Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/business/yourmoney/25slip.html?_r=1&oref=slogin <comment><USER2> I'm not much of an expert on this stuff... what do you all think about their chances?

<comment><USER3> I'd say I'm a little skeptical.

The first question I'd have is how fast they can parse video. The second is how much it costs to do it.

It seems you would have to be able to do recognition much faster than real- time for a realistic web video search capability (see for example http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=599600) and you would certainly need a lot of hardware to do this at scale for millions of video clips.

See also: http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2005/09/blinkx_a_citize.html

<comment><USER4> The first link you cited is spot on. The authors are from Univ of Cambridge, and work on HTK <http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/>.

That paper is 10 years old. As I'm sure you can imagine, there have been improvements in the field since then. To be completely honest, I don't stay on top of search applied to speech, but the keyword you want is "Spoken Document Retrieval" (SDR). Ciprian Chelba and TJ Hazen do cool stuff in this area; they are giving a tutorial at ICASSP this year SDR.

An aside. Both of these approaches use the fact that when you process speech, you essentially form a graph of words (or phonemes). Paths through the graph represent possible transcriptions. So, since graph is a denser, richer thing to search than the transcript, and we've got graph algorithms sitting around, there are neat tricks you can do to build a search engine index for speech...

I've recently been reading some interesting work that uses locality-sensitive hashing to search audio. The Google speech people are presenting a lot of it at ICASSP this year. See this post for more, and chase the links in their papers for even more: <http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2007/02/hear-here- sample-of-audio-processing.html>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the information and links. My background is in video and image processing, well originally multiple target tracking, sensor management, and sensor fusion, but now I work in biometrics and video analytics. Understood about processing the information into a graph.

Your point about Google raises one of the obvious questions about this company... if Google is doing leading edge research in this field it seems unlikely they need to buy a "video search destination" site employing lesser technologies, that is unless it gets really really big (i.e. YouTube). They might be interested in some deep technology, but my impression from the reading I've done and the links you've posted is that Blinkx is using standard well known techniques to achieve their results.

FWIW: I was applying Markov modeling to areas such as mission planning and modeling integrated air defense networks back almost twenty years ago now. We didn't call them HMMs, but there were some very similar ideas employed.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, perhaps we should talk. Email me at email@example.com if you're interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Since the NYT demands your info:

THE World Wide Web is awash in digital video, but too often we can't find the videos we want or browse for what we might like.

That's a loss, because if we could search for Internet videos, they might become the content of a global television station, just as the Web's hypertext, once it was organized and tamed by search, became the stuff of a universal library.

What we need, says Suranga Chandratillake, a co-founder of Blinkx, a start-up in San Francisco, is a remote control for the Web's videos, a kind of electronic TV Guide. He's got just the thing.

Videos have multiplied on social networks like YouTube and MySpace as well as on news and entertainment sites because of the emergence of video-sharing, user-generated video, free digital storage and broadband and Wi-Fi networks.

Today, owing to the proliferation of large video files, video accounts for more than 60 percent of the traffic on the Internet, according to CacheLogic, a company in Cambridge, England, that sells "media delivery systems" to Internet service providers. "I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent," says Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

But search engines — like Google — that were developed during the first, text- based era of the Web do a poor job of searching through this rising sea of video. That's because they don't search the videos themselves, but rather things associated with them, including the text of a Web page, the "metadata" that computers use to display or understand pages (like keywords or the semantic tags that describe different content), video-file suffixes (like .mpeg or .avi), or captions or subtitles.

None of these methods are very satisfactory. Many Internet videos have little or obscure text, and clips often have no or misleading metadata. Modern video players do not reveal video-file suffixes, and captions and subtitles imperfectly capture the spoken words in a video.

The difficulties of knowing which videos are where challenge the growth of Internet video. "If there are going to be hundreds of millions of hours of video content online," Mr. Chandratillake said, "we need to have an efficient, scalable way to search through it."

Mr. Chandratillake's history is unusual for Silicon Valley. He was born in Sri Lanka in 1977 and divided his childhood among England and various countries in South Asia where his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, worked. Then he studied distributed processing at Kings College, Cambridge, before becoming the chief technology officer of Autonomy, a company that specializes in something called "meaning-based computing." This background possibly suggested an original approach to search when he founded Blinkx in 2004.

Mr. Chandratillake's solution does not reject any existing video search methods, but supplements them by transcribing the words uttered in a video, and searching them. This is an achievement: effective speech recognition is a "nontrivial problem," in the language of computer scientists.

Blinkx's speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using "hidden Markov models," a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known.

Mr. Chandratillake calls this method "contextual search," and he says it works so well because the meanings of the sounds of speech are unclear when considered by themselves. "Consider the phrase 'recognize speech,' " he wrote in an e-mail message. "Its phonemes ('rek-un-nise-peach') are incredibly similar to those contained in the phrase 'wreck a nice beach.' Our systems use our knowledge of which words typically appear in which contexts and everything we know about a given clip to improve our ability to guess what each phoneme actually means."

While neural networks and machine learning are not new, their application to video search is unique to Blinkx, and very clever.

How good is blinkx search? When you visit blinkx.com, the first thing you see is the "video wall," 25 small, shimmering tiles, each displaying a popular video clip, indexed that hour. (The wall provides a powerful sense of the collective mind of our popular culture.)

To experiment, I typed in the phrase "Chronic — WHAT — cles of Narnia," the shout-out in the "Saturday Night Live" digital short called "Lazy Sunday," a rap parody of two New York slackers. I wanted a phrase that a Web surfer would know more readily than the real title of a video. I also knew that "Lazy Sunday," for all its cultish fame, would be hard to find: NBC Universal had freely released the rap parody on the Internet after broadcasting it in December 2005, but last month the company insisted that YouTube pull it.

Nonetheless, Blinkx found eight instances of "Lazy Sunday" when I tried it last week. By contrast, Google Video found none. Typing "Lazy Sunday" into the keyword search box on Google's home page produced hundreds of results — but many were commentaries about the video, and many had nothing to do with "Saturday Night Live."

Blinkx, which has raised more than $12.5 million from angel investors, earns money by licensing its technology to other sites. Although Blinkx has more than 80 such partners, including Microsoft, Playboy, Reuters and MTV, it rarely discloses the terms of its deals. Mr. Chandratillake said some licensees pay Blilnkx directly while others share revenue and some do both. Blinkx has revealed the details of one deal: ITN, a British news broadcaster, will share the revenue generated by advertising inserted in its videos.

For all of Blinkx's level coolness, there are at least three obvious obstacles to the company's success.

First, because Google Video is not much good now doesn't mean it won't get better: after all, when Blinkx was founded, it first applied machine learning to searching the desktops of personal computers, a project that was abandoned when Google and Microsoft released their own desktop search bars.

Second, even if Google improbably fails to develop effective video search, the field will still be crowded: TruVeo, Flurl, ClipBlast and other start-ups are all at work on different subsets of the market.

Finally, Blinkx might not go far enough in searching the content of videos: the company searches their sounds, but not their images.

THIS last objection is the most serious.

"Because Blinkx emphasizes speech recognition, there is a great amount of multimedia content that they cannot address, like photographs," said John R. Smith, a senior manager in the intelligent information management department of I.B.M.'s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. "But what's worse, speech is not a very good indicator of what's being shown in a video."

Mr. Smith says he has been working on an experimental video search engine called Marvel, which also uses machine learning but organizes visual information as well as speech.

Still, at least for now, Blinkx leads video search: it searches more than seven million hours of video and is the largest repository of digital video on the Web.

"Search is our navigation, our interface to the Internet," said John Battelle, chief of Federated Media Publishing and author of "The Search," an account of the rise of Google. With Blinkx, we may have such an interface for digital video, and be a little closer to Mr. Chandratillake's vision of a universal remote control.

Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: email@example.com.</comment>


Startup Business Lessons from the Founders of Rockstar Games - <AUTHOR> http://rosssimmonds.com/2013/09/16/business-lessons-gtav/

<comment><USER2> thank you for posting this. i am currently starting my own startup. this is a really good resources.</comment>


Show HN: Kickfurther – interact directly with small biz, cut out banks - <AUTHOR> http://kickfurther.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love any feedback whatsoever on our site/business/etc.

Specifically: do you like the name? is it clear from our homepage what we do? would you use this, why/why not?

<comment><USER2> Your home page could be a lot clearer.

The word "inventory", which is what distinguishes your business from a Kickstarter-like reward model and all those loan and equity crowdfunding sites, is halfway down the page and since the summary is still too brief and confusing I still have to scroll down the bottom and click on a small text "how it works" link to actually understand what it is you do; "promoting them to help sell" turns out to be completely optional.

Your expected returns also look quite low relative to the risk (although I guess they're pretty good on an APR basis) and you don't provide me enough information to help quantify that risk - _how much will the company 's current sales have to change to hit that PSR_ would seem to be a pretty critical metric, for example. That's a criticism I'd levy at _most_ crowd-"investment" sites though, including some highly successful ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the reply, these are definitely some of the things we've struggled with the most. We have a message that is challenging to communicate clearly and succinctly. This is something we will continue to iterate on and test in the early stages.

We think the returns are excellent, "on an APR basis" as you said, which is another thing we need to communicate better. A 10% return in 6 months is kind of the same as a 5% return in 3 months, both of which are 20% in a year which is great. We don't think APR really captures this idea correctly though and may want to instead come up with some similar metric that will allow you to better compare the offerings.

We also need to better communicate the backers' responsibilities in that promoting isn't exactly optional. This is a similar transaction as buying goods on Ali Baba then putting them up for sale on Amazon and Ebay. If you do that but don't do any marketing, you can't have an expectation of profit. Some goods may sell naturally, and especially with the help of the other backers, but you should do your part to help with the marketing.

<comment><USER2> To clarify my earlier comment, the APR is the upside but you also could benefit from some metric which more clearly indicates the risk factor. If ACME Fashion needs to shift $6k worth of stock [representing half the consignment] in the next six months to repay their backers, is that substantially less, about the same or substantially more than the amount of stock they managed to shift over the last six months?

For example with Allegory Handcrafted Goods I can see they made $183,500 in sales last year, so sticking a couple of hundred bucks towards buying them $12k worth of stock to shift doesn't seem too risky; probably you could highlight that figure more... With some of the other products though, I'm left with numbers of social followers in lieu of any indication of whether they've actually sold comparable quantities of stock before.

And frankly, I'd want rather more than 10% to front up cash if these vendors' recognition was so low the actually needed _my_ contribution to their social marketing campaigns.

I doubt I'm your target audience for this anyway :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Freakin' A - I love this.</comment>


Jeff Bezos is $5B away from being the world's richest person - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/18/technology/culture/jeff-bezos-bill-gates-richest/index.html <comment><USER2> He can do it, as long as the price of oil does not go up higher. Then Carlos Slim and others might beat him.</comment>


PhoneDrone: Let your smartphone be your personal drone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/137596013/phonedrone-let-your-smartphone-be-your-personal-dr

<comment><USER2> We love this idea ,we wish you all the luck with this project. London's Finest Team</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for a company wide documentation tool? - <AUTHOR> I currently work at a company where I've built a marketing automation tool focused on local businesses. I'm trying to make sure all staff are trained on how to use it so that support can be provided to our clients and sales have an understanding of what they are selling.
Right now we are trying to use the new Google Sites (and Google Docs) for internal documentation. The documentation contains guides for setting up and managing accounts within the application and is all internally focused.
Use do use Zendesk Guide (Their knowledge base solution) for our client guides along with some videos clients can watch to learn how to use the app.
Confluence is a possible solution that I've looked into, however, most staff bailed using Jira and are using Asana to manage tasks because Jira was too confusing for them. So Confluence would be too difficult for them to use.
What I'm curious about is what everyone is using for a company-wide internal "wiki" that most staff find "easy" to use and maintain.
On a side note, any suggestions on getting people to adopt a solution would be helpful as well. <comment><USER2> I will always recommend Dokuwiki, if only for the extremely low administration effort needed.

If your users insist on shiny UI, you will look elsewhere, but it's my first recommendation if the number of users doesn't get too high and you don't need all kinds of integrations into other Enterprise tools.

<comment><USER3> Has been the case for me to use DokuWiki for maybe 10 years but switched to Wiki.js in 30 minutes after I figured how powerful it is. (You need to install an instance yourself to see the admin side of the interface)

DokuWiki is good but it is aging. Wiki.js has user authentication against nearly 10 sources including LDAP, has WYSIWYG editor as well and access control for pages as well as easy to use interface to modify the menu list.

It also has automatic backup to many remote storage types and I'm just impressed how it has all I wanted but was hard to accomplish efficiently with DokuWiki and its plugins like having a working WYSIWYG editor.

And all are built-in and works as intended unlike third party plugins which might turn out buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dokuwiki for the overview of all projects, instructions for setting up and "how-to-do"'s with links to github code. Each github repo has their own description codes of course.

</comment><comment><USER5> We use global wikijs + markdown Readme in source code.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks really promising. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish we had a documentation standard. We use word, cucumber, confluence, sharepoint, and a couple other things.</comment>


Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-python-stack-to-the-browser/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17830226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17830226).

<comment><USER3> Actual previous discussion from less than a day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19677721)

I guess this slipped through the dupe detector due to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684806)

<comment><USER2> Just so, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> % python —version Python 2.7.15 %

<comment><USER5> I get: 3.7.0 (default, Mar 21 2019, 17:54:42) [Clang 6.0.1 ]

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does not work in Safari for me (latest Mojave version).

Happily works in Chrome and Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can we update the link to the original technical post?

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the- scien...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific- python-stack-to-the-browser/)

@dang

<comment><USER2> Sure! Updated from [https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/16/mozilla-details- pyodide-a...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/16/mozilla-details-pyodide-a- project-that-aims-to-bring-python-to-web-browsers/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What.... why? Why must we insist upon piling so many features on top of browsers? It's a _web browser_ , not an application platform...

<comment><USER9> You're using a web app now.

Is this bad for the long term preservation of knowledge? Sure. But it's the world we made.

<comment><USER10> How are webapps worse for the preservation if knowledge than native apps? I can't open most of the apps I used on a daily basis 10 years ago.

<comment><USER9> For reasonably complex documents PDF/A is a pretty good choice for long-term archival:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A)

That said, the comparison I was trying to make was the pre webapp web to the current web. We have AOL today, just not one big company running it. It will mostly be lost because it's not legal to save it.

The future will know us through scraped videos from Youtube before it was taken down suddenly and without warning in the mid 21st century due to corporate politics and/or the takeover of the government in DC by descendants of the house of Habsburg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dear Mozilla, I love you, but stop working on these side projects. Your work in these non-browser projects is excellent, but pointless.

It may be that I don't understand Mozilla, but I believe they should focus on Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN. Even Rust is sort of a weird CS project that you don't technically need, but fair enough, if makes Firefox development easier, go for it.

Mozilla get most of their money from search engine companies, so may they should start focusing on trimming down to the point where they could survive without that big Google check and drop some of the side projects.

And why is it that there's no "Support Us By Donating" button on www.mozilla.org? I feel there should be.

<comment><USER11> This is exactly the kind of thing Mozilla _should_ be working on, in my opinion. It's enabling something new to work in a browser, and if Mozilla didn't do this Google would have, only it would be locked into Google Sheets or something.

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but is this honestly solving a problem for anyone but the slimmest niche group. Thimble is no more and in my mind that's a similar kind of project (I bet most of you forgot that Thimble was a thing). Firefox OS is dead, Persona is dead, Pocket and Send is still being questioned.

Why should Pyodide or the whole Iodide project be any different. Other than Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN, only Bugzilla and Rust really stands out as successful projects, and that's only because they've been developed to solve an actual problem.

I'd be surprised if the Iodide project will see any real usage 5 years from now. Are any data scientists really look to move to a browser based workflow?

<comment><USER12> This project was designed to meet the internal needs of data science at Mozilla. Them releasing and developing it openly likely has no/little impact on the amount of energy going into their core products.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did I just see a flexport ad on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835326 <comment><USER2> You'll see this occasionally for YC companies

<comment><USER3> (Agree.)

More details in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

> _Can I post a job ad?_

[...]

> _The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear > on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or > comments. They begin part-way down, then fall steadily, and only one should > be on the front page at a time._

<comment><AUTHOR> I went to FAQ to look for this before posting but I guess my short attention spam syndrome prevented me from reading the third paragraph.

Mea culpa</comment></comment></comment>


Modelling game economy with Neo4j - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/neo4j/posts/modelling-game-economy-with-neo4j

<comment><USER2> Amazing article on Game modelling. Amazed to see the details and the astonishing graphics used. I want to know more about these MMPORG game development concepts. Please share links if any one knows good references.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :-) I also wrote a post about how we approach localization for this game, maybe you'll find that interesting as well - [https://www.airpair.com/aop/posts/oneliner-to- localization-w...](https://www.airpair.com/aop/posts/oneliner-to-localization- with-postsharp)</comment></comment>


Scoble talks with Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/13/tea-with-the-guy-who-stole-a-big-fish-from-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Anyone else think it's interesting that he described the Y Combinator application process as "holding a contest"?

I guess it fits the technical definition, but it sure makes it sound like PG is drawing names from a hat.

<comment><USER3> The New York Marathon is a contest. Contests are not necessarily lotteries. If there are winners and losers it's definitely a contest. And with Y Combinator there's usually about 30 "winners" and more than 1,000 "losers."

<comment><USER2> Like I said, you're technically right. But nobody describes Harvard admissions as some contest that they hold. YCombinator is a lot closer to that than the New York Marathon.

<comment><USER3> Heh. OK, I'll give you that. Language is such a funny thing.

<comment><USER4> Oooh, Scoble is on HN. Welcome Scoble!

Is it just me or have the major bloggers taken an interest in HN recently? I noticed that Dave Winer started engaging about two months ago and now Scoble. Did something major happen to prompt this or is it just a general response to the increasing levels of traffic that we send to the various blogs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The worst YC interviews being the ones where people cannot explain what their start-up is going to do is interesting. The same thing happens when talking about past projects in technical interviews. The worst candidates cannot clearly explain what the project was, or give specific details about their work. I'm never sure if they are actually confused about it or just aren't good at explaining, but either way it is not a good sign for how it would be to work with them.

<comment><USER6> A useful follow-up question should have been "how are startups invited to do an interview when they're not able to describe what they're doing in two sentences?"

It does not seem possible that an application where the only description is "we're improving the way people interact" gets an invitation; so, when the interview is a little shallow (because of stress, etc.) why not start back from the application?

Or maybe the interview is not about the idea, but about the ability of the founders to communicate effectively...?

<comment><USER5> That would have been a great follow-up question.

The application must have had a description of an idea that was good enough to get the interview. Probably the interview starts by asking the team to explain their plans in more detail. If after 5 minutes pg & friends don't have a clearer picture than what they got from the application, then is the team going to be able to explain the idea to customers (who are not going to give them 5 whole minutes)? Or be ready to pitch VCs in a few months (which is even more stressful)?</comment></comment></comment>


Systems Languages: An Experience Report - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sargun/systems-languages-an-experience-report-d008b2b12628 <comment><USER2> I like Zig as a C replacement for systems programming.

      [1] ziglang.org

</comment><comment><USER3> This is my experience also. Basically the only workable languages for serious systems programming are C and Go.

In many ways Go vastly improves on C but my Go programs are consistently between 1.5 and 5 times slower than equivalent C programs.

One way to see Go's speed disadvantage is to solve problems on leetcode using both idiomatic C and idiomatic Go. Leetcode tells you the runtime of your solutions for large test sets.

I solved 50 random problems on leetcode in both languages, doing the best I could to avoid writing slow code, and Go is slower by a factor of 1.5 to 5, usually around a factor of 2.

I wish this wasn't the case. I really prefer to use Go.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by "systems programming"?</comment></comment>


Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler - <AUTHOR> http://wingolog.org/archives/2020/03/25/firefoxs-low-latency-webassembly-compiler <comment><USER2> What's the latest with WebAssembly? I must admit, I'm not fully sure I understand what its goals are and what we should expect its usecases to be.

For a time there seemed to be a lot of hype around writing SPAs in whatever language you like, not just JavaScript, but that seems to have cooled off somewhat - at least that's my impression.

Last time I checked in it seemed to be actually quite the opposite - good for low level stuff, data processing, graphics, things in other threads essentially, but if you want to touch the DOM at all just use JS seemed to still be the standard advice. I haven't looked again since. Have things progressed on that front, and if not was that ever really a goal of WebAssembly anyway?

<comment><USER3> The goal: Allow a uniform execution context (compile target) in the browser via a standard byte code. That means executing an application written in any language, provided a corresponding compiler, as an island in a web page.

In practical terms the language of the browser is JavaScript, but what if JavaScript doesn't do what you need, or it isn't fast enough, or you simply don't like JavaScript. Instead you want to write some application in Rust (just using that as an example). The language of the web is still JavaScript and not Rust so your new application will not run directly in a web page. That's unfortunate, because the web is a fantastic distribution platform because things that run in web pages do not require a separate installation step or a separate download step, since web page assets are downloaded automatically as called by the web page. If you compile your Rust application to WASM it can run in a web browser.

To be clear though WASM isn't replacing JavaScript or even in any way competing with JavaScript, because that is certainly what it sounds like. WASM is a separate and isolated execution instance in the browser, even from the page that contains it. JavaScript, on the other hand, executes directly in the context of the page that requests it.

You might hear some discussion of wanting WASM to replace JavaScript, but that is clearly stated by the WASM project as not a design goal. You might also hear that if only the containing page's DOM were available to WASM it would replace JavaScript, but that isn't a design goal either. That part about the DOM is the confluence of a misunderstanding about the DOM and about WASM's security goals of a separate execution context. There is work, however, on providing some Web API capabilities to WASM so that a WASM instance may have some awareness of its execution context or to allow some manner of external interaction of the WASM instance from the surrounding page. I don't know the status of that work though.

* WASM project site - [https://webassembly.org/](https://webassembly.org/)

* Web APIs, a list of de facto standards for interacting with web browsers from JavaScript - [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API)

* DOM specification, the DOM is a language agnostic dynamic tree model that represents markup and containing content - [https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/](https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/)

<comment><USER4> > You might hear some discussion of wanting WASM to replace JavaScript, but > that is clearly stated by the WASM project as not a design goal.

Unfortunately, that appears to be a huge miss. There are a _lot_ of programmers in other (non-JS) languages that would very much like to create front end pieces for their web applications.

Hopefully when the interface types proposal (or whatever) happens, direct access to the DOM does become a thing and non-JS programmers really can do their front end work without JS.

<comment><USER3> Nobody from the WASM working group is working on that though, so the probability of direct access to the page's DOM is close to zero. Programmers have been hoping for this for years but WASM has been very clear that isn't in the project's design path. The are intentional design objectives limiting that work officially but likely the largest hurdle is overcoming various security and privacy concerns already in place due to the isolation of WASM instances from their containing page.

Far more likely, and this already exists in various unofficial examples, is that WASM instances ship with a DOM for accessing markup provided by or requested into the WASM instance.

<comment><USER4> > ... WASM instances ship with a DOM for accessing markup provided by or > requested into the WASM instance.

Sounds like it would achieve the same end goal? eg direct access to the page elements, without needing to go through JS

Or is that my not really understanding the problem space? :)

<comment><USER3> No, a DOM that is provided by a WASM instance will provide access to markup contents available to that WASM instance, such as markup requested or shipping with the WASM code, but not outside the WASM instance such as the containing page.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. What's the intended use case for that?

Trying to think of something, but nothing is coming to mind.

<comment><USER3> If your WASM application makes use of any kind of XML or HTML content you need to parse it or it's just a string.

<comment><USER4> No worries, thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> AFAIK I know Figma uses a fair bit of webassembly for perf. Their editing core is C++ compiled to webassembly which is then bound to a canvas. I am pretty impressed at how silky smooth their UI is. (I could be wrong)

If anyone from Figma is reading this, would love if you could shed more light on how you use webassembly and your learnings.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load- time-...](https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still wondering why webassembly is not used more. I did not discover helloworlds tutorials, how to call js from WASM and vice versa... I sense WASM is still a little fastidious?

I would love to have python released as a python WASM blob, there's pyiodine but it's not just python.

I thought I would see more libraries compiled to WASM but it doesn't seem to be the case. I want to guess the c/c++ toolchains are lacking support and usage, or maybe C/C++ devs don't care about WASM? I know I do.

WASM lets non-web-developers run their code in a browser, but web developers don't really care since they prefer writing JS. Maybe that's why WASM is not taking off. That's a shame.

<comment><USER8> > I'm still wondering why webassembly is not used more

Largely because the majority of the problems that I have as a web developer are not solved by manipulating 32/64-bit ints/floats at native speeds.

While I'm sure there are many exceptional uses for wasm that are related to computational pipelines, machine learning, and canvas rendering none of that really helps me add a text node to a DOM element that let's my user know they entered an invalid username/password combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In SpiderMonkey there is no mechanism currently to tier down; if you need to > debug WebAssembly code, you need to refresh the page, causing the wasm code > to be compiled in debugging mode.

Is there ever a reason to "tier down" WebAssembly besides debugging? In JavaScript functions will often get deoptimized back to the baseline interpreter if they side exit too often, but is this a thing that needs to be done in WebAssembly?

<comment><USER10> As far as I know: Not really the initial "downgraded" code is normally worse in more or less any aspect. It's just emitted fastly.

The only reason I could come up with is to downgrade to them upgrade again to a differently optimized code. But then WebAssembly doesn't need to do speculative optimizations like JS needs. So I guess it's not really relevant.

<comment><USER11> In theory, you could generate better code after having observed the actual arguments to various functions and recompile while treating them as constants. Basically profile-guided (re)optimization. But the observation would slow down the initial code, it would be a large implementation effort, and the gains would be dubious imho. Especially given how much information was already lost via the initial AOT (ahead of time) optimizing compile; you might need to keep the original source around or something.

Unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER12> _> you could generate better code after having observed the actual arguments to various functions and recompile while treating them as constants_

This transformation is valid for pure functions; therefore you can mark it constexpr before compiling to WASM. There's the `constexpr-everything` project (among others) that uses libclang to apply constexpr to all legal functions/expressions in a codebase.

That's for C++ - Rust is working on `const fn`.

<comment><USER9> > This transformation is valid for pure functions; therefore you can mark it > constexpr before compiling to WASM.

It's also valid for non-pure functions at runtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Real question.

Most of the wasm instructions are very low level (eg, the test and branch are different, similar to assembly).

But then when you get to the control flow constructs they went in the this weird direction. There is no goto, some of the instructions (br) are context dependent, and if the wasm JIT tries to inline anything it has to muck with the br operand (not even the worst of it). The looping constructs are just odd too.

When I last checked you couldn't even do basic blocks with a control flow graph like most other compilers (so that also means no jump threading optimizations, and without goto you would have a hard time optimizing at the wasm generation level).

It just seems like this part of the instruction set was developed by somebody who wanted some weird higher-level asm, but others wanted an asm close to the instruction set. Just seems like a really bad decitions.

Is there a reason for this or has this been cleaned up at all?

<comment><USER14> That was done entirely on purpose, to make validation simpler. It does make things harder for compilers that want to support irreducible control flow, but the workaround is a single "relooper" algorithm that doesn't really fundamentally change how those compilers work.

It is possible that in the future this will be relaxed (without giving up on the benefits for validation) via something like this: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/funclets](https://github.com/WebAssembly/funclets)

<comment><USER15> It's not just validation. A lot of things compilers have to do becomes dramatically simpler with structured control flow and simpler means faster. When you operate on an unstructured CFG you first have to analyze the entire graph to find the dominators, loops etc and _then_ you have to propagate the dataflow information in that order. All these complications go away.

There's been a few other works that realized this, among them the CORTL IR, suggested by Carl McConnell in his Thesis proposal "Tree Based Optimizations" and the IR used in the Oberon compiler by Michael Franz.

<comment><USER13> 1\. You can have both. Jumps (conditional or unconditional allow for more complex control flow and different control flow than was immediately thought of.

2 only having structured control flow makes it a difficult target for HLL, which is what was is supposed to be.

3\. A few years ago I was working on an array language and was trying to use tree based optimization and code generation, but I put it on hold until i understood more - can you recommend and links or papers?

4\. Wasm is an IR, both target and source. Why not add a goto and structured primitive. There are clearly some things that cannot be compiled anywhere remotely performant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> what's the use case for WebAssembly? Why are people working on it and why should I use it?

edit: why am i being downvoted? Is this a bad question?

<comment><USER11> As I understand it: (1) calling an optimized library written in another language for performance or size -- say you have a physics engine component in your game, or a graph traversal algorithm, or whatever; (2) calling an existing library that is available in another language with no JS equivalent; and (3) running a full existing application of some sort that is written in another language and giving it a Web interface. Oh, and (4) sandboxing untrusted code, and coming up or already present (I'm not keeping close track) (5) portability, where you can either run it on the Web or on a truly cross- platform runtime (WasmTime I think?).

(And the downvotes are probably because your question could be interpreted as implying that Wasm is useless and people are wasting their time. Even though you're asking a totally fair question, it's easy to read the tone as negative and dismissive whether you meant it that way or not.)</comment></comment>


Rejecting Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> https://0gitnick.voidnet.tech/rejecting-visual-studio/ <comment><USER2> I hope you don't use a smartphone. Or cellphone at all. Several technologies are patent encumbered and contain, in some of the chips, proprietary code. And it is a tech that provides the cellphone provider with telemetry as well.

I assume you are running a RYF approved PC or laptop.</comment>


Scanner Can Build a Digital Library in Five Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/02/the-czur-scanner-can-build-a-digital-library-five-minutes-at-a-time/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice if people would stop posting links to proposed products with descriptions in the present tense.</comment>


Ask HN: Where is "who is hiring"? - <AUTHOR> It is supposed to appear Today. I even saw a thread titled like that and 1-upped it but it is not in the main page. <comment><USER2> The thread is automatically posted at 11AM Eastern on the first weekday of every month.

<comment><USER3> Finally a site operating on eastern

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It is supposed to appear Today. I even saw a thread titled like that and > 1-upped it but it is not in the main page.

For reference, the only threads allowed are created by whoishiring to prevent such a karma race.</comment>


Learning to See in the Dark - <AUTHOR> http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~cchen156/SID.html <comment><USER2> I'm always concerned when this type of deep learning image processing is presented. The resulting images look nice but there's no guarantee that all the extra detail visible in those images is genuine detail and not just "believable" data filled in by the net. Maybe fine for happy snaps but it's very important that users of the camera know that its output is just an "artist's impression."

It raises shades of the Xerox copiers which helpfully "compressed" images by deciding that 6s, 8s and 9s looked similar enough and using them interchangeably. ([http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202))

<comment><USER3> > The resulting images look nice but there's no guarantee that all the extra > detail visible in those images is genuine detail and not just "believable" > data filled in by the net. Maybe fine for happy snaps but it's very > important that users of the camera know that its output is just an "artist's > impression."

I completely agree with this, and it's more and more dangerous as the resulting images appear more and more realistic. On a related tangent, this also showed up recently: [http://fortune.com/2018/04/24/nvidia-artificial- intelligence...](http://fortune.com/2018/04/24/nvidia-artificial-intelligence- images/)

A lot of people I know -- intelligent people who are familiar with machine learning and image manipulation -- were confused as to how this approach was "recovering" data.

It's not recovering data at all; it's guessing and filling in blanks, but doing so in such a realistic fashion that apparently it's poking around in some blind spots because the result is so convincing that you think it's the "real" image. I feel like the same blind spot would be attacked with "seeing in the dark" as well.

<comment><USER4> > On a related tangent, this also showed up recently: (NVIDIA's inpainting). A > lot of people I know -- intelligent people who are familiar with machine > learning and image manipulation -- were confused as to how this approach was > "recovering" data.

Realistic image inpainting & synthesis has been going on for decades, so I'd guess the main confusion is due to reading the title of Fortune's article, rather than the paper's title "Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions". BTW, Kudos to Fortune for actually linking to the paper. I felt like it was pretty obviously inpainting, and suggesting arbitrary training data just from watching the video, so maybe the confusion was from reading the PR title only, and not diving any deeper?

Here's my favorite inpainting paper, partly because the author is a friend, but also because it's able to hallucinate written text, which most inpainting algorithms since then haven't been able to do. It's not a neural network though, and the training data comes from the single input image itself. [http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/research/EfrosLeung....](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/research/EfrosLeung.html)

> it's more and more dangerous... I feel like the same blind spot would be > attacked with "seeing in the dark" as well.

It's possible, yes, but it does depend on what the authors did, how the network was trained, whether they allow reconstruction from pure noise, etc.. I would agree that this paper title is a bit provocative, and suggests assuming the output is realistic. The problem might be the title, and not the technique.

While it is important to understand that NNs are hallucinating output with training data, it's also a good idea to reflect on the history of analog & digital photography & photoshop, and recall that this slippery slope of danger against fake realism has been warned against multiple times before. There are lots of legitimate uses for inpainting (movies, ads). As someone who's worked in film, I'm excited about the possibilities that NNs bring in terms of new techniques and reduction of labor.

<comment><USER5> >> I'm excited about the possibilities that NNs bring in terms of new techniques and reduction of labor.

Reduction of labour is nice. Elimination of labour is problematic. To photoshop something someone has to actually photoshop it. We don't set our cameras to automatically photoshop things as we take them. The techniques in the OP are dangerous because they could be employed in situations where the photographer doesn't realize. A camera/robot trying to edit something automatically fabricating a false reality in the eyes of humans. Imagine a camera used to capture evidence of crime. You don't want such a thing filling in details on its own.

<comment><USER6> Isn't Google Photos / Google Camera App doing that, automatically or semi- automatically? I recall they had a feature that could magically merge multiple photos into one that has a combination of details from the source images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Remarkable machine learning result for "producing astoundingly sharp photos in very low light" (Cory Doctorow - [https://boingboing.net/2018/05/09/enhance- enhance.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/05/09/enhance-enhance.html) )

Demo example (one of many examples - drag the middle slider from left-to- right): [http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~cchen156/SID/examples/16.html](http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~cchen156/SID/examples/16.html)

GitHub: [https://github.com/cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the- Dark](https://github.com/cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the-Dark)

Paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01934](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01934)

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWKUFK7MWvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWKUFK7MWvg)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd be very curious to see this applied to not just a single frame of video, but rather to the video as a whole. My assumption is that it would create a weird jitter to the parts of the image that have been recreated by the neural net.

I think what would be almost even more interesting is an algorithm like this that is specifically trained to video, and takes into account previous and next frames when recreating lost data.

<comment><USER8> There's been work (in a related field) to "stabilize" the jitter in consecutive frames. As you say, by taking into account the neighboring frames.

Relevant excerpt from [1]:

"If you just apply the algorithm frame by frame, you don't get a coherent video — you get flickering in the sequence," says University of Freiburg postdoc Alexey Dosovitskiy. "What we do is introduce additional constraints, which make the video consistent."

[1] [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/25/deep-learning- paint...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/25/deep-learning-paints- videos/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a couple of questions if the authors are following along.

While I understand the choice of using a downsampled input with 4 channels I'm wondering why you went with a downsampled output instead of going to the original resolution directly where the 3 color channels are separate.

Also, did you investigate "faking" the training data by taking a single well exposed image, making it darker using conventional methods and using the resulting image as an input to the workflow?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish they provided the RAW files. Looking at "traditional-pipeline" photos I am positive I can get a much better result just spending some time with Lightroom and coming up with some "super high ISO" preset. Perhaps it will not match their new pipeline but it will be better than what they have for the "traditional pipeline".

</comment><comment><USER11> This might work wonders for webcam video if it works fast enough

</comment><comment><USER12> I love playing with my mirrorless camera and lenses, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's a risky proposition "investing" in a bunch of expensive camera gear (which traditionally holds it's value better than most gadgets) when computational methods will soon evaporate the advantages of bigger sensors / faster glass.

</comment><comment><USER13> This does not sound right. The source image must have had more information (perhaps not compressed raw data) than in the example.

The book cover details simply are not there on the dark image (if you scale up the brightness then there is only blocky noise.

So either this is not the right dark image or their network dreamed it up.

<comment><USER14> The dataset is composed of D -> F sets (not pairs, because there are many underexposed images) of Dark to Fully-illuminated images.

Yes, the net is "dreaming" the details, based on what it learns from those mappings. I'd say this nets are very specialised on the sensor, and maybe even lens choice. Simply put, what they did is compressing a full pipeline of processing into a deep net that consumes RAW files and spits out natural looking images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This isn't my field but I'm curious: are the results in the slider samples novel images or ones that were trained on?

Could it not just be really good are recreating the image it was trained on or is it generally doing this with novel images in this case?

</comment><comment><USER16> I can see Apple and Google rushing to secure a deal to include this tech on their cameras.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't look like their slider bar works with mobile chrome.

</comment><comment><USER18> Astronomers spend entire careers trying to squeeze as much data as possible from low light shots of the stars. And their math skills are superb, and budgets almost unlimited. There is very little to add to their job really.

</comment><comment><USER19> The technology and those pics are interesting. Though the content of the pictures are odd.. mannequin heads and metamucil.. xD</comment>


Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/26/amazon-is-piloting-teams-with-a-30-hour-work-week/ <comment><USER2> Something about this bothers me. Time-keeping is already not straightforward for an engineer. Because the work is done in our heads and doesn't necessarily stop just because the workday is over. You don't have to be sitting at a keyboard for your head to be grinding on a problem. More often some problem takes hold of you, occupying some mental bandwidth even while you're away, at home trying to enjoy time with your family or whatever - technically you're still working, your mind is preoccupied, you might not be able to sleep or when you do you dream about the problem.

From the outside it might appear like you came back to the office after a nice weekend break and quickly knocked out whatever task it was that was on your mind. But it's not that simple and after unloading that task, even though it's Monday you could be feeling like you need a break because you actually just worked through the weekend on it.

Because of this, I feel like engineers are already massively overworked and/or underpaid when you consider their salary based on a 40hour workweek when the real mental effort can be pushing 60-80 hours a week. Things like unlimited/discretionary PTO, flex hours, and management that understands the balance of overtime and undertime keeps things fair. Establishing a 30-hour workweek just seems like going hard in the other direction.

<comment><USER3> I'm skeptical of claims that developers are underpaid. Maybe I feel differently about this because I'm not in a major tech hub and am not faced with the prospect of buying a multimillion dollar cottage, but when I compare my life as a software developer to that of more or less anyone else I know, including doctors and lawyers, I struggle to find a single person who seems to have a more comfortable life than me.

I'm not _the_ highest paid person I know, of course. My low six-figure income can't compete with $300k+ salaries that many surgeons get. I couldn't afford the $1.2M Mediterranean mansion that my dentist lives in. And I'll never get the sort of pay package that big law firm partners can command.

But I'm not performing life-altering surgery. I didn't even have to go to medical school, let alone complete a residency.

I didn't have to start up my own dental practice. And I'm not in my hypothetical dental practice every Saturday morning at 8AM taking care of patients who couldn't make it during the week or couldn't afford to take off work.

I never had to go to law school. I didn't have to pass a single licensing exam. I took out no loans to get to where I am. And I was never worked 80+ hours a week as a young associate.

I worked less than these people to get to where I am, and I continue to work less than them. My work is easier than theirs too. It's less stressful. Even if a problem does consume me for days, including outside of work, it's just not that big of a deal. I started making this income when these other folks were doing nothing but accruing debt. My lifetime earnings won't be all that different from theirs because I got such a tremendous head start.

If I look at friends who are not in any of the above three professions, not a single person comes to mind who makes as much money as I do. Many make half as much as I do but have much more stressful jobs, fewer perks, etc.

And yet apparently I'm underpaid. I don't buy it.

<comment><USER4> You can usually just do the math. Let's assume last year I decreases the loading time of our website by 50%, taking it from 2 seconds to 1 second. This reduces the drop off rate of customers (people who switch websites before it loads) by about 15%. That means a 15% increase in overall sales.

Now let's assume it was a $10 million a year business. That means it's now making $11.5 million dollars a year because a software engineer optimized the loading time. That engineer probably makes $100k or so, and he might get a 10% raise since he did such a good job. The remaining $1.49 million gets distributed amongst execs and investors.

Hardly seems fair, when most executives have no idea what's going on, and provide zero value add for that case.

<comment><USER5> Why does everyone talk like the leverage of the business is the leverage of the developer when discussing compensation? That's not how it works.

Compensation is set by the market: what is the next person who can do this same job willing to be paid?

If we go out into the market to find all the people that can decrease page loading time by 50% and have them bid against each other, we will probably end up paying the lowest bidder who is capable of the job about the median salary of the profession.

And another point on >the remaining $1.49 million gets distributed amongst execs and investors. People who own equity in the company have legal claim on the cash flows of the business. They balance free cash flows with reinvested capital (assets,, SGA) to sustain free cash flows into the future.

<comment><USER6> Well, you are both right. Compensation is set by the market, but the ceiling for compensation to perform a task is (roughly) the amount of value that a employee can generate, in a rational market.

Of course, our market is far from rational, etc, etc.

FWIW, I don't think that software developers are overpaid, at all. It's a difficult career, requiring years of intense study to do well. Sure, maybe not as much as Doctors, at least not formally, but a lot of that has to do with the structure of medical education in the United States (in particular, the requirement to complete an undergrad degree prior to admission to medical school). The job of a surgeon is certainly more difficult than the average software developer, but compared to a SRE at Google, say, who is working with real, "living" distributed systems that interact in complex ways, I would say they are comparable. If anything, I'd expect, in a rational market, for the SRE to be paid more, because their services are providing for millions or billions of customers, while the surgeon is only providing for one at a time (and maybe a few thousand over their carrer).

<comment><USER7> What I usually reach when thinking along similar paths, using me (programmer) vs my doctor friends, is the failure scenario:

If I introduce a bug it will hurt revenue in some way, possibly affecting the company's operations. If most doctors mishandle a patient it could have significant, immediate effect on that person's life.

I deal with the responsibility weighing on me, but they've had to get used to dealing with a much heavier responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an amazon SDE myself, one who doesn't think working at Amazon is that bad, but do admit that it is challenging, and often do work much longer then 40h a week, I would need to have a guarantee that my pay cut comes with a no more then 30h a week clause.

I'd like to see proper hour counting, like a check in and check out. Where any hour above 30h comes at an extra cost to Amazon, like double pay. So that they would be incentivised to actually tell me to stop working and send me home.

I know some people might say, that's up to you, just don't let yourself work extra, but at a company like Amazon, you can actually lose your job or at least not be promoted from delivering less then the other employees. You're ranked against your peers, so deciding to work only 30h would hurt you in the long run if the others started putting in 35h, 40h, 45h, etc.

<comment><USER9> I never thought I'd want a clock-in, clock-out system until this moment. Early in my working life (teen retail electronics job), I felt the pressure of the clock, even as a super reliable worker. I just knew it was there.

Now, the idea of a clock that tells me to go home seems super appealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'Amazon is piloting 25% pay cuts'.

I wonder if the group that does this will be viewed as lesser, e.g. work on less interesting projects, be less likely to be promoted, than the "40" hour employees.

<comment><USER11> The pilot is a team-wide thing. You won't have a 30-hour employee on a 40-hour team. 30-hour employees will work with 30-hour employees under a 30-hour manager. I think that will help offset some of this, but it does put a limit on what projects you could work on. For the pilot, anyway. I'm interested to see how this pans out.

<comment><USER10> I recognize that 'You won't have a 30-hour employee on a 40-hour team'... my point is that, unless they segregate them in another building, probably another company, the pilot teams will interact with the non-pilot teams... and, at some point in the hierarchy, will be managed by 40-hour people.

As jaded as I sound, I do think there's a place for workplace flexibility. What would really tell me the executives are committed to it: Calculate their actual FTE's - average work week hours divided by 40 - and make sure there are at least that many physical FTE's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think what they really mean is "30-hour workweek while being physically present in the office". I would find it difficult to believe that employees wouldn't continue working from home under pressure from management or simply because of tight timelines.

<comment><USER13> Precisely.

Amazon is a sweatshop. The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours.

All this is doing is giving people more freedom to burn themselves out at home, while further blurring the lines between work and life and throwing in a 25% pay cut as the cherry on top.

It's like the opposite of Google campus life, but with the same goal.

<comment><USER14> "Amazon is a sweatshop"

I wouldn't agree with this broad generalization. I work in Alexa and the work environment on my team is pretty awesome. Lots of freedom to try new things, good work life balance, and generally a high level of respect for engineers. I turned down Google to come here and I have no regrets (though not to imply that Google isn't equally awesome).

<comment><USER8> I'd have to disagree. I've been at Amazon for 2 years, and while it's not a sweatshop, it's definitly a challenging environment where I know of no one who works an exact 40h week at all times.

There's zero buffer to slack off, a less productive day is followed by a longer one.

I like working at Amazon. I like the challenge, the projects, the people I work with are fun and smart, but it is not a place where you can easily balance your life for a long period of time. I've never met someone past the 5 year mark that does not define his life as an Amazon employee first, everything second.

You can try to keep yourself at 40h, but eventually it will hurt you, it'll show in your review, it'll hold back your promotion, and if you're unlucky enough to have a management switch at a time where the team is expected to perform, you might even lose your job. I've seen it happen.

Now, maybe in some teams things are different, but in my 2 years, it's been my impression that this is the culture here. You either like it, as I do, I enjoy the rush and the busyness, makes my days fly by. Or you don't and you leave.

I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse.

<comment><USER15> > I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked > 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on > an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call > time offcourse.

I work 40 hours per week on average. For the 20 years I have been in the industry.

I solved some problems in the shower, but I also slack away on my desk sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This plus stack-ranking means 60 hour workweeks. I worked at Amazon for several years, their culture may pretend to support this, but, like almost everything you read about Amazon, it's PR fluff. Never going to happen.

Simply only showing up in the office 30 hours a week would be enough to put your team on the bottom end of the stack.

Amazon is organized such that the politics are vicious and anything that can be used to put another team down (And thus elevate your team in the stack) will be used.

Managers like Bezos are proud of creating this toxic cult like culture because they rationalize it and are not interested in hearing about how they are screwing up.

A real example of this is Bezos claiming after the NYT article that if anyone saw abuse they should email him directly... and now the ex-amazon alumni group has grown by several people who did exactly that and were fired.

My boss was committing felonies on the PacMed grounds on a regular basis, drove %80 of his team to leave, and he still got promoted.

Because he was good at politics and BS (and terrible at actually getting product done, easily wasting %25 of our time with nonsense because he didn't understand how the system worked but wanted to "manage" (which really meant micro-manage.))

Felonies, I'm not kidding.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hate to be cynical (really, I do) but this seems like a clear attempt to soften Amazon's current public image as being a horrible place to work. It seems like all surface/headlines and no real substance. The headline makes you assume "Oh employees are going down to 30 hours a week but still being fully paid." because in order for this to be really noteworthy at all, it would have to be, right? But that's not what this is. They are basically just knocking people down to part time but keeping benefits, apparently?

That doesn't seem like a good deal to me. I don't want a 25% pay cut for 25% fewer mandatory hours of work. As other commenters have pointed out, unless this comes along with a reduction in responsibilities and/or increase in staff, the same amount of work still needs to be done. And most exempt employees already work more than 40 hours a week.

Add to this the fact that the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, and this just seems like a clear PR stunt to me, and a lame one at that.

<comment><USER18> I'll agree on the reason why they're doing this, but I've actually always wanted this deal, or something like it. Less hours for less pay, which as a software professional would still be pretty good money. The challenge is having that be accepted by the organization, which most American companies won't because we're all supposed to love what we do or whatever.

If you're supposed to still accomplish the same amount of stuff in 75% the time then that's just clearly not going to work. Can't fit 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.

But anyway, yes, I'm sure it's either a PR stunt or bound to fail or both.

<comment><USER19> never heard of a bag that has a weight limit instead of a volume limit.

<comment><USER18> Shhhh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "Even names like that, 'part-time' or 'reduced,' make it seem like a > deviation from the norm, like you're doing less."

This is a telling statement. Why are we still stuck on a minimum of 40 hours being 'full-time'? After over a century of productivity increases, and with ever-increasing automation, we could soon be at the point where a 15-hour work week is the equivalent of an old 'full-time' work week. Now is a good time to start nudging down expectations.

The pay cut is wrong, however. The fact that people are producing much more now in 30 hours than they used to produce in 40 argues against that. If a company is profiting from the benefits of that productivity, but can't afford to pay the employees for their work, then it needs to change something else.

<comment><USER21> >Now is a good time to start nudging down expectations.

Agreed. As technology advances, we have a much less need for labor. Yet we are not yet at the stage of "Star Trek abundance", so people still need to work for a living. A cultural shift to a shorter standard work week will be essential, I feel, to avoid having catastrophic waves of unemployment.

I'm not sure about the pay cut being wrong however. That may be necessary to some extent, society-wide. But if nearly everything is becoming automated and dirt cheap, one's standard of living need not necessarily decrease. It may dramatically increase, even if the dollar amount of your paycheck doesn't change (or even if it goes down).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The folks I know at Amazon may have been in the office for a normal amount of time, but they worked long night after long night from home. If they're approaching a 30 hour work week as a reduction from 40, it's bound to fail. They have to realize it would be q reduction from 60 or 80

<comment><USER23> And my team at Amazon almost every day has only 4/5 engineers at the office because one is taking it easy working from home. Sometimes people take hour lunches and leave after 7 hours. Sometimes they want to finish something and stay later.

<comment><USER24> In which way is "working from home" "taking it easy"?

<comment><USER11> Because working from home is usually light on working.

<comment><USER25> Your viewpoint, without experience, is toxic to rational discussions regarding remote work (and is ironic, considering your employer).

<comment><USER26> No, it's just a different viewpoint.

If you don't have measurable inputs and outputs (i.e. Tickets, service requests, widgets, cases, etc), you typically lose productivity. Not necessarily because of the employee, but also because of managers who don't function well with out of sight people.

Personally, I think in many cases you'd get better outcomes out of sending people home at noon on Fridays than having them telework.

<comment><USER20> > If you don't have measurable inputs and outputs

Of course if you're not giving employees anything to do, you'll get reduced productivity. That's also true if you force them to sit in a chair in the office and do nothing. If you can't come up with anything for them to do (slow season, sales pipeline stalled) maybe let them pitch ideas for things they'd like to work on and give the ok on some.

Either way, if they have something to do and you keep in touch with them on how things are going, things should keep moving even without specific granular measurements. But why not use tickets or tasks or something to make it visible?

> also because of managers who don't function well with out of sight people

Those people probably shouldn't be managers, at least not working with remote workers. Communication is critical. A remote team should feel like they're communicating at least as much as an in-office team, if not more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So while this is really good for people that have dependents at home, or other consistently demanding activities. I would not enjoy such an arrangement.

The arrangement I'd be most excited by is a team with forced three month sabbaticals yearly (or honestly even 6 month sabbaticals). Of-course with the normal amount of vacation time added as well.

The way it would work is: Say a team is supposed to have 8 people. Hire 25% more people and schedule sabbaticals such that there is always ~8 people working. Additionally, you could ensure that there is never a time where two developers go more than 2 months without working together.

Benefits: Increases the supply in the job market; Reduces income disparity; Improves employee work-life balance.

<comment><USER28> Also ensures good handoff on projects -- if you work 60h/wk for, say, 8 weeks to ship something, and 40h/wk for 2 weeks before/after to handle turnover, and then are basically AFK for 8 weeks, you'll probably do a pretty good job on handing it off.

(My personal ideal is ~8 days on (12-16h/day), 6 days off, and then a month or two off twice a year.)

</comment></comment><comment> amzn-336495 What is likely occurring at Amazon is that the board has outlined that executive and line managers should be paid based on number of reports beneath them and this is a scheme simply to get more butts in seats so manager can be paid more. Before you say that can't possibly be correct, consider you don't know Amazon. At Amazon this sort of out in the open cheating or ability to game the system is seen as a mark of power. It's the same as cheating vendors or publishers. It's seen as a _positive_. Secondly the management culture is that employees are mere chaff to be used in any way possible to increase management compensation and power. There is absolutely no way this has anything to do with making Amazon better as a business.

</comment><comment><USER29> Makes sense to me. For most of my 40+ years of working, I worked a 32 hour work week and this was mostly for large corporations. I simply informed HR that I would not be working Monday's and to pay me 80% of my salary. It always amazed me that I was able to do this decade after decade, but the trick was that I worked really hard the 4 days I was in the office.

I mostly used the extra time for friends and family, and to write books.

<comment><USER30> BTW if you went around and asked a bunch of software engineers how they finangled there way into working a sub-40 week and collected that into a e-book. I would buy the shit out of that. And judging from other hacker news posts there are lots of other developers who would as well.

I would do it myself but I don't have the extra day to write books :) and I'm a terrible writer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is fantastic news. It's absurd that it's basically impossible to have a successful career working a bit less than full time. This is way overdue in the modern world and hopefully becomes an option in more companies going forward.

<comment><USER32> There's a 25℅ reduction in pay. This policy is another one of Amazon's "screw the worker" policies.

<comment><USER33> Working 75% of the time for 75% of the pay is screwing the worker?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been told by people that work for Amazon that they can barely keep their teams properly staffed and working over is just a common occurrence, I doubt a 30-hr work week is viable for a company that is more or less (now) a logistics company. Doing so would require higher headcounts, losing money, or both. Not a viable solution, even with the automation push Amazon has.

The only type of companies I could see getting away with this would be pure software companies or agencies. Otherwise, I can't see it fitting many models or personal finances.

<comment><USER35> > I've been told by people that work for Amazon that they can barely keep > their teams properly staffed

I think that's true of every tech successful company. There's always more +EV work to be done than people to do it, and recruiting quality people is never easy.

It seems short-sighted to suggest that the existence of this problem necessitates working long hours. There are lots of factors to consider:

* It's possible that somebody working 30 hours is actually more productive than somebody working 40 hours, so productivity goes up under the new policy without hiring anybody new.

* It's possible that many more people could enter the workforce if a 30 hour week with a flexible schedule was possible. This working style could be appealing to students, retired people, stay-at-home parents, artists, etc.

* Maybe it's actually okay for productivity to go down. If the company is able to remain stable while getting slightly less done and having much happier employees, perhaps that's a net gain to society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 75% pay / 100% benefits thing is likely the factor that prevents many companies from doing this. This is part of the reason I love the idea of a single-payer health system. If companies were no longer on the hook for the most expensive benefit, then more flexible wrking arrangements with concordance between work and pay would be possible.

<comment><USER36> Agreed. I don't think healthcare should be tied to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Just wondering, but it strikes me as odd to have the Washington Post report anything about Amazon, since bezos owns them both. It's like Bloomberg reporting on Bloomberg's flirtation with a third party bid.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have quite a few friends who work at Amazon and what I hear from them is that the quality of your experience is completely dependent on team you're on.

There are teams where all horror stories you hear are common occurrences(although less so in recent years) and others where it's an absolute pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER39> I work for Intel, and just a couple weeks ago switched to a 32-hour-a-week schedule. I had to get approval from my boss, and presumably my boss had to get approval from his boss, but it was a pretty easy switch. So far, it's been great. Benefits are the same, salary amortized at 80%, and stock grants are reduced a bit more than that.

I think most people would rather have the extra money, for various reasons. If I owed a couple hundred grand on a mortgage or was saving to send my kids to college, I might think the same but as it is I have no house and no kids and relatively low living expenses, so I can afford to be a little bit self- indulgent and take a 3-day weekend every week.

<comment><USER40> Good for you. I can assure you that there are plenty of people with kids who like this idea, too!

But what's the justification for a more-than-pro-rata loss of stock grants?

<comment><USER39> I still get full benefits even though I'm only working 4/5ths the hours, so it makes sense they'd take that out somewhere else. I don't get a lot of stock, so I think it works out numerically that the stock I don't get is probably about equal to a fifth of the cost of my health insurance. I think that's fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> When I was at amazon I was routinely putting in 170hr+ work weeks. It was impossible.

<comment><USER13> I'm gonna assume you meant 70+, not 170+, unless you're a time traveller...

Or you really did mean it was impossible, in which case... math checks out.

<comment><USER42> He was doing 4 men's jobs, but not even close to 10xer's 400 hr/wk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is an excellent step to getting people more motivated and productive. I don't find working more hours improve my life in any positive way. It's much less satisfying as I want to commit some hours to learning or creating something new.

</comment><comment><USER44> 3/4 pay for 3/4 butt in seat time. Seems like Amazon is getting a great deal here!

<comment><USER45> Compared to the alleged 80 hour norm, it's 3/4 pay for 3/8 of the butt in seat time. If it's truly just 30 hours per week, that's a great deal for the workers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn."

How does this sentence make any sense?

<comment><USER47> It means that they get the same [non-cash] benefits as other workers and that their cash compensation is the only thing scaled down in proportion to nominal hours worked.

(I'm assuming you were confused by "same benefits" and "75% pay". Benefits, in this context, is the non-cash benefits: health insurance, PTO accrual, etc.)

<comment><USER46> I was (still am) confused because they say employees will be 'salaried' the same and than receive 75% of full time 'earn'. Salary and earn are the same to me.

<comment><USER47> Salaried means an employee is paid a fixed amount per _calendar time_ (per week, month, or year). The word "salaried" doesn't specify the _amount_ , just the _structure_ of pay.

The alternative is "hourly" where the employee is paid per _hour worked_ or "piecework" where the person (typically not an employee) is paid per unit of work (bushel picked, unit assembled, etc)

From the original quote: "These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits" means:

"These employees will be salaried [not hourly]." and

"These employees will receive the same [non-cash] benefits."

Nowhere does it say nor imply "These employees will receive the same salary."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> My company (Administrate - [http://www.getadministrate.com](http://www.getadministrate.com)) went to a 4 day, 32 hour week (but paid for 5) a little over a year ago. It's been a huge success, and we haven't seen any drop in productivity. We have had to be a little bit more efficient in some areas but overall the productivity gain was more or less "automatic". I'd recommend trying it to anyone, but understand it can be a scary thing to implement, mainly b/c it can be an easy thing to blame when things aren't going well. We have had some brief periods (usually when we're hiring) where teams have had to work 5 days, but overall we've been pretty consistent.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is one of the things I really, really love about being in my current Ops/Engineering position: I have a defined shift. I work 4x10 _, fixed hours (flexible within certain rules, like if I 'm running 15 minutes late or leave 30 minutes early, my boss doesn't come down on me), a few weeks of vacation, and no on-call. I still get to work on interesting projects _and* I have people who work before my shift and after my shift who also handle tasks and projects so there's no institutional reason to come in early or stay late to pull extra hours. (Barring a major service meltdown, of course.)

To each their own, but this is why I don't want to dev for a living.

* - 3 day weekends every week is an awesome thing for me.

</comment><comment><USER50> The most difficult thing to do is to stop work after 30 hrs (or whatever the time-to-be-paid is) It is counter to stop working if the job is not completed. But one must learn the discipline to stop.

Even if you can squeeze more productivity into 30 hours the temptation should be resisted.

The outfit I work for intentionally gives 9 hours of work to new employees and has them work an 7.5 hour day. It's intentional and brilliant. New people do not know they don't have to do 9 in 7.5. Old timers coach them but it is a very hard thing to tell someone to work slower.

I think Amazon will realize more productiviy in 30 than in 40 (in some cases)

</comment><comment><USER51> I thought Amazon employees were routinely burned out. At least that's the perception I get from reading the news. Maybe this is to help combat it?

What's next? Unlimited PTO? :)

<comment><USER52> Yes, it seems like this move is to help combat the perception that Amazon employees are routinely burned out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> i've been working a 30h/week job, 6 hours a day, with flex hours (without overtime pay but comp time) for the last couple of years and i absolutely love it.

last job i worked at had 42 hours and after 2 years i've been totally burnt out; now i'm motivated, usually well rested and concentrated. when my concentration drops i go home for the day, if i'm working on a hard problem that occupies my mind i'll stay a couple of hours more (but only if i want to, which i usually do). i haven't had to do crunch time for several years and when that was the case they asked if you wanted to volunteer and if you said no that was ok.

also if my project lead tells me there's not much work to do right now and if i want to take off time now would be a good time to do so i'll usually do it.

additionally, if you want to it's possible to work from home if there aren't any reasons speaking against it (meetings) - many colleagues work one fixed day a week from home (i don't because i love the quiet conditions and free, potent coffee).

in my opinion this benefits both me and my employer. i'm motivated, concentrated, productive and loyal - currently i can't imagine working somewhere else full time, even for higher pay. i do regard my employer as fair and really want the company to succeed, not only because of my workplace security but also because i think they're doing it right and that's how it should be done. there's no us-vs-them mentality.

pay is good but i'm probably not going to become a fabled startup millionaire here; quality of life is, in my opinion, unbeatable. currently i don't know any people who lead a more comfortable life than i.

</comment><comment><USER36> I see a lot of skepticism in the comments.. is a 30 or even 20 hour week (for commensurate pay) even possible? I have lived fine on very little money before and I value my time much more, but it seems like my only option for not slaving away is working for minimum wage.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would much rather have 75% pay for 13 weeks of PTO. Highly unlikely anyone will ever offer that.

</comment><comment><USER55> "Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post."

</comment><comment><USER56> Cool, perhaps that's why I was required to work more and be oncall all the time, have meetings after 18:00, have no life, have high blood pressure.

</comment><comment><USER57> Could it be that this has to do with Obamacare? I read that it is cheaper to have part time employees in the US right now, but I might be wrong on that.

<comment><USER58> That's true but I don't think it's cheap enough at these pay levels for that to matter a whole lot.

<comment><USER57> Well if it was Google or Facebook I certainly wouldn't entertain this thought but with Amazon? They are known to do things that some (not me) regard as pretty shady to shave off costs wherever they can.

I wouldn't object to that as Amazon didn't create the rules, they are just operating within the system in the most efficient way they can.

What I find concerning is that the rules are changed in the West to incentivise part time work (which doesn't pay living wages in other sectors than IT) over full time work, effectively leaving more and more workers dependant on welfare.

It's what we see here in the EU too since the crash in 2008. Many jobs were lost and the recovery was mostly in part time jobs where the government has to support these workers with additional payments in order for them to survive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Get two jobs working 30 hours, each paying 75%, and you'll work the same as one demanding software job, and make 50% more!

</comment><comment><USER60> With the speed and aggression that Amazon moves, it's going to be a challenge to implement this for Engineers.

</comment><comment><USER61> guys lets not pretend Amazon doesn't operate in Europe and already have this setup - if its already working over there dipping their toes in the US is reasonable. it's a pilot.

</comment><comment><USER62> > 30-hour workweek

Amazon, is that 30 in decimal or hexadecimal?

</comment><comment><USER63> Not for the guys in the factories though.

</comment><comment><USER64> The most important thing about this is that it will give other companies institutional cover to implement this within their firms.

I love my job but I have had jobs I've hated. Work sucks, go Amazon. If widely adopted, this would represent a massive reduction in taxation imposed on the average American family. A two-income family working 25% less hours pays over 25% less in taxes. Progressive taxes work both ways, Feds :)</comment>


The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv6t21xXogY <comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22630526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22630526) made me think of this poignant documentary. As JSTOR virtuously opens their walled garden... We can't forget...</comment>


The Battle to Rewrite Texas History - <AUTHOR> https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/battle-rewrite-texas-history/ <comment><USER2> I'm a 7th generation Texan, still live here and was educated in the system. My dad, my grandfather, uncles all talked alot about Robert E. Lee. "A brilliant battlefield tactician and leader of the confederate army". It's absolutely awful why we seceded, I don't agree with it now. Would I have agreed 150 years ago?

I think it's easy to look back and measure him up as a bad man when you use a 2019 yardstick. Little is mentioned about his post-war efforts to encourage pacification of white on black violence, encouraging of all African American kids getting an education, and his denouncement of his own military education.

The history books should be accurate, and accurate all the way around. I ask you, what is the value of painting him a bad man if you don't also highlight his own public repentance for so many of those deeds.

My city has renamed several confederate parks, always highlighting that "Robert E. Lee fought for slavery" and "didn't want blacks to vote". Both are true statements, but you miss a huge educational opportunity and I believe a chance to teach a powerful lesson: Apologizing, rebuilding, unity, freedom - all of these things require an open and honest conversation about what happened. Lee had extremely complicated views on slavery.

His words: '''In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.'''

In summary, I don't condone him. I don't think statues are appropriate. But erasing his full life with his post-war works and efforts is losing an opportunity to heal.

<comment><USER3> Actually, a lot of people at the time had issues with slavery! At an absolute bare minimum, 3.9 million enslaved people in the United States probably had some strong critiques to level against the existing system of slavery and Lee's decision to commit treason in defense of that system. Of course, Robert Lee didn't consider those people to be humans, with full human rights. And similarly, when you ignore their humanity, and you ignore the historical record of abolitionists from the United States and all over the rest of the world, it becomes a lot easier to pretend that anger at the continued celebration of someone who committed treason in defense of slavery is somehow based on shifting modern mores.

The post-war stuff isn't being ignored; it just doesn't matter. The value of "painting him as a bad man" is that _he was a bad man_ , who did horrible things, for horrible reasons, and people like your family still think he was actually a great hero. Even in the language you use, you imply that you don't actually think he was that bad, and you definitely are suggesting that opening a school later in life somehow mitigates leading the military arm of a rebellion in defense of slavery. It really, really doesn't!

<comment><USER2> I think you've missed some of my points, but I appreciate your passion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand this obsession with the Confederacy in Texas or in the south in general. You don't see Germany having "Nazi Soldiers Day" or Hitler statues. And there's a damn good reason for that. That kind of heritage is damaging and holds our entire society back. It's one of the many things that essentially says "slavery was ok and racism definitely still is." It's frankly, fucking disgusting. What happened should be taught in schools, but it shouldn't be celebrated with holidays and statues like it's something to be proud of. It's shameful, disgusting, and ugly and it makes those who celebrate such things shameful, disgusting, and ugly too.

<comment><USER5> You're not going to get very far in diplomacy if you don't try to understand their point of view.

<comment><USER6> I live in the Texas, my mother was born in Texas, my wife is from small town texas, as are her parents and grandparents. Many people in my family have this same obsession with the confederacy. I hear them talk about it, I've lived it, and I do not understand it either. It was a revolution to defend the right to own slaves (as we stated explicitly at the time: [https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.htm...](https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html) ) so that we could do farming. mostly.

its not interesting, its disgusting, I do not see what there is to be proud of. Smart people try to explain and sound like idiots.

Yes, I'm not a diplomat.

<comment><USER7> I worked with a guy who was very much the type to have a confederate flag and grew up worshipping the Dukes of Hazzard. I remember when the controversy started lifting off and they began taking down statues, he was confused and upset by it. I've seen this guy around all sorts of people, and he's about the furthest thing from a racist Nazi there is.

I believe the "confederate rebel" idea is a source of pride for some groups and is ingrained into their culture. Sometimes that may be mixed with antiquated and racist themes, but they're not always the same thing.

<comment><USER8> >I believe the "confederate rebel" idea is a source of pride for some groups and is ingrained into their culture. Sometimes that may be mixed with antiquated and racist themes, but they're not always the same thing.

Yes. They believe the Civil War was really about states' rights and independence from Federal authority, and that slavery was just an incidental part of that greater struggle, and that their culture represents the last strain of "pure" (politically, not racially, but also kind of yes racially) American culture reflecting the original intent of the founding fathers, before the Federal government started its slide into totalitarianism.

It's a lie, but like all effective lies, it's half-baked in truth. Yes, the Civil War was about states' rights... the _right of states to own slaves._ Yes, Southern forces fought, often valiantly, for their independence... _from anti-slavery laws._ Yes, there were issues other than slavery, specifically, that caused the South to secede. Every one of those issues inevitably intersects with the institution of slavery at some point.

The lie is that it's possible to somehow extract Southern culture from its racist roots, as if slavery and its legacy can just be ignored and set aside as not really pertinent, when slavery was as foundational to the South and its culture as anti-Semitism was to the Nazis.

Sure, Hitler designed the VW Beetle and the Nazis built the Autobahn (but not entirely), but that's no reason to fly the swastika in your window.

<comment><USER7> > The lie is that it's possible to somehow extract Southern culture from its > racist roots, as if slavery and its legacy can just be ignored and set aside > as not really pertinent, when slavery was as foundational to the South and > its culture as anti-Semitism was to the Nazis.

And yet we do not hold cultures of the world accountable to their roots. Many religions and cultures of today stem from primitive patriarchal beginnings. And just as many have people within who hold these backwards views (anti semitic Palestinians, racist rednecks, Post-Apartheid racism, etc.)

As soon as you generalize the people of a culture and make assumptions about them separate from the non-controversial aspects of the culture, then that is when you yourself need to question if you're being the prejudiced one.

<comment><USER8> People who believe statues of Confederate generals and the Confederate flag don't represent the institution of slavery are at best living in a state of denial, or are at worse trying to whitewash their culture.

And yes, we do often hold cultures of the world accountable for the sins of their past, because those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Progress cannot be made otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In the Blink of Bird's Eye, a Model for Quantum Navigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2011/01/quantum-birds/

<comment><USER2> > _That second field was so weak — less than one-third of 1 percent of Earth's > field — that it could only have influenced a quantum-sensitive system._

While I love the idea of quantum robins, if I had to place a five dollar bet somewhere, it would be on that assumption being incorrect.

<comment><USER3> Wrt. strength change - the Earth's field would easily change 1% depending on your location, so definitely shouldn't be an issue for a sea/continent crossing birds.

What is special about the second field is that it was probably much more - several orders of magnitude - curved than the Earth's field (which for practical purposes of flying to Africa is a bunch of straight lines pointing to South). I'd bet those "ripples" and "criss-crosses" was what confused the bird. And in addition the field was oscillating :)

From the article :

"Moreover, in the 7-MHz oscillating field, this effect depended on the angle between the oscillating and the geomagnetic fields. The birds exhibited seasonally appropriate migratory orientation when the oscillating field was parallel to the geomagnetic field, but were disoriented when it was presented at a 24 or 48 degree angle. "</comment></comment>