Microsoft Japan's 3-day weekend boosts worker productivity - <AUTHOR> https://soranews24.com/2019/11/03/microsoft-japans-experiment-with-3-day-weekend-boosts-worker-productivity-by-40-percent/ <comment><USER2> The 5-day workweek was implemented what, 100 years ago?

Are we to believe that a 100 year old bizops practice is the optimal solution?

I honestly think that the main reason it's (nearly) impossible to implement something new, is because the old practice and mentality is so ingrained and etched in management, they'll feel cheated if the need to pay the same for less days (even though hours may be the same).

They'd rather have people around for as long as possible, doing 70%, than having them less but delivering 90%. The same type of management that values facetime and butts in seats over nearly anything else.

<comment><USER3> The whole arrangement is about control, preventing workers from having the time or energy to build competing enterprises, develop skills beyond a certain level, or organize against their employers. It's the same reason why most big corps oppose a national healthcare system in the US: it keeps people locked in to their current positions and has the knock-on effect of putting downward pressure on wages and turnover expenses.

<comment><USER4> > It's the same reason why most big corps oppose a national healthcare system > in the US: it keeps people locked in to their current positions

Ok, then why isn't EU a Mecca of enterprise and innovation? Seems like EU is largely technologically stagnant compared to the US despite tons of safety nets at every level.

<comment><USER2> There are many reasons, IMO.

1\. The US has almost 330 million people; Europe has 740 million - but we're spread over so many different countries / policies / cultures etc. Hell, eastern Europe was locked out up until 30 years ago, and didn't stat to see industrial prosperity until 20 years ago.

2\. USA had a massive advantage after WW2, while Europe was still in shambles. The rebuilding of Europe wasn't really completed until the 50s and 60s, at a time when the US experienced its golden age of industrial development.

3\. More rich people and more investors compared to Europe, from earlier on, coupled with excellent schools that could produce and feed talent into the industry.

Sure, we here in Europe have had excellent schools, but nowhere near the financial backings. In many countries, financial backing of tech and companies have been a gov / state affair, which in turn can be extremely limited compared to private investors.

etc.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's just amazing how people completely forget that whole "bombed literally to bits in WWII" thing. Most Americans have no clue how long rationing lasted in the UK after WWII, and yet you guys managed to implement the NHS. Meanwhile, at the same time, the fabulously prospering USA has never managed to do anything to take care of this basic need of citizens, yet keeps calling itself "superior".

<comment><USER6> The United States was once a 3rd world country that lost 10% of its population in the American Civil War. Within 5 decades of that, it produced 50% of the worlds manufacturing output.

Needless to say, Europe was it its peak at the time, and has only declined since.

Excuses are easy to come by - root causes are more useful to examine.

<comment><USER7> The US was the second country to industrialize (Britain was first; France third) and that industrialization had been going very strong for many decades before the start of the American Civil War. Also life expectancy, infant mortality, adult height and similar measures were better in the American colonies than in the most advance Western European countries a century (and probably a century and a half) before the start of the Civil War. So I don't agree that it was a 3rd-world country at the start of the Civil War.

(I have no opinion on grandparent; I am reacting only to your choice of the term "3rd-world country".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This year I was forced to change to a 3 day work schedule (4 day weekend), by some recent boneheaded changes in Italian tax law for self-employed workers: if I were to make more before tax, I would make less after tax. That means that the average tax rate has a discontinuity and the marginal tax rate diverges at one point.

Even if this change was to be reversed by the new government I don't think I would go back to working full time: not only I'm less stressed and more productive (per hour worked), but a more interesting change is that you stop defining yourself by your profession. You are not a programmer, you code to pay the rent and are all the other things you do in the four days you have left.

(I'm using a throwaway, because it doesn't take long to figure out what the limit income is and derive roughly how much I make per hour)

<comment><USER9> This is exactly how many conservative Americans think our tax system works (it doesn't work like that at all). Republican politicians and their henchmen like Rush Limbaugh played that up for years during the 90s to help keep the anti- government anger stoked. Whenever they were called on it they hedged back to some weak argument about having to work twice as hard for each marginal dollar being a disincentive.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand the downvotes. I have friends who have turned down more work/pay because of it pushing them to the next tax bracket. They think that that would _lower_ their overall take home. They seem to not understand that it is a marginal rate. If they felt that the effort vs reward was not valuable, that makes sense. But they think they will actually lose money. Maybe I'm the one missing something.

<comment><USER2> No, it's a completely widespread tactic and misinformation (how tax brackets work), not only in the US, but elsewhere too.

I'm in Norway, and have heard the exact same things. People that turn down extra work, because they're certain that the said OT pay is getting bumped into the next tax bracket, and they'll net LESS than if they had not worked at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I definitely want to believe, but they implemented this for one month. So literally four days off, and declared success? Couldn't many of those measurements be just standard deviations? Curious how productivity gain was measured and whether or not this is just a honeymoon period and at some point it settles back to baseline..

<comment><USER12> There's also the issue that Japan is quite notorious for a work culture that prohibits people from leaving to early and staying at office for a long time sometimes doing very little work. So the opportunity to increase productivity (or just not getting less work done) is probably bigger because there's a lot of slack to cut out.

In Germany we have a very different culture. You come at eight or nine and leave at four or five, you have your break but otherwise you're basically supposed to work. I have a hard time believing that cutting an entire day out is going to increase productivity a lot.

<comment><USER13> A german company did a similar experiment with positive results: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-5-hour-workday-gets-put- to-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-5-hour-workday-gets-put-to-the- test-11571876563)

<comment><USER14> Note that they explicitly did it with the intention of clamping down on informal breaks, socialising and other "distractions". The founder heavily suggested he decided on this solution because he wanted to cut down on on-the- clock use of Facebook, private conversations, etc. They basically enforce a rather strict work focus during those 5 hours and justify it by offloading that overhead into leisure time. Also the 5 hour cut-off is socially enforced with a strict "countdown".

Our company is in the same region of Germany and we independently started experimenting with our work time but our focus was employee well-being via stress reduction and encouraging our employees to use the extra free time for self-care.

We ended up with a flexible 25-40 hour work week (or similar 60-ish % adjusted for non-40 hour positions). The goal is to keep each employee's work hours as close to 25 as possible but allow for "overtime" (up to the full 40 hours) if necessary. If we notice employees are working "overtime" over a longer period of time, we rebalance the work load or adjust timelines as possible to get them back to 25.

Despite the reduction of work hours by 30-40% the effective work output only shrunk by 10-20%. But the real benefits are social.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.

I'll gladly switch to any job that offers a 4 day work week. It's one of the best perks.

As someone with ADHD, work days are entirely spent getting work done. There isn't any extra slack or allotment for personal tasks. They're 100% owned by the employer.

Weekends offer barely enough time to catch up with chores. There isn't enough time both to catch up and still have fun. I use vacation time to catch up on chores, so that's spent too.

I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone.

I don't care if it's a 10hr/4day schedule or a 9hr/4day 8hr/4day with less pay, I want an extra day for myself. I'm an excellent engineer aside from my ADHD quirks, and I'll go anywhere that offers this where I live.

My own startup (I almost have the capital for a long runway) will be 9hr/4day.

Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.

<comment><USER16> As someone with ADD (essentially ADHD with only the "attention deficit" bit, no hyperactivity) I recognise the feeling. I'm lucky to be in a position where I can work 4 days a week, but I'd still barely have energy left for fun activities.

I've now been on methylphenidate (also known as ritalin) for about a month and _good god_ that has made a difference for me. When I get home I can get right into hobby projects or chores instead of just deflating on the couch until bedtime.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, have you tried looking into medication? I know a lot of people are vehemently against medicating ADHD issues, I was pretty much one of them. The thing is you can totally try it out and if it doesn't work for you or has side-effects you'd rather not deal with you can stop easily enough.

I've heard plenty of ritalin horror stories, but a lot of those start making sense once you read the list of side effects. You need to be somewhat lucky to not be too affected by them. If you are there's other medication that can be tried.

I guess my point in a nutshell is don't suffer if you don't have to. I've spent 25 years suffering with my inability to choose what to focus on, and a simple pill has let me trade that for cold hands and a restless leg. I'd take that deal any day. Speak to your GP and ask what your options are. Worst case you're no worse off than you are now.

<comment><USER17> Is it a long-acting medication? Doctors seem to diagnose me with anxiety/depression or ADD/ADHD. The antidepressants don't help. Does the ritalin "work" all day, or do you have to redose it?

<comment><USER16> I'm currently on 15mg in the morning and then 15mg after lunch. It doesn't _quite_ last all the way to lunch or all the way to the end of the day but it's already such a massive improvement that I really don't mind too much. I'm lucky to not get much if any "rebound" when it stops working, so I can just keep going at my old pace even when it does wear off.

There do exist long-acting versions and I might try those in the future, but for now this is already pretty damn amazing.

> anxiety/depression

As far as I know those are commonly comorbid with ADD/ADHD. I'd get pretty anxious and stressed by having the feeling of not working hard enough while simultaneously being unable to work harder in any case. You'll definitely want to talk to your doctor. Mention that you might like to see if medicating the ADD/ADHD helps with your symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My employer, a F500 non FAANG company, has been doing something similar for a long time. During the summer they have what they call summer hours. It's usually from June through August. Friday's are mostly off. That is if your work is complete then you can leave early. We have a large remote workforce so I assume quite a few of those remote workers don't work at all on Fridays. It is a nice perk and I do hope it continues. It does not seem to impact our ability to hit our targets in any negative way. No idea if they ran any numbers to see if it impacted them positively, but we all like it and we have been hitting our numbers for the most part across the company.

<comment><USER19> > "if your work is complete then you can leave early"

What happens if your work is complete before Friday during non-Summer hours?

<comment><USER20> I don't think I've ever worked somewhere where I could exhaust the work items. There's always vastly more work to be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In a country like Japan, anything you do to improve work-life balance(also the way its looked at) is going to add to productivity.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Due to its success this year, Microsoft is planning on repeating it again > next summer or perhaps at other times as well.

If the results were truly as remarkable as the article is making them out to be, why not implement it all year?

<comment><USER23> We've done this the last few years at my company, so that we have every other Friday during the summer off, staggered for coverage.

It's nice. Nobody ever does anything on Friday anyway, and a three-day weekend lets you actually go somewhere or get a project done. Moreover, when you have a weekday off regularly, you can actually go to the post office or the bank or all the other places that are only open when working people are working and can't go.

<comment><USER24> The most people get used to it, the more I would expect "Thursday" to become the new Friday and you should expect to quickly end up losing the benefit of that additional day off as laziness takes over.

<comment><USER25> My company implements an optional every other Friday off. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday hasn't really become the new Friday. In fact, the people who choose to work the full 5 days tend to get more work done on Fridays, since fewer people are around to interrupt them. The people who take those Fridays off are generally happier and still pretty productive on Thursdays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Posts like this remind me why I really enjoy working for myself.

You have the option of being able to decouple your hours worked from your accomplishments. You get to choose whether or not you take the day off because you crushed it yesterday, or you can continue grinding it out hardcore for months just so you can take a few extended breaks in the near future.

You are in control of the dial that dictates when you work.

</comment><comment><USER27> How do you implement such amazing perk for customer support team in a bootstrap startup where cash and people is a limited resource, but your customers need support at least during the office hours? I guess I should not dream about it now , as such experiments work only for companies with a lot of money or departments which do not need their work to be done in a specific time during a day?

<comment><USER28> In any support organization I've worked in (including software teams with support responsibilities, software teams with escalation responsibilities, etc.), a given customer question doesn't necessarily get a good answer on the same day. The SME might be out sick, there might be an incident distracting everyone, the problem might be genuinely hard and require research/experimentation, etc. Even if you have a 24h SLA it's usually 24h to a response saying "We're looking into it but check out the FAQ", not to a resolution. And this gets _more_ likely the _smaller_ your team is.

So invest in better FAQs and diagnosis tools and in procedures to reduce incidents, instead of trying to throw more bodies at the problem, because you don't have more bodies. Customers will be happier about getting actual answers sooner than they otherwise would.

This isn't a perk, any more than weekends or healthcare or market compensation is a "perk." It's an investment in getting better results for your business and for your customers, through making sure you have healthy and productive employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It looks like this was a sales department. The metric of productivity was sales per employee according to the tweeted image and the Nikkei article.

The sources also mention better use of meeting time via an increase in shorter meetings and teleconferences.

</comment><comment><USER30> Entirely anecdotal, but my personal experience confirms this. I switched to 4-day weeks nearly four years ago and it feels very beneficial. Claiming I get the same amount of work done in less time would be an overstatement, but I'm definitely more productive in the four days when I'm working. Can't remember the last time I suffered any work-related stress and my motivations for taking time off are almost purely external now (spending time with friends and family), never the feeling of needing a break.

</comment><comment><USER31> My favorite version of this is the M-H then T-F weeks. That way you get a 4 day weekend every two weeks and the office has 5 day a week coverage if you put people on alternating weeks.

<comment><USER32> As parent replied that H stands for Thursday, I should add to that three-shift staggering pattern would be more useful: mo-th, we-sa, fr-tu

<comment><USER31> Why would I want to work the weekend?

<comment><USER32> This results in an overall 7-days-a-week schedule, with a desirable property: two shifts working at a time on weekdays and one shift at a time working on weekends. Fr-Tu was intended to be Fr,Su-Tu.

<comment><USER31> I can work M-H, have a 4 day weekend, work T-F, have a 2 day weekend, and repeat. I am not sure how I would do that with your schedule. Plus, I don't want to work weekends.

<comment><USER32>
       mo-th twice, then 6 days off
       we-sa twice, then 5 days off
       fr-tu once, then 6 days off

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A single month trial says nothing. A rational employee would surely work a lot during this trial period, because if the experiment is successful, they get a lot more free time in the future.

Nobody works at 100% productivity all the time, but if it only about a month with a big incentive, they can tap into their reserves and improve productivity for the prospect of more free time.

Social experiments are very difficult because the observed subjects know about the experiment.

<comment><USER34> +1 (BTW I'm not implying the 4-day week doesn't work)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" \- John Maynard Keynes

</comment><comment><USER36> Interviewed at Dolby Labs once. They told me depending on your start date, you get every other Friday off. Someone else may start on a different cycle so they have the opposite Friday off from you. They said Fridays are pretty much a day with no meetings and time to finish projects or tasks. If the following Monday of your Friday off is a holiday, you essentially get a four day weekend.

</comment><comment><USER37> One month is not enough to check whether this works. Furthermore it's important to check for the Hawthorn Effect.

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

</comment><comment><USER38> Japan's work culture is crazy. Everyone works too many hours and is NOT productive. It seems like the easiest problem in the world to solve for them, give people back some time in their day, enjoy life more, and get more productivity.

That said, Keynes predicted we'd have a 20 hour work week by now in the US, and when exactly does that happen.

<comment><USER39> To be fair, if you wanted the standard of living of the 1930s you can achieve that with 20 hours/week of minimum wage. Average income was around $8-9k at that time.

<comment><USER40> True if you add that you won't likely be able to live in certain cities or expensive towns. But that leaves most of the country. There are some really beautiful places you can live that are not expensive.

Check out the Appalachians if you like to live in a misty postcard, and the stereotypes are largely false. Your neighbors are more likely to be artists or organic farmers than the characters from Deliverance. (I used to live in Asheville which is moderately expensive but you don't have to go far from town and it gets cheap.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Meanwhile, at my company, our HR has decided to cut sick leave to the CA state mandated 3 days minimum.

So now we have people coughing their heads off at work and spreading flu everywhere. How efficient can you be I wonder when you are sick? Yet people seem to take pride in the fact that they are still working while battling an illness.

I'm honestly surprised they tried this in Japan which has a super rigid work structure.

</comment><comment><USER42> I would also like to add that whilst this may (or may not) work for companies such as Microsoft, rolling out something like this nationwide is still a bad idea. There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay.

That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably. I much prefer the idea of having a job to support my lifestyle and hobbies, rather than my life being by job. I've always liked the idea of having a day-ff mid- week, we used to do this as school children and it made the week a less of a drag (you were always looking forward to the "weekend" being at most one more day away).

<comment><USER43> > There are many roles where this will have little effect on productivity, > likely less office-based roles. Another reason not to roll this out > nationwide is simply that lower paid roles may also see even lower pay.

What kind of roles are you talking about? The food service workers gotta keep flipping burgers all week while you eat out on your midweek weekend? You sure that won't affect productivity/caring-about-health-code-standards? As somebody who has seen the actions of disgruntled line-cooks behind the scenes, I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively content worker -- even for selfish reasons.

> That said, given the opportunity, I believe I would much prefer to work four > days a week if the pay was adequate to support myself comfortably.

Of course you would, you're a human.

<comment><USER42> > I'd pay extra to have my food prepared by a relatively

> content worker -- even for selfish reasons.

Of course, but where productivity doesn't increase significantly from having additional time spent not working, there will simply be less work done - i.e. people will be paid less. I don't know whether your burger flipper will be more disgruntled from working more hours a week or getting paid less and working less.

I highly suspect that such trade-offs are privileges of those who get paid more, hence have enough excess income that they can take a day off without significant detriment or their companies are in a position to swallow those costs. And it's not even that simple in the second case, one of my old employers made several billion dollars profit every year, but were still making engineers redundant in order to reduce engineering costs and increase investor gains. Microsoft seems to be in a position where they can just swallow such costs and not worry investors, even if productivity didn't increase significantly. Even it's ability to do such experiments is owing to it's size.

> Of course you would, you're a human.

It's not quite that simple - I personally have life-long goals that I would like to work more on. After speaking to people from a wide walk of life, I don't believe everybody has such passions for their side projects, or their goals simply benefit from more cash (i.e. holidays, family, expenses, etc). For some people their work is their goal.

I'm also willing to take a 1/5th cut, as long as I can still make the rent. Not everybody would be willing to say that, especially if you find yourself closer to the breadline.

The audience here on HN is likely to be middle class and above... My point is that before protesting nationwide for a day to be cut from the working week, we should also consider our lesser paid equals. Everybody's case and reasoning will be different.

<comment><USER43> > Of course, but where productivity doesn't increase significantly from having > additional time spent not working, there will simply be less work done

I don't believe that productivity in the service industry doesn't significantly decrease with number of hours worked. I get that with some work you end up mulling over it while you're away and coming up with a solution to a problem in a way that doesn't apply _nearly_ as often for a kitchen environment, but I've seen workers who felt they weren't getting enough time off show up drunk, take 45 minute breaks without clearing it with management, not bother with proper food handling procedures (e.g. putting meat products in ice and water before throwing them in the walk-in so that time spent between holding temperatures would be minimised and bacteria wouldn't grow in the meat we served to customers), etc. Even as somebody who tried to stay on the ball, I would be slipping up and making dumb mistakes at the end of a 14 hour shift in a hot kitchen without enough time for adequate hydration. Work two of those in a row and I doubt you'll be at peak efficiency, either. When I worked in food service workers tended to be asking for less hours, not more. We'd bribe each other to take shifts. That doesn't mean we didn't want more pay, it's just that the bottom feeders of society also value their free time. Being paid less means that each hour you sell you get _less_ for. Selling your reading time for $8.50 an hour feels way worse than selling it for $50.00 an hour; at $50.00 you feel like you're building towards something, at $8.50 you feel like you're pissing away your life for practically nothing.

> It's not quite that simple - I personally have life-long goals that I would > like to work more on. After speaking to people from a wide walk of life, I > don't believe everybody has such passions for their side projects, or their > goals simply benefit from more cash (i.e. holidays, family, expenses, etc). > For some people their work is their goal.

I get what you're saying here. My point with the "you're human" line was that you were making an argument about the service industry employees based on how we as a society could most efficiently capture their labor value, and then stating your own desires for work-life-balance in more human terms.

<comment><USER42> A 14 hour shift is quite significant for anybody, I just came off a solid 20+ hour shift myself (long story - code needed to be pushed out for a deadline). I can certainly appreciate all the points raised.

I still don't think that we can blanket say: "less time worked is beneficial to all the people". I think people need the ability to choose based on their goals and situation (and not be forced into a decision).

This certainly gets quite complicated quite quickly. In the UK for example, we've had zero hour contracts and apprenticeships for quite some time. In some cases they've allowed people greater flexibility around their personal situation and in others they have been used as a tool to pay people below minimum wage.

> [..] we as a society could most efficiently capture their

> labor value, and then stating your own desires for

> work-life-balance in more human terms.

Sure. But this work-life balance is also reflective of a realistic input into society. If given the choice, I would accept full pay and work zero days (and some have chosen this life-style with a social support systems). As a society and a company we need to maximize productivity per hour - and part of that equation could be less hours worked, but it could also not be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is not the first experiment of its kind. Here is a New Zealand firm, trusts manager, experimented with 4-day workweek with very satisfactory results

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day- workw...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workweek-new- zealand.html)

Here is an article about how working less is a solution to just about everything

[https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just- about...](https://thecorrespondent.com/4373/the-solution-to-just-about- everything-working-less/168119985-db3d3c10)

I personally have been working 4 days a week or less for more than a decade already. Loving it. Does it improve my productivity? Why the heck should I care! It improves my life.

<comment><USER45> Are you self employed or is this something you have been able to negotiate with your employers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> There are a lot of comments here that are espousing the value of getting more time to do the work - this is fine. Some businesses need to be open 5 days a week.

However, if your work does not really require you to be in the office, then I see no issue with people working even two days from home.

What I feel is that in order to get to the office, a lot of work needs to be done before you can get there, and it is an expense (in terms of time as well as money) that the employee bears.

I think we need to realize that we are in the 21st century, and that most things can be resolved by video-conferencing and email. We have so many tools for remote communication, and they are really very good.

It is high time, we took full advantage of them, and give people less stress in their lives, and more time to spend with their families and developing themselves.

</comment><comment><USER47> In the Middle East and Southeast Asia even a 2-day weekend is rare!

People CHOOSE to work ALL week, only closing for a few hours just for Friday prayers because of social norms.

Expat workers in the Middle East get only a couple consecutive weeks off per year to go visit their families.

In developed societies, I think even keeping it a 2-day weekend and allowing employees to have at least one day of their choice to work from home would be great.

<comment><USER48> work from home is very industry/role dependent, IT can easily work from home but the same can't be said for Hardware Ops or finance, who often rely on paper even in "modern" companies.

if there's going to be a "new default" I think the 3 day weekend makes the most sense, or a Wednesday off scheme where you work 2 sets of 2 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I work for a non-FAANG Fortune 100 company that just implemented a 4/10 schedule after being 9/80 for a number of years. These are the perfect kinds of symbiotic moves where everyone benefits - employees get more time for their lives, employers save operating costs, and the environment saves a day of commuting from thousands of people.

<comment><USER50> Can you elaborate on what 4/10 and 9/80 means?

<comment><USER51> Work 10 hours a day M-Thu but get Friday off, or get every other Friday off, respectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> A reminder that most scientific studies that report sensational results enough to "go viral" are wrong.

And this doesn't even claim to be scientific, AFAICT.

But it _does_ report that we don't have to make hard choices. We can pay less and get more. You can see why this message travels fast.

</comment><comment><USER53> I work alone in Japan for my own company but boy people work too much I think. Some people reply to my message after midnight and that is someone who is employed and not someone running a company.

And some other people message me on Saturday morning and again, that is an employee but the good part is that for the people I know, they don't look unhappy or maybe they're just used to that work hours... I don't think I'll want to work like that if I'm an employee.

When I was an employee for the one year in my entire life, I asked for overtime (I was the only person getting it in a company of about a dozen people) and usually worked 9-10 hours for 5 days.

</comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone know whether this is 40% daily or weekly productivity? If it's daily, that's only a 12% weekly boost (still good! but less breathtaking). If it's weekly, that's an amazing 75% daily boost!

</comment><comment><USER55> This is a bold statement. I don't think I can get more things done when I take one more day off. Can you?

They don't show how they measured their productivity exactly. I also don't think a month trial is good enough to derive the conclusion. Furthermore, there is a chance that other variables affected the result. It's difficult to come to the conclusion through this kind of uncontrollable experiment where you cannot control the variables and constants.

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder how many hours per day these people are working. With Japanese corporate culture a 4 day workweek could still easily be 50+ hours.

</comment><comment><USER57> apparently from comments below this was a sales metric and had nothing to do with software engineering. However many colleagues have so much vacation time built up that if they don't take one three day weekend a month they stop accruing vacation

</comment><comment><USER58> The 23 percent change in electricity use could largely be explained by the 20 percent reduction in the time people were in the office.

</comment><comment><USER59> Would you still get a productivity boost, when the workers spent the weekend working on their open source projects?

</comment><comment><USER60> This is great, why not move to 4 or 5 day weekends?

</comment><comment><USER61> I honestly wonder what most people would do with the extra time? Side projects? Hobbies? Family?

<comment> david-gpu I've worked 4-days/week for a year and on Fridays I do the same sort of things as Saturday and Sunday.

Initially I thought it would be a special "hobby day" but the reality of being a parent took over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> finally..they get a break.

</comment><comment><USER24> How is productivity measured by Microsoft in Japan where they have huge market dominance and therefore could actually fire most most of their workforce and still generate as much business, resulting in gazillions % of productivity improvement?

</comment><comment><USER63> Go ahead: implement a four day work week. I'll keep working five or six days per week like I do now, and consequently, I'll look more productive and impactful compared to the do-as-you're-told types. You can't actually stop people in a creative profession from working, and tech generally evaluates people on their impact. What do you think will happen?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is good to be a hard worker. It is also good to spend time on activities that help us achieve our own goals, instead of the goals of an organization.

That's great that you're proud of how much you work. Along with their work, some other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, etc.

<comment><USER63> > other people are proud of their parenting, their hobbies, their friendships, > etc.

People can choose to work more or less. But if someone chooses to work less, he forfeits the right to complain about being paid less and being promoted slower compared to people who work more.

The proposed four day work week would _increase_ this disparity between hard workers and "default workers" who work as much as they're told to work, then do other things, some of which you just mentioned. Many people already find vaguely unjust, though it isn't.

<comment><USER64> Consider that work-hours are not necessarily the only measure of productivity. If i work 100% and do it in 4 days and you work 100% and do it in 6 days, you're the loser in this scenario.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding Aesthetics with Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/understanding-aesthetics-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> Jurgen Schmidhuber has an interesting perspective on the rewarding aspects of art and music.

To paraphrase, "Artists (and observers of art) get rewarded for making (and observing) novel patterns: data that is neither arbitrary (like incompressible random white noise) nor regular in an already known way, but regular in way that is new with respect to the observer's current knowledge, yet learnable (that is, after learning fewer computational resources are needed to encode the data)".

In other words, enjoyment of art is about learning (easy) patterns. Schmidhuber likens "fun" to the improvement of an observer's ability to compress a scene.

The source is worth the read: [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much our sense of aesthetics has to do with the perceived scarcity or effort of creation needed. I remember the first HDR photos looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, but now, as the process has been automated and is ubiquitous, it just looks tacky.

<comment><USER4> read adorno

<comment><USER5> Have you read him? If so, why not synthesize his arguments so we can all understand?

<comment><USER6> Here goes: Aesthetic Theory is a posthumous book by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and is one of the most important works on aesthetics in 20th century philosophy. In it, he combines elements from Kant, Hegel and Marx. From Kant's 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, he draws on the idea of the Sublime and the notion that art has formal autonomy (which Adorno modifies). From Hegel, he takes a dialectical understanding of the ultimate goal or aim of art, and from Marx he approaches art as being inseparable from society as a whole.

He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx).

Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre- categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability.

edit: links.... [http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic- theo...](http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theory) [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4) [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant- aesthetics/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/)

<comment><USER7> Author here. Just to clarify, motive of this work is to ease curation, with the massive amount of content being created; but by no means an attempt at creativity or originality.

The work is not at all contradictory to Adorno, especially in the sense that it is explicitly trying to as non-reductionist as possible, and assuming notion of aesthetics is a dynamic entity .

There is a finite pattern in the dataset; more interesting, it has its interesting share of subtleties ( for example, as opposed to a image classification problems), and the technological question is whether we can capture these.

But there is another interesting data question. For our work, we curated our training set with the help of expert curators. But the dataset itself is a metamorphising entity; i.e. it is subject to revision ( it is a continuous process for us at the moment), but more interestingly it is a chance for open debate between our curators. In some sense, technology allow to codify and challenge our notion of aesthetics ( especially with the evolution in our training sets) at a given point of time.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the followup. I enjoyed reading the article and it is a very interesting project and a great effort. I did read at the end that it was about how to amplify the efforts of the human curators -- a great problem to tackle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A better title would have been "Using ML to rank and classify images according to aesthetics." Which in itself is quite impressive. But nowhere do we see indications that these algorithms "understand" the images, in any meaningful sense.

<comment><USER7> The author here. I used the term "understanding", not as in machines understanding the images, but more as scientific attempt in understanding aesthetics. ( <snippet from the text>"empowering me to develop systems for understanding images from a computational and scientific perspective"</snippet ends> ).

<comment><USER8> Fair enough -- thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aesthetics is a game of cat and mouse. Artists create some new things. Then critics and theorists observe the patterns of composition, color, proportion, etc., that are popular. These rules are canonized in books. Then artists challenge the rules.

The comparisons to music theory in this thread are apt. Music theory is always behind music production.

How can you understand aesthetics without understanding creativity?

</comment><comment><USER9> I believe that there are factors that go beyond visible composition. Just a though experiment, I imagine that the brain would evaluate easthetics of two similar images differently depending on whether it is an image of an object it recognizes or not - when evaluating the image with an object other qualities of the object (that are not necessarily visible in the image) will be taken into account.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, exactly. No good critic of photography thinks that subject matter is irrelevant, that you can understand pictures as if they were abstract compositions of light and color. You'd might as well try to read a poem in an unknown language. This algorithm might learn to identify certain cliches, but it'll never learn what makes a picture powerful.

<comment><USER11> You have to wonder, though. Is it impossible that there's a "music theory" for images/paintings/art that explains the mechanics of what makes them more compelling vs less compelling? I suspect there is, at least to some degree.

Obviously images convey much more information than music, so any theory that doesn't encompass the semantics of the subject will miss most of the signal. But is there a theory for the presentation and composition of the subject? To some degree, I'm confident there is.

Some of the methods used to debug the deep learning of images already do a fair job of showing the locus of focus in the image where the DNN found maximum information. I can see such a technique discovering many of the techniques used by artists and photographers to direct the observer's eye or juxtapose objects that conflict.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it's not quite analogous to music theory, but what you're describing in the first paragraph would be referred to as the formal elements of art or simply the elements of art.

Analysis of these elements (form, line, space, color, and texture) is usually a part of the sort of art criticism you'd find in academic studio art, art history, or even just the New York Times art section.

The visual design field has a similar, extended set of elements for describing the formal elements of a design piece.

In both art and design, works are usually considered effective if they use the formal elements of art/design to support what you refer to as the semantics of the subject. That's a broad generalization, but you see it in practice a lot, so it seems like a fair thing to say.

Academic art history is starting to feel the influence of machine learning and computer vision precisely because computers can be trained to recognize the formal elements of art and associate their use with movements and historical periods. There are way more detailed articles than this one, but this will get you started if you're interested in this sort of thing:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537366/the-machine- vision...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537366/the-machine-vision- algorithm-beating-art-historians-at-their-own-game/)

<comment><USER13> I heard the term Gestalt Laws, from a German loan word, used to describe this. I don't the relation of this to your notion.

[http://www.dict.cc/?s=gestalt](http://www.dict.cc/?s=gestalt)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think computers would be able to understand aesthetics. It is a really high-level concept. Plus, I think deep-learning is a marketing mambo-jambo and does not perform much better than a linear SVM.

<comment><USER15> Then why are we using deep convolutional networks for state of the art vision and speech when we could just plug an SVM with handcrafted features? From what I know, error rates in vision dropped from 25% to less than 5% since deep learning. That's no trifle, especially at the higher end of the accuracy scale. It's very hard to conquer those last few percents.</comment></comment>


Collapse OS Web Emulators - <AUTHOR> https://schierlm.github.io/CollapseOS-Web-Emulator/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a super-fan of Collapse OS, and just found this site with a bunch of different Collapse OS with various configurations based on a JavaScript port of the Z80!</comment>


Dotfiles Management with GNU Stow - <AUTHOR> https://fbrs.io/dotfiles_management_with_gnu_stow <comment><USER2> See also: vcsh - Version Control System for $HOME - multiple Git repositories in $HOME

* [https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh](https://github.com/RichiH/vcsh)

* [https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=vcsh](https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=vcsh)</comment>


Free (maybe) app for testing - <AUTHOR> http://easytext.shaydesdsgn.com/ Stumbled along this nifty looking site. No idea what it's for though... <comment><AUTHOR> I signed up and got sent out a code to download the app from the app store.

</comment><comment><USER2> yea i gave this a go as well</comment>


The RadioInstigator: A $150 Signals Intelligence Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.rtl-sdr.com/the-radioinstigator-a-150-signals-intelligence-platform-consisting-of-a-raspberry-pi-rpitx-2-4-ghz-crazyradio-and-an-rtl-sdr/ <comment><USER2> Wait, an antenna connected to the GPIO pin on a RaspberryPi for transmissions? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Pi output square waves, that would cause harmonics if transmitted?

<comment><USER3> There was an old RPi project released a while ago (PiRadio I think?) which simply involved attaching a jump lead to GPIO pin 4 which allowed the transmission of FM radio signals.

It worked on the principal that the Pi had a stupidly powerful clock and thus could be used as a transmitter.

I did a little experiment where I hooked it up to a yagi antenna and asked my dad to set his cars radio to the frequency I set the software to transmit on and drive around the block to test the distance.

Not only did it work well but I think I heard someone listening to the radio in their home near mine open their front door and yell out "who ever is doing that could you please stop it!" as it was interfering/jamming what they were listening to.

I'm definitely checking this project out though, thanks for posting.

<comment><USER4> "There was an old RPi project..."

Is this it?

[http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry...](http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter)

<comment><USER3> That link looks very familiar but I remember getting the idea from this article first:

[https://makezine.com/projects/raspberry-pirate- radio/](https://makezine.com/projects/raspberry-pirate-radio/)

Using this disk image for the RPi:

[http://cdn.makezine.com/make/pifm/PiRadio.zip](http://cdn.makezine.com/make/pifm/PiRadio.zip)

(good times)

EDIT: That link was definitely part of what I was researching at the time (as it is linked in the project article I posted and I remember reading about the limitations regarding stereo output, as well as the line "Most radio receivers want a signal to be an odd multiple of 0.1 MHz to work properly").</comment></comment></comment></comment>


California breaks 50% solar – electricity pricing negative - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/04/07/solar-power-breaks-50-of-california-demand-for-first-time-driving-negative-wholesale-electricity-rates/ <comment><USER2> That will cause an immediate surge of investment into all kinds of storage systems.

<comment><USER3> Years ago I read paper describing a project to develop a process for electrowinning iron and sulfuric acid from sulfide ores. It was sort of economic in Norway because of cheap electricity an because iron sulfide was a waste product. It's not economic because of the cost of electricity. But if solar starts regularly producing $0.0 MWhr electricity it probably would be economic to run intermittently.

Found Source:

[http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%...](http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%20publ.pdf)

tl;dr: If solar creates periodic conditions where the marginal cost of electricity drops to zero that opens up market opportunities that didn't exist before.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Women Tell of VC's Unwanted Advances - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/silicon-valley-women-tell-of-vcs-unwanted-advances <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: The Information says that 6 women have come forward to report unwanted sexual advances from Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. Three of the women have allowed themselves to be identified: Niniane Wang, CTO of Minted, and Susan Ho and Leiti Hsu, co-founders of Journy.

Binary Capital's response avoids the issue:

> Binary said that while The Information had "found a few examples which show > that Justin has in the past occasionally dated or flirted with women he met > in a professional capacity, let's be clear: there is no evidence that Justin > did anything illegal and there is no evidence that any of his investing > decisions were affected by his social interests."

I'm not associated with The Information (besides being a happy paid customer), but this link will give you full access to the article if you input your email:

[http://go.theinformation.com/8b274ad670eebd07](http://go.theinformation.com/8b274ad670eebd07)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like a shame piece for this fellow Justin Caldbeck. Was he given a chance to respond and is that in the article?

<comment><USER3> From TFA: > In a statement, Mr. Caldbeck said, "I strongly deny The Information's attacks on my character. The fact is, I have always enjoyed respectful relationships with female founders, business partners, and investors."

So yes he was requested to respond and did.

<comment><USER4> actually it now says:

"UPDATE: Through a spokesman, Mr. Caldbeck issued an additional statement on Thursday afternoon: "Obviously, I am deeply disturbed by these allegations. While significant context is missing from the incidents reported by The Information, I deeply regret ever causing anyone to feel uncomfortable. The fact is that I have been privileged to have worked with female entrepreneurs throughout my career and I sincerely apologize to anyone who I made uncomfortable by my actions. There's no denying this is an issue in the venture community, and I hate that my behavior has contributed to it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone who has access beyond the paywall explain this story and report a bit more?

What are the examples used in the report?

If someone hits on you and you are not interested, does that qualify as an unwanted advance? Is it unwanted flirting? Is it a direct proposition? Is it an implication that physical activity would lead to a beneficial business relationship? Is it inappropriate topics? Or is an unwanted advance even more than that?

I also wonder, are there any men who report unwanted advances from women in similar environments? Is this a widespread problem in general?

</comment><comment><USER6> Non paywall link?

<comment><USER2> > No subscription? You're missing out.

Ha. I'm not exactly in the know but this is the first I've ever heard of theinformation.com.

<comment><USER5> The Information is well known but the price is intentionally exclusionary, it's not aimed at average readers or average consumption.

<comment><USER7> Yes, god forbid the rubes have access to such a respectable publication.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Trash-Collecting Spacecraft Will Pit Giant Nets Against a Space Harpoon - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-trash-collecting-spacecraft-will-pit-giant-nets-ag-1783122102 <comment><USER2> I have given some thought to space junk and how to go about cleaning it up. Would it be possible to attach small engines (ION engine, Rocket, etc) to an object/satellite that is not in use anymore and give it a nudge towards the Moon or Mars?

I would even suggest before the Space Station is abandoned, we should consider moving it to an orbit or even trying to gently put it down on the moon.

If anything we could begin to build a scrap yard of equipment that might become useful some day to the folks who colonize the Moon or Mars.</comment>


Writing a Book with Unix - <AUTHOR> https://joecmarshall.com/posts/book-writing-environment/ <comment><USER2> I will not name the company, but a book deal I was working on fell through because I refused to install MS Office (since I didn't have a Mac and I refused to install Windows), they refused to accept markdown or LaTeX, and I couldn't get their template working in LibreOffice.

The part I find funny was that the book was about doing network server development with Haskell...on Linux.

<comment><USER3> There is a reason for word: Reviewers are used to Word's versioning and change tracking system, where they can suggest edits and the author can accept them or not. My publisher also offered using .prn files but then the reviewers wouldn't have done the full job ... (in the end I cancelled the contract for other reasons, so no idea how well that would have worked out)

<comment><USER4> Can Google Docs replace MS Word in this workflow ? It seems intuitive enough and there can be real time collaboration. This might allow authors to not install MS Windows and MS Word

<comment><USER3> I don't have experience with Google docs, but I don't think they produce layouts which are good enough™ for book printing.

Google docs change tracking probably could be taught, but you are dealing with people who spent lots of time in their workflow and who are resisting to adapt for a single author. Mind that those reviewers and editors switch from book to book depending on frequency of author's feedback. The author is just one between many ...

<comment><USER5> I beg your pardon? I have never heard of a decent publisher doing the _publishing_ in MS Word, i.e. the process from formatting to printing. The _editing_ most often gets done in Word. As far as I know, Word lacks the formatting capabilities to do professional publishing. But maybe I just misunderstood you, or things have thoroughly changed in the last couple of years.

<comment><USER3> My story was ~10 years ago. The publisher asked to install a specific printer driver (as Word's rendering depends on printer settings) and using a specific Word template (defining margins, formatting, ...) and final result would be printing to .prn files.

If you look at many contemporary books typesetting is not an important topic for many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been writing on Linux/Unix systems since the late 1980s, including now a few book-length projects. Tools have varied over the years, including some uni work in nroff, HTML, and more recently, LaTeX and Markdown, among other markup languages.

LaTeX strikes me as the ultimate tool, and far less intimidating than most people seem to think (Laport's book is an excellent intro), though for most purposes, Markdown is more than sufficient. In practice, I tend to use Markdown and either include inline LaTeX as needed, or convert to LaTeX and continue editing in that where finer-grained control is necessary.

I'd add pandoc to the toolkit, as well as GNU Make. With the two, I've got a standard makefile that can output a wide range of formats (I refer to them as "endpoints") ranging from ASCII text to standalone or snippets of HTML, PDFs, PS, MS Word, OSX, Mediawiki, and others. Adding a new endpoint is a simple matter of tweaking the makefile.

One piece of organisational advice: _Do NOT apply your chapter numbers to your filenames._ Instead, allow your principle document outline, using an include structure, to define the flow of the text. Depending on the project size and complexity, I'll either directly include chapters within that level, or have a top level of parts with chapters specified (as second-level includes) within those.

As you decide you need to re-work flow, this becomes much easier to manage and rearrange than if you'd pre-labled the files themselves.

<comment><USER7> TeX is necessary when you want to go to print and have a high level of quality, especially if any math is involved. For screen display Markdown is sufficient.

<comment><USER6> In addition to HTML for online viewing, I tend to produce PDFs or ePub formats for reading, either onscreen, on a tablet, or (very rarely) printed. I've discovered that consistent pagination really matters to me for content retention, an argument which still favours PDFs over many alternatives (though Postscript and DJVU offer similar capabilities).

Markdown is _very_ nearly fully sufficient, and for almost any nontechnical work with minimal art or layout, will suffice. It falls flat in some interesting areas:

There's no underbar/underline markup.

There is no native colour markup.

There is no formula support -- not something typically encountered in most texts, but when you need it, you need it.

There is no fine-grained placement control for callouts, boxes, figures, images, etc. They simply appear where they happen to be dropped on a page.

(In several of these cases, you can revert to embedded HTML or styles, which are fine _when rendering to HTML_ , but this won't be picked up by all Pandoc endpoints.)

Mind, if a work consists of nothing more than text, bold, italic, strikethrough, super/sub-script, lists, tables, sections, footnotes/endnotes, and images whose placement is _not_ critical, _Markdown is entirely sufficient._

But if you find you need more control, exporting to LaTeX and doing your final editing there will buy you a great deal more control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad there's always LaTeX.

For any serious writing, Microsoft Word is one of the worst pieces of tools out there. It starts showing its ugly side when start using anything remotely advanced.

<comment><USER9> _For any serious writing, Microsoft Word is one of the worst pieces of tools out there_

Why? I'm no big fan of Word and doing any sort of layout in Word is painful, but for actual writing I don't see a problem. It has good tools for outlines, TOCs, reviews and comments, tracking changes, footnotes and citations (when combined with EndNote) and just about anything else I've ever needed. Hell the equation editor even lets you use LaTeX if you're into that sort of thing. What makes Word so terrible in your eyes?

And yes I wrote my Masters thesis and most of my other university work in LaTeX, so I know what I'm comparing it to.

<comment><USER8> A couple of things I've noted over the years:

\- Fields, or anything that uses fields: They're completely broken. They only seem to function in straight-forward case. For e.g: it's very easy for sequences to completely go off whack.

\- File comparisons: this feature can only tolerate up to a certain number of pages. It will crash and burn for large documents. I sometimes wonder why this is even offered!

\- Formatting: No matter how carefully paragraph spacing etc. is controlled there are always instances where things won't work as intended. A good example is cover pages.

\- Hanging and freezing on large documents while Word figures out how to render them.

\- Font rendering: it's never great. It never looks the same as what it would on a printer (irrespective of the printer). The Mac version does a decent job, but the Windows version, even with ClearType configured, is not great.

\- Lastly, my biggest issue: feature incompatibilities between the versions of Word available on Mac and Windows. The Mac version (the latest O365) release doesn't have a lot of advanced features that are available on Windows such as document signing and style breaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Was hoping that this would be using the original UNIX typesetting tools like troff. Also, surprised to see that asciidoc wasn't deployed over markdown.

<comment><USER11> i was recently turned on to asciidoc from seeing that its supported at github

[https://github.com/github/markup](https://github.com/github/markup)

and ironically development seems to have stalled on markdown with the advent of commonmark

[https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/558](https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/558)

[https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/559](https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/559)

[https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/560](https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/issues/560)

<comment><USER12> I don't understand how these links indicate that markdown development has stalled.

All these issues were only created recently, by one person, and are actually not in the right place for the type of discussion they're trying to prompt. CommonMark have a separate [forum]([http://talk.commonmark.org/](http://talk.commonmark.org/)) for feature discussion, which seems quite active.

<comment><USER13> Looking at [https://spec.commonmark.org/](https://spec.commonmark.org/) , it does seem it has stalled. They'll need to put in another gear if they're ever going to reach 1.0 (if that's a goal..?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like that you mentioned `bat` and `ag`, two of many favorite CLI tools.

Others you might want to checkout not necessarily for writing a book but general CLI pleasantness:

\- fzf ([https://github.com/junegunn/fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf))

\- autojump ([https://github.com/wting/autojump](https://github.com/wting/autojump))

\- jq ([https://stedolan.github.io/jq/](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/))

\- fd ([https://github.com/sharkdp/fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd))

<comment><USER15> If you use and like `ag`, I suggest taking a look at ripgrep (`rg`). It seems to be by far the fastest out of three (`ack`, `ag`, `rg`). And it has a pretty interesting codebase (written in Rust).

<comment><USER16> If you're working in a git repository then IMO the most appropriate search tool is simply `git grep`. I don't think there's any reason to use ripgrep, ag, ack etc in that situation. (Personally, if I'm working with text files, then I'm nearly always in a git repo.)

<comment><USER17> (author of ripgrep here)

Well at least one reason is because ripgrep is faster. On simple literal queries they'll have comparable speed, but beyond that, `git grep` is _a lot_ slower. Here's an example on a checkout of the Linux kernel:

        $ time rg '\w+_PM_RESUME' | wc -l
        8

        real    0.127
        user    0.689
        sys     0.589
        maxmem  19 MB
        faults  0

        $ time LC_ALL=C git grep -E '\w+_PM_RESUME' | wc -l
        8

        real    4.607
        user    28.059
        sys     0.442
        maxmem  63 MB
        faults  0

        $ time LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -E '\w+_PM_RESUME' | wc -l
        8

        real    21.651
        user    2:09.54
        sys     0.413
        maxmem  64 MB
        faults  0

ripgrep supports Unicode by default, so it's actually comparable to the LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 variant.

There are other reasons. It is nice to use a single tool for searching in all circumstances. ripgrep can fit that role. Maybe you don't know, but ripgrep respects your .gitignore file.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I knew ripgrep was praised in particular for its performance but I didn't know the difference was that large. The repo I usually work in has 8.7M lines of code and I had been finding `git grep` performance very adequate (I use it in combination with the Emacs helm library where it forms part of an incremental search UI, and hence gets called multiple times in quick succession in response to changing search input.) It looks like it will be fun to try swapping in ripgrep as the helm search backend; I'll try it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Org mode and pandoc work quite well for a similar workflow. The ability to move around chapter trees in org mode is a godsend. It's crazy to see how far the art of "word processing" deviated from WordStar days. MS Word's proprietary doc binary didn't help either (people would mess up formatting and lose entire documents). It's nice to see the focus come back to content and streamlining production with reproducible formatting.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love articles like this. I write quick daily notes on my computer in markdown and back them up in a GitHub repo. (Using this fun little script: [https://github.com/dcchambers/note- keeper](https://github.com/dcchambers/note-keeper)) It's worked really well for me and helps me easily synchronize my notes between systems.

I love the elegance and simplicity of plain-text notes.

<comment><USER20> vscode has these two phenomenal plugins[1] that together convert vscode into a true journal with basic check lists and the ability to add arbitrary markdown notes to any particular entry.

It works wonderfully as a programmer journal since I generally have vscode open anyway (for gitlens even when I'm working in intellij) the friction is close to zero.

[1] [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pajoma.v...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pajoma.vscode- journal) and [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Gruntfug...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Gruntfuggly.vscode- journal-view)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> i wonder why he has the "wrapper over wc" which does just what wc does?

        #!/bin/sh

        total=0

        for FILE in `find . -type f -name "*.txt"`

        do
            wc -w $FILE
            words=`wc -w < $FILE | tr -d ' '`
            total=$(($total + $words))
        done

        printf "%'d" $total

        echo " words"

all this achieves is

        wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") | sed '$s/total/words/'

and frankly, i'm not sure the total->words substitution is worth the trouble.

then there's the inefficiency of running wc twice per file. while this is not exactly bitcoin-level disaster, it rubs me the wrong way...

        wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") |
        awk -v t=0 '
          { print; t += $1 }
          END { print t, "words"; }
        '

personally i'd just do this (in zsh):

        wc -w **/*.txt(.D)

the (.D) is two "glob qualifiers": the . (dot) limits the result to plain files, the D turns GLOB_DOTS on for the pattern.

</comment><comment><USER22> Of possible interest is my open-source, Java-based desktop Markdown editor with live preview and variable interpolation.

* [https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar)

* [https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/blob/master/USAGE.m...](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/blob/master/USAGE.md)

The software provides a simple way to include variables in technical documentation. It also integrates with an R engine for editing R Markdown files, which can also use variables sourced from an external YAML file. (Editing XML documents that have stylesheets is possible, too.)

My authoring workflow involves Scrivenvar, Markdown, pandoc, knitr, and ConTeXt. As Markdown separates content from presentation, I prefer ConTeXt to LaTeX for the same reason.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am writing a book on introduction to theoretical computer science in markdown and use pandoc to transforming it into HTML, Latex (and from there to PDF) and MS Word. (The latter format is rather buggy at the moment, but I am including it because I've heard from visually impaired students that it is often the easiest format to read as you can control the font size.)

I've now put my scripts on [https://github.com/boazbk/tcs/tree/master/scripts](https://github.com/boazbk/tcs/tree/master/scripts) in case anyone finds them useful. (This is not a "plug and play" package that you can install and use, but people that are better programmers than me might be able to adapt it and improve on it.)

</comment><comment><USER24> Was hoping to see some sed tricks, and would have settled for some vim, but I guess I need to stop being such a gatekeeping grump about stuff. Hell, maybe I'd _like_ SublimeText if I tried it.

</comment><comment> nils-m-holm Looks like the author is just using some apps that happen to run on Unix.

I write all my books using vi (not vim!), troff and friends, make, and ghostview (gv) for the layout. Plus a couple of shell/awk/sed scripts for making the TOC, index, etc. I cannot imagine any better tools for the job. I tried LateX, which only got me into trouble, and Lout, which was fun, but too complex in the end. After 20-something books, above turns out to be the sweet spot.

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like everything he does can easily accomplished using emacs orgmode and pandoc

Ripgrep is maybe an alternative for ag

<comment><USER26> Any sufficiently advanced text management system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > I could use a git repo to keep a backup of the book and ... ag (basically a > faster grep)

IMO if you are using git then you should use `git grep` rather than ag/ripgrep/ack/grep etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> On the "txt" script I want to note that this does the job for files like those in the example that have no whitespace:

      wc -w $(find . -type f -name "*.txt")

</comment><comment><USER28> I will give bat a try. That looks nice :)

<comment><USER29> > I will give bat a try. That looks nice :)

Two of the three comments already referenced _bat_. It's also what impressed me the most. It looks great. Link below:

[https://github.com/sharkdp/bat](https://github.com/sharkdp/bat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Misleading title, I thought we has writing his book on an ancient AT&T UNIX mainframe. He's using Linux or MacOS, bfd. Why do people throw around the word Unix to describe Linux is beyond me. MacOS claims it's Unix too, they payed some organization to get them a Unix cert, but we all know it's BSD/Mach/Darwin rewrite. Nobody is really using the original Unix.

<comment><USER31> It's because most people don't confuse the etymology or history of a term with its actual use and current meaning -- and aren't stuck up with BS pedantic distinctions.

There's no "original Unix" (except the first Unix back in the day). There's lineage of operating systems.

Heck, even the people who actually created UNIX in the 70s and early 80s don't have such stickups.</comment></comment>


My PC thinks Silverlight is a Virus! - <AUTHOR> http://www.apollohunter.com/browse/blog_detail.php?id=4 <comment><USER2> It looks to me like the virus software thinks it's a virus simply because it's a .exe file in the cache, not because it's actually any indexed virus.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anything that can install on your system through your browser without your knowledge or permission is petty close to a virus IMHO.</comment>


Exploring an alternative to git-subtree - <AUTHOR> http://www.mos6581.org/git_subtree_alternative#

<comment><USER2> This is the #1 problem I have moving from SVN to Git. With SVN, everything is just in one repo. I can atomically commit to multiple related projects. If i split up projects into individual Git repos, everything is suddenly more complicated. Keeping dozens of projects in the same Git repo avoids this problem, but now developers are forced to clone projects they don't use.

I'm a Git novice, maybe managing submodules isn't as bad as it seems to me or the author of this article. What is your experience?

<comment><USER3> If you have multiple related projects that you release together, you might be interested in Google's repo[1]. That's the tool used in Android (where each app and piece of framework has it's own git repository).

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/git-repo/](https://code.google.com/p/git-repo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting. moz6581, can you please email the Git development mailing list[1], I'm pretty sure there are lots of folks there who may have missed this that are interested in this topic.

This approach is novel and quite gittish, and I for one would like to see this explored further.

[1] firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


What is Y Combinators marketing strategy? - <AUTHOR> How was their marketing when they started? and how did it change over time <comment><USER2> Hacker News.</comment>


Ask HN : Shall I continue writing? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I have decided to build a blog. It gives random blog posts about coidng, new technologies and other things.
I'm not a native english speaker, but I read a lot and have been in the Internet for about 2 years now. I just want to know your opinion about my writing.
Here's the blog post : http://codeinput.com/?p=3
Ok, please I don't want you to tell me about the topic, I just want to know if my English is good and I can write other blog posts that readers can read and enjoy. Your response should be one of the following
* Ok, it's not bad, you'd better start now and you'll become better day after day
* No, hold on few months and continue to read, then try again
* Stop, it's desastrous I don't think you can succeed
Ok, at least give me one of those choices, if you still have another 1 minute, can you tell me if the domain name is good? suggest a tagline (a header phrase) or other things to improve it
Thanks a lot!! <comment><USER2> I think your English is fine. It's not perfect, but it's better than many I've read. Concentrate on making sure you have something to say, then say it as simply as you can.

It's a good start.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it has potential but you need a better grasp of the English language if that is what you're going to write in. Why not blog in your own language?

The domain name is great stick with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> hah people with my "own language" use English for sure! it's programming related and English is the best</comment></comment>


Show HN: GitHub Pages Generator – Comprehensive scaffolding with frameworks, tools - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ronik-design/slush-gh-pages <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here: I put this together after setting up a simple project page on GitHub Pages and not finding any great, current boilerplate. I also noticed there was some excellent functionality in the plugins / gems GitHub Pages now allows.

I tried to tailor the documentation and experience to getting a beginner rolling with some powerful tools, basically rolling up the best practices I've used and seen in use in a variety of landing page / demo sites and projects.

Hoping this will prove useful for people trying to set up a page for their next open source project, or just as a great sandbox for somebody starting out in front-end development and the various services and tools involved (e.g., using GitHub, Travis CI, ES6, SCSS/PostCSS, static-site generation, testing).</comment>


Show HN: iOS music player, like a virtual record collection - <AUTHOR> 1 minute screencast: https://youtu.be/AmDL2QtkoJ4
If you'd like play with it, please send a note with your name and email to email@example.com and I will send you an invite (via TestFlight).
If you're the kind of person who listens to albums cover to cover, or would like to manually arrange your records instead of going through a boring alphabetized list, or are just really annoyed with the iOS Music app (like I am), you should check this out! <comment><USER2> I don't use iOS (just mpv on my laptop), but this is the sort of well-thought out design that modern software needs. A clear vision followed out through development into a product without sacrificing major features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, kind stranger on the internet! :) I actually only recently started learning how to code, this is my first project.

<comment><USER3> I came here to say the same. I'd love to see Apple implement this style in more of their os and apps.

I can only imagine how much better a calculator, for a start, you could make than Apple's!

Seriously, nice work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't suppose you'd be able to support Google Music on iOS? I am a big album person, and the number of hoops I have to jump through to find an album to listen to always frustrates me - so this looks great. The problem is most of my music is either ripped to FLAC or on Google Music these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> If there's enough interest in this, and I have the time to do it, I'd be happy to support it! Apple Music and Spotify would probably be first though. TBH I'd rather build in FLAC support, iPhones have plenty of storage these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this! I'm not sure what's involved in your beta testing nor do I have any idea what TestFlight is, but I'd like to give it a try.

My purchased music that's actually on my iPhone is somewhat limited (maybe a dozen albums) but I'm always using Spotify and increasingly Apple Music; maybe I'm not quite the user you're targeting at this point.

But I'm very much someone who appreciates albums in whole form and care very much about seeing the artwork/info/etc well, as much as is possible in an app...my main jam is vinyl.

edit: I'd potentially find this even more useful in iPad form, where I could pair it to my stereo and have nice, large graphics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple Music support is absolutely on the roadmap, and so is iPad support! If you haven't already, do send me an email. TestFlight is Apple's platform for doing beta testing, it's super straightforward.

<comment><USER6> Glad you answered the this point, I'm pretty keen to try any alternative to the white + bold/slab San serif wasteland that is the Apple Music app. The moment they went from one touch on the home screen, to several taps into a sub menu in order to "love" a track i knew the UX team went off the rails. So I'm keen to try new apps that support Apple music, but the majority are just shovelware or borderline malware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I too am annoyed with the ios music app. And this is a beautiful app you have made here. However, for me I prefer practicality.

I miss the days when the apple music app for ios would display everything in plain text, just like the old ipods.

It made finding music faster, and gave me more retail space on my screen. I dread apps that don't give me this option, and force me to scroll through heavy animations of artwork to find my artist by name.

I don't want to sort and find things by colors.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a wrong place to ask, but can somebody recommend an _opposite_ of this? I don't care for album covers (at least while listening) and prefer alphabetized lists and a text-only playlist for a main view. With good queue management (like in old Winamp and iOS 10 Music; in 11 they screwed it up).

<comment><USER9> I'm looking for same thing but for macOS. People usually recommend Vox, but Vox is absolutely awful. Tiny ass window, that always, _ALWAYS_ , drags songs when I try to scroll.

<comment><USER10> Try Swinsian: [http://swinsian.com](http://swinsian.com). Basically iTunes without any bloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That photek 12" is tight.

Would be nice to have curated collections in this app by people whose taste you trust, and to be able to quickly skim through them, like back in the day when you were checking out a stack of vinyl the shop owner would pick out for you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the look and style, and I think you really nailed the vinyl aesthetic. Unfortunately, I've abandoned music on my iPhone in favor of Spotify+Amazon. But, I would love to see this for non-iOS devices. If you could get it to run on a touch screen powered by a Raspberry Pi, I would totally use it for a home jukebox-stlye device. I think the album art elements and other mechanics would be awesome in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm completely ignorant about any iOS music player, having only every seriously used Android, but didn't the first iPhone have such a feature already? Such as showcased in the famous reveal video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=1084](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ&t=1084)

Did it get removed?

<comment><USER14> Cover Flow, as it was named, was removed during the great Skeuomorphic purge of 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's an issue with that concept, where the iOS for like 2 or 3 major versions now doesn't show properly artists and album art correctly for a lot of people, including myself. Without that fixed, the workflow and user experience is going to be horrible.

</comment><comment><USER16> Speaking of TestFlight. Sometimes it's extremely frustrating to send TestFlight invitations to people, and they simply never receive it, or there is a problem with the invitation in some other way. Has anyone else experienced this lately?

<comment><USER17> I had some issues with this a few months back, and was in contact with apple dev support about it. They investigated the issue and since then it has worked for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not really something I see myself using, sad to say - I have way too much music to ever fit on my phone, which limits my options in practice to those with solid self-hosted streaming support. But I really like the style!

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple Music support is on the roadmap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did you used SceneKit, or UIKit dynamics, or is the physical effects are homemade/keyframe animations?

Very well done!

Edit: On a second thought I would see myself doing it as UICollectionView with a custom layout.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is definitely a pretty app. I can see from the quick video that you put a lot of effort into. However, it looks just too fiddly for my taste[0].

[0] As in, too many touches required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't mean to be a pushy-car-salesman-types, but I think you should take it for a test drive – your experience might surprise you. One of my explicit goals in designing the app was to get you OUT of the app ASAP, since I don't give a damn about "engagement". Today, the stock iOS music app seems too fiddly to me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks really nice. Am I correct in that it'd work only with apple music currently? Would've loved to test it, but most of my stuff is in spotify...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it only works with local files (as in synced via iTunes) at the moment. Apple Music is on the roadmap, and so is Spotify!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> IMHO it's not 100% intuitive that you press the settings button to search. Maybe a separate search button in the top left?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered it! But:

\- I really like the idea of one button for "everything else"

\- Once you start using the app, I've found that you don't tend to search often, because you just intuitively where things are placed

\- It's more fun to browse through your collection and find something you'd forgotten about instead of searching for whatever is "top of mind" at the moment

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like that for once, the records displayed in a music app are tasteful independent productions and not national top charts.

<comment><AUTHOR> TBH I didn't even realize what I was showing when I recorded the screencast, but I find it painful to listen to mass-manufactured crap :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "This is different from genres because genres don't really mean anything today." uhh.

<comment><USER25> For folks like the OP who would categorize Tropical Drums Of Deutschland as "morning music", and respect for that, genres stopped making sense about two decades ago. The release is officially classified as both Jazz, Folk, World and Country but it is really none of the above [1].

[1] [https://www.discogs.com/Jan-Schulte-Tropical-Drums-Of- Deutsc...](https://www.discogs.com/Jan-Schulte-Tropical-Drums-Of- Deutschland/release/9970910)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> /side rant

Do you truly mean "iOs" or did you mean "iPhone"? I couldn't care less if an app is an "iOS" app when it doesn't work on my iOS device (iPad AIR 2 with iOS 11).

ps: i'd love to see something like that on iPad. I don't like the builtin player. I used the "track 8" app for a while sadly not updated to iOS 11.

<comment><USER27> I also hate it when I get a Windows program and it doesn't work on my 386. After all, it's running Windows 3.11!

<comment><USER26> Your analogy barely applies to the iPhone / iPad situation. You're talking about APIs accross many generations of an OS, while I'm talking about apps for the same , current OS not supporting different layouts.

edit: rewording my previous comment, yes I am using iOS 11 ... and the AIR 2 is not that much behind anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Don't have the time to be a proper beta tester, but would totally pay to have this app!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you just wanna get your hands on it, it's already quite stable! And you can totally be an IMproper beta tester :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of the landscape mode of the old iTunes(?) app on the iPhone 3gs.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is horrible.Its just coverflow except portrait. Nothing 'Beautiful' about it.

<comment><USER31> This is unduly harsh. And with the organization tools and turntable visualization calling this 'just coverflow' is also incorrect.

I'm assuming you don't find the interface particularly appealing, but do you think that others might? From the comments in this post, it sure seems like it.

The OP was able to articulate an interesting insight into why other music apps were lacking for him (genres aren't a useful grouping mechanism), and build a (beta!) solution. That's beautiful.

From the demo one thing was clear to me: that thought and care went into making this, and that should be respected.

Good work, OP. Keep going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> At which release Apple will just stop supporting playing your own mp3? iOS 14-15?

</comment><comment><USER33> Do people still listen to 'albums'?

<comment><USER17> Some people, me included, very much do. :)

Edited to add some background:

I feel it gives the tracks more context, especially as for many artists an album isn't just an unordered set of independent tracks but a carefully designed listing experience.

That said, I still like my playlists as well. ;)</comment></comment>


ARM licensing fee increase could drive some customers to competitors - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/86012-arm-could-significantly-increase-licensing-fees-sources.html <comment><USER2> Who would the competitors be?

MIPS could be a competitor, but AFAIK there is currently no "high-performance" mips processor. An ARM-like roll-your-own model might be feasible, but that would take at least 4-5 years (i'm just speculating).

RISC-V? Maybe, but again, neither tomorrow nor next week.

Regarding Apple... Apple is not stupid when it comes to money. My guess is that Apple probably cut a long-lasting deal with ARM (the company).

At this point though, I wonder why Apple hasn't bought a quota of ARM shares, given how much strategical it is.

<comment><USER3> PowerPC is still around too, but their problem is that it's _either_ very high-performance (ppc64le / IBM POWER9 & co.) _or_ efficient embedded but also outdated if not straight up dead (powerpc & ppc64 / NXP e-series & IBM 6xx)

But then again, Intel's Atom came from rifling through the design archive, and look at what's in Lakefield now...

Also — NXP already "cross-platform'ed" their QorIQ / Layerscape stuff from PowerPC to ARM, pretty sure if they don't like the license fees they _could_ go back. (But that'd probably piss off their customers to no end. They'd rather use it in negotiating a cheaper ARM license I suppose.)

<comment><USER4> Also there's a dedicated little slice of the ppc market that is radiation hardened/ space rated chips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So private equity is going to ruin yet another successful company?</comment>