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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.

My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."

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All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!

Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.

(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).

Given that hot tubs have been brought up twice in this thread, I'd pose that hot tubs at conferences might be their own Schelling points.

This would explain why I've never gotten a lot out of conferences…

> I've been inside the conference

Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.

Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

> Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

I suspect you are thinking of burning man

Couldn't be burning man, because the people are dressed too nicely.

Ok, sure, but were you also involved in dosing the creature that lives under the Westin St Francis?

So, I actually only read the first half of the article before making my post.

Please don't mention the beast that is at the heart of SF. It does not like the publicity.

Haha, I did wonder! Looking at the various comments in this thread, I don't think you're the only person who did that. I nearly did the same - and was very glad I stayed to the end!

For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).

Aren't these conferences setup like this as they are tax write-offs so you get a holiday for cheap?

I've heard that a lot of medical conferences take advantage of the fact that doctors need to fulfill a quota of "professional development" every year, so they set themselves at very pleasant resort hotels.

When I was in grad school in SF, my Aunt who was a doctor (dermatologist) attended the annual dermatology conference there. She invited us out to dinner at several of the nicest restaurants in the city and we were treated to the full course experience, plus lots of nice wine.

At the end, all the doctors fought to pay the bill because it was a tax write-off (business expense? I don't know how professional doctors with practices account for these things). As a grad student in SF living on $25K/year it was quite an eye-opener.

> At the end, all the doctors fought to pay the bill because it was a tax write-off (business expense?

Either these doctors went to the Michael Scott School of Business or it was some other reason they were fighting over who pays.

A tax write off is only worth (dollar amount - (dollar_amount * tax rate in percent)

Example: You spend $100 and pay 30% in corporate tax. Your write off that you spent $100 for is worth $30, end result is you’re out $70.

If you let someone else pay and just pay $30 of taxes on your $100, you keep $70, which is over twice as much money as the previous scenario.

If no one else was willing to pay for the meal, having the business pay for it would save you the tax rate.

This only makes sense if it’s something like a car that you’re going to own anyways, not for fancy ass meals unless that’s how you eat anyways.

Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

"Tax writeoff"? What?

Or to be more specific, you can take your whole family to a tropical location and pay for it out of pre-tax money, effectively getting a discount of whatever your tax rate is.

At least that is how it would work in the UK if it was allowed.

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