Show HN: Baby Buddy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cdubz/babybuddy <comment><USER2> Tracking bowel movements and feedings became a necessity for us as my son had a couple digestion issues when he was born. Collecting data not only helped us manage the situation better, but it was crucial for us to communicate the symptoms to our doctors to get referred to the right specialist for the care he needed. Thanks for sharing this.

<comment><USER3> Only if medical professionals actually pay attention to the data you're gathering. My first daughter had a horrible first few months of life due to an undiagnosed tongue tie. The evidence was right there.

<comment><USER4> 100% this. I showed my doc some stats once, and she looked a) annoyed; b) surprised; c) disbelieving. All of which i was not expecting.

By the second child i was too tired to keep stats, so we winged it and the docs and I happily acknowledge that ignorance is bliss (sarcasm, i think).

<comment><USER3> 2nd child I got gaslighted again until I went to the _specific person_ who had diagnosed it correctly the first time. And yeah, exactly the same problem (different symptoms, but children are different). Turns out she'd been disciplined after the first time for stepping out of lane.

(You'll note, not for being wrong, the diagnosis got independently confirmed both times.)

Medical professionals like and are used to being the unquestioned experts. But you are always the expert of your own child (because, like I said before, every child is different.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an excellent app called BabyConnect that we used for this with our daughter.

Of course eventually we (like most parents I believe) learned to relax and not obsessively record sleep, feeds and nappies. My friends who have more than one child said after the first they didn't do any recording like this and instead just let things take their natural course.

There is a market for this. But I can't see anything doing a better job than baby connect.

<comment><USER6> Agreed on all points. Though in the early sleep-deprived months I did find it useful to have a big, dashboard-style display. I built one with a userscript on top of the Baby Connect web interface.

Our daughter had feeding issues and medicine that had to be administered in certain intervals so it was really useful to see at a glance what was going on.

The feature I really wanted was Alexa or Google Home integration for logging events or checking times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome!

Fun hack to make data entry easy: Use hacked Amazon Dash buttons for really quick data entry. ie: press a button when feeding the baby, press another button when changing diaper.

<comment><USER8> Shameless plug: [https://github.com/ipartola/amadash](https://github.com/ipartola/amadash)

This is a general purpose daemon I wrote that monitors an arbitrary number of Dash buttons and does whatever you want when they are pressed.

<comment><USER9> Is there an alternative to dash buttons in Canada?

<comment><USER10> Single-button app on your phone: [https://ifttt.com/do_button](https://ifttt.com/do_button)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the app I wish I had during my kiddo's first few months. Thank you for writing it. If we have another kid we'll likely use it :)

We ended up using WebMD's baby tracker which was definitely not ideal, but it let my wife and I use both phones for data input.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks fantastic! One thing I've noticed is that most existing baby-related apps aren't very well designed. Most have plenty of good-enough features, but there always seems to be a slapdash effort that sleep-deprived parents will commit to and never look back from. This is a real nice departure from that, great to see the effort.

One suggestion would be to add an import option, for those of us who already have some data.

My wife isn't CL-user, so this isn't for us. If you're looking for recommendations, she and I are using Feed Baby ([http://feedbaby.com.au](http://feedbaby.com.au)) because it's got great graphs and really flexible good features without the social crap of Glow. Definitely worth the $6 for unlimited syncing.

<comment><USER13> CL-user?

<comment><USER14> command line

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few years ago we used BabyConnect by Seacloud, having it as an app that worked offline and synced was very useful.

NB: On your screenshot it says 'Last Feed: Formula, Left Breast' \- that confused me, then I realised you're probably doing both (maybe? some people supplement breastfeeding with formula).

Is there a way to record how long a breastfeed was? That's pretty important.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, shit. That's unfortunate in the screenshot. Just a symptom of the fake data generation.

The app does keep track of breast feeding duration as well, but so far we (my wife and I) haven't done much with that data so it's not well represented.

<comment><USER16> 12 solid diapers yesterday also seemed a little... impressive. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I know. Our little guy has had 34 wet diapers and _one_ solid in the past week (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks neat but from what I've gathered a notepad and pen works best for this. No app can compare with the speed of a quick scribble. Having the data digitized is fun though (poop charts!).

Found a couple bugs:

\- The sleep pattern page gives a 500 if you haven't slept yet. Likely a null pointer / empty list situation.

\- I think you may have some time zone issues. Some of the timeline pages display histrical events that occurred in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out!

Pen and paper was our original plan as well, but I wanted to be able to aggregate and graph information easily.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some TZ issues. I'm still fairly new to Django and had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around its TZ handling at first. I probably need to revisit some of the earlier commits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> cool app, but in my limited experience with newborns, there just isn't enough time to input data into a system like this to get the cool reports.

<comment><USER19> My experience is identical.

I think this kind of app could be really helpful but inputs need to be automated for this to be feasible. Maybe using some IoT devices (baby cradle sleep monitor, diaper box sensor, etc.).

<comment><USER20> Use Amazon dash buttons throughout the house. A poopy and a wet button near the change station, a nap start and nap end near the crib, a left breast/right breast near the rocking chair etc. Set them to make an API post request.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a pretty cool idea! Currently the app only has a minimal (Django REST) API, but expanding it to those sorts of functions would be really neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Back in my sleep-deprived days after my oldest was born I had an app idea similar to this, but with an added dash of AI/machine learning.

Imagine a bunch of parents using a free/relatively inexpensive application, tracking feeding schedules, sleep, food intake, play etc. and then ranking each day as a thumbs up/down.

Taking that data, properly anonymizing it and then comparing it across babies with similar characteristics (location, age, siblings etc.) you could suggest a daily schedule (with alerts) that would trend closer to a thumbs up.

Started with a prototype, but it never amounted to much. I just imagine the collective value of some of the data managed by these applications and the potential to ease the extremely challenging (but rewarding!) experience of being a parent.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about this along the way. It would be really cool to have some alert that says, "Baby is probably ready for a nap" or "Baby probably needs a diaper change", but the ML side of that is far outside my domain. Did you get far enough to judge whether or not such a thing would be very feasible, given how babies can develop so drastically differently?

<comment><USER21> I didn't get far enough, unfortunately. This was a number of years ago, and not the panacea for ML/AI that we have now. The variance in data is certainly a concern, but the free/inexpensive nature of the app itself was intended to gather as much as possible (anonymity being absolutely key, given the subject) and start looking at data points vs. positive ratings to find the correlation.

At the very least, that sort of data would be incredibly value for academia/research etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoot me an email (see HN profile/website) if you ever think about reviving the idea. I would be very interested to colloborate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great :) Expecting a baby girl next year, so will give the project a go. Wish I had something like it for our first. Have a big 65" in the living room connected to a HTPC so the dashboard would be much loved.

Also a great opportunity to brush on my Py.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Feel free to PR or hit me up if you think of features that might be worth adding.

<comment><USER22> If I can find some time, I will do. One thing I thought of was to be able to log the extraction process for bottling milk - that was something that was rather frustrating IIRC.

Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> We thought about that and figured it wasn't really necessary (for us). I think it would need to be a new model, which could be used to track the status of pumped milk (and may well be super helpful, particularly later on) but UX wise that would introduce a bit of complication with the feeding entry process. It's certainly doable, just not something my wife prioritized. Right now she just pumps when she feels full and baby isn't ready to eat. Then I get to do the night feeding and record it as a bottle feeding with Xoz of breast milk (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone without kids and who has never been around babies, what the heck is 'tummy time'?

<comment><USER17> It's placing the baby on it's stomach ("tummy") so he can practice raising his neck to strengthen those muscles. It's the first step to being able to roll over and sit up.

<comment><USER24> The reason tummy time is recommended is because now it's encouraged to have babies sleep on their backs to avoid SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The down side is they don't get time on their stomachs to work those muscles, and so you have to put them on their stomachs (and supervise them).

Edit: information from an actual authority rather than just me: [https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx](https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx)

<comment><USER25> Fun other fact: the vertebrate digestive system evolved to "hang downward"—i.e. for gravity to aid digestion by pulling matter toward your anterior.

If you ever feel gassy, one of the best solutions is to lay on your stomach and then slightly elevate your butt until you've created a pathway where the gas can exit by _rising_.

Similarly, if you ever feel constipated or have acid reflux, try just getting down on your elbows and knees (on your bed or another soft surface) and then relaxing your core to let your stomach just hang down. Picture imitating the body position of a cow. Everything should run in the right direction again after 10 or 20 minutes of this (bring a book.)

I bring this up because, of course, babies shouldn't be any different. If a baby—especially after weening—is colicky and looks to be in pain, it might be gassy bloating that it has no idea how to resolve. Flip them over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Shit. I have a baby due next week. My first one. Help?

<comment><USER27> Develop an immunity to advice that is offered.

<comment><USER28> Yes! Read books, or trust your instincts, or do whatever you want, and feel free to ignore all the drivel that people tell you.

Everybody in the world seems to know how you are doing it all wrong.

Even random strangers on the street have started giving me unsolicited advise.

People just can't shut up about how they think you should raise your kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've got a newborn on the way. This looks like an ideal way to track data and patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck! Let me know if you give it a try, and if you think of anything that could be added/improved. Having the data has been so incredibly help for me and my wife.

<comment><USER30> I strongly urge you to make a mobile version - it's much easier to enter data on the go, rather than having to walk over to your computer. UX is going to be key here - dropdowns are hard, buttons are easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I really would have liked to make it an app with better handling of offline data and such. But I simply didn't have the setup or experience to approach it that way by the time I decided to start (I think a month or so before our son was born).

On the plus side, the current app does have a pretty solid (I think!) mobile UI. When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries. I actually have been meaning to add a mobile version screenshot to highlight the fact that it is pretty functional on mobile (with the caveat that it needs an Internet connection). Mobile is how my wife and I use it about 95% of the time and has been a huge driver in my development of the UI.

<comment><USER30> > When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and > bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries.

Nice! I didn't check it out on mobile.

I'm incredibly impressed, btw, that you're working on something like this with a newborn. The month before and after birth, I was basically dead to the world. Kudos to you and her!

<comment><AUTHOR> All those kudos can go to my wife. She was incredibly supportive of giving me time to work on this before the birth and tweak it after. We also had lots of good support from her family. Definitely would not have happened without that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> We did something similar for our newborn in the first few months of sleep deprivation. It helped us with focus until we relaxed and could keep better track of it on our own in our head. The key thing these things miss is keeping track of yourself.

</comment><comment><USER32> Someone got too much paternity leave! :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I love these services but I never used them for my kids and would never use them. There is definitely a good market for it especially in the US where everyone is paranoid and you have liability issues etc but I just learned not to worry about it and that's with a son who was born 10 weeks too early.

But looks like a great solution for those who need some peace of mind.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'll be recommending this app to a relative of mine. I really like the fact you've open sourced it. Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I went back and forth on open sourcing only because I think there may be potential for building a service like this for _daycares_ in addition to parents. My decision to work on it stemmed largely from the ~20 different daycares my wife and I visited. _All_ of them had a pen and paper tracking system for infants so it gave me lots of ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> As someone who is both an avid Django user and about to be a new parent, this is awesome! Expect a PR or two from me :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Woo! My biggest hope with open sourcing this is to find other new or soon-to- be new parents with ideas for making it even better. It is such a huge motivator for me. Looking forward to your input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> how come no one ever told me you have to change diapers 20 times a day. wtf??

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm so glad I do not need this....yet!

</comment><comment><USER38> You shouldn't need these kind of apps. Listen to your child. They communicate quite clearly what they need, and after a while you understand their patterns.

This is one of those areas where I believe technology will do more harm than good

</comment><comment><USER39> What the actual fuck... You can automate or collect data about anything, but some things are going just too far. From experience I know that the forecasting and predictions you can do with this kind of data is very, very limited. The time and costs you need go through are way too high. I sincerely question why anyone would use this, aside from the hobbying and gadget-ness of this.

<comment><USER30> You got kids? Because you're factually wrong. When we had a kid, we used a mobile app, and it was _fantastic_, especially since it synched between my wife's phone and mine.

My turn to take care of the baby, while she gets badly needed sleep? I can easily check when the kid ate last, when she last had a wet or dirty diaper, without needing to check on the wife - and that kind of information is _very_ useful when she's crying, and you're trying to find out which one of a dozen things is the problem.

It's also very helpful at doctor visits - you can quickly pull up information on how often your kid pees and has a dirty diaper, how much she's drinking throughout the day, and if you have a scale, you can record information.

<comment><USER40> [3 kids, youngest a toddler]

A dozen things? Temperature, hunger, 'nappy', burps ... there's nothing else a baby ordinarily cares about.

Also it's not formulaic, a key thing IMO that those caring for infants need to realise is that babies cry. They don't decide to cry, they sometimes just cry.

Ever have a day when you feel sad/happy/emotional/excited/whatever and you don't know why? Babies do too, and what they do is cry, because they can't write posts on social media yet.

"They cry all the time, I'm doing something wrong", are they failing to prosper (put on weight after the initial dip), then it's highly unlikely the crying has anything to do with you at all.

Stick your finger in the nappy elastic to see if they've dumped, you now know if they're too hot/cold too; give them a hug and a chat, offer them milk.

IMO you need to learn to read your baby rather than treat like a car with a service schedule.

"Normally they wake at 3:13+/-12, not 3:50; and their median time to evacuation is 80mins, not 115; ..." you're going to stress yourself out. Babies are not machines.

<comment><USER41> Knowing something and using that to schedule something are different. The primary value here is knowing what happened.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis - <AUTHOR> http://artofmanliness.com/2011/08/28/viewers-vs-doers-the-rise-of-spectatoritis/

<comment><USER2> As a student of history, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this odd philosophy that there's something wrong with watching other people do things that you will never do.

Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language, and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw practical conclusions from those stories.

I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a net win for humanity.

<comment><USER3> You are using a cherry-picking argument.

There is a big difference between the mentality of the creator and the consumer. This should not be news.

Hacker News, exists, in part, as a monument to creating.

At this point, I thought it was a forgone, forknown point, _especially here_ , that being a creating being is better than a consuming being.

<comment><USER4> The popularity of iOS around here, a consumer-centric platform blatantly hostile to tinkerers, makes clear we don't have such a consensus now if we ever did.

<comment><USER3> Okay, I'll bite. :-)

It's important to separate the ethical, technical, and business concerns and look at them one by one.

iOS offers me a few things. As a _user_ , it offers me a smooth widget experience, no hard crashes, and a ginormous store full of toys and a few useful widgets. As an appliance, it is sterling. My music player works as reliably as my toaster. _Exactly_ what I want, actually. I have no need to tinker with my appliances; they do exactly what I want, and I free my mental cycles to do things like work on my Master's without fiddling around with configuring my toaster. As a _developer_ , it offers me a simple delivery platform, delivered to people with spare cash who have been trained to purchase software. It's a pretty sweet gig, in my opinion.

Apple _really should_ open up the hood to tinkerers, in the ethical sense. It does us as a society no good to have a society of 'couch potatoes' and spectators. We need doers & thinkers, people who can get the job done and also reflect on their existence. I strongly believe that Apple should incorporate that awareness into product policies: there should be something like a 'enable tinkerer mode' in my iPod system settings. However, their corporate DNA goes against that, from the early 80s on. They really want to provide a unified and 'beautiful' experience for their customers. Tinkerers open up the hood and cause variety and divergence from the norm. (Think all the weird kludges in Windows because it has to support such a variety of hardware).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to spend a lot of my weekends watching my AFL team, Collingwood, losing. Then I saw the episode of Seinfeld where he did his bit about sports fans:

"We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!' No, they won - you watched."

"They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault.

I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that.

Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself, but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just spectating.

<comment><USER6> i came away with a similar sentiment after reading this blog, and it really articulated a similar notion in my head -- for me, wasting precious free time online, living through the success stories of fellow entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it is inevitable that we will do a little spectating. I got my insight into the pointlessness of watching spectator sports from watching Seinfeld, watching TV, another spectator activity. I still enjoy comedies and movies and they don't make me depressed like watching professional sport. I try to limit my time on sites like Hacker News for the same reason I try to limit my TV.

Anytime I think of the masses of creative output of greats like Beethoven, Picasso, Edison I think to myself - "The amazing power of not watching TV for four hours a day."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about gender in a strangely jarring way.

The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well).

Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.

<comment> mkr-hn <http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/>

It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.

<comment><USER7> This article isn't gender-specific, though, except in a very lazy way that just gratuitously throws in the word "man" and "manliness" a few times in an article that has nothing to do with them, unless you count some vague reference to old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes a "real man". It would require changing about four sentences, and not even changing them a lot, to make this a completely gender-nonspecific article.

The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50% obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive, backwards crap.

<comment><USER8> Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled _sexist_?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

<comment><USER9> It's ironic that many authors resort to using the blatantly sexist 'she' to avoid being called sexist.

I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.

<comment><USER10> It's not that using "he" is sexist, so much as it's an indicator of a society where being male is the "default" setting, and it's always a little bit surprising to see a woman doing something. So I would argue that no, it's not really sexist to use "she" as a pronoun, if you're doing it to be rebellious. It isn't about putting down men. It's about encouraging the visible presence of women.

The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That "he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that science is not for them.

There's some interesting studies and anecdotes in this page: <http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/node6.html>

<comment><USER9> Why is the small number of women in science a problem? To call this fact a _problem_ good evidence is needed.*

Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the courage to speak up against these accusations.

I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number of women in science.

[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]

<comment><USER10> Countries with more gender inequality have more female IMO contestants: <http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract>

If you change the gender of a name and leave everything else constant on an academic CV, acceptance rates go down from 70% to 45%. [http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1...](http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1738)

If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm always amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year old men who'd rather watch football than play it.

<comment><USER2> Are you talking about American football? The sport where you need a suit of armor just to lower your risk of neck, knee, and brain injury to the point where you can survive a two- or three-year career in the pros before being forced to retire?

I'll watch, thanks.

<comment><USER12> There's always tag football.

<comment><USER13> Or Rugby - which would seem closer to American Football but without the fancy outfits and all the standing about. ;-)

<comment><USER14> Rugby is also a terrible sport to play casually with high impact tackling.

When you think about it even more casually, going down to the park with a few friends, rugby and american football are both hard to replicate. Sure you could pretend to both be quarterbacks and pass the ball back and forward but it's really nothing like the actual sport. Same with rugby which is mostly backwards passes.

Taking the American sports angle you can see why it's much more common to seeing friends playing basketball casually as getting a few friends together you can mostly replicate the game.

<comment><USER15> Most major american cities have one or more rugby clubs. It is great way to unwind after a long day at the office. You should definitely have good health insurance, and be prepared to accept some longer term consequences, but unlike football, there is a fairly active (albeit small) adult population that engages in the sport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me of it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors my observations perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about video games?

</comment><comment><USER19> If 95% of people were not fraggles, sheep and spectators, then a lot of things in this world would not get done as quickly as they do now. People think that the innovation phase of a project is the hard part, but in some ways, it's just the seed, you need an army of autonomous humans to do the mundane work to make the innovation take root and flourish.

If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.

<comment><USER20> "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 894 likes, 35 +1s, 160 tweets

<comment><USER22> Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.</comment></comment>


A new approach to building companies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/aaa32e7ba50f

<comment><USER2> > All employees are founders so there is less team risk

I'm really interested in seeing how that plays out. I've always thought that a more equitable ownership distribution across the first 10-15 members of the team (incl. 'founders') would result in better outcomes more consistently (defined to mean sale or IPO).</comment>


Game Genie declassified: That summer I played 230 Game Boy games - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-24-game-genie-declassified-that-summer-i-played-230-game-boy-games <comment><USER2> Interesting that the article claims they encrypted the codes for legal reasons.

I don't really buy it, though. Listing a numeric offset can't possibly be any kind of legal risk, and anyone with a brain would understand that's how the device worked anyway. And especially, Nintendo could easily disassemble the BIOS and see the grade-school level cipher being used. Plus, Pro Action Replay used raw address:value pairs and never had any issues.

I always figured the point was to make it hard for normal people to tweak the codes, and to bloat out their code lists. You can have "Start with 3 lives; 5 lives; 9 lives", but if the last value is 03,05,09 ... then there's not much point in offering three codes.

I got tired of the shady websites full of ads giving you Game Genie codes for the wrong regions, so I worked with another person (mightymo) who made a list of all known codes. Then I decoded all of them to raw address:value pairs, and I ship all of those codes in a database with my emulator. The downside of this is you can't input your own codes in the weird Game Genie encode format. But so far, no one has complained.

Now moving onto the GBA era, and the devices just got disgusting. Each game would have a "master code" you had to enter first. That was actually an RNG seed value for all subsequent codes. So many people must have wasted so much time hand-keying in those things for zero added value. I'm almost completely certain the purpose of those was for the manufacturers to protect their codes from being stolen by competitors with similar hardware devices.

<comment><USER3> > Listing a numeric offset can't possibly be any kind of legal risk

Theoretically, if the code _also_ for some reason needed to contain the original byte-value of the address at that offset, you could be sued for copyright-infringing reproduction ("you published one byte of the game ROM!") Encryption would prevent this being a clear reproduction.

One could then argue, given that, that when it's trivial to deduce what the original value _would_ have been given what the code does, you _still_ have published a reproduction. E.g., if a code XXXXXX:YY means "give a player 0xYY lives at the start of the game", and the game regularly starts with 0x05 lives, then it's clear that byte $XXXXXX of the ROM must be 0x05.

<comment><USER2> > Theoretically, if the code also for some reason needed to contain the > original byte-value of the address at that offset

The NES and Game Boy devices usually needed this. Without it, bank-switching would result in one code changing several actual ROM bytes, when you only wanted to change one. The SNES almost never used bank switching so it wasn't necessary there.

Still, it's not a one-way hash function here. If you were sufficiently bored, it would be very easy to deduce the encoding for at least the :value portion of the codes, just by comparing the codes in the book. I actually did something similar as a kid. If a phrase (as in a sentence of text) were illegal, using rot13 on it wouldn't make it legal. And Nintendo were chomping at the bit to ban/outlaw/block Game Genie devices (Nintendo has a sad history of being fiercely litigious against everyone), so I'm certain they would have gone for this had they thought they stood a chance at winning.

That would be one hell of a jury trial, though. "They clearly reproduced the number 5, which was in our original game! It's obviously an illegal reproduction of our copyrighted game code!"

<comment><USER4> Nintendo did sue Galoob/Codemasters, but they lost. I have to wonder if the same trial was held today if the outcome would be the same. Copyright lawyers have really gotten quite good at convincing juries about the necessity of Copyright maximalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "With the Addams Family game for example, Fred just couldn't locate where the game stores the lives or any useful value - the only thing he managed to do was lock the jump button on, so your character was permanently and uselessly leaping about the level. We submitted this to Codemasters QA as 'unlock pogo stick mode', and they accepted it."

Awesome bit of marketing right there!

</comment><comment><USER6> I have fond memories of a tool for Acorn RISC OS computers called "The Hacker", later "Desktop Hacker", the website for which astonishingly still exists: [http://www.doggysoft.co.uk/cheat.html](http://www.doggysoft.co.uk/cheat.html)

It worked very much like the examples given in the linked article, except you had to find the memory locations yourself, in most cases. So for example, if you wanted to find a cheat for extra lives, you'd start the game, drop out into the "Hacker" tool, search memory for "3", then lose a life, then search the results for "2", and test anything that was left by modifying it. Fun stuff.

<comment><USER7> Not only does the website still exist, so does RISC OS. And it's free.

That's right, if you've got a Raspberry Pi or other RISC computer on your hands, you can re-live the 90's once again, and emulate the 80's from within it.

Have fun.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I've tinkered with it. RISC OS has some huge limitations in the 21st century, most notably, no multithreading, so you can never use more than a single core. On top of that 32-bit only (and 26-bit software from the 90s crashes), no IPv6, tiny fixed-size icons... sadly, the OS is dating rapidly.

<comment><USER7> There are some efforts to bring it into the modern era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Game genie gameboy code "encryption", if anyone cares:

each letter is one hex digit.

GG CODE: ghi-jkl-mno

Address = lijk XOR 0xF000

Data = gh

Compare = mo ROTATED right by 2, and the result XOR by 0xBA

Mystery value = n

Codes can be 6 or 9 digits long, 6 digits if the compare value feature is not used.

The game genie can only modify addresses in the 0000-7fff range, meaning it cannot modify on-cart ram banked in the a000-bfff area (the later datel action replay, however, can modify this and other ram areas, using a periodic interrupt and swapping out the interrupt vectors for its own)

Mystery value has a min of 0, never greater than 7? this was apparently, from what I remember from the usenet leak, intended to thwart games which would checksum their roms before starting, but seems to me to have little practical use, and I'm not even sure how it worked if it worked at all, it may have restored the original value if it saw an access to rom 'mystery value' bytes away from the value being changed by the code within a certain number of cycles, or something like that.

The compare value is so that the game genie can selectively patch values in banked rom gameboy games which have multiple rom pages appear at certain addresses due to mapper chips, in which case it will only replace the value at said address if the compare value matches.

LN

<comment><USER9> There is a Game Genie code decoder/encoder here:

[http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/gamegenie.html](http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/gamegenie.html)

(This was designed for the Sega Game Gear version, but the Game Boy algorithm is the same.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The one cartridge I want to know more about (that I never owned myself, but was a _huge_ influence on me) is ISEPIC for the C64 (I always pronounced it "I-Sep-Ick" which obviously is wrong). From what I can put together myself after the fact, it dumped the loaded game from memory to disk and included a fastloader to read that dump back into RAM. I had _hundreds_ of games on floppies that my cousins mailed to me monthly. In particular, I remember Beach Head II - the dumped game ran fine, but when I tried to duplicate the floppy it was on, I ended up with a long message about how pirating games was wrong, and then my computer crashed.

I never had the cartridge myself, but the cartridge wasn't necessary to play the dumped games.

</comment><comment><USER11> Game Genie cheat codes are what taught 8-year old me that 0x63 = 99 and 0xFF = 255 due to the frequency of those characters in infinite life/max score codes.

<comment><USER12> Haha. Me too. They should have included a lightweight debugger or hex dumper with it. I would have had a blast creating my own codes.

<comment><USER13> Codemasters tried to build a walled garden around Game Genie codes so they could sell you updated codebooks. The codes were hashed so they had little relation to the memory location they referred to.

What you really wanted was an Action Replay.

<comment><USER14> LOVED my Action Replay. That was really clever - apart from infinite lives, you could also pull out the sprites.

I feel like we live in similar times any time I see a good javascript game!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _The Game Boy wouldn 't run a game unless the cart sent it the Nintendo loading screen - a clever legal ploy that meant unofficial games were breaking copyright laws simply by replicating the logo._

Diabolical! I wonder if Nintendo ever used this one in the courts.

<comment><USER10> _Sega v. Accolade_ [0] is an interesting take on the same issue.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade)

<comment><USER16> Later, Lexmark tried the same thing with printer cartridge DRM:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v._Static_Control_Components,_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a GameShark for the N64. It persisted cheat codes you'd entered in- between sessions and it came with a built-in debugger which was surprisingly good.

I especially liked its variable search function. When you started the variable search you could choose whether you knew the value of the variable you were looking for or not. Then, at any time, you could pause the game and tell the game either what exact value the variable should have now or simply that it was the same, different, greater or lower than the previous value. The GameShark itself then kept track of all memory positions which matched those constraints. This made it really easy to find where in memory something was stored. Playing around with this little toy taught me a few valuable lessons in debugging.

The coolest thing I managed to pull off was playing the Single Player levels of Perfect Dark in Multiplayer. It took a while, since the current level wasn't stored in the same place for Single Player and Multiplayer. I seem to remember there being some difference in the level numbering, as well.

<comment><USER18> Wow, I'm sad now that I never tried to get one for my N64. I would have had so much fun with a debug mode for the console; I didn't know it could do stuff like that before emulators.

I think I would have been more into assembler-level stuff in CS earlier in my education and career; enough to have made it my focus.

That would have been the thing to totally jazz me and change my thinking.

<comment><USER17> I understand what you mean. As a 13 year old aspiring game programmer, the GameShark was the perfect toy to sink countless hours into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always wondered if this was how they created the codes. Even at 10 years old I had assumed the process was more eloquent. Amusing that I had assumed wrong.

<comment><USER19> Nowdays they'd use an emulator to find them, which is at the very least faster.

<comment><USER20> There's also Cheat Engine for PC games, which is basically a debugger streamlined for finding memory related to cheating at games. I have to admit I use it from time to time to give myself money or ammo in games.

[http://www.cheatengine.org/](http://www.cheatengine.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Game Genie is actually a fascinating piece of hardware/software, and there are many great tales like this one associated with it. Also of significance is its cousin, the Game Shark, which came a bit later.

I never really got the hang of asm myself, though... I should probably give writing some GB software a crack at some point. I might actually learn it if there's a use.

<comment><USER21> Game hacking is pretty fun. One useful(?) task is to search for unused stuff in games and document it at <[http://tcrf.net](http://tcrf.net) >. For example, I learned 6502 assembly and NES MMC3 codes to write a level map dumper for M.C. Kids and its prototype, which lead to a full comparison of how the levels changed during the game's development process <[https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids#Level_Changes](https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids#Level_Changes) >. It was a really fun learning experience.

<comment><USER7> It sounds fun, I just don't know where to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great. At the time I had no idea how a Game Genie worked or how they'd come up with codes, though thinking about it now of course that's what they did.

I know what Mickey Mouse game they're talking about too. "Mickey's Dangerous Chase" I'm pretty sure. At least it had patrol dogs and fire hydrants, so it seems likely.

</comment><comment><USER23> POKE 47196, 201

<comment><USER24> KL!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah Codemasters, another name from my Amiga years.

Anyways, these days you can try your hand on cheat finding on most well developed emulators.

</comment><comment><USER26> it never occurred to an 8 year old me how game genie worked and 25 years later, I had sort of forgotten about it. It, like the Virtual Boy and the camera/printer peripheral were a few game boy accessories that were totally ahead of their time.

<comment><USER27> I've still got my Game Boy Camera, along with a Game Boy Pelican Codebreaker, with an integrated debugger and flash to backup savegames into (it was great for transferring saves between versions of Pokemon).

I pull them out every once in a while. The Codebreaker is more interesting to play with now than it was as a kid actually, because I can understand more of its functions.</comment></comment>


The vegetables of truth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/THE-VEGETABLES-OF-TRUTH

<comment><USER3> Earlier today there was a HN discussion[1] about a rather average Techcrunch article about the internet of thing.

To me, one thread stood out. There was a suggestion[2] about the amazing and undeniable benefits an intelligent toilet would have (stool samples can be analysed for bowel cancer, and early detection dramatically changes the projected outcome for bowel cancer).

The sad, tragic response to a truly life saving technology was this: _How about not just "no", but "hell no"? This is the surveillance era - do you really want the NSA logging a continuous stream of your health data?_[3]

I don't want to get into an NSA discussion here, but instead relate it to the linked article. Increasingly I see a rejection of real technological improvements because of fear. I think this is similar to the rejection of science: some industrial applications of advanced science created risks and when those risks were realised people reacted by rejecting science.

Now we see technology being used to surveil us and there is a rejection of technology itself, rather than looking for ways to address the genuine risks that it can bring.

It makes me sad. I believe science and technology can bring a better life to everyone, and rejecting it rather than solving the problems associated with it leaves us no better off than we were yesterday.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442266)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443063)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442266)

<comment><USER4> I'm firmly in the "hell no" camp. I realize how these devices can benefit me. As an embedded designer, I eagerly thought about these types of devices 15 years ago.

The problem is that we, the technical community, got hoodwinked away from open protocols into thinking that closed systems based on dumping data to someone else's server is an acceptable basis for much of anything. Manufacturers are quite happy to foist these proprietary solutions on us because it lets them create lock in, differentiate on superficial features, keep hiding sloppy development, and derive licensing fees for any third parties that think they can help analyze your data (with your consent, or not). The "average" user sees no difference because it's all magic boxen to them, and we've done them a great disservice by shirking our _professional duty_ and being "yes men" for this backwards environment.

My rejection doesn't come from "fear" of "risks" \- it comes from the rational assessment that once this data is out there, especially in such collated form, you've lost control of how it is used against your interests. The only way to brush that off as "fear" is to say the future where cloud-big-brother knows more about me than I do is inevitable. So rather than being scared, I should learn to love the rats on my face. I am _hoping_ this is wrong.

Furthermore, reliance upon any technology makes it de facto mandatory which becomes much harder to extricate yourself from to switch to something with a less hostile architecture. Especially as more open architectures will be less polished due to less funding as creating freedom isn't lucrative.

And it's _not just the NSA_ \- there's the much larger and better poised threat from the commercial side as well, via insurance / background check companies. How long until "I have to do 500 more steps today so I don't have to pay $50 extra on my health insurance" ?

(PS Never mind getting on the upgrade treadmill for fixtures who's lifetime has traditionally been decades, just for software bugfixes and upgrades. And the input response time on many of these products - looking at you Nest - <USER2> that it's amateur hour)

<comment><USER5> Health insurance is going to advance it's ways of knowing about your risks wether you like it or not. And denying them ways of estimating your risk will likely just boost your cost beacuse of high-risk outliers. If you don't think it's fair that some people will have a much higher health charge you should not argue against companies gathering insurance data but the fundamental problem -- probably by introducing universal health care legislation.

It's also a fallacy to suppose that companies have to know your data at all (assuming they would even have such a huge interest in selling your stool sample data to risk their reputation). Encryption was created to solve exactly this privacy problem, and homomorphic encryption goes even further (although it's still early in development). Worst case, you just run the analysis on your own desktop.

As technolgy progresses it's only natural our inference and survaillance prowess will increase and the battle can't be won by restricting technology itself. The only way out is for society to put proper value on privacy as a _right_ and put proper regulations and legislation to defend it. (although the NSA scandals have shown most of the US doesn't care)

<comment><USER4> Your second paragraph is exactly what I'm getting at - companies do not need to know your data, and analysis should be run locally with software under your control. You would then be free to choose from various non-exclusive analysis options via informed consent. However, I think it's deluding oneself to sign up for today's proprietary share-everything services, and expect them to magically transform into privacy respecting ones as time goes on. For these type of applications, mentioning homomorphic encryption comes from that same wishful thinking that a third party will work to preserve your privacy more than you will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The leek film at the end of the article is an absolute joy.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article on lead [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29568505](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29568505) just showed up on the BBC. While I absolutely dislike the post-'60s attitude of kneejerk hostility to technology and industry, the article's a sensible corrective to the opposing attitude that things were great in the good old days when everyone trusted in technology and didn't worry about risks.

</comment><comment><USER8> One idea from the world of science that might benefit articles like this is that of the abstract. It's a one-paragraph summary that helps the reader decide whether they should bother reading the whole article.

</comment><comment><USER9> This went from the dangers of technology, to criticism of scientific studies, to baseless accusations that the scientists' were politically biased about _vegetables_.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why people always post this stream of conciousness and non- sequiters from Adam Curtis.

You can pretty summarise all of them as "Rah rah socialism!".</comment>


The 5 Worst CEOs in Tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/09/the-five-worst-ceos-in-tech.php <comment><USER2> _" [About Ballmer] He failed to close the deal to buy Yahoo. This year, Ballmer steered the company into an ill-advised $8.5 billion to buy Skype."_

So buying Yahoo was a good thing and buying Skype was ill-advised?

This is a very tabloid-esque article: while I am not a big fan of Groupon's business model, I wouldn't call Andrew Mason one of the worst CEO's in tech.

This seems to be more of a rant on companies that the author has seen getting bad press, rather than the actual qualities of the CEO's running them...

Elop for instance - the reason he is named is because the author thinks the new Nokia WP phone will fail (without even seeing the phone). The man has been in charge for what, less than a year? Nokias dropping market is likely a result of years of stagnation in the feature phone segment, not quite Elop's fault - at least wait till he has time to make an impact before judging him (i.e. a couple months after the new phones launch)

</comment><comment><USER3> _Let me paraphrase Ghostbusters here: Andrew, when Google asks if you want to sell a startup for $6 billion, you say yes!_

Unless you're Mark Zuckerberg, in which case you're a visionary because you turned down a crazy-huge offer for your company. Regardless of what you think Groupon is worth (I tend to think it's a bit early to call it), you have to respect a CEO that's in it to win it.

</comment><comment><USER4> The 5 worst CEOs in Tech are CEOs of companies that no one has ever heard of.

<comment><USER5> No, the worst CEOs are the ones who turned companies with huge potential into companies that no one has heard anything interesting from in a while. You know, like the guys listed in the article.

As CEOs go, it's not a failure until you lost big and you're not exceptionally bad without having made some really mindbogglingly stupid decisions. A nobody CEO in some garage running his insignificant ragtag shop into the ground just isn't the same as someone who gets handed the reins of a huge empire with endless opportunities and then manages to utterly kill it. This requires not only incompetence but also a very active role and great creativity in the destruction of something that had been great once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing new here. Bartz, Ballmer, the Nokia guy...the usual large- company/high-viz suspects subject to backseat drivers second-guessing their business. For instance, Bartz failed to live up to the promises of other people.

Write a story about the 5 worst startup CEOs and then we'll be getting useful information.

<comment><USER7> True. Cracked.com articles are way more informative than this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Look for Windows 8 to be the next Vista._

Well, that's some B.S. right there. Vista was the fast-hack project that came about after the failure of Longhorn. Windows 8 will be, oddly enough, the next Windows 7. Not a great OS, but certainly not bad.

Seriously, though, get rid of Ballmer. In fact, spin off Skype and put him in charge of it. Watch the ship sink from as far away as possible.</comment>


Racing the Beam (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam

<comment><USER2> This book is so informative it's unbelievable. I really hope Nick and Ian keep doing these platform studies because there is nothing else like them out there right now. A few things about the Atari 2600 make this book fascinating. It's like reading about some weird ancient civilization and how it tried to build nuclear bombs out of sticks and stones.

Case in point: The Atari 2600 had no screen buffer. You drew lines on the screen in real time, as the electron gun was firing. As the gun moves, so does your code, immediately rendering whatever is being drawn by the gun. This means everything had to be calculated at the exact moment the electron gun is where you want the tank to be drawn. It all took place through the TIA chip designed by Joe DeCuir and others at Atari.

Additionally, drawing the background of the screen was even more difficult, as the Atari 2600 could only address half the screen: you had to mirror whatever background was on one side, onto the other side of the screen, mirrored vertically.

But wait, it gets even more complicated! That one side of the screen was composed of 20 columns of possible addressing, making for 40 columns total across the screen. The 20 columns you could address on the left side of the screen were numbered, and I am not making this up, as follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4

That means you addressed the first part of the screen in ascending, left to right. Then, you had to draw right to left in reverse order (though numerically, it was still ascending), then you had 4 more bits to address, left to right.

Absolutely nuts. You can actually see the graphics if you look at the assembly of a 2600 game because the graphics were literally dot, no dot. The graphics were stacks of one's and zero's. Check out these Distella maps. They're in the NY MOMA, and the MADE. [http://benfry.com/distellamap/](http://benfry.com/distellamap/)

<comment><USER3> I haven't read the book yet, but David Crane's Pitfall Post Mortem[1] also covers a lot of what you mentioned. Truly fascinating stuff.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU)

<comment><USER4> While we are on the topic of post-mortems for old games, I enjoyed Bob Pape's writeup of his port of R-Type to the ZX Spectrum. You can get the free eBook here: [http://bizzley.com/](http://bizzley.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, this book was inspiration for getting back to the fundamentals of game development. To 'not take for granted' the sheer power we have today. It's one thing to jump in at high-level and get some graphics moving on the screen. But to really make something big, you will inevitably confront complex problems. Complex problems that require the same level of engineering skill as the people programming Atari games back in the day.

The focus was much closer to the metal in those days - working with the 2600's extreme limitations forced them to come up with some crazy solutions.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really great book.

One underappreciated aspect of the games industry is the extent hardware dictates game design. This is very clear on the 2600 where the limitations were ludicrous by modern standards, but extends through the tile and sprite acceleration hardware of the 16 bit era to the present day with issues like touch control or video processing latency making the very reaction driven titles that were so common on the 2600, by virtue of the limited time you had to process an update and the direct manner the video signal was produced, practically impossible on modern hardware.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure why this is hitting Hacker News now, but it's an excellent book about game design and designing given the constraints of hardware. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> The book has been mentioned many times on HN. People just recycle or rediscover stories. You see resubmitted stories almost daily, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buy this book. Buy it right now. It is an incredible read. It is an absolute riveting page turner that I could not put down until I had finished. Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have this (it's available in Kindle format from Amazon), it's fantastic.

<comment><USER11> See his website too [http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml](http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An excellent book. I'm glad it's hitting front page of HN. I think that any aspiring game developer should read it.</comment>


Apple doesn't care about making computers anymore - <AUTHOR> http://bu.rri.to/2010/07/23/apple-doesnt-care-about-making-computers-anymore/ <comment><USER2> Could it just be that computers have gotten good enough for most things that most people want to do ? Apart from incremental updates cpus, graphics cards, peripherals and interconnects havent had a breakthrough innovation in the last few years. apple does update their lines now and then to include the latest cpus and graphics cards.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is simply not true. One specific example is SSDs -- they offer a huge increase in performance, yet Apple only offers mediocre, overpriced ones as options on its higher-end machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apple just saw record mac sales last quarter. They CARE about macs, they just take their sweet time in releasing updates.

There was just an upgrade to the mini.

Also their laptop sales far outpace mac pro sales, thus they get more attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there was just an upgrade to the Mini, and it's pretty and all, but it lost a USB port, is still using the same (old) Core 2 processors, and they raised the base price by $100. Not very competitive if you ask me.

Their laptops do sell better, that's true. Why are both the Macbook and Macbook Air still using those same Core 2 processors then? Also, the Macbook Air has 2GB of RAM in a machine costing $1499. That's absurd.

If they still care about their computer business, then in my opinion they're doing a pretty poor job of managing it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Desktop app to play YouTube, SoundCloud and Mixcloud music - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Cloud-Player/desktop-app <comment><USER2> Hey man, I really like it! Will you build a Linux version?</comment>


Girl Scouts to offer cybersecurity badges - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-girl-scouts-cybersecurity-20170713-story.html <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if they will offer a badge for pen testing.

It could be really embarrassing for a big bank or corporation if its systems got penetrated by a 10 year old girl.</comment>


Show HN: Find the tab you need instantly - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i60ul6/find_the_tab_you_need_instantly/ <comment><USER2> I do this in Firefox by typing "% searchterm" into the awesome bar (URL bar).

So I press Ctrl-L to get to the bar, then "% searchterm", then use the arrows to choose which tab I want to activate.</comment>


Online School Ratings and Segregation in America (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3265316 <comment><USER2> I do not agree with the conclusions of this paper because it ignores a massive factor that is leading to this type of segregation - Access to housing.

If one wants to send their kids to a good school you HAVE to buy a single family home in that school district. For some reason, many of these homes are massive McMansions with 4 bedrooms, 2 car garage, backyard etc. This makes it even more expensive to either own or rent (compared to an apartment) and completely inaccessible to a lower-middle-class family. The property tax based funding model skews this inequality even further.

Access to good education is a very good way to move up the social ladder and the way its currently setup only locks people out.

Either there should be no restrictions on zoning for housing or you have to force state-wide pooling of property taxes to fund schools. I understand some states use a lottery system to assign children to schools but I don't know if it really solves the problem.

<comment><USER3> > For some reason, many of these homes are massive McMansions with 4 bedrooms, > 2 car garage, backyard etc. This makes it even more expensive to either own > or rent (compared to an apartment) and completely inaccessible to a lower- > middle-class family.

The reason isn't mysterious. That is what keeps the quality of the school up.

<comment><USER4> It isn't that simple. The public high school I went to is one of the best in the country and was largely comprised of middle class and upper middle class families. The very wealthy largely sent their kids to nearby private schools. The parents of the children at my school were largely professionals / tradesmen / small business owners, worked incredibly hard to get access to the school district (I know mine certainly did), and placed a large priority on education. This resulted in a culture of parental involvement in the schools / their childrens' education and a competitive academic spirit which kept standards high. High property taxes also produced a funding model where at least 95+% of funding was coming from local taxes, local bonds, and communal fund raising by engaged parents. Local people supporting their community schools because they cared. These were being levied against regular homes as well as large homes.

There were attempts made to bus in people from outside but they were fought tooth and nail by families across the income spectrum in the district because the perception was that it was unfair that they had to work extremely hard to get access to these resources but other people could simply show up and get it for free.</comment></comment></comment>


Five minute guide to better typography - <AUTHOR> http://pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-to-better-typography <comment><USER2> It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography _is_ an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag.

For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well- defined, it's just not understood by the program.

More complex, the amount of space under a heading. A heading's bottom is neither its bottommost pixel (the space between the bottom of an "a" and "g" is mostly empty), nor its baseline (that space isn't entirely empty); it has a soft bottom, a fade to emptiness. The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.

Does anybody know of good resources on this subject? What I find tends to be more about habit than derivation.

<comment><USER3> I agree that typography could be an exact science, but I think starting with mathematics would be the wrong choice. Rather, it would be better to devise perceptual experiments and back fit a mathematical model to the results.

The excellent LAB color space was created this way. Scientists used experiments - for example the MacAdam ellipse to measure what colors are distinguishable - then backfit a model to that. It involves a bunch of cube roots and funny constants, not something you'd reach from a standpoint of mathematical purity. But it works really well.

So if you were looking at rigorously defining typography, I'd look at quantifying how spread out a pattern of ink needs to be before it looks smaller (aligning I and L might not be the leftmost pixel). I'd also look at quantifying some of the gestalt laws of grouping.

<comment><USER4> Edwin Land also made tremendous contributions to color science through empirical measurements and finding the deeper "mathematical" models[1]. Besides his scientific achievements, he was a real renaissance man, a tour de force of human intellect. Unfortunately, Josef Albers's pseudoscience[2] and artistic non-sense get most of the credit[3] when it comes to color theory.

[1] [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/12/the-story- of-...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/12/the-story-of-edwin- land/) [2] [http://depts.washington.edu/jrphys/ph214A07/albers.pdf](http://depts.washington.edu/jrphys/ph214A07/albers.pdf) [3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/arts/design/josef- alberss...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/arts/design/josef-alberss- science-and-soul-of-seeing.html)

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's fair to criticize Albers in this context, and this particular critique seems mostly like pedantic nitpicking at a fairly concise non-technical book; he wasn't trying to establish a detailed technical model, but rather to teach artists to think. ( _"The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wave length…. What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing."_ )

His book and teaching method are all about learning to work with colors through direct experience. To that end, he made students do numerous small projects with colored paper, etc.

(Have you read Albers's book? I would definitely recommend it, with the proviso that you actually try to do Albers's recommended exercises, which are really the important part of the book, instead of worrying too much about the text. Reading Albers's book straight through is like reading a math textbook straight through without doing the problems.)

If you want to call Itten out for nonsensical babble though, go right ahead.

* * *

Edit: here's Dorothea Jameson's response to Alan Lee [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.470...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.470.2468&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER4> I read Josef Albers' Interaction of Color years ago and I've also bought the iPad app. I've been disappointed by both.

The problem is that "experiential" teaching without any scientific explanation is inadequate and misleading. Teaching part is where you explain the students - _why_. It is perhaps the approach in art colleges where rigorous science doesn't matter.

The problem stems when Josef Albers made scientific claims which go unquestioned as the factual basis for his cool color experiments. That is wrong and that's exactly the kind of nitpicking we need to do. What you call 'Pedantic nitpicking' is necessary and essential to the scientific process.

It is rather misleading to start the book with "The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wavelength…. What counts here—first and last—is not so- called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing." and then go on to explaining his experiments using false claims (which again are highlighted and detailed in Alan Lee's criticism).

Anyhow, even if I am considering Josef's Interaction of Color from an artistic standpoint, he simply points out the cool illusions without any follow up on how to use/implement his concepts. I find it as a casual book that sits on the coffee table, not on my work desk.

<comment><USER5> You're approaching the book the wrong way. The original came with a big pile of colored papers. You are supposed to spend dozens of hours over the course of months doing careful visual study of various arrangements of them. If you don't do the exercises in the book you're not going to get much out of it.

Albers is not dogmatic. His purpose is not to prescribe a particular style or method. This is not a recipe book. He wants his students to explore deeply and learn how colors interact by spending a whole lot of time looking at them carefully, and then develop their own methods and styles.

The book is not supposed to be about "scientific progress". It's supposed to be a pedagogical tool aimed at artists. If you want a technical explanation, you are looking at the wrong book.

It sounds like you wanted to read a technical color science book. There are plenty of those out there, pitched at various audiences.

<comment><USER4> I know what you're saying - I've done a few of his exercises and using the iPad app makes that very easy to do. Literally, simulates the same experience of getting the $200 edition with all the color plates. Drag a shape over another and see the effect.

Color is relative. Got it. What else does it offer?

>> The book is not supposed to be about "scientific progress". It's supposed to be a pedagogical tool aimed at artists. If you want a technical explanation, you are looking at the wrong book.

I understand and I wish that was the case! However, the popularity of it and its fame as a text book (see Amazon reviews) combined with his claims of explaining how brain perceives color - indicates that it is used as THE color theory reference. I have a problem with that.

<comment><USER5> > _indicates that it is used as THE color theory reference_

That's just not true though. These Amazon reviewers apparently have no idea what they're talking about. People looking for color science books, or even for dogmatic advice about how to make color combinations (most of which is bullshit, but anyway ...) have many other books to study.

Your criticism is kind of like judging a book about meditation techniques for being neither an answer to all of your life's problems (despite Amazon reviews claiming so!) nor a complete psychology textbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My humble appendix wrt online typography ("-" means IM-not-so-HO):

\- If your font colour is more thant #333 on white, you're being cruel, especially to those who suffer astigmatism.

\- Make sure the font colour contrasts the background for prose.

\- Except from "fi" and "ffi", avoid ligatures in Latin scripts. They were useful when fonts were forged in metal and typesetting was manual labour. Dots may connect to serifs, but those "st"s and the ilk hurt my eyes.

\- Do not use huge fonts. That's illegible on plebeian displays.

\- Do not use very narrow or very light serifs for long texts. Looks cool with titles, brand names and logos, but they are really hard on eyes with anything longer than a short sentence.

\- Account for when the user disables your fonts. Use defaults for things that are not needed to be stylised for your brand / website identity (i.e. any prose).

\- Avoid stuff that obscures the text on your page (dickbars, links to top, etc).

\- Repeating this, but can't repeat enough: make sure you understand the difference between brand identity and prose. If you style your prose too much, it'll become hard to read.

\- Honour conventions (i.e. links have underlines, use hyphens and en- and em- dashes correctly, etc.)

\- Use the space economically, and try to hit a balance between making things stick out, and making things miles apart. IDK how it is right now, but the Deck network's website was one of the best product websites around. Another good example is [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/).

Many of theese the user may overcome by using the likes of reading mode in Firefox (that's a life saver), but why would you want the user to just skip away all that styling you worked on for maybe weeks? Just respect how the eyes work when you're putting together a webpage.

<comment><USER7> I think most of your advice is solid, but I take issue with one point:

> \- If your font colour is more thant #333 on white, you're being cruel, > especially to those who suffer astigmatism.

A designer should think hard before reducing contrast. You may be improving the experience for one group at the expense of others:

\- A low contrast page is difficult to read on a cell phone in daylight.

\- A low contrast page is difficult to read at night on a dimmed display.

I don't meant to discount folks for whom high contrast is a problem, but don't they have a simple recourse? Reduce the brightness or contrast of the display. Most monitors and laptops have controls that allow this.

<comment><USER8> I read the OP's comment to argue _for_ increased contrast, not against it. Though it isn't fully clear exactly what "more than #333 on white" means.

<comment><USER6> Colour codes are hexadecimal numbers, 000000 is basically zero, and is for black. FFFFFF is 16777215 and is white. The more the numerical value of the colour the lighter it is, the lower the darker (well, not exactly, but kind of).

<comment><USER8> Right, but to be pedantic, the OP's original statement was ambiguous.

"more thant[sic] #333 on white"... You could interpret this many ways.

A) You could interpret "#333 on white" to refer to the contrast ratio of "#333/#fff", which according to this calculator [1] is 12.6. In this case "more" is referring to a higher contrast ratio. "#000 on #fff" would fit - even though "#000" is less than "#333" \- because the contrast ratio of the two colors is 21.

B) You could interpret the statement as "(more than #333) on #fff", e.g. increasing the numerical value of "#333". Something like "#444 on #fff" \- which actually has a lower contrast ratio of 9.7 - fits, because "#444" is more than "#333".

This is dumb, I'm just pointing out that it can be important to be precise with your language.

1: [http://leaverou.github.io/contrast- ratio/#%23333-on-%23fff](http://leaverou.github.io/contrast- ratio/#%23333-on-%23fff)

<comment><USER6> I'm the OP, and yes, I should've worded that out better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading and text styles, and then everyone after them just uses these saved styles to save time because changing them would mean having to work with frustrating aspects of the tool (MS Word).

So my question is, how can I get people to care about this? I've argued for a properly defined corporate style guides as well as adoption of typesetting systems like LaTeX but nobody wants to hear it. Am I just in a minority by being put off by poor typographic and formatting choices and should find more important battles at work? It concerns me that customer facing documentation is severely lacking in quality.

<comment><USER10> Latex is too hard for mortals, but I'd suggest Sphinx or one of the markdown alternatives. I think atlassian confluence is another even friendlier alternative, with a price tag.

<comment><USER11> Tools won't make people care, but they can help produce consistent documents.

Atlassian Confluence is a horrible recommendation; it has few tools for typesetting, PDF export is very mediocre and hard to control (there is a plugin that allows you to control pagination), and I once found something that was impossible to produce in its markup (my workaround was to insert a zero- width character and hope no one copied it into a terminal).

<comment><USER10> We're talking about alternatives to ms word for mortals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's 10 min yet also a nice guide: [https://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten- minutes.ht...](https://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html)

Just love the book and his fonts :)

I know it has been posted before, but I just had to ...

<comment><USER13> It looks like the author has chosen to "graylist" HackerNews in an attempt to sell copies of his book. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but warning you that anyone clicking on your link is actually redirected to [https://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html](https://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html)

<comment><USER14> Graylist?

<comment><USER13> I have never personally seen it used the way it was used on this website, but graylisting is the middle-ground between blacklisting and whitelisting.

In a blacklist something is completely blocked. In a whitelist something is absolutely allowed. In a graylist you may be allowed after a certain number of attempts, or after completing some sort of task, etc. It's kind of like a soft block.

In this scenario the website detects the link is coming from HN and "graylists" your visit to the website. You are redirected to a page that explains he's trying to sell a book and people coming from this site just use his bandwidth and never pay. But the website explains if you don't want to pay you can still get to the book by browsing to the website directly -- as opposed to being redirected there from HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A great guide to typography for the reader with a few hours to spare is Butterick's Practical Typography: [https://practicaltypography.com/](https://practicaltypography.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> A nice quick guide. Definitely eliminates a lot of experimentation when in hurry to get going.

Here's a 10 second theory class: stick to the four principles of design - remember CRAP (not my theory though)

\- C: Contrast -> use contrasting design to make things that are supposed to be dissimilar look dissimilar.

\- R: Repetition -> repeat design patterns for similar items. Remember CSS?

\- A: Alignment -> don't leave anything just hang in air on the canvas. Align things together.

\- P: Proximity -> birds of the same feather flock together. Similar things are closer. Dissimilar ones are farther.

<comment> Anthony-G I first came across these guidelines in Robin William's books[1]. I read a couple of them ( _The Non-Designer 's Design Book_ and _The PC is Not a Typewriter_ ) back in the mid 2000s and found them to be very useful as an amateur desktop publisher. I thoroughly recommend her books for any lay person with an interest in understanding the basic principles of typography.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams_(writer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams_\(writer\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> JIRA could benefit from this. After their big fancy redesign, I was shocked to see that they had re-arranged the old pile of shit into a new pile of shit.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're looking for some ideas / examples for nicely formatted documents, there are some amazing LaTeX templates out there, e.g. try browsing [https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates](https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates)

You can open them for editing online in Overleaf to try them out - if you do, any feedback is appreciated, thanks (I'm one of the founders).

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice display of typography, so much data is poorly presented nowadays.

Here's a 5 second guide: use larger fonts that are easy to read with lots of white space.

<comment><USER20> Here's a 5 second guide for typography on the web:

Set max-with and increase line-height. Everything else is just fine as it is.

<comment><USER21> Yes, and use the correct units when setting max-width and line-height. This is good:

      line-height: 1.4;
      max-width: 30em;

This is not:

      line-height: 120%;
      max-width: 700px;

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/line- height...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/line- height#Prefer_unitless_numbers_for_line-height_values)

[http://maxdesign.com.au/articles/ideal-line-length-in- ems/](http://maxdesign.com.au/articles/ideal-line-length-in-ems/)

Also, use the proper typographic characters in body text: [https://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/#typo](https://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/#typo).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We "see better" than the optical system of our eyes allow. Image processing happens to the signals from our retinas before it arrives at the visual cortex and especially before it arrives at higher levels within the brain. This means that _logical_ letter forms may not be ideal and that actual experiments need to be performed to understand what works well when considering visual perception.

For example, Kuffler units within the retina are triggered by the presence of intensity transitions so we have edge detection and enhancement happening very early in the visual system. We don't actually see edges as clearly as we think we do. A number of optical illusions are due to this fact.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great guide.

Interested to see the advice on doubling type-size for contrast. I thought sticking to the typography scale (10, 11, 12, 14, 16 etc) was a golden rule. The x2 factor looks good though.

And now I can reliably type -, –, and –. That alone's worth the read.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice guide, I only personally dislike the blinking animations because they don't allow me to properly stare at it, e.g. the "headless in a bar" example I would really prefer side by side, and the "Bonjour" example I'd really want to see that box all the time to properly be able to see how the lines are (mis)aligned. Fortunately second half of the article had less of those "aargh can't properly see what I want as long as I want" moments. Thanks nonetheless! :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Another good resource about typography with a focus in responsive layouts [http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive- typography-...](http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive-typography- the-basics/) .

</comment><comment><USER26> Good intentions with bad implementation. Some UX guy could probably use it for his own "five minute guide to better UX", about spacing, blinking elements etc. And dear author, not everyone uses Apple PCs these days. Sincerely, Windows user.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like this article for its lack of philosophy. It gives practical advice for people like me who are dumb with typography - what one gets using it is not the next Mona Lisa artwork but something acceptable and readable.

(* sorry the lack of em-dash)

</comment><comment><USER28> If it's that simple, why can't we just let some ML application do typography for us?

<comment><USER29> It's such an easy task that a set of rules are totally sufficient - no need to throw ML at it.

In fact, typography is a solved problem since Donald Knuth gave us TeX in the 80s.

The problem isn't typography. It's people not caring enough, or forgetting and then repeating history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> While visiting a newspaper for a project, I heard them talk about how it is better to use a sans-serif font for the body and a serif for the heading because it is easier to read. I think that's more true for printed stuff than on the screen though.

<comment><USER31> > I think that's more true for printed stuff than on the screen though.

What makes you think that?

<comment><USER30> Sans-serif seems easier to read on a screen when the font-size is small. Maybe that's just me though.

<comment><USER32> No, it's not just you. It's been a long-standing "rule of thumb" in typography that serif typefaces are better for longer passages of text (which is why nearly every magazine and book uses serif type for body), but sans serif type tends to be more legible on _screen,_ in part because screen resolution isn't high enough to make serifs look good.

There are always exceptions, of course; Georgia was explicitly designed to be a screen typeface, and there are other serif fonts that look pretty readable once they're at 18px or higher sizes--which is perfectly reasonable as a web font size in today's world, rather than the 13px that everyone seemed to adopt circa 2000. And "high-DPI" displays make even more delicate serif fonts a lot more readable these days.

Personally, I tend to choose serif fonts for body typefaces even on the web nowadays, but tend to keep "UI" elements sans serif.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ironic for an article about good typography to be so hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice quick guide! I definitely need to learn more about typography as I'm convinced the designers I work with don't know enough and what they design doesn't translate correctly in build.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's a good guide, the only I specifically disagree with for web design might be the 'choose four font weights' bit since Google Fonts warns me of slow loading times when I choose that many.

</comment><comment><USER36> Read this initially a few days back through codrops. This information did helped me a lot and the idea of choosing a font with 3+ variations is just awesome. Very helpful, recommended for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great page, just remembered me that I have to control flow in my own site. More work to the pile :( :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Helvetica and you're done.

^ My one sentence guide to better typography.

<comment><USER39> That's your guide to better typography for OSX users. Then we also have folks using Windows and Linux that doesn't ship with Helvetica. Worth knowing!

<comment><USER40> I'm always sad to see people say things like "Helvetica and you're done!" There are so many beautiful different fonts to use... imagine if everything was Helvetica? Boring :(

<comment><USER38> Helvetica and its derivatives are beautiful, they're not boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I only see a white page when i open the link...

<comment><USER42> It's almost all images / gifs, maybe they failed to load or you have them blocked?

I was thinking it would be interesting to recreate the site with CSS but the animations that show the before and after state change might prove tricky.

<comment><USER43> Yes - I got a white page until I allowed ajax.googleapis.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The author hates us, see this xkcd on kerning: [https://xkcd.com/1015/](https://xkcd.com/1015/) ;)

<comment><USER45> That's some brutalist website for sure

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think en dashes are good enough to use as comma replacements. I especially like The Economist's style of using a thin space, then an en dash, then another thin space to punctuate the break properly. But in plain text, I'm perfectly fine with using two hyphens together.

</comment><comment><USER47> Such a great guide. I think a lot of people don't realize just how essential typography is to UI design and development.

</comment><comment><USER48> Here is some nice typography's [https://goo.gl/eRL1vZ](https://goo.gl/eRL1vZ)</comment>


Project 880: The Avatar that almost was - <AUTHOR> http://chud.com/articles/articles/21969/1/PROJECT-880-THE-AVATAR-THAT-ALMOST-WAS/Page1.html#

<comment><USER2> In case you want to read the scripment for yourself:

[http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14294813/Avatar-Scriptment-by-- J...](http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14294813/Avatar-Scriptment-by--James- Cameron)

</comment><comment><USER3> That is an interesting comparison. Still the movie is worth seeing no matter what the script as a demonstration of what special effects are now possible. And for the full experience, IMAX is best.

That said, I would have personally enjoyed the amazing special effects in _Avatar_ more if I hadn't recently seen _Under The Sea 3D_ with my 5 year old son. Therefore I was aware of exactly what 3D visual experience that screen is capable of, and was correspondingly aware of how much the movie fell short of that ideal.

In the documentary I remember looking from one fish to another, and feeling my eyes refocus for the different depth and then notice the amazing detail. By contrast in _Avatar_ I never felt that anything really was in solid focus.

</comment><comment><USER4> (cross-post from here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1018254>)

wow thanks so much for that link! it's great to see that cameron's original script (which really seems like a short novel) had much more depth and soul. however, i suspect that he was first and foremost aiming to make a dazzling action film, so unfortunately a lot of the back-story and slower scenes had to be cut. i can't imagine how he could've squeezed in more story without cutting much of the action.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, the movie makes more sense now. I guess the original script was... unobtanium.</comment></comment>


The Little Hack That Could: The Story of Spotify's "Discover Weekly" Rec Engine - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/software/the-little-hack-that-could-the-story-of-spotifys-discover-weekly-recommendation-engine <comment><USER2> Discover Weekly has, in my opinion, made Spotify much more useful.

Pro Tip: You can subscribe to somebody else's Discover Weekly feed, also.</comment>


Futuristic Rocketship schools redefine teaching - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/10/13/charter-schools-future-classroom/1631387/

<comment><USER2> To get an idea of what ST Math (mentioned in the article) is all about, this TEDx presentation is probably the best intro: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLje8QRrwg>

Disclaimer: I'm a developer at MIND Research.

<comment><USER3> I'm a little surprised that this technology is only available to schools, and not to individuals. Is there any effort underway to change that? It seems like these games could be big on the various app stores (e.g. DragonBox), or in partnership with some of the big learning sites such as Khan Academy.

<comment><USER2> MIND is a non-profit and a neuroscience research institute, with the mission of improving Math education.

With all the hype around computer-based instruction, a big part of that goal has to be the ability to measure and demonstrate positive results on a large scale. With limited resources, the focus is on deploying the program direct to schools and providing the teacher training and support to make sure that the kids get the most benefit from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like a great initiative and they seem to be doing it the right way, staying lean, cutting unnecessary expenses and using technology a lot. Yet when I think about it, what I loved back in those years was the interaction with other kids, the noise, the sort of controlled chaos. I don't know if they would have been able to keep me sitting in a lab, glued to a monitor. But alas, those were different times and I do remember getting very excited when we got our first, really really old computers and how we tried by any means to get some time with them. I am not even that old and yet I feel I live in a completely different world. Times have changed, and so fast :)

</comment><comment><USER5> OT: This website does not work on Safari. The toolbar that should be sticking to the bottom of the viewport ends up repeating across the content as I scroll.

Now, to attempt to get the print version to work...

Edit after reading: In general I disagree with the concept of charter schools, but this seems like a good idea. If there's one in my city when I have children that age I will definitely research them further.

<comment><USER6> It's a pretty bad design in general, I was flicking between this and my email client and clicking on the 'background' of the page takes you to the front page.</comment></comment>


How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/technology/20ping.html?ex=1366344000&en=c8cf5bd4dfb3b247&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Well this doesn't seem like anything new to me. We all know that Google, MS, IBM, and all the heavyweights are opening up research centers in China and abroad.

The issue is that it is difficult for startups to get access to the research coming out of those places - thus encouraging startups in the native land, like Zoho.</comment>


French researcher treated 1000 virus patients with 99.3% success rate - <AUTHOR> https://techstartups.com/2020/04/06/french-researcher-dr-didier-raoult-has-now-treated-1000-coronavirus-patient-with-99-3-success-rate/ <comment><USER2> Actually it says there was a 0.7% death rate in the sample and some patients are still in hospital.</comment>


Facebook employees wanted to block Donald Trump from Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employees-wanted-to-block-donald-trump-report-2016-10 <comment></comment>