The Great Facebook "Boost": How Click Farms Make Facebook's Paid Promos a Scam - <AUTHOR> http://www.greysquall.com/2016/06/wasting-money-advertising-on-facebook.html <comment><USER2> I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.

It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.

One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.

Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.

Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.

<comment><AUTHOR> _One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea /Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes._

Interesting that, if we accept the click-farm premise of the article, your hack puts the farms in _your_ service to get the initial likes, and then drive the kind of engagement you are actually seeking (in the crowd-influenced countries like Japan/Korea)...

In an environment like this, where the "likes" themselves are suspect, what counts as a success story for FB promotion for the work that you do?

<comment><USER2> I focus mainly on driving clicks to both content and eCommerce. The actual likes and comments on a post don't really matter much to me but it does help for increasing the CTR

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anecdote time:

I just got back from VN after a 2 month stay. Culturally, the people there really like liking and growing their social network. I was shocked at how active many of the people I met while traveling there were active on Facebook. People, that I knew spoke 0 english, would like many of my text only English posts.

I took a photo of one girl in a costume and she posted it on Facebook. One day later, she had over 600 likes. Based off of these experiences, I think 90% of Facebook liking is done by VN girls lol.

She had tagged me as the photographer, and suddenly I got about 20 friend requests.

I would not be surprised at all that these are real girls clicking on your ads.

TL;DR: Based on my experiences of living in VN, I think those likes were done by social-media crazed vietnamese.

<comment><USER4> >People, that I knew spoke 0 english, would like many of my text only English posts

so what you are saying advertising on FB for asian markets is pretty much throwing money away, and any engagement stats are meaningless trash.

<comment><USER5> Gresham's Law is at play here. If you advertise for likes, guess what? You'll get likes! If you want a different kind of "engagement", you have to make sure that's what you measure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.

Some guidelines:

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.

3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.

Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for chiming in. A few comments regarding your guidelines.

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. \- I did, and I actually had M, the Facebook Global Marketing Specialist, comment that my targeting was solid. If this becomes a game of guess-and-check, then that's borderline gambling. I had a pretty specific target group, and that got me nowhere.

Also, whenever FB responds with "you need to improve your targeting," I interpret that as "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome."

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. \- I incidentally tried that with one of my previous ads. No luck. Try try again?

3) Focus on post quality and virality. \- This sounds like a bit of 1 and 2 put together. Again, when FB gave me this canned response, it started to sound like "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome." My messaging was both clean and direct. Even for the Japan market (with specific targeting), I wrote IN JAPANESE "whether your on the train, at home, or in school, listen to my podcast to help you improve your English listening skills." Again, nada.

Do you have any specific anecdotes with your own business and FB advertising that you could share?

Thanks for mentioning Google, I'll research it to see how it could help me.

<comment><USER6> Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on platforms like FB so difficult.

I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I dove in. Good luck to you.

PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day- trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage can be found. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately this is nothing new. Facebook advertising has long been seen as garbage in many respects, especially when it comes to "liking" a page.

After $1,000 spent, I would estimate over 75% of all the accounts that liked my clients page were fake. Pretty inexcusable.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, but the fact that this problem persists raises a few questions, not limited to:

1) WHY does this problem still exist, considering all of the resources at FB's disposal? 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them? 3) Why does FB only do sweeps annually? Why not daily?

As you might've read in the Updates section of the post, I came to the conclusion that these click/like farms, although not supported by FB, are still a pleasant surprise for FB, as FB vis-a-vis these farms TRICK unsuspecting low budget ad buyers into thinking that they're still getting something for their money.

In other words: * Big corp with multimillion dollar ad budget = we put your ad in front of your desired audience, and you get lots of quality engagement. * Those with smaller ad budgets = we put your ad in front of garbage accounts, and you get garbage engagement. It's still engagement, though, so be happy about that.

That, or (and prep your tin foil hats for this one) one of FB's business models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.

<comment><USER9> I don't know the answer to 1 or 3 because I'm not a FB insider, but I can answer #2 for you:

> 2) Where do these click/like farms come from, and what's in it for them?

All you have to do is go on Fiverr and see people advertising Facebook likes for $5. The bots like a bunch of other pages and posts to simulate "real human activity", then the sellers direct all the bots to "like" a page that their client paid them to like. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER10> And in order for these fake accounts not to look "too" suspicious, they have general activity like clicking on ads and other things on these accounts. Most newsfeeds of real people are not very public, so all these accounts are left with is clicking on public newsfeeds (of celebrities, etc) and clicking on ads. Boom - account is not "abandoned" anymore.

<comment><USER11> And that's all it is?

Because this guy is obviously not a click-farm customer, and Facebook is presumably not paying them to click, either. They're just spam clicking the "boosted" posts Facebook puts in front of them to seem more legitimate?

<comment><USER12> The parent is saying that these clickfarm accounts are randomly liking stuff so as to look like normal users. If a group of 10,000 accounts only like things from 5 different pages, the farming would be easy to detect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Running ads is difficult. There's clearly people spending huge amounts of money through online advertising and this happens because they are able to get results (understanding what works and what doesn't work on each platform).

Once they figure out how to get the results they need, they can put a dollar into Facebook and get more than a dollar out. Then they just turn the budget knob to 11.

Point is, those who make posts saying that Facebook is scamming people are just dipping their toes into advertising and will more than likely fail at first. Advertising online takes some investment to find out what works for your situation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe you have to practice and experiment to learn advertising channels. Or one of the other 30 variables that could have gone wrong here?

As far as I've seen every ad channel has spammy/scammy/bot like engagements but as long as they are factored into the cost its OK. Google search this same idea applied to every ad network.

Mis alignment of goal, ad channel and creative here, not a shitty platform.

<comment><USER7> The parts I didn't include in the post due to length were the previous ads (boosted posts, promote page, etc) I created and paid for before this very last one that I wrote about on my blog.

Those previous ads raised enough red flags for me to pay very close attention to my last one. That's not to say that I didn't pay close attention to the others; I was tracking data and seeing how well Japan-only targeted ads (that included both Japanese and English language) performed against Vietnam-only targeted ads, and how well those two performed against ads that targeted Japan, Vietnam, and Korea all at the same time.

The data collected and differences among the three were enough for me to conclude that something foul was afoot.

Sure, there may be 30 other variables that could've gone wrong here. However, M's verbal (via phone) approval of how I created my ad and crafted my targeting and the consistently large amounts of garbage accounts from VN leads me to believe that this entire thing was a waste.

Furthermore, again, FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that they can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page, and even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.

</comment></comment><comment> Black-Plaid Advertising with them has actually been shown to be detrimental. The Veritasium YouTube channel has bit on this.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. I actually included (with links and credit) both of Veritasium's videos in the post.

The rest of my post explains in detail my own experience with this problem, including data, screenshots, and my own email correspondence with Facebook's Global Marketing Specialists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Likes should never be the measure of success when advertising on Facebook.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, especially in this age when even authentic likes are arguably almost useless - any post on Facebook nowadays seems to need boosting to reach more than a negligible fraction of a page's likes.

But it's definitely worse when the likes aren't even authentic. Boosting posts to reach fake likes is a total waste of money, on top of the original waste to procure such likes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something looks fishy, but the author has some unreasonable expectations.

Specifically, if FB is optimizing for click through rate, you cannot expect an even distribution across the demographics. You aren't paying enough to saturate all channels, so you should expect to be mainly shown to whichever segment converts best for your ad.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for chiming in.

What were the expectations you took away from my post?

"cannot expect an even distribution across the demographics" \- I mentioned that if there were even a modicum of distribution. I was driving home the idea that 1) if we assume a tiny level of distribution across the three geographies, then I should see something from JP and KR. But, that didn't happen; and 2) if targeting multiple geos is, in fact, ineffective, then the option to target multiple geos shouldn't even been an option if FB really wanted people to be successful with their ads. Furthermore, I actually DID target a single geo, and even THAT didn't work.

"You aren't paying enough to saturate all channel" \- NOW you've gotten to one of the main cruxes of my post. As I wrote on the post an in a few replies below.

The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad process CHEAP and EASY, knowing full well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for engagement. FB makes it so easy for new FB page owners to believe that they can drop $5 here and $10 there to promote anything--a post, their page, and even their website. I gather that FB WANTS these page owners to pay these small amounts 30 times to play trial-and-error, even though doing so still only puts these page owners 1) up against larger budgets, and 2) in front of garbage accounts that are only cleaned up once a year in FB's annual sweep.

If it's a matter of paying enough, then why bother encouraging people to pay $5 here and $10 there to promote knowing that it'll be a waste?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> More importantly to me is how does the agent "M" have 6,000 friends when the limit is 5,000? And why the hell does FB still keep a limit like that for accounts that are phone-verified and known to be real etc...

FB, it is time to raise the friend limit! I have heard of many complaints from people with max friends that they have to delete someone to add a new friend, kind of messed up!

<comment><USER19> I think 5,000 friends is the messed up part, not the limit. Humans can't process that many friendships. Why not just have a page if you're blasting out to that many people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have tried using Facebook Ads in Israel on several occasions, strictly targeting to a very specific demographic: Lives in Israel, knows Hebrew, knows English, Age: 18-35, Interests: various technology buzzwords.

Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew, or English, or interested in tech. Most of their profiles have thousands of friends, and everything is written in Arabic and not English/Hebrew.

For the last 4 years I tried putting small amounts of money to see if the situation has changed, and each time the result was very similar.

I didn't go and talked to Facebook support about it, since that would be a waste of my time imho, and not do any good. The support engineers with canned responses most probably cannot do anything to change the situation, or even if they have ideas for improvement those would be drowned in the huge FB ocean of outsourced employees.

<comment><USER20> >Each time I got a (very) large amount of likes from Palestinian and other Arabs who most definitely don't know Hebrew //

Isn't that fraud on behalf of Facebook. You're paying them to present the ads to people who have characteristic A, but they instead show them to other people and charge you as if they'd done what you asked? Or are all those people saying in their profiles that they speak Hebrew? [Which makes it just people lying and not fraud at all].

<comment><USER21> Maybe FB thinks they speak Hebrew because they liked lots of other Hebrew language posts too. Could be a vicious cycle. These like-trigger-happy Arabs probably drown out the real Israelis simply because they like more posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That particular Blogger theme (and other dynamic themes) are among the most reading-hostile abominations foisted on the Web.

I've come to appreciate the two-gear overlay that pops up in advance: they tell me it's save, and a good idea, to close my browser immediately.

(On platforms with JS blocking enabled, all that shows is a blank page. This is also an improvement.)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback. Noted and updated with a better theme and format :)

<comment><USER22> Thanks, that _is_ an improvement.

I'd be happier still with something solidly black for body text, and a larger font.

Blogger also breaks Firefox's Reader Mode, which is unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Even if the accounts behind the likes are 'fake', isn't the page/brand still getting exposure mindshare? Namely, real users will see that your brand has N likes, where N is hopefully a number that resonates with real people who'd be interested in your content. It creates an aura of legitimacy in their minds, which says 'someone else also likes this'.

There is a thriving, if questionable, market in fake Twitter followers, for example. People wouldn't buy fake followers if it weren't effective.

<comment><USER7> The Veritasium videos on my post provide a decent counterpoint to the idea that there's a potential "credibility" upside of having a bunch of fake accounts like your page.

For example, let's say you have a mix of 90% fake likes, and 10% real/organic likes, presumable because they saw your page, saw all of the likes, and thought, "I want to be in on this."

Now, let's say that I post something, and chances are that it's only going to be seen by 100 people. This means that whatever I post will be put in front of 90 garbage accounts and in front of only 10 people who I actually want to target. Unfortunately I can't target based on fake vs. organic accounts.

If I want to increase that 10ppl number, then I'll have to pay more to increase the visibility across the entire population. Let's say I pay $10 to get 200 people to see what I've posted, then 180 fake accounts see it, and only 20 real/organic people see it.

Unsuspecting businesses of any kind, and especially small ones, can't afford to waste money on this kind of mess.

<comment><USER23> I appreciate your explanation. Let's go with your numbers, and say 90% of likes are bots, while 10% are real. You're getting much less value from your ad spend than you would if 100% of the likes were real, but so is everyone else who's running ads.

Meanwhile, the 10% real people have friends who could potentially like your brand organically as they see it in their feed. These second-degree-of- separation people, who have not seen your ad, will first be exposed to your brand through their friends' likes. You're building mindshare, however minor. In the small chance they decide to check out your page, having a believable number of likes already on your page is beneficial in winning their attention -- and interaction. The post that talks about 'bootstrapping' your likes with SE Asian users who are more like-prone to entice the Japanese/Korean likes is making the same point.

There is no doubt that bot-likes are much less useful than real-person likes, but they're not useless.

<comment><USER7> You raise a completely fair point, and conceptually I agree with you.

Again, this entire example rests on the assumption that bots DO exist, which it sounds like they do based on everyone's comments so far.

The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad BUYING process cheap and easy, knowing FULL well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for engagement.

Before confirming my purchase, if FB gave me a warning saying something along the lines of "based on your targeting and how much you're paying for this ad, about 10% of your engagement will be from real people," then at the very least FB has both acknowledged the risk and done something to manage my expectations. Perhaps we wouldn't even been having this exchange.

But, FB doesn't. They keep quiet about this, allowing the farms to exist to make it seem as those unsuspecting business owners are actually getting what they paid for. That's the scam in all of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain how the 'click farms' are getting money from this?

<comment><USER7> For the life of me, I have no idea.

I replied above in another person's comment that it is no longer out of the real of possibility that one of FB's business models is to covertly financially support these click/like farms so that they encourage ad buyers like myself to keep spending $5 here and $10 there on advertising with the belief that it's actually working for them.

Pay some group of kids $100 in VN ($100 goes a LONG way there) to create and manage garbage accounts, and then like the smallest and newest of FB pages that pay the $5 or $10 to advertise so as to make it seem as though that person's ad is successful.

On a side note, isn't it strange that these farms seem to come from developing countries/areas?

Why wouldn't FB work harder to delete these fake accounts, especially if 1) they've been called out on it, and 2) FB page owners who have advertised in the past are pissed off about it.

If FB sweep deletes these accounts once a year, as both M and J claim, then why couldn't they increase the frequency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't Facebook allow you to "target" to whom your ads go to? Doesn't this basically solve the problem, because you should be going for a narrow market anyway?

<comment><USER10> The post explains exactly how this doesn't work in reality.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Super simple static blog generator, Benjen - <AUTHOR> http://daeken.com/2013-03-17_Benjen_v1.html <comment><USER2> And, to complement this, I wrote a small program that serves static (or Jinja2) files from folders (optionally on AppEngine):

[https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static- appengine-...](https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine- hoster)

You just create a folder called "yourdomain.com" and put your static files in there, upload, done. All URLs are rewritten (/foo/bar/ resolves to /foo/bar.html or /foo/bar/index.html) and you can host multiple domains on the same GAE instance. I use it for various static sites, such as my company's site (<http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/>) and my resume (<http://resume.korokithakis.net/>). They're all pretty much hosted for free, since they're static files on a single app on AppEngine, and migration is almost free (you just upload the whole thing to the host of your choice).

You can also assign multiple domains to one site, or rewrite your URLs to custom files.

<comment><USER3> What is the benefit of your server over just dumping the static files to S3 and letting Amazon serve them?

<comment><USER2> Does S3 remove the .html extension from URLs? I can't stand dirty URLs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the main itch being scratched here, is the problem of templating.

Those that grok file systems, might be happy assembling content into an appropriate folder structure, and hitting a 'publish (to html)' button. You could use a little metadata - such as summaries and keywords to string it all together.

I know there are systems such as Pelican already out there, but it's still too complicated for Joe Blow to produce a site with the tool.

Frames were a pretty simple alternative to elaborate CMS's that have been employed to pretty much solve the same problem.

So much wasted CPU time and money. So called professionals cashing in while presenting building web sites as mystical and technically difficult (I realise the tech is difficult - but why should it be?). It goes so against Tim Berners-Lee's vision of publishing easily and straight from the browser.

Not having some dead simple web page editor, has ended in sites such as Facebook becoming 'the web' to so many people.

<comment><USER5> I miss Geocities, etc.

<comment><USER6> Tripod is still around, but I haven't actually tried to use it in ages. Shame about geocities though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been seeing a lot of static blog generators being paraded around lately. I seriously think that static blog generators should be the next "hello world" when learning a new language. It seems to be useful in doing just that.

<comment><USER8> The intention of Hello-World is to check that compiler-linker and basic IO works.

A static blog generator checks that filesystem access works and your language provides a markdown and a template library.

<comment><USER7> Oh I mean it as a way to know how the language works.

EDIT for more information:

Being able to write a static blog generator means you have to learn most of the basic skills in a language from the data structures to objects/functions (whatever floats your boat). You have to also most likely interact with outside systems like I/O and databases (if your static blog generator is db driven). You get to familiarize yourself with packaging/modules that the language uses. So yea, I think creating a static blog generator as a next step after hello world would be great

<comment><USER6> I completely agree. I'm still working on my own but already i've learned a lot (among which, it's a bit more difficult than I expected.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea of generating as many of our site pages as 'static' as we can. We created our own system for our needs but I am seeing a lot more of this as I look around. What I'm curious about is how people tend to handle dynamic content?

<comment><USER10> If you put Varnish in front of your site you can use edge side includes to populate the dynamic fragments of your site. Since it is Varnish you can also cache the fragments themselves.

<https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/3.0/tutorial/esi.html>

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I've seen Varnish but never used it. I will give this a go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love seeing the source for such elegant single-purpose projects like this. I'm in the middle of writing my own static site generator for Python; it's a bit more feature-rich, but it's up at something like 800 LOC for the minimum feature-complete implementation. Great to see evidence that I have a long way to go..

<comment><USER12> Yes, I've learned a lot seeing how different people are approaching the static web page publishing job. I'm at the other extreme, a couple of bash scripts to push markdown files through markdown and add header/footer then push the changed ones out to the Web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems nice but at first sight the code needs a bit more checks. There is a rmtree on a config parameter that could delete all your content if the tool is misconfigured.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about mitigating that, as it could definitely have some nasty effects, but couldn't come up with a decent way to do so. Hopefully, people won't misconfigure it too often!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since we're talking about minimalistic static site generators, here's the one I wrote a while back: <http://srgpqt.github.com/Wakefile/>

It's a 74 line Makefile (or 174 with generous spacing and comments) with rubygems and node module support.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wrote something similar: <https://github.com/jimktrains/gus>

I like the flexibility of gus and the ability to create custom index files (for tags, by date, &c) and run preprocessing on asset files.

It also has a watch option, but at the moment that acts a little wonky and I'm working on fixing it.

One of my end goals is to create a search index and then use that server-side or ideally via JavaScript on the client.

Here is an entry I wrote about it: <http://jimkeener.com/posts/first>

</comment><comment><USER16> These days most people prefer spend some time to create thier own static blog generators than use popular products like octopress or nanoc.

And that's great.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wrote a Tumblr (=Editing backend) to static S3/Cloudfront script on App Engine for my linkblog. If there's some interest I might put it on Github.

</comment><comment><USER18> What's the difference between a static blog generator and something like WP's blog system, or Posterous? Bit confused by the terminology.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rather than a web app that runs and serves up content dynamically, this just spits out HTML that your webserver can serve up. No additional surface area for attack, no need for caching to keep things efficient, etc. Super simple.

<comment><USER18> Cool. So there is no DB involved at all for the content? When you edit, the old file is replaced by the a new one? I guess there is a backend you log in to and a wysiwyg for editing?

<comment><USER19> Yup. The only problem is with using shorturls (since there no DB object ID to map to).

<comment> grey-area You could have your static generator create symlinks for each post at the short url pointing to the actual page at the canonical url to handle this, and set your server up to follow symlinks.

Alternatively it could generate a table of redirects for you to put in your server config/htaccess.

<comment><USER19> Is this possible on S3?

<comment> grey-area No idea I'm afraid, it depends on their setup. I used it as one approach when generating a static blog a while ago under Apache, but there are plenty of options (using config redirects, using symlinked pages or dirs, using duplicate html pages with rel=canonical, using js redirects in extra html pages), and I'm sure some if not all of them would work on S3. As long as you're generating statically anyway, you can always add another step to generate all your short links automatically too in whatever form works on your server...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool. Any plans to add an RSS feed? Your blog is really interesting, so I'd like to subscribe, but I probably won't remember to come back and check it manually.

<comment><USER21> This is an all too common issue with roll-your-own static site generators. There are quite a few blogs in this category.

Maybe there is space for something like that uses HTTP responses to check for changes, and generates RSS.

<comment><USER20> No need for it to be an issue though. Generating an Atom feed is dirt simple. I wrote my own Jekyll template to do it:

<https://gist.github.com/graue/5184195>

The only Jekyll-specific stuff is the first three lines and the `{{ .. }}` and `{% .. %}` templating code.

(For those who don't know, Atom is the better, cleaner replacement for RSS, supported by virtually all RSS readers. I like to promote RSS since people know what that means, but when I go and actually implement it, I spell RSS "Atom".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems interesting, but I recently got started with Kirby and will likely stick to that for the time being.

<comment><USER23> I have mixed feelings about static site generators on one hand i really like the geeky approach where you make everything yourself and build it all from scratch and you fiddle around in the terminal ... on the other hand im really lazy and just want to push a button and it just runs.

And I think that is why I love the idea and concept of Kirby. It's PHP yes, but I this case I don't really think that, that is a bad idea. I wan't my blog to be easy and cheap to host. And a PHP hotel is easy and cheap. With Kirby you build your site and upload it to some random host and it just runs. No need to setup S3 or Github commit and push.

So thumbs up to Kirby, it suites my lazy habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I recommend you to change the URLs: use dash to seperate words and all lowercase.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very cool. URLs are a little funky (underscores).</comment>


Colorado 'Right to Record' bill addresses citizens' right to film law enforcemnt - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/right-to-record-bill-addresses-citizens-right-to-film-law-enforcement

<comment><USER2> "I don't think its right to impose a penalty, there is already a process to determine if police acted appropriately"

Yep, and its clear this 'process' doesn't really work too well, so by all means this is a welcome step</comment>


Optimizing an Open Source Texture Synthesis Library - <AUTHOR> http://peterstefek.me/texture-optimization.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, it starts maybe a bit dull (and uses "micro-optimization" wrong IMO, I tend to use them for stuff that doesn't optimize a lot the runtime of a given function), but gets better when it talks of an issue with profiling in debug mode, and then of a thread contentention issue.

A note about that specific library: why isn't texture generation used more in videogames? Nowadays, a game contains tens of gigabytes of textures and models (~80 GB or more). Certainly there is a point at which it becomes worth it to procedurally generate the texture instead of storing multi-megabyte images for every object in the world. What would that point be?

Are GPUs fast enough to generate textures on-demand nowadays, in the pixel shader, for instance? An additional benefit would be that mipmaps might not be necessary anymore, depending on the algorithm.</comment>


The Beauty of Erlang Syntax - <AUTHOR> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2009-February/041969.html <comment><USER2> I can't quite put my finger on it, but Erlang syntax is beautiful in the same way that an old Porsche is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhat related: [https://medium.com/erlang-battleground/beautiful- code-254a5f...](https://medium.com/erlang-battleground/beautiful- code-254a5f8ef958)</comment>


Ask HN: Did HN bring a change in your life? - <AUTHOR> I wonder how did HN bring a change in your life. Did you find inspiration, valuable lessons from someone's failures, interesting insights and information, etc from the HN community? <comment><USER2> HN has completely changed my life for the better. Reading about people working at big tech companies really opened my eyes and inspired me to move to the North American west coast and start seeking out more opportunities. That directly led to getting a job at Microsoft which was something I'd only ever fantasized about.

After leaving Microsoft, I also found my current job through HN, in a "Who's Hiring" thread. It's a super flexible job that allows me to work remotely and have enough time to focus on my game development career on the side.

These things don't even take into account my enjoyment of the informed, high- quality comments and overall high level of discourse I find on HN, as well as all of the awesome, informative articles people post on here.

I wish more of the internet was like HN. I owe this site so much. Thank you, HN!

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh quite. HN is the first and last thing I check online, and then several times in between. It has inspired me sometimes and made me feel worthless other times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Worthless mostly, but I get it what you feel.

<comment><USER4> but you keep coming back!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it did expose me to the broader aspects of technology and what really drives techies, these days HN has become a source of time wastage for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think brought this drastic change? Is it because of quality of content or something else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely. Beyond the "obvious" stuff like getting an early look at what people in the heart of the tech universe are working on, I've found the community to be very supportive and willing to help on promising ideas.

For example, I shared an early version of TechLoaf on here last year ([https://TechLoaf.io](https://TechLoaf.io) — think: The Onion meets TechCrunch) and a) received super precise feedback on our landing page and newsletter format and b) recruited a few writers who now actively contribute each week.

I'm very grateful for this wonderful corner of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> For me:

\- healthy body is the foundation of healthy mind. I started swimming twice a week and it changed me in good way.

\- mindful meditation. It works for me.

\- dealing with burnout. I was unfortunate to have a chance to use HN's advice. It worked for me.

\- Toastmasters as the way to improve one's communications skills. It works and there many other benefits. You meet many interesting people for example.

\- the idea of lifestyle business and, for bootstraping one person "team", creating rather products to sell than SAAS. I'm currently traveling along this route.

And a lot more (golang, TDD, CQRS, Elixir, Phoenix Framework,...).

</comment><comment><USER8> I found out about patio11, tptacek , amyhoy and their writings / posts here. Totally changed my career path and how I think about software.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes, I got a job from one of the Who's Hiring threads. Beyond that, it is a daily news source. I check it multiple times a day to just get a sense of what smart people are talking about (glance at the comments and almost never read the source material).

</comment><comment><USER10> Definitely. Found two awesome remote jobs. Quadrupled the rate.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't really point to an article that changed my life from HN but I can say that the whoishiring threads are a pretty valuable resource.</comment>


The Strangely Compelling Game Mechanic Powering Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/the-strangely-compelling-game-mechanic-powering-google/241595/ <comment><USER2> While "juicy" interface elements are certainly found in games, the "+1" pop-up circle is no more a game mechanic than a text input box is.

(I realize I'm being pedantic. As a game developer, this sort of playing fast- and-loose with words annoys me in the same way people talking about "programming in HTML" may annoy you.)

Regardless, while I think it overstates the case a bit, I do think that that pop-up is actually a good driver of user behavior, at least on a moment-to- moment level.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested to know what people consider a true game mechanic to be. Examples such as the op of including game like behaviour or incentives in interactions we wouldn't normally think of as games is increasingly popular and effective so at what point does it move from "gamification" to a true game mechanic?

<comment><USER4> I would say there are three main elements of game mechanics: 1) rewards or penalties; 2) unpredictability, either through interaction with other players or pure chance; 3) utilizing player skills that can be improved with repeated play experience.

None of those are involved here, except maybe a little bit of 1) if you consider +1 a "visual reward". I'd really expect all three to be involved before saying something has game mechanics--you can easily find each of them in Foursquare, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little off-topic: but does anyone who has tried Google Circles know if they're as easy (I've read many times that they are more fun :)) to make as Facebook friend lists? To make a list in Facebook I add two or three people to it and Facebook guesses pretty damn well who else I want on that list (presumably by doing something like approximate clique cover on my component of the social graph). Maybe other people's social circles bleed into each other more and that might confuse Facebook algorithm, but for me it worked like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER6> This would only be true if Google wanted you to invite as many people as you can! But this is not the case; at least for now.</comment>


Amazon reportedly had a 300-person conference call to deal with the Prime Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-day-glitches-how-amazon-reportedly-responded-2018-7?r=UK&IR=T <comment><USER2> How useful can a 300 person call actually be?

<comment><USER3> Very, when "that's Taylor's area" is mentioned, and Taylor can chime in with the answer.

With that many people, you generally have a system to manage it; you won't see "who just joined" and "for god's sake go on mute when you use the toilet" scale anywhere near that large.</comment></comment>


20 years ago today: The First Linux Announcement from Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announcement-from-linus-torvalds/

<comment><USER2> Interesting how Linus thought so poorly about portability prospects. Turns out in spite of a "bad" (from the perspective of porting) initial design, it was still in far better shape than HURD or BSD.

Another story whose moral is basically "artists ship."

<comment><USER3> Alternate moral: Gall's Law.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law></comment></comment>


How to hack video screens on times square - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_HUYi9aVvI&feature=topvideos <comment><AUTHOR> Obviously this is fake. But this is a brilliant PR stunt.

If you watch the follow-up video, the guy gets interviewed on how he comes up with this stuff. He says he uses NZT - the drug used in the upcoming movie, limitless. Also the video that he "hi-jacks" on the big screen is a preview to that movie.</comment>


List of really, really stupid article ideas that you should not create - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_really,_really,_really_stupid_article_ideas_that_you_really,_really,_really_should_not_create <comment><USER2> I often wondered ever since Wikipedia started that if they just had slightly more involvement, they could handle all of this kind of content and the site would still be great. I also often wonder if the content that does get rejected should actually be there, and the site is worse without it.

That being said, there are still probably too many articles, especially in other languages, that could use more depth, and I guess that's been the driving force for some time, and I hope we don't give up.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that article attention is necessarily always going to be the limiting factor, otherwise you'd expect there to be piles and piles of fancruft all over Wikipedia, meticulously maintained by obsessive fans.

One argument for not being just a universal repository for any kind of information is that it may make it much harder to navigate to actual information you care about, where encyclopedias are supposed to generally be a digest of the information available about a subject. There's also the issue of proper namespacing for this sort of thing, since if you let there be an article on every single person and every single piece of information, you can imagine that there would be a large number of name collisions, making navigation a bit tricky (The disambiguation page for common names would be insanely long, for one thing).

I think the proper way to build a "repository of all knowledge" on top of Wikipedia would be to spin off daughter Wikis (e.g. wikitionary), where in- depth curated information can exist that break out content from Wiki articles (for example, Wiki has an article about a given album, but WikiMusic has an in-depth article on each song, with curated links to reviews and articles about it, etc). I think we're seeing some of that already with the various sister projects to Wikipedia.

<comment><USER4> If you really want a "repository of all knowledge", though, the main thing you need is standardization of wiki APIs and dump formats, such that you could, say, create DB dump file that contained "Wikipedia, all its siblings, and every Wikia wiki" and fixed up all the links between them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If there were any justice in the world, that article would be immediately nominated for expedited deletion, and every other wikimedia site spawned due to exclusions by wikipedia's rules would mercilessly make fun of them for it.

<comment><USER3> This article isn't in the main namespace, it's in the Wikipedia namespace, which is dedicated for essays and meta discussions about Wikipedia. The rules for deletion of Wikipedia-namespace articles are very different than the rules for deletion of main-namespace articles.

Even if it were deleted, the author could migrate it into his/her personal user-namespace User:username/<article title>, and it would have an even lower standard for inclusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There could be a near infinite list of stupid article ideas that would just be fine for them, namely any top 40 song; points for a page dedicated to its video; individual episodes of select science fiction tv shows, or nearly every anime character.</comment>


Nike acquires demand prediction startup Celect - <AUTHOR> https://news.nike.com/news/nike-celect-acquisition <comment><AUTHOR> Interested in hearing if anyone out there has any insights on the acquisition. Why would Nike acquire a data science company that has previously raised $30+M?</comment>


Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0083325& <comment><USER2> "... from approximately 1 m using a ... 39 megapixel digital camera ... with 120 mm macro lens"

Good news: At least we can still trust that normaly surveillance cameras won't have the kind of resolution to perform this feat.

<comment><USER3> ... with 2x Bowens DX1000 1kW flash lamps with dish reflectors to illuminate the bystanders at a distance of 1 meter.

That's ridiculous. Why is this even published?

<comment><USER4> The point is that the information is clearly there, and with current technology it is possible to extract it under ideal circumstances. It's not to say it's feasible or will be, but it's not hard to imagine sensors becoming advanced enough to capture the required light without using a special lens and artificially illuminate the bystanders.

<comment><USER3> Wrong, current image sensors have around ~50% quantum efficiency nowadays. [1] That's 1 f-stop from the theoretical maximum, while they're pushing around 10 f-stops above the top-of-the-line mobile phone cam / security cam.

The pace of technology is still limited by physics - if they take out the 2kW monster flash then the lens size needs to be increased to a diameter of several meters, just to maintain the same performance at a distance of 1 meter (!).

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

<comment><USER5> You're missing the point. This is not a paper on image acquisition, it is a paper on image processing. Because they began from scratch, they used very favorable image conditions. They are not pushing the idea that their capture format is representative of an application.

We have no idea how hard it would be to recover an image using 50-5% of the light. No one has written that paper. Same for resolution. The paper does not claim to address that question so it seems silly to critique it for not doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As expected, mainstream media reports this as:

'Zoom and enhance': A much-mocked CSI trope becomes reality

[http://theweek.com/article/index/254848/zoom-and-enhance- a-m...](http://theweek.com/article/index/254848/zoom-and-enhance-a-much- mocked-csi-trope-becomes-reality)

<comment><USER7> As annoying as that is I'm still comforted by the reminder of the (plausible) Blade Runner scene and the thought of how much I like that film - and it's never ending relevancy.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't Deckard actually shift the angle the picture is taken from.....

<comment><USER9> I still don't know what happens in that scene, which is strange for a movie with such heavy handed exposition; even the version without narration.

GET IT - SHES A REPLICANT! SO IS HE AND HER AND HIM! OH THE OWL IS FAKE. DID I MENTION THE OWL YET? ITS FAKE!

Yet a weird 6 minute sequence with a photo editor just goes unexplained. He magically sees something we don't using technology that isn't remotely explained.

<comment><USER10> I always thought the point was that he spots a ... tattoo? Of a snake? That reminds him of the club? Or the dancer... I'm going to have to watch it again aren't I?

<comment><USER7> Yes in the 3 minute scene there were multiple indications from the picture to indicate: Chinatown (food/texts), the girls outfit (being a dancer), and an identifying tattoo. Which would point to only a few dance clubs in the city.

It was also a connection to the artificial snake scale being found in the bath tub that happened to be rare and only created by a few possible engineers. Engineers who work on robotics. One Chinatown engineer happened to be employed by the people he was looking for, who were robots in need of an engineer...

Not a far fetched connection by Hollywood's standards.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tell HN: When submitting scientific research it would be very helpful to consider that some people do not readily understand the abstract and the importance of the findings. A brief description in laymen's terms would be appreciated.

<comment><USER12> I don't know why this was downvoted. I find it relevant for submissions like this, that there are people voicing that they'd appreciate ELI5-like summary which I don't think is hard to reason for, nor can I see how it could be a problem if someone provided one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For one of the first projects of this type (from 2006) see [http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/](http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/world_eye/).

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6970772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6970772) <\- Discussion

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6971753)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6974543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6974543)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981938)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036296)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091655)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8826340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8826340)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8839516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8839516)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this concept (corneal reflection photography) can be used for an eye-tracking interface for computers. Can you match the segment of the image of the corneal reflection that is above the pupil with what is on the screen to figure out where/at what the user is looking?

</comment><comment><USER16> It's good to understand what "resolution" actually means when considering these types of problems. Suppose you have 2 dots close together. The ability of your camera to "see" (resolve) 2 dots as opposed to a single blob is a function of the sensor and the lens.

All the sensor resulution in the world is not going to let you resolve something if the lens has already blurred the image.

While sensors have become relatively cheap, optics have not. I think physics alone makes it impossible to have a camera phone lens that resolves anywhere near what these XX megapixel image sensors could theoritically resolve.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hope I can tuck in this video as a gentle reminder of what we wishes we can do. Now that we are pretty much there.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish they provided one of the original source photos.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of the first episode of Twin Peaks where there is reflection of key evidence in the eyes of a character in a video recording...

</comment><comment><USER20> Enhance!

Sorry, just had to say that. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> it's happening.

</comment><comment><USER22> Received: June 17, 2013 Accepted: November 2, 2013 Published: December 26, 2013

Not complaining or anything. Just noting when the research was done

<comment><USER23> Good catch. We added the year to the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> uncrop</comment>


UK Labour Party says it has experienced a 'large-scale cyber attack' - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/12/uk/labour-party-cyber-attack-gbr-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> From what I understand of the story it started with an email sent to internal activists explaining why there were some performance issues with internal campaign tools. The attack was just a DDoS but once it hits the press it takes on a life of its own. Simplified technical details for a non-technical activist base get used to create a story, it's interesting to see how the sausage gets made but other than referring to the government body for cyber attacks as a matter of protocol I don't think there's much to it.

As an aside Labour really do seem to have a pretty good technical team. Both the party and the loosely affiliated activist group Momentum have built a variety of campaign tools which have helped organise and mobilise large canvassing efforts. I've been impressed by what they've managed to put together. It sounds like they shared ideas and expertise with Bernie's campaign team in the US when it comes to building these tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a standard DDoS attack - that was handled by CloudFlare as designed.

</comment><comment><USER4> An attack by the many, not the few.

<comment><USER5> Very clever, humour pun at it's best.

<comment><USER6> You mean "large-scale", as in many computers?

<comment><USER7> The motto of the UK labour party is "For the many, not the few". I hope you get the joke now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would be interested if they could release all pertinent logs. I think it would be something interesting to spool through.

For instance "large scale attack" makes me assume a DDoS, which is hardly the level of attack I'd expect to risk data exfiltration unless it is used as a distraction.

So I'm not sure what "large-scale" means in this context; eitherway, pcaps plz.

<comment><USER9> I don't see why they'd do that. A 'russian hacking' narrative would serve the parties interest, and while they won't sink to the level of actually insinuating that the attack was carried out by state actors (which seems very unlikely) there's no harm in letting the media do their thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Autoplay sound warning

<comment><USER11> Firefox disables this automatically now

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be nice to have some context and by that, a weekly data volume in attacks and types of attacks as well as normal visitors. May be a case of they scale and this is just normal. Equally the same data upon other parties, again over time and also be great to see previou election spikes in visitors and atatcks.

But for many, this is just part and parcel of the state of play of the internet and politics upon that stage.

I'd not rule this out as a tactical PR release to sway hearts and minds style approach. But then, I tend to be over pragmatic when it comes to anything political when the minutia is missing along with the context it brings.</comment>


Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/chasing_the_whale_examining_the_.php?print=1 <comment><USER2> From my experience, free to play games are basically always guaranteed to be deceptive in order to recoup the cost of development.

There are a few examples that don't fit, like; TF2 and Fortnite I suppose. But I'd always rather pay a fixed fee for a game and be confident there's no incentive to sell me something...

<comment><USER3> It's ironic that you mention TF2 as a good example as it is the _very first example_ of the opposite in the linked article.

Fortnite, besides having their own issues, also have the issue of "secondary whale-chasers" which is all those youtube videos proclaiming that they found a hack to enable a bunch of skins or similar for _free_. This means installing (what I assume to be) bitcoin-miners on each twelve year old's machine. You'd think that wouldn't be possible on a machine used by a twelve year old but Epic is extra _helpful_ in that it basically _requires_ its game launcher to be run as admin (because of its frequent updates to Fortnite that requires admin rights). So I assume most parents make their kid's account admin out of convenience.

<comment><USER4> That has become a major source of problems in my household. I don't live with my girlfriend and her 4 kids (my stepkids, I'm not disowning them, just explaining quickly the situation). Youngest son has a PC, and due to experience gained with the older son (now 18), his account is locked down and I'm the admin on the system.

I often have to use TeamViewer to access the PC to allow Fortnite to upgrade, and they don't understand why I still insist on this - my warning about just about all the possible negatives have been completely ignored, but I'm sticking to my guns. I know I'm fighting a losing battle and eventually will have to give up on this, but at the moment, it's working. I'm sure most people have given up, made the kid and admin and the computer is awash with issues as a result.

Obviously if I'm not available (which is often the case as I'm self employed in a number of roles, most of which mean I can't be available instantly), then it has to wait, and you'd think the world was ending!

<comment><USER5> Would a possible solution be to buy them a more locked down system like a nintendo switch or an ipad and tell them if they want to play a game they either use that or the non-admit user on the PC?

<comment><USER6> You can't compare iPad and switch games to the ones on pc. They are totally different.

<comment><USER5> Literally the game they talked about (Fortnite) is available on both iOS and Switch. Anyway when I was a kid I only cared about having good games to play (and even the "good" part is debatable), not which specific games - there's plenty of great stuff to play on the switch.

<comment><USER7> > Anyway when I was a kid I only cared about having good games to play

This was generally true for me too, but in 2019 games are primarily a social hangout spot. They're like a park or a concrete basketball court next to the parking lot, where the kids come hang out and shoot the shit in the lobby even if they aren't actively in a match.

Not being on the same game your mates are playing is akin to telling your kid "you can't go to your friends' park 30 minutes away, why don't you hang out in our perfectly nice backyard with a basketball hoop"

Edit: upvote for the rest of your comment though

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in learning some of the techniques that make gaming more enticing. I've got some educational apps for iOS that I would like to make more engaging. I've noticed that after 5-7 days retention really trails off. Do people buy into badges, leveling up, daily streaks, etc?

Two of my apps:

Hundred Words: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred- words/id1469449237](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237)

Language Pairs: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language- pairs/id1438817614?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language- pairs/id1438817614?mt=8)

<comment><USER9> My son explained it to me (11 year old) - Basically if you are "default" you suck. I have 20+ gamedev experience, and I didn't know what it means. Basically if you have the "default" skins you suck. You need to get shiny new outfit, that would cost some v-bucks.

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't being constantly killed by the same default guy hurt more? If I would be a pro gamer I would do just that, just to troll them.

<comment><USER11> People are social creatures, and have a strong innate desire to stand out and express themselves. If a game successfully creates a social atmosphere, selling cosmetic items can be a lucrative business.

It's essentially the digital version of the fashion industry, which most people seem to viscerally understand-- aesthetics are the primary motivator for most people's clothing choices, and they are willing to pay a significant premium for some items on this basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook is full of free to play games and so are Android and iPhones.

I'd rather pay a flat fee for a game and not be forced to buy in game currancy to buy gems and other things to buy extra items in the game.

Some people pay hundreds of dollars on ingame items to become a wallet warrior and beat the grinders playing for free.

</comment><comment><USER13> I briefly worked on recommenders for a fair sized fashion retailer. I was flabbergasted to learn just how much certain shoppers spend. (Though we purposefully called them "platinums", vs "whales", internally. Better optics.)

For me, becoming more aware of "whales" highlighted other power law distributions, Pareto's Law, or whatever we call it, throughout society.

A few "bad apple" cops get most of the complaints.

A few alcoholics drink _a lot_ more than others.

A handful of people do most of the property damage crimes.

Etc.

So whatever else comes from this "freemium" awareness, there are some useful, important policy implications.

<comment><USER14> At Disney we called them "Good Customers"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would peg it down to innumeracy and inability to handle relativism and anchored valuations.

I would wager the same people who become whales are merely the same who would overspend on traditional sales periods for physical stores.

<comment><USER16> If I say you need 2 gems to buy a hat and there's 7 quoofs to the gem and a quoof costs 3 for $4.99 it's not your fault if you can't process how much a hat costs, child or adult. Let me put a 60 second timer while you think about this special offer to add some pressure. Don't ask why the hat price isn't in dollars so you'd readily understand.

Facebook actually asked developers to make more confusing abstractions to exploit children they identified using parents funds. They wanted misunderstanding because the children would spend more and they would refuse the refunds and leave kids explaining perhaps a multi-thousand dollar series of transactions to their parents.

I would wager whales are simply being exploited more than anything. Defrauded. There simply are no people who accidentally spend $6000 in Target because it's not possible to accidentally spend that much money unless someone is duping you. If nobody is trying to defraud you, and you walk into any retail store, you're not going to spend $6000 by accident.

[https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly- duped-...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game- playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/)

<comment><USER15> Exploitation of children is an important but separate issue that I would argue falls on the parents. I would argue that while the scenario you describe is a gotcha moment, after two or three times it's really on you to understand what's going on. Either way, it's driven by innumeracy. It may still be exploitation so I'm not really disagreeing.

I do think you're wildly off base thinking that people don't drastically overspend at physical stores for physical goods though.

<comment><USER16> If obsfuscated pricing causes children to disassociate spending money, and obfuscated pricing makes "whales" out of 1% of adults that are spending outliers by 4 orders of magnitude how can it be a separate issue? I think it is the same tactic applied to two demographics that are both incapable of unpacking maliciously-complex pricing.

The children make the fraud apparent. FB defrauded their parents and they ______ the children to do it. They ______ adults in the exact same way and 1% are as susceptible as children and end up spending thousands and being called "whales". They have to suck it up and the kids can get their parents to demand the fraud be reverted, that's the only difference I can see.

BTW I'm not saying people don't overspend in retail stores. What they don't do is discover days or weeks later that some of the products actually cost thousands.

<comment><USER15> I think that your depiction of whales is generally incorrect. There are certainly apps that try to trick kids by requiring currency that is not- obviously real money. These exist for adults too, but aren't what people refer to when they talk about whales.

Whales make such payments intentionally. They understand that they're paying hundreds or thousands of dollars- and are doing so in bulk transactions because it's the most cost effective rate. They play a game regularly and spend so they can maximize their standing whenever new content is released (very frequently).

That is to say, whales exist in games with transparent pricing. I don't recall specifics but I think Pokémon go was a good example of this. IIRC you could buy coins that were useful for buying poke balls and egg incubators. Not 1:1 but hardly abusive. Whales still spent (spend?) thousands on it.

Edit: every so often I click on an ad for the most awful looking porn based online game I come across just to see what it is. It's quite surprising to see how deeply implemented some of their gameplay is given their garbage marketing strategy and value prop. What is truly fascinating however is how incredibly complicated some of their micro payment systems are. Dozens of resources introduced around every corner with unclear ways of acquiring any of them in game but each one noting that it will be required to unlock some stupid scandalous picture and can be refilled for $5. Whatever your mental model is for the insidiousness of app based micro payments is, you might find it bizarrely entertaining to explore how much worse it can get in such a context.

<comment><USER16> I think whales are just a bunch of companies selling a lie that combining all the dark patterns = great customers.

You say they're happy to do it but just to "find" a whale you must disassociate real spending and transactional cost, obfuscate real currency, create inconvenience etc. Nobody went in wanting to spend thousands and 99.99% opt-out of paying. That's 0.01% of customers being happy and a generous use of the word since they were never offered a version that wasn't a sales funnel of dark patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't this (2013)?</comment>


Casablanca's Gift to Marrakech and the Birth of Morocco's Modern Art Movement - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/03/casablancas-gift-to-marrakech-and-the-birth-of-moroccos-modern-art-movement/ <comment><USER2> Those pieces are so striking and gorgeous to me. Thank you</comment>


Can someone "fly under the radar"? - <AUTHOR> https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2952/can-someone-actually-fly-under-the-radar <comment><USER2> If anyone could, this pilot could:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iOoiEbtf2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iOoiEbtf2w)</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to blog / where do you host your blog ? - <AUTHOR>

Hi fellow hackers,
I was going to start a new blog (personal / technical) and was wondering what platforms / tools people use here.
I tried hosting my own thing writing PHP scripts etc to control everything but that turned out to be a little more work than I thought it would be.
Suggestions / comments / good-bad experiences ? <comment><USER2> 1\. A lot of people start out on WordPress.com. You can get started quickly. It's relatively easy to use. It is free. There is a lot of shared knowledge and experience out there.

2\. It is easy to download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and install it on your own site.

A good strategy might be to start on WordPress.com at first, and then migrate to your own server if/when you think the benefit is worth the added effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> Self-hosted Wordpress. Easy as pie. Just keep it updated...

Squarespace looks a nice hosted alternative, though.

</comment><comment><USER4> wordpress. there are plenty of resources and a good community.

provided, of course, this is all you're looking to do, just host yourself a blog. there are other good options out there that have different strengths and weaknesses. wordpress is just the overall, general usage leader in its field.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the advice, everyone. Wordpress it's going to be, to begin</comment>


Jython 2.7 beta4 released - <AUTHOR> http://fwierzbicki.blogspot.com/2015/02/jython-27-beta4-released.html

<comment><USER2> Don't you think it is time for you to have a personal Website for your company affairs.</comment>


John Carmack Archive – Interviews [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I found these insights interesting:

"I know that most people won't believe it, but a 100x increase in income really didn't have that big of an impact on me as a person. It is certainly nice to be in a position where people can't exert any leverage on you, but it's definitely not the primary focus of my life. I get to drive a Ferrari in to work, but my day to day life is almost exactly the same as it was eight years ago. I get up, go in to work, hopefully do some good stuff, then go home. I'm still happy." [1]

[...]

"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work. That's what I hope never happens to me. I want to stay in the trenches working on the things all the time. There is some benefit to sitting back, reading and researching and getting some broader scope on it. But if you're divorced from the low level nuts and bolts of things, like how this actually applies to the real world, then you're just an academic. You get these huge disconnects between what an academic can do and what somebody in production can do." [2]

[1] Page 77

[2] Page 89

<comment><USER2> Working in the "trenches" where you direct your own work and have $1B in the bank isn't exactly the same as working in the "trenches" under the direction of those disconnected managers that have all this leverage on you. Good engineers, who should not be going into management, are doing so because it's their only way out of the trenches. Founders get a choice between becoming managers or letting someone else run their company. Can you manage a tech company without understanding technology?

How come we're not innovating more on the structure of those companies?

<comment><USER3> > _Can you manage a tech company without understanding technology?_

Yes. You just need to understand people, markets, and processes.

Any deep technology insight will be irrelevant -- the right advisors from your stuff (which you'll know who they are, since, as we said above, you can understand people -- including when they are full of shit or not), can explain it to you "like you are five".

Taleb makes a similar point described here that extends beyond the domains in the story:

One of the most successful traders to ever buy and sell green lumber – which is freshly cut wood – actually had no idea what he was trading. He spent his entire career trading green lumber career believing the product was just wood painted green, and not newly cut trees. His ignorance of the product had no impact on his ability to make money trading it. The term "Green Lumber Fallacy" was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his excellent book 'Antifragile', where he outlined a second similar situation: a star Swiss Franc trader who's inability to locate Switzerland on the map didn't hinder his ability to make money trading its currency.

[https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/betting- psychol...](https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/betting- psychology/the-green-lumber-fallacy#height)

<comment><USER4> There's a flipside to this though - this is how you get shit and useless products. What you (or Taleb) are describing here is a money-making specialist. A person who can play the market and management game well. That's almost entirely orthogonal to creating the best product, or doing something valuable for society.

The argument I'm trying to make here is very similar to the one about MBAs ruining companies. You get people who can play the market game so well their incentives get completely misaligned with what the rest of the company would like (and what the customers would like).

And in general - as a society we like free markets and competitions because they're supposed to give us a spectrum of products, from cheap but good enough to expensive and high quality, in an efficient way. But people who are _too_ good at optimizing for the way markets work can make money without giving us the result we expect, thus ruining the very reason we want capitalist economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I liked this:

CARMACK: - The intersection of people that run Quake on Linux, SPARC and Light is probably a dozen people. But if it's just a matter of compiling, we'll do it anyway.

HOOK: -And we do this, not because it makes any particularly good business sense, but because it's cool. All this is an ego thing. The more platforms you port to, the more people are playing your game. And its a cool thing that someone can say: "Yeah, I was playing Quake 2 on a SPARC Linux Box."

CARMACK: - It doesn't make good business case, but it helps us to be better programmers.

</comment><comment><USER6> The DRM-free "Masters of Doom" audiobook is currently (expires July 10-ish) included in the "Hackers, Gamers & Geeks" Humble Books Bundle for $15, along with a bunch of other video game history audiobooks, including "Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories" also by by David Kushner at the $8 level.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hackers-gamers-geeks- audi...](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hackers-gamers-geeks-audiobooks)

<comment><USER7> Damn. Really wish these had eBooks as well. Podcasts/audiobooks are really tough for me to get into. I cannot process spoken word nearly as well as the written one, and I get far too easily distracted when trying to listen to audiobooks.

Still might buy it since Kushner's new MoD book seems to be audio only from what I can see.

<comment><USER8> Erm, there's a printed version: [http://amzn.to/2tkRUI4](http://amzn.to/2tkRUI4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actual link: [http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc- interviews.pdf...](http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc- interviews.pdf#page117)

And it's press interviewing Carmack, not job interviews conducted by him.

</comment><comment><USER10> > As far as unreal goes, we can't compete with an unreleased product, because > a non existent product does everything you dream of and has no faults

Oh, Star Citizen...

</comment><comment><USER11> This is what Quake looks like today:

[https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/875934261320220672](https://twitter.com/SimsOCallaghan/status/875934261320220672)

(Yes, it is Quake1 in a modified OGL engine)

</comment><comment><USER12> > John Carmack: You wind up getting this sense of partisanship or just taking > sides. It's human nature, I suppose, but when it gets away from a strict > technical discussion, then you start getting your "army of followers." I > suppose that's part of having influence, but it's not a part that I'm > particularly comfortable with.

This is so pervasive (politics, technology) and damaging (less so in technical world but there's still the price of stunted intelligence to pay) that I wish along with me more people in the world would read this and pledge to making every discussion interesting and productive.

<comment><USER13> Why do you believe its less in the technical world?

<comment><USER14> One (not necessarily me) could argue that there is (or, at least, ought to be if people took their egos out of it) usually a clear and objective way to resolve technical disputes, while the same is not at all true of (parent comment's other example) political disputes.

<comment><USER13> I think that in-spite of being programmers, we've deluded ourselves into believing that we can be hyper objective. The practical human factors IMHO, always overpower theoretical technical decisions, and bring you back into the realm of politics/social issues. But that is a very large topic for discussion and comments won't do it justice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How professional game developers, like Carmack with his OpenGL love, actually see the whole relevance of graphic APIs.

"John Carmack: Its still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. Its interesting how little of the technology cares what API you're using and what generation of the technology you're on. You've got a small handful of files that care about what API they're on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they're on."

</comment><comment><USER16> While not directly linked, this video ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OipJYWhMi3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OipJYWhMi3k)) about Quake got my attention last night and I found it riveting regarding its technical aspects, development history, and cultural impact.

</comment><comment><USER17> John Carmack was my programming god, back in the day. I would devour everything he wrote, which if I remember correctly, was on Usenet, but I'm so old my memory fails me now. Recently I found out that one of my friends was working with him at Oculus via Facebook, I was jealous beyond belief.

</comment><comment><USER18> Carmack on Java: "I like the language"

Your move, language hipsters.

<comment><USER19> As a dev that moved into a sysadmin role who has to deploy stuff from our Java and C++ devs. As dev I used to like the language itself, but not the frameworks.

These days I seriously dislike the runtime with all it's tuning it requires, memory bloat, ... The absolute worst however is most Java developer's complete disconnect with and ignorance of the actual deployment environment/target. I actually kept a score-count for a while for "the server is not configured correctly, it works on my laptop" actually being true and not a developer error. Was asked to remove the sign though since 'it didn't improve the working atmosphere'.

A few pointers for Java devs: please don't use hard-coded paths, certainly when you develop on windows and I need to deploy it on a *nix system, Java will not automagically fix that because it's supposed to be 'multi-platform'. No, XML files are not 'easy' or 'practical' to configure stuff, and I certainly don't want to use java cli tools to manipulate them. Oh and don't rewrite your base config files when some misc hardly documented API was used to deploy some application in your web framework. I don't like it that it removes every single comment from that file, and my config management has to do a lot of hacky ugly stuff so it doesn't treat that as a config change from it's pov. Also, I don't 'just' want to use java library org.X.Y to talk to that hardly documented deployment API. No the database isn't slow because it's misconfigured or doesn't have enough resources, it's because some framework you use to access the database generates a monstrous 30-page SQL query with a few hundred JOINS. Oh and please stop using SOAP when you expect me to talk to it.

I can keep on going - this goes on for a while, and that's only partially the language's fault - but sadly, the stdlib and community encourages some of that undesired behavior. You can however write pretty clean and nice stuff when avoiding large enterpricy frameworks with all the FactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactories where XML is king, but in reality, most Java projects end up using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It sounds like he is a development machine, in a good sense. I wonder if he has ever blocks, like mental or creativity ...

</comment><comment><USER21> Has it really been ~9 years since Carmack did a technical/game dev type of interview?

Time is just flying past...

</comment><comment><USER22> Drinking game time. A shot for every "when it's done."

<comment><USER23> and one for every time you suspect johnc said "Ayum" while thinking

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Team5150 the old Tribes clan?

</comment><comment><USER25> Gold+. Thx for posting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Url changed from [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/880204928811126784](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/880204928811126784), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER27> [PDF] decorator would be appreciated.

<comment><USER26> Ah yes, added. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Reports that Bassel Khartabil Has Been Executed in Syria - <AUTHOR> http://jimmywalesfoundation.org/horrific-reports-that-bassel-khartabil-has-been-executed-in-syria/ <comment><USER2> TWo points. One, the campaign to raise awareness did very poorly. I had heard of Bassel's arrest around the time it first occurred; I had no idea there was a campaign to learn of his whereabouts or that he had disappeared. I would have been happy to support this campaign if I had been aware of its existence.

Two, moral appeals generally don't work. The western style of protest has become mere gesture: 'I would like for this to change, but will not interfere with the outcome in any way.' We are bombarded with moral appeals on a daily basis, and while signaling our agreement or support online can sometimes yield enough traffic for a commercial or voluntary activity, it has a pretty dismal record in bringing about political change.

<comment><USER3> > _We are bombarded with moral appeals on a daily basis, and while signaling > our agreement or support online can sometimes yield enough traffic for a > commercial or voluntary activity, it has a pretty dismal record in bringing > about political change._

Agreed. It seems as though no one who's relatively comfortable is willing to put any skin in the game (literally). We're sitting around with our thumbs up our collective arses wearing stickers of our preferred social justice brand while wondering why the world is hurtling more and more towards a dystopia- enthusiast's wet dream. It's too bad signalling our morals to everyone achieves jack shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel this should say 'murdered'.

<comment><USER5> It's only murdered when it's unlawful. This was death by government agents and lawful regardless of whether we agree with the law. This was an execution of someone that the government felt was in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody clarify if he was executed by Syrian government?

<comment><USER7> My bet is that it wasn't or it would've been the first thing written.

The fact they don't explicitly say who did it, or who they think did it, or whom the "troubling news from Syria" say did it, makes me think they still want to somehow implicate the government - which makes this a despicable attempt to politicise this man's alleged death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can almost feel my blood boiling.</comment>


Teacher earns six figures teaching Dungeons and Dragons classes online - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2019/05/21/this-teacher-earns-six-figures-teaching-dungeons-dragons-classes-online/ <comment><USER2> I always wished there was an Uber for dungeon mastering. I really like dungeons and dragons but it's hard to find time and people to DM.

It'd be awesome if we could just get some cash together, try out a DM for a one shot. If we like it, make it a regular gig. The DM would be free to reuse campaigns, etc..

<comment><USER3> Not sure if you saw this similar idea on Reddit recently, "Tinder for D&D": [https://old.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/bqay95](https://old.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/bqay95)

Actual site: [https://crawlr.app/](https://crawlr.app/)

The creator mentioned in one comment: "Are you looking for a feature to look for ONLY players interested in DM'ing? I could look into revising my search queries, if so."</comment></comment>


How many words do you need to speak a language? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277 <comment><USER2> Those numbers are about right IME. I speak two languages and I'm learning a third. With a vocabulary of around 1100 words I am able to make basic conversation (able to talk about myself, who I am, what I do and what I enjoy and so on). If I read a newspaper I understand on average about 60% of what's written which sounds like a lot, but it's often not enough to understand what's going on for certain.

If someone is learning a language for fun, I'd recommend starting off with one with a lot of shared vocabulary with your native language. French for English speakers is a good start. Much better than German (despite English itself being a Germanic language). Even as someone who's only exposure to French was a couple of Michel Thomas cassette tapes; I understand a surprising amount of a French newspaper. I studied German in high school and I understand virtually nothing in a newspaper in comparison.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to monitor site uptime? - <AUTHOR>

Title says it all. Basically just looking for a dead simple way of monitoring a webserver that will alert me when it's not responding.<p>I realize there are a number of services out there but currious what people are using these days. <comment><USER2> Dead simple, you can't get much simpler than <http://wasitup.com/>

Three form fields. Click submit. Done. It's been monitoring my blog for the last six months

</comment><comment><USER3> Monitorus. They use delicious periods, so I just Google it every time.

I also use <http://scoutapp.com> , which has saved my bacon when the problems were a little more nuanced then "the home page fails to return HTTP 200." Well worth the $20 a month if you've got a web application with paying users, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use <http://wasitup.com> and the free version of <http://pingdom.com>. Both seem to work well, although Pingdom has the advantage of a monthly summary.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is old, from the Web 1.0 world and inspired by Philip Greenspun's book "Database-Backed Web Sites" but it's dead-simple and it works:

<http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/>

Oh, and it's free too.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use nagios, and for some rails projects I use rpm (but i'm not terribly impressed with rpm), might be more worth it when we get more traffic.</comment>


FFmpeg libav tutorial – from basic to transmuxing, transcoding and more - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial#chapter-3---transcoding <comment><USER2> For a second I hoped it'd be an actual low-encoder that does a clever lossless transcoding by treating H.264 data as a subset of H.265 data. But this just feeds frames to ffmpeg.

<comment><USER3> Would be interesting if that would be possible and if you could save some bytes with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        import encoder
         encoder(stuff)

look, I wrote Minimalist Encoder!

<comment><USER5> How do I invest in your startup!?!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having done something similar to transcode h264 to fragment mp4, there are a ton of pitfalls, weird settings and flags that need to be set to get a "correct" output that will play in most players. FFmpeg/libav provides a ton of functionality, but sometimes it's like reading javadocs, where you get the interface but have no idea of what to put in.

<comment><USER7> This is a fair point, making it a great example, and further supports the change in title to underscore that its using libav

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has h265 got to the point where it's always in every case better than h264? I don't need to think about it anymore?

<comment><USER9> Define better.

It's more CPU/GPU intensive, is not as widely supported, and there probably are more downsides.

Better quality at the same bitrate? For most use-cases: yes.

<comment><USER10> Video codecs becoming more CPU intensive was actually a point when many casual users in my circle upgraded their notebooks.

These devices lasted 15 years in some some cases.

But videos not playing correctly was too much. Hardware vendors should develop H266.

<comment><USER11> h266 would be pointless for your problem.

There is something for you to understand here:

CPU/GPU "intensiveness" of a codec depends, and an increased computational overhead of newer codecs is always to be expected. The more efficient a coded (perceived "quality" per bit), the more complicated the computations of decoding need to be.

That's why most (consumer) CPUs built in the last decade have hardware decoding support (having a dedicated hardware implementation is always more efficient than running on the CPU) - and often even hardware encoding support.

The difference between h26x decoders must not need even that big (depending on the implementation). Widespread use of h264 killed most notebooks because of the missing hardware decoder.

h266 would with 99% guarantee never run more efficient on the same hardware than h265, unless we find some magic to achieve better-then-h264 encoding with MPEG1 complexity, and if this was easy, why was h265 not that.

And then there is AV1, which makes any newer MPEG-LA standard pointless anyway. You just need to wait for the respective widespread use of the hardware en-/decoders (and efficient encoder implementations I guess).

<comment><USER12> I parsed his statement the opposite way: "if hardware vendors want to drum up some business, they should develop h265+1, which will trigger the next round of laptop upgrades because it will be too cpu-intensive to work on devices which haven't been upgraded in 15 years."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is really good tutorial. Just not aligned when the expectations about programming depth. Really good.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting tutorial on libav for sure but the submission title is definitely a bit of a stretch given that it's just a libav tutorial and you can probably do the same with ffmpeg directly quite easily. Can we change the title please?

<comment><USER15> Agreed "A minimalist encoder with libav" would be better

<comment><USER16> It quite literally is not an encoder - title should be something like "how to use libav to convert H264 to H265" \- libav is the only thing doing encoding here.

<comment><USER17> I thought it would be about finding a way to losslessly transform a H264 bitstream to a H265 one, and writing a simple application to do it. That would be a _very_ interesting article if it was possible.

Even the title of the page itself is (currently) "FFmpeg libav tutorial - learn how media works from basic to transmuxing, transcoding and more" which is far more accurate.

<comment><USER18> ignorant question: are h264 and h265 related in a way that would make this remotely possible?

<comment> TD-Linux Basically, no. Basic features like the transforms and loop filters are different. It would cause the result to rapidly differ after a few frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great to see it here, simple and educative.

</comment><comment><USER20> char* convert(char* str, char find, char replace){

        char *current_pos = strchr(str,find);

        while (current_pos){

            *current_pos = replace;

            current_pos = strchr(current_pos,find);

        }

        return str;

}

convert("H264", "4", "5")

<comment><USER21> Here's an optimized version:

char* convert(char* str) { str[3] = "5"; return str; }

I tried it with your testcase and it worked, so it passes 100% of the tests I've ran.

<comment><USER22> No it didn't and it doesn't :)</comment></comment></comment>