WebGPU and WSL in Safari - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/9528/webgpu-and-wsl-in-safari/ <comment><USER2> As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is _compatibility_. I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I _do_ care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to.

Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big players constantly use new and incompatible graphics APIs to try to obtain some sort of competitive advantage, adding to the workload we developers have to deal with. There is almost no cost to the platform developers to add new APIs; instead, the costs are borne by the application developers. It's a classic case of negative externalities.

<comment><USER3> I miss the years where inspite of all its flaws, OpenGL was a non deprecated option on all the platforms. I know it left performance on the table, I know the drivers for some vendors were iffy and I know reasoning about performance across different vendors / drivers / platforms was difficult - but it worked most of the time and allowed me to have a mostly unified codebase everywhere.

<comment><USER4> You can still kind of have that experience by using ANGLE[1] as your OpenGL implementation. It lets you use the same dialect of OpenGL ES on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android, with consistent behavior across platforms.

ANGLE is the base of the WebGL implementation in Chrome. For WebGPU, we (Google) are working on a new native library called Dawn[2] that will fill the same role that ANGLE does for WebGL. I'm personally hopeful that Dawn itself can eventually be useful as a cross platform graphics abstraction for native apps as well as web apps. There's also Mozilla's gfx-rs[3] in the same space.

[1] [https://github.com/google/angle](https://github.com/google/angle)

[2] [https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn](https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn)

[3] [https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx](https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx)

<comment><USER5> That's nice, but it's a pretty big dependency to add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Web Shading Language is a non-starter. I looked quite closely at the specification. Apple has argued in the WebGPU WG that SPIR-V is not defined enough, semantically, to be meaningful, but WSL is even worse. Sometimes, it's even explained in terms of SPIR-V, like in the case of discard, where it was hastily explained in terms of SPIR-V's OpKill after we identified it was completely missing.

Apple has blocked any possibility of using a SPIR-V profile, sometimes with bad-faith arguments, despite it being the suggestion of all other vendors and the graphics community participating in the WG.

The team working on the WSL compiler had to have dominator analysis patiently explained to them, and then told us it was too complex of a concept, despite being something learned about in Compilers 101.

<comment><USER7> The WSL specification is a single document that tells you how the language executed and how it ensures security. SPIR-V simply does not have this. I don't get your argument here.

It's really funny to say that we had to have dominator analysis patiently explained to them. I don't have a clue what you are talking about there. In one meeting I remember having to explain dominator analysis to SPIR-V folks. (I am both a member of the WSL team and an expert on dominator analysis.)

<comment><USER6> WSL tells you very little about how the language is actually executed. I do not see _any_ explanation of, say, waves and quads, which will need to be spelled out explicitly when these things are added. It's a requirement for proper LOD selection for texturing, along with ddx/ddy.

Simple branching in shaders is notoriously under-defined as well because of complications related to divergence/convergence and the SIMT model.

re: dominator analysis, it was brought up by an Apple WebGPU developer (Myles C. Maxfield) as a complexity of parsing SPIR-V. David Neto had to explain it to Myles. [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wG9BRLUSw4FbpnvqieK-- jTW...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wG9BRLUSw4FbpnvqieK-- jTWaNnuaahtA0VBIvHdA5c/edit#)

<comment><USER7> > WSL tells you very little about how the language is actually executed. I do > not see any explanation of, say, waves and quads, which will need to be > spelled out explicitly when these things are added. It's a requirement for > proper LOD selection for texturing, along with ddx/ddy.

The spec has a semantics that describes that the language does when executed in great detail.

It seems that your complaint is that there is some thing that you think that SPIR-V describes better than WSL - waves and quads in this case.

I was there when we brought up dominators. You are right that _we_ brought it up as a complexity of SPIR-V, but not because we didn't know what dominators are. We do know what they are, and because we do know, we know that it's complex. We're not saying "it's so complex that we don't understand it". We are saying "we understand it and we know it's complex". In particular, an early argument against text-based languages is that you have to specify and then validate variable scoping. Dominator analysis _is_ a variable scoping rule, just a very complicated one for a wire format to have.

<comment><USER6> > The spec has a semantics that describes that the language does when executed > in great detail.

Here's what the WSL specification says about loading a texture, one of the simplest possible features of a shading language, but one that introduces a lot of complexity (again, to load a texture requires calculating an LOD, which requires talking about derivatives and scheduling pixels and shader execution in terms of quads):

> Todo: fill this section Sample, Load, Gather, etc..

That's it.

Now, your Babylon.JS demo clearly samples textures. So you have _some_ semantics implemented, but what semantics are they? Note that these things are baked pretty heavily in hardware, so if you get the semantics wrong, you can't really fix the hardware. Your semantics _have_ to model reality as it exists. Your automated tests can say that the spec is correct, but might break on a real GPU after translation to SPIR-V/Metal/HLSL.

The WebGPU working group does not currently have any participation from AMD or NVIDIA. Khronos and the SPIR-V working group _do_. I trust them to get these details right.

Fun fact: The current modelling of "discard" of as OpKill instead of OpDemoteToHelperInvocation is incorrect for Metal's "discard", which I presume is one of your backends right now.

<comment><USER8> > The WebGPU working group does not currently have any participation from AMD > or NVIDIA. Khronos and the SPIR-V working group do. I trust them to get > these details right.

On the other hand, the SPIR-V working group has no participation from Apple or Microsoft (vendors of relevant platform APIs, relevant shading languages, and in Apple's case, of relevant GPUs).

You might argue that Apple should join the SPIR-V group but you could likewise argue that AMD and Nvidia should join the WebGPU group. After all, their voices would be valuable as to the API and not just the shader language. The barrier to entry to a W3C Community Group is also much lower.

<comment><USER6> I doubt those vendors really want to retrace their steps to go through the multi-year pain and _many_ committee discussions that brought us SPIR-V, again. Look at all those names on the SPIR-V specification. Do you want to waste all those people's time, again, for that many years?

Nobody inside the WG but Apple wants WSL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article is pretty good at explaining why WebGPU is needed for the Web. It could probably be more clear about the fact that all browser vendors are developing this API (i.e. it's not Apple's thing, and never been, if you don't count the name borrowed from their earlier prototype) and have implementations in the works.

For shading languages, it's not clear to me why GLSL-to-SPIRV would be so slow. Would be great to hear back from Google. Side note: we are currently experimenting [1] with Rust-based SPIR-V generation, and the transformation is looking to be mostly trivial - there is no reason it should be slow.

A bigger question though that needs to be resolved is how to specialize SPIR-V shaders. Without this, there is no good alternative to text-based cut-and- paste that the blog argues to be the best approach.

[1] [https://github.com/jrmuizel/glsl-to- spirv](https://github.com/jrmuizel/glsl-to-spirv)

<comment><USER10> > A bigger question though that needs to be resolved is how to specialize > SPIR-V shaders.

Is the OpSpecConstant family not enough? Those exist specifically for specialisation.

<comment><USER8> Specialization constants don't seem to cut it for all the use cases. There's variation beyond plugging in constants. Also some frameworks and engines give their clients the ability to provide shader snippets at runtime.

<comment><USER11> The answer to shader snippets in the SPIR-V world would be linking. I don't think that's well developed in the ecosystem if at all, but it's a perfectly natural extension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Web Shading Language is going to have to pick a new acronym; I did a double take when I saw that Windows Subsystem for Linux was coming to Safari

<comment><USER13> It really should be WebSL like everything else in its space (WebGL, WebAssembly, etc.)

<comment><USER14> It's a bit weird that they talk bout WebGPU and WebGL and then name it WSL instead of WebSL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I trust nothing from Apple when it comes to graphics. My years of pain as a graphics engineer trying to support their hardware and get good performance has created this deepseated mistrust, especially given their track record of abandoning open source standards, including the ones they started! (I'm looking at you, OpenCL).

</comment><comment><USER16> Please let Apple's shader language die an early death.

Maybe they're on some ego trip to leave their mark in a more visible way than through shaping the shared effort in various places and want to have a big thing to call their own. Or maybe they just want to get some vendor lock-in.

But it's yet another slightly-incompatible, slightly-better slightly-worse alternative to the existing shader languages, and nobody wants to deal with that, just like nobody really wanted to care about Metal. Apple's tight control over their devices will probably force some people to build some kind of compatibility layer into their pipelines, but it won't have to be good, and it won't be the primary target.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the meantime, they never added support for WebGL2 and MSAA on Framebuffer Objects. Blargh.

<comment><USER18> [https://twitter.com/gfxprogrammer/status/1171553288681996288](https://twitter.com/gfxprogrammer/status/1171553288681996288)

"We're collaborating with Dean and the WebKit team to use ANGLE for WebGL's backend in WebKit, which will allow an easy upgrade to WebGL 2.0 on all platforms. Follow [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198948](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198948) for updates on the work."

<comment><USER17> That's great news! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Haven't we been down this text based vs Bytecode avenue before? The same arguments were made with asmjs against Bytecode wireformat, and ultimately we ended up with wasm. WSL seems to be making the same arguments.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm unsure how they're getting better performance. Webgl is using opengl in a sort of sandboxed manner, does this webgpu approach bypass some checks or find different performant ways to do them? Afaik the biggest problem with gpu access from browsers is that the you instructions are not at all hardware secure. So everything has to be managed.

<comment><USER21> The performance comes mainly from a different programming model, not primarily from direct access to GPU resources (although the access is _more direct_ than before).

The potentially expensive stuff has basically been moved out of the render loop, and into the initialization phase. For instance, when you create a shader in WebGL, that shader may be patched and recompiled internally when it is used for different situations (for instance different render target pixel formats). And "last minute" changes like this happen all over the place in GL and WebGL, because the GL model has so many flexible "knobs" that can be pressed at any time.

In WebGPU everything is "baked" at creation time. You may need to create more "state objects" upfront for all possible state combinations you need, and this creation may be more expensive than in the GL model, but once those state objects are created they are very efficient to use, and more importantly, they wont be "recompiled" during use.

It's a similar effect like having an unpredictable GC which can kick in at any time and produce frame spikes (like Javascript), versus not having a garbage collector at all (like WASM).

WebGPU also needs a lot fewer calls in the "hot path" compared to WebGL. When in WebGL you may need dozens of calls to change state between draw calls, in WebGPU it's only a handful.

<comment><USER6> If you are 100% careful, you can get equal performance with a good WebGL implementation, like ANGLE, and good user code. But this is very difficult, and requires very careful programming.

I built a WebGPU-like layer [0] for my 3D web application [https://noclip.website](https://noclip.website) , so I get some of the performance benefits today, under ANGLE, but WebGPU has these best-practices baked in, so everyone will see an increase.

[0] [https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/gf...](https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/gfx/platform/GfxPlatformWebGL2.ts)

<comment><USER22> Unbelievable performance. Bravo. You don't happen to be using WASM, do you?

<comment><USER6> I use a limited version of WASM for decompression and texture decoding. Everything else is just being very careful to not create any objects in the hot path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone from other browser vendors care to comment? Would love to know their progress and what they think of SPIR-V/WSL.

<comment><USER23> Here are Google WebGPU efforts:

[https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation- Status](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status)

Which already mentioned on the standard meetings that although Chrome already ships a prototype implementation of Web Compute, they don't plan to fully productise it, rather take the learnings from the community into WebGPU shaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The helmet gif is breathtaking. The eliding over abstractions as an API simplification is a bit disingenuous.

      gl.Foo(...)
      gl.Bar(...)
      gl.Baz(...)

into

      encoder.setPipeline(pipeline)

Unless they're intuiting what needs to be done, those Far, Boo, and Baz calls are still happening somewhere.

That's not to say abstraction isn't a useful way of separating out code. And OpenGL/WebGL's pipeline setup has always been a bit archaic. This is definitely progress - it's just not really being presented directly in the article.

<comment><USER21> ...it's the exact same difference like GL to modern 3D-APIs (like Metal, Vulkan or D3D12, or even D3D11). The cost for those Foo, Bar and Baz calls is paid once during the _creation_ of the pipeline object which usually happens at the start of the application.

Making that pipeline object _active_ during rendering is very cheap (about as cheap as one of those gl.Foo() calls).

<comment><USER24> My point was the post is misleadingly saying: "These 15 lines go away and are replaced by this 1 line".

That's not what's happening (unless I'm mistaken) and the code examples are comparing apples to oranges.

<comment><USER21> Well, yeah ok, the lines move from the drawFrame() function into the init() function basically.

It may not be less code to type, but it's much less code to run :)

<comment><USER24> I re-read the article - and that's just not what the article implies. They make the implication that there's a reduction in "code to type".

I suppose this is just an exercise in pedantry though. I'm excited, regardless, for any API simplification.

<comment><USER25> This seems pretty clear and unambiguous to me

> _Most 3D applications render more than a single object. In WebGL, each of > those objects requires a collection of state-changing calls before that > object could be rendered._ [...] _All the pieces of state in the WebGL > example are wrapped up into a single object in WebGPU, named a "pipeline > state object." Though validating state is expensive, with WebGPU it is done > once when the pipeline is created, outside of the core rendering loop. As a > result, we can avoid performing expensive state analysis inside the draw > call. Also, setting an entire pipeline state is a single function call, > reducing the amount of "chatting" between Javascript and WebKit's C++ > browser engine._

> _Resources have a similar story. Most rendering algorithms require a set of > resources in order to draw a particular material. In WebGL, each resource > would be bound one-by-one. However, in WebGPU, resources are batched up into > "bind groups"._ [... _In both APIs_ ] _multiple objects are gathered up > together and baked into a hardware-dependent format, which is when the > browser performs validation. Being able to separate object validation from > object use means the application author has more control over when expensive > operations occur in the lifecycle of their application._

The clear point in both of these comparisons is that the same operations must be done in both APIs, but the WebGPU version allows much of the work to be pre-computed, allowing the draw calls (where the performance bottleneck lies) to have as little overhead as possible.

<comment><USER24> That's neither clear nor unambiguous. The text I highlighted including their summary of it _states_ there is a reduction of code. Not only that, the "both APIs" part you're mentioning isn't even pertaining to the code but rather the execution of the pipeline.

My point is, and has been, that they should focus on the perf gains and reduce the misleading sentiment that it has simplified the API footprint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The course of development with WebGPU initiative is breathtaking. The effort poured into the API is producing content that will be consumed by people that desire to study GPGPU applications.

Included in the final specification or not, a well-tailored shading language is only of benefit to the GPGPU community, similar to how simultaneous existence of DirectX, Metal, Vulkan has been to the robustness of the abstractions of the engines built upon them. No one should doubt the rigor of developers that are shaping the WSL specification; they are experts in their game. Moreover, the web mode of SPIR-V will also have considerable differences in its morph, and all parties are trying to find a good common denominator where none of the existing works is an exact solution; the work of Apple here will benefit everybody going forward.

Also, we are getting GPGPU computing abilities in the browser for a much broader market on many form factors! Let's prepare for it!

<comment><USER11> The claim that the developers shaping the WSL specification are experts is questionable given that the actual experts in shading languages -- i.e., the implementers building GPU hardware -- are looking at SPIR-V and seem to be pretty frustrated by the NIH syndrome of the web developer community here.

<comment><USER27> Do you have some evidence for this assertion? Because Apple happens to make its own GPUs and shading language... a shading language that also runs on other people's GPUs. Seems like relevant expertise to me.

<comment><USER11> Apple is huge. It's not clear to me whether the Apple GPU folks are involved, or whether it's just Apple's web people playing at graphics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Unrelated: the video doesn't fit on the screen in Mobile Safari.

<comment><USER28> Update: the demo site doesn't work for me either. There's a 404 in the console for [https://webkit.org/demos/webgpu/babylon/babylon.max.js.map](https://webkit.org/demos/webgpu/babylon/babylon.max.js.map).

<comment><USER8> I've reported the video issue to the author. The demo site requires STP 91 or newer with the WebGPU experimental feature enabled.

<comment><USER28> I'm using Safari Technology Preview Release 91 (Safari 13.1, WebKit 15609.1.3) on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running macOS Catalina 10.15 Beta (19A558d) with the WebGPU experimental feature enabled and not seeing anything. I'd be happy to file a WebKit bug or Feedback Request if you'd like.

<comment><USER8> Please do! It's working for me with STP 91 on a Catalina beta build. Could be a hardware-specific issue. A bug report would be useful. Please Cc mjs at apple dot com and I'll make sure the right people see it. For reference, do the other demos in the gallery work for you? [https://webkit.org/demos/webgpu/](https://webkit.org/demos/webgpu/)

<comment><USER28> Might be, my computer has been having a number of OpenGL issues in Catalina. Anyways, I filed [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201765](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201765) and CC'd you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Random comment. I've monitored the discussions of WHLSL/WSL vs SPIR-V and I can't decide which side I'm on.

I started in the SPIR-V camp. I liked the idea that WebGPU would just get "shader assembly language" and that would let a 1000 other higher level languages blossom. I also liked the idea that injesting assembly seemed easier and less code than injesting a higher level language.

But, Apple had their original WHLSL post ([https://webkit.org/blog/8482/web- high-level-shading-language...](https://webkit.org/blog/8482/web-high-level- shading-language/)) and I liked some of their arguments for a text based language. I like the idea that I can just make snippet/jsfiddle/codepen and don't need a entire tool chain nor any 3rd party libraies just to get something working. I have 100s of standalone WebGL samples that have next to zero external code. I'd like to do the same with WebGPU but if it's SPIR-V based that will be impossible.

I also agreed that AFAICT SPIR-V being more assembly language like is not really a help. To validate it still requires a bunch of work, understanding it as a whole (building up an AST?) and checking everything so it's not clear to me there's a win there. The SPIR-V came does list some valid points here in relation to validation

[https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/44](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/44)

It's also been pointed out that SPIR-V is not a small format. Suggestions have been made that if you care about download size you'd send some other format that is smaller + a library to decompress/compile that format into SPIR-V. That sounded less interesting to me as again I need now both an offline toolset and a library to use its results.

I don't remember why but at some point I gravitated back toward the SPIR-V camp but when I went over the arguments it turned out to be mostly a tie.

I feel like if someone wrote a WSL or GLSL to SPIR-V compiler that was very small (50k to 100k compressed JS), ideally in JavaScript not WebAssembly, that might help decide the issue? Unfortunately AFAIK none of the devs involved with WebGPU are JS programmers so they do things like re-compile ANGLE's GLSL compiler via Emscripten as a solution which turns into a large bloated library with multiple parts.

I hate the idea that I won't be able to create small WebGPU demos without large external libraries or without finding places to host binary spirv files. A __small __library might push me in the SPIR-V camp. Without that I think I lean to the WSL camp.

I think the SPIR-V camp would argue that small samples don't matter. What matters is AAA games and AAA apps like Google Maps and those teams don't care if they have to use large offline toolsets. They'd also argue there's 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more devs using a large library like three.js than using low-level WebGL so the fact that without a large library the experience sucks is irrelevant. So again, I don't know which direction is better.

<comment><USER30> Also, with SPIR-V the browsers are simpler, thus less likely to be buggy, incompatible, or have widely different performances.

All in all there's waaaaay more reasons to use SPIR-V.

<comment><USER8> SPIR-V with full web safety rules and translation to native shader formats is not really simpler to implement than WSL with those same properties. People make these claims but the code doesn't best that out.

There's also a good chance that in the end the shader processing will be in a common library like ANGLE.

With GLAL the issues were much more about the drivers consuming a textual language than about the browser consuming a textual language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> is tensorflow going to use this?

<comment><USER4> Tensorflow.js will probably add a WebGPU backend when WebGPU becomes widely available in browsers. But that won't by itself close the performance gap with native ML libraries. For that there is a new W3C community group specifically looking at ways of adding machine learning acceleration to the web: [https://www.w3.org/community/webmachinelearning/](https://www.w3.org/community/webmachinelearning/)

<comment><USER32> This backend work has already begun (and can run posenet, albeit still slower than WebGL): [https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs- backend-...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs-backend- webgpu)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Totally not another side channel. Waiting for WebPCI and WebDMA.

</comment><comment><USER34> Such a shame that webGPU is not Vulkan based... Thanks Apple.

<comment><USER35> It wasn't just Apple, even several Google engineers working on WebGPU agreed that simply mimicking Vulkan wasn't the right model. There are some notes here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-lAvR9GXaNJiqUIpm3N2XuGU...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-lAvR9GXaNJiqUIpm3N2XuGUWv_JrkpGizDN0bNq7wY/edit#heading=h.vty7esorrmjf)

The bit about network transparency is the most interesting one IME (which, in this case, assumes the "network" is essentially a collection of intercommunicating system processes, not nodes), as well as the bits about how Vulkan exposes _too much_ of the vendor model to the programmer, which also isn't their goal. But it's a very sensible goal for Vulkan itself on the desktop.

If anything, the work on the gfx-rs means that WebGPU might actually end up as a more low-ish-level "portable" graphics API than Vulkan itself if you want to target every major platform + the web. In particular, gfx-hal is a non-Vulkan abstraction layer on top of D3D12/Metal/Vulkan, and webgpu-native/wgpu-rs provide WebGPU APIs for desktop platforms (in C/Rust) based on gfx-hal. Eventually you should be able to target WebGPU+WebAssembly too. I just ran a wgpu-rs demo yesterday on my mac with Metal and on my Windows desktop with DX12 with no changes! Pretty good stuff so far. And if you're a die hard Vulkan fan and don't care about WebGPU, then gfx-portability will let you program against Vulkan while building on gfx-hal, all the same, so you can still target Windows/Mac. (It would be interesting to ask how gfx-rs overcomes the problems outlined in the above design doc.)

The shading language will probably end up being the most contentious point in the end, but ultimately I think the overall tool quality/available for desktop is impressive, and WebGPU will probably end up as a good offering in the design space.

<comment><USER34> This is not about being a Vulkan fan. Not even about portability.

The real issue is the one no one talk about. Webgpu is the _intersection_ of features from Vulkan, directX 12 and metal. Which _means_ that webGPU is a subset of Vulkan, metal and DX, by design it is less powerful than metal, less powerful than DX and less powerful than metal. By being an intersection, by design they've created a sub-par, non evolutive api. As a consequence, performance reachable on desktop, and expressivity of possible software and graphical features will be inferior on the web which is _deeply sad_

Nobody understanding and stating that is another sad thing.

<comment><USER29> WebGPU is for the Web. You're expected to be able to put up a webpage and have it run everywhere (as much as is possible). Vulkan is designed so you have to make paths for every differen type of hardware. That's a non-starter for the web

<comment><USER23> With extensions count growing every week.

Good luck making sense of Vulkan in 10 years time.

<comment><USER34> That's why it's versioned.. Webgpu could start from Vulkan 1.1 or the latest Vulkan version could be bumped to Vulkan 1.2 for marking it's the one used for webgpu.

<comment><USER23> Except that OpenGL and WegGL already proven that there is what the paper says, what the driver states and what the GPGPU actually does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not really interesting until Chrome adopts it

<comment><USER37> Chrome is adopting it!

They've signaled "intent to implement", and have started work on it in chrome for mac.

[https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation- Status](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status)

<comment><USER6> Note that Chrome has not signaled adoption for WSL (formerly WHLSL), instead preferring to use a profile of SPIR-V. They also put out a demo with the Babylon.js team for this as well.

[https://medium.com/@babylonjs/webgpu-is-coming-to-babylon- js...](https://medium.com/@babylonjs/webgpu-is-coming-to-babylon- js-c44f8065ac05)</comment></comment></comment>


Da Vinci's Mechanical Lion Brought To Life After 500 Years - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idINTRE57D1MQ20090814?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=11584&sp=true

<comment><USER2> nice one! Here is a video of his wind-up car:

[http://green.autoblog.com/2008/01/08/cool-video-leonardo- da-...](http://green.autoblog.com/2008/01/08/cool-video-leonardo-da-vincis- wooden-car-designed-in-1495/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you suppose Da Vinci was a time traveller from a later century? Sure seems that way sometimes.

<comment><USER4> If he was, he wasn't from this Earth. His painting style is not very modern, much less futuristic. He was a man of his time, though one of extraordinary talent, interests, and energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what he could have accomplished with the resources we have today. He was so far ahead of his time and accomplished so much - I wonder how he managed to find time for everything. We owe him a lot.

<comment><USER4> _"I wonder how he managed to find time for everything"_

He didn't have TV and the internet to distract him. That was one benefit of living in his time.</comment></comment>


Ezra Klein Interviews Nicholas Carr - <AUTHOR> https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-reading-and-digital-thinking/id1081584611?i=1000480085743 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised there are no opinions on this, at Hacker News. Even if it is just to object to the conclusions that Carr draws :)

For the record, I'm a huge fan of Carr and his work.</comment>


Jeffrey Epstein's grift was to hook scientists up with the superrich - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/jeffrey-epstein-grift-hooking-scientists-up-with-super-rich <comment><USER2> When you have no substance then appearance counts for a-lot. Sadly, people can get pretty far on appearance alone. But Epstein is such a shady guy, how could some one be a billionaire (maybe an exaggeration) and no one knows what they do.</comment>


Prompt elasto-gravity signals and their potential use in modern seismology - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-02-earthquakes-deform-gravity.html <comment><USER2> Why would LIGO ([https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/)) not detect these signals?

<comment><USER3> Speculation here, but from the article's description I suspect these are too high in magnitude (they would likely saturate the sensors) and not the right "mode" or frequency. The LIGO method is looking for very small fluctuations in a more complex field (certain components of the "metric tensor" which amounts to measuring tiny time-dependent variations in the speed of light in two different directions). By contrast, this signal would be a change in the direction and strength of gravity's local pull and is probably one of the things they work hard to filter out at LIGO. As such, the main instrument probably wouldn't be able to measure them accurately, but I'd expect the instruments used to maintain and isolate the main instrument would see it pretty well.

Similar in concept to how a radio antenna isn't the best way to measure a shift in the local magnetic field. It's the "same" thing, but the instrument is sensitive to a very different part of the space of "magnetic field changes", including in this case the fact that the antenna may actually be measuring the field by looking at different data (electric field) and relying on the way the two interact in the "far field".

Edit: sorry for the abuse of scare quotes, I'm on mobile and it's the easiest way I can think of right now to indicate that I'm oversimplifying certain technical digressions that are deep subjects in their own right

<comment><USER4> I did some stubby pencil work a while back and if I recall correctly, the mass energy conversion of 1kg of material (i.e. nuclear test) on the other side of the planet was orders of magnitude 'louder' than anything that LIGO has detected so far.

It still suffers from having no chirp before that you get from two orbiting bodies that merge, but I think it would technically be detectable as a pop in the signal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original paper here:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X20300935)</comment>


Meet H. Moser and Cie., the Swiss Watch Company Apple Is Probably About to Sue - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/meet-h-moser-cie-the-swiss-watch-company-apple-is-probably-about-to-sue/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure I agree with the statement that Apple Watch is ruining sales of Swiss luxury watches. It has more to do with the slump in oil money and China (economic slowdown and new push against showing-off luxury items and against corruption that have dented the habit of giving expensive presents. Who buys a 10k mech watch will probably also fork out 500usd for an apple watch if he/she cares about it.</comment>


I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day <comment><USER2> You've inspired me to write a counterpoint - I tried the same, and for a pretty large set of things I do day-to-day, the Raspberry Pi has been working well. So much so that I am currently engaged in an internal debate on whether or not I should purchase a more powerful machine to use as a desktop.

The only real deficit to me is that initial compiles of Rust code can take a while. A vast amount of CPU / Memory is available for pennies on an EC2 instance, so it comes down to convenience and psychology, really.

</comment><comment><USER2> A minor correction - You _can_ run a Raspbery Pi 4 @ 4K / 60Hz over HDMI. I'm doing it on an LG 32UD59-B. It did take a tiny bit of research and a non- obvious change to the monitor settings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. As with so many other things I ran into throughout the day, it comes down to "how many hours do I want to dedicate to searching docs and forums, tweaking obscure settings in config files and rebooting my Pi to try to get it to do things my macOS/Windows 10 laptops do out of the box?"

(Also, can you link to what the setting is or mention it? I'd love to give it a try and see if I can get it working with my LG 27UD68-P.)

And that's just the thing. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who are saying right now "geerlingguy's an idiot, it's so easy to tweak all these settings!"

But I care more about picking something up and starting to use it immediately. Defaults matter, and ecosystem matters. And it's not like the Pi Foundation is not trying—things have improved _vastly_ in the past decade. And that's why I tried this experiment finally (the Pi 4 is mostly-adequate, hardware-wise, for what I do).

But I now know some of the things I would want to see before I could consider moving all my non-text-editor/k8s/infra-dev work over to a Pi-based or even Linux-based desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the end, you will be disappointed with the latter if you love running your Electron apps + Firefox or Chromium on this device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Surprisingly, that was the least of the issues I encountered. I used Slack all day inside Chromium, and besides the fact that it took ~5 seconds to get back to a workable state whenever I switched back to its tab, it was perfectly usable and didn't really hinder my ability to communicate.

Also, Slack is slow enough on my core i9, so I'll give the Pi a pass if it's even a little slower there. It just pushes me back more and more to preferring IRC, since I can chat from any device, anywhere (Pidgin in the Raspberry Pi's case), without having to load up 500+ MB of RAM for a fancy GUI.

<comment><USER3> Running Slack in Chromium is fine for the Pi, but not what I mean.

I meant running separate electron apps and Chromium at the same time. I doubt that it could handle three or five of them running at the same time which most users would be trying to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Rebel girls and children's books: In defense of well-behaved women - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/rebel-girls-and-childrens-books-in-defense-of-well-behaved-women.html <comment><USER2> > Parks made history precisely because she was well-behaved, because her image > was so wholesome and unthreatening, and her protest stood out as an > apparently isolated act of forgivable "misbehavior" in an otherwise virtuous > life. She was a much safer heroine than working-class teenager Claudette > Colvin, pregnant out of wedlock, who had been arrested for refusing to give > up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus several months earlier

This hits home. Society wants well behaved women -- and men. Heroes they can rally with, not so much. Just people that the average person think are like them, living a vicarious life.

But is that the best for the individual and their unique talents?

Personally, I do not want to glorify submission to any cultural value. I want to forge my own path. While I am sure many men would like well-behaved women, I do not think we ought to become their idealized version of a human being. Likewise, I do not want men to think they have to follow some cultural narrative to 'prove their worth.' They should forge their own path.

I thought we had left these old values in the previous century, but apparently we haven't.

<comment><USER3> > I thought we had left these old values in the previous century

You are welcome to go forge your own path - but many of us love and cherish "old values" \- so why should we follow?

<comment><USER4> Because those old values lead to the misery and needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, for very little benefit.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. Proponents of "old values" would argue they come with billion$ of benefit$.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My five-year-old is really into the "Rebel Girls" book. Its format -- one page biographies -- makes it easy to flip thru and pick stories.

Unlike almost everything else we read it is both _real_ and _edgy_.

The one that she returns to the most is Malala, shot in the head by men who didn't like her going to school, won the Nobel peace prize.

<comment><USER7> "The one that she returns to the most is Malala, shot in the head by _fundamentalist Muslim men_ who didn't like her going to school, won the Nobel peace prize."

Fixed it for you.

Or let me explain: The problem here isn't that they are men in general, but that they follow a set of beliefs - Sharia law - which say that Muslim women only live to please Muslim men. Which also means that they don't like Muslims girls or women to go to school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Well-behaved women seldom make history". I love that quote.

<comment><USER9> I think it's rather likely that the vast majority of poorly-behaved women also don't make history.</comment></comment>


Unique Carbon Allotrope Offers Path to Neuromorphic Computing IEEE Spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/unique-carbon-allotrope-offers-path-to-neuromorphic-computing <comment><USER2> It also offers path to cure cancer, create perfect cryptocurrency, stop climate change and legalize marijuana!

/s</comment>


Peter Norvig answers reddit's questions (Ask Me Anything video interview) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/b8aln/peter_norvig_answers_your_questions_ask_me/

<comment><USER2> That was great - well worth 30 minutes. He seems to take so much more of a 'scientific' approach to his work and general thinking than I do - I am now sitting here thinking about my own thought processes and the ways I analyze problems. (I rely probably too much on previous experience, rather than new analysis.)

I also liked his question to the Reddit community re: does up/down voting produce a system that gives us what we want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you agree with the answer to #2? He goes on to say that some former JPL employee named Ron attributed his high productivity to Lisp but, when he joined Google he found out C++ programmers there that were more productive that he in Lisp. Then he realized it was the programmers that mattered, not the programming language.

Now, isn't this a bit stretched? I'd believe if it was Python against Lisp, of course...</comment>


Ask HN: Can we ban BusinessInsider's paid article links for HN community? - <AUTHOR> Hello There,<p>I am seeing so many links from BusinessInsider on Hackernews. To read the article we need to pay them. I still don't know what is the point for posting it over here. This is the community to share knowledge without charging any money. Why are we allowing them to post those links in this community? This is not a community to make some money. Please share knowledge without charging any money. Internet should be free and open. <comment><USER2> HN's policy on paywalls is clear: if there's a way to work around them, they are allowed. Given that I can't remember ever seeing a paywall on BusinessInsider, I suspect a strong adblocker suffices as a workaround.

<comment><USER3> Does that work for WaPo articles also?

<comment><USER4> WaPo links work fine for me in incognito mode (so it can't accumulate a count of articles read). But NYT recently started detecting/restricting incognito mode. So now for NYT you have to do the same thing as WSJ links: click 'web' or look up the article's title on Google. Then with Google as the referrer NYT will not paywall the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> HN's policy on this is really clear -

> please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic

</comment><comment><USER6> I think some of their articles are behind a paywall and others aren't.

</comment><comment><USER7> This should be the case for all paywall sites imo.</comment>


How invokedynamic just might save Dynamic Languages on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/how-invokedynamic-just-might-save-dynamic-languages-on-the-jvm/

<comment><USER2> Really good short talk by Ola Bini on invoke dynamic in Java 7 and what it means not only for dynamic languages on the JVM but also Java and Scala. Ola is a really creative person - I always enjoy hearing what he is working on.</comment>


Cities affect surrounding temperatures for thousands of miles - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-01-cities-affect-temperatures-thousands-miles.html

<comment><USER2> After reading the article I was disappoint to find out this is merely a guess based on the assumption the model they are using is otherwise correct.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like most of the rest of climate science to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this kind of effect is still being studied, is there some hope that it is correctly compensated when measuring planet temperatures?

From the article, it looks like the known effect is the urban heat island effect, which I assume is modeled correctly when predicting global warming. This new effect has about the same magnitude, but affects a much wider area.

<comment><USER3> Urban heat island should not have much effect since is is simply re-radiation of energy (mostly solar) that was there already. The new effect is additional heat introduced by burning fuel.

<comment><USER5> You make a good point. Concentrating the release of energy in a small area in a relatively small time frame is bound to affect temperature surrounding the city for many miles around the city. This heat is distributed through the atmosphere.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA has patented a new route to the moon - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/GazEtc/status/1298979254244261890 <comment><USER2> "Helium 3 nuclear fuel mining?"

I thought the first product from the moon would be oxygen (7/8 the mass of your rocket "fuel") and that you'd produce it by reducing hematite (one astronaut scooped up powdered iron ore about as good you'd find at any mine on Earth.) Thus you get iron as coproduct; use it to make storage tanks for the oxygen you're producing.

I wonder if you could possibly get rare earths or any other moonproduct to Earth economically with one of these bad boys:

[https://thediplomat.com/2019/06/us-navys-railgun-entering- ne...](https://thediplomat.com/2019/06/us-navys-railgun-entering-new-testing- phases/)

Delivering O2 to Low Earth Orbit by skimming the Earth's atmosphere seems possible but would take close attention to maneuvering to lose the right amount of energy and get into the phase space footprint of the catching machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> So I don't understand, any space farer who takes this route will be sued for patent infringement?

Lol. I'm going to patent a driving route to Walmart. I'll be rich.</comment>


The Syndicate Wars sequel 15 years in the making - <AUTHOR> http://www.redbull.com/uk/en/stories/1331610579076/satellite-reign-syndicate-wars-returns-at-last

<comment><USER2> A youtube user has posted a video run of the original game including shots of the mission emails from maritz, which can be read in fullscreen. I love the plots in games of this ilk from the nineties, syndicate and system shock are among my favourites.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nycxPg6lJmk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nycxPg6lJmk)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the actual kickstarter campaign: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite- reign)

<comment><USER4> Although the kickstarter campaign is over, they still accept pledges towards their stretch goals:

[http://satellitereign.com/pledge/](http://satellitereign.com/pledge/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Redbull.com is a random source for this information, just saying. Anyway I'm a huge fan of Syndicate and used to play it on Atari Jaguar so I can't wait for this.

<comment><USER6> Redbull is a pretty notable backer of e-sports. [http://www.redbull.com/us/en/esports](http://www.redbull.com/us/en/esports)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to hear. Syndicate Wars was a lot of fun. I have no interest in FPS games, except maybe Portal, so good to hear they are staying true to the format.

</comment><comment><USER8> I loved this series so much. Challenging, interesting, cyberpunk.

Best of luck to these guys. I'm 100% in on whatever they create.</comment>


The Internet Had Already Lost Its Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-21/the-internet-had-already-lost-its-neutrality <comment><USER2> The author has some misunderstandings about the actual rules of net neutrality with respect to how traffic shaping works. Actually, I'm not sure if my own understanding is right of traffic shaping.</comment>


Can schools survive in the age of the web? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121123-can-schools-survive-the-web-age

<comment><USER2>
      As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman
      of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a
      September article for the MIT Technology Review:
      "If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school,
      what does that say about kids in New York City who
      do not learn even with school?"

Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!"

Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty & Halo. For example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real book like The Lorax.

Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to?

I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online courses) will eventually surpass us.

<comment><USER3> All people are intrinsically motivated to learn.

People can give up wealth, sex, and addictive drugs. We can fast. We can even stop breathing for a little while -- or longer, with a little planning. But short of suicide, you can't stop thinking about the world around you.

<comment><USER4> Actually, learning to stop this process is the goal of several systems of meditation.

It is by no means an easy thing to do, but it can be done, for short periods of time, and feels great.

<comment><USER5> Mthe goal or process of meditation is kind of an oxymoron. You actually are learning. You're learning to stop thinking briefly. And how do you do it? By thinking about not thinking. How do you that? Concentrate on your breath. The whole thing is very strange. You're thinking but you aren't. You're learning but you aren't. I don't doubt that it feels great and I accept that it is a beneficial thing to do. But when you really think about it, it's full of contradictions and oxymorons. It's like a question with no answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> MOOCs might replace a traditional university for a few people, but the top universities will remain around. The major benefit to college is not the academics, but the social connections you make. For hackers, this might be meeting a fellow hacker to start a company with. For a director, it might mean meeting an actress to star in a movie. For a businessperson it might mean getting a job at a friend's dad's company.

The central idea behind MOOCs is that education is expensive now. It isn't -- just go to the library and pick up a book. Completely free, and if you're disciplined enough, probably pretty close to a university quality education. I'll concede that this doesn't apply to hard science education where you need sophisticated labs, but it does apply to a lot of students' fields of study.

When most people think "education", they aren't talking about learning, but the complete package of learning, social activities, and making connections. That is expensive. You need a nice campus with plenty of green space to lie about and play frisbee. You need a nice gym, a welcoming student center, and a nice dorm area for people to socialize. If you were to build a campus solely around education, it would probably be pretty cheap. Just buy up some cheap office space in a nondescript office buildings, and have professors give lectures there. But this isn't what students want.

<comment><USER7> I see meetme groups forming around MOOC courses. It's not "The College Experience" but it carries much of the same value.

<comment><USER8> I've seen this too, it's an interesting development. The virtual community is also pretty powerful in a lot of the courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've taken a few courses through coursera, udacity, racked up points in khan and I've watched some videos from the MIT open source libraries, so the answer to "But what will that mean for traditional institutions?" is they will (hopefully) change dramatically.

Imagine having 5,000 students all wanting a MSCS, each student writes out a check for only $20,000 ($5,000 year). So you have $100 million dollars at your disposal for the complete education... what sort of 'online system' could you create for $100 million? Not just video, not just lectures, hell you could make games, interactive puzzles, you could pay to tape some of the brightest minds in the field... and you could change it --every year--.

You could offer a better experience for a fraction of the price that students pay today.

edit: fixed confusion over 20k

<comment><USER10> If I was paying 20k/year that is in the same ballpark as a real university + I get all the other stuff, the experince, the connections, the friends, etc.

You are more likely looking at 5k/year. At that price point it becomes a posibility for those who can't afford to quit their job and go to school but who still want to improve their life.

Then, from there, you can grow the reputation of online school (which still have a huge stigma attached to it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The web is possibly the greatest invention of the 20th century and has certainly democratized the way the human race shares knowledge but I don't think online education can ever become a better or more competitive option than traditional offline education. There are unique cases where each is better than the other but I cannot see one overtaking the other. At best I think online education could become almost equal to traditional education but never a more popular or better option.

Consider those living in countries where web access is still rare or slow or a challenge to access. Online education isn't viable for these people though it may be in the future.

There is no substitute for being educated in the presence of a professor and a room full of students. You could email, IM, video conference, or voice call all day long but web based education takes a bit of the humanity out of the whole experience and it's importance should not be underestimated. Online education makes things more rigid in some ways. An instructor prepares lessons as usual, teaches, then receives feedback from students in the form of questions and their scores on assignments and tests just like usual but theres an advantage to being present in a room full of students. That advantage is that it is far easier to tell if students are catching on and if one or more students are struggling to understand certain concepts then it's easier to sort of improvise and immediately find out and address the cause of any sort of problem.

Individual attention suffers with online learning. You can still give individual attention but for many, having someone there makes all the difference.

That said, there are just as many benefits to online learning and I have to say, I don't believe one is better than the other, just that they're different and that I don't think either will become endangered any time soon.

As someone who went to but did not finish a prestigious university, I think online education should only be sought out in certain circumstances. The experiences you have when attending a traditional university are priceless and cannot be had online. Those experiences aren't part of any curriculum but are an important part of forming the person you will become after graduation. Online education seems, at least to me, better for those needing a cheaper alternative to traditional education. Also those who are unable to physically attend a university due to, again, cost constraints, or their location would also seem to be a good fit as well as those folks who are older, need a more flexible schedule, have difficulty learning in a classroom, and others.

I've dome online and traditional education. They compliment each other well and both offer certain things the other doesn't but given the hypothetical choice of choosing all of one and none of the other, I'd take the traditional experience any day.

The web is the most incredible thing that's happened to us since the Enlightenment probably but it isn't the cure to all mankind's ills. Online education is certainly a viable alternative to a traditional education but I still don't see it being able to rival or outmatch a traditional education. There are intangibles that come with a traditional education that have no on,one counterpart. So I doubt traditional schools have anything to fear and truly hope they don't.

<comment><USER11> Some of the negative aspects of schooling:

Destruction of creativity, obedience, deferring to authority, loss of time, loss of identity, bullying, inability to pursue subjects in depth, learning to self-censor, second-rate materials, not being allowed to read, not being allowed to talk, have to ask permission to go to the bathroom, learning to tease those who fail to self-censor, everybody trying sooo hard to be normal, belief that exams measure knowledge, being put off math for life, inability to learn during adulthood, etc.

<comment><USER5> I think some of those aren't bad. It seems like a few of those points are things that you maybe had a hard time coping with or know someone who has and so now you're saying this is a negative consequence of schooling.

Learning to self-censor is a good thing. It doesn't mean you stop thinking independently, it just means you learn what's appropriate to say to whom, and how, and when, and where, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and is an important part of developing as a person. We can't go around saying "hi, I think you're fat" when we meet someone overweight and then applaud it because self-censorship is bad. Kinda lame example but you know what I mean.

Trying to be normal and fit in is also an important part of growing up. Because I don't know any better, this point makes it sound like you're promoting non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity. You can be normal and still be unique. We live in the real world and learning how to choose groups to be accepted by and subsequently fitting in with them is an essential skill all humans need to learn. I personally am lacking in that skill so I have lots of awkward social interactions at work and other places. It's not a good thing and I wish I did learn to be normal. I can still be myself when its appropriate but sometimes you there's nothing wrong with just fitting in.

Learning how to handle teasing (regardless of whether you are being teased or doing the teasing) is, once again, an important part of developing as a person.

These three points you list are not negatives of schooling at all and they are just as prevalent outside of an educational environment as they are within one. Furthermore, being exposed to these things and subsequently learning how to cope with them makes you a more well rounded person. People who don't go through these experiences and don't develop these social skills will have a harder time out in the real world than those who have. It's my personal belief that people who tend to spend lots of time online (particularly the stereotypical nerd gamers and coders) have a hard time socially partially because they have avoided situations where they would have to learn to self- censor, be teased, tease someone else, trying to fit it. There are other factors but learning how to get through these challenges would probably help them a bit.

Now, you do make some good point about second-rate materials. The belief that exams measure knowledge is also highly debatable and probably false too, I'll grant you that. That said, the rest of your points sound more like a rejection of authority than anything that's detrimental to people. There's nothing wrong to deferring to authority. We live in a civilized society and there's a structure to it. The key is learning when its justified to stand up to authority. I can see you're coming from a sincere place but I just can't get behind you on this. It seems more like you're ant-authority for the sake of being anti-authority and nothing more.

<comment><USER11> Well, it's more important where education is going than what any one of us happens to think. Most people who went to school find it very hard to conceive of it as a purely bad thing because they themselves had to pay a large psychological price to adapt to it. They don't understand about memes and how harmful ideas and institutions can persist. They would rather see it in a positive light. No doubt ancient Aztecs felt similarly after their relatives had been sacrificed!

The self-censoring issue is directly linked to creativity. Our first thoughts are the most creative; however, people learn to censor them so that these don't reach the level of awareness. Thus they don't have the option either to criticise or to enact them. HNers have retained a portion of their creativity. It's the majority and esp. the minimum wagers who have paid the highest price.

Learning to get on with people is a vital part of life but being herded together to perform make-work with people the same age as you is not the best way to learn this. Neither is prison nor the army. Voluntary relationships with friends and colleagues are more instructive, where people are unafraid and free to leave and there are real creative tasks at stake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't read this article in the UK. <http://i.imgur.com/ecXnV.png>

Apparently we're allowed to benefit from the profits they make with the BBC Worldwide service but we're not allowed to actually see the content.

<comment><USER13> There's a mirror of it here for UK readers:

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/9cac8469-887f-40fd-9401-8a21fd26c668/a5a7c9f72ab6fd97ada76634883cc87f)

<comment><USER12> Cheers. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing the article doesn't touch on is how to replace things other than the big, sit-in-an-auditorium style introductory lectures. It's plausible MOOCs are on their way to delivering the equivalent of that educational experience for much less money. But that's really only the introductory part of university curriculum. Just as important imo is the part where you do projects and get hands-on experience.

For example, in my senior-level AI class, we had lectures for the first 2/3 of the semester (approximately), and then for the last third, picked a project to do individually or in small teams, and met one-and-one with the professor once a week to develop and carry out our project. That was _by far_ the most educational part of that class. And in physics, the physics lab was just as important as the lecture, possibly even more important when it came to learning how to actually carry out experiments properly.

I can imagine that kind of learning being tackled, too, but I think it'll require something considerably more innovative.

<comment><USER15> All these articles are borne out of the same question: will MOOCs supplant the education system?

None ask how can MOOCs and online lectures increase the quality of our education system? What would happen if universities adapt to incorporate these tools?

You hit the nail on the head: more projects, more hands-on, more interaction with your professors, more labs, more experiments. The auditorium lectures become redundant thereby freeing up space and time for the aforementioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _As the author and technology theorist Ian Bogost argued earlier this year, "if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?"_

A good analogy would be newspapers vs news websites. In the end, it is still the same news, but online it is more up-to-date, globally accessible, and more convenient to access. Lectures suck when they're at 8am and if you miss them they're gone forever. They also can't be paused or fast-forwarded. But most importantly, they only happen in one location. Putting them online puts them in the hands of students across the globe, and gives them the ability to watch them at any time, at their own pace.

<comment><USER17> You did nice job listing why lecturers suck. Now try and list why your teaching videos suck.

<comment><USER16> Improving is an iterative process. You find problems, solve them, and then find more. Videos suck because they're static, they don't answer questions. So you make them adaptive. And so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think I would have done better at school if there had been a camera at the back of the class and ability to download the videos later.

Firstly, people tend to talk a lot in class. This is distracting and makes it difficult to hear what is being said. Perhaps if there was a recoding nobody would want their rude behaviour documented.

When listening to a class it is also very easy for your concentration to wander for long enough that you have trouble keeping up with the rest of the lecture because you missed something. A video trivially allows your to rewind those minutes.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's the same as the question "can schools survive in the age of the book". Education is not technology/media.

<comment><USER14> That's something I've been thinking about lately. I personally don't learn any better from MOOCs than I do from working my way through a good textbook. So if universities were going to be obsoleted, the printing press is what should've done it, if most people learned like me. However, MOOC advocates are, I presume, betting that for most people a good series of video lectures is a more compelling way of learning than a good textbook. I wonder if it's the modality (visual vs. aural learners, etc.), the social pressure of people "taking a class" together, or something else.

edit: For me personally, the biggest advance the internet has brought in autodidacticism is actually mainly on the textual front too: Wikipedia makes it much easier to find and navigate bodies of knowledge, and nicely complements the linear style of learning that you get by working through a textbook. There have long been encyclopedias of course, but Wikipedia is much bigger than most, always at hand, and somehow much easier to get engrossed in.

<comment><USER19> I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more in these contexts, but there is already precedent for MOOC's: bar study courses. For about $3,000, BarBri will teach you all the law you need to pass the bar. Everyone takes the course, because law schools, ivory towers that they are, don't actually teach you much of the law.

BarBri courses include all the things you have with Coursera, etc. Video lectures backed up with a big stack of paper course outlines (for reference), work sheets, online sample questions, assignment submission, etc.

My experience with my bar course was that all the online/video stuff is superfluous. The most efficient way to learn the material is not to sit through the video lectures, but to work through the outlines, taking notes and doing practice questions. Text is just a vastly superior format to video for conveying information quickly. The real benefit of the course format is not the online/video crap, but collecting all the information into a series of self-contained outlines. That's the big advantage of the course over just going to a library.

Of course we've had paper course outlines for god knows how long. And they haven't replaced law school, even in California where there is no requirement to go to law school. I didn't go to law school to learn the law--that was what BarBri was for. I went to law school to get a name on my resume that would get me a job, connect with professors who could serve as career mentors, and start building my professional network. The education itself is just 10% of the whole purpose of school.

<comment><USER20> So, if I didn't care about the name on my resume, already having as I do a pretty decent career, why can't I just skip law school and do the online law course?

<comment><USER14> Are you asking with a view towards becoming a licensed attorney, or with a view towards learning a sufficient amount about the law to be qualified to answer questions / make decisions, without being formally licensed to do so as a profession?

If it's for formal licensing, only four states let you take the bar exam without attending an ABA-accredited law school (California, Vermont, Virginia, Washington). A few others have provisions for you to attend only 1 or 2 years of an accredited law school, and then do self-study for the remaining portion without actually earning a J.D. as a prerequisite (Maine, New York, Wyoming). But even in these states you typically have to engage in some kind of approved course of study, although at least in California, this _can_ be via an online law course.

I haven't looked into the others, but at one point I looked into it in California, and the two options are: 1) attend an unaccredited law school (could be an online one) for the equivalent of a 4-year course of study, and take certain exams along the way; or 2) follow a 4-year approved course of independent study supervised by a judge or a legal practice (the classic "reading law" apprenticeship option that was once standard, but has been phased out in most states).

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't even mind law school! My problem is, I've only got a semester of undergrad. I was a professional developer more or less directly out of high school.

<comment><USER21> The easiest solution if you want to get a great credential with no undergrad seems to be a London Business School or London School of Economics MBA, which does not depend on undergraduate degree, followed by using the MBA as a credential to apply to other schools (PhD programs or potentially law school).

The other way with some programs is to do "special student" (non-degree) for grad school, and then get undergrad and grad requirements out of the way at the same time. I believe there are no-prior-undergrad PhDs through this method, at least in math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most important asset for a private school is connections.

I've experienced schools that were directly tied to the industry, so that the local companies would first go there and check with the teachers to see what student would be suitable for their company, instead of advertising the position through the usual channels.

The student would go from graduation right into employment without having to do any actual job search.

If you are an institution that has an established connection to the local industry, then I think such a school would be able to survive the online offerings from other international schools/sites.

<comment><USER23> Also allow wealthy families to network with each other, on top of whatever connections the school itself sets up.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure how that "wealthy families" part fits in with this?

Maybe this depends on the country, but one example that relates to my original comment was a school which specialized in university students who are about to or just finished their studies and wanted to enhance their studies in a specific area.

The whole program was less than a year and the costs would be easily covered even by a few months of part-time work, so we're not talking having to get an actual loan to even attend.

<comment><USER23> I meant private schools as in high-schools. Didn't realize you were talking about schools for adults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always wonder about headlines like this, schools exist to educate students, if they provide value to the students they will exist. Its the nature of the market. If they don't provide value they will cease to exist (unless maintained by an unholy subsidiary of tax payer money)

<comment><USER25> Even absent government policy, it's quite possible for contingent organizations to exist long past their sell-by date, because of the ravine their existence has sketched in the market landscape.

And with government subsidies--and imagining the American education market as moving toward existing without them is a flight of fancy--they can be disastrously harmful and still continue forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Finally_ , mainstream media addresses the elephant in the room re:education.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes, schools will survive in the age of the web. Most people learn via interaction, not passive observation. That's the reason we have homework, and labs, and (at the K12 level) all sorts of silly in-class activities.

College education will not change much either. If the purpose of college was simply exposure to factual information, they would never have survived the commercialization of the textbook. Colleges are about higher-level, deeper interaction with the material. (This means different things for different majors.) Moreover, colleges provide a simple, relatively efficient way of proving familiarity or mastery of a subject matter that would be technologically impossible for a web-course to provide (i.e., prevention of most forms of cheating).

The web may affect the _number_ of colleges, but it will not affect the fundamental nature of higher education.

</comment><comment><USER27> What I suspect in the future is a team of really qualified teachers offer short videos online, like those on KhanAchamdey and use them as supplement. But I don't see traditional school disappearing because of jobs and keeping a child at home is very dangerous. Hybrid class runs by having one recitation/dicussion and the rest online. On the recitation day the students have to take a quiz to show they watched the videos. What it killed is daily interaction with others.

You can try to do that in college, but not below college. Kids would enjoy to go to school just to see their friends.

Another thing is considered is once again jobs. What are you going to do with millions of teachers? If each school makes a video, only 1/1000000 videos will be favored.

Online classes have many bad things, and personally I only use it to supplement my college courses.</comment>


Oracle v. Google full trial transcripts: day 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012090614295190

<comment><USER2> I would love to see Groklaw adopt something akin to the way that openaustralia.org or www.theyworkforyou.com provides online access to hansard. Here is an example exchange, the most recent at time of posting:

<http://www.openaustralia.org/debates/?id=2012-08-16.74.1>

A lot of the things the site does well would also work well for legal transcripts:

\- Ability to comment on individual remarks

\- Links to wikipedia articles for jargon

\- Links to their own glossary

\- Links to the original hansard source

\- Mug shots of speakers: I found following the original Oracle/Google Groklaw transcripts more immersive after seeing at pictures of Van Nest et al.

\- API access[0]

And I'm sure there are many others. Anyhow, I'm still glad Groklaw provides this service. For anyone who goes on about the apparent bias of the editorials on Groklaw, at least they provide the straight facts too. Then you can make up your own mind, rather than having to rely on other (potentially biased) journalists.

[0] - <http://www.openaustralia.org/api/></comment>


The Design Contest Flaw - <AUTHOR> http://www.sixshootermedia.com/blog/the-design-contest-flaw/

<comment><AUTHOR> The part that struck me as most important:

>>But if I could give one piece of advice to these contest holders, it would be to do a bit of research on what you are after. Choose the proposal which best fits your project, and if you don't really know what that is, then you would be best just hiring a real designer to get the job done properly.</comment>


Ask HN: Career advice for failed entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> I just shut down my startup (after 2.5 years) and need help deciding next steps. We did great on business development (had partnerships with our best potential customers, gathered enough feedback on MVPs, were a part of one of the best accelerators in Silicon Valley) but could never ship the final product because of some technical challenges (we were building a hardware product, could never achieve some critical network latency v/s packet drop metrics critical for deployment of our product).
I started the startup right out of college and this is the first time I'll be job hunting. I come from one of the best universities in India and have interned in the past with one of the world's best investment bank, have programmed for Google Summer of Code and interned with an MIT Media Lab remote programme. In the startup, I was the CEO hence had a very generic work role. Now I am having trouble deciding what kind of jobs should I target.
I love enabling and helping innovative technologies (passionate about it). I can programme decently but there are better people than me at it and I would prefer to continue to be a generalist than a specialist. Can you recommend which roles/companies should I be targeting? <comment><USER2> What university in India</comment>