Unknown Horizons: An open-source 2D realtime strategy game - <AUTHOR> http://www.unknown-horizons.org/ <comment><USER2> Growing up, we always had Macs, so when my grandma got an old Windows box from a surplus auction, I went to OfficeDepot and bought Anno 1602, a game no one I knew had ever heard of, for $9.

Actually it was a pretty awesome game, despite having different controls from every other RTS; the focus was more on trade than military which was pretty cool. They ended up making a few higher budget sequels as well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_(series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_\(series\))

Unknown Horizons is basically a clone of the original Anno 1602, and I've been sort of following the development for 6 or 7 years, always thinking "that would be the perfect open source project for me to contribute to" but sadly I haven't really spent much time playing it and haven't written any code for it.

<comment><USER3> I've never managed to get into the Anno series, but in Germany all the Anno games were _huge_. Like "Call of Duty"-huge, not in sales numbers, of course, but in mindshare.

Pretty fascinating how games don't necessarily cross cultural borders. "Patrician" was also huge, and there were lots and lots of similar games. Also football managers like the "Bundesliga Manager" series.

<comment><USER4> Actually, Anno 1602 sold 2 million units, which is very much for a PC-game from the 90s and on CoD-level, adjusting for market size.

But in general you're right of course. The other parts of the series sold less, and there are a bunch of other great german games that weren't even registered on the international market. Not sure that this is still a problem though, with steam and internet distribution in general those culture specific games maybe disappear.

<comment><USER3> Those football managers and most of those German economy simulations have already disappeared, precisely because the German-speaking market (D, A, CH) is considered to be too small nowadays.

<comment><USER5> They just have been replaced by games like "Farming Simulator".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love Unknown Horizons as one of the rare desktop games that's both open- source and built with Python.

On revisiting my past contributions to it some years ago, realized it could use more publicity. Kudos to the team for maintaining it all these years.

Direct github link: [https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown- horizons](https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons)

</comment><comment><USER6> Code repo [https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown- horizons/](https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Also checkout 0 A.D. - [https://play0ad.com/](https://play0ad.com/)

<comment><USER8> I play this game every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They are looking for translators for the next release:

[http://www.unknown-horizons.org/devblog/115/114/Unknown- Hori...](http://www.unknown-horizons.org/devblog/115/114/Unknown-Horizons- needs-your-help/)

<comment><USER10> Direct link: [https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great. As a kid learning programming (hell, as an adult programmer) I wish I would have had access to open source games! Kudos to the team.

<comment><USER12> Keep an eye on GitHub's Game Off then! [0]

[0] [https://github.com/showcases/game-off- winners](https://github.com/showcases/game-off-winners)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else having graphic bugs in the sprites on the Mac? Makes it sadly unplayable as text/icons are often unreadable.

<comment><USER14> Could you open a new issue here (with a screenshot if possible)? [https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown- horizons/issues](https://github.com/unknown-horizons/unknown-horizons/issues)

A while ago I got access to a mac, so we should be able to test things better now. Contributers come and go, I'm not even sure we have someone for macOS packages right now.

I'm not really using macOS, but I just tried the last release, and I think we might be having the same problems.

I'll try to test the current git version, since the last release was in 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Remind me of FreeCol [1]

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

<comment><USER10> It's more like Anno than Civ

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me on the face of Banished

</comment><comment><USER17> Do I have to learn python to contribute?

<comment><USER9> You could contribute artwork or translations.

<comment><USER10> They are using weblate for translations [https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/uh/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install unknown-horizons

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there any MMO or multiplayer elements in this game?

<comment><USER14> Yes, you can play the game together with others.

We do have reports of games getting out of sync though. The multiplayer code definitely needs more love, but there is only so much time. For the next release, we will evaluate the current state of multiplayer and decide if we can fix the issues. Otherwise it's probable that multiplayer will be a focus in the next year.

(I've been contributing to the project from time to time in 2012/2013 and getting more active recently, hence me writing "we".)</comment></comment>


Canary in the Code Mine: Coal miners learning to code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/canary-in-the-code-mine-903884eca853 <comment><USER2> After eight years in mining I made the jump to coding. However, my coding quickly changed to infosec. So definitely miners can make this jump. This is highly biased, but I would say that many blue collar workers bring a very different work ethic as compared to other workers in the software industry. Miners especially have a comradery that I have not heard of in other industries. In addition to this 80+ hour work weeks were definitely the norm in many mining industries. This type of work ethic has somewhat set me apart from many of my peers.

<comment><USER3> I feel like your comment and the article in question are completely anecdotal. Sure, a subset of miners can learn to code. You can't argue against that. But, that really means absolutely nothing to the big picture.

The real question is, what percentage of the entire out-of-work blue collar worker population can make the jump? I would agree with Bloomberg, it's probably fairly low.

But, I might not be fully recognizing the software engineering jobs from huge companies that are vastly less demanding than your typical SV "rock star developer" job. Maybe there is enough of a market there...

<comment><USER4> > Sure, a subset of miners can learn to code.

Anyone can learn to code, it isn't hard what we do. Granted some do push the boundaries, but that is a tiny % of what actual programmers do

<comment><USER5> >Anyone can learn to code, it isn't hard what we do. Granted some do push the boundaries, but that is a tiny % of what actual programmers do

Anyone?

I attended a selective prep school. Something like 99% of people there went on to university.

Certain students, who'd later finish say, medical school, and go on and be doctors, were completely unable to 'get' coding. Really basic stuff, some Pascal. Mostly women.

They treated it as 'magic'. Couldn't do anything on their own really, even though both teachers and boys tried to explain.

And here it was students at a selective preparatory school. Above average intelligence mostly, in a genetically privileged region(eastern Europe).

"Anyone"...

..sigh.

<comment><USER6> They failed because they thought it was magic and probably no one ever stopped to show them that it wasn't.

The skills necessary to be an average developer are pretty minimal. Basic math, literacy, organization, basic problem solving, patience and persistence. Communication helps but it's obviously not a requirement as you've displayed.

<comment><USER5> >The skills necessary to be an average developer are pretty minimal. Basic math, literacy, organization, basic problem solving, patience and persistence. Communication helps but it's obviously not a requirement as you've displayed.

I'm skeptical of this.

All of the things you say are things an average IQ person could have.

Are there any established developers with an IQ of 100? Possibly, but very few. IQ correlates very well with the ability to solve complex problems, which means there are few average IQ people who can solve such problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really liked this article. My father has been a blue collar worker his entire life and I've considered teaching him how to code in the past to help me on freelance work / side projects.

This really opened my eyes. He spent so much of his time teaching me how to change breaks on a car, change oil, hang drywall in my house, do plumbing, lay brick and pour concrete and any number of things I've done to my house - it's time to circle back and teach him what I do and extend his working career a bit. He's never had a hard time looking for a job; but why wait until he has to.

</comment><comment><USER8> Coal miners could probably "learn to dent" too, but dentists have set it up so dental school is expensive, exclusive, and requires a four-year degree to gain admission. That's why the cost of dental care is soaring and the median salary for dentists in the US is now $140-150k[1] a year. By contrast, the wages of software engineers (sorry, coders) have been flat for decades, despite a supposedly dire "skills gap" that tech companies cite as justification for expanding the H-1B visa program and making "coding" part of public school curricula.

[1] [http://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/dentist/salary](http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dentist/salary)

</comment><comment><USER9> >But it's just as important that they screw around with Unity in their spare time. It's just as important they know he's speaking emoji when he says "sad face" in a sentence, and that they crack up at programmer memes. It's the subtler side of coder culture, the exuberant and unrepentant nerdom. And it turns out the assessment was incredibly adept at finding the miners who could be part of the club.

Blech. I know what they're getting at but programmer in jokes? Really? I don't think that's what we need more of.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a very inspiring story. As a reminder though, this kind of "rural sourcing" isn't a totally new concept.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=ruralsourcing](https://www.google.com/search?q=ruralsourcing)

</comment><comment><USER11> I conjecture that if you take any random subset of the population, about 10% of them will be able to program. It's a curious bug that seems to afflict certain people for no apparent reason and spare others.

But the beards will definitely help, that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER12> When did exactly "programmers" become "coders" and why?

<comment><USER13> When journalists started worrying about their job security.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there no way other than remembering 'Passwords'? - <AUTHOR>
 We are increasingly subscribing to new services daily and the list of passwords keep growing. Each provider has their own rules which force us to create new ones just to forget the following day. And additional pain from those who force to reset every 90 days without allowing to use previous ones.<p>'LastPass' and 'FirstPass' and 'SecondPass' and all such utilities have slightly solved the problem, but are you happy?<p>Where is the world heading with identity management? Is there no other way? <comment><USER2> It's about the level you want to trust 3rd party. Many people already trust Google / Facebook / Apple for auth and others just use 'LastPast', 'FirstPass' and 'SecondPass'. And for a clarity, most consumer grade biometrics is at funny low level.

I don't have a reason to think there will be anything better than new Apple ID (which protects your email). Therefore, why would I (as a user) use any new auth method? From my point of view, the auth problem is solved.

90 day policy is bullshit and even Microsoft started discouraging it. The solution is to abandon the 90 days policy not to reimplement the wheel of auth.</comment>


Local privilege escalation on many OS (CVE-2018-8897) using MOV/POP SS - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z9p2iZuysTmkPIC2BdcDbQOCSnVwhaHfrPdzGiStLHI <comment><AUTHOR> White-paper: [http://everdox.net/popss.pdf](http://everdox.net/popss.pdf)

Code: [https://github.com/nmulasmajic/syscall_exploit_CVE-2018-8897](https://github.com/nmulasmajic/syscall_exploit_CVE-2018-8897)

Saw it at BH. Was a great talk/interesting research; surprised it didn't get much attention.</comment>


A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Digital Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.architectureofradio.com/ <comment><USER2> That's cool, but it seems to be based upon a database of radios, Wifi, etc. How hard would it be to make something that picks up on the actual wireless networks and plots something similar? I imagine some movement for telemetry would have to be involved.

<comment><USER3> This is a neat project where they make a very one dimensional rendering of actual WiFi signals.

[http://www.yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light- painting-...](http://www.yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting- wifi/)

Not quite the same, but the only real world instance that came to mind.</comment></comment>


Google acquires FameBit to connect YouTube creators with marketers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/11/google-acquires-famebit-to-connect-youtube-creators-with-brands/ <comment><USER2> One thing that is impressive about YouTube versus other social media platforms has been YouTube's willingness to help content creators to make money.

There's a path for people with a minimum of marketing savvy to start making revenue off of their videos.

Compare this to Facebook/Instagram which requires individuals to find other ways of getting paid while those platforms profit directly off of your content.

Makes me wish for a "cooperative" Facebook where all content creators (posts, pictures, etc) get a slice of the ad revenue much like YouTube.

<comment><USER3> Facebook has to solve the content piracy problem that they have. Drives me crazy when an original video goes viral and then you see other pages upload the video as their own..

I wish there were human editors matching videos, giving credit to the original author's page/upload. At least tackle the videos with 1,000,000+ views..

<comment><USER4> Yes, absolutely. If I share a video on FB I always take the time to try and dig-up the original source. It usually ends-up being on YouTube. Not that hard to do. I wish FB didn't obfuscate and people took the time to do this. If anything because it might represent revenue for the author and they deserve to receive it.

<comment><USER4> For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would down-vote my comment. Please educate me, what's wrong with my statement? I don't get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, I hired YouTubers via FameBit quite a _bit_ ago to help make videos like this one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=Ko586_GPuR8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=Ko586_GPuR8)

I have to say, it was a great experience. Famebit encouraged both sides to be open and transparent. They wanted to their YouTubers to include a note like "sponsored by so and so".

We wanted that too. As an advertiser, I'm not trying to sneak into the native content of unsuspecting viewers. I want everyone to know the scenario. The fewer surprises, the better.

And this type of thing works great on YouTube. Users aren't totally scornful of sponsored content. I wish more platforms were like this. Can you imagine how angry most reddit users would be if someone posted original content (even if it was great) and said "This is a paid posting by..."

Sadly, it didn't work out for long with FameBit. We were getting a lot of new storefront owners... but they seemed very young, and they had no concept of copyright issues. That's a story for another day.

</comment><comment><USER6> A significant amount of revenue is being made through YouTube as a platform in a grey area that Google doesn't really currently touch (integrated content through creators).

Creators and MCN's benefit the most from this. By starting to control the medium brands and creators connect with, they at least get a piece of the action.

<comment><USER7> Serious question: when you say integrated content it has the same meaning as product placement right?

<comment><USER8> I would guess partly - product placement is a type of integrated content, whereas the broader spectrum can cover those passive placements, more traditional ad slots, sponsored event coverage etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> this is a very interesting acquisition for Google. i wonder if they are concerned about adblockers and see native advertising as a solution. or, perhaps their data shows that native ads perform much better than traditional advertising.

<comment><USER10> I doubt it is the adblockers. The adblocker arms race is won by those who own the browser since the browser is the last place you can enforce DRM and the incumbants (Google, Apple, and Mozilla to a lesser extent) have the capacity to stage a power play that enforce trusted computing policies for ad-laden web applications. Ad blockers will lose their in-browser hooks and will need to instrument the browser from outside its process space using computer vision and memory exploits to detect and remove ads in the future. This cat and mouse game will relegate ad blockers to the <10% market share thus staving off a lost market for ad revenue and reducing any dependence on native advertising or product tie ins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always wondered why youtube and twitch don't just make a platform for content creators to sign direct deals and get a cut. Seems like a no-brainer IMO.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I've been working on a similar project in my limited spare time. I wonder if I should continue or throw in the towel. I searched for others like mine before I started and didn't find much. I guess I'll have to up my googling skills.

<comment><USER13> Youtube is a big, ever expanding ocean. Plenty of space for smaller fish. Important is to find your niche and target audience, and grow from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty cool. I'd guess that most people making any money off YouTube are making a lot more from FameBit (and similar platforms) than from YouTube itself. Makes sense that Google would want a slice of that.</comment>


Show HN: My #1 game as a nontechie girl- Word Hookup -hook letters to make words - <AUTHOR> https://www.wordhookup.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi this is Neha, creator of this word game - Word Hookup. This was my first dabble in a tech world making a game. Luckily for me it was noticed by Apple editors, and featured as game of the day some time after launch. Its been a while since I had launched the game but never got around to posting this here on HN. Now I am finishing up a new version of this game that merges it with a crossword layout. I am seeking your feedback on the original gameplay and any advise on improvements, difficult level etc, would be helpful in improving my new version!! Here are the links to the original games IOS - [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/word- hookup/id1467012830?ls=1](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/word- hookup/id1467012830?ls=1) Android - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wordhookup...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wordhookup.android)

Here's my original writeup about creating this game - [https://medium.com/@wordhookup/word-hookup-my-journey- creati...](https://medium.com/@wordhookup/word-hookup-my-journey-creating-a- word-game-with-my-kids-a-non-techie-mom-of-3-f5618a31d54c)

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks like a cool game. A short video on the page might be helpful (like the one in the blog post).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Actually, there is a video further down the page, in the preview section, but it's probably getting a little lost there. Will make sense to move it to the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> looks interesting, will give it a try!</comment>


"We currently have no plans to support Xwayland" - <AUTHOR> https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia-364-12-release-vulkan-glvnd-drm-kms-and-eglstreams/post/5188874/#5188874 <comment><USER2> For a company that is wholly reliant on Linux to sell quite a few of their products, the lack of support from Nvidia continues to be impressive.

Intel is actively trying to kill off lowend and mid-range GPUs in the desktop, and has locked them out in the mobile space, leaving Nvidia with just the high end GPU market and their ventures into the ARM SOC space.

By not treating Linux end user devices as first class citizens, I don't see how Nvidia intends to have a viable business long term. Who wants a tablet, phone or desktop GPU without drivers?

<comment><USER3> A company that is wholly reliant on Linux to sell quite a few of their products?

Gaming enthusiasts aren't running Linux. The HPC/GPU compute market don't care about Wayland. Android devices aren't using Wayland.

What part of their target market runs Linux?

What portion of the desktop market runs Linux?

If it wasn't for Linux, I'd be in a very different profession, so I'm a huge fan. But I don't understand where you guys that act like the Linux desktop is a big enough market that this will make a material affect on nvidia's bottom line is so weird to me.

<comment><USER4> _> Gaming enthusiasts aren't running Linux._

More and more do today.

<comment><USER5> Not to pile on, but every few years I decide to see if Linux is ready for gaming. I use it every day to get my work done, so why not double dip and not have to deal with Windows?

However it's never been good enough. At first there just were no drivers, so I couldn't get acceptable performance from any game. Then came drivers, but I had to fight for days to get them to work on handful of games and even then performance was sub par compared to Windows. Last time drivers installed without any problems, but still from the games I tend to play only couple had native Linux support (in this case, they could be downloaded straight from Steam), but still most required Wine and that sucked the performance right out. Then there were bunch of games that didn't even work with Wine.

I'm first to admit that I do not have high end gaming PC, but 16GB of middle of the road RAM, i5 2500K, and nVidia GTX 970 serve me well on Windows side. Frankly, I see no reason to spend more money to get the same performance on Linux.

If you can get acceptable performance from your Linux PC while gaming then more power to you, but from my point of view we are still long way and I mean really long way from gaming being "viable" on Linux.

<comment><USER6> Portal, Portal2, Tomb Raider, Kerbal space program, Shadow of Mordor, Rocket League, The Talos Principle are some of the AAA games that I've played on my linux mint box in the last few years. I am just an occasional gamer and I do not have a gaming machine (amd fx8350, nvidia gtx770, 1GBram) but all these games worked flawlessly. No wine, no glitches no driver problems. I don't know if it would have been "good enough" for professional gamers (I admit I play on "high details" instead of "ultra high details" mode)

<comment><USER7> Shadow of Mordor and Tomb Raider are the only AAA game on your list.

The rest are indie games tiny budget indie games.

<comment><USER8> I'm not a gamer by any stretch, but is Portal really an indie game?

<comment><USER9> IMHO, no. It's made by Valve, you can't really sort them as an indie studio.

<comment><USER10> It was made by a bunch of college students who were trying to start their own company who got bought by Valve partway through development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this isn't "no plans to support wayland" \- these drivers are built to support wayland. It's the Xwayland translation layer they're talking about here, which (I think - my understanding is a bit thin here) is for running applications that are compiled to use X11 graphics in a wayland environment.

So: it could well be that this is an issue of resource allocation more than anything else. Over time, most applications should move to using wayland (or whatever window / surface library emerges as the clear winner, but that looks like wayland is the future here) for their graphics. A lot of effort into supporting Xwayland would mean work spent on a library that should be of limited utility - only useful during the transition between platforms (like the old carbon layer for OSX in the early 10.0, 10.1 days). Right? Or maybe I'm misreading it.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I read on reddit, Xwayland is X running _within_ wayland, and (for some reason) needs some special code in the drivers. I'm not fully clear as to why or what needs to change.

<comment><USER12> The motivation for Xwayland is that 1. a lot of applications use no GUI frameworks (or outdated versions thereof, e.g. all these apps that are still on Qt 4), so if the frameworks are ported to Wayland, it doesn't help them. And 2. a lot of applications talk to X directly even if using a framework (e.g. an application that takes a screenshot needs to use xlib or xcb directly because that's typically not abstracted by a GUI framework).

Xwayland enables these types of applications to continue working in a Wayland session, so that desktops and distributions can move to Wayland without having to either wait on the legacy applications or remove them from the distribution.

<comment><USER13> Couldn't those just be recompiled with a wrapper that maps X calls to Wayland?

<comment><USER14> You mean like xwayland?

<comment><USER15> AFAICT XWayland is a server that speaks the X protocol and not an Xlib replacement compatibility layer that emulates X11 client+server in-process and speaks Wayland protocol (though, I imagine various mismatches prevents that sort of thing from working well at all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been following the X11 vs Wayland story since very close to the beginning and have built and used wayland and weston multiple times over the years. Cutting through all the FUD on both sides, my conclusion is that Wayland was created in the context of some very specific use cases which essentially preclude it from being a general solution that can replace X by itself (it could succeed if there was a single project to reimplement X in a sane way, but leaving it to GKT and QT is NOT a solution by any stretch of the imagination). Nvidia's engagement with linux simply does not cover the use cases that Wayland was created to address. In my view desktop/workstation use cases are not sufficiently covered by Wayland, and that is where nvidia's focus has been.

tl;dr Nvidia has no need to play in this space, anyone using X will just use X without the translation layer.

<comment><USER17> > (it could succeed if there was a single project to reimplement X in a sane > way, but leaving it to GKT and QT is NOT a solution by any stretch of the > imagination).

Qt and GTK are not responsible for implementing the compositor at all. Compositors aren't actually the problem at all, the problem is applications.

XWayland is one of the main ways we are going to bring legacy applications to Wayland desktops. It works about as well as X does, and lets the other applications take advantage of the sane architecture of Wayland.

> In my view desktop/workstation use cases are not sufficiently covered by > Wayland, and that is where nvidia's focus has been.

What use cases? The only thing that's missing for me is input method integration. It has full display colour management, handles multiple refresh rates in the same session well, handles scaling, supports every input device I own (including graphics tablets). What's not really firm right now is native support in every application, that's coming along at some rate, and XWayland is bridging that gap quite well.

<comment><USER16> Qt and GTK and responsible for implementing how all of their windows talk to each other. My point is that it is not reasonable to expect or require programs to depend on a widget toolkit just so they can get proper keyboard input. I realize this is a bit of an exaggeration, but X11 is more than something that draws windows and from my understanding wayland doesn't address many of the other parts. For example, from my understanding wayland does not provide a standard way to support window manager level keybinds that override the binds set by the developer of the window that currently has focus. For me this means that the primary way I interact with my computer is now broken on wayland unless every single program I use implements the ability to pass those custom keybinds to the program that actually handles them. Sure, everyone can implement their own way of dealing with window manager level keybinds but that completely defeats the purpose of having a standard in the first place.

Probably the most salient issue with wayland is that it prevents programs from communicating with each other in the name of 'security' and 'sandboxing' when preventing those things at the display server level adds literally zero security and just makes everything more painful for application developers (imo to the point where they simply won't touch the stuff). If there were a 'windowing protocol' that went along with wayland that covered many of the things wayland does not then I do not think there would be as much of an issue, but the thought that we can force a new display server on people without the other bits as well seems at best naive. Again, I think that the absence of such a 'windowing protocol' from wayland is because one of the main use cases it was developed for often had literally one program running (car backup camera displays).

I do not dispute that xwayland bridges the gap. But if people are using X right now then nvidia has no reason to support xwayland right now because there are no wayland only applications that their customers are demanding support for. Down the line that may change, but from a corporate decision making point of view there is zero reason to do this.

<comment><USER17> > Qt and GTK and responsible for implementing how all of their windows talk to > each other. My point is that it is not reasonable to expect or require > programs to depend on a widget toolkit just so they can get proper keyboard > input.

You don't need to. Just like X11 has Xlib and libxcb, Wayland has libwayland. It is actually easier to get input from libwayland than it is to get it from Xlib, and about on par with libxcb.

> I realize this is a bit of an exaggeration, but X11 is more than something > that draws windows and from my understanding wayland doesn't address many of > the other parts. For example, from my understanding wayland does not provide > a standard way to support window manager level keybinds that override the > binds set by the developer of the window that currently has focus.

You're right about that, global keybindings will have to be allowed through the compositor, and I don't know if there's a protocol for that yet. Global keylogging is one of the things Wayland was designed to avoid, so the way we implement that feature will have to be a bit different. It's for good reasons though.

> For me this means that the primary way I interact with my computer is now > broken on wayland unless every single program I use implements the ability > to pass those custom keybinds to the program that actually handles them. > Sure, everyone can implement their own way of dealing with window manager > level keybinds but that completely defeats the purpose of having a standard > in the first place.

I don't know that it defeats the purpose of a standard! I agree that these use cases need to be addressed, but I don't think the way to do that is to give every Wayland client the ability to globally change the way input reaches other clients without permission from the compositor.

> Probably the most salient issue with wayland is that it prevents programs > from communicating with each other in the name of 'security' and > 'sandboxing' when preventing those things at the display server level adds > literally zero security and just makes everything more painful for > application developers (imo to the point where they simply won't touch the > stuff).

Yeah, I think that the XDG compositor extensions should loosen this stuff up a bit, or at least make it easy for an application to ask the user for permission to spoof everything. I'm unlikely to be displaying a hostile application on my machine. That said, doesn't exactly add "zero security" though. It is helpful for partially-isolated applications, like those in containers. I would like to be able to trust the isolation of applications some day so that I can run spotify on my workstation without breaking into a sweat.

I think it would be perfectly adequate to have the application ask for permission to do the heinous boundary violations that make X11 fun and dynamic.

> I do not dispute that xwayland bridges the gap. But if people are using X > right now then nvidia has no reason to support xwayland right now because > there are no wayland only applications that their customers are demanding > support for. Down the line that may change, but from a corporate decision > making point of view there is zero reason to do this.

For what it's worth, NVIDIA is looking to support Wayland on desktop. They already support it commercially in their embedded products (especially targeted toward automotive). So it's not exactly accurate to say that they have no customers asking for Wayland-only application support. The question is, _when will it be convenient on desktop Linux?_ and that's hard to say. It is somewhat surprising that they aren't currently planning to support acceleration in XWayland, given that they have at least put some effort into supporting Wayland in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ouch. Is Xwayland still the only way to do remoting? [https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8) just punts on it and speculates about what could theoretically happen someday, but I don't even know how or why I'd start using a backend that can only run on one computer.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is support from nvidia even needed? I remember that there was always this weird thing where graphics drivers were written for X11 instead of being part of the kernel (or a module) like all other drivers, is this still the case? Why can't they write a kernel (framebuffer?) driver so no specific support is needed for a desktop environment?

<comment><USER20> Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia- graphics-c...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics- cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html)

Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers.

 _edit_

I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card.

If you _do_ want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally wasn't able to make multimonitor work with nouveau, but the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion well.

<comment><USER21> FWIW, I use an nVidia GTX960 with the nouveau driver on openSUSE Tumbleweed, with two displays. Basically, it Just Worked(tm) out of the box.

Performance is good for regular desktop use, including video playback (then again, my CPU is a Ryzen 1700), 3d gaming performance is not overwhelming, though. Plus, Kerbal Space Program gives me weird display errors and sometimes manages to crash Xorg.

I am not much of a gamer, though, so I can live with this arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's just too bad, especially for those who use Wine (Wine on Wayland now looks completely stalled, and XWayland would be the only way to use it in the foreseeable future). Firefox is also far from ready.

But Mesa really caught up lately, so switching to AMD was never as good. Just forget Nvidia and enjoy properly integrated graphics stack.

</comment><comment><USER22> Note that this is not equivalent to saying "we plan to not/we will not support Xwayland." It just means it's not currently in the pipeline (and may or may not be in the future).

<comment><USER23> There's no meaningful difference between these. Not planning support is equivalent to planning no support.

<comment><USER24> I mean, that depends, doesn't it? nVidia also refused to support KMS for a long time but they finally added it as it became a harder and harder requirement. KMS was a big overhaul and pre-requisite for modern stacks like Wayland. If that can get added, I'm reasonably confident that Wayland support will show up somewhere along the way (assuming that Wayland continues on its track to widespread adoption).

<comment><USER23> No, it doesn't depend. The two statements are equivalent. NVidia could certainly _change_ their plans, but the particular way they phrase "no support" is irrelevant.

It's not as if "we have no plans for support" could result in accidentally having support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is AMD supporting xwayland? If so I'll just buy their stuff and call it a day.

<comment><USER26> amdgpu is an open source driver, the userspace part is in Mesa, so it should support xwayland all the things

<comment><USER25> Sounds good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I guess I have no plans to buy another Nvidia card, then. Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that.

<comment><USER28> > Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will > fix that.

No they don't. I have had 3 different nVIdia configs, and presently 2 for gaming, and through my experience hopping from one distro to the next I find that the problem is actually unrelated to nVIdia drivers - but the compositor. For example, in Mint if you switch to compton, it makes all tearing disappear. This is well documented.

<comment><AUTHOR> They definitely tear, at least for me. I was able to do some hacks to make Plasma not tear, but quite a few games tear like crazy.

<comment><USER28> What compositor do you use? Feel free to reach me, maybe I can help if you can provide me with more details of your config.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use whatever is included with Fedora's KDE spin. Not quite sure which to be honest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yeah well I doubt they keep that stance for very long. Nvidia is investing like crazy in keeping the deep learning community happy about their products and they are disproportionately on Linux.

If/when Wayland becomes the default for Ubuntu, Nvidia will follow. Can't let them ponder the amount of time it would take to code the missing layers for AMD hardware

<comment><USER30> A bit off topic, but do the people using deep learning GPUs use the same device for desktop graphics? There aren't problems with display lockups etc?

<comment><USER31> Not exactly on the deep learning side, but I am a scientist who does some computatinoal work on the GPU.

You're right that we don't use our computer card for our graphics and, as many people pointed out, the computation will wind up running on a headless server. On the other hand, during development, our code will be running on our desktops and will be using the GPUs on the graphics card. I've witnessed a developer's frustration with X11 driver issues cause a project to transition from CUDA to OpenCL.

Granted, he didn't just throw a hissy fit an port the code. Rather, it inspired him to write up a tradeoff analysis of OpenCL versus CUDA that showed that OpenCL offered this specific project significant benefits and that the main selling points of CUDA weren't being used in this instance. He also wound up rage coding a prototype port to OpenCL to go along with the proposal.

The project would have moved eventually, since it was the better engineering decision in this case, but it was about a half decade away on the timeline until the lead dev's compositor stopped work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps Linus needs to give them another middle finger.

<comment><USER33> No not really. The finger was about not giving enough details for opensource driver and pushing closed source blob instead. This issue is about closed source blob not supporting next gen linux desktop until the desktop has gotten enough market share to force them to.

<comment><USER12> But if there was a proper open source driver, no one would need to put up with this shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> From what I gather, it's about GLX support in Xwayland. Most general purpose applications won't be affected* but games would be.

* The big exception is Chrome which uses GLX for accelerated rendering. The software fallback path uses a lot more CPU and won't support WebGL AFAIK.

</comment><comment><USER35> What's the best supported graphics card line on Linux now and in the near future, anyway? I recently tried to search and it was difficult to get good information.

<comment><USER17> Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported. Both the proprietary blob driver and the Mesa-based free driver share an upstream kernel module. The Mesa-based driver tends to have better performance for most applications, but currently lacks some of the bleeding-edge display technologies from the proprietary driver. That is likely to be completely rectified in the next couple of kernel release cycles.

They continue to expand their team, and there is a certain amount of broader community involvement in the Mesa-based driver. Valve software has at least one full time developer working on the driver in addition to the full time developers working directly for AMD on it.

The peak performance of AMD's top (pre-vega) cards right now is less than the peak performance of NVIDIA's top cards, but for similarly priced cards, the performance is basically on par. Finishing out 2017, and starting 2018, I think AMD may reach or exceed NVIDIA in flagship performance.

<comment><USER36> > Any of AMD's recent discrete graphics cards are very well supported.

This is true and I'm a happy linux gamer these days but I wanted to point out that these are new drivers and the mesa support is really only in new kernels. Ubuntu 16.04 - don't bother, Ubuntu 16.10 - getting there, Ubuntu 17.04 - worked great for me since day 1. Arch will also work fine.

<comment><USER4> Gamers know to either use rolling distros, or to make sure to install recent kernels and Mesa from backports and etc. instead of being stuck on LTS kernel / drivers.

<comment><USER37> Even without going out of your way to get newer versions, the kernel and video drivers get updates on Ubuntu LTS releases as a part of the hardware- enablement stack. [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack)

<comment><USER4> Not by default. Default updates are much slower than what might be needed for gaming. Rolling distros work better for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow, that's _seriously_ disappointing.

As of recently, I have a mixed 1920x1200 and 4K setup on my home desktop, and 1920x1200 + 2560x1440 setup on my work laptop. I was very interested in what I'd heard about Wayland supporting per-monitor scaling and hoping to move over whenever KDE's Wayland support stabilised.

Well, I guess I'll still be doing that on my work laptop with its Intel graphics... here's hoping AMD does better for my next desktop GPU upgrade.

<comment><USER39> You'd be surprised by how many apps support Wayland natively. Gtk+ and QT support it transparently for app developers, and I assume other frameworks do as well.

And Wayland is a huge improvement over X. Whenever I go back to X, it really suffers from tearing on portrait sub-1080p DIV-D monitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've consistently had issues with Vulkan on the 960M my laptop has. Nvidia sure makes it easy for me to go back to AMD.

The graphics market is dangerously locked up by two players and its time some new players took the capital risk and stepped in. Nvidia would probably give a shit if someone bothered to challenge their share of the market in both graphics and computational space.

<comment><USER41> The patent situation is a huge barrier to entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I currently have no plans to buy an NVIDIA card ever again for display; and if AMD does well enough, probably not for compute either. They've been consistently useless in supporting the platforms I want to use for work and play, and while they've gotten a shade better over the last decade, not as better as their competition in the discrete GPU market.

</comment><comment><USER42> Good luck using Wine with Wayland on Nvidia driver.

I'm really glad I ditched Nvidia and switched to AMD. With Mesa progressing at fast pace, Nvidia will become simply inferior in many aspects, including the above one.

</comment><comment><USER43> The best thing Linux users can do: Buy and recommend AMD and Intel hardware. Both are working well with open source drivers built into the kernel.

</comment><comment><USER44> This really sucks considering that nvidia drivers have better perf than nouveau. Well can't help it, only nouveau till nvidia releases new ones.

<comment><USER45> nVidia is crippling the Nouveau drivers by not releasing the signed blobs required for basic things as fan control and setting the clockspeed.

<comment><USER44> Yup. Can't believe that such great drivers were written from nothing but Reverse Engineering. Since mine is entry level laptop GPU the performance has no limits. But Nvidia should follow AMD is releasing Opensource drivers. (But they won't)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is xwayland the same thing as wayland?

<comment><USER4> No. It's X11 implementation over Wayland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Well i guess that is more confirmation that my best bet is to buy AMD components when possible.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is why I buy Intel graphics only... No laptops with Nvidia, not even dual graphics.

Maybe AMD if they drop proprietary drivers. But never Nvidia.

<comment><USER49> In my experience, dual graphics on Linux is more of a pain than either solely Nvidia or solely integrated. Both my current and past laptop have had dual integrated/Nvidia setups (the first because I didn't know any better, and the latter because I mistakenly thought it was discrete only), and both times my solution has been to just not set up the discrete card at all because I've been unable to get the dual setup working in a reasonable amount of time and I don't do anything graphics-intensive enough for it to matter.

<comment><USER28> Solus is, as far as I know, working on a software solution to make dual GPU systems better supported.

<comment><USER50> it's not just Solus. they are riding on other peoples work too. GLVND (GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch) was worked on by Redhat folks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Software Engineering Exam Approved for Licensure - <AUTHOR> http://www.computer.org/portal/web/pressroom/New-Software-Engineering-Exam-Approved-for-Licensure

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong but this licensure exam is like those exams that was taken by some engineering graduates to gain the "Engr" status?</comment>


The Benefits of a Quiet Ego - <AUTHOR> http://www.quietrev.com/the-surprising-benefits-of-a-quiet-ego/ <comment><USER2> The gold is at the bottom: _"The humble person is probably more aware and accepting of the fact that against a cosmic scale of time and space, every human being is minute."_

If there's one thing that will humble you it's trying to fathom the scale of the universe. You think a celebrity matters at these scales? But don't let it make you feel impotent - rejoice at the fact that you're alive, you exist and the world is fucking interesting. Even if you just stare out the window all day, you're a consciousness residing in a stardust body observing the thing that made you.

<comment><USER3> "that against a cosmic scale of time and space, every human being is minute"

There is a paved road to clinical depression which starts with thoughts like these. I know it because I've taken it.

Life stops having meaning if you take this too seriously - I mean, why do anything or achieve anything if we're just specs in time and space destined to die and be forgotten ?

Besides, this doesn't necessarily imply humility. If it doesn't matter then it doesn't matter - if you've got a small/quiet ego or you're a larger-than- universe egomaniac... because... we're just a minute...

<comment><USER4> We are minute, yet here we are - the Universe observing itself.

"Why do anything?". Presented with these options, which would you prefer:

A. Live a normal life and be promised that after your death people will fabricate a story of your adventure, heroism and glory?

B. Live a life of adventure, heroism and glory with the promise that when you die nobody will remember you?

The point being, why derive meaning from the notion of being remembered by people you will never know, when the meaning may be found in the experiences our actions produce now?

The heights of human happiness (yeah, misery too) are ours for the taking. Derive meaning from trying to squeeze as much of the former from life as we possibly can.

<comment><USER5> I'm not disagreeing with you but just feeling like I could look at (A) as be helpful too lots of people and (B) live a selfish life of hedonism. Was that your intent or do you see a different way of defining (A) and (B)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While there might be some benefits, the biggest disadvantage of humbleness is that many people are not prepared for it. It's not how the role models on TV act, therefore it's weird.

People often take ego as an indicator for status or intelligence. If you're not asserting yourself, you don't know as well, or you're not as smart as others. Humbleness doesn't mix well with assertiveness. Assertive people need to be humble around humble people, and the other way around. With just two persons it might work, add more and you get interesting group dynamics.

<comment><USER7> It's perfectly possible to be both humble and assertive. Assertiveness is about having clear boundaries and enforcing them. You can be humble about your place in the wider scheme of things and very assertive within that place.

Humility doesn't mean letting people walk all over you, it means not thinking you're the most important person in the room.

Mr Myagee (sp?) from Karate Kid was both humble and assertive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's interesting in these comments is the egos clearly trying to defend themselves. Introspection begins with the question: do you own your ego or does it own you?

<comment><USER9> Heheheheh :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like a rebranding of old ideas. We should be expecting new book soon I guess.

All this has been talked about by various western authors and scholars before(Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Carl G. Jung etc.) and as far as I understand them, they all agree on one thing: western people are good at being individuals, having an ego, and it would be mistake to start removing this part of ourselves and think about it as something bad. Of course we should be integrating mindfullness and controlling our narcissistic behaviour, but without antagonizing our ego.

<comment><USER11> > All this has been talked about by various western authors and scholars > before(Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Carl G. Jung etc.)

I'm reading Marcus Aurelius (AD121-180) right now. It's one of the themes he covers over & over again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've come to see ego as just another evolutionary mechanism that can on occasion misfire due to the complexities of modern civilization. It's a mechanism (IMO) in gregarious species meant to maintain or enhance a member's status in the pack/tribe/group, since that status affords survival advantages.

But a lot of the times when ego is triggered today have nothing to do with survival advantages or success. Identifying this fact in itself is a first step to quieting down the ego. Identifying a feeling as not valid (just because a feeling is 'natural' doesn't automatically make it valid) can take away a lot of the justification to perpetuate it.

<comment><USER13> Anything can be reduced to cheap evolutionary psychology with just-so stories.

<comment><USER12> There's no need for condescension (especially on HN). I presented that as an opinion rather than a scientific assertion. In terms of practicality, it is no more valid or invalid than most of the other theories/models of the human mind we entertain. But yes, I share your disdain for evolutionary psychology theories not backed up by data (I suspect these are what you call "cheap").

<comment><USER13> It wasn't condescension. Every word was accurate, intended, and addressed widely with the intention of it being understood by equally competent people. My concision was a reaction to its banality.

The problem with evo-psych just-so stories is that they do not discriminate between possible worlds: ie. if men of place A were all angry then the just- so-ers of place A would come up with a story about why men are "evolutionaryily angry". And if men were mellow in place B, we'd get some other story about how men are evolutionarily mellow.

Narratives of this kind are not good explanations of anything. And I suspect mostly false anyway, since evoltuion does not provide particular psychologies genetically - genetics provides merely the hardware, not the software.

<comment><USER12> > since evoltuion does not provide particular psychologies genetically - > genetics provides merely the hardware, not the software.

I'd venture to say that's an unsupported assertion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny how most of this ideas are in reality very old concepts of Greek/Roman philosophy. Seneca was a big proponent of "quite ego", for instance (his critic to a strong ego/desire: Tamquam mortales timetis, omnia tamquam immortales concupiscitis). Socrates could be too. I think the common denominator was the understanding that we have no access to the Truth and that we might as well spend the time trying to know ourselves.

<comment><USER15> It is actually Indian philosophy, based on Upanishads, much older that anything Greek/Roman. Basically, they say that it is your "ego" which prevents you, like a veil, from seeing reality as it is, because your mind is constantly busy, preoccupied with petty desires and childish concerns. Think of the ego as a virus processes with results in a high load average

       load average: 5.38, 5.30, 4.11

The oldest maxim says - let it go (killall -9) and you will find everything (the ultimate reality, which is unity of everything, the state above socially conditioned intellect (which could be called 100% idle), and source of endless joy (due to personal realizations of unity and non-self) which is (and always been) within you.

This is, by the way, the basis of Buddhism, which nowadays is ruined by piles upon piles of narcissistic commentaries of so-called teachers.

<comment><USER16> The idea of some "ultimate reality" is so annoying to me. There is regular ol' reality which our mind and senses have evolved to perceive as best they can via natural selection over millions of years.

The reasons we have a lot of "scripts" running in our mind is because they have historically helped us survive and pass on our genetics. Turning them off doesn't manifest joy but a genetic dead-end, in aggregate.

<comment><USER17> We evolved to spread our genes better, yes, but how does perceiving reality as best as we can follow from that? Both things are kinda orthogonal I'd say.

> Turning them off doesn't manifest joy but a genetic dead-end, in aggregate.

Everything ends, anyway. So at worst it'd be a dead end just like everything else :P And concepts like "chair" or "puredemo" or _anything_ we talk or think about are really more concepts than tangible, discrete entities, you might also say they're made up. They can be useful shorthands, but when they take on a life of their own in our minds, when we think the symbol is the thing, that's where things get kinda pathetic, and not rarely it turns into a sort of pyramid scheme where we have to make up more shit to defend the delusions we already are invested in. Considering neuroscience, I'd even say we are willfully overriding what we discover because we like the delusion of ego better.

And considering what humanity "in aggregate" is up to, how we pollute and destroy, I would say the latest word in the effectiveness of ego to "survive" isn't spoken yet. It's not like there is this alternate Earth where people pay attention to people like Buddha or Erich Fromm we can compare ours to.

To me saying "we" have evolved to be this way for obvious reaons is like saying "this person is a heroin addict because that's obviously the best way get them going each day", without comparing them to a non-junkie in earnest. If you think not being possessed by ego means just meditating all day or doing nothing, you're wrong, from what I understand and experienced it just means doing and being without having a fake narrative in your head about it you consider to be real and super cereal. Being deeply content and at peace feels great, too, and compared to that short bursts of "ego-based" happiness seem very flimsy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So how is a quiet ego measured? I understand those four facets in the article are supposed to correlate with the quiet ego, so it would be interesting how the loudness of your ego is measured before those 4 questions. Otherwise is seems like imposing your own bias to create a category that fits your per- conceived western Buddhism bias.

For example "Facet #1: Detached awareness", I don't really see what "detached" adds to the category of awareness if it only involves those 3 questions mentioned in the article. I can easily imagine people that also score low on those questions but who practice "involved awareness" feeling really attached to what they are doing in a very aware state of mind.

Same with the rest of facets, the idea that "Facet #3: Perspective taking" involves quieting your ego is a point of view that is not obvious and you will have to prove somehow. I think for a lot of people empathy intuitively involves feeling the pain of others as your own, which is not a detached feeling at all, and involves a strong involvement of the ego.

And I really can not see how the last point of personal growth is supposed to fit with the rest of them. It seems like the typical Western Buddhist marketing, they start speaking about how alienated we are in our consumerist way of life, some love and compassion follow, but the real selling point is that with their help and a little bit of detachment you can even be MORE successful on the consumerist game.

All in all I don't buy it unless there's more to it.

<comment><USER19> > _So how is a quiet ego measured?_

In our lab, we recognize is as deactivation in the PCC, some of our collaborators recognize it as deactivation in the DMN, measurable with both EEG/fMRI.

> _All in all I don 't buy it unless there's more to it._

I'd say it's preferable if more people don't feel like they have to "buy" into it… but as you know, there's a burgeoning industry surrounding such, but I'm mostly grateful that I get to be apart of working on the technology which I'd say will be way more useful outside of just meditation and contemplative practices…

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. I want to make a point that questions the premise of the article. What is wrong if people dont have a quiet ego? What is wrong with the fact that humility is mentioned 43% less. Why is that automatically bad( I am not saying it is good either)? Values of a society change over period of time, many things that were acceptable behavior in the 1900s are not acceptable anymore. In the early 1900s black people were disenfranchised, there were no laws to protect same sex partners. I am sure many of you will agree that you dont miss those laws.

Again why do we want to demonize or characterize not having a quiet ego as less superior to having a quiet ego. I do think that if the non-quiet ego is bombastic and misleads people by stating not true statements, that can be a problem.

<comment><USER21> Let's be honest. The things the article is talking about are largely a reflection of people's demands. The type of people who are looking for self help are clearly not looking for lessons in humility. There is a type of person who would experience problems in their life from not having enough humility. Maybe the number of these people who experience enough personal problems to seek self help has gone down. Perhaps this means that our society has actually become more humble, since there isn't a demand for the value anymore. Or maybe it means that people without humility simply don't experience as many problems anymore? Or maybe a lack of humility would prevent you from seeking self help in the first place. You see these statistics could go many ways depending on how you want to interpret them.

<comment><USER22> The reduction of 'humility'/'humbleness' was across a broad sample of books, not only the self-help section, and was part of a broader study [1] describing the down-trend in many words associated with virtue.

You can indeed interpret these statistics in many ways, but you first need to know the statistics.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254336923_The_cultu...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254336923_The_cultural_salience_of_moral_character_and_virtue_declined_in_twentieth_century_America)

<comment><USER21> Thank you for pointing this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really liked this — but how to cultivate a quiet ego?

<comment><USER24> Sadly, I would say experiencing a great personal tragedy is a "good" way to cultivate it. There really is nothing like the death of a loved one to put everything, including your own place in the world, in perspective.

<comment><USER16> That gave me more of a sense of urgency and egoic ambition, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would pay for a social network/dating app/site for the introverted. I just do not know whether this is an oxymoron or not, but if someone figures this I would pay for it. Gladly.

<comment><USER12> An 'Anti-social network', so to speak. I too, have thought of this before. The main feature, I suppose, would be that interactions revolve around smaller groups.

<comment><USER26> Introversion has nothing to do with being anti-social. An introverted person can be as sociable as an extrovert. The main difference is that the introvert doesn't get energised by being around other people; they need time alone to recharge. An extrovert is the opposite - they're tired by spending time alone but recharge in social situations.

Susan Cains book "Quiet" is an exceptional exploration of the field, and well worth reading to breakdown some of the misconceptions about introverts.

<comment><USER21> Is there any hard science that supports that you can generalize the entire population into two categories: introverts and extroverts? I find this impossible to believe.

<comment><USER26> Introvert and extrovert are the two extremes of a well-defined spectrum which everyone places on _somewhere_. Those in the middle are called ambiverts.

<comment><USER21> Why would there even be a spectrum? Maybe a 2 dimensional spectrum. I'm sure someone can be both an extreme introvert and an extreme extrovert. Honestly, I think the idea is ludicrous. People aren't so different. But if there is hard science to back it up, I'd be willing to have my mind changed.

<comment><USER27> Look at the work of Harvard Professor Jerome Kagan, or the fRMI work of Carl Schwartz at MA General Hospital. People are different, and the differences are measurable, both behaviorally and in brain structure.. It's not as simple as introversion-extroversion, but its also not a useless way of thinking about it.

Anyway, somebody offered you a book to read. You chose to call the ideas in it ludicrous without reading it. Not sure why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Off topic: site totally unreadable on my phone. The content is in a huge font, wider than the screen, and zoom behaviour is disabled...

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't want to lose any anxiety about death. I'm hoping that organizations such as sens and calico can solve aging within my lifetime, and that I'll be able to afford the treatments. This goal definitely requires a strong ego. It takes pride to say that I deserve to live longer, instead of donating that money to save other people's lives. I've come to the conclusion that I would like to extend my life indefinitely, and I'll have plenty of time to help the poor after that.

Of course, I'm probably going to die pretty soon (relatively speaking), and I've come to terms with that, but you should question the inevitability of death.

<comment><USER9> The anxiety of death isn't just about the death of the body. It is rooted deeper into the anxiety about change.

This is change happening at the microscopic scale all the way to the macroscopic scale: the death of a thought, the death of an emotion, the death of an idea, the death of an ideal, the death of a pet, the death of a person, the death of a group, the death of a startup, the death of a community, the death of a nation, the death of a civilization, the death of a star, the death of a galaxy, the death of the universe.

Real change does not happen without the death of the old.

Change is inherent. Changes happen with or without you. Resisting change makes from some incredible drama, but it doesn't have to be a struggle.

You could find longevity treatments so that your body does not die, but I think people will ultimately find the whole thing fruitless even if it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this really depends on someone's stage of development for a particular issue. I'm coming from the frame that, there is no "standard" maturity for an "average" person. Each of us have pieces of ourselves that are in different stages of growth, and not necessarily because some of them got "stuck" somewhere. It is what it is.

For some people, on some issues, there is a need to assert themselves. I've met people for whom, some issue, left them feeling victimized, helpless, and hopeless. There's a shift that happens when, such a person drops that sense of victimization, and develops the sense of the initiative, of agency, of being able to make choices. For a lot of people, this idea that you can make choices (as opposed to merely taking options presented in front of you) is life- altering.

Likewise, when you are used to making choices and having an effect on the world, all sorts of things now come up. This includes the asshole (someone acting from entitled superiority), the jerk, (someone acting as if surrounded by idiots), and so forth.

As one of my friends put it, the "ego" \-- and by that, I speak of "the acquired self", or "the conditioned self" \-- likes to take credit for everything even if it is not the source of everything. That means that even humility, modesty, charity, mercy can get hijacked by the ego. I've met people, even meditators, for whom, the ego hijacks the spiritual development that comes out of their practices.

One of the things the ego can hijack is that very capability of making choices (real choice, not just taking one of the options). We have long associated the acquired self with this idea of making choices, but making real Choice ... the ego actually shies away from it.

It's similar to how most people don't actually want real Change. Real change has much more to do with death. People tend to seek out novelty, instead -- apparent change that doesn't really change anything deep down.

One of the things I've been working on in the past week or so in my meditation is the relationship between posturing and posture. Posturing happens as a result of clashing egos. In some cases, maybe it is just one person thinking they need to posture, while no one else is participating. The noun "posture", though, is neutral, associated with "martial arts stance", or "yoga asana". I've found through martial arts, there is a particular feeling that comes from wanting to win and overcome the other person, which leads to becoming physically unbalanced, and then the other person exploits that. My desire to win and submit the the other person is the seed of defeat. A lot of work went into being sensitive to balance and imbalance ... to seek out balance within myself, to upset the balance in my opponent, to correct postures and structure of the body, to learn how to break all of that. It's only in the last week that it dawned on me that posturing is accompanied with the same kind of imbalance in the emotional and social dimension, and that by simply by dropping things to the ground, the desire to win an argument disappears.

</comment><comment><USER30> Started reading, got stupid interstitial popup, left. Has anyone built a blocker for this new breed of pop-up?

See also: [http://tabcloseddidntread.com/](http://tabcloseddidntread.com/)

<comment><USER31> Mindfulness might help as well.</comment></comment>


Glasses can have a markup of 1k%. Former LensCrafters executives reveal why - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/6/18253555/eyeglasses-cost-lenscrafters-essilor-luxottica <comment><USER2> My wife works for Essilor here in the states at one of their distribution centers as an industrial engineer and the scope of how they operate is mindblowing sometimes considering how much space they have.

In a building the size of a Costco, they have over a million SKUs of lenses ans contacts.

I don't really have much to add except for I agree the prices are a ripoff. Luckily, I get a new pair for free once a year since my wife works there, which is nice because I'm pretty hard on my glasses. We also have access to an on-site optometrist and her pay is decent for our location and her experience.

Not much has changed since the merger except some corporate types coming around doing inspections but from what I understand, Essilor and Luxottica were about the same size before the merger, and now the have the benefit of a larger supply and distribution chain for both companies.

I'm more surprised that the EU hasn't broken them up, but maybe they will in the next year or two.

<comment><USER3> I don't think EU will break them up.

See Volkswagen group.

EU already doesn't have economic boiler rooms like Google or FB, so they won't go around breaking their own companies for a while untill it all changes.</comment></comment>