The Concept Creep of 'Emotional Labor' (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/ <comment><USER2> This article is about a term, "Emotional Labor" being used more broadly than the inventor of the term appreciates. She thinks it waters down the impact of the word.

Her definition of "Emotional Labor" is most succinctly: Work performed with the intention of creating a _feeling_. Additionally, it's important in such roles that you manage your _own_ feelings: You might need to be nicer or less nice in your role than you're typically comfortable with.

Her examples are social workers, teachers, flight attendants. It might also be a clown who is paid to make kids feel happy at a party even if the clown is really sad that day.

The inventor of the term wants to be clear that there is no gender specificity to it and that it might be a tool used by the feminist movement to classify work mostly done by women as emotional work because women are emotional, but that line of thinking shuts down conversations about emotional work that apply to all parties involved regardless of gender.

<comment><USER3> > Work performed with the intention of creating a feeling.

This sounds like a pretty pointless classification to me. Any work that involves any form of social interaction is going to fall into that category.

<comment><USER4> No, there's lots of work that involves social interaction, but any feelings created during it are an accidental _side-effect_ and not the intent or primary goal of that work.

A waiter at a fancy restaurant interacts with customers with an intent of creating relevant feelings and the service is a big reason why that job exists (it's not really about delivering stuff from kitchen to the table); while a clerk taking applications at DMV also interacts with customers, but managing their emotions isn't part of their prescribed duties, the job is about processing the applications.

<comment><USER3> Any form of social interaction involves this kind of 'labor'. Some jobs more than others, but your distinction is complete nonsense. The DMV is just a poor example, it still involves the same 'labor', just arguably less, as the DMV has little incentive to care about their customers. But this relates only to the value the company is trying to provide, not the nature of the work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading that interview leads me to assume that it must've been emotional labor for Hochschild to keep her cool at how badly people can misinterpret it.

There's physical, mental and emotional labor. The first is pretty self- explanatory, the second involves thinking and the third involves keeping your emotions in check in order to complete a task.

Whenever you have to put up a fake smile, that's emotional labor. Whenever you have to be tough, but don't want to, that too is emotional labor. If your emotional stability (or lack of) aligns with the task, it isn't. So if you're a flight attendant and smile without forcing it (thus it isn't a fake smile to begin with), there's no emotional labor involved. If you're a drill sergeant and naturally grumpy and condescending, there isn't any either.

EDIT: In the cases above, when I meant that there's no emotional labor involved, I meant that there's no _effort_ involved. The value of the labor is still derived from the emotions nonetheless.

<comment><USER2> It's not just about managing your own emotions, but emotional labor might also be about producing emotions in other people according to her definition.

I think that helps people expand the word's meaning, because "People feel good when they are in a clean house."

<comment><USER5> Apparently so, yes, but I'd contest that evoking an emotional response in other people is actually _mental_ labor to begin with, and correctly applying the ideas derived thereof is then the emotional labor.

EDIT: It appears it's a two-to-Tango issue. All the cases mentioned are with another party involved, and whether it is to incite emotion or prevent it (i.e. e.g. hiding an aggravation as a flight attendant), the emotional work being done is within the subject itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple points that hit home to me:

> One thing that I read said even the work of calling the maid to clean the > bathtub is too much. It's burdensome. I felt there is really, in this work, > no social-class perspective. There are many more maids than there are people > who find it burdensome to pick up the telephone to ask them to clean your > tub.

And:

> There seems an alienation or a disenchantment of acts that normally we > associate with the expression of connection, love, commitment. Like "Oh, > what a burden it is to pick out gifts for the holiday for my children." Or > "Oh, it's so hard to call a photographer to do family Christmas photos, and > then to send it to my parents." I feel a strong need to point out that this > isn't inherently an alienating act. And something's gone haywire when it is. > It's okay to feel alienated from the task of making a magical experience for > your very own children. I'm not just judging that. I'm saying let's take it > as a symptom that something's wrong. I think a number of my books speak to > that. The Time Bind says, wait a minute, what if home has become work and > work has become home?

<comment><USER7> > "Oh, what a burden it is to pick out gifts for the holiday for my children." > Or "Oh, it's so hard to call a photographer to do family Christmas photos, > and then to send it to my parents."

The burden isn't so much in the act as the expectations and image management. Especially with things presented towards parents. Is it going to be "good enough"? Does it match the "perfect family" self-image? In situations like this people become heavily invested in maintaining an image towards everyone, including themselves. The work involved in this can be burdensome. But actually presenting the true "messy" self is far scarier.

<comment><USER6> In that second passage, I like that Hochschild tried to be clear, she is not blaming these (mostly women) for finding that burdensome, she's saying we should ask "What is up with our society that things that ought to be enjoyable time with and caring for family, expression of love have become burdensome and alienating"? And And, the unsaid next step, what can be done?

> I'm not just saying, "Oh, how terrible to think making a magical experience > is alienated work." I'm saying, "Well, why has it become alienated work?" > The solution is not for men and women to share alienated work. The solution > is for men and women to share enchanted work. These are expressions of love.

Why is it our personal family life seems like a job?

<comment><USER8> I do not think it is a job, but yes, a lot of it are chores. Sometimes you derive pleasure from it, but other times you are just tired, hungry, without idea, the store is overcrowded with nervous people (particularly around christmas) the kid does not want anything and you really really just want to go home watch a movie or read pointless hacker news.

The romanticism of "enchanted work" and "making a magical experience for your very own children" is not realistic expectation. You don't have those magical feelings around activities and duties that happen with regularity. First, second time yes, eleventh time less so. Plis while the kids enjoy gifts, they are not really magical to them. Especially around christmas, they get more toys then they are able to play with.

And it really seems to me that those who romanticise child caring familly activities the most are either the ones engaged in them the least or the ones having ideological reasons. Stay at home mothers with no hobbies and whose life's centers children to the point of excusing everything else are the least romantic and the most pragmatic/mundane about it all - even as their only topic is the kid.

<comment><USER6> So, I think maybe you're actually confusing the thing Hochschild is trying to distinguish.

It might seem like a chore in various ways, on the 11th time etc. It might not be super fun or your favorite activity in the world. You might be tired and rather be taking a nap.

But it shouldn't be _emotionally_ difficult to do routine caring things for your family. And it shouldn't require you to pretend or force yourself to have emotions other than you have. That is, Hochschild's definition of "emotional labor". It shouldn't be "alienating".

<comment><USER8> I think I do understand it well. A family is not a magical space where you suddenly cease to be human, where you own emotional needs and states suddenly don't matter due to other people needing something.

The caring work is a work that requires you to force yourself (or manipulate) or pretend emotions no matter what context. That is just what it is, that is inherent part in it.

And when you are being tired, made passive by daily routine, want a nap, have stress, that is when it becomes even more difficult to be emotionally in that supposed magic space. Or at least, it is not automatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the few occasions I've heard someone use the term "emotional labor" in real life (and not on Twitter), I've asked them to specify what it means, and every person gave a different answer. It did pretty much boil down to "doing chores and mailing holiday cards", though.

I had never seen the original definition before, and that's exactly what I _thought_ it meant when I first saw the term, and it's also what I thought it should have meant after I repeatedly saw it used in ways that I now know were erroneous.

<comment><USER10> The discussions I've had around it have generally involved people defining it as "managing and planning chores even if someone else is doing them," with the canonical example being the stay-at-home wife who manages the household and the husband who "helps" by asking her to micromanage him rather than just taking the initiative.

By the article above, this definitely sounds like mental labour (although still tiring) rather than emotional.

<comment><USER11> The example I think of is choosing a meal for a household—anticipating every household member's reaction to the meal and accepting the consequences if people don't like it.

Basically, managing people's emotions.

<comment><USER10> That sounds like a more reasonable example that matches the original definition. I'll use this one next time it comes up amongst my friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a sign of cultural decline that people can only relate to each other using financial terminology.

The continued financialization of all things cultural is not a positive development.

</comment><comment><USER13> Moral Mazes talks a lot about emotional labor, especially the expression of fealty to one's employer and enthusiastic participation in signalling activities that demonstrate compliance with the internal moral and ethical system the company creates.

That book posits that as you move up the ranks, this emotional labor becomes much more important and serves as much more of the basis for judging if you're effective at your job than your nominal performance of subject matter tasks related to the ostensible job functions you have to perform.

<comment><USER14> I think that being bad at emotional labor even (especially?) outside of work is something that is looked down upon quite a lot in society. We generally don't like the person that seems to get angry over minor issues, we expect them to manage their emotions in these kinds of situations, especially when they're not like 'us'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this article misses the point. It's not about doing the chores. It's about being the one who has taken ownership of the chores being done, by whom, when, etc.

When people say it about chores, they mean they are in an unacknowledged managerial role, and that "just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it" doesn't solve the problem, because knowing what needs to be done and when in the first place is a huge part of the work in question.

So sure, "emotional labor" is the wrong term. But it'd be better if the argument against using it in this broad way were directed at the strongest version of the claim, instead of a strawman.

<comment><USER16> An interview with the woman who coined the phrase, about what she meant when she coined it, is hardly "missing the point". How people have used the term may have moved on, but that's what the article is about.

<comment><USER15> I guess I wasn't clear, but I didn't mean the woman who invented the term is missing the point. I meant the introduction to the article, written by the author/interviewer, framed the misuse of the word in a way that hides the reason that someone might be tempted to misuse the word in that way.

And one thing I was very clear about was that even when you use the better frame, the people are still misusing the term, so I'm explicitly not disagreeing with the inventor of the term.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Huh. I would have termed "emotional labor" as doing the work to maintain harmony of relationships within and outside of the home. Like being the person responsible for setting up family events, sending cards, remembering birthdays etc. Also in parenting being the more present parent. While the need to be household manager is more "mental load" like are we out of laundry soap or when is the kid's next doctor appointment. But apparently those uses aren't really accurate.

<comment><USER18> Emotional labor is about managing _your_ emotions, not others. Managing another's emotions may end up demanding physical, mental, or emotional labor of your own- a massage, thinking about what gift someone might like, or containing your irritation at someone not understanding what you are teaching.

The concept-crept, popular-feminist definition of emotional labor is more about the target of your labor. The labor is emotional because the product you create is an emotional one. Knowing the roles men and women typically choose, it makes sense that feminism has latched onto emotional labor in this respect.

I don't think those uses are necessarily innacurate as I think they classify a real phenomenon, but it is unfortunate the popular feminist definition of emotional labor collides with the original creator's definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Recently there was a conversation on Slack at work about gender pronouns. Several people asked that everyone use "hey ya'll", "hey folks", "hey everyone", etc instead of "hey guys" (when addressing an entire not-all-male channel, for example). Two or three people fought this giving various arguments about why this was unnecessary, calling it word-policing, value- signaling, etc. Throughout, I made an attempt always to respond in a civil manner, to try to explain reasoning behind counter-points, provide examples, and make sure all voices were heard. I basically took it upon myself to be a mediator for 30 people.

It finally ended after an hour, and afterward I realized I felt totally emotionally drained. I had spent the entire time reacting emotionally (internally), and then reacting mentally (externally). All that emotion, even if it was "inside", had been chewing away at me as a form of stress. I had to take an hour break from work to calm down. It did not feel good. "Emotional labor" might not have been the right phrase, but it sure felt like my emotions had just unloaded a 25-foot box truck.

<comment><USER20> That's a good example of the problem. Your reacting emotionally internally didn't help you do a better job, and may have been a liability, so a less emotional person may have been more qualified to mediate. Also, you took on a job no one asked you to do, and then complained about the cost using the emotional labor term as an acceptable ploy for sympathy.

One of the biggest (and unintended) benefits of the emotional labor movement is detecting either martyr-like or unhelpful behavior at home and the workplace and coaching the person towards stopping it.

<comment><USER19> That's a strange response. I never complained, and I certainly never looked for sympathy. Also, is the martyr comment directed toward me?

My story is more one of explaining how what I experienced could be invisible, as nobody came to me and said, wow, you must have gone through a lot. But people do go through a lot, and it's often invisible. In my case I "volunteered" for it, but others may be expected to take it on, which I imagine is more stressful.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it was directed at you (and others who act similarly.) I also am glad you shared your experience and liked your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I see the following phenomenon repeat itself: someone convinces the world that a particular behavior, described by a particular term, is bad: bigotry, racism, emotional labor, transphobic, sexual assault. Usually this is straightforward because the behaviors are truly monstrous and the offenders deserve to be un-personed. Then a bunch of other people draft behind this term to air out their grievances: this person did something racist, racism is bad, this person is bad. This works for some years, but eventually society just normalizes out the effect of the word: if so many actions are racist, then racism must not be so bad. When this happens, it actually lessens the opprobrium that the hardcore offenders, the people whom the term was designed to denigrate, experience.

It's effectively trademark dilution.

</comment><comment><USER22> Concepts creeps because when we want to affect world, we need to name things first. When we name them, we need short phrase that will fit twit. Who cares if somebody already used it to describe something different?! [1]

The other reason why concept creeps is connotations of previous meaning. Call digital sharing a piracy. Call privacy breaching a personalization. Call protester a terrorist. Call different opinion a hate speech. Call looking lustfully a rape.

[1] I do.

</comment><comment><USER23> > I think this gets to perhaps a main confusion that is happening. I often see > emotional labor referred to as the management of other people's emotions, or > doing things so that other people stay happy and stay comfortable.

This strikes me as something worth examining closely. Attempting to manage (solicited or not, though I would guess most often not) other people's emotions seems guaranteed to end in discord.

</comment><comment><USER24> The concept that 'emotional labor' has been sort of co-opted from its original meaning, thus losing the actual significance of the term is quite interesting. I kind of internally related it to 'spoon theory' use- clearly it was originally meant explicitly for chronic physical illnesses, but I often see it used for depression and anxiety.

<comment><USER25> It makes sense that happens, "spoon theory" is basically a metaphor for "limited resources", anyone who looks at it without context is just going to see a nice metaphor for a very common issue.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but the expansion of the term somewhat dilutes and transforms the original meaning of the term and its original context and usefulness. Similar to what is being done here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >There's no doubt that the unpaid, expected, and unacknowledged work of keeping households and relationships running smoothly falls disproportionately on women.

[citation needed]

<comment><USER24> [0] [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170926105448.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170926105448.htm) \- "Household chores: Women still do more"

Study confirms that women tend to do more housework than their male partners, irrespective of their age, income or own workloads

[1] [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0832-1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-017-0832-1) \- "Time, Money, or Gender? Predictors of the Division of Household Labour Across Life Stages"

Results indicated women performed more housework than men at all ages.

[2]. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584401/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584401/) \- "The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood"

Mothers, according to the time diaries, shouldered the majority of child care and did not decrease their paid work hours. Furthermore, the gender gap was not present prebirth but emerged postbirth with women doing more than 2 hours of additional work per day compared to an additional 40 minutes for men. Moreover, the birth of a child magnified parents' overestimations of work in the survey data, and had the authors relied only on survey data, gender work inequalities would not have been apparent.

<comment><USER26> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It is strange how people always associate domestic work with women, or something women are not compensated for.

I know I do _a lot_ of domestic work that my wife barely knows needs to be done, or assumes it's trivial, or assumes "you are intelligent/strong/used to/a XY warm body, so it's easy for you". And it mostly consists of things that cannot be outsourced (perhaps a butler or secretary would help, but these are more expensive than a maid).

Honestly I don't know who the hell falls for this kind of narrative.

<comment><USER28> I never thought of family care as something that needs to be paid. Should I pay my wife for doing that work? In that case should she pay me for shouldering the burden of working hard in a job I don't like making money I don't spend myself? All this doesn't sit well with me. It's too individualistic.

<comment><USER27> The law accommodates for that - 50% of the assets for each in case of divorce. Guaranteed not to be fair for most particular cases, but puts an end to the discussion, and everybody knows the deal before marrying.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Girls for Hackers (Improve your confidence with women) - <AUTHOR> http://girlsforhackers.com

<comment><USER2> If you click Buy Now and then enter an email address you get a message "Oops! Our credit card processor seems to be down, we'll email you as soon as you can continue your order!" I didn't enter mine and wont because I'm almost sure the addresses collected will be sold to other marketeers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do I have the feeling this is /r/seduction condensed into ebook form with a paywall in front of it?

<comment><USER4> /r/seduction itself is the condensed version of decades of literature on the subject, much of it better than the watered down version you get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> that's a nagative example that proofs how valuable testimonials/excerpts/trial are when introducing a product to brand new customers

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER6> It's not very funny if it is. Women aren't some technical 'thing' you can learn 'how to' from a book. They're 'people'. Wow.. I thought we were making progress here.

<comment><USER7> Plus the title implies that hackers aren't women...

<comment><USER4> No, you're implying women can't sleep with women.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What happened to "asking for help"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alwinhoogerdijk.com/2011/11/09/what-happened-to-asking-for-help/ <comment><USER3> The problem is the normal response to their questions. Most companies, or even just people, will respond negatively to bug reports, especially if they aren't good reports. This has trained the users that they shouldn't bother asking.

Instead, they do what gets them results: They complain publicly. See, you can't ignore them if they're speaking publicly. Everyone else gets to see the problem and response, or lack thereof. In this situation, they either get a fix for the problem, or the developer loses future sales.

Here's an example from my life: I bought a mousepad on eBay for like $10. Ridiculously cheap, compared to what others were asking. When it arrived, it wasn't the right one. Now, I had 2 choices. I could contact the seller, and they'd probably tell me to ship it back at my expense, which would cost me more than the product was worth and waste my time, which was even more valuable.

Or I could just give them a low-star rating and explanation, and be done with it. I wasn't about to waste my valuable time, so I chose the bad rating.

The seller contacted me, upset. "Why didn't you contact us?" And I explained the above, and said that there was nothing they could do because I wasn't willing to spend the time and money to send the item back.

They ended up refunding my money and letting me keep the product. (Which probably sits in my closet somewhere, unused and unwanted.) I allowed them to nullify the rating.

tl;dr - So why do users take that route? It's quicker, easier, and works better.

<comment><USER4> It's also quicker, easier and more effective than navigating most companies' support tools. I don't want to spend half an hour or more registering, confirming and entering a bug report that will most likely be ignored.*

* A company taking reports seriously in a visible way is a rare occurrence in my experience.

<comment><USER5> It's the ignoring not the complexity that's frustrating. I'm suffering from an annoying bug in Google Groups. I've raised it a few times and it disappears into the void. Next time there's a bug, even if it's serious, will I bother? Probably not - my expectations are set.

\-- (Edit)

Incidentally, for software issues this makes a public bug tracker something of a marketing tool. Even knowing my bug rather than lost without trace would be an improvement.

<comment><USER6> Google is especially bad in this regard. I'm a software developer, and I can probably write a pretty decent bug report. I'm also available to further look into the issue, and can use development tools. I help fix bugs if I find them in many products we use. But with Google, I just don't bother. There's often no way to even file a proper bug report, just some Google Group, and never any feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the average customer service response from a company nowadays goes something like this:

Me: "I'm having a problem with the fribbulator. It appears to be broken - <USER2> metal is snapped cleanly in two."

Them: {no response}

Me: "I sent you this last week but didn't receive a reply. I'm having a problem with the fribbulator. It appears to be broken - the metal is snapped cleanly in two."

Them: "Here are instructions on how to reinstall Windows. Please see our FAQ as well. Did this response answer your question [Y/N]?"

That sort of response might as well include a .gif of a raised middle finger. Companies that intend to provide better-than-this customer service should factor in customer conditioning into their plans. The customer has been conditioned to complain publicly first. You'll have to fix that explicitly if you don't want it to happen to you.

<comment><USER8> This kind of conversation happens all the time with "support" accounts on Twitter. I tweeted the @ParallelsCares account for help and ended up in or around the third circle of hell [1] trying to get a simple answer to a simple question [2].

I think customer conditioning, as you suggest, is part of the solution. Training also needs to include learning how to _thoughtfully_ write a response, which would then show empathy. Instead what we have are a lot of Twitter support accounts whose names end with "Cares" run by a lot of people who don't.

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/shaggyfrog/status/100974626112421888> [2] <https://twitter.com/#!/shaggyfrog/status/100727705112285184>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We _just_ had this problem. Someone posted a 1-star review on the App Store saying:

> I create puzzles under the username: [---]. The editor is designed to allow > you to upload an increasing number of puzzles as a reward for earning high > ratings on those puzzles you've created so far. However, if the rating > drops, the puzzles you can upload may actually drop. This is lame and > unfair. Numerous times I've trashed a puzzle with the intention of replacing > it with a new one, only to find that I am now not allowed to upload a new > one because my max number of uploads has dropped. Fix this and I will give > you 5 stars. Otherwise I will stop uploading puzzles altogether.

The annoying thing is, he's absolutely right. We didn't think of this use case, and we're fixing it right now (it should be rolled out within a few days). But it's so frustrating that he felt like he had to threaten us ("otherwise I will stop uploading puzzles altogether") and didn't even think to contact us first.

And what's more, he decided that our game deserves 1 star, even though he's clearly played it for many, many hours, and presumably has really enjoyed it.

<comment><USER10> I, on a few occasions, have went the nice route by firing off an email (or phone call) about problem and have it deleted or a form letter sent back. In essence, my problem was ignored.

In that case, I went on Google and linked my name to a nasty complaint. Lo and behold, they called or emailed back and solved it if I removed the negative feedback.

Time and time again, if I complain publicly and become a cost sinkhole I get results. If I am a sheep, I get nothing.

<comment><USER9> I understand that, and it's happened to me a few times also.

But I still feel like the first response, if it's possible, should be an email. We're just a couple of guys, and both our website and our game's credits make it clear that we're not a major faceless company.

I suppose people are conditioned by large companies ignoring them, so I hope that the proliferation of indie developers in the App Store can recondition people to actually send emails.

We love getting direct email from people, and we respond to every single one. I think people are sometimes surprised to get a personal reply; hopefully that won't be such a surprise if enough developers do it.

<comment><USER3> For your company, that may be the right way to go. But people don't know that.

All they know is that 90% of the time, their time and money is wasted if they go that route. So they take the shortcut. Once you have a good rep with a customer, you can bet they'll do it your way, because that then becomes the best way for them. The problem is that you have to get a rep with that customer first. That usually happens by having a problem, which is the problem in the first place.

Why did this guy think that this was the best communication medium? Do you have forums where you regularly engage your users and answer their questions? Do they know they exist? He sounds like a creative user, and most creative users visit the forums to share and learn tips and tricks.

<comment><USER9> There is a touch arcade thread that people occasionally visit, but most of our contact with our users is through email. We're planning to add a direct email link in our "about" page in the game (we already have a link to our website), so hopefully that will make it easier for people to contact us.

(We readily admit that we're pretty bad at forming a community. This is a spare-time thing for both of us, and neither of us uses twitter, facebook, or really any social service, much personally, so we feel a little like fish out of water when it comes to the social aspect of the game. We have a level editor, but no way for people to share levels outside of the game itself, and no way for people to talk about levels they make. We're getting there...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a big gap between a two way medium like Twitter and something like the frustratingly one way App Store reviews.

I think HN is mostly familiar (and admiring of) Zappos and their awesome customer service. Twitter is bar none the easiest, cheapest way to get positive public customer support stories.

Most twitter users have a handful (less than a 100) people they regularly interact with and are kind of amazed that a company would take the time to message them directly about an issue they were having.

From there it is usually easy to get a dialog going and when their issue is fixed they aren't just satisfied but ecstatic about your company and product (typically they go back on Twitter and talk you up to their friends).

</comment><comment><USER12> Funny the article never addresses "they don't ask for help because either there's nobody to talk to or nobody who isn't reading from an inapplicable script." After that becomes the dominant customer support experience, seems the only solution is fling bad vibes into the ether[net] and buy a different product.

You know the drill. My obligatory anecdote: bought a popular notebook from a big name computer company. Called tech support for the same problem six times. Five times was connected to someone who ran me through a pointless drill and refused to vary from the script, culminating in sending the machine in for replacement of random parts, which each time worked briefly then the device died again. The sixth time someone more conversant was willing to LISTEN to me, understood my job is designing such things, went off script, and informed me he was not allowed to tell me that complete exploded mechanical drawings were available online at <http://www.bigcompco.com/foobar/product_X_disassembly.pdf> ... I expressed my happy dismay that he couldn't tell me what he told me, hung up, took the machine apart (now knowing the secret sequencing), and proceeded to vacuum out the clogged heat sink which somehow nobody in the repair department managed to notice FIVE TIMES. Worked fine ever since.

Anecdote 2, short version: called MegaSoftware Corp about a non-booting OS. Was told to delete all 2GB of somebody else's data (a huge amount at the time) and reinstall everything - and was told this for $29. Unwilling to, 20 minutes later figured out copying one file solved the problem. Credit charges were soon reversed.

Upshot: we're now conditioned to assume there's nobody (or nobody competent) to talk to. The only hope to get attention is to leave scathing feedback and assume nobody will notice anyway. Quite a surprise when competent willing support appears.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes doing things right means bumping the price up which for some reason companies are unwilling to do. Apple gets this very right in my opinion. Here is an anecdote about HP. If you buy HP elitebooks which cost > $1000 you get 3 years of warranty with shipping paid both ways for free. On top of that you get 24/7 access to enterprise level support. On a few occasions HP has overnighted me parts when I have needed them. On the other hand I have bought HP consumer line laptops which dont come with support or 3 year warranty by default and my experience has been horrible. In other words consumers need to stop buying the cheapest provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google -- that's what happened. They enabled crowd-sourced customer service.

The chances someone else has already encountered a similar problem? Good or better.

The chances someone else already commented online about the problem? Good or better.

The chances somebody else posted about how to address the problem? Good or better.

The chances of a Google query's response time being better than direct customer service? Whatever the maximum of "good" is.

Combined with most companies lack of decent customer service, it's obvious it has come to this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's a fun anecdote which I think summarizes why people don't ask for help:

Two days ago I read an article about a local company; deciding my wife may find enjoyable work with them, I decided to visit their website and careers page. The careers page presented an SSL cert error. I decided to write an email to the DNS administrator explaining that their intermediary signing cert was expired, and why this is a problem, and even provided a helpful link.

Amazingly, I got a reply - within hours, but unfortunately it went like this:

Them 2) You're going to the wrong site, its here:

Me 3) The URL you've provided me 302 redirects to the URL I said is the issue. Here's a paste from wget of this action happening:

Them 4) What browser are you using? Works fine here.

Me 5) I've tested this on 3 machines in 3 different browsers, here's output from browsershots.org showing it doesn't work on 78 other browsers.

Them 6) I'm forwarding this to someone else.

... silence...

Now one must question -- would have I gotten a better response by publicly @mentioning this multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company that can't get SSL working on their careers site? (Just confirmed its still broken)

(edited for formatting readability)

</comment><comment><USER16> It should be a rule in every company "don't blame the user"; if they don't contact you with their problems, it's _your_ task to let them contact you. Put a big "contact" button in your app, make it easier to give them direct feedback to you instead of in the app store.

And, obviously, don't release software that's not ready for production. The mindset "we'll just release without proper testing, the users will point out the bugs" - is so 1995

</comment><comment><USER17> Instead of blaming your users (terrible idea), improve your app so that it is clear to the user what they should/can do if they experience problems, e.g. a Help function, link to an online forum or your email, etc. Ideally this would pop up whenever they get an error.

</comment><comment><USER18> _They're addressing other users, asking "Is anyone else having this problem?" What's that about? How is finding other with the same problem going to help you?_

Sounds like the user hasn't ruled out a configuration error or buggy device and is simply looking for a solution. This is due diligence before reporting a bug (along with reading the documentation, of course).

</comment><comment><USER19> Remember: you're more invested in your application than your users. Even if it's possible for them to have a dialog with you to fix their problem, they may not care to.

Posting a negative review is not part of that investment - it's just a cathartic release, and after that, they move on. If you're selling a relatively cheap application that your users don't need (such as a comic- viewing app), you may only have one chance with your users.

</comment><comment><USER20> The cynic in me wonders how many of these warnings and one-star reviews are from authors/supporters of competing apps.

Down-vote bots are becoming quite common in other forms of media (Reddit, etc). I wish there were some way of computing the number of players 'gaming' the system.

<comment><USER21> Given the sheer number of inane "reviews" with bizarre complaints, I think the sad truth is that most of them do come from real users.

<comment><USER22> I saw an absolutely excellent Japanese app that was at 3.5 stars because a bunch of people 1-starred it for not being in English.

<comment><USER23> Is that really unfair though? Was it made clear on the product page that it was not i18n?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to use that sort of feedback sometimes myself.

Here's an example. Recently I tried a demo version of an upgrade to a program I already own. Certain things were broken that used to work fine. The only support allowed is to sign into my account on their website and use a feedback form. Email support is not allowed, nor is there a product forum. When I filled in the form it told me that I was not a registered user of version 2, therefore support was not available. So then I went and wrote a scathing public review advising people to avoid the product for specific reasons.

Compare that to another product I have and seldom use which I also wanted to check the upgrade out. I tried the demo, and there were essential features missing. I emailed the developer using the link in the program and explained myself. He wrote back saying that feature would be added in version 3 and I could upgrade 1 to 3 when it comes and skip 2, no problem. And so that was the end of it for now.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think one of the problems may be that people dealing with AppStore or Android Market customers are not realizing that they are dealing with a different kind of user group. One cannot compare the feedback that HN users (developers/advanced-users/early-adopters) give, with the responses from your average iPhone user. He doesn't understand how complex a piece of software may be. There is probably an expectation that even a free app should work perfectly well.

Additionally the abundance of similar apps means that there is no real interest in "asking for help"; the user can just try the next app. Still, before doing that he will post his comment for the benefit of future users (this app is (terrible|bad|doesnt-work|...).

Finally the feedback channels may not be as easy to find as for traditional software. I am not sure where I would send feedback about some indie-app that doesn't even have a homepage (or that may be ranked on page 20 on Google).

<comment><USER26> > _There is probably an expectation that even a free app should work perfectly > well._

I'm disappointed that this appears to be an unreasonable expectation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's often easier to find the review form on the App Store than it is to find a human-answered "contact us" form or address for the developer.

When a user writes a shitty review, they know for a fact the developer will read it, whereas many app store developers may not even have a web presence, let alone a reliable looking way to contact them.

I'm not saying that's good by any means -- dialog with your customers gets to the bottom of things and usually leaves them happier -- but right now if it's easier for your customer to find and leave a public vent session on your app store page than it is to find out how to contact you, they are going to take the path of least resistance.

If user to developer dialog is important to you, enable your users to do it, don't expect them to jump through hoops to seek you out when there's an easier alternative.

</comment><comment><USER28> _There is no way to fix actual bugs in your software, because you can't learn what the problem is exactly, what might be causing it, how to reproduce it, etc… Making it next to impossible to fix the bug, let alone help the user (and possible other users running into the same bug!)._

You can fix bugs without having a conversation with a user. It involves a two prong approach: 1\. Proper testing \- Most people are probably doing more testing than they can possibly bear, but we all know we should do more. 2\. Proper tracing \- If an app crashes, the logs can be studied to work out what went wrong. \- I accept this might not work on a phone as well as with web/desktop apps.

</comment><comment><USER29> Being a "customer review" log, I think the sentiment of the comments posted are valid. If the App crashes, you assign a star rating accordingly. Sounds exactly like what one should expect.

It's unforgiving out in the wild. It might not be ideal, but that's the system we have (until support systems are integrated into the store). Even if there was a brilliant direct feedback/support portal & the customer used it to your satisfaction, I believe it's still appropriate to rate a product based on your experience with it. If it crashes, it's going to get a lower rating, regardless of how many reps apologised & promised to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'll tell you what happened: trolls who instead of helping out, will post a smug "let me google that for you" reply and assume everyone else is as big a know-it-all as them.

Trolls, reinier, trolls killed 'asking' on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER31> The general principle at work here is the "early-adopter" vs "mainstream". Your early users probably recognized that it was a new product and were willing to take a risk with it, recognizing that it's a small organization in charge and that their answers are likely to be answered in a timely manner. Once you've got 10,000+ users and hundreds or thousands of reviews, then you're "established" and people will be much harsher in their reviews, and less likely to contact support expecting some kind of auto-responder and days response time.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is in no way a software issue, this is a social issue. Everywhere people are complaining about everything that doesn't work exactly according to their wishes. Not seldom in order to gain something themselves, such as threating hotels with bad reviews if they don't get a discount..

Then again, when a customer complaints about a bug, this (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208990>) is probably not a good way to keep them from going public.

</comment><comment><USER33> We provide immediately an invitation for our users to interact with us, such as having a 'click to call' button on our login site at all times and having start page that asks them to contact us. Before we made it obvious that we actually have a great support team, there was certainly less interaction and our users have responded well to these changes. Can you put a splash screen on your app that makes it clear that you're available to help?

</comment><comment><USER34> People optimize like crazy to get users to convert. I'm pretty sure that if it were as easy to get help as it was to download the app, more would do so.

You used to only get users who were smart enough to find the download link, which might have even been on a subpage. Now, you get the people who can only be bothered if they need only press the great big button in the center of their field of view.

</comment><comment><USER35> There is no mailto: link anywhere on that page. If you don't reduce friction for people to contact you, they might not bother.

</comment><comment><USER36> We just naturally assume that any reported issues that we receive are vastly under represented. I assume that only 10% of users actually report things.

</comment><comment><USER37> I say it's partly due to Google's record of pushing customer service to the bottom of the priority list, but it's also because we're getting the "unwashed masses" online now. Everyday people are now online, have smart phones, and are purchasing apps. They don't know what a bug report is. They may not even know what good customer service is. They don't want to spend their time and mobile minutes/data on helping you fix your product. They just want things to work.

<comment><USER38> These new users probably carry their expectations from the real world to the internet as well. If some merchandise from a store isn't good, you don't appeal to the company who produces it, you simply tell other people your negative experience with the product and encourage everyone to avoid it, just like what's happening on these app stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I see the same thing even from my close colleagues. With one in particular, the first I'll even know he's using my code is when he bitches about it on Twitter. Forget about usable information in a bug report about what he did to trigger it (usually turns out to be utterly insane hacked configs), sometimes _we've been talking on IRC_ and then I switch windows to find he's slagging the code on Twitter.

I think it's a cultural thing. Righteous anger is addictive. In this case it's anger at bad code, and the craving for another hit precedes any attempt to find out if the anger is even justified - let alone to work constructively toward a resolution. Some people (lots here BTW) are just rage junkies, and should simply be ignored.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does your app have a "report a bug" option? I sure hope so, otherwise this complaining blog post would look awfully hypocritical.</comment>


Smart Algorithms beat Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03129 <comment><USER2> Important to note that the datasets used are sparse, and that the key to this algorithm is better exploitation of sparsity. The GPU over CPU advantage is a lot lower if you need sparse operations, even with conventional algorithms.

"It should be noted that these datasets are very sparse, e.g., Delicious dataset has only 75 non-zeros on an average for input fea- tures, and hence the advantage of GPU over CPU is not always noticeable."

In other words, they got a good speedup on their problem, but it might not apply to your problem.

<comment><USER3> WaveNet, if I remember correctly, has 1-from-256 encoding of input features. And 1-from-256 encoding of output features.

It is extremely sparse.

If you look at language modeling, then things there are even sparsier - typical neural language model has 1-from-several-hundredths-of-thousands for full language (for Russian, for example, it is in range of 700K..1.2M words and it is much worse for Finnish and German) and 1-from-couple-of-tens-of- thousands for byte pair encoded language (most languages have encoding that reduced token count to about 16K distinct tokens, see [1] for such an example).

[1] [https://bellard.org/nncp/](https://bellard.org/nncp/)

The image classification task also has sparcity at the output and, if you implement it as RNN, a sparsity at input (1-from-256 encoding of intensities).

Heck, you can engineer you features to be sparse if you want to.

I also think that this paper is an example of "if you do not compute you do not have to pay for it", just like in GNU grep case [2].

[2] [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Aug...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

Given all that I think it is a paper about combination of very clever things which give excellent results in a synergy.

<comment><USER4> > If you look at language modeling, then things there are even sparsier - > typical neural language model has 1-from-several-hundredths-of-thousands for > full language

Most real-world models don't use one-hot encodings of words -- they use embeddings instead, which are very dense vector representations of words. Outside of the fact that embeddings don't blow out GPU memory, they're also semantically encoded, so similar words cluster together.

<comment><USER3> First, you need to compute these embeddings at least once - sparsity, here you are! Second, these embeddings may be different between tasks and accuracy from their use may differ too.

For example, the embeddings produced from CBOW and skipgram word2vec models are strikingly different in cosine similarity sense - different _classes_ of words are similar in CBOW and skipgram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best laypersons's summary I could find:

 _" SLIDE doesn't need GPUs because it takes a fundamentally different approach to deep learning. The standard "back-propagation" training technique for deep neural networks requires matrix multiplication, an ideal workload for GPUs. With SLIDE, Shrivastava, Chen and Medini turned neural network training into a search problem that could instead be solved with hash tables"_

[https://insidehpc.com/2020/03/slide-algorithm-for- training-d...](https://insidehpc.com/2020/03/slide-algorithm-for-training- deep-neural-nets-faster-on-cpus-than-gpus/)

<comment><USER6> Seems this is related to an adaptive approach which GPUs don't have support for, but could be made to. I think this means the next version of TPUs will support it, and then GPUs follow closely after.

<comment><USER7> No, their approach changes the fundamental access pattern into something anathema to GPU and TPU architectures.

In ELI5 or layman's terms: current GPU/TPU accelerators are specialized in doing very regular and predictable calculations very fast. In deep learning a lot of those predictable calculations are not needed, like multiplying with zero. This approach leverages that and only does the minimal necessary calculations, but that makes it very irregular and unpredictable. Regular CPUs are better suited for those kind of irregular calculations, because most other general software is that as well.

<comment><USER8> In layman's response that sounds like that network could use normalization

<comment><USER9> Simplify normalization if you want a layman's terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They don't implement SLIDE in GPU so we don't actually know if CPU is faster than GPU. It's SLIDE on CPU vs softmax & sampled softmax in GPU comparison.

They should at least give rationale why GPU is not speeding up locality sensitive hash based algorithm. GPU's are used to compute fast hashes (they were used in Bitcoin mining once).

It's Intel sponsored research, but come on.

<comment><USER7> Since when is calculating the hash the bottleneck in hash table access?

The bottleneck is the:

      ptr = h(x);    // trivial, ~0.5-2 cycles
      bucket = *ptr; //  --> ~200-300 cycles

edit: reading the paper, it's pointers to the data being stored, so I have to add the following as well:

      el_ptr = bucket[i]
      el = *el_ptr

So that's two dependent random-access loads.

<comment><USER11> Forgive me if this should be obvious, but why would a simple read from a pointer take so many cycles?

<comment><USER12> because you have to fetch it from RAM, unless the problem is small enough to fit in cache

<comment><USER11> Ah, right. I don't know how I forgot about cache and RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who ported memory-bound workloads to GPU, I say SLIDE appears it would run even faster on GPU than on CPU. I skimmed the paper and SLIDE is described as a memory-bound workload, specifically random memory accesses to 2-10GB of data. GPUs excel at this type of workload. For example the Ethereum PoW (ethash) is memory-bound, and GPU ethash implementations are faster than CPU ones.

So I don't understand why the authors don't mention the possibility of implementing SLIDE on GPU. Of course, I could have missed something (I spent less than 10min reading the paper)...

<comment><USER7> No, that is definitely not the case, not all memory-bounds are of the same type.

Hash tables produce lots of data-dependent random accesses into DRAM which are definitely not better on GPUs. Warps divergence, bank conflicts, partial cache-line access inefficiencies, etc. Even CPUs struggle on this type of pointer chasing workloads due to cache inefficiencies. Open addressing schemes such as robin hood hashmaps are popular because they reduce the amount of pointer chasing.

Your example is a false comparison, generating a hash is very different from pointer chasing the address generated by the hash.

<comment><USER13> " _Your example is a false comparison, generating a hash is very different from pointer chasing the address generated by the hash._ "

That's not true at all in the case of ethash, where the running time is dominated by waiting for memory read ops to complete, not waiting for ALU ops (hashing) to finish executing.

I have also written an Equihash miner where the workload is similar: running time dominated by hashtable reads or writes, and can confirm GPUs beat CPUs.

I reiterate: GPUs _excel_ at data-dependent random reads, compared to CPUs. Sure, these are very difficult workloads for both CPUs and GPUs, but GPUs still trump CPUs. That's because the atom size (minimum number of bytes that a GPU/CPU can read/write on the memory bus) is the same or better on GPU: 64 bytes on CPU (DDR4), and 32/64 bytes on GPU (HBM2), and GPUs have a significantly higher memory throughput up to 1000 GB/s while CPUs are still stuck around 200 GB/s per socket (AMD EPYC Rome 8-channel DDR4-3200).

So in ethash or Equihash mining workloads, many data-dependent read ops across a multi-GB data structure (much larger than local caches) will be mostly bottlenecked by (1) the maximum number of outstanding read ops the CPU/GPU memory controller can handle and (2) the overall memory throughput. In the case of GPUs, (1) is not really a problem, so you end up being bottlenecked by overall memory througphut. That's why GPUs win.

As of 3-4 years ago I remember Intel CPUs having a maximum number of 10 outstanding memory operations so (1) was the bottleneck. But things could have changed with more recent CPUs. In any case, even if (1) is not a bottleneck on CPUs, their lower memory throughput guarantee they will perform worse than GPUs on such workloads.

<comment><USER7> Correct, in GPUs can indeed do a better job at hiding latency through massive parallelism.

My expertise might be outdated here, but the problem used to be that actually getting to that max bandwidth through divergent warps and uncoalesced reads was just impossible.

Is this still the case with Volta? Did you avoid these issues in your Equihash implementation?

<comment><USER13> Divergent warps are still a huge problem (but SLIDE doesn't have this problem AFAIK).

Uncoalesced reads are not a problem severe enough to make GPUs underperform CPUs. Or, said another way, uncoalesced reads come with a roughly equally bad performance impact on both GPUs and CPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do you all guess? The paper has a link to their github with the source and instructions: [https://github.com/keroro824/HashingDeepLearning](https://github.com/keroro824/HashingDeepLearning)

I see no reason not to try it with some AMD Threadripper or EPYC instead.

<comment><USER15> It looks like it benefits from AVX512 which AMD does not support.

Might be worth trying on something like an 10940x/10980xe if you can get your hands on them.

<comment><USER3> AVX512 benefits are coming from gather-scatter instructions, I think.

What is interesting here is that in their current implementation they aren't very beneficial [1] and [2].

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05713.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05713.pdf) [2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer- science/scatte...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer- science/scatter-instruction) (recommends these instructions to be used outside of main loop)

I remember vaguely that first implementations of scatter/gather instructions were not faster than sequential access from different memory registers.

And, thusly, it may come handly that AMD has much bigger core count because each thread will have less memory to access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For reference since it's kind of buried/obfuscated: Their point of comparison is between an NVIDIA Tesla V100 and a 44-core CPU. The latter is probably something like a Xeon E5-2699, which has a list price of $4115 USD. Hard to find accurate pricing data for the V100, but it looks like it was in the $7-10k USD range back in 2018. Still a cool cost/performance improvement but not as massive as I was expecting before I looked up the test hardware.

<comment><USER17> Also worth noting that that Xeon processor takes somewhere around 350-400W and the V100 is also in the range of 300W. So not huge on energy savings. Although a really cool, potentially industry shaking breakthrough, regardless.

<comment><USER18> The V100 would need to run for 3.5 times as long, so would use way more energy. E.g. training for 1 hour on CPU: 400W×1h = 400Wh of energy, vs training for 3.5h on GPU: 300W×3.5h = 1050Wh of energy.

<comment><USER19> Why is this downvoted? This is absolutely right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "hashing is a data-indexing method invented for internet search in the > 1990s"

Eh? It was invented multiple decades prior to the 1990s. Some days you could get the impression that computer science did not exist before the Web.

</comment><comment><USER21> A more correct headline would be: "An algorithm beats a poorly optimized GPU implementation on a narrow problem that uses an extremely sparse dataset using $8.5K worth of CPU".

This is for recommenders only, and it does not translate to anything else. I don't know why everyone seems to misrepresent this as NVIDIA's undoing. Read the freaking paper, people.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious to see if they can apply this to industry-standard tests like ImageNet classification.

The workloads that they test on make it hard to quantify the broad applicability of their work.

</comment><comment><USER23> > Slide: 3.5x Faster Deep Learning on CPU Then on GPU

Typo in the submission title - it should say "Than" on GPU

</comment><comment><USER24> I _think_ I'm right in saying that the type of locality-sensitive hash systems they're talking about are not entirely dissimilar to Igor Aleksander's WISARD, RAM-based recognisers from the 80's. I suspect the latter is a special case of the former. How far off-base am I?

</comment><comment><USER25> A reminder for us all: No matter how much faster your hardware, you can still write slower code

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel like this is more a stunt for the new intel xenon. Creating a new paradigm on a heterogeneous hardware dependency is misleading. Linear analysis could be more explored. They could achieve the same with less. Holomorphic functional analysis.

But it's a good try. I'd say that this catch's my interesting as is a valid point to optimizations [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05858.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05858.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER27> actual paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03129](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03129)

</comment><comment><USER28> Did they just accidentally kill NVidia's business model?

<comment><USER29> I don't think so. Matrix multiplication has plenty of uses besides neural network training, and GPUs will still excel at those workloads.

<comment><USER28> Matrix multiplication with INT8, INT16 or BFLOAT16 doesn't have that many uses outside Deep Learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been trying to get through this paper for the last two days. It's somewhat sparse itself. Maybe I need to go read the code they wrote first...

</comment><comment><USER31> This is obvious to me. Since Hadoop came out, (a lot of) people have been giving up on even forming algorithms and just dumping data into machine learning and hoping for the best. I recall someone high up at Google complaining about it.

We need to get back to forming algorithms as well as concepts and first principles. We cannot and should not expect ML to brute force finding patterns and just sit back and relax.

Here is another prediction for you: we will not solve ray-tracing in games and movie CGI with more hardware. We will need some algorithm that gets us 80-90% of the way there in a smart way.

<comment><USER32> This was my first thought. Well, to be more complete - smart algorithms beat dumb algorithms even if the dumb algorithms use hardware acceleration (unless the problem is trivial anyway.) Smart algorithms plus hardware acceleration beats smart algorithms on general purpose hardware. Smart algorithms are just better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >We provide codes and scripts for reproducibility

Where? I want to get my hands on this code

<comment><USER34> paperswithcode has a link to the repo

[https://paperswithcode.com/paper/slide-in-defense-of- smart-a...](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/slide-in-defense-of-smart- algorithms-over)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "But... Moore's Law, more hardware!" he plaintively cries out...

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry for the off topic comment but this then/than mistake I read every day is just getting on my nerves.

" What to Know: Than and then are different words. Than is used in comparisons as a conjunction, as in "she is younger than I am," and as a preposition, "he is taller than me." Then indicates time. It is used as an adverb, "I lived in Idaho then," noun, "we'll have to wait until then," and adjective, "the then governor."" [1]

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use- th...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-then-and- than)

<comment><USER37> For a non-native speaker it's hard to tell the two apart. Then and than sound pretty much the same. And even if one knows the difference, it's easy to make a typo.

In the sort of "international pidgin English" that's spoken anywhere outside the UK such subtle differences should just be ignored.

<comment><USER38> I don't think you'll get much play for suggesting (to an audience of at least some programmers) that we should allow for more ambiguity in language, heh.

The programmers I've met without an eye for detail are usually ones I do not like working with.

<comment><USER37> Hehe, true, but unlike programming languages, the languages humans use for communication are "sloppy" and ambiguous by definition. Grammar rules have been invented after the fact to create the illusion that there's order where none exists.

English allows much more "freedom" than many other languages (e.g. German), maybe that's one reason why it has been so successful in the end.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Talos II - <AUTHOR> https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ <comment><USER2> Talos™ II drives the state of the art of secure computing forward. Talos™ II gives you — and only you — full control of your machine's security. Rest assured knowing that only your authorized software and firmware are running via POWER9's secure boot features. Don't trust us? Look at the secure boot sources yourself — and modify them as you wish. That's the power of Talos™ II.

That is fkin nice to be honest. There is so few which do this. totally already worth the price. (open source bios/boot procedures etc.). It's a total mess trying to get such a setup on a x86 server machine. i think there is a grand total of 1 server board which support coreboot (?)

<comment><USER3> I just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism

HTTPS://puri.sm

Coreboot based laptops...

<comment><USER4> The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs.

Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the info... what's a better/the best option?

Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?

<comment><USER5> The very best option right now (and dirty cheap, ~$200 new) is to get an Asus C201P / Flip Chromebook. It uses a Rockchip ARM CPU, and if you disable 3D acceleration (which is slow anyway) and use an external wireless antenna, you don't have any closed firmware in your computer. Not even CPU microcode firmware.

This is unique. Of course, it's a machine targeted by Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html](https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html)

I guess that if you install GuixSD, given all binary packages can be verified against the source, and there are some decent sandboxing facilities you can get pretty great security.

<comment><USER6> At the moment GuixSD doesn't yet work on ARM. Not much is missing and you can use Guix as a package manager on top of some other variant of the GNU system, but GuixSD on ARM is not quite ready yet. Give it a couple more weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for an 8- or 12-core processor).

Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is anyone selling POWER9 in retail quantities (preferably in Europe).

Another question that isn't answered on their page is the payment options. Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

I wonder how much power this system will consume on idle? I read IBM significantly improved the power management with POWER9, so here's hoping 8 cores of this won't take significantly more than the 110W idle of my 8-core Piledriver system.

<comment><USER8> > Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the > only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

Why would that be the only option? Never seen a shop accept credit cards only. I only have a debit card and have never had any problems.

<comment><USER9> I think this is a common misunderstanding. The US seems to use "credit card" to refer to all payment cards, but is rarely limit to just _credit_ cards.

I think the distinction between credit and debit cards is more commonly made in Europe.

<comment><USER7> I mostly mean that I don't have a card that can be used for payment over the usual networks like MasterCard (unless those "Maestro"-cards do work, which I doubt), Visa or AmEx …

<comment><USER10> IME Maestro cards generally don't work, but there are MasterCard debit cards that do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming desktop build and do a Talos II for the server.

<comment><USER12> No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked.

The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly.

Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine.

I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases

Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well.

basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though..

hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm

<comment><USER13> Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode.

That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.

<comment><USER14> In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time.

If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.

It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.

<comment><USER7> They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300. And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore, is almost half the price as then.

<comment><USER15> Yeah previously it was over $4,000 for the board and CPU, this is nearly half the price.

If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd gen.

<comment><USER16> Talos Model 3.

Oh wait, wrong company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems they're not all that interested in marketing to end users, despite the talos ii "bare-bones" kit available for pre-order on the site - I couldn't find any reviews of the previous talos I/power8 system online - i would assume they'd at the very least get someone like anadtech, ars or one of the many Linux journals to do some hands-on testing / free marketing?

I mean, if I had too much cash, I'd be tempted to get one, but I'd probably be even.more likely if I could see some blender rendering benchmarks and Linux kernel compile timings etc...

<comment><USER18> I don't think Talos I was ever released. They created a backlash last time by hyping an unavailable and unaffordable product so maybe the low-key approach is better.

<comment><USER7> There was a crowdfunding campaign, but it failed. This new product however can be directly preordered (and for much lower price: the board costs little more than half of what Talos 1 would have and the CPUs they are offering right now cost about a quarter of the _cheapest_ option back then)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Prices starting at $4,750 [sic]: [https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html](https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html)

<comment><USER20> That price does not include RAM or a GPU.

Even a bare bones motherboard costs more than $2,000.

I have no doubt this an awesome machine, but that price puts it outside my budget range. :(

<comment><USER21> That's par for the course for a workstation. Actually on the affordable end, which is surprising given that it's using POWER9 which I figured would be expensive (by virtue of not being x86).

<comment><USER20> It depends, I think.

Compared to the RISC based propietary Unix workstations of 20 years ago, the price is really good.

At work, our CAD people have machines that are in the € 1,000 - € 1,500 price range. Those machines are fairly big and powerful, at least compared to our regular desktop PCs.

It is possible to spend more money on a workstation, if one wants or needs to, and get a more powerful machine. Far more.

Depending on your use case, our CAD machines might be lightweights. But the amount of computing power you can get for € 1,000-1,500 these days is insane compared to the landscape 20 or even 10 years ago.

I am certain the Talos II offers good performance for its price. My point was that I would like to have a machine that comes without any opaque blobs or "management engine", but I am not going to spend that much money on it. I'd be happy go get such a machine in the € 500-1,000 price range at correspondingly lower performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Will it support FreeBSD? Of course it would run it, but I don't have time anymore to write my own device drivers.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is excellent, glad to see these guys trying again. They attempted a crowdfund of this project a year or two ago and didn't raise enough, which was a huge disappointment. Hope the second try is the charm.

</comment><comment><USER24> Despite the high cost (when compared to 'comparable' _x86_64_ hardware) I am very excited by this.

However I'm concerned by desktop Linux support and graphics driver support. It would be really miserable to get this kind of machine and then have a lacklustre desktop experience (though I'd be using it as a high-horsepower workstation, it would need to be able to dump computations onto the GPU and use ordinary free productivity software on the side).

<comment><USER7> Given that they're selling systems with AMD cards in them, I would imagine that AMDGPU/RadeonSI at least would very well.

<comment><USER25> They had a video of playing Unreal Tournament (the new one) on a Talos 1 with a AMD card.

As long as a card with Open Source driver support gets used it should work mostly fine. Back then they need a 4line patch to play ut4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks interesting, I didn't even know that you still could buy PowerPC she. Anyone know of pros and cons?

<comment><USER27> POWER was historically the architecture for "I don't care about efficiency, I just want a fast machine!". This hasn't really changed. For some applications they are still substantially faster than any x86 system, but they're almost always far less power efficient. That's why they're not widely adopted in data centres.

<comment><USER12> > That's why they're not widely adopted in data centres.

I don't think that's the entire picture..

If you're running systems at full capacity, throughput vs power consumption becomes a relevant equation - e.g. if the chip runs code 2x faster but is 1.5x less power efficient, I'm still saving .5 of power to get the same data processed.. Not sure of power consumption specifics for POWER, but they've been about to 4x faster than PC for some workloads.. E.g. 4GHz CPU + giant cache and 4x the registers will tear through matrices like a hot knife in butter... Also, there's the question of density vs performance - e.g. I only need X sq units of datacenter to process this dataset within the timewindow..

Also, historically the only people 'needing' power and willing to pay for it were companies with deeper pockets who wouldn't mind shelling out for AIX and the rest of the IBM stuff that goes along; linux is to some extent an 'afterthought'/'second tier' OS for this market though that has been changing in last few years. People using IBM or AIX have typically tended towards being risk averse and have been on POWER for ages; for everyone else, people haven't wanted to spend the money to migrate to a platform controlled by one company, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wish I could afford one.

</comment><comment><USER29> How would this compare to a ThreadRipper/EPYC system? Any advantages in favor of Talos?

<comment><USER6> Do you not consider the freedom aspects (e.g. sources to the secure boot implementation, no x86, etc) as advantages in favour of Talos?

<comment><USER29> That's definitely nice! Any other advantages?

<comment><USER30> The Power9 should be more performant than EPYC/ThreadRipper and CAPI gives you higher memory bandwidth to a GPU.

<comment><USER31> Are there any benchmarks that I can look at for this?

<comment><USER32> Here is a comparison of POWER8 vs Intel Xeon [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms- power8-pa...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms- power8-part-1/3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I seem to remember some similar board based on RISC, anyone know what I'm thinking of?

<comment><USER18> There have been some Freescale PowerPC boards in recent years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Only 4 core CPUs, a tad disappointing.

<comment><USER16> It is; the question is, can you put the 24-core chips from IBM in the same socket? For that matter, what on earth is the socket name for POWER9 (or POWER8)?

<comment><USER16> After some more looking around, talking to someone on reddit.com/r/openpower, and looking at the new site information; the thought is that these are 50 mm × 50 mm Sforza sockets and the 4-core CPUs are 12-cores with 8 cores disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _> Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this._

I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.

<comment><USER36> Why do you find it surprising? They cost money and provide little benefit (for me).

Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK most credit cards don't cost money.

Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of that.

<comment><USER36> They surely do cost money, but you pay it indirectly. Somebody first pays the fees and the card itself, and ultimately you are going to pay.

There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.

<comment><USER38> Either the merchant agreements forbid charging credit card fees, or it's just a norm that our businesses have adopted (over here we strongly believe in the advertised price being the actual price - we don't have tax-added-on- afterwards or mail-in rebates like in the US), but either way you very rarely get charged a fee directly. Some places will have a minimum spend to pay by credit card, and low-end shops won't accept Amex because their fees are higher, but for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash.

<comment><USER36> > for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're > paying cash.

That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.

<comment><USER38> Remember cash isn't free either - armoured cars and the like cost money, I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees.

I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.

<comment><USER35> >I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees.

This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I won't get anywhere near it considering what happened to the first Talos [http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I](http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I)

</comment><comment><USER40> To set on PCI-E 4.0 is a mistake. PCI-E 5.0 is right around the corner. It might be backward compatible, but if you buy it for that it would be better to wait.

<comment><USER41> ETA for PCI-E 5.0 in consumer equipment is 2020 or 2021. That's actually fairly quick considering that PCIE 4.0 is just starting to trickle out, but I wouldn't call that "right around the corner". I do expect many providers to skip PCI-E 4.0. OTOH the delta from 4 to 5 is a lot smaller than the delta from 3 to 4, so running PCI-E 4 is also a good mechanism for getting a head start on 5.</comment></comment>