Apple Is Getting More Bang for Its R&D Buck - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-30/apple-gets-more-bang-for-its-r-d-buck <comment><USER2> I wish Apple would spend some more R&D money fixing up their Mac application- level software, which in my opinion has been on a gradual decline since about 2005.

More seriously though, Apple's revenue is much higher than these companies, and their R&D budget is still in the same order of magnitude (larger than Qualcomm or Facebook, about the same size as Google). So the answer here seems to be that they have a more efficient business model or participate in larger markets than Facebook or Qualcomm or Google.

<comment><USER3> Would it be rational to assume that even Apple has a hard time coming by quality people and all their A players are already busy laying the ground work for whatever product category they are about to enter next?

For example, if that might be a car they will need much better software and that from day one, otherwise people will die. The lack of polish on OS X might be an indication that they are working on something big. Not necessarily big for us, but a huge effort for them.

<comment><USER2> I assume that's a big part of it. It's disappointing though, because there are huge possibilities for user interface improvement in systems like file managers, "office" software, web browsers, image/video/audio/&c. tools, developer tools, and so on, for someone willing to invest serious time and money in getting the core abstractions right instead of chasing shiny new small features.

It's depressing that for example the file manager from BeOS is still better than anything we have in current machines, and that the OS X file manager isn't fundamentally anything but a mashup of the ones from NeXT and from original Mac, with slightly different chrome.

<comment><USER4> What's stopping a third party from making the software-with-better-core- abstractions you're talking about, and selling it—on the Mac App Store even?

<comment><USER2> In most cases, nothing in particular (the file manager is a bit different, as it needs work at the operating system level). But software projects competing in established markets which require many years of development to catch up to "industry standard" tools are hard to get off the ground, because new untested ideas are risky and there are few short-term payoffs. I would love to see new products competing in all these areas.

The one I'm most familiar with, Photoshop-style image editors, is based on core abstractions dating from research done on 1970s graphics workstations with far-too-literal adaptations of darkroom photography practices with 19th century ideas about how color works embedded deeply, and there is huge room for improvement if someone is willing to reimplement everything from scratch on better foundations. It's a several-year multiple-developer kind of effort though.

I'm sorry about Apple in particular because it seemed like their Mac application software teams were on a roll from ~1997–2005, but have sort of stalled since then. (Some of what they've done since has been awesome, but overall in my opinion there's been substantially less great stuff in the past 10 years than in the 8 years before that, and many apps feel severely neglected.)

I am thankful that Apple (with help from Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, etc.) keeps pushing the hardware side though. The new stylus, "retina" displays, better battery life in thinner computers and tablets, etc. are wonderful.

<comment><USER5> Careful about ditching too many paradigms at once; you'll end up with something like Kai's power tools, which everyone agreed were revolutionary but always remained a curiousity. This industry does not like having to retrain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an article by Horace on Aymco in 2012 on this same subject [1]. Back then Apple was spending just north of $600 million a quarter on R&D (in 2011, which is when he had figures for). Since then to reach $8 billion a year, Apple would have had to increase spending by over %30 per year. That's a very impressive ramp up in spending, especially when sustained over a substantial period of time.

The thing is their revenue growth has been so spectacular, it's swamped their otherwise dramatic increase in investment in R&D on a proportional basis.

[1] [http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/30/you-cannot-buy- innovation/](http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/30/you-cannot-buy-innovation/)

</comment><comment><USER7> R&D accounting for tech companies should somehow factor in M&A spend as this is becoming the de facto way to "generate" research and IP for large tech companies.

> Apple's relative thriftiness extends to its vaunted advertising and > marketing operations. The company spent $3.5 billion on advertising and > marketing over the past four quarters, while Google spent about $8.8 billion > in the past three. R&D spending isn't worthwhile if it never leaves the lab, > says Tim Swift, a business professor at St. Joseph's University in > Philadelphia. "Apple's products are going through some of the most effective > and sophisticated marketing we've ever seen," he says. "That's the other > half of what makes Apple the most productive R&D spender."

Surprising to see that Apple also spends less than 50% of what Google does in direct advertising. Amazing what kinds of costs you can cut when you have such strong marketing already built into the name, look, and design of your product.

<comment><USER8> Google's sales and marketing expense category consists of the following items (from their 10K) - some (perhaps most) of it is actually stock comp for sales & marketing employees.

• Labor and facilities-related costs for our personnel engaged in sales and marketing, sales support, and certain customer service functions;

• Advertising and promotional expenditures related to our products and services; and

• Stock-based compensation expense for our employees engaged in sales, sales support, and certain customer service functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read this as "how Apple relies on the R&D of other companies" For example, the quote about how IBM spent 100x as much on R&D as Apple.

IBM has produced 6 Nobel prize winners that lead to revolutionary advancements in the industry which Apple "innovation" relies on. There would be no iPhone without the investments in basic research and process that has done been done at IBM, Bell Labs, Intel, et al. When I worked at IBM, I couldn't wait to read the next IBM Systems Journal, it was the only piece of "corporate" internal communications in any company I've ever worked for that I looked forward to. I worked at IBM T.J. Watson in the 90s and one of the things told to us during orientation is that our budget, and our research was separate and independent from the commercial divisions of IBM and we were free to work on stuff that wasn't necessarily commercially viable.

Something rubs me the wrong way about this article and Apple's R&D spending. R&D spending is wasteful, it is a gamble, but every once in a while, it produces something incredible that leads to a huge net positive externality for the world. Some of the greatest inventions were done on research no one ever thought would have any commercial usage. These days politicians decry studies on bear DNA, or Shrimps on Treadmills, but who's to say these won't be vitally important things 20 years from now?

Part of relying on the research advancements of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, IMHO, is to take your success and your profits, and invest them, continuing a kind of scientific "social contract" for those that come after you.

Hoarding profits and bragging about how you can get away with making lots of money without having to hire many researchers is IMHO, a kind of parasitical attitude.

On top of that, is the tendency of people to credit Apple for all advancements, even those that were tweaks on hard work done by others. Do I credit Apple for their graphics performance, or Microsoft, AMD, PowerVR, NVidia, SGI, and everyone else who over the past decade have invested massively into consumer 3D acceleration? Do I credit Apple for amazing battery improvements, or Intel or Samsung investments into NAND? Is the A9X more important than TSMC/Intel/Samsung fab innovations? Or IBM's introduction of STM, Magnetic Storage, Eximer Lasers?

Science and Innovation are social endeavors relying on a community of shared progress. The secretive way Apple does R&D, their lack of publishing, and the way they promote this 'lone genius/inventor' view of the company rubs me the wrong way. I'm not saying Apple hasn't innovated, especially in mobile software, but won't should brag about not doing basic research, and banking a hundred billion in offshore cash to be used for what, stock buybacks?

Just what is wrong with say, spending some of that money to fund research into say, quantum computing or medicine? Does every damn thing have to be applicable to the next iPhone?

<comment><USER10> >Shrimps on Treadmills

Serious question, meant with no sarcasm at all: Can you give an example of something as ridiculous as the shrimp on treadmills study that cost a fortune and ended up being incredibly important in a way that wasn't immediately obvious at the time the study was conducted?

<comment><USER9> The shrimps on treadmills study didn't cost a fortune, that was ridiculous and dishonest conservative demogogueing over it with fictitious accounting.

It's like when a politician will say "This government project spent $1 billion to build a highway, and only produced 1000 jobs, at a cost of $1 million per job!" without looking at the other thing the project produced: a new highway!

The shrimp treadmill cost only $47 to make.([http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-shrimp- treadmill-became-a-3-million-political-plaything/)) and was trying to figure out a way to determine food safety, you know, like whether the shrimp we're eating are diseased.

I'm pretty sure if you total up the money spent on number theorists over the past several decades, it all looked ridiculous numerical masturbation, up until the point where public key cryptography was invented.

By contrast, military R&D is HIDEOUSLY expensive by several orders of magnitude. The people whining about a $50 shrimp treadmill need to get their fucking head in order and look at the cost of the F-35.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for answering. Now it makes a lot more sense. I wasn't aware of the follow-up articles, only the original politically-fused exaggerations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These seem like different horizons on investments. Apple seems to be dedicating a lot of resources to projects with 5 year horizons, while Google seems to be dedicating a lot of resources to projects with 20 year horizons. Neither strategy is wrong, but of course you would expect better ROI in a short period than money spent on fundamental research at a (relatively) new company.

<comment><USER12> Technology goes really fast. 20 years is insane, I'm not sure I'd bet a technology business on where we'd be in 20 years. 5 seems risky but worth thinking through. Probably not worth planning for except in the most abstract of ways.

<comment><USER11> I agree - but I'd describe things like self-driving cars or curing cancer as fundamental research rather than technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: 3.5% of $233bln is more than 21% of $12.5bln. Is this just an article about basic math, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER14> Your missing something.

Reading beyond the infographic, the article is really about how Apple is able to offset the need for R&D dollars (which as expanded from $4b in 2013 to $8.5b in 2015) by being an overwhelming large consumer of components ($29b committed next year).

This causes the suppliers to invest heavily in R&D to be able to "wow" Apple and lock up big contracts with their innovations, instead of Apple needing to do it directly.

The most interesting part to me is if this speaks to a counterpoint of the slow direction Apple appears to be taking moving more and more in house. This appears to indicate there is significant value by keeping key partners separate and in the free market, even with the lessened control of being a 3rd party.

<comment><USER4> Seen that way, Samsung Electronics is basically an Apple subsidiary kept at arm's length to keep the market forces going.

<comment><USER15> Apple is a marketing arm of Samsung.

<comment><USER16> I see what you did there. "... marketing ARM..." Clever. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tl;dr: Apple only spends 3.5% of its revenue on R&D versus companies like Google, Qualcomm, and Facebook who spend 15%, 22%, and 21% respectively. (2015 stats)

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, their absolute R&D spend seems to be working very well for them!

That said, I wish Apple would invest more in their web services. I find iCloud, Siri, etc. to be not as good as services from Google and Microsoft.

Because of (at least what I percieve is) Apple's fairly strong stand on the basic human right of privacy, I would probably award them all of by business is their web services were much better.

As it is, in addition to Apple gear I also use a Chromebook, Android phone, and even a Windows 10 laptop (I was curious to kick the tires of Windows 10).

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure I have read about some pretty strong stands for privacy from both other companies you mentioned too.

<comment><USER18> I am a huge fan of Google's services but they do make money from our personal information.

I am hopeful that Microsoft will evolve into a strong supporter of privacy, but with some (hopefully temporary) issues with Windows 10, I will wait and see what happens.

<comment><USER20> They make money from personal info but not necessarily in a way that would automatically be considered a violation of privacy.

The best way I can think of it is to compare to cable TV. Insert some other service if you've never had or wanted cable TV. Right now I pay something like $40/mo for cable TV and still have to watch something like 15-18 minutes of advertising per hour of programming.

The "Google version" of cable TV would either be free or cost a nominal $5/mo subscription and their algorithm would automatically use my viewing history to determine which ads might be applicable to me. As a result, I'd only have to watch a single 5 minute ad segment in the middle of every hour-long program. The better odds of a given ad being applicable would make the ad time more valuable so they wouldn't need to run as many to make the same amount of profit. Likewise, people and companies that want to reach potential customers waste less of their advertising and publicity budget on viewers that would never buy their products.

So, gross oversimplification aside, there's "making money from personal info" and there's "using data to make the same money from less advertising than traditional methods". I'm sort of on the fence myself and somewhat playing devil's advocate here but it's something that's often lost in discussions.

My main concerns are that government, law enforcement, or criminals would gain access to data that I only agreed to share with one company's algorithms. My main point is that "making money from personal data" can sound a lot like "selling my personal info to god knows who" which I've never known to be the case regarding Google or any of the info that's collected by Microsoft in newer versions of Windows.

My main conflict is between two things: a reflexive distrust of the motives of business and an acknowledgement that some really cool things (and plenty of mundane but still good things) only work when you have the data to power them. It's definitely a complex issue and not something I'll solve in an overly-long comment while I waste the last 10 minutes before it's time to go home.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your comment. It is a complex issue for me also. I get a lot of value from Google Now and even FB has value because it lets me know what family and friends are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is whatever was spent on something like buying FaceShift counted as R&D spending?

</comment><comment><USER22> That's a polite way to say that apple is spending less on R&D.

<comment><USER23> They're spending less per dollar of revenue, but the amount they're spending in absolute terms is totally comparable to other big tech companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> apple is not a standalone research company, it is market driven, with its purchasing power for components and tooling budget is making its vendors innovate and that shows up

</comment><comment><USER25> Are acquisitions considered money spent on R&D?

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks for the autoplaying video ad!

</comment><comment><USER27> I read this as: how successful you are has nothing to do with how innovative you are.

The Apple formula: keep innovations at a minimum, but market all your products as the coolest thing that anyone has ever seen anywhere. With enough of a marketing budget, everyone will believe you.

<comment><USER28> From the article:

> Apple's relative thriftiness extends to its vaunted advertising and > marketing operations. The company spent $3.5 billion on advertising and > marketing over the past four quarters, while Google spent about $8.8 billion > in the past three.</comment></comment>


Faust: Stream Processing for Python - <AUTHOR> https://robinhood.engineering/faust-stream-processing-for-python-a66d3a51212d <comment><USER2> Looks pretty good. So many applications in fraud detection.</comment>


Prediction: Amazon Will Acquire Rivian and Upend the Trucking Industry - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sure and after that they'll buy Airbus or maybe Boeing. Did FedEx or UPS ever need to buy a truck maker to grow like they did? Did Southwest Airlines ever need to own a Tier 1 aerospace firm to grow like they did?</comment>


Why Social Media Is a Negative Influence - <AUTHOR> https://www.theodysseyonline.com/10-reasons-social-media-negative-influence <comment><USER2> Are you trying to tell us something [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=chenster](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=chenster) ? I can't figure out what it is. Something about social media...</comment>


Python With Braces (The simple solution to PythonB) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Max00355/BracesForPython

<comment><USER2> What is the advantage of adding braces to Python? I find Python's indentation based syntax to be very readable, very close to pseudo code.

<comment><AUTHOR> In all honesty this was a bit of a joke, there is this implementation of Python called PythonB, which was posted on HN the other day, that violates everything Python stands for and uses braces instead of white space.</comment></comment>


Marketing new SW product and public relationships stuff - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everybody.

I plan to run new product and I need to do PR support for my new starting company and for my product on market. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with PR stuff. But I know it is very important issue and I must to figure out how can I do that PR stuff?

I need any start point for that. For example please recommend me good books about PR in the Internet or web-site.

If you had real experience with place on market new on-demand software product I would be really happy to have several advices from you.

Thanks in advance.</comment>


Howler.js - Lightweight Javascript library for Web Audio and HTML5 Audio - <AUTHOR> http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Audio-Javascript-Library <comment><USER2> I'm still waiting for a JS library to call it's self heavyweight, or bloated ;)

Nice work though

<comment><USER3> <http://www.javelinjs.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is kind of an aside, but I have a question. Is the format of the W3C specification an actual value-add to ideas like this? I mean, if I look at <http://www.w3.org/TR/webaudio/> my eyes kind of glaze over, whereas if I read something like <http://json.org/> (to pick something at random) it is far more accessible. Heck, most of the RFCs I've read are more readable than the W3C formatted specs (and are often written in a human, witty way).

</comment><comment><USER5> what's the advantage of using the web audio api for this over html5 audio elements? i don't think there's anything here that html5 audio elements can't do...

<comment><AUTHOR> For starters, Web Audio is much more performant than HTML5 audio.

<comment><USER6> This seems to be true, but I never understood why. HTML5 Audio is the simpler API; browsers vendors should be able to optimize it much more, yet, it still performs as bad as it did 2 years ago[1].

Another interesting fact is that iOS supports WebAudio, but doesn't support HTML5 Audio (for a meaningful definition of "support"). I just don't get it.

[1] <http://phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audio>

<comment><USER7> Yup, that's totally correct and sadly not much has changed since that blogpost. I still have several bugs filed on HTML5 Audio on chrome that have received no attention, that cause problems in BananaBread,

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread>

I suppose their assumption is that everyone should use Web Audio and forget about HTML5 Audio? It's sad though because Web Audio is total overkill for many things.

<comment><USER8> I didn't have played with WebAudio yet, but I assume that the main problem of HTML5 <audio/> is that the controls cannot be customized to fit the stylesheet. Using WebAudio probably allows to use custom html structure.

So the main question is : when will we have a standard shadow dom styling ? :(

<comment><USER9> You can do any customization with <audio/> that you can with Web Audio. The element doesn't have to be in the DOM to play audio.

It's actually harder to provide custom UI for the Web Audio API since seeking and general stream navigation are a _complete afterthought_ and their API makes them a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there any decent free tools for doing batch conversions on mp3 or wav files to the formats needed for HTML5 audio across browsers?

</comment><comment><USER11> Crashes Chrome 24.x OSX 10.8.2 - Awww Snap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I run Chrome 24 on a Mac and haven't seen any issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has Firefox implemented Web Audio by now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, no. However, it will have at least partial support in Firefox 20, so it is on its way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesnt work on an iPad...

<comment><USER14> Check your mute switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't work on iphone5 either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check your mute switch. I have an iPhone 5 and all of the functions work.

<comment><USER15> Thanks... That fixed it. However maybe you should detect if the mute switch is on and display a message. I'm guessing a lot of others would not think of that.

<comment><USER16> > Thanks... That fixed it. However maybe you should detect if the mute switch > is on and display a message. I'm guessing a lot of others would not think of > that.

Sure, except there is not an API call for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The tragedy of Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-tragedy-of-aaron-swartz <comment><USER2> A book review of Justin Peters' new biography, "The Idealist".</comment>


NASA Releases Jaw-Dropping Satellite Pics of Earth at Night - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412941,00.asp

<comment><USER2> gave up after having to click through 4 ads to see something bigger than a postage stamp</comment>


A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/04/experimental-webgpu-in-firefox/ <comment><USER2> I love how much this is like Metal! I've been really getting into Metal lately and I find it so much easier to use than I did OpenGL.

The one glaring exception is binding. It's the thing I hate most about OpenGL. I don't really have to think about it in Metal at all. The fragment shader just takes a texture or buffer as a function argument and I can use it just like I'd use any other C++ object or struct in the shader. From the calling side, I just say, here's the texture that goes with that argument (by name in the code, not by some random ID assigned at runtime). No figuring out which texture unit to use, or which texture target. No cases of accidentally forgetting to enable a texture unit or bind a texture to it, or using the wrong texture target. All of that fiddling around makes OpenGL such a pain in the ass to use. But it seems like WebGPU kept some of that nastiness. Why?

<comment><USER3> The binding model of WebGPU is nothing like OpenGL. I don't know where you get that idea, especially considering a dedicated section in the article describing this.

Metal binding model works well because each buffer can contain references to other resources (`MTLArgumentBuffer`). So you can change whole packs of resources at once with this. But argument buffers are not implementable on other APIs. We chose Vulkan's descriptor set-like model as the least common denominator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will this API be opt-in, or can we expect another security disaster like with WebGL?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457791) , [https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension- for-...](https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-a-new-dimension-for-browser- exploitation) , [https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl- security-...](https://www.contextis.com/en/blog/webgl-more-webgl-security- flaws)

 _Edit_ I should have given a quote from one of the articles covering the issue, so here's one:

> anyone running Firefox 4 with WebGL support is vulnerable to having > malicious web pages capture screenshots of any window on their system

<comment><USER5> Browsers should be run in a VM, via a fake GPU which is mapped to a window ( possibly root window ) of a main desktop. Giving code fetched from the internet in real time full access to hardware, especially complex hardware, is lunacy. I'm shocked that neither Google nor Mozilla still have internalized this lesson.

<comment><USER4> The browser should simply disable WebGPU by default. It's already intended to be sandboxed, but given what happened with WebGL, I'm not convinced we can trust it. There's nothing to gain by faking a GPU.

 _Edit_ For clarity, I'm saying you may as well just disable WebGPU. A CPU- based simulated GPU would indeed improve security, but its performance would be so atrocious that there would be no point having it compared to the existing drawing APIs.

<comment><USER6> > There's nothing to gain by faking a GPU.

Moving applications that can do _anything_ into sandboxed pages in a browser that can't do arbitrary things to the user's system is a win. The more capable the browser is, the more things that once would have been downloaded applications can become safely sandboxed pages.

<comment><USER4> As I said, it's already intended to be sandboxed for security. As I've clarified in an edit, my point was that CPU-based virtual GPUs perform so poorly that they aren't worth implementing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope it will bring real performance gains besides just easier API that is abstracted away in most apps.

I have 2 projects using Three.js and pure WebGL: [https://bad.city](https://bad.city) (multiplayer browser game engine + editor) and [http://fonted.io](http://fonted.io) (shader toy + fonts)

<comment><USER3> Right. I think, if by 1.0 we aren't able to show significant performance gains in a wide sense (latency, frame stability, and the actual frame time), it will be a failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know some people coded up raytracers with glsl texture shaders, but rayracers are massive parrallel with no shared state needed algorithms (the entire scene is tiny in those examples). Would this new API enable shared state (to some extent)? For example, someone may want to solve numerically the diff equation of the liquid flow. This usually involves dealing with big lattices where parts of the lattices can be updated in parallel, but on the edges, there need to be some data sharing involved. Same question, but for multiplying big matrices, as many of those numerical methods allow to reduce the task to multiplying huge matrices.

<comment><USER3> We are exposing writable storage buffers and textures in all shader stages (there is a caveat discussion [1] on the topic though), which means you can write data out directly. Sharing data between shader threads can be efficiently in the compute shaders (via the shared group memory), which are included in the core of WebGPU.

P.S. vange-rs [2] is written on wgpu-rs and uses ray-tracing in fragment shaders for the terrain. I hope to run it in the browser one day!

      [1] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/639
      [2] https://github.com/kvark/vange-rs

<comment><USER9> > writable storage buffers and and textures in all shader stages

Beware the behaviour of writes will not be consistent between vendors or shader stages, and may be surprising.

<comment><USER3> Yes, we are fully aware of that. There must be a line drawn somewhere between work that we can make portable, and the work that is platform-dependent. Enforcing any ordering on storage writes is completely unfeasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not working for me on Safari even with turning on the experimental feature, when will this land on regular Safari ? Excited to see WebGPU possibilities.

<comment><USER3> Safari implements a large surface of the API ([1]), but they don't accept SPIR-V shaders. When WGSL design is complete, and we have it supported in the browsers, it will be time for truly cross-browser applications.

[1] [https://webkit.org/blog/9528/webgpu-and-wsl-in- safari/](https://webkit.org/blog/9528/webgpu-and-wsl-in-safari/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now the cryptominer JS scripts can REALLY get some performance while you are on their site!

And of course its another way to do unique profiling of users.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would this enable bitcoin mining using gpu in a browser?

<comment><USER13> It's already possible, see [https://gpu.rocks/](https://gpu.rocks/).

Would likely just make it faster as you wouldn't have to read the results out of a canvas, although I haven't checked what the pure data API for WebGPU looks like.

After a bit more searching: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27056.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27056.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can I debug shader in webgpu like JavaScript in devtools?

</comment><comment><USER15> WOW! Finally WebGPU. Web Games will become a thing now!

</comment><comment><USER16> I really dislike when these articles say "works on Linux" (Reminds me of people that say "works on PC" when it actually only runs on a single OS.

Some Linux setups run Xorg, others run Wayland (with the world moving towards the latter). Yet, many times these new features (especially things related to rendering!) only work on older Xorg setups, but not on Wayland.

For anyone Linux users out there: these updates only work if you're still running Xorg.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why it wouldn't work on Wayland. We are currently using "software" presentation, which is a CPU roundtrip, as described in the article. This means we don't depend much on the actual Linux compositor. As long as WebRender can run on it, and you have Vulkan support, WebGPU will be available. If you are having issues, please file a bug!

<comment><USER16> Setting `gfx.webrender.all = true` makes sites like google maps render as just plain black (eg: no image). I'll try to debug in further detail and open a bug when I have clear reproduction details.

<comment><USER3> That's worrying! Mozilla gfx team would be interested in fixing that, as we are trying to roll WebRender on more platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So this WebGPU stuff is pretty much a Javascript binding to Vulkan. The design is almost 1:1 identical. Good luck securing that! I find bugs in the standard Vulkan validation layer pretty regularly after it has been in development for a couple of years. Sure, some of the stuff is pretty hard to check like device memory addresses. But just this week I had the validation layer blow up spectacularly because I simply dared to give it an unrealistically high index for a vertex binding and the layer attempted to resize its internal state tracking array for vertex bindings to accomodate that.

Vulkan has another fun aspect to it: the application doesn't have full control over the layer loading mechanisms in the mandatory driver wrapper. A user's system can be configured to load arbitrary validation layers in various ways and the application cannot prevent any of that. It can only ask for more layers to be loaded. This is great for development, but it also means that browsers can't generally assume that the Vulkan API does what they think it does. There might be a little extra in there.

<comment><USER18> Is this unique to Vulkan or would the same hold true for DX12 or Metal? If it's unique, perhaps WebGPU could steer Vulkan closer to the others in this regard. I don't think WebGPU is meant to be a Vulkan binding exactly but pushing secure and safe low level GPU computing across platforms. If Vulkan isn't good enough implementation layer it will just need to evolve

<comment><USER17> Vulkan itself is what it is now: an abstraction of (reasonably) modern GPUs on a very low level. It is certainly very useful in that it allows applications to use GPUs in ways that are very efficient and simply impossible with older APIs, especially OpenGL. The flipside is that this flexibility and the intentional thinness of the abstraction makes it hard and actually undesirable to check the validity of the API usage in actual production use. That's why the debug layer is an optional layer and not part if the Vulkan loader.

I need to check out a few things, but if WebGPU prevents access to a few hairy bits of Vulkan like explicit synchronization and memory management (the Vulkan app has to provide that), it might be securable. There are still some benefits over OpenGL left like the entire pipeline state being expressed in pipeline objects.

I don't know about DX12 or Metal in practice, so I will not comment on that.</comment></comment></comment>


Utah man dies from rabies, the first in the state since 1944 - <AUTHOR> https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900041016/utahn-dies-from-rabies-a-first-since-1944.html <comment><USER4> There's actually an experimental treatment for rabies that can be administered if post-exposure prophylaxis fails (called the "Milwaukee Protocol"). It involves a drug-induced coma followed by a cocktail of antivirals, and the success rate is around 20% in the best case (n.b. the sample size for the study that figure was 10).

Not that it would have helped here, when the diagnosis came at such a late stage.

The case report for the patient treatment that pioneered the Milwaukee Protocol—the first-ever successful treatment of a rabies patient—is worth a skim, if you're into this sort of thing.

[0]: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa050382](https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa050382)

<comment><USER5> I believe it's also associated with severe health consequences and the only survivor has stated regretting the protocol...

EDIT: Seems I'm misinformed. Thanks for clarifying, commenters below.

<comment><USER6> I don't see much regret: [http://www.jeannagiese.com/my-personal- story.html](http://www.jeannagiese.com/my-personal-story.html)

<comment><USER7> > I had less than 4 hours left to live. Dr. ... was not ready to let me die. > He researched the internet and found a few key phrases that helped him > devise a treatment

Well I guess in desperate times all treatments started somewhere, a quick goog is probably as good as any.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've had bats slip into my house late at night several times. They're cute little fuzzballs when I see them outside flapping around _far away from me_ , but hearing a "pittpittpittpattpatt" whirling above your head at night is terrifying. My first assumption was always rabies, because why else would a tiny animal get so close to a huge and dangerous animal like me?

A large number of stories I've heard involving people playing with small wild mammals end with rabies. When it comes to bats, raccoons, and possums, I was always taught to treat them as rabid because healthy ones won't ever get close to random humans if they can help it. That this guy was letting them lick his fingers is unimaginable to me.

<comment><USER9> Luckily, it's extremely rare for opossums to contract rabies, so keep snuggling those scary beasts to your heart's content.

<comment><USER10> what's the rate for opossums who get close to humans though?

<comment><USER11> This!

It's related to the assertion that fewer than 1 in 100 programmers is unable to write "FizzBuz" in the programming language of their choice.

The rate may be statistically insignificant amongst all programmers, but what is the rate amongst programmers looking for a job?

Different question :-)

<comment><USER12> I really struggle with the concept that some programmers cannot write FizzBuzz. I'd expect it from someone who has finished their first programming unit.

<comment><USER10> I've known some programmers that I expect might not be able to write FizzBuzz in the time allotted within an interview, based on how long it has taken them to produce code 5-6 times as verbose as needed given the simplicity of the task at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > They never hurt us

I guess as I understand it, it doesn't matter if animals are normally friendly because rabies causes them to act aggressively.

Radiolab did an episode on rabies that is absolutely fascinating. They talk about the "Milwaukee Protocol" for treating it, which I'd never heard of before that. It's no longer a recommended treatment, if it ever was, but the story really stuck with me.

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/312245-rodney-versus- death](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/312245-rodney-versus-death)

<comment><USER14> Why is it no longer recommended? Is it not the only viable way to save someone infected to life, when the disease has progressed far enough?

<comment><USER15> According to a study [1] it has never been a viable treatment. The treatment has been repeated on at least 12 patients since the original case (Jeanna Giese) and has been a failure every time.

No-one know why Ms Giese survived, but the Milwaukee protocol does not seem to have been the reason. Or if it was, it is not repeatable on other patients.

[1] [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal- of-...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of- neurological-sciences/article/critical-appraisal-of-the-milwaukee-protocol- for-rabies-this-failed-approach-should-be- abandoned/8A47C583B24B2B2E43248770F78CC35A/core-reader)

<comment><USER16> Sure, but I don't understand what the harm would be in trying the treatment for a patient who will otherwise have a 100% chance of dying in a very short timeframe. I mean, if the Milwaukee protocol did help the one patient, then the treatment has a 5% success rate, which is better than 0, no?

<comment><USER17> The harm is that these patients and their families lose the tiny amount of time together they'd otherwise have left, because the patient is put in a coma.

It's a difficult trade-off for a lot of high risk medical interventions to judge the relative worth of the potential chance of survival vs. that last remaining time, and it's certainly not a choice we can objectively make on behalf of other people.

In this case it's not certain the protocol have helped _any_ patients. _If_ it did help, then the success rate is so low that there are ethical issues with overselling the potential vs. giving people that extra time together.

If a patient wants to try, I'd be all for giving them that choice. But there's a big gap from letting a patient ask for something and promoting it as the recommended course of action without evidence of _any_ efficacy.

<comment><USER18> Well, are you aware of how death by rabies happens? Way better for you and your family if you die in a coma, then to have to watch you going through it consciously. If I had rabies in a stage where death is certain, the options I would be looking at would be either the Milwaukee protocol or euthanasia. The other option (doing nothing) doesn't just means death, it means painfully, awful death.

<comment><USER17> If people want to take that option, then I'd be fine with that. But it's not for anyone to decide on behalf of others. If MP has no effect - and it's very possible it's effectiveness is actually zero, as we don't know if it was what saved Giese, - then it is wildly unethical to give unjustified hope to people, especially when this will prevent doctors from trying to find other options that might at least give them a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This explanation of how it is to die from rabies is horrific, if anyone fancies a story that stops you from sleeping at night :P

[https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/9vdumn/utah_man_dies_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/9vdumn/utah_man_dies_from_rabies_first_in_state_in_74/e9bpd2j)

<comment><USER20> There's no rabies in the UK, right?

<comment><USER19> No, apparently it has been fully eradicated in 1922, and only deaths due to rabies were due to bites while abroad.

<comment><USER21> Last death: Scotland 2002. A chiropterologist studying native bats. He had not travelled out of UK

<comment><USER22> Now chiropterologists all get vaccinated as a matter of course (source - <USER2> wife is one).

<comment><USER20> I initially read that as chiropractor and was very confused... I obviously need beer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's fun to ask an anti vaxxer what they would do if they were bitten by a rabid animal. You can watch cognative dissonance kick in.

<comment><USER24> How would a vaccine help someone who already has rabies?

<comment> village-idiot The vaccine is extremely effective if taken between the bite and when symptoms occur. If treated properly and promptly, you have basically a 100% chance of living. As symptoms begin to show up, the chance of survival drops rapidly to 0%.

<comment><USER25> > As symptoms begin to show up, the chance of survival drops rapidly to 0%.

Probably even before symptoms show up, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There was also a fatal case in Virginia this year, a woman who contracted the disease while traveling in India. It took several trips to the hospital before they diagnosed it correctly, since it's not something docs are expecting to see. They tried the Milwaukee protocol unsuccessfully. [https://www.cdc.gov/worldrabiesday/stories/rabies- virginia.h...](https://www.cdc.gov/worldrabiesday/stories/rabies- virginia.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> "I had no clue," Giles said. "We would wake up in the night and they would be walking on our bed"

I'm sorry for the family but I can't exactly say I'm not surprised. Generally having any wild mammal hanging out where you sleep is a very bad idea.

Edit: Reworded to be less arse

<comment><USER28> And it's a very good idea to get a rabies vaccine shot if you find an unknown dog in your bed at night. Like a very very good idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > "I had no clue," Giles said. "We would wake up in the night and they would > be walking on our bed."

Not to judge, but isn't this getting _a little_ too close with nature?

</comment><comment><USER30> The practical takeaway here underscores the advice in Auerbach's authoritative text Wilderness Medicine. If a person interacts with potentially rabid animals and that interaction results in even the smallest scratch or contact with saliva the victim should undergo rabies treatment and if possible have the animal undergo necroscopy.

The odds of surviving rabies once it becomes symptomatic are negligible. They can throw the hail Mary from the 5 yard line in a snowstorm but the chances of winning the game with it are slim.

</comment><comment><USER31> Rabies enters a nerve cell at the bite site. It then travels along the nerve axon to the next cell. It does not proliferate at this time. Cell by cell, via the axon railway to the brain. It then proliferates in the brain and kills large numbers of brain cells and causes death. If you have antibodies, they can somehow block the axon travel. The Milwaukee treatment was a success - <USER3> only one? Perhaps that girl had some immunity? In any event, once it hits the brain the body starts to mount it's own immune response, and apparently the anitivirals she was given, along with the induced coma, allowed her immune system to overcome the rabies.

</comment><comment><USER32> Rabies is one of the scariest diseases to me, because most aren't vaccinated, it's virtually 100% lethal, and most of the time, doctors will tell you that you don't need to be vaccinated "just in case", because the incidence is so rare.

If you can, bring in the animal that bit you; you don't want to go through the shots unless they are necessary, but you also don't want to die.

<comment><USER33> I was dumbfounded by the attitude of some of the medical personnel I had to deal with when I was once randomly bitten by a stray dog. After I demanded to be vaccinated at the emergency room they finally gave in but their attitude was "the dog lives in the city, it doesn't interact with wildlife so you're most likely fine". I told them 'most likely' doesn't make the cut for me when we're talking about a disease with a mortality rate at 100%.

<comment> Paul-ish It's amazing how, to doctors, what were once once meaningful life and death scenarios just become more work or less work scenarios over time. They are desensitized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> they allowed bats to walk on their beds at night? WTF

<comment><USER35> To be fair bats are pretty harmless when they aren't infected with rabies.

<comment><USER36> To be fair, in quite a few places bats are the main rabies infection vector.

<comment><USER37> The places where bats are the main rabies infection vector are generally places where rabies is extremely rare[1], such as the US with 1-2 cases per year. ~99% of human rabies cases globally are from dogs[2], unsurprisingly these are mostly in places where dogs are not usually vaccinated.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/bats/education/index.html)

[2] [http://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/rabies](http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies)

<comment><USER36> Yes and when a bat has a 10% chance of carrying rabies you get a rabies shot it you come into contact with one.

Yes, the odds of you getting it are small, but the downside is that if you do get it you're almost guaranteed to die.

<comment><USER37> The number is probably way below 10%, but yes obviously getting the shot is still a very good idea.

Though the other nasty thing is that getting rabies shots cost thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in the US, which leaves a lot of people with the choice between bankruptcy or some unknown probability of getting rabies and the subsequent guaranteed death.

<comment><USER36> WA state for example: between 3-10% of bats submitted for testing are found to be rabid (this is from the DOH website). Yes, 10% is the high number in some years.

<comment><USER38> Bats that have been submitted for testing are not likely representative of the overall bat population.

<comment><USER39> Bats that have been submitted for testing are likely fairly representative of the bat population that is likely to bite you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Note to self: don't let bats lick my hands.

</comment><comment><USER41> When I got my rabies shots to do bat work years ago i remember the nurse that gave the shots told me the story of one of her first patients out of med school who died of rabies. Apparently, he was actually bit a bat that flew into his tent when he was camping and he didn't end up going to a doctor about it until it was too late and he slowly died. This was in canada. We've had deaths more recently than the USA from rabies.

It sounds like a horrible way to die. She gave me shit for going to work with bats...even after getting the shots...

Rabies is pretty intense. Even after being vaccinated you still need to get a titer shot every few years to keep your level of antibodies high enough to fight off the virus if you're exposed to it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is rabies vaccine so expensive as to be rationed?

<comment><USER43> That's not the case in Europe.

<comment><USER44> It was still 210€ for 3 shots when I took it. (Germany)

<comment> stargazer-3 Yet it is fully covered by public health insurance in Germany (got my rabies shots refunded by the TK).

<comment><USER44> Not fully and not by all public insurers AFAIK. But the price of the vaccination itself is still high anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's interesting to me that my town, Mountain View refuses to require rabies vaccinations or licensing for cats.

<comment><USER46> I think that's pretty typical throughout the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So why doesn't everyone simply get vaccinated?

<comment><USER48> Rabies vaccine is crazy expensive and takes multiple shots. Even then you still need immediate post-exposure treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> patient 0

<comment><USER50> It's a real human, not a Hollywood film for your entertainment

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is a badly written article, journalists should have a little science background.

"... the bats .... were carriers of a rabid and highly contagious virus."

Yes, it is a rabid virus...

"A person usually has some time before it is necessary to get the post- exposure prophylaxis vaccination."

A friend had to handle a bat in her cabin, and she was not told she had "some time" before the shots. If you've been exposed get your butt to the ER.

"An estimated 40,000

people in the US who might not be up-to-date on vaccinations

get preventive treatment for rabies after a bite or scratch from a dog or cat."

Statistically 100% of peeps aren't up to date on rabies vaccines. Vets, bat researchers, and bat house zookeepers may be up-to-date, but no one else is.

Rabies shots costs thousands of dollars, btw. Tricare, for military dependents, doesn't charge a copay for rabies post-exposure injections. My friend's insurance had something like $4000 copayment.

<comment><USER32> "Rabies shots costs thousands of dollars"

I assume you mean in the US. Really? I had no clue. They are like $5 in Eastern Europe.

Edit: I _am_ referring to the post-exposure shots.

Edit 2: All of this reads like a bad joke - if our numbers are representative, rabies treatment is 20-2000x the cost of other countries in the US. Would be interesting to see someone play devil's advocate on this.

<comment><USER52> Oh! I got rabies shots in 2014 after being bitten by a dog.

The course of treatment is injections 0day, 3day, 7day, and 14day. I went to the emergency room to get these injections, at the recommendation of my primary doctor.

Unfortunately I don't have the bills anymore, but the total cost was a bit over $20,000, which insurance adjusted down to about $500/visit.

Basically, it would have bankrupted me if I didn't have insurance. Yes, the US healthcare system is really this broken.

<comment><USER53> Yep, my family had to do the same ER visit for our treatments. Immune globulin is a blood product and I was told it is atypical for any medical center outside of a hospital to have it available. Having to go the ER added a not insignificant amount to our total bill, but we did only have to pay for a single visit to the ER - our followups, we just walked in and a nurse would give us the shot.

On the somewhat funny side, it's weird walking into an ER and being greeted by first name and a wave . . .

<comment><USER52> Hah yeah, it was kind of funny that by the 4th shot, the ER docs and police there knew me as "the rabies guy".

I also was told that the immune globulin is a bit complicated because it needs to be prepared specifically for the person's weight. So unlike off the shelf vaccines, it requires an on duty pharmacist to actually do something before they can give it to you, which I'm sure adds to the cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another sad case of lack of scientific formation. Could be easily solved spending 20 minutes at the schools to study basic ecology of parasites, vectors and diseases.

Microbats shouldn't be, never, ever, manipulated with bare hands. Specially if they seem to be sluggist or ill. Full stop. You need strong gloves, or much better, let it to a trained zoologist or veterinary.</comment>


The era of geek pork has arrived - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/the-era-of-geek-pork-has-arrived/ <comment><USER2> Hogwash.

Looking past the author's insulting and sophomoric use of "geek" as a derogatory put-down, let's get to his claims:

> The "US is behind on broadband" thing is a myth.

Yet no sources are cited. All he does is wave his hands about how Mossberg is the only one saying it, and everyone is just a regurgitating idiot. Last I checked, this issue has been around for a while, and is supported by a _lot_ more voices than Mossberg.

Then he starts going to a straw man - claiming the regulatory angle is fundamentally undemocratic, and completely ignores the fact that existing telcos operate with a government-granted monopoly, making internet service fundamentally not a free market enterprise to begin with.

> _"At the root of this anger against the ISPs is that they want faster > Internet access and they don't want to pay for it"_

I'm not sure how much more ignorant this comment can get. My internet service at home experiences frequent lag spikes up to 3000ms, yet I have to just _deal_ with it because no other ISP can operate where I live (this is a city thing, not a building thing). Quit pretending there's a free market when there is none.

> _"since I'm about as geeky as they come"_

I'm not sure how this can be, since he seems to claim to be a geek, yet he uses the term in a derogatory way and pisses all over the demographic frequently in the post, portraying them as entitled children, and blind sheep following the Mossberg prophet.

So let's summarize: straw man argument, appeal to ridicule, argument from ignorance (i.e., there is no problem with ISPs because the studies claiming problems are allegedly problemtic), appeal to emotion (the pointless linking of this to "democracy")... is this a high school rhetoric class or something?

</comment><comment><USER3> Note: Read with caution; digitalsociety.org is a libertarian soap box.

Telecommunications infrastructure has capital costs that prohibit disruptive newcomers. The established players have the power to charge (and profit) at whatever rate they choose. Unless there is regulatory pressure, they will never focus on service over profits. Relative to the rest of the developed world, our throughput rate to consumers is far from excellent[1]. We need better service for citizens. It is true that the US's large size makes the country costly to wire. This is precisely why government intervention is needed to bring our connectivity up to the level of nations with similar standards of living.

Skimming the author's other posts, he seems to miss the mark on so many issues. (Indeed, visiting the homepage is like stepping into a crazier, "Twilight Zone" version of reality.)

Personally, I would like my Internet connection to come from a public utility. Roads are public, why not fiber?

1\. [http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_3869010...](http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah. If people don't like the fact that the cable companies jack up the prices 5-10% a year for service that sucks and doesn't improve, they should just go bootstrap their own nation-straddling, trillion dollar infrastructure project and outcompete them in the free market.</comment>


Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-09/young-bankers-fed-up-with-90-hour-weeks-move-to-startups.html <comment><USER2> While some certainly choose to leave finance for startups, I think they and far between. Who in their right mind chooses to give up a huge salary in favor of an equivalently time intensive startup which pays 1/10 as well?

> data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the number of employees aged 25 > to 34 in the New York metropolitan area in finance and insurance fell to > 109,187 as of the second quarter of 2013, down 19 percent from the second > quarter of 2007.

This definitely has nothing to do with the financial crisis which happened in the intervening years and the ensuing mass layoffs on Wall St.

<comment><USER3> > _Who in their right mind chooses to give up a huge salary in favor of an > equivalently time intensive startup which pays 1 /10 as well?_

If that one tenth the salary is enough to cover your monetary needs, then why pay the price for the other nine tenths?

<comment><USER4> It may be enough to cover your needs _now_ , but most people want to be able to do things like support families and save for retirement.

(Granted, 90 hours a week is terrible for family life.)

<comment><USER3> And what part of my comment implied "covering monetary needs" does not include that?

<comment><USER5> The assumption that 1/10 of an analyst/associate in a bank will be enough to get you to retirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have very low expectations for an article that leads with a photo of two "MBA candidates" at Princeton. (Princeton has no business school, so doesn't award MBAs).

<comment><USER7> The business school is located right behind the medical school

<comment><USER8> And for all the fellow foreigners:

"Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.[13] It does not have schools of medicine, law, divinity, education, nor business, but it does offer professional degrees through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Architecture and the Bendheim Center for Finance."

:)

<comment><USER9> No school of divinity?

 _drops monocle from eye in shock_

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, they do have an excellent religion department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's really interesting is what is absent from the article: An actual reason for junior employees to work 90 hour weeks.

There is no plausible task or process in ibanking that requires that. It amounts to a form of hazing. It's an industry gratuitously consuming the people in it, as if that would justify their subsequent compensation.

Here is a telling quote:

 _"Culture really matters," says Podolsky, 33, a Wharton graduate. "How the bullpen interacts is critical. You can work 80 hours a week and not mind it so much because the people you work with are awesome."_

Not a hint, not a whiff of _why_ this culture matters. Why wouldn't it be forgotten 5 minutes after it's over. It's an unusually pure delusion.

<comment><USER11> Well, people are proud of being competitive; but more to the point, if they like the sort of work they're doing, then they don't mind doing it to extremes, for a while at least. I do film production, and when that's in full swing it's 80-hour weeks, albeit for only a month or two at a time. It's not all that profitable (partly because I can't move to LA), and work product is sadly lacking in cultural value as often as not, but the work itself is very satisfying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why would anyone knowingly subject themselves to 80-90 hour weeks. The money and success you make in the short term could very well be overshadowed by health problems.

A guy at my work doing high stress support work recently had a heart attack.

<comment><USER13> People aren't that delicate. I've known _factory workers_ who've done 50-80 hour weeks for decades on end. When I was a machine operator at Harte-Hanks outside of Baltimore, I worked a 76 hour week without a day off for three months straight (12h * 5, 8h * 2). They refused to open the plant on Thanksgiving, so it broke my streak.

Right now, somebody in Germany is wondering how I can deal with only having 2 weeks of vacation a year, and speculating that it could lead to serious medical problems.

My father had a series of mini-strokes after having a pleasant salmon dinner.

<comment><USER14> 50-80, 80-90, 90-110, any difference?

Factory work can be high or low stress, depending on the pacing and risk of injury.

<comment><USER12> My thinking exactly, if you are only screwing bolt A and B to nut A and B every time I dont think you have a lot of job stress, youre just working long hours.

I knew a guy who worked 60 hours a week putting stickers on a package he loved his job. No stress and his productivity determined his pay no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are startups not another area where working silly hours is considered somewhat normal?

<comment><USER16> Startups are rarely as bad as banking, where you can do 100 hour weeks several weeks in a row, have vacations canceled, miss weddings and funerals. Even though you're expected to work more at startups, most founders realize their employees need time off. I could be wrong, but I'd say a majority of startup employees work less than 60 hours per week.

Also the work at investment banks is boring and monotonous. Doing 100 page pitch decks, knowing very well that 90 of them are going to get thrown out.

<comment><USER17> Banking != investment banking. I work in asset management I do a 45 hour week most of the time, with very few exceptions.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I've come to use the terms interchangeably. That's what happens when your friends are all investment bankers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article got me thinking about the frying pan (investment banks) and the frier (startups.)

I _just_ pulled an all-nighter in my company (note: I'm our CTO). We needed to put a new capability in for our team as part of a rollout of a big new feature that integrates with other customers. I was glad to do the work and put in the time.

I just so happened to interview a candidate the following day (I think it was hour 34). He's very eager -- wants the "fast-pace of a startup", "meaningful work", "make an impact and see the results". He currently works at TechBigCo in Seattle -- take your pick, I hear the same words over and over from candidates who work at these places.

We talked about what it's like at our company, and I explained what we just went through with _ALL_ the caveats -- atypical, I made the decision on timing, it's a startup, etc.

The candidate was completely turned off and said he could not work for a place that would ever condone that amount of time or that decision. I explained that my team didn't pull an all-nighter -- I was the one who did, because I made a decision (business ultra-critical level), and that decision would affect only me in terms of time. I explained that it's because I have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed. He didn't accept it and has dropped out of consideration for our role.

The candidate's response surprised me -- he viewed my action, even as a one- time event, as something that could happen again in the future. He's right -- it very well could, although we're managing our growth (much of the cause of this situation) to balance against our resources. We also have a business to grow, and sometimes success can be dictated by timeframes. That was the case here.

<comment><USER19> Was it mentioned what was going to happen after the time spent on the project?

If I were that candidate and it was mentioned that once the emergency was past you were going to take two or three days off (not counting against days off) to unwind, then I would take that as a fair trade of time.

If it was expected for you to show up the next day and continue on as if nothing happened then I would pass too. That's a sign your company doesn't respect people's time. Which as CTO reflects on you.

The rules may be different for you being CTO and you have a vested interest in the company succeeding, but it's hard to communicate that to someone that you also don't have vested interest enough to get someone else to spend the extra time with no real recognition or compensation.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, all things mentioned that you would expect as reasonable -- this was strictly my decision, I didn't ask this of anyone else, and indeed I'll take some time because I could use the rest.

The candidate still wasn't accepting of any decision. Frankly, I don't think it was the timecrunch that really bothered him -- it was the effort associated with it. Purely a hunch on my part, but I think there is a question of adaptability, task-switching and dealing with re-prioritization.

As for expectations I set with my employees, I insist on work/life balance. Several on my staff have kids (I do as well). A few are in soccer leagues. Others do only knows what in the off-hours. My expectation is that time away from work greatly enhances productivity when at work, so it's a payoff for us. We have long-term goals, and I want to keep the crew we have around us happy and hungry (for success.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "I'm not sure how you stop work if there's a deal on..."

This makes me the think the guy is totally clueless and doesn't understand time management. Why is it that these types of people think you absolutely must squeeze in two weeks worth of work in three days? What's so important that you can't take the time to do it properly the first time without doing it in a manner that almost literally kills the staff? What's wrong with saying "hey, you've been on this for ten hours today, go home and rest up to hit it fresh in the morning"? Seems logic dictates productivity would increase in that case.

Then he follows up with "Hey, have we got this right?" If you don't realize that right off after someone freaking dies essentially doing their job then you are clueless.

But, I'm a developer, so what do I know?

<comment><USER20> Banking moves fast. Can you seriously not imagine one of the hundred possibilities that would require immediate action? Banks also have huge customers that they simply don't say "No" to, without consequences.

<comment><USER19> I can imagine situations that require heavy hours to accomplish in the time frame required. I'm a developer, I do it all the time but not as a standard work week.

But I cannot imagine that there is always a situation one after the other that requires people to put in that amount of time for weeks or months at a go.

If they are working their people that much for that long, they haven't hired enough people to cover the workload and are taking advantage of the people they do have.

<comment><USER16> As crazypyro said, deals move fast. These are often billion dollar decisions clients are making. If a bank can't turn it around quickly, they'll lose the deal. With only a few deals going through every year, they have to keep them.

The unpredictability of client demands makes division of labor much more difficult. This article does a good job of explaining why investment banks cannot simply hire more people.

[http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/why-you-actually- work-...](http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/why-you-actually-work-so-much- as-an-investment-banker-yes-even-in-a-recession/)

<comment><USER19> What? So only banks have those problems? No other industry has similar issues that have not been figured out? How does any company with hundreds of employees and dozens of people on any one project ever get anything done?

Seems to me the article supports my thought that these people are just not that good at managing people and projects.

If I were of a conspiracy thinking mind I would suspect that the labor pool is kept artificially low to keep income levels high.

And if we're only talking a few big deals a year then how is it that people are working 100 hour weeks constantly?

<comment><USER16> It makes sense if you understand how the deal process works.

It's unlike other industries where you can plan ahead and delegate accordingly. If you're building software, you have the luxury of a 6 month plan with set milestones and deadlines. With deals, the work changes several times per day based on demands of the client. If you're the CEO of a multi- billion dollar company bidding on another company worth several hundred million, you're going to have questions and requests every step of the way. Investment bankers have to respond to those requests in real time.

Because of the dynamic nature of these deals, 2 people working 40 hours per week is less productive than 1 person doing 80. Each person on a deal has to be intimately familiar with the deal, and hold a lot of information in their head. The incremental communication (and potential for miscommunication) that would occur between 2 40 hour workers simply wouldn't work.

A few big deals per year is what you see - they only get paid when a deal goes through. Depending on the division, it's not uncommon for 1/10 deals to go through, and that doesn't even include the pitching that does on.

Also, it's not 80 hours of straight work (most of the time). There's a lot of down time while you wait for clients to respond. Another reason why 2 40 hour workers wouldn't replace 1 80 hour worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From a hiring perspective: if you're at a start-up, take advantage of the trend and try to hire these people who want out after their 2-3 years. They know how to get stuff done in crunch periods and are still young enough where their creativity hasn't been (totally) crushed. Bonus points for a former Big 4 auditor--they tend to have the same work ethic but without the entitlement. [1]

Disclaimer: former Big 4 auditor but used to run a finance org, so have tons of friends in both (many of which have made the transition)

[1] Bit of a stereotype here, but most i-bankers get used to the huge salaries and massive expense budgets, which auditors and tech startups don't have.

</comment><comment><USER22> A sign of how nonsensical it is -- here's their fix:

> Junior bankers who keep lighting up red, and the people who manage them, > typically get a call from Urwin to find out what they are working on and if > the hours are justified. If not, the manager requesting the work may get a > warning.

So if your underlings _keep_ lighting up red, they'll check to see "if the hours are justified", and you may get a warning if they are not.

In other words -- we don't want you killing the junior bankers just for your own entertainment; please only kill them if it's going to make us a lot of money. THEN it's just fine.

<comment><USER21> A "warning" typically just leads to analysts eating hours (not recording all the hours they actually worked), especially for fixed fee projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here in London, Barclays is about to boot 7k staff from its investment banking division. The writing was already on the wall for contractors, bankers looking for another industry is par for the course.

</comment><comment><USER24> ...move to startups and 120 hour weeks.

</comment><comment><USER25> The thing is, you do have to work hard for those Investmen Banking/M&A type jobs, but do you seriously think jobs with a £2m+ earning potential would be given away?

You're better off thinking of your first few years as the office equivalent of Hell Week for a Navy Seal.

</comment><comment><USER26> How much of this work is the result of the US tax system?

<comment><USER27> You mean the finance work? Although almost all of it has tax implications, most actual tax work is handled by accounting and law firms. The finance folks do the bread and butter of corporate financial transactions and asset management. They underwrite IPO's, put together bond issues, arrange lines of credit, and work out mergers and divestitures. Very little of it arises due to the tax system. Even the law firms doing the legal side of these transactions don't devote huge resources to tax. The NYC firm where I used to work, which had a top-rated tax practice, had about 1/10 as many lawyers working on tax matters as they did working on M&A or securities matters. I'd imagine the accounting firms have a higher percentage of tax people, though.

<comment><USER26> So, if a federal flat-rate tax[1] was set, it wouldn't significantly reduce the workload?

1) revenue * tax rate = taxes (asking question, not advocating)

<comment><USER27> A flat tax isn't revenue * tax_rate. It's income * tax_rate. You have to subtract expenses from revenue, otherwise your tax is totally arbitrary. A company like Wal-Mart makes 5-6% operating income on revenues, after paying for rent, workers, inventory, etc. Even a 10% tax on revenue would wipe them out.

Most of the work in taxes is getting from revenue down to taxable income, and after that it's just a number you plug into a spreadsheet. For individuals, a flat tax would make calculating taxes much easier, but that's because their tax situation is dead simple to begin with. But for a business, you still have hard issues like depreciation rates for capital equipment, carryforwards, etc, and those don't go away with a flat tax.

And in any case, none of this has much to do with the finance industry. They might ask their tax lawyer: "what's the tax implications of spinning off this subsidiary as a separate company?" and a simpler tax code might reduce that bill, but it's not work they'd be doing themselves. Their job in that situation would be to plan and analyze the divestiture. What kind of cash flow will the stand-alone company have? What assets should go with it? Then the lawyers will get involved and do stuff like draft the asset purchase agreement between the seller and the buyer, or the agreement that allows the spun-off company to continue to use certain IP belonging to the seller. And the accountants will, well, do the accounting for all of this. None of this work goes away just because the tax code is simpler.

<comment><USER26> yeah, I should have put income. I was pretty much asking if tax law was driving some of the hours - guess not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> People don't understand the value of their time, news at 11.

<comment><USER29> You've already given out the news, it's the film that comes at 11.</comment></comment>


USS Truman sailors use 3D printing to create new part, save Navy more than $42k - <AUTHOR> http://pilotonline.com/news/military/local/uss-truman-sailors-create-truclip-at-sea-and-save-the/article_37dd3370-d7f9-5305-9cb3-bb2ef2c1c4cb.html?dolujhbkjn <comment><USER2> imagine what they could do with a commercial grade 3D printer or CNC machine.</comment>


Ask HN: State of OCR in 2018 - <AUTHOR> What is the state of OCR in 2018?  Has the technology progressed over the past 20 years? <comment><USER2> Abbyy FineReader is _far_ and away the best we've ever used. Nothing comes close in the space.

Tesseract requires piles and piles of training, which you may or may not have.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I use it a lot and it is really, really good as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have played around with Google's Cloud Vision API and it is the best OCR I have ever experienced - a big step up from my old poorly trained tesseract setup.</comment>


Are we "developers" gatekeeping "knowledge" from our juniors and peers? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/uilicious/are-we-developers-gatekeeping-knowledge-from-our-juniors-and-peers-4gc6 <comment><USER2> We're certainly not gatekeeping fashion advice</comment>


Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-did-science-make-little-real-progress-in-Europe-in-the-Middle-Ages/answer/Tim-ONeill-1?share=1 <comment><USER2> In fairness, most of the progress the article is talking about happened in the High or Late Middle Ages. The period from 800 to 1200 was considerably less fecund, so the "myth" isn't entirely false: the early Middle Ages were pretty barren, scientifically speaking.

That said, one of the (many) things that makes us tend to underplay the scientific progress made even in the Late Middle Ages was the disconnect between science and technology. In modern science, from Newton's time onward, the two have been closely coupled (with technology leading the way to new science as often as the other way around).

In the Middle Ages, technology developed more-or-less independently of science, often with quite astonishing results. An excellent book on the subject if Jean Gimpel's "The Medieval Machine", although the solemn declaration of the end of Western technological power makes the preface pretty hilarious reading, 35 years on: [http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine- Industrial-Revolution...](http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Machine-Industrial- Revolution- Middle/dp/0140045147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410818839&sr=8-1&keywords=the+medieval+machine)

</comment><comment><USER3> One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who _chose to make his life 's work the translation of Aristotle_? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.

<comment><USER4> Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?

<comment><USER5> Note: IANA medieval scholar nor particularly versed in medieval translation, but here would be my explanation:

A medieval translator tackling Aristotle would face several challenges, some insurmountable, but Boethius had many unique advantages.

Boethius was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Latin Empire (the "magister officiorum"), so he had the influence and access to manuscripts that few others could match. He was classically trained in his youth and could speak, read and write in both classical Greek and Latin, a skill that was becoming rare among his contemporaries, a good thing for him but also a problem since there weren't many colleagues he could confer with.

If a word or phrase was unfamiliar --and in a technical work like Aristotle's there could be plenty of vocabulary that wasn't common-- Boethius would need to research and document it. That wasn't as simple as it would be today, there were no real dictionaries or reference books to assist in translation. So he would have to access other manuscripts, which might involve a painstaking copying process by hand, travel over large distances, and other numerous challenges the modern translator rarely needs to face. Fortunately Boethius had the power, influence and wealth to do this.

Making things even more difficult is that the Aristotelian corpus was fragmentary even in Boethius' time, much of what survives from Aristotle aren't anything close to completed manuscripts but more like class notes, compiled and edited by students and later scholars. This meant that Boethius wasn't able to do just a word-for-word translation or a paraphrase, he needed to analyze and comment on each section so that nuances weren't lost. Without a large body of existing scholarship, Boethius had to do a lot of the work on his own.

Given that translation wasn't his day job, each document could take years or even decades of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had my opinion of the christian church dramatically overhauled a few years ago, paradoxically by a great scifi novel: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz)

<comment><USER7> Funny, I had the opposite reaction when reading _A Canticle for Leibowitz_. There's one scene near the end where a refugee mother and baby are dying. They are crippled, burned, and suffering radiation poisoning. Both are in great pain, and the mother wants euthanasia for herself and her baby. A priest first tries (and almost succeeds) to talk her out of it. He then resorts to force, trying to kidnap the baby and eventually punching a doctor. When stymied by police, he is let off with a warning instead of being jailed.

I'm pretty sure that scene was supposed to make the reader feel sympathetic towards the priest. Instead, I felt disappointment toward the author.

The preservation of knowledge across civilizational collapses was neat, and the writing was good, but I would have enjoyed the story more if it had been about a less dogmatic order.

<comment><USER6> I thought the point was to show a full cycle, from collapse to collapse. In times of collapse the church was useful in preserving knowledge and supporting the spirit. In times of hubris (ie just before collapse) it subsides to dogma. We don't know how to separate the benefits from the dogma. At least that was my interpretation..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's an understandable mistake, since we tend to view history with a sort of flattening perspective; the recent past is spread out before us in sparkling detail, then fields marching away we spy the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, the renaissance — but beyond that, as records are fewer and the major changes coming at longer intervals, history essentially disappears beyond the curvature of the landscape, and the horizon marks the moment when our understanding lapses, and time compresses, robbing centuries of their weight and duration. Beyond that are the rolling hills of the late roman empire and the stern peaks of the classical era, clearly visible but isolated.

This also reflects a very Western-centric point of view, for a great deal of reasons; the massive changes and wars wrought in the east, as Creasy writes, "appear before us through the twilight of primaeval history, dim and indistinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in the early dawn." It doesn't quite tally with my other metaphor, but feels true nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are no scientific advances in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, i.e. between 500AD to 1000AD, just a 'mere' 500+ years...

This is actually acknowledged by the writer of the article.

Things get somewhat better in the 2nd part of the Middle Ages leading to the Renaissance. So roughly 1000AD-1500AD. The earliest references from the author are in 12th century.

Such an intellectually dishonest title.

<comment><USER10> There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years regarding the Medieval period...the "things weren't _all_ that bad" and "the notion that nothing happened is just a myth".

Is it real? Are we just now learning about advanced and invention that happened during this period and were previously ignoring/ignorant of? Maybe. But I suspect something else is at play here, I'm just not sure what.

man, if that doesn't make me sound like a conspiracy theorist

I mean, we actually _know_ that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology _regressed_ massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented.

The loss of knowledge was vast and unprecedented in history. I've heard it said that Western Europe almost reverted back out of the Iron Age the loss of information was so great.

What's triggering all this revisionism? Again, I don't know, but sources like this

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hwrSE5DZrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hwrSE5DZrQ)

list all things that happened in the later periods.

Even if you just blame the first 500 years, that's a loong time where not much of anything interesting happened.

<comment><USER11> I have witnessed the same change in the zeitgeist, and also wondered about it's source. My hypothesis is that it's rooted in the trend toward environmental sustainability, local and human-powered production (e.g. hand- made things from locally acquired materials).

It seems reasonable to me to believe that life wasn't that bad even for a Christian peasant, assuming: good health, good weather, no plague, no war (to be conscripted in), ugly daughters (to avoid prima nocta). Sure, you didn't own anything but life was simple, food was good, the world was understandable (even if your understanding was primitive and wrong), and the countryside must have been beautiful to explore. Plus you had the remarkable benefit of dreaming about truly foreign and far-away places, like Africa, India or China. Even countries within Europe were so distinct from each other as to make travel a real adventure.

There's an interesting take on going back to something like this in Paolo Bacigalupi's _The Windup Girl_[1]. The world has undergone a "Contraction" and oil is incredibly scarce. Travel is difficult and expensive; the world has grown large again, and human and animal power are once again the staples (although military and governments still use oil for some things).

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

<comment><USER12> The reason Feudalism came about was because it was a good deal for the average bloke. You weren't constantly threatened by slavery, you were mostly protected from raiding, etc. by your landlord, and you only had to work on someone else's land (in the beginning) 1 or 2 days a week. The reason we hear about it being so awful is because we hear about the last legs of Feudalism: when peasants were expected to work 8+ days a week (children counted for a half day, so this was actually possible) on the lord's land, and because of a rise in population had their labor devalued, and the average acreage for individual plots reduced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this question implicitly restricting itself to European Middle ages? If not, surely it's worth mentioning the scientific advances in the Islamic Golden Ages? [1] As I understand it, these were so important that in Europe if you wanted to keep apace of scientific advances, many undertook to learn to read Arabic.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islamic_world)

<comment><USER14> This is a cogent question and one that historians of science are currently debating. There's been a lot of debate in my own field (early modern history) about whether we can speak of such things as "early modern Japan," "early modern India" or indeed an "early modern world," or whether we should restrict the term to Europe. I personally vote for the former on the basis of the globalization that had been occurring since the Pax Mongolica. (A few book recs on this would include Janet Abu-Lughod, "Before European Hegemony," and the third book of Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism" series).

So if we can agree that there was a medieval world or world system, then the old picture of a scientific dark age ceases to make much sense. At the same time that Western Europe was in a period of slowed technological innovation-- the period just before Charlemagne, let's say--huge advances were occurring not only in places like modern-day Iraq, India and China, but even cities on the periphery of what we think of as medieval Europe, like Cordoba and Constantinople.

A couple more interesting takes on global premodern science and technology - Richard Bulliet's "The Camel and the Wheel" and Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series, which I admittedly have only skimmed, but is really fascinating stuff.

<comment><USER15> If you read George Steiner on Needham, it's interesting to see that he ended up identifying with China to a point that he even parroted their line in the Vietnam War uncritically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A friend of mine recently published a related article:

 _Scientific Geniuses and Their Jesuit Collaborators_

[http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and- their-...](http://www.strangenotions.com/scientific-geniuses-and-their-jesuit- collaborators/)

</comment><comment><USER17> That is a terrific answer. Our understanding of history and especially the 'rewriting of history' never ceases to amaze me.

I read a history of Christianity book several years ago, and found it fascinating and inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER18> All I get is a login signup paywall thingy.

Yes I would like to know about this article.

No I would not like to sign up to yet another web site.

Why do people use quora again? It can't be out of loyalty to YC surely?

<comment><USER19> A response to a similar question on Quora ([https://www.quora.com/Tom- Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Pat...](https://www.quora.com/Tom- Harrington/Posts/Why-Im-Losing-Patience-with-Quora)):

 _We require that people join because many of those who join like the service and end up contributing back to Quora, which makes it better for everyone. People spend a ton of time making Quora great by sharing their knowledge on here, so we think it is reasonable to ask that others who want to get to all the free knowledge here take the first very small step toward contributing back which is creating an account. That is the only reason we have the policy: to get more people to join who will share more knowledge and make Quora even better for everyone in the long run._

The community at Quora is pretty good, so they seem to know what they're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm by no means a medieval scholar. But this doesn't mesh at all with the information in the"The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt (a national book award winner).

The texts of the pagans were not preserved because they were revered but because it was the duty of a monk to know how to write. To learn how to write, you have to write. Since very little new work was being created, old work was copied by rote.

<comment><USER14> Stephen Greenblatt is a great scholar but "The Swerve" is a deeply problematic book. At any rate, the comments in this thread are conflating two very different things: 1) humanistic learning, particularly Greek scholarship and 2) technological and scientific innovation writ large.

Humanistic learning did stagnate in some ways in the post-Roman, pre- Renaissance period. Many Greek texts were lost or were only known via garbled translations from the Arabic. Works like "De Rerum Naturae" (Greenblatt's subject) were scientifically significant so there is a bit of overlap between this loss of humanistic, bibliographic learning and scientific and technological achievement. But the two things aren't co-equivalent. The same 12th century European culture that had no idea what De Rerum Naturae was innovating in all sorts of technological ways, from creating new types of wind and water mills to developing new forms of financial funding (in fact the word "company" dates to the 12th century - it originally related to trade guilds that pooled their money to build water mills and the like). So a great deal of new "work" was being created - the question is how posterity judges the value of that work. Renaissance humanists tended to care more about Greek grammar than about mining technology and windmills, so they created this narrative of medieval backwardness that we're still beguiled by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > In the Third Century, however, there were major social and political > upheavals that interrupted many aspects of Roman life, including scholarship

The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell, and was replaced by the "Three Kingdoms" (220 AD - 280 AD), a time of constant war and many deaths. Were the synchronized downfalls related somehow, perhaps shared diseases?

> The Christian church came to hold political power when the decline in > learning in the west had been under way for over a century

The same happened in China from c.300 AD to 600 AD when Buddhism spread (although the textbooks tend to list lots of little kingdoms and emperors for that time). The Tang and Song dynasties (including the Sui and empress Wu) then took over and completed many engineering projects over the next 700 yrs. Why did the Chinese "Middle Ages" last for a much shorter time than the Western European?

<comment><USER22> >The 3rd century is also when the Chinese Han Dynasty fell

And the Parthian empire, for that matter. At around the same time (the early 220s). An interesting timing for the three of them, although the worst of Rome's troubles didn't take place until decades later.

Not to mention how much the more aggressive Sassanid empire that followed the Parthians added pressure to the already troubled Roman state. Certainly, the Sassanid invasions played a very large part in Rome's own three way split from about 260-274.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Indeed, maybe there was no scientific dark age in the Middle ages, at least not globally, but It was a dark age in Europe, knowledge was lost, the (roman) world economy collapsed and entirely disappeared, economic throughput and population would not recover until the industrial revolution[1]. The dark age ended when the last remaining of the ancient Roman world was forcibly dispersed from Constantinople, most of it found a safe harbor in Italian cities that would become the center of the Renaissance.[2]

[1] Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization

[2] Brownworth, Lars. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

</comment><comment><USER24> The middle ages were a period of great turmoil in Europe, so even if there were scientific, literary or artistic advances they could easily have been destroyed. We only know what we know from stuff that has survived the turmoil and the following thousand or so years.

Also, I'm very surprised the quora article did not even mention the plague and the effect it had in those days.

</comment><comment><USER25> Great BBC TV series from 1969, based on the book with same title:

 _Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark_

On youtube: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA)

</comment><comment><USER26> Is Quora the new way to publish papers?

</comment><comment><USER27> You should ask Giordano Bruno about the "anti-catholic prejudice".

</comment><comment><USER28> There isn't a way to measure scientific progress.</comment>