They Don't Build Them Like They Used To: The New Construction Shortage - <AUTHOR> https://www.zillow.com/research/new-construction-shortgage-20991/ <comment><USER2> That graph is pretty useless by only focusing on single family homes in metropolitan areas. Single family homes may hold nationwide as a housing growth indicator but one would expect mature and rising cities to have more multifamily residences even if they had a space boon from obsolete industrial jobs move elsewhere due to urban areas providing less of an advantage due to high numbers of workers being less needed with increased automation. Similarly sixteen high rise permits would do more for housing than one hundred sixty single family homes despite there technically being fewer new construction permits - evem though they would rightfully be more involved in making sure it wouldn't cause disaster. While I do not doubt that many urban areas have a housing shortage that isn't very good evidence given the caveats.

<comment><USER3> That graph doesn't tell the story, it's just picked because single family is the simplest indicator and has well defined economic benefit. The figures always incorporate new housing units -- a 20 story high-rise does not look like a single family home in the stats.

You can look at the raw data and see single/multi/large residential starts: [https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/bpsa.pdf](https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/bpsa.pdf)

Single family construction is the canary in the coal mine because the costs are escalating to the point where more and more people are priced out. New construction is $150-275/sqft (10% more if no garage is present). When I started working in 2000, it was about half that. Per-unit costs drop with multi-family, but it's still creeping up there. The minimum price for finished new construction condos in my area (which is usually a 50th percentile market in the US) is about $350k.

<comment><USER4> People don't need single-family homes. People in other countries do just fine with multi-family dwellings: high-rise condos, apartments, etc. In cities which are steadily increasing in density, single-family homes are utterly wasteful, and completely unnecessary. You can only fit so many of them in a given area, whereas with a high-rise, you can fit hundreds of people into the area used by a small handful of single-family homes.

<comment><USER5> There are pros and cons to both options. High rises bring exploding population, lack of green areas and noise, congestion and different set of limitations and high prices.

But high home prices in a tech center can bring medium to long term system level benefits, too. They help distribute work options and wealth generation to other cities. If one builds monster high rises to house 20M people in urban SF it might still suck in young smart engineers two decades from today. But if instead you price them out, they might gravitate to other, cheaper cities and help those thrive. It is painful to be priced out of the city where ones job is, but with jobs plentiful it is also an opportunity to look elsewhere. One might end up happier in the end. My 2c.

<comment><USER6> High rises can actually extend green areas, presuming the city planning isn't completely dumb or bought out.

Unfortunately developers is live to fill every space in with small flats to sell more of them and with high rises likewise. As long as pricing holds up.

The thing that cannot be provided with single homes is services availability, since they cannot be built close at all. This necessitates big road infrastructure and pedestrian hostile design.

<comment><USER5> > High rises can actually extend green areas, presuming the city planning > isn't completely dumb or bought out. Unfortunately developers is live to > fill every space in with small flats to sell more of them and with high > rises likewise.

Agreed on both points. And IMO, the second part quickly negates the advantages. What I have seen is that once you start on high rises sooner or later (usually during property price peaks) we have most green areas built over and what is left is either far far away or feels like an overcrowded zoo between concrete walls.

On pedestrian hostile design -- the small city I live in has sidewalks practically everywhere and while I do drive to the store from my condo I can walk to my work. And if I drive, the short, non-congested, <2 mile trip is still a pretty efficient commute. And my kids can still play outside with other kids with no playdates arranged weeks in advance.

Urban life can be pleasant and good for society, too; but small towns and suburbs are not an evil it is often portrayed to be.

<comment><USER4> Surburbs are what drive the need for everyone to have a car, which has an enormous impact on the environment and society. As a result, we have global warming, high pollution, insanely-long commute times, and massive sprawl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it sort of odd that they feel that keeping an existing house longer is a bad thing. The house I live in now was built in the 1850's, and I lived for a while in a house from the 1780s. The main drawback is you have to get used to there being no level surfaces or right angles.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the main drawback that there is a lot of maintenance needed on old houses? I worked many hours on a fixer upper built around 1900 by an amateur homebuilder. It's incredibly frustrating that every single change you want to make to windows, doors, or anything is complicated by non-right angles. It increased the time required for basic repairs by 2-fold, so much re-doing needed to get even a mediocre fit, never mind a great fit.

<comment><USER9> I've lived in houses built in the 40s and 90s. I would take the former any day of the week. I'm not generally a "they don't build them like they used to kind of person", but my experience with houses is that older homes were built to last while newer ones are just built to sell.

Of course, there's probably some survivorship bias there. All the shitty homes from the 40s are gone now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting to see the pre-built / manufactured home business is only finally starting to pick up sales again after imploding post year 2000.

We used to see 350k manufactured home units sold per year in the US throughout the 1990s. That fell to ~50,000 for '09-'12\. Now back up to 100k units again.

There used to be a stigma about these types of homes in regards to quality. I was surprised at how relatively nice they are now, looking at the Clayton Homes site (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway). I would think these types of inexpensive housing units are a critical element to relieving the US housing shortage again.

[https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/2018/08/16/cheap- and...](https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/2018/08/16/cheap-and-sleek- manufactured-housing-is-primed-for-a-comeback)

<comment><USER11> There is a middle ground too, prefab homes, where the walls, floors, etc, are all built off-site in a factory, and then shipped to your location in sections. It allows for faster building (can go from foundation to roof on and siding up in 2 days) and in theory, much cheaper costs.. Currently, most roof trusses are already built this way, but all walls, flooring, etc, electrical, plumbing, etc, are all custom done on site, meaning much higher costs. However, the hi-end companies I was looking at when I last looked were much more focused on the speed, then the cost efficiencies.

<comment><USER12> This was my experience as well when I thought, "Gosh, $200/sq ft seems too high for a home. I bet someone could do well building them off-site, shipping them to me, and bolting them together on-site." As it turns out, $200/sq ft appears to be the _minimum_ of prefabs these days. Cost savings is not the benefit from what I could tell. Reduced waste, sure, but not reduced cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm in an isolated market, but I recently priced out a new build of a single family home. Bids between contractors fluctuated by over $200,000 for the same sets of plans on the same lot. Their excuse was high demand for sub- contractors that would work on the project that was paying the highest.

\- done well

\- done on time

\- done within budget

Pick two.

<comment><USER6> For the customer, number 2 would be the best to skip, but it is the worst for the developer as they cannot really sell an unbuilt house easily, while they get to pay the debt or such leverage plus construction company.

They also cannot do 3 as the budgets are super tight already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like a steady increase from the '08 crash. I don't really see the issue.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just built a home. There's a lot of out of control factors that make it harder to build. "Historic districts" are basically ways to add extra red tape for the NIMBYs. HOAs are now more common and also add red tape for NIMBYs. Environmental changes for energy efficiency aren't always funded by banks.

One of the things we need is to abolish things like HOAs and historic districts; and then reform lending so it will fund environmentally-friendly building codes.

<comment><USER16> Building codes themselves are driven by industry and manufacturers. This has been a huge driver for the increase in size of house, compare a 1960s era bathroom against modern code and you will find the increase in minimum sizes dramatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems like these charts are for single family homes only? So a new apartment building wouldn't be included? If so, that would seem to tell part of the story?

<comment><USER18> > People can also shift from single-family to multi-family residences. However > the share of households in single-unit structures is 61.5 percent — > virtually unchanged from 60.3 percent in 2000, which indicates that no such > shift has occurred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why would he not show the trend up untill 2008 on the graph "Permits per 1,000 new residents in previous 12 months"? That seems shady graphing.

</comment><comment><USER20> This related blog post is an interesting read:

Building Affordable Housing: Where Has the Entry Level House Gone?

[http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/08/building- affordable-...](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/08/building-affordable- housing-where-has.html?m=1)

<comment><USER21> This kind of highlights a huge issue with being poor: lack of mobility.

If people with modest budgets could afford to pack up and move to Columbia, Missouri, then the cost burden of housing could be mitigated somewhat. We'd probably see housing prices stabilize across the country. As it stands, only wealthy people can afford to migrate across the country, usually in pursuit of even more wealth. This just adds to the problem because it results in more dollars chasing a supply of existing houses that isn't expanding rapidly enough.

Probably, the only way to reverse this trend now is to raise property taxes on single family homes in desirable locations such that it becomes uneconomical to maintain them as such. Then these massive tracts of suburbia can be bought up by developers who are incentivized to build high-density housing. Of course, a serious proposal of this sort is likely to get you killed.

<comment><USER22> > If people with modest budgets could afford to pack up and move to Columbia, > Missouri, then the cost burden of housing could be mitigated somewhat. We'd > probably see housing prices stabilize across the country.

I'm not sure if it's an issue with modest budgets or if it's an issue with job availability. Lots of people can pack up and move to Columbia, Missouri. But the jobs that exist here don't exist there.

If anything, being extremely poor _helps_ with mobility. If you're living off disability, there's a pretty decent payoff to buying a Greyhound ticket to an area with cheaper rent, because you get the same disability check no matter where you live. Homeless people are similarly extremely mobile. It's the whole middle-class, have-to-work-for-a-living-and-my-job-is-right-here lifestyle that inhibits mobility.

> Probably, the only way to reverse this trend now is to raise property taxes > on single family homes in desirable locations such that it becomes > uneconomical to maintain them as such. Then these massive tracts of suburbia > can be bought up by developers who are incentivized to build high-density > housing. Of course, a serious proposal of this sort is likely to get you > killed.

This kind of happens implicitly with a Land Value Tax, except there might be ways of implementing an LVT that wouldn't immediately displace single family homeowners.

Also, you don't need "massive tracts of suburbia" to build high-density housing; the whole point of high-density housing is that it doesn't take as much land. You can just leave most of suburbia alone.

<comment><USER21> I relocated when I was poor, single, and in college. Literally the only reason I was able to do so was because I knew a person in the town I was moving to. Without a social network, it would have been impossible for me to relocate without also becoming homeless.

People with money can find apartments or stay in hotels. People in my situation needed money for a place to stay before they could get a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's an unexplored possibility: What if the places with room to build single-family homes are too far away from where people work? If the commute is too long, people might prefer to stay where they are.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's disappointing to see Zillow ignore the wage pressures that are reducing housing demand nationwide. Permits are decreasing per growth capita because that segment can no longer afford houses.

<comment><USER25> If housing demand was going down then housing prices would be going down. That's not what we see except in certain markets such as Detroit.

<comment><USER26> > If housing demand was going down then housing prices would be going down.

Assuming supply (in the economic sense) was constant; if supply was dropping, then prices could go up even with demand dropping.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if you're expert, but I'm curious: What's the push/pull balance between destruction/abandonment of old homes vs. construction of new homes vs. constant habitation of the existing homes? I guess I'm asking is the effective amount of houses on the market stable, decreasing, or increasing? Also, relative to number of people looking for homes, what's the situation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Inventory is up as well in many locations: [https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/08/lawler-few-hot- ma...](https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/08/lawler-few-hot-markets-home- inventories.html)

Signs are pointing toward a correction in the home price insanity, hopefully this will make things more affordable for everyone.

<comment><USER28> I admit that I don't have a deep understanding of the real estate market; however, from what I've heard the (temporary) reduction of prices in 2008 was largely a unique situation. The reinflation of prices since then would suggest that gov't doesn't want to see prices go down significantly (for a variety of reasons) and so it is more likely that prices will simply plateau (and be made more affordable long term by inflating away home values without impact dollar amount to purchase). Thoughts?

<comment><USER18> I could buy that devaluation via inflation is coming, and maybe even that the government prefer it, but I'm skeptical that they have the ability to actually do that. Rather it's more like the fed pushes its buttons and prays.

<comment><USER29> It's already happening, but the Fed isn't doing it. Here's what's happening:

1) Trump put tariffs on Chinese imports

2) The Chinese retaliated by devaluing their currency, to negate the effect of the tariffs

3) This had the net effect of strengthening the US dollar

That's why home prices are flat-ish in 2018.

<comment><USER30> How does a strong dollar affect home prices in the US? The exchange rate only matter when importing something, and you aren't importing anything when you buy a house in the US denominated in USD.

Besides, the RMB hasn't been devalued (as in the standard definition, which is creating a new currency and dropping a few zeros). It has risen from 6.29 RMB to 1 USD in April to 6.86 today, but that is +10% and the tariffs are +25%. But a year ago the RMB was 6.68, so the year-over-year increase is +2.6%.

Of the four assertions, only #1 is correct.

<comment><USER21> Labor prices must be set in USD. So during a strong dollar, the cost of labor relative becomes the dominant factor in the price of new houses, since material goods can be imported. This makes it difficult/impossible to reduce the cost of a new house by just building smaller houses, since the marginal cost in terms of labor is lower, i.e., installing 30 outlets in a house costs much less than twice the cost of installing 15; only the material costs are doubled.

This is ignoring the fact that a strong dollar makes real estate in the US a much, much more attractive investment. Not only do you get a decent appreciation in real value if you own in a desirable areas, but you also enjoy the relative appreciation in value relative to the currency you buy goods in. Chinese investors holding real estate in the coastal USA have done quite well in the past decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would like the author to show me on a map where they plan to fit an additional 173,000 single family homes in Washington D.C...

<comment><USER32> They're referring to the entire metro area there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> tl;dr: homebuildling activity is still depressed from its 2008 high.

</comment><comment><USER34> No mention of stricter mortgage requirements resulting from '08 crash? Lower demand = lower supply.</comment>


Top innovative technology achievements of 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356795,00.asp

<comment><USER2> First two did not deserve the position but Xerox printable electronics <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356800,00.asp> has a very high potential IMHO and it would probably open zillions of application opportunities, keep an eye on it! :)</comment>


Rats 'wrongly blamed' for 1900 Glasgow plague outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-46654092 <comment><USER2> This means the rats will seek an official apology from the current government and possibly financial restitution.

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe we can stop trying to kill them so hard?

Millions in wasted money, plastic traps with poison, poison in sewers and onwards, immeasurable with current technology amount of suffering in beings closely related to us, all on another ridiculous quest of species-blaming.

<comment><USER4> We don't really kill them because of plague risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My hometown on hacker news

Glasgow was second city of the British empire back then, so I wouldn't be surprised if the plague arrived by boat.

</comment><comment><USER6> My admiration to those who investigate outbreaks of diseases. This is important work, investigating the contacts of patients, and determinating patient zero.

It involves coming in dangerous close contact to those who might be already infected.</comment>


The revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhn/ <comment><USER2> A lot of Kuhn's argument about "paradigm shift" centred on Copernicus vs Ptolemy. Owen Gingerich wrote an article disputing this view which is available here: [https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4258973/Crisis%2...](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4258973/Crisis%20vs%20Aesthetic%20OGingrich.pdf?sequence=2)

<comment><USER3> I think this article misses a point that has become standard. My understanding is that the historical consensus already was that the Copernican system was no more accurate than previous Ptolemaic system and for that reason in practice had as many ad-hoc corrections as the Ptolemaic system. The only thing the Ptolemaic system had was conceptual simplicity, simplicity in it's outline and that really can't be determined by a direct comparison of tables. That increased conceptual simplicity was a response to practical complexity may seem a bit strange but only if you want to ignore fairly natural intellectual impulses (if your system is moving towards complexity-overload, organizing it with simple principles seems like something worth investing in even if you see immediate improvements).

And naturally, "intelligent design" proponent Owen Gingerich might not the most unbiased in his judgments of obviousness here.

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

<comment><USER4> The above is my understanding of the situation too (based on E.A. Burtt's 'The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science', in my case).

Additionally, in Kuhn's book, there is an abstract argument in addition to many examples. Copernicus is one example—and a good one because of its clarity via the whole epicycle vs ellipse 'refactor'—but not the only one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember writing an essay on Kuhn vs Popper as a final assigment in Ex.Phil. My memory of Kuhn has now been distilled into "Science advances one funeral at a time."

<comment><USER6> Max Planck said something similar:

 _" A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think science and technology are closely intertwined, and for all the debate about _scientific_ progress, I think it's indisputable that a term like "progress" can be meaningfully used to describe the gains in capability and complexity of technology over time. I don't think any analysis of technology would yield to an interpretation that insisted different technological ages were merely a succession of untranslatable frameworks to which no notion of progress could be descriptive. Some things worked better than others, and that was that.

And if it's true of technology, which depends on science, why couldn't it be true of science too? I'm not even sure there's a clear dividing line between them.

<comment><USER8> Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way. People were reliably producing alloys before metallurgy, flight happened well before any meaningful understanding of aerodynamics, and most famously, steam engines led to the development of thermodynamic science, not the other way round.

<comment><USER7> As Joe said, the relation of dependence is complex. You added an extra caveat, of it being "straightforward" which wasn't part of my claim and I would argue is not even a good faith interpretation of the claim.

And all of this seems lateral to the point I was making: can we really trust Kuhn's arguments, which demand we dispense with a notion of scientific progress or independent reality of scientific truths, when we would never take such an argument seriously if made about technology?

<comment><USER8> You're right, sorry, I jumped on your second paragraph a bit too eagerly. Pet peeve against the "technology is applied science" view.

That said, Kuhn definitely does not ask that we dispense with the notion of science making progress. New paradigms are accepted because they're _better_ , after all.

<comment><USER7> You're definitely right that technology isn't merely applied science and your examples illustrate that well. Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory. But my point was that nobody would get away with talk of paradigms and incommensurability in the context of technological progress the way Kuhn gets away with it in talking about scientific progress.

And those aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that we should wonder why the rules are different.

For Kuhn paradigm shifts are shifts of largely faith, and paradigms supposedly aren't "really" better or worse than one another. Any declaration that this is so is, Kuhn insists, an anachronistic re-interpretation from within a preferred paradigm rather than an actual insight into truth.

And as the article says, Kuhn frustratingly thinks the whole question of relativism implied by his philosophy is "beside the point." Which is even more frustrating than if the charge were answered positively or negatively. Having that kind of an attitude toward truth is like a banker saying it's "beside the point" whether you have any money in your bank account.

<comment><USER8> > Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather > than any theory.

Not with _blind_ trials, but technology has historically advanced (way) ahead of theory _most of the time_.

See, for instance, Clifford D. Connor's "A People's History of Science" or the authoratitive (in philosophy of technology circles) "What Engineers Know and How They Know It" by Walter Vincenti. One of the convincing cases Vincenti describes is the development of wing profiles. Structured, intelligent trial and error (parameter variation) to get to shapes that work, but no theory to speak of (nothing that helps the development, in any case).

The rules can be different because science and engineering _are_ different. Linked, but separate.

And I've never gotten the relativism charge against Kuhn. In my reading, he doesn't claim one paradigm isn't "really" better than another. He claims that when paradigms compete, there is at that time not an objective test to select between them. That's why belief is required. But again, the proponents of a new paradigm believe (and do their best to argue, rationally) that it is _better_ in some sense. More true.

There are many directions in which to move away from ignorance. That competing paradigms take such different routes away from falsity, that they're not both on one dimension, and that one is not incontrovertibly and obviously superior to the other in every way with reference to some imagined objective standard, does not mean that it isn't a step towards a more true and accurate representation of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No wonder our culture is careening off the tracks, when contradictory metaphysics like Kuhn's are considered important to philosophy.</comment>


Ask HN: Does YC want startups to exit, or generate dividends? - <AUTHOR>

It seems that acquisitions of technology startups frequently kill the startup, disperse talent when the employment contracts expire, and ultimately result in an accounting write-off.
If these exits are common to a market, I can understand that such a market would encourage sellers to take advantage of them, especially if dividends are not forthcoming, as long as the selling price of such startups exceeds their intrinsic value and cost to the seller. Such sellers are entitled to be in the business of selling businesses, and where there is a buyer, let there be a seller.
But I believe it is also possible to be in the business of business, to invest in a business as a going concern, in order to receive a dividend, to retain one's share in a business as long as it remains a good business, and to fix it where not.
I would like to think that the best technology startups have proved to be good businesses. I would also like to think that dividends and equity appreciation win over short sells.
Hypothetically speaking, if a startup I knew where to apply to YC, and if the startup were interested in building a technological business like HP or IBM or Boeing or GE, would YC be a good fit?
Regardless of market conditions, would YC be more likely to encourage its startups to exit, or generate dividends? <comment><USER2> YC is on the record of supporting whatever the founders want. I'm sure they have their personal preferences but they have decided to align themselves with the founders and that actually sets a trend which is now being picked up by other financial parties.

edit: this is actually very smart strategy wise because it avoids friction in all the cases where YC might want something else than the founders which increases the chances of the founders giving it their full 100%. Nothing more de-motivating than to get an 'angel' on board that starts to pull in another direction than were you wanted to go in the first place. So YC actually benefits from _not_ getting their way. And in those cases where the company would fail it doesn't matter anyway.

I think this on face simple item is one of the bigger recruiting factors for YC over other players, they won't get in your way, they trust you to know best what's best for you, which makes them an 'enabler'.</comment>


Skillshare, Codecademy and the gamification of education - <AUTHOR> http://plasticresume.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/skillshare-codecademy-and-the-gamification-of-education/

<comment><USER2> Isn't the education system already pretty full of a pretty large range of game-like and competition-like scoring and motivational devices? We've got completion-based ones, ranking-based ones, competition-based ones, the works. Degrees, points on assignments, percentage scores, exam grades, GPAs, percentile ranks, science olympiads, etc. They were even made _literally into games_ starting in the 1970s, with the edutainment-software movement. I can see tweaking these scores, removing some, introducing others, but the idea seems pretty standard.

Overall, though, I'm not sure the secret to education is that we just haven't invented a better scoring system to feed you Skinner-box-esque reward pellets whenever you do every incremental good thing. In fact we're already pretty decent at _that_. We're less good at convincing people why they should care _beyond_ that. It's very easy to convince students that they should care about their grade and the badge (degree), but much harder to cultivate any sense of actual interest.

There's also some research that extrinsic rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation: once you start doing something for the brief high of getting the "ping!", it becomes _much_ harder to bring yourself to do it later if the reward is removed, even if it's something you originally enjoyed; which means I think we have to be very careful in gamifying/badgifying/achievementifying things. It's a bit different debate, but Chris Hecker has a good talk about that where he worries that modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics: <http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F> And if that's true in videogames, I would also worry about it irl.

<comment><USER3> I came here to make this point as well... Education _is_ gamified. While some seem to think that changing the scoring/reward system is the key to moving forward, I think the gamification itself is the problem with education (to a degree). It's far easier to say "did you answer this the way I wanted you to? If so, here's your A (or badge, or points) and you win," than to actually make sure people care about and grok the info they're meant to. I can memorize a formula to pass a test, but I may not know jack-shit about how and why the formula is applied to get the answer. That is a problem that is much harder to solve in education and I'm not sure it will ever be solved except by those that can inspire kids to see the beauty in the subjects they love.

<comment><USER4> I don't think being scored in school and game scores are that much alike.

In games, a bad score can be re-tried usually as many times as it takes for you to be satisfied with it. You're not at a loss as long as you take the time to re-do them until a good score is earned. On the other, in school, usually, your bad score sticks. That's it for you. Better luck next time or you might fail the entire year. Retrying in school takes an entire year of your life, you have to re-do even the things that you got right. It's quite punitive. That's without mentioning social aspects of it (peer view, self-esteem, etc).

Also, there's a big difference between scores and game reward system. Game rewards (nowadays) are designed for addiction. Rewards begin plenty and often, then are made scarcer and occasional. Not any school system can beat that behavioral craving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not convinced that a society run on supercharged external motivators is any better off. I'm actually thinking the opposite is true, which is why the trend of gamifying education scares me. It's a temporary and imperfect bandaid for a much deeper issue.

The blogger quotes Dan Pink, "job satisfaction is driven mainly by autonomy, mastery, and purpose." -- however I believe Dan Pink's findings are contrary to the blogger's points. "Mastery" is generally attained and sought for when one is intrinsically motivated. This is because extrinsic motivations are much less likely to lead to mastery as mastery is often not the goal in games, but rather the successful completion of the goal of the game. For example, grades in school prove some level of proficiency in something, however grades are often very loosely connected to proficiency in the discipline. E.g. If someone tells me they received an A in calculus, I have absolutely no inclination to then trust they are proficient in calculus. If someone tells me they majored in Computer Science I have no inclination to then trust they are skilled computer scientists or engineers.

Alternatively, if someone tells me sincerely that one of their passions in life (ie. "purpose") is to build computer programs, or play with numbers, and they have something to show for it (which they must if it truly is a passion), then I am instantly inclined to trust that they have some competency and deserve some respect.

So this being the case, gamifying may lead to people learning at some level, however forming such a dependency I think could be dangerous. Once the game is removed, ie. once the primary purpose of taking action is removed, what do people have left? The discipline itself (without the game) may have absolutely no intrinsic value to the person, so what good is it to the person anymore?

<comment><USER6> The only way to be introduced to a discipline is extrinsically. It's impossible to wake up and enjoy Computing Science - one must have had an introduction to it in some form.

The idea behind the "gamification" of education is not to trick people into mastering a discipline. It's to introduce them to it.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. If I do I'm not sure if I agree. A love for computers and all they're capable of isn't born inside a game that gives you points for building [insert program]. A love for programming goes deeper -- it's linked to an internal curiosity and drive to create things and the knowledge that you have the capability to create nearly whatever you have the capacity to think of.

Secondly, the blogger isn't arguing for games to introduce people to new disciplines, but rather to let games drive their entire learning career.

<comment><USER6> I wasn't so much concerned with the blogger's views (which I disagree with as well), as I was with your fear of the trend of gamification.

How come a love of computing can't be born inside a game consisting of building programs for points? I was introduced to programming because I wanted to make video games. I didn't want to program - I just wanted the satisfaction of a completed game. My love of programming came over time as I experimented.

This is, of course, very subjective but whenever I think about any of my hobbies I recall always being led to them because of some outside factor. It was only after I began practicing them that I learned to enjoy them for what they were.

<comment><USER5> Oh I see -- I think we're interpreting 'external motivator' differently. You coming to the decision on your own that you wanted to create a game is not to me an example of being externally motivated to begin programming. That's an example of you discovering the world and coming to the decision that you liked what you saw in video games. Another person might experience the same video game and be indifferent to it.

An external motivator would be someone telling you that if you create a game you will get some irrelevant award, and so you go ahead and create a game. The next time you have the idea to create the game, and the award isn't there, you'll be less inclined to do it.

<comment><USER6> I guess it depends where you draw the line in the sand. I'm still a fan of whatever the trend may be, but I think we both agree that the blogger goes too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like this post, even though I feel pretty strongly that the gamification of everything, and education especially, is net negative.

aik has it right elsewhere in this thread that Dan Pink's findings are contrary to this blog post's points. Dan Pink's most interesting finding in my mind is that applying extrinsic financial motivation has positive effects on methodical, repetitive work, but a strongly negative effect on creative, out- of-the-box work. I'd be shocked if gamification had a different effect, though of course I have nothing empirical to offer. I expect that gamification works for repetitive tasks like playing WoW, but is not that effective for actually learning something, even if it does push you through Codecademy's tasks.

We have an educational system that repeatedly de-emphasizes intrinsic motivation. How much of school is driven by what you want to learn and what you are interested in? I didn't take my first elective until junior year of high school.

Given that most Americans (and most inhabitants of OECD countries) spend the first 12 years of their conscious life in a gamified environment, as _delirium points out, is it so surprising that the "underachievers'" intrinsic motivation is weak, and that the author finds gamification powerful and useful? I don't want to sound conspiracy theory-ish, but I think we've been quite effectively trained to respond to exactly this kind of stimulus.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the author is forgetting where eggs come from. (hint: Chickens)

Games work because they mimic life. (By life I mean, you, your emotions, the circumstances you encounter and how you handle those circumstances.)

Essentially this whole post is a semantic piece interchanging the words "emotions" with "gamification"

Everything about life is driven by gamification (read:emotions) already, and everything about games is triggering emotions. forcing people to make decisions using logic, experience, and driven by their emotional needs.

In other words, we like games because it is life, except there is such a thing as do-overs.

</comment><comment><USER9> ANY free education, regardless of a comparison of today's system, is great.

MIT and Stanford's courseware - AMAZING. The courses are THE SAME courses as CS courses. Now, there's no excuse not to learn it, and a lot of people in 3rd world countries ARE learning it.

The classroom is going to drastically change very soon. We're entering a great time for eduction.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome post!

I've recently started gamifying life. It's amazing how much just a little change of perspective can make you more happy.

What would you do with the character that is yourself if you were playing it in a game?

<comment><USER11> What are some examples of things you gamified? Is it more repetitive things like exercising or more creative things?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great post. I guess the classic argument is something like: "People need to learn to think outside the box to navigate life, so gamification doesn't prepare people for life" etc. But I agree that gameification and getting things done while "being stupid" is underrated, especially when what is being learned is a core skill.

That completion-oriented learning is effective seems hard to dispute. Somehow it currently gets lost once we leave primary school.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it gets lost, it just loses it's value. In my company we have "games" all over (also known as extrinsic motivators or artificial targets). For example, in the consulting world we're chasing higher billability, ie. the more hours I log as billable a quarter, the happier people will be. If I log under a certain amount, people become angry. What a fun game, right!? Not exactly. The fact that I'm pushed to play games rather than pushed to do something I actually value is demoralizing and off target. If my goal was rather to ensure the client is happy (within reason), ensure that I'm producing great stuff, and overall skilled at my discipline, I can guarantee the outcome would be much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great point, but I don't think we're talking about the same thing when we use the word "game". There is a counter-intuitive difference between a sales contest and a weekend spent playing Modern Warfare. One has a real monetary value attached, and the other doesn't. Yet we'd STILL rather engage in the activity that has no real reward attached. To me, that is the sign of a well-designed "game".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You forgot Math Munchers, Oregon Trail and Dora the Explorer.

</comment><comment><USER13> On a slightly unrelated note, is there anything like Codecademy for musical instruments / music theory?

<comment><USER14> Rock Band 3.</comment></comment>


The Howl Editor – a fast, lightweight, LuaJIT based, fully programmable editor - <AUTHOR> http://howl.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the developers and happy to answer questions.

0.4 was also just released: [http://howl.io/blog/2016/05/31/howl-0-4-released.html](http://howl.io/blog/2016/05/31/howl-0-4-released.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat !

Is there a package management framework for this ?

I would love to see some technical architecture documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no framework at the moment, but will probably be added at some point.

Currently packages are easily installed be just copying the folder into a 'bundles' directory.

Note that there's a lot of built-in functionality, e.g. highlighting for 80+ syntaxes out of the box.

What specifically are you looking for in technical architecture docs?</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/18/silicon-valley-wages-have-dropped-for-all-except-highest-paying-jobs-report/ <comment><USER2> I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students.

Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time.

From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all full-stack software engineers.

If anyone wants to help out, send me an email to song at garagescript.org. I believe the real long term solution is to train under-served communities better and help them acquire technical skills.

 _edit_ remove donation link.

<comment><USER3> First thanks for what you're doing. I think it's definitely part of the solution. My worry though is that I don't think everyone is equipped to be a programer. The thing I keep coming back to is my younger brother. He's got mental disabilities which mean he can't read or do math at more than a very basic level (first grade maybe) and for what ever it's worth he also scored pretty low on IQ tests. Despite a bit of a falling out he's working in construction and doing fine, but he could never go into a highly skilled occupation. There's plenty of people like him some not nearly on such an extreme who would have been perfectly capable of working in management or similar, but as we require more and more training for simple jobs I worry that we loose places for people who can't keep up

<comment><USER4> Replying so that the other person pleading for skepticism in this thread, and myself, can be seen near the top. This non-profit is not vetted, has a very basic website, has no proof of the students, this persons account is 24 days old.

Please be mindful that while this all sounds like a great idea and I hope it really exists, this also could be a scam as there is no evidence or any 3rd party that this is a real nonprofit which has been paying 20 people 2k a month to learn to code.

Please don't donate until you're sure this person is using the money as they claim. Attempting to verify their website and facebook leads to some red flags - no pictures of events, just events on facebook with 1 or 2 people attending, no documented proof of the 16 people who are full stack developers. If the non-profit is successful as they've said it is, then if he doesn't want to burn through his own savings (again supposedly) then he needs to seriously do better marketing and proof. Even with those things, I'd be skeptical unless it was independently verified.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for reminding people be aware. Fundraising wasn't the point of my original comment, so I took out the donation link. My focus primarily has been to teach students, so I haven't had time to update any of the social media or the landing page.

I lost the pw to my original account on HN, but here's my username: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=songzme](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=songzme)

<comment><USER5> Here is a link to your previous post about it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16043552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16043552)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have when the news writes an entire article around a single report, but then fails to link to that report. You had one job ...

Anyway, here's the report in question: [http://www.everettprogram.org/main/wp- content/uploads/TIGHTR...](http://www.everettprogram.org/main/wp- content/uploads/TIGHTROPE-2018-REPORT.pdf)

Reading the fine details of the report, you see that the top-line metric is real income, adjusted for inflation and local cost of living. And the #1 factor that's proved ruinous to local cost of living in the Bay Area these past two decades is of course housing prices. If zoning restrictions were relaxed and more housing was allowed to be built, costs would be reduced and a lot of these problems would be solved. The Bay Area has a critical lack of housing, which is driving all these prices up and causing most of the decline in CoL-adjusted non-tech wages.

<comment><USER7> If only we could aloe property assessments to increase with a local cost of living index, we would at least have enough property tax revenue to pay teachers.

<comment><USER8> I think we should be careful with this. Currently, because of the frozen property tax law, many houses worth millions pay very little in property taxes; if they did have to pay taxes on the millions of dollars their property is worth, they would have had to sell their houses ages ago. This would have likely created a downward pressure on the prices; making it unlikely that the home prices would reach the levels they are now.

All of which to say that assessing the property tax on the current market value of all those properties isn't an accurate number; there is no way there are so many people making that much money living in California.

<comment><USER9> Given the scale the only sane way to unwind it is to grandfather all sales before a certain date. Otherwise you'll have masses of people forced out of their properties and chaos.

<comment><USER8> I mean, there are many solutions to this which aren't an immediate hike in property taxes which would cause much market disruption. But its important to acknowledge that the California Housing market is indeed a market distortion on an Epic Scale. There is just no way that everyone can get the prices they're asking for. And this is perhaps the major reason why I won't personally invest in the CA housing market even though I love the state otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author almost noticed Simpson's paradox:

> Surprisingly, the UC Santa Cruz study suggests that employment in low wage > industries is growing. The share of worker in jobs considered low-wage in > 1997 grew 25 percent over the next 20 years, while the percent working in > middle- and high-wage jobs declined.

The problem isn't that wages are dropping for certain work; the problem is that middle-wage jobs are being automated away, leaving only low-skill but non-automatable jobs that require organically-optimized things that all people have but machines don't, like fingers and eyes.

<comment><USER11> the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away?

It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots.

No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx of capital in the area is being returned only to the tech sector, who merrily spend it and drive up the cost of living. The machines are not to blame for this one.

<comment><USER12> I think there's a step missing in the analysis there. If tech workers are spending all this money — what are they spending it _on_? If they're spending it locally shouldn't that increase wages locally?

<comment><USER13> No. They're spending it all on housing.

To be clear the flow is: tech companies make enormous revenue but require high skill workers. To make this work they pay whatever it costs to get workers and no more - in this case that means just enough to offset the enormous cost of housing.

Since the baby boomers practically banned all housing development in the bay once their little burns were built, this result in a little see-saw battle where landlords raise the rent until tech companies are forced to raise wages, back and forth. Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you'd earn in software anywhere else.

Thus the flow of capital is from tech companies to landlords, in an arms race that will only end when the landlords have taken so much of the capital out of tech that the industry sputters and moves away.

<comment><USER14> _Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you'd earn in software anywhere else._

It's probably true that the cost of minimally acceptable housing drives entry level tech salaries, but they go way up from there. A senior SWE at Google with salary+bonus+stock of $300k/year has a whole lot of disposable income even after the ridiculous housing expenses.

<comment><USER15> There are very few senior SWEs at Google, relative to tech employees as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How about:

1) Introducing a much higher tax rate for rental property income.

2) Making property taxes be reassessed every single year unless your AGI is lower than average and you are a resident.

3) Introducing a much (much!) higher tax for non-residents/foreign investors who buy a house purely for investment, and sometimes they don't even rent it out (I know a few rich folks from FAANG who bought a handful of houses in MV, and they keep them empty because they don't want the trouble of dealing with tenants, they say the appreciation is more than enough, to me it's borderline criminal).

I've seen numerous instances of those three events playing out against normal people trying to afford some housing while working a normal job. If it's not obvious, I'm heavily biased against real estate investors, because housing is a need for everybody, so the market should be much more regulated.

<comment><USER17> My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don't rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices. The real fix is to build enough housing for everyone. Eliminating prop 13 could help with this, since it would cause homeowners to be penalized for high home values, building political will to build more housing and bring down the prices.

<comment><USER18> >My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don't rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices.

No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.

<comment><USER6> Please don't make up fake stats.

I live in Manhattan and the idea that a full third of the real estate here is empty is laughable. Have you ever visited??

As my sibling comment points out, the real rate (as determined by actual data) is less than 5%.

<comment><USER19> I think you might be confusing rental property that is unrented vs property that is not in the market but not physically occupied.

"about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant for more than 10 months a year" [1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more- apartments-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments- are-empty-yet-rented-or-owned-census-finds.html)

<comment><USER20> I'm sure the parent commenter meant to use "please" in that manner, as the stats are being used in a deliberately misleading manner.

Even your source shows it... that's 30 percent of a small (presumably affluent) section of the city, not of the whole city. There are some 2.5 million apartments in the city, and this is talking about just 5k.

There are other sources that cite the actual percentage as 11% [1]. That's still high, unfair to residents, and worth discussing, but you can't win arguments by putting up fake stats.

[1] [https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments- si...](https://www.6sqft.com/nearly-250000-nyc-rental-apartments-sit-vacant/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's incredible how hard it's been for retail and service companies to recruit lower-wage workers her in the South Bay. Mike Rowe and tech execs love to talk about skills gaps, but the fact is most jobs aren't filled because the compensation these positions offer is garbage.

<comment><USER22> They're trapped - probably unable to even scrape together the money to move. Moving is expensive! You need the money not only to relocate, but also to tide you over until you find work. Casual mobility is for the wealthy.

<comment><USER23> It isn't just that, many low wage people have their families there. Sometimes extended family. Moving would mean moving the whole clan away from friends and their connections and where they grew up. Moving is not a small thing.

<comment><USER24> Exactly this. Moving elsewhere when your extended family has lived in one place for multiple generations is probably one of the largest risks a person can take. You're essentially trading most or all of your network for the possibility of a better life. If the possibility doesn't work out, the person is usually worse off than if had they stayed in their original location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As someone who lives in the outer bay area, pay for jobs hasn't really gone up at all in the last 8 years, but the tech industry has really pushed the cost of living up a lot. I can't say I've noticed a drop in pay outside of the media industry since that's what I work in. And a lot of that has to do with the cost of gear now and the supply is so high buy the demand hasn't grown that much.

Most of my neighbors are contractors / construction workers. Nobody I know can fathom buying a home. But until last year things were fairly stagnant for them. There is a lot more construction going on now, but it's mostly to turn homes we can't afford into vacation rentals.

<comment><USER26> This is because zoning laws largely prevent additional housing construction. Converting existing housing isn't blocked however so converting them to vacation rentals makes sense economically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> One thing I've noticed is that aside from rent, random expenses in NYC are so much more expensive. E.g. classpass classes, restaurants, etc. Do service workers get better paid there?

</comment><comment><USER28> Zoning law and housing code were enacted across the nation in response to the crowded, unsanitary, and unsafe tenements of the industrial revolution. But, we've gone too far and allowed too much local control of housing. Now in 21st century American boomtowns, you can't convert your single family into a duplex or small apartment building, you can't convert the first floor of your building into a small business, you can't have organic growth in your city the way cities had grown up until the early 20th century. Far from just outlawing tenements, we've outlawed our cities from adapting to change, which is why we see such absurdities as in the bay areas cost of living.

For decades now we've been surviving off technical debt. Cars and roads allow us to survive even when our cities are absurdly inefficiently organized. But as the nation changes more and more, our top cities' roads and street layouts don't adapt to the change, so we have unbearable traffic in every major city. On top of that, we continue to ignore the needs of a more efficient method of organizing ourselves - relaxing zoning to allow organic growth in the city, and construction of mass transit between the dense regions that develop under this system.

That's how we developed cities before we started relying on cars, and what we need to do to continue scaling American cities. Or we can just accept as every house in the Bay Area reaches multimillion dollar price tag.

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't it ironic that the rates of poverty are increasing in possibly the wealthiest region in the world?

<comment><USER30> > Isn't it ironic that the rates of poverty are increasing in possibly the > wealthiest region in the world?

Not really - a natural side effect of corporations not paying their fair share in taxes, alongside employees who are compensated in ways (stock options) where large chunks of their salary are untaxable by local governments.

(It's my understanding it's much harder for local governments to tax stock options as capital gains go to feds, please correct me if I'm mistaken)

<comment><USER31> That's half true at best.

Capital gains are reported on your tax return as a form of income. The rate at which they're taxed is up to each jurisdiction. For federal taxes, long-term capital gains happen to be taxed at a lower rate than other income. For California state taxes, there is no such distinction - all income, including capital gains, is taxed on the same progressive taxation schedule. So for Californians, getting paid in stock options usually results in lower federal taxes, but no change in state taxes.

Now, where it gets interesting is with local jurisdictions. In California, cities and counties are not allowed to collect income taxes. However, San Francisco does collect _payroll_ taxes. Paying your employees in options could reduce the amount that counts as payroll, but only if the stock options are increasing in value quickly. If your employees are getting all of their money from you, the city gets its cut. If your employees are getting some of their money from you and some from the stock market, then the city loses out on the latter portion - but most employees should consider that a bonus and negotiate pay primarily based on current value, so that shouldn't matter too much in the long run.

What the city (but not the state!) definitely misses out on taxing is capital gains on wealth already accrued. When I make money on investments (not so much this year, but hypothetically), the city doesn't get anything from that, because there's no payroll involved. The feds get some of it (at the reduced capital gains rates, assuming I've held for a year); California gets some of it (at the full income tax rate); San Francisco gets none. But again, that story is only for investment income on money I already had, not for new stock compensation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Silicon Valley has a multi-fold problem.

1\. Housing is expensive because of the influx of people immigrating to the state from out of state and also out of country. (I'm one of them.) This causes a housing shortage which will naturally drive up price of housing.

2\. The housing prices don't come down because California in general has very restrictive zoning laws, especially in the most expensive areas, that prevent building of sufficient housing density to cover demand. This in turn drives housing development further outside of the bay area forcing long commute times and highway usage.

3\. Because of the high cost of living (primarily from housing, food/etc is not significantly more expensive) from the above problems the solution proposed is to greatly raise the minimum wage, now hitting $15 in many areas. This causes a drive to automate away simpler jobs (also providing an entry for further tech startups to automate these things) or more commonly, move the jobs out of the state via company acquisition followed by moving the administrative jobs to company headquarters located out of state or sometimes out of country. A high minimum wage reduces the available job market by putting an artificial job supply limit in place thus causing unemployment for these simpler jobs.

4\. On top of this there's a loophole for illegal immigrants where companies abuse them by paying them below minimum wage because they are here illegally. (Another reason that giving a path to legal immigration for illegal immigrants would help things.)

The first thing and most important thing that needs to happen is for the state to overrule local zoning laws (as opposed by the NIMBYs) and force generic zoning, allowing unrestricted housing development. Just look at the south bay area. The zoning is obvious even looking at satellite maps. Industrial areas are kept separate from housing which are kept separate from retail. This prevents natural intermixing of these causing a lot of need for road development to allow people to travel between these blocks rather than walking down the street.

<comment><USER32> > ...giving a path to legal immigration for illegal immigrants would help > things.

I would rather consider paying _anyone_ below minimum wage a form of wage theft and prosecutable as a criminal offense. Dunno why embezzlement is a felony but breaking the law to underpay people is just grounds for a lawsuit.

<comment><USER33> It's difficult to prosecute considering the employee risks deportation if they report.

<comment><USER32> Still seems more likely than an undocumented person filing a lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is the real truth about the tech boom - how it impacts society as a whole and who benefits. A nation's progress is measured by the standard of living of the average citizen, not the elite. By that yardstick the so-called advanced nations such as the UK and USA, with their spiralling housing costs, are moving backwards not forwards.

</comment><comment><USER35> This looks like the run of the mill hollowing of the middle that has been going on since the late 70s.

</comment><comment><USER4> Boost the wage floor. High skilled workers have more force to push against the wage supply price that employers set; they have a lot of power to set wages, including an entire department called HR dedicated to ensuring they get the best deal as they can. Low wage employees do not have that power.

<comment><USER26> The wage floor has been continuously getting raised. Many areas of California have the highest minimum wage laws in the country. That isn't going to solve the problem.

<comment><USER4> Adjusted for inflation its lower than it was in the 1960's

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Surprised? I'm not. Capitalists are well known to conspire together and create capitalist unions to block workers of all stripes.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/technology/silicon- valley...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/technology/silicon-valley- antitrust-case-settlement-poaching-engineers.html)

Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe in this one....

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay here.

[https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/ftc-brings-first-wage- fixin...](https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/ftc-brings-first-wage-fixing- enforcement-action-following-joint-doj-ftc-human-resources-guidance)

<comment><USER37> Edit: I'm not a mod, nor trying to masquerade as one.

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. > This destroys intellectual curiosity [0]

Please keep your ideological battles away from HN.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER38> Sticking up for my ideological opposite crankylinuxuser again. HN is constantly used for political and ideological battle. Why is crankylinuxuser's different?

<comment><USER37> Disclaimer: I'm not a mod, so you don't have to listen to my opinion.

This article is about low-skill workers, and has nothing to do with tech companies being against unions.

But, it could simply be a tangential discussion, and those are often interesting! My main concern was the

        Capitalists are well known to conspire together and create capitalist unions to block workers of all stripes.

generalization, which turned a potentially interesting discussion of tech unions into an "capitalism vs. xyz" ideological battle.

<comment><USER36> > Disclaimer: I'm not a mod, so you don't have to listen to my opinion.

So... You're masquerading as a HN mod? Damn.

Now, that seems like a bannable offense.

<comment><USER37> I'm not trying to masquerade as a mod, I'm trying to gently suggest that ideological battles be fought elsewhere, and for us to focus on the discussion itself (tech unions).

I've edited my first comment to make it more apparent - I thought that sort of comment was a common thing, but perhaps I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Call any service business from top list on Yelp (Handyman, Dryer Vent Cleaning, Plumber etc), they would charge minimum 80$ (Irrespective of whether they do work or not).

Where is this money going?

<comment><USER40> Time spent sitting in traffic?</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is the AIM Service Down at the moment? - <AUTHOR>

I just tried logging into AOL Instant Messenger service from three different remote services (Pidgin, Meebo and GMail) and none of them seem to want to connect.  Is the AIM service down for anyone else? <comment><AUTHOR> Okay, I'm getting back in from Meebo, but still not desktop applications.

</comment><comment><USER2> just came back up for me, but yes, it was down for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> it's down for me too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does AOL have a status page/blog for events like this, for the past 20 minutes I've been scrambling looking for one.

<comment><USER4> <http://summize.com/search?q=aim></comment></comment></comment>


Newly discovered carnivorous jungle plant eats rats whole - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-08/newly-discovered-plant-species-eats-rats-named-after-famous-naturalist

<comment><USER2> Note dispiriting Wikipedia link:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthes_attenboroughii>

Evidently, the journal article says no rats have been discovered eaten by this plant.

<comment><USER3> So this means that the photograph of a rat sitting in the plant was placed there by the photographer? What's the word to express the sense of extreme revulsion I am feeling...

<comment><USER4> or maybe the Wikipedia article was incomplete.

Also, it doesn't say that rodents don't fall in, it says it seems to be more of an accidental catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is new media marketing at its finest.

How do you ensure that your newly discovered species makes it on the next Planet Earth? Name it after David Attenborough. :-P

Even scientists are reading Seth Godin's blog these days.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great time-lapse video of how the plant grows. I would have liked to see how the rat actually gets trapped though.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if you skipped the text or you just wanted to _see_ this happen, but in case it's the former:

>The plant lures in the rats with the promise of sweet nectar. When the rat leans into the plant to drink the saccharine liquid, it slips on the pitcher's waxy interior, and gets stuck in the gooey sap.

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to see it happen. I wonder if the rat just dives in or is apprehensive. Still a great video on the plant growing.</comment></comment></comment>


Cyber armies are gearing up in the cold war of the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/25/cybercrime-nato-cold-war A major online attack could bring a country to its knees. Nato's hawks back a strategy that threatens cybergeddon <comment><USER2> Wake me when one of these stories has something interesting or actionable to say. Obama or not, China or not, Web 2.0 or not, people have been writing this exact same story since 1994.

<comment><USER3> I would point out that, during the cold war, we never got bombed and yet years later many interesting and fascinating stories about close calls, spies and intrigue have come to the surface.

I don't doubt that a lot goes on that we may not be privy to for some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cory Doctorow's "Overclocked" has a great little story in it called "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" that always comes to mind when I read headlines like this:

[http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked...](http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Plus, when are we going to start to hear the horror stories of nuclear subs cutting cables (again)? If we start to have combat patrols guarding the inter continental cabling...</comment>


RLSL: a Rust to SPIR-V Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_cB-sxUusYVoCYdXnqwAg2u3-lrqBfgrUj205ytxYaw/edit?usp=drivesdk <comment><USER2> I've been working on a project with similar goal to RLSL, called Emu. It's a procedural macro that automatically off-loads portions of code to run on a GPU. Here's a quick example...

      #[gpu_use]
      fn main() {
          let mut a = vec![0.2; 1000];
          let mut b = vec![0.3; 1000];
          let c = vec![0.0; 1000];

          gpu_do!(load(a));
          gpu_do!(load(b));
          gpu_do!(load(c));
          gpu_do!(launch());
          for i in 0..1000 {
              c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
          }
          gpu_do!(read(c));

          println!("{:?}", c);
      }

Emu is currently open-sourced as a 100% stable Rust library and while it only supports a tiny subset of Rust, that subset is well-defined with useful compile-time errors and a comprehensive test suite.

So if you're looking for a way to contribute to single-source GPGPU for Rust, please consider helping expand Emu's supported subset of Rust. The repository is at [https://www.github.com/calebwin/emu](https://www.github.com/calebwin/emu)

I will say that since Emu works at the AST/syntax level, RLSL is of great interest to me because it works instead at the MIR level which allows it to more easily support a large subset of Rust.

<comment><USER3> \- So RLSL can work with Emu?

\- Would it mean most of the general Rust code could be made to work on GPU? Or is it you want Emu to work at MIR level?

\- Do you plan to actually try to do it?

Emu seems like a really cool project either way. :)

<comment><USER2> \- Maybe there is a component of RLSL that could be useful. I have to think more about what I want that component to be.

\- I want Emu to support general Rust code but still use stable Rust and provide really nice compile-time errors. Maybe Emu could do AST-level checking to (1) ensure that only legal transpilable-to-SPIR-V subset is used, (2) infer the kernel parameters, (3) infer global work size, local work size and then do MIR-level compilation to OpenCL or SPIR-V?

\- At the moment, I want to focus on AST-level compilation because I think many applications (AI, ML, simulations, etc.) can still technically be implemented without a huge subset of Rust.

<comment><USER3> I was planning to write a tiny SVM in Rust just as a plaything, so I would probably use Emu to see if I can speed it up....

Does Emu have some getting started other than docs?

<comment><USER2> [https://docs.rs/em](https://docs.rs/em) contains not only documentation but also comprehensive explanation on effectively using Emu.

I would recommend looking through it first. Of course, if you have questions feel free to ask - [https://gitter.im/talk-about- emu/thoughts](https://gitter.im/talk-about-emu/thoughts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Woah excellent to see Embark partnering with the RLSL project!

As someone who does a lot of creative-coding contracts with lots of video, graphics and real-time requirements, RLSL has long been one of the Rust projects that excites me the most. The idea of writing graphics and compute shaders in Rust, a modern language with a decent type system, standard package manager, module system, etc, is very exciting. It makes a lot of sense that Embark see the potential in this for game dev too.

The ability to share Rust code between the CPU and GPU alone will be so useful. The number of times I've had to port some pre-existing Rust function to GLSL or vice versa is silly.

Obviously the Rust that compiles to SPIR-V will be a subset of the Rust that compiles to LLVM or WASM, but this still opens up so many doors for improved ergonomics when interacting with the GPU from a Rust program.

I've long dreamed of an API that allows me to casually send a closure of almost arbitrary Rust code (with the necessary 'lifetime + Send + Sync + SpirvCompatible compile-time checks) off to the GPU for execution and get back a GPU Future of the result. It looks like this may well become possible in the future :)

<comment><USER5> > Woah excellent to see Embark partnering with the RLSL project!

IIRC, actually they hired the guy behind RLSL a few months ago.

<comment><USER6> I thought it was the self driving truck company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great write-up. I think Rust could be a very nice language for Shader-like applications which are already very functional, and don't involve alot of shared, mutable state across threads.

In HPC, we're very much interested in GPU compute programming, rather than shader programming. In CUDA codes, you're typically doing transformation from input buffers directly into output buffers from your CUDA kernels. This should immediately raise red flags for a Rust developer - you've got shared, mutable state across threads!

Consider this simple CUDA-ish Rust code with threads independently executing over 0..cuda.len() (ignore the bounds bugs at i = 0 and i = in.len()):

      fn stencil(i: usize, in: &[f32], out: &mut [f32]) {
          out[i] = (in[i - 1] + in[i] + in[i + 1]) / 3.0;
      }

(The `i` is a conceit around computing indexing from thread/block IDs, but the input and output arrays are pretty similar to the style CUDA promotes).

It's obvious to me, the programmer, that I don't have any aliasing issue - each thread is only mutating at a single index in the output array. However, Rust is not smart enough to see this. If they allowed the definition of the kernel as is, you could easily write multi-threaded code that has shared mutable access to individual memory locations, violating Rust's memory model. OK, you force the kernel to look more like this, then:

      // `in` is the slice of [i-1,i+1]
      fn stencil(in: &[f32], out: &mut f32) {
          *out = (in[0] + in[1] + in[2]) / 3.0;
      }

And you'd enforce Rust's invariants at the kernel launch site, computing the valid slices at some higher level in the library in some "unsafe" code. But this only solves the simple case where you have some array mapping to another array where the index relationship is obvious, and it's easily provable that there are no aliasing issues. Start layering in things like unique indirect indexing, or perhaps non-unique indexing but with atomic reductions, and it becomes difficult to phrase your correct program in a way to safe(!) Rust that is compatible with the borrow checker, at least without having to build a bunch of abstractions to express each of your parallel patterns. Having to build a bunch of bespoke abstractions may not be scalable to the types of developers building big scientific codes.

Anyway, I'm curious if the folks at "Embark" have spent any time thinking about the issue of shared, mutable state in GPU programming with Rust. It seems like a deal breaker from where I stand.

<comment><USER8> Your point is especially important as most of the GPGPU performance gains come from really clever use of shared memory. That is the very model of shared state with concurrent acces.

Usually, your shader or kernel is required to synchronize threads that need to see each other's changes. I'm sure that there are at least some kernels out there that skip synchronization and still work because there are enough other instructions between write and read accesses that cover the issue up.

<comment><USER9> > shared memory.

I've done enough Hacker News discussions to note that the lay-reader won't understand what this means, and this probably needs more elaboration.

"Shared Memory" is a special memory area inside of GPUs where grids (NVidia) or workgroups (AMD)... a group of 32x to 1024x SIMD threads... can perform inter-thread communications in an outrageously fast way.

Shared memory is extremely small: roughly 64kB in size. Optimizing shared memory access involves resolving bank-conflicts, and lots of very-low level thought. At a minimum, you need to consider how you fill shared memory (the memcpy in) as well as how to get the final data out (the memcpy out).

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>---

In many cases, synchronization to-and-from shared memory only requires a __threadfence() instruction. Maybe only a __syncwarp() instruction in some cases.

A lot of thought goes into the "ordering" of memory accesses, to make shared- memory as fast as possible. See here for further details: [https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch39....](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch39.html)

See "39.2.3 Avoiding Bank Conflicts" for how shared memory is optimized in practice. You're not only thinking about the shared-state, but also the average number of other threads hitting any particular bank. On a say... 32-bank system, you'll want all 32-banks to be utilized as much as possible. If all 1024 threads are accessing bank#0, you'll be 1/32th the speed (and banks #1 through #31 are all wasted).

A "bank" is basically the implicitly "RAID0" arrangement of shared-memory. The precise number of banks is somewhere between 16x banks or 32x banks, depending on architecture. But regardless, if all GPU-threads access memory location #0, that will all hit bank#0, which is slow. Instead, you want GPU-threads to "spread out" over the banks (maybe GPU-thread#0 should access Bank0 / Memory location #0. GPU-thread#1 should access bank1 / memory-location #16. GPU thread #2 should access bank2 / memory-location #32. Etc. etc.)

<comment><USER7> > I've done enough Hacker News discussions to note that the lay-reader won't > understand what this means, and this probably needs more elaboration.

This is why I didn't mention it, but I agree that shared memory and typical uses present a particularly challenging problem for Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand Rust's advantage in lots of use cases, but can someone elaborate the benefits of using Rust over other languages for shader?

<comment><USER11> I'd also be curious to see some of the disadvantages?

<comment><USER12> The standard library is a bit awkward at places with its pointer usage. This is why I have a custom one.

From a language point of view, it fits really well. I am also constrained with syntax as I want rlsl to be a strict subset of rust.

Closures capture by references which means you always have to capture explicitly with move (No pointers in structs in SPIR-V). Although I am fairly confident that this can be fixed.

Also MIR optimization passes are pretty weak right now, and rlsl would require an optimizer in the future. like SPIR-V <-> LLVM. I am not sure how good spirv-opt is right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Exciting talk! And I'm happy to know that one of the leading shader devs from Rust community has successfully "embarked" :)

Technology-wise, the compiler goes from MIR to SPIR-V. This is specific to Rust and different from the other direction Khronos has been exploring: [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/LLVM-SPIRV- Backend](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/LLVM-SPIRV-Backend) . It's a bit sad that we can't all have nice things.

<comment><USER14> MIR seems the better choice in rust land in general. I wonder if cranelift could be an alternative approach here in the future.

<comment><USER12> I didn't choose cranelift because there was no real benefit for it. If the focus would have been on optimizations, I might have used it. The IR seems more friendly compared MIR, although I think there is a rewrite coming to make MIR more suitable for optimizations as well :).

And I do quite a lot of transformations at the MIR level, so I am looking forward to a more optimization friendly IR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rough-sea Just to be clear, SPIR-V has no relation to RISC-V?

<comment><USER15> No relation. SPIR-V is the fifth iteration of the Standard Portable Intermediate Representation, originally based on the LLVM IR.

It's an intermediate representation between the high level shader programming language and the GPU's native machine code. It's expected that the GPU will compile the SPIR-V to its own internal instruction set, rather than executing it natively.

RISC-V, on the other hand, is a native instruction set for CPUs.

<comment><USER8> SPIR-V really is an intermediate representation of a program. There's no way that this can be executed without any further translation. But it stops driver developers from having to write and ship complex compiler front ends that deviate from language specs in subtle ways that the shader writers need to test for and work around.

<comment><USER16> Yep, now shader writers only need to test for and work around backend bugs in drivers.

Also it makes gamedevs slightly happier that they don't have to ship the plain text source code of their shaders with games.

It doesn't provide any real security against RE, as SPIR-V is pretty close to being tokinized/SSAed GLSL and decompilers are trivial to implement. But if it makes them happier, so be it.

<comment><USER17> > * SPIR-V is pretty close to being tokinized/SSAed GLSL*

SPIR-V is in SSA form; GLSL most definitely is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Call me dumb but I'm always confused with SPIR-V. Does it have any relationship with Vulkan or OpenGL?

<comment><USER19> Graphics programming is fundamentally a form of client/server programming.

Your (usually) c++ is the client, shaders are the server, OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D are basically your client libraries to talk to the server.

Your OpenGL driver has a compiler in it that JIT compiles GLSL into into shader programs your GPU can run. In this world, SPIR-V is sort of like JVM/WASM bytecode — a compilation target for shader languages, that's a bit nicer for drivers to work with.

<comment><USER18> > Graphics programming is fundamentally a form of client/server programming.

Thanks, in that way it is a lot easier to understand. So do you mean GLSL would be compiled into SPIR-V?

<comment><USER19> Yup! [https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/18.104.22.168/linux/spirv_tool...](https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/view/188.8.131.52/linux/spirv_toolchain.html)

Microsoft actually has an HLSL to SPIR-V compiler too. [https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/blob/mast...](https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/blob/master/docs/SPIR-V.rst)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is amazing and I hope to see things like this extended. There are so many gotchas with glsl that it's hard to get going and something with a really strict compiler would make that a lot less of a burden on an engineer. It would be really cool to see whole program & profiling guided optimization between GPU inputs, shader stages, and GPU outputs.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a great candidate for the Vulkano rust library: [https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano](https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano)

It's currently using shaderc to compile glsl -> spir-v but it's clunky and takes forever to compile.

Would be great to have a more Rust-centric way to send spir-v over to the GPU

</comment><comment> Avi-D-coder Is the video of the talk posted anywhere?</comment>