Why Diablo 3 is less addictive than Diablo 2: a scientific explanation - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexc.me/a-scientific-explanation-why-diablo-3-is-less-addictive-than-diablo-2/417/ <comment><USER4> Whilst I'm not qualified to comment on the science, I can certainly agree with the conclusion. In Diablo 2, the hunt for loot was part of feeling the "hero" - keep digging for treasure, keep dismembering those skeletons; somewhere, there's that Epic Item with which you can win the day!

I've played Diablo 3 through to "Hell" difficulty, and I've not been using my own looted gear since the middle of the "Normal" mode - there's just no competition between drops, and what you can buy on the AH for very little money. The "sensible" play style is just to farm gold, and buy AH kit. Found an item? Sell it for gold (or, very occasionally, AH) - don't use it!

It's hard to feel like a hero when you're popping off to Macy's every few hours to grab a new +1 Sword of Wounding. Your quest to save the world - sponsored by Nike?

<comment><USER5> Another thing, related but not frequently discussed, is the change in how important gear is vs. other factors. For instance, in Diablo II a high level item would give +20 vitality. Your character got 5 stat points per level which you could, if you wanted, put all into vitality. This high level item was roughly equivalent to only 4 character levels (of which you got 99).

In Diablo III, a high-level item is giving you 200+ vitality. I don't know about other characters, but I believe my Monk is getting 2 vitality per level (and there are 60 levels). A _single_ item can give me more of a stat than I gain from leveling all the way from 1 to 60. As such, leveling up doesn't do much other than allow equip items with better stats.

Because items in Diablo II gave, comparatively, closer benefits to gaining another level than those in Diablo III, I felt like I was making progress with either a level up or a nice item drop. If my character was getting decimated in Act IV of Nightmare, I could go back and gain a few levels and maybe get some new items in the process. In Diablo III, not only do your levels not increase your survivability or killing power in any way (besides new skill runes), by the time you feel like you aren't strong enough to defeat an encounter you'll most likely have few or even no more levels left to gain. The only tangible measure of progress is "phatter lewt" at this point.

<comment> guard-of-terra This is actually a good thing. Diablo II spoiled you with unique items so no magical and almost no rare items could ever be useful. In Diablo III, a very simple item can be very useful because of stat bonuses.

<comment><USER6> This is not entirely correct. While several Uniques could be considered Best In Slot, a good magical (especially true pre 1.10 path with Cruel weapons) and more commonly a good rare would be the best choice for a given build. Rare (or Crafted) Gloves, Amulets, Belts, Boots and Tiaras could spawn with extremely good properties, often surpassing Unique items.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I think you're getting there, I think there's a better explanation: variable reward schedules (eg. slot machines).

More of Schultz's work looks at this [1]. Basically, a reward of 50% of the time is far more addictive for Julio and his pals than 100% (eg. the Staff of Beatings only drops 50% from The Butcher). Diablo 2 uses a traditional variable reward schedule for its loot system, as seen in most other RPGs. Diablo 3 uses gold (stick with me). You need gold to get the items the game requires you to have from the AH, and you're mostly burning the loot you find in-game for gold on the AH or other mats. This means that you're working on a small, 100% drip feed, which you eventually cash out in a predictable fashion. Not as addictive!

I don't agree with your assertion of a frustration loop being different. Diablo 2 could be just as frustrating if loot you needed didn't drop in time. One thing I think Blizzard has done very poorly is that AH transactions do not provide instant gratification, but take up to 48 hours to process(!). This means if you are in a rut, you'll have two days stuck in it, and perhaps just break the habit and leave altogether.

[1]: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/299/5614/1898.full>

<comment><USER8> The elaborate on the Schultz paper, dopaminergic reward feedback mechanism is for unexpected reward only. Repeated stimulation depreciates the neuronal signals.

A take home message from this is that an ideal diablo 2 drop has a expected drop time of T, and should never change. The reward, of course, can come from increased benefit of character strength, or from the rare item itself (Herald of Zakarum + Barnar Star ftw).

It seems to me like the T for Diablo 3 is much greater than that of Diablo 2, and because pretty much set items and unique items are non-existent, the satisfaction of getting the item from drops is also non-existent. Alas, the AH allows you to gain strength when you are stuck, but because the time it takes you to go to AH is not a function of T itself, since you can go whenever you want, it does not really contribute to the over all game reward mechanism.

Not to mention the horrible infrastructure they have built for the AH as Lewisham mentioned.

<comment><USER7> _The elaborate on the Schultz paper, dopaminergic reward feedback mechanism is for unexpected reward only. Repeated stimulation depreciates the neuronal signals._

As I'm still working through this stuff, and am certainly no psychologist or neurobiologist, did I say anything above that was contradictory to this? It sounds like you know more than I do about the subject (I'm dabbling in it for my Computer Science thesis) and I'm always paranoid that I'm overstating or overgeneralizing some experiment result.

<comment><USER8> Oh no, you did not contradict it at all. It is one of the vital point that was pointed out in the paper, and I wanted to make sure anybody else who don't having interest in reading the actual paper to have an opportunity to get this particular point across. I'm a researcher in a neuroscience lab, and this is one of the foundational paper into modern understanding of reward mechanism. Kudos to you for linking it here :)

<comment><USER9> Dopamine doesn't just spike at unexpected "rewards," though. It can also spike at surprising loud noises, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "enjoyment graphs" might explain why I like D3 more than D2, despite the fact that according to many in the D3 forums it is a horrible game.

I played D2 back when I was a college student, so I had the time to spend in those long troughs between finding awesome items. Well, I didn't actually play D2 that much because I didn't find it fun -- and perhaps this article explains why. But for the people who want D3 to have the same addictive feel of D2, I speculate that part of it has to do with being able to commit a lot of time to get those rare spikes of joy upon getting a fantastic drop. All the serious D2 gamers knew all of the best items and finding them was a big part of the game for them (or perhaps it WAS the game?)

For me, I'd rather have a game where the combat is fun, and that's where I think D3 is a huge improvement upon D2. Blizzard's own stats show that people are playing with a wide variety of skills. That's a lot different than D2, where many skills were useless, there were only a handful of worthwhile builds, and everybody lusted after the same items.

At first I didn't understand why a randomly generated magic item could be better than a "legendary" item, but now it makes sense. If a person gets a legendary item, they know they've gotten something that will be good for most players, but it won't be the best. As such, people still have the ability to grow and get better items instead of thinking, "Well, I've gotten Sword of Awesome, no need to do anything more." To me, that makes the game more interesting, and it enhances replayability for when I sign on and play with friends. I guess things might be different for people who only play alone, though.

I'm sure the Auction House plays a big role in all of this, and many want to ascribe "evil" motives to Blizzard. Certainly the item economy will take time for them to fully understand. But even if there wasn't an AH, I think that the way they went with items (and the way skills play off of them) was the right choice for creating a game that is consistently fun. At least until Inferno -- which was meant to be ridiculous anyways!

<comment><USER11> _All the serious D2 gamers knew all of the best items and finding them was a big part of the game for them (or perhaps it WAS the game?)_

Diablo was always about the exploration and the loot hunt. That was the game. Diablo 3 is a deviation. The loot hunt kept you playing. It let you set defined goals: "I want to obtain a perfect Skin of the Vipermagi and then use the quest reward to socket it with a perfect topaz." D3 does not let you do that. You don't set item goals, you set achievement goals: "I want to beat inferno."

I'm sure a lot of people will prefer this, but the effect is much different. In particular, without the excitement of the item hunt, there is no reason to keep playing after you complete the game a few times; No surprises.

<comment><USER12> Blizzard could've made it easier to replay if you didn't have to go through the same dialog (story) again and again.

I got half way through Nightmare and was like "I am not wadding through this crap dialog again". And put the game down.

The "story" was lackluster at best. Easy to predict. And absolutely no surprises. And to make me run though it again, at each difficulty level is just mean.

<comment><USER13> Additionally, the boss mechanics were extremely disappointing for normal and nightmare, so there's no real triumph the first two times you play through the story. For most of the bosses, you have to _try_ to die.

<comment> guard-of-terra Play on hardcore.

<comment><USER13> I'd love to play hardcore, but the friends I play with aren't on board. I love the idea of it (and I've been watching some Hardcore-Inferno players on TwitchTV)

<comment> guard-of-terra You don't have to play with your friends all the time. Might as well go 50%/50%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Diablo 3 has no real reward loop – there is only a frustration loop, which > can be temporarily alleviated by using the Auction House.

This is completely wrong, there is a very powerful reward loop. Whenever you find an item that you can sell at the auction house - that's a reward. It's arguably as good as it is in Diablo 2.

I think the _real_ reason why Diablo 3 is less addictive than Diablo 2 is simply because the folks who played Diablo 2 are now 12 years older. There's something about getting older that makes you less prone to being addicted to games.

<comment><USER15> I disagree with the reward loop you perceive, as #1 Finding loot that you sell doesn't directly increase your avatar strength. Case in point? Find an axe, equip it and now you're plowing through enemies with greater ease. Feels good. Find an axe, POST it on the AH and walk away. The loop doesn't include detached events.

Someone's mentioned 12 years old or 12 years older now several times. I'm sorry but this simply does not apply. Diablo 2 is so incredibly popular NOT because people played it back then and are returning now, but because of the SHEER mass of people that continued to play it for 5+ years. So even by the norm of sales you're looking at people merely 5-6 years away, not including that some of the most vocal people STILL PLAY IT.

I was playing through the last two ladder resets, one of them just a few weeks prior to D3 launch.

The biggest problems aren't caught by people who have nostalgia goggles on, they're caught by the people who still played it regularly (off and on over the years.

<comment><USER12> "I disagree with the reward loop you perceive, as #1 Finding loot that you sell doesn't directly increase your avatar strength"

Not to mention most of the items you find (even rare items) are vendor trash not worth selling on the AH. And crafting is just terrible in this game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this scientific? All I see is a lot of speculation with no experimentation/testing. Vague similarities to another study don't cut it - <USER2> are not monkeys, and the monkeys weren't playing D2/D3. He's just assumed the premise that D3 is less addictive than D2, and the rest is an argument made to fit this assumption. I'm not saying he's wrong, just saying that this is bad science.

<comment><AUTHOR> But... but... it has graphs!

The "scientific" part was pretty tongue-in-cheek given all the handwaving I do, I obviously didn't hook up electrodes to anyone's brain while they're playing (although that would be fascinating). I'll edit the blog title to put it in quotes, can't edit the submission title though.

<comment><USER17> Give yourself some credit: you have a testable hypothesis. We could conceivably monitor the brain activity of Diablo 2 and 3 players and see if they match your predicted behavior. That we could either confirm or contradict your hypothesis means that we could actually provide support or falsify your theory.

<comment><USER9> OK, so suppose you measure metabolic activity in (say) nucleus accumbens, with pretty sensitive equipment, for a number of different players (experienced or naive? D2 vets or not?) as they somehow play this commercial computer game with their heads stabilized, for not very long periods of time. You aggregate the data across individuals, losing a ton of information.

Now what is the hypothesis - that D2 will drive significantly more metabolic activity than D3, because some blogger thinks that it is a better game?

This would tell us nothing of any scientific interest whatsoever. (Not to say you couldn't make a poster or even get grants for such rubbish, with the right connections)

If there is a testable hypothesis in here, it is so bizarrely specific as to have no practical value nor any value in distinguishing among meaningful theories about how the brain works.

<comment><USER17> The theory isn't about the brain itself, but about the enjoyment cycle of Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. The hypothesis is clearly stated in his post: it's the graphs he drew for the brain activity of Diablo 2 and 3. He is predicting a very specific reward-frustration cycle for each game.

No one said science had to be useful.

<comment><USER9> This has nothing to do with science. It has to do with complaining about a matter of taste, and dressing it up with scientism.

<comment><USER17> A testable hypothesis whose result will either support or falsify a theory is the very definition of science.

Note that this theory has nothing to do with whether or not one _likes_ the experience. Someone very well may like the experience with more frustration more, for whatever reason. The theory is not "This is why Diablo 2 is better than Diablo 3," but an explanation for why many people may feel less satisfaction playing Diablo 2 than Diablo 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The complaint here is that inferno (highest) difficulty is not enjoyable in the traditional sense. From what I understand, inferno is not designed do be addictive per se, it's designed do be hard and it's aimed at people who want to play hard games.

I believe (but have no good citations / evidence for) that there's another system in the brain for rewarding behavior, one that is based on the satisfaction of accomplishing tasks that are difficult. This other loop may be a little harder to study, I'd imagine that it would be difficult to get most animals to exhibit this loop.

Just take a look at a sample of walkthroughs for various games, alongside traditional guides you'll find esoteric ones: guides marked as "low-level", "solo", "pacifist", "naked", etc. There are also play styles such as "ironman". Back in the day, I used to play Diablo ironman with friends. You're not allowed to talk to merchants in town. I played FF6 "low-level", where you don't allow the characters to gain levels: run from any fight you can, but you still have to fight the bosses with a woefully underpowered team.

It's tapping into the same reward systems that reward programmers for refactoring code.

So I guess my final point is that you can't call something less addictive by analyzing it, since you can only analyze the addiction mechanisms you know about. You have to determine how addictive it is by measuring the behavior of the actual people using it. From a scientific perspective, this article is really a hypothesis.

<comment><USER9> I don't think anybody has ever shown any studies with animals being extra rewarded for achieving difficult tasks. To speculate, that may relate to our social wiring.

Not even the dopamine system is exactly and entirely a "reward system," there are multiple pieces carrying out various signal-processing tasks without clean alignment to our intuitive categories.

Despite the existence of localization and specialization in the brain, it is not common for any high-level behavior to weigh completely on just one distinct piece of the brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Insightful because I don't seem to enjoy Diablo 3 as much. I'm currently pretty bored with the inferno difficulty level. My options is to keep farming gold until I can afford something strong enough on the auction house to carry me further. Really frustrating. Before I could just farm and eventually get myself an awesome piece of gear and use that for progression.

<comment><USER20> I think a lot of people dissatisfied with D3 are forgetting they were 12 years younger when Diablo 2 was released. That's a long time for your tastes to change. Everyone who played Diablo 2 as a child is now an adult.

<comment><USER21> A lot of people dissatisfied with D3 are also satisfied with StarCraft 2, which had a 12 year delay from its predecessor.

Tastes change, but I don't think that's the primary issue at play here.

<comment><USER22> Well I think it depends.

Starcraft 2 has improved it's e-sports appeal which I credit mostly to the community but it suffers from the lack of variety in strategy and the dumbing down/nerfing of a lot of micro. HotS will likely shift add more strategies alongside future patches that tweak the balance, but I think it's still about a year or two before gamers are truly satisfied with the state of the game. Kind of like what Starcraft 1 went through.

<comment><USER23> Look at Dota 2. It's going to blow Starcraft 2 our of the water with regards to eSports, probably everywhere but Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think one of the big things that comes to mind is something I remember reading with competitive games like Counter Strike and Starcraft- the games where if you are doing poorly against the competition you're not enjoying yourself _at all_.

The sentiment was "There is a large portion of gamers that do not enjoy _playing_ games, they enjoy _winning_ games."

I think this translates to Diablo 3 very well- everyone was perfectly happy farming Diablo or Baal (previous "final" bosses), yet no one seems to enjoy farming Act 1 or Act 2 inferno. It's the _exact_ same thing, but I believe people are not enjoying it because they are unable to beat the game.

I see a lot of talk about how it's impossible to beat the game just by grinding, and you have to play the AH to get gear from the people that have already beaten the game but it's important to remember that there were people that beat the game for the first time. These people didn't have people to purchase the best stuff of off because they were the furthest of anyone in the world.

Similarly, there are people progressing (albeit slowly) through inferno hardcore where there are probably less than ~100 people in the world. There's very little gear on the market and there are still people progressing by farming gear themselves.

</comment><comment><USER25> A friend of mine is making a competing game, Path of Exile.

According to some, it's more of a D2 sequel in spirit than D3 is. Darker setting, more emphasis on skill and action play, etc.

The goal when making PoE was to create a game where the item economy was really strong. There is no gold in PoE. Instead you have currency items (see <http://www.pathofexile.com/news/dev-diary/>).

All of the shops are horrible for trade, offering tiny amounts for even great items. If you really want something good, you have to trade for it directly with other players or find it yourself.

It is a far more addictive game than either D2 or D3 because a greater range of interesting, random things happen.

PoE also has some great mechanics, for instance flasks (health / mana) are items that last for a long time - they use charges when you drink them and recharge as you fight. They can be magical and unique.

Also, the skill tree offers a far greater range of choice.

Definitely worth checking out.

<comment><USER26> That game looks amazing! Can't wait to play it. Already been passing the website to friends :)

<comment><USER25> You can donate to get access to the closed beta - <https://www.pathofexile.com/purchase>

<comment><USER26> I noticed - awesome. Definitely plan to pick up a copy next week. After reading through the site and the forums, it really does sound like a great game and the graphics are beautiful too. I especially like how they replaced gold with currency items that actually have value and the dev diary post[1] about the logic behind doing so shows that they've carefully thought it through. I think this game has a real chance to being what Diablo 2 fans (myself included) have been waiting for! Now to finish a ton of work so I have time to play...

[1] <http://www.pathofexile.com/news/dev-diary/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A comment by Tei from Rock Paper Shotgun forums:

      Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH.

It's funny. Laugh.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recently wanted to impulse buy Diablo 3. After seeing a price of 60 USD and clicking order I needed to login to my battle.net account. Which set my country to Germany and the price to 60 EUR.

Updating my residence? I just need to send in a government issued id and, if that doesn't include an address, a recent utility bill..

Want to delete a battle.net account? It seems the only way is calling a hotline of some sorts. I'd bet they ask for similar bullshit.

Yes, I enjoy Diablo 2 more. The braindead way Blizzard treats me excludes any new version as mere option. Ignoring all the always online idiocy.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the main problem is their flawed auction house design.

Prices for weapons, armor, and gems will keep dropping to lower and lower prices as long as you aren't in the first wave of players. There's nothing to stop that price drop since demand for items will decrease over time AND supply will increase.

An example of the bad design is in the fact that constructing a gem in the game (which takes mutiple lower quality gems you have to find) costs more money than to just buy it from another player. And it will only get cheaper.

<comment><USER9> I don't know, it seems like the options for fixing this are limited.

As more of anything spawns, the market supply increases. Everyone would cry if they couldn't farm monsters for good stuff like gems. So at higher levels, great gems are spawning, and then they are going on the market, increasing supply and driving the price toward zero.

You could make gems decay in storage to take them out of circulation, but everyone will cry. You could make gems into very fragile/limited-use items, but everyone will cry. You could increase the work required to generate gems, now they will not be accessible to anyone except by buying from Chinese gold farmers or working Diablo like a job.

All you can do is forbid any kind of selling of gems (or whatever). But then the entire market is the black market and again the game is run by people who are using automation to produce items to sell for cash. So you actually have to prevent transfer of ownership altogether... but nobody suggests that because it doesn't sound like any fun.

And anyway, even if you do that you will still have people paying for someone else to level up their character and get goodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The game's user score on Metacritic wouldn't be so binary if it wasn't for the fact that the game is called 'Diablo'. The name invites certain expectation. If they had the sense (and confidence in their abilities) to call it something else, at worst they would be getting "Meh.", "I played it, finished it, and moved on. A decent game I guess.", "Nice, but nothing special."

One thing that particularly annoys me is that Diablo 3 developers _are in denial_ about the game even being different. They are either in denial or they're cynically lying. Check out this thread, a guy responds to Jay Wilson's sentences point by point. Highly recommended !

<http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5638007856?page=1>

<comment><USER30> I think the OP in that thread is a mix of rose coloured glasses and sour grapes (sour grape coloured glasses?). The rebuffs are mostly of the "D3 does just what D2 did despite what you said!" variety. About the only thing that I felt was pretty valid was the invasiveness of the story, partly through the fluff conversations of hirelings but mainly through all the boss cutscenes. If the cutscenes didn't play after the first time you'd seen them I'd be a lot happier. At the same time I like the story and it's one of the things I've enjoyed most in just about all of Blizzard's games, this being no exception.

(While I like the fact I can find things to improve my character on the auction house, the fact that I need to because I find a very small number of upgrades makes me sad.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Diablo 3 has some issues (mainly rareness and badness of legendary items and excessive difficulty/frustration in Inferno), but I've still found it the most fun game I've played in quite a while. The most important part of the game - skills and combat - is really excellent.

</comment><comment><USER32> The original article put "scientific" in quotes. I suggest this title should've kept it, because there is nothing scientific about it. Stating a hypothesis doesn't make it science. It might make for an interesting read though.

</comment><comment><USER33> How I avoid this problem (and enjoy D3, very much):

1\. Play hardcore. This instantly transforms the entire _point_ of the game from "get the best gear" to "stay alive", though of course awesome gear is still fun because it helps you stay alive, and squish monsters faster.

2\. Don't use the Auction House. Sure, this means I won't be competitive (level for level) with players who do, and I probably won't ever be able to play Inferno, but I play mostly single player or with friends who use similar rules.

A lot of people do seem to love the gear grind of D2, and that's fine for them, but I'd much rather play it in the vein of a classic roguelike.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ok, you can't put a bunch of graphs on something and call it a scientific explanation, While the reasoning is decent, there is no data backing up any of these assertions, it hardly seems "scientific" in nature.

</comment><comment><USER35> As both a scientist and avid Diablo 2 player, this blog post is laughable in its superficiality and its claims.

TL;DR: Diablo 3 was WoWified: broke itemization and skill builds, and thus replayability.

In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.

In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it".

\--

Background: thousands of hours manually farming and botting Diablo 2 since vanilla release, equivalent time spent trading/on d2jsp (most of this will refer to 1.09 since that is most fresh in my mind). Also lvl 60 demon hunter in Diablo 3 Inferno Act 3.

Please don't argue that D2 was just as broken on release. The D3 team had YEARS of experience to look back on.

\--

1) D2 was all about plowing through monsters. If you were underleveled or undergeared, bosses should be somewhat difficult. If you were reasonably prepared, bosses should be fairly easy. If you even had decent gear, bosses should be a joke.

D3, on the other hand, treats everything like a WoW raid. Hours of grinding to prepare for a fight, min-maxing forcing everyone into a single class or build (energy armor wizard or PMS demon hunter?), and even then, the fights are difficult( vs champions/elites).

Why is this important? Because D2 was so "easy", many many skill builds were viable. Wanted to roll a melee sorc? Go ahead. Fishymancer ( = pet wd in d3)? Works. Throwing barb? Surprisingly strong. Thorns + fire aura pally? Too good.

The proliferation of crazy builds is important, as it makes a MUCH larger proportion of items valuable. This will tie in with the next point.

\--

2) D3 itemization is broken. First, there are very, very few item stats that are important. Weapon DPS, main stat, vitality, resist all. Maybe atk speed, crit, crit dmg, move speed. Everything else is garbage. Health globe radius, seriously?

What made many D2 builds viable was the much larger variety of item effects, as well as lack of dependence on stats. Life tap wands made smiters useful, enigma was good for everyone, infinity runeward allowed lightning sorcs and javazons to fight lightning immune, etc.

\--

3) Rare items. The above 2 problems, when taken together, kill the D3 end- game. D2 was all about making a MF build, getting some money, then making a bunch of crazy characters, either min-maxing MF or PVP or Baal runs or something, but there was a ton of variety in what you could do. End game economy revolved around rare items.

In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.

In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it". This means that botting was difficult, because the really big $$ items are ones you wouldn't even recognize, and stash size was a limitation.

\--

Anyways, that's why I stopped playing D3. I really don't think they can fix these problems without very large patches, which seems unlikely coming from actiblizzard.

<comment><USER35> I'm kind of sad that this was downvoted. I thought on hacker news downvotes were used for factually incorrect or trolling posts, and I don't think this post is either.

Can I get an explanation for the downvotes at least?

<comment><USER36> I read the post and am not sure why people downvoted. I have sneaking suspicion that because snarky, trolling posts are universally disallowed, people resort to snarky downvoting. Not the best solution, but I guess people need an outlet. I upvoted you to counter a little.

Anyway, this is more of a personal question. I was wondering if you've actually looked deeper into the personal question of why loot drops, etc, even constitute a reward. This is not blackberry juice! It is manipulation of RAM that affects the display. I play D3, and the closest I've come to understand is that it's _the challenge of maintaining forward progress against increasing resistance_. In which case the OP is correct - one waits for resistance to grow too high, go the AH, buy new gear.

The other option, of course, is to adopt/discover a new strategy (which can then drive your gear choices, of course). But really my question (which is still a bit perplexing) is why I want to maintain forward progress going through content that I've already seen.

<comment><USER35> I think the reason is a combination of different aspects, with varying proportions of each for different people.

I would agree that one of those aspects is surmounting obstacles.

For me, and I would argue for the majority of hardcore Diablo players, the main aspect is market manipulation. It feels GOOD to buy cheap and sell, or find some inefficiency in the market and exploit and profit.

Diablo is essentially the free market at its best and worst, and I find it amazingly addicting to go from rags to riches, and the power that comes with that. If you are rich enough, you can essentially create a niche market by yourself.

There was this insanely rich guy on d2jsp that offered large amounts of currency for the most ridiculously bad items. This "make people do stuff for me" power is even apparent at lower levels of the heirarchy. I remember finally reaching "middle-class" status and going into trade games and offering somewhat valuable items to new players in exchange for them doing inane things like bringing me tedious (unnecessary) quest items, or answering trivia.

Other aspects are pride in skill builds (I want to try this ridiculous skill build and show it's viable), showing off items ( through faster PvE, more wins in PvP, etc )... many more probably.

<comment><USER36> Aha! In a word: _status_.

Status is such an interesting, and compelling, enticement for behavior. Even entirely synthetic status, like D3, has it's advocates. In that case, we can say that the dopamine spikes occur during _status events_.

Perhaps that's D3's real problem - the dearth of status events. Perhaps PvP will sove that problem for ActiBlizzard.

(Personally, I don't think I'm motivated by status events. I'm more motivated by puzzle solving, and although D3 has some puzzles, particularly in the meta- game, they aren't particularly compelling to me.)

<comment><USER37> I doubt status is the correct answer here.

Firstly, you can't use a term like status and then apply it across the entire D3 player base. The edge cases here are complete player types which make a sizeable portion of the player base.

<comment><USER36> I think that _status_ correctly summarizes the incentive that the grand parent post describes. And from what I know about gamers I think he's onto something. It may be a more local status; e.g. within a close network of friends, but status is potent.

If you do not want to apply it across the player base, fine. But one must provide an alternative, perhaps some partition across the base according to motivation. I'd be interested to see that from you.

<comment><USER37> Well instead of seeing that from me, this link may help perhaps - <http://chiproject.googlecode.com/files/cpb2E20062E92E772.pdf>

Survey results of 3000 mmo gamers on what motivates them, Nick Yee.

<comment><USER36> 1\. I don't see any results. Even the supplamentary link [<http://www.nickyee.com/cpb-supp.html>] doesn't break down, say, top responses as fractions.

2\. In the list of MMORPGs WoW is not listed. That seems strange, casting doubt on this study.

3\. The word "status" is the 5th word in table 1.

It's great that there are multiple motivations, but I'd like to see which motivations are most prominent in the sample. That is, are 80% motivated by achievement, 50% by social, and 40% immersion? (And note that in this case, the percentages don't need to add to 100).

<comment><USER37> It's an old sampling, and even with or without wow it makes no difference.

As I have said elsewhere you can go to the dwarf fortress forums and you will find status to be a far lesser motivator than doing cool stuff.

Gaming is studied pretty extensively nowadays, I pulled the first result you get for video games plus motivation. A few further google searches will help illuminate this further for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have only played D3 in normal, not touched the AH at all, and definitely felt the lack of addiction and excitement. Putting aside that me and my life are very different now than back in D2 times, there's a very visible issue for me: all loot is just a collection of variations on the same few numbers. A piece of gear can be good, it may have a great combination of the right stats for my char, but it's not _special_ , it's not memorable, it's not unique. I like it but I don't love it.

</comment><comment><USER39> While we're on the topic of Blizzard and wasting time - are there any HNers that enjoy a game of StarCraft2 from time to time? Get in touch!

<comment><USER40> I do although I'm barely dipping into Silver. Also I'm on the EU server.

Perhaps something for an "Ask HN" or an in-game channel? I'll go sit in a "HackerNews" channel when I'm online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could a reason for disappointment/changed degree of addiction have something to do with varied expectations over a course of time? Diablo II launched back in 2000, right? Not to say that game wasn't played years after, but I'm just thinking my opinion of a game like Diablo would have been quite a bit different that many years ago.

</comment><comment><USER42> tl;dr -- everything changes on Inferno, so scroll down and read only that part if you're in a tl;dr sort of mood. I apologize for any typos/grammatical mistakes; I should probably get back to work, and that guilt is enough to prevent me from proofreading this super carefully.

\--

So, I sort of agree with the linked post, but I feel it doesn't apply to the game as a whole, rather only to certain sections and to certain demographics. I'll explain by digging into the presence/shape of the reward and frustration loops (which can co-exist, imo!) for each difficulty level both with and without use of the Auction House.

On Normal: The game is never very hard. As a result, the frustration loop is non-existent for both AHers and non-AHers. Players using the AH and players _not_ using the AH are pretty much in the same boat, though decent items are inexpensive enough in this level range (1-30) that a player can pretty easily flatten the reward loop entirely (and thus never find anything truly useful to him/her) by purchasing new "good" gear every few levels that's very likely to blow away anything they're going to find. tl;dr: on Normal, the AH serves only to destroy the reward loop (and removes all challenge from the game as well).

On Nightmare: The game begins to get more difficult; you realize things are a bit more serious the first time you see an elite pack with potently synergetic affixes. The increased challenge does not frustrate most players, and for these players the game (as well as the effects the Auction House has on rewards/frustration) is the same as on Normal. For inexperienced players, however, the effects explained in the OP's post begin to manifest themselves. The game gets tough in some places, and the AH can alleviate this pain at very affordable prices. Using the AH creates a frustration loop because buying cheap, relatively powerful gear is easier than learning to play better, and as such the idea becomes to "out-gear" rather than "out-think" challenges. This dampens the peaks of the reward loop significantly for AH users. Nightmare is very doable without using the AH, and as such many users are unaffected and the game still feels a lot like Diablo II.

As of Hell, D3 becomes much, much harder. Elite packs with deadly affix sets become common and characters can be killed very quickly at times whether or not they're prepared for what's coming. Hell, I think, is the part of D3 that is most negatively impacted by the Auction House. Hell is completable without using the AH, but it's hard enough/some parts are frustrating enough that many people will use the AH to augment their gear before finishing it (and will likely do so several times). Hell difficulty, IMO, is where the linked post really shines, and I think everything in the OP's article really describes this very well. Lots of people will use the AH to complete Hell, and as a result will experience the frustration loop and lack of a reward loop described in the post. Since the gear necessary to complete Hell is very affordable still, players can buy their way out of difficult situations and power through without the addiction that comes along with finding awesome stuff every so often.

If you've read this far, thanks! This is where the game changes.

On Inferno, the linked post doesn't apply. Starting with Act II, Inferno becomes incredibly difficult to the point where characters just "playing through" and even characters who have been farming (collecting gold and new items) for awhile in Act I are eliminated by foes instantly and frequently. Inferno is nigh-impossible (yes, some people have finished it, but the vast majority won't for awhile if at all) as it is intended to be and the absolute best gear is needed to progress without major pain.

This gear is very, very expensive, and most players won't be able to afford it. I don't have statistics to back this up (yet?), but imagine that gear quality follows a power law distribution in which there is a _ton_ of crap and only very infrequently do the wonderful things pop up. The wonderful things are needed to progress on Inferno, so the demand for them is very high, higher even than it'd be if Inferno could be reasonably completed without them. The game is now different. Instead of being able to smoothly purchase the items you need as you go, there is a brick wall in front of you that says you must be THIS TALL to ride, and you're only half this tall. So how do you get THIS TALL? You farm.

You farm and farm and farm. The game becomes about total equippable assets. Say a suitable item for a given slot costs 1 million gold; 2x rings, 1x amulet, 1x chest, 1x helm, 1x boots, 1x pants, 1x weapon (2h for sake of example), 1x belt, 1x gloves, 1x shoulders = 11 items = 11 million gold. You don't need to find or trade for 11 suitable items; you just need to be able to purchase them. You feed the power law curve of crap on the Auction House by selling everything you think will sell for a reasonable price so that you can buy the super-expensive items you need to progress.

Here's the kicker: this means that the presence of the AH doesn't actually dilute the reward cycle! The inability to trivially purchase everything you need means that the items you find have full meaning. Even if you can't wear the good ones, you'll sell them or give them to friends who need them, building up gold and friend-goodwill s.t. they'll give you things they find as well. In short, the incredibly high bar set by Inferno combined with the rarity of the items needed to progress through Inferno balances with the effects of the AH in cheapening the reward loop, restoring the feel of Diablo IIness.

For those wondering about the Inferno frustration loop, I argue that the presence of the AH doesn't change it. Were it not for the AH, Blizzard would still find a difficulty bar befitting their highest difficulty. (It would likely be easier to compensate for having no AH -- or perhaps good rare items would drop more frequently -- but the difficulty would likely not change substantially.) In both cases, the very rare amazing finds are what pushes the player toward progression; in the AH case, the few major item find successes give the player the gold he needs to move on; in the non-AH case, the few major item finds are what you actually use. The reward loops then are awfully similar if not the same (hence the feeling of Diablo IIness).

\--

To sum up: for players who use the Auction House whenever it's in their best interest to do so before Inferno, yes, I agree with the linked post. The game is cheapened, the reward loop doesn't feel as good or doesn't exist, and a lot of the challenge is removed. This does, however, allow Blizzard to make the game more difficult for players looking for a challenge (as not using the AH through Hell is pretty tough!) while still making it possible for less experienced players (via using the AH). Perhaps that's part of their design, and they should have made it more obvious (like a recommendation not to use it for experienced players until later, etc).

<comment><USER43> That's where I think most people are wrong about inferno though. That difficulty rewards proper communication and group play. Sure, soloing everything requires a crap-ton of godly loot, but damage and defenses can be compensated by a proper synergy of group skills. Lack armor and resists? that Barb shout may just solve it. Your tank getting face-melted a lot? You could have a monk stack a 50% damage reduction debuff on the enemy. Your glass cannon wizard getting chased down? Have a witch doctor load up on CC skills. What I'm seeing everybody try to do is to gear up and go berserker on the enemy and it just doesn't work.

<comment><USER44> On Inferno the monsters scale quite massively with each and every player that joins the game. I believe it's 110% of hit points and about 15% of damage per player.

So your party have to synergize alot in order to overcome this scaling. This is further exacerbated by the Nephalem Valor buff's mechanics - a bonus to magic find you accrue after killing hard mob packs - which prohibits changing your skills and runes mid-game. Hence you cannot really have your party members leave and be replaced by someone of different class without losing the synergy (or the buff).

In solo play, of course, you don't have these problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How would others rank the story line of Diable 3? I loved the story line of Dungeon Siege when I was younger but I haven't found a modern replacement.

<comment><USER35> Pretty terrible compared to Diablo 2.

If you like being ( in the story ) some unrivaled being that everyone flatters and looks up to and expects you to defeat all evil, you'll love it.

Voice acting was superb, though. I guess I just found Diablo 2's ominous "good luck hero, you're gonna need it" atmosphere more realistic when going against the embodiment of all evil.

<comment> guard-of-terra Diablo II didn't have any story line worth mentioning. It had some long monologues but that was it.

Did you actually read Diablo III storyline? The idea was: the worldstone is destroyed, everybody will be nephalem now. There's no reason why you would be nepalem and anybody else won't. People were miserable but now they actually become what they should be in the first place.

<comment><USER35> That was what was great about Diablo 2. The storyline was fairly subtle, but the whole time I felt like I was really a hero struggling against the forces of evil, following this path of destruction and being scared of actually finding hat I was looking for.

Yes I read the D3 storyline, and I think you're a bit mistaken in how it happens.

The humans (nephalem) are offpsring between angels and demons, but their potential power was too much, so the Worldstone was used so that each new generation of humans would be progressively weaker. Since you killed the Worldstone in D2, and some time has passed, _some_ humans have regained nephalem powers.

The question becomes: how does every minor character know what a nephalem is? how do they know it's all powerful? why does everyone have so much faith in me to defeat the evil that has pretty much been uncontested forever?

D3's story makes me feel like I'm Superman, born to save the world and everyone knows.

a good read: <http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/10/diablo-3-the-story-so-far/>

<comment> guard-of-terra I don't understand why everybody won't be nepalem.

Ancient entities like Diablo and Imperius recognise you being nephalem because the difference is as obvious to them as the difference between an ape and a human.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As someone that never played Diablo 2, I find this to be very accurate. Skyrim was much more enjoyable and habit forming.

</comment><comment><USER47> I thought Diablo 2 was nowhere near as addictive as Diablo 1 _shrugs_.

<comment><USER48> And Diablo 1 was nowhere near as addictive as Angband.

Which I'm playing right now on my Android phone...

<comment><USER47> And now I'm addicted to Angband. >:(

<comment><USER48> Mission accomplished!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So, for those of us who haven't purchased Diablo 3 yet, is it worth it?

<comment><USER35> It is actually fun from 1 to 60 if you avoid the AH (though near the end of Hell you might need to). Replayability is totally down from Diablo 2 though.

<comment><USER15> I found your other post to focus on the wrong aspects of D3, but this one is right on.

It's pretty fun 1-60, especially with a friend.

As soon as you play a bit longer you quickly realize that most people just quit trying to loot in regular intervals to use the AH. They only pick up gear to sell to merchants.

Before I was even hacked I realized the replayability wasn't there and donated for a beta invite to Path of Exile.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, I think D3 nailed the social aspect of leveling. I only had one friend playing the game, but I ended playing regularly with over 10 other people that I just met in game randomly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Great theory and great reference study to back it up.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Diablo III is a wonderful game and anybody who claims otherwise is probably a combination of:

\- Whiner who likes whining more than playing games.

\- Bad genre match: go play your mindless Max Payne or Counter Strike, we won't possibly feel any worse without you.

\- Not really remembering Diablo II downsides that were fixed in Diablo III. Having idealized past and snarky today.

Of course you have to play on hardcore. AH makes single player softcore much less fun; multiplayer softcore a bit less fun (it was possible to trade even in Diablo II); and hardcore becomes a lot more fun. Because seriously.

Now, Diablo II had a lot of problems of its own that I'm glad are fixed in Diablo III. A clear improvement.

Come on! Meph running without maphack is NOT fun! Throwing out every magic and rare item is NOT fun! Ignoring every non-mandatory dungeon because the only good drop is from bosses is NOT fun! Skipping acts 1 & 2 because good exp only comes in 4&5 is NOT fun! Running thru huge levels killing monsters with lots of health but little scare factor is NOT fun! First scene in act 5, where very good exp could be made but no scary monsters or interesting drop - <USER3> definition of boredom!

We loved Diablo II, but now we love Diablo III, so please ignore the whiners and give it a try! Hardcore.

<comment><USER51> GL on hardcore inferno act 3

So many mops that jump or do quick long range attacks. Not to mention elite packs.

Takes just too much time to be a considerable challenge. I know its about farming gear on hardcore... but the chance of rolling perfect stats that you need.... slim.

<comment> guard-of-terra You don't play hardcore to never die.</comment></comment></comment>


Please review my API for HackerNews - <AUTHOR> http://api.ihackernews.com/

<comment><USER2> Not sure if you have some other strategies for the URL scheme, but I'd probably use RESTful paths... like:

/users/{username}/posts instead of /by/{username}

or

/posts/{id}/comments instead of /comments/{id}

And how come threads are indexed by userid but posts are indexed by username? These kinds of things are the things that slip by developers and give them headaches. I can easily imagine not noticing the username/userid switch and being like "WTF!? 404?!" for a while.

I would expect the standard REST paths would a) make it easier to guess the paths and b) allow for simpler URL generation in client apps (you can generate the url for a user and then just tag on /comments or /posts to get the url for those things)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, but that isn't what RESTful means at all. Structured URIs like you mention can be pretty, but are completely unrelated to REST. In the real world they are often used in an anti-REST way, specified in advance instead of linked via hypermedia. If the client needs to use foreknowledge to construct URI strings, that goes against everything REST stands for.

REST is _Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State_ — the default modus of ActionController::Routing::Routes has nothing to do with it.

A design that uses only opaque UUIDs as names for resources and reveals them to the client via links in the responses is perfect REST. Clean-looking URIs are a distraction, except that they tend to be easier to preserve across software rewrites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks clean and simple. Well done. I'd add in the documentation comments about caching (on your side and the requester's side) and rate limiting.

For those wanting debugging tools for JSON APIs (a common request for the APIs I operate):

* JSONView, an addon for Firefox that prints nice-looking JSON from the URLs of the API. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10869/>

* Tidy JSON, a command line tool. <http://www.raboof.com/Projects/TidyJson/>

</comment><comment><USER5> An API that is subject to change should have a version number as a namespace somewhere in the URL. That way you can have different API versions running and it makes less painful to go forward.

</comment><comment><USER6> How timely. I just started writing a library to scrape data from Hacker News because I wanted to put the posts I'd upvoted in the sidebar of my blog.

Link: [http://blog.edparcell.com/how-i-added-my-hacker-news- saved-s...](http://blog.edparcell.com/how-i-added-my-hacker-news-saved- stories-to-m)

Your API has advantages and disadvantages against this approach: On the upside, it provides a uniform way for all languages to access content from HN, which is really cool.

On the downside, all requests through your API have to flow through your server - this makes me uneasy for two reasons: First that you could switch off your servers, esp. if take-up is high and you are not being compensated sufficiently for running them. And second, because I'm uncomfortable authenticating to an intermediary.

</comment><comment><USER7> Similarly, <http://github.com/seven1m/hackernews> if you want hit HN directly with Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER8> If PG isn't opposed to an API, maybe somebody could hack the HN code to add it natively?

</comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested, I have created a Java library wrapping the JSON APIs exposed by Ronnie.

<http://github.com/anoopengineer/jhackernews>

Currently supports only fetching of News pages - top pages, new pages and ask HN pages. Support for comments and voting to be added soon.

Licensed under Apache 2.0 license.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very cool idea. I will definitely start using it on my iPhone.

Regarding security, you are proxying login credentials through your server. Is that correct? I'd suggest putting up information regarding your privacy policy, if you store any credentials information and the security of your server(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea. I'll put that up tonight.

FYI, I don't store any data at all. The username and password are required to get an auth token from HN, which is only needed for voting and commenting. The token is what's stored in the cookie that HN issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about a way to retrieve comments or post ID for a given story URL? I often save articles and read them days or weeks later, and it would be nice if there were a simple way to find the associated HN discussion without risking upvote/story submission using the bookmarklet.

<comment><USER12> I could probably build something like that on top of ronniers API, not sure because I haven't had a chance to look at it and the api page is not loading for me at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks really awesome, congrats. So it scrapes hackernews and then exposes the data as a JSON api?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and caches the data for a couple of minutes.

<comment><USER14> How often is it hitting the server and how many pages deep does it go?

<comment><AUTHOR> It only hits HN when asked, and caches each request for 200 seconds. Additional requests return the cached version instead of re-scrapping HN. It mimics what is on HN. So requesting /page only returns the first page. If you want to go deeper, you need to pass in the next page ID, which is returned when you request /page.

<comment><USER14> Good work, man!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sounds like a plea to be smacked with a banhammer, more than anything else.

It seems to support automating things things that are almost certainly better off left un-automated - posting, voting, commenting.

It doesn't support anything that might be interesting to automate - say, asynchronous notification on replies to me, posting or commenting on my url, mention of my name, mention of keywords I care about, etc.

It asks for HN credentials.

Nit, but still a little lame - lifts the HN favicon.

<comment><USER16> ihackernews is currently the best browser for hacker news on the mobile by far (its far better than the "app" in the android market).

this api is just extracting what he already built for ihackernews and allowing others to use it, I would be very very surprised if pg banned it, if it causes any issues then they can pretty surely be sorted out.

<comment><USER15> _ihackernews is currently the best browser for hacker news on the mobile by far_

Not really relevant to anything I said.

 _this api is just extracting what he already built for ihackernews and allowing others to use it_

There are actually significant downsides to 'others using it'. One is that it becomes a single point of failure for anyone using it. It's essentially a proxy so one abusive user could make HN ban the whole thing and everyone else with it. Same goes for downtime, etc.

Similarly, it introduces a third party in the authentication process for relatively little value and significant risk.

I could well be missing something but I just haven't come up with very many reasons such a service is a good idea to counter the many obvious ways in which it is a bad one.

<comment><USER16> "Not really relevant to anything I said."

By ignoring the fact that this was built for a practical purpose, and only mentioning ways that it could be abused implied that the author had bad intentions when writing it, I was clarifying that for everyone else, he should be thanked for ihackernews at the least.

I didnt say there was no downsides to people using it, but people can figure that out for themselves, there are also significant advantages over 1. not writing code yourself, and 2. caching and sharing the load from this domain, we already know that this site has stability issues and bots can quite easily affect the load, even if all people do with this api is create new ui's for hacker news then it would be worth it, I am pretty surprised that is the only useful thing you can see it being used for, there is obviously a lot of use cases.

<comment><USER15> _By ignoring the fact that this was built for a practical purpose, and only mentioning ways that it could be abused implied that the author had bad intentions when writing it_

No it didn't imply anything of the sort. And whether something is built for a practical purpose or not is, in fact, not relevant to whether it's stupid or not. My point was that I think having this is a public web service is stupid and I explained why. The practical purposes you speak of could have been achieved just as easily by releasing the code so people interested in such functionality can use it as a library or host the service themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very awesome, needs a search, but yes, I'm sure it'll get use.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks really handy for getting hold of my raw data. One thing -- parentID for comments I fetched with <http://api.ihackernews.com/threads/Robin_Message> is blank -- is it meant to be or am I missing something? I'd expect it to be the id of the parent comment, and possibly for there to be an "On" field that takes me up to the top level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll look at this tonight and get it fixed.

<comment><USER18>
        "children":[{"postedBy":"ronnier","postedAgo":"21 hours
        ago","comment":"\u003cfont \u003eThanks, I\u0027ll look
        at this tonight and get it
        fixed.\u003c/fontu003e","id":1694452,"points":1,
        "parentId":1694340,"postId":1694049,"cachedOn":
        "\/Date(-62135575200000)\/","children":[]}]}

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very nice!

Two questions, curious as I'm as well in the process of indexing HN, and your API may help me avoid this:

\- how much content are you actually indexing ? Do you keep every single post or only the ones that do it on the home page or ask HN ? How far in time did you go ?

\- do you have some way to implement a full-text search (eg: posts that contain a specific word, to be accurate) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't store or save any data, other than an in memory cache. I just scrape, process, and output the data. Since I'm not storing data, I have nothing to search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I may very well use this to launch a Hacker News reader for iOS. Is there space for this (would you want it)?

</comment><comment><USER21> I couldn't wait for JSONP, so I whipped up a simple wrapper proxy (couldn't believe this didn't exist already).

[http://jsonpify.appspot.com/?url=http://api.ihackernews.com/...](http://jsonpify.appspot.com/?url=http://api.ihackernews.com/page&callback=whatever)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is awsome, I was looking for something exactly like this last weekend! No more scraping for me =)

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell IIRC there is some Internet Explorer issue involving the "application/json" content type which makes it safer to just use "text/plain". Worth looking up...

<comment><USER23> You usually access an API programmatically rather than via the browser, so this shouldn't be an issue for most use cases.

<comment><USER24> Unless it supports CORS for cross-domain access from the browser: <http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/>

Which it probably doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wich language/framework have you used to create it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all C#, ASP.NET MVC. I'm just exposing functionality that I had to build in for <http://ihackernews.com>.

<comment><USER26> Awesome. I'm hoping that you already have a library of HN entities and are using the JsonSerializer? Would it be possible to share that C# library or some client code?

Of course I could just do it myself, but it seemed like silly work going from C# > REST > C# :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I thought PG frowned on this kind of stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you link me? If he does, I'll bring it down.

<comment><USER28> etiology of previous frowns suggests frustration due to load placed on the server. in this case you should actually be alleviating load on the server since so many people love to hack on HN for fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> At some point this API will fail if it gets popular to the point of triggering HN's abuse protector.

</comment><comment><USER30> OpenID login? Everyone seems to forget about this.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank you!</comment>


Self-Driving Chairs Make It So Much Easier to Wait in Line - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/self-driving-chairs-make-it-so-much-easier-to-wait-in-l-1787137020 <comment><USER2> The first step toward the levitating robotic armchains depicted on the space ship in Wall-e. :-)

[http://tinyurl.com/wall-e-armchairs](http://tinyurl.com/wall-e-armchairs)</comment>


The iPhone monoculture - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/02/the_iphone_mono.html

<comment><USER2> Lets not forget that Apple make it easy to develop and test using Webkit on iOS. Grabbing the simulator and testing it at native speeds is only a click or two away from the App Store.

Opera on the other hand seem to get it, by offering a webpage where you can get a feel for how your page will run: <http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mini/>

If I want to test my website on a blackberry I first have to know which blackberry to test on ( <http://cl.ly/3n3x0r0H2C2y0P1O3C3o> ) to get the version, I then have to use Windows.

Finally a search for "Samsung Dolfin Emulator", admittedly the first time I've heard of the browser, turned up nothing. I found the dev tools on bada.com, though again, windows only.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a market share issue. How many people do you know who use a mobile Internet device that doesn't run iOS or Android? Exactly. If open webOS gets its shit together, maybe we'll have three mobile platforms instead of two.

The point is, they all use WebKit.

Mobile is a trendy thing to talk about, but a lot of people still think of the Web as a desktoppy place to be. If they start testing their apps on mobile as well, they aren't going to start by testing for Opera Mobile - they're going to test what people actually use (iOS and Android).

Opera on both the desktop and mobile and Firefox on mobile are in such a minority that it's not worth the QA time to test them or the developer time to fix them in many cases. This, of course, will continue to support an ecosystem where the only mobile UA that matters is WebKit.</comment>


Denmark's wind farms generated 140% of the country's electricity needs yesterday - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/450737/denmarks-wind-farms-generated-140-of-the-countrys-electricity-needs-yesterday/ <comment><USER3> Alas, as the wind soars, so do our energy costs. Danish electricity prices have only gone up, up, up, and through the roof during the last thirty years or so, concurrent with the massive, statesponsored introduction of wind turbines. Or, to be precise, the pricetag of electricity itself hasn't really changed much since the 1930s, but has been completely buried under an avalanche of taxation, which in various guises makes up nearly nine tenths of my electricity bill. A lot of this is "green" tax, earmarked for sponsoring - you guessed it - more governmentally mandated wind turbines.

To the best of my knowledge, our Danish electricity is the most expensive in Europe.

<comment><USER4> Make sure you qualify what "most expensive" means. Here in California, we have some of the highest electric rates in the United States but also some of the lowest electric bills [1]. Saying we have "expensive" energy requires defining what that metric is; sure, CA loses on energy _rates_ but I'll argue the rate is a questionable metric at best. I have no idea what the situation is in Denmark, of course, but there's more than the per-kilowatt-hour figure.

For the curious, California achieves this by a regulatory measure called "decoupling": a utility's profits are not connected to how much raw energy it sells. In particular, CPUC (the statewide utility regulator) lets electric utilities, both municipal (e.g. SMUD) and investor-owned (e.g. PG&E), charge higher rates if they implement energy efficiency or demand-side management measure to reduce total demand, allowing the utility to maintain about the same level of profitability but at reduced energy consumption. It's pretty cool.

[1] in 2012, from EIA data, CA paid $0.15/kWh rate and $88 average monthly bill mo whereas the national average was $0.12/kWh and $107/mo. Slides from Jane Woodward.

<comment><USER3> Yes, there is more than the per-kilowatt-hour figure. There is a fixed charge for being connected to the public grid. That connection, here in Denmark, is mandatory, by the way.

But apart from that, there's nothing more. That's the cost I see, that's the price I have to pay. And I do mean HAVE to pay. Going off the grid, producing my own electricity, will only get me into taxational hot water and possibly fines.

<comment><USER5> Wait, what ?

If you have a rural vacation house (for instance) in Denmark, and you are off the grid and ... perhaps have some solar arrays ... you would have to pay tax on the power generated ? And possibly fines ?

Am I misunderstanding what you wrote ?

<comment><USER6> The thing you have to understand about Denmark is, there is no "off the grid". If you have a house that it's legal to live in, it's connected to public utilities. There are no unnamed roads or unnumbered houses here. (Or unnumbered citizens, for that matter.)

What happens if you install a solar array is that your meter stops running or runs backwards when you're generating more than you're using (and you're selling back power). Even if you don't draw anything from the grid, you're still paying to be connected.

<comment><USER7> Fascinating. Wondering what their tax rates look like...

<comment><USER8> VAT is 25%. And the tax is depending on your income. It's from about 40-51%.

However, living in Denmark I've got multiple things in return: \- Free health care \- Free schools and university (got my computer science degree for free. Only had to pay for the books). \- You get paid about $1000/month while studying to cover apartment rentals etc. \- If you loose your job, you will still get paid by the state to continue living :-)

When having got your education, and you might think that it's crazy to pay so much in taxes of your income, but remember what you've got for free to get there :-)

However, I think the whole tax-system needs an overhaul. For example there is a 180% tax on cars (+25% VAT). So many people are driving in unsafe, fuel- consuming cars. Lowering the tax on cars could lead to roads with safer and more fuel-efficient cars. Electric cars have been tax-free the past years, but it looks like it's going to change in 2016.

AND electricity is expensive by the end-users. The electricity itself is cheap, but when I buy electricity for 200 DKK, I have to pay about 800 DKK in taxes.

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

<comment><USER9> When ~half your income is getting taken, it is most definitely not 'free'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is partly the problem with renewable power. You get large swings in generation where some days it's your entire demand and you may even have to pay to export the excess power and other days it's 0 and you need to fire up the gas plants in order to avoid brownouts. Building two power plants (wind and gas) results in double the cost and less reliable grid overall. It's surprising how much people seem to discount the reliability of wind and solar when discussing them as true alternatives to fossil fuels.

<comment><USER11> It's surprising just how much people seem to discount the reliability of markets to smoothly deal with variations in supply and demand.

German aluminum smelters for instance are already building their plants to be able to scale electricity with supply. They've seen these periods where electricity prices dropped almost to zero and they want in.

As always, markets often take time to adjust to new realities, so this shift won't be instantaneous.

<comment><USER12> I'm totally with this, the idea that no market for 'excess' electric will appear doesn't pass the sniff test. A paper I read discussed a pilot plant in the 50's that produced iron from sulfide ores. Certainly sounds like a process that can consume excess power without much trouble provided that situation happens frequently enough.

[http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%...](http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%20publ.pdf)

'High purity iron was produced, with a current yield of 85% and a power consumption of 4.25 kWh/kg iron'

Far as I can tell, 1 GW for an hour would produce ~250 tons of iron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know how many days are required to cover the energy required to produce one turbine?

<comment><USER14> I don't think this is relevant honestly. ( I'm assuming you want to compare the costs with other energy sources )

This reminds the question about How much energy are we spending today to build an electric/hybrid card versus a petrol one? (By comparing the factory emissions for example) Currently petrol cars are cheaper to produce because of the decades of investment, usually no one has in consideration in the equation, but on the long run eco tech wins the race. We should also expect new discoveries in Material Engineering that would help to reduce the cost and/or improve the efficiency.

I don't think it's a fair to compare the cost of producing versus the cost of petrol solutions until the planet's crust isn't a source of energy.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the answer to my question, it is totally relevant.

> but on the long run eco tech wins the race

Fine, but if some cleaner alternative is developed over the carbon repayment period, we could in fact be better off sticking with the current technology until then.

<comment><USER15> You can not make the switch in a hurry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meanwhile in Australia, "Coal is the future!" \- Tony Abbott

<comment><USER17> Financially it is, at least in the short term.

Australia has a lot of coal (no need to import raw material).

Australia has coal mining companies (no need to import technology).

CO2 is only a global problem, the coal which Australia burns won't make a big dent in the effects and the cost is shared globally.

So, financially it totally makes sense to use up the local resources first. At least in the short term until these resources get scarce.

In the long term, saving resources may be the wiser option. E.g. have coal plants on standby most of the time while solar and wind supply the grid. Then you can export some of the coal or save it for future generations.

<comment><USER18> Coal plants don't really do "standby" well though. They are much better at providing constant output. Gas turbine plants are better at handling rapid changes in supply and demand. Possibly pulverized coal could be used in a turbine but I don't know how well that works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's worth noting that we sell wind energy a lot cheaper than the non- renewable we buy back to cover the times where we don't produce surplus.

<comment><USER20> Then buy it back from Norway. (99% hydroelectric) :-)

<comment><USER21> We also some times just give the excess power to Germany, or pay them to take it. The Danish power grid is funny like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article reminded me of an interesting structural problem in eastern Germany, right next door to Denmark. The many wind farms there give a net surplus of power, but there's no easy way to route it to western Germany, where most of the demand is. Maybe a fellow commenter will remember the details better than I do.

<comment><USER23> The problem is mostly discussed in Germany in context of north vs. south - <USER2> north with the coast and all its wind parks, and the energy-hungry, industry- rich south. Right niw the solution is to build new power lines, but that spawned a huge political debate (NIMBY). Power lines are about as unpopular as new freeways, and there is a risk of court cases dragging on for years, stalling the energy transition program. The compromise right now is to spend more tax money and use underground cables in densely populated or otherwise sensitive areas (e.g. nature reserves).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The question never was can wind generate enough power - just build more windmills. The question is can it be reliably integrated into a stable electrical system?

Unfortunately, largely no. At least not still. Without getting into technical details note that in jurisdictions with a legal mandate to prefer windpower (when available) and large installed windbase the price of power goes negative. That is, there are situations when power companies pay to have anyone dump their power. Otherwise they'll damage their equipment.

the problem never was the turbines, but the grid!

<comment><USER25> I agree the grid issues are a major constraint on new wind turbine. But is there actually evidence that they cannot be reliably integrated in the grid? Is Denmark's grid actually unstable?

At least in the UK the grid operators simply refuses connections if their is not enough grid capacity in the locality of a proposed wind farm. It is surely a problem, but one that is well understood. And paying people to dump power is a method of maintaining the grid in unusual conditions; it is just a bit unpleasant. Excess capacity is an unintended consequence of having free fuel!

<comment><USER24> Before I rant; I dunno the specifics about Denmark, but as a maritime nation they have a unique advantage for windpower. Off-shore windpower is far less stochastic than on-shore windpower (see last paragraph for why). So all the problems below are significantly mitigated.

In power engineering we're not talking about switches that readers in this forum are more acquainted with (in computer architecture). Currents are in the thousands of amps, not nano, and volts are in the hundreds of thousands (or millions in one Soviet era line).

Furthermore the grid is very strict with quality. The frequency must be within a certain tolerance at all times, and no more than a maximum allowed of phase shift in a period of time. The sinusoid must be quite pure, with strict maximums allowed of harmonics. The voltage has to be right. The power has to flow out, not in.

Keep in mind that the grid is unforgiving with the python philosophy of asking for forgiveness. A mistake costs millions.

Every time you add or remove a load/source the frequency changes, the voltages change, the flows change. To stabilize the grid you have a bulldozer (the throttle) and a little scalpel (capacitor banks). A few jurisdictions are blessed by the engineering gods and have an instrument that works in-between (hydroelectric storage).

Now imagine you don't have to slowly integrate a single large and lethargic source in the middle of the night when ppl are sleeping. Instead you have thousands of stochastically generating sources being integrated and removed as the load is changing.

The proof are in the prices. Wind power is expensive, but ironically the spot price sometimes drops to negative!

Wind power needs a storage revolution. Then most of these problems go away.

There is one cavet to all of this, off-shore wind. Since maritime flows are very constant and the relative speed at an interface is zero, offshore wind power if _far_ more reliable and useful the on-shore.

<comment><USER25> In this kind of discussion I think most of us would assume that "instability" means a threat to continuity of supply. High prices are hardly evidence of that.

I understand that balancing supply from numerous turbines is difficult, but is that a solved problem? Is there evidence of customer supply problems or not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That is the reason why there are currently huge North-South power lines planned to go through Germany. As you would expect, from the German states to small villages everybody is fighting over where they will be build. Germany has a huge generation of fit retirees and it has become a meme that they engage in citizens initiatives to fight power lines. Then there is our special child Bavaria, for whom these lines are primarily build, who wants them to go through Hesse.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if taking energy (sun, wind, water) from the earth make any damage in long term to it - let's say fields that not going to get sun they got used to, or clouds wont move the way they otherwise would - thus causing unpredictable climate changes. Just a thought

<comment><USER28> Wind farms are known to impact their micro-climate. See for example: [http://m.phys.org/news/2012-04-farms-temperature- region.html](http://m.phys.org/news/2012-04-farms-temperature-region.html)

<comment><USER29> Almost everything impacts it's own micro-climate. Cities being the most obvious example.

It's when the effect creeps into the global climate that we need to really pay attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While the number is slick, it does not account for the energy needed for cars. (see below for the explanation of this terse statement)

<comment><USER31> That's why it says electricity. Also, when you can produce this much electricity (already), it makes it possible to fill electric cars' batteries with 100% renewable energy.

<comment><USER32> You will need to burn a whole lot of fossil fuels to make batteries for every car on the road. Thats always ignored by proponents of electric cars who conveniently ignore the fact that batteries manufacturing processes are very dirty and use a number of toxic materials.

<comment><USER33> You also need a lot of energy to make a car, or to build a combustion engine. Yes, battery driven cars are particularly polluting to produce, but a couple tanks full of gasoline will make up for the difference.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/21/are- electr...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/21/are-electric- cars-really-that-polluting/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra "Earlier today, the Chernobyl power plant has fulfilled its 5-years plan of thermal energy generation in just 150 milliseconds"

Talk about mad swings.</comment>


Free programming E-books - <AUTHOR> http://citizen428.net/archives/434

<comment><USER2> Also see Stack Overflow's List of freely available programming books: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely- ava...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available- programming-books)

<comment><USER3> wow, it's been a while since I posted that question. Can't believe it has so many views...

<comment><USER2> It's currently the top-voted question on the site. We programmers are a bunch of cheap bastards! :)

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They can't be serious with the "Building Accessible Websites" cover. <http://joeclark.org/book/>

<comment><USER5> There aren't enough tubes for it to accurately reflect the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let Over Lambda does not seem to be free. Am I missing a link somewhere?

<comment><USER7> It's partly available, the first 5 chapters are at <http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/toc></comment></comment>


An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://ruder.io/optimizing-gradient-descent/index.html <comment><USER2> Note that this is very much geared toward machine learning. In many other descent algorithm applications, it would be sensible to use Conjugate Gradients, which this site doesn't mention.

<comment><USER3> Of course, there's tons of theory and practice in nonlinear continuous optimization.

It's interesting to see what machine learning practitioners will rediscover or reinvent next. Quasi-Newton methods appear to be surfacing again.

But you do get some very interesting improvements to vanilla gradient descent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A long long time ago I tried every gradient optimization method available at the time on fitting a model to noisy / non-smooth data with many local minima..... and found all of them lacking in robustness.

In the end the only truly robust algorithm I could rely on was a combination of Nelder and Meads downhill simplex method with simulated annealing. I'm curious to see in the overview he mentions neither....

Have they been supplanted by something better? Or is he only considering "nice" functions (ie. "Smooth" even for higher derivatives with no local minima)?</comment>


How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/04/how-the-internet-is-killing-the-worlds-languages <comment><USER2> Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

<comment><USER3> Can't upvote this enough. A united world needs to speak the same language. Down with the borders, of any kind.

<comment><USER4> I welcome your attempts to learn and speak Mandarin as that single global language.

<comment><USER5> I wish I could upvote this more than once. A lot of comments here are positive about the idea of a single global language when it's their language that wins out. I strongly suspect that if it were Mandarin, Arabic or Russian instead of English that was being suggested, their enthusiasm for the idea might be more muted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The interesting article kindly submitted here reports:

"His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.

"Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography."

Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of the Internet, will not likely be used on the Internet. Whether or not such languages are still used in family life or for local community interaction is a distinct issue.

I am multilingual, as disclosed on my Hacker News user profile. The number of languages in regular use on the Internet is more than any one person can learn in a lifetime (most claims of one individual being able to speak dozens of languages fluently are very badly exaggerated) and every one of those languages, from multiple language families, is very likely to stay alive for a long time. A person who speaks more than one language, as I do, can choose to use different languages in different circumstances, as I do. Indeed, for many multilingual people, "code-switching" is part of signaling a switch to a different tone in conversation (say, from serious to humorous, or the other way around) or signaling "social register" (whether the person you are speaking to is being treated with friendly intimacy or with distant deference).

So I am not worried about this, on the whole. Other comments here posted before mine talk about the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (that "language shapes thought") but the strong version of that hypothesis is certainly untrue. (For one thing, human beings don't always think in language, but often also in pictures or in music.) Diversity in language will not go away because of the Internet. If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

[1] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity- why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

<comment><USER7> > If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys > better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing > worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious > about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what > languages they use, and when.

And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?

It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the reality of space and time.

<comment><USER8> No, having less languages is not bad - far from it. Even the Bible (which I think is a rather useless relic of the past) says that multiple languages were made to stop people from working with each other and reach heaven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This happened before the internet with Arabic numerals.

There was a time when each culture had their own method for transcribing numbers. (My favorite is Egyptian Numerals that denoted 10,000 with a drawing of a bent finger.)

Today, I imagine (but I'm not sure) that I can travel almost anywhere in the world and the number 123 would mean the exact same thing. And that seems to be a good thing.

<comment><USER10> Sort of. There are two other numeral systems I know of that are still being used: Chinese (used in Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Korean) and Khmer (used in Khmer/Cambodian, Thai, and Lao). Literate people in places that use those numeral systems know and use Arabic numerals too, but the Chinese and Khmer numerals are in no danger of dying out anytime soon. And even in the English-speaking world, we still use Roman numerals in certain contexts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

<comment><USER12> Languages shape the mind. A language gives a special outlook on life and has its own reality. There are also specific linguistic features that are interesting to linguists and help to comprehend how languages work. One could also draw a parallel with genetic diversity.

<comment><USER13> This has been my experience with picking up a second language. There are concepts that are expressed in a single Japanese word that seem like they would need a small book to explain adequately in English. Maybe there are places where the language and culture aren't so intertwined, but Japan at least isn't one of them. So as much as I think the grand flattening of the world is great in some ways, I would be a little sad if we ended up with a global monoculture catalyzed by the coalescing of languages. Other cultures are just fascinating to explore.

<comment><USER14> As a native French speaker, I agree with you. For technical discussions such as programming or engineering it can be argued that using one language (nowadays, obviously English) encourages cooperation and progress. However, in other domains, languages carry much more than a practical means of transmitting information, they bear a whole culture with them. Two examples which I hear and read a lot in the English speaking world but which are either impossible to translate in French or at least to utter without ridicule: "successful" (as in a person), and "evil" (as in, a dictator).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The internet doesn't "kill" languages.

People _choose_ what language to speak. If they -- rather, we -- have a choice of languages, why do we choose common ones instead of uncommon ones? We are actively choosing to speak common languages, not some abstract network of computers is killing something.

If linguists or anyone else says we're doing something wrong and losing something valuable, why do we keep doing it?

Is it possible they're missing something, that maybe we gain more in choosing to understand each other than we're losing in ... in what, being able to read books that we haven't translated yet? In having a different set of nuances? Do any languages have a greater ability to describe thoughts than others? I suspect different languages have _different_ nuances, but I doubt any has _greater total_ ability to communicate.

<comment><USER16> In what? In being able to study the thousands of dramatically different ways humans can communicate.

Preserving languages is about preserving data for linguistics (and other fields). We preserve a lot of things with no "real value". We preserve fossils, species (any species with fewer than 100 remaining specimens isn't contributing to any ecosystem), books (even ones that are outdated and no one is ever likely to read), websites... I could go on all day. We preserve this stuff because we can learn by studying it.

Languages don't just have different nuances, they have completely different ways of putting human thought into words. They have grammars so different that a word for word translation would be no more readable than an untranslated text. They have such a huge variety of sounds that encoding them into IPA stretches the limits of Unicode's variants of the Latin alphabet, relying on many diacritic marks on top of regular characters.

It's not about preserving something that gives some greater ability to communicate. It's about preserving a database of linguistic evolution and the bounds of how human thought can be encoded orally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since this came up again -- we recently did an analysis on a data-set of over 100 million of the app store reviews across different countries. English and other european languages were extremely prevalent, with english dominating. The people who tend to use fancy smartphones etc are much more likely to speak english and are also exposed to english language content, apps, etc. For example, in Israel, 51% of reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. More examples: [http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what- apple-app-s...](http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app- store-reviews-can-tell-you-about-foreign-language-app-users/)

</comment><comment><USER18> My first native language is not English, nor is the second language. I say good riddance, humanity will prosper more without linguistic barriers.

</comment><comment><USER4> People might be interested in the Endangered Languages Project - [http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/](http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/)

"An online collaborative effort to protect globa linguistic diversity".

</comment><comment><USER19> The measure used here is a little suspect. Looking at words used in webpages is a pretty poor measure when many languages have little handwritten language to start with. I just returned from a remote tribal group (The Khasi) in India last month and although their web page penetration may be low, they all facebook or text in their local language. I doubt these social aspects are measured and thus miss widespread use of many languages. Public webpages are often wanted to grow beyond your small group and if a writer knows a more common language, then he would rightly use that to grow the sphere of understanding.

</comment><comment><USER20> On one hand, having a variety of languages makes the world diverse, more interesting and perhaps even encourages different ways of thinking. On the other hand, the high cost of communicating with multiple languages makes sharing thoughts and ideas harder, and perhaps even hinders our productivity and advancement as a whole. It's a tough call, but I vote for unification. In the name of advancement of humanity, we shall sacrifice diversity!

<comment><USER14> And choose what as the universal language? I assume, lest it might seem like there is a conflict of interest, that you are thinking of some language you don't speak? Thank you for showing the way in this sacrifice everyone must make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related discussion from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837722)</comment>