A related video series showing many places around the world in the 1900s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-UhDuKZ2OQ

There's a lot of really interesting things to see there besides the sites themselves. The obvious one worldwide is that this is before the mass commercialization of clothing + planned obsolescence of such, which seems to have a very negative outcome.

But one thing not so visible that's really interesting to see is how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd. But that sterness is regularly belied by things like a couple of guys in their 40s happily putting on a fake fight in front of the camera, falling on their asses, and just basically playing around like school boys having a great old time - a far rarer site now a days.

> how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd

FWIW, the fake smiles and hidden gazes, to me the least, were always a North American thing.

In fact, in Switzerland we have its opposite, the infamous "Swiss stare" :-)

https://www.newlyswissed.com/about-the-swiss-stare/

Super interesting. I recently learned that a lot of foreigners moving to Germany find that Germans are staring. It’s called the German stare. I wonder if staring is a Germanic thing.

https://www.zeit.de/campus/zeit-germany/2023/01/culture-face...

Pro tip for everyone else: start counting with your thumb.

For some reason I don't quite understand, my pinky and ring fingers don't operate well independently of one another. This is an issue when counting on my fingers (or attempting a boy scout salute), so I've started counting 1,2,3 from the thumb, 4 with the thumb down and all four fingers up, and 5, of course, with all digits extended.

(I could start counting at my pinky, but that just makes me look totally nuts)

Edit: If you read the article the comment I replied to posted, it includes thumb first counting as one of the cultural differences people experience when visiting Germany - in addition to the "Germanic Stare" they specifically mention in their comment. Consider actually reading before assuming I'm just typing nonsense - unless responding to titles and comments without reviewing the content they contain is a cultural difference I need a guide to get used to when visiting Hacker News.

I've started counting in a very weird way, because from an open hand, I can bring my ring finger down to my palm independently, but if I try to bring just my pinky down, the ring finger comes along from the ride.

So when I count, I start with a closed fist, then open my thumb, followed by my index finger, then middle, then pinky, then ring finger.

The pinkie and ring finger share a tendon - this is why they are weaker than the other fingers.

Or, at least that’s how it was explained to me as a kid learning to play the double bass. The standard technique is to use those two fingers together to press the string on the upper part of the fingerboard where the most strength is required.

American smiles in photos are mostly not fake, fwiw.

That’s interesting. I’ve been told every time (so far) to keep a “neutral face”. I smiled once and the guy let out a heavy sigh and made me take the photo again (Redwood City, CA DMV).

Can confirm. US passport photos want a neutral expression and explicitly say (not in the below page, but elsewhere during the renewal process) not to smile.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...

Strange, one of the example photos has a person smiling. I’ve seen several US passports recently with the person smiling. It must not be an important rule if it’s not clearly communicated or enforced. Especially since some (all?) US states allow smiling in ID photos I would think they would be more explicit about not smiling in passport photos.

Same. I've been explicitly told "Neutral Face. Don't smile." for my passport and driver's licenses in NC, FL and CA (Redwood City too).

I smiled for my CA license. Not a toothy one though.

same, here in Australia

It’s not a requirement, just a suggestion. The most i ever got was “say cheese!” once at one of my DL renewals, but that was it.

In the US, I had to take photos for driver’s license at least 4 times, for green card 1 time, and for passport 1 time, not in a single one of them I am smiling. Saw the DLs of my friends more than a few times (either at bars or clubs or while crossing the border or when the topic arrived naturally), and the breakdown of smiling vs not smiling is 40/60 at most (with a heavy lean towards not smiling)[0].

I partially agree though about the US being a bit special in the aspect of even just allowing people to smile in ID photos. In the previous country I lived in and where I had to take ID photos, it was explicitly prohibited to smile in those photos, and they would reject applications if someone did.

0. Purely anecdotal, as it could totally be the case that I just accidentally ended up befriending mostly those who don’t smile for ID photos.

Whereas here in Iowa, smiling is forbidden in DMV photos. I guess it's state by state.

Oh, interesting, for me it was PA and later FL, both places requested smiles.

It is not often that a photo is required of me for some ID, so I believe the MVD here in Arizona has got two photos from me in 26 years. If I recall correctly, the instructions were "smile if you prefer to." My expression is cheerful but not overly smiling; I'm wearing a full beard, and the photo has been converted to monochrome - why, I have no idea.

However, the camera used at MVD is clearly more sophisticated than it appears, because if you install the Mobile ID app, your photo goes full "Harry Potter mode" and animates in a 3D rotation!

I don't recall any directions about my expression for the US Passport photo at the USPS station. However, they did attempt to reject the photo for strange technical reasons. I could not fathom the rejection because the photo had been entirely handled by the professional USPS clerk and I wasn't involved in generating it. I insisted on submitting exactly the same way a second time around and it was approved. It must've been a procedural glitch of some kind. Or the government knew I shouldn't be traveling to an ill-fated vacation, and was trying to gently dissuade me?

You will never convince Europeans of this. They simply seem to be unable to grasp that (1) cultural norms about introversion/extroversion and friendliness are not universal, and so the default baseline IS more outgoing, social, friendly, and extraverted in North America, and (2) because of the other differences in service industry culture [not necessarily themselves all positives but nevertheless relevant], the service industry in America optimizes for extraverted and friendly people.

So yeah, when the super friendly waitress comes over and asks the table "how is your day going", they're not forcing a smile for a tip. It helps, but they're most likely naturally outgoing and friendly and genuinely curious.

When you grow up with this environment, moving to Europe is adaptable (have done so), but whenever you go back home it is a breath of fresh air.

> how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles

They still have stern looks in photos back home in Asia. But when they immigrate to America, everyone starts smiling in photos.

My parents had a theory. They noticed that even in real life, Americans smiled more than back home. They think and I agree with them, that back home life is hard for most people and it is hard for people to put a smile on. Sometimes life is too hard for even a fake smile. And even if you have a pretty good life, you do not want to stand out by smiling, especially with a big smile that shows your teeth. People will mock you if you smile too much in photos.

In the US, life is easy, comparatively, people are happier and it is easy to smile. And if someone is unhappy, they still want to fit in, so they, at least, put a fake smile on.

And I think this can extend to older photos too. Back then life was harder and people did what was natural to them.

In very early photography the exposure time was so long that people used expressions they could keep up for a while without moving.

Europe is comparable to the US in terms of happiness if not better, yet Europeans don't smile as much. Faking a smile is considered weird unless you're a politician in press photos (and those look creepy if you actually look at them closely)

We're all "media trained" now from a young age to behave like people being filmed or photographed "should" behave.

And if you don't quite fit the look, the camera AI selfie mode can tighten up your face for you.

The explanation I like is that the exposure times needed for photos back then meant you had to be absolutely still for maybe a full minute.

Maintaining a natural looking smile for that long is hard.

The stern bit is covered in parody form in A Million Ways to Die in the West:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SslNMLO0tw&t=20s

>sternness

I really enjoy observing this and other changes in social tone visible through the ages in archaic videos .. One of my favourite idle pasttimes is to watch videos on Youtube of digitized film from a bygone era, especially of cities I've lived in, or visited and with which I am familiar.

For some reason it is just so interesting, for example, to visit the streets of Vienna from 100+ years ago, and see how folks were living back then. So many well-dressed Viennese, looking sternly at the camera, or merely walking in a steady plod along streets I, too, in the modern era, enjoy.

Vienna is particularly interesting because it has a long history with film, and some of them go back to before the widespread adoption of automobiles. It struck me just how easily we overlook the fact that Vienna was built for walking, originally, and all the crazy car life that the city suffers now was grafted on top of routes originally designed to be navigable by foot - or hoof.

Just take a look at Vienna, from 1896:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aPvmD6ktZs

.. to Vienna, 1926:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGbTkQX6R0Q

.. pre-war Vienna (30's):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA9dHEKD-vM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QITjWb29JZ8

.. Vienna, 1939:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w96umMf9r3E

.. post-war Vienna:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2VbXdrFXB8

.. to Vienna, 1964:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0WCigqJ_wU

.. and lastly, Vienna in the 80's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WttS-PP-r4o

Its just so interesting to see how the city has evolved over the century, but also very interesting to see how it hasn't changed much at all, too!

These days I walk many of the streets depicted in these videos, and having binge-watched all the videos I can find on the subject, it has given me a much deeper appreciation of the trials this city has weathered.

(I've got another set of videos for Los Angeles, another city in which I've lived and loved, and it too is very intriguing to see the city evolve over time .. but I'm yet to find a film as old as 1896 for the region, strangely enough..)

I love the 1896 "what the hell is that" double-takes, where they glance over and then approach the camera. Might've been these people's first experience with one.

> Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think I can see in his deadened, ambitious eyes the character that would later lead Leopold to inflict immense suffering on the people of the Congo for personal gain. The spark of humanity that you can see in the eyes of so many of Nadar’s subjects just isn’t there.

Or maybe the author's perception is colored by what we know of this man.

Well yeah, that's why it has that disclaimer. Everyone knows there's an obvious bias there.

Sure, just feels like a weird thing to call out, especially when you've admitted the bias is there.

Given that it fit a pattern of commenting on what he perceived in all the other portraits, what exactly would you have had him do?

He obviously isn't lacking in self-awareness. He was upfront about his possible bias.

>The painter naturally visited Nadar’s studio fo a portrait; it captures an artist of fierce intelligence:

As true as it might be in many cases, I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance. A brief meeting is bad enough, but a single photo? It's poetic to think that they tell us more about a person than they do.

  > I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance

I find this odd to hear. Not because I think we should base our opinions on someone's appearance but because I thought it was a common belief that we shouldn't. Or rather that you would be committing a faux pas by making such a statement publicly. That people at least wanted to paint the image of themselves as upholding this virtue, despite it being clear that society operated under such biases.

Growing up (American millennial) it was routine to see public service announcements to tell people to not judge others by their appearance. It was the lesson of not just children shows but a frequent trope in popular movies. Such as James Bond entering a fancy resort looking like a homeless man, being treated as such by some staff, only for that staff member to be chastised for not treating him with the upmost respect. "Don't judge a book by its cover". "The ugly duckling".

Have things changed? Is this no longer a social taboo? To at least feign this virtue?

I think people are taught not to look down on others based on appearance, but not to avoid looking up at them.

This is a fair enough distinction. Though I still think there is more contextual nuances at play. Shallow Hal seems to fit both cases. To be vapid or shallow. We certainly don't just critique those for exclusively caring about other's appearances but also those that only care about their own.

Which I can see a deterioration of the vapid criticism as social media capitalizes on this nature. Not just with people, but we do seem to care more for form over function now.

There's actual studies about how easy it is to get a job, or do well professionally, if you're handsome

the human brain is hardwired to assume beauty equals -better- some how

No one is saying anything that is in contention to this. In fact, most of what has been said explicitly acknowledges these facts. Please read the conversation before responding.

I’d say it’s not that the man is intelligent and you can tell just from a photo. It’s instead saying that the photograph is framed in such a way as to make the subject look intelligent.

A comment on the artistry rather than the subject.

A non-groady interpretation might be that we know Manet was intelligent, and the portrait captured that well; you might not be able to judge food by its photograph, but a photo that makes it look delicious when it actually is delicious has managed to capture the deliciousness.

Personally, I don't find it groady anyway; pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein. I can imagine a species that evolved to conceal the appearance of intelligence, but in humans I think it's more something natural selection would try to broadcast.

> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein.

exactly how?

Or I should say, all humans are intelligent baring extreme circumstances (for example signs of genetic defect, potential inbreeding, or FAS may possibly be a sign of lower IQ it's not a certainty of it). Are we trying to say there is some correlation between 'high' IQ and outward appearance, because that is quite the statement, and one that really has no scientific basis that I know about.

It's honestly a pretty good case study of the limitations of the approach, because you can imagine all sorts of spurious correlations you might pick up from a photograph (limit case: subject is holding their framed mathematics doctoral degree) that could result in a classifier good enough to give you a betting edge, but good for little else. Broadly, you'd expect a trained photo classifier to pick up a bunch of SES signals.

> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein

Yeah maybe, however as a life-long photographer and former freelance DoP I would heavily caution on then using those images to infer a persons intelligence from that picture. Because in my experience the number of false-positives and false-negatives is high.

There are extremely intelligent people who always look like shit on camera, because they constantly move, so you always capture them with their mouth half open, mid blink. And then you have complete hollow-brains who look deep and dashing whenever a camera is around, but god forbid they open their mouth.

So if anybody decided to make machines decide who is intelligent based on pictures (sounds like modern eugenics), the amount of false classifications would be exhorbitant and have real consequences for real people.

And let's not forget that appearances can be altered, so once you use such a system those deemed to be most intelligent will be those who game it best. So judging intelligence directly is probably the more reliable way.

> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein

It would start judging people by their clothes. Among other factors, none of which would be intelligence.

You will find correlation, but it would not be reliable at all.

If I trained a neural network and it learned that stethoscopes are strongly correlated with IQ, have I learned anything useful?

In case anyone in Australia is wondering, grody/groady is basically a less versatile version of ‘grotty’, which has the added benefit of being used as a noun (ie. ‘what a grot!’).

While this prediction isn't very precise I'm sure it must be better than random. A mistake would be to still rely on the visual appearance when stronger data becomes available

If you know how to smolder you're eyes, you're fiercely intelligent. If you don't, you might as well be chopping off hands in the Congo.

Most HN posts are how to program, mainly focusing on new tools and ideas.

But now the tooling is so good and the competition so fierce that the real question now is not how but what to program.

For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.

This post imagines how Nadar saw his subjects, and how his subjects saw things. Not only is it a different time, but in most cases the subjects had a hand in history, we know now.

To me that's the essence of product design: imagining a different world through the eyes of another, and understanding how to make a real difference.

Products mostly focus on the present-market scale, but investments incorporate the full life cycle. The real power of the historical perspective is understanding how it's the latent value in the context that gives a new product its power, and how significant that can be over time, particularly when a technology becomes pervasive.

Here the photograph far outdoes the samurai's sword in its influence, not just for images and history but as a demonstration of the power of recording light for science, medicine, etc.

May this post inspire someone to make the next photograph.

>For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.

The main issue is that the skills needed to make a product can be different from the skills needed to land a job in an organization. That makes it further muddy what to program.

"But now the tooling is so good and the competition so fierce that the real question now is not how but what to program.

For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them."

It's always been that way. e.g. Infamous HN Dropbox post.

A fascinating tour of 19th C France through the the photographs of one man.

Captivated me much more than reading about the AI-enhanced-startup du jour.

I wonder if we can actually quantify this effect: humans painting are "richer" in meaning than AI. But then once that is decypher the next step is to put an "AI" on top of it.

It's fascinating how much body language and facial expressions differ across cultures. While some societies value open, expressive interactions, others lean toward reserved or neutral expressions. I’ve noticed this in my travels, a simple nod or slight smile can mean very different things depending on where you are.

I wonder if these cultural norms around eye contact and facial expressions have roots in deeper societal structures, like the emphasis on individualism vs. collectivism, or even the pace of life in different regions.

What do you think? Could these small, often overlooked gestures reflect much larger cultural attitudes?

I'm ashamed to say that while I enjoyed the article and particularly the photos, I still can't quite parse what "cannot even look" means; does not understanding what it means make me one?

I interpreted as, some people can't be bothered to try seeing. They don't even know that they're missing something.

But clearly other people interpreted it differently, so what do I know? I'm just simple programmer.

Every "imbecile" can take a photo, but not everyone can do photography. Is basically what he meant.

There's a newish requirement not to smile in US Passport pictures. I compared my new one (with the photographer-enforced requirement) and my old ones (smiling). That type of requirement has existed longer elsewhere. (Both for Hong Kong and PRC visas the no smiling requirement was there decades ago.) So the pendulum swings both ways?

I cannot really explain why, but I feel like each of these photos captures so much more about the respective person than a modern colored photo ever could.

Back then photos were more expensive, rarer and taken primarily by professionals. It makes sense that they on average were more compelling to look at than the average picture taken today.

But there are plenty of great modern colored photos.

Portraits are like long exposure photos where the artist watches a person and captures the right elements at the right moments.

.

  "[Photography] is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds -- and one that can be practiced by any imbecile."

I like this quote.

Fits [software engineering] too

heh

Not at all true, computer literacy is a hard prerequisite and many people don't have even that.

I'd like to have a hackers news that was just posts like this!

you mean, about physiognomy?

I did't have to. I don't know what you saw, but you can probably click it away.

On mobile, you have to signup first.

I am using on mobile,can read without signing up.

>I wonder what these Japanese diplomats were thinking as they sat, so far from home, having their portraits taken with cutting-edge gadgets by this bohemian weirdo.

If only there was a detailed first-hand account of the diplomatic mission to Europe which details this exact trip that's been widely translated to most European languages and is widely available.

Not sure if this is sarcasm. I have no idea if this exists or not.

If it does exist, I would like to read it.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

There's actually a youtube channel that has a bunch of excerpts from various trips to the west (and other cross cultural journeys), if you're interested in that sort of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvPxCuIspWs