I don't get it, either. I mean, I realize that the OP's method would be obscure to someone who's never seen it, but at least on some level, it's more intuitive. Your example is simply obfuscated code for no other reason (other than humor, apparently, which like I said, I missed).
I would say that you have much more creative freedom as a tenured professor (if getting to that point hasn't completely destroyed your spirit) than as a startup founder. Look at some of the stuff Noam Chomsky has been able to devote almost all of his time to--it sure isn't linguistics.
You probably shouldn't use Chomsky as an example. Chomsky is the ultimate outlier. He's got a superhuman intellect and it's actually exceeded by his superhuman patience.
I will tell you a Chomsky story. One night in grad school I was wandering the library stacks looking for anything other than what I was supposed to be working on. I found myself in front of Emerson's complete works, picked out, let's say, Volume 18, and stumbled on Emerson's critique of the Mexican-American war. I noticed that he was saying exactly what Chomsky was to say about the Vietnam war 120 years later. I thought hey maybe Chomsky hasn't seen this, so I wrote him a letter: Dear Chomsky, you don't know me and I'm just a grad student in an unrelated field, but I thought you might enjoy this quote from Emerson. Love, me.
A couple weeks later, I was surprised to find that Chomsky had written me back: Dear Daniel, I wasn't aware of that quote and found it very interesting. Thanks for writing. Love, Chomsky. Well, that was nice of him. End of story.
Not quite. Two years later, I got another letter: Dear Daniel, I was at your university last week and had been looking forward to giving you a call and meeting you. Unfortunately, blah blah blah came up and there was just no way. Hopefully next time. Chomsky.
This one flabbergasted me. By that time I had learned enough about academia to realize that in the star professor system, star professors never do that. They talk to students maybe after class or if they sign up for an appointment. Other than that, they avoid you because they don't want to lose star power. One guards one's fraternizations very carefully, and there are quite fine and quite strict lines demarking the various equivalence classes. Probably most celebrity systems work that way. It's the same reason Hollywood actors date each other.
Anyway, the fact that Chomsky would write a letter like that to a nobody of a grad student, the lowliest of the low, really touched me. It also convinced me that, among star academics at least, the man really is a mutant. A decent mutant. Who would remember something like that after two years?
Who would remember something like that after two years?
I think most academics do.
My own story: When I was an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper which gave sharp bounds on the round-off errors resulting from computing FFTs using floating-point arithmetic; and I noticed that my bound was much better than the bound given by Higham in his Numerical Analysis textbook (which is, by quite a wide margin, the most widely used textbook in the field). I sent him an email -- "Dear sir, I noticed that in section X.Y of this book, you prove a bound of N sqrt(N) log(N) instead of N log(N); if you change foo to bar in your argument, you'll get the stronger bound which I prove in my paper (see attachment)" -- and he wrote back to thank me and tell me that he would make sure the improved bound was in the next edition of the textbook.
A year later, a copy of said textbook arrived in the mail, "compliments of the author".
Two years after that, when I was a graduate student at a different university, I went to a talk by Higham; and at the end when we were asked for questions, I introduced myself (by name, no mention of FFTs) and asked a question. Higham answered my question, and then went on -- in front of most of the department -- to announce that I had found an error in the first edition of his textbook, and that when I wrote to him he had assumed that I was a professor rather than an undergraduate student.
I think "star professors" are actually more likely to remember things like this, simply because someone pointing out something they didn't know, or a mistake they made, is so unusual. It's people like Chomsky, Higham, and Knuth who remember such contributions and can afford to send out free books -- or $2.56 cheques -- to those who provide them.
But the thing Higham remembered was orders of magnitude more significant than thing I was talking about, which was genuinely trivial.
Still, I take your point that among true star professors this kind of brilliant decency isn't as uncommon as I made out. I was using the term "star professor" a little more ironically than that.
I definitely disagree with what you said about most academics, though!
My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't generalize!
While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My fault for not being clearer in the first place.
Yeah, but it's not really an equal comparison. You can start a startup with a bachelor's degree (or less...) and a couple years of work experience. You need about 6 years of grad school, 2-3 years of postdoccing, and 6 years as a tenure-track professor to become a tenured professor. Assuming you aren't weeded out at any one of those stages. Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort.
A better comparison would be startup founder <=> grad student, cashed-out entrepreneur <=> tenured professor. Startup founders tend to have more freedom than grad students, and multimillionaires tend to have more freedom than tenured professors.
"Your chances of getting tenure at the end of this are quite a bit lower than the chance that your startup will succeed, given equal intelligence and effort."
You are way off! Just count the number of multimillionaire founders vs. tenured professors.
Count the number of people who attempt to start a (tech) startup and compare with the number of people who go to grad school. You've gotta apply Bayes's rule: P(success) = P(good outcome) / P(trying), not just P(good outcome).
Unfortunately, I can't use my personal experience as a reliable count, since I went to college and live in the educational capital of the world (Massachusetts). It also happens to be a startup hub, and I hang around with lots of startup founders. So both my count of tenured professors and my count of successful entrepreneurs are likely to be distorted.
Anyone have actual numbers we could use to perform the computation? We need the number of students entering grad school, the number of new technology firms started, the number of tenured professors in the U.S, and the number of multi-million-$ acquisitions and IPOs.
You also just described the major problem with the government artificially allowing such a thing as a limited liability (I'm talking about legal, not debt) corporation.
This has little to do with limited liability. In fact, the problem here is that groups within the company do NOT have limited liability (from each other), thus necessitating some oversight.
The only role limited liability plays here is that investors in this company to lose only their investments (but not their house and car) should the company die.
As the slit gets smaller the percentage of photons that are bouncing off of the walls of the slit as compared to the percentage that goes through directly raises.
True, but geometric rays of light bouncing off the walls of the slit won't broaden the beam. Similarly, the barrel of a machine gun doesn't broaden the stream of bullets coming out.
Only Heisenberg does (note, however, this is a purely classical/maxwellian use of Heisenberg).
Right, but it is interesting that if the camera were adjusting it's iris due to the decrease in light, we would see the same thing without Heisenberg. The spread would be there in both cases, but would be overwhelmed in the wide-open case by all of the particles of light making it straight through. As the light intensity lowered and the iris widened to compensate, the effects of the photons bouncing off of the walls of the slit would begin to be more visible.
I find this interesting because I actually had a friend who worked the night shift there one summer in college (around 4 years ago). He was paid hourly.
I don't see all the mystery: people no longer beat their kids to the extent that they did 60 years ago. Maybe if they made the request as part of a game instead of as an order from an adult there would be more validity (but you can't go back in time to the '40s to make them change the experiment as well).
I am not sure that's it. I wasn't beaten as a child, nor are my children. However, I had much much more unstructured play "in the neighborhood" than my children do. Almost any activity is mediated by adults today. Other parents, primarily fathers, have remarked on this in the last five to ten years when we compare how we organized our time when we were between five and fifteen years old with how our children's time is organized and managed for them. For the most part we didn't have adult umpires or coaches as children, we had to work out situations for ourselves. Sometimes a game would break up, but over time we learned to compromise in ways that seem less common with adult coaches and adult referees who are often more committed to "winning" than the children involved. We may be getting off topic for "Hacker News" but unstructured play seems to be a key component to fostering self-control and creativity is my take-away.
