Google is developing its own Android game console - Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195257/Google_is_developing_its_own_Android_game_console__Report.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple and Google will most likely be the real 'new consoles'. Maybe this will make Microsoft allow self-publishing.

Looking forward to this.

Apple was always going to take their appstore apps/games to the TV and games are always a huge boon to that.

"Wall Street Journal sources suggest the move is motivated not simply by the recent launch of the Ouya and the upcoming GameStick but also on expectations that Apple will be introducing game support with an upcoming version of Apple TV."

They will also allow self-publishing like their appstores on mobile because unlike Microsoft/XBone they realize larger markets/economies sell more hardware and make more money, in the end they also allow and create games that are more fun. Even it 99% of games on mobile are below par the 1% from that set is better/bigger than any curated/controlled console market. Gonna be funny when Microsoft has to change tune on that one as well.

Also Apple TV and Google consoles will be micro and more like OUYA, less of a financial burden than powerful consoles like Xbone. Sony has it right with PS4 and is allowing self-publishing, which will in turn sell more hardware and get more games on there. Microsoft is just making poor moves on open storefronts.

<comment><USER2> >Even it 99% of games on mobile are below par the 1% from that set is better/bigger than any curated/controlled console market.

I strongly dispute this point, while there may be a few decent mobile titles, the quality and number of quality titles is still nowhere near traditional platforms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gabe Newell on this point: "Economies get better the bigger they are," Gabe Newell.

John Carmack on this point: "I was really happy that when mobile came along with the more 'pure' games, they didn't have to be a $50 game that had man- centuries in them," Carmack tells Ars Technica. "You can have these small things that cost people a couple bucks."

"I don't have a lot of free time and I don't have 50 hours for Skyrim. That's not to take anything away from the massive titles, but it's great to have this broad spectrum of gaming," Carmack added.

Yes there will still be blockbuster games that can't be made on the current devices (although I'd argue tablets and TV consoles will surpass game consoles not long after the 2013 refresh). The idea is that you have so much competition that games and innovation have to become more fun. On controlled environments that level of competition is not explored because of the high dollar amount needed to play or compete.

Game companies like Halfbrick, Firemint, and others wouldn't exist without the openness of mobile. If consoles were truly open there would be games that the bigger companies cannot even risk trying that are immensely fun. PC games allowed anyone in and companies like id software appeared, leading to PC games from Valve as one example. Market determination of good is better when bigger.

The internet itself is an example of this. Would Hacker News exist if there were only 10 publishers of content on the web? Bigger and more open always makes for better content. Even if not now, it will shortly. Games have gotten back to arcade level fun rather than trying to create movies. Controlled, top down ivory tower markets never create better content, the currents get too stagnant.

<comment><USER2> _Gabe Newell on this point: "Economies get better the bigger they are,"_

While this might be true in isolation, ie. a widgetbox with 30M sales is a strictly a better economy than the same widgetbox with 10M sales, I do not believe it to be transitive ie. Widgetbox @ 30M sales vs PlayBox360 @ 10M sales. This played out in the last console generation with the wii vastly outselling both the ps3 and the xbox360, but having an inferior library.

Smartphones and tablets are by no means new, nor niche platforms at this point (outselling every other gaming platform by a mile), but id argue that by and large they have failed to produce the kind of quality games available on say, the DS/3DS.

I cannot even think of one mobile title that measures up to even an average DS game.

<comment><USER3> You can't think of even one? I can give you several. I'm speaking primarily of the iOS market, specifically ipad versions since this is what I'm most familiar with, but many of these exist or will exist on Android as well.

XCom, in a direct port from the PC version, was just released.

Final Fantasy Tactics, III (ironically enough, ported from the original DS code), IV, and other FF titles. Spectral Souls, ported over from the Playstation portable, and Warhammer Quest, in a new version, are also present for your tactical RPG needs.

Knights of the Old Republic was recently released with all the content from the PC version, but a revised control scheme.

Board and card game conversions have been quite popular lately with things such as Stone Age, Agricola, Ticket to Ride, Elder Sign: Omens, Magic etc.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes- a game originally released on the DS

Phoenix Wright, also from the DS.

Minecraft PE

Waking Mars

Plants vs. Zombies

King of Dragon Pass - the unusual and very interesting kingdom management, RPG, interactive fiction, really-doesn't-fit-in-any-categories game.

Battle Academy and Battle of the Bulge: two PC quality turn-based wargames. In the case of Battle Academy, this is a direct port from the PC version.

I'm really just scratching the surface with the games I've played recently. There's tons more. The amount of iOS quality games is rapidly approaching equality with the DS market if it hasn't already surpassed it.

<comment><USER2> while ill conceed these titles are avalible, years after the fact ports (largely with ill suited control schemes, virtual buttons suck badly) arnt much of a market driver on any platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So the players are Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google, and Vavle vying for living room media dominance through one strategy or niche play or another. I have my popcorn ready. This competition will be good for us consumers.

<comment><USER5> "This competition will be good for us consumers."

Not sure how strong this point is.

For one the average consumer will miss out on more exclusives for the consoles you don't have.

For another you're going to get shitty ports on a lot of them.

Finally there will be an inevitable shakedown to 2-3 players and if you've invested in one of the losers well just ask the people that bought 3DO's and Atari Jaguars and all the other losers of the early 90's console wars how great that worked out for them in the end.

Game devs are already competing with each other for your time and dollars. Beyond that you only need 2 major consoles to put pressure on each other to keep prices honest.

<comment><USER6> > For one the average consumer will miss out on more exclusives for the > consoles you don't have.

Exclusives are not good for consumers. If the companies that make them are punished accordingly, maybe they will learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes Google feels unfocused to me, and this is a good example of this. This reminds me of the Nexus Q which came out a year ago — and was never backed a real national (or international) ad campaign. Is Google really ready to make a real game platform, or is this just another android thingie? In the same way that Apple struggles with software services Google really has a way to go with hardware. And I don't mean just making good hardware, but marketing it to a mass audience.

<comment><USER8> The Nexus Q feels like the Nexus One. An experiment paving the way into a market. A hardware beta test.

I expect to see an amazing Samsung gaming+streaming machine running Android.

<comment><USER7> If you see an announcement from Samsung they won't mention Android!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love Android, but Google has a terrible record with these kind of devices. Google TV is a pretty poor system, it really should be more simple and look more like XBMC, and the (original) Nexus Q speaks for itself.

<comment><USER10> Google TV, Nexus Q etc are trying to crack a different nut, and one of the hardest ones out there. The fact that these things are called set-top-boxes in an era where TV's aren't big enough to put anything on top of them is an indicator how long people have been trying to make it work.

XBMC has been most successful because They have focused on providing people what they want. Every company has delivered something that they would like people to have (and ideally pay them lots for content).

Consoles on the other hand seem to be marketed by Black magic, Hype, and dodgy stats. That does seem to be more Microsoft's game than Google's, but they are gaining ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll just take this as another of Google's side project that generate some buzz but ultimately lead nowhere.

<comment><USER12> If it 'generates some buzz' but in doing so helps push others to follow suit and help build the market - Then I'll count it as a win. Also, if it ends up being enough of a threat - Maybe it will push Microsoft into allowing self publishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Only Valve works on a real glibc Linux console though.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't think of many fun games for Android. What are we paying for? Old Final Fantasy and GTA3? I don't see a market for this until their games improve which is nontrovial given the poor graphics performance of these so called consoles.

<comment><USER15> Are you comparing an XBOX to an Android phone? Android is an OS, not a hardware platform. It can be deployed to arbitrarily powerful hardware, so long as the graphics drivers are written.

<comment><USER14> There are few games and the hardware is crap compared to a console. Doesn't look like it is changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I doubt they are aiming at the PS4/X1. Making hardware was never Google's forte and you need to be very good at that to compete with either system.

My guess they want another pass at Google TV.

<comment><USER17> Yet they make the best non apple laptop out there in the market right now.

<comment><USER16> I thought their laptops are off the shelf hardware, are not they? If not I stand corrected.

<comment><USER17> Whose laptops are not off the shelf hardware anymore? ie I am sure someone else manufactures them to googles specs - but thats the same for apple, dell, hp etc. From the moment you pick up a chromebook pixel you get the feeling that you normally get from apple devices - that someone thought this whole thing through. Actually the chromebook pixel and the htc one are the only two devices off late which had this effect on me.

<comment><USER16> I was talking about consoles. They are not off the shelf. Even the Xbox (though it was pretty close).

<comment><USER17> "I thought their laptops are off the shelf hardware"

<comment><USER16> And they are, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been anticipating rumors such as these ever since Google announced Google Game Services. I just hope said services get improved before the actual console launches.

</comment><comment><USER19> Finally. They should've been on this over a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does that mean games built in Java?

<comment><USER21> There is an android native interface. [http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html](http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html)

Games _could_ be written in Java. Just intelligently schedule garbage collection and in return you get to use a very fast safe, well-optimized JITed virtual machine.

They won't be, of course, they'll be written in NDK because the culture of the game industry is a powerful one, and one that takes pride in their ways. It would be like telling a race car enthusiast that continually-variable transmission is better for racing because even though it's less efficiant it allows the driver to focus on driving and is always in the exact gear needed. The driver would never except this because in their mind they are an amazing driver and manual makes them faster because it is more efficient and makes them feel cool.

<comment><USER22> > They won't be, of course, they'll be written in NDK because the culture of > the game industry is a powerful one, and one that takes pride in their ways. > It would be like telling a race car enthusiast that continually-variable > transmission is better for racing because even though it's less efficiant it > allows the driver to focus on driving and is always in the exact gear > needed. The driver would never except this because in their mind they are an > amazing driver and manual makes them faster because it is more efficient and > makes them feel cool.

The problems of concurrent garbage collection in games are not imaginary, as you seem to be implying. Keep in mind that 60 FPS allows a maximum of 16 ms of GC per frame, and that's assuming the game has no work to do at all. Turn on the GC profiling sometime in your browser of choice and look at the numbers sometime; then extrapolate that to the slower CPUs and RAM on mobile and you can see why this can be a cause for concern.

<comment><USER23> John Carmack seems to have other opinion

[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/342324071004008448](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/342324071004008448)

<comment><USER22> It's hard to read into a tweet, but I'm pretty sure that he was not saying that the performance of a dynamically typed, garbage collected language will be equivalent to the performance of optimized, tuned C and C++.

<comment><USER23> No, if you follow his tweeter feed, he means he would like to have GC strong typed language with the performance from C and C++.

This follows his ongoing Haskell experiments and with a short deviation to Scheme/Lisp.

I was just trying to make the point that known game developers do value GC languages for game development, even if nowadays that is still not mainstream.

I am old enough to remember the days C was considered too slow and together with Pascal was just used for prototyping ideas, if ever. Times change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mh- cool, this can sit next to the Nexus Q from I/O.

<comment><USER24> If you do not like your nexus q, maybe donate it to an education facility where students can hack on it

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google has taken a jab at games before (Google plus Games anyone) but unsuccessful, not sure if they'll be able to get into it ever.</comment>


Incomprehensible job titles are an elitist affectation - happy-go-lucky https://theconversation.com/calling-all-time-ninjas-lets-put-a-stop-to-ludicrous-job-titles-79544 <comment><USER2> > Yet a nationally representative study of 1,000 British adults, with which I > assisted, found that 75% of British adults thought "scrum master" was a fake > job title, or didn't know for sure if it was real.

I think this bit misses the point. "Scrum master" is pretty descriptive and explicit _if you are the least bit familiar with Scrum methodology_. Unlike the other examples which are intentionally obscure and playful, this one is only obscure if you're unfamiliar with the specific industry.

I'm fairly certain there are perfectly legitimate job titles in other industries "75% of British adults" aren't familiar with. That's okay, they don't have to be.

If it was "75% of British technical project managers", I would be far more concerned. A job opening for a "Scrum master" likely isn't an entry level position for someone with no prior knowledge of Scrum -- and if that career path is interesting to you, you'll likely already know what Scrum is.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, I'm in tech, have known actual "scrum masters", and still don't think it's a real job title.

<comment><USER4> yeah, i still dont understand, in my company we have 2 scrum masters, and the only thing i can see they do is sending 2 emails a week and coding like juniors.

<comment><USER5> They shouldnt code at all and instead be busy with coaching your team and the enterprise in practicing proper scrum

<comment><USER6> else they be never true scottsman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it ironic that the author is _Sir_ Cary Cooper, who received knighthood at a birthday celebration for the Queen? It's an honor, but with so many knights running around, hasn't that title become a bit ludicrous itself?

<comment><USER8> > who received knighthood at a birthday celebration for the Queen

The Birthday Honours aren't given at a birthday celebration for the Queen. You make it sound like they're handed out at her birthday party!

The 'birthday' part of the name just means that they are the summer version of the bi-annual honours ceremonies, the other being the new year. The Queen's official birthday is a general set of official events held in the summer. It's not even anywhere near her actual birthday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I for one do like job adverts looking for a 'guru' or 'ninja'. They are a good early indicator that the company is either immature enough to publish such ads, or using a cynical ploy looking to attract younger/flexible recruits less likely to make 'grown-up' demands.

</comment><comment><USER10> > So when a pet supplies company advertises for a "time ninja" instead of a > human resources administrator or office clerk, we need to ask why.

Why not question "human resources" too? I wonder what came first. This term or the way HR handles people as faceless commodities.

<comment><USER11> If there's a "Human Resources" department, shouldn't there be an "Inhuman Resources" label instead of "IT"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am Director of IT at my workplace.

I don't actually direct anyone--I'm the only technical employee. I got the title when my boss told me he was having business cards printed and wanted to know what title I wanted. It was just the first thing that came to mind. Some titles can be very descriptive, and others are just random noise.

</comment><comment><USER13> My first job was doing programming / game design / writing / composing / audio design at a startup computer game company in the 1990s. No one really had a title. When we finally decided that we should really have business cards, I got mine printed with the job title of Chaplain.

<comment><USER6> Oh, father be with us in our hour of need, for we are going gold. Please forgive us our soon released Alpha, for we forgive our brethrens early Alphas released at full price. Amen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can we stop with the self-aggrandizing CxO titles while we are at it?

I've had someone introduce themselves as a CTO of a company that has 4 people. How many other technical officers are there for you to be the chief of them?

It sounds ridiculous.

<comment><USER15> I get what you mean, in that CxO titles sound silly. But I'm not sure what the alternative is, really - particularly when you're talking about a startup that's hopefully going to be growing a bit.

It seems when you want to talk about your team, you really want to say 'This person does the business stuff, this person does the technical stuff, this person does the marketing stuff, this person helps with the technical stuff…". Something like CTO is a convenient shorthand for 'person in charge of technical things'.

<comment><USER14> Technical Director is a better term. (In fact, it's the job title I use).

It says you are in charge of tech without implying anything about the size of your company.

<comment><USER16> It also makes it clear that you are a director of the company, a CxO might not be a member of the board.

<comment><USER15> I would be wary of that one though; I've been 'technical director' in the past without being 'director'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any industry will have weird sounding titles. The different is that in IT some have only existed for a few years so they havn't had time to work their way into general public culture. A quick scan of my local jobs boards finds the following exotic titles:

      * Gib stopper
      * Manual Materials Handler- Sample Crushing
      * Hammerhand
      * Class 2 Civil Driver
      * Shot Firer
      * Kaiawhina
      * Precaster
      * Dogman
      * Assistant Greenkeeper
      * Concrete placer
      * Estimator

<comment><USER18> What is your estimation of when the titles of Guru, Rockstar and Ninja will work their way in popular culture, and the responsibilities will be well understood at least within the industry?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the 1970s, my first job was an electronics assembly technician. Going to my first tech conference, I asked that the conference badge job title was "Gnome".

Given the incredulous reaction of the badge maker, I was at least the first he'd ever seen. It wasn't long before the rest of the staff at the company became "Wizards" and "Gnomes" as well.

Now I just put "Nerd" as my job title, and nobody raises an eyebrow.

<comment><USER7> My title is "Director of Technology" in a small company but I tend to introduce myself as "chief nerd" as I think that speaks better to what I really do day-to-day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Full-stack Engineer is a perfectly descriptive job title.

This is my favorite stupid job title, though:

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

<comment><USER20> Self proclaimed "Thought Leader" and "Digital Prophet" sounds rather egomaniacal. I just assume anyone with titles like that is trying to sell synergy and snake oil.

<comment><USER6> Cold-Fusion Acupuncturists & Proctologist

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bah. This is the English news org writing this. In the English-dominated age of sailing ships, specialist sailors had all sorts of jargon-laden job descriptions. So did weavers. The English thrived on high tech for centuries. You'd think they'd embrace this kind of obscurity.

Just because some journo doesn't understand "scrum master" doesn't make it a bad job title. (Whether scrum is a good way to do things is not a question this journo raised.)

Now, let's talk about "Chief Experience Officer" and "Chief People Officer." WTF? Title inflation, anybody?

In startups, the executives should aLL be "Chief Maintenance Officer" meaning we'll clean the toilet when it needs it as well as raise money and convince prospects to become customers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Back before we were bought up by $Multinational_corp, my job title read General Purpose Geek; after a couple of practical jokes in the office which were attributed to me, my boss added 'and master of shenanigans' in the employee database.

When we were being integrated in the company that bought us, some HR apparatchik called me and asked whether geekery or shenanigans was my primary role; compound titles didn't cut it.

They then realized based on my pay grade that I would be a senior engineer at the very least, and my first business cards after the merger read 'Master of advanced shenanigans'.

Then some sod spotted the title and adjusted it to the more corporate-sounding advanced project engineer. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER23> IMHO, even "developer" is a stupid job title which shoud be replaced by a more descriptive one like "computer programmer" or "software engineer".

<comment><USER24> Computer programmer is fine. Software engineer... I think the argument about what qualifies you as a real engineer comes up every other day on HN.

<comment><USER25> I tend to stick with the (intent of the) law here. I'm not an engineer, not in any jurisdiction I worked in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Recruiters also constantly write about how they are searching for "The best ...".

I mean, know many people who are better developers than me, so I'm certainly not the best. I'm always thinking "Then why write me??"

Sometimes they are hiring for a global corp and I kinda can understand that biggest players need the best people and also can pay the best people.

But when some recruiter comes and talks about how he searches the best talent for a job in some no-name company, I can't help but chuckle.

I worked for a few startups and the hiring managers always said two things "I need good people, but there aren't any on the marked!" and "I interviewed someone who was really great, but too expensive."

</comment><comment><USER27> ...patiently waiting for a job title with emoji.

<comment><USER28> Would you prefer being chief :smile: officer, chief :frown: officer, or chief of :tears: ?

<comment><USER29> I'll take Chief :eggplant: Officer.

(Previously known as Chief Restructuring Officer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it quite the offensive take on tech jobs.

Arguing that "scrum master" should have a more general name is one of the stupidest things I've read. It's based on a methodology and has a specific meaning. Asking 1000 random people what pi is might result in them defining the food so we might as well change the name of either one. If you don't know what scrum master is you should not be applying for it anyway.

There is no problem with tech job titles. If anything it's a solution. If you don't want to work for a company as a ninja then the environment is probably not the right fit.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oddly enough, a few things come into play:

1\. It's hard to describe what you do, to someone who doesn't understand what you do.

2\. This isn't a new problem.

3\. There are actually _fewer_ official U.S. Census occupation codes today (545 as of the 2000 census) than in 1920 (587). Much of _that_ explosion had to do with railroads.

I did some research on this a few years back.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupation_classifications_growth_and_change_over/)

The Iron Horse gave us such classifications as:

* Baggagemen and freight agents

* Motormen

* Switchmen, flagmen, and yardmen

* Express, post, telegraph, and telephone, selected occupations

* Express messengers

* Inspectors

Or we could turn, as _The Conversation_ hails from Britain, to the UK Census classifications of 1851, 1861, and 1871, for: joiner, beermaker, gamekeeper (this sounds suspiciously SV, probably growth-hacking on the side), worsted manufacturer (but no "bested manufacturer"), hose manufacturer ("laying pipe..."), hawker, huckster, jockey, straw hat and bonnet maker (don't confuse your boots and bonnets), protestant dissenting minister, ropermaker (in cahoots with the hoseist, we surmise), staymaker (someone who stickifies the gamekeepers gamified websites, obviously), currier (but no ives), wine and spirit merchant (good, not evil, spirts, one hopes), boilermaker, Chelsea pensioner, commercial traveller (ads delivery and reach?), and weaver not otherwise described.

And, ah, yes, to the pedants, I'm aware of the original contexts of these descriptions.

The point is that, _especially_ at times of dynamic change and specialisation, new distinctions become important.

Overblown? In cases, yes. The value of jobs titles is both for _internal_ and _external_ communications and comparison, as with most protocols.

"Astro" Teller, by the way, is the grandson of a gentleman who's known for a few particularly bright points in mid-20th century history, of which there's some residual glow.

Speaking of which, my favourite jobs title remains that from the 1880 U.S. Census classification, #309, "Gentleman".

</comment><comment><USER31> > _Plonking the word 'guru' or 'rockstar' into a job description just confuses > things, writes Sir Cary Cooper._

If that _Sir_ doesn't see the irony in that sentence..

</comment><comment><USER32> Yeah I cringe at a lot of the job titles I've been seeing, everything from "chief innovation officer or chief resiliency officer" to "big data consultant" (yes I know what this is I just don't like the buzzword) and it drives me kinda batty. On the other hand, I've been seeing a couple of companies employ people in "apprentice" and "journeyman" titles positions, and I like those.

</comment><comment><USER33> My wife was an _advocate 's devil_ while training to go to the bar - <AUTHOR> advocates that trained her being her _devil masters_.

So who has silly titles?

<comment><USER34> Your wife is clear winner. I kind of like those titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe, just maybe, it's a reaction to all that's wrong with job titles - [https://stackstreet.com/4-problems-with-job- titles/](https://stackstreet.com/4-problems-with-job-titles/)

</comment><comment><USER36> If I am ever employed to manage a data centre, I want to be Cloud Master.

</comment><comment><USER37> All of this discussion could be just a rant on a HN comment and that's it. Not worth a serious article in my opinion.</comment>


Friction: why we can't build software as fast as we think we can - <AUTHOR> http://iaindooley.com/post/51974072812/friction-why-you-cant-build-software-as-fast-as-you

<comment><USER3> Here's the thing, estimating software development time is essentially equivalent to estimating time to think + overhead. Overhead includes actually typing the code, booting the computer, dealing SVN issues, etc. The overhead is relatively consistent, and can be minimized and predicted. Time to think is highly variable. Previously I used to work for a consulting company. After about a year of working there the company started to settle in a particular niche. We built libraries to do things, then we just started to churn out work. Predicting development time became an exact science, because all we had to do was estimate overhead. There was very little new things, so time to think was minimized to nearly nothing. I hated working in a code factory, so I left for greener pastures. The new place has a lot of new things, trying to fit it together is a real challenge, and requires thinking. My estimates are no where near where they were at my old company.

My main point is this, estimating software time is hard because you don't know what you don't know. If you can solve that problem, you solved one of humanity's greatest challenges.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a good start, but I wish the author had taken it deeper. E.g.:

* Can a team discover patterns in the things they underestimate? * Can a team do better by not estimating? * Can a business do better by not estimating? * What are the axes along which scope can be cut? * What emotional needs keep stakeholders from cutting scope?

I also have found a lot of value in trying to stop using terms like "launch"; I think they confuse things more than they help.

<comment><USER5> > Can a team discover patterns in the things they > underestimate?

If you do almost the same project twice, definitely. If you are doing different projects of a similar nature all the time, you can at least get an idea of the risk to the schedule and of systemic biases in estimation (i.e. the statistical distribution of time taken to complete a task / work package as a function of the initial estimate).

> Can a team do better by not estimating? > Can a business do better by not > estimating?

One of the goals of project management is to ensure that organisations don't start projects that do not have a valid business case (and cancels them as soon as it becomes clear that they don't); to work out if a project has a business case, it is necessary to estimate the benefits they project will bring to the organisation, and the costs and risks of the project. Businesses that can't do at least some basic form of cost-benefit analysis will likely end up going out of business under a series of projects that don't make financial sense.

The biggest win-win is to take an agile approach; instead of taking on a massive project which is hard to estimate, planning it up front, and deploying it in a big bang (the waterfall method), break it up into smaller iterations, each of which immediately delivers benefit to the organisation. Smaller projects are much easier to estimate, and if the organisation doesn't have the cash flow to continue after one iteration, they still get the benefit of the first iteration. The second iteration is only planned near the end of the first iteration, and so knowledge from the first iteration goes into the planning of the second, again making estimates more accurate.

> What are the axes along which scope can be cut?

When looking at a project, you have to look at all six variables at the same time: time, scope, cost, risk, benefit, and quality. If you want to cut the time / cost / risk, you might cut the scope, but that is likely to have implications for the quality and benefits. To assess whether a reduced scope makes sense, you need to look at the estimated effect that has on the benefits for the organisation - if cutting the scope leaves the project with no meaningful benefits for the organisation, because the products are unusable, but it still has some cost, then cutting the scope is not worthwhile. If cutting the scope reduces the cost and risk significantly, but still delivers most of the benefits, then it is probably worth it.

Delivering a project in iterations does have some overhead costs (and sometimes risks due to the rapid pace of change), so it ultimately comes down to a trade-off between iterating fast enough to manage the estimation risk but not so fast that it causes new problems - and that trade off is going to depend on external factors like the culture of the organsiation.

> What emotional needs keep stakeholders from cutting scope?

Often, stakeholders don't know much about software project management, and I think the application of the waterfall method, creating projects with huge scope, is applied because senior management wrongly believe that it is the best way to manage risks.

Up-front planning of large projects works very well on other types of projects with lower levels of uncertainty (for example, when constructing a large and complex building that could take hundreds of human years, up front planning probably works much better than agile approaches), and so managers apply what they know and insist that software projects be planned out from start to finish with full scope.

<comment><USER6> > Businesses that can't do at least some basic form of cost-benefit analysis > will likely end up going out of business under a series of projects that > don't make financial sense.

You can't execute an estimate and make money with it, so they are waste in a lean sense of waste.

There are usually cheaper* ways of dealing with the problem than producing estimates.

Where I work now I don't think I have ever provided a written estimate (and no one else has) for my work.

Who does estimates for the time to produce all these estimates?

* Estimates have subtle costs and benefits apart from the time to produce them.

<comment><USER4> Yes to all of this.

In the Lean sense, estimates are necessary waste if you use them to make productive decisions. That is, if by wasting time on estimates you can avoid an even larger waste, you win.

But otherwise, they're pure waste. And that's something I've seen quite a bit of. E.g., when estimates are used to give managers a sense of control. Which, in this case, means an opportunity to yell at people who fail to meet the estimates. Curiously, they almost always conclude the problem is a failure of execution, rather than over-optimistic estimates. And by "curiously", I mean "predictably."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the problem with programming is fricking programmers.

We write so much obtuse code with no documentation, adhering to no standards, and with no tutorials that you can literally get side tracked for days on some esoteric dependency that has you bashing your head against the wall. (getting mcrypt working with php I'm looking at you)

You should keep other developers in mind when writing software.

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of people in this thread have mentioned "tools" and I think this is mostly because some friendly admin at YC decided to editorialise the title of my post so that it differs from the article (and subtly changes the meaning of it), so they're talking about tools that help us build software as fast as we can _think_... which is different from the original title of the article which says "as fast as we think we can". Anyway.

I think that where tools can help is by making a wider variety of different projects _more predictable_ because domain experts create easy to use tools that abstract away alot of the friction for us.

One notable example is jQuery: it has allowed a huge variety of non-javascript experts to very reliably produce work that, in the old days, would have been wildly unpredictable due to skull crushing differences in browser behaviour and the intricacies of JavaScript as a language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of a great Steve McConnell book, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0735605351/ref=redir_mdp_mobil...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0735605351/ref=redir_mdp_mobile)

<comment><USER9> I agree with this recommendation. McConnell has done his usual trick of distilling lots of material into a concise, readable account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are two different questions here:

\- Why can't we build software as fast as we think?

\- Why can't we build software as fast as we think we can?

The author probably meant the latter (which is more associated with estimation and prediction).

But I find the former question MUCH more interesting. We've all had the experience of envisioning software solutions that would be useful to us - <USER2> then the actual task of developing that software seems much more difficult than the task SHOULD be.

I attribute much of this to IMPEDANCE rather than FRICTION. We are often not using the best tools for the job, and hence suffer great amount of superfluous work in solving any particular problem.

General purpose programming languages may always have this problem; being able to describe any solution means that they are not particularly well suiting to expressing solutions to particular classes of problems).

I've always experienced myself being much more efficient when I have domain- specific languages specifically tailored to the class of problems I want to solve. I think we are moving (slowly) in the direction of developing more targeted languages (e.g. Angular or Dart from Google for client-side web development).

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually the title of the article is "Friction: why you can't build software as fast as you think you _can_ " (emphasis here only).

Some admin was obviously in an editorial mood and has updated it to confuse everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article moves away from its interesting proposition to just restate something bland about keeping scopes tight.

We can't build software as fast as we can think because we don't have the tools. What those tools should be is an interesting and important thought experiment.

<comment><USER12> >We can't build software as fast as we can think because we don't have the tools

Actually, the real "problem" is that, as soon as we have the tools to easily solve something that before was difficult, we move the target a step farther. But that's also why programming is so interesting, and programmers are in such high demand, so I wouldn't really call it a "problem".

<comment><USER13> The right tools move the goalposts. If this wasn't the case things would stagnate pretty fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only estimation I give on tasks is "as fast as possible"

</comment><comment><USER15> AKA You Ain't Gonna Need It, sensible advice indeed.

To me though, Friction in software development is something slightly different:

<https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22zero+friction%22+ayende>

<comment><AUTHOR> YAGNI to me is something different from scope creep.

YAGNI, to me, is more about programmers tendency to want to "solve each problem only once" which leans to premature abstraction and generalisation, more often than not before they truly understand the scope of the problem.

Being ruthless about what features you include is more about being able to say, at the end of the project when it's overdue and everyone's hassled out of their brain "well, at least we know we got it done as fast as we possibly could have".

I'm always reminded of the HHGTTG bit (can't remember which book it's in) about the ship waiting until a new society arises that is capable of manufacturing lemon scented napkins so they can take off[1].

I think we spend a _lot_ of time in software building lemon scented napkins :)

[1][http://thelostcityofcarcosa.com/2012/11/12/lemon-soaked- napk...](http://thelostcityofcarcosa.com/2012/11/12/lemon-soaked-napkins/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In their doctrinal manual, _Warfighting_ , the US Marine Corps use the same term and with a similar meaning. The original analogy comes from von Clausewitz.

        Friction is the force that resists all action and saps energy. It
        makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible.

        Friction may be mental, as in indecision over a course of action.
        It may be physical, as in effective enemy fire or a terrain
        obstacle that must be overcome. Friction may be external, imposed
        by enemy action, the terrain, weather, or mere chance. Friction
        may be self-induced, caused by such factors as lack of a clearly
        defined goal, lack of coordination, unclear or complicated plans,
        complex task organizations or command relationships, or
        complicated technologies. Whatever form it takes, because war is a
        human enterprise, friction will always have a psychological as
        well as a physical impact.</comment>


Anya Groner: The Heart You Save Won't Be Your Own - <AUTHOR> http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/anya-groner-the-heart-you-save-wont-be-your-own/

<comment><USER3> _> 'During our Secret Santa drive, volunteers sometimes refused to drop gifts at houses with TVs inside.'_

This brought back memories.

Part of my first 'job' (minimum wage program for at-risk youth) was pickup / delivery and otherwise making use of donations to various county programs.

People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from stuff that was often just a step above garbage. It wasn't even a matter of TV, just seeing people living in something above total squalor (battered women sleeping on 'beds' made out of doors and 2x4s in a converted toolshed - <USER2> luxurious) pissed people off.

 _> 'Gray computer monitors lined one wall.'_

Memories here too.

For every 20 machines to come through the door we could piece together one capable of running the GED training app at the heart of our computer lab.

 _> 'When I decided to quit, friends told me that the end of idealism is the beginning of awareness, that awareness is power, even when it shuts you down.'_

I think so.

Armchair idealists, who lack the conviction of the active or the awareness of the defeated can be quite a pain as they deal exclusively in 'should'. Should doesn't feed anyone, but does work to disempower those who do.

<comment><USER4> > People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from > stuff that was often just a step above garbage.

This is a quite fascinating phenomenon psychologically that one has to face when meeting low income people: They don't necessarily want most the things you think they should want most. I remember being shocked by seeing "poor people" have IPods and IPhones or similar "luxurious" electronics while complaining that they don't have money for rent. One part of it is that electronics are actually very cheap compared to living expenses. The other part is that it does not matter what your income level is, there is still a desire for self-actualization. This last point is well argued in this following quote:

 _When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realize that they don't exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never. ... Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a- day to fetch water. There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones._ ([http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/31/the- quality-of-life/](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/31/the-quality-of-life/))

While I don't know exactly how, I think the insight that the receivers of social security are not primarily motivated to climb the Maslow hierarchy one level at the time, but rather shopping all levels at the same time, could be useful to build better interventions.

<comment><USER3> _> 'One part of it is that electronics are actually very cheap compared to living expenses.'_

Cheap relative to living expenses and childcare in particular. Years ago, it was cable TV to keep kids off the street while parents were at work - now it's something with a touchscreen.

 _> 'When you actually meet people living in tough conditions...there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones.'_

Nice quote.

I think the indiscretions often come back to one thing - stress and seeking to relieve it.

Looking back my own experience, the really tough thing about being poor wasn't lacking any specific thing it was the crushing stress of constantly teetering on the brink and exhausting effort to keep from toppling.

I think the discipline of a life without small indulgences makes a person 'brittle' and invites the risk of outright breaking when some inevitable disruption is beyond your control.

Also, the stress I refer to is something I believe is frequently misunderstood and grossly underestimated. Having ample means and choosing to live spartan or fasting periodically is a toy version of actual hardship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK, if you aren't depressed enough by _that_ story, read this: [http://www.wbez.org/news/illinois-losing-more-children- child...](http://www.wbez.org/news/illinois-losing-more-children-child-abuse- and-neglect-any-time-last-30-years-109155). The examples can be multiplied ad nauseam.

As a first order analysis I file these failings together with the educational ones, e.g. see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738513). I was downvoted quite a bit in that thread for suggesting that some aspects of that (and I maintain this) problem can be tackled by independent, small entities (startups, if you will) rather than behemoth governmental organizations that are filled with people who are either incompetent or don't care, or if they are neither of those two quickly get depressed to minus infinity, as is the person in this piece. People argued that, no, we have to strike at the root cause of the problem: poverty. Noble as this goal is these institutions keep going on, with what seems to be increasing levels of deficiency.

And kids like Gina Presley die. Chris made it through this time due to heroic efforts of a newbie, what do you think will happen (or most probably already have) to him when he instead faces a seasoned SS worker who will be much less enthusiastic?

<comment><USER3> Looking at your linked thread, I don't think it's the concept itself that saw you downvoted so much as the way you stated it.

It comes off as an oversimplified 'Everything is better with startups!'

Cut out grating phrases like 'ingenious solutions' and 'young, energetic outsiders', articulate the idea more fully, speak with a little humility and I'd wager those posts would have fared much better - like this one [1].

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739184)

<comment><USER5> I wasn't complaining about lost karma (although thanks for the thoughtful suggestions) but rather a certain way of thinking which I colloquially refer to as 'Googlism', although it's widely known by a different name ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal)).

I'm all for putting up such a goal for motivation. But one must win small, persistent victories along the way. As an example, Google initially won by superior technology (PageRank, GFS, etc.), they just didn't hope to "organize the world's information" by idealism. Similarly, what is the big game changers we are bringing to the "war on poverty". If we cannot name any such thing its idle talk.

I don't believe such new approaches will come from government organizations for various obvious reasons. Note that the author of this piece was a "young, energetic outsider".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "I've heard it argued that non-profits function as a sort of safety valve, > releasing just enough steam so that instead of organizing for systemic > change, people compete for assistance."

<comment><USER7> Well, yes. Why do you think there's such insistence on using private charity to provide relief?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, shit, now I'm just feeling depressed.

What is the story from the social services part of this? Why are they denying so many applications? Surely the entire organization cannot just be full of people who have not but hate and loathing in their heart. Has working at such an organization for so long made them callous and depressed as well?

Perhaps what should be investigated is what sort of help social workers need to enable them to cope with their job long term?

<comment><USER9> If the social workers could help everyone that came to them deserving help they wouldn't be depressed in the first place.

Unfortunately, the elected officials in charge of changing the rules can get more votes by talking about other wedge issues. Worse, some of them can even get votes by peddling the myth that the poor are the ones responsible for bleeding the working class dry. This is often accompanied by a "fix" that costs more than it saves, makes life even harder for those at the bottom, and sometimes even funnels money back into the party / official's pocket (e.g. the urine test performed by a company owned by the official's wife).

It's voters that need to change, not social workers.

<comment><USER10> Well, I think you were to take a look at the budgets... you would find that there is enough money. At least up here in Canada.

You need to spend your budget or you get less money. And frankly, some departments should recieve less if they come in under.

The problem is that the people who do an incompetent job and/or give out grants via patronage. They never really operating a competive service The over head is just disgusting.

You cannot fire the incompetent or the amoral. There is lots of fat to cut in these organizations. I know people that start out working hard on cases but then are nerfed to keep others from looking bad.

Hell I even offered to teach a google alert class for job seekers and the department free of charge. Did they do it... nah duplication of effort keeps their budget high and their employment stable.

<comment><USER11> If you think of these govt agencies as employment-welfare themselves, makework jobs with a false veneer of productivity, it begins to make sense. The bureaucracy is the actual welfare program.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that was ever the intent, although I do know a handful of conservatives who swear up and down that it was all part of the liberal agenda.

I always thought a much more plausible explanation was simply the accountability gap in public policy. The voters don't care if a policy works or not, they care if it sounds like it works according to their preconceived notions about how society functions (e.g. charging people to ride the bus will save money). Analyzing policy is a difficult and thankless task. It's hard to do right and voters don't pay attention anyway.

My suggestion: give each candidate 1/2 (or 1/3 or 1/4) of a ballot page to use as they please (with caveats on sourcing data). Let the infographic battles begin! It's not a perfect solution, but I think that it could do a great deal to steer the debate back in the correct direction: the post-mortem debunkings would likely be more socially productive than any immediate effect the graphics had on voter behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've heard things of a similar spirit from over here. Considerably less extreme, of course, but the unemployed and the very poor are a politically vulnerable group. Not to mention the psychologically ill.

In my opinion, charity is kind of a sucker's game. It's the government's job to redistribute money from the haves to the have-nots. Because they certainly won't do it themselves.

<comment><USER11> Sucker's game? Because someone else may be less generous?

Then join up with your fellow and rise against the greedy wealthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting how Social Services is vilified here, but her own organization's failure to help everyone is obviously because they lack the resources. This person's loathing for Social Services let her get through the day, provided an enemy to fight, but completely prevented her from getting any insight into the problems that they face and the reasons they are forced to make so many denials. She offers an explanation (they like denying people things) but even she seems aware how ludicrous that is.

Meanwhile in just a few months of dealing with the needy and not having the ability to help them all she is ground down into bitterness and cynicism. I think the subtext here points to much better reasons for the Social Services people giving her a hard time. She's just some dilettante college chick doing some good works before going off to her real career. The people who she's railing against do this for a living, and don't run away after a year. They've been working at this for their entire careers, and see people like her every day.

</comment><comment><USER14> the title is a reference to a flannery o'connor story ( [http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/2312/lifeyousave.htm](http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/2312/lifeyousave.htm) )

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone have a link to the text of the article that doesn't go all wonky (including an undismissable "gone fishing" dialog) on my phone?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

 _"Working with Social Services is hard and the stress is tremendous," one man wrote. "You hate it. They make you feel like you're nobody. Cow dung on someone's shoes."

"Social Services is very disrespectful," complained another. "They put you in a low category, which is not fair."

When clients lost their patience and became loud or violent they were escorted to the sheriff's office, conveniently located in the same building. As a client pointed out to me one day, the proximity felt like entrapment._

<comment><USER16> This problem exists at all levels of governmental agencies if you ever have to interact with them. Even been to the DMV?

<comment><USER17> The DMV can sometimes be frustrating, but it's been a long time since I've dreaded going or encountered bureaucratic resistance out of proportion to a problem I was bringing (sure, registering a car you bought at an estate sale when both the previous title holders are dead can be slightly tricky. Normal transfer of ownership or renewing your license, not so much). As far as I can tell, with modern IT systems, most routine tasks are pretty smooth.

I'd rather go to the DMV any day of the week than talk to my completely private health insurer, that's for sure .</comment></comment></comment>


A short list of things I don't like about Python - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/2009/05/26/a-short-list-of-things-i-dont-like-about-python/ <comment><USER3> Agreed on every point, but I have to add a few things.

\- No real metaprogramming is a big problem for me. I want decorators to be able to manipulate the AST (I'm playing around with a way to do this: <http://pastie.org/490836> ) at the very least, and preferably real macros that can add new syntax.

\- Anonymous functions. I want real anonymous functions in Python, not lambda or anything like it. After a long time of hacking Nemerle code, I go back to Python and cry when I write lambdas.

\- Tail call recursion. Another functional programming thing that I'd absolutely love to see, just because it's so incredibly useful.

Sadly, I know none of these will likely be implemented, as they're just not the Python way, but it doesn't change the fact that I love Python and would love to see these changes.

<comment><USER4> I can't help thinking that certain languages impose their own variation of the Blub syndrome, namely in leading to the conclusion that one particular way of thinking about programming should be the One True Way to think about programming.

Various Lisps, for example, produce the well-known "when all you have is an AST, everything looks like a macro" syndrome; Scheme inculcates a desire to use tail recursion even when counting on one's fingers; etc.

This is, incidentally, precisely the same criticism proponents of functional programming typically level at proponents of, say, object-oriented programming. And I've no doubt that, if the popularities of those paradigms were reversed, comments like this one would be the usual snipe from OOP fans at their "unenlightened" functional brethren and sistren.

At any rate, I'm very far from being convinced that this is a healthy thing for either the programmers affected, or for the state of the art in general.

<comment><USER5> When you can modify the semantics of the _entire language_ , you can use any paradigm you want.

<comment><USER6> ...which is great, until you want to use one paradigm and you also want to take advantage of a certain library, and you discover that the library uses a completely different paradigm. Either you put up with an impedence mismatch between your code and the library, or you discover that in this language all paradigms are equal but some are more equal than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author makes the assertion that flat is better than nested, and indeed it's one of the rules in "import this", but I just don't see it. I spend about half my time in python, and about half in erlang. Erlang makes python look pretty deeply nested, since it pretty much lacks support for any namespace nesting, but honestly, I prefer Java's namespaces. If I were to write a library in Java (god forbid), I'd start it in net.tsuraan.whatever. I'd know that I'm not going to have namespace clashes with the standard library, apache, nor anybody else that is half-way sane. In python, the root namespace is pretty crowded, and you need to step carefully to avoid namespace clashes. In erlang, it's even harder. Why do people like flat namespaces, as opposed to reasonably nested ones?

<comment><USER8> noooo, I wasn't making that assertion - I was saying the argument against my gripe about nesting bits of the stdlib deeper would be responded with "flat is better than nested". The "flat" crowd always whips that one out when someone suggests nesting it a bit more. I am a fan of nesting it just a little bit deeper than what it is today.

<comment><USER7> It reads as though you generally do agree with the flat is better than nested though; your argument appears to be more against how the system is currently organized, rather than being concerned with the ability to write libraries without worrying much about namespace clashes. I'd love to see the entire python standard library moved into a root-level "python" namespace; I'm guessing that would be about as popular as curly braces with the general python crowd...

Heck, even the ability to root your imports, like import .email would bring in the root-level email library, would be pretty nice. I'm sure I've seen the idea shot down before, but I can't recall what the reasoning was.

<comment><USER8> Relative imports are in python, which allows you to dictate where a "foo" module is imported from

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yay for another person like me who wants to be able to sprinkle just a little static-typing goodness back into the dynamic typing orgy everyone is having these days.

I don't mean huge cumbersone Java or C++-esque typing, just the simple ability to declare to the compiler (or to humans trying to read my code) - 'object foo is a Foo, please give me a hand and tell me if you can deterministically figure out that it is not, or if it is doing something that Foos are never allowed to do'.

<comment><USER10> While it's not caught at compile time, why not use assert?

      assert(type(x == "float"))

should be a very clear declaration to others reading the code, and assert is also not limited to type checking.

I like static typing in some circumstances, but adding it to Python would be a major change to the language. I'd rather just use OCaml when static typing is really important, and save scripting languages for the niches in which they excel.

<comment><USER8> asserts are stripped out when python is run in optimized mode. Not to mention sprinkling them around your code is infuriating for people dealing with your code :) I'd also point you to the links to guido's writeup I put in the post, I agree: it changes the language too much to be a positive net gain.

<comment><USER10> > sprinkling them around your code is infuriating for people dealing with your > code

Would this necessarily be any less true of static type annotations, though? And as for them being stripped out, yes - it's for making debugging easier, not performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a pretty minor thing compared to a lot of the warts here - to be honest, I'm not in the league of most of you as a programmer, I suspect - <USER2> two pretty simple things I've found surprising/annoying and have managed to shoot myself in the foot with:

* loops leaking their control variables: I get why this is useful sometimes, but it particularly bites with list comprehensions, especially as generator expressions don't leak. Apparently the list-comprehension part of this goes away in Python 3 ([http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2008-April/0131...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2008-April/013189.html)).

* How mutable default argument values behave. Now, this one's even mentioned in the tutorial - [http://docs.python.org/tutorial/controlflow.html#default-arg...](http://docs.python.org/tutorial/controlflow.html#default-argument-values) \- so I've really got no excuse, but that hasn't stopped me getting it wrong before!

<comment><USER8> Mutable arguments are considered harmful; and will probably cause cancer, plague, locusts and other end-of-the-world problems.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's more or less what happens. What you'd, admittedly naively, want, though, is a way of saying "a new empty dictionary, please", so you don't wind up having to write this kind of thing:

      def f(a, d=None):
          if d is None:
              d = {}

which, okay, it's a minor deal, and I know _why_ it happens, but it's the kind of thing I forget you need to do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Macros. Macros macros macros. Even if I can't have full-on lisp-y AST macros, I'd kill for relatively simple CPP-ish textual macros, just to cut down on boilerplate code.

Not that the chances are any good, and I can understand why - it would be decidedly un-Pythonic. But it's just mildly frustrating at times when I find myself writing the same coupe of lines of code twenty times within a file, because scoping rules insist they have to be there (reading from locals() is often where it hits me))

<comment><USER13> I have used exec and eval as something way better than _relatively simple CPP- ish textual macros_. What's better, you have all the power of Python string manipulation. If you're reading from locals() a lot you're in evil land anyway. :)

<comment><USER14> exec and eval can be powerful. But that's their problem. They're a little bit _too powerful_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this whole "things I hate in $language" misses a very important point.

There is an immensely rich universe of languages you can chose from today. If you want Lisp-ish lambdas and macros, you should, by all means, go with Lisp. If you want to build your own DSL, you may as well chose Ruby. If you want pythonic indentation-as-structure, you should go with Python and, if you love the "do this if that" thing, you should consider Perl.

Having said that, I would love if Python threads had better support for multi- processors. It's not like changing syntax and turning Python into something it isn't, it's just properly implementing something that should be there from day 1.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it misses anything. My post is mainly around things I want to make better, to make python better. I am definitely a fan of using the right tool for the right job: that means using the language which fits the domain. This is why I don't think arguments for "more functional programming" features or "be erlang" hold a lot of water for Python; if that's what you want, you need to go use those tools.

<comment><USER15> I agree with your points and, having done a lot of Zope/Plone programming in the past, your #1 is by far my #1 too. More than once I have sworn if I knew enough of the inner workings of CPython, I would solve the problem myself, even if it took years of labor, even if I had to rewrite each and every module out there ;-)

I think my rather inadequately thought out response was because most of the comments here in HN were about changing Python into something else. I am truly sorry I implied your article was about turning Python into something unnatural and I most certainly owe you an apology.

<comment><USER8> It's nothing. But I wholly agree that many of the comments here and elsewhere are very much in the vein of "man wouldn't it be great if python was OCaml?!!", which is about as useful a comment as a hole in my head.

<comment><USER10> Python isn't OCaml. It's not Prolog, Haskell, awk, or SQL either, and trying to bend it into those is largely missing the point.

A more interesting question is, "In what circumstances is Python an excellent fit, and OCaml a poor one?", and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, I was ready to reply with a nasty comment until I saw who the blog post was from. :-)

<comment><USER8> Heh. No reason to flame me ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He forgot one: "Everything is a run-time error."

<comment><USER17> Somebody stopped reading before 5 and 6.</comment></comment>


What is a good employee engagement SaaS tool for mid-size(50+) companies? - <AUTHOR> We are looking for a a tool for our employees to be aware of work being done in other departments, feel like they're in the loop, and ask the exec team questions about strategy and execution (may be even anonymously). Slack doesn't cut it, too noisy. Also, post the 40-employee mark, a company meeting hasn't been sufficient.<p>I've looked around but haven't found something. Would appreciate any recommendations. <comment><USER2> check out agora - an idea platform for employees. it's used by many communities to crowdsource ideas and ask questions. here's an example of a public community: [https://agora.co/community/-KS1p19O5jl8PjpSmkrK](https://agora.co/community/-KS1p19O5jl8PjpSmkrK)

we've developed an enterprise version for companies to do employee engagement too :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried [https://www.15five.com/](https://www.15five.com/)? They offer a full suite of integrated tools; continuous employee feedback, OKRs, pulse surveys, and peer recognition...

</comment><comment><USER4> Rewardian has a pay-as-you-go rewards platform for small to mid-size companies. [http://www.rewardian.com](http://www.rewardian.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://knowyourcompany.com/](https://knowyourcompany.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> check this out! [http://www.woobe.hr/](http://www.woobe.hr/)

</comment><comment><USER7> email?

</comment><comment><USER8> idonethis ?

<comment><AUTHOR> too granular.</comment></comment>


Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens' emotional states - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/05/facebook-helped-advertisers-target-teens-who-feel-worthless/ <comment><USER2> Totally unsurprising. I mean, people don't actually think FB is a positive force in the world do they?

The science is clear on human's capacity for meaningful/real realtionships (it's a pretty small number), the anecdotal evidence is also fairly clear on FB's real contributions to society (it's not positive).

FB really is the poster child for just how willing we are as a species to roll around in our own feces. It's most definetly a sad commentary on where we are at in general as a society and the contribution it made to the last electoral shitshow is just icing on the cake.

Hell, it's also sigularly unsurprising that Zuck is headed to politics, in fact that morass of crap is just about a perfect fit for him.

<comment><USER3> >FB is a positive force in the world do they?

Thats how I keep up with my extended family 1000 miles away. I do think it's a positive force in the world.

<comment><USER4> I am not trying to demean your comment in any way but I will give you an alternate viewpoint..

Back in 2011 I also used Facebook to "keep up" with my distant friends and family. I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Then one day I realized that these were all (for me) extremely shallow interactions, and I decided I would make a better effort to stay in touch.

I closed my Facebook account, and made a commitment to reach out directly to the people I cared about. Perhaps less often, but in more meaningful ways.

I started sending monthly emails, and scheduling Skype or (eventually) FaceTime calls, and so on..

Fast-forward 6 years of that and I feel much more connected to the distant people I care about in my life than I ever did via Facebook, and almost all of them have reciprocated my efforts at maintaining a better connection..

Again, this is just my story, but you really don't need Facebook to stay in touch with the people you care about, no matter where they are in the world.

<comment><USER5> But you can only do that with so many people. Facebook is more convenient. And it has the random factor. Sometimes there's a friend d who you weren't super close with but always thought well of. With Facebook you can see when they're visiting your city (if they make a post about it). It gives you the opportunity to know that that friend is around and reach out to them.

I think there are a lot of positives to Facebook, but a lot of potential negatives for certain kinds of personalities (people who are negative or addictive). With the right attitude though, it's certainly helpful

<comment><USER6> That's not random, that's the algorithm. It might not show you anything if it decides you won't find that friend interesting.

<comment><USER7> Not that this is "what you decide is interesting". Which makes it much less useful, prone to social signalling and what is worse, actually less meaningful than more direct contact. Remember, it is mostly text, not even time of voice is carried in it. Even a picture is static.

Contrast with realtime voice and video. (Facebook has those features but they're nowhere near as utilized. And they definitely do boot show up in feeds.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do people working at FB feel about spending their time building a huge advertising engine, compared to working at, say, Tesla? Genuinely curious!

<comment><USER9> People working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.

<comment><USER10> They're not ignorant. They either don't care, or don't see source of revenue as the defining quality of their work.

<comment><USER11> I used to work at Intel and then Microsoft during the anti-trust years. We were totally oblivious to what mgmt did and were quite happy to accept the company line. It was after all delivered by nice respectable people and we were getting paid well.

Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem.

Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace.

What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island.

Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.

<comment><USER12> Another real problem is the willful ignorance of all things political. As if there isn't a political dimension to almost everything we do. Engineers as a rule have a lot of leverage, small changes in what we make have huge consequences in the real world and a bit of understanding about how the two are coupled would go a long way towards making this a better world. It would also at times require engineers to take a stand and I suspect that that is what drives the willful ignorance. After all it is much easier to do something inherently bad if you can pretend there are no real world consequences.

<comment><USER13> Um, could you give some specific/concrete examples of what you mean, when speaking of this leverage? I honestly have no slightest idea of what you may have in your mind here, and am totally curious - at least as long as we're talking, I assume, about legit/ethical/morally acceptable actions? (Also please note I'm not in US, though I presume it's not relevant to this discussion.)

<comment><USER14> Engineers build small things that have huge impacts. The Linux kernel, the ARM core, the internal combustion engine, the atomic bomb.

As a profession, software engineers have very weak ethical standards. We have no Hippocratic oath, we have no iron ring. We might not be happy about it, but we'll release code that we know to be dangerously buggy, we'll cooperate with surveillance agencies, we'll design systems that exploit users, we'll build products that are sold to the governments of Saudi Arabia or Libya.

If software engineers were collectivised, we could refuse to do all of this shady stuff. Any software engineer tasked with doing something unethical could simply say "I'm not doing that, I'd lose my license". By establishing a professional body equivalent to the Bar Association or the General Medical Council, we could throw a giant wrench in the machinery of evil.

<comment><USER13> Hmm; so maybe I just misunderstood the original post at first, this or the fact that I'm already trying hard to take into account ethics in what I do as much as I can, so no big change for me? I dunno; still not quite convinced by this interpretation. I understand and endorse the idea of "picking who you work for" (though sometimes it's _very_ nontrivial, esp. in context of big companies/corporations). I just thought that maybe the fragment about "a lot of leverage" and "small changes in what we make have huge consequences" was alluding to some other idea. Personally, I have extremely hard time seeing me choosing a different employer as "a lot of leverage" or "huge consequences [for the world]". I feel it's only a _very small_ , though potentially at least nonzero, leverage and consequences for the world (I imagine someone else with weaker spine will hire for a particular position anyway), but in my perception notable (positive) consequences for feeling of personal integrity, though potentially (but not necessarily) at a cost for personal material situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The original headline was potentially misleading.

> Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: Facebook has issued a statement disputing The > Australian's report. "The premise of the article is misleading," the company > wrote in its authorless statement. "Facebook does not offer tools to target > people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian > researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express > themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on > data that was anonymous and aggregated."

<comment><USER16> Given the level of detail in the Australian article (or what we can see quoted from it; the original seems to be not easily available at the moment), and FB's past behavior[2], I'm not sure I believe their denial at this stage, quite frankly. We'll know for sure when the original presentation that the article refers to inevitably leeks out in full.

[1] _According to the Australian, the data available to advertisers includes a young user's relationship status, location, number of friends on the platform and how often they access the site on mobile or desktop. The newspaper reported that Facebook also has information on users who are discussing "looking good and body confidence" and "working out & losing weight"._

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook- users-emotions-news-feeds)

<comment><USER17> >The newspaper reported that Facebook also has information on users who are discussing "looking good and body confidence" and "working out & losing weight"

What's wrong with that exactly?

Is that any different than an option to advertise to people who are talking about buying cars?

<comment><USER16> Because it's creepy.

More specifically: it explicitly attempts to address a particular _mental and psychological states_ (in particular, states associated with anxiety and the need for approval from others) rather than an economic activity (like "needs a car").

Yes, car ads (and all kind of ads) have implicitly been designed to work off feelings of anxiety (and the need to fit i), since the beginning of time. But it's the all-out brazenness off this effort (combined with the fact that, again, it was explicitly designed to _target teenagers_ ) that pushes it over the edge, in my view -- and well into the terrain of Creepy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, facebook was paid for data on users' poor emotional state.

And facebook experimented with adjusting news feeds to make people feel better or worse. [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+news+feed+experiment&t=lm...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+news+feed+experiment&t=lm&ia=news)

I wonder how much it would cost to have facebook make people feel bad, and then serve them ads to which they would be more susceptible because of their low state.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure there is already a price for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hoped they did it to prove themselves that advertisers will use such capabilities to take advantage of innocent filterless future consumers, but that would require a diametrically inverse interpretation of results. Having worked in advertising, I feel we should have heavy-handed restrictions with regard to advertising to minors. Given the potential for abuse, I would recommend enforcing equal restrictions on targeting based on the current emotional state. Irrational decisions are the motor of many successful marketing campaigns (things like anchor pricing are the norm). Letting advertisers sophisticate the message according to the customers emotional state, is like giving sudo privilege to a bitlocker. The metrics on their dashboards do not include morals. We have to stay on top of this.

</comment><comment><USER21> From the article, it just looks like a misunderstanding; this was at worst a proposal and most likely the weird/inappropriate "Facebook Research" that gets occasionally reported. It's easy to find out what controls are available to advertisers: just open up an ad campaign on Facebook [1].

1\. [https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ads-manager- app](https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ads-manager-app)

</comment><comment><USER22> Zuckerberg was talking about all these programs to protect people at risk. I guess this is what he really meant. If you can find people at risk, then you can exploit them.

</comment><comment><USER23> What should we think about the future, where nobody is making the decision to target teens' with specific emotional state, but instead the machine makes the decision?

I see this as inevitable - probably something that is already happening to some extend. Let's assume you are advertising something where the target action takes place online. Something where you can establish a direct connection between the events "Person A sees ad" and "Person A buys product". Assuming the volumes are high enough, why would you put human in charge for targeting the ads? Why not just put the machines to work, to analyse the thousands weak signals your platform is collecting about each individual and then determine which ads are most likely to result in purchase. If the sale takes place through your own platform you have pretty nice feedback loop there.

The machine of course does not think "hey, this person is depressed, let's sell him some Happy Pills" but the end result is likely the same. Machine learns some patterns in behavior which indicate the person is likely to be interested in Happy Pills. Is this good or bad?

<comment><USER24> I can't say whether it's good or bad but I definitely can say I don't want to live in a world like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > a representative for Facebook Australia issued a formal and lengthy apology, > saying in part, "We have opened an investigation to understand the process > failure and improve our oversight. We will undertake disciplinary and other > processes as appropriate."

What did they mean by that, oversight by whom?

<comment><USER26> Oversight by whoever dared leak this.

<comment><USER11> Kudos to the leaker. I am quite happy to contribute to a patreon page or the ACLU or whoever that makes sure these whistle blowers are taken care off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Repeat after me: "If I don't pay for the product I am the product."

Teaching this to schoolkids is necessary for public mental health.

I'm sure FB, like gouging pharmaceutical companies, employs risk managers who plan just how far they can go with this sort of thing and still get away with "issuing a formal and lengthy apology."

<comment><USER28> I'm experimenting with building a subscription based social network: [https://postbelt.com](https://postbelt.com) \- basically to entirely step over the 'you are the product' problem and offer the type of social network I actually want to exist.

Check it out if it sounds interesting!

<comment><USER29> Can't you just, like, make it free and just add very dumb ads, and few enough to be worth it ? Nobody (meaning mainstream people) will pay.

<comment><USER30> The idea I had is to let users monetize their own data, as in by default there are no ads or tracking, but if you choose you can turn them on and get paid to do so (and the site takes a percentage of that money). It could easily grow into a platform for users to monetize and sell other types of content that they create too, like photos, videos, stories, etc.

<comment><USER28> That's very interesting, but obviously very difficult to bootstrap. As long as it didn't, in any way, impact the UX of anyone else on the platform, it could fit in and be workable. I guess working out those details is the difficult part, and I've chosen to go with a simpler approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All kids feel worthless at some time. This is evil.

</comment><comment><USER32> To all those who supposedly "show they care" by "keeping in touch" with "folks from around the world" (as a reason for explaining why FB provides an important service). Whatever FB's lofty mission statement is on the inside, the actual service Facebook is providing is estrangement, as mentioned in a comment below.

Here is a very small way you can show you care, which will be actually productive and hopefully makes you rethink that statement. There is _someone_ in your life who is technologically inept. Help them with their technology related problems for an hour a week. Pull your hair out in frustration at your complete failures (which will definitely happen initially). Persist with it until they learn something. Continue for a while until you realize they have mastered it so well that they are now teaching you something even you didn't know.

In about 6 months, ask yourself if you would rather show that you care about others by actually helping someone out, or if the better way is to press the Like button like Pavlovian dogs. And then come and comment on how useful you think FB is at that point.

I am not saying it is absolutely useless. I am just saying that FB's engagement would dwindle down in proportion to its actual importance. The funny thing is, anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that FB has been designed to be like an entertaining movie, designed to appeal to our most base instincts (the well studied combination of narcissism and voyeurism). You will not watch such movies 24 x 7 x 365, would you?

</comment><comment><USER33> The title ("Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens' emotional states") is fundamentally incorrect.

Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state."

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and- ad-t...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad- targeting/)

<comment><USER26> We really have no way of knowing for which purpose or in which way any data that is collected about us is used by any company/person/entity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> And here is one reason why I'm busy trying to get people to abandon Whatsapp.

I don't want to support this company. I don't want them to have tons of metadata including a list of everyone I talk to.

I definitely don't want them to track my kids.

So I hold my nose and say "try Telegram".

<comment><USER36> Say 'try signal' instead. Good crypto is never be overrated.

<comment><USER35> _Good crypto is never be overrated._

Agree.

But for the rest of us: does Signal have group conversations and multi-device support?

I think if we are going to replace Whatsapp we need to provide an alternative that matches the features people use and feels better.

Telegram does all that and more.

Amd BTW if you can get people to use Signal then that is great too!

(Oh the irony of me trying to get people off WhatsApp, - I was an enthusiastic user until they got bought.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A bit like hitting the broad side of barn, though, isn't it?

I've been seeing a ton of backlash against Facebook lately. I know there's always backlash against Facebook, but I've been seeing a lot more of it. Especially devs calling out other devs for working there.

<comment><USER38> If you watch comment sections where shareholders hang out, such as Yahoo Business site for FB, you see every negative allegation against FB ever published, every single day. In comments sections, it is typically the shorts railing against any uptick in share price. And while the main Yahoo Business site does publish both pro and con articles year-round, there does always seem to be one major "new" negative allegation right at earnings time (Q1 report is in two days), like clockwork. Often, the "new" thing is not new at all. The major themes they like to repackage as news at earnings time are 1) the young are fleeing FB; 2) FB's revenue growth will slow as user growth slows; and 3) FB uses their data to sell ads. It's really funny to see these things touted as new revelations, when FB openly discusses all of these and more when discussing risk factors in their own financial reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> [http://thoughtmaybe.com/facebook-cracking-the- code/](http://thoughtmaybe.com/facebook-cracking-the-code/)

Watched it last night and I think it's very relevant to this discussion.

Now I don't think its _Facebook, the company_ that has these scary social side effects, it is the concept of the 'social network' itself that's dangerous.

Facebook is just very good at promoting and monetizing it (and of course it's also a technological marvel).

Give everyone a voice ? Nice idea in theory, but one bad apple ... what about a million bad apples ?

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't understand, this has been a feature since forever. You can tell the emotional state of people by the music they listen to.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't think it's fair to say that marketers ruin everything...

Marketers _devalue_ everything.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not sure why nobody has tried cache:-loading the news article. It gets around the paywall just fine.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloI...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloIGKuoJ:www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/digital/facebook- targets-insecure-young-people-to-sell-ads/news- story/a89949ad016eee7d7a61c3c30c909fa6)

[http://archive.is/paAKu](http://archive.is/paAKu)

</comment><comment><USER43> It is time to criminalize targeted advertising.

<comment><USER44> Especially advertising targeted at children. The way I see it, an advert is a business proposal and children do not have the autonomy to engage in a deal.

<comment><USER45> It used to be illegal to direct TV ads at kids in Sweden but it's now been legalized to harmonize with the TV channels that were broadcasting from the UK. Even though it's legal the networks have refrained from doing it as far as I'm aware. Not sure about other mediums though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Live stream killing an elderly man, or hanging of your 2 year old kid, or want to target the most volunrable in our society? Facebook.

They keep overstepping the mark and they keep getting away with it.

<comment><USER47> I think this is so disingenuous it's insulting to those who died.

<comment><USER48> To their famlies maybe, dead people don't take offense. Impling the reaction of someone is equally disingenuous. Not saying you are wrong, the conflation is a bit overreaching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make. Currently fashionable imperative that society has to force it's members to good choices and protect from bad ones is, in my, opinion, deeply immoral, and strips society's members from their ability to make meaningful choices.

Now, this particular story includes teenagers, and I agree - the people who we are not yet take as adults _should_ have some protection and guidance. But as person closes to the 18 (or 21) years, this protection and guidance needs to gradually go away. We cannot pretend that a 16 year old and 9 year old are on the same responsibility and mental level.

<comment><USER50> > A person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is > actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make.

A company doesn't "want" to satisfy anything; it _needs_ to make money. We're talking mega-corporations with armies of psychologists and data scientists, pouring billions of dollars and collective man-centuries into learning to manipulate people to act in certain ways, irrespective of their own self- interest, on a massive scale... versus individual human beings with inherently limited time and access to information and, on average, predictable behavioral patterns. The most successful ad isn't the most helpful, informative, or even honest, it's the one which acts the most like a mind virus.

<comment><USER49> Still, the critical thing here is _personal_choice_. Any kind of interaction is, in some respect, manipulation; you just used a lot of scare tactics right now to inflate the role of manipulation in this particular one. May be fair, may be not; having worked in an industry that usually gets a rep for being manipulative (free2play gamedev), I don't believe in the black magic power of the game designers and marketers anymore, but I don't have enough information about topic at hand.

But regardless - we have to make a clear distinction between somewhere, because otherwise we would be on a slippery slope to forbid any kind of interaction where parties have conflicting interests at all. And in my opinion, the perfect way to make distinction is whether the person is making the decision out of a sane state of mind and voluntarily.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux Animated Wallpaper - <AUTHOR> Hello HN! I am running arch linux with a tiling WM. Right now I am just using feh to set a wallpaper. I would really like to play a video or GIF as my wallpaper just like feh does with images. I can't find anything that would work with something like i3 or other tiling window managers. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I looked into this earlier this year with disappointing results. This seemed to be something that was popular a handful of years ago, but which just sort of trailed off. There are a couple of options out there for making "live" video wallpapers work, but they are really hit or miss, and I couldn't make any of the available options work. Using VLC was the most popular suggestion, and it "worked" but displayed the VLC title bar on the desktop, which is janky. There was some utility that I tried to install also, which only displayed a black square. It was however an ancient (5+ years old) utility with ancient dependencies.</comment>


NP-complete problem solved with biological motors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/np-complete-problem-solved-with-biological-motors/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this the idea behind evolutionary algorithms? Just executed with protein fibers instead of computers.</comment>


Ask HN: Business Plan Resources - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
We have started a B2B company that delivers simplified environmental information to manufacturers across Canada. To obtain certain grants, we require a business plan. I have put something together, but would like to see a template. Does anyone know where I might find Web App business plans online?
Thank You HN Readers. <comment><USER2> You can find a good guideline on Sequoia's site:

<http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas/></comment>


Ask HN: Domain Appraisal: luckyscoffee.com - <AUTHOR>

As the title says, wondering if anyone has any domain appraisal muscles that they'd be willing to flex and give me an appraisal for LUCKYSCOFFEE.COM. <comment><USER2> the domain is worthless. if there was a business attached to this that was generating revenue, there'd be value. don't be a troll.

<comment><AUTHOR> I purchased it with the intention of tying into a game I was working on, but the game has since went belly up. Was just wondering if there was any value in it to keep it, or if it would be saleable.</comment></comment>


Gallery of Computer Scientists (Photographed by Bertrand Meyer) - <AUTHOR> http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/gallery/

<comment><USER2> Darn, I was hoping for something a bit more artsy like these chicken ones <http://37signals.com/svn/posts/220-chicken-portraits></comment>


Ask HN: Is making one-page websites for apps a pain? - <AUTHOR>

Recently, the bottleneck for releasing products for me has been making the website for each of the apps. The best solution out there right now is buying templates but I'm never sure if I like it enough to shell out $15 instantly. I am wondering if others feel similarly. <comment><USER2> It looks like wordpress has some nice free one page templates... but 1) it might be overkill for your need 2) I just discovered wordpress so... I may have false hopes 3) in any case: either you buy a template & customize, hire a designer, or get your hands dirty

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thoughts. I keep using various hybrids of the 3 that you mentioned and it's been getting annoying. I'm going to try and see if I can maybe build a tool that could ease this process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depending on what you need, [http://html5up.net/](http://html5up.net/) has some free templates. I'd also be willing to build you a custom page.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey! thanks for the link - its definitely got many nice free templates! i have an idea you might be interested in building together - email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER3> alright sent you a message; I'm Heidi

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious: Where are you buying templates?

<comment><AUTHOR> creativemarket.com .. do you know any better sources?

<comment><USER4> No, actually. I am learning the ropes like you are.</comment></comment></comment>