The $3B+ Exit Tumblr Could Have Had - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/05/the-3b-exit-tumblr-could-have-had/ <comment><USER2> There are a two major faults with the author's analysis which lead me to believe this post should not be relied on.

1\. Advertising rates are far below the author's $10-20 CPM estimate for dashboard advertising; $10-20 is for legitimately premium advertising such as high-end audiences, wrapping a website, etc. Dashboard / banner ads will fetch $0.5-3 CPM the way Tumblr is running them.

2\. The "valuation" formula of 10x trailing ("or"?) forward revenue is misplaced. Revenue multiples in acquisitions are often reserved for companies which are mature and predictable, not in early stages of their revenue plan. Corporate acquirers will often times use the expectations of the revenue created for the acquirer, which has little to do with the target in the status quo. Yahoo's expectations of revenue creation could be anything, and they have their own internal formula which we can't glimpse.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. What makes it worse is that Tumblr has lots of soft core porn and other unsavory content which brand advertisers don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole.

Plus, the P/S of 10x looks pulled out of ye' olde arse. Google's trailing P/S is 5.6x and Yahoo's is similar. AOL is 1.31x. What media company that might be a "comp" trades for 10x.

<comment><AUTHOR> HuffPo, and I said it was steep not what people should expect to get.

Huffington Post, a media company, was purchased by AOL for $315M @ $30M rev. That's 10x. Stop trolling.

<comment><USER3> You could goto Bloomberg.com or Yahoo Finance and get real P/S ratios but you used the uncontested paragon of financial data - HuffPo.

And you said it's high but still used it in your headline cuz you thought would have a higher chance of getting to the top of HN.

I guess pursuit of provocative > properly researched.

<comment><USER4> Will you both please stop?

<comment><USER5> Did the flame war algo catch this one? If so, well done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only reason Yahoo made an offer is because they were afraid someone else might. Otherwise they'd be content to wait for the layoffs to begin before giving an opening bid of $150 million.

Tumblr seems to have followed the SV model in all respects but one. Raise a lot of money, get a lot of users, and staff up way beyond your needs (175 employees)? Check. They missed the last one, though: don't bother to monetize so you don't run the risk of doing it badly and lowering your evaluation.

The urgency to get a billion dollar offer on the table as the wheels fall off of the bus is so utterly ridiculous and symptomatic of the problem with SV culture.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is another one of those SV deals that simply DO NOT make sense whatsoever.

So Yahoo! wants the young audience (check), but what are they going to do? Throw ads at young teens (who browse porn and nail art on Tumblr)? Have a "bigger" presence in mobile? Integrate Flickr with Tumblr? Don't get this.

And how does Yahoo! still have cash? Jesus

The acquisition just makes zero sense, Tumblr price (valuation) makes even less sense:

\- $15M in revenue (down $85M from the projected 2013 of $100M) \- 175 employees (for what? 150 of them are probably useless with regard to the company) \- Running out of cash (so hey, let's sell for $1B since we'll be worth $100M in 6-months anyway)

Why is SV rushing in to buy this company as, like another user said, the wheels are falling off? Where is the value, yet alone $1B value?

Just stupid SV math.

<comment><USER8> _And how does Yahoo! still have cash? Jesus_

You realize Yahoo! is a profitable company, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In the end Tumblr won't see a bigger exit because they didn't prove they > could monetize their massive traffic before time (and money) ran out.

Instagram had $0 in revenue when they were acquired for $1 billion in cash/stock. The price paid in that instance was for _potential_ , and it's likely to be the same in the case of Tumblr.

<comment><USER10> We should probably avoid using Instagram in examples. It's such an insane outlier that it doesn't make sense to compare anything to it.

<comment><USER11> Tumblr is very similar to Instagram and should be considered as example.

The overlap between Instagram and Tumblr users in the early days is huge. Both are targeted at young crowd with similar taste graph.

As a Platform Tumblr has great potential in spreading the content. Reblogs works just like retweet and a good content can potentially go viral. That also includes rebloging of promotional content.

I personally feel people who don't use Tumblr see this as yet another blog site. They have the best mobile app to post pics, stories, videos & even audio. After Instagram, I am slowly getting addicted to Tumblr's mobile app.

<comment><USER12> I think Instagram acquisition and this are not similar cases. Instagram was a direct competitor of a core product of Facebook: Photo Sharing while there's no such competition in Tumblr case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having worked in both media and creative agencies I can't agree with the potential revenue analysis in the article.

User Generated Content, as many here have pointed out, is not valuable and often is indeed toxic for big brands. The young audience surfing cat pictures is also not valuable. What products will the advertisers sell to them? Games, some fashion, fizzy drinks but then what?

Lastly, non targeted audience is also less valuable for obvious reasons. This is why they are looking at ~ $0.75 CPM but LinkedIn campaigns start at $1.50 and go only up from there.

Successfully monetizing anonymous teenagers wasting time on the internet is something nobody has managed to do so far. Ask Digg.com

</comment><comment><USER14> The Pricing that Danielle has quoted - $10-15 RPM is extremely high.

First - Tumblr is not a "Premium" Property. NBCNews.com and Business week is.

Second - Porn which is plentiful on Tumblr is the opposite of premium. It tends to be cheap and not easily monetizable.

Third - A better metric to use would be CPM. Un-targeted ads deliver <$1 CPM Typically. These are the Run off Network kind of campaigns.

Targeted ads such as search / display targeting, retargeting typically deliver between $2.5 - $5.00 which represents the best case.

Fourth - The ad platforms tend to take a revenue cut + platform fee which easily amounts to 30-40% of that.

Fifth - I am assuming that Tumblrs ads are direct buys in which case it is highly unlikely that they can quote CPMs given in my earlier statements. This is because they probably don't have enough technology to deliver those kind of media buys yet.

Net net..your numbers are off. The $3b title is a nice bait but the valuation numbers are off.

<comment><USER15> Porn is not just 'not monetizable', it is toxic to regular advertisers.

You really don't want that ad for the new car next to grandma in her see- through... bad associations.

<comment><USER16> But that is not how the advertising works on Tumblr. Read this for a clearer insight/explanation: [http://allthingsd.com/20130518/why-yahoo-doesnt-think- tumblr...](http://allthingsd.com/20130518/why-yahoo-doesnt-think-tumblr-has-a- porn-problem/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a sometime Tumblr user, here's hoping that whether acquired or not, Tumblr manages to find enough revenue to keep itself running well into the future, but does so without unduly alienating its users or making the site feel compromised. That other T*r site has well demonstrated the rockiness of the road from potential to actual profitability.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think combining Flickr and Tumblr could be a massive win for Yahoo! They have monetised Flickr successfully and the model they use to do that combined with Tumblr's current model could see them transform revenues on both titles very quickly. I do think Tumblr should grab the offer while it's on the table, however.

<comment> ms-rm Quick question: how did Yahoo monetize Flickr?

<comment><USER18> Quick answer: Freemium +

<comment><USER7> Quick rebuttal: Flickr barely makes any money.

<comment><USER19> and the freemium model was in place before Yahoo bought them

I was a pro user, cancelled when Yahoo bought Flickr and forced us all to use Yahoo accounts.

<comment><USER18> I did completely the opposite. I like what Yahoo have done with Flickr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it odd that a freemium model was never considered by Tumblr. It has worked for WordPress.com, which is very similar.

<http://en.support.wordpress.com/upgrades/>

<http://vip.wordpress.com>

<comment><USER21> Wordpress is used by people managing professional identities and business related content, Tumblr is predominantly young people wasting time on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't understand this Internet math.

</comment><comment><USER23> "According to Forbes Tumblr is targeting $100M revenue in 2013 but, according to sources I spoke to who are familiar with the company, actual Q1 revenue growth was flat and Tumblr is on track to do only $15M in revenue this year."

This is unbelievable. I can't believe they're running out of the $85M so soon after raising it, and have basically nothing to show for it. I'd be pretty outraged if I were an investor.

<comment><USER6> They have 175 employees, so it's not too surprising they blew through $85 million in 8 months.

<comment><USER15> 85000000/175=485714, that's actually quite surprising unless the averge flickr employee grosses more than 50 K per month.

$85 million is a lot of cash.

<comment><USER24> Shouldn't that be /8? So around 6k per month.

<comment><USER6> You're off by one decimal place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the potential Tumblr acquisition offer is based on userbase/audience value rather than any kind of (current) monetization.

It seems Yahoo is trying to extend their reach in the active/young people market. Tumblr audience is a perfect fit for this strategy and sure Yahoo is ready to pay premium as there are not many comparable platforms available for acquisition.

<comment><USER26> The problem with active/young people market is they are very temperamental to ads, if you don't treat your user base like the tumblr founders have, they would have easily changed to another platform with less ads. Sure if yahoo acquires tumblr they gain direct access to this marketbase but if they tarish what tumblr is now, with a bad ad revenue scheme they will very easily lose that market base to something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would it even be feasible to monetize Tumblr by running ads on massive scale? I would assume one reason for its popularity is the lack of ads. This has for example allowed quite relaxed page templates, you can make the site look whatever you want. With mandatory ads things would be more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER28> I love how non-tumblers just like to throw out the fact that tumblr is full of porn omgz!!111 and that is really bad for ads etc

try using tumblr before making such comments. you only see porn if you subscribe to porn tumblrs or people who like to reblog such things.

</comment><comment><USER29> Note: there is a share button for google reader on the page.

I thought reader was shut down?

<comment><USER30> July 1

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> To be honest, businesses that are good at making money will always be valued higher (relatively speaking) than businesses that are just good at getting users.

Getting someone to use your free product is a different skill than getting advertisers to put their ads on your product or getting people to pay for your product.

Making money is a skill and if your company doesn't figure out how to do that successfully, you shouldn't expect to sell for a large amount of money.

At the end of the day, businesses are about making money, you know getting customers to pay you. They aren't about getting people to use your free product.

<comment><USER32> I cant figure out a single reason why this comment was downvoted. can anyone help me understand? genuinely curious please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm very curious to know how many consumer focused sites/companies/apps have had 1 billion+ buyouts.

</comment><comment><USER34> Completely OT, but I quite like the photograph of early evening San Francisco. I wouldn't mind a link, if it's available somewhere -- for my private enjoyment; not to duplicate the blogger's design.

</comment><comment><USER35> Danielle,

What do you reason is Tumblr's intrinsic value?</comment>


Short on Money, Cities Around the World Try Making Their Own - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-07/a-depression-era-idea-gets-a-new-look-local-money <comment><USER2> I remember reading an economic history book and they mentioned that the Spanish bringing gold to Europe from the Americas stimulated the European economy, and it struck me all at once that basically none of the economic activity in Europe _required_ gold (they weren't making intricate electronics, after all). Growing food, making clothes, tools, shelter, it all could have been done without the gold. What they needed was "money" that everyone believed was valuable in order to convince people to do work. It's the work that causes prosperity, not the gold.

I think local currency can function similarly. A lot of people in small towns struggle to turn their skills into dollars, partly because the modern economy values a lot of stuff rather weirdly. Just because their skills aren't easily translatable into dollars globally doesn't mean that they can't still make their local community a much better place, provided there's a way for someone in the local community to communicate that they value the service (which they can't do using dollars, because they also don't have any).

<comment><USER3> >the Spanish bringing gold to Europe from the Americas stimulated the European economy

"Stimulated the economy" is a choice way of looking at it. What it did was create a period of inflation on a scale of size and duration never before seen. It basically led to the decline of Spain as a major world power.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution)

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Thank you for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The modern rebirth of local currencies was probably the Austrian town of Wörgl which having been hit badly by the Great Depression recovered magnificently after creating its own local currency in 1932. The currency was so successful it was later forcibly shut down by Austria's Central Bank.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl)

<comment><USER5> It's amazing how well a society can function, if you ensure that the money that circulates in it doesn't leak out of it, fueling further investment and purchases. I think it's worth actually re-examining our view of globalization and global trade with this in mind.

<comment><USER6> I'm no economist, but wouldn't this lead to greater wealth disparity?

When money leaks out, it leaks in to somewhere else. Sort of like connecting bodies of water will lower the water level of one body and raise it in another. One place will lose out and another will gain.

Unless differences in local taxation/laws/amenities/other lead to wealth/poverty hotspots. With some areas vacuuming up wealth and others repelling it. Is that what this is really solving? Unable to compete on local taxation/laws/amenities/other, cities have to find another way to prevent their wealth being repelled.

Sounds like just another wall though. Which can surely never last

<comment><USER7> With the experience of the Euro and the vastly different countries under different legislation, I think this is far too naive.

The common currency was a bad decision in my opinion. Sure, now legislation is getting "normalized" (I love the jargon), so that nobody is happy with it anymore. I don't think I would want that for anybody. It is like a marriage that doesn't really work.

Complete detachment of capital that was created in one place is not a great idea. That doesn't mean other places cannot grow and it doesn't mean there is no exchange.

<comment><USER8> The Euro was and is not as bad IMO as many people make it to be. I'm half Croat, half German and I remember when visiting Croatia pre-Euro rollout that you had to do three currency exchanges along the trip - from Deutsche Mark to Austrian Schilling to Slovenian Tolar to Croatian Kuna. Today? It's only the Croatian Kuna which is probably going away in 2023-2025. Everywhere else I can pay with a credit card without paying any "currency conversion" fees or exchange rates far away from actual market rates. And especially you don't lose hours upon hours on useless border control any more (with the exception of the SL-HR border and the idiocy at the German border).

And it's not just tourism. Euro + SEPA + free movement between countries are what fueled the growth of the European economy pre-rona. That all of this got attacked in the recent years (no matter if Italy/Greece threatening/being threatened with Euro removal or Germany's Seehofer introducing border controls again to "combat immigration" aka get rid of refugees) is saddening.

The people who want to dial back European unification are going to cost Europe a lot, especially the ability to compete with the US on the global stage.

Do note that this does _not_ mean there are no problems relating to the Euro - especially the economic disparity between the powerhouses Germany/France and the (South) Eastern European countries - but these should be solved by wealth transfers and nation building, not by risking all progress of the last decades!

<comment><USER9> Remain-voting Briton here.

The Euro has nothing to do with border control or free movement, free trade, standardisation or fishing quotas. It has nothing to do with immigration policy, the Dublin treaty, or even the Maastricht treaty.

There is no doubt that central European monetary policy has harmed Italy and Greece. It likely contributed to the Catalonian vote for independence, too and is also squeezing Portugal in ways that are making the citizenship sit up and take notice.

Britain was successfully showing it was possible to have free movement & trade and significant collaboration inside the EU's organisations and projects without a single currency or monetary policy.

Sadly, the Dublin treaty was not being enforced that led - and still leads to this very day - to hysterical media coverage that turned public opinion against the whole project. The EU's inability to flex on that was one of many contributory factors to the Brexit vote, but so was the drive for tighter political and economic unification.

That is now causing other countries to have their own exit movements gain attention. If the EU does not pull back there is a real risk those movements will gain more momentum and the project will end.

People aren't interested in competing with the US on the global stage. They want a home, a family and fulfilling work and social lives. The technocrats trying to wave their genitals don't care about the damage they do, as long as the EU rises in league tables with ever bigger numbers.

I believe a reformed EU is the only future where we get any of the benefits of the original ideals. It's not clear to me you need to have a common currency to do that. It's not even clear to me you need a Parliament to do that, never mind one that moves between two cities regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These schemes always remind of Paddy's Bucks from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

They are a monetary solution sent in to fight financial problems. The solution to those problems usually lies outside issuing your own money; it instead compounds your problems. There's probably a case to be made for them if you could find and administer an optimal currency area, which is a monumental challenge.

<comment><USER11> Thus creating the self sustaining economy

<comment><USER12> "I don't understand how _finance_ works." - Dennis Reynolds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is a bit weird that cryptocurrency folks talk about "disrupting" financial system when they actually talk about rolling monetary policy back to about middle ages. Come up with a currency _anyone_ can create and there you have a real disruption.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M22NTCT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_9eOm...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M22NTCT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_9eOmFbJKDZM99)

It's a bit of a hard read, but the author proves that Bitcoin is pushed by far right activists who have extreme views of how money should work.

<comment> atom-morgan I, and many others I know, aren't far right and support it. We just don't want the government to print money at will.

<comment><USER14> That is a far right viewpoint. Modern economics requires a government to actively maintain a steady value in its currency. Removing this control is, by definition, far right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My guess is they are going to owe the IRS a lot of money.

In real USD.

[https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/four-things-you-should-know- if-...](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/four-things-you-should-know-if-you- barter)

<comment><USER16> This right here shows how much the value of USD depends on the power of taxation. Even if you barter goods with no USD used, the IRS will still force you to find a way to obtain USD to pay taxes on that barter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what is wrong with the USA's economy, because the FED is printing dollars like never before to provide liquidity to the economy and still cities have to fall back to initiatives like this one to keep their local economies going.

Where did all the dollar liquidity of those cities run away to?

<comment><USER18> In the US, almost every of the 50 states must balance their budgets. They can't spend what they don't have without selling debt (municipal bonds that pay interest). They can't manufacture money as that is handled at the Federal level.

[https://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state- balanced-b...](https://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-balanced- budget-requirements-provisions-and.aspx)

<comment><USER17> Sure, but the FED money is going somewhere in the USA. Either to banks or other companies. Those companies are located in states. So eventually the FED money flows to those 50 states.

But it apparently doesn't reach local companies and people, or maybe it does but then it quickly leaks away again. I wonder why that is.

<comment><USER19> A lot of it is going into prop-ing up corporate debt. I remember that they even bought junk rated bonds.

<comment><USER20> Looking at the most recent balance sheet [0], corporate bonds look to be under the other securities section which has 86 billion in assets or about 1.2% of the asset sheet. Most of the balance sheet is taken up by U.S. Treasury securities and Mortgage-backed securities.

[0]: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure where they are getting the wir-currency facs from. But they are definately wrong about 1/5th of swiss companies using it. 60'000 members of wir (private&company) versus ~600'000 businesses in switzerland cant match up with that statement.

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a horrible idea. How does nobody realize that you can't just "will" a currency into having value? A piece of paper won't produce value... At least bitcoin gains it's value from traders buying USD with BTC.

<comment><USER23> Local councils can create some value by allowing people to pay council taxes, fees and fines with the issued currency. Enough to peg it 1:1 with the USD? I'll be honest, I don't know how countries like panama manage that, so hell if I know how a council would do it.

Fundamentally, this is what underwrites the US dollar as well. If you don't pay your taxes you (eventually, provided you aren't connected enough to avoid it) get arrested. You can generate your wealth in corn or software or boat building, but you have to pay your taxes in US dollars. You can't barter your boats for corn and pay your taxes in corn. Thus, (almost) everyone in the US needs some US dollars to avoid being jailed. This is the foundation upon which the value of the US dollar is built.

Of course, making sure it doesn't blow up in the councils face in a few months/years time due to lax issuing controls is a different matter.

<comment><USER16> I suspect there may be a psychological effect giving these currencies value as well, considering they've only been rolled out in small towns. Imagine living in a 2000 population town like in the article where everyone is socially connected. If you refused local currency because you doubted its future value, your business could very quickly become a local pariah.

Taxation is necessary to maintain the value of currency when dealing with a country of millions of people, but somewhere on the sliding scale as the population numbers we deal with decrease social factors outweigh purely economic factors. One of the biggest impacts modern capitalism has on human society is its ability to strip away all social considerations from financial decisions. In the premodern world your shopkeeper was also your neighbor, and every transaction was filled with social considerations like your relative wealth, recent hardship, or length of acquaintance. In the modern world, everything has a fixed price regardless of whether the buyer is a foreign stranger or childhood friend. Only by stripping away messy individual social connections does trade among 7 billion people operate efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is pretty much what we're doing at [https://cambiatus.io](https://cambiatus.io). We have a handful of successful communities that use the platform to a very useful degree, and we're expanding the platform to be able to accommodate other community shapes and needs as well.

<comment><USER25> That domain doesn't resolve for me, [https://www.cambiatus.com/](https://www.cambiatus.com/) works.

<comment><USER24> Thank you. We use the io domain for our stating platform so I always get them mixed up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My grandpa didn't get the opportunity to empathy much wisdom on my before he died. But, he did tell me "Never take wooden nickels" and that sounds like good advice to me.

</comment><comment><USER27> I understand that this is expressly forbidden in the US.

<comment><USER28> Is it? Nobody is stopping Tenino (the city in the article)... nor did they stop them back in 1931.

<comment><USER27> I'm not an expert of constituional law, but Article I section 10 says:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit;

[https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-1...](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-10/)

<comment><USER28> Huh, interesting. I'm also not a lawyer, but I guess that means that _states_ can't (but cities and towns can)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any city can create an ethereum token and use it. That's a fundamental aspect of blockchain</comment>


Kaldi Speech Recognition Toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kaldi-asr/kaldi <comment><USER2> We have an open position for an Kaldi Engineer, in case anyone's interested.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630618)

</comment><comment><USER3> This used to be the basis of Siri I think. Not sure it is any more, and not sure it's state of the art of speech recognition, given what neural nets can do.

<comment><USER4> It is state of the art in speech recognition exactly because it uses neural networks. I helped develop its nnet3 neural network library and have published based on work I've done on it. No other open source toolkit is better than it right now, both because it has an open license (Apache2) and because it has a larger community than any other speech toolkit.

You can see a lot of state of the art work done using Kaldi at Dan Povey's web page: [http://www.danielpovey.com/publications.html](http://www.danielpovey.com/publications.html) He is the main maintainer of the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's a good resource to learn more about speaker diarization so that I can learn how to use existing tools properly (tweaking and modifying them according to my needs such as improving accuracy).

Some diarizers that Im interested in trying so far are - PyCASP, pyAudioAnalysis, dlg-segmenter

<comment><USER6> Previous generation technology used GMM and agglomerative clustering. Example is Pycasp, lium diarization. For best performance you need ivector extraction and ivector clustering, that technology is not fully available in open source yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a good resource for getting started with Kaldi? I wanted to test it as an alternative to Julius, but all the documentation seems to assume you have a doctorate in speech recognition technologies or something.

<comment><USER4> This guide was written by a user who thought the learning curve was too high: [http://kaldi-asr.org/doc/kaldi_for_dummies.html](http://kaldi- asr.org/doc/kaldi_for_dummies.html)

The reality is that you will have to study a lot to truly understand the toolkit though. Speech recognition isn't as simple as image recognition where you can just throw a neural network at the problem (that might come off as offensive, but it really is more complicated). Note that you do not need a doctorate in speech recognition to understand it, as I don't have one.

In hindsight, the resources most useful to me when I first began working with Kaldi were:

\- the HTK book (behind a login wall, annoyingly) \- This book [http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/mjfg_NOW.pdf](http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/mjfg_NOW.pdf) \- The finite state transducers paper [http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/hbka.pdf](http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/hbka.pdf)

<comment><USER8> To add to this, Daniel Povey's lectures [0] are fairly useful (although not exactly colourful, per se).

Would definitely second the FST paper. You'll get shunned from the forums if you haven't read that one.

[0] [http://www.danielpovey.com/kaldi- lectures.html](http://www.danielpovey.com/kaldi-lectures.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kaldi is used in production at the BBC: [http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/transcriptor/](http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/transcriptor/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have any benchmarks for this?

<comment><USER4> Every dataset has scripts to run reproducible baselines. Look at the RESULTS file for each dataset to see the results of various models. e.g., [https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/tedlium/s...](https://github.com/kaldi- asr/kaldi/blob/master/egs/tedlium/s5/RESULTS)

The training of these models can be reproduced on your own machine using a run*.sh script plug-and-play style, but you'll have to do some digging to find what scripts correspond to which models in the RESULTS files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Still based on MFCC features, which are very noisy / high entropy.

<comment><USER12> This is completely wrong. Kaldi has code to compute all kinds of features (filter bank, pitch, PLP...) and the many recipes use them.

<comment><USER11> But not spectral peaks, which is what audio fingerprinting services like Shazam use (very successfully too it seems)

<comment><USER8> There's been very little use of spectral peaks in LVCSR for the past ~10 years.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spark deserves a better IDE - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/prophecy-io/spark-deserves-a-better-ide-92d23175f3b4 <comment><USER2> Yes please. Integrate with GitHub notifications, and gitlab ci-runner too. So that pull/merge requests can be shown as well.

Maybe a leaf of inspiration from golang modules so that upstream code modules can be imported.

IDE++, it can't stop evolving. Thanks for the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great inputs, pulling Git info back into the IDE is a great idea. Will definitely add it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excited about sharing the new interface we're building for Apache Spark.

We're also trying live screen gifs for the first time - quite an effort to get GIF size down.</comment>


How would you design a chicken? - <AUTHOR> http://apply.hubbub.co.uk/design_a_chicken <comment><USER2> I understand the interest in a novel kind of engineering, and this seems to be more of a thought exercise than anything else. I also understand that not everyone shares my views on animals, but this is such an awful exercise. This absurd mechanization of a living creature is just disgusting. Modern factory practices already deny animals of so many of their natural behaviors. This kind of thinking totally lacking in empathy and consequences scares the hell out of me.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, we could drastically improve the lives of farm animals if we engineered them more. For example, we could give them CIPA[1]. We could make their brains smaller. A vegetable chicken can't suffer. These modifications may sound perverse, but I doubt we're going to stop cooping these creatures up and killing them any time soon. We might as well do our best to reduce the amount of suffering we cause them.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_sensory_and_autonomi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_sensory_and_autonomic_neuropathy#Type_5.2C_Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain_with_partial_anhidrosis)

<comment><USER2> You think factory farms are disturbing now? Just wait until animals cannot feel pain. I'm envisioning far more fights to the death for starters.

<comment><USER3> Painless death at the hands of other chickens sounds more moral than the current situation: a life of suffering followed by painful death at the hands of a machine. Of course if all chickens are born into a persistent vegetative state (or something close to it), I don't see how fights could happen. Also, farms where chickens kill each other would probably be less profitable than farms that slaughtered their chickens at the optimal time.

Painless animals were discussed on Overcoming Bias a few years ago: <http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/painless-meat.html> . Interestingly, vegetarians were more likely to oppose painless animals than meat-eaters.

<comment><USER2> Well animals in a coma all of their lives will clearly not being killing each other. You're right about profits though which of course is the driving force behind all of this. There's also human safety to consider. Painless, larger animals would be quite dangerous.

<comment> jon-wood Honestly, the driving force behind all of this is that we thought it was an interesting question which tells you about how people view food. My favourite answer so far has been "Don't redesign the chicken, redesign society to better use it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For what purpose are we designing the chicken?

If we're designing it as a food animal, I'd maximize the meat area and try to minimize the rest. I'd reduce the amount of body fat naturally carried. If possible, I'd take a page from "Top Secret"[1] and make the bird perform photosynthesis.

If we're designing a good prey, I'd make it smaller and give it better wings for flight.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-John-Reynolds- Gardiner/prod...](http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-John-Reynolds- Gardiner/product-reviews/0316303631)

<comment><USER5> Is very low fat necessarily optimal? I think _excessively_ fatty birds are a problem, but depending on use, I suspect a non-zero percentage of fat is desirable. Though I have no idea what the optimal amount would be. But in plenty of food applications, grease is good.

<comment> jon-wood If anything, you'd want a chicken with skin which excretes fat so you can avoid putting butter on it, although that would make it quite a bit more difficult to catch.

<comment><USER5> self-buttering chicken makes me drool at my desk. Would that make it a cow- chicken hybrid though (assuming it's butter from cow's milk anyway)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like chicken to have a programming interface so I could write automated scripts. For example, if an event is sensed that an egg is coming, then walk to my boiler and tweet. By tweet, I mean tweet like a chicken, or if you like, tweet like a chicken _and_ tweet through the Internet.

<comment><USER4> The internet of animals?

<comment><USER6> No, THE INTERNET. I mean post to twitter...

<comment><USER4> similar to the internet of things...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's no point in redesigning _the_ chicken, because we already have quite a few kinds. And yes, they are already optimized through primitive genetic engineering techniques for various characteristics useful to humans: early maturity, large breast size, egg production speed, taste (or lack thereof) and so forth... not all in the same variety, of course.

Diversity builds resilience. When the genome development environments go online, I recommend that we open source the chicken and let a million variants cluck. Now, BSD, MPL or GPL?

</comment><comment><USER8> Spin the chicken in a centrifuge so that it lives in 2.5G and develops far more muscles:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318124.900-review- sp...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318124.900-review-spin-a- chicken-.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Stackable, of course: [http://mydailycow.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/far_side_cows....](http://mydailycow.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/far_side_cows.jpg?w=500)

</comment><comment><USER10> "How would you avoid the impeding PETA backlash" is another good question...

<comment><USER11> I'd be more worried about the impending backlash from God.

<comment><USER12> Don't worry about it - nothing been said so far.

[http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research- innovations/photos/12...](http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research- innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/mad-science)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If it's going to be of any help for world domination, or at least in serving as a good guard chicken, it'll need the personality of a goose, the fangs and venom sacs of a deadly snake and the talons of an eagle. Something will have to be done to make it sound more intimidating as well, so we should add a rattle on its tail. Oh, and unlike a regular chicken, the wings should be functional in order to control the skies. Behold the fully-realized rattle- chicken.

</comment><comment><USER14> This prompts some interesting questions. Could you design a brainless chicken or one with just enough brains to eat, breathe and lay eggs? And would that be more or less horrible compared to the way chickens are currently being treated in factories? Where's the line between vat grown meat and brainless chickens?

<comment><USER15> > Could you design a brainless chicken or one with just enough brains to eat, > breathe and lay eggs?

Yes, it's called a chicken.

<comment><USER11> Actually, chickens are pretty intelligent and social creatures[1].

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken#Social_behaviour>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Simple, you have two versions of the chicken - one optimized for eggs and one for meat.

As an extension to the meat chicken I would like to see extra re-generating legs, a bit like how lizards loss and regrow their tails through autotomy.

They would come with their own super-oven, so you press a switch and they self-cook in 2 seconds. Pooof!

</comment><comment><USER17> At least the meat problem is already solved: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/beyond_meat_fake_chicken_that_tastes_so_real_it_will_freak_you_out_.html)

<comment><USER17> As for eggs, for baking they can easily be replaced.

It's more difficult if you want to replace scrambled eggs or similar. I have tried the vegg [1], but have not been very impressed.

And I just googled and found out that apparently in China there is a food scandal where they produce fake eggs [2]. Obviously they design them for profit and not as a replacement for vegans or even a healthy, cheaper alternative. But it seems that it could be done.

[1] <http://www.thevegg.com/> [2] [http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/06/how-to- make-a-rotten-egg...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/06/how-to-make-a- rotten-egg/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Screw redesign. Why not turn the chicken into a raptor-like dinosaur?

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fro...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Obviously they should be cube shaped, to facilitate more efficient shipping.

<comment><USER19> If you ever played the old game HyperBlade, it had it game ads about GE chickens. IIRC, they were boneless and bun shaped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I expected growing meat and eggs from cell cultures.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how long until GM hackers can prototype their new chicken design.

<comment><USER22> I think I saw in Food Inc. that chickens have been bread to have enormous breasts to serve the market demands. Same goes for basically all fruits and vegetables, raised and modified for unnaturally large sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For some bizarre reason, this reminds me of the human centipede.

</comment><comment><USER24> Start with the egg</comment>


Real-time global illumination on desktops and consoles - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/11/05/awesome-realtime-gi-on-desktops-and-consoles/ <comment><USER2>
      GI = Global Illumination</comment>


Kharkovchanka – Soviet Antarctic Cruisers [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6R-h06IsJw <comment><USER2> Captivating documentary. Thanks to the author. Also thanks for staying consistent with pronunciation too. Surprised it would bother the Russian speakers so much at all. Oh, well, the designers back in Ukrainian SSR would not dare to name it in Ukrainian manner either.

There seems to be some unintended irony in the naming. There was a popular sedan car Moskvitch [1] (masculine for Moscow resident), and Zaporozhets [2] (masc. for resident of Zaporizhia in Russian). Both of these cities had resp. car factories. However, Kharkiv, had none, instead it had a tractor and tank factory... The product is literally out of the league, so is the name Kharkovchanka (fem. for resident of Kharkiv in Russian)

I'd guess the choice of masculine for a car name is in line with masc. for 'automobile' in Russian. Meanwhile, the feminine in this case is, perhaps, for fem. 'machine' in Russian. Just a guess.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_402](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_402)

[2]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets)

<comment><USER3> If you like this stuff check [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag) they most informative and dryly hilarious historian I know is Drachinifel.

His stuff is beautifully researched and you can tell it's his passion.

I posted that one on HN a while back but it didn't go anywhere.

I've listened to it several times entirely because it reminds me of dysfunctional companies so much.

<comment><USER4> Hahahah, oh man, one of Drach's best. Highly recommend his episode on what to do if your ship is sinking/exploding/disagreeable too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbX8rJMI9GM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbX8rJMI9GM)

btw, did anyone else see Japanese torpedo boats???

<comment><USER3> The Battle of Samar is my 2nd favourite.

> "After 17 bombs and 19 torpedoes, at least some of which were probably > unnecessary..

> After firing all their armor penetration rounds, they switched to high > explosive, then anti-aircraft, then starshells which was was surprisingly > effective as it caused a massive number of fires to break out

That and the USS Johnston,

> "[Johnson] seeing the ship under attack by a Heavy Cruiser, it promptly > shoots up this ship as well....because of course it does."

A light destroyer escort mistaken for a cruiser because literally no light destroyer captain would charge a fleet and trade fire with a cruiser (never mind damage it so badly it was out the fight then trade fire with another and then we'll watch the video it's surreal), it's so unthinkable that to stay in a sane world where the rules made sense it had to be a cruiser.

That and the pilot landing his plane, helping defend the airfield then buggering off into the jungle coming back with a new wing to replace his damaged one.

If it was a movie you simply wouldn't believe it.

And it should be a movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a twitter thread by a guy who built a nice model of one:

[https://twitter.com/PeterOlsson/status/1280940641472655367](https://twitter.com/PeterOlsson/status/1280940641472655367)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing, very good scratch-build on display with the track extension and cabin build.

<comment><USER7> It also shows interesting deep-nerd cross-pollination in the model building/military history/art scenes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not quite sure why apparently accepted english name for the town is Kharkiv, and author wrongly (understandably) pronounces it as Charkovchanka. Yeah, it's hard - no biggie.

just wanted to let those of you who interested to know how to pronounce it is: first 3 characters are same as in word 'harvest' and rest almost the way author pronounces it - kovchanka, so

har-kov-chanka

only r has to be softer. It just sounds so much better

try russian sound ->

[https://translate.google.com/?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS806US806&um=1&...](https://translate.google.com/?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS806US806&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw- ob#auto/ru/harkov-chanka)

</comment><comment><USER7> I am highly impressed by the production values as well as the research quality here. Edited in an attic studio, facilitated by Google Translate.

The YouTube auto transcription is brutally bad with Callum's Scottish accent, though. Do uploaders have the ability to manually edit subtitles?

</comment><comment><USER9> Later designs moved the engine outside to reduce noise. I'm not aware of any operational difficulties but I'd rather cope with noise than service a V12 diesel in -60C wind.

<comment><USER10> You can't shut off the engine in that climate, if you do you would need a way to heat it up before restarting so, it's redundant.

In other words if you will anyway need a warmer environment [hangar, large building] to enable the engine to start, there is no point to "fixing it" in the cold as it will not turn over anyway.

<comment><USER11> While looking for more info on Kharkovhanka 2, I found a blog of a russian guy who actually lives on the Vostok station [1]. There is an additional engine+generator inside [2], which is used for heating of the interior, but probably can also be used to heat up the main engine.

I was not aware of the fact that all the stations in Antarctic are on the ice actually, so they drift as time passes. There is a map of that [3]. Given the extremely low humidity, non-existing grounding (since the station is on the ice), when there is a blizzard or strong wind outside, snowflake rub themselves, and the station accumulates significant static charge which affects all the equipment.

[1] [https://pikabu.ru/@deratizator](https://pikabu.ru/@deratizator) (in russian, but google translate is capable of translating most of the text, except profanity words which appear occasionally to highlight the complexity of life in such climate conditions :) )

[2] [https://pikabu.ru/story/kharkovchankaii_5499165](https://pikabu.ru/story/kharkovchankaii_5499165) (still in russian, same blog)

[3] [https://cs7.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2017/12/11/7/151299321313...](https://cs7.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2017/12/11/7/1512993213138441238.jpg)

<comment><USER12> The pictures are pretty cool. It looks like the cabin of the kharkov II is significantly less insulated than the crew space? The hatch between the two looks as thick as the "external" doors (actual door and transmission hatch). I was also surprised to hear the windows are _only_ double-paned in kharkov, and it doesn't look like model II is any better.

Understandable but a bit sad to see how decayed they got, especially if they're still in somewhat active use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe I'm crazy but wondering if your engine is gonna overheat, field modifying tracks and swapping a gearbox in the middle of nowhere in -40 weather sounds like a fun time.

</comment><comment><USER14> a wonder what on earth made the guy pronounce kh as ch

<comment><USER14> i was also completely puzzled what the hell "yearny" (or something) meant until i saw мирный on the map

god, is it that hard to check up at least the approximate pronunciation of things and places when you are making a video like that?

<comment><USER15> I've been studying Russian for several years. The pronunciation of certain letters and letter combinations can be difficult; give people a break. Or at least correct them in a helpful way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I still wonder why many people think colonizing Mars is doable, when we can't even colonize Antarctica.

I mean, weather _might_ be slightly better, but the lack of breathable air, water and the distance from Earth far outweigh that.

Neither Mars nor Antarctica offer anything of real use, even asteroid capture and mining seems like a more viable idea.

<comment><USER5> It's about the 'why'. The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabitable. With a self sustaining backup on Mars we can keep humans around even after that. Asteroids are interesting too, but more far fetched than Mars.

I recommend watching the Elon Musk presentations on Mars / making life multiplanetary.

<comment><USER17> I can't actually imagine what could happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars.

After an asteroid impact at least there'd likely be breathable air and some water and oceans still around. Most of an atmosphere.

Mars is a radioactive, extremely cold, thin atmosphered dustbowl without breathable air and no life to speak of.

<comment><USER18> The issue is not with long term effects, it's that the impact itself wipes out human race entirely.

<comment><USER17> I think it's a highly dubious proposition to imagine human beings lasting on Mars for more than a generation or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Such an interesting machine.</comment>