bigcorp-slave

It’s actually not true at all that C++ developers are lower paid. Rather, their pay is highly bimodal. Most work at all FAANGMULA companies is C++.

What are you planning to spend those 10-15 years doing that these people are competition?

This is unabashedly great news. For those debating if it is a sterilizing vaccine, if it’s perfect, what it means, etc, I point you to the following chart from Moderna’s trial:

https://www.zq1.de/~bernhard/images/share/mRNA-1273-trial.pn...

I think this pretty much says it all.

This appears to be a totally unrelated set of authors attempting to force a journal to retract someone else’s paper. They literally have a dedicated website to promote this retraction and if you look up the authors, some of them headline their Twitter with it. The first author just today posted on Twitter that mRNA vaccines can alter your DNA.

The intent of the retraction seems to be to suggest that the epidemic is overblown, to which I would respond by pointing to the the two million dead people, and the excellent correlation of positive test results with new dead people.

This is new information for me - thank you for providing it. What I’d like to understand next is - is there a causal link? This is a pretty unusual year in a lot of ways, including a record number of unemployed people and many people experiencing serious financial pressure. I did a little preliminary googling and it suggested that this is related to a large increase in gun sales in March and April, prior to the George Floyd incident. The other factor that I would think could be relevant is the increase in domestic violence during coronavirus restrictions, as people are trapped with their abusers.

I don’t agree the folks involved in the terrorist attack last week were not a credible threat. If they had succeeding in kidnapping and executing congresspeople, which was both possible and clearly the intent of at least some people who made it into the Capitol, things could have turned out very differently. Something like a third of Congress still thinks we shouldn’t do anything about this - the conditions are ripe for a coup; just because it failed doesn’t mean it didn’t have a chance.

There is a difference between eight months of protests in which 15-26 million people participated across the entire country resulting in significant property damage and some loss of life (~25 people), and what happened last week.

Let’s call what happened last week what it was: a terrorist attack against the seat of government perpetrated by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election.

You need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask if you’re the bad guy. As arch-conservative a figure as Mitch McConnell describes this as a failed insurrection and you make excuses for it.

Millions (the estimate I saw was 15-26 million) of people were involved in the BLM protests, which lasted many months. 25 people are known to have been killed. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assign 3-4k deaths to it. By contrast, this was a single event with a few thousand people in which 5 people died. That’s what I mean by orders of magnitude.

I agree that there is a destroy-the-government black bloc present in some of the BLM protests. It’s a fair thing to point out, but I’ll say this: they’ve never had a chance or a credible threat. It’s really a false equivalence to compare a terrorist attack on the Capitol incited by the ruling party in an attempt to overturn a democratic election with seven months of mass protests against police violence.

The officer being discussed in [2] is a different police officer than in [1].

Setting aside for a moment the multiple orders of magnitude difference in lethality per participant, the key distinction for me is this: what happened in the Capitol is about usurping the monopoly on violence possessed by the government. BLM is not about overthrowing the government, and has never posed a credible threat to it. Even if BLM overthrew the government, no one has been talking about mass executions. By contrast, 6MWNE was on full display at the Capitol attack, as were calls to execute legally appointed representatives. I have been half expecting Trump to declare on Twitter that anyone who kills a democrat gets a pardon.

With the current state of the right wing in the US, there is a clear and present danger of us losing our democracy. When you look at the statements about the election from last _June_, or the purges at the Defense Department last fall, it is clear that this nonsense (and it is nonsense, 59 court cases and counting) about election fraud was premeditated, and so was this coup attempt. This is the Beer Hall Putsch, and it’s a mistake to see how lucky we got and say there is an equivalence to protests against police violence.

Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, what you’re missing is that the outrage from this event isn’t about the five dead people, tragic though that is. It’s about the fact that armed protesters just walked into the Capitol Building while Congress was in session. We are very, very lucky we don’t have dead congresspeople. What do you think the mob that beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher in the Capitol building would have done to AOC if they’d gotten to her?

We cannot afford to make the mistake Weimar Germany did. We cannot assume that because this failed the problem is gone. We cannot appease these people, we cannot treat them as benign. They must all be identified and prosecuted, and their enablers in Congress must be expelled from our governing bodies.

I don’t know if you were paying attention last week, but the mob literally came for the members of Congress.

There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society.

If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?

Attempted coup appearing to have failed, treason enablers vanish into the woodwork.

Shocking.

A great write up, and don’t miss the publications section of his website. The paper on multiframe superresolution is a tour-de-force and crushes a ton of deep learning results despite not being learning based.

I claim you can save $100k/year on a $200k/year compensation. SmartAsset pegs you as right on the money as $133k take home. Let’s say you live in a $1400/mo place like I did for years (no roommates, but how often are you in your place in your 20s anyway?), that’s $17k a year. Now you’ve got $1300 a month for food and luxuries, and $100k/year going into investments. That is not roughing it. If you hit a financial rough patch you sell a little stock. If the market does 7% inflation adjusted per year (its average for the last 50 years), you end up over a million in the first eight years without a problem. And again, this is assuming you never get a raise or a bonus.... anything extra is gravy.

How much could a banana possibly cost? $10?

Let’s just throw out one company as an example: let’s say you graduate from undergrad today and join Google as a fairly unremarkable new hire. Your average first year total compensation is $187k/year. If you negotiate well that can easily exceed $200k. If you do well in your career, three years later you’ll be an L4 earning an average of $263k/year. There are a number of companies that pay this well. All of FAANG is >$150k/year fresh out of undergrad.

What I am saying is: if you decide early enough that you don’t want to be a wage slave your entire life, and you are talented and a bit lucky, you can wage slave for ten years and call it good, then spend 30-death doing whatever you want. The biggest danger, and one I’m wrestling with now, is that you get addicted to it.

Thanks for providing the interesting article - sounds like you’ve lived a fun and variety-filled life so far. That’s fantastic and I’m a little jealous of you, but you compromised real economic utility by doing so. I think it’s a popular model, lots of people spend their 20s having adventures and making little money. Nothing wrong with that - but if instead you spend your twenties soullessly grinding away, thanks to the time-value of money you can have the rest of your life to have adventures.

There are plenty of entry level jobs for people with bachelors degrees that pay $150k-$200k. You might have to make a lot of sacrifices to get them.

For me, I didn’t graduate making this kind of money but ended up in the can-FIRE bucket anyway due to saving and market performance. But it wasn’t like it wasn’t possible, I was unaware that such jobs existed.

For those of you in industries like software: it’s very easy to stop working. At $1m saved, you can comfortably withdraw 3%/year forever. $30,000/year stipend on top of whatever passion thing makes you money is more than enough to live a modest life almost anywhere in the world. You won’t be eating at Michelin star places and you won’t have a palace, but you can comfortably live a decent quiet life in an out of the way place with a tiny rental, home cooked food, and maybe a cat. Want to be a tour guide in Iceland? All the other tour guides are surviving without that $30k stipend. Want to plant trees and sell homemade pots on Etsy? Same deal.

If you save to $2m, then that’s $60,000/year, already you are beating the median American family. This is the point where, for me, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t working like a dog to survive. I was doing it to have more stuff.

If you graduate college at 22 making $200k/year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.

So now that we’ve disposed of engineers, finance folks, and a few other white collar disciplines, what about everybody else? It seems clear that the big problem facing us on an economic perspective is that most people are economically extremely low value. Somehow, before all people are economically extremely low value, we have to figure out how to get to the Star Trek future. That, I have no idea how to do.

Ok, point well taken. Thanks for all the work you do keeping the site civil and high quality.

I don’t agree that this is flamebait. A significant fraction of the Bay Area seems ok with decriminalization of street crime including shoplifting. There are many stories of businesses like Walgreens closing due to the impact of constantly theft in San Francisco.

Seems like a relevant sub thread.

Oh please. These crimes have real consequences, both financially and in quality of life for the people who live in these areas. Almost everyone I know has had their car broken into. I know multiple people who have been assaulted. I personally have had to run from a homeless man with a knife. I’ve seen people grind up pills on the roof of a trash can and snort them next to a police officer.

We deserve a better quality of life than this. There is absolutely no reason to tolerate people behaving in this way in society. These are adult human beings with agency who should face consequences for their actions. The problem isn’t lack of investment or infra, the problem is incentivizing behavior that is destructive to a functioning society.

Christ, why? Have you see what decriminalization of street crime has done to San Francisco? It’s a disaster.

As we see in the US, it is easy to condemn the evils of others governments, but hard to fix ones own. The entire world is in the midst of a hard slide into authoritarianism. Sad to see France, such a beacon of liberty, also start to succumb to the societal cancer that is sacrificing freedom for the illusion of security.

I wonder if your employer appreciates your injection of your own personal ideological axe-to-grind into their hiring pipeline. If I found out that any of my employees was rejecting candidates we were paying to bring on-site out of hand due to their previous employer, I would fire that person instantly.

I’ve been an extensive user of time travel debugging for most of my career, and Pernosco looks great. However, please, please change your business model. As is, it is useless for employees of corporations with sane legal departments.

Hot take: it’s ok to not want to be an activist and to engage in politics primarily by voting. People should vote.

The counter-meme is something I’ve seen a lot lately in both left and right wing circles. This idea being that if you’re not an activist, you’re the enemy. It is bullshit, and depressing to see on HN.

Does the person dying of cancer have time to care about politics? What about the person with crippling chronic disease?

What about the person who is just trying to make ends meet and comes home every day exhausted?

What about the person taking care of a relative, or recovering from an opioid addiction?

Being an activist is a luxury for people with a surfeit of money and free time.

Edit: the rapid downvoting of this post is actually a great example of how badly this idea has infested the meme-space. HN consists primarily of unbelievably privileged people, to whom the idea that someone might not want or be able to tie huge aspects of their identity to their politics seems to be unacceptable or at least controversial.

Indirect ToF: easier to manufacture in small form factors, relatively cheap, well established technology. Easier temperature calibration and lower precision required when manufacturing the emitter, meaning cheaper components and more vendors that can make them. Because the technology can only measure the shift in phase, there is phase ambiguity between waves. The way this is dealt with is to emit multiple frequencies and use the phase shifts from each to disambiguate, but you usually only get a few channels so there ends up being a maximum range, after which there is ambiguity (aliasing, if you will) about if an object falls in a near interval or a far one. Multipath can commonly also cause such artifacts in indirect ToF systems. Finally, because they are continuous wave systems, they can (though modern indirect ToFs try to mitigate this) interfere with each other like crazy if you have multiple running in the same area. I’ll note that there are also gated systems that I would characterize as indirect ToF, that use a train of pulses and an ultrafast shutter to measure distance by how much of each pulse is blocked by the shutter. These suffer from more classical multipath (concave regions are pushed away from the camera), and are not very popular these days. You are right to call out that Microsoft is very heavily patented in the ToF space, and they ship probably the best indirect ToF you can buy for money on the HoloLens 2 and Microsoft Kinect for Azure.

Direct ToF is a newer technology in the mobile space, because it has proven challenging to miniaturize SPADs, which are really the core technology enabling them. Additionally, the timing required is extremely precise, and there are not that many vendors who can supply components adequate for these systems. While there are patent advantages, there are also some significant technical advantages. Direct ToF systems have better long range performance, are much less affected by multipath, interference with other devices is minimal, and most critically - you can push a lot more power, because you emit a single burst instead of a continuous wave. This is really important for range and SNR, because all active IR imaging systems are limited by eye safety. For eye safety you care about not just instantaneous power but also energy delivered to the retina over time. Its helpful to recall that for all these active IR systems that go to consumers, they need to be safe after they’ve been run over by a car, dropped in a pool, shoved into a toddlers eye socket, etc - so this puts pretty strong limits on the amount of power they can deliver (and thus ultimately on range and accuracy). Direct ToFs are also really nice thermally, because your module has a chance to dissipate some heat before you fire it again (vs CW systems where you’re firing it a much higher fraction of the time).

The only part that I think could be debated is my assertion that it’s single module. While technically the illuminator and receiver are different components manufactured by different vendors, they are integrated into one module well before final assembly - and generally when you buy ToFs from semiconductor manufacturers, you get a single mostly rigid part that has everything attached to it.

I suppose I could also imagine someone challenging my assertion that industrial 3D scanning uses structured light, because there are some vendors that use -temporal structured light-, where you flash different patterns to resolve different spatial frequencies on a stationary part. But beyond that I am as confused as you are.

Hi, I work in this field professionally - you are correct up until the tradeoffs. It is not the case that the spatial resolution is higher - in fact, semiconductor manufacturers have struggled to get ToF sensors much above VGA in mobile form factors. In general, ToF systems have a considerably lower maximum precision than structured light of the same resolution, especially at close range - typically structured light systems have quadratic error with range, but the blessing that that curse gives you is that at close ranges, precision goes up superlinearly with horizontal resolution. This is one reason that essentially all industrial 3D scanning is based on structured light. The other is multipath inference, which is specific to time of flight systems (and you can see the effects if you look at a ToF’s results near a corner - the exact corner itself will be correct, but the walls immediately adjacent to it will be pushed out away from the camera).

Temporal resolution is more debatable, because ToF is a lot more conducive to “extremely short, extremely bright flash” than structured light is. But for example, there are systems that run structured light (specifically, single-shot dot pattern structured light, like that seen in TrueDepth or Kinect), or its two-camera equivalent (active stereo) at exposure times of 1ms or less. It is all about the optics stack and sensitivity of the camera. So I don’t agree that temporal resolution is a compelling advantage either.

The main advantages of ToF are that it can be built in a single module (vs two for structured light), it does not require significant calibration in the field when the device is dropped or otherwise deformed, and it is easier to recover depth with decent edge quality. In general the software investment required for a good quality depth map is lower, though in this case Apple has been chewing on this for many years. Another potential advantage is outdoor performance at range - while historically this has been a significant weakness for ToFs, more modern ToFs adopted techniques to improve this, such as deeper pixel wells, brighter and shorter duration exposures, and built-in ambient light compensation. These are hard to do with structured light without manufacturing your own custom camera module. Finally - and I suspect this is why Apple ultimately picked it for their rear depth solution - because time of flight is a single module, it can be worked into the camera region on the rear of the device without having to have a separate opening for the illuminator and camera. The quadratic drop in accuracy with range that I mentioned above can be offset not just by resolution but by the distance between camera and illuminator - for a rear mounted device, the temptation is to make that baseline large, but this would put another hole in the back on the other side of the camera bump. I don’t see Apple going for that.

Can you provide a citation for this? I appreciate that it is a bit unfair to ask for one here, but I fundamentally disagree with your point and would like to learn more about why you believe it to be true. While I concede that at the extreme high end, there are limited ways to invest without distorting the market yourself, it’s just not the case that returns are higher with less money. If anything, returns are lower, because Fred in this example must pick more conservative investments with his single unit of investable utility - he has only the one to lose! By contrast, Bob is free to make riskier bets with higher payoffs, as his asset portfolio starts with ten units of utility.

Or they come from wealth. It does not require a massive inheritance to get ahead here - it requires enough to be exposed to the market, which most Americans don’t get.

The 10% above is to make this example clear and easy, not a specific asset class.

We can discuss to what extent people receive opportunities to gain significant personal income, but I strongly disagree that personal conduct and talent are the primary factor. The number one rule of the world is “people respond to incentives” - there are massive structural deltas in incentive landscape and opportunity exposure as a function of background. You can have amazing parents who do right by you, and grow up poor and stay poor for want of exposure to opportunities and the market.

Because year-over-year growth is runaway, time in the market is of extreme importance too. In a very real sense - every second you don’t have more assets in the market than the next person, they are pulling away from you in literally exponential manner.

A huge amount of it is society, and there’s a lot of light between “let’s try to make society better by preventing the gravity-like accumulation of capital entirely into a modern feudalist state” and “communist slavery”.

Bob starts with 11 units of utility. Fred starts with 2. It costs 1 unit of utility to exist. Each of Bob and Fred invest their remaining utility in the utility market, which grows at 10% per year regardless of what either of them do. 25 years later, Bob has 109 units of utility, and Fred has roughly 12 units of utility. At the beginning of this thought experiment, Bob had 5.5x the utility units of Fred. At the end, he had more than 9x.

This is a simple thought experiment that I hope illuminates something important: in an economy where there is year over year growth, inequality grows by default as a function of exposure to the market. Here, Bob starts with more and can be more exposed to the market. In this example, Bob started with 5.5x more assets - but in America today, the top 10% of households have a median net worth of $1.6m, and the 40th-60th percentile of households have a median net worth of $88k, a multiplier of 18x (note: this data is from 2016).

Most Americans have little to no exposure to the market, while the richest 10% own 84% of stocks. There are many factors driving inequality, and I don’t think anyone would argue that some people are more economically productive than others. But it’s not the case that inequality in the United States is purely a function of hard work by talented people - there are very significant structural factors.

I just wanna say I love your site so much. Thank you for keeping some of the old internet alive by generating high-quality, free content instead of just aggregating it!