Android coming to wearables - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/sharing-whats-up-our-sleeve-android.html <comment><USER2> I am in the position of being torn apart by two very strong feelings. One is the world where information flow due to companies like Google does a real service to humanity: for e.g. wearing devices that can keep us reminded of our meds or monitor sugar levels, to talk just about the possibilities in healthcare. Then I think of Edward Snowden and I now know that what Google knows, maybe America/Russia/China/WhatHaveYou know. Although at this point I am as normal a citizen as you can find, that can't be taken for granted forever. For e.g. in my nation (India) being gay is illegal and so is marijuana, and so is alcohol (in some states) and so is a lot of stuff. This feeling makes me want to minimize my footprint.

Wish there was a way to combat either the wariness, or to exacerbate the joy. For, I must be assimilated into the Borg, too. :)

EDIT: spellings

<comment><USER3> More and more I'm thinking that some sort of Digital Bill of Rights is necessary to carry on in this technological-based World. At first I always thought of it as a nice thing, but perhaps a little too abstract or extreme to really do what it needs to do. However now we have some very large and real threats to our personal lives via this medium.

I just feel like it makes a lot of good sense to produce something of the sort. I'm also naive enough to believe that it isn't too late to attempt to establish such a document and have it not contain all sorts of loopholes that would render it useless.

I can understand why the feds want to monitor the Internet and various communications, however there needs to be that pushback, that line drawn where we can hold their overreach accountable. It may not always work, but there needs to be something that us ordinary citizens can lean back on for protection.

<comment><USER4> Call me defeatist, but when I see an _existing_ Bill of Rights being violated so frequently and carelessly, I don't think a _new_ Bill of Rights would be a solution.

<comment><USER5> I find the existing bill of rights quite adequate. We don't really need anything new, maybe an amendment here and there but in reality most of today's issues are already covered, they're just being utterly violated and nobody seems to realize as the ap has so eloquently demonstrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We're in a situation comparable to smartphones pre-iPhone: we know there is value in displaying stuff on your wrist, we know we need some way to send information in response to those received from the screen, but all of this doesn't click together. We have fragments of a solution, but we don't know which problem it solves, and certainly not how to integrate it into a life- enhancing experience.

Smartphone builders had similarly vague ideas about which problem they were solving: they knew they needed to give access to some dumbed-down subset of the web and of our computer data. They knew that mails were part of that subset. Mail is easy, it's SMS with a different transport protocol, right? So they were looking for a dumbed-down keyboard, dumbed-down mouse, dumbed-down windows, scrollbars, etc.

The iPhone took a mile-high view of the problem. "Dumbed-down mice (stylus) and keyboards suck. How do we make them superfluous? And how do we get adequate access to non-dumbed-down Internet, too?"

Now with the watch. We have some vague fragments too. We know when we don't want to take our phone out, so in each of those cases we plan to use the watch as a dumbed-down phone screen. It's probably touch-sensitive, too (in a dumbed-down way no doubt), and it lets you awkwardly have a subset of the interactions you'd have had with your phone. So, I bet that watch is nothing but a dumbed-down proxy of our phone.

I'm still waiting for someone, not unlikely Apple, to show me what I really wanted from a smart watch, without realizing it. And if apple figured this out as well as they figured out the smartphone, the Google-wearable guys will kick themselves during the demo, the way the Android guys decomposed themselves while Jobs was showing them what they should have done.

<comment><USER7> Looking at all these things -- workmate has a Galaxy Gear, I've got a Pebble, another friend has a Basis B1 -- they're all so tall and clunky. They're uncomfortable and not particularly useful. The obvious answer, IMHO, is just a phone on your arm. I'm looking forward to the device that stops trying to pack things into a watch form-factor; that makes use of curved OLED displays, and puts a longer, thinner device on my wrist.

That said -- I've sort of thought for a while that the display should actually be decoupled from the device. I have a phone, a kindle, a smartwatch and a laptop -- all of which have separate user accounts, need cloud syncing (blech) and in general are a PITA to manage. I'd much prefer it if I had a computer on my wrist, which could wirelessly connect to external displays (Miracast?), and make use of them. So, my phone, kindle, laptop -- even a new tablet! -- are all just differing views of the same actual computer.

<comment><USER8> I hope that the idea of separating I/O from computing gains traction in the next few years. Dropbox, Google Docs/Drive, app stores, etc. all prove that there's demand for true cloud computing at the hardware level (unlike the web- based kludges currently offered).

I'm imagining a world where monitors, keyboards, touchscreens, etc. are all just dumb devices with a network connection, interfacing with a nearby server, which acts as a hypervisor platform for nearby peoples' operating systems (which might 'follow' a person from home, to work, to the grocery store). Brushing aside privacy issues, it _almost_ seems feasible - and infinitely preferable to the fragmented mess we have now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing is, hardware is key here. The OS matters, and I would bet that someone could do way better than running Linux in a watch (something much more low-level on a much weaker processor could extend the battery life significantly).

The hardware and sensors is the big problem. Currently, the best smartwatch specs I have seen are the Basis B1. It claims it can monitor your heart rate, track your sleep, etc. But that is all a lie. Sure, it can track your heart rate at rest, but during intensive exercise there is no comparison with something like a Polar chest strap. At the same time the claim that the B1 can monitor your sleep phase based on your heart rate is a bit far fetched as well. From what I've read the heart rate does not change by more than 1-2 bpm between REM and deep sleep, which is within the margin of error of the measurements, so the data out will be all wrong. As for the non-fitness functions of a smart watch, I don't see a huge value in having my wrist buzz every time a random ticket on GitHub gets updated or NewRelic sends me a performance metrics summary. Even text messages are much easier to process on the phone.

I want to believe in the smartwatch idea. I want it to be a gadget that somehow improves my daily life. So far, aside from things like the Garmin Forerunner, I haven't see anything that would remotely come close to improving anything.

<comment><USER10> I disagree, we already have watches with weak processors (e.g Pebble) but they lack features. Android can bring those, and ARM processors are powerful enough.

Indeed, the only difference between an Android watch and a full-size smartphone would be the smaller casing. The largest component nowadays is the battery, which can be greatly reduced thanks to the smaller screen.

So, I don't see a major obstacle to an Android watch, and the benefits of it are worth the CPU. Of course temperature will be a concern but I'm sure demand will produce lower-powered CPUs powerful enough to run Android.

<comment><USER9> A watch that aim supposed to wear 24 hours a day cannot runout of battery every three days. Give me two months of battery life on an ARM device that is smaller than an average cheeseburger and I will be impressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm _far_ more interested in how we're going to solve issues like battery life with these devices than how they're going to look. So yes, this preview looks great. But for now I still consider my Pebble watch to be a much better option.

<comment><USER12> Moore's Law will eventually catch up. The Pebble is currently the PalmPilot of smartwatches; perfectly suited to the current state of the art. However, progress being what it is, eventually the technology will be good enough that Android (or iOS) on a smartwatch will become the better solution.

<comment><USER13> Moore's law is about transistor count; what does that have to do with battery life?

<comment><USER14> Everyone is interested in maintaining the growth in compute devices diversity and capabilities that Moore's Law has enabled in the past decade. To do that we need to continue to pack more and more transistors on chips.

As you pointed out, todays problem is not the transistor size, but rather it is the energy consumption. Both dynamic and static power are not decreasing proportionally with node size, and therefore we have gotten to the point of asking "why add them if we can't use them?". This is the problems of the power wall and the observation that we must continue to turn off more and more of our silicon if we can't scale dynamic and static power characteristics of transistors with their size. This problem threatens the well being of all semi conductor companies.

Do you think that Intel will just surrender and go bankrupt? If they don't defeat this problem, soon companies will have no reason to buy chips from Intel. So what if they have 2x the cores on the chip if you can only keep half of them active? Without breakthroughs in energy storage and heat dissipation, how can google/apple/... create exciting new compute devices if the processors continue to sip as much power as they did two years ago? Do we decrease the compute capabilities (i.e. give up on the additional transistors) or run them slower than we are used to and is that acceptable?

There is a lot of interest in continuing Moores law. Todays problem is power, like you pointed. Tomorrows problem will be different. With 100 billion dollar livelihoods on the line, I have no doubt they will be solved in the coming years!

<comment><USER15> > As you pointed out, todays problem is not the transistor size, but rather it > is the energy consumption.

If >10 GHz processors were available, that's where the excitement would be. Instead, because we've hit such a wall in raw compute power, the bleeding edge is in things like multiprocessor architectures, power consumption, and sensor integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It'll be a cold day in hell before I let Google have an always-on device attached to my person, wearable or otherwise.

These folks have proven--proven!--that they are unable to protect their infrastructure from state actors, that they do not care about individual customers, and that they will hijack our services on a whim to try and raise money. Fuck that noise.

Any wearables need to be completely open-source, and with the ability to retarget their output to servers that _we_ control, with security that _we_ verify.

And you know what? Not a single "normal" person understands the issue here. Aaaargh.

<comment><USER17> I feel your pain. Out of curiosity, do you carry a mobile phone?

<comment><USER18> Or drive a car?

<comment><USER16> Nope--issue came to a head after my insurance company wanted me to put a GPS tracker in my car to get lower rates.

So, I do without now. If I decide it's unavoidable, I'll buy an ancient clunker (preferably one with as little electronics in it as possible, think classic car).

<comment><USER18> Whoah! What insurance company is that?!

<comment><USER19> Tons. I am going to say the majority. It is optional though. You usually get a discount just for signing up, then you get an additional discount for your driving

Progressive, Travels, Allstate, The Hartford...

They not only track your location, they track your speed, the amount of quick stops you make (an indication you are tailgating), and time of day (some times of day are more risky than others statistically), and how much you drive. People who drive at low risk times, don't drive very fast, don't make quick stops, and drive only a little bit get discounts. Usually you leave the device in your car for 6 months-1 year and your discount is forever. My insurance (Travelers) gives you a 30% discount max. You can also log on online and view all your stats.

You plug a device into your OBD-II port.

There are significant privacy issues at hand here. In one case, it can be argued that you shouldn't be tracked, in another case it can be argued that driving is extremely dangerous (more dangerous than many people assume) and every attempt should be made to make driving safer. Humans have already demonstrated that they will alter their driving behavior for financial gains.[1][2]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage- based_insurance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage-based_insurance)

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457511...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457511000662)

[2] [http://money.msn.com/auto-insurance/will-insurers-pay-you- no...](http://money.msn.com/auto-insurance/will-insurers-pay-you-not-to-speed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had expected them to be aiming more for commonality with the API of Google Glass. Maybe in turn Glass will move more towards this. But they're going to end up with a lot of notification UIs for devs to worry about (Android, Android wear, Chrome, Glass are different) unless they are working on consolidating this.

Given that Glass rapidly deteriorates to being a fun camera, but otherwise not too much else, the only compelling use they presented here was the checking sports scores and needing water resistance. Until it's clearer just what scope for customisation there is going to be for the "cards" it's going to remain looking like a solution in search of a problem (EDIT: thanks todd for obvious correction :) ).

Finally, I think this space will be won by the "Game Boy" approach. Lower fi (possibly even no touch screen), but longer battery life and easier to view screen in bright direct sunlight.

<comment><USER21> I was actually thinking it was more of a solution searching for a problem. Unless that is what you actually meant to say, then I agree.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Although the software important I think with wearables hardware will be key. No matter how functional these devices are they are first and foremast a fashion accessory and need to look good. There will also need to be a large variety. Every time I look at buying a new watch I cycle through dozens and dozens of devices before I find one I like the look of. This is where I think Google has the upper hand on Apple with wearables. Apple will most likely produce the only device running their software and a lot of people won't like wearing the same fashion accessory as everyone else - they will want choice. Of course if Apple knocks it out of the park with the software/sensors (which is plausible from what I read about Healthbook yesterday) the functionality may just edge out the important of fashion.

</comment><comment><USER22> Those things look huge. Until "smart watches" can be made smaller and lighter, the adoption rate will be abysmal.

Seriously, those things are electric hockey pucks with straps.

<comment><USER23> Saw a new metal Pebble watch yesterday and was actually shocked to discover it was both smaller and thinner than my own analog watch, which isn't particularly big or chunky.

<comment><USER24> Here:

[https://getpebble.com/steel](https://getpebble.com/steel)

It looks like a calculator watch for the 21st century.

(But I guess given that I don't like watches much it isn't surprising I don't find these devices very interesting)

Edit: Adding maybe a little bit of value to this comment, the function of the device is very apparent in it form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why not approach this from the computing as a bicycle for your mind point of view?

Smartphones were the latest computing evolution bringing general purpose computing with you all the time and with an incredibly ease to use interface. Now people are trying to introduce this new computing device (the smart watch). What does it bring?

It doesn't take up a hand since you don't have to hold it. You don't have to get it out of your pocket or turn it or pick it up to use it. To get it to do stuff you speak to it (possibly even easier to use than touch computing). It can be attached to your skin and read all sorts of data through your skin.

What it doesn't bring you is a sizable enough screen to view photos or text (yet). Also it doesn't take advantage of one of our most precise tools (our hands).

From this we may be able to predict what niches smart watches will evolve into to fill. Heavily voice based, quick call and respond style communications, updates and reminders, location based notifications, no-hand enhancers such as leveling, altimeters, etc... And since the watch is oriented towards your own face... it is heavily personal and can't be easily shared like a phone.

</comment><comment><USER26> Urgh...I wish we could skip this whole awkward smart watch phase and just realize its a bad idea.

<comment><USER27> If you watch people interact with their phones for a few minutes you realize it __is __a good idea. Take any average person and you 'd see them constantly checking their phone for time(!!), messages, emails, weather, missed calls, current calls (i.e. who is calling me right now), change playing song etc. All those functions could be easily handled by a companion watch device.

<comment><USER26> Firstly: you can't fit all those notifications on a watch sized display. So you'd have to interact with the display.

Secondly: To interact with something strapped to your risk, involves both hands.

To interact with your phone requires 1 hand.

There's also a mild security element - notifications and information are essentially constantly being displayed to anyone looking at you, projected outwards from the body.

Add in all the other unsolved issues - i.e. no improvement in battery energy density for a couple of years now, and the whole thing is a non-starter. It can only provide less information, less conveniently.

The only benefit a watch brings to the table is when for whatever reason you _can 't_ carry something in your pocket.

<comment><USER28> Have you used a smartwatch before?

I got a Pebble recently and although you bring up good points, real world usage isn't quite the same.

>Firstly: you can't fit all those notifications on a watch sized display. So you'd have to interact with the display.

Watch defaults to a "watchface". Usually is time and/or date with maybe weather info. If a notification hits my phone, my watch pops that open on the display automatically. I hit one button to dismiss it. Quite faster than first realizing I have a notification (felt the vibration? Saw the flashing LED?) and then turning on the screen, unlocking the phone, and then checking the notification.

For music, it's two button presses to get into the music app and and one more to change songs. Can be improved here (buttons should have shortcuts enabled), but still a bit faster than pulling phone out of pocket to change songs.

>To interact with your phone requires 1 hand.

True, but I only use my watch to do quick, simple tasks that would take longer to do if I had to get my phone from my pocket.

>There's also a mild security element - notifications and information are essentially constantly being displayed to anyone looking at you, projected outwards from the body.

No arguments here! I was also thinking the other day how bad it would be to for someone to see a text they weren't meant to, haha.

>Add in all the other unsolved issues - i.e. no improvement in battery energy density for a couple of years now, and the whole thing is a non-starter. It can only provide less information, less conveniently.

Can't speak for the Moto 360, but my Pebble lasts for about 3 days on average (I've had it for a week only).

If the price isn't too high (has to be < $200 IMO), the battery lasts at least a day on HEAVY usage, and the UI is designed well, smartwatches can have a place in the world. For me, it's a bit about freedom from my phone. I used to obsessively pull my phone out to check if the LED was flashing and even feel "phantom vibrations" while in my pocket. Now, I leave it on silent and pull my phone out much less.

It feels good, it really does. This is one of those cases where more technology actually liberates us from tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When someone has a 'session' with a wearable that involves anything more than the the most minimal of operations [1], I feel like that's the "stylus moment" [2].

Sure, there are narrow use cases when 'interacting' with a wearable is conceivable where a phone still is not (e.g. while biking or jogging). But that's going to run into the same problems that Glass runs into: how many people can really justify an electronics purchase to enable _interactive_ computing during those situations? [3]

[1] Swiping to cycle through glance-able cards or triage notifications

[2] "If you see a stylus, they blew it"

[3] Particularly not when purely-passive devices will inevitably be available with lower cost, smaller size/weight, better battery life, etc. (e.g. Pebble vs Fuelband)

</comment><comment><USER30> The last time I used Google Now was too scared to use it ever again. I don't want to report my location, see cool pictures of my surroundings, or know about the events of my city. It's not just only about the surveillance, it's about the future. The connected future, the uninteresting one. The one on which one must "opt-in" or just stay out. Personally, I do not get Google Now cards. When they are relevant, they are depressing.

Hopefully this stage of the future is just a step into a more positive and fulfilling one.

That being said, give me a rooted version of this device where I can install a custom OS that allows me to use it as a computer and I am in.

<comment><USER31> I want to be careful not to imply that I'm passing judgement on your feelings, or implying that they're invalid, because I certainly have my moments where I'm a little creeped out by Google Now as well. But I do want to push back a little bit on Google Now cards being necessarily depressing.

I recently traveled up to Boston on a short hybrid work/vacation trip with my wife. When we were headed to the airport, Google Now had a card letting me know my flight was on time, and letting me know when I had to leave to make it to the airport on time. It was information I could have otherwise looked up, but it surfaced that information for me, and it was nice.

When we landed in Boston, we wanted to contact our hotel to verify the check in time and ask if we could leave luggage there for the day if necessary. When I pulled my phone out, there was already a card with the hotel address, travel time, and contact info. Again, stuff I could have looked up (check my email to verify hotel name, look up number, call), but it was nice to have it there and ready for me.

When I head to work in the morning, Google Now has a card for my commute, along with notifications about any accidents that may impact my travel. I also live far enough away that there are a few very different routes I can take, and day to day one or the other may be the best. Finding out my commute needs to go a different way, or I should plan for it to be a bit longer (or shorter, sometimes!) doesn't seem depressing to me.

I keep a pretty close eye on how Google is using my information, and if I begin to feel like it has crossed a line from mutual benefit (helping me, and deriving value as well) to something more one-sided (exploiting me for value), I hope I won't prove to have been naive, but in the meantime, this is something that really seems to make my life better. Just my experience.

<comment><USER30> Fair enough, I did not test Google Now for a long period of time, and I would not be able to use it as it is meant because I stopped using smartphones the way they are meant to be used many years ago (circa Nexus One). Now they are just a target platform for work, occasional mp3 player, offline map, emergency travel thingy. What you explain sounds perfectly useful if you already use an smartphone.

That Google is able to give you the information you where going to check anyway is not an small accomplishment and, while a bit creepy or invasive on sensitive data, is an amazing achievement for a search engine (I do not know for "don't be evil", but at least for "the search engine" it makes total sense).

My mind might have associated looking at a smartphone as a depressing feeling, and that would be it (and is wrong). I decided I want to spend time figuring out things by myself, even when that will cost me my own time. The backlight from the screen has something it makes me want to play with it when I am idle. Similar as my laptop at 4 AM in the morning.

What I think might explain this a little bit more, I like to see devices as what they are, hardware that can be used to do stuff. When devices start being life enhancing experiences I am out. What does bother me is that as a developer I am no longer a target for the things I do develop. The moment my 70 y.o. uncle is more connected than I am really speaks for my future in technology as a career.

<comment><USER32> Google Now is not something you can briefly "test" because the benefits really only develop after giving it time to learn your habits. The longer I have used it, the more useful it has become.

There is a trend away from discrete computing, where your computer sits at your desk and only at your desk, and while there will continue to be options for people who prefer that lifestyle, there is a much larger market for people who want their computing to be blended into the rest of their lifestyle. Whether its "laziness" or "augmentation", a lot of people find value in smartphones and smartglasses and smartwatches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whatever you wear reflects on you. I don't think this is something for someone who is fashion conscious people (like many people in LA). Wealthy people would prefer an Audemars or a Rolex any day compared to a Motorola or Samsung. Definitely see maybe teens and techies in Silicon Valley wearing these.

Like the iPad when it first when out, the smartwatch should do some key things better than any other device, which it does and some minor things like telling the weather, taking notes etc. although reading long articles, viewing photos or anything that involves a lot of interaction is be suited on a phone, tablet or computer.

</comment><comment><USER34> The key to the success of these things will be the ability to get information from the display without having to touch it. At first I figured this would mean an always-on display (so, e-ink, I guess), but this clearly isn't that, and yet they don't seem to turn the displays on in the videos (though I'm sure they're all fake).

I wonder if you could do something with the accelerometer that would be good enough? Like, if your arm orientation changes to look-at-your-watch position, the display turns on, and it turns off again when your arm goes back down to your side.

<comment><USER35> It seems quite possible -- it's like how smartphone screens detect when you've moved it from your ear while on the phone to use the number pad.

<comment><USER36> No, it's not like this. Smartphone has distance sensor, but I am not really convinced that the distance sensor would work in this case too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Glass is going to quietly shift to being a device for niche groups - not the average consumers. Google has likely realized via the beta of Glass that it's not going to be accepted into the mainstream - but a watch (which is much more discreet, yet performs many of the same functions as Glass) will. If Google wants to really saturate the market, this is a super smart move.

</comment><comment><USER38> So it's like an amped up google now on a watch?

I'm intrigued, but the price has to be good. Anything over $100 is just going to be a nonstarter in my opinion.

Will I have to charge it 3 times a day, not going to work...etc.

There's lots of difficulties with packing this in to a usable form factor and selling it.

The galaxy gear had a return rate > 30%. But it's also a $300 watch. For $300 it better do more than make it mildly easier for me to do things that I already do on my phone, which sits literally inches away from where my watch would be on my wrist.

And let's say it's wildly successful, I'm really interested in how a watch, on a bus full of people with watches, will know that _you_ are saying "ok google" to it and not somebody else. Imagine sitting in a subway car, and some guy comes in and shouts "ok google, find me a bukake site!" or similar and now everybody on the train has to deal with that.

<comment><USER39> As far as I'm aware, the Moto X is very much able to avoid triggering by anyone's voice except the one it's keyed to. I was curious about how well it worked, so I tried repeatedly to launch Voice Search on my girlfriend's phone (even trying to imitate her voice); I wasn't able to do it at all. Trying to do so to an arbitrary person's device would be even harder.

<comment><USER38> That's good to know, but also a bit disconcerting, that Google has a voice print profile for me sitting on their servers somewhere.

<comment><USER39> How would this even work if it was stored on the server? Every singkr sound triggers a roundtrip to the server from your phone to check the voice? I can't imagine this working any other way than being stored locally.

<comment><USER40> if it's stored locally, it's probably stored on a server too.

<comment><USER39> I don't really see how this follows, particularly since I don't believe you can sync the voiceprint across phones. If you're saying that it's _possible_ to send voice prints to the server unnecessarily, then sure: but this has nothing to do with always-listening/voice-print storage; it could be the case for any sort of voice command, which means that what we're talking about here isn't any different from any voice command system in that respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Voice Actions

> Register your app to handle voice actions, like "Ok Google, take a note."

I think this is what most interests me. Hopefully we won't be locked into Google's pre-defined tasks and developers can start working on their own voice actions.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not sure why but saying 'Ok Google' feels a little creepier than saying 'Ok Glass'. More obvious that you aren't interfacing with a mere gadget, but a multi billion dollar corporate entity...

<comment><USER43> I've never heard anyone say "search for it", but rather "google it".

<comment><USER42> True - but that I would argue is a slightly different thing. Referring to a thing is not the same as addressing the thing. Would Siri have been as successful were it to be addressed as Apple?

<comment><USER43> Yeah, I guess it makes you sound like a tool, but I'm not sure what unique phrase would work better.

<comment><USER44> As a person who finds both "okay, Glass" and "okay, Google" to be somewhere on a spectrum from merely awkward to full-on creepy, I would just prefer people could set their own custom keywords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The part of the advert that impressed me most was that Google Now's voice recognition worked well enough to be useful. Something tells me that isn't actually a new feature.

<comment><USER46> The Google Now voice recognition is incredible. I never search for direction manually, and I use it to compose most of my text messages and all of my reminders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Two points:

\- This looks basically like an amped up google now, so maybe this means developer access to Now as well, which would be more exciting to me at the moment.

\- Pretty much all of the info they showed in the demo would work on an epaper display, maybe minus the swiping gestures. I sure hope the experience will include pebble style watches with a battery life longer than a few hours, but I am not holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER48> This looks really cool, but I worry about the battery life of these devices. Doesn't the Galaxy Gear already have not amazing battery life?

<comment><USER49> My Pebble has a battery life of 7 days and that's one of the biggest benefits compared to Galaxy Gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The software is an important part of this, but I'm more interested in seeing what new types of hardware will run this OS. The watch concept is only neat to me right now.

It definitely feels like Android is ripe to bust the confines of the phone and move in to other parts of our lives. The work that Qualcomm is putting in their Snapdragon platform is evidence of this.

</comment><comment><USER51> The commerical, PoC is great. But its idea has the same flaw as Facebook Paper ([https://www.facebook.com/paper](https://www.facebook.com/paper)).

I can check the weather, get alert and listen to my music from my smartphone. I can enjoy some home automation with Canary ([http://canary.is/](http://canary.is/)). If I have free time I can design my own app and integrate a speech recognition to open the door (I am sure there are companies selling this too).

What unique "innovations" \- conveniences will Google wearable (which at this stage seems to be just a watch) offer?

I say it has the same flaw as Facebook Paper because Paper 's success is based on rich, beautiful, poetic content. If your circle is casual writer, Paper will look lame to you. I love Google Glass because I can take pictures and record the world from a first-person view attached to my head. I don't plan on making a phone call directly from Google Glass yet - that's kind of weird.

So what else can Google watch do? I just can't see it.

 _The ability to better monitor your health and fitness._

You see, I can still get away with it with other accessory. I will give Google credit and say this is useful, but other than that, I really don't see it.

You know what is unique? What I want to see?

Iron Man computer screen + Iron Man interactive airtouch computer system.... That's what we are lacking. I want to be able to swipe through contents, web pages from thin air with gesture. We can do some of that already. Push it forward!

 _edit_ :

I will say this is useful as assistive technology. People who are visually impaired or motion disable can benefit from it. Just put it on wrist and good to go. But other than that, I just don't see it.

<comment><USER49> That's an argument against all smartwatches, not just Google. Nevertheless, I think you're wrong. I have a Pebble and it has changed my life. I will never leave the house without a wearable on my arm again.

<comment><USER52> In what ways has it changed your life?

<comment><USER49> * My phone is on permanent silent mode.

* I never miss a call.

* When biking I know if I need to stay and bring out the phone just by glancing my wrist.

* It's very convenient to be able to read texts and emails on your wrist (this is even better than you imagine).

* Great for meeting notifications.

* If I leave the phone on my desk I still see when people call (several times I've catched calls by running to my desk from the other side of the office if I see that it's an important call).

* When using RunKeeper I can see all the stats (speed, distance etc) immediately and also control the music without touching the phone.

* I can use Sleep Cycle without putting the phone on my bed.

* Silent alarm which does not wake up my spouse.

* I can easily access my grocery list (through Evernote) and have it available right in front of me until I'm done shopping.

* I can play Flappy Bird on it.

<comment><USER53> When do you charge it? (Sounds like you wear it 24/7.)

<comment><USER49> Only need to charge it once a week but I do it at my desk via USB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I can't help but think of this as a pimped out house arrest ankle bracelet.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's going to be pretty great now that everyone has shown their "huge black square on the wrist" design before apple has shown anything. Looking forward to seeing them scramble to steal apples design.

<comment><USER56> Yeah, something like that.

I actually wonder if Apple will ever manage to come out with a wearable, because honestly they are in a can't win situation: everyone else is iterating through technologies and designs, and while these aren't for everyone (though everyone who it isn't for is sure that means it is for no one), they're getting better and more reasonable, while Apple needs to come out with some sort of God watch that will completely upend technology.

They can't win. They are absolutely bound to disappoint.

Nonetheless, though, I'm sure six months after they come out with something, you'll be on here proclaiming that everyone else is copying Apple.

<comment><USER55> every watch design i've seen so far is uninspired and unrisky. they basically slapped a phone on the wrist.

if apple ever releases anything, it will almost certainly not be an ugly square touchscreen with a wristband around it.

and i won't need to proclaim anything, it will be obvious just like it was with the iPhone.

edit: Also your point above doesn't make much sense. Apple has surely been working on their watch for many years. I would be really shocked, and it would be very un-Apple like, if they came out with a new piece of consumer hardware like this that didn't leapfrog over everyone else by just thinking a bit outside the box. Most likely they are not coming out with a "watch", but a smart wristband that has tons of patented UX and hardware that will be a complete new experience for people.

<comment><USER56> The Motorola device is neither square (which you've stated repeatedly, almost like you didn't even bother looking at the site before you declared that Apple does it better), nor ugly. I'm not a watch person, but it looks pretty beautiful to me.

I imagine that Apple has been working on it for years. So has everyone -- this is hardly unanticipated technology, having been predicted for many, many decades. It just needs technology to make it possible.

And processors are getting faster, while sipping far less juice. Screens are getting better (such as the amazing, likely AMOLED round screen on the Motorola 360). Batteries are getting better. Connectivity options like Bluetooth LE are making connectivity possible. Samsung might take a lot of deserved flack for products like the Gear, but they're trying to iterate the product to make it happen.

While Apple might have had some luck timing entrants at the right time a couple of times, they have no particular advantage in any of those realms. The halo of the iPod won't carry this product launch, so they don't have the normal heads up they used to. It's going to be interesting. But I have absolutely no reason to soundly denounce alternatives against some imaginary, not actually existing foe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I hope you're all paying attention to the trend this represents, a trend fueled by ever-smaller and more intimate Android devices. Pretty soon the term "Android" may become literal.

<comment><USER24> What do 'intimate' digital devices have to do with humanoid robots?

<comment><USER57> I's saying this trend toward a closer and closer association between computers and people -- beginning with a huge, noisy room with lab-coat-wearing attendants who accepted your stack of 80-column cards through a little window, sort of like a bank (my first exposure to computers years ago) -- and now moving toward blurring the line between the computer and its "wearer", and given a number of neurological experiments in which the line between the computer and the human is blurred, I can see the handwriting on the wall.

That sentence was way too long, but I think you get the idea. :)

<comment><USER24> That would traditionally be called a cyborg, not a literal android (a sci fi reader would expect the android to be fully synthetic).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I agree that software is secondary to current hardware concerns at the moment, but doesn't this effort make it more attractive for hardware experts to try and dive in to improve the wearables market?

They've already got a "ready to go" OS with which to prototype. Pretty awesome since I'm sure Samsung worked hard to get its Gear integration working. Maybe this will improve the number of players in the space? I'm all for efforts that help bring more options to the table.

</comment><comment><USER59> We're throwing a IoT/Wearables Hackathon in april. Check it out: [http://hackendo.techendo.co/](http://hackendo.techendo.co/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Asking me to strap a computer to my risk is like assigning me homework: it requires a new way of thinking and interacting.

Having said that, I'd better see a significant improvement over using other interfaces. That's why I'm at least initially disappointed with the Android watched.

I get that we all love new interfaces because they're new and fun to play with, but what will this watch do for me that my smartphone can't do?

</comment><comment><USER61> So we now want to wear Ads on our wrists? Just checking!

</comment><comment><USER62> If helpful for anyone, I put together a collection of coverage on today's Android Wear announcement + other neat stuff on the rise of wearables

[http://wayfinder.co/pathways/5328b918bf637c0a00000001/what-y...](http://wayfinder.co/pathways/5328b918bf637c0a00000001/what- you-need-to-know-about-android-wear)

</comment><comment><USER63> Why do they have any expectation of success at the sort of power consumption that Android requires, with the power supply that wearables can contain? I note that the previous Galaxy Gear was Android - the new one is running Tizen and has around double the battery life. That's not all battery improvements, and no coincidence besides..

</comment><comment><USER60> Sorry for the typos; I wrote this on my phone and can't edit it. Also, I should note that I'm putting myself in others' shoes with the "homework" analogy. I'm a geek, so I don't mind learning about technology for tech's sake, but the same isn't true for most non-developers.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have 3 question:

1\. Will this only work with Android phone for now?

2\. Do you agree that smart watches are more for apps that don't need a lot of user interaction. Like Instagram or Dropbox will not be great on these. Simple things like showing weather etc. will be okay.

3\. Does anyone know the price of the Moto G or another Android Wear devices?

</comment><comment><USER64> Optical illusion: does anyone else see the guy's sleeve move left/right when the page is scrolled up/down?

I am using an iPad4, and scrolling the part of the page with the second video showing the guy's wrist with a checkered cuff. (The video is not playing, just how it shows on page initially).

</comment><comment><USER65> People wearing this watch do not seem very much interested in news articles ;) More seriously, my fuzzy estimate is that 80% of the time spent on my phone is for reading stuff that is definitely not the departure time of my next flight (that I can memorize five months in advance :) ).

<comment><USER66> While I don't fly much, Google Now was absolutely fantastic the last time I flew. From notifications about flight delays to checking in. It was one of those things that I didn't think I was ever going to use, but when it came into play it was magical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Just another crapshoot from a research institution trying to divest as its core business decays.

Google is showing evidence they can't predict the future very well and won't sustain development in shaky fields.

Instead, they're going for PR and military research projects, like IBM and Veridian Dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm more interested in the watches that were shown on the video. I realize I might be confused, are the watches in the video just placeholders/random design concepts to get the idea across? Still, I'm wondering what devices will eventually support this SDK.

<comment><USER69> They appear to be the LG G Watch [1] and Moto 360 [2], which were announced at the same time.

[1] [http://www.lgblog.co.uk/2014/03/lg- gwatch/](http://www.lgblog.co.uk/2014/03/lg-gwatch/)

[2] [http://moto360.motorola.com/](http://moto360.motorola.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is not wearables. It is just a tiny screen mobile device. I'd consider labeling Google Glass a wearables before what was demoed here.

Wearables is the idea of changing what we wear with technological augmentation. Watches have had tech for a long time....nothing new here sadly....

</comment><comment><USER71> I wonder what precautions Google will take to avoid fragmentation of smart watches.

If this software works well I'd be interested to see an actual watch manufacturer implement it, seeing as software has always been their downfall.

<comment><USER72> Same thing they've done to prevent it on android phones. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Why are we still using watches as the base of new wearables? Is it because it makes users more comfortable with wearing a computer on their wrist?

Also not really sure about the round LCD, why not a curved rectangular LCD?

</comment><comment><USER74> Try to look ten minutes onto your arm and than tell me your feelings. Smart watches are a nice add on to a phone. Don't expect it to be a news reader, nor a phone replacement.

</comment><comment><USER75> First rule of privacy: keep private things private. Second rule of privacy: if two people know then everybody knows.

</comment><comment><USER76> They should focus on getting the regular Android working and looking good before diverting attention to wearables.

</comment><comment><USER77> Such a tacky video. I prefer pulling my phone out over wearing a watch ...

</comment><comment><USER78> If they can shrink the size of that watch in half, I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER79> How much will google pay its user for using this spywearable?

</comment><comment><USER80> Constant cringing state with that video...

</comment><comment><USER81> Come on Microsoft !!! Where are you ?

<comment><USER82> Reading this news on a desktop, laughing on the way to the bank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Totally cool! Can't wait to have one!</comment>


Ousted Hyperloop One co-founder BamBrogan is suing Pishevar, claims harrassment - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/ousted-hyperloop-one-co-founder-brogan-bambrogan-is-suing-shervin-pishevar-claims-harrassment/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also [http://nytimes.com/2016/07/13/business/dealbook/hyperloop- on...](http://nytimes.com/2016/07/13/business/dealbook/hyperloop-one-co- founder-claims-harassment-in-lawsuit.html) and [https://wired.com/2016/07/hyperloop-lawsuit-brogan- bambrogan...](https://wired.com/2016/07/hyperloop-lawsuit-brogan-bambrogan- shervin-pishevar/)

</comment><comment><USER2> It takes a special kind of stupid not only to leave a noose on someone's desk (inarguably a sinister death threat, especially in a time of conflict) but also _to do so when you know that it will be captured on a security camera_.</comment>


Are nation states still valid in the Internet age? - <AUTHOR> The Internet has somewhat broken down borders, especially in things like e-commerce. There are many more examples. So do we still need governance in the form of nation states? <comment><USER3> I'm baffled by you asking this question, and I'm wondering who you represent as you ask it - the website, or yourself, whomever that might be?

The question is so broad that it's almost impossible to answer without dozens of caveats and presuppositions.

I think the quickest answer I can give is "yes, because the further removed government officials are from their constituents, the more abstract the constituents become."

Another quick one is probably "yes, because the there's no path to an alternative that doesn't begin with a lot of death and destruction."

Those are just the two immediate and quick ones that pop into mind, and remember what I said initially about the caveats and presuppositions - <USER2> didn't list any of them for my two scenarios, because most of them are self- evident to any reader.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a question for an article one of our writers is working on. It is not a conclusive statement, just a question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do we need a nation-state?

The single biggest thing a nation-state is for: Keeping hostile people from crossing the border with guns. You can't stop that with lots of internet connectivity and e-commerce. (And you're naive if you think the internet age means that nobody invades neighboring countries any longer.)

Other things nation-states do: Enforce laws against, for example, fraud. That's of value even if the commerce is happening on the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't we break down governance to city states rather?

<comment><USER4> We could. But why would we want to? Why, in your view, would city states be better than nation states?

<comment><AUTHOR> More accountability from those who govern as well as reducing a BIG central point of failure.

<comment><USER4> True, at least in theory. It's at the price of higher transaction costs for everything you do outside your city (or the surrounding region, at best). Whether that's a win or not depends on your perspective, I suppose.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


8 Ways to Hack Your Office Lease for Cash - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/11/02/8-ways-to-hack-your-office-lease-for-cash/ <comment><USER2> Hm. Why'd they misspell advice as "hack"? That's just bizarre!

</comment><comment><USER3> I love all these articles. A downturn forces us to become way more efficient. By the time the next boom starts, the improvements have become best practices and carry over. There are so many things we take for granted now that were once breakthough cost-cutting measures. A good example is the move to commodity hardware, which was the result of the previous bust. I love what happened to Sun during that period: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_microsystems#The_.22Bubble....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_microsystems#The_.22Bubble.22_and_its_aftermath)

<comment><USER4> _the improvements have become best practices and carry over._

They also become canaries, for when you hear "well, that's what we used to do but now it is different". There are best practices for buying a house, and then there were the "new way of things" during the bubble -- bidding wars, listings with offer expiration dates, etc. Three years ago, a real estate agent may have told you that you may have to be willing to pay more to get into the market or be priced out for good. That makes very little economic sense on an asset level, but it was the "new way of things". How is that working out now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 9\. Skip getting an office and just rent conference rooms

10\. Hire a good office broker who has been in business for more than a decade, they will know more and save you more than this article.

We did a series of interviews on a startup's first office that cover some additional advice. <http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/category/first-office/></comment>


Analytics, Big Data, and More Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.kyledaigle.com/post/45416460579/analytics-big-data-and-more-questions

<comment><USER2> This is exactly the problem my startup is attempting to tackle. We're still in the early stages of product development, but prototypes, tests and research are quite promising so far.</comment>


Why the Landline Telephone Was the Perfect Tool (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/why-the-landline-telephone-was-the-perfect-tool/255930/ <comment><AUTHOR> The article title is not as descriptive as the lede.</comment>


No Man's Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim - <AUTHOR> http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/07/mans-sky/ <comment><USER2> There is an incredible amount of negativity in this thread.

They said all the landscapes are procedurally generated. They did not say that there won't be any missions or tech trees or some other kind of hand-crafted progression system.

Many games like Minecraft or Terraria do very well with procedurally generated terrain and some kind of progression system.

I think that this might have huge potential. This could be an awesome game indeed, and so far I have not seen anything that hints to it being boring or repetitive--just unfinished.

<comment><USER3> Check out "Elite: Dangerous" it has a scientifically accurate 1:1 scale, fully Seamless Milky Way galaxy using a mix of procedural generation with artist direction

[http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ](http://elite- dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ)

[http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation](http://elite- dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation)

<comment><USER4> I've been a fan of David Braben's since playing Elite and Virus as a kid. I'd never seen him speak and The Procedural Generation video gave me a whole new appreciation of his intellect. I hope he gets a knighthood for his work on Raspberry-Pi. Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge.

<comment><USER5> > _Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had > started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge._

Wow, that's more than a little bit self-important / arrogant. You do realize that Cambridge is home to several huge tech innovators, right (ARM?) And that the UK produces more than its fair share of huge video games (GTA?).

Applying your logic, who knows what that Tim Berners-Lee guy might have achieved if he'd started off in the valley rather than CERN...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit- theory...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an- infinite-procedural-space-game) (pledged $187,865 of $50,000 goal)

2) [https://www.inovaestudios.com/](https://www.inovaestudios.com/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k) (has been in development for years, about to start a campaign on kickstarter)

3) [http://pioneerspacesim.net/](http://pioneerspacesim.net/) (free, open source, alreaady playable, alpha stage and actively developed)

<comment><USER7> I like the list. I'm thinking/hoping that sandbox games with generated content will becomes a larger part of the core game market.

Mostly, we see success in the indie 2D world:

Don't starve - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s)

Binding of Isaac - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4)

Terraria - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I)

And just released Starbound - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q)

Certainly 3D games are quite exciting in this space, too, but the 2D games seem to have a lot more traction with the big exception of minecraft.

I suspect it's simply easier to make an engaging sandbox when you don't have to worry about complexities in art assets that a 3D game requires.

<comment><USER8> Uh, Don't Starve isn't generated. The world is fixed.

Pro-tip: You need rocks, and you need them fast. Get all you can in the south, and then move northeast for the large rock pile. From there, you need to figure out how to survive the stronger enemies.

<comment><USER9> The video above for Don't Starve shows the game saying that it is generating the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Today we are still writing code like 20 years ago and one could think there has been little evolution regarding that. But this imo shows where the evolution has gone. Today a team of 4 is able to build a procedurally generated game of high visual quality with a gigantic scope like that because our tools, libraries, techniques and also hardware have evolved to a point where this is possible. I think thats pretty amazing!

<comment><USER11> Revolution vs Evolution. People want to think that progress comes from a handful of revolutions that change the world. It's a lot more exciting than what we actually have: evolutions, over long periods of time.

<comment><USER12> Except that actual biological evolution works via _punctuated_ equilibrium, so it _is_ possible to be living in interesting times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Edit: I agree this thread contains a lot of negativity and I agree it's too early to make any calls on this particular game, which does look fantastic.

Since so little can be said of this game the discussion is more "why have so many tried to do this, and failed"?

So I'll try:

Why is "procedural" used as a sales pitch? The only thing cool about procedural is that you can make something extremely vast. But then "vast" should be the sales pitch!

I'd much rather buy a game that promised "ten thousand planets carefully modeled by artists", than a game that contains millions of random ones. I fact, I'd probably prefer a sim with a designed world much smaller than that.

The thing with procedural environments is that they leave everything to game mechanics. A well designed world can support a basic or boring mechanic (such as a linear shooter). Procedural worlds need a game mechanic so deep and brilliant that only very few games have managed it (minecraft and a few of its inspirations, for example).

There isn't much that can be said about mechanics from the trailer, so we'll see.

I think (sadly) it will be the prettiest in a long line of "let's make an elite style universe sim where the game mechanic will probably/hopefully emerge from the sheer awesomeness that is an enormous space sim".

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the concept of a procedural space exploration game and No Man's Sky looks like a promising entry in the genre. There has been a number of attempts so far that approached this concept from different angles (from using space as a setting for fast roguelike gameplay [1] to pure exploration [2]), many of them resulting in good games.

That said, if No Man's Sky really is totally procedural I wonder how the developers will handle the overall structure of the game and avoid the "quicksand box" [3] trap. This is especially pertinent if the game doesn't feature a Minecraft-style combination of building and survival to make the players not mind the "quicksand".

I know the game in which I enjoyed exploring space the most is The Ur-Quan Masters (formerly known as "Star Control II") [4]. The star systems and planets there are not procedurally generated and I don't think randomizing them would make much of the difference for the reason I'll explain in a moment. My best guess as to why I liked UQM/SC2 so much beyond its audiovisual style is that a) it has no formal mission structure that limits the player's actions; and b) there's a lot you can do; but c) your exploration still ties into an engaging larger story, which and in turn contributes unique one-time encounters to the exploration. A consequence of c) is that mixing up the layout of the galaxies without changing the overall plot, which at its core is fairly linear and features a time limit (think the original Fallout), wouldn't really change what the game is like. My guess is that the company that figures out how to generate distinct game plots that provide c) along with a) and b) will take over the procedural games business, if not the game industry as a whole. The question is whether c) can be done well enough in some way that doesn't involve an artificial general intelligence or per-player MTurk writers.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis)

[3] [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox)

[4] It's now FOSS and available from [http://sc2.sourceforge.net/](http://sc2.sourceforge.net/). Highly recommended if you have an interest in SF space games.

</comment><comment><USER15> We've heard this same claim so many times before. Procedurally generating each atom? Come on, this is just a marketing gimmick. These never turn out to be decent games, usually it's just running around a world with randomly appearing enemies who all act the same and you're bored within 10 minutes. I'd be more optimistic if this exact thing hadn't been claimed before every year for the last 20 with no results.

<comment><USER16> First, I want to say how amazingly cool I think "No Man's Sky" looks -- as an enjoyer of scifi content and indie games, I will certainly be among the first in line to buy/play it when it comes out.

That said, I agree with this criticism of "procedural content" completely. A while ago I created a little toy WebGL tech demo featuring "a vast virtual 3D universe containing billions of unique stars and planets" (it's open-source on github if anyone's interested) -- so I encountered this issue first-hand (and saw it come up many times elsewhere in the past, of course).

IMO, the fundamental problem lies in a subtle distinction between "infinite variation" vs. "infinite novelty". Most procedural generation amounts to not much more than random noise passed through a variety of hand-tuned filters and/or custom code. In most cases it's how you tune that filtering and custom logic that leads to any amount of interesting results, not the underlying random noise generator (from which the too-good-to-be-true claim of "infinite variety" is derived).

I don't think it's completely impossible to derive interesting variation from a combination of mathematics and randomness, but I think the degree to which we find something interesting or "novel" is at least somewhat related to the amount of computational complexity put into its derivation (at least, that's my intuition on the matter).

<comment><USER17> I think grammars are a way to formalize this intuition of novelty (NB: grammars can be use to generate as well as to parse). Noise is like a stream of random symbols from an alphabet - anything is possible; most all of it boring. A grammar carves out a subset of the possible streams, only those with certain relationships between the symbols.

Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") - you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"), and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything.

Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators.

You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance, verbatim (this compresses _real_ well: it just needs to encode which instance. i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances, assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar avoids this.

This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length of the description of the grammar.

( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a sequence. )

Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate model _must_ be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.)

The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there.

What I'd like is _gameplay-significant_ procedural generation. e.g. trees you can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain - mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers _have_ to make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this. Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what _must_ be finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc.

FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far. Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.

<comment><USER18> One of the difficulties in creating novelty is in creating the "relationships between symbols" as you say.

Take a sword in an RPG for example. It can be a weapon, it can be sold, it can be used as a crutch for a wounded person. It can be used to signal to others by reflecting the sunlight off it. Each of these aspects add new systems of gameplay.

but these additional relationships don't seem like things you can predict without presupposing the existence of the whole sentient world. And we've said nothing about where the sword came from in the first place!

I agree with you on gameplay-significant procedural generation. After playing and loving Noctis and Frontier: Elite II, I wanted to create an arty space exploration game where you took control of a mysterious alien being who roamed the universe in search of "knowledge". You'd do this by exploring and scanning features of the universe with different tools that took skill to use.

For example, to scan a mountain range, you'd have to land several probes around it, maybe in difficult conditions. "Knowledge" would be things like "tallest mountain range","largest ocean","oxygen atmosphere","binary system with habitable planets". I thought this was a good way of having distinct goals, but remaining open ended and unpredictable. "biggest","tallest" etc being things which are easy to specify but could be anywhere in the universe.

I thought you could fly a "living ship" a bit like Moia in Farscape. This ship would develop according to how much knowledge you accumulated, along with resources you extract from the universe.

My goal was to make the procedural world itself as something of concern for the player, to encourage the player to actually get out there into the depths. Maybe I'll start on it someday, I don't know. Everyone seems to be making space games at the moment!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The embedded gameplay clip has been removed from YouTube so here's an alternative post: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA)

<comment><USER20> The above video has also been removed.

Use this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU)

<comment><USER21> This looks awesome - Minecraft meets Dune meets Homeland?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I was a kid, my parents got me a couple sci-fi encyclopedias, which were big books of beautiful sci fi illustrations with some made-up history explaining each painting encyclopedia-style. I loved them. This video reminds me of those illustrations very much, which I mean to be high praise.

I just looked through my books and called my mom to see if she had them, but no dice. They were large hardcover books with a blue cover. Anyone else remember them? I'd love to track them down for my own kids.

<comment><USER23> Maybe this one? I got it when I was a kid, and it's still right there on my shelf:

[http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority- Han...](http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority- Handbook/dp/0890092117)

<comment><USER22> Thanks so much redler! That's totally it! I found a number of photos of the book on flickr ([http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/)) and they really brought me back to my childhood. I had the first two as listed here: [http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html](http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html)

I'll have to see if I can pick up the whole series. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks massively impressive. Wonder if they can deliver as much as the trailer promises?

This is the sort teaser which makes me want to try the game just because of the "subtle" Dune-reference. Is there an Arakis anywhere there for us to discover?

</comment><comment><USER25> I dislike this kind of news coverage very much. It is designed to tease rather than inform. Although, I have to admit I was intrigued less by the _claim_ that the game procedurally generates every atom, and more by the _question_ it begs of how you'd actually generate every atom.

Usually, of course, atoms don't matter. The ideal gas law, for example, is essentially a "rule of thumb" which gives you useful ways to predict the behavior of large ensembles of atoms; e.g. to average over the movements of statistically significant (avagadro's number or so) individual particles - indeed, one of the most amazing things in physics is the connection between Newtonian physics and thermodynamics via statistical mechanics.

In any event, my naive answer to the question of what should we simulate would be "don't simulate anything you don't have to" which means that unless you have scanning electron microscopes _in the game_ you don't simulate atoms at all. You mostly use approximations. In games, collisions are important so surfaces (and their properties) tend to be important. And so those simple geometries defines the data structure you use to define the world. In essence mass is _defined_ in a computer program to be a volume that behaves a certain way in the presence of acceleration. But there is no need to describe materials as a lattice of much smaller particles. It's almost never relevant to the simulation.

So, yeah, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a game to simulate a world such that ad hoc chemical reactions can take place, etc. But it's not unreasonable to expect in-game scanning electron microscopes to be able to realistically resolve the details of any material.

<comment><USER26> I think they mean atom as in, the smallest unit that everything is built out of, not the scientific atom. I.e. not a single polygon is placed by a human artist and the sets aren't pre-designed with just some random variation.

But looking at the demo that doesn't seem to be true either.

<comment><USER27> Eh, I think the more charitable reading is they meant a physical atom, but in the sense "not a single atom has been designed by hand."

It's like if you made some algorithmic music and claimed every nanosecond was generated automatically, even though we tend to think in terms of notes that are orders of magnitude larger.

If they really expect anyone in the gaming community to believe they're rendering each blade of grass with a few Octillion points or polygons, they're absolutely insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This game came out of nowhere, the VGX show was basically being hyped of AAA titles, but no one was expecting an indie title to get as much hype as it's getting right now. I think the next gen consoles are making it much easier for devs to develop on, though frustratingly its still far more difficult to publish on console then mobile, mainly because you need to first be approved into the developer program before they even consider letting you publish games. Regardless, it seems to be moving in the right direction, although somewhat slow.

</comment><comment><USER29> It reminds me a lot of Starglider 2. That was a great game from the 80s, which let you fly between several different planets to complete a set of missions. The graphics and gameplay were pretty amazing at the time on the Atari ST and the Amiga. One minute you'd be navigating around a set of tunnels deep inside a planet, and the next you'd be chasing whales in the outer envelope of a gas giant. It was some stunning game design and coding. I've not seen anything quite like it since.

</comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of infinity (from [https://inovaestudios.com/](https://inovaestudios.com/)), which I've been watching for the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's an video interview with one of the developers here:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games- deb...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-debuts-first- person-action-adventure-no-mans-sky)

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool Video! By the way, in the video, by "Hydrogen Dioxide", I am pretty sure they actually meant actually meant H2O - "Dihydrogen Monoxide" or simply "Water".

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks quite cool and such. But what do you actually do in this game? I mean, in what ways do you interact with your environment?

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of an old "game" I used to play called Noctis: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis)

<comment><USER6> Too bad Noctis programmer went through an hard time... Last time I checked his website he had blogged about some kind of depression that arised from always trying to be perfectionist. And you can see this if you consider he was about to write everything from scratch for his next version of noctis. He started coding something like a new assembler language (if I remember correclty) which would have later be used to code the game in.

<comment><USER34> Yeah I used to hang around the forums waiting for Noctis V.

He was developing it in Linoleum, which is his own portable assembly language that he wrote. It's still available and an interesting experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Neat tech, but the problem with procedurally generated games with large worlds is that the core game mechanics are often bland or shallow, and the content can come across as very samey.

<comment><USER36> How can you even begin to judge the gameplay from the teaser video?

<comment><USER37> You cant. But, the poster didn't do that at all, didn't even mention the video. The post is short, so its not hard to see that.

My skeptical question would be: how can you set a mission in a genuinely dynamically generated world? For example, you might not even know that a bit of land will exist where you want the mission to begin. But, maybe I'm missing something obvious.

<comment><USER38> Procedurally generated just means you can create lots of variety; not that you can't generate ahead of time, save it to disk, and even put potentially useful features in the database and then just pick from those when putting together a mission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER40> "If you see the stars, those are real stars. They have their own planets around them, and you can go there"

There goes my dream.

</comment><comment><USER41> good stuff. i've been waiting for a small team to do something like this for a while... and have been planning something similar myself for when i can break free from the shackles of full-time work.

knowing some of these guys personally - i'm quite pleased its them who are doing it. :)

</comment><comment><USER42> This game has an incredible potential for broken promises. I predict bad review scores, howls of request for refunds, and the lead developer putting out blogs in the vein of "sorry, we should do better. Expect free updates that will fix everything soon!"

</comment><comment><USER43> The music

artist : 65 days of static

album : we were exploding anyway

song : debutante

</comment><comment><USER44> Hopefully this game will be good. I've been looking for a decent spacey game like Freelancer, but so far nothing seems remotely close to it. The Discovery mod in particular added a dimension that most modern games lack.

</comment><comment><USER45> Anyone know what engine they are using? The visuals look excellent.

EDIT: Think I found it: [http://www.crytek.com/cryengine](http://www.crytek.com/cryengine)

<comment><USER46> Oh great, no OS X version then. :-/

<comment><USER47> In my experience if you have an Apple computer and you want to play demanding games it's better to have windows installed in a separate partition.

The performance difference for some cross platform games is huge (around 30 - 40% slower on OSX).

<comment><USER10> true, also i find the way mouse acceleration works in OSX quite annoying for games.

<comment><USER48> try this [http://smoothmouse.com/](http://smoothmouse.com/)

<comment><USER10> yeah i actually have that installed, but when i enable it i get issues with clicks not registering sometimes, which is even more annoying when playing a game.. Dont know if its related to my mouse or something else though.

<comment><USER49> Give SteelSeries ExactMouse tool a go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anybody know what platform this game will run on? Xbox One, PS4, Wii, PC, Mac, iOS, Android? None of the promos gave us a clue as far as I could tell.

</comment><comment><USER51> I see landscapes, animals and ships, but no people.

<comment><USER37> Well, people do tend to ruin and scar everything. I'd leave people out completely. Play the game as an animal!!!

<comment><USER52> Have you seen Burgundy vineyards or Longsheng rice terraces? Would you say these are scars over the landscapes? In the old world at least, humans have created with their hands most of the countryside landscapes and it is not always ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I don't get why there's so many negative comments here.

This game looks absolutely amazing.

If anything, efforts where previous attempts have been unsuccessful, should be lauded, and there's a lot of academic talk for a 2 minute video.

Let's wait and see but I have a good feeling about this one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ouch.. that "it has to be funny" stylized graphics everywhere..

<comment><USER54> I thought the aesthetic was actually kinda neat!

<comment><USER6> You know in the angry birds era (and generally in mobile games era where all games need to look appealing to everyone, even the most casual gamer ever) a lot of indie devs started to think they had to create cute appealing girlie- awe-insipiring stylized graphics even when that would not be the best fit for a given game genre and would completely compromise player immersion.

Another reason for this is that this kind of asset is way easier to implement than full blow realistic 3D models and environment.

In the end it's all about that, sacrifying game immersion so to be appealing for casual gamers who are not interested in game immersion and could even be put off by that because it contributes to let them think game is harder to play because it's not 'just a game'.

<comment><USER55> But not all games ask for "full blow realistic 3D models and environments". You have plenty of indie titles (Stealth Bastard, Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami) for which "stylized graphics" in 2D are essential. Another example is Apotheon [1]: even if I'm not that fond of the gameplay, I wouldn't trade their stunning 2D graphics for any kind of 3D.

1: [http://www.apotheongame.com/](http://www.apotheongame.com/)

<comment><USER6> Where exactly did I say all games need full blown 3D graphics?

I am just saying that for this kind of games, where the hype/fun/immersion is all about how much fine-grained procedurally generated spatial/life details you can get, to make it all look cartonish style it's a bit simplistic and not up to the capability/deepness/complexity of the ecosystem engine they are proud to market.

To me it's just a bit of riding the trend because indie devs know very well that nowadays cute looking cartoonish indie games are well praised and boosted by mobile app stores whose ratings are driven by casual gamers looking before everything else for cute bleeps and rainbowish color splashes!

Anyway this is just my little opinion and I am sure it is incomplete and does not encompass all the aspects there are to it. Just see it as a starter for a more in-depth conversation, if you wish.

Provided you will take a 360 degrees approach to it :)

<comment><USER55> I think it's important to distinguish between "crappy graphics" and "stylized graphics". You can get away with a lot as long as you have great art direction. And this won't sacrifice immersion. On the other hand, you can make terrible-looking games with the best engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Procedural generation is a widely used term in the production of media; it refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually. Often, this means creating content on the fly rather than prior to distribution. This is often related to computer graphics applications and video game level design.

<comment><USER57> You might as well post a link to the Wikipedia article [1], when you copy its blurb.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation)</comment></comment>


Pythonpy – Command-line Kung Fu with Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Russell91/pythonpy/

<comment><USER2> Note that :

\- sony did a project like this : power at prompt ([https://code.google.com/p/pyp/](https://code.google.com/p/pyp/)).

\- an alternative exists to both : pyped ([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pyped/1.4](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pyped/1.4)) I like it better because it packs many utilities, but that's a matter of taste.

\- other projects like that existed prior this one doing the same thing. The author choose to reinvent the wheel instead of contributing. I tend to dislike this behavior.

\- both alternatives uses the "pyp" command, instead of the "py" command. The reason is that the "py" command is now an official command in Python on Windows. Installing pythonpy will cause a conflict.

<comment><USER3> And there it is a previous discussion about this on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158976)) with some useful comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice.

However, division behavior was unexpected in Python 2. It looks like it imports division from __future__ without asking.

      python -V
      Python 2.7.8

      python -c 'print(4 / 3)'
      1

      In [1]: 4 / 3
      Out[1]: 1

      py '4 / 3'
      1.33333333333

EDIT: Yes, it does do that import, and others from __future__.

Unless these imports are essential to the _operation_ of pythonpy, I suggest making these optional/configurable, and default to Python 2 defaults, i.e. don't import.

<comment><USER4> OK, someone downvoted this. That's OK, but can you say why you think it's good for the default in Python _2_ to not act like Python 2?

<comment><USER5> It wasn't me, but I can understand that for sharing scripts this should be quite useful. Also, I think the Python 3 division is way more logical (like most things in Python 3) and the old division is only one / more away. (// is integer division)

Also in a shared code base where you use division this is almost always necessary, or at least easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had used a very similar one for a while [https://github.com/ksamuel/Pyped](https://github.com/ksamuel/Pyped) and found it quite useful. In that other utility they mention "'py' has been renamed to 'pyp' to avoid conflict with the new tool in the Python stdlib named 'py'" I wonder if such a problem would arise for your project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the name is controversial. But it's also highly functional. I do recommend that you try out pythonpy even though you have already tried one of the other similar tools. I think you'll find it to be simpler, without losing much in terms of functionality. Also, the others haven't implemented ipython style tab completion from the command line.

<comment><USER7> You're not really addressing the one concern voiced in the post you are replying to. As much as you might find the above information interesting, I'm sure tucif wasn't looking for a sales pitch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've reinvented the wheel myself and made "pype" (link below).

I've been using python on the command line for quite a while, but I found that I tend to use it when I'm doing something a little more advanced than what can easily be done with standard Linux tools - and command line python would often fail me, because I couldn't easily do conditions or loops, because of the requirement for whitespace indenting. So pype contains a simple parser that'll convert bracket indented code to regular whitespace indented code, besides supporting all the stuff you want on the command line.

[https://github.com/ircflagship2/pype](https://github.com/ircflagship2/pype)

</comment><comment><USER9> I didn't think I'd need something like this but it actually seems like it could be quite useful.

I think the "killer" feature is the -x modifer to apply the scriptlet to every line of input. it seems like a nice way of sticking a quick python function into a pipe of commands for when you want that little bit more than the shell (or sed) is offering you.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome...Right now I'm teaching a class that starts off with bash and doing everything from the command line, and then moving into Python...the more that I can have students do from the command-line, the easier it is to get the concept of functional programming/pipes/filters across.

</comment><comment><USER11> Along the same lines: [https://github.com/geophile/osh](https://github.com/geophile/osh)

* Python expressions on the command line

* That are connected by piping

* But in a single python process

* And adding distribution

* And database access

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been looking for this since I last saw it. Thanks for posting it!

To me, the auto import is such a game changer compared to every other implementation (including my own: [http://github.com/samzhang111/pit](http://github.com/samzhang111/pit)).

<comment><USER13> Agreed, the auto import is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this, Perl has been my goto choice for scripty style commands that I run directly from the command line.

While Python has the -c option, that doesn't compete with the implicit loop capability that Perl and Ruby have with the -n and -p options.

This utility seems to give a lot of that same power to Python.

</comment><comment><USER15> Neat. I'm curious why the quotes around the commands are necessary. Why "py '3 * 1.5'" instead of just "py 3 * 1.5"?

<comment><USER16> It's required to prevent the shell from interpreting and expanding special characters. e.g. in the example you provide, without quotes * will be expanded to a list of files in the current directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is good stuff. Finally I don't need to hack together shell scripts with Python for adhoc text processing.

</comment><comment><USER18> `ruby -pae` in Python. It could be nice if we doesn't have awk, sed and bc already.

<comment><USER19> This is for mere humans who don't want to fight with sed awk-wardness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is kind of awesome.

"Sys admin" type usage definitely drives adoption/popularity/usage of a language (e.g., see perl; and people _like_ doing sysadmin stuff with ruby). I would love, love to have something close to pythonpy in the python core. The absence of being able to cleanly fit into standard UNIX pipe / 'filter' type workflows is a real downer for python for me and for others trying to do "sys admin" workflows.

If you were to invent a time machine and put something close to this (pythonpy) in core python ~15 years ago, then I literally think python would be more popular today (and even maybe chef and/or puppet might have been written in python. That said, rewinding time and playing it forward is a bit challenging, so I suppose we'll never know. ;-)

One-liners play a big role in sysadmin type usage. I'm not a sysadmin, but I have to frequently hop on different boxes to see what the heck is going on. Typical use might be something like "whoa, lot of files here... how many the heck files are there?", which is answered with a simple 'wc -l', but then you start asking other question like "how many big files" and "what's the average file size", etc., etc., and you start putting together longer one liners chaining together sed and awk and gawk and sh and bash and perl (including to pick up a convenient modern regex engine, which awk is not), etc., and doing it all in an extremely fast iterative run/press up arrow a few times/edit/run cycle... but for me, even though I like python, only very rarely do I use a python one-liner.

In general, some one liners sometimes grow, and then grow some more, and then some graduate to a script that then graduates to a full-fledged project. Python sometimes effectively gets eliminated from the running for a project at step 0.

I like using the right language for the job, and have no problem using multiple languages on a large or medium sized project... but it slows me down and causes me some mental agita to use 2-3 languages on a _tiny_ project like a one liner (where I'm counting mini-languages like awk/sed here).

I'd love to use python as my default "go to language" for one liners... This project (pythonpy) and other projects help, but really for me good support for python one liners needs to be in the _core_ default python so that when I hop on some random box to troubleshoot something for one of many teams, that capability is there waiting for me (and the absence of that "just being there waiting" is what killed my usage of my own version of a simple "improved one- liner support for python" package; our environment was too diverse and too often in practice it ended up being faster for me to use perl or ___, rather than going through the hurdle of installing a python module, which in some cases is more or less frowned upon for production boxes).

Based on a quick initial review, pythonpy looks better than some of the alternative efforts. Love the tab completion!

<comment><USER20> My thoughts as well. Sure I know there is an apparent wealth of command line utilities that can do everything you want and more. But not everyone knows those.

Take me for instance: I know a couple of programming laguages pretty well and know how to do most of the typical awk/sed/grep/... functionality in them by hart. I don't do a lot of command line work though, and never came around to learning it properly, so when I do and have to do something like 'move all files if some condition is true'/'do x for files containing y' and so on it's always the same struggle - couple of options:

\- start googling around till solution found using awk/sed/... crawl through sometimes awkward syntax and require multiple dummy runs or on copies od data (not nice if it's in the TB ranges) to make sure I don't screw something up

\- once and for all learn the ins and outs of awk/sed/...; not sure if the amount of time I'd have to spend on it is worth it

\- start an IDE, write some C++ or C#, enter debugger and fix things on the go until correct. The process is usually _way_ faster than the above one since I know syntax and needed methods by hart

\- write Python/MsBuild script

\- use something like pythonpy

Usually any of these except the first two seem a better idea in my case. So next time I'm definitely going to try the last one out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Python 2 :(

<comment><AUTHOR> And python3 as well :). Just use `pip3 install pythonpy`.

<comment><USER21> Good. I didn't see. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tool to build GPT-2 textgen APIs scalable and free using Cloud Run - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-cloud-run <comment><USER2> Wow this is really cool - thanks for sharing. Apparently you can add a clickable button to repos like this now for deploying to cloud run. Might be something you would be interested in. Would be cool to be able to click a button and then have GPT-2 on demand (not that it isn't easy already with the provided instructions)

[https://github.com/jamesward/cloud-run- button](https://github.com/jamesward/cloud-run-button)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately handling the model makes me unable to use the button, but it's a neat hack I'll keep in mind!

<comment><USER2> Ah I see what you mean. Makes sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Nuclear fusion breakthrough raises hopes for ultimate green energy source - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/12/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-green-energy-source

<comment><USER2> Title: "Nuclear fusion breakthrough raises hopes for ultimate green energy source"

As usual in science journalism, the article's content flatly contradicts its title. The described result is not remotely a breakthrough, and it doesn't measurably raise hope for a green energy source, and nuclear fusion is not the "ultimate" green energy source -- there are many equivalent candidate sources that meet that description.

Imagine a science journalist writing a headline after being forced to take a truth drug -- "Scientists report an interesting result caused by tweaking their ignition experiment."

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this article to be more informative:

[http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/giant-leap-for- nuclea...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/giant-leap-for-nuclear- fusion-as-scientists-get-more-energy-out-than-fuel-put-in/)</comment>


View140 (Twitter Image Search) - <AUTHOR> http://view140.com

<comment><USER2> Really glad I clicked this link and the first image was of a man doing a strip-tease. I should know better. ;)</comment>


Women in Tech: Stephanie Morillo - <AUTHOR> https://townhall.hashnode.com/women-in-tech-stephanie-morillo-cke9z7w1m003fd2s12pj7asrj <comment><USER2> Good try, but to get women in tech (or anyone with common sense) all you have to do is to hit these targets:

\- Tech is fun and helps human beings

\- Pays very well

\- Tech jobs offer the best life/work/family balance

\- You will have nice coworkers (not nerds or weirdos)

Movies have helped set some ugly stereotypes on tech workers, if only they could make them look more glamorous as they did with laws that would be awesome.</comment>