How Did Things Ever Get This Good? (2009) | Hacker News Reader

How Did Things Ever Get This Good? (2009)

prog21.dadgum.com

82 pointsTomte36 comments

> there must be a reason that pros can buy two-thousand dollar lenses and three-thousand dollar camera bodies.

It's pretty simple. If you make your living with a camera, the marginal improvement of high dollar equipment becomes worthwhile, as it is amortized over a lot of pictures that you make money from.

For example, in high school, I had a soldering iron and struggled to make good solder joints. They were always globby, ugly messes. I read and followed the directions, it just didn't work out.

In college I got a job soldering circuit boards. The soldering iron was a professional one, costing maybe 20x what the ones I used in high school cost. But suddenly, it was easy to get professional results soldering.

> the marginal improvement of high dollar equipment becomes worthwhile, as it is amortized over a lot of pictures that you make money from.

I'm not even sure it is the marginal improvement, but the increased likelihood of experiencing the high cost of re-work. Rework is the last thing you want when your time is valuable.

A former partner of mine was a documentary film-maker and I observed on many occasions times where she spent way to much time trying to make up for bad or out of sync audio. I encouraged her to make changes in her equipment, but not because of the minor improvements in video or quality over her current equipment, but just because the likelihood of rework would be much lower. The video and audio quality at the end was very comparable, but the cost to get from A to B ended up being much better time-wise.

Also (at least where I live) business expenses are typically tax deductible, so the effective cost can be 20-30% lower than if you bought it privately.

Some serious hobby photographers have committed tax fraud by establishing fake photography businesses and then deducting all of their purchases as business expenses. The IRS takes a dim view of such tricks and looks at several factors to determine if such businesses are legitimate.

https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/small-business-taxes/wh...

The trick is to have an existing successful business with more expenses now from the camera equipment. If you're an employee and claiming the same in losses every year, you're going to get ruined.

I would be curious to hear of an economy where business expenses were not deductible.

Such an economy would either need a super low tax rate or I imagine would have strangled everything but the highest margin businesses.

I would hazard to assume such an economy does not exist but I've been wrong before.

In a similar vein Japan still has a tax on capital goods depreciation. One would expect the government to encourage capital investments. Canada and US removed this tax over a decade ago, yet it continues in Japan. Perhaps tax policy like this is in part responsible for Japan's sluggish corporate investment.

In the UK we have legislation (IR35) that tries to force contractors and small businesses into being deemed employees with limited ability to offset taxes.

To be fair to the government there were a lot of people operating through limited companies just to avoid taxes.

Goods Depreciation is required for over 100,000 JPY so we tend to buy cheap suck Dell Vostro. It's bad for productivity.

>I would be curious to hear of an economy where business expenses were not deductible.

...This can get really non-trivial pretty quickly. Even in the US, the tax code doesn't let you deduct any expense. I would imagine that certain industries could get pretty tricky pretty quickly, and would affect the workable margin in some businesses more than others.

I agree, I cannot imagine a functional economy without such a tax policy. Yet instead of assuming none exist I asked.

In Asia, often a tax audit will demand a percentage of total revenue, like 10%.

If you respond with, "but I had expenses," you're just told, "so charge more next year then, or shut down."

That analogy doesn't exactly work, pro cameras do two main things differently: They allow you to take shots you couldn't before (because of some extra feature) and they allow you to do it much more easily than before (because of much better ergonomics).

It's more like if you could solder and get excellent through-hole joints, but you just couldn't solder SMD at all until you got a better iron.

What exactly would you think a pro camera allows you to do? I have one (one that is 4-5 years older than my iPhone) and I am not sure there is a single thing it can do that I couldn't do with my iPhone12Pro or compact camera. Having said that, these are the main things you get:

* One million times better image quality under all conditions (I am not kidding, iPhone12 Pro is an utter joke in every regard compared to unprocessed pro camera footage, even though its 4 years more recent and we don't even need to talk about professional editing here)

* 100 times faster shutter speeds and reaction times. I.e. when I press the button, the pro camera gets focus and makes the shot with virtually zero delay. I can get exactly the piece of action that I wanted. With the iPhone your only chance of capturing the right moment is video or live pictures. If things move fast, you won't be able to get any decent shot at it, but you can still get a blurry image of something :D.

* Superior auto-focus. There is almost no shot under any circumstance where the focus isn't lasered on the eye of people (video and stills) and I mostly shoot at 1.4f, because hell, why the heck would I spend 2000$ on a lens if I use anything but the widest aperture...

* That brings us to another point: Superior bokeh. The iPhone's Portrait modes is a nice gimmick, but that's pretty much it. It's physically incorrect and often looks hilariously wrong/off. Compare that to a 1.4f full-frame lens and be mind-blown...

* Many many features that make it much easier to do many things, but I can't recall anything that wouldn't be possible with the iPhone and manual editing.

All in all having a pro-camera did two opposite things for me:

* Make me not want to take pictures with the iPhone, because I know the pictures will look ugly and I won't even be able to get the shot I want

* Make me not want to take pictures with the pro camera, because I know I never have it with me when I need it and it weights like 10 kilograms lol.

BTW, one thing an iphone camera does very well is take pictures of documents. That's one thing my old 35mm AE1 couldn't because it could not focus up close without a special lens.

Before the phone cameras got good, I'd carry around a Minox because it would fit unobtrusively in my pocket.

One thing your iPhone camera can't do at all (as opposed to can, but worse) would be long range zoom - there's only so far that cropping and software cleanup can go.

Although I know there are aftermarket lens attachments for iPhones, so maybe you could. (Likewise maybe you could get proper bokeh with an aftermarket lens too)

Not sure that qualifies. But yeah I didn't think of it because actually I also don't have a long range zoom for my pro camera...

One thing that fascinated me in web development before we had Canvas or WebGL was 3d engines implemented using HTML tables, because it was the most performant way to put a triangle on the screen. Meanwhile we had very good looking 3d games built on platforms/languages with hardware level/access... That 3d game made with JavaScript and HTML tables was amazing, but it was also a "potato camera".

That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to link to that? I tried searching for it but didn't turn up anything.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2436698

Link to original demo: https://www.uselesspickles.com/triangles/ (the site's certificate is expired, so you'll get a warning).

>Even a language like Ruby, which tends to hang near the bottom of any performance-oriented benchmark, is thousands of times faster than BASICs that people were learning to program 8-bit home computers with in the 1980s. That's not an exaggeration, I do mean thousands.

I don't buy it. Unless we're comparing the computers BASIC ran on to computers today.

He goes into that statement in a later post: https://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html

So people don't have to click through: Yes, the comparison is between '80s hardware and '00s hardware.

I think it's pretty clear that's exactly what we're doing.

BASIC on a 6502, Ruby on a VM atop an AMD Ryzen or some such.

Sounds like its comparing lang+hardware but wrote a sentence comparing only the langs, hence the confusion.

What I would agree with is a factor of 1000 in programming productivity between e.g. python and BASIC for many common usecases. Having such a powerful standard lib is a huge advantage.

This is a nice idea, but in the real world it really helps to align your language choice with your goals. When you're working in teams, especially large teams, then things like popularity, ecosystem, tooling, and even project fit hugely amplify overall productivity.

> Most slams against individual languages are meaningless in the overall scheme of things. If you like Lisp, go for it.

Hah

Edit: Lots of people not noticing the scheme pun

What is the pun? I’m not seeing it. Just that it uses scheme or is it more than just that?

That's a pretty un-useful comment. If you actually said something specific, we might know what your point is.

I would say: If you like Lisp, all things considered, then use it.

Some things to consider: Coworkers (both existing and future). Ecosystem. Maintainability (including by people other than yourself). And, worst of all, management.

I was pointing out/laughing at the scheme pun

Ah, I see. I confess that I missed that particular pun.

It could have been unintentional, but I laughed anyway

I still can't tell who is in on the joke here!

I agree in the sense that, compared to the staggering complexity of the web/mobile as an application platform, the weaknesses of languages themselves seem pretty small (possibly excepting the lack of memory safety in C/C++.) Tooling and ecosystem are also important, but if the platform isn't overly complex there's less need for tooling. I feel like hackers who just want the joy of creating something cool should stay away from the web or mobile platforms, because it's too hard to focus on the problem itself instead of platform/dependencies/deployment issues.

I've found web to be great: you just need a single file if that's all you want. All the modern frameworks and tooling are complicated, but easy to ignore for a small project.

Talk about an article that felt like it ended before it began. He just makes the point and then ends it with very little support.

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