This is corresponds to Chapter 1.4 of SICM (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics).
Although SICM doesn't expose the underlying optimization method in the library interfaces. The path is represented as polynomial. I'd have to check if they also do gradient descent.
Come to Europe.
PhD candidates are not treated as students.
They are treated as adults, and get the salary of an (entry-level) engineer with a master degree.
You get paid a living wage to do a PhD in most countries actually.
If this is about (your) kids?
Send them to Europe for higher education. Many universities with great international ranking have virtually no tuition. But they can be quite competitive in terms of getting a passing grade.
Thanks for the encouragement and sorry for my late reply!
Indeed. Chemical Engineer that has always loved programming + InfoSec to include it in some way, shape, or form on what I do...
I took a chance during Covid and was fortunate to land DevSecOps-y roles. Not a 10x engineer by any means, but I have been working my way through Knuth's TAoCP and slowly learning to love lower level.
Living now in the Netherlands, but didn't know that there were such types of benefits to studying a PhD.
I'll definitely need to have a good think (and budgetary assessments as well) ... having to pay rent in the Netherlands due to the (probably artificial) housing crisis feels like a seriously limiting factor to afford studying.
Of course not.
But you might get paid only a 50% salary for a PhD in the natural sciences (or liberal arts).
Different fields have different cultures in that regard.
1) India. Lots of conflicting laws. Lots of conflicting paperwork. And as a foreign company you'll probably pay more in bribes ("voluntary non-disclosed payments to ensure success") than you would in taxes, because the alternative is that they send the police after your local employees and maybe try to have the local court seize your property.
2) EU. The VATOSS is straightforward, but the income tax systems are not. Within the EU, France is the worst, followed by Belgium, Denmark, and Germany. Portugal and Ireland are very chill about tax returns. For the bad countries, there is lots of paperwork. Literally every transaction must be documented. On both sides. And they will ask for the documents when they audit. And they will challenge any cross-border transaction that results in reduced local income.
3) Africa. I've only dealt with South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt. South Africa was the easiest to deal with, and Nigeria was surprisingly business friendly other than the constant requests for bribes. Egypt should have been straightforward (and there is a bit of language barrier), but the bribes were not optional, even to file basic tax returns.
4) South America. There's a lot of it. So much of it. In Brazil, you need certified letters just to send and receive money...including tax payments. And there's a lot of requests for bribes in other countries. But once you get past the language barrier and the logistical hassle, it's actually quite straightforward and logical. If not for the military dictatorships and drug gangs, South America would be a good place to do business (from a compliance perspective).
5) USA. Lots of laws. Lots of jurisdictions. But all relatively straightforward. It only gets complicated if you choose to minimize your tax burden (or maximize your refund) by taking advantage of the many, many complications. If your only source of income is W2 income, you could finish your tax return in 15 minutes.
6) Canada. Even Quebec, which insists on doing everything in French.
7) Australia. It's the least complicated tax system I've dealt with, and the easiest to work with as a taxpayer. The ATO is also quite easy to reach...I'm almost always able to get a human on the phone within 5 minutes.
Huge +1 to Australia, speaking from a salary worker PoV. So many of the Australian digital services are absolutely fantastic. As an American who was working there, there were often situations where I thought I did something incorrectly because my mentality was, "if it was this easy, I did something wrong and there are more steps".
> Canada. Even Quebec, which insists on doing everything in French.
Quebec would be the one place in Canada where you’re expected to do business in French. Maybe New Brunswick? Even right across the river in Ottawa you’d have no reason to use French in any official capacity.
Sure, you might want a FR/EN selector at the top of your site since Quebec is a big market (within Canada).
Having formed multiple companies in India - my experience was that I did not pay any bribes and it was relatively easy (not as easy as USA - where too I have formed multiple companies)
"If your only source of income is W2 income, you could finish your tax return in 15 minutes."
Also free on H&R Block now. They can scan your W2's with your phone camera, too, if they can't pull it. Then, direct deposit it into your bank account. It was great.
It does if you're actually incorporating (C or S corp). You'll need to at least file both federal and state returns. And in many cases you'll need to pay money even if your business earned $0.
An LLC setup as a passthrough can get away with filing personal returns, but that only works for small freelance operations. Once you've got payroll or investors it's constant paperwork hassle.
Having payroll is always a tax hassle, but I've been at passthrough-structured LLCs with employees and mid-high 7 figure revenue (at some point, you start filing as an S for your LLC).
But can we get back to the original thing here? Creating an LLC in the US is trivial and does not require accounting.
Payroll is relatively simple for a basic LLC. You can use a service like Rippling or a local CPA to do it for you. Usually costs around $40 per month per employee.
S Corp filings are drop dead simple. The tax return may take a CPA’s help if your structure is complicated or you want to get the absolute best tax breaks possible.
Yes it could be simpler - jurisdictions like Estonia figured this out.
I've had a couple of LLCs in the US (now and in the past) and they've been pretty hands-off as far as paperwork/tax stuff go. More or less, just keep good books and file/pay quarterly taxes and that's about it. I'm curious about what you've run into?
Mine is almost certainly almost the minimal case, except for someone running in Delaware. Federally, I file quarterly 941s (employee tax withholding), annual 940 (unemployment) and 1020 (tax return). In Delaware I final annually (stamp tax). I then file locally for Washington (excise tax) and Seattle (licensing tax).
I believe a freelancers wouldn't file employee tax forms. They frequently roll their filings into their personal taxes.
There are already services that do that, e.g. firma.de[0]
But in general, not really. I also just founded a GmbH in Germany, and the paperwork really isn't that crazy, and for the more complicated parts you'll generally will want to have a tax advisor you are going to have a long-term relationship with (rather than a one-off founding service). I considered using a founding service, but ultimately, most of the "hard parts" about the process is in understanding what agency you have to talk to for what parts, which you'll have to learn anyways if you want to run a business in a way that doesn't land you in jail, so the benefits of such a service are marginal.
The only real way to streamline it would be to deregulate the process (e.g. getting rid of notary requirement).
Having gone through the process of incorporation myself, I agree with everything you said: Yes, there is some paperwork you'll have to take care of and a bit of a learning curve to everything but not outrageously so. It can all be done within ~2 weeks (including roundtrip times for mail). Yes, that's still a lot more than it'll take you in e.g. Estonia (where you can do everything online in a few minutes from what I've been told) but it really would be the least of my worries, compared to actually running the company.
That being said, I do think the process could be simplified drastically. Not necessarily by getting rid of the notary requirement but 1) through digitalization and 2) by streamlining (possibly centralizing) the whole back and forth between notary (official incorporation & signing of articles of incorporation), bank (getting a business account + obtaining proof you actually put the money in that account that you're claiming to have during incorporation), local court (registering the company, including articles of incorporation), tax authorities (getting a tax ID and sales tax ID), local authorities (getting a business permit), local chamber of commerce (paying dues for mandatory membership), Federal Gazette / federal company register (submitting your initial balance sheet).
This is my general opinion with regards to bureaucracy in Germany. All the data is most likely already there and all the technical challenges have been solved in the meantime. Why do I have to do the runaround from office to office, when they are physically connected by a piece if wire (aka the internet).
There is a reason why we have so much bureaucracy in Germany (1. because we like it) and second because it is supposed to provide trust, trust that every company I deal with is legit, trust that the system knows who is participating. Without trust nobody would make business or business would be very hard, because you would have to price in the risk of not having trust.
There is something to be said for trust here. I like that I can go straight to the imprint ("Impressum") to know with whom I'm dealing with online, where the company is located and who the CEO is. This is not always easy to decipher from the "Terms" pages companies in the US and elsewhere provide.
The downside for founders is that you have to divulge your address, unless you take additional steps to give yourself a mailbox address, but this can also be illegal if you're not careful. You can also rent an office of course, but for indie devs and freelancers, this is usually not financially viable.
Yes, there are ways to buy up existing “empty” companies with a bank account, commercial registration, etc.
If you want to found a new one, there are also services that will prepare all paperwork and set up appointments with notaries, etc. for you for affordable prices
Day to day operations do generally not require much else than bookkeeping and accounting which you can almost fully outsource (though accountant fees are not cheap, however, doing it yourself is also not to hard if you have the right software and do not sell thousands of different products) unless you are in specific industries
There are a few unnecessary fees and it takes longer than it should to get started but for most businesses it does not really matter and is limited in scope when it comes to time and money needed
I happen to be an (associate) editor of an academic journal.
What the people who critique the publication process are missing: 90% of submissions are crap - unfit for publication.
We need some process to gate-keep.
a) The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent. b) The PhD students learning the craft need objective feedback. The supervising professior/university often has the incentive to "just submit" -- even if they know that a publication does not meet the quality standard.
Before peer-review, somebody also needed to make a decision on what to publish. This typically fell to a single individual. The editor or some well-known member of the community who could recommend a paper for publication. On old journal issues they even mention the "recommender".
So the question is not whether peer-review is bad, the question is which alternative gate-keeping process would be better. Otherwise we will drown in crap publications (even more) and the PhD students don't get a honest feedback signal upon which they can improve their craft.
As a (former) reviewer at 5 journals, I disagree first and foremost with the notion that
> We need some process to gate-keep.
Journals, when print was the medium through which academic research was disseminated, had to gatekeep because there were practical considerations regarding how many articles they could put in each issue. With online repositories like arxiv, this is hardly a concern anymore.
Someone putting a crap article on arxiv does not hurt anyone else, and I'm saying this as a person who recommended tons of articles to be rejected because they had atrocious grammar/spelling issues. Worst case, it gets 0 attention and is ignored by the research community.
Something not being published in a journal/conference proceedings clearly does not prevent it from drawing tons of research attention, as we saw in numerous cases like the Adam optimizer [1].
Which brings us to the second point: what even is the purpose of a journal now? The answer is that the sole function of a journal now is gatekeeping, with the presupposition that, as you observed
> The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent
Except, well, top journals have tons of articles that get 0 citations too. Clearly the filter fails at this purpose as well. So, why gatekeep at all then? Because if we did not have some exclusive prestigious journal, the plebs would not be separated from the esteemed titans of academia with the biggest grants, most prestigious scholarships and diplomas from the most famous universities.
The only reason we need to gatekeep today is to feed the academic prestige and politics machine. If you care about the science, upload the goddamn PDF to arxiv , tell your colleagues about your research at a conference and let the scientific community decide on whether your idea is interesting.
The Adam optimizer was published at ICLR, a top conference in machine learning. So, basically, analogous to a peer-reviewed journal for the purposes of this discussion. ML (and some other subfields of computer science) have the particularity that the really comptetitive gatekeeping happens even more in conferences than in journals.
That said, there definitely are very relevant papers that are not published in any peer-reviewed venue. A good example is "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners" (the GPT-2 paper, which I would argue started the whole generative LLM revolution). But I think if you look for this kind of papers, you will find something in common to all of them: they are by very well known researchers, elite institutions or influential companies. That's why people went out of their way to read them even if they were posted somewhere without peer review.
If you removed peer review and just relied on posting to arXiv or similar, new researchers, or researchers from less known institutions, would have no chance at all to make an impact. It's peer review that allows them to be able to submit to a top journal, where the editor and reviewers will read their paper, and they can get a somewhat fair chance.
PS: I don't really like the peer review system that much either. It's just that every alternative that I have seen proposed so far is worse.
> The Adam optimizer was published at ICLR, a top conference in machine learning.
Fair, must have misremembered that one.
> If you removed peer review and just relied on posting to arXiv or similar, new researchers, or researchers from less known institutions, would have no chance at all to make an impact.
I disagree on this one. I did my PhD at an institution that ranks in the top 10 in the most well known university rankings, and I distinctly remember that one time when I was submitting a manuscript to a prominent journal in my field, got some reviews back which weren't positive yet were quite valid criticisms, and my professor told me not to worry because the editor is his buddy and my manuscript will get published for sure.
When that sort of "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" culture exists in journals I don't see how peer review can be an equalizer. It just means everyone who publishes at a journal, including the less well esteemed ones, can claim they went through the rigor of peer review. Of course, we all know peer review is just a vibe check and is actually not that rigorous at all, and besides no one cares unless you published in a prestigious journal anyway. The less revered journals exist to collect $5k in open access fees for the publisher in return for hosting a pdf at the marginal cost of maybe a cent a year.
It seems to me that something like eLife's model is the best solution to this [0]: you still have a minimal amount of curation, but generally if a paper is written well enough and within the field it won't be desk rejected. Then, it gets published on the site and sent off for peer review. Peer reviewers assess how sound the paper is and pass a judgement which readers can view, as well as provide some recommendations to the authors make it stronger. The authors can then either revise the paper, or do nothing at all. In either case, papers don't languish in reviewer hell and the larger scientific community gets to see it.
Exactly, everybody can publish on arXiv.
And there are enough semi-predatory journals/conferences which basically accept everybody. Especially since the LLM can rewrite any paragraph nicely.
So the role of journals and conferences is not to prevent "the word getting out". It is to provide value by a curated list of on-topic and high-quality publications.
So no need to wade through tons of crap.
Especially for PhD students who might take more time to detect crap as such.
In my experience, the publications at the good venues get a lot more eye-balls and by consequence citations. So there seem to be a lot of people who like this role as a "filter" for what to focus on.
> Someone putting a crap article on arxiv does not hurt anyone else
> ... only reason we need to gatekeep today is to feed the academic prestige and politics machine
This to me says you have may not have experienced some parts of the (long-term) research process. It suggests that you have infinite resources to filter out noise, which is probably not the case. It suggests you're willing to spend a lot more time figuring out why something doesn't quite make sense, rather than get to the heart of the problem, while this is fine in many cases it sucks when you're hot on the trail of something interesting, and you're slammed by a million twisty paths full half-baked hot-takes.
We need to filter ("gate-keep" is pretty inflammatory term) information and processes so that we don't have 12 different screw types with 12 different electric screwdrivers, instead of "just" 6 (sigh). We need to come to consensus and that means some things go in and something are left out. We need many mechanisms to filter.
> tell your colleagues about your research at a conference and let the scientific community decide on whether your idea is interesting.
All of these things feel like filters, when does a filter become a gate: colleagues - i.e. not everybody, but some selected few, who and how?; conference - filter (well, gate!); scientific community - != your baker's community; decisions directed by you, not on my own (i.e. a pointer to my paper) - filter.
Conference does not imply gatekeeping. There are many conferences out there which accept almost all submissions.
As for the "scientific community" being a filter, there is a difference between "elite" researchers being the ultimate arbiters of scientific truth via their positions in the editorial teams of journals versus everyone being allowed to publish on open platforms like arxiv and bad ideas/quackery being filtered out naturally.
Because the former is what makes or breaks a scientist's career, grad students and postdocs hyper optimize to publish at prestigious venues, as opposed to optimizing for doing science. These two are aligned only sometimes.
Per Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." [1]
I think it's straightforward to make an argument that many of today's conferences are as bad as journals, accepting submissions is only one way conferences filter. IRL they are prohibitively expensive to enter, let alone attend (but again, see "Zoom"), and therefor eliminate all but the elite, they are run by commercial entities in all cases with more than ~200 people, they are more or less required venues for networking and therefor selling yourself for a tiny chance at academic permanence, they give plenaries to elites (filtering to one voice), they have special symposia by invite only, with other submissions dumped to inaccessible parallel sessions (which one will you choose to see?), the submissions you make are published in much more ephemeral ways, and tend to be more difficult to discover in the long term, making the event important but the research not as much (at least in my experience), etc.
Yes, there are many scam conferences that don't do any peer review. They are a huge problem. They waste researchers time and money and exist only to extract dollars from people, not to advance science.
> What the people who critique the publication process are missing: 90% of submissions are crap - unfit for publication.
Publication is antiquated. HN doesn't need reviewers to boost the best content or to provide commentary on how to improve a paper or fact check its contents. Join the 21st century.
We are on the cusp of being able to plow through vast quantities of literature and data in an instant using multimodal machine learning models. Journal articles are written for people. The landscape is changing. We are headed toward a future where scientist upload data and thoughts en masse into the cloud to be consumed by interpreter models that in turn feed back into the scientific machine. Data quality and attribution (scientist performance rating) is automatically allocated by models.
Many researchers learn LaTeX by looking at the idioms used for the papers they really like.
That includes code for Tikz figures.
I hope people will use this tool only to remove the inadvertent disclosure of commented regions and to reduce the file size. But keep the LaTeX source intact otherwise!
You can upload only the PDF on ArXiv. Useful when you for some reason (e.g. client request) publish in certain engineering conferences that only allow Word submissions...
if arxiv detects that it's a latex-generated PDF, it will reject it. Though it's probably possible to launder the latex-generated PDF through ghostscript or something to evade detection (I haven't tried...)
You could agree to have the value of the company evaluated by a neutral outsider. There are specialists for it -- on the VC side and expert advisors for the legal system and arbitration courts. Typically the regional chamber of commerce keeps a list of accredited experts.
Where I am from (Germany), many founders agreements refer to a neutral arbitration body to resolve conflicts regarding the value of company shares. Typically the agreement requires that you attempt an arbitration process before triggering a real lawsuit.
Although SICM doesn't expose the underlying optimization method in the library interfaces. The path is represented as polynomial. I'd have to check if they also do gradient descent.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...
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