

Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have been worth billions (Reddit the exception) for more than a decade. They've collectively innovated how much since 2005? They have a bunch of small improvements that anyone could have anticipated and purchased many of the good ideas that have come along (Occulus). Some are floundering in spite of having massive reach (Twitter), some can't anticipate uses of their platform until after it happens (Facebook). Some are dead and their founders have joined the VC game (Digg). Did Kevin Rose not look like a pretty sure bet in 2006? Whatever happened to Milk?

Yet according to the "they know how to deliver" logic, they should be knocking new ideas out of the park. Where are they? Of course they have some successes but you could have some successes too if you have billions of dollars to subsidize yourself and an existing social network to support yourself and advertise your success. You throw ideas at a wall and the ones that work are evidence of know how. It's a broken metric.

Honestly, there is no evidence these companies are well run except for the fact that they won, but they effectively won a lottery at which point money starts flowing in. And that's the entire VC game - you'll have some moderate successes, mostly failures, and some unicorns. As long as you hit jackpot a few times you are ok. Meanwhile, part of the VC job is selling the idea that they know what they are doing, too.

And with hundreds of thousands of the world's smartest kids being funneled through the top colleges each year, you've got a lot of lottery tickets.

I think it's interesting that all of these authors are at Stanford or MIT. Seems similar to the backgrounds of a lot of tech talent:

Gates (Harvard), Zuckerberg (Harvard), Brin and Page (Stanford), Reddit guys (Cambridge area) you could go on and on.

Maybe there would be more diversity of ideas if the people behind them weren't all coming from similar backgrounds and self-selecting to certain locales...

<comment><USER10> I suspect that buying something that is a good idea and bring it to commercial success is what an accomplished founder should be best at doing. A successful founder is usually good at telling a better idea from a worse idea _ahead of time,_ when the competition hasn't yet done the same.

A successful founder is usually good at execution, so the next logical step is to bring the idea to fruition. OTOH coming up with a new and worthy idea by oneself is much harder: most good-looking ideas do not survive a contact with the reality.

This is why Google came up with Maps and Android, both hugely successful, by acquisition. This is why Facebook got its iconic "Like" functionality by acquisition.

As you noted, coming up with an idea and following it through to making millions off it is a lottery. Acquiring a good idea in a semi-product shape and making millions off it is also a lottery, but with much better odds. Guess what an intelligent person would choose more often, given the choice.

<comment><USER11> Do you have links on how or when Facebook got likes by acquisition?

I don't remember seeing this anywhere, but it might as well have happened. And if it did, it's weird how we can forget that Facebook didn't always had a like button, seeing as how it's a fundamental part of their platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After close to 8 years with zero or negative interest rates (QE is a form of negative interest rates), there's 2 things causing this:

Anything -reasonable and otherwise- has been tried. Mostly on the taxpayer's dime.

A number of industries, most famously big parts of the US oil industry, but they won't be alone, are bad ideas that people really, really, really want to see working. Therefore those companies have been using capital injections for profits. It should be called a Ponzi scheme, but in some ways it isn't.

A lot of companies have been using credit and capital to do what every economist assumes they use profits and free cash flow for : pay dividends and share buybacks. In reality for quite a few companies free cash flow has been steadily worsening since 2015 or so.

So we have the double whammy of the government making it VERY cheap for huge companies to try every idea under the sun, which of course they have partially used to make it impossible for others to try (e.g. Uber, Deliveroo and Domino's pizzas have used capital to beat every reasonable delivery company on price, the idea being to become the next Amazon, and of course, they have not become the next Amazon. And I would say that Amazon itself is also a "become monopoly - then jack up prices" play that so far hasn't even succeeded in part 1 of that. Their stock has done well, not because Bezos has kept his promise, but because of his reports of progress).

So has every idea been tried ? Of course not. But due to sustained easy credit it has become very hard to try new ideas. Those of us working for huge companies best prepare for a few leaner years.

<comment><USER13> > But due to sustained easy credit it has become very hard to try new ideas.

If anything low interest rates and easy credit make it easier to raise capital and explore new ideas.

Unfortunately when rates are kept artificially low to avoid financial catastrophe, resources are misdirected into ventures that should never have been funded in the first place, and we kick the financial can down the road. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and right now we need necessity (resource constraints/challenges to the status quo) more than ever.

<comment><USER14> >Unfortunately when rates are kept artificially low to avoid financial catastrophe, resources are misdirected into ventures that should never have been funded in the first place, and we kick the financial can down the road.

Untrue. Rates are not kept low for an explicit purpose of "avoiding catastrophe." They are kept low to encourage borrowing.

Resources are never "misdirected," as both the lender and the borrower must agree on the venture. This system allows for experimentation and innovation. As someone sitting on the sidelines, it is easy to call many investments - usually after they fail to produce ROI - failures that should not have been funded in the first place.

However, the economy is a cyclical process. Your comment projects your thinking that it works as an equilibrium, which has never been the case. Eventually, speculation dies down, rates increase, borrowing deceases, saving increases, companies repair balance sheets... etc.

Then the cycle begins again.

<comment><USER13> QE, in conjunction with the Fed dropping FRR to 0% for 6 years, was a direct response to the financial collapse of 2007-8. Obviously policymakers weren't going to explicitly say - "wow guys we screwed the pooch on this one, time to lower rates and inject liquidity to help banks (and the business/individuals they lent to) clean up their balance sheets full of mispriced, risky assets and avoid financial catastrophe" \- but sometimes you need to read between the lines.

There is being (equilibrium) and there is becoming (cycles away from/towards equilibrium). The economy is always becoming, but it is striving towards a pure state of equilibrium where supply and demand in every market are working to equal one another, but never getting there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This isn't a new idea. The real peak for invention was around 1880-1900. Steel production finally worked, electricity was known, the basic machine tools existed, and steam power was working well. That's when Edison was most active. His "invention factory" had a goal of a minor invention every two days and a major invention every _three weeks_. There were so many easy hits available waiting to be invented, and the tools were there to build them.

Some technologies develop rapidly and then hit a wall. Aviation developed rapidly from the Wright's first flight in 1903 to the late 1960s, which produced the Boeing 747 and 737 (both still in production), the Concorde, the SR-71, the C-5A,and the Saturn V. Since then, improvements have been minor by comparison. Yet technical documents from the 1960s project vast improvements - hypersonic ballistic transports, single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft, atomic- powered interplanetary rockets, and fusion drives. Even antigravity was studied seriously. Didn't happen.

<comment><USER16> In aviation, it all slowed down after the tech started to require larger and larger investments to research, combined with hitting harder boundaries on fundamental energy and propulsion capabilities. Individuals were priced out because of the increasing capital requirements, and institutions (gov't and large companies) are so bad at making non-sure-thing bets that individuals might otherwise pursue. Hence why rocketry is only advancing now after some random billionaires came along to make investments, which as financial bets would be disqualified in a heartbeat by most of the people holding the strings of business investment.

There's still capability to be gotten in propulsion, but I suspect a lot of it will revolve around basic materials research (which is definitely unattractive to the vast majority of potential investors).

I worry that the aviation market is an example of how modern capitalism is failing to systematically advance civilization (even apart from the more political class inequality problems that is being argued about...).

Edit: and the failure is in any endeavor that doesn't fit typically short investment time scales and 'calculability' of ROI, not just aerospace.

<comment><USER10> Not just one, but _a number_ of "random billionaires" suddenly started to invest in rockets and spacecraft during the last decade.

I'd rather link it to something else: maybe CAD advancements, maybe material science, maybe avionics, maybe the release of some regulatory limitations. Likely all of these in concert.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but my main point was that the advancement of civilization shouldn't depend on the whims of random billionaires. We shouldn't prevent random billionaires from developing the tech either, but multi-decade trend of politics and society believing that "capitalism" provides a complete economic system has big holes in it for certain advancements: space travel, for antibiotics, for civilization-ending externalities like climate change. The pileup of what capitalism isn't addressing is getting very serious. And if you're being quantitative, skipping all/most long-term, low-visibility-payoff risks still leaves your economy behind one that is able to make those investments -- at least some of the time, in favor of the next social-chat app, or k-cup juice tech.

And incidentally - IMHO, I strongly suspect there is nothing in avionics algorithmically or computationally that modern rocketry needs that didn't not already exist 30-40+ years ago (then again, I don't closely follow that anymore...) One of the key structural advancements for SpaceX rockets - <USER2> created 20+ years ago - friction stir welding... I may be too cynical, but really the only real advancement there is parties able & willing to take on long term risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bjelkeman-again For me it is interesting to see that new ideas may be harder to find. My experience is that there are lots of great ideas that are just lying around, unused. In some of our work we are taking scientific or technical discoveries from the early 1900s and implementing them in new ways, in combination with mobile phones, for example, to make breakthroughs in possible uses.

We are building new water quality tests that makes the phone a "mobile lab" using quite old science and targeting it at a huge market, the two billion people that drink unsafe water. It isn't your normal Silicon Valley play, as it requires quite a different set of resources to implement well. But the impact can be massive.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised that amid the sea of comments lamenting the demise of individual experimentation, nobody has mentioned the vastly stricter regulatory environment surrounding individual experimentation. You can't buy any chemical equipment because you might be making drugs. Mechanical equipment might be used to make bombs or guns. For now I guess you might be able to get away with making transgenic bacteria in your garage, but it's only one or two media panics away from being banned because you might accidentally make grey goo. Plus, if you _do_ try to do any sort of substantial experimentation, be prepared for your neighbors to report you to the police and your HOA to fine you for smell and noise.

Orville Wright would be behind bars today. Jonas Salk would be a public enemy. Alex Fleming would have been kicked out of grad school for not properly sterilizing equipment.

Of course, you can buy seventeen kinds of homeopathic medicine at Walgreens. Everyone knows it doesn't work, but they also know it's harmless, which in the Rawlsian dystopia of a life lived behind the veil of ignorance, is the only thing that matters.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've always wondered about this aspect of idea research (from the intro in the paper):

 _" For example, each new idea raises incomes by a constant percentage (on average), rather than by a certain number of dollars. This is the standard approach in the quality ladder literature on growth: ideas are proportional improvements in productivity"_

I am not convinced they capture efficiency improvements (or externalizations) in this model. Say for example you have an idea for scrubbing sulfur out of coal. It becomes mandated by the EPA, it makes everyone around the coal power plants live 1.5% longer but it doesn't change their income at all. Was it a good idea? Was it an important idea?

We have invested billions in improving efficiency, from solar panels to cars to power plants. How much of that has offset income gains from growth? For example, you add 25% more cars on the road that are 50% more efficient, the net total of gas consumed annually stays the same. So how is that represented in economic GDP ? When you have a video game that is distributed digitally, it costs a fraction of a cent in electricity to "manufacture" and copy to the user. But it represents $1 - $10 in economic activity.

So clearly I've got problems with the definition of a "good" idea :-) I don't like tying it to income improvements. I'd much rather tie to a balance of externalities where the net change is fewer negative externalities. Harder to measure for sure, but ideas that increase efficiency will get as much "goodness" as ideas that increase income.

<comment><USER19> If we actually included the externalities of coal, the damage to property by acid rain, the health effects, the tearing the tops off our mountains to strip mine - then we could see things like scrubbing sulfur out as efficiency improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is one reason why many people think a technological singularity will never come. The rate of innovation isn't an exponential curve but rather an S-curve which will eventually flatten out. That doesn't mean that innovation will cease, but rather that the _rate_ of innovation (the first derivative) will stop increasing.

<comment><USER21> That's true, for any area of technology. It may not be true for technology as a whole, though.

Take electricity, for example. It was climbing rapidly in from 1900 to maybe 1950. After that it started flattening out. But the transistor was growing from 1950. One could argue that it started flattening out in 2010. It's still growing, but not as much. But genomics is just getting started. And so it goes, with the action moving from one area of technology to another.

<comment><USER22> Different _areas_ of technology have profoundly different dynamics and interactions.

Much of the 19th century boom drove directly off of coal and what it made possible (steel, electricity, lights, electric motors, locomotives, mang), and toward the end, petroleum and automobiles. Henry Ford's Model T began production in 1901, just after the end of the era, and the Wright Brother's flight was in 1903, enabled by low-weight, high-oputput gasoline engines (we've improved considerably since then).

Vaclav Smil's _Energy in World History_ provides a really good illustration of various technolgies and capabilities, many with semi-log plots (log power vs. time). They show the overlapping-band dynamics you mention, _but_ that applies pretty much exclusively to _energy_ technologies.

The thing about _information_ technology is that it only buys you so much. The Boeing 747, and for that matter, the Dreamliner, both still continue the design originally pioneered with the 707 (and its bomber/transport predecessors). We've added avionics and controls and engine tuning and a slew of other elements which are _far_ more advanced than was was available in the 1950s and 1960s when the airframes were first produced. There's been a slight improvement in fuel efficiency, enough that today's turbofans are roughly comparable with prop-driven planes of the 1950s (props are more efficient, but slower, than jets). There's been a _big_ increase in _safety_ , witness the HN article a few days back noting that it's been 15 years since a major widebody jet fatality by a US carrier (smaller planes and non-US carriers, yes). Actual travel times have _increased_ since the 1970s, due mostly to security checks, also some congestion and routing changes. Prices are down from the late 1970s, but _not_ from the pre-oil-embargo days, at least not by nearly as much. (The airline deregulation story gets hugely oversold on that point.)

Genomics is another form of information processing, ultimately. It's not clear to e that it will have the same impacts as, say, clean fresh water supplies, sewerage, municipal waste removal, and public health and nutrition programs. Certainly not at the same costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My friend had a great quote a while back: "Not only are all the good ideas taken. But so are all the bad ideas!"

<comment><USER24> If this were true, the next 100 years we would have no progress. Unless one says "All of the ideas are taken, but few have executed on those ideas"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The basic problem is cultural fragmentation of the middle class who are the main market for any product (the middle classes are the only class with the money and size to be worth mass selling).

There is so much more diversity now in what middle class people want that it is impossible for one idea to appeal to a large section of the population. When everyone middle class listened to same music, watched the same TV shows, saw the same movies, ate the same food, drove the same cars, lived in the same houses, etc it was possible to create a product that appealed to most. Today that is no longer possible so all ideas are small and niche.

Regulation and risk avoidance has also played a strong role in killing ideas. For example, most of pharmaceuticals developed in the 1950 to 1970s could not be brought to market today.

</comment><comment><USER26> I while ago I was thinking about Leonardo da Vinci and how today there really aren't any "renaissance" individuals. By "renaissance" individual I mean multidisciplinary prolific geniuses.

I sort of came to the conclusion that the paper proposes... new ideas are harder to find. To really make a breakthrough in a field seems to require intense specialization.

It is sort of sad because some of the greatest innovators have traditional started in some other field and often use the power of analogy thinking to come up with new ideas.

<comment><USER27> I've gotta say thatI disagree.

There are surely such individuals alive today and others that have been between now and then. They may not be as visible or, if they are, are rarely presented in the same domain as leonardo. I think it's better to say that no one alive today is as fetishized for their multi-disciplinary capibility as Da Vinci.

It's also not hard to argue that we have more surface area for innovation today as well a society that offers the 'resources' (i say this broadly) for individuals to pursue explorations and discovery.

<comment><USER26> It is fairly hard to measure quality and I guess to some extent quantity of ideas coming from individuals and I agree Da Vinci is vastly overrated.

But do you honestly think there are individuals alive today making extreme broad breakthroughs like Isaac Newton?

Part of the reason I believe previous scholars were so successful in coming up with a plethora of ideas is that it was easier to observe things. For example Galileo just needed some really good glass aligned properly to see planets but today the amount of manpower needed to see into the cosmos far exceeds a single individual and their budget. To detect neutrinos required a multi story tank filled with water with extreme precision instruments. Meanwhile Newton took some glass (glass was damn useful back then... it was like the computer for innovation) and noticed light could be broken into colors.

<comment><USER28> Yes I think there are individuals making extreme breakthroughs in every field of science in modern day.

<comment><USER26> Of course but they are not broad ideas like creating a new type of math while explaining how planets circle the sun kind of ideas.

Like I said earlier I don't know how you can place the value or rate ideas but please point out some individuals making cross disciplinary breakthroughs at the level of Newton today. I'm actually sincere because I would like to know more about these individuals.

<comment><USER29> The big issue I have with the "solitary genius" theory is that ideas do not occur in a vacuum Isaac Newton who several people in this thread have mentioned went to great lengths himself to dispel this myth. One of his most famous quotes is:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Scientific progress is incremental it builds on the work and ideas that have come before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ideas are by defintion always harder to find. I think thats true but trivial. The answer would always be yes.

Ideas are mostly solutions looking for a problem and mostly based on companies looking for wholes in the market they can fit into.

There is another way to think about it which is to ask are problems harder to find and is it harder to get ideas for solutions to these problems.

I did an ASK HN called "What problem in your industry would be a potential startup"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007)

takinola followed up on that with this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638#13145691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638#13145691)

I think one thing that really stand out is that the real trick is to find the real problem that hide underneath the obvious solutions. And they might be harder to find because entrepreneurs especially in Silicon Valley are young men who don't have much experience in what problems exist out there and is worth solving.

I wrote a follow up on the HN thread too.

[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with- problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with- problems-47ee63bb3511)

</comment><comment><USER31> > We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and > firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research > productivity is declining sharply.

I think this is a natural course of things that is also suggested by "law of diminishing returns" [1]. As I understand, it's unlikely to maintain the growth multiple with the innovation even if number of people involved in this field is constantly rising. What matters more, however, is if the returns in absolute numbers are greater than what they were before.

Making a rough assumption that number of computers in 1970s were 100,000, a performance gain of 10X would have meant a return of 1,000,000. Supposing that number of computers have multiplied by 100,000, even a gain of 1% beats the old figure by long margin.

I guess there could be time when gain in absolute numbers won't be significant to justify the added costs but in today's world, it matters to squeeze out small performance gains as long as more and more people are using products of those industries.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> No, people are just too attached to good ideas requiring an acquisition and/or lots of cash. Some ideas might not have a cash or business value. I hope we're not training the next generation to attach money and ideas _too_ much.

</comment><comment><USER33> I found the problem with inventions (personal projects) is, you have to maintain them after. And once you're maintaining too much you've run out of free time for the rest of your life - I've been running one for ten years that is famously unchanged and isn't going to.

If you're just talking about tech, the life pattern of forcing everyone in the industry to move to Silicon Valley and work all day on someone else's ideas to cover rent can't be helping.

</comment><comment><USER22> I find there's a lack of clarity on just what technology is, and how the _specific mechanisms_ incorporated into it operate. I've been constructing an ontology and identify nine discrete areas. Each has its own capabilities, limitations, and consequences. Moore's Law applies to only a very limited subset of dendritic and networked structures.

1\. Fuels & combustion, generally. Wood, plant and animal oils, charcoal, coal, petroleum, steam, otto, deisel, turbine engines.

2\. Materials. Functions dependent on specific properties, and abundance of materials they're based on.

3\. Power and transmission. Simple machines, shafts, belts, cogs, electricity, magnetism, hydraulics.

4\. Sensing, perception, symbolic representation & manipulation.

5\. Process-knowledge. Arts and practical stuff, say, agriculture, construction, boatbuilding, sailing, etc.

6\. Systematic knowledge. Science, geography, history.

7\. Governance and control methods. Management, business, institutions, and systems.

8\. Dendritic and network technologies. Cities, transport, communications, computers, organisations.

9\. Hygiene factors. Sinks & unintended consequences: Pollution, effluvia, systems disruption, and their management.

More on this (from an earlier development): [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz- ms8nww](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww)

</comment><comment><USER34> That itself is not a new idea. Most of the ideas which are easy to find and cheap to exploit have already been found. A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation ([http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.p...](http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf)), published in 2005, arrives at a similar conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER35> This video [1] has a great explanation and exploration of why innovation seems to be slowing down. He uses data coming from the patent system over a period of 100 years.

The video touches on much of what is in this study and does a great job of explaining it.

[1] [https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI?t=44m39s](https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI?t=44m39s)

</comment><comment><USER36> Whenever the COST trend of something is being considered, it must be balanced with the RETURN trend.

It might cost more to double a transistors capabilities (as a combination of size, speed, manufacturing reliability, etc.) but as transistors not only improve current applications, but take on whole new areas of usefulness, the returns on investment may actually go up.

I am not saying they do or do not. But COSTS in isolation of RETURNS can't be used to conclude anything about the effectiveness of research efforts.

</comment><comment><USER37> Related:

 _The Size and Shape of "Idea Space" (2011) [pdf]_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072265)

</comment><comment><USER38> I think it is getting harder to remain committed to bad ideas, some of which are being referred to as 'good' after the fact.

</comment><comment><USER39> Breakthrough ideas are made by a diffrent type of mind then the usual one. Chaotic,messy..recombinig stuff not expected to be recombined. People who whoreship structure and efficiency murderd this one.

</comment><comment><USER40> > "everything that can be invented has been invented." \- Charles H. Duell, > Commissioner of US patent office in 1899

It tends to appear this way to those with little imagination.

<comment><USER34> According to the Wikipedia page about him ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell)), which provides references to the original sources, the quote is bogus.

See also [http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/22779.html)

<comment><USER40> OK, how about "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." \-- Patent Office Commissioner, Henry Ellsworth to Congress in 1843.

My point was that this impression is human nature and thus suspect.

<comment><USER34> That quotation is accurate, but apparently taken out of context. See [http://www.ideafinder.com/guest/archives/wow- duell.htm](http://www.ideafinder.com/guest/archives/wow-duell.htm)

"But Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize the growing number of patents as presented in the rest of the report. He even outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity to increase in the future."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pretty simple production frontiers result. IT moved the production possibilities frontier outward about 30 years ago. Everything experiences diminishing returns.

</comment><comment><USER42> Iterate and improve is my latest gamble, it doesn't has to be the latest and greatest.

A lot of niches have room for another player in town ;)

</comment><comment><USER43> Because Intellectual Property. It causes artificial scarcity of ideas to keep their price high

</comment><comment><USER44> For you who just scrolls to the end of the article to find out the bottomline ...

tl;dr: Yes.

</comment><comment><USER45> No.

Wow Bettridge's law really works!

PS: I especially like Godwin's law: when you confidently state something inaccurate online, someone's bound to correct you. It's a great way to crowdsource an answer that you might have a hard time looking up.</comment>