Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, says 140 years of data - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census <comment><USER4> Even if you accept that the trend of more jobs being created by technology than are being destroyed will continue indefinitely, fretting over technology replacing you if you're taxi driver is very justified. Having to learn a completely new trade is not easy.

<comment><USER5> Society as a whole benefits, but there are high individual costs. We ought to figure out a way to smooth out those costs for the individuals.

<comment><USER6> I am not sure it always does.

Do you view the NSA's snooping technology as a benefit to society? More high tech, well paid jobs have been created there.

Likewise I feel that a great deal of the tech involved in finance is of questionable benefit to society as aw whole. Does High frequency trading actually benefit anyone other than the banks?

<comment><USER4> I'm no financial expert, but I believe HFT benefits many people by making the difference between buy-price and sell-price smaller and increasing the liquidity of the market.

<comment><USER6> The banks seem to be the only ones benefiting from this as far as I can tell. My life doesn't feel any better for HFT.

<comment><USER7> Look around you. Pick any product you like. A thousand financial transactions went into making it, all along the supply chain. Currencies were converted and hedged, iron ore and copper and crude oil futures were purchased and sold. When technology squeezes out middlemen and makes them more efficient, you gain.

<comment><USER8> I could be wrong, but from what I understand of HFT, it doesn't squeeze out middlemen, it squeezes out competition. It sets the barrier to entry so high that only the super rich can participate. I agree completely with your point, by the way, I'm just not sure HFT is a good example of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If true, is this good?

Isn't the purpose of work to end (or to diminish, at least) all work? (and leave us with more time to take care of ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our kids, our parents, our friends, our neighbours, our politics, our environment etc)

<comment><USER10> The trap I find myself in is that (at least here in the UK) we are all in competition with each other for a fixed, limited resource. Housing. I earn a very good wage, as does my wife, but we still work tough jobs for long hours so that we can afford a nice house, in a good location, with a garden for our kids to grow up in. No matter how much people like me earn, we will just use it to bid up house prices even more. Everyone blames the government or the banks, etc for house prices and how hard we have to work to afford a nice place. The truth is we're doing it to ourselves and each other.

<comment><USER11> That's a cultural construct, not an economic one. In a lot of other countries, it's perfectly acceptable to rent or live in flats, or around cities that are not the capital; but in England, these conditions carry a huge social stigma, which is compounded by deeply-entrenched classism. It's a perfect storm, really; but yeah, you're doing it to yourself. Move to Manchester ;)

<comment><USER12> > That's a cultural construct

The rental versus buying dichotomy is orthogonal to the issue of limited supply. If everyone rents there is still the same overall demand for accommodation, hence rents would be high (due to limited supply) and that would propagate through to push up property prices. End result is the same.

<comment><USER13> that was _one_ example he gave, you've not diminished his point in any way by questioning only a part of his argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have no real doubt this is true, but what _may_ be different in today's situation is that something akin to true "artificial general intelligence" is not completely unfeasible (or something close enough to it that there's no practical difference). This is quite different to previous technological revolutions, where it was primarily manual labour that was automated. We seem to have in general conceded that many of those types of tasks can be better done by machines (with the exception of our adaptable intelligence, but how long will that be unique to us?).

Now, people who are displaced by technology can move on to other things, but what happens if there really is nothing we're better at than a computer, in say 100 years?

<comment><USER15>
        what happens if there really is nothing
        we're better at than a computer

It's not that you have to compete with computers while being naked and without tools in outer space.

The line between Humans and Computers will continue to blur. Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to type stuff into a keyboard and looking at a screen.

If there is nothing left "we" are better at then computers, the last remaining "old" parts inside of us will be discarded and we will just be a computer like everybody else :)

<comment><USER16> > Right now, you carry a computer with you in your pocket. Tomorrow you will > have it in your head. And it will aid your thinking without you having to > type stuff into a keyboard and looking at a screen.

You're assuming people will want it in their heads. I'd rather be naked and without tools, than become part of The Borg. YMMV though.

<comment><USER15> That reminds me of the time when mobile phones were new and some people told me "You will _never_ see me walking around with a mobile phone. When I'm alone, I want to be alone! And not being reachable and connected all the time.".

They all have mobiles now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking at current uk employment numbers[1] , it seems that healthcare , education accommodation and food services count as 23% of the economy.

But :

1\. Will they grow under new conditions ?

These sectors historically didn't enjoy more productivity due to technology. Economists called this "baumol's disease". But this is changing. We're seeing higher education and maybe some lower education being automated. In japan we saw a robotic hotel, there's plenty of efforts to automate the food industry(both making and serving food), and in healthcare we're on the way to become much more effective at a fast rate with many(hundreds of genetic treatments in clinical trials,great improvements in targeted cancer therapies, artificial pancreases and continuous glucose monitoring are on the way to solve diabetes , etc ,etc) .

2\. How much more can they grow ? Will said growth be enough to stop job decline in other sectors ?

All those sectors grew due to stuff like cheap credit, degree inflation, more expandable income, growing country budgets, etc.

But will those conditions continue to be true in a world with a lot of unemployment in other sectors - much more than we saw in the past ?

Also - all those three sectors are 23% of the economy. We're talking about 40% of jobs at risk due to automation in 20 years. So those sectors would have to double/triple themselves to compensate. Is this realistic ?

[1][http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/bus-register/business- register...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/bus-register/business-register- employment-survey/2013-provisional/rft-table-1.xls)

<comment><USER11> _> 1\. Will they grow under new conditions ?_

Some conditions don't change. An OAP with limited mobility will always require assistance day-to-day, and it's the sort of thing robots are really bad at. OAPs are also growing in number, as life expectation increases. Another one: you will always need someone to help give birth - in fact, as hospitals are deemed too expensive and scaled back, we will likely need more nurses, since home-births stop them from sharing their time between patients. Again, this will not be touched by automation. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

 _> 2\. How much more can they grow ?_

I think that's more a function of our social organisation than technology. The real question is basically "how can we pay these people?" \-- morality and common sense tell us that a lot of these activities should not be linked to profit, but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.

 _> We're talking about 40% of jobs at risk due to automation in 20 years._

I find that number too high to be true. 10 or 20%, maybe; 40%, it's really hard to believe - that's 15 million people in the UK without a job, where currently we have 2.3million unemployed. It would mean basically 1 million newly unemployed people each year; I would argue society would not survive 5 years in such conditions, let alone 20.

In any case, I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles to offset the bulk of those losses (dedicated entertainment people in every office; corporate psychologists; continuous-change oversight; dedicated corporate tailors; and so on and so forth...).

<comment><USER17> >> I find that number too high to be true. 10 or 20%, maybe; 40%

The 40% came from a study at oxford, which i think was a bit conservative , because it didn't take into account the possibility of creative jobs being automated.

>> I have no doubt we can create more office-based bullshit roles

Sure we can. But will we ? i'm not so sure.

>> but that is economically challenging unless we rethink how money is created and distributed.

If that happens , a lot of things would change, for both directions - <USER2> jobs and less jobs.

>> Again, this will not be touched by automation.

Automation is the less powerful technology working on healthcare. But if you can detect diseases very early , and have very effective , side-effect free and long-term treatments , healthcare will become more efficient.

Or let's talk about limited mobility(your example) - a leading cause is severe arthritis. But maybe we can cure that ?

>> home-births

Maybe we'll see growth there.But i would guess it's not that big of job provider. and even for home births, there's telemedicine and remote continuous monitoring , i think in use today - saving work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure the number of jobs is that related to the amount of work needing to be done. It's more people like doing something and so will tend to do so. Otherwise as the number of people employed in agriculture dropped from like 70% to 2% over a couple of centuries it would of led to 68% sitting about. But instead they invent new things to do - say interior design or computer game design. Whether the person designing interiors counts as having a job or a hobby is down to whether people exchange money for the service which they tend to do in a way that is not terribly effected by what technology is involved.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out when robots get smart. My guess is people will still work on their novels, designing stuff, acting and the like.

<comment><USER19> >It's more people like doing something and so will tend to do so

You're putting the cart before the horse (or I misunderstood you).

People have less they are required to do and use time they would have spent tending to their farm to ensure their survival, to pursue novelty and comfort instead.

But people aren't great at entertaining themselves, so a lot of people are employed in the business of entertaining others.

Comfort is also something that doesn't come easily, so a lot of people are employed in the business of doing menial tasks (like cooking and cleaning) for others, or producing furniture or machines that enhance our comfort.

<comment><USER20> > People have less they are required to do and use time they would have spent > tending to their farm to ensure their survival, to pursue novelty and > comfort instead.

Are you sure? Maybe what they are actually pursuing is trying to convince other people that some new job is sorely needed in the "new economy"?

<comment><USER19> Dereference 'they' for me.

*People in what you quoted was intended to mean "anybody who would have been a farmer", so that's the 68% that have to find alternative employment.

I live in an apartment building, my rooms have air conditioning units, and I have a bed and a sofa and a refrigerator and lots of other things that improve my quality of life, and people had to build all of those things (including the building I live in and the rooms in the building and the power plant that runs all the stuff in my apartment and the buses and trains I use to get to places and the roads and track those drive on etc.), the labor and ingenuity required for all those things to exist comes from (I think) that 68%+ of people who were unemployed by technology, and those people also have their own things (homes and food and furniture and transportation), which they use to entertain themselves or make themselves more comfortable.

<comment><USER20> There are some sources that claim that medieval peasants in agricultural economy worked around 6 hours a day, and it was less than is standard today in the developed world.

Seeking leisure is a human nature, true. But maybe also human nature is to compete for resources, get more for your family, and make yourself more attractive to the other sex, even if that means working harder. If the alternative is unemployment, this may drive people to work in (or even create) services that they know are not really that useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to. In 1900 people were still settling in America, and production has grown immensely worldwide at a steady rate since then, while population was relatively low.

Now, population has grown three fold in the last hundred years: [http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp- content/uploads/2012/1...](http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/populationgrowthhistory2.jpg)

There are more old people alive than ever before as a percentage of the overall population (I guess there's jobs in caring for them, unless robots do that, as well), and technology is at a point where it can replace humans completely, instead of working side by side.

I always say, the Industrial Revolution = _humans aided by machines_ (say a ratio of 1-100), the Automation Revolution = _machines aided by humans_ (take the same ratio in reverse).

You see the problem? Population is exploding, job automation is doing the same. In a society that needs to work in order to live, that is unsustainable.

I'm all for automation, but we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money...

The people who own and maintain the machines will be fine, those who mediate relations between humans-humans-machines, as well. What about the rest?

<comment><USER11> _> Uh, yeah, because there was room to grow or move in to._

There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.

 _> we need something for those who will simply have nothing to do in order to make money..._

We need to rethink how money is created and distributed. Once you do that, the need to "make money" might be lessened or replaced with different ones.

<comment><USER22> >There is still plenty of room to grow and improve. Africa and Asia have huge amounts of land that are nowhere as dense as the US, let alone Europe.

You might want to re-think that. Places where people do not live are generally like that for a reason. How much fresh water is there? Do we really want to have more places on the planet under water stress? Do we want to ship water there? Is it hot as hell there? How much of a persons income is needed to survive with modern conveniences? What is the carbon cost of living there?

>We need to rethink how money is created and distributed.

That has to happen, but will it happen? For example, after the horse was replaced by the car, did we keep millions of horses around? No, there numbers dropped significantly. If technology can truly replace huge numbers of people, the people left with the capital may think that getting rid of huge portions of the population is a valid outcome. The truly scary thing is it may actually be a valid answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What this is actually showing is that wages continued to increase and the discretionary income that people had went back in the economy and the people found things to do that they could charge money for. So yes as long as there is money, people will find things to offer other people. That has not much to do with technology but more with the circulation of money.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not quite sure the article is making any point about technology that was not widely accepted before. Industrialization with its the social progresses, and the golden age post-WW2 are always taken as counterpoint in any discussion about impact of technology today, as is the article conclusion "where one avenue closes in the jobs market, others open.".

The actual problem that worries people nowadays is if there is a limit to the number of avenues and if we are close to hitting it ? And even if new avenues open, how easy it is to switch to them physically ( they open in another country ) or practically ( they require high qualification level ) The article does not make a case for that at all. Increase in caring professions, for example, is government policy driven. Is the article claiming that technology what the key factor that drove those policies and that further automation will drive the state to push for even more caring professionals ?

Anyway, I guess the only goal of the article is to give hope to Joe Reader. That is not a bad thing, after all, at the very worst, we are still only at the peak of employment and wealth and (without the singularity) the world will not brutally crash, it will slowly degrade leaving plenty of opportunities for everyone to get a clue. For others though, they would have guessed that with a population doubling during the same period and low current unemployment rate, it is obvious that some jobs must have been created somewhere.

<comment><USER18> >the world will not brutally crash, it will slowly degrade

I think if you look at the stats it's been slowly upgrading rather than visa versa. I don't see much sign of the trend reversing globally. Pessimists tend to look at worker living standards in the US where they have been kind of static, ignoring the poorest 80% of the planet where they have been shooting up. China for example has been transformed over the last 30 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am more interested in another question: has technology created more leisure than it has destroyed?

<comment><USER26> I guess it that depends from person to person but I'd be definitely interested to see the general population happiness (not sure how they measure that) with tech.

I personally can't stand tech anymore, it's what I'm forced to do to make a living. I'd rather stare at a tree than a mobile screen.

<comment><USER27> I think it's a good idea not to be too Western. Median living standards in the West have improved a lot over the last century, especially since WWII.

But a lot of that improvement has been off the back of Rest of World, where slave-like conditions still endure. It's fine to have hairdressers here, but it's useful to remember that hairdressing is only possible because there are textile makers, miners, and farmers working in extremely harsh conditions elsewhere in the world.

And there's also been incredible damage to the planetary carrying capacity, with effects that will become more and more obvious as the century progresses.

So it's just as possible to argue that technology is more like a drug that works on generational time scales: you get a hit, you feel _awesome_ for a while, then you fall apart.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. It well may be that technology temporarily enhances our lives while in the long run it's detrimental for our species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this article completely misses the point. The technological revolution happening right now is unlike any other in history, and is escalating faster than anyone realizes. We are really just entering the ascent of the S-curve, and things are already starting to advance dramatically on a yearly basis. Comparing the effects of technology between today and even 40 years ago (much less a century ago) is the epitome of apples-to-oranges. It is a meaningless comparison for all sorts of reasons.

We're in a new and exponentially developing Renaissance, the likes of which we have no historical analogy for (not even the actual Renaissance or Industrial Revolution). It's incredibly exciting, but we're in for quite a ride over the next few decades, and our sociopolitical foundations are not prepared for it in the slightest. I think encouraging further procrastination of preparedness does a disservice to us all.

<comment><USER22> _A rabbit in Australia, circa 1788._

The biggest issue with our era of technological growth, is we really have no idea if it is sustainable socially or ecologically over periods of time.

If we take human social structures out of current growth and look at the 'people like to work and create to survive issue as an individual' we can easily destroy the world around us. This occurs all the time in biological systems. The great oxygen catastrophe is a prime example. Each individual bacteria produced oxygen in order to survive. This worked fine for around a billion years. The bacteria had no means to realized that free iron and other rocks in the crust would absorb their byproduct only for so long. Once the saturation point was reached free oxygen filled the atmosphere and essentially poisoned the Earth for a time.

The question is, 'is there a technological saturation point'? How quickly will technology continue to grow even if it is poisoning the social structures it was built on? Will people and society adapt quickly enough?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A large and growing % of the economy works to create demand through marketing & advertising. It seems like the number of jobs is more driven by the number of potential employees than the natural demands of consumers.

I also find it interesting they highlight the decrease in professional cloth washers something technology has allowed us to DIY. Next to an increase in professional hair cutters something we previously DIYed with little technology. If someone makes a good hair cutting robot what will we outsource next besides food cooking and drink serving?

</comment><comment><USER20> Creating jobs is easy - you can always add more people monitoring if other people are following the rules - add more security guards, inspectors and managers.

AFAICT the article doesn't make this distinction, and it is difficult - <USER3> don't have a standard way to consider this problem.

The question is if it's worth it, and if it wouldn't be more useful to just let people work less and have more free time (for example through basic income).

</comment><comment><USER30> Hopefully the trend is shifting soon.

Let's just hope that the way we distribute wealth changes simultaneously, otherwise a lot of people will suffer.

</comment><comment><USER31> If this is true (and I take these things with an enormous grain of salt), it is an unfortunate thing. Tools are created to get rid of jobs, yet they create yet more work?

In a rational society, more jobs being destroyed would be something to be celebrated. It is a sign of a sick culture in which it would be seen as a bad thing.

<comment><USER30> Totally agree. Many people seem to believe that having to give away the majority of our most valuable non-renewable resource in life, time, in order to actually enjoy the remainder of our time, is a fantastic system that can't be improved upon.

Sure, having to work was (and still largely is) a necessity, but we should make it unneccessary as soon as technologically possible.

We act like being forced to do something is a right/privilige instead of a burden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Past performance does not guarantee future results.

It's just an indicator.

</comment><comment><USER33> Beware the intoxicating belief in technological determinism ;)

</comment><comment><USER34> Pointless article.

We know this, I don't think anyone has ever said otherwise. We also have had positive growth and increased consumption over this time as well.

When it will stop is the only interesting point now since there seems to be many indicators we are hitting limits.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is self evident.

Secondly nobody can argue that there are less things in the world that we want to do than there were 100 years ago. They are not the same jobs but can anyone really argue that nope, there is nothing left to do. Of course not, that's absurd. Technology has simply changed and expanded the areas to work in.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious if in the 21st century those jobs are created in the same country they are servicing.

Because India (customer service centers) and China (apple product assembly) would say otherwise.

Technology has simply allowed easier outsourcing while funneling the profits to fewer and fewer people.

</comment><comment><USER37> Not all technology has an equal ability to displace human workers. I'd argue that the _most_ displacing technology is just now being developed. Sure, _some_ technology has a neutral impact on the job market, but some!=all

</comment><comment><USER38> Would this be a fat tailed process though? In which case 140 years of data would not be enough to draw conclusions from the change in mean, in terms of a long term trend.

</comment><comment><USER39> can anyone find the link to the original paper? it seems to be by Deloitte but I have found nothing on their website nor just googling authors' names.

</comment><comment><USER40> But is it the same elsewhere?</comment>


Ask HN: Massive dying birds and fish: do you have a theory of the causes? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I don't have a theory on the causes, but I'm not yet convinced this is anything more than the media reporting a trend that may not be statistically significant.

See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079371></comment>


Java Rebel - On the fly class reloading - <AUTHOR> http://vinaytechs.blogspot.com/2009/10/java-rebel-on-fly-class-reloading.html <comment><USER2> I should stop being stubborn and try this--I've been holding out that Sun would just add this to the JVM itself, but that seems fairly unlikely:

<http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812>

Ironically, the IBM JVM has the best support for hot code replacement--you can add methods without restarting, IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI: To support the Scala community, ZeroTurnaround offers a a free licensed version of the Scala version of Java Rebel with the Lift (Scala-based web framework) installer.

<http://www.zeroturnaround.com/scala-license/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I stopped after "JEE development, though challenging and exciting"</comment>


Ask HN: Keeping track of random stack traces - <AUTHOR> Every so often in a piece of software we're testing, you get a random crash. If you're unlucky it's a nice race condition, hasn't happened 50 times in a row, then boom, it happens again.
In terms of tracking it for the future, what suggestions do people have? I can backlog it as a bug, but it's not going to be easily searchable.  A dev could pick it up, but without a method to reproduce, it's not easily fixed in a sprint either.
And it's also hard to know if it gets fixed in the future either!
But it's also a crash, and I personally hate not documenting them, no matter how rare.  But I'd like a better way to manage it. <comment><USER2> Pretty low-tech, but what we do is to create an md5 hash of the whole stack trace as a single string. Before hashing, we munge some bits to help make similar stack traces hash to the same value:

\- remove file/line#

\- omit the bottom (top) frame, which can be different between environments

\- convert certain constructs to a common format (e.g., "unknown module" (clang) to "???" (valgrind)

\- translate "func@@GLIBC_version" => "func"

This works well enough in practice for our purposes (identifying regressions and suppressing specific reports from valgrind/Address Santizer).

We also maintain a xref between md5 hash and full stack trace.

</comment><comment><USER3> You didn't specify where your software is running. I'm building software that my users install and run on their own hardware.

I send errors to Sentry.io when the error contains a novel stacktrace for the user and the user hasn't disabled error reporting. I also send recent log messages and some other info, like the OS and hardware architecture (so I can reproduce it on my end). [1]

PhotoStructure uses a SHA of the stacktrace to discriminate between different errors. This certainly can group different problems together, but in practice those problems are related.

Only sending novel stacktraces prevents a user from clogging up my Sentry dashboard, and from wasting my users' bandwidth. PhotoStructure imports huge libraries, and before I added this squelching, I could have a single user send tens of thousands of reports (when the "error" turned out to be an ignorable warning due to the camera they were using writing metadata that was malformed but still parseable).

If you're building a SaaS, and you own the hardware you're software is running on, just send all errors to Sentry.

Sentry does a good job in helping me triage new errors, marking when errors crop back up, and highlighting which build seems to have introduced a novel error.

Keep in mind that the stacktrace may not be relevant if that section of code or the upstream code is modified. I use automatic upgrading on all platforms to keep things consistent.

[1] [https://photostructure.com/faq/error- reports/](https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Sentry is great for this.

</comment><comment><USER5> At previous company there was a home built service which was a database of unhandled Java exceptions. It attempted to generate a hash value so that you could see how often exceptions were happening, and graph them over time.

Highly imperfect of course, and it created separate entries for some exceptions that included random numbers in their message. But it did put pressure on people to clean them up.

</comment><comment><USER6> A little automation can help you here. Errors could be auto-transformed into bugs somewhere and duplicates just add +1s or votes, etc. How you detect duplicated depends on your configuration but it should be doable (eg. use the stacktrace sha as a tag).

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel you.

> I can backlog it as a bug, but it's not going to be easily searchable.

In my experience, I've marked it as a bug, comment with the stack trace and mark as U. Then when it arises again, hopefully someone searches for a part of the stack and comes lucky or more often than not, I (or others) will hear of the crash and relay the bug info. Bug is updated with any new info and live continues until it crashes again... Not perfect by any means. I'd love to hear how others deal with this

<comment><USER8> I've also: Added more logging code for future cases, and or try to reason about how it could have occurred. Try to make it impossible if you can, but sometimes that requires too big of a rearchitecture to be worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have an upcoming product in this space. It basically lets you send errors and their stack traces to datadog. You can then search, aggregate, filter etc your stack traces

You can email me if this interests you (email is in my bio)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd suggest looking at backtrace.io It may be overkill for what you want to do, but one thing it does really well is to log stack traces.</comment>


Why Windows power users break Linux - <AUTHOR> https://freedompenguin.com/articles/opinion/windows-power-users-break-linux/ <comment><USER2> I bet most issues come from those mysterious "mount points". In most peoples mind the windows "drive-letters" are just short symbols for various devices and not equal to "mount points". So they end up writing raw data directly to partitions and mess everything up. Luckily most modern linuxes have automounters now.</comment>


UK Rejects International Court of Justice Opinion on the Chagos Islands - <AUTHOR> https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/02/uk-rejects-international-court-of-justice-opinion-on-the-chagos-islands/ <comment><AUTHOR> >I have taken it for granted that you know that the reason the UK refuses to decolonise the Chagos Islands is to provide an airbase for the US military on Diego Garcia.</comment>


Evolution of <img>: Gif without the GIF - <AUTHOR> https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-the-gif/ <comment><USER2> Unsurprisingly, Apple goes for the patent-encumbered video format [1]. I'm disappointed that Firefox never really had the opportunity to "win" the browser wars and push more user- and developer-friendly formats on the world.

[1] [http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_pat...](http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents) (the vast majority of the patents will expire by 2023, but 2027 is the last probable date that it will be encumbered)

<comment><USER3> This is to support sites like imgur, reddit that are essentially distributing GIFs as MP4s now. They didn't really determine the format that the community adopted

<comment><USER4> I've never really understood this. I previously had figured that the popularity of GIFs on reddit had been about bandwidth and load times. In that past, video would be too slow for the rapid novelty stimulus reddit offered, while GIFs were lightening. But now every "GIF" people post is a just full movie, and it loads more slowly than YouTube or other websites that are smartly structured to handle video.

Why do they do this?

<comment><USER3> [https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing- gifv/](https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/) has some of the details.

It definitely makes sense technically. It should in most cases reduce file size, and also allows you to stream content in buffered so you don't need to wait for the whole thing to load for it to play. (Though I believe streaming in gifs is teeeechnically possible? I feel like I saw a demo one time that made a clock by streaming in gif frames)

<comment><USER4> Hey thanks, this is super useful! I still don't quite get it though. I understand that converting huge HD GIFs to a standard video format allows steaming and better compression, but why encourage people to upload it like this rather than just upload videos?

The only explanation in the post is "the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format. With Project GIFV, Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture." Is the idea just that people want soundless looping HD video, and they're accustomed to uploading GIFs, so Imgur is going to accommodate them by doing the conversions server-side?

I guess this is an explanation, but it's a surprising one. For instance, it doesn't really fit well with the observation that people uploaded GIFs of content that was obviously native video and not connected to internet GIF culture, e.g., sports videos.

<comment><USER5> Yes it's all about no sound. Everyone likes opening up a bunch of tabs that include auto-playing funny looping videos, but nobody likes auto-playing sound, especially if it overlaps with some other sound.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if it is Chrome's doing or YouTube's, but if I open a couple of youtube links in tabs (a selection from the "related" list to the right of one I'm currently watching for instance) the clips in the new tabs don't start playing until that tab gains focus. This avoids the auto-playing sound overlapping problem _and_ means you don't miss the start of the clip and drop in part way through. Surely this is the solution to that selection of requirements?

<comment><USER5> I've noticed the Chrome feature as well. I watch a lot of Twitch streams, and it causes a frustrating experience, albeit with possible workarounds by Twitch. It's that Twitch is about live streams and live chat, but now the video autoplay is delayed until I activate the tab, but chat is still live from the moment I clicked on the link. It basically buffers the stream now, but makes me go out of sync with chat. One alleviator could be Twitch adding a "go live" button that shows up when I'm not live.

There are still two classes of problems unaffected by this change.

1) As is popular with gifs, there could very well be multiple of these autoplaying videos on the same page, probably even multiple fitting in the same viewport area. If they had sound, these would interfere with eachother.

2) My understanding is that many listen to music from some source unrelated to the webpage containing these autoplaying videos. So even if there's only one video, its autoplaying sound could easily mix with my tunes.

Doing autoplaying sound is hard, but with gaze tracking and knowledge of system sound usage status, I think a pretty good solution is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see why the "issues" with the <video> tag couldn't be fixed in the video tag?

"Autoplay video is used for ads and thus controlled by browsers" (and  video won't have the same development?!) and "<video> can't be saved" (yes, if you use a JavaScript player that interferes with it, if you just link in a file through a <video> tag at least FF and Chrome do have a save option) seem especially nonsensical.

I guess there is some semantic argument for "videos that should act like images", but I somehow doubt that'll happen nicely...

<comment><USER8> > I don't see why the "issues" with the <video> tag couldn't be fixed in the > video tag?

You could make that argument for a lot of html tags. <address>,
,
. Perhaps this is the safari teams opening argument for a new tag to be added to the spec.

<comment><USER9> Those tags add semantic meaning. Putting video in your img tag as opposed to fixing the video tag does the opposite.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't "do the opposite". It applies a different, better-fitting semantic meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was appalled when I first started reading this.

But in reality, it feels quite true to HTML. The HTML author is declaring to the browser the purpose of this asset. This one is to be viewed as an image. This other asset is to be viewed as a video.

The encoding format shouldn't dictate the tag, the content and intent should.

We've been okay with animated GIFs being images for long enough now that we've kind of opted into animated images being okay in general.

<comment><USER12> I hate that I can't find fault with this argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> APNG is also a very good way to achieve that! No limits in the number of colors, better compression. No patents?

All major browsers now support APNG, Chrome being the last in the bunch :) For example, we use it in our README screencast for [https://github.com/wallix/awless](https://github.com/wallix/awless)

<comment><USER2> I didn't realize support for this had improved, but it's still missing Edge: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=apng](https://caniuse.com/#feat=apng)

You could probably polyfill something in WebAssembly for it, however!

<comment><AUTHOR> still ridiculously large file compared to webm/mp4. The alpha support is cool though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems super pointless.

Their reasons:

> 1\. Browser performance is slow with <video>

Maybe look into ways to make <video> fast?

> 2\. You can't right click and save video

I never had an issue with this... But if Safari does, perhaps they should have fixed that there?

> 3\. Autoplay abuse

Mute the video or remove the audiotrack. If even this in the future gets prevented to autoplay, then I don't see how  tags wouldn't as well. After all, they're just becoming the same thing.

<comment><USER15> 1\. The issue here is what browsers are expecting with a <video> tag, which is long-form content and that's what they are optimizing for.

2\. Depends on the browser and the player that is used.

3\. Well, the  tag is by default much more limited, hence it is less of interested to the ad companies and the browsers allow it more freedom. But yes I agree that this is a point the browser developers should improve upon.

<comment><USER16> For #1, Safari could support a "shortform" hint on the video tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Linked site is down - it's a pretty well-written writeup, archived here - [https://web.archive.org/web/20171204164627/https://calendar....](https://web.archive.org/web/20171204164627/https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated- gif-without-the-gif/)

EDIT: original author put this up on medium - [https://medium.com/@colinbendell/evolution-of-img-gif- withou...](https://medium.com/@colinbendell/evolution-of-img-gif-without-the- gif-8da25adcca15)

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh the irony of a site named "perf planet" going down under a little HN traffic.

<comment><USER19> was thinking the same high fi

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This page crashes on chromium before you even have the opportunity to read half of the article. I wonder if there is a memory leak or it's just the GIF implementation in chromium.

<comment><USER21> same same (chrome 62; x86_64 Linux)

Btw. from the TL;DR: This post is 46MB on Chrome but 2MB in Safari TP

And the post looks great in Firefox Quantum ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The crux of the problem seems to be where we encode the information "this video should loop".

We did it before in surrounding HTML structure. The proposal is to now do it different, slightly shorter, surrounding HTML structure. As far as I can see, there's no fundamental difference, just syntax sugar and a battleground reset.

How do we get the video to loop when viewed directly? When set as the background? When saved as a file? These are use cases that .gif satisfies and videos don't, or only awkwardly and inconsistently.

Also note that content is inherently suited or unsuited to looping. It's rarely useful to play a normal video on a loop, or a video meant to loop just once.

All this points to one solution: a new file extension that means "a video meant to be played in a loop". The format of the file need not be any different from a video. Maybe ".mp4l", ".webml", etc.

<comment><USER23> That would have some downsides. You to browser behavior to url in a way that never been done before, it doesn't really account for mime types or content encoding, it isn't backwards compatible at all, it doesn't allow you to use one resource in both ways, and it relies on duplicating all extension names 2x for all video formats and times no one unrelated will make a video formats ending in 'l'. If we must change this some combination of css and/or js would probably work better. Like 'img { repeat: none; }' for example

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of the reasons GIF's are popular is that it's a format with nearly universal support, with no codecs to fuss about. Anyone can see a GIF, and anyone can edit a GIF.

The proposed "improvement" offers the key limitations of GIF without the key advantages, and lacks many features.

Like, what about variable frame rate? Transparency? Not fuzzing out the pixels in pixel-art?

The last one specifically: a great use-case for GIF is capturing screen animations (see [https://www.cockos.com/licecap/](https://www.cockos.com/licecap/)). Video codecs aren't optimized for this - you won't see the comparison for such GIF's on the linked webpage.

<comment><USER25> It's not supposed to replace GIFs for the things they're actually good at, like your examples. It's supposed to replace the abuse of GIFs for things they're not good at, like long, high frame rate, and/or high color depth videos.

The majority of the GIFs being produced today are not things the GIF format was designed to handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've floated the idea of allowing various video formats in <source> for the <picture> element. Would allow for the right codec to be selected, and would easily allow for a  as the final fallback. Might be worth pushing on more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know if you need a spec change since this is technically now supported in Safari TP. (See the example) Really it's up to the browser to decide if it wants to use the media type or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article mentions removing the audio track. Is that required for this to work or would it play if it's included or is that just for efficiency? i.e. will Safari simply ignore it if it's included?

<comment><AUTHOR> don't need to remove the audio. it's muted by the browser. removing audio just saves bytes.

<comment><USER28> Incorrect. If an audio track is present, the mp4 does not qualify for autoplay unless other conditions are met.

EDIT: Context is unclear about whether the parent's guidance is about <video> or . No idea what  does. I sure hope it doesn't play due to the wasteful audio track, so that people are forced to do it right instead of lazy, though!

<comment><AUTHOR> in the context of  the audio track doesn't play anyway. dropping it ensures you save the bytes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Site is down for me so I have no idea if they addressed this in the article or not, but what's wrong with the `<video>` tag?

As a user, I greatly prefer that option since it lets me control playback (via the "show controls" menu option) whereas GIFs (and presumably also mp4 "images") don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> the biggest draw back is the browser preloader and general performance. For cinemagraphs & clips this will be great. Anytime you want to add audio or pause/control playback, this will be the wrong solution.

<comment><USER29> > the biggest draw back is the browser preloader and general performance

So why can't we just fix that issue with the `<video>` tag? (Maybe with a `preload` attribute or something.) It just seems semantically incorrect to be putting videos in `<img>` tags (and yes, I realize this same argument applies to GIFs as well).

> Anytime you want to add audio or pause/control playback, this will be the > wrong solution

I'm referring to me as a user showing controls even when the site has them hidden. Obviously as a developer I can always just choose to not use this feature and use a video tag instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mirror: [https://medium.com/@colinbendell/evolution-of-img-gif- withou...](https://medium.com/@colinbendell/evolution-of-img-gif-without-the- gif-8da25adcca15)

</comment><comment><USER30> It's just HEIF. [http://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html](http://nokiatech.github.io/heif/technical.html)

I think we should not deny its future proving goodnees.

<comment><AUTHOR> mp4s aren't HEIF. but this feature is certainly pre-lude to Safari supporting HEIF in the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you're interested in seeing this in Chrome, star [https://crbug.com/791658](https://crbug.com/791658)

</comment><comment><USER32> Does it support transparency and 4:4:4 chroma? Otherwise it does not cover all gif use cases. Namely pixel art and sprites.

Animated PNG is probably a better replacement for those.

</comment><comment><USER33> WebP and APNG are both good formats instead of GIF. But the problem is that Chrome developers stubbornly do not want to add APNG support, while Firefox developers, also stubbornly, do not want to add WebP support. "Thanks" to both those teams we are forced to do such hacks...

</comment><comment><USER34> Can we please replace image and video formats by something more generic, e.g. bytecode+data?

(We can put the bytecode of the encoder/decoder in some content-addressable remote storage, and pre-fetch/pre-optimize it when necessary.)

<comment><USER35> Videos are usually decoded in hardware.

<comment><USER34> Yes, the solution to that is to make opcodes for the special instructions typically available in hardware, e.g. discrete cosine transforms; or a more coarse grained approach if necessary. Eventually, it will be up to platform owners to provide translations from the bytecode to the underlying hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Did it get hugged? The website isn't loading for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> Link is dead. Is it also supported on mobile Safari?

</comment><comment><USER38> Still no date as input type :(

</comment><comment><USER39> IE 5.5 supported  back in the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER19> what other browsers are drinking this cool aid

</comment><comment><USER40> But .mp4 is a video/... MIME type. Not an image/...

We have <video>, so why not use that?

What next? Utterly ridiculous, Apple.

<comment><USER41> Probably because videos don't auto play anymore and they come with controls?

<comment><USER40> But aren't Apple the only people enforcing that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrome now has the same enforcement for <video> tags.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mind the Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

<comment> daniel-cussen [2004]

You may want to append that to the title. Some people here already know it's not a new essay, but it's a courtesy to those that either forgot or don't know because new pg essays attract a lot of interest on this forum.

</comment><comment><USER2> In the discussion about the ratio in incomes between those earning the least and those earning the most, pg does not seem to be aware of the fact that this ratio has been changing over large time spans (even ignoring the excesses from pop culture which can be explained by a structural change in how that part of society functions).

Curiously, these changes correlate with the rise and fall of certain political movements. It is then quite reasonable to wonder if, perhaps, the disreputable ways of earning money via political manipulation are really not a thing of the past after all.

</comment><comment><USER3> "In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want" - sure for products but it is not entirely true when it comes to compensation. If janitors, in some united way, stopped cleaning our bathrooms for minimum wage then we would pay more. I'd say their service is "worth" more then we compensate them for, we are just collectively taking advantage of their position in life.

<comment><USER4> If janitors charged much more than the reasonable market value for their services we'd invest more in self-cleaning technology and tools so those few janitors that remained employed were less necessary and were _really effective_ such that they could do more work per unit time. We'd also probably just adapt to a lower level of cleanliness. Or clean the bathrooms ourselves as needed or as an extra add-on task to some more valuable job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another point of view is that money equals power. Societies rightfully worry that uber-accumulation of wealth leads to power imbalances; i don't think it's just a superstition. There are also a number of points i disagree with. I wonder how he would write about it today, after the crisis.</comment>


Regex Colorizer - A JavaScript Library For Regex Syntax Highlighting - <AUTHOR> http://stevenlevithan.com/regex/colorizer/ <comment><AUTHOR> A super nice regular expression highlighter from a guy (Steven Levithan) who knows his stuff (<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1449319432/?tag=slfb-20>)

Interested In More Developers' Resources? Check out Functionn: [http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/regex-colorizer- javasc...](http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/regex-colorizer-javascript- library-for.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool, useful. Thanks.</comment>


The USS Fitzgerald Is at Fault. This Is Why - <AUTHOR> http://gcaptain.com/uss-fitzgerald-fault/ <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this not for the kind of click baitish title, but it is a really interesting systems interaction piece. Two different systems with a common protocol that just failed.

</comment><comment><USER2> Somewhat misleading headline. Last sentence: _" For this reason I am 99.9% confident the USS Fitzgerald will be found at fault… and so will the ACX Crystal."_

While the author makes a compelling case why the _Fitzgerald_ should have avoided the collision, the accident is still under active investigation and thus definitively assigning blame is premature.

Information released to the press has been quite limited. Only the crews of both ships have an idea of what actually took place, and the investigators are still in the process of interviewing them and reviewing instrumentation, damage, and onboard recordings.</comment>


Why Do So Many Geeks Hate Internet Explorer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32372/htg-explains-why-do-so-many-geeks-hate-internet-explorer/

<comment><USER2> The short answer is that Internet Explorer since IE 6 represents the opposite of everything a modern web developer works towards: constant development, quick releases, and always, _always_ improving. Just look at Chrome, it's become the poster child for how to do a web browser right. They are on version 6 (release) and 7 (development) and no-one would even know. You install Chrome and THAT'S IT. There's no "upgrading" there's no worrying about supporting old versions, you ALWAYS have the most up-to-date version and if it works on Chrome for you it will work for everyone else.

Even Firefox and Safari get this wrong. Does it work on FF3? What about FF2 or (god forbid) FF1? Safari 4? 5?

IE has taken this to the far, far extreme. Years between product releases, and nothing but security fixes between that. No features, no polishing, nothing.

This article is good but the conclusion is wrong. As long as Microsoft continues to do this "release a browser version every 3-4 years" us web developers will have to deal with this hell. I now refuse to support IE 6 in anything I do, and I'm very VERY close to adding 7 to that list, but 50% of our users still use 7!!!

10 years from now, we will still have to support the god awful mess that is IE 8! And IE 9 will be the same thing 5 years down the road as Webkit and Firefox push the boundary of what's possible in web development. IE will always, _always_ lag behind.

And that is why we hate IE. It's not about the past, it's about the future as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real dev hates Internet Explorer (especially 6) because of all the designers who: \- have no clue what KISS means \- invent CSS, DOM and JS hacks \- sum a collection of hacks in their code \- do not read the technical papers about their environment (the browser)

Please complete the list if I am missing some. ;)

A browser is like a girl, you should take it as is and not force it to do what you want to. :)</comment>