Stream processing, Event sourcing, Reactive, CEP… and making sense of it all - <AUTHOR> http://blog.confluent.io/2015/01/29/making-sense-of-stream-processing/ <comment><USER2> ye, good article, but it's already been discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966852)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently in the process of redesigning the whole server architecture of our SaaS application to embrace event sourcing - we were using a classic relational database until now. I'm excited by all the new possibilities this will give us, but it's a lot of work to rewrite just about everything and to migrate old data into event streams. My advice to anyone who considers event sourcing for future projects: use it from the beginning. Transitioning from a more traditional model is hard.

Btw, the author seems to make a confusion between events and commands. These are not the same thing: a command represents an action (by the user, an other system or an internal process), while an event represents a change in the data. A command may generate 1 or several events during its processing. It is not saved in a data store, but it can be replayed in case of failure if retry policies are in place.

<comment><USER4> I always think that event sourcing is missing the concept of commands.

If you have the idea of commands (which I think are mentioned in some of the literature) it becomes a lot easier. Commands are intensions to change the world that might fail, and have access to the current state when they are executed. If they succeed when they're run, they will emit events. Doing it like this means that you are guaranteed a sane event stream, and it makes it much easier to map from an existing system to events.

I've written both a web scraper and a database exporter that works in this way: as the legacy system is traversed you try to run commands. If the command succeeds and produces events you know that the events are compiant with your business logic. If the command fails you have the option to fail the whole operation or continue without the parts of the old system that don't meet your business logic.

 _edit_ updated as you mentioned commands above.

<comment><USER3> The concept of commands is very useful but I don't think it belongs to the event sourcing pattern. Event sourcing is just a way to write and read data, it doesn't say anything about how you process inputs and how that processing can lead to a change of data. For that concern there exist other patterns like CQRS which introduces the concept of command. These patterns are complementary, and using both CQRS + ES is actually common practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some of this is very good, and it's a good beginner's introduction, but there is significant misunderstanding about the applications of FRP and the actor model in the area of complex event processing. These are fertile areas of CS research (to which I made some small contribution in the CS department at Yale), not just "loosely coupled ideas" or industry buzzwords. They have real academic meaning, even if the terminology is sometimes co-opted to make unrelated software sound cutting edge.

<comment><USER6> Care to point me to a better place to learn about the aplications of FRP and the actor model besides what it is being buzzed around?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's great to see the world finally rediscovering this stuff. CEP is a superb paradigm that makes reasoning about so many kinds of complex, asynchronous systems far easier. One just has to get over any aversion to storing a massive event store. The good news is that great datastores exist for this purpose and one can usually bootstrap by storing events in whatever relational DB you are already using until size/perf becomes an issue.

This is great article. I really like the work from Stanford on Rapide (a declarative, logic style language for event pattern rules).

[http://complexevents.com/stanford/rapide/](http://complexevents.com/stanford/rapide/)

The site is a bit outdated but the language is awesome.

Also check out these books on CEP:

[http://www.amazon.com/Power-Events-Introduction- Processing-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Events-Introduction-Processing- Distributed/dp/0321951832/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1423071897&sr=8-3&keywords=complex+event+processing)

and

[http://www.amazon.com/Event-Processing-Action-Opher- Etzion/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Event-Processing-Action-Opher- Etzion/dp/1935182218/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1423071897&sr=8-2&keywords=complex+event+processing)

</comment><comment><USER8> A great article. A couple of open source projects for CEP/event processing.

1\. Esper ([http://www.espertech.com](http://www.espertech.com)) has been around for awhile. This is _the_ CEP engine a lot of people are familiar with.

2\. Norikra ([http://norikra.github.io/](http://norikra.github.io/)) is a schema-less event processing engine, often used with Fluentd ([https://www.fluentd.org](https://www.fluentd.org)) as the data collector (Fluentd can do stream processing as well).

3\. Apache Storm ([https://storm.apache.org](https://storm.apache.org)) has been popular in the Hadoop community, often with Kafka as the event source.

</comment><comment><USER9> Storm and Kafka are great building blocks for event streaming and processing, but if you're interested in a very well designed and non-opinionated framework for Java that helps you build CQRS applications, Axon[1] is worth looking into. The creator and maintainer, Allard Buijze is a great guy (and he is paid to maintain it) and the code base is very solid with improvements being made on a regular basis.

[1] [http://www.axonframework.org/](http://www.axonframework.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This architecture seems great for analytics apps, but when expanded beyond that (e.g., Pete Hunt's Full Stack Flux talk) I never see explanations of basic patterns like validation. Where does validation happen and how are errors sent back to users?

For instance:

AddToCart(prod=1, quantity=1) -> Transactionally check that there is still inventory, return error if there isn't, add to stream if there is.

<comment><USER3> This is where the distinction between commands and events is important. "AddToCard" is a command (which might fail), while "AddedToCart" is an event that will result from processing only if the command passed validation. You should store events, not commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really interesting blog post by one of the guys behind Kafka related to this topic: [http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log- what...](http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every- software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying)</comment>


Ask HN: Does your dog have a theory of mind? - <AUTHOR> Recently my dog has found a new level trick to get the playing going. He basically goes to another part of the house pushes that door closed and waits behind it until we discover him. All while making sounds, peaking behind the door, closing and opening it again and again. This is 100% playful behavior but on Google I only find explanation of anxiety and stress related causes. I hesitate to interpret this as intelligent behavior and project a theory of mind on it but it sure is a nice surprise. <comment><USER2> My dog has been known to be more perceptive and cunning than humans at times (including me), so I'd have to say yes.

It ultimately depends on the breed, upbringing, the dog's individual personality, and so on. Generally speaking however, there's a mountain of empirical evidence that demonstrates how extraordinary canine intelligence can be.

Humans have a rather long history of discounting other species' intelligence, and it seems as time progresses we learn just how wrong we were. I was reading an article the other day about how turtles of all species are actually much more intelligent than previously thought, in part due to flawed behavioral studies in the 1950s and 60s. They aren't even mammals. It makes one wonder:

I eat meat. I enjoy it. If anything I'm aware of how unethical it is, but I currently rationalize its consumption partly as a tacit acknowledgement of how dark and broken the world is, and partly for nutritional and cognitive health reasons.

Yet, it's still terrifying to think that if you remove the notion of humans being unique in our ability to experience suffering—not only physical pain, but notably psychological pain—we're essentially inflicting what amounts to large-scale genocide of creatures with feelings, on a daily basis. It's suffering on a scale that is incomprehensible.

To circle back to the topic at hand, it's curious that consumption of canine meat is considered highly immoral or more commonly is outright illegal in the majority of the civilized world. Yet, use of other mammals as livestock—mammals who arguably exceed canine intelligence in many instances—is widely accepted.

I think that dissonance underscores just how badly we've failed in recognizing intelligence beyond that of our own species. Intelligence, the capacity for suffering, sentience—it all has been unduly anthropomorphized.

<comment><USER3> Interesting take. I'm also a huge carnivore, to me there's nothing better than a rare ribeye or filet. It's going to be interesting to see how the synthetic meat movement develops. If they could "print/grow" filet mignon's and at a "frozen burger price," I feel like I'd be happy to switch.</comment></comment>


Inside the UK's fastest machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/02/computing.climatechange

<comment><USER2> "It has cost GBP5.6m less than the GBP65m estimate to build" and "in computing terms that is the same as 12,000 standard desktop computers"

59.4 M / 12000 = GBP4,950 each. A good desktop computer is less than GBP1,000. It doesn't sound like a great buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting its number 17 in the top 500 list. I would wager that the government here in the uk has a couple bigger ones that they can't talk about. I bet the US has a few too.

<comment><USER4> The Top500 list refers to performance on the linpack benchmark. While the UK and US government probably have "more powerful" systems than this which are used for classified purposes, those are likely to be special-purpose designs which aren't able to run the linpack benchmark. (For example, the NSA has access to wafer fabrication facilities, and is believed to have several custom silicon designs.)

The linpack benchmark runs on general-purpose supercomputers, and non- classified supercomputers shared between a large number of researchers are inherently general-purpose supercomputers.

<comment><USER3> thanks, great bit of insight</comment></comment></comment>


Ada 2012 Language Standard Approved by ISO - <AUTHOR> http://www.adacore.com/press/ada-2012-language-approved <comment><USER2> But does it have awesome rockstar ninja tech like Node.js?

I mean, if I don't have my event loops (event loops are web-scale, you see) and MangoDB ORM/ODM/object-state-propagator I can't be productive. (Gotta slam code for my startup!)

Also I heard Ada's type system was responsible for blowing up that Ariane V rocket. Clearly ninja-tech like JavaScript's weak/dynamic type system wouldn't have caused that.

<comment><USER3> > Also I heard Ada's type system was responsible for blowing up that Ariane V > rocket.

Please post proved facts, not wrong, misleading "I heard" FUD.

<comment><USER4> That's the joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Today while programming in Javascript I found myself wishing for static typing and preconditions. Honestly. It'd have saved me a fair amount of time.

I ... I think this is what getting old feels like.

<comment><USER5> Older and wiser. Compilers and static typing are a good thing if you care about code quality and reliability.

<comment><USER4> At least on the server side I can use stricter languages. On the client I can do it only indirectly (I'm thinking of playing with TypeScript ... someday).

<comment><USER6> You should check out js_of_ocaml [1]. It's a very good compiler from OCaml to JavaScript which lets you interface with the DOM and existing JavaScript libraries relatively easily. You can play around with OCaml in the browser[2], which was implemented using js_of_ocaml.

[1]: <http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/>

[2]: <http://try.ocamlpro.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One problem that Ada shares with Fortran is that a lot of the users out there are still restricted to old standards. Just like you still find some projects that have to code in Fortran 77, I found quite a few Ada books and guides where Ada95 is still the new kid on the block.

Let's see how that changes. One only has to think of C++, where for quite a while a lot of people urged strongly against template metaprogramming and other more modern features, basically sticking with a '90s C++, but now that C++11 out, everyone is really hurrying to get on the bandwagon again, just because a few of the new features are _that_ good.

Looks like I'm spending my holidays with some statically typed compiled languages again. Might as well try finishing/redoing that RPG I started out in '94. Design notes must be somewhere, though I guess I won't have much luck with my backup floppies.

<comment><USER8> The sad thing is that Norman Cohen has decided not to update _Ada as a Second Language_ for Ada 05. It's just about the best book I've ever read for any computer language.

</comment></comment><comment> s-phi-nl For all those advocating Ada on this thread, could you recommend a good tutorial to us? I love learning about new programming languages, but particularly for a relatively-obscure language like Ada, I would appreciate a recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER9> When I started in my CS program years ago, Ada was the teaching language (now I believe they moved to Java like everyone else). At the time I remember joining in the grumbling "Why do we have to learn Ada?! Who the hell uses Ada?" ...but now, looking back, it was a pretty good teaching language: You don't have to worry about little details like C, OOP, decent complier tools, etc.

I have 5 or 6 Ada textbooks still sitting on my shelf, which are now even further outdated. Maybe I'll go get the latest GNAT and play with Ada again to pretend I still use those books.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have an Ada textbook that mentions in its foreward that it's appropriate that Ada was named after the first programmer because it will likely be the last major programming language. The book was written in the early 1990s.

<comment><USER4> I've done a lot of programming in PL/SQL, which was "inspired" by Ada.

And by "inspired" I mean it has the same chatty Pascal-descendent syntax and inline queries and that's about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ada is a really nice, really effective language for being careful in, and yet compiling low-level and with a great deal of on-the-metal control, possibly more so than C without cheating and stepping outside the language. And yet, inexplicably, it never became popular. It can't be compiler support, there's GNAT and there has been for over a decade.

</comment><comment><USER12> From someone who has never even ventured into object-oriented programming: Why Ada? From the Wikipedia level overview, it doesn't seem like it offers much over Java or C# (remember, I haven't touched any of the three). It does look to be quite a bit more readable, which I like, but I still would have a hard time justifying its use over languages that have endless libraries and strong communities with similar features/paradigms. I'm sincere about the question, and I hope this doesn't come off as snarky.

</comment><comment><USER13> I _really_ want to do something productive in Ada. Its just that every time I sit down and look at it the pragmatist in me balks and I end up doing it in C or Scala. It reminds of ALGO 60. A Language that on paper should have been the goto language ( even had the same DoD support Ada had/has ) , but never gained traction outside a small niche.

<comment><USER8> Ada has Pascal-like syntax for sure. The designers were fans of Pascal so that was their starting point. Personally after using it for a while it really grew on me. I especially liked having := for assignment and = for equality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ada was the first language I ran into that would make guesses about your code (e.g. type of variable) and that scared me greatly. It was also fun to see the Ada compiler generate better code than the C compiler.

</comment><comment><USER15> Which programming language wins the award for "Most Strongly (Statically) Typed"? How much of Ada's advantages for safety-critical systems is from language or runtime features _not_ related to type safety?

<comment><USER16> I think this chart is a few years old, and scala and haskell look different (type holes, deferred type checks, simplistically, better "undefined" in haskell)

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3165525/go-scala-go- what-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3165525/go-scala-go-what-are-the- main-differences)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ISO has been bought and paid for by Microsoft in the past, they cannot be trusted anymore.</comment>


US rail freight is the world's best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/16636101

<comment><USER2> Most of this article is pretty good, but it mostly isn't about any sort of relationship between high-speed rail and freight trains. That comes in only at the very end of the article, and is quite speculative.

They admit that the _current_ batch of high-speed rail lines being built, mainly California's, will run on new lines that won't interfere with freight. The _Economist's_ worry seems to be about the more extensive proposed high- speed rail network that's currently on the drawing board, which is proposed to include extended portions on existing freight rails (at 110mph) to link together the purpose-built higher-speed segments. They seem to be thinking of plans like this one: <http://www.fra.dot.gov/Pages/203.shtml>

But is that really even a medium-term worry? I'll be surprised if even California's line gets finished by 2020. I would be _very_ surprised if this more extensive national HSR plan that's supposed to follow later gets anywhere anytime soon. The map linked above is the result of a process begun in 1991, which has not been turning into a high-speed-rail network at any particularly great rate of speed. It'll be a miracle if they settle on a final plan by 2020, much less fund it or actually start building anything. I'll eat my hat if that entire network is built in my lifetime!

<comment><USER3> One reason to be a bit more optimistic is Texas (<http://www.thsrtc.com/>). Their equivalent plan to California's is loads cheaper thanks to their more agreeable geography (plains, mostly).

More importantly, the lighter touch of the state government means rather than do a full-on government build and operate (ala California/Amtrak), they're looking at private build & operations under a long-term lease, with the government providing liability limitations and eminent domain, in return for owning the infrastructure after the lease expires in some decades of operation. This means the builder is subject to market forces: they can only recoup their build costs within the lease window by getting to operations as quickly and efficiently as possible. The incentives are the opposite for government construction: the milk flows during construction, so there's a disincentive to ever finish, and when things go over budget, it almost always means more money, rather than anyone cutting their losses.

To get a sense what a difference this makes, consider that the NYC subway system was built by competing private concerns under the long-term lease model (ala Texas), between 1905 and 1940. In 1940 the system was unified under government control (ala California), and basically the system was frozen in time, with no expansion happening in the 70 years since (see: <http://www.diametunim.com/shashi/nyc_subways/>).

<comment><USER2> I do think Texas's plan is one of the most promising, but I suppose my guess is that it'll still take a long time, partly because it's been looking promising for a _long_ time now: the first feasibility study was launched in the 1980s. The state actually awarded a contract to a private group to build high-speed rail in the Dallas-San Antonio-Houston triangle, under terms like those you discuss, in 1991, but it was killed, largely by Southwest Airlines lobbying, in 1994. I went to high school in Texas 1996-2000, and a new high- speed rail plan was being discussed that entire time too, but the talk never went anywhere. In the early 2000s, it was revived once more, this time as part of an ambitious Trans-Texas Corridor (which would have had freight rail, high- speed rail, car-only freeways, and truck-only freeways), but that died a few years later as well, partly due to a nativist backlash against its role as the "NAFTA superhighway".

Now there's yet another HSR plan, separated back out from the road plans, which might work this time, but I probably wouldn't put any money on _this_ being the year the 20+-year impasse is broken. Honestly I haven't seen any of that supposedly lighter-touch, actually-functioning Texas state government on this issue, just a multi-decade series of special interests and politicking resulting in no rails being built.

<comment><USER4> I think rail doesn't get anywhere in the U.S because it makes it to easy for "undesirable elements" to get to places they're not wanted too easily. I think that's the incredibly sad but honest truth of it all.

The class differences in the United States are far more extreme than most people realize, mostly because people stay inside their tight little class bubbles all day long in their private cars, driving to work and back and rarely venturing out to get a latte every once in a while.

<comment><USER5> I don't agree with this comment in this context, but I do know for a fact that the Washington DC Metro does not extend to the popular Georgetown shopping and nightlife district for precisely this reason.

<comment><USER2> That's the same reason Atlanta's MARTA doesn't extend into Cobb County. I don't think it has much to do with intercity rail, though; it seems to be mainly an issue with opposition to metropolitan-area rapid-transit systems, with people worried that they'll blur boundaries between nice and not-nice neighborhoods within the same city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel compelled to point out that high-speed passenger rail isn't likely to be anywhere near as successful in the US as in Europe even if heavily subsidized.

One problem is population density. The US is geographically twice the size of the EU, but has three fifths the population. Germany is the size of Montana, but has 90 million people. Typical travel distances are short, and the number of travelers on any given day is high. Fixed costs would be proportionally higher for a US service as a result.

Local transport upon arrival is a big issue. Most European cities have public transportation systems that are effective enough for large portions of the population to not own cars. This is only true in a _very_ small number of US cities (probably fewer than 5). For many people, any cost savings from taking a train instead of driving would be offset by the cost and inconvenience of securing transportation at the destination.

A final issue is that very long distance train travel still takes a long time compared to air travel. Using a generous estimate of a 100mph average (remember, the trains have to make stops), a high-speed train would take 20 hours to get from LA to Chicago. I think few people would opt for that over a 3 hour flight even given a significant difference in price.

<comment><USER7> Rather than pointing out where it won't work, how about finding places where it will work. The northeast, for example, is densely populated and the major cities are close. The real problem is building straight tracks so trains can go 200mph.

NYC to Philly - 95 miles

NYC to Washington DC - 225 miles

NYC to Boston - 220 miles

Washington to Bostin - 420 miles

<comment><USER8> Exactly. We have airplanes for cross country travel. The train technology that exists in other countries could make even Boston to Toronto doable.

<comment><USER9> People need to slow their fucking lives down. cross country travel by rail is much more enjoyable than flying, even if it takes 2-3 days. Give me wifi and a sleeper, and leave flying for those who haven't figured this out yet.

<comment><USER10> _cross country travel by rail is much more enjoyable than flying, even if it takes 2-3 days._

Not in my experience. I took Amtrak from Atlanta to DC in 2008, and it was basically a 13 hour flight -- same kinds of seats, only marginally more space, and the food service amounted to paying exorbitant prices for awful sandwiches that could have been vended from an office machine. I would prefer to spend 10 hours in an airport and 3 hours in flight, given the chance; airports are at least quite comfortable, in general.

<comment><USER11> Rail seems like it would be a win for someone who was mobility impaired (wheelchair, old, morbidly obese, etc.). The only other viable option would be a specially outfitted car or bus.

The times I've taken Amtrak (mainly for amusement value; Seattle-SFO and SFO- DEN), it was mainly old people (many of diminished mobility), some religious groups (mormons? menonites?), and foreign tourists. And mostly empty seats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also a major issue of right of way. Atlanta has freight lines running right through very built up parts of the city (including right outside my condo window here--I see 6 Norfolk-Southern tracks with at least 100 trains per day). We've already had controversy over the amount of property that would have to be taken through eminent domain, even when just adding passenger lines to the existing rail corridors. There's no realistic estimate yet, but it will be in the tens of billions. Billions spent to tear down buildings and build up rail, for no certain benefit. That's a tough sell.

Markets talk. As the article said, when rail was deregulated, the business ditched passenger and emphasized freight. That's what is in demand. If government has to fund something, that's often a signal that there is not an organic market demand for it.

</comment><comment><USER13> If US rail freight is so great (which I do believe it is) then get the f __*ing trucks off the interstate highways! Let's load up the rail system with the freight it was meant to serve. If not, then make way for the passenger trains, and the tractor trailers can have the roads, which they destroy with every wheel turn they take!

<comment><USER14> This was mentioned in the article. A number of trucking companies are doing this, and just using trucks for move it around locally.

This has increased congestion on the railroads, and the new passneger traffic will make this even worse.

It really is worth reading the article, very informative. I remember reading some ridiculous statistic about how cheap it is to move a ton of cargo in the US before, now I have a few more details.

<comment><USER13> I did read the article. :-) And absent from it is the fact that the federal government gave the railroads the land in the first place. I love The Economist, but leave it to them to bemoan regulation, but leave out a simple and fundamental fact like that.

The article even mentioned how new tracks are being put in for long distance passenger traffic -- which will not impact the freight trains -- but that local traffic has to be on freight lines, and this does impact freight because of freight's erratic schedule. But perhaps with more use freight will be less erratic. Perhaps the best solution is to move freight transfer stations (where rail freight moves to trucks) out from cities, and allow passenger service closer in. This does not help freight that has to go through the city in the first place. But, if we can move off of coal a little faster, then maybe we will have the capacity for increased freight and passenger rail service.

<comment><USER15> You know that sounds like a job for some simulation software, especially if you could model things like adding intermodal terminals and adding links to the network constrained by the cost of right of way. Even better if you could figure out how to model the politics and market forces, if you could come up with something that helped railway executives make better decisions about the environment they operate in (apparently they lease rights of way back and forth, and the company running the train is not necessarily the one that owns a given stretch of track), you would have a saleable product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think Americans should make yet another sacrifice to appease big business who would rather use rail capacity for freight instead of passenger traffic. For once the American citizens should be the priority here.

<comment><USER17> Is it in Americans' interests that more freight should go by road, at a higher cost, so some Americans can travel by train? It's not a simplistic 'big business bad, passenger trains good' argument.

<comment><USER18> If it's 1 to 1 then yes. People cost a lot more to transport on roads than bulk freight so it's a net gain to the economy.

Edit: The total cost to the economy to send a single person per car is about 60c/mile if you include the cost of maintaining and expanding highways / increased congestion on existing highways. It costs to use busses, but the benefit is primarily from getting people out of private cars and high speed trains are much better at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought this article about electrifying railways in the US was an interesting perspective, too:

<http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4301></comment>


Don't Be So Happy About That Tax Refund - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/dont-be-so-happy-about-that-tax-refund/ <comment><AUTHOR> The complicated part of this is that your tax owed (and, by association, a refund from over-withholding) is contingent on tax credits and deductions. The article mentions this in relation to EITC—briefly. But it doesn't mention other things, like the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, which comprises the bulk of my refund this year.

I could monkey around with my W-4, but it would be like robbing Peter to pay Paul.</comment>


Netflix sends journalists on pricey trips - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/12/netflix-sends-journalists-pricey-trips-raising-questions-angering-rivals/ <comment><USER2> This is kinda weird for WaPo to write about considering it's pretty common for many companies to send journalists and reviewers on fancy trips. They'll often hold product launches in places like Hawaii, or recently with Jumanji they had a press event in Mexico at a nice resort. Netflix's rivals all do the same exact thing.

> The Washington Post's policy is not to accept any material gifts from news > sources or coverage subjects.

But I bet they're more than willing to accept what is essentially a free vacation on company time.

<comment><USER3> but you know what: for Jeff Bezos it doesn't work out, so there has to be something wrong...

Given that: I'm getting tired of Netflix's concept of producing a lot of crappy shows for regional markets - if I'd like to have that, I can go to my public broadcaster too for the mandatory fee I have to pay anyways... (and they also realized by now that they have to do something for non-retirees). For nice and "special" movies, buying a DVD is most often the only sensible option. Or some stream somewhere... (which are not good at special things either)

<comment><USER4> Beg to differ. Netflix has made some great local content, narcos, Dark, Casa de papel, The dutch civil war resistance miniseries, some great French comedies, and the list goes on.

I think it's great to see stuff not all coming out of Hollywood.

<comment><USER3> I can see a lot of non-local (but still European) stuff in Europe too, fully synchronized, in public TV, which I have to pay (...) anyways. And it's the same shallow, non-distinguishable, mass-market ready stuff like 90% of Netflix's own stuff. The only thing Netflix does better for me personally is that the setting generally seems to cater to younger people. Production quality and plot are the same as in public TV.

<comment><USER5> I really don't get people who use broadcast TV. You have to plan your life around anything you want to watch -- which is the oppostite of Netflix, which adapts to my own schedules and free time. It just seems crazy!

<comment><USER6> One word: "DVR". _Verb sap._ We also have Netflix and Prime, and watch a lot of YouTube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh those poor innocent Hollywood studios, it's so unfair when critics just get paid to endorse movies--at least it is when those movies are getting made by your competitor. Maybe if the big studios weren't so focused on pumping out sequel after sequel after remake after lowest common denominator designed-by- commitee movies they wouldn't have to worry about this. Netflix is simply making better movies, and if these studios want their awards they're going to have to compete for them.

<comment><USER8> Better movies? On Netflix? Are you sure?

<comment><USER9> Well, a movie they made earned universal acclaim _and_ the Academy Award for best picture last year, and they're in good shape this year too, so…yes?

<comment><USER10> Green Book won the award for Best Picture last year. It was not made by Netflix.

I do think Netflix has made a lot of good (and less good) content. But that statement is simply untrue

<comment><USER11> 2019 is still the current year. 2018 was won by Shape of Water:

[https://oscar.go.com/news/oscar-news/best- actress-2018-franc...](https://oscar.go.com/news/oscar-news/best- actress-2018-frances-mcdormand-wins-2018-oscar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh man, not the half of it.

My wife won the Netflix PR account for our market for the agency she worked for.

They moved into their office and built an elaborate viewing room — and their retainer came in at multiples of other high end clients.

And yeah, constant trips for entertainment journos.

One of the more aggressive and savvy companies when it comes to PR. In my experience that signals strong management.

</comment><comment><USER13> From what I can tell from reading the article, the established Hollywood studios are mad that Neflix upgraded the experience at their 'press junkets' which are a completely normal part of the promo cycle.

Press junkets are notorious for being rapid-fire grinds that studios consider a necessary evil. I guess the case could be made that by making it a more pleasant experience (and also granting journalists paid set visits is mentioned?) could give them an advantage among critics/voters? Probably but that's the business, just like this WaPo article was probably pitched by a competitor PR firm.

</comment><comment><USER14> I did wonder how two such mediocre long and boring films The Irishman & Marriage Story got such rave reviews. I'm annoyed with myself, having been swayed by the the critics, so wasting over 5 hours of my life - watching these in the vain hope that some excitement or entertainment would emerge - thoroughly disappointed.

<comment><USER15> To each their own. I thoroughly enjoyed the Irishman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like sour grapes to me. How much Amazon Prime produced programming got nominated again?

<comment><USER17> Having worked at a newspaper, it's fairly unlikely the WaPo's journalists feel brand loyalty to Amazon Prime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are Critic Choice Awards comparable to Emmy awards? I always felt these were B or C tier awards. However I am not in this industry and could be completely out of touch.

To me actions like what Netflix did are nothing more than another form of marketing. You either buy what they are selling or you don't.

<comment><USER19> You'd also have to be a shitty movie reviewer to like one (of 61 films) films more because you got a free flight. And why would you put an industry professional in a shitty hotel when you fly them there? They should treat them with respect since they play a big role in the industry.

This sounds like it helps critics covering films be industry insiders with closer access to the filmmakers/actors which makes for more interesting content which they wouldn't have otherwise. Which helps them with the critiquing when it goes wrong or right.

Ensuring high quality coverage (or any coverage) for an event featuring != ensuring positive reviews

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is/was a common practice with movie studios promoting new films and flying reporters to screening.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm really grab Netflix is disrupting the market like this. Some things (like Theatre's monopoly over new titles) are absurd and need to stop. Wanna watch a new movie? Waiting for months or theatres are the only options. I'll be very happy the day this changes for all new titles.

</comment><comment><USER21> So what. The journalists get to live a little - good.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is getting tiresome.

HN needs a policy to disallow completely paywalled links.

That's akin posting a photo of a printed magazine cover and suggesting to discuss a terribly interesting article on page 17. It works only for a limited audience that comprises magazine subscribers and those willing to make a trip to the library, borrow from a friend, etc. That's counterproductive and exclusionary. It also doesn't age well.

<comment><USER23> Yes, HN should take a stand here: all links should point to the open web. I realize that there is lots of interesting content that is not on the web, and that's fine. It's just that HN links should not point to it.

We are losing the concept of the open web, and I thought HN would be the community that would understand the problem.

<comment><USER24> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779375)

<comment><USER25> Sure, that's great it's written down. Doesn't mean we have to agree to the rules.

The complaints about paywalled articles are warranted, and we should take a stance about it whether the debate itself is viewed as off-topic or not. It's turned into a form of protest, at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What should HN's stance on paywalled sites be? It seems like at the very least, having an alternative link posted along with the main one that's accessible to everyone would be a reasonable proposal.

<comment><USER27> [https://outline.com/mdeq7H](https://outline.com/mdeq7H)

<comment><USER28> The best stance is one of defiance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I saw a link "Netflix sends journalists on pricey trips". "Support great journalism," said the link I followed.

(paywall)

<comment><USER30> Great journalism isn't free.</comment></comment>


Source code for backdoor found in Tenda router - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/socoola/yhrouter/blob/master/user/goahead/src/goahead.c

<comment><USER2> [http://www.devttys0.com/2013/10/from-china-with- love/](http://www.devttys0.com/2013/10/from-china-with-love/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/socoola/yhrouter/blob/master/user/goahead...](https://github.com/socoola/yhrouter/blob/master/user/goahead/src/goahead.c#L939)

I'm no security export, but what this is doing is creating a UDP socket (SOCK_DGRAM) that expects commands to be executed (using call_shell()). It then replies with the output back to the sender of the UDP packet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Er... where, exactly?

<comment><USER5> Looks like here is where it gets interesting: [https://github.com/socoola/yhrouter/blob/master/user/goahead...](https://github.com/socoola/yhrouter/blob/master/user/goahead/src/goahead.c#L957)

An example fo the inbound command structure, then code further below to execute it and respond.

It listens on the LAN interface (assuming the value shown is what it says it is) for datagram requests. Unless I'm missing something, that seems to indicate an attacker must already be on the same network.

It does shell out the commands it receives - so perhaps more interesting would be look and see what kinds of accessible binaries and scripts ship on the device.</comment></comment>


Hacking your Growth - <AUTHOR> http://1url.com/81

<comment><USER2> Why did you revealed this secret.. I didn't disclosed it from past many years because I don't want everybody using it.</comment>


Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping - <AUTHOR> https://ventspace.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/games-look-bad-part-1-hdr-and-tone-mapping/ <comment><USER3> A lot of the oversaturation problem can be attributed to bad displays. Think about early Instagram. Everyone used terrible super saturated filters on their photos because the early smart phone screens were so bad, and got washed out so easily in the sunlight. By overcompensating with filters you got a photo that looked good on a bad screen, even in sunny conditions.

The same was true of early games. Gamers love the bright colors of World of Warcraft for instance because displays were bad, and it was easier to watch bright colors for hours on end while gaming. Even today my modern TV looks pretty bad in the sunlight. As much as I love the muted colors of Breath of the Wild I have to admit that without closing my curtains its really hard to tell what's going on if a sunbeam is hitting the TV.

I think as gamer's screens get better we will start to see a transition away from exaggerated brightness and a trend toward more realism, just like Instagram has transitioned largely from a platform that overcompensated for bad smartphone screens to a #nofilter style.

<comment><USER4> WoW was released the same year as LCD monitor sales first surpassed CRTs (2003). So in the early days of WoW, people actually got better colors than a few years later when most people had dumped CRTs for the relatively poor consumer LCD monitors of the day.

<comment><USER5> I was just a kid, but as far as I remember the transition to LCD brought worse colour not better. To be clear, i'm not talking about early professional colourists LCD displays that were £5000 or whatever. Surely everyone is familiar with those horrible TN panels in laptops... desktop LCDs used the same tech once.

<comment><USER6> That's the point - that in the first years while CRTs were still quite widespread, people had better displays than a few years later when many had switched to terrible early LCD screens.

<comment><USER7> On the otherhand, I cannot COUNT the amount of headaches I got as a kid from the TV and CRT monitors in our house.

It's physically painful to remember it.

I got a Compaq Portable (8088 clone) for a dollar years ago. I weighs a "tiny" ~35 LBs. ("portable"!) I got it to boot up after some problems with floppy drives. I was so cool to see little BASIC programs displaying silly, fancy, tech-demo graphics. But the whine... oh the whine... I'm half tempted to replace the built-in screen with a small LCD and just disconnect the blue and red wires to keep it solid green.

Sidenote: I still miss the warm glow of an amber screen though. There's something magical about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article makes me appreciate the balance struck in GTA.

IMHO this type of scene is better than any of the examples shown in the article:

[http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB...](http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB4SamD3UmQ1HF7Qf1bsg_0_0.jpg)

<comment><USER9> This picture is from a video game ?!

<comment><USER10> A more than four-year-old videogame, yes.

<comment><USER11> on last generation hardware too, though the screenshot in question might be taken one of the ports to more modern systems

<comment><USER12> It's from a computer, not a console.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > We would need 20 bits of just luminance to represent [the range 1,000,000:1

I don't understand this statement. Why do you need a certain number of bits to represent a large range? You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower.

Representing a large luminance range isn't a problem of resolution though is it? It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. If I represented the same luminance range with a thousand bits it doesn't do anything to solve the core problem, does it? So why does the number of bits matter?

Not a graphics programmer, so genuinely asking, not saying the article is wrong!

<comment><USER14> The larger the dynamic range, the more bits you need to represent the possible values in between.

Imagine a gradient that smoothly transitions from black to white. 8 bit color means only 256 shades of luminance, which would quickly show banding artifacts.

In fact, the entire reason we gamma encode images is because 256 is too small for even a low dynamic range monitor. Gamma encoding is a clever technique to give us more bits to represent shadows, which humans are more sensitive to than highlights.

<comment><USER13> Right, but the contrast range 1:1,000,000 - that's a real range isn't it? Not an integral one? So why does it ideally need to be represented with a particular quantisation of 1,000,000 different states? I mean there's not 1,000,000 different values between the real numbers 1 and 1,000,000 are there? There's an infinite number. There's only 1,000,000 values (20 bits) if you decide to quantise on each integer. Why do you need to do that? Why not more? Or less? What's special about the integral values on the number line?

<comment><USER9> Because 1 defines the lowest value you want to see. 20 bit is the minimum number of bits you need (in linear light) if you don't want noise in the darkest parts of your image

<comment><USER13> There are an infinite number of luminance levels between a contrast of 1 to 1,000,000, right? You will need 20 bits if a human can distinguish 1,000,000 levels between those two extremes. Is that the case? Maybe a human can distinguish 2,000,000 levels between 1 and 1,000,000, in which case you would need 21 bits.

You can't take a real range and give a number of bits needed to represent it without also stating what resolution you need. And I think it's unlikely that the resolution that a human can perceive is coincidentally the same as the factor of one extreme to the other.

<comment><USER15> This was certainly not meant to be a crucial piece of information, but sure, let's get into it.

Much of the post comes from a general assumption that the goal of computer graphics is primarily to replicate how a camera sees the world around it. Thus I think it's easiest to start from the idea of real world light entering a digital image sensor. Light in this setting is not continuous! Each subpixel in an image sensor acts as a photon counter. One photon hits the sensor, the count ticks up by one. There's no question of being able to perceive the values between 1 and 2 because they don't even exist. Either the sensor counted one photon or two. If you were going to literally create a digital camera that can process the entire world, you need 20 bits to count up to a million photons without losing any along the way. So if you were to build the hypothetical rendering pipeline that works on "real world" data about the scene, that 20 bit value would be the input.

As a practical matter, nearly all modern games store lighting levels internally in floating point, in arbitrary units chosen by the developers. Lighting pipelines are not integer based, but they're linear and not perceptual. The conversion to perceptual 8 bit (gamma curve) happens as part of the tone map stage. Doing things in floating point physical units is a better idea than the photon counter anyway, but the line you're confused about was really written with idealized cameras in mind.

( _Technically an image sensor is an analog device and the voltage increases with each photon detection by an increment that is subject to noise of all sorts and pre-amplification before hitting ADC. Don 't jump me on the photon counter thing._)

<comment><USER16> > Technically an image sensor is an analog device and the voltage increases > with each photon detection by an increment that is subject to noise of all > sorts and pre-amplification before hitting ADC. Don't jump me on the photon > counter thing.

But it's rather important, and not even for those reasons. This is not meant to jump on you! (and I really loved your article, like you said it's not a crucial point at all)

The 1:1000000 or 1:2^20 contrast ratio only corresponds to exactly 20 bits if the 1 on the low end of this ratio corresponds to exactly one discrete unit of light (photon). If it's off by a factor of 0.5, 1.618 or whatever, that's what the whole argument is about.

First, the sensor counts not photons but a value relating to _photons per second_ (because exposure time). If the 1 on the low end of the range corresponds to some exact minimum number of photons, it's going to be "one discrete unit of light per <exposure time>". Making the whole thing analog from the start.

Second, those sensors most probably aren't able to count individual photons any way[0]. The human eye, after about 30 minutes to get optimally adjusted to darkness, can _sort of_ perceive individual photons, or small bunches of maybe 2 or 3, kind of. Those barely-perceptible specks of light in the utter darkness aren't the sort of resolution issues we're worrying about in the dark end of these types of scenes. And, as soon as you make a light source that can be described as "emitting single photons" in a certain context, you get uncertainty effects and all that quantum jazz (show me a photon/path tracer renderer that gets the slit experiment correct[1] and you can have your integer photon counters :) ).

So the sensor output values can (and should), for all intents and purposes, be assumed to be an analogue value.

The amount of bits you represent it with just puts an upper bound on your signal-to-noise ratio (as per Shannon entropy). But since we're dealing with 2D images, the distribution of this noise over the spatial resolution (either as a result of sensor noise at the input or explicit noise shaping dithering at the end of the pipeline) also comes into play when considering the quality of the output.

If the signal-to-noise ratio of a sensor output happens to allow for 20 bits of precision, for a sensor that happens to have a 1:2^20 brightness range, that's coincidental. Sure it correlates because higher-end sensors tend to perform better in both range and SNR. But I don't believe that the 1 on the very low end of a discrete range represents precisely one photon per <power- of-two times minimum exposure time>.

[0] correct me if I'm wrong about this btw. There might be specialized scientific equipment that can, but I doubt even high-end cameras bother to go to the accuracy of single photons. But, I mostly know about digital signal processing, not about state of the art of camera hardware. Yet even if they are able to detect individual photons, that's going to be a probabilistic and per-unit-of-time measurement, so the rest of my argument holds.

[1] these probably exist, but aren't used for games or photorealistic rendering purposes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like this post does nothing in terms of educating readers. It all sounds very interesting, but I didn't learn anything. It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.

<comment> aaron-lebo It's a well-written and informative post, it deserves a little more praise than "does nothing in terms of educating readers".

What he is discussing is about aesthetics. There are two things at play here: the big studio business model relies on making blockbusters, so you pack together a few hundred devs and artists and try to pop out the biggest game you can. The other is that many devs are technically trained but not especially artistically educated. They have a limited understanding of lighting, color, framing a scene, etc.

Someone who has made some great criticisms of this as well as provided real solutions is Eskil Steenberg.

<comment><USER18> The article isn't very concise and is actually quite repetitive, it uses a bunch of jargon (without any description), and shifts blame around.

The topics are interesting and the opinions are there, but it certainly could be written better.

As a programmer who has done a small amount of work in graphics but hasn't worked in HDR rendering I have no idea what any of these are....

        film LUT

        color grading

        post process LUT color grade

...but I could write the linked-to shader. So who is he helping?

> It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, > so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.

I second this.

<comment><USER19> CLUT = color look-up table

color grading = adjusting the color in an image, as you might do in Photoshop or whatever

post process = any image adjustment that happens after the image is originally captured

This author is assuming a basic background in lighting / human vision / film technology.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I understand the acronyms, but they are being used as jargon, not in a instructive way.

If I were to talk about a web framework and say, "we've got our JSON files wrong and our package configs are cluttered, and don't get me started on the XML files," it's clear that it is metonymy [1].

Knowing that JSON is JavaScript Object Notation, the package.json is used for Node Package Manager, and that XML is a file format doesn't capture the feeling that a developer might have reading that sentence, and it doesn't instruct.

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

From the article:

>>> It was Reinhard in years past, then it was Hable, now it's ACES RRT. And it's stop #1 on the train of Why does every game this year look exactly the goddamn same?

If the problem the author is facing is a gap between art skills and technical skills, then the post could be less angry and more informative about color theory or rendering technology, maybe bridging the needed skills.

<comment><USER20> The title of the blog is literally "vent[ing] space".

<comment><USER18> Sure. I feel like this discussion has drifted away from the original comment and reply. Great vent, mediocre article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability.

A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD."

We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.

<comment><USER22> > We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, > and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible.

It's been a while, but last I looked, it seemed that the temptation was to use ever muddier and desaturated visuals, with as much glare and shiny surfaces as possible.

<comment><USER23> It comes and goes in phases according to the available technology. The first Quake was all muddy brown and gray. Quake 2 and Unreal both introduced color lighting and looked like a disco on Saturday night. Mid-2000s games added a lot of new lighting and post-processing effects but they had limitations causing harsh shadows and highlights, hence another round of gray/brown photorealism came through.

But in this decade things are finally feeling more evened out. Lighting models are sophisticated enough to allow for designs similar to a film set or photo shoot, and post-processing is getting past basic glows and filters and into a spectrum of quality/performance tradeoffs.

Of course, the games that don't aim for photorealism always age better. That's been the case since people started digitizing photographs for games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Everyone commenting here that they don't care about photorealism in their games is missing the point. The example games (and movie) given at the start of the article lack an appearance of photorealism not because they were going for something else, but because they either didn't pay enough attention to the HDR rendering, or else they didn't have the expertise to do it right. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally went with a non- photorealistic look to achieve a specific effect. So the point is not "these games look bad because they aren't photorealistic", it's "these games look bad because their HDR rendering is bad".

I don't know enough myself about HDR rendering to have an opinion on whether the author is right or wrong about any of this, but people arguing that the author is wrong because games shouldn't look photorealistic are attacking a straw man.

<comment><USER25> The author doesn't appear to have bothered to investigate or honestly ask _WHY_ games are the way they are, though. They are just blindly attacking an entire industry on basically the claim that the entire industry is stupid.

But the industry isn't stupid, and some of the "over-contrasty garbage" is intentional to help people rapid identify the things that they need to identify. Being able to quickly spot the things that you need to play the game are more important than sensible tone maps and contrast curves.

This is not a medium you observe like film & paintings are, it's a medium you _interact with_ , and rapidly at that. Approaching the visuals with the same perspective as something you only observe is a fundamentally flawed approach.

This article is packed with baseless assertions, unfounded claims, and offhanded but not investigated technical limitations. Hell, right after saying "partly due to technical limitations" the author proceeds to throw out a "nobody in the game industry has an understanding of film chemistry" snark. The author doesn't even bother to elaborate on the technical limitations that they remarked on, opting instead to just hurl insults for no reason.

<comment><USER26> I was hoping that the author would go into how to do tone mapping correctly.

> ask WHY games are the way they are, though.

To add to your point, the main reason for "bad HDR" in FPS games is for simulating eye adaptation. Screens don't have 1,000,000:1 constrast ratio and can't shine as bright as the sun (we wouldn't want them to). This means that games are forced to approximate this effect - inevitably resulting in shortcomings.

Furthermore, game development is a race against time. You have milliseconds to render the scene and apply tone mapping. It may very well be mathematically possible to create automated tone mapping that would make a cinematographer proud, but can you make an algorithm that completes in less than 1 millisecond? I doubt it.

To my point, there are mods on PC that replace the tone mapper (I think ReShade does this) and they absolutely destroy your framerate - however the results are absolutely gorgeous if you know what you're doing.

<comment><USER27> > To add to your point, the main reason for "bad HDR" in FPS games is for > simulating eye adaptation...

How is that different from what photographs do?

> Furthermore, game development is a race against time. You have milliseconds > to render the scene and apply tone mapping.

Maybe I know just enough to be ignorant of the topic, but LUTs are just lookup tables. People working in film apply LUTs to the footage they're watching in realtime on normal PC hardware. Fragment shaders have been common in games for years. Last year I was working on a VR project (targeting 11ms per frame) and I think the post-processing took between 0.25 and 1.5ms--any more an it would have been dropped). For a desktop game having 16 or 30ms to render many fewer pixels is an eternity, comparatively. The only difference between a LUT and ICC profile (which most OSes support out of the box) is that for ICC profiles are mean to be calibrated against either an input or output--they're used everywhere in realtime.

I've never actually used ReShade, so I had to look it up. It does way more than color correcting. Depth of field, ambient occlusion, antialiasing are completely separate from tone mapping and notoriously computationally expensive (not just in video games, but in film as well). I also think since third-parties are writing them, they're not always tuned to be performant.

<comment><USER26> > How is that different from what photographs do?

A typically developed HDR photo is a single sample following the time at which the eye has adapted. There are [hopefully] no over- or under-exposed areas.

The dynamic range in HDR games is often used to simulate the entire process of eye adaptation. It's a function over time that intentionally creates over- or under-exposure some of the time.

<comment><USER27> I still don't see why animating the exposure explains why there's "bad HDR" in games (high contrast and over saturation)? I haven't implemented it or read any papers on the subject, but the games I've played don't look that much different than auto-exposure on camcorders in the 90's (or your phone today). For actual cameras it's more difficult because you need to guess and adjust the aperture or shutter instead of having a HDR image in a buffer and deciding how to generate a LDR image to present. Calculating the exposure (especially if you're animating it and only willing to go so far in one direction or the other), should be fairly quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've always said (as a joke) that all game developers must have bad eyesight and dirty glasses.

Everything is blurry, you can't see far, you get dirt over your vision and there are glares and lens-flares all over.

What's worst is that this is done on purpose and on almost all the games. They must think that this is what real life look like.

<comment><USER29> I rarely play games but the most recent game I played was Alien: Isolation. It had been quite a while since I played a game before that so I was surprised to see a lot of these things on by default. Specifically, chromatic aberration. Why the hell would anyone add in a setting for that? I get that they were going for the Super8/VHS type of look but it's just really distracting. I forgot what the other settings were but I turned off a lot of those junk visual effects and then things looked beautiful.

<comment><USER30> I also can't stand chromatic aberration in games - especially because it's so freakishly exaggerated compared to actual CA you would experience with old video/photo gear.

A lens that completely separates color channels is defective. It was defective in 1950 and it's defective today, so unless your goal was to replicate the look of hopelessly broken hardware, it's in no way "vintage".

Which I think goes more generally into my issue with game graphics - <USER2> taking of interesting effects (depth of field, chromatic aberration, lens flares, etc) and cranking it up to 11 for its own sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> From part 0, they make the claim and question:

> So why the heck do most games look so bad?

And then they go on to pick a game that people specifically calling out for looking amazing: HZD.

In fact, the problem seems to be:

> But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a > photograph.

To which I would reply: because they are video games. A photograph doesn't pass as film, and film doesn't pass as a photograph (though the nature of the two, film essentially being a lot of photographs). A video game must serve a different purpose than a photograph or a film. The players interact with the game, and therefore the intent and purpose is different. Glares on the screen aren't just there to add lens flare, but to make it harder to see because that's part of the challenge. It is harder to see, and you have to deal with that to overcome the challenge. That can be offset by keeping the sun to your back. Same with grime in the screen, or other such things. You want to highlight the things players need to react to, and in such a way that allow them to react quickly.

There is so much more, and yet so far this article is only referencing the pure look and seems to ignore the goals of the medium. I'll reserve judgement until I read the next parts of the articles, but until then, I can't help but wonder if this really matters.

<comment><USER32> Most games attempt to look realistic, and they fail. They definitely _try_ to look like film, so comparing them to film is perfectly fair: it is an impossible standard that masochist, mannerist or hopeless game art directors have freely chosen for their projects and by which they deserve and _demand_ to be judged.

Failure at realistic game graphics is so common, so taken for granted, that the scale of artistic accomplishment shifts downwards: if HZD looks only slightly bad, not constantly, and without disgusting the player too much, it's considered to have "amazing" graphics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a > photograph.

Until graphics and animation are photorealistic I prefer my games to look videogamey. All those 4 screenshots are beautiful and I wouldn't want them any other way.

</comment><comment><USER34> As a fairly avid gamer, but there is a reason why my top 10 games are all fairly mediocre in the graphics department. High end Triple-AAA games with "Great" graphics usually lack depth in their mechanics, and while this isn't always true, it happens enough to keep me from enjoying them.

There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating > playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible > mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.

Those are all sandbox games that you effectively never stop playing. People tell me that there's a story and an endgame in Skyrim, but I've played a few hundred hours without doing any main-line quests past the first city. Mount&Blade I've sunk even more into - there isn't even the pretense of a story there, so you're pretty much on your own if you want to role-play, or just take in the enjoyment of riding around, hacking at people, and looting their corpses.

<comment><USER34> Those were just 3 of the more mainstream games with semi-limited graphics I could think of, but you're right they do share a sandbox style. Overwatch would be another example of a game where they put "good enough" graphics combined with much more refined mechanics (depending on who you ask, this last patch...eh) to achieve success

Anyway, the point I was going for the last thing we need is having them spend even more effort trying to make pretty looking but mediocre playing games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> While on the subject of graphics in games...

Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation).

Corners don't look like that: [http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/](http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/)

(Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)

<comment><USER36> Latch on to that idea -- corners don't look like that -- and follow it to its logical conclusion: no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality.

That's a huge leap, but it has the benefit of being true.

(To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)

<comment><USER37> > (To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of > fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to > be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost > any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)

Out of curiosity is this from something? it sounds like you're citing something and for realtime I'd agree. I think people are fooled everyday by raytraced images (movie cg etc).

> no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable > from reality.

I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it _fast_.

<comment><USER36> _I 'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast._

If all I do here today is hatch an egg of doubt in your head, I would be delighted. Someone needs to carry the torch.. My life has turned to other interests.

It's the central problem. It's as hard as AGI, and it might be as impactful as the invention of the airplane.

Think of it. Fully-simulated video, indistinguishable from reality.

In many ways, it was my first love. The desire to be a gamedev drove me to learn programming. I ended up a graphics dev -- Carmack's old path. My job was to make a certain game engine look better. What an innocent problem... 12 years later, I still feel the pull, the need to blow off everything in my life and bend a computer to my will. To our will. The human mind has never once achieved this goal. And it was the perfect problem... I never cared much about fame or money. But to be _the first_. Think of it... How can you not want to spend the rest of your life on this? The solution is out there, taunting us. Everyone is pursuing physics, when all we need to do is pursue the fact that video cameras can already generate images that look identical to real life.

The ancients have made up stories about the sky and stars since long before civilization. Put yourself in their shoes, if they even had shoes.

Look up. It's the night sky, far brighter than anything we can see today. Imagine staring up at the infinite complexity, wondering, how does it work? Why do the stars go the way they go? We tell stories; could one of the stories be right?

A few millennia later, one person had an idea: What if we watch the stars very, very carefully, and collect the stories very carefully? We could compare the movements of the stars to the stories, so that the alternative theories might be distinguished from one another.

This was the key to modern science, and the root of wisdom. When you stop thinking about what everyone else is doing, you're free to hit on solutions that everyone else overlooked.

And think of the feeling you'd get when you finally solved it. Can you imagine? You'd get the same rush as the Wright brothers, or Ford when he made the assembly line, or McCarthy when he stumbled across Lisp.

If you or anyone else intends to take on this challenge, know this:

The fact that no one believes you when you say "No one has ever done this, and no one has any idea how to do it," is your biggest advantage.

It means you're free to spend the next five years figuring out that solution that everyone else missed because they were too busy chasing the pipe dream that if you throw enough physics+time at a computer, it will produce synthetic video that fools people into thinking it's real.

The moment people realize that it's probably not _that_ hard, you'll lose your advantage, because every top tech company will start exploring your problem space. Like if in 1902 you'd hinted to a top university the gist of Einstein's thesis. No one would take you seriously. Lucky for you.

So, what's the secret technique? Well, if I knew that, I'd have fulfilled my 12-year dream. But I know a few things that will move you (12-N) years toward the goal.

There is one rule, and one rule alone. You have to force yourself to stay true to it, or else nothing else you do will matter. Here it is:

If you get a dozen people together, and show them a mix of 10 real videos and 10 simulated videos, and those videos are reasonably complex, like clips from a nature documentary, then 12 out of 12 people will effortlessly call out your fake videos as fake and your real videos as real. It's not even close. That's how far away we are from the goal of fully-simulated video indistinguishable from reality.

Maybe I've hooked you at this point. Maybe not. But if anyone comes up with a way to fool those 12 people so completely that their responses are no better than random chance, you win.

Let's call this the "Carmack criterion." If you tried administering the above test to a dozen clones of Carmack, here's how they'd sound: "That's a fake. That one's real. Fake. Fake. Real. Real." No matter how much ornament or showmanship you throw into the video, you can't fool Carmack. He'll report whatever his eyes are telling him.

And as of 2017, he'll be right 100% of the time. His eyes would shout: "None of those fakes were even close to real! Are you kidding? One of the real videos was of a lion taking down a gazelle. I know every artist in the gamedev industry. None of them have ever produced anything approaching that level of quality, even working together."

That, and that alone, is the game. Literally nothing else matters. If you can fool people until their responses are statistically identical to RNG, you've done it. You're world-famous. Yer a wizard.

Corollary: you can use the Carmack criterion like a compass for every decision you face. Should you research physically-based rendering, or try to apply machine learning? The latter seems unpromising. Yet Hollywood has been administering the Carmack test to millions of people, most recently with Avatar, which completely rules out physically-based rendering. So we know to spend zero time on it.

As you can see, that razor is so sharp that it will cut away every illusion you might try to cling to that humans are anywhere close to achieving the Carmack criterion. Or that some smart hacker somewhere has a pretty good idea of how to achieve it, or that it's just a matter of letting computers advance another few decades, or any other false reason that those around you like to tell themselves.

But if mainstream ideas are dead-ends, then what should we research?

I hesitate to give concrete suggestions, because the history of science demonstrates that progress isn't made like that. Whatever the real solution is, it's far beyond anything you or I can imagine today. People were forced by mathematics to believe that planets' orbits were elliptical. An ellipse is the only shape that makes the numbers come out right. Yet how many of our ancestors came up with that idea? Even by accident, it's probably too bizarre for anyone to seriously consider it. Not without mathematics.

Yet that's a positive statement: It meant that if someone _were_ audacious enough to trust in mathematics alone, they _could_ determine the right answer. The solution was always there, waiting for you to find it.

To make any progress at all, your ideas will need to seem shockingly different. The whole world has spent two decades going over every inch of physically-based rendering -- presumably hoping that if they put on a different pair of glasses, maybe they'll spot anything other than a mountain of evidence that it doesn't work.

So you _have_ to let yourself consider _every angle_ , no matter how strange.

720 frames of 720p video. That's all you need. That's 30 seconds of HD footage. Get a computer to conjure up those 720 frames. Summon DaVinci's ghost, and you win.

Whenever someone finally solves this, you'll think "Oh, right. That technique makes sense." But it only makes sense because you see it works. Till then, that correct answer will seem to be a complete waste of time.

Think of Airbnb, and how awful their idea sounded. Yet when someone spent a couple years exploring the problem space, shazam! Out popped a billion-dollar company.

Since there is ~zero chance these ideas are anywhere close to the right answer, here are the two avenues I left off with:

1\. A video camera generates images that pass the Carmack criterion. Ask yourself: why do those videos look real? And why is it so important to judge video, not photos? (It's crucial.)

This is key: Are you absolutely certain you should be ignoring the fact that any old camcorder's videos look real? Whip out your phone. Take a video. That video looks real. Why? Quantify the difference vs footage of the latest game engine.

(Try to avoid using the latest movies as a basis of comparison, because movies mix real-life footage into their VFX. Our criteria of "fully-simulated video" is strict by design: it keeps us honest about our progress. Especially to ourselves.)

2\. After meditating for a year on why crappy cellphone videos look real, you may start thinking along the lines of "how can I write a program to mimic the essence of that realism?" It looks real because the colors are _exactly_ right. Think of evolution, and how long we've been evolving. That whole time, every single one of our ancestors were staring at images that they believed were real. Our brains are wired to notice even a hint of strangeness. ("When we notice there's something strange about a video, what exactly is going on there? What do we mean by that?" is another "fun" question.)

Now, wouldn't it be handy if someone knew how to write a program that can mimic real-life data? If only such a technique were possible... We even have an infinite stream of pre-classified data to feed it: phones and webcams.

Hmmm. :)

<comment><USER38> You've probably looked at this, but maybe it would help to avoid thinking "out of the box", and try it more incrementally: create an extremely simple cellphone video of an "easy" scene, like a teapot sitting on linoleum or something. Then try to recreate it -perfectly- using computer graphics. Get it to the level where you can literally compare the pixels for each frame.

Maybe that could bring you closer to understanding what the important factors are that the current graphics pipeline can't do. Why is it hard to get the pixels in the simulated video be the same color as the cell phone ones? Are the materials off? The shadows? If you can't even make the teapot look real, then you've zeroed in on something fundamental that's still going to bite you when you're busy trying to rig antelope skeletons.

<comment><USER16> There's already one standard scene / benchmark like that, the Cornell Box: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_box)

Of course it's ridiculously simple, so you may want to increase the bar a little to impress GP :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Compelling article, but I can't help but feel the author hasn't appreciated some of these games on an HDR capable screen. They call out Battlefield 1 and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which look stunning in HDR mode on an LG OLED screen. BF1 only got HDR mode implemented in a patch fairly recently, and before then was unplayable on an OLED with its deep blacks, it was a contrast fest with no luminance range what so ever. After the patch however, that all changed.

I've never played HZD in anything _but_ HDR mode (in fact, I bought the game specifically to test HDR) so admittedly I don't know the difference there. All I know is in HDR mode, HZD is one of the prettiest games I've ever played, with fantastic colors and brilliant transitions in luminance.

HDR I feel is one of those things you just can't appreciate in screenshots or comparison videos. You have to get a good screen (I can't see myself coming back from OLED, it's – no pun intended – a game changer) capable of HDR and just appreciate it for yourself, it's really something.

I'm sure it'll be even better as technology matures and game developers become more familiar with it, and as well the market penetration of HDR capable screens increase, but to say they don't know what they're doing now seems a bit of a stretch. Especially if all you have to go on are screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe I just play too many video games, but I don't think any of those "terrible" screenshots look bad. If anything, the foggy image from Breath of the Wild looks worse than any of them. What am I missing? What is supposed to be bad about these?

<comment><USER41> Some of it is just one's personal taste, but I would say that a practical difference is that I find it difficult to pick out details in the images called out as "bad". My eyes feel overwhelmed by the huge shifts in contrast and it's hard to visually identify objects in the very dark areas and the very shiny, bright areas.

I also get a very strange sense of depth from those images -- it feels like everything is either very close or very far away, without having a sense of how far apart objects actually are.

In comparison, in the BOTW screenshot, I can clearly identify objects of interest (a shrine, a tower, a volcano, a river, a bridge) and have a sense of where they are compared to each other and myself.

That said, I feel like it's not a completely fair comparison -- the "bad" images all seem to have the camera in a dark area looking out and up into a bright area, while the BOTW camera is on top of an exposed mountaintop looking out into the sunset. The lighting is going to look a lot different regardless. However, the HZD image after _that_ is really quite garish and harder to justify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The first game to feature (pseudo) HDR was actually _Shadow of the Colossus_ , and it's still a beautiful game _despite_ its washed out colors, super high contrast, and "that dynamic exposure adjustment effect nobody likes". It may have been the template for most or all of the "bad" games in the article.

These effects are beautiful in _Colossus_ because they were chosen for artistic reasons and they are artistically used. The lack of color saturation complements the game's lush, but somehow bleak and foreboding, natural environment. The extreme contrast highlights the differences between the dark and dank indoor environments of the various ruins and temples, and the raw untamed wilderness that lies outside them. And the dynamic exposure adjustment effect is, vaguely, supposed to parallel the main character's eyes adjusting as he moves from one kind of environment to another. (Either that or just "hey look, we can do this on a PS2!")

It's kinda like how the parallax line-scrolling effects in _Shadow of the Beast_ were amazing in that particular game at that particular time, but take the same effect in a shitty game -- like, say, _Bubsy_ \-- and it just looks awful and tiresome.

</comment><comment><USER43> Isn't this just a matter of taste? There are a lot of tone mapping algorithms everybody know about. So it's just a matter of taste choosing the one you like.

Edit: As far as I know render engines use the complete dynamic range until the last step which converts it to a 16 bit output range. So maybe games can let the user decide which tone mapping algorithm to use.

<comment><USER43> *24 bit output range

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The point of most video games is to be distinct, not to look like reality. Furthermore, they use high-contrast to help distinguish game elements. Games are not movies.

<comment><USER45> Came looking for this. Unnatural contrast is good in games because it can help players distinguish different set pieces easier.

This is also why a lot of people prefer older FPS titles or games like TF2 used stylized profiles of the characters that stand out. In some games, you want interpretation of the game scene to be a challenge, but in most games, you want players to easily tell what they are looking at. Using high contrast / distinct models / distinct animations / color differentiation all help to achieve that.

<comment><USER46> Photos and film need to be readable too. I think gaming culture has poor taste in art for historical reasons. Here's some games that were called "gorgeous":

[https://www.dualshockers.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/COW-...](https://www.dualshockers.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/COW-IW_E3_Ship-Assault-Zero-G-Combat_WM.jpg)

[http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png](http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png)

[http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust- an-...](http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-elysian- tail-xbox-360-1345475788-020.jpg)

But there's a small minority of games that do look great:

[http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gall...](http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gallery/the- order-1886-release-day-screens/the-order_-1886_20150215102558.jpg)

[https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow- knight/screensh...](https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow- knight/screenshots/hollow-knight-screenshot-0.jpg)

[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/sites/3/2015/...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/sites/3/2015/08/cupheadcarrot.jpg)

<comment><USER47> > Screenshot of Shovel Knight

I don't think it's fair to put Shovel Knight in your list. Yacht Club Games tried really hard to recreate a NES aesthetics and constraints (limited color palette, sprites, etc...) with careful deviations when it is really necessary [1]. I don't think you'll find more aesthetically pleasant game in the NES library.

[1] [https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383...](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php)

<comment><USER46> Yeah, NES games looked pretty bad. I can find only a couple screenshots that don't make my eyes bleed:

[http://www.defunctgames.com/pic/review-batmannes- big-1.jpg](http://www.defunctgames.com/pic/review-batmannes-big-1.jpg)

[https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/k/kirby-s- ad...](https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/k/kirby-s-adventure- epf/kirby-s-adventure_12.png)

Hence my mention of historical reasons that are holding game aesthetics back. I think making good art requires criticizing your childhood tastes, not following them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I hate this idea that it should be photo realistic.

        > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph.

Thanks, if they didn't looked at least "videogamey" I wouldn't have any interest. Stop this terrible trend of being a film!

<comment><USER24> The point is that the lack of photorealism in the given examples is not intentional, but happens because of a lack of proper attention to the HDR aspects of rendering. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally deviate from photorealism in order to achieve a specific effect.

<comment><USER48> HZD is intentional the way it is and it is perfectly good on my not-HDR tv. So he is missing the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some pretty bold and controversial (and subjective) statements, but I think the author makes a good case! Very interesting article.

<comment><USER50> "ventspace" indeed, but I agree--it's an interesting perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Honestly, I'm tired of the race for games to just 'look' better. Most of the time it seems as if it is a detriment to actual gameplay and frame rate.

I would definitely prefer games to look bad (or preferably stylized in a way that works for the game) over having a somewhat realistic looking game ( only when your standing still so the frame rate doesn't dip) and terrible mechanics and a bad story.

Far to much information and talk about making games look better and very little about how to make games actually better. Modern gaming to me has become the same as clicking the X on hundreds of popups from your windows 98 machine. Just with somewhat realistic looking ugly faces instead of X's.

</comment><comment><USER9> Related to that, colors of videos on the internet (and YouTube) are always kinda ugly and (I think) not very faithful of what the color artists intended to show...

I'm not sure but I think one of the issues are from the 16 - 235 channel remapping

<comment><USER52> It's probably more likely due to the fact that codecs for videos on YouTube tend to have lower resolution in the red and blue channels, which leads to very bad blocky artifacting around bright red and bright blue areas.

<comment><USER53> I think everything else (Blu-Ray, DVD, cable TV) is using the same technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It makes sense for artists to concentrate on the details of how games look, and this article provides some good insight into that world.

But using stark moral terms for aesthetic judgements seems rather insular at best. When I think about games like Minecraft, Factorio, RimWorld, and so on, I wonder if maybe imitating movie-quality graphics is really as important as the author thinks it is? It's only a small part of the experience.

<comment><USER55> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the author was protesting against the misuse of techniques for imitating movie quality graphics. He held up BOTW for not attempting such imitation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The author makes a point of Nintendo opting out of HDR but does not realize thats due to hardware limits not allowing deferred shading. The HDR techniques he does not like are all made possible by the use of deferred shading. These techniques may be sometimes used to overky stylize the look but it is undisputed they create more realistic images.

<comment><USER57> Promit Roy has been being knowledgeable about graphics since before I was in college. I kind of doubt he "doesn't realize" it. The dude is really, really good.

And HDR doesn't really do anything to materially aid what he's calling out as well done in the first place. It's ancillary. It's not important. What's important is actual artistic intent and structure. That's what's lacking, along with a misunderstanding of why certain techniques work in film and don't when they are uncritically applied to games.

<comment><USER56> I dont know what kind of HDR you refer to. My point was that for realistc rendering or physically based, whatever you might call it, a linear workflow (light calc in linearized space) is crucial. It is very important for the artist too if you aim at realism. Of course it brings challenged such as exposure correction and managing dyamics. These challenges are not yet fully solved but to say we ought to abandon HDR and go back to SRGB is at least questionable... we might as well go back to mode 13.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Does anybody know what's the technical ground for some games to have dark areas turn brighter (typically, of a squashed, dark, green/blue) instead of darker?

I remember one game ("Through the woods") which had this problem in a very aggressive form. It was very visible while playing, but it's hard to find a screenshot.

Here, for example, the house on the left (but also the cabin in the center:

[http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0...](http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0ff9c9c29ba576d021b2332a3547800a35f2.600x338.jpg?t=1477404343)

What's the exact issue? Is it a tone mapping problem? I'm curious, because I have a rather good monitor, and some dark games (eg. "Alien: Isolation") are equally dark, but don't look as bad as this.

<comment><USER43> Looks like environment lighting to me.

I'm not sure this is the case in your example, but a lot of render engines use an environment light when rays don't detect collision.

So the camera is looking at the wall of the house and bounces into oblivion. Therefore the environment values are used. And since the stones of the house are gray a lot of environment light bounces back to the camera. But when the camera is looking at the trees a lot of rays bounce to leaves and the ground returning almost no light back to the camera.

I would even say that your example looks realistic (although way to dark).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Half Life: The Lost Coast, this is all your fault!

</comment><comment><USER60> I play World Of Tanks and tried every one of their mappings (forget what they call them). Even the one I can tolerate makes the tanks look like toys in a sandbox. Never feels like a real tank.

</comment><comment><USER61> HDR is the new "next-gen Brown!"

</comment><comment><USER62> As HDR panels used for TVs 'trickle down' to PC displays the HDR part of the problem will solve itself. Perhaps then people will focus more on color grading (although I suspect over-saturation will always be a staple in some genres).

</comment><comment><USER63> This can really be attributed to a general rule of thumb in game development: aesthetics are more important than graphics.

</comment><comment><USER64> I would guess this isn't a priority for the industry because gamers themselves don't care. Case in point: gaming monitors. Gaming monitors advertise high- refresh rates and low input lag but rarely color quality. What percentage of gamers use wide gamut monitors or even perform color calibration?

<comment><USER65> FWIW, I'm a colorist and have very expensive color critical monitors and calibration probes. For GUI monitors I've started recommending gaming panels for suites that don't want to invest in professional graphics displays. Once calibrated these monitors are surprisingly accurate and hold the calibration well (at least as good as professional displays many times more expensive - though still a far cry from color critical displays). The expanded refresh rates are a nice bonus for eye relief as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Some films are absolutely just as contrast-y as these HDR images. In particular, Fujiilm RDP-III slide film. See: [https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/](https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/)

But yes, Arri does have a beautiful soft look along with Fuji digital cameras, and plenty of film stocks do as well. It all depends on the tastes. Gamers aren't going for soft reality. A lot of hard-edged gamers are going to go for the high-contrast, desaturated ExTreMe ChaLLeNgE look.

</comment><comment><USER67> The resident evil screenshot looks incredibly realistic. I thought that was a real photograph placed there to contrast reality with games. Until I read the paragraph below it.

</comment><comment><USER68> It's amazing how many commenters seem to be embarrassing themselves by trying to be the first to wildly misunderstand the problems being discussed and reduce them to trite memes. You're not even disagreeing with the thrust of the article in your vehement objections.

Yes, this indicates the article was poorly written. I advise you move on rather than reflexively attack nothing.</comment>


Dean Kamen's 'LED Nation' - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/dean-kamens-led-nation/

<comment><AUTHOR> Dean Kamen is awesome. He has an amphibious vehicle and replica of Stonehenge on his island!

<http://www.longislandlighthouses.com/ndpics.htm>

<http://flickr.com/photos/timoreilly/2892279349/>

<http://flickr.com/photos/timoreilly/2893125074/>

<http://flickr.com/photos/timoreilly/2892284045/>

</comment><comment><USER2> It's really nice to have Dean Kamen as a validator for LED lighting. Our startup has developed the brightest and most beautiful LED lamp available at any price, and we plan to sell it at a price that is really nice. We are currently raising our seed round and are located in Ottawa and Montreal which is very close to Mr. Kamen's workshop.

I wonder if he would be interested in what we are doing...

For those new to the space, LEDs are the future of light. For over 50 years they have followed a Moore's law type of geometric rate of improvement in energy-efficiency, brightness, and cost. (2x improvement every 18-24 months) They are now competitive with CFL and will be the obvious choice within a few short years. Sooner if we succeed.

Learn more: <http://www.arkalumen.com>

<comment><USER3> <http://superbrightleds.com/edison_globe.html> is currently selling LED products for homes and vehicles currently. Though they are expensive.

What sort of area of the market are you planning to target with your product?

Full disclosure: I previously worked for superbrightleds several years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LED products may still be expensive, but they are easy to use and great to DIY. They are also perfect for locations (boats, sheds, etc) where you can't get AC power easily. I have a basic page here <http://www.cedarlakeinstruments.com/products/led.html> to show just how easy it is to build your own LED lighting. I am (slowly) adding more content to it as time permits.

If anyone has any ideas for content, contact me.

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem with CFLs & LEDs is not that they theoretically last a long time, it's that they're electrically fragile. Incandescents can take worse electrical conditions a lot better, and thus can last a lot longer.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I've tended to find that CFLs last longer with dodgy electrics than incandescents do. I lived in a flat three years ago where no incadescent lasted more than 6 months, but the flourescent bulbs were fine.</comment></comment>


Pee and poo and the language of health - <AUTHOR> https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and-poo-and-the-language-of-health <comment><AUTHOR> I'm submitting this because this is a reasonably detailed look at how they chose which words are accessible. Accessibility is something that is mentioned often on HN, but rarely in the context of low-literacy.</comment>