Recruitly: Evaluate Code to Get Paid - <AUTHOR> http://recruitly.co <comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then."

<comment><USER4> Can you specify in what way this isn't "ready?" I'd assume it's because they seem to be peddling "early access" in which case that's not an immediate indication that's "not ready."

<comment><USER5> "Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs."

<comment><USER4> Perhaps this should have been the quote pasted above instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. I should have known better or/and taking the time to read the rules.

However, like delinka says this is an invitation to a private beta, where our beta MVP is sent out to a select users we screen. Hence, the landing page will remain until we open our MVP to the public. In any case, many who signup to the mailing list now will gain access to an early version real soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of how unions used to certify that their members were competent. Specifically, the Carpenters' Union in my area administers tests for different levels of skill, and rates union carpenters based on the results of these tests. To be rated a Journeyman, for instance, the test requires you to demonstrate competence at a variety of carpentry techniques that would be required in framing a house or concrete form, for instance. Then you pay your dues and can be added to the list of union members without a job. Then when you hire someone whose union represents that they are a Journeyman, you can be confident that they're competent.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Evaluate Code to get paid"

This statement is not telling me (a dumb user) what exactly is it that you do. The name is Recruitly so I am guessing it is a recruitment platform ? So is the ultimate goal to hire developers through your platform or is it more like a portfolio for devs who can evaluate code to get ratings for themselves ? Or is this a freelance type of platform when you say "get paid".

I suggest you make it more clear in your copy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback!

Recruitly is a community that helps its members code better. It does this by helping managers to pair with other developers and by having members rate each other.

Given your confusion, how would you rephrase the headline "Evaluate Code To Get Paid" to reflect this?

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cycle will be complete once there's an exclusive hiring site for people who work on hiring sites.

In other words: Many things about hiring are broken. It needs a _cultural_ change, not more software.

<comment><USER9> "It's a people problem"

The hardest 5 words for People Who Like To Build Stuff to grasp. Me included.

The amount of times I should've just hired some help instead of building myself out of the issue is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the incentive for giving rating to people?

It seems like I will be benefitting them financially with no guarantee what so ever that I will get rated positively as well.

If people start giving ratings out of reciprocity, then what's the point?

How do you guarantee that people's ratings of each other are relevant?

<comment><USER4> They appear to be paying evaluators based on candidates keeping the job for which the candidate was evaluated. It says "You'll receive a percentage of the hired candidate's annual salary for their first full year." If we interpret that to mean they have to work a full year before you get the commission, it's in your interests to make sure your rating is accurate.

<comment><USER10> That's motivation to give ratings, but not necessarily accurate ones.

Actually since your commission per employee is likely to be very small, it's in your interest to cast a wider net by giving ratings to as many developers as you can. Since you can't really lose anything.

<comment><USER11> And you have every incentive to give (just) positive reviews...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting. Knowing the online community, it will attract really strict graders (I'm using a euphemism, you should know what I mean) - so you can piggyback on this to just paste code that isn't working from a throwaway and have the pedants tell you exactly why and why you shouldn't be hired (for reviews that say the code is broken, it can be a requirement to say where) -- which I'm sure they'll be thrilled to do for like $5. "total idiot, didn't even cast to a float so the comparison is wrong. would not hire. keep away from real systems." Cheap alternative to debugging!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure how this works. I submit random snippets of my own code, then others get paid for reading it? Then if enough people read it I can approve people for jobs? Very confusing landing page

</comment><comment><USER14> " All developers are graduates of accredited online programs that meet the highest international standards."

So I'd need a certification to participate?

<comment><USER15> Just based on how that phrase is worded ("all developers..."), this would seem like a market almost purely to hire bootcamp graduates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Stupid question:

What safeguards does this have in place to stop me from building a set of bots that game it?

<comment><USER10> Not a stupid question at all.

As far as I can tell, their concept is not very well thought out.

<comment><USER16> Its OK for it to not be completely thought out. It is a startup. They probably don't know how to make money from it. But I'm curious as to what checks they have to avoid gaming. Its pretty straightforward to build various bot to commit, evaluate, and accept code. Some people might even get a kick out of making such things... ;)

Edit: Spelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for clarifying it. I agree everything hasn't been fully thought out, and there's lots of questions that needs to be answered. This is why we welcome any feedback people may have as it will help us clarify things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My gut is that this product will add more noise than signal to the process.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this a pair programming site, or a hiring site? It's very unclear

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all of your feedback. I have updated the website in the hope of getting our message across more clearly. We will roll out the MVP in a few weeks, but we want to ensure that people "get it". Please have another look, and we welcome all feedback. [http://recruitly.co/](http://recruitly.co/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have mixed feelings about this because people may game the system just to protect people they know or to simply try to make money without actually being honest with the evaluation.

I don't know the details on how the evaluations happen, but I think you should only be able to evaluate the code and recommend people without knowing who the actual author is. This way you prevent some biases.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm looking forward to this and new ways of getting coders connected. I know a lot of freelancers, including myself, that are always hard pressed for work when there seems to be an abundance. The only thing I'm afraid of is having too many profiles and services to manage. If this could somehow link into services we already use, like github, that would be great.

<comment><USER16> _I know a lot of freelancers, including myself, that are always hard pressed for work when there seems to be an abundance._

Tell me about your marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I submitted my email address and received an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm reminded of [https://codereview.stackexchange.com/](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/) except for the getting paid part.

</comment><comment><USER23> 503 unavailable

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting that many traffic.

<comment> mk-61 _cough_ probably you need to evaluate code of your site then.

<comment><USER24> I don't think you understand what a 503 means.

Edit - In the wild, a 503 usually means that the person who built out the site did not do a very good job of estimating traffic. An empty response can return 503 if the server is overwhelmed with connections.

In other words, a 503 more likely than not has nothing to do with code and has everything to do with provisioning enough resources for the amount of traffic received. Unfortunately, that's a tough thing to get right, particularly when you land on the front page of Hacker News during extremely busy times.

<comment> mk-61 My comment was just (probably ugly) joke attempt. Though, you was right - <USER2> didn't understand 503 fully, and then I became interested after your hint and googled for it.

Now I know, that it can be easily a cause (out of the many) when owner simply "suspended" site for a while, and fixing stuff.

Thank you.

<comment><USER24> Uh oh, I fear that I may have started you down the cold, dark path towards becoming a sysadmin!!! :)

If you're interested in taking this further, it's a great chance to figure out how you would:

a.) Deal with a 503 if it happened while your site was under heavy load.

b.) Harden your site to avoid 503s.

Have fun and thanks for your kind response!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Returning a 503 for a "Code Review" site isn't exactly putting it into a good light...

Perhaps your own needs to have done so.

</comment><comment><USER19> A bit off-topic, but: to all the people complaining about the 503 and suggesting that this is a code issue, I don't think you understand what causes a 503. You can have a 503 with an empty page if the web server gets overloaded with more connections than it can handle, for example.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good day everyone,

I'm Jonathan, CEO of Recruitly.co. [https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jonathanfetienne](https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jonathanfetienne)

I would personally like to thank everyone for their interest. I recently wrote the following blog posts, and hopefully that may answer many questions you guys have. If not, let me know, and It would be my pleasure to address them. =)

[http://www.recruitly.co/blog/brand/recruitly-bringing- educat...](http://www.recruitly.co/blog/brand/recruitly-bringing-education- recruitment-closer-together/)

[http://www.recruitly.co/blog/community/improve-coding- skills...](http://www.recruitly.co/blog/community/improve-coding-skills/)

<comment><USER26> Interest? This thread is full of people saying they have no clue what this is.

And I assure you, most developers don't give a damn about more recruiting software.

Also, the blog posts you link to both return a 500 error, and now the link to your marketing site you posted is returning 503 for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Elliot,

Thanks for your comment.

Receiving honest and brutal feedback is the only way we're going to move this thing forward.

I made this post long before many of those comments and as a response to the significant amount of people who kindly decided to join our mailing list, resulting in our site shutting down multiple time due to an unprecedented level of traffic.

Please try the blog post link again. If not try it later tonight or tomorrow. We will evaluate later on today what's the best step to take as a team, and this after taking all of the comments into consideration.

If you have any other concerns, please feel free to address them.

Best, Jonathan Etienne

CEO of Recruitly.co

<comment><USER27> Here is some honest and brutal feedback: No one is going to buy the idea that your site went down due to the number of people giving you their email. It went down due to the amount of traffic. I doubt the HN crowd was clamoring to hand over their email to a generic looking, templated landing page with no product to actually see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment.

I would be more than happy to share with you my mail chimp mailing list, but out of respect and privacy for the user I will not. I am not trying to sell, and quite frankly i have little to gain in selling "this idea" to anybody.

There's lots to be learned here today, and we are ready to adjust because as you know this startup world is all about learning. When we do have the product up and running, i'll make sure that our server are ready to accommodate an unexpected, and large amount of traffic.

However, before even getting to that stage we have learned that we need to communicate better, and will use many comments here to refine our idea, our approach, and the way we convey it to the public.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM Watson can now read your personality traits from a 100-word email - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2015/07/30/ibm-watson-personality-quiz-test-ai-email-100-words/

<comment><USER2> So i ran Watson's output through Watson:

You are confident, generous and helpful.

You are assertive: you tend to speak up and take charge of situations, and you are comfortable leading groups. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are calm under pressure: you handle unexpected events calmly and effectively.

Experiences that give a sense of well-being hold some appeal to you.

You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person."

Hmm....

Got my wife down to a tee from an extract of an academic paper she just finished (Tis pot o mousomantis)

</comment><comment><USER3> "the the the ... the the"

You are analytical, rational and can be perceived as insensitive.

You are adventurous: you are eager to experience new things. You are calm under pressure: you handle unexpected events calmly and effectively. And you are self-controlled: you have control over your desires, which are not particularly intense... etc

</comment><comment><USER4> My native language is Spanish and I speak a little English, mostly for work. I ran samples for both languages and suprisingly I got a very similar analysis!</comment>


Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/05/17/experience-as-a-teacher-turns-out-to-be-worthless/

<comment><USER2> The title of this story is a bit misleading. From the Urban Institute website, the Teach for America teachers were "high-achieving college graduates ... [who in North Carolina] tended to have graduated from more selective colleges and universities". So they're essentially comparing the cream of the crop college graduates with a bunch of experienced (but presumably average) teachers. For the claim in the title to be really tested, high achievers with teaching experience need to be evaluated against high achievers with no experience.

Notwithstanding, I suppose the interesting conclusion is that intelligence and talent beats out experience (on average) in teaching. Ultimately the ideal situation would be to have teachers with intelligence AND experience.

That said however, I personally feel that using test scores as the metric for evaluating teachers is a bit dubious.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just used the title of the original blog post.

What other metric could be used for evaluating teachers?

<comment><USER3> Derivative of test scores.

A good teacher should make your scores _improve_. The absolute numbers are much less meaningful.

<comment><USER4> No, it really depends on the teacher. My precalculus teacher (probably the best math teacher I've ever had) gives progressively harder tests/quizzes as we learn more about each topic. He ignores the textbook and writes the tests himself.

(Incidentally, we've recently been covering derivatives.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine, classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing, and schoolteacher skills can only be evaluated on their ability to teach to the test, this result can hardly be surprising. Older, more experienced teachers are distracted by caring about students and schools rather than tests, and do weird things that most of us might recall as great educational experiences that only distract from filling in the right bubbles.

Yes, inexperienced teachers are probably significantly better. Soon, computers with marginally skilled babysitters can take their place. Better yet, since standardized tests are all that matter now, we should just buy computers that can take the standardized tests for the students and be done with it. We'll get simple, easy-to-understand numbers and won't have to trust anyone so unstable as an experienced teacher.

There are somethings we can't measure well, and measuring poorly is only going to deliver a false confidence. I don't propose another metric. I propose we don't measure something we can't.

<comment><USER6> > Since current educational objectives in the U.S.A have shifted from genuine, > classroom-centric education to national simplified standardized testing

The above suggests that schools were ruined by the shift to "let's see if we're getting what we're paying for". While there may have been a time when schools were considerably better than they are today, they weren't significantly better right before the recent testing push. The testing push was a reaction to crappy schools, not the cause.

Note that the charter school movement makes it possible for folks to have "old style" schools for many definitions of "old" Feel free to demonstrate the superiority of your approach.

<comment><USER7> Just because testing was a reaction to crappy schools doesn't mean that it leads to improvement.

* * *

I don't have time to start my own alternative school and report back to this thread. But I note that

      Brin & Page, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Will Wright

all attended Montessori or Montessori-influenced schools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think we might be seeing a bias here.

 _New teachers care._

In my experience that $80,000/year "experienced" unionized public school teacher stopped caring about teaching before I was born.[1]

[1] Yes I know that this is a gross generalization and that there are very good teachers that educated and inspire throughout their careers simply because thats the kind of people they are. They are rare. Thats why we remember them so fondly.</comment>


Show HN: Check My Links – a Chrome extension that highlights broken links - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

<comment><USER2> Already using this regularly (and it got a 5-star rating). I have one criticism:

You can't relocate the box that pops up, I'd like to either have an option to choose what corner it goes to, or even better, be able to drag it around.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is super helpful, I'm rebuilding a directory website and I'll be putting this to good use. Thanks a lot. :)

<comment><USER2> EDIT: I just tested it on the old page here: [http://goo.gl/WNw5OG](http://goo.gl/WNw5OG)

It's right about the home page, the home button at the bottom being broken. But on other pages it marks like 3-4 wrong that all work fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The extension does HEAD requests by default, and occasionally you don't get accurate responses back from the server. You can change the request type to GET requests in the options screen (right click on extension icon -> options) to get more accurate (but slightly slower) results.

<comment><USER2> Perfect, thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bit of warning, don't use it in an admin where following a link means delete!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, as it essentially visits all links on a page to check their availability.

However, you can add rel="nofollow" to links you don't want to check. You can also exclude entire domains and specific links by right-clicking on the extension icon and clicking on 'options'.</comment></comment>


An open letter to Dong Nguyen, creator of Flappy Bird - <AUTHOR> http://www.techinasia.com/open-letter-flappy-bird/ <comment><USER3> This article is weirdly condescending. "Buck up and keep coding, little feller!"

<comment><USER4> Almost every time something is labeled as "an open letter", you can be sure it's going to be condescending self righteous egotistical BS.

<comment><USER5> Really? Why do you think that is? Do you have some examples?

<comment><USER4> "An open letter" is used when you've decided that you're really important and everyone really needs to read your opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An open letter comparing him to Dave Chapelle is probably not a good plan, given his statement:

 _Press people are overrating the success of my games. It is something I never want. Please give me peace._

</comment><comment><USER7> This letter misses that Dave Chappelle had serious concerns about the cultural impact of his work. He feared that actual racists were laughing at his racial humor that was rooted in a critique of the racism he experienced in his life. Chappelle's break down was much more than feeling over burdened by attention. The flappy bird dev just seems to be upset that he put something out into the world & people are responding to it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everyone is assuming they have any idea that they know what Dong's real problem is. He put out a few tweets. A few clues (at best). Ultimately we have know idea what kind of mental (or other) anguish this attention, money, and fame is causing him.

Don't try to encourage him to do something he clearly doesn't want to do unless you know what you are truly asking of him.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone really grasp what it must be like to become somewhat famous or rich overnight in a poor country? The amount of attention (normally bad) must be horrible. What if the platforms that made this game possible to help a developer make their success more manageable?

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's a little different in that Dave Chappelle was on TV and people knew him because they saw him. Dong Nguyen is a developer and while he will still be famous it will be among a much smaller community (in my opinion).

<comment><USER11> Dong Nguyen as a developer might be a smaller name but I guarantee you the ability to put "from the developer of Flappy Bird" is going to have similar effects to being TV famous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course they want to keep him around, that's the only way those tech-news get any attention.

This one in particular being in Asia means a lot of $$ for techninasia - <USER2> that they effectivly give a shit about the product itself, but that it puts eyes and attention to them and their spastic gossipy website.

</comment><comment><USER13> You have put yourself out there and published a game. The fame, money and problems come along with that naturally. If you learn to deal with it now, you might be more successful in the future, but if you back off now there is not chance of progress.

<comment><USER14> You assume this "progress" is desirable. Maybe the guy would prefer to take his app store millions and retire in peace. :P

<comment><USER13> His twitter comments would disagree with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This situation reminds me a little of Notch.

Maybe we should have a meetup for introverted nerds who have become wildly successful but have not found happiness with their success? When the event happens we can turn off all the lights and talk in the dark.

<comment><USER16> I think it seems like Notch enjoys his fame because it has allowed him to focus on his own projects, and work with great people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> By making Flappy Bird down , he is making his game a "Legend" by stopping at the top of fame.(the virality will go down soon or late with no new versions)

About Branding and Video Game History,it is a really smart move.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why can't people just accept his decision? Let him do whatever he wants.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the deal with this game anyway? It's nothing new, I was playing games based on exactly the same, pretty popular idea, years ago. What's all the fuss about?

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe he loves programming just for the sake of programming, not for sake of earning money. Not all of us want to corrupt our souls.

<comment><USER21> If that were the case, I can't help thinking he could have released the app without the ads, or at least pushed out an update removing the ads at this point, instead of removing it. I don't think this is about money.</comment></comment>


3 Google executives convicted for 'violating privacy' in Italy - <AUTHOR> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7039110.ece

<comment><USER2> It's already being discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147670></comment>


A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://theprairieecologist.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/a-field-guide-to-roadside-wildflowers-at-full-speed_january2020-1.pdf <comment><USER2> This just came up last week when marveling over the splendor of Science Diagrams that Look Like Shitposts.

[https://twitter.com/scienceshitpost](https://twitter.com/scienceshitpost)</comment>


How we keep GitHub fast - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1252-how-we-keep-github-fast <comment><USER2> Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house?

Edit:

I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than 10 minutes of actual focus) and think to myself: "If that were me, I'd feel like I was just goofing off"

Get the information there. Make sure its nice and and usable. This does more than that though, which is great. I personally just would feel like I was wasting time and energy worrying about picking a color scheme when I had other work to be done.

Third thought: I appreciate the romantic justifications mentioned in the replies. I think they're fairly superficial, but they are romantic, and thats fine. I think the real difference here (and the root of the disagreement) has to do with why I associate this with 'waste of time'. There is obviously opportunity cost of doing this. I expect people most in favor of this stuff are salaried and not really concerned with opportunity cost. If I were salaried, I wouldn't feel like I was doing something wrong by doing this work because I'd do in _in addition_ to my other work. I'd stay late and do it because I enjoyed doing it. I don't have that luxury where there isn't much opportunity cost because I'm paid by the hour. I don't work over-time. I'm not going to spend an extra hour at work one day to take care of this, so if its going to get done, its going to have to be prioritized over my other work. If picking colors (however important it is) is the most important thing on my to- do list, I have a problem.

 __TLDR __: I'm paid by the hour. Thats probably why I feel this way.

<comment><USER3> "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

-Steve Jobs

<comment><USER4> That's not actually true. You'll use the plywood because it's stronger and because it's not seen. You get both the cost savings and increased structural stability, which will get you more customers.

<comment><USER5> That's the difference between Ikea and a company like <http://www.urbancase.com/>. Craftsmen don't think that way.

<comment><USER6> Craftsmen absolutely think about what's stronger and more durable, not just what's nicest looking (especially for non-visible parts!). I've got a few pieces of pretty decent antique furniture that's made its way down to me in my family (stuff made by craftsmen, not by mass production), and the hidden pieces aren't finished or styled to the same degree as the front ones. The purpose of the back and other non-visible parts is to hold stuff together, not to look nice. I would also point out, from your own link, the specs for their "the ledge":

 _"available with a solid domestic walnut top, sides and doors with a plywood bottom and low voc finish or painted mdf."_

(Of course, these little details about what's "the right way to do it" are rather irrelevant to the greater point, which is that if you're the type to want to do things the right way, you're going to do things that way. Just don't hate on plywood, it has its uses (and feel free to come up with the programming equivalent!))

Edit -- some more notes on plywood: a sizable piece of plywood (like for the back of a chest of drawers or bookshelf) is going to be stronger (especially with regard to bending, IIRC) and vastly cheaper than a solid piece of wood since it only needs thin pieces of veneer with good grain for the outer layers. And IMO, it looks nicer than having several individual solid-wood boards jointed together in parallel.

<comment><USER7> It's pretty universal.

We have some amazing antique Persian and Korean chests in the house. Hand carved and split grain matched fronts and maybe sides, but the backs are plain and/or rough hewn. These pre-date plywood, but the same goes - don't waste effort on parts that will never be seen, just build them to do their job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Github is generally pretty nippy for me, and it's a pleasure to work with.

Just 2 performance concerns I've noticed:

1\. The network graph [https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/network](https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/network) seems very sluggish to render

2\. The API is slower than normal for HTTPS

Usage: $> time curl -i [https://<site>/](https://<site>/) For comparison (2nd request's):

* <https://www.googleapis.com/> _187ms_

* <https://graph.facebook.com/> _175ms_

* <https://api.github.com/> _400-700ms_

Not sure if anyone else noticed this

<comment><USER9> That's easy: googleapis.com and facebook.com use 1024 bit RSA keys, github uses 2048 bit. So the initial handshake is slower and the performance on your end is probably the main bottleneck.

(by the way, RSA labs deprecated the use of 1024 bit keys in 2003(!), so one could say that googleapis and fb use snake oil rather than ssl ...)

<comment><USER8> Good find!

Didn't realize Github were using 2048 bit keys. I would be interested in knowing what the actual performance differences are between key sizes, given RSA is used in the initial negotiation before symmetric SSL takes over.

>so one could say that googleapis and fb use snake oil rather than ssl ...)

Given that Paypal, my bank, Google and Facebook use 1024 keys, I think labelling 1024 bit as "snake oil", might be a stretch. ;)

<comment><USER10> >Given that Paypal, my bank, Google and Facebook use 1024 keys, I think labelling 1024 bit as "snake oil", might be a stretch. ;) It's no less snake oil just because every con man sells it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple of questions:

\- What does the top chart represent that blends into the background?

\- What is so costly about rendering pages for Googlebot that it takes almost twice as long as the average rendering time for public views? The throughput is especially interesting as it is less than 30% of its public equivalent.

\- What does 1 cpu unit equal to?

\- Also interesting to me is the fact that API requests require the most horsepower, yet also provide almost the lowest response time and very high throughput. How API requests are so different from "browser" requests, since I suspect both are powered by the same backend?

Sorry for my naivety.

<comment><USER12> The top chart is the throughput for the whole stack over the time period listed in the dropdown.

Googlebot tends toward the opposite of the pages we optimize for. For example, Googlebot is _really_ interested in the 38,291th page of your history.

I think 1 CPU unit is a core, but I'm not sure. It's mostly interesting in terms of relative numbers.

And yes, both api and the web live in the same application servers.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your answers, nice insight. Great job on the dashboard, its interface is really inspiring.

I still don't grasp how API can be so efficient while doing basically the same thing as the public-facing site minus probably the HTML rendering, which leads me to believe that rendering is damn resource-heavy in Rails.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind that a huge portion of our requests are rendering code. Syntax highlighted code. With line numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't something have to be fast in order for it to be kept fast? My experience using the Github web frontend is one mostly of frustrating slowness, especially as of late.

<comment><USER8> Upon further investigation, it's not just the API, it's the entire site.

A significant cause of the issue is their SSL implementation. Specifically it negotiates a new connection _every time_ instead of resuming the session, eek!

[http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl- session...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5511/ssl-session- resumption-and-ids)

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=github%2ecom&s=207%2e97%2e227%2e243)

<comment><USER14> Is this a problem with the default setup of Nginx out of the box, or has GitHub intentionally disabled session resumption?

<comment><USER8> Haven't tried the latest nginx install, but according to the wiki, _ssl_session_cache_ controls this, and is set to _'none'_ by default.

<http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule>

As for Github, could just be a misconfiguration, or perhaps they had some more deliberate reason in mind.

Good news is I just received confirmation from one of the ops guys. He says they know about it, and are working on a fix. :)

<comment><USER14> Awesome, GitHub ops on it. :) Curious if there will be a speed improvement once they enable session resumption.

Any idea why the default in nginx is: none. Soft off: nginx says to a client that session can be resued, but nginx actually never reuses them. Seems like a bad default to not cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, those are some of the nicest reporting tools I've ever seen. Usually any application that involves measuring metrics like page load, average response times and whatnot looks horrible. It might be a small thing, but wow the design of that dashboard is really nice.

Github are absolutely killing it right now.

</comment><comment><USER14> The performance dashboard and mission control bar look amazing. Would be great if they could be open sourced. :)

<comment><USER16> Take a look at <https://github.com/nesquena/query_reviewer> (if you're using MySQL).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is how they keep an eye out for slow pages. This isn't how they keep the site fast. :(

</comment><comment><USER18> I find myself saying this a lot, but the Github guys do really cool work and whenever I see something new from them, I just want to get home and code.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/performance-is-a- fe...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/performance-is-a-feature.html) :

"The simple act of putting a render time in the upper right hand corner of every page we serve forced us to fix all our performance regressions and omissions. [...]

Most of the performance fixes were trivial, and even the ones that were not turned into fantastic opportunities to rearchitect and make things simpler and faster for all of our users."

Stackexchange open sourced their profiler at <http://miniprofiler.com/> (.NET & Ruby)

The post provides some data showing how they improved their site performance over time where Github just states they have a strategy to use "powerful internal tools that expose and explain performance metrics". Guess it's just common sense now.

</comment><comment><USER20> The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it?

Edit:

I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.

<comment><USER21> Maybe your thinking of the old FiveRuns Tune-Up app. I used that all the time when I was doing early rails projects. They got bought and shut down awhile ago but I found an old TechCrunch article on it.

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/29/dont-debug-alone-with- fiver...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/29/dont-debug-alone-with-fiveruns- tuneup/)

<comment><USER22> I think it is (I remembered the black bar too).

It seems to be there (but not updated):

<https://github.com/fiveruns/fiveruns_tuneup>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now that Github is fast and beautiful, I personally hope they make it fast _in Japan_.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it me or the new feature that hasn't shipped they mentioned is the source code search input box next to the download button?

<comment><USER25> If so, that would be incredible. More than once I've found myself wanting to search a repository for a specific word or variable without downloading it and acking through it.

<comment><USER26> You can actually do that already. Just go to github.com/user/repo/search

So: <https://github.com/rails/rails/search>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is "responsiveness" the same as "responsive design"?

<comment><USER28> I don't think it is. "Responsiveness" in this article's context is about how responsive the page is, as in how fast it renders and shown to the user.

"Responsive design", OTOH, is about a page that adapats to the user's screen resolution; eg: renders differently on 480x320 vs 1024x768, on the same code base. HTH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Github is fast now?

<comment><USER30> Hehe, I was just thinking this while looking at a Github page watching that little cat with the spinning border; didn't want to be the one to say it :).</comment></comment>


Baidu Hires Andrew Ng - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese-search-giant-baidu-hires-man-behind-the-google-brain <comment><AUTHOR> Andrew Ng on why he decided to leave his day-to-day responsibilities at Coursera for Baidu: [http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal- message...](http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from- co-founder-andrew-ng)

<comment><USER2> Usual fluff. Only relevant part is,

 _With the MOOC movement healthy and growing, I now plan to dedicate more of my time toward AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning. I will be joining Baidu as their Chief Scientist to help build out a research organization, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Both education and AI have been longstanding passions for me. I believe some of my skills will allow me to make a contribution to the latter._

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that was unexpected. I admire Ray Kurzweil but Andrew has always struck me as that rare sort of person who can both see the big picture and pick out the stepping stones to getting there. That is incredibly valuable and I did not expect that Google would let him be poached by a rival search company.

<comment><USER4> Ray Kurzweil is a laughingstock in the machine learning community and he hasn't been a legitimate researcher for many years. Putting him in the same sentence as Andrew Ng is a bit insulting.

<comment><USER5> Kurzweil's life achievements look more impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most interesting thing about this announcement is the huge emphasis on GPUs at Baidu driven by Ren Wu:

[http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S465...](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S4651-deep-learning-meets- heterogeneous-computing.pdf)

Combine this with Andrew Ng, whose own student Adam Coates matched Google's cat detector network with 64 consumer grade GPUs, and we are in for interesting times...

[http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/CoatesHuvalWangWuNgC...](http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/CoatesHuvalWangWuNgCatanzaro_icml2013.pdf)

<comment><USER7> In the presentation you linked by Baidu's Ren Wu on page 6 it says:

               Deep Learning:
        AI Brain   -   World's first RI

What is RI? I haven't seen the acronym before.

<comment><USER8> Might just be "Research Institute":

'The Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) is the first formally established research institution projected to be Baidu's "Artificial Intelligence Lab".'

source: [http://idl.baidu.com/en/IDL-about.html](http://idl.baidu.com/en/IDL- about.html)

<comment><USER7> Ah yes I think you're right - I guessed the I stood for intelligence and couldn't come up with anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A more detailed article by MIT Technology Review: [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese- search-g...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese-search-giant- baidu-hires-man-behind-the-google-brain/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks. We changed the url to that from [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/baidu-opens-silicon- valley-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/baidu-opens-silicon-valley-lab- appoints-andrew-ng-as-head-of-baidu-research-2014-05-16).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a Chinese I have to say baidu dose have a bad reputation even in this country. Even my friends that works at baidu feels confused after heard this.

Baidu devotes a lot in algorithm and machine learning. But when it comes to Chinese market we can see that technology does not even play an important role in one companies' success (marketing and government relations plays a more important role).

I am wondering how long will baidu keep investing in deep learning as it has so many troubles in international market (where technology really matters).

<comment><USER11> baidu sucks. And we Chinese know it. I guess it has to keep investing in relatively advanced tech to keep its high tech image for China market in U.S. stock market. This at least is one of the results baidu wants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Baidu's deep learning based image search is actually quite impressive: [http://shitu.baidu.com/](http://shitu.baidu.com/)

<comment><USER13> shitu, not the best choice of word.

<comment><USER14> It makes perfect sense in Mandarin, and since it's a Chinese site, I'll call it a reasonable choice of word.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure we could form a pejorative from it. Like 你是土, pinyin is just so ambiguous.

<comment><USER16> 你是吐, for when you want to look for a spitting image of yourself ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, I just finished his Coursera ML class this week. I hope that course continues to be offered. I wish I could tell him thanks for teaching it! The way he balances cutting-edge research with popularization of hard concepts reminds me of Richard Feynman. Best of luck to him.

<comment><USER18> > reminds me of Michael Feynman

Richard Feynman?

<comment><USER17> Uh, yes. :-) Edited....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hm, leaving Coursera to work at the most censored search engines of all times? Not a good day for humanity...

</comment><comment><USER20> "For now, relatively few people are versed in the tricks needed to get deep learning to work well"

How does one exactly become one of these people? Is any of this information public yet?

<comment><USER21> The other responses to your question tell only part of the story. Yes, the academic groups that work in deep learning publish papers describing their methods. But these papers are rarely sufficient to be able to recreate the models they built.

There's a lot of other knowledge/expertise/intuition that's required to make working implementations. There have been some deep learning tutorials at recent conferences that might be more in-depth. (See my previous comment [1] for details.)

Another good way to learn is to look at some open source implementations, such as caffe from berkeley [2] or overfeat from NYU [3].

In addition to showing how to choose architectures or set params, they also have tricks for speeding things up. This is actually very important, as they can make orders of magnitude difference (training in hours vs days).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742192)

[2] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/)

[3] [https://github.com/sermanet/OverFeat](https://github.com/sermanet/OverFeat)

<comment><USER20> Excellent response. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> China is in the process of becoming a real superpower. They are making what US made last century: attracting brains.

[http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014032...](http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140326132305490)

</comment><comment><USER23> Andrew, is in my opinion, one of the smartest people alive today. Call it what you'd like, but I'd love to see his work going into an American company.

<comment><USER24> I 100% agree that Andrew is one of the smartest people I've ever met, but I for one wouldn't mind if Baidu started to challenge Google in the deep learning space. International competition will be better for American companies than Google's current monopoly on the research and experts.

<comment><USER25> It never ceases to amaze me how many americans completely overlook this in their blind patriotism. Baidu today may well be the only company able to challenge Google's strength on the search engine land, and an effective monopoly (i.e. if Google got their way with China and toppled Baidu) would be sad for mankind. Here's hoping instead that a breath of american mindset at Baidu can slowly make it reach out of China and who knows, challenge Google with (non-censored as in China, and non-NSA'd as in Google) english results.

<comment><USER26> Given Baidu's long history of being "cooperative" with Government, I cannot support such a company to be an effective competitor to Google. Besides, deep learning is about far more than just search.

<comment><USER27> Every company has to be cooperative with its government, or relocate/close.

It just happens that Google isn't based in China, therefore they were able to make the decision not to expand to China.

But in the US, Google will have to accept basically anything the government demands, as long as it is backed by the courts. (which isn't that hard since the government just invents secret courts based on secret laws that back almost 100% of the governments demands)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks like the trend of search engines becoming more like recommender systems will continue.

</comment><comment><USER29> Baidu has a long history of being one of the most proactive and restrictive online censors in the search arena so how does he reconcile this contradiction?

<comment><USER26> I think it's natural for Baidu to offer this kind of search capability as a means to hunt down restricted information disguised in non-text format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They should have hired Chuck Norris instead to shoot all the people that block the internet in China or make the internet slow. With slow I mean slowing gmail down by factor 40.

<comment><USER30> Every Bozo downvoting this has obviously never lived in China

<comment><USER31> I expect the downvotes have little to do with true/untrue, but rather that the comment is off topic and doesn't advance the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> By completely leaving Coursera, this is a vouch of confidence for MOOcs in general. __sarcasm __Horray for worthless online degrees that have an attrition rate past 90% of total registered students and a near-zero overall completion rate. I 'm sure MOOCs will have a great future henceworth now that the CEO of a very visible MOOC company has left.

<comment><USER33> MOOCs are great for people who want to learn on their own (although no different than classes in college, some are more valuable than others). I'm not sure of the value these bring in getting a job, but the learning value makes them very worthwhile.

<comment><USER34> > MOOCs are great for people who want to learn on their own

MOOC + in person coaching could solve the problem. We don't need professors, we need coaches (experts in education, psychologists) to keep people motivated and not drop off. Also, in large cities study groups could generate the same feeling as going to a real class.

What we are missing in MOOCs is the motivational effect of meeting people (in real life) who are serious about learning and seeing them work hard. That is what makes us believe we can do it too.</comment></comment></comment>


The Coke bottle was designed by a small team in a competition - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/551682/the-coke-bottles-iconic-design-happened-by-sheer-chance/ <comment><USER2> One of my absolute favourite podcast/radio shows is "Under the Influence" on CBC Radio. Recently they aired a terrific episode on product packaging and discussed Coke's signature bottle and it's origin.

Interestingly, it came up in a conversation I had with my mother recently that one of the most distinct memories she has of growing up is going to the corner store and selecting a soda from the icebox. Each bottle had a unique shape and texture that uniquely distinguished it from all other brands just from touch alone. I really enjoyed hearing the tinges of happiness in my mothers words as she recalled a memory from so long ago.

These two experiences really shaped me. Before I thought marketing was glorified manipulation of buying habits. Now, I see it as shaping the experience of enjoying the product. It can be a very powerful thing, as my mother's recollection from over 60 years ago demonstrates.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fair warning: There is nudity on the page that may not be work-safe (YouTube video's freeze frame contains topless individuals).

<comment><USER4> Oh how I relish living in a country where someone witnessing me viewing this page at work this wouldn't be grounds for immediate dismissal or reason for some stupid lawsuits.

(Sweden. I hate living here for a bunch of other reasons though. In fact I am about to emigrate, again.)

<comment><USER5> Whats your reason for emigrating?

<comment><USER4> In no particular order:

Craving a warmer climate.

Not feeling fairly taxed. (My marginal income tax rate is 58 or 60%, I forget which. And it will increase next year. And then again. And so on.)

Having stock option vestings taxed at my marginal income tax rate PLUS an additional ~30% for the company's social security payments.

Not feeling very hopeful about the economic future of Sweden, with the current flow of economically speaking worthless immigrants/"refugees". (A third of them or so satisfy the UN critera for being a war refugee.) For the past month the rate has been about ~2k/day. It will likely go up exponentially over time unless policies are changed. In Africa alone there are probably half a billion people who would prefer Sweden.

Living in a country that has become so twisted that it is social suicide to publicly suggest that having a 10-20x higher immigrant rate of illiterate and uneducated people from e.g. Somalia and Afghanistan than the rest of Europe might be somewhat problematic in the long run.

<comment><USER5> 58% in tax is ridiculous, especially if you know its not going towards you but towards people with 2nd grade education at best who aren't accustomed to a peaceful society.

"~2k/day"... Sweden is doomed.

<comment><USER4> Yup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> pretty cool to see the industrial design elements and what resonated with the designers based on their cocoa pod inspiration.

shape: "an elongated shape and distinct ribs"; "curvier, with more girth"

color: "German Green"

material: "made of heavy, durable glass"

weight: "no less than 14.5 ounces"

</comment><comment><USER7> I love how coke essentially crowdsourced their bottle design. Silly me thinking crowdsourcing was some sort of "disruptive innovation".

<comment><USER8> There are other examples of this in history.

A good one is the invention of the modern billiard ball. Balls were made from ivory and were very expensive, which prevented the mass popularity of the game.

Michael Phelan put in an ad in the paper offering $10,000 (the equivalent of millions today) to anyone that could develop a substitute for ivory. The result was cellulose, which later begat Bakelite, a perfect substitute.

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-post-billiards- age...](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-post-billiards-age/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title here confuses me. I don't see anywhere in the article that they make the case that it happened by chance. Seems like it was designed by a small team who were trying to design a distinctive bottle - The complete opposite of chance!

<comment><USER10> Agreed, though I guess they _happened_ to see an illustration of a cocoa pod when looking up coca.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think the 'chance' is that coca and cocoa are so similar in English.</comment></comment></comment>


C# : When to go Fluent - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/69519/c-when-to-go-fluent

<comment><USER2> Greatest comment for me from this discussion: "In other words, if your code is read a lot more than it's written (and what code isn't?), then you should consider creating a fluent interface."

Good code is probably written once, and read a million times.</comment>


Show HN: Lofimusic.app, an open source Background Music Progressive Web App - <AUTHOR> https://lofimusic.app <comment><USER2> A bit of a tangent, but this sort of music actually makes it near impossible for me to concentrate.

Instead, I have what I call "loop songs", which are selected favourite tracks that span a range of genres from fairly heavy metal to Afrobeats. When I want to focus I pick a loop song and set it to repeat (the ideal volume varies per song, but is typically moderately loud). I can't explain how or why but it settles my brain far, far better than any white noise or "chill" playlist I've tried.

It's also a point of humour with my friends because they're horrified that I listen to the same song hundreds of times over a couple of days, while I'm perplexed that they can actually get tired of listening to a song to the point of disliking it.

<comment><USER3> I have a very similar progress, but my favorite loop-genre to work with is grindcore. Highly recommend Magrudergrind: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB290E30AC7EEFAFB](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB290E30AC7EEFAFB). I have listened to this album many hundreds of times by now.

<comment><USER4> Tried it, definetly can't concentrate with grindcore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to love this. I leave these stations on in the background anyway and being able to change them like a radio station is a desirable feature.

It's missing 2 key features that will prevent me from using it and recommending it to everyone I know:

1) No volume control. You could argue this is more a failure of my browser, but it's easier if you just add a volume control. Bonus points if up/down arrows controls work to control it. Really, all the youtube keyboard controls would be helpful here.

2) YouTube sometimes detects my bitrate incorrectly and I need to manually set it to highest. I don't know why this happens, but it does. Let me change that somehow on your site. Even if I have to opt-in to seeing a full youtube player to set it, that's ok.

I would also like a convenient way to get this on my TV. I wonder which android TV devices can install PWAs now.

<comment><USER6> have to appreciate the irony in worrying about the bitrate of simulated lo-fi crackling

<comment><USER7> same same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome! Looks very slick.

I'd have this open constantly if it had a pause button. Bonus points if there's a easy keyboard shortcut.

This kind of music increases my productivity enormously. Part of it is there's no lyrics and rhythm is interesting but steady. The other part is my brain associates this music with productive coding so it's easier to get into the zone.

<comment><USER9> +1 for pause button

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> the app needs a volume control. It's playing at the same loudness as the system's volume, which is not right for a background music app. It prevents you from listening to it while also listen to someone on a video call!

<comment><USER11> I'm also starting to really hate this direction in software design where all buttons are either flat with the UI or hidden through some cryptic menu or swipe gesture or even worse, they're unavailable to the user, all for the sake of _simplicity_.

If you were to teleport 2003 me into the present, I would have no idea how to use most front ends of today's websites or smartphones.

<comment><USER12> This is not a UI direction, its just a missing feature. Most websites with audio have a volume slider.

<comment><USER11> I wasn't referring to this website specifically but to an industry trend in general of removing basic controls for the sake of simplicity and clean GUIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it in line with YouTube's TOS to embed them like this? Without displaying the video gui? It also seems to somehow supress the ads?

<comment><USER14> Asking the same questions, and some more:

I like the idea, and the app looks cool. I just wish there was a way to just get the audio streams from these channels and have the video constantly looping be embedded into the app or something.

The reason why I don't stay tuned to the YT channels is exactly because of ads, and I don't like my bandwidth being consumed by video when I'm not watching anything.

<comment><USER15> > The reason why I don't stay tuned to the YT channels is exactly because of > ads

This is why God gave us ad blockers :)

<comment><USER16> I'm curious - are there good adblockers today that can block YouTube ads? I vaguely remember uBlock Origin facing the problem of Google serving ads from the same domains/addresses as the actual video, making adblocking on YouTube virtually impossible.

<comment><USER15> I use uBlock Origin on Firefox and it seems to work fine for blocking YouTube ads (to the point where I frequently forget YouTube _has_ ads until I make the mistake of trying to access it on a browser lacking an ad-blocker, lol).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great work. Suggestions from a small device user (iPhone SE):

\- A reminder to open in Safari and how to add to home screen. I opened in Firefox and the music pauses as soon as I switch tabs.

\- Test the design on a small device please. The shuffle button gets on top of the other buttons.

\- No obvious way of getting out from the hamburger menu. Figured out I can click on the title, but it wasn't obvious.

</comment><comment><USER18> What does it mean that members of society have evolved to constantly need audible stimulation? I feel like there has to be some sort of mental effect from listening to music constantly.

<comment><USER19> I don't have an answer for you, just wanted to pile on with my own experience and questions in the same vein.

I find that a background noise app really helps me stay calm/lowers stress and anxiety, and I get a huge productivity boost out of it. Something about being at peace hearing natural sounds really does feel like it's deeply engrained in me, and I assume other people also. I wonder: (1) if there's a difference between the effects people generally get from various noise types (lofi, natural sounds, white noise etc), (2) whether something relevant about the individual correlates with preference among these, and (3) what is universal among these that makes background noise so commonly helpful.

(I use Noice for free nature/background sounds, off f-droid. I highly recommend it)

<comment><USER20> Tried noice, uninstalled since it would stay open in the background, even though i closed it. Display used 36%, Noice used 11% of power! Was open for 36 minutes, ran 1:3X:XX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pause button, volume slider... lets code it :) thanks for the feedback!

</comment><comment><USER21> They have the radios on Spotify, your smart tv probably has an app for that.

If you mean the video part, wouldn't it be a bit distracting? Still, I think webos-based TVs (LG) have a webkit browser that might be able to handle it. Edit: nope, they are not. Sadface.jpg

</comment><comment><USER22> You need a pause button, I can't use this without it.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is so close to being a tab I'll constantly have open for coding. Simple volume and pause controls make this a 10/10 site. Awesome job!!

</comment><comment><USER24> The tiny drop shadow on the text looks really good.

I enjoy a most of the music in this genre. But a lot of the tracks use effects that makes me nauseous, heavy stereo panning and some sort of woomwoom feeling sound (is this "ducking"?). Makes it impossible for me to listen with headphones. Bearable on low volume on laptop speakers.

</comment><comment><USER25> would be nice to see what each track playing is and who made it, rather than have it reduced to anonymous muzak

<comment><USER26> Some playlists have the info, some others don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if it's just my Chrome browser but this website doesn't load at all for me and just hangs on a black screen. The only relevant extension I have is uBlock and uMatrix.

<comment><USER28> uMatrix breaks many websites if you don't mess with it constantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm looking for almost this, except I don't want music, I would like the white noise of people in a public space where don't speak english. Any recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qA0nelfNc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qA0nelfNc)

doesn't get any better than that for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> I need some sort of extension that would "cut" out the beats from all those lofi music so I can actually concentrate.

<comment><USER32> Just the kick/low-end drum beats, or all of the rhythm (only leaving the melody)? Just curious. Sometimes I listen to relaxing music or videos on headphones when I can't sleep and I use the EQ on my phone to cut low frequencies. If it's all of the drum/rhythm that distracts you I don't know of a good solution other than finding music that's all melody and no rhythm.

<comment><USER31> Just the most distinct ones. I'm not agains drums or anything like that (hell, I usually code with heave metal in my headphones), but it's one thing when it's part of the picture and a whole different thing when the music goes like this:

____..__._A_.___.___

Where A is the beat.

I'll try to do something using EQ (never though about this option for some reason)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love this soooo much!</comment>


Why Age of Empires 2 is still growing - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/12/28/age-of-empires-2-forgotten-empires/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to remind you that there's openage, a free engine for Age of Empires 2.

[https://github.com/SFTtech/openage](https://github.com/SFTtech/openage)

It will be the future if you wanna accomplish things the original engine is incapable of doing, especially a sane mod API.

Help us make it more awesome :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing! I actually thought this was going to point to 0ad [1]...which because it deals with ancient warfare, I had just assumed it was sparked by AOE2 community. Good to know of openage.

Out of curiosity...how much do _you_ still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :)

[1][https://github.com/0ad/0ad](https://github.com/0ad/0ad)

<comment><USER2> I'm not playing it much, i'm actually pretty bad at it, but it's totally fun. We mainly play aoc in wine, which works very well on local LANs but is crappy via internet, same without wine, which was the initial spark.

Nobody had suceeded in creating a clone with potential at 2013, so we took chances and are still trying to do it the "right" way.

I think the last year I played about 40h of aoc, so actually not that much, and haven't played aoe:hd yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AoE 2 in likely the most engaging strategy game I've ever played. I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization). With the voobly client, its possible to challenge aoe players across the world for a game, and its kinda awesome to cooperate and deal with the mess that comes from playing an RTS game at that level.

Probably true for most strategy games, but aoe seems light enough (requirements wise) and has a great enough balance (and the fact that the game is almost freely available worldwide) enables anyone with a computer with a decent internet connection to play.

<comment><USER5> > I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were > certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive > (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain > civilization).

This is always going to be true for a strategy game. Heck it's probably true in general for any competitive game that that there are certain things that you just _have_ to do.

The more competitive the game is, the more obvious this is (which is why you see more people complaining about this kind of thing for Starcraft than AoE), but it's still always present, lurking in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Each entry in that series tells you something about the history of gaming at the time. AOE1 made some great innovations in order to handle "1500 archers at 28.8kbps."[0] Conquerers was the dawn of expansions and ultimately DLC.

AoE Online had a bunch of interesting ideas, letting players customize their civilizations ala MMORPGs or MOBAs. Interesting quests too, and good coop for the story mode, something I've always wanted RTS games to pull off better.

They did not need to make it an actual MMO with central servers though, and because it never attracted a playerbase / they couldn't monetize it, it was killed off (meaning completely unplayable) in a pretty short time frame. This seems pretty typical for games of today though, tying them to a central server for an unnecessary social or data tracking layer, dooming them to die in a few years when the income slows down a bit.

AOE2 was privileged to come from a time where installing a game meant you owned it, and you could probably play it with your kids. Maybe you could even take it apart and rebuild it better. We're living in a world now where a lot of games are ephemeral, the world may have no idea what it's like to play them after a few years, once the servers are shut down to run something newer.

[0] [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php)

<comment><USER7> Re: owning the game - so very true.

I'm going to date myself here, but I remember picking out the box for AOE2 with my kids at CompUSA. We played that game a lot, and it was a wonderful bonding experience that we still talk about.

<comment><USER8> Oh man, my dad and I went to compUSA all the time when I was growing up. Great memories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've played a great deal of AoE2. Here are some comments:

* The two new expansions are nice. The developers have done an excellent job at maintaining the balance of the game and not pushing any outlandish changes. (After all, the game thrives on a nostalgia factor.) However, it's apparent that it comes from a tiny dev studio. Releases are usually littered with bugs and playability issues. This is a great shame, because they manage to garner significant hype and excitement, only for the release day to be somewhat frustrating for most players.

* In fact, due to the small size of the dev team, there usually is a long turnaround period on fixing smaller gameplay issues. This means that most of the more invested players, who are more easily irritated than the casual players, use other, older, more established clients to play the game, where the new expansions are not available. Indeed, the new expansions, while very similar in spirit to the 13-year-old expansions, change the metagame so significantly that at the competitive level, only the 13-year old expansion is played. This deeply fragments the player base. The new expansions, and AoE2 on Steam in general, are mostly played by newcomers.

* It's very difficult to get the advanced players to take the expansions seriously because the competitive scene has been basically unchanged for about fifteen years. As such, the theoretical metagame has been nearly perfected, and the random components in game generation do not make a difference to the point of needing true _improvisational_ play. Competitive players have spent months, if not years, carefully practicing minutely differing iterations of the same game scenarios. I've seen professional players end games over early-game mistakes that an intermediate player might not even notice. I consider it a little similar to chess, in the sense that the metagame/opening theory is so well explored that the game can rarely be considered improvisational, but is more like a ballet performance: an extremely well-studied routine that has to be executed as perfectly as possible (which, by the way, means above 400 actions per minute for a top player). Considering the immense amount of study that has gone into the game, and the even larger amount of practice required to become truly good, it is clear that most competitive players would rather keep spending their time on the old game, as opposed to on the new expansions -- the latter would necessitate a great amount of exploration of new strategies, and a similarly enormous amount of practice.

<comment><USER10> Regarding your last point: I really don't like that competitiveness. I don't get the fun in repeating the exact same schedule over and over again just to finish the game as quick as possible. I would rather prefer to build a nice city first and take it slow, but with strategy games that almost never works in multiplayer, which is why I never play them. I don't really get that feeling with FPS games, they seem to be different every single time (although for games such as counter strike that may not be true).

<comment><USER11> I can totally see where you're coming from but I think it's a differing view on what it fundamentally means to 'build a nice city'.

In this competitive arena, your current 'city' is the culmination of each game you've played under a certain set of meta-rules self-imposed in conjunction with the nuances of playing as a particular civilization.

While an opponent may only see it for a fleeting moment, your actual, current city is how, given specific starting conditions, under the constraints above, your pre-game-plan and ruleset have been tweaked and optimized to the point where they are not actively in need of changing.

The only resource that really matters is time. A nice city is one that cannot be defeated by an opposing 'city' in any arbitrary amount of time and frees you up to focus on the more reaction-dependent offensive strategy.

edit: Experience is mostly from Empire Earth, YMMV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Age of Mythology is still one of my favorite games ever. What made it fun is not the real time strategy, but the custom scenario maps that people could create. This wasn't just the terrain, but the mechanics of the maps themselves. It was part "programming" as well as part design.

The multiplayer servers are still online, but the certificate expired years ago. You can force AOM to connect to them with fiddler2, but you have to have an existing account.

But now there is the steam re-release, and of course Voobly/GameRanger for the original release, but the steam version is full of bugs that have not been fixed in over a year.

<comment><USER13> I prefer AoM too, it's IMHO the best RTS game of the AoE series. It was the first 3D game of the series, nevertheless had a very nice graphics. The AI is certainly the best of the series. And the random map generator was great too. (as well as the music, etc)

AoE3 was great too (superb graphics and physics engine - very nice even today), but I wasn't so fond of the timeframe and several design decisions (8 tower limit, no random maps, the trains concept.

AoE 2 has a buggy AI, it gives up way too often. It was an improvement in every respect to AoE1.

AoE 1 was great for it's time. Less units than modern games, so every unit was worth more. One could create unlimited amount of towers - I played tower defence style gameplay in AoE 1 in 1997.

<comment><USER14> AoE 1 endgame was basically just building 50 heavy catapults and a bunch of towers.

AoE 2 at least had fairly compelling multiplayer with a variety of options. Although town centre rushes were a dominant tactic in the original version...

<comment><USER13> I almost exclusively play RTS in single player mode on random generated maps.

And the AI is very good in AoE/AoM series (well except for the AI bugs in AoE2, in both the original as well as in the "HD" re-release). Whereas other RTS games (e.g. EmpireEarth) cheat a lot, that's not very rewarding. The developer at least tried to create an AI that doesn't cheat with resources.

Playing an RTS for several hours in multiplay against friends (LAN) is fun (as long both are almost equal). Internet gameplay isn't that fun, when someone suddenly leaves the game, or just doing a common rush strategy. Nowadays some of them found their niche with League of Legends, etc.

For me, AI gameplay in single player is more fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're a fan of age of empires 2, you should definitely try 0ad [http://play0ad.com](http://play0ad.com) it's open source and multiplatform

<comment><USER16> 0ad is excellent for quite a number of reasons, first is the history it teaches you, the other is you can grab it @ [https://github.com/0ad/0ad](https://github.com/0ad/0ad) and [https://github.com/0admods](https://github.com/0admods) and really tinker w/ the AI and build meshes,models w/ Blender, +1 for 0ad

<comment><USER17> Just got the game :D

I'm curious though, where did you find the history lessons? The campaign doesn't seem to have been implemented yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.

<comment><USER19> Strangely I am responsible for the name of this cheat code. It's an accidental-turned-intentional misnomer for a place we used to eat a lot during Age2 development called Fred's Downtown Philly.

<comment><USER20> If you have written up any memories/folk lore from your days building this game, I would love to read it (and I'm sure many others here would too).

<comment><USER19> I have never written anything up personally, but I'm sure there is some stuff out there to be found.

Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)

<comment><USER21> Ensemble was a truly great studio. I hear people rag on AoE3 but I personally don't think Ensemble ever missed. Once. Between you and Westwood, RTS was pretty great for a long time.

Whatever you did for them, thanks for some really fun entertainment across many years of my own life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I still play a ton of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, which is just a Star Wars re-skin of AoE2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrounds)

<comment><USER23> So this is the game I played years ago. Thanks. I found demo of this game on one of the cd that came with Digit mag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _AoE II HD_ [1] and _AoE II HD: The Forgotten_ [2] are currently on 80% discount holiday sale on Steam.

Offer ends in 29 hours and 15 minutes as of this writing.

[1]: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380](http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380)

[2]: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550](http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550)

</comment><comment><USER25> AoE is great. I was so happy after they released the HD release. The bad part is that there is no native MacOSX version available :(

<comment><USER26> I'm playing it on MacOS using VMware Fusion. Works well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As I'm reading this my 14 year old daughter and my 12 year old son are playing a game while discussing strategies and having a blast.

</comment><comment><USER28> The thing I like so much about it are the different civilizations, which come with their own unique language and music. It's a minor detail and helps a bit with the immersion, compared to just a simple paint job to differentiate between them.

</comment><comment><USER29> TIL people sitll play AoE 2! I used to play this game all the time at the all- night LAN parties my friends hosted. It was great because the graphics weren't so crazy that literally anyone could play it, so it always commanded the largest amounts of players, other than Counter-Strike: Source.

</comment><comment><USER30> Played a LOT of AOE2 back in the day.

However, I was always more of a fan of AoE1 RoR expansion. Anyone else? Something about the brutal simplicity of it, made it much more fun for me and my friends?

Would love to see that "HD'ified"!

<comment><USER10> Oh yes, the villagers beating enemies with huge bones/clubs and the famous wololo :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I loved the original Age of Empires (+ Rise of Rome), I remember asking a friend who was lucky enough to have a CD writer at the time to copy it for me; probably the first game I ever pirated.

AOE2 HD on Steam is great fun, I've really enjoyed playing it over LAN with friends (and online, although the competition is much harder).

Unfortunately a reasonable percentage of games run into unrecoverable issues with the netcode - clients lagging out and going out of sync. It's a real shame and I hope the devs get some time to focus on this, especially now that 2 expansions are out.

</comment><comment><USER32> As someone who plays AoE2 from time to time on Voobly, I consider this and the HD versions to be complete separate games, simply for the fact that said expansions are for the HD release but not the original one (original mod aside). So people like me are by these releases completely unaffected.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat. Man, I'd love to see this happen to Starcraft 1.

<comment><USER33> It's happening. And not only for StarCraft =)

[http://us.blizzard.com/en- us/company/careers/posting.html?id...](http://us.blizzard.com/en- us/company/careers/posting.html?id=150010X)

[http://us.blizzard.com/en- us/company/careers/posting.html?id...](http://us.blizzard.com/en- us/company/careers/posting.html?id=15000XZ)

<comment><USER34> Also for Command & Conquer: [http://openra.net](http://openra.net) (currently C&C (Tiberian Dawn), C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000 with Tiberian Sun on the way).

<comment><USER13> I am a fan of C&C Renegade (the concept of 3D shooter and RTS gameplay is so awesome) and C&C Generals. Would love to see some community projects around them as well. Something like 0 A.D. for C&C Renegade and Generals (mind you both featured the same game engine)

<comment><USER35> Checkout Renegade X [http://www.renegade-x.com/](http://www.renegade-x.com/). Amazing remake of the original C&C Renegade. I still play every now and then (ShotgunJH)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I played a lot of aoe I and some 2 as a kid. Nearly 30 now and have not so much time for gaming. But the online streaming community is impressive and the skill level is high. Also there was a 120k tournament last year for a 15 year old game. It's very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER37> Have been playing AoE on and off for a while now. Still like the game. Wish I had more time to play it. It has certain playing qualities that hold one's interest over time. Even when compared to other more modern games.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing I'd like to see improved is the unit AI, which is frustratingly poor. This would probably annoy some serious multiplayers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

<comment><USER39> The HD Edition has a new AI[0] that's much stronger than the old one. It's built by Promiskuitiv and Archon, two well-known AI scripters in the Age of Empires scene :)

[0]: [http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934...](http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934297500960/)

<comment><USER38> As I understand it, this is a bot AI, and not a unit AI. Am I wrong?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have just started playing AoE2 again. I have some complaints.

The units are so stupid and frustrating. They will casually walk into the range of enemy castles and towers. They will chase units across the map if you don't put them into defensive mode. If you do put them into defensive mode, they can easily be take out by archers without fighting back. They will open gates and let hordes of enemies into your town. They will stand there and continue cutting wood while an enemy army approaches them and kills their coworkers. The monks won't attack units unless you specifically order them to. Etc, etc. It makes parts of the game very tedious and unenjoyable.

The campaigns are similarly tedious. At first it's really fun and challenging, if you have the difficulty right. It's a challenge to figure out how to repel the big attacks and build up very quickly.

But after building up, it's no longer a challenge. And to win, you just need to spend an hour clicking through the enemies base destroying their structures. Even though you basically won an hour ago.

The multiplayer is terrifying. I tried it once and within like 10 minutes my opponent had surrounded my base with cannon towers and trebuchets. I haven't played it since.

The AI scripting is really cool. It's super simple to learn, very easy to modify other people's scripts, and very powerful. You can do a lot with just a few lines of their domain specific language. And you don't need any programming knowledge at all. And it's very extensive. There are tons of variables and functions available that let you do all kinds of things, and it's well documented.

But it's also extremely restricted. You can't do basic things like store variables, compare numbers, etc. There are arbitrary limits on how many conditions you can have in a conditional, how many lines you can have total, etc. They are workable, but I have no idea why they are even there. The only people modifying AI scripts in the first place are probably willing to accept if the game runs a bit slower because of all the extra code they put in it.

There's also no way to speed up the game. You only get "slow", "normal", or "fast". You need to use Cheat Engine to make the game run a hundred times faster. This is necessary for testing those AI scripts, or getting through those tedious offensive parts I mentioned above. They should have just let it be an option in the game.

Same with other variables like population limit, that's restricted to 200 for no reason. If I want a higher limit, I'll accept that the game runs slower. Just let it be an option, even in a hidden menu with a big warning or something. TBF, the new HD edition does let you go up to 500 IIRC.

<comment><USER41> Going from single player to multiplayer is like going from the pond into the ocean. The real action happens in the ocean, but it is not for the timid. I look at single player as just a tutorial for multiplayer.

<comment><USER40> Possibly. I don't really want to play against people who have been playing competitively for 16 years. And I like messing around in single player, building cool bases or trying different strategies. Not trying to be as efficient as possible and micromanaging every single unit. Competitive multiplayer games in general have never really been that enjoyable to me.

<comment><USER40> Ok I went back and tried another game just to see if my first impressions were entirely wrong. This time there were a lot of noob maps and some less skilled players to play against.

I joined a 4v4 map, and while I still didn't do great, I had other players to back me up. I also didn't feel like I was the worst player in the game.

However just as the game was getting interesting (and I was probably about to get crushed), everyone paused the game and kicked me. Possibly because they blamed more for their lag, possibly because I wasn't that good of a player. They didn't say. It was very discouraging.

But it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be, and I might try playing again some time.

<comment><USER42> What? They kicked you? There is no "kick" functionality once the game begins on steam. What are you talking about?

<comment><USER40> I have no idea. the game paused and then suddenly i was on the main menu and confused.

<comment><USER42> The game crashed. You were not kicked. The game is 16 years old, it happens. Much less than it used to, and someday maybe it won't happen at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can we get an AoE 4 already?

<comment><USER44> We're getting Cossacks 3 on Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> One of my favorite strategy games growing up. It also encouraged a healthy interest in history that persists today.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've wanted to play this on iOS for so long! Very frustrating to see it Windows only still :-( If anyone from MS is here, please please please consider compiling this for iOS, I know a lot of people who would buy it.

I believe OpenAge is cross platform, but sadly most friends all use the version they purchased on Steam.

<comment><USER47> ...iOS? Surely you mean OSX. This would be impossible to play on a touch interface.

<comment><USER40> There was a mobile age of empires game made a year or two ago. I heard it was shitty and only vaguely based on age of empires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I use to play AoE 2 as UConnBBall and wrote for MrFixItOnline. Sadly the website just came down a few years ago. It was an awesome run with that game for me.

</comment><comment><USER49> Oh! I loved that game as a teenager. Actually, the first one even more so.

</comment><comment><USER50> I could never get into aoe2 after playing aoe rise of rome for so long.

</comment><comment><USER51> Check out Feudal Wars. It's really cool.

[http://www.feudalwars.net](http://www.feudalwars.net)

</comment><comment><USER52> As an active player since forever, Steam has ruined this game. It's full of bugs from 1999 and a whole lot new ones -- currently the lobby won't list games, you have to use a third party website. There is a pinned thread on Steam's support forums for a variety of bugs that are common to a lot of players (and the solutions don't always work), there are horrendous net issues ("Waiting for players", "Out of sync"), etc. I just don't play on Steam anymore.

Voobly, an unofficial platform similar to Gameranger, + mod community and tournament organizer, has a very active player base, including most of the top players in the game. It has it's own HD patch and several improvements not present in Steam. It's impressive how an unofficial, unsupported, free plataform can be light years ahead of the billionaires at the Valve/Microsoft partnership.

<comment><USER53> What's the website?

<comment><USER54> [http://www.voobly.com/](http://www.voobly.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Number one choice for Erlang ide</comment>


YouTube is now better at live streaming than Twitch - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/10/9126091/youtube-twitch-the-international-5-live-streaming-timeshifting <comment><USER2> My question is, has anyone tried YouTube Gaming on Firefox or IE? When the YouTube Gaming coming soon page launched, it only worked on Chrome.

Google seems to have forgot how to test browser compatibility prior to launching websites.

<comment><USER3> This seems to be the case with a lot of things google is doing lately</comment></comment>


Serial podcast returns as Bowe Bergdahl talks US military 'desertion' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/dec/10/serial-podcast-series-season-2-bowe-bergdahl-sarah-koenig <comment><USER2> I'm so addicted to the sound of her voice that she could read the damn Yellow Pages and I'd listen.

<comment><USER3> I think it's her storytelling that makes her voice sound compelling... Because you know you're going to hear a good story. The first time I heard Lea Thau's voice, I thought "this person is in radio?" After listening to her podcast, I'm hooked on her voice because it signifies a great story to follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really see how much good can come from this season of the podcast if they've chosen such a politically polarized subject. Surely they know there's very little chance the program will be judged on its merits; instead, I fear people will use it as another way to wedge themselves against one another, making for more unfriendly/uncomfortable political discussions between friends and family.

There's already been much ballyhoo about his role as a "traitor" and a "coward," and it seems very few on the political right even valued his life enough to trade him for a few prisoners. Is this podcast meant to change their minds? Studies typically show that facts make people more entrenched in their opinions. What, then, should we expect of the subjective opinions of the target of their derision?

EDIT: Quotes around 'traitor', 'coward'.

<comment><USER5> I was completely thinking this same thing before I started listening. Now, even just 11 minutes into the first episode, I'm changing my opinion. As was the case with the first season, the details make this much more complex and interesting than a simplistic "Is Bergdahl a traitor or not?" line of investigation.

<comment><USER4> Ha, I haven't had the time to listen to it yet, but I was hoping my opinion would change as well. Glad to hear it's changed at least one person's opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bergdahl, deserter and traitor, violated his oath.

<comment><USER7> Insightful analysis. I don't understand why you're being downvoted.</comment></comment>


Ionic drag-n-drop creator released - <AUTHOR> https://creator.ionic.io/

<comment><USER2> Really really nice tool and very well executed.

Offers lots of utility in the event you want a non-interactive app. The problem with it is however you still need to know how to code. It's all very well having a login form, but if you cant code that up to make a request to your auth server, it's useless.

I guess the point is though, that you get the visuals nailed first, then add the code, so for that instance, it's spot on.</comment>


Facebook Comments, Now On Over 50K Sites, Get More Social With Latest Upgrade - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/facebook-comments-now-on-over-50k-sites-get-more-social-with-latest-upgrade/ <comment><USER2> 50,000 sites that I can no longer comment on.</comment>


Ask HN: What should Diaspora do now? - <AUTHOR>

Looking at today's FB event, I get the feeling that Diaspora's whole 'own your social graph' and the contextual sharing vision is doomed. What Should Diaspora do now?<p>I thought this would be a good thought experiment... <comment><USER2> Is this really what Diaspora wanted to be? Facebook with the ability to download a zip file? Wouldn't this help Diaspora or the next Facebook killa, since you could feasibly transport from one network to the next?

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's not kid ourselves, Diaspora was doomed from the get-go. Today's announcements were just another nail in the coffin. Seriously, did you really think that Facebook wasn't going to do something on contextual sharing?

Anyone wishing to compete with Facebook is going to have to have a pretty damn compelling unique value proposition, and "we're not Facebook" isn't going to be enough.</comment>


International AppStores: The medieval side of the iPad  - <AUTHOR> http://ipadwatcher.com/2010/05/04/international-appstores-the-medieval-side-of-the-ipad/

<comment><USER2> Many of those apps are subject to the same licensing deals as music, movies, etc. For instance, if you're working on a licensed game, you have territory issues.

Furthermore, prices are set per-region.

Furthermore, sales tax etc. works differently in different countries. It's easy enough to flip a switch and sell the apps, but it does take time to get the legal infrastructure in place that actually enables you to do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are we nearly done with the ridiculous outrage over everything that Apple does?

The iPad is clearly not officially available in other countries. The reason that iPad apps are not available in other countries is likely legal. Does the author really believe that Apple just does not want his money?

</comment><comment><USER4> _"When user tries to connect to his regional AppStore with an iPad he is simply blocked. That is it. End of story. No downloading free apps or purchasing some of those new iPad applications you international scum! The worst of it is that versions of the applications adapted for the iPad are already available on those stores, if the application is a universal binary that can work with both the iPhone and the iPad. Still, the user isn't even allowed to download such applications, or even to connect to the store from his/her iPad."_

It sucks. But simple way around it is to just download those apps from a Mac. You can still download the same iPad-specific or universal apps from your local, non-US app store, except a few apps such as iBooks.</comment>


Show HN: Album Release "8-bit" Raycaster in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://greenlanguage.rustie.net/

<comment><USER2> The button wasn't showing up in Chrome on Windows, but when I moved the tag to just after the </canvas>, gave it a z-index:2 and removed that display:none, I could click it.

Then the awesomeness began.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, I managed to jump around and launch myself into the heavens, fumble through a maze which shot me flying to a pyramid... then appeared to glitch as I kept flying into the heavens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah nice you got past the maze... the flying bit is actually quite long (you fly for > 1 minute) ... there's a very trippy bit in the flying audio that I wanted to reach, where it mellows out quickly and drops a beat (that's when you also drop...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know about anyone else- but I got extremely nauseous playing this- physically nauseous, especially in the maze with all those closeup walls. I think a mix of the FOV and graphics caused this. Perhaps also the mix of the bad music.

I don't mean to offend the creator, it's just that I don't get this kind of nausea from Minecraft or other FPS's, something is amiss here.

EDIT: The small FOV thing is a real issue : [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.393496-Field-o...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.393496-Field- of-View)

</comment><comment><USER5> mouse cursor trapping is glitchy, I can't seem to look around without my view snapping back to the floor..

Chrome on OS X

<comment><USER6> Same. And if you escape the mouse, it allows you to look, but gets even more glitchy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice. I got to the end (I think? I was send back to a screen with the album title), but only found about half the songs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You did! I figured if someone made it all the way to the pyramid, they deserve to win. If you're a bit OCD as I can be, there's a 'moon door' in the pyramid that lets you drop down and keep searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the record you have to allow fullscreen for anything to happen.... took me a while.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice and I love Rustie. Well done!

May I ask how you landed this gig?

<comment><AUTHOR> I run playfuljs.com - warp just got in touch to see if I could build something cool for their next album!</comment></comment>


Extending Cassandra with Asynchronous Triggers - <AUTHOR> http://maxgrinev.com/2010/07/23/extending-cassandra-with-asynchronous-triggers/

<comment><USER2> This could make Cassandra a great deal more useful for many applications. Having the database itself handle keeping secondary indexes (eventually) consistent is far more palatable than doing it externally through some sort of queue. Though clearly far more cumbersome than adding a simple index through DDL in a SQL database, the asynchronous nature of these triggers brings some benefits as well.</comment>