On the Use of a Life(daemonology.net)
daemonology.net
On the Use of a Life
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-life.html
272 comments
Ok but finding teams like this in the real world is not simple. Half the roles billed this way are cynically lying. The other half think that because they’re struggling to stay afloat, they must be swimming in the ocean, but they’re actually in backyard kiddie pools and just not very sophisticated.
Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
>Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Not the OP, but instead of "bombing Moscow", try "designing and building a reusable space rocket". A similar task, but much nobler intentions.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
You also have to keep in mind that SpaceX pulled this off 40 years after NASA created the Space Shuttle. I'm not sure if that invalidates the example per se, but it seems a little like giving Apple credit for inventing the modern GUI, when they basically took it from Xerox PARC.
Original creators definitely need credit, but in my opinion, they are not the only ones who should be adequately respected.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
But a great example of the difference between academia and private industry. The shuttle was reusable in theory, but required $1.5B in refurbishment between flights. Refurbishment of the boosters cost more than simply buying new ones would have.
Sure, and the Falcon rocket is not fully reusable, either. It's a lot harder to reuse the second stage, because it's the part that goes to orbit, which means it's moving very fast, and has to lose a lot of energy in order to land softly.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Yeah, and that whole walking on the moon thing.
This "Industry, industry über alles!" chest beating is very unconvincing.
This "Industry, industry über alles!" chest beating is very unconvincing.
Saturn V was a huge feat, but Apollo program consumed about 2 per cent of American GDP in 1965.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
Yes - I absolutely agree there is a place for industry, the market and competition; I just find the superiority argument misplaced.
Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..
> Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
There's a story that an academic was telling the world that heavier-than-air flight was impossible at the same time that the Wright brothers flew the first plane. Not all engineering advances are based on science, often the engineering comes first.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
The internet and the web both came out of public/gov funded organisations with fundamental academic ties.
I think there is some dubious domain claiming in these industry vs academia anecdotes.
I think there is some dubious domain claiming in these industry vs academia anecdotes.
OK, but only partially. The invention of IP protocol and HTML happened as byproducts of government-funded projects (they were certainly never invented to be what they are). Since then all the impact (and further development) has happened because of things deliberately developed by industry.
>* Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work).*
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.
Much of the work on realising quantum computers seems.to be happening in industry, no?
The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...
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There haven't been recent (significant) advances in relativity or quantum mechanics.
I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress.
That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.
Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.
Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
“Emphatically” is a good one.
"Totally" and "fully" also seem wholly adequate.
I can corroborate this: "If you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world."
Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
The way I see it is that academia and self-entrepreneurship are much alike. Comparing working in academia and for a company is apples to oranges, as working for a company is literally about working in company, i.e., not by yourself.
It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
At the same time, those missiles probably used quite a bit of science discovered/explored in academia.
Surprisingly not much (if you mean the knowledge discovered after WW2). Scientific endeavors were financed differently during the Cold War, and the academia people were quite anti-militaristic usually, so they didn't get money to work on these sort of problems. It is only after 1990 the funding started to shift to the universities back again, somewhat.
> you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order
a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs.
On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
I don't think that approach would be as fast. The ICBM program created the whole airospace industry within a few years through massive investment directed by a military industrial complex scared by the soviet union.
If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
>I'm in violent agreement with Colin here.
You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset.
https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset.
https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
Interesting.
I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...
I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...
> The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime.
This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
That Admiral Rickover link doesn't seem to be working anymore --- do you have another source, or even just a title I can search for?
Looking up Bennie Schriever really took me down the rabbit hole. Quite a life he lived. Incredible to think what he was able to lead.
You can compare Groves with his Manhattan project and Mueller with his Apollo project. Schriever is right between in the story line. He advanced the atomic weapon pioneered by Groves and prepared rocket science for "human payloads".
Rickover way overstayed his welcome. In academia he would have been kicked upstairs when he started strangling people’s careers.
In my mind, your opinion is the epitome of capitalist thinking. You have an extremely low bar for the definition of lifetime impact. In a century, will "changing how household brands do business" be remembered, or rather the low-paid scientists who will have discovered the thing that will make nuclear fusion work? Admittedly, academic work is often a dead end. That's because it's high-risk, low pay. You're choosing the high pay, low risk path. It's almost certainly a better path personally speaking, but will people remember you for it? I think not, and nor should they.
Nuclear fusion is an interesting example. Right now academia is mostly focused on conventional tokamaks, and while they're learning a lot, the exponential rise in the fusion triple product essentially stopped while we wait 25 years for ITER to finish construction. Now private startups are building reactors to explore all sorts of alternative ideas.
The example was chosen on purpose, as I'm aware of that. However, pure research startups although private, definitely do not fall in the same basket as companies which produce something they can sell. Otherwise and following the alternate opinion, the distinction between academia and private businesses disappears (in the US) since US research depts are in good part funded by private money.
Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
I'm nowhere near as smart as Colin but I'll also share here a little personal story which relates to the topic.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
+1 to pandering in mining/oil. The field really felt like a fraternity (House SPE), where ideas only moved as fast as the old guard felt like it. I also felt like a necessary skill as an academic in the field was vetting ideas early for clear financial gain.
Drake meme: 1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma 2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
Drake meme: 1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma 2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
I like your anecdote because it very clearly shows how nuanced and unique to each individual experiences with academia and the industry at large are.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding. I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding. I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I don't think your last point is a good thing. It sounds like the problem with Academia is the source and requirements of the funding, rather than the work itself.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
> I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
I'll add my anecdata to this. The lab I got my Masters in was, well, saddening. So were all the other labs. My SO has a higher degree in another field from another location. My SO's lab was ok, well maybe okay-ish, but all the other labs were similarly saddening.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
Loved your SQL course.
> academia is a lousy place to do novel research
This observation seems a bit at odds with the abundance of core technologies that originated in academia. The ENIAC (and a good chunk of the history of early computers), the internet, the world wide web (counting CERN as an academic institution here), most of the core ideas in programming language design (most programming languages we use aren't academic, but most of their ideas can be traced back to academia), most of the history of AI (including neural nets), probably most published work on algorithms and data structures, ...
And that's just talking about CS. This doesn't necessarily disprove the author's point: most of the things I've listed are quite old, academia may have worsened in the meantime. But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects. Although investors can do the same thing, as a system academia is more reliable, and for some technologies which take very long to develop or are too hard to monetize (such as algorithms) I don't think entrepreneurship offers an alternative.
EDIT (small addition): I think the author is also a bit quick to generalize from "I had a lousy experience in academia" to "academia is a lousy place to do nover research".
This observation seems a bit at odds with the abundance of core technologies that originated in academia. The ENIAC (and a good chunk of the history of early computers), the internet, the world wide web (counting CERN as an academic institution here), most of the core ideas in programming language design (most programming languages we use aren't academic, but most of their ideas can be traced back to academia), most of the history of AI (including neural nets), probably most published work on algorithms and data structures, ...
And that's just talking about CS. This doesn't necessarily disprove the author's point: most of the things I've listed are quite old, academia may have worsened in the meantime. But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects. Although investors can do the same thing, as a system academia is more reliable, and for some technologies which take very long to develop or are too hard to monetize (such as algorithms) I don't think entrepreneurship offers an alternative.
EDIT (small addition): I think the author is also a bit quick to generalize from "I had a lousy experience in academia" to "academia is a lousy place to do nover research".
> academia may have worsened in the meantime
This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
> But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects
Both I and others moved to academia for this reason. However, it is incorrect. Perhaps "market" is not the right word, but the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding, and mostly focused on "salesmanship" -- more focused on selling than an entrepreneur, in fact.
This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
> But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects
Both I and others moved to academia for this reason. However, it is incorrect. Perhaps "market" is not the right word, but the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding, and mostly focused on "salesmanship" -- more focused on selling than an entrepreneur, in fact.
> the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding
This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).
At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.
At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.
This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).
At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.
At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.
Academia is a market. Your customers are reviewers and your income is citations. You have to pander to this market with everything that you got.
I agree with this sentiment*
So really the choice comes down to the problem you want to solve: if it's easier to sell to reviewers do it in academia, if it's easier to sell to customers do it in industry.
(* if not the detail - non academic impact is worth quite a lot in uk academia nowadays, and you may at times measure that through e.g. sales figures, but these in turn must ultimately be sold to reviewers)
So really the choice comes down to the problem you want to solve: if it's easier to sell to reviewers do it in academia, if it's easier to sell to customers do it in industry.
(* if not the detail - non academic impact is worth quite a lot in uk academia nowadays, and you may at times measure that through e.g. sales figures, but these in turn must ultimately be sold to reviewers)
Speaking as a former tenured professor, I can say this is no longer very accurate. What would be more accurate is that your customers are grant review panels, and your income is indirect funds on grants (at least in the US, and increasingly elsewhere).
>> academia may have worsened in the meantime
> This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
I think it's a bit of the opposite: academia didn't get _that_ worse but entrepreneurship has gotten much much better. In reality it's probably a mix of both.
> This is, I believe, correct, and the problem.
I think it's a bit of the opposite: academia didn't get _that_ worse but entrepreneurship has gotten much much better. In reality it's probably a mix of both.
I think this depends very much on what field you're in, who your supervisor is, etc. I'm a PhD student and I haven't written a single grant application in two years so far.
Also, imo writing papers feels more like "persuasion" than "salesmanship". For one, in-depth discussion of the shortcomings or drawbacks of your approach tends to be appreciated in academia.
Also, imo writing papers feels more like "persuasion" than "salesmanship". For one, in-depth discussion of the shortcomings or drawbacks of your approach tends to be appreciated in academia.
I think that when others are talking about the experience of being an academic, they mean that of a professor, not student. While some students do help their advisors write grants, I don't think it's the norm - I never did. But grant-writing is a major concern for professors at top-tier research universities.
I wasn't merely generalizing from my own experience; that was something multiple tenured professors had explicitly told me. (I think their hope was that I would be less novel rather than leaving academia, mind you.)
I absolutely concur that academia has worsened. There used to be enough money sloshing around that you could get plenty without needing to be particularly good at selling yourself to grant committees.
I absolutely concur that academia has worsened. There used to be enough money sloshing around that you could get plenty without needing to be particularly good at selling yourself to grant committees.
I've heard the money is harder to get but I haven't heard why.
Tuition has gone up much faster than inflation; I know that rarely funds research directly, but it should at least prevent an operational drain on endowments.
Speaking of endowments, investments in general have done quite well over the past 30 years, even taking into account major impacts like the dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008 meltdown, pandemic, etc. Endowments should be doing well.
Has private giving declined? Is the government spending less on research?
To be clear: I'm just curious.
Tuition has gone up much faster than inflation; I know that rarely funds research directly, but it should at least prevent an operational drain on endowments.
Speaking of endowments, investments in general have done quite well over the past 30 years, even taking into account major impacts like the dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008 meltdown, pandemic, etc. Endowments should be doing well.
Has private giving declined? Is the government spending less on research?
To be clear: I'm just curious.
It’s a good question. I don’t have any numbers, but I visited my old (early 90s) campus, Exeter (UK) recently. The Chemistry and Music departments had closed down and some kind of shiny Financial Engineering building had appeared. A lot of new purpose-built student accommodation had been built on campus and off. Is it the case that students are viewed more as customers looking for a return on investment and the money is dedicated to that end?
This is late, but I think this whole thread is interesting and no one has really answered your question.
I'm a former tenured professor at a major research university who left my position, in part because I came to hate my department (there was an exodus of faculty and it and the university changed substantially), developed a sense that academics is in crisis, and because of family issues (good issues, of the compelling kind).
The salience of grants has increased for a variety of reasons.
The first, and in my mind, most important reason is because of indirect funds on grants, which universities have come to recognize as a revenue stream. It's not just that grants are harder to get, it's that university administration is focused more on profit as a major administrative goal. A former NIH head lamented this once in an article by pointing out that indirect funds (vague, nonitemized pay demanded for things like heat, police pay, etc.) scale linearly with direct funds (the actual cost of the research), even as the actual indirect costs are bounded sublinearly. This is because most universities just negotiate a percentage of the direct funded grant award be indirect funds, but those indirect costs don't continue to increase--e.g., the cost for a heated office and phone line are the same whether you have 100k in direct funds or 1m in direct funds, but the government pays a lot more in the latter case (in which case taxpayer money isn't really paying for the heated office and phone line).
You might recognize this, as do many HN readers, but it's difficult to convey how pernicious an effect it has had. In my time in the department, I saw the attitude change from "people should seek funding to cover their research" to money, and indirect funds in particular, being the primary goal above all else. In preparing grants, by the time I left, grand administrators would strongly encourage you to apply for grants that were maybe 2-4x what were needed for the actual research, just to increase indirect funds that would be paid off the grant. Note that this leads to a spiral, in that inflated asks that are met by the government lead to less money for others.
I do think there's been a shift in administrative goals for whatever reason, maybe due to career administration types increasing, admin coming from outside the university rather than inside, etc. etc. Some of it has to do with changes in how administration is trained for administrative roles per se. Some of it is changes in demands by legislatures, who want to see universities independently turn profits and serve corporate interests more, indirectly or directly. I don't know what it is. But the goals have shifted, and it's enabled by indirect funds from the federal government. The number one thing someone could do to change the grant culture in the US is to eliminate indirect funds, or at least to raise requirements so that they are no longer a source of profit for universities.
Another question is why grant monies are scarcer though. One answer is the pyramid scheme of university research at the moment, which has changed over time. There's a great paper about this by some former federal agency heads (I think in PNAS?) with revealing analyses and figures showing that the indirect fund seeking really picked up steam in the late 90s to around 2000, when per researcher funding was at a peak. Around that time is when universities and researchers started this indirect fund seeking -- admin and researchers realized there was enough to go around, and they could bring in grad students and postdocs ala pyramid scheme to support the indirect funds and it all worked. After that, with increasing newcomers, funding per researcher started to decline, but the incentives for indirect fund seeking remained. So basically in 1999-2000 the current system was established whereby universities get profits from indirect funds from federal agencies, burning through newcomers (grad students and postdocs) to make it work. Although it's not explicitly stated, trainees are essentially seen as disposable labor, justified under some Darwinian idea that the best will rise to the top and the rest will just leave the field. The core issue, whether or not indirect funds are really justified, or whether or not grant money is an appropriate metric of research value, or whether those leaving the field truly have no value in the sense that they should be funded, is left unaddressed.
Another, subtler issue is that many in administration who are former researchers came of age during the pre-2000 era, and so are just used to the system, and don't really see the problems. They were funded early on, and get grant extensions or career funding, and are not faced with the issue of whether or not they would have survived in the current system, so they don't demand any changes (there's a lot of research showing that the average age of first R01 has increased over time, and that older researchers are much more likely to get extensions to large grants than newcomers are to get new research funded). This is exacerbated by the fact that those who did come of age later are used to the current system also, and sort of see it as "well this is what I had to deal with, so you should have to deal with it too."
Another issue that doesn't get as much attention is the decline of tenure. Tenure is a favorite thing to criticize in many circles, but what many don't realize is that it has been severely declining. In many fields or areas of academics, most faculty are untenured, and in other areas tenured faculty have been replaced by adjunct faculty and so forth. The problem with this is that it means that increasingly the faculty that do exist are dependent on grants for survival, which increases the pressure to obtain grants, and more grants. Even if you're tenured, admin sort of sees the untenured grant-contingent faculty and uses them as a comparison (rather than asking how can their time be balanced between teaching and research, or is their research value really best indexed by grant dollars).
There's also a general issue of the black box of increasing university costs, which no one seems to have a good answer to, and is probably due to a combination of things. Increasingly top-heavy admin, "glamor project" funding, increasingly extreme retention salary offers are some of it. Some of it at public institutions is declining state funding, although that doesn't account for private universities. As the pandemic has highlighted, endowments are often fixed in the sense that they're dedicated to specific things, like the library, or whatever.
So:
Increasing university costs no one can really fully explain (or wants to explain). Decreased state funding. Decreased federal grant money availability, worsened by inflated grant proposals. Increased number of researchers due to pyramid scheme incentives. Increased pressure from admin to seek indirect funds, due to increased profit motive and other factors. Decreased protections from tenure and other similar things.
Really you could write an entire large book about these issues, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.
I'm a former tenured professor at a major research university who left my position, in part because I came to hate my department (there was an exodus of faculty and it and the university changed substantially), developed a sense that academics is in crisis, and because of family issues (good issues, of the compelling kind).
The salience of grants has increased for a variety of reasons.
The first, and in my mind, most important reason is because of indirect funds on grants, which universities have come to recognize as a revenue stream. It's not just that grants are harder to get, it's that university administration is focused more on profit as a major administrative goal. A former NIH head lamented this once in an article by pointing out that indirect funds (vague, nonitemized pay demanded for things like heat, police pay, etc.) scale linearly with direct funds (the actual cost of the research), even as the actual indirect costs are bounded sublinearly. This is because most universities just negotiate a percentage of the direct funded grant award be indirect funds, but those indirect costs don't continue to increase--e.g., the cost for a heated office and phone line are the same whether you have 100k in direct funds or 1m in direct funds, but the government pays a lot more in the latter case (in which case taxpayer money isn't really paying for the heated office and phone line).
You might recognize this, as do many HN readers, but it's difficult to convey how pernicious an effect it has had. In my time in the department, I saw the attitude change from "people should seek funding to cover their research" to money, and indirect funds in particular, being the primary goal above all else. In preparing grants, by the time I left, grand administrators would strongly encourage you to apply for grants that were maybe 2-4x what were needed for the actual research, just to increase indirect funds that would be paid off the grant. Note that this leads to a spiral, in that inflated asks that are met by the government lead to less money for others.
I do think there's been a shift in administrative goals for whatever reason, maybe due to career administration types increasing, admin coming from outside the university rather than inside, etc. etc. Some of it has to do with changes in how administration is trained for administrative roles per se. Some of it is changes in demands by legislatures, who want to see universities independently turn profits and serve corporate interests more, indirectly or directly. I don't know what it is. But the goals have shifted, and it's enabled by indirect funds from the federal government. The number one thing someone could do to change the grant culture in the US is to eliminate indirect funds, or at least to raise requirements so that they are no longer a source of profit for universities.
Another question is why grant monies are scarcer though. One answer is the pyramid scheme of university research at the moment, which has changed over time. There's a great paper about this by some former federal agency heads (I think in PNAS?) with revealing analyses and figures showing that the indirect fund seeking really picked up steam in the late 90s to around 2000, when per researcher funding was at a peak. Around that time is when universities and researchers started this indirect fund seeking -- admin and researchers realized there was enough to go around, and they could bring in grad students and postdocs ala pyramid scheme to support the indirect funds and it all worked. After that, with increasing newcomers, funding per researcher started to decline, but the incentives for indirect fund seeking remained. So basically in 1999-2000 the current system was established whereby universities get profits from indirect funds from federal agencies, burning through newcomers (grad students and postdocs) to make it work. Although it's not explicitly stated, trainees are essentially seen as disposable labor, justified under some Darwinian idea that the best will rise to the top and the rest will just leave the field. The core issue, whether or not indirect funds are really justified, or whether or not grant money is an appropriate metric of research value, or whether those leaving the field truly have no value in the sense that they should be funded, is left unaddressed.
Another, subtler issue is that many in administration who are former researchers came of age during the pre-2000 era, and so are just used to the system, and don't really see the problems. They were funded early on, and get grant extensions or career funding, and are not faced with the issue of whether or not they would have survived in the current system, so they don't demand any changes (there's a lot of research showing that the average age of first R01 has increased over time, and that older researchers are much more likely to get extensions to large grants than newcomers are to get new research funded). This is exacerbated by the fact that those who did come of age later are used to the current system also, and sort of see it as "well this is what I had to deal with, so you should have to deal with it too."
Another issue that doesn't get as much attention is the decline of tenure. Tenure is a favorite thing to criticize in many circles, but what many don't realize is that it has been severely declining. In many fields or areas of academics, most faculty are untenured, and in other areas tenured faculty have been replaced by adjunct faculty and so forth. The problem with this is that it means that increasingly the faculty that do exist are dependent on grants for survival, which increases the pressure to obtain grants, and more grants. Even if you're tenured, admin sort of sees the untenured grant-contingent faculty and uses them as a comparison (rather than asking how can their time be balanced between teaching and research, or is their research value really best indexed by grant dollars).
There's also a general issue of the black box of increasing university costs, which no one seems to have a good answer to, and is probably due to a combination of things. Increasingly top-heavy admin, "glamor project" funding, increasingly extreme retention salary offers are some of it. Some of it at public institutions is declining state funding, although that doesn't account for private universities. As the pandemic has highlighted, endowments are often fixed in the sense that they're dedicated to specific things, like the library, or whatever.
So:
Increasing university costs no one can really fully explain (or wants to explain). Decreased state funding. Decreased federal grant money availability, worsened by inflated grant proposals. Increased number of researchers due to pyramid scheme incentives. Increased pressure from admin to seek indirect funds, due to increased profit motive and other factors. Decreased protections from tenure and other similar things.
Really you could write an entire large book about these issues, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.
It would be interesting if someone managed to find this PNAS (maybe?) article on the pyramid scheme of university research.
Just wanted to say thank you, I did come back and read this and found it interesting and informative.
How much of the Internet was academic? Reading Where the Wizards Stay Up Late one would have a strong feeling that the impetus for it's development was mostly between Arpa/DoD, Rand Corporation (well Paul Barron) and Bolt Beranek & Newman. The installations were made at Academic Institutions and staff there certainly got very involved in it's development...but that account certainly doesn't make it feel like it was an academic exercise.
The things you describe or old mostly-military-funded development projects, not the publish or perish modern academia.
Also, we shouldn't forget his hashing algorithm, scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD. Colin has added so much beyond 'backups' and should feel quite accomplished in his technical contributions to society. I am glad he has the commercial independence to follow his dreams, rather than being trapped in academia.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Colin, you are an inspiration. You have achieved so much and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Colin has added so much beyond 'backups'
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
Frankly, working backups are good enough because his service has allowed people to recover from disaster. Hope instead of misery is a fine way to spend one's life.
> scrypt, powers a popular cryptocurrency with a market cap over 3 Billion USD
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
For those who (like me) were wondering what cryptocurrency this was referring to: Litecoin has a ~$3B market cap and uses scrypt. Dogecoin also uses it but has a much smaller market cap, closer to $350M.
scrypt is an interesting choice for cryptocurrencies because it does not only need a significant amount of compute resources – which can be scaled using GPUs to perform huge amounts of work in parallel – but also requires large amounts of memory which is much more difficult to scale to the same level.
Indeed, Colin mentions scrypt in TFA:
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
> In 2009, having had many users ask for passphrase-protected Tarsnap key files, and having determined that the current state of the art of password based key derivation was sorely lacking, I invented scrypt — and in the process, opened up a whole new field of cryptography. Sure, I was doing this because it was something I could do to make Tarsnap more secure; but it would be a stretch to place this under the umbrella of "spending my time working on backups".
[deleted]
> "academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
This hit me. I was focused on getting a Masters in Math, and I had a 4.0 GPA and 40 hours of credit with just a test or thesis preventing me from a credential. Instead, I dropped out to focus on building products with friends.
Best decision ever.
At least for me since I'm 38 and on the verge of retiring.
> academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization
The whole publish or perish ideology is teaching people the wrong f'n skills on imaginary problems, so I gave on reading on academic papers years ago because the amount of noise to signal was intolerable.
Like Colin, I do independent research but in a different space. I'm currently writing a programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I believe could turn into something crazy as I'm inventing a low-cost way of doing "serverless stateful micro services" or "a key to state machine service".
I don't know how I could even get a grant for such work, but it interests me. And, I've reached a nice point in my life where success is measured by whether a task brings me joy rather than external signals.
In a sense, when I decide to retire, I'll have the ultimate freedom of the idealized tenure that I built myself.
This hit me. I was focused on getting a Masters in Math, and I had a 4.0 GPA and 40 hours of credit with just a test or thesis preventing me from a credential. Instead, I dropped out to focus on building products with friends.
Best decision ever.
At least for me since I'm 38 and on the verge of retiring.
> academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization
The whole publish or perish ideology is teaching people the wrong f'n skills on imaginary problems, so I gave on reading on academic papers years ago because the amount of noise to signal was intolerable.
Like Colin, I do independent research but in a different space. I'm currently writing a programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I believe could turn into something crazy as I'm inventing a low-cost way of doing "serverless stateful micro services" or "a key to state machine service".
I don't know how I could even get a grant for such work, but it interests me. And, I've reached a nice point in my life where success is measured by whether a task brings me joy rather than external signals.
In a sense, when I decide to retire, I'll have the ultimate freedom of the idealized tenure that I built myself.
But did you learn something useful in college or the experience could have been skipped entirely?
I learned a lot of useful (and useless) stuff in college, but I do think we should encourage a gap between undergraduate and graduate studies.
I dunno. Seems to me like people can be productive in lots of different environments. Can anyone argue that people like Dick Karp were unsuccessful because they were academics? Conversely, people like Page and Brin took what they developed in an academic setting and made something amazing in industry. Others like Steve Jobs/Wozniak built something purely in industry. All things can be good and possible; there is no one path that is the right one for all.
> people can be productive in lots of different environments
I think this is why sharing stories is important so wandering people can find ideas for them achieving better results.
I think this is why sharing stories is important so wandering people can find ideas for them achieving better results.
I do agree. But this wasn't just a "sharing my story", it also had a lot of opinion about the "better way" and a lot of negative thrown in the academic direction. But yeah, it's still an interesting read.
Page and Brin didn't do anything academically. They took a standard technique and deployed it industrially "X but on the Internet" as we describe software patents today, and scaled it up.
Academy is where they made the social connections (each other and VC) needed to launch a business, before they hired DEC people to build the tech.
Academy is where they made the social connections (each other and VC) needed to launch a business, before they hired DEC people to build the tech.
A summary in quotes:
"academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
"It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure."
"In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to"
"academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
"It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure."
"In many ways, starting my own company has given me the sort of freedom which academics aspire to"
This comment contributes nothing to the discussion except steering people away from reading the whole thing (a whopping 5 minute read), and the author actually wrote this in the second paragraph:
> I considered replying in the thread, but I think it deserves an in-depth answer — and one which will be seen by more people than would notice a reply in the middle of a 100+ comment thread.
I feel like you're going directly against the long-form answer the author intended to give, so I'm downvoting you.
> I considered replying in the thread, but I think it deserves an in-depth answer — and one which will be seen by more people than would notice a reply in the middle of a 100+ comment thread.
I feel like you're going directly against the long-form answer the author intended to give, so I'm downvoting you.
How does what gp wrote steer people away from reading the whole thing?
I upvoted them because I appreciate their useful and pithy insight.
Is it pithy? The summary given is "academia sucks, be an entrepreneur". IMO the actual point of the post is "I didn't pursue an academic career, here are the various things I did instead and why I think they are meaningful".
The point is somewhere between the two. I'm not telling anyone that they should be an entrepreneur; but I'm saying that being an entrepreneur has worked well for me because it has allowed me to do a surprising number of things which are not entirely part of the job description.
It sounds like you have the free time to read long form writing of potentially good/bad value, however I do not and almost all of my engagement and value seeking from this site comes from the comments section.
I typically read the shortest and most down voted comments as those are clear pointers to things that I need to learn/research further, such as "do I gain anything from a piece of writing longer than a tweet?"
I typically read the shortest and most down voted comments as those are clear pointers to things that I need to learn/research further, such as "do I gain anything from a piece of writing longer than a tweet?"
The length of this exchange is probably more than the reading time of the OP. So if you haven't already, I would suggest go ahead and reading the whole thing.
I feel like the TLDR'ing of someone else's writing is a negative reinforcement loop that needs to be challenged because it leads us all into doing the same.
Personally I read comments sections to find things that are not in the OP and point out weak points or blind spots--you know, actual discussion.
I feel like the TLDR'ing of someone else's writing is a negative reinforcement loop that needs to be challenged because it leads us all into doing the same.
Personally I read comments sections to find things that are not in the OP and point out weak points or blind spots--you know, actual discussion.
Why would I read the full source code of the HashMap implementation in OpenJDK when I could read the API in 5 minutes and obtain 97% of the information I need to use it?
The answer of course, is if someone can provide me a two sentence reason that explains very clearly why that extra 3% of value is so crucial.
The answer of course, is if someone can provide me a two sentence reason that explains very clearly why that extra 3% of value is so crucial.
Really interesting point of view. I have some opinions about your logic and I in no way am trying to attack you. I disagree... the irony is not lost on me, either.
Comparing:
- Reading the source code of HashMap vs reading the API.
to
- Reading HN comments vs source articles.
...is not a fair comparison, IMO. Well what is, then? Ok, glad you asked!
Reading HN comments vs source articles is more like:
- Reading the book vs reading the reviews on Amazon about the book.
Comments on an article are not the API docs to the article. Going with your analogy, the API docs of an article would be something like the spec for how a concept fits into a perspective of a topic (...this sounds so confusing...but, just work with me for a minute, please :D). Unlike something like HashMap, articles are almost always going to be less objective and more subjective. When something is subjective, you could think of it like everyone designs their own API docs; the protocol with which you interact with a concept can be designed by yourself.
The problem with not designing your own protocols (perspectives) for interacting with a concept is that you could be missing an arbitrary 3% of information or the information that your gleaned could be of a completely different taxonomy (or unforeseen perspective dependancies, maybe deps that you don't agree with) than what you would have designed if you had read the article.
This matters because when your perspective is guided by the perspectives of others, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to make connections across topics throughout time. Maybe the cryptographic inventions the author describe connect with another detail in an article about DIY satellite programming or some voting machine vulnerability that inspires you to do something bold (whatever, who knows, that's the point); changing the course of your life.
As a species, I think (super opinionated part) we will advance further if as many of us as possible are actively 'reading the books' and 'forming the opinions'. I don't think the amount of value someone can bring to the world is strictly correlated with their IQ. So everyone can bring value to a discussion or a body of work or whatever, if they think critically about it and develop their own opinions based on their own unique perspectives.
Comparing:
- Reading the source code of HashMap vs reading the API.
to
- Reading HN comments vs source articles.
...is not a fair comparison, IMO. Well what is, then? Ok, glad you asked!
Reading HN comments vs source articles is more like:
- Reading the book vs reading the reviews on Amazon about the book.
Comments on an article are not the API docs to the article. Going with your analogy, the API docs of an article would be something like the spec for how a concept fits into a perspective of a topic (...this sounds so confusing...but, just work with me for a minute, please :D). Unlike something like HashMap, articles are almost always going to be less objective and more subjective. When something is subjective, you could think of it like everyone designs their own API docs; the protocol with which you interact with a concept can be designed by yourself.
The problem with not designing your own protocols (perspectives) for interacting with a concept is that you could be missing an arbitrary 3% of information or the information that your gleaned could be of a completely different taxonomy (or unforeseen perspective dependancies, maybe deps that you don't agree with) than what you would have designed if you had read the article.
This matters because when your perspective is guided by the perspectives of others, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to make connections across topics throughout time. Maybe the cryptographic inventions the author describe connect with another detail in an article about DIY satellite programming or some voting machine vulnerability that inspires you to do something bold (whatever, who knows, that's the point); changing the course of your life.
As a species, I think (super opinionated part) we will advance further if as many of us as possible are actively 'reading the books' and 'forming the opinions'. I don't think the amount of value someone can bring to the world is strictly correlated with their IQ. So everyone can bring value to a discussion or a body of work or whatever, if they think critically about it and develop their own opinions based on their own unique perspectives.
Why would you read a tweet about HashMaps being awesome instead of reading the JavaDoc?
There's always a risk somewhere in that 3% there is a 1% that can drastically alter your understanding of the 97%.
You can mitigate that risk by reading a summary from a trusted source, however you can never fully eliminate it. Everything is a trade-off.
You can mitigate that risk by reading a summary from a trusted source, however you can never fully eliminate it. Everything is a trade-off.
Recall that the original academics were not primarily paid to do it, but were wealthy-enough people who devoted their spare time to it.(Theoretical scientists needed less money to do this then experimentalists and field scientists.)
This is a big part of life: "wealthy-enough"
I feel like we do academics wrong. We should encourage a large gap between undergrad and graduate school for two reasons. First, develop empathy for the realities of shipping software (or whatever the field is). Second, build some wealth to not chase wrong grants.
I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an inspiration on this front. He did hard work and had some good fortune due to great timing (real-estate in California) to build up wealth before becoming an actor, and this manifested in the freedom to go all in on Acting.
The thing that I take as inspiring is that instead of chasing the money via that path or just chilling out, he went hard on a passion.
I feel like we do academics wrong. We should encourage a large gap between undergrad and graduate school for two reasons. First, develop empathy for the realities of shipping software (or whatever the field is). Second, build some wealth to not chase wrong grants.
I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an inspiration on this front. He did hard work and had some good fortune due to great timing (real-estate in California) to build up wealth before becoming an actor, and this manifested in the freedom to go all in on Acting.
The thing that I take as inspiring is that instead of chasing the money via that path or just chilling out, he went hard on a passion.
This is pretty close to home. A few weeks ago someone brought up the subject of my education and was surprised I didn't go to any university. In fact, I never even completed high school due to what is euphemistically called 'personal circumstances'.
I went to work at 17 and had my first company by the ripe old age of 21. The alternative, some degree (likely CS) and doing computer science would seem terribly boring compared to the live that I ended up living and I feel no less productive because of missing out on that crucial secondary education.
Colin is obviously about a million times smarter than I am, he would have probably moved the needle in whatever field he would have entered. I would have probably hung on just long enough to launch my own company anyway because that's just the way I'm wired. In the meantime, my one original contribution (live video on the web) has touched more lives than anything I would have done as a minor cog in some university.
In the end, what others think of your life or your decisions to fill it in one way or another doesn't matter. What matters is that you feel satisfaction at what you have achieved. You are your own harshest judge and what others say about what you've done is irrelevant. Colin has received more than his fair share of flak on HN for not chasing the $ as much as he could have. I think he's done things 'just right', enough commerce to get your hands free and spend your time on the things that you think matter most. That freedom is worth far more than being beholden to investors or partners in a business. Wished there more of him and fewer wanna-be-rich-guys.
I went to work at 17 and had my first company by the ripe old age of 21. The alternative, some degree (likely CS) and doing computer science would seem terribly boring compared to the live that I ended up living and I feel no less productive because of missing out on that crucial secondary education.
Colin is obviously about a million times smarter than I am, he would have probably moved the needle in whatever field he would have entered. I would have probably hung on just long enough to launch my own company anyway because that's just the way I'm wired. In the meantime, my one original contribution (live video on the web) has touched more lives than anything I would have done as a minor cog in some university.
In the end, what others think of your life or your decisions to fill it in one way or another doesn't matter. What matters is that you feel satisfaction at what you have achieved. You are your own harshest judge and what others say about what you've done is irrelevant. Colin has received more than his fair share of flak on HN for not chasing the $ as much as he could have. I think he's done things 'just right', enough commerce to get your hands free and spend your time on the things that you think matter most. That freedom is worth far more than being beholden to investors or partners in a business. Wished there more of him and fewer wanna-be-rich-guys.
Not to mention he invented scrypt, which underpins billions in cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin, the second-biggest cryptocurrency. He could easily create another hash function for tens of millions.
s/live/life/
> Sure, I have customers to assist, servers to manage (not that they need much management), and business accounting to do; but professors equally have classes to teach, students to supervise, and committees to attend.
When I made this sort of comparison myself, my day job didn't seem quite so bad. I've seen a few different studies into how academics spend their time. Seems that full professors spend about 9-10 hours per week doing research, and that's working around 55 to 60 hours week in total. (The numbers vary depending on which study you look at.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180509023409/https://thebluere...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-resear...
So, if you work 40 hours per week and then do 10 hours per week of research, in some sense you're doing better than someone who did things "right". As someone who just completed a PhD but was unable to get a research position, I'm keeping this in mind. (And, more importantly, I'm doing vauable research that would be hard to do in academia.)
When I made this sort of comparison myself, my day job didn't seem quite so bad. I've seen a few different studies into how academics spend their time. Seems that full professors spend about 9-10 hours per week doing research, and that's working around 55 to 60 hours week in total. (The numbers vary depending on which study you look at.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180509023409/https://thebluere...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-resear...
So, if you work 40 hours per week and then do 10 hours per week of research, in some sense you're doing better than someone who did things "right". As someone who just completed a PhD but was unable to get a research position, I'm keeping this in mind. (And, more importantly, I'm doing vauable research that would be hard to do in academia.)
right but most professors have graduate students working under them essentially doing work for them. they simply direct the research
The unstated assumption in my comment was that I want to do the research myself. As I have a PhD, I am of course aware that advising students is a core part of the job of most professors.
This reminded me of something else he wrote years ago, on people's tendency to compare themselves to others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524346
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524346
Heh, I completely forgot about that.
Well, I'm now 39, and still stutter when I'm nervous, but I'm slightly less socially awkward. I'm still diabetic -- no cure for that yet, sadly -- and overweight, but I've been getting more exercise and am somewhat more fit.
The biggest change since I wrote that almost 5 years ago, however, is that I found a wonderful woman who somehow manages to put up with me, and we got married in June. :-)
Well, I'm now 39, and still stutter when I'm nervous, but I'm slightly less socially awkward. I'm still diabetic -- no cure for that yet, sadly -- and overweight, but I've been getting more exercise and am somewhat more fit.
The biggest change since I wrote that almost 5 years ago, however, is that I found a wonderful woman who somehow manages to put up with me, and we got married in June. :-)
Congrats bud. As a bit of an introvert, getting married made a significant improvement on my life. I'm much calmer and happier. My then recent occuring panic and anxiety attacks even disappeared. I hope yours is enriched similarly.
Taking care of health is interesting optimization problem. Too bad that almost advice in the topic is given by people trying to change fit bodies to professional bodybuilders. Or from crash course to fastest results with diminishing returns of time invested. My personal experience that not exercising takes more time than exercising. Yes, when I didn't exercise, I lost a lot more time of being tired and sick than I spend when I started to exercise.
Here's how I started and lost 10kg in under a year, and more than that in fat but didn't measure fat, but belt holes showed it even when I stagnated in weight. Not diabetic so this is just my personal experience should consider your own body.
1) Lifting adjustable dumbbells at home. Done right before taking shower anyway. So avoiding transition time to exercise and avoiding taking extra shower and drying time can go back to computer right after shower. For beginners maximal muscle growth is 3 exercise sessions per week to have enough recovery between sessions, and single well done set is enough stimulation per muscle, it doesn't grow during exercise but during recover from exercise. I had my exercise sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be in constantly in a state that if I eat slightly too much it goes to growing muscle instead of fat. Not because maximizing muscle growth, but just to avoid gaining fat at random times. I just had random bodybuilding dumbbell program moves that I thought would hit every muscle and learned those from a book. I didn't have any body weight exercises since moving my weight would of put strain on joints. The time recommendation for that would be more when learning the moves and doing them slowly and checking correct way of doing them and after a while under 30 minutes per session, but keep minimum 10-15 minutes. Now healthy muscles with about a hour per week after initial investment, and not feeling as tired definitely worth doing.
2) Slowly reducing sugar consumption, and my taste buds eventually adjusted to the change.
3) Random eating habits based on if I'm too concentrated on something to miss a meal. If I eat too little I loose fat, if I eat too much I gain muscle.
4) Once I was healthier I spend some of my thinking time just walking outside thinking the problem before returning to computer for actual implementation. Worked since there was quiet forest path near by.
Now my mistake. I upgraded to going gym trying to gain more muscle after my dumbbells became too small. It increased time requirements for each exercise session. After a while I got so busy that "I'll exercise next week", and it stayed that way for a year. And once the habit was broken it was really hard to get back.
Here's how I started and lost 10kg in under a year, and more than that in fat but didn't measure fat, but belt holes showed it even when I stagnated in weight. Not diabetic so this is just my personal experience should consider your own body.
1) Lifting adjustable dumbbells at home. Done right before taking shower anyway. So avoiding transition time to exercise and avoiding taking extra shower and drying time can go back to computer right after shower. For beginners maximal muscle growth is 3 exercise sessions per week to have enough recovery between sessions, and single well done set is enough stimulation per muscle, it doesn't grow during exercise but during recover from exercise. I had my exercise sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be in constantly in a state that if I eat slightly too much it goes to growing muscle instead of fat. Not because maximizing muscle growth, but just to avoid gaining fat at random times. I just had random bodybuilding dumbbell program moves that I thought would hit every muscle and learned those from a book. I didn't have any body weight exercises since moving my weight would of put strain on joints. The time recommendation for that would be more when learning the moves and doing them slowly and checking correct way of doing them and after a while under 30 minutes per session, but keep minimum 10-15 minutes. Now healthy muscles with about a hour per week after initial investment, and not feeling as tired definitely worth doing.
2) Slowly reducing sugar consumption, and my taste buds eventually adjusted to the change.
3) Random eating habits based on if I'm too concentrated on something to miss a meal. If I eat too little I loose fat, if I eat too much I gain muscle.
4) Once I was healthier I spend some of my thinking time just walking outside thinking the problem before returning to computer for actual implementation. Worked since there was quiet forest path near by.
Now my mistake. I upgraded to going gym trying to gain more muscle after my dumbbells became too small. It increased time requirements for each exercise session. After a while I got so busy that "I'll exercise next week", and it stayed that way for a year. And once the habit was broken it was really hard to get back.
IDK how old are you, I am 42 and I am better off, health-wise, than I was at 38. Those are the changes:
1) Just like you, I started to work out, but I have one more recommendation: a weighted vest. An absolutely great tool for plankings, push-ups etc. If you want your body core to get really tough, weighted vest is a great tool.
2) This, plus intermittent fasting. Got my blood pressure back into the normal range, I am no longer on medication which I took for 17 years, hooray.
3) See 2), it seems that eating/fasting time matters a lot, not just total calories. Constant snacking is probably really bad for us. (The pancreas is forced to produce too much insulin too often).
4) Absence of civilizational noise is definitely something that has healing effects.
To this, I would add
5) Some supplementation is useful, if not outright necessary. Lots of people are vitamin D deficient, for example. 4000 IU a day should help a lot. It seems that vitamin D is even more important for us than we thought. (Specifically, D3).
6) People who like the entire anti-aging and longevity field, can horse around with things like resveratrol and NMN, or perhaps senolytics like fisetin. I like to do that, so far the only visible difference is that my eyesight got a lot better (unexpectedly so for someone who looks into screens all day long). But there is a risk that you are wasting money on "producing expensive urine".
1) Just like you, I started to work out, but I have one more recommendation: a weighted vest. An absolutely great tool for plankings, push-ups etc. If you want your body core to get really tough, weighted vest is a great tool.
2) This, plus intermittent fasting. Got my blood pressure back into the normal range, I am no longer on medication which I took for 17 years, hooray.
3) See 2), it seems that eating/fasting time matters a lot, not just total calories. Constant snacking is probably really bad for us. (The pancreas is forced to produce too much insulin too often).
4) Absence of civilizational noise is definitely something that has healing effects.
To this, I would add
5) Some supplementation is useful, if not outright necessary. Lots of people are vitamin D deficient, for example. 4000 IU a day should help a lot. It seems that vitamin D is even more important for us than we thought. (Specifically, D3).
6) People who like the entire anti-aging and longevity field, can horse around with things like resveratrol and NMN, or perhaps senolytics like fisetin. I like to do that, so far the only visible difference is that my eyesight got a lot better (unexpectedly so for someone who looks into screens all day long). But there is a risk that you are wasting money on "producing expensive urine".
I told you what I did when my first real transformation from unhealthy to healthy happened in my early 30's . Now I'm 41 and I'm having second transformation beyond what happened in the first. Most people really need the first transformation. And one of the driving factor of getting it rolling reasonably well was that I realized how little was truly required to get a lot healthier. There ways to optimize it, but most important thing is to make one simple change and stick with it. Two were real changes I decided were the lifting weights and slowly reducing number of spoons I put sugar in my tea. Everything else was just what I did naturally anyway. The huge point helping me to stick with it was that there were only two simple rules that I had to stick, and both of those were low enough effort for me to stick with.
It wasn't completely without civilization noise, but it was something where I could actually think better when walking outside than when sitting still in front of computer. It was quiet enough that fresh air and walking actually helped me to think.
It wasn't completely without civilization noise, but it was something where I could actually think better when walking outside than when sitting still in front of computer. It was quiet enough that fresh air and walking actually helped me to think.
Would you mind sharing your fasting routine? Or just good resources on the topic that helped you. Thanks!
I started off with 16:8, but my body shifted to longer intervals (20:4, 21:3) on its own. Only rarely did I try longer than 24 hours fasts.
My blood pressure definitely responds to fasting. I went from 150/100 to 115/75 within months. IDK if this can happen in other people, we are a fairly diverse lot.
Food eaten during the eating window matters. Fats (avocado, olive oil, bone broth) will carry you longer than carbs. But one of the things I enjoy about IF is that I no longer have to watch my food intake too strictly. An occasional treat is OK.
As for resources, I believe that Jason Fung, a Canadian doctor, is a good start. He has a lot of videos on YouTube and a few books out. His main idea is that you need to keep your insulin level fairly low in order to avoid metabolic disease, and that IF helps with that a lot.
Also, the r/intermittentfasting subreddit has a lot of veterans.
My blood pressure definitely responds to fasting. I went from 150/100 to 115/75 within months. IDK if this can happen in other people, we are a fairly diverse lot.
Food eaten during the eating window matters. Fats (avocado, olive oil, bone broth) will carry you longer than carbs. But one of the things I enjoy about IF is that I no longer have to watch my food intake too strictly. An occasional treat is OK.
As for resources, I believe that Jason Fung, a Canadian doctor, is a good start. He has a lot of videos on YouTube and a few books out. His main idea is that you need to keep your insulin level fairly low in order to avoid metabolic disease, and that IF helps with that a lot.
Also, the r/intermittentfasting subreddit has a lot of veterans.
Thank you.
Thank you for writing that. The "everyone's life has difficulties" is true and often said, but it's such a platitude without someone providing a concrete example.
Congrats on finding a life partner and getting married. :)
I don't know which kind of diabetes you have. Did you know that some people with type 2 diabetes are cured with weight loss?
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20180917/lose-weight-rev...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12549482/what-is-new-nhs-type-...
I've tried losing weight many times with varying success. The only time I've had full control over my appetite was after attending a silent meditation course (the free Goenka one). For 5 weeks after the course, I meditated twice a day for about 30 mins each time and resisted eating sweets. I lost 10 lbs. Then I ate some cake at a friend's birthday party and fell off the wagon. Maybe meditation would work for you?
I don't know which kind of diabetes you have. Did you know that some people with type 2 diabetes are cured with weight loss?
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20180917/lose-weight-rev...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12549482/what-is-new-nhs-type-...
I've tried losing weight many times with varying success. The only time I've had full control over my appetite was after attending a silent meditation course (the free Goenka one). For 5 weeks after the course, I meditated twice a day for about 30 mins each time and resisted eating sweets. I lost 10 lbs. Then I ate some cake at a friend's birthday party and fell off the wagon. Maybe meditation would work for you?
Fantastic! Congratulations to you both!
Congrats to you both!!
Congrats!
I think the keto/carnivore community has a decent track record with diabetes -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRHir1k9jmE
Eat animal products, avoid processed/sugars/carbs/grains etc
Stick to low FODMAP vegetables, and cook/ferment them when you can.
Eat animal products, avoid processed/sugars/carbs/grains etc
Stick to low FODMAP vegetables, and cook/ferment them when you can.
Depends on the type of diabetes. There are several. If it's type 2, then yes a keto diet, or just plain fasting (Jason Fung seems to be the expert to read up on for this) can help.
If it's type 1, then no.
If it's type 1, then no.
Wow owning your own company and a wife... Damn I wish I could be you.
While thoughtful, this missed an opportunity to write about a deeper dynamic.
Most of us spend our lives chasing the creation of transactions (with employers or the market, whether grants, purchases, or contracts) and maximizing the benefit we receive from those transactions. While I appreciate that this holds us to producing in ways that others adversarially agree is valuable and can incentivize efficiency... It also holds us in competition against rather than cooperation with. It focuses us on transaction creation, not on life improvement. If something would make everyone better off but that value can't be captured it often isn't done. If something should efficiently make us all happier but costs the decision maker any money it often isn't done.
These are necessarily generalizations. Instances of it being otherwise occur. Some contexts, like families and collectives allow for contradictions to my statements. These rarely scale.
I think of the dynamic that children will happily help out the family and do chores. Many parents find that when compensation for chores is offered the children become less helpful. They switch from joyfully (or at least meaningfully) participating in the family endeavor that supported and supports their growth and well being (and if lucky showered them with love). They switch to demanding compensation for everything and end up doing less to help.
If this describes our economic engagement, how much more could we all be happily accomplishing at greater efficiency with our time and energy?
I recognize this could sound like it would depend on some idealistic prosocial world. What assumptions hold that in place? What if the little supports we give and the forgone advantages were noted to our credit? What if our game theoretic strategies for engagement influenced the rules under which we labored and the willingness of others to interact with us? How do we better optimize?
Most of us spend our lives chasing the creation of transactions (with employers or the market, whether grants, purchases, or contracts) and maximizing the benefit we receive from those transactions. While I appreciate that this holds us to producing in ways that others adversarially agree is valuable and can incentivize efficiency... It also holds us in competition against rather than cooperation with. It focuses us on transaction creation, not on life improvement. If something would make everyone better off but that value can't be captured it often isn't done. If something should efficiently make us all happier but costs the decision maker any money it often isn't done.
These are necessarily generalizations. Instances of it being otherwise occur. Some contexts, like families and collectives allow for contradictions to my statements. These rarely scale.
I think of the dynamic that children will happily help out the family and do chores. Many parents find that when compensation for chores is offered the children become less helpful. They switch from joyfully (or at least meaningfully) participating in the family endeavor that supported and supports their growth and well being (and if lucky showered them with love). They switch to demanding compensation for everything and end up doing less to help.
If this describes our economic engagement, how much more could we all be happily accomplishing at greater efficiency with our time and energy?
I recognize this could sound like it would depend on some idealistic prosocial world. What assumptions hold that in place? What if the little supports we give and the forgone advantages were noted to our credit? What if our game theoretic strategies for engagement influenced the rules under which we labored and the willingness of others to interact with us? How do we better optimize?
It doesn't need a prosocial world, just a small space. With some effort, we could make a few square kilometers with both democracy and socialism. We could start a town.
I think the town would need these things to be successful:
- All land in the town is owned by a non-profit. The non-profit's board is elected by the town. It's private property, like a university.
- Businesses in the town are owned by non-profits. The non-profit's boards are elected by the town. The non-profits also provide venture capital and mentorship for new businesses.
- Everyone receives the same monthly income. Everyone must work at least 10 months a year, 35-hours a week. Folks who can work but refuse to work must choose between staying in a mental clinic and leaving the town.
- There are strong barriers to using outside money. For example, rent may only be paid from one's town-paid monthly income.
- Health care, education, and child care are free.
- Immigration to the town uses a lottery system, with buckets for various socio-economic and ethnic groups, so the people in the town represent the people in the country. The town charter specifies quarterly immigration quotas up to a target population (50% growth per year, from 50 people to 500k in 25 years).
- Voting is mandatory, ranked-choice, without districts, and without propositions. Elected leaders must be women and may serve only one term. All election candidates must take a knowledge exam and their answers are published for voters to scrutinize.
- Personal motor vehicles are not allowed inside the town. Everyone moves by walking, bicycles, and subway. Zoning is high-density mixed-use, like many cities in Europe and Asia.
- Products are transported between buildings via underground automated systems, like airport luggage delivery systems, in standardized crates. Trash, compost, and recyclables go in sealed crates. There are multiple delivery companies with rails/tracks stacked in the under-street corridors. Large items can be delivered by small electric trucks driving slowly on the roads.
Safe, quiet, and clean. Cozy.
I think of this nearly every day.
I think the town would need these things to be successful:
- All land in the town is owned by a non-profit. The non-profit's board is elected by the town. It's private property, like a university.
- Businesses in the town are owned by non-profits. The non-profit's boards are elected by the town. The non-profits also provide venture capital and mentorship for new businesses.
- Everyone receives the same monthly income. Everyone must work at least 10 months a year, 35-hours a week. Folks who can work but refuse to work must choose between staying in a mental clinic and leaving the town.
- There are strong barriers to using outside money. For example, rent may only be paid from one's town-paid monthly income.
- Health care, education, and child care are free.
- Immigration to the town uses a lottery system, with buckets for various socio-economic and ethnic groups, so the people in the town represent the people in the country. The town charter specifies quarterly immigration quotas up to a target population (50% growth per year, from 50 people to 500k in 25 years).
- Voting is mandatory, ranked-choice, without districts, and without propositions. Elected leaders must be women and may serve only one term. All election candidates must take a knowledge exam and their answers are published for voters to scrutinize.
- Personal motor vehicles are not allowed inside the town. Everyone moves by walking, bicycles, and subway. Zoning is high-density mixed-use, like many cities in Europe and Asia.
- Products are transported between buildings via underground automated systems, like airport luggage delivery systems, in standardized crates. Trash, compost, and recyclables go in sealed crates. There are multiple delivery companies with rails/tracks stacked in the under-street corridors. Large items can be delivered by small electric trucks driving slowly on the roads.
Safe, quiet, and clean. Cozy.
I think of this nearly every day.
That's not a town, that's a cult.
Would you please explain?
In my understanding, a cult is hard to leave. For the town I want to start, anyone can walk out at any time. They can to take a chunk of money with them, determined by what jobs they worked and how long.
Cooperative communities exist in USA and around the world and can be nice places to live. Most are based on religion or ideologies like permaculture or veganism. I want to live in a secular cooperative community that prioritizes quality of life. It's how I imagine human societies could be 200 years in the future. We already have a post-scarcity economy, it's just unequally distributed.
Many people give up the ability to walk to live in suburbs. I'm willing to give up the ability to be rich to live in a nice city.
In my understanding, a cult is hard to leave. For the town I want to start, anyone can walk out at any time. They can to take a chunk of money with them, determined by what jobs they worked and how long.
Cooperative communities exist in USA and around the world and can be nice places to live. Most are based on religion or ideologies like permaculture or veganism. I want to live in a secular cooperative community that prioritizes quality of life. It's how I imagine human societies could be 200 years in the future. We already have a post-scarcity economy, it's just unequally distributed.
Many people give up the ability to walk to live in suburbs. I'm willing to give up the ability to be rich to live in a nice city.
It requires (although implicitly) that everybody in your family also sign up. And it certainly doesn't sound like a place in which visitors are welcome. Also: what if there isn't enough work to go around for your mandatory minimum work amounts? What if the citizens (and jobs that need doing) aren't all perfectly spherical entities that are interchangeable?
You should read about the Kibbutz settlements [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz]. These were social settlements, that succeeded for a long time. However, many of them stopped being so social due to capitalistic pressures from the environment.
One of the biggest factors is that the Kibbutz is a business: it has income and expenses. If it doesn't produce enough income, it will fail, and indeed a successful Kibbutz is one that has a successful factory or other, producing goods or services that are sold to outside customers.
One of the biggest factors is that the Kibbutz is a business: it has income and expenses. If it doesn't produce enough income, it will fail, and indeed a successful Kibbutz is one that has a successful factory or other, producing goods or services that are sold to outside customers.
Yes! The success of the town will be determined by how much money its businesses can bring in from outside the town. I hope to start tech businesses to sustain the town and enable growth.
The big difficulty of traditional cooperatives is that they are subject to local markets for necessities: housing, health care, energy, transportation, and food. By starting a cooperative as a town, we can save big on many of these things.
For example, a cooperative in San Francisco has huge capital costs for each resident for housing. The cost per resident in major cities is dominated by housing. A cooperative built in a rural area has negligible housing costs. But building in a rural area brings some interesting problems.
Health care is also a large cost. The town will have its own clinic to save on that. If the town can grow fast enough, it can build its own hospital and save enormous amounts on health care. The hospital can also earn money by treating people from the surrounding area. I wish to retire in a town with a hospital.
Much modern housing is built without energy efficient options. This is because buyers are either ignorant or they prioritize short-term costs over long-term costs. An extra $200/mo in energy bills isn't so much when you're paying $1000/mo in mortgage. But once the mortgage is paid off, that $200/mo feels like a lot and they regret the decision to skip the architect consultation, triple-pane windows, and heat-recovery ventilators. A cooperative can have the expertise and foresight to optimize for long-term housing energy efficiency. This is good for the environment, the residents, and the cooperative's finances.
Cars use lots of energy. They wear out and depreciate. Accidents destroy quality of life and waste tons of money on medical bills. Roads are extremely expensive to build and maintain. Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. A town without cars and trucks won't have these costs.
The big difficulty of traditional cooperatives is that they are subject to local markets for necessities: housing, health care, energy, transportation, and food. By starting a cooperative as a town, we can save big on many of these things.
For example, a cooperative in San Francisco has huge capital costs for each resident for housing. The cost per resident in major cities is dominated by housing. A cooperative built in a rural area has negligible housing costs. But building in a rural area brings some interesting problems.
Health care is also a large cost. The town will have its own clinic to save on that. If the town can grow fast enough, it can build its own hospital and save enormous amounts on health care. The hospital can also earn money by treating people from the surrounding area. I wish to retire in a town with a hospital.
Much modern housing is built without energy efficient options. This is because buyers are either ignorant or they prioritize short-term costs over long-term costs. An extra $200/mo in energy bills isn't so much when you're paying $1000/mo in mortgage. But once the mortgage is paid off, that $200/mo feels like a lot and they regret the decision to skip the architect consultation, triple-pane windows, and heat-recovery ventilators. A cooperative can have the expertise and foresight to optimize for long-term housing energy efficiency. This is good for the environment, the residents, and the cooperative's finances.
Cars use lots of energy. They wear out and depreciate. Accidents destroy quality of life and waste tons of money on medical bills. Roads are extremely expensive to build and maintain. Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. A town without cars and trucks won't have these costs.
If you need to connect two servers together semi-permanently, and haven't tried spiped, stop reading and do it now. It's the single most useful tool I have on the backend.
Since Colin thinks kivaloo is more useful, but I've not heard of it, in going to look at that right now...
[edit]
I don't really have a use for a high performance, durable, KV store right now, so not convinced on kivaloo
Since Colin thinks kivaloo is more useful, but I've not heard of it, in going to look at that right now...
[edit]
I don't really have a use for a high performance, durable, KV store right now, so not convinced on kivaloo
Hey, I didn't say that kivaloo was useful for everyone. ;-)
I could not find you on https://dbdb.io.
Maybe you want to submit it at least there, so people will find it.
How does kivaloo compare to other databases like Redis?
Why should I use it?
PS: fully understand that you might have just written it for fun, but if you want it to grow, this is the kind of information I am looking for as a database user. :)
PS: fully understand that you might have just written it for fun, but if you want it to grow, this is the kind of information I am looking for as a database user. :)
What’s the advantage over a WireGuard point-to-point connection?
I've been using it long before wire-guard was generally available. I would guess that it's far less configuration to just "make port X on host Y look like port Z on localhost" with spiped, but I can't be sure.
Things I like about it off the top of my head:
- I will often start out with a single box, then say "well the DB should really be on a different machine" and just setup an spiped between them and I'm done. The actual application configuration changes not at all since it's still connecting to localhost.
- My dev machines can be configured to spiped to the non-production database and I can run tests just like I would in production, since everything internal connects to ports on localhost; I literally can't accidentally mess up the production DB in a dev environment because the only place the hostname for the DB is is in the service file that starts spiped.
[edit]
Totally forgot the best feature: it can proxy between unix domain socket and TCP, which is something I think it had before SSH (it certainly had it before the ssh on my machine could do it).
It also will re-lookup hostnames at a configurable interval, so new connections can be sent to a different machine just by configuring DNS.
Things I like about it off the top of my head:
- I will often start out with a single box, then say "well the DB should really be on a different machine" and just setup an spiped between them and I'm done. The actual application configuration changes not at all since it's still connecting to localhost.
- My dev machines can be configured to spiped to the non-production database and I can run tests just like I would in production, since everything internal connects to ports on localhost; I literally can't accidentally mess up the production DB in a dev environment because the only place the hostname for the DB is is in the service file that starts spiped.
[edit]
Totally forgot the best feature: it can proxy between unix domain socket and TCP, which is something I think it had before SSH (it certainly had it before the ssh on my machine could do it).
It also will re-lookup hostnames at a configurable interval, so new connections can be sent to a different machine just by configuring DNS.
The most obvious thing to say is 'it's been there for the last decade'.
I don't say that to preclude it from continuing to have an advantage over WireGuard, but I haven't used it (spiped) so couldn't comment.
I don't say that to preclude it from continuing to have an advantage over WireGuard, but I haven't used it (spiped) so couldn't comment.
I am still blown away by what you did with BSDiff. Recently I was benchmarking it against architecturally optimized delta generators like Courgette. Amazingly BSDiff outperformed Courgette on my payload of AMD64 binaries. You have projects with years of dev time getting outclassed by simple BSDiff.
So I am not familiar with those tools at all, but I feel like it's worth noting this is the difference between academia and general practitioners/laymen. laymen and general practitioners may often be the first to explore an area that academia overlooked, but with the way academia is supposed to work, the amount of deep study and essentially throwing minds at the problem is supposed to produce completely separate classes of solutions (or the understanding that a better solution can't be made).
General practice is often incremental improvement, research is supposed to produce paradigm shifts. This is why PhDs are worth something to all the FAANG employers -- they can get by just hiring smart people without worrying if they can write good code or not, because it's way easier to find someone who can write you the code to implement the algorithm created by someone who's steeped their brain in a problem for 5+ years.
General practice is often incremental improvement, research is supposed to produce paradigm shifts. This is why PhDs are worth something to all the FAANG employers -- they can get by just hiring smart people without worrying if they can write good code or not, because it's way easier to find someone who can write you the code to implement the algorithm created by someone who's steeped their brain in a problem for 5+ years.
A bit off topic, but I am major fan of single developer apps and services. They generally have a focus and lack of bloat that makes them invaluable as tools to just get things done, and because of the small business footprint they don't need to endlessly scale into oblivion to satisfy shareholders / staff wages etc. Off the top of my head I am thinking of things I use regularly like pinboard, mailmate, Name Mangler, manager.io. Even builtwith.com is (or was for a long long time) one person!
I waste my life implementing the stupid decisions of the business and doing chores while my wife pursues hobbies.
I have no agency over my own life at work or home - I hate it. I will make no meaningful contributions to society in my life.
I have no agency over my own life at work or home - I hate it. I will make no meaningful contributions to society in my life.
It is amazing the impact of finding something in your life you can control and build on that.
Start off by putting 24*7 hours on an Excel sheet, fill them in with your sleep and obligations and necessary rest, then work out whether you have 60 minutes a week for you. If you do, start from there.
In those 60 minutes of your time, figure out how you can increase it to 120 minutes a week. Maybe you say NO to that unpaid overtime, or let some of those chores slip, or ask your wife to do 1 particular chore.
Then slowly build out from there. Once you are at 8 hours a week you can possibly consider a bigger thing, for example learning new tech or passing interviews that could land you a job that you love, that you do less hours. Or seeing if you can be a digital nomad and plan that out for after covid.
And then let it snowball.
Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
What you do with your marriage - then that's up to you but you'll be in a better place to answer it.
Start off by putting 24*7 hours on an Excel sheet, fill them in with your sleep and obligations and necessary rest, then work out whether you have 60 minutes a week for you. If you do, start from there.
In those 60 minutes of your time, figure out how you can increase it to 120 minutes a week. Maybe you say NO to that unpaid overtime, or let some of those chores slip, or ask your wife to do 1 particular chore.
Then slowly build out from there. Once you are at 8 hours a week you can possibly consider a bigger thing, for example learning new tech or passing interviews that could land you a job that you love, that you do less hours. Or seeing if you can be a digital nomad and plan that out for after covid.
And then let it snowball.
Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
What you do with your marriage - then that's up to you but you'll be in a better place to answer it.
> Eventually you will not feel like "I have no agency over my own life".
The fact that you have to resort to an excel spreadsheet implies that you have no agency over your life. People with actual agency over their lives don't have to squeeze a few minutes for themselves no more than a wealthy person has to search between the cushions for pocket change.
The fact that you have to resort to an excel spreadsheet implies that you have no agency over your life. People with actual agency over their lives don't have to squeeze a few minutes for themselves no more than a wealthy person has to search between the cushions for pocket change.
I disagree, but even assuming you are correct there, I think there is a roadmap. The key is to get some wins under your belt. It's like getting fit. Don't try to run 10k from sedate lifestyle. Try to walk 2k with a couple of jogs along the way.
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Never underestimate your impact on the lives of others. The most meaningful impact you can ever have is in your own home with your own family.
I made a really cool dependency manager that I thought was groundbreaking but not a lot of people use it and those that do are strangers. I found a lot more meaning in my life comes from gardening and helping around the house. Real people who depend on me need that.
Lately I found something to look forward to in knitting and listening to a book on tape at the same time at night. Just 45 minutes or so every night after my chores really helps me feel like I can get up the next morning.
With all of Collin's many accomplishments, I'm sure he still feels that the best thing that ever happened to him was his family, in this case his new wife.
I made a really cool dependency manager that I thought was groundbreaking but not a lot of people use it and those that do are strangers. I found a lot more meaning in my life comes from gardening and helping around the house. Real people who depend on me need that.
Lately I found something to look forward to in knitting and listening to a book on tape at the same time at night. Just 45 minutes or so every night after my chores really helps me feel like I can get up the next morning.
With all of Collin's many accomplishments, I'm sure he still feels that the best thing that ever happened to him was his family, in this case his new wife.
Sorry, but you don't know that at all. Your presence or a couple of happy words might have been the thing that kept someone from taking a dark path. The smile to a stranger, a head nod, or just holding the door open might have brought some back a bit. We don't have perfect information, so we really don't know.
I am sorry for your situation. The treadmill truly sucks, and I hope you find a way to discuss your situation with your wife in a constructive manner.
Sometimes the best we can do is be kind to others and work at getting to a good place ourselves. I've worn the mask more than once myself.
I am sorry for your situation. The treadmill truly sucks, and I hope you find a way to discuss your situation with your wife in a constructive manner.
Sometimes the best we can do is be kind to others and work at getting to a good place ourselves. I've worn the mask more than once myself.
99 percent of humans that have ever existed had less wordly impact than you, just based on your ability to comment and post on the internet.
Comparatively, you’ve had an incredible impact and driven change in the world.
(I think that’s accurate)
Comparatively, you’ve had an incredible impact and driven change in the world.
(I think that’s accurate)
Have you considered hiring help to do the chores at home? You might have more time to spare for hobbies.
I don't really have the money for that since I also pay all the bills while my wife spends her income on hobbies.
Sounds like some marriage counseling would go a long way.
Sounds like you are not happy with the way your wife is treating you. Something will snap if you don't sort that out.
Sounds like you are not happy with the way your wife is treating you. Something will snap if you don't sort that out.
I've thought about it, but that would just be another expensive bill that I have to pay. I'm not sure I can swing that now with my kid's medical issues and my wife's legal issue.
It's cheaper than the eventual divorce.
If that happens, I'll quit my job and live in a van down by the river. The system has screwed me enough already.
Please reconsider therapy. If your wife won't engage in couple's therapy, then please consider therapy on your own. You sound depressed, and you are providing reasons to not bother taking action to be not depressed. I am worried by that.
Eh, it's just life. Nothing can be done.
Things can be done! But you have to decide that your life satisfaction is worth it.
There are some skills that will help you a lot in your situation. I learned them from a book called Nonviolent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. My therapist recommended it. I hope you will try reading it.
Maybe you should have your partner do the chores then? You sound like a push over. How does your wife even have income if all she pursues is hobbies?
She doesn't just pursue hobbies. She turned one of her hobbies into income (tennis teacher). She uses almost all that money for her hobbies like dressage (she saves a tiny amount).
She refuses to learn how to do most chores, like shopping or cooking. She doesn't have the technical mindset/background for others, such as handyman, mechanic, or yardwork stuff.
She refuses to learn how to do most chores, like shopping or cooking. She doesn't have the technical mindset/background for others, such as handyman, mechanic, or yardwork stuff.
Okay, so at least she is earning income. But it isn't really a good situation if you work 8 hours and she works 8 hours, but then you also do 4 hours of housework per day and she does zero. There are a million mindless tasks that need to be done regularly in a house...putting dishes in the dishwasher, cleaning a bathroom, folding laundry, that takes zero learning.
She does 3 chores - most of the dishes, most of the laundry, and vacuuming. And she still won't get that stuff right. So there is some learning involved.
She consistently ruins the seasoning on the cast iron because she insists on using scotch-brite on everything (plastic, glass, enamel, etc). She asks me to do the laundry if there are stains or if I need to pre soak the whites. Otherwise she always does it cold water with soap only and they come out dull or still dirty. And she insists on using the 2" vacuum cleaner tube to do the vinyl floor. It would be sooo much more efficient to just run it over the floor normally (won't hurt this floor).
She also has a tendency to break things and expect me to fix them - like it's not her problem. I even have to tell her stuff like keep the dog on a leash. Now I have to take care of a bunch of legal stuff for her (side not is that the officer wrote it up incorrectly or it would just be a fine).
Isn't one of the points of getting married to work as a team and make each other's lives easier? In my opinion she makes my life more difficult. I swear I'm the only adult in the house.
She consistently ruins the seasoning on the cast iron because she insists on using scotch-brite on everything (plastic, glass, enamel, etc). She asks me to do the laundry if there are stains or if I need to pre soak the whites. Otherwise she always does it cold water with soap only and they come out dull or still dirty. And she insists on using the 2" vacuum cleaner tube to do the vinyl floor. It would be sooo much more efficient to just run it over the floor normally (won't hurt this floor).
She also has a tendency to break things and expect me to fix them - like it's not her problem. I even have to tell her stuff like keep the dog on a leash. Now I have to take care of a bunch of legal stuff for her (side not is that the officer wrote it up incorrectly or it would just be a fine).
Isn't one of the points of getting married to work as a team and make each other's lives easier? In my opinion she makes my life more difficult. I swear I'm the only adult in the house.
Sounds like you're miserable and don't even want to be in that relationship. Why bother?
You sound like a huge pushover.
You sound like a huge pushover.
It seems like ML is an interesting counterexample to Colin's point. Industry is now one of the best places to do ML research, but, the history is pretty fascinating. It seems like ML was a product of academia, and quite a fine product too.
I think we as entrepreneur types want to dismiss academia. But there's something to be said for the institution. It's one of the only ways to "infect the world with a thought virus."
Besides, which research problems has Tarsnap solved? At least, solved in a way that can be reused by the world?
I think we as entrepreneur types want to dismiss academia. But there's something to be said for the institution. It's one of the only ways to "infect the world with a thought virus."
Besides, which research problems has Tarsnap solved? At least, solved in a way that can be reused by the world?
The answer to your question is in the OP article. If you forgot, reread it.
If Colin knew that he would have proved Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer as an academic, would he have regrets about leaving academia? This is clearly an academic (no pun intended) question, but I say it to illustrate a point: it's hard to know if you made the right choices in life, since you don't have perfect information about the course of alternative paths.
I have been in academia and industry. I suffer from 'grass-is-greener' syndrome right now in industry, and am pining for more research. But I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I were stuck on a postdoc-to-postdoc treadmill.
I have been in academia and industry. I suffer from 'grass-is-greener' syndrome right now in industry, and am pining for more research. But I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I were stuck on a postdoc-to-postdoc treadmill.
I think backup system ops are super important. If an invisible college exists for security research, then the dude who invented scrypt would be pretty close to its top. He's also too modest for not using an anchor tag to link to his business, and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
He's also too modest for not using an anchor tag to link to his business
I figure that my my readers probably know what Tarsnap is by this point; or if they don't, they know how to use Google.
and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
I saw no insult. I omitted the users's name because thought the question was interesting independent of the person who asked it.
I figure that my my readers probably know what Tarsnap is by this point; or if they don't, they know how to use Google.
and too generous for not naming the HN user who insulted him.
I saw no insult. I omitted the users's name because thought the question was interesting independent of the person who asked it.
Read a different way I suppose it's actually a compliment. It's not everyday I see people voicing frustration that someone chose not to solve P vs. NP.
I didn't have to squint so hard to read "obviously a genius" as a compliment
Right on, man. I'm following the same path--couldn't afford college, decided to start a business, then freelance, then became a yuppie, then started living in my car to write software, started selling it, and now I'm making money (minimum wage, at-least) writing the software I want to. I've so-far released an OS and desktop sync client for this weird tablet, and now I'm writing a libre handwriting recognizer.
If you have faith in yourself, and follow your spirit, you can be successful and not accountable to anyone--complete intellectual and creative freedom. However, it does require some nerve to stand against the corporate machine.
If you have faith in yourself, and follow your spirit, you can be successful and not accountable to anyone--complete intellectual and creative freedom. However, it does require some nerve to stand against the corporate machine.
(The weird tablet in question probably being the ReMarkable, considering other comments)
As an academic myself I can somehow relate with Colin sentiment, not all work that is done in academia is impactful and/or novel, and indeed the current system rewards small incremental improvements rather than working on challenging problems.
However, I feel that there is academia and academia. I am lucky enough to: a) work with a supervisor that, during my PhD, encouraged me to ignore, and sometimes even challenge, the consensus view of the research community on the topic, believing that there's always more than one way to do things.; b) live in a country were universities are still mostly state-founded and so I do not need to constantly be hunting for grants.
Of course, there are compromises. I do have to spend some of my time on projects/papers that I hardly believe will ever have an impact outside of the academic world but that is pretty much the same as having to manage servers and customers, as long as it leaves me enough time to work on projects/papers that I enjoy.
Finally, I do believe that "small incremental improvements" is not the only way to do earn a living in academia. Being curiosity-driven, I consider myself more of a "generalist" rather than a "specialist" and I've been investigating rather diverse topics (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361852). As I only have been doing this for a few years I have no idea whether my work will eventually be considered relevant enough to earn me a permanent position, but so far it has been quite well received by the academic community and I had no troubles in publishing it.
However, I feel that there is academia and academia. I am lucky enough to: a) work with a supervisor that, during my PhD, encouraged me to ignore, and sometimes even challenge, the consensus view of the research community on the topic, believing that there's always more than one way to do things.; b) live in a country were universities are still mostly state-founded and so I do not need to constantly be hunting for grants.
Of course, there are compromises. I do have to spend some of my time on projects/papers that I hardly believe will ever have an impact outside of the academic world but that is pretty much the same as having to manage servers and customers, as long as it leaves me enough time to work on projects/papers that I enjoy.
Finally, I do believe that "small incremental improvements" is not the only way to do earn a living in academia. Being curiosity-driven, I consider myself more of a "generalist" rather than a "specialist" and I've been investigating rather diverse topics (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22678471 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361852). As I only have been doing this for a few years I have no idea whether my work will eventually be considered relevant enough to earn me a permanent position, but so far it has been quite well received by the academic community and I had no troubles in publishing it.
I did not realize scrypt was invented to secure Tarsnap backups. Funny. I imagined the backup problem as being a matter of just careful engineering and the pbkdf problem as requiring novel insight. Solving the latter to improve the former is pretty cool.
Anyway, this guy walks the walk. But how did he do on the Putnam?
Anyway, this guy walks the walk. But how did he do on the Putnam?
I bet he didn't even crack the top ten.
Not that it matters, but #6: https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/putnam1999results.html
This whole rhetorical question/joke was a reference to "the comeback of all time" (also involving Colin Percival):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
#6 alphabetically, yes.
They don't announce the ranks of the top 6 because they want to just say that all the Putnam Fellows won without drawing distinctions between them.
They don't announce the ranks of the top 6 because they want to just say that all the Putnam Fellows won without drawing distinctions between them.
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> Is our society structured in a way which encourages people to make less than the greatest contribution they could?
While he answers his question, I want to point out that posing this question implicitly ties "contribution to society" with "use of a life". The utilitarianism makes sense to me, but I don't think everyone would agree that that is the right metric (for example, average or total happiness might be alternatives).
While he answers his question, I want to point out that posing this question implicitly ties "contribution to society" with "use of a life". The utilitarianism makes sense to me, but I don't think everyone would agree that that is the right metric (for example, average or total happiness might be alternatives).
I believe I did address the philosophical question with the fact that it's my life and I can spend it however I like. I don't think that's inconsistent with wondering how one could make the greatest contribution to society -- if anything, it makes the choice all the more meaningful.
I have misunderstood. I re-read the passage and it seems that in that question you were not trying to derive insights about society, but saying because society is not structured this way, therefore you went and did that. The question was left open until the end, and because of the way the original question was phrased ("society" being the subject) I thought your thesis was about optimizing your life from society's view rather than from your own point of view.
Yeah. Summing it up in just 3 words: "Greatest for whom?"
"Is our society structured in a way which encourages people to make less than the greatest contribution they could?"
Is this a serious question? I feel like anyone with a conscious can safely answer this with a resounding "Yes!".
Is this a serious question? I feel like anyone with a conscious can safely answer this with a resounding "Yes!".
I don't think it's so straightforward but I guess it depends on what societal structures we are comparing.
Considering historical structures I would argue that we currently live in a world much more open to various contributions. In the past you might have been locked down in a village doing fieldwork with no one even giving you the possibility of higher education. In some parts of the world this is still true. There is no way to tell how many hidden talents we lose right now to just toiling away with daily chores.
In the western society I think things are much better. The problem we are facing is that if you want and have talent to contribute to a niche is "just" the question of who will finance you. This is indeed for many a showstopper but also many have found a way to push through.
Then, after you have made the contribution, the problem is to convince others of the value. How many great ideas are lost to obscurity because some powers that be are stopping them? IMHO this is the bigger problem and perhaps this is what you are referring to?
I would still say that the contribution had been made by then and, with time and a bit of optimism, those powers that be also erode and a contribution can come to life. Or, if it applies, launch a startup and disrupt the powers by yourself ;)
Considering historical structures I would argue that we currently live in a world much more open to various contributions. In the past you might have been locked down in a village doing fieldwork with no one even giving you the possibility of higher education. In some parts of the world this is still true. There is no way to tell how many hidden talents we lose right now to just toiling away with daily chores.
In the western society I think things are much better. The problem we are facing is that if you want and have talent to contribute to a niche is "just" the question of who will finance you. This is indeed for many a showstopper but also many have found a way to push through.
Then, after you have made the contribution, the problem is to convince others of the value. How many great ideas are lost to obscurity because some powers that be are stopping them? IMHO this is the bigger problem and perhaps this is what you are referring to?
I would still say that the contribution had been made by then and, with time and a bit of optimism, those powers that be also erode and a contribution can come to life. Or, if it applies, launch a startup and disrupt the powers by yourself ;)
And after an HN comment touched some nerve, he took a few hours out of the life "working on backups" to explain to the rest of us why he thinks his lifes activities were impactful. (And it seems it was!)
I'm not sure HN comments (intentional or not) should ever put someone else in a position of feeling they need to explain the impact of their life.
I'm not sure HN comments (intentional or not) should ever put someone else in a position of feeling they need to explain the impact of their life.
On the one hand I agree with you: no one should be expected to justify their life. (Who would have the wisdom to judge, anyway?) But on the other hand, I do think it's useful to ask whether the limited supply of genius in our society is being well-employed. Thinkers in the finance industry worry about this a lot, for example. Is it really a "good thing" that huge pools of quantitative talent are being drawn away from math and physics towards complex derivatives trading? Is shaving a few fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a second off the duration of a securities trade a good use of their time and talents? While I agree the original comment could have been more sensitive to the real person on the other side of the screen, I still think it asked a useful question and we're getting a good discussion out of it.
I didn't feel that I needed to explain things. Indeed, I could easily have ignored the comment and -- buried in the middle of a large thread as it was -- very few people would have noticed it.
In case anyone's curious, here's the original comment thread Colin is referring to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532469
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532469
> spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems
The fundamental issue with this comment is that it assumes that solving millennium problems is obviously a high impact thing to do. It ignores the complexity and unpredictability of the world.
The TarSnap developer's story is a great example of this -- how "working on backups" led to impactful work that he probably didn't predict when he started it.
I often see people fall into the trap of moralizing about what "good" work is. Ironically, that prevents them from ultimately having the most impact that they could have.
The fundamental issue with this comment is that it assumes that solving millennium problems is obviously a high impact thing to do. It ignores the complexity and unpredictability of the world.
The TarSnap developer's story is a great example of this -- how "working on backups" led to impactful work that he probably didn't predict when he started it.
I often see people fall into the trap of moralizing about what "good" work is. Ironically, that prevents them from ultimately having the most impact that they could have.
This is really excellent, thanks for being willing to share Colin. It's an impactful essay and the last paragraph in particular hits very hard. I'm a big fan of your work and the path you have taken!
> In short, academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused.
I find it stunning at how little people understand the role of incentives in basically any sort of human-driven activity.
I find it stunning at how little people understand the role of incentives in basically any sort of human-driven activity.
You find it stunning that people don’t intuit a fundamental principal as regards human behavior? You’re either commenting in bad faith or you yourself don’t understand some basic principals of humanity in the 21st century itself.
It’s interesting. I’m looking at your comment and GP’s comment and there are two equally obvious ways to interpret the GP’s comment:
- academia’s bureaucracy not understanding the incentives they’re creating and the positive and negative consequences
- the OP not understanding the intentional incentives and outcomes created by the academic bureaucracy
- academia’s bureaucracy not understanding the incentives they’re creating and the positive and negative consequences
- the OP not understanding the intentional incentives and outcomes created by the academic bureaucracy
You can substitute surprising for stunning. In any case, I'm guilty of missing this as much as anyone. I chuckle at Charlie Munger's aphorism:
"Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther."
"Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther."
It's the man in the arena who counts, per Teddy Roosevelt. I really enjoyed your work on PiHex and haven't used any of your later more notable works. Loved it! But should you have done that the rest of your life? Who should you serve? Was it great progress and good for you to move from PiHex to tarsnap or a step backwards? By what standard? Do we really have as much agency as the questioner implies? Do we choose problems or do they choose us? Is there only one true joy in the world? Is there only one good work to be done? I find the original question contains false premises that I personally found very ridiculous. You responded very maturely though, and it is a credit to you. Thanks Colin. You be you.
About that last bit where he mentions the academic grant, I wonder if the standard of living afforded to academics has dropped over the years.
If you hang around Oxford and Cambridge, you find these old buildings that look impressive. Then you study there for a bit and you find out a lot of the places seem to be divided up, as if there was once a time when each member had much more space than they did when I got there.
Same goes with the common areas, they somehow seem like they were meant to be used by fewer people.
Of course there are also new building there, but they're all of the cramped office variety, lending further credence to the theory.
If you hang around Oxford and Cambridge, you find these old buildings that look impressive. Then you study there for a bit and you find out a lot of the places seem to be divided up, as if there was once a time when each member had much more space than they did when I got there.
Same goes with the common areas, they somehow seem like they were meant to be used by fewer people.
Of course there are also new building there, but they're all of the cramped office variety, lending further credence to the theory.
A life spent on a backup system is unproductive? Ha ha, if only mine had been so productive. I'd say the majority of code that I've worked on was dubious in the first place, and decommissioned by now.
Thankfully I'm a nihilist and don't have any expectation that my life will be meaningful. I happily work on things that most people would consider pointless and a waste of time.
Thankfully I'm a nihilist and don't have any expectation that my life will be meaningful. I happily work on things that most people would consider pointless and a waste of time.
It’s unfortunate that Tarsnap uses cryptography (and technology) developed 95% in academia that seems not appreciated by its author who seems focused on the rest of the 5%.
People in industry deliver a product and feel the impact. But sometimes they forget that there is several centuries of innovation in math and physics that has enabled that product.
On cryptography, you need people like DJB who invent algorithms, you need thousands of pages of crypto analysis to make sense of it, you need guarantees, you need to think of quantum computers 50 years in the future, etc etc. For instance, you need Salsa20 and those hash algorithms developed by others. These components each depend on other building blocks developed earlier. I encourage you to see the broader scientific and technological enterprise.
The vast majority of long term research takes place still in academia.
People in industry deliver a product and feel the impact. But sometimes they forget that there is several centuries of innovation in math and physics that has enabled that product.
On cryptography, you need people like DJB who invent algorithms, you need thousands of pages of crypto analysis to make sense of it, you need guarantees, you need to think of quantum computers 50 years in the future, etc etc. For instance, you need Salsa20 and those hash algorithms developed by others. These components each depend on other building blocks developed earlier. I encourage you to see the broader scientific and technological enterprise.
The vast majority of long term research takes place still in academia.
To what part of the post are you responding? If there is any point in which the OP showed a lack of appreciation of what came before them, I missed it.
Probably to the "academia is a lousy place to do novel research" part. I don't know about you, but I also took this as really dismissive of the work done by people in academia.
Interesting. I only saw that as criticizing the institution and processes rather than the academics themselves.
The comment that is mentioned in the article is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24533381
There is one more lesson here. Sorry if this is a bit OT and I don't know Colin but the lesson is "be good at one thing and crush it."
It's good that he has dedicated a big part of time to just one thing: backups (and things related to backups). And that's why he is best at it and has billion dollar companies like Stripe giving him testimonials. Had he spent his time on 20 different things, chances you wouldn't think of tarsnap when you think backups.
This I feel is also a very common trap of entrepreneurship (especially for solo people).
It's good that he has dedicated a big part of time to just one thing: backups (and things related to backups). And that's why he is best at it and has billion dollar companies like Stripe giving him testimonials. Had he spent his time on 20 different things, chances you wouldn't think of tarsnap when you think backups.
This I feel is also a very common trap of entrepreneurship (especially for solo people).
I think the whole post was trying to say that he has also done other things not related to backups so you certainly are OT
This made me chuckle because I work in consulting for private equity funds doing diligence on companies they're going to buy, and to them, encrypted backups are one of the most important things out there! They go in the category of "risks you'd better goddamned be taking care of right or we'll just keep our millions". "Just backups"???? lol
Do you mind sharing your pathway in that line of work and what the Dynamics are like in tech PE?
Just, thanks for posting this. Been down lately (hasn't everyone...) and wondering "what could have been" if I'd stayed in academia. This post gives me new inspiration to keep plugging away at work and spend some spare time researching things that are interesting to me, and could be just as productive as doing it in academia.
The academic/business split is weird. In business, you're much more likely to be unknowingly treading on known ground, but the visibility of lessons learned is, in most cases, incredibly narrow. I've worked on compilers blindly implementing features I know other competitors have worked on but can't cheat off of, and I've worked on systems programming issues that probably pushed at the state of the art, but whose lessons wouldn't go outside my team in any case.
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.
In academia, though, there's a whole host of obstacles to doing anything useful and interesting that have nothing to do with "the problem at hand". So while you can be more confident in the relative novelty of what you're doing, as well as the broad applicability of said work (since the whole point is publishing) the scope of things you actually can work on is incredibly limited until late in your career.
In parts of academia, there is much deeper collaboration and smaller gaps in goals, incentives, etc. Both sides publish papers everyone reads, and there is general applicability. People even, gasp, go back and forth throughout a career.
Pure math though, sucks and is total blackhole for talent. Definitely agree there.
Pure math though, sucks and is total blackhole for talent. Definitely agree there.
I don't believe in irreplaceable geniuses that will solve every problem if given the time.
Let's take the most archetypal genius: Einstein. First, he was here at the right time. Relativity was begging to be discovered, at the time we had observations good enough to invalidate the previous theories and fit the new ones. The mathematical groundwork was here, all that was needed was a spark of genius, which Einstein had, but I'm quite many others had it too. But maybe the others chose a topic other than physics, had a different education, or were born too early or too late...
Furthermore, Einstein essentially took 10 years to revolutionize physics. And then, not much. By not much, I mean he was still a top class physicist, but he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
So what if after finishing his work on general relativity, he just died, or pursued a career in management, or something like that. Many people would have probably said he would have discovered all the secrets of the universe, when in reality, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in history.
So don't worry and live your life as you want to, and don't expect too much of others. Things will get discovered eventually, and just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, and vice versa.
Let's take the most archetypal genius: Einstein. First, he was here at the right time. Relativity was begging to be discovered, at the time we had observations good enough to invalidate the previous theories and fit the new ones. The mathematical groundwork was here, all that was needed was a spark of genius, which Einstein had, but I'm quite many others had it too. But maybe the others chose a topic other than physics, had a different education, or were born too early or too late...
Furthermore, Einstein essentially took 10 years to revolutionize physics. And then, not much. By not much, I mean he was still a top class physicist, but he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
So what if after finishing his work on general relativity, he just died, or pursued a career in management, or something like that. Many people would have probably said he would have discovered all the secrets of the universe, when in reality, it wouldn't have made much of a dent in history.
So don't worry and live your life as you want to, and don't expect too much of others. Things will get discovered eventually, and just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, and vice versa.
This is essentially the theory of multiple discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery), as opposed to the heroic theory of discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_theory_of_invention_and...).
Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.
One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.
Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.
One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.
The funny thing is that the theory of evolution is an instance of multiple discoverers, one is just much more famous than the other. Alfred Russel Wallace is "the other guy." There are a few examples of truly heroic discoveries, but often they aren't recognized in their lifetime, the discovery needs other supporting discoveries to be identified. Mendel and Bayes are examples of people who should have revolutionized their field, but their importance wasn't recognized u til after their deaths. The progress of society is based on a lot of little discoveries over a few big ones. I agree that we need to be encouraging people to make those little discoveries.
So, in other words, it steam engines when it's steam engine time, and it relativities when it's relativity time.
Not exactly. Steam Engine time doesn't come on its own; it's created by people.
It's like any job -- we don't need all of the available workers, but we do need some. And in creative work, we need multiple perspectives to help improve the idea.
It's like any job -- we don't need all of the available workers, but we do need some. And in creative work, we need multiple perspectives to help improve the idea.
“ just because someone did great things in the past doesn't mean they will in the future”
I would say a Picasso or a Da Vinci is much more likely to create something meaningful given the track record at the height of their career, than some random person off the street.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of effort it takes to master a given field, and the subsequent dividends that are paid when you achieve mastery.
I would say a Picasso or a Da Vinci is much more likely to create something meaningful given the track record at the height of their career, than some random person off the street.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of effort it takes to master a given field, and the subsequent dividends that are paid when you achieve mastery.
Not necessarily. After some point, any new Picasso was just "more of the same". The reason his later works are still valuable is mostly because of our fetishism with the products of (already) famous artists + inflation by galleries and art merchants -- not because of any unique new insight/style/proposition/innovation/inherent value they had.
You chose a bad example.
Picasso is famous for reinventing himself and abandoning cubism (which he invented) to study and pursue classical painting.
Picasso is famous for reinventing himself and abandoning cubism (which he invented) to study and pursue classical painting.
>Picasso is famous for reinventing himself and abandoning cubism (which he invented) to study and pursue classical painting.
He abandoned cubism in his 20s or so. He afterwards had 50+ years of more boring work with less re-invention.
He abandoned cubism in his 20s or so. He afterwards had 50+ years of more boring work with less re-invention.
And Billy Joel switched from Pop to Classical, but his Classical work wasn't as important as his Pop work. He's no Picasso but the pattern holds.
But would those classical paintings be as famous if his earlier work wasn't? Probably not.
There's a good reason why many laws in math and physics have two or three names. They are oftentimes discovered simultaneously by several people and it's not always possible to tell who was first.
> he couldn't restart the spark of genius, or he simply didn't have fuel for it.
In other words, by the time he had proven himself for academia, it was too late to fund him. You are proving the OPs point that academia isn't the place to do novel research in.
In other words, by the time he had proven himself for academia, it was too late to fund him. You are proving the OPs point that academia isn't the place to do novel research in.
What do you mean? Einstein was well funded for decades, and his famous work wasn't funded at all.
> What do you mean? Einstein was well funded for decades, and his famous work wasn't funded at all.
That's exactly what is being pointed out.
His famous work wasn't funded, so perhaps funding at that point would have resulted in even more work at that level of insight and impact, or perhaps the we would have had the special and general theories of relativity sooner.
Conversely, by the time he was famous and therefore well-funded, he was no longer producing work at that level.
So, the idea is that funding doesn't go where and when it would do the most good.
Personally I think generalizing from one famous person's track record isn't such a great idea, but there is certainly data that suggests that committees aren't particularly good at choosing which grant proposals to fund[0][1][2], and that it would be a good idea to choose at least some proposals randomly[3] (as long as they meet a minimal threshold of quality/sanity), if only to shift the incentives away from trying to game the system.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/12/2952
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4797
[3] https://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16
That's exactly what is being pointed out.
His famous work wasn't funded, so perhaps funding at that point would have resulted in even more work at that level of insight and impact, or perhaps the we would have had the special and general theories of relativity sooner.
Conversely, by the time he was famous and therefore well-funded, he was no longer producing work at that level.
So, the idea is that funding doesn't go where and when it would do the most good.
Personally I think generalizing from one famous person's track record isn't such a great idea, but there is certainly data that suggests that committees aren't particularly good at choosing which grant proposals to fund[0][1][2], and that it would be a good idea to choose at least some proposals randomly[3] (as long as they meet a minimal threshold of quality/sanity), if only to shift the incentives away from trying to game the system.
[0] https://elifesciences.org/articles/13323
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/12/2952
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4797
[3] https://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16
I think there is another angle to it. After a major result, is the purpose to continue finding major results or broadcast, proselytize, and teach.
One of the crazy things that I have found as a senior engineer, I focus much more on growing people in the space I created. Afterall, if the space I create can't be occupied by people, then I failed.
For Einstein, how much of his time was dedicated towards the education of ideas versus trying to solve new problems. I don't know, but it is worth considering what the purpose of tenure. Is the idea of tenure to encourage people to find new results, or to continue teaching their ideas?
One of the crazy things that I have found as a senior engineer, I focus much more on growing people in the space I created. Afterall, if the space I create can't be occupied by people, then I failed.
For Einstein, how much of his time was dedicated towards the education of ideas versus trying to solve new problems. I don't know, but it is worth considering what the purpose of tenure. Is the idea of tenure to encourage people to find new results, or to continue teaching their ideas?
I understood tenure to more or less mean "We've found your contributions valuable enough to date that we are now ensuring that you can never be fired for having the 'wrong' opinions, thus guaranteeing your academic freedom."
Whether that academic freedom is intended to enable teaching or further research probably varies by institution and subject/department, and maybe individually as well.
Whether that academic freedom is intended to enable teaching or further research probably varies by institution and subject/department, and maybe individually as well.
What makes TarSnap so good? I would assume that borg + Backblaze would be equivalently secure but much cheaper.
@cperciva -- I was very surprised to see you not mention bsdiff here as one of your accomplishments. Incidentally, did you ever succeed in freeing the enhanced version of bsdiff from Oxford University? Seems a shame for it to still be going to waste, even now.
As an academic, I agree with much of the post (although I'd say people who are able to do free, autonomous research is a minority both in academia and in industry. In industry, most people don't own the company, and even those who do often have too many restrictions imposed by clients, time, etc. to do that). But I would like to comment on one detail:
"In short, academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused".
Not ironically. Deliberately and consciously. In recent decades, there has been a push to evaluate public services in private sector terms, i.e., basically, economic profitability (and in particular, short-term profitability). At least in my country, this is quite explicit, but I suppose it happens everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. There is a lot of public discourse that academia cannot be an ivory tower, it has to constantly be evaluated and provide proof that what it's doing is useful. It's difficult to obtain funding for basic science, you need to promise immediate practical applications to obtain grants. Papers are increasingly shunned in favor of patents, the academic that "only publishes papers that other academics read" is now a figure of parody or derision. There are even research grants whose main or sole evaluation criterion is "amount of research income generated in the last X months".
So to sum up, the capitalistic mindset of looking at everything in terms of short-term profitability has harmed, and continues harming, academia. But this is not a paradox, it's something quite explicit and deliberate.
"In short, academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused".
Not ironically. Deliberately and consciously. In recent decades, there has been a push to evaluate public services in private sector terms, i.e., basically, economic profitability (and in particular, short-term profitability). At least in my country, this is quite explicit, but I suppose it happens everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. There is a lot of public discourse that academia cannot be an ivory tower, it has to constantly be evaluated and provide proof that what it's doing is useful. It's difficult to obtain funding for basic science, you need to promise immediate practical applications to obtain grants. Papers are increasingly shunned in favor of patents, the academic that "only publishes papers that other academics read" is now a figure of parody or derision. There are even research grants whose main or sole evaluation criterion is "amount of research income generated in the last X months".
So to sum up, the capitalistic mindset of looking at everything in terms of short-term profitability has harmed, and continues harming, academia. But this is not a paradox, it's something quite explicit and deliberate.
> If I had been awarded a five-year $62,500/year grant with the sole condition of "do research", I would almost certainly have persevered in academia
If that were a thing, I would have actually wanted to go to college. I was fortunate enough to have some high school teachers lay it out plainly for me given my interests and desires, and concluded much the same things as Colin has stated in the article.
Not going turned into the first large risky thing I did in my life that really, _really_ paid off in later years. There was no incentive otherwise to go for the same reasons described in this article.
If that were a thing, I would have actually wanted to go to college. I was fortunate enough to have some high school teachers lay it out plainly for me given my interests and desires, and concluded much the same things as Colin has stated in the article.
Not going turned into the first large risky thing I did in my life that really, _really_ paid off in later years. There was no incentive otherwise to go for the same reasons described in this article.
Academia is the best place to do novel research, and a bad place to write great codes (like Tarsnap). You can't do great research on "Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture", if you are not an academian (like Manjul Bhargava).
> In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel...
As far as I know, the first publication about cache side channel attacks was [1] by Dan Page in 2002.
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/169.pdf
> In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel...
As far as I know, the first publication about cache side channel attacks was [1] by Dan Page in 2002.
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/169.pdf
I don't think the smart-card processor cores Dan Page was considering were multithreaded.
I have moved from consulting to academia with the start of the crisis, as I have thought I will bring more utility there. It is true so far, but the amount of bureaucracy is staggering. Though running a small business here in Switzerland is also impossible without a ton of bureaucratic hurdles, so there's that. I have won a "fast track" grant back in June, but the money is still not unlocked, as it requires cooperation for paperwork of 10 individuals (of which 7 are the administration) in 3 organizations.
This person, of whom I never read before reading the article, is kind of a hero in my eyes. Fully committed to their work and writing amazing software it seems. Good. More people should do so, if it makes them happy. Not everyone needs to found a family and have a 9 to 5 job. I am a big fan of society allowing for some special cases, where people can unfold their potential, instead of forcing them into some (for them) boring or unproductive jobs.
> but most of them can be summarized as "academia is a lousy place to do novel research"
Completely agree. And the cache crypto example is a good example.
Especially in computing. There's so much red tape in the academic world that doesn't make sense when you're basically thinking or writing about code (ok, I know CS is not only about code, but what I'm saying also makes sense for things like big-O analysis, crypto, etc).
Completely agree. And the cache crypto example is a good example.
Especially in computing. There's so much red tape in the academic world that doesn't make sense when you're basically thinking or writing about code (ok, I know CS is not only about code, but what I'm saying also makes sense for things like big-O analysis, crypto, etc).
That is a really good article. The question that prompted is very telling: the asker fails to see nuance, and reduces OP's work to "backups." He/she might be more impressed if Colin were an author of tons of papers that collectively amounted to less than scrypt.
I completely agree with the author.
Academia is disapointing, I had the opportunity to discover it soon enough to avoid wasting too many years.
If you're attracted by deep work on novel subjects, especially in Computer Science, academia is one of the most soul crushing place to be, unfortunately.
Academia is disapointing, I had the opportunity to discover it soon enough to avoid wasting too many years.
If you're attracted by deep work on novel subjects, especially in Computer Science, academia is one of the most soul crushing place to be, unfortunately.
Could you expand on what you mean by that? I felt the total opposite when I was working in academia, it was incredibly inspiring.
Was trying to find the comment that triggered this, and couldn't.... anyone have a link?
The premise that "just" backups is not high on the scale of usefulness is flawed from the start. Does not nearly every other production IT project there is depend on a reliable backup infrastructure?
I think about dedicating myself to one service and main technology stack, and that just sounds dandy. The time to fix all of the bugs, incrementally improve it. Be in charge of its feature list...
Is entrepreneurship a trap? No; right now, it's one of the only ways to avoid being trapped.
The author convinced me here - he's not "wasting his time". He's owning it.
The author convinced me here - he's not "wasting his time". He's owning it.
"On the use of a life" from a website named "daemonology" I fully expected some satanic witchcraft here!
Interesting read nonetheless.
Interesting read nonetheless.
It's "daemonology" not "demonology"
Daemon=>A computer program that runs as a background process rather than being under the direct control of the interactive user
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)
I actually went back into academia to try and maximise my utility. I am not particularly interested in forging my own path in enterprise or as the head of a laboratory. Instead I try to be a helper within other people's teams. This seems to work pretty well for me so far. Some might think I am "not the master of my own ship". However, I would argue I have chosen this pathway into high utility subservience because it does achieve my goals.
I'm a paying Tarsnap customer and I'm proud to be sponsoring you living your life the way you want to!
The original comment was completely unacceptable.
can someone offer a TL;DR on who the author is? I feel like i lack context on this Tarsnap and Colin in general, and there is no about page on the site
Here you go: https://www.tarsnap.com/about.html
Quote:
Dr. Colin Percival studied mathematics at Simon Fraser University, entering at age 13, before going on to a doctorate in Computing at Oxford University, where his thesis covered problems in string matching, data compression, and file synchronization.
In January 2004, Colin became a FreeBSD committer and a member of the FreeBSD Security Team; he became the Security Officer for FreeBSD in August 2005, a position which he held until May 2012. Aside from his work as FreeBSD Security Officer, he is probably best known in the FreeBSD community for his work on FreeBSD Update and Portsnap.
In addition to direct experience handling security issues via his experience as FreeBSD Security Officer, Dr. Percival has published several research papers in areas ranging from numerical analysis to cryptography, including the first published cryptographic attack against shared caches in Intel's "HyperThreaded" processors.
Quote:
Dr. Colin Percival studied mathematics at Simon Fraser University, entering at age 13, before going on to a doctorate in Computing at Oxford University, where his thesis covered problems in string matching, data compression, and file synchronization.
In January 2004, Colin became a FreeBSD committer and a member of the FreeBSD Security Team; he became the Security Officer for FreeBSD in August 2005, a position which he held until May 2012. Aside from his work as FreeBSD Security Officer, he is probably best known in the FreeBSD community for his work on FreeBSD Update and Portsnap.
In addition to direct experience handling security issues via his experience as FreeBSD Security Officer, Dr. Percival has published several research papers in areas ranging from numerical analysis to cryptography, including the first published cryptographic attack against shared caches in Intel's "HyperThreaded" processors.
ah! didnt think to look at the tarsnap about page. thank you.
[deleted]
[Deleted]
> I work 9-6 every day ... then sleep for a couple of hours then stay up to 3am doing self study in math and programming.
Could you elaborate? You take two naps at night in lieu of 7+ solid hours? Is this sufficient? Why?
Could you elaborate? You take two naps at night in lieu of 7+ solid hours? Is this sufficient? Why?
Its not ideal, so I dont recommend it to anyone. It just so happens I am super tired after work, so I need to give my brain a rest. But because I’m sleeping so early (like 7pm - 9pm), I inevitably wake up during the late evening. Then i try not to waste the remainder of the evening and end up staying up late for math and programming. Programming is easy to stay up, math is hard to do consistently.
Then I sleep 3.30am or so to 8.30am, am cranky for the whole morning, but that is okay since I can do my work in autopilot most of the time.
The end result is I am definitely getting a solid few hours each day for my studies, whilst maintaining a job.
Then I sleep 3.30am or so to 8.30am, am cranky for the whole morning, but that is okay since I can do my work in autopilot most of the time.
The end result is I am definitely getting a solid few hours each day for my studies, whilst maintaining a job.
It was actually quite common in the 1800s to wake up and do a bit of work in the middle of the night.
Thanks. I was just curious because I don't seem to have the mental focus at night for such endeavors, but that is the only time I have for such things.
I struggle a lot without that small nap. Would recommend trying that, alternatively maybe wake up early and spend the first hour on your chosen personal field before work. That way, you can be happy the rest of the day, knowing you accomplished the most important thing for you (your personal endeavours), and spend the day at work more relaxingly :)
This was a great message, why delete?
Many Thanks for the kind words. I felt I misjudged the purpose of this thread and did not want to sidetrack the conversation / steal the attention.
Also I feel like I am personally a better talker then doer, so I always get a bit of internal backlash within myself when I spend time talking about what I am doing vs doing it. In a similar vein, I need to reduce my addiction to Hacker News and use the time to study theorem proofs ;) But I think we all suffer from something similar :)
Also I feel like I am personally a better talker then doer, so I always get a bit of internal backlash within myself when I spend time talking about what I am doing vs doing it. In a similar vein, I need to reduce my addiction to Hacker News and use the time to study theorem proofs ;) But I think we all suffer from something similar :)
PageRank was an Academic project that got evolved into Google Corporation; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone
"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone
Who pissed this guy off so bad? I'm not a user of Tarsnap and don't know this person, but it seems like a comment here seems to have carried a lot of weight both with him and the community (considering the fact that his rebuttal has reached #1 on this site.)
I clearly don't know what's going on but is this sort of stuff normal on here?
I clearly don't know what's going on but is this sort of stuff normal on here?
It was me, and it seemed like a fascinating person and startup story to inquire about. I didn't expect any response at all. His epic response here makes him more so. A few others responded with some bitterness, and that's okay too. I hope that they can experience enough good things in their life to see the good in others too. And yes, I believe I have seen this a few times now. Some of the most active members here are remarkably brilliant and productive in the real world too. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the causal link of the former to the latter seems to be negative for my longitudinal N=1 study. Good luck in your explorations.
Nothing in Colin's post came across as "pissed off" to me. It's an interesting discussion and I'm glad he decided to respond in long form.
On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started.
The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business.
And, have a read of Rickover: http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf
Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.