Hi, I'm from the games industry. Governments, please stop us - <AUTHOR> http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/12/13/hi-im-from-the-games-industry-governments-please-stop-us/ <comment><USER2> > "We need to reign this stuff in. Its not just psychological warfare, but > warfare where you, the customer, are woefully outgunned, and losing. Some > people are losing catastrophically."

I strongly disagree with this statement. I am very aware of the psychology behind marketing and advertising, and anyone with half an interest in it has probably read Vance Packard's _The Hidden Persuaders_ , which was released, oh, _58 years ago_. People _know_ what pushes their buttons, too, and we have a name for it: _interest_. Not "manipulation". Certainly not "psychological warfare".

Marketing and advertising might seem to be refined in this dopamine-heavy, short-attention-span social gaming age, but this shit has been around as long as humanity itself has existed. Some people have better impulse control than others; it's not the state's job to regulate the impulses of their populaces, or regulate systems that know how to manipulate them. It's a slippery slope that would take down the entirety of marketing and advertising as an industry, an industry which is pretty much necessary for the vast majority of the citizenry to even know _what is out there to purchase_.

Furthermore, how would one even decide where the line between manipulative consumption and social signaling is? Some people want to own all the capital ships; they have some social hierarchy in some subculture standing upon it. Should I regulate that, too, and force them to have the same consumption values and preferences that I do? Should we take this a step further and ban all vices? Let's see how fast American society would fall apart if we banned alcohol again.

FWIW, I hate consumerism and advertising. I block ads everywhere, I hate big branded items, I don't know the last time I bought something from an ad. Just because I feel this way, I don't go around trying to violently force that opinion upon others by begging the state to do it for me.

<comment><USER3> So in your opinion there's nothing a gaming or marketing company can do that's legal now, but really shouldn't be?

I'm also not buying that it's a slippery slope and banning, say, cross compiling profiles on customers from different, unrelated platforms would "take down the entirety of marketing and advertising as an industry".

In capitalism, companies will do everything within the legal framework to make more money. That's their job. Ours is to set and adjust those bounds to keep the whole system productive.

<comment><USER4> Take a look at someone who spent $30k on ships in Star Citizen.

[http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on- sta...](http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-star-citizen- ships/)

He seems like a reasonable person to me. He's not in financial ruin. He doesn't seem to regret his purchase. He's just putting money into his hobby, the same way a different 40 year old would buy an "unproductive" boat or an "unproductive" Rolex.

<comment><USER5> When you buy a boat or a Rolex, you own a boat or a Rolex. Now you can buy all Star Citizen's ship you will own nothing, if tomorrow they decide to close their servers you are pretty much screwed.

<comment><USER6> With a boat, you might spend thousands on consumables. All that you have left is the memories of driving the boat around.

Some guys spend $100k to go motor racing for a season in single-make cars. At the end of it, they don't own anything but any trophies they might have picked up.

If people want to spend money on digital goods, putting up walls to stop or make it harder is unlikely to be successful unless you outright ban it with heavy punishment for use.

That hasn't worked so well for other items in a similar category, and digital goods are completely victimless.

<comment><USER7> I don't really buy into this argument. Regulating the sale digital goods works. Companies that wish to remain legal will refrain from the sale of digital goods in an illegal manner; mandatory company audits will be a vector governments use to enforce that.

The article and others in the thread have given arguments that digital goods are not victimless. Most societies acknowledge that gambling is harmful; digital gambling with fake money or with time spent in-game is presumably harmful as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm this is a tough one. Firstly I should make it clear that my wife works in the games industry. She works on PC, Console and Mobile titles. She has mentioned several times how there is _a lot_ of pressure put on developers and publishers to "catch the whales". They employ psychologists and gambling specialists to make games, mostly mobile but it is also creeping into PC and Console, super addictive.

Personally I am of the opinion that people should be able to do what they want* but my wife is genuinely concerned about just how they go after certain types of people. They _do_ want to get the gambling types. They are the people who spend money. Lots of money. I have seen numbers where people who obviously have more money than we can imagine spending $50-100k on IAPs. Some games even have "limited" IAPs that were designed for just _one player_ as they spend so damn much.

However I can't help but feel there is something else behind this post than what the author seems to spin it as. What I am not too sure but it seems quite the ramble and he doesn't actually have any solid sources or data to back up his claim. Of course neither do I outside of what my wife tells me :)

* Okay so there has to be _some_ limits.

Edit: I would like to make the point clear that while I think people should be able to do whatever they want, I do find this kind of predatory game design unethical. As does my wife. Thankfully nothing she has had to do so far has been totally deplorable.

<comment><USER9> The original article is bad. It can be summed up in a key phrase the author used 3 times: Governments need to "save us from ourselves". I'm sorry but that's not the role of government. "Protect us from each other" as well as "provide us necessary public services" is closer to the actual design of government.

I wish that instead of running around screaming "think of the children", the author actually respected his audience and their very real free will, rather than just wave his hands, claiming that free will does not exist, _except when we use our political will to save people from themselves_ , or something.

I wish the author addressed people like your wife, who is dealing with an ethical dilemma at work. These are the people who have the choice to stay or to leave their jobs--an incredibly hard choice for someone who has a family to think about.

Let me offer my respect to your wife who is dealing with this issue first- hand. Whatever choice she makes, it will not be without much anxiety and it will not take a small amount of courage.

There are other jobs out there, and I'm thankful that I live in a country where I have the freedom to choose where to work. Such a freedom--the expansion of my free will to include the needs of my conscience--was enabled by the work of men who came before me, men who used their free wills to establish a system that protects this freedom. I am grateful for this system, and I reject any attempts to pervert this system towards poorly conceived ends in the name of "saving me from myself".

<comment><USER10> > I'm sorry but that's not the role of government.

That is a very american point of view. The author of the article is british.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who worked in the customer-facing ends of the gambling industry (hell, I haven't been able to totally let go, I just ordered a true casino machine for my home... for reverse engineering and pentesting)... that online shit is far worse than "offline" gambling.

With gambling offline, well you have to leave your house, gonna dress up, and people will notice if you fuck up your life by gambling every day. Also, maximum losses per machine and hour are usually regulated and you can have yourself banned from gambling venues.

Online gambling - and online playing of the "free to play" or "pay to win" sort - however, does not offer any of these advantages. Instant pay-ins of five-figure sums (and instant pay-outs, publically shown)... or just the pleasure of 0wning an opponent because you paid for the "by-cash-only" battleship.

No limits at all, disgusting. And no one will see you going down and down, except the pizza delivery guy and the coroner when it's too late.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and it's amazing how blind freemium game developers are to this. I'm a game developer, and I've done well off of freemium games, but no one wants to have this conversation.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't call it "blind". From a capitalist POV, they're doing their job very well.

<comment><USER12> Well, devs generally admit that there's a spectrum of coerciveness and intrusiveness. It's just that all the devs I've talked to generally believe themselves to be on the "not as bad" end. So it's not purely A) devs don't think they're doing anything wrong or B) they don't care. It's the usual cognitive dissonance of "those other guys are doing something wrong, but we're not as bad, and we need to pay the bills."

There is a real problem -- 98-99% of people will play your game but won't pay for it. So, that other 1-2% has to subsidize everyone else.

Some other points that I rarely see discussed...

Game developers don't have some inalienable right to make games AND be financially successful (unless we as a society decide they do and regulate them and the market).

Here I'm drawing an analogy to other jobs that HN readers may be less sympathetic to, e.g. cab drivers or fishermen. They got disrupted. There's no reason why technical creatives are immune to disruption.

Second, there's a black-hat / white-hat argument. Humans shipped with mental bugs. Many of these are exploitable. The gambling and game monetization industries basically identify, study, and exploit these bugs. Individuals have a choice to make -- do I work for the black-hats, or do I work for the white- hats? What about studying these mental bugs and inoculating users against being exploited? I know there are some resources for this out there, but this post is long enough and I'm getting too lazy to link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of people here seem to be missing the main point of this post. It's not about crowdfunding or advertising, it's about using hugely manipulative tactics within the games to get people to basically throw money at them.

The reason they're called microtransactions is because they're small, usually priced at a point that's negligible. Using these tactics, they entice people to buy over and over again, each time the spend is a negligible amount but over time it adds up to hundreds or thousands.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that there is nothing that can be done due to the fact that its all opt-in and is based on ( as the article points out ) psychology. Free to play has gamed the inherit structure of the world wide web.

<comment><USER13> Gambling is the same yet there are a whole host of things that governments have done to try and help protect consumers.

<comment><USER14> Gambling isn't the same because the money users spend isn't used as a bet for a real-world money return. That is why when this stuff goes to court it gets thrown out.F2P relies on pure psychology and large sums of marketing dollars.

<comment><USER15> what about the gambling apps that, from top to bottom are exactly a slot machine with the only difference being that you can't get money out, only facebook trophies?

<comment><USER14> As I said, the reason these things get thrown out of court is because it isn't gambling since no money is expected by the user. If you're asking me a legal opinion I'm not a lawyer. I'm just telling you what I've read. I'm not advocating free to play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This post is a bit rambly and doesn't make its case particularly well.

I think the case is better made implicitly by reviews of games like Game of War: Fire Age. They are designed to be addictive and get players to spend literally thousands of pounds (or dollars) on microtransactions. They have ruined lives.

Particular attention should be paid to games which advertise microtransactions to children.

<comment><USER17> < Particular attention should be paid to games which advertise microtransactions to children.

Particular attention should be paid to the parental controls available in every mobile OS out there.

<comment><USER16> Even with parental controls, why should companies be allowed to advertise expensive microtransactions to children? Certain types of advertising aimed at kids are already banned in various countries.

Companies are well aware of the power of making kids nag their parents to spend money. But now they have an even worse tool: many kids have almost direct access to their parents' wallets if they borrow their devices.

<comment><USER17> Because parents can just turn parental controls on. I'm sorry, but it's not the state's responsibility to make sure my kids don't nag me for shit.

<comment><USER18> Most western nations impose age limits on drinking and the purchase of cigarettes as well as limit advertising targeted at children. If it's addictive and potentially habit-forming, it should be regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"We take Facebook stalking to a whole new level. You spend enough money, we will friend you. Not officially, but with a fake account. Maybe it's a hot girl who shows too much cleavage? That's us. We learned as much before friending you, but once you let us in, we have the keys to the kingdom."_

Discussed previously [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239931)

</comment><comment><USER20> I was totally and completely addicted to WoW for two years. Almost lost my girlfriend, friends, etc. When I finally quit I had the shakes. Literally.

One thing though is I've never saved more money than when I was playing WoW because I never went out. These newer games do seem to have a different financial model that exploits addiction in potentially a much more dangerous fashion.

<comment><USER21> "These newer games do seem to have a different financial model that exploits addiction in potentially a much more dangerous fashion."

It's mostly that they're "casual" and, most importantly, primarily mobile. Which means they follow you everywhere as you conduct your life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was momentarily good friends with someone who went on to become a well known entrepreneurs in this space. Right before he got his business off the ground he emphatically told me :"I am going to exploit the living fucking shit out of these people". He wasn't just talking about his users, but the investors and the entire silicon valley ecosystem. It kind of blew my mind when he actually did it. He went on to be extremely successful in the free-to-play space.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really don't understand the opening rant against Star Citizen. This is a game that quite literally would not even have started production if it weren't for crowd sourcing because the big boys are too busy cramming the next Call of Duty down everyone's throats than taking chances on interesting new IPs. If Star Citizen never materializes it will still have done the gaming industry a huge service by signaling to the other companies out there that a huge, verifiable demand exists for that style of game.

<comment><USER22> Star Citizen employs microtransaction, you just pay them in advance. There are also whales, like the guy who paid 30000$, and many more who pay between 100$ and 1000$. In comparison with other mentions it is even worse, because this game isn't even completed yet. It fits in the narrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, pretty doubtful of the author's initial claim of being "not a big fan of government regulation in general" and "not a friend of regulation". I can only imagine the views on gambling and drugs of anyone who proposes regulation for _video game advertising_.

Suffice it to say this guy _is_ a friend of regulation if he's making this proposal. It's a nice little rhetorical device but most of us are smart enough not to be fooled by this.

<comment><USER24> Almost seems like he's... advertising it? Doing some mild "psychological thing" on the readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think what some are missing here is whom the regulation (of gambling, alcohol/tobacco advertising, lending regulation etc) is ment to protect.

Pulmonary physicians didn't need regulation to cease smoking[1], people with basic financial schooling probably won't get tricked by usury (which, interestingly, has been banned since medieval times but is now permitted in many countries), and so on.

If you're an educated, conscientious person you don't need this (and are sometimes needlessly constrained by it, which can be frustrating). But it was never for you.

It's for the struggling single-parent who would otherwise burn their paycheck on an online casino -- and get through the month with 300% payday loans.

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.36.1.2/p...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.36.1.2/pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> OP is rolling two separate claims into one.

The first claim is that there is a problem.

Yes, I agree. There is.

The second claim is that the solution is prohibition.

The results of applying that solution to alcohol addiction and then drug addiction were... 'more harmful than beneficial' is much too mild a way to put it. 'Society-wrecking catastrophe' would be more accurate. Given those precedents, any argument that another round of prohibition is the right answer here requires far more justification than OP gives.

</comment><comment><USER27> The solution is to teach people to be savvy consumers, to have a skeptical eye to the world, to be able to sort out fact from fiction from opinion, to understand incentives and identify ulterior motives. This skill will never become obsolete. The government can never protect you from everything, but politicians are happy to take your freedom away while they convince you that they can. No consumer protection law can ever supplant caveat emptor.

</comment><comment><USER28> This idea to stalk customers in Facebook is scary, but why don't other companies (let's say the home appliances manufacteres) do the same trick? Is it effective only for some niches?

<comment><USER29> Nest tries to increase your emotional engagement with your thermostat, a tough sell at which they've had some success. Then they can sell you a home monitoring system and additional home automation.

The gambling industry is scarily good at this.

<comment><USER19> You can potentially do cool things with cloud connected home control/monitoring devices. In short, I would never ever buy a cloud connected home control/monitoring.

Why?

Suppose you have an IoT device in your bedroom that uploads CO2 values (of course it may also do something useful too such us showing this data to you or regulating the ventilation).

Now the rate of CO2 production depends on bodily activities. More activity means more CO2 production. I suppose that you agree that having this information you more or less are capable to deduce when a couple has sex.

This means that we could calculate a metric how much sex is going on and relate it to a specific user.

Suppose that we detect that the rate of sex has gone down by 20 (a made up number dependant of our model). We can now sell this information.

This information is for example useful perhaps for a psychologist who wants to sell you counselling.

But it is even more interesting for the divorce lawyers who now could prey on couples having period of difficulty in their sex lives.

Even more, this information could be made more valuable by some additional influence. For example feeding the user with articles related to marital happiness and sex life.

The same thing could be probably aslo implemented within a thermostat with a precise enough temperature sensor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad someone called out this "addicting" as a positive adjective nonsense. First of all, the word is "addictive". Second, how is this a positive for the user?

I got addicted to Clash of Clans after starting to play for market research. I spent $400. It didn't hurt me financially, but it was very interesting to observe myself engaging in classic addict behaviour.

"I can buy another gem pack because I'll just come in by transit tomorrow, so I won't have to pay for parking."

"If I bring my lunch tomorrow, then that will cancel this other item."

... of course, knowing that I wouldn't do any of these things...

</comment><comment><USER30> I might be reading this wrong but this gentleman's problem seems to be that some companies make way more money than he thinks is "fair". Because all his sources are about who made how much. If this was similar to gambling he might be able to show a story or two of somebody mortgaging their house and/or losing job, taking a loan from mob and unable to pay it etc. etc. over addiction to Candy Crush as we have plenty of such stories about gambling.

I have never seen anything similar about f2p games. At most you learn about kids dropping out of school to play DOTA/LoL/WoT/etc but this had been happening ever since there had been video games. Same kids dropped out over EQ/UO/WoW, which are not f2p. Heck, a dude dropped out of my school over a single player PC RPG (was either one of M&M or Wizardry games). I never heard of anybody becoming homeless trying to get their Farmville's dog to lv85. All there is are stories about somebody spending thousands of dollars at once to by some magic crystals in some stupid cell phone game. While it looks pretty stupid it does not seem any more danger to society than people buying pieces of painted canvas for millions and even tens of millions at art auctions.

</comment><comment><USER31> That this person is putatively in the games industry does not bolster the point of the article, so I have to assume that used as a manipulative aid to help sell the idea therein. Mildly ironic, I suppose, but it's okay to manipulate when you are doing "the right thing" in some minds.

</comment><comment><USER32> > have an incredibly fine tuned and skillful marketing department bent on > psychological manipulation.

This.

This is not specific to games industry. In fact they are rather late bloomers and amateurish. This is consumerism. This is production driven economy (in which goods are produced and post facto demand is manufactured). This is inevitable in any market with unequal ownership of resources (that is any market system were it's possible to profit or "get ahead", i.e. all of them).

All advertising is this. Almost all marketing is this. It only varies in it's sophistication and subtleness.

I can not fathom why people watch commercials, don't ad block, read advertising based periodicals, go to shopping centers, etc. Why people willingly participate in being psychologically manipulated into beliefs, decisions, and actions.

<comment><USER22> I think they mostly see the ads (read: products) as things that will influence their life positively. While this is true in the short term, brief entertainment in compensation for their money, it makes the life less significant in the long term, because their time was wasted not improving themselves. _You are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of you wallet..._ Most people are short sighted.

(I'm not pretending that this fully answers the question.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd draw the line at the point where the user/consumer can't easily recognize advertisement as advertisement.

For example, paying people to write blog posts or to friend your client on social media without making the "I'm being paid to do it" part explicit should be illegal.

I know nothing about US law, but shouldn't that be some kind of fraud crime or "confidence trick crime" already?

</comment><comment><USER34> I have talked in front of rooms full of my peers about abusing the vulnerable with predatory IAP's. Rooms full of artists (and students) applauded me. While rooms of more 'professional' developers booed me. I found more often than not, the 'professional' people that have a family to feed defended there moral very strongly. I could boil their argument (unfairly?) down to this, its ok to trick the vulnerable out of their money because I need to make money to feed my family. Where the more idealist artisans where more interested in the craft of games and earning the right to make money with good content. Its a weird rational to base your moral actions on.

I count myself as an idealist, I care about people before my own ability to buy things. I don't think I have a right to make a living at what I love, an opportunity for sure, but thinking you have an entitlement to make money at making games seems to lead us to a dark place for us all.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how i is that South Park did a great episode[0] on this subject of addiction to freemium games, and neither the post nor anyone in over 100 episodes mentioned this. Is South Park completely passé?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium_Isn%27t_Free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium_Isn%27t_Free)

<comment><USER22> It is becoming more and more current and relevant. I'm assuming you saw the current 19th season. If you didn't see it, or at least the last three episodes that form a "trilogy" or sorts, and talk about online ads and ad-blockers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think there would be a better case for regulating in game purchases. Some kind of limit, or a at least a warning at the beginning so people know what they are in for. "This game contains purchasable items. You may spend more than 10 000 dollars in this game."

Marketing on the other hand is a different story. We cant really ban that.

<comment><USER22> And why not?

There are cases over the world where advertising was banned with success.

[http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5338](http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5338)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1125...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11250670/Grenoble- to-replace-street-advertising-with-trees-and-community-spaces.html)

This is just the first step.

<comment><USER37> Random related question then; how do smaller companies and individuals starting out in business for the first time compete? Because as much as advertising and marketing can be sleazy in its execution, it's also potentially a way that smaller companies can compete with incumbents. Remove that, and what's left? Brand recognition and word of mouth. The former is great for multinational corporations, but kind of bad for anyone trying to dethrone them. The latter can be good for smaller companies and individuals, but can take decades to become effective.

Banning certain types of advertising is a good idea, but trying to ban all of it would kill competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> He brings up a bunch of things, only one of which applies to Star Citizen: the "addictive" element of collecting things. Star Citizen is a game with genuinely exciting concepts and visuals exhibited in their marketing. The "addictive" thing that appears to have driven part of their $100M fundraise is prepurchasing cool-looking spaceships.

But how would you regulate that? And what would be the impact on Lego kits, Star Wars action figures, Beanie Babies, coins, stamps, and other real-world collectibles? They have the same issues with OCD. Wouldn't it be arbitrary to limit it to software?

If found it interesting that the author left the _most_ potentially regulatable thing about Star Citizen untouched: consumer protections for crowdfunding investments.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't think I've ever thought of "addictive" as a positive attribute to a game. Reddit and HN are addictive, I want entertainment that I can leave when I want and that has depth.

<comment><USER40> I don't play games, but my roommate does for several hours every day. I asked him about it and he said he loves being immersed in it, and finds it much more engaging than other forms of entertainment, such as watching a movie. I wouldn't call him "addicted" though. We hang out all the time, and I never see the sort of desperation that the author describes.

...

Are there specific genre's of games that have the sorts of traps the author describes? A giant achievement screen sounds like it could be in any game, but I'd be curious to hear of any patterns recognized by others.

<comment><USER41> >Are there specific genre's of games that have the sorts of traps the author describes?

Free-to-play games are the obvious example. MMORPGs are another, though I would say they are somewhat less sinister as — while they use many psychological tricks to keep players coming back — they are at the core generally an attempt to produce an interesting or enjoyable game world, which is generally not the primary goal in F2P games.

I feel one of the worst (or at least most interesting) offenders for gambling is Valve, through Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike. In those games people can buy "keys" to open randomly dropped "chests" which may or may not contain valuable items (valuable in the sense that they can be traded to other players for sometimes hundreds of dollars in Steambux). They are essentially running a lottery. I will concede that it's quite similar to Magic: The Gathering's business model (small chance to find something valuable!), but something about the exact implementation (perhaps the ease of trading and valuation of items, or the heavy use of Steambux which can only be redeemed in a Valve store?) Valve uses feels a bit more skeevy.

<comment><USER40> As a former MtG player, I remember the gambler's high I'd get opening every booster pack. But while my cards are sitting in a dusty box somewhere, it sounds like there's a lot of recirculation that happens within the Valve community.

<comment><USER18> There also a big difference between Magic cards and the Valve items -- Valve items are only cosmetic, while Magic cards derive their high value because they can make your deck stronger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm always wary of people who beg for more government control .

</comment><comment><USER43> "You think you are not manipulated by ads? Get real, read some of the latest books on the topic."

Any book recommendations? Sounds like this would be really interesting to read about

<comment><USER44> Try Hooked, by Nir Eyal

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Terrible article, but raises some good issues. Would like to see a better discussion of those issues.

One problem that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is that in my experience a large proportion of people in the games industry are essentially game addicts.

They've forgone other opportunities, higher pay, IRL social interactions, family duties, etc. due to their passion for games.

It's hard to have a serious conversation about games and addiction without examining this further.

<comment><USER45> I've been in the game industry for 20 years and I don't recognize this image you've painted at all

<comment><USER12> Glad to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Where do erotic web camera sites that allow tipping and rake money off the top fit in?

I'm pretty sure lots of people are addicted to these shows.

</comment><comment><USER47> Look, this is just commerce at work. People are going to use whatever edge they can get to make more money. These edges only go so far. If you think the only reason Game of War is popular because of the million dollar ads, then why isn't every single product, everywhere using these ads?

These games fulfill more than just some need to mindlessly click on shit. Just because doesn't do anything for you, that doesn't make the people it does work for stupid or rubes. As soon as something better comes along, all of these games companies are going to be toast, way, way deader than disco.

Assuming that any massive success is due to nefarious attention-gaming is pretty much categorically wrong. Video gaming, by the standards of global commerce, is a ridiculously tiny niche. There are billions of people who have _never played a video game in their entire life_. Game of War is the largest player in a sub-niche of this small niche. Big enough to buy ads on the Super Bowl, sure, but that says a lot more about the declining power of television and advertising in general than it does about the size of the gaming market.

That this market needs political attention to curb abuse is utterly laughable. How about we fix oil drilling, or pharmaceutical production first?

<comment><USER48> >Look, this is just commerce at work.

And? Oil drilling and pharmaceutical production is just commerce at work. As is child labor, sex trafficking, drug trade, and slavery.

<comment><USER47> So they are. Are you really equating them?

<comment><USER48> Nothing is "just" commerce at work. This is also a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because these things happen to be legal doesn't necessitate that they should be.

<comment><USER47> When did I say they should be legal?

The political process has limits. There's such a thing as political capital and there's only so much of it at any given time.

Most people seem to think that shit is unlimited, that we could just fix everything all at once if the politicians just knew what it was.

That's emphatically not the case. Issues all get their time in the sun, and the political fix is almost never perfect. The issues you compared social video games to, slavery _et. al._ all were banned, rightfully, a long time ago.

When I say that this is "commerce as usual" I mean that the market will sort out the complained-about issues itself, without the need for a law. Legislation is a complicated, tortuous affair. Society needs many, many individual events to draw on in order to draft effective legislation. Someone has to study this stuff in order to write a law, someone has to convince others to vote for the law. None of this is free, it all comes at the expense of other issues needing attention at the moment. Votes get traded like horses.

In this case, political attention isn't needed, at least not yet. There are way too many other issues that beg attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> The article the author links to is more revealing:

[http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions- of-...](http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-a-free-to- play-producer/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Only if the regulation get 90+% votes.

I am so waiting for the future when one can switch (mobocratic) government like a house.

</comment><comment><USER51> > "I guess at this point we could just say 'A fool and his money are soon > parted'"

Yep.

</comment><comment><USER52> NSFW tag would help.

</comment><comment><USER53> Cliff's comparison of Star Citizen's preorder process to gambling, painted in _royal we_ , is obscene.

I don't like to be dismissive, but it sounds like he's mostly upset that their slimy marketing actually works; while meanwhile people haven't even heard of his company.

For kicks I looked at his company's website, and their top two titles are "Democracy 3", and "Big Pharma". i.e. he makes video games about regulation and a highly-regulated industry. After seeing these titles, the attitude makes a lot more sense.

<comment> norea-armozel I think he picked Star Citizen since you can spend close to thousands of real dollars (US) on items that don't physically exist. It's really no different than running an unregulated lottery since you can't be sure if Star Citizen will ever reach published state (It's been alpha close to two years IIRC). So, I think his comparison is close enough to question the validity of at least Kickerstarting projects like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This has absolutely no sources. And if you compare what "an anonymous developer" says he does (which may as well be made up) with what a company that spends $40,000,000 in an ad campaign does, you see how this is delusional.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is jealousy, at the core of it. Not just the gaming industry uses these tactics. I work in an industry that does that all the time (I hate it).

Certain kinds of games shouldn't be regulated, though I would agree that creating fake profiles on social media in an attempt to gather more information from users should be regulated to some extent.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, are you in favor of people having a free will, or do you want to mitigate what a person can and can't do with their free time because in your opinion, it's bad for them?

<comment><USER56> Well there is actually a middle ground, where society (through te government) can make changes so that people are nudged to a better direction. (Check out UK's nudge unit.)

So even though people can smoke, drink, gamble - there should be some form of policy to limit or reduce the harm that comes from these activities.

This actually goes double for such free-to-play games with IAP as in some ways they are no better than plain old slot machines - or "pokies" as we call them in Australia. But since they are just "games" on "phones" they are not treated with the same rigor as other pure gambling machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't see any problem with games or any other product spending that much on advertisement if it's beneficial for them. I don't understand what people have against targeted advertisement? So what if the advertisements are tuned for your interests. Wouldn't you rather see relevant ads, rather than the something completely irrelevant to your life? I actually wish, they had more information and were better targetted. Right now, the ads really don't have much of the right information or enough intelligence at all.

Also, since when is it to much to ask people to spend responsibly? I mean, we have licences for driving and licences for fishing. Should we also have a licence to spend? Perhaps, all these so called 'victums' you speak of, should go to the a financial therapy class and their spending should be limited by the government.

If you dont know how to spend your money, you shouldn't be allowed to have a wallet or money.

People need to be responsible for their own spending if they want to grow up and live on their own.

<comment><USER58> > Wouldn't you rather see relevant ads, rather than the something completely > irrelevant to your life?

Absolutely not. The cost to my limited time & attention span is not worth it. If I feel there is a problem in my life that I can solve with a product, I am perfectly capable of finding it using sources I trust.</comment></comment>


Space Shuttle and Space Station Photographed Together - <AUTHOR> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140831.html <comment><USER3> This reminds me of an experience I had in Joshua Tree one evening.

The sun had just set and it was getting dark. I noticed two bright dots in the sky in close proximity to each-other. At first I thought "airliners", but had to rethink my hasty conclusion because the lights weren't blinking. I had to stop walking to really take in the scene: two very bright white dots in the eastern sky, about one closed fist at arm's length away from each other, moving across the sky slowly but consistently.

Having observed ISS before I knew how bright it could be. This certainly seemed like another ISS sighting, but what was the other thing? Then I remembered: the shuttle had launched not too long ago for a mission to ISS. Could I have just witness the moments after undocking? I checked NASA's data as soon as I got home and sure enough the undocking time was just prior to my observation.

This was among the last shuttle missions so I'll never forget that moment!

</comment><comment><USER4> Immediately wanted to use this for my wallpaper, but was hoping I could find a better multi-monitor version. It still looks cool if you just center it, but it would be even better if the earth weren't cut off.

Couldn't find one, so decided to make it. I basically rotated and cropped it to get as much of ISS as possible, then added a bit more Earth. This way it looks like the planet is naturally just falling below the horizon of your monitors, rather than being cut off. Fortunately the space background is a nice deep black, so that's easy to extend.

If anyone else is running (2560x1440) x 3, feel free to use it: [http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1440.jpg](http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1440.jpg)

Or if you prefer, this version crops the top solar panels of ISS, so you get a closer view, and less artificially generated Earth: [http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1440_clos...](http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1440_close.jpg)

Enjoy!

<comment><USER4> Here are a couple more:

7680x1600 version: [http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1600.jpg](http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_7680x1600.jpg)

9516x2320 source: [http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_9516x2320.jpg](http://www.helpertubes.com/images/iss_shuttle_9516x2320.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not just the Shuttle, but a Soyuz and a European ATV. Every significant spacecraft model at the time in one photo.

<comment><USER6> Looks like two Soyuz...

Edit: Actually, one Soyuz (TMA-21 on _Poisk_ ) and a Progress (M-10M on _Pirs_ ). The ATV is the _Johannes Kepler_.

<comment><USER7> And the picture is taken from another Soyuz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Be sure to check out the full pic at

[http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1408/shuttleiss_nasa_6048.jp...](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1408/shuttleiss_nasa_6048.jpg)

<comment><USER8> I used one of this series as my wallpaper for quite some time after its initial release. It's useful to remember humans can do extraordinary things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The damaged S1 cooling panel lends it an authentic, lived in, this thing is here to stay look.

[http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/h...](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/hires/iss027e036630.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station_ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station_maintenance#2009_.E2.80.93_Potential_ammonia_leak_from_S1_radiator_due_to_damaged_panel)

</comment><comment><USER10> The thing that impresses me the most about the shuttle is that it was designed in the mid 60's, built in the 70's/80's, and flew 100+ missions to space over ~30 years. I have a car that was built in the mid-80's and barely trust driving it a few thousand miles a year without it breaking down. I can't imagine what it took to keep the shuttles flying to space for so long without more major accidents.

<comment><USER11> There were six shuttles and had 25, 28, 10, 39, 33 & 0 missions each for a total of 135 missions and killed 14 astronauts. Not that impressive a record for something that was originally intended to do 55 launches a year.

Something I find more impressive is the B52 Bomber, first flew in 1952, finished production in 1962, expected to be in service until 2040. Will be in service for almost 100 years.

If like an aircraft, you were doing 1 hour of maintenance for every 10 - <USER2> hours driving, I'm sure your car would be more reliable.

<comment><USER12> For military aircraft, there are far more hours of maintenance than flying time. It's a factor of 10-20 in the other direction.

<comment><USER13> I actually looked up the B-52 schedule and from what I could tell its maintenance and duty schedules aren't _too_ out of line from recommended maintenance for a privately owned automobile:

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/PfZc...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/PfZckXeBqP7)

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress was introduced in 1952. Its mission is presently projected through 2044.[1] That's a ninety-two year mission.

There were 744 built, unit costs range from $9.28 million (1962) to $53.4 million (1988). The most recent new production was 1963, over a half century ago. Effectively the planes are rebuilt periodically, though some original components may remain (I'm not fully up on my B-52 maintenance procedures and schedules).

"Flyaway cost": $9.29m, in 1955 dollars, $82.53 in 2014 dollars)

Present maintenance costs: $10,406/hr.

That is equivalent to the purchase price of the aircraft every 8,000 flight hours.

AAA publishes a "cost of ownership" report for automobiles which assumes 15,000 miles of travel and an average of $0.05/mi maintenance, or $750/year.[2] This suggests that a B-52 level of maintenance is at least twice the going cost of automobile maintenance. But not _hugely_ out of line given relative capital costs.

GlobalSecurity.org claims B-52 total service life being 32,500 - 37,500 flying hours.[3] Over the 92 year life of the program, that corresponds to a duty cycle of roughly 4.6%, vs. 5.7% for the automobile referenced above. It also gives us an annual maintenance cost per B-52 of $4.2 million -- or 5% of the total purchase cost. Over the 92 year life of the aircraft, that's equivalent to purchasing 4.7 new planes.

(Taken from a longer response to an allegation about failure to incorporate demand-side depreciation in GDP, largely deconstructed, demolished, and dismissed here.)

Also, incidentally, I dropped you an email concerning your "Internet with a Human Face" blog posting, seen that by chance?

______________________________

Notes:

1\. [http://www.gizmag.com/b52-upgrade/20098/](http://www.gizmag.com/b52-upgrade/20098/)

2\. [http://www.colorado.aaa.com/auto/fuel-guide/driving-costs- fo...](http://www.colorado.aaa.com/auto/fuel-guide/driving-costs-for-vehicle- types/)

3\. [http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-52-life.htm](http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b-52-life.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> All amazing engineering achievements, and yet such white elephants in so many ways. The Mars Rovers and Space probes have been so much more valuable for science.

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't write off the shuttle so quickly. It flew 100+ missions, brought up the Hubble and helped fix it, brought up parts of the ISS, etc. Sure it didn't get past low earth orbit but it did a lot of great stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bringing up parts to the ISS doesn't count. It's done even less for science than the Shuttle. :-)

Richard Feynman expressed great scepticism about the Shuttle, and its scientific value. In his books he writes how he never came across a single scientific paper that referenced it -- check out the chapter titled "Committing Suicide" of "What do you care what other people think?".

<comment><USER14> The shuttle is a tool. If you're growing crystals in space or trying to measure gravity waves, you don't mention the spacecraft, but you have to get the experimental equipment up there some how or you can't do it.

Note: Not saying the Shuttle was the most suitable solution, but I think that 'it was never referenced in papers' is not a useful fact.

<comment><AUTHOR> No way. Anyone -- anyone -- who wrote a paper based on experimental data retrieved on the Shuttle would absolutely list the Shuttle, the flight, and the date. Basing research on data gathered in zero-gravity (technically micro- gravity freefall) environment would be _so exceptional_ that the specific spacecraft would have to be listed.

It would be like publishing a particle physics paper using data gathered at the LHC and not mentioning that you got the data from the LHC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man, the shuttle's cargo bay was rediculously huge. Lofting that whole volume for a routine iss resupply seems insanely wasteful. (I know that it is expensive to loft mass, not volume. But in this case it is volume that needed to be enclosed in a shell that could survive reentry.)

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/i...](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/inflight/ndxpage42.html) [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/i...](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/inflight/ndxpage42.html) [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/i...](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-27/inflight/ndxpage43.html)

for more of them both. Some great shots.

</comment><comment><USER17> And few pics of the ISS + other space crafts taken from Earth: [http://www.astrokraai.nl/viewimages.php?category=9](http://www.astrokraai.nl/viewimages.php?category=9)

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone ever created a virtual walk through of the ISS? Like every real estate web site does for their listings? Google????

<comment><USER19> I don't know, but this is probably better: [http://www.wimp.com/orbitaltour/](http://www.wimp.com/orbitaltour/)

This is astronaut Sunita Williams providing an extensive video tour of the ISS. Gives you a feel for what life is like up there. For example: they need to take care that the use of the stationary exercise bike doesn't set up vibrations that shake the exterior solar panel arrays.

<comment><USER20> Watched every minute of that, thanks for posting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is the Canadarm inspecting the bottom/tiles on the Shuttle? If not, then it's dangerously close to them ..

</comment><comment><USER22> wow those solar panels are huge.

</comment><comment><USER23> WHO'S TAKING THAT PICTURE??

<comment><USER24>
        [D]uring the Space Shuttle Endeavour's last trip
        to the International Space Station in 2011 May,
        a supply ship departed the station with astronauts
        that captured a series of rare views. The supply
        ship was the Russian Soyuz TMA-20 which landed in
        Kazakhstan later that day.</comment></comment>


Moving on from Rails and What's Next - <AUTHOR> https://blog.seantheprogrammer.com/moving-on-from-rails-and-whats-next <comment><USER2> I've seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they're very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it's possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison.

I guess I'm just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they tackle after Rails when I don't see them overlapping at all.

<comment><USER3> Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to something like Elixir/Phoenix.

<comment><USER4> I cut my teeth on Ruby and Rails, I've screwed around with Phoenix, and I'm currently infatuated with Rust. Earlier on I thought that, yeah, Rust is a great replacement for C and not something want to write a web app in. So, sure, I've got a bunch of little doodads written in Rust (mostly CLI tools). Now? The fluff I've written in Elixir is getting ported to Rust.

The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'd rather have to work on some extra verbosity and maybe even maintain my own helper library in Rust than deal with with Elixir/Phoenix at this point. The number one reason is that Elixir deployments are nothing short of a nightmare. I've found the community not particularly helpful or knowledgeable about how things work (and given how many moving pieces are in an Elixir deployment, and how brittle Elixir deployments are, this is a terrible thing). And you're definitely not going to write CLI tools in Elixir (it straight doesn't work with escript in the first place).

Compiling down into a single "static" binary like Rust (and Go) do by default is a huge win for things like this. The quick startup time of a Rust or Go app compared to Ruby or anything JVM based is great for rapid iteration and testing. The tooling around Rust is, in general, fantastic. Being that much of a pleasure to use really makes up for how inappropriate it is to use Rust for most high level web app things.

Phoenix had a lot of promise, but these days I'd much rather go back to Rails or Django (with an eye towards how to migrate to a compiled language) if I needed to churn something out quickly.

<comment><USER5> I'm currently looking into learning Elixir, but your comment sprinkled some doubts on that.

If deployment was easier in the Elixir world, would you have stuck with it?

<comment><USER6> Honestly Elixir has been one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I've had in years. Deployment is fine, but there are a few different things to consider (because you can do some really cool stuff using BEAM). But you can just chuck it on Heroku if you want something easy.

I also like Rust a lot, but I find Elixir pretty much frictionless to work in. Rust is basically you vs the compiler for quite a while. I've been using Rust for IoT work but I vastly prefer Elixir for web. And since I've been enjoying it so much I'm gonna start looking at Nerves ([https://github.com/nerves- project/nerves](https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves)) for IoT work as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The problem is that working on MIT/Apache licensed software doesn't exactly > help pay the bills. That's why I'm asking for your help. I've spent the last > 5 years having a single company sponsor my open source work. This time I'm > going to try something different. Right now my goal is to get a handful of > medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. > If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, > please reach out.

This is the crux of the problem which seems left unadressed in the comments.

If it feels nice to enjoy those consulting rates, give something back.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, my initial thought when reading the article was whether anyone is using Patreon for helping them focus on open source projects, or if there's a popular competitor for that. Patreon seems to have all the controls to handle this well though. I would happily give a buck or two to someone monthly, and an additional few dollars per release capped at once a month or quarter (and Patreon supports both those, but I'm not sure it supports them at the same time). Although something that worked at the project and/or individual+project level might be better in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe Sean's decision of moving to Rust has very little to do with Ruby/Rails. I think all of us have a point where we just simply want to move on to new things in life.

I really appreciate all the contributions done by Sean in Ruby On Rails and wish him all the best.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like some philosophical differences too.

I hope he can make a living doing open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would have thought rails to golang so I too am surprised.

I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don't do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.

<comment><USER12> Ruby has developer happiness as one of its main goals. Go on the other hand seems to have a lot of narratives around keeping the language small even if it's inconvenient. Add to that that Rust with Cargo has a package manager that will fell just like home to Ruby devs, whereas Go brought package managing back to the dark ages. => All this makes it hard to get excited about Go. Rust on the other hand comes with a bunch of new and exciting language features.

<comment><USER13> I don't think the "lot of narratives" you're talking about actually exist. I've never heard anyone from the Go camp say that they want to make the language "small even if it's inconvenient". From a language design point of view I think they're trying to make it small to maximise convenience. Yes, it's a different philosophy to "kitchen sink" languages but that doesn't make it wrong. In fact it's considered a gold standard of language design. Wikipedia says:

> Orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of > primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to > build the control and data structures of the language[2]. It is associated > with simplicity; the more orthogonal the design, the fewer exceptions. This > makes it easier to learn, read and write programs in a programming language. > The meaning of an orthogonal feature is independent of context; the key > parameters are symmetry and consistency (for example, a pointer is an > orthogonal concept).

Go modules are a fairly new feature which addresses past criticisms of Go dependency management so I don't think that's a valid criticism any more.

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree that making the language small is a great goal and makes the language better. I just think that such a language will not appeal to everyone who enjoyed a large language full of syntactic sugar like Ruby. In fact I very much agree with Go's design goals and see lots of problems with Rust's design choices, at least when considering it for "mondain" work like web dev. However, I cannot get myself excited about Go at all, while I am very excited about Rust. I think it's that Rust, especially coming from Ruby, has interesting new concepts that lead to many rewarding learnings where you change how you reason about some things. When I read about Go, there are no surprises, everything immediately makes sense. All of this is good. It's also boring (in a good way). If I somehow got forced to use one of these languages for a new startup, I'd go with Go. If I had to pick one for playing around with on the weekend, I'd definitely go with Rust.

<comment><USER14> Mundane... Not mondain

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am curious to what drives the next thing? Just wanting to use a new fresh language?

I saw the rise of Ruby on Rails; the driver was the ability to deliver wellstructured web applications fast. The language was a secondary thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it even possible? Or do you basically have to relearn what you missed in Computer Science over the last 6 years.

It reminds me of what Dijkstra said about people raised on BASIC in the 70s:

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have > had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally > mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

<comment><USER17> My progression was BASIC > Pascal > (insert a bunch of procedural/OO langs and scripting langs)> .NET > Ruby > coding Ruby in a FP style > Elixir.

So basically procedural > OO > functional.

I will say the hardest transitions (where "hard" is still less hard than, say, understanding everything about how a SQL join works) were from .NET to Ruby (and even THAT transition was mostly hard because I was going from "Microsoft ecosystem" to "open-source ecosystem" without having Java on my resume), and from Ruby to Elixir (syntactically similar, semantically night-and-day). But clearly it's possible... and I'm a Dijkstra fan!</comment></comment>


Why do yo use JavaScript-Libraries like jQuery? - <AUTHOR>

jQuery was released in January 2006. At this time, IE6 was the major browser at the market, so everything concerning to JavaScript was a bit messed-up with Microsoft specific stuff, Firefox market share was growing, the need for animations combined with CSS 2 came up etc. pp.
Today, we have our browsers in a who-is-most-standard-compliant-competition and a lot of nice new APIs with most of the basic ones even supported by IE 8, so most of them have higher backwards-compatibility than jQuery 2.x, which officially only supports IE >9.x.
So I asked me: For which reason are most of the web developers using jQuery? I mean: Selecting DOM elements isn't an argument, Element.querySelector should be faster. AJAX complexibility isn't an argument, ActiveXObject is dead since IE 7. Animations aren't an argument, CSS 3 is grown-up. Since ECMAScript 5, there's Array.prototype.forEach. Events can be easily handled by CustomEvent.
If you're interested in these native APIs called WebAPI, just take a visit to MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.querySelector https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API (Everything at a glance) <comment><USER2> The biggest reason to use jQuery is the extensive ecosystem. Nearly every JS problem has a jQuery extension-based solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are mistaking jQuery for a querySelectorAll alias, I have no words for how wrong that is.

<comment><USER4> +1. Dear lord..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taking a quick look at the source code directory structure [https://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/master/src](https://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/master/src), I believe that you could create a minimal, customized build containing only features that you actually want. For example only element selection (which is very convenient and fast IMO) and AJAX.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Selecting DOM elements isn't an argument"

I think this is actually the remaining argument. JQuery was the best at selecting DOM elements and grew from there. I think the question now is whether you find enough value in the other parts of JQuery to include its (rather massive) .js file.

<comment><USER7> You can use the selection engine as a standalone.

[http://sizzlejs.com/](http://sizzlejs.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Practically everything I can think of needing on a daily basis has a solution already made and tested in jQuery. Very rarely do I have to reinvent the wheel, be it tablesorting, an AJAX-sourced type-ahead box, or a nicer date widget. That saves time and effort.

Its ubiquity also means that problems are often already solved in it. Every time I've run into a jQuery bug there has been discussion and work-arounds already posted online by people much smarter than myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> there's still no nodeList.prototype.forEach. You can(and should) make it but it's pretty sad qsa was implemented without fixing the most basic thing about its result.

Also jquery neatly abstracts single/ multiple element operations making for shorter code.

Use jquery 2, it's tiny and gives you the tenseness without the extra code for all the old stuff.

Or cut a few pixels from the top of a single image and save bandwidth that way.

<comment><USER10> jQuery still lacks the ability to select for just a single element. That makes it horribly inefficient for id selectors among other single-element cases.

<comment><USER9> Sure, and if DOM selector performance is a issue, you should consider ditching it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You are underestimating how much work jQuery does for you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Dependencies, unfortunately I am forced to use it, because it's just there in the code used by someone few years ago.

Plugins are not the reason and fortunately it is changing already, because UI/UX feature developers do not want to be jQuery plugin vendors anymore, they want to promote their stuff under their own brand.

</comment><comment><USER13> jQuery has a lot of useful things, such as a good selector engine (although can be inefficient if you abuse it), lots of easy to hook into plugins, and helpers such as `scrollTop()` & `$(window).on('resize', ...)`. I'm a huge proponent of Angular, but jQuery still has its utility.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here is a reason why.. [http://jsperf.com/queryselectorall-vs-jquery- jb](http://jsperf.com/queryselectorall-vs-jquery-jb)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure people also test a lot less when using jQuery. It's a convenience thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> One word: "Plugins".</comment>


Lo-Fi Prototyping: Paper in Screen Prototyping - <AUTHOR> http://www.uxmag.com/design/paper-in-screen-prototyping

<comment><USER2> I was taking HCI courses under both Dr. Davide Bolchini and Dr. Anthony Faiola while they were working on this research. It is fun to see it progressing.</comment>


What's this component? Was a national secret in the 1940s. - <AUTHOR> http://whatisit.pen.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> The OP here. I'll explain what it is later if no one cares to guess.

If you're interested in electronics, you probably know its name and purpose, as I did. But it happens to be a little difficult to "extract". I had been meaning to get my hands on one of these for ages. Finally got one!

What's so intriguing to me is that the internal _geometry_ is what makes it function, and was (as I understand it) the genius involved in making the first working version.

<comment><USER2> It's a magnetron. It what makes our microwave ovens work.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here again. That's what it is.

There are some good pictures of a cutaway of a magnetron here:

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

It's kind of amazing that you can create microwaves with nothing more than a high voltage, a magnet, and a cavity with precisely the right shape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a magnetron of course. AFAIK the "warming" effect of microwaves was discovered by accidentally melt chocolate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could a home microwave's magnetron be converted into an antenna? what possible use could it have?, are they good for data transmission? the microwave antennas I mean, not the ovens.. It could be cool to have a dyi super high power wifi of some kind!</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - gem.is - <AUTHOR>

Access large amount of web search results, news,  and other information, at a glance, suitable for mobile and desktop.<p>http://www.gem.is <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the issues with source crediting. We are adding the appropriate credits to the site.

As we are still experimenting with the site, we are only getting news from one source.

The key point is not to redirect or scrape someone's news, but to explore innovative ways to enable users to access and read massive amount of info in a short amount of time.

Our objective is to allow users to read 10X amount of news and other info in 1/10 of the time they normally spend.

Thanks for the comments.

<comment><USER2> That's great - but proxying the entire yahoo news page at the very least appears seedy (and you'll probably end up with google turning the screws on you). I understand if it's experimental but you can't just reflect _everything_.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a work around. Yahoo does not allow showing their news in an iframe, which we currently implement. Again, this is just experimental. We could use another news source which allows iframe. And there won't be a need for the proxy approach.

We think this actually is helpful to the content owner, in our opinion, as it allows more access to their content.

<comment><AUTHOR> By having the content shown in iframe, it makes it easier for users to navigate without opening lots of tabs in the web browser.

Everything is preserved in the original site. It helps the content owner by making more of their content accessible to the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The immediate redirect I don't care for at all. And then the auto reload. You're scraping news sites (looks like mostly Yahoo news) but I don't see any attempt at accrediting the sources, and while that may not actually be necessary (I don't know) it would at least be polite.

And then the proxy loads the entire content of the external site in your domain, but all of the relative links wind up broken and pointing to gem.is

This is just a little too blatant for my tastes, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER3> the tiny display-box you use to display the articles you scraped is unbearable

</comment><comment><USER4> looks like Webscraping of major news sites ..</comment>


Ask HN: What is the Mac tool which installs multiple programs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm asking about the tool which lets you set up a list of programs (and maybe dotfiles too) to install on a new Mac.
It's like a one-shot setup tool, originally intended (IIRC) for setting up new developer's machines.
It has a unique name that I've forgotten, and I can't seem to find it on google since the search terms are pretty generic. It's been mentioned on here a few times.
Thanks!
EDIT: I was thinking of Ninite, but it seems that it's everything except Mac. Is there a Mac equivalent? <comment><USER2> Boxen? <https://github.com/blog/1345-introducing-boxen>

<comment><AUTHOR> That one was on here recently wasn't it? It's close but it's not the one I'm thinking of. I wish I could remember! Thanks though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SoloWizard? <http://www.solowizard.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> New to me but looks perfect. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Math Poetically Solved Now = Free Time for Me - <AUTHOR> http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/solved-now/

<comment><USER2> The poetry didn't do much for me, but the Mathway site the poem linked to (<http://www.mathway.com/>) is just too freaking cool for words.</comment>


A critical look at Atom.io - <AUTHOR> http://reza.jelveh.me/2014/02/28/a-critical-look-at-atom.html <comment><USER3> Wow, the GitHub hype machine is working extra hard these days. I think this is at least the 5th article that hit the front page about Atom in the last couple of days.

Are we still seriously discussing a closed source, non-free, Mac only Sublime Text clone that was written in Javascript and as it turns out, is painfully slow?

Say what you will about Proggit, but at least the discussion there isn't all "OMG I can switch from Sublime now!!!". Jesus Christ.

<comment><USER4> Different strokes for different folks' I suppose.

Seriously though, the fact that:

        It's closed source
        It's Mac only
        Written in Javascript
        Painfully slow (compared to Vim)

probably don't matter much for many HN users. The things that do matter (powerful text manipulation, batch editing, block editing, multi-select, etc) are being handled by this editor. That's fine.

Please don't show up and start saying "STOP LIKING THINGS I DON'T LIKE!!". It's not helping.

<comment><USER3> > powerful text manipulation

Have you read the article you are commenting on? It talks about the exact opposite:

> Compared to Atom the search [in Textmate] is blazing fast.

> Doing regex searches in vim on that file is instant. The memory barely > moves. Searching for the character d takes almost 10 seconds in Atom, and > significantly increases memory usage. When I say significantly, I'm talking > 200 megs.

That doesn't mean powerful _anything_ to me. Especially not text manipulation.

EDIT: Also, I don't care if people actually like things. What bothers me is blind fanboyism/praise for something people used for 2 days at the max.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty convinced to stick with vim at this point, myself, and see where the neovim project goes, but I thought I'd throw out that when I think of "powerful text manipulation" I'm not necessarily thinking of how fast it takes to do basic operations.

For instance, I messed around with sublime text and I really dug how it handled multiple cursors. I'd never say something like vim couldn't do that, but sublime (for me) made multiple cursors seem intuitively powerful and useful, in that I could perform quick operations in seconds that I wouldn't have thought to perform in that way before.

I'd say it's similar to me if you were to compare regex find/replace with normal find/replace. It's a more powerful/flexible idea. Whether or not it's a good one is up for grabs.

That said, the speed does sound like it could be a problem. I just don't think power text manipulation is referencing processing efficiency.

I'm wondering how the efficiency of this setup is played out in stuff like Light Table and Brackets, which seem pretty similar (I think the front end on those is just html? I could be totally wrong). And like I said, so far I'm way more interested in neovim than any of the newer other browsers.

<comment><USER6> CodeMirror has had a ton of work put into it and Light Table mostly rides on that. Opening a 40kloc javascript file and searching in it is totally smooth. Auto-complete, jump-to-definition etc are fast and don't block the UI. We still have performance issues in places (eg watching large directories which change often, serialising large inline results) but we haven't had any problems with the DOM being too slow. CodeMirror deals with all of that for us.

I'm playing around with React (and Om, Quiscient etc) at the moment and it's by far the nicest UI model I've ever encountered. If I could get Cassowary working reasonably fast too it would be miles ahead of anything else.

The only thing that I don't see improving soon is not having shared memory threads (or even zero-copy messaging). Webworkers are all well and good but sometimes the serialisation overhead is still enough to block the UI. thread.

<comment><USER7> I agree 100% about React - I can't help but think that an editor based upon it could really speed up all the DOM manipulation that holds back every webkit- based desktop app.

Re: Web workers, this probably isn't news to you but you can use transferable objects [1] to eliminate the serialization hiccup. Of course, if you're really trying to share objects across threads in real time, rather than transfer data, parse, and fire events, you may have bigger issues.

1\. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/Performan...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Guide/Performance/Using_web_workers#Passing_data_by_transferring_ownership_\(transferable_objects\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Without looking at the behind the scenes memory allocation/speed — the real world speed of the application surpassed my expectations.

I've jumped from ST to try and use this since I received my invite and am incredibly impressed without how little I feel the urge to switch back. Other editors that I try out (which I do far to often, ugh) are pretty, have unique features, but they lack the can't live without feature(s) that no one has matched in ST is the ease of line/text manipulation (find-next(cmd-d) + find- skip-next-next(cmd-k+cmd-d)+ undo + Multi Cursor, Block Select, Dupe...).

Atom got close with this version. The duplicate function is only duplicate line but without knowing any CoffeeScript I was able to override this function to duplicate selection if there is a selection before duping the line — for every selection. There are many other areas that are close and will either be closed out by myself for my own use, addressed by others via packages, or even in the core once it hits 1.0.

Anyway, this is a good write up and good look at the negatives of a web based editor, but I would argue the drawbacks of the DOM outlined are outweighed by the ability talk to it (and also the entire API) via the webkit inspector.

Also, the current version number is 0.6.0.

<comment><USER9> I challenge anyone to find me a feature in an editor that you can't find in an IntelliJ IDEA based editor like WebStorm or RubyMine. Atom, Sublime Text, Text Mate, and even Vim and Emacs use (broken) regular expressions to do syntax highlighting and intelligent things. IntelliJ build a "PsyElement" tree which is basically an AST. As such it will always have more features and be more powerful, and it's all on the JVM and super amazingly fast, well except for the indexing and startup (yech), but Cmd+B on any variable in any language IntelliJ understands, or Alt+F7 on a variable definition or Shift+F7 or Shift+F6 for a rename. IntelliJ is actually here from the future to write our code for us, and I'm saying this as a pretty dedicated vim user.

<comment><USER3> Speed? Resource consciousness? Ability to work on older hardware? Ability to work in a terminal?

Nock Vim's hacky syntax highlighting all you want, but people have done amazing things with it. I mean, just today I found a plugin that properly highlights PHP annotations. All the intelligence in PHPStorm failed to deliver on that front.

<comment><USER10> > Speed?

Aside from startup speed Intellij is pretty fast, I would like to know what speed issues you might be talking about? This isn't a buggy piece of mess like eclipse.

> Resource consciousness? Ability to work on older hardware? Ability to work > in a terminal?

You're right, vim has Intellij beat on all these things. But let's be real here, what platform are you doing heavy duty development on? I'm going to guess it's not a resource constrained, esoteric piece of hardware that only has terminal access. Don't get me wrong, I think you should be proficient with a terminal based text editor to be able to do in place edits over ssh, but seriously, that's not where you're doing most of your development work. At least I hope not.

This is also from a huge vim fan, I love it and I've used it for primary development when suitable IDE environments didn't exist (in the past Scala, recently hacking around with clojure and playing with Rust). But when you've got a mature IDE environment that isn't buggy, fast, and not resource intensive enough to make a big different on your development environment, it's a no brainer in my book. Plus the VIM plugin for Intellij is pretty good ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMHO this editor ony will be a improvement to those that are used to something like GEdit, Notepad++, TextMate, Adobe text-editors and Github's devs. I don't think that there much here for ones that use LightTable, VIM, Emacs or some fancy IDE for their everyday job.

<comment><USER12> For Go dev, I used gedit for a while before finding LiteIDE- Granted it was gedit with my own scripts hotkeyed (which it support doing) and a few plugins, but it was surprisingly featureful- and lightening fast... I could commit, build, run unit tests, had syntax highlighting and auto-complete... And it was fast... So I think you are underrating some of the above editors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might not open a large file in common usage but when you need to open a large log the issue is not negotiable. If anything the Rope data structure is to text editors as the B-Tree is to file systems.

<comment><USER14> I haven't used Atom yet but choking on initial load of large files was a big downer for me when using Sublime Text 2.

This is a problem that memory mapped files solved a long time ago, seeing newer editors revert so badly on this is just sad.

<comment><USER15> Memory mapping the file doesn't really help an editor much. For one thing you can't have your buffer changing arbitrarily underneath your parse of it.

But also in order to have both precise and fast scrolling, especially when syntax highlighting or line wrap is involved (usually you don't want both but you might want one or the other), you need to do at least a superficial parse on the whole thing anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I regularly work with relatively large JSON files (500kb - 4mb). These open and edit quickly in ST. Atom refuses to load anything over 2mb, and chokes even on 500kb files.

</comment><comment><USER17> The size limitation seems like a killer, and rather hard to fix. In my main editor, opening a 100mb file is not unheard of.

<comment><USER18> At my previous job, two of the most important C files exceeded 500k - <USER2> lines in one, 25k lines in the other (expression parser and declaration parser, respectively).

Emacs doesn't do so well on those files either, for reasons I don't quite understand. C-Home (M-<) from the end of the file took 3+ seconds on an 3.8GHz i7 machine, yet the command those keys are bound to - beginning-of-buffer - was instantaneous, as was M-g g 1 (go to line 1).

<comment><USER19> I really hope those files are well structured, but it baffles me that no one would think about splitting them up...

<comment><USER18> Multiple files would mostly just make them more fiddly to work with, juggling all these buffers. In my experience, the modern fashion for tiny source files is not intrinsically better, especially when all the code is related to a functional area (and is mutually recursive, in a compiler's parser).

You'd still rely on search to navigate, and whether it's in the same file or a different file is just an IDE / editor detail. If anything, fewer source code files meant you always knew which file to switch to to find any given function, which you could in turn find with an incremental search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Web technology - adding memory usage to solved software problems since 1998.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think atom is targeted towards those that are very happy with vim or similar. I'm thinking it's more aimed towards those using sublime or notepad++ or textmate or netbeans or some eclipse based ide.

<comment><USER22> It's targeted to the huge amount of people who are becoming programmers just now.

Github is already a key component of how many people develop software. Expanding to an editor is going to make GH _the_ essential toolchain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So it's not a web application, but rather a native application (a derivative of chromium)?

Why then use html for rendering text if it isn't a web app? (Not to mention javascript...)

<comment><USER24> it's chromium embedded framework[1]. it's technically a c++ application. in theory very close to how brackets works[2]. but they use the chrome rendering engine for text storage and all the drawing, which in theory means that it's easier to port across osx/windows/linux. there's still some platform specific code in there.

think about it a little like xulrunner

[1]: [https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/](https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/)

[2]: [http://brackets.io](http://brackets.io)

<comment><USER25> When you say Chrome rendering, are you implying that is HTML and CSS based?

<comment><USER26> Yes, as well as JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Really good article, thanks to author for digging under the hood.

As for most of the comments on this, I feel as if I could reply _early beta release_ to them.

</comment><comment><USER28> What happened to research, investigation, profiling rather than just publishing snark, vitriol and guesswork?

</comment><comment><USER29> I doubt the performance of DOM manipulation, so I open a large file, and Atom raise error: "Uncaught Error: Atom can only handle files < 2MB, for now."

</comment><comment><USER30> An impressive beta. Nothing yet that makes me want to switch away from sublime text.

I do think they will create a very cool eco system for editor extensions.</comment>


Cult of the Dead Cow Publications - <AUTHOR> http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/texXxt.html <comment> vezzy-fnord This file dated to 08-09-2004 is one of my favorites: [http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html](http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0395.html)

It's a long read, but worth it. A rather deep psychological and technical profile on how one boy grew up at the height of the BBS warez and hacking scene.

</comment><comment><USER3> Back orifice! I remember that around 98-99 you could do a simple scan of some dialup networks and always find around ten machines with back orifice installed. A lot of fun for person discovering the state of security of windows machines and networks...

<comment><USER4> I used to scan the users at IRC channels for BO (my mirc client had a plugin that did it automatically). I used to get into people's computers (so many were infected!) and checking the stuff they had in their drives... I know that is illegal, but back then the Internet was the Wild West. Among other things I remember seeing some very disturbing self portraits.... I think it was 98-99. The Internet was special back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow... Cult of the Dead Cow archives... Blast from the past. The Conscience of a Hacker[1] was always one of my favorites during my angsty teen years.

[1] [http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html](http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0012.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing. I totally forgot about Cult of the Dead Cow. I remember reading articles on here when I was younger.

Edit: Just found this in the apps section `08-01-1998 - "Back Orifice" by Sir Dystic` - so awesome!

<comment><USER7> Back Orifice was an awesome tool.

Very fun to play pranks on less knowledgeable friends.

I even remember starting to learn Delphi 3 because I met a guy that did a similar tool called Hacker's Paradise, but was later renamed to Admin's Paradise I believe, as he realized this could be used for and sold to admins.

He was kind enough to send me the source code and give me a few tips here and there, and man, Object Oriented programming was so hard for me at the time

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember seeing these guys at Defcon for the release of Back Orifice 2k. Full-on rockstars

<comment><USER9> As a 14 year old kid, I was really into that. Could you share what you saw? (Being from Europe, none of that really reached me back then )

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure why cDc is on the front page on HN right now, but along the same vein, here's PLA (Phone Losers of America) and it looks like he's still going strong (even has a YouTube channel):

      http://www.phonelosers.org/

</comment><comment><USER11> Randomly browsing the archives... "Ebola - Disease of the Year" \- Aug 1996

[http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola--- disease.html](http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/08/ebola---disease.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stuff out.

Blue Boxes (at least where I lived) no longer worked, but black boxes and red boxes worked. I don't know when blue boxes ever worked, but I have the impression it was in the seventies, or at the latest, the early eighties. A black box was a circuit you put on your line to pick up a call without dropping the voltage on the line enough for the phone company to think you'd actually answered. So, your friend could call you long-distance (even internationally) and you could talk to them without them having to pay a long distance charge. The problem was that you could always hear the ringing every few seconds in the background and their voice was attenutated. It was fun and it kinda worked, but I didn't use it that much because it was so annoying. The red box was a device for making free phone calls from pay phones. It faked the tones you inserted for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. You could just hold it up to the speaker of a pay phone and just hit the button. I built one off a schematic I downloaded. At most pay phones it didn't work at all, but I found two that it worked at. I'd go there and call all my friends in distant states and call them for hours. Every time the operator would come on and ask for money, I'd hold up the device to the speaker and press the "quarter" button a few times.

Later I got hold of "hacking" programs for "MCI" codes and other providers. Actually, MCI was more sophisticated that most of the other providers, and quickly shut off hackers. There were a lot of other providers that weren't so smart. The way the programs worked is by dialing an 800 number, some "user ID code" and then a known modem number. If a computer answered (i.e., you got a carrier tone from a modem), you knew that the code was good. If not, you tried another code. These computer programs would just try random codes all day using a known-good modem number and then print you a list of the successful codes.

As I started to learn more about this stuff, I did crazier stuff like call all over the world. In this era of Skype it's free to call all over the world, but in 1984 placing international phone calls was really expensive. But I'd call my teenage hacker friends in England and Australia and just chat with them for hours. At retail rates, I was running up a couple of thousand dollars a month in phone charges.

Occasionally I'd hear of someone in my circle of friends getting busted in some way, but in my teenage naivete I figured it couldn't happen to me. When I was sixteen and got a driver's license, I met some of the hackers that were within driving distance. One of them got busted at his house: the police arrested him and took all his computer equipment. Since he was a minor he got off with a slap on the wrist, but he didn't get his computers back. I knew that my time was coming soon, since there were already some hints my phone line was being tapped by companies I was stealing from.

<comment><USER13> You can do some fun stuff with SIP and the hacked up VoIP networks today. I found at least one Asterisk-based company followed 302 redirects, but didn't update the CDRs. So I could forward my phone to an expensive destination, but only hey charged for a few seconds of incoming call to my phone. An enterprising user exploited this to offer free calling to Haiti to a bunch of customers. Oops. SIP is convoluted from the parsing on up, so there's plenty of space for interesting behavior to hide. Not to mention the interactions resulting from lots of custom platform code interacting with what's traditionally considered s closed network, written by people that still have that mindset...

Of course, the stakes are higher, now. It's not hard to earn $0.30+ per minute per channel. In a day, you can earn $30k just compromising one little box and 10Mbps of bandwidth.

But it just doesn't have the same mystique and feel as old phreaking. Plus since it's just often computer hacking and fraud, and these days people are more sensitive about all that, it even feels more criminal.

<comment><USER14> > Of course, the stakes are higher, now. It's not hard to earn $0.30+ per > minute per channel. In a day, you can earn $30k just compromising one little > box and 10Mbps of bandwidth.

Is that from premium number dialing or something else?

<comment><USER13> With a premium number you can get the money directly. Just get a premium number and pump calls to it. But there are other legitimate destinations that are rather expensive. So you could setup shop and proxy calls to hacked boxes. But then you've gotta get customers, accept payments from them, etc. - <USER2> like more work.

<comment><USER14> > But there are other legitimate destinations that are rather expensive.

What would those be today? I can't see how long-distance reselling could be worth it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, this reminds me of astalavista ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk) ) where i learned a bunch of stuff back in the day...

Doesn't seem to exist anymore though.

</comment><comment><USER16> We actually used Back Orifice as a VNC solution for remote assistance.... I forget what we did to make it so it wouldn't cause outside people to poke our remote stations - changed the port number via hex editing, IIRC.

The nineties were fun.

<comment><USER17> I did something similar with a friend, it was easier than having him figure out how to configure VNC. Sometimes a "Trojan" is the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, I remember reading some of this stuff when I was younger - just checked the most recent ones. It's surprising that the tone and style is a mix of something (I perhaps a bit pretentiously feel) I grew out of over the years, and thoughtful, elegant prose.

If not anything else, it's interesting reading, which is a compliment in itself these days: [http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html](http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0410.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I grew up in the 80s and remember my first cDc exposure in the early 90s through a co-worker who showed me how to access a command line on the work computer that was used to order books . I remember being in awe of Back Orifice and many plugins that came out back then. I never embraced that life, but I still read these with nostalgia and a bit of jealousy at the technical and mental freedom the underground enjoyed (and still does).

</comment><comment><USER19> And then they sold out.

CdD turned into "L0PHT Heavy Industries" ([http://www.l0pht.com/](http://www.l0pht.com/)), a computer security firm. That turned into "@Stake" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@stake)). "@Stake" was acquired by Symantec in 2004.

<comment><USER20> That was only some CDC people. Many went on to sell out in entirely normal ways. Name me one smart hacker from the 80's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail. Hackers are worth money, lots of it, and experienced hackers, doubly.

Even the ones who didn't sell out got great jobs. It's just what hackers do, now. Besides, hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon. Now, they're just Internet street gangs stealing credit card info and spreading trojans, instead of spreading thought crime and information.

<comment><USER21> _Name me one smart hacker from the 80 's or 90's that didn't get wickedly rich, and I'll show you a guy in jail._

This is a bit snipey. Plenty of us don't value cash as highly as the American culture-complex would wish us. (eg. Listened to any hip-hop recently?) Though, the majority did sell out... and pretty hard and fast, and in one direction: the US military industrial complex and its once-removed assets such as Google. (See latest Assange book if doubting...)

 _hacker groups are dead as a cultural phenomenon_

Disagree. We've got more outcome-oriented collectives now, such as maker spaces and Github projects. This is arguably more to the point, and an efficiency improvement on idling on IRC for years on end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perfect timing. Was just reminiscing on the bbs days last week and punched up the documentary 'BBS' from Jason Scott on youtube.

Good times.

</comment><comment><USER23> If anyone has the dirt on those old SW crack sites... Please share!

</comment><comment><USER24> what is this website all about?

<comment><USER25> Textfiles published by long-time hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. The wiki page has more information on the group: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Moo.

<comment><USER27> At some point, we flee after Joe630 demands "hugs" from us... something he continues throughout the conference. "Touch me not, boy... I will not submit to your fondling," I tell him behind clenched teeth as I back out of the room.

"I'll only hug a man if he's buying me drinks or I'm trying to lift his wallet."</comment></comment>


If you want more X, make X faster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/faster-edits-with-inline-editing/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so much interested in the particulars of inline editing, but very interested in the concept used as the HN title.

Anyone have examples of how this has made a real difference in their sites/businesses/other aspects of life?

<comment><USER2> You can see this very easily in the task of programming. Back when programs where written on punch cards and results were returned in days, hand compilation and execution was a net win because you didn't want to compile\execute your program more than you had to.

A business example would be mail order. Think mail order by horse->truck->plane then invention of the internet.</comment></comment>


ECC is faster and more secure than RSA. Here's where you still can't use it. - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/ecc-https-certificate-support <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Both AWS and Heroku have confirmed privately that they're intending on remedying the lack of ECC support.

As the article mentions, browsers are supporting more curves over time too - <USER2> of the major 4 are ready for 25519 once it's approved.</comment>


How to Systemize, Delegate and Grow Your Freelancing - <AUTHOR> https://simplecast.com/s/279635dd <comment><AUTHOR> Direct download link here: [https://audio.simplecast.com/72161.mp3](https://audio.simplecast.com/72161.mp3)

I'm happy to answer any questions about this episode! I know a lot of us are freelancing.</comment>


The Latest React and React Native Conferences on 99 Videos – React Talks Q3/2017 - <AUTHOR> http://meetupfeed.com/the-latest-react-and-react-native-conferences-on-99-videos-react-talks-digest-q3-2017/ <comment><AUTHOR> I know this list is especially overwhelming, but Q3 had been busy for React conferences. :)</comment>