You Have to Hack This Massively Multiplayer Game to Beat It - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/04/multiplayer-hack-to-win/ <comment><USER2> Pwnadventure 3 debuted at the Ghost in the Shellcode CTF this year, and it was an absolute blast. If anyone is hoping to break into security or CTFs, I can't recommend this contest enough.

I play as part of the team that placed 2nd this year, Samurai, and all of us were in awe at how well put together the problems were, and how great the experience was overall.

Here's a link to a writeup I did of one of the quests, that involved reverse engineering a massive circuit, then using it to open a locked door: [https://medium.com/@shanewilton/ghost-in-the- shellcode-2015-...](https://medium.com/@shanewilton/ghost-in-the- shellcode-2015-blockys-revenge-7074a119115e)

The official website for the CTF is here: [http://ghostintheshellcode.com/](http://ghostintheshellcode.com/)

Edit: If you enjoyed that writeup, here is a (In my opinion), much more interesting writeup I did of a similar problem last year: [https://medium.com/@shanewilton/9447-ctf-2014-hellomike- writ...](https://medium.com/@shanewilton/9447-ctf-2014-hellomike-writeup- ba812f012d5)

<comment><USER3> I like to think I'm good at this stuff, but that HelloMike writeup still boggles my mind. I need to get better at NFAs, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly endorse this sort of thing! Reverse engineering online games is how I really got started with computers. It's a great teaching tool because the reward loop is short and immediately relevant - you get superpowers, in the game you already play with your friends, in almost direct proportion to how much you've learned.

Depending on the game you'll learn about binary reversing, executable formats, networking, rendering, x86 assembly, C, JVM bytecode, or more advanced topics. We dove right into hard things because it was fun and there was no one to tell us they were too hard for kids. The end result among my group of friends seems to be several careers in tech with a decided systems and security skew.

edit: I remember Runescape in particular. They applied such an escalating series of obfuscations to the client code and network protocol that we deployed things I now recognize as AST analysis and machine learning to work past them. These days, I really wonder what the view from the Jagex security team was like. Did they have fun constantly coming up with new challenges for bored teenagers?

<comment><USER5> I too got into my game development career by essentially, trying to hack Runescape. I sank an unhealthy amount of my early teenage years working on Runescape bots, for both original and RS2. Every time I think back on it, so many happy and exciting memories.

From AutoRune scripts, to writing bots, to computer vision, all for one game. That turned into an obsession with an industry that had me move half way across the world to work on our own multiplayer virtual worlds.

The community was pretty active, and at one point I was building/hosting the most-used public bots/sites. I can imagine our paths crossed one-way or another at some point!

<comment><USER4> I have a very similar set of good memories. I put more time into deobfuscation, updating, detection evasion, and (eventually) server emulation than bots per se.

My contact info is in my profile, it would be cool to see if we ran into each other back then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been involved in the gamehacking scene for longer than I'd like to admit; it's a tremendous amount of fun and feels rewarding but it's a very hollow reward. Sure, you can build programs to manipulate game clients to do all of those things. The problem is that there's most often no legitimate way to openly bring the fruit of that labor to market as a result of the MDY vs Blizzard case regarding wowglider[1] and more specifically with the DMCA.

I wasn't sued but paid for intellectual property counsel to examine how the Ninth Circuit ruling would translate across the US and they didn't exactly tell me to go ahead.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to extend games, which is why WoW had LUA and many other games are at very least hooked into for parsing capabilities. These kinds of 3rd party parsers are in many cases not legal, so not openly marketable.

So for anyone considering a future for-profit project, hire a lawyer and review all those nasty agreements and see how the DMCA might come back to haunt you before you're _too_ invested in it.

For anyone who's considering it for fun: Just understand that the time you spend on gamehacking _probably_ won't result in a revenue-producing project. If you're looking to learn, gamehacking can teach you a lot about a variety of things like memory (address space/pointers/offsets), rendering, assembly code, geometric and pathfinding algorithms (Dijkstra/A*), pattern matching/signature scanning. Many of those things have real-world applications such as signature scanning for virus definitions. You'll get plenty of hexadecimal math practice. You can learn about DirectX or network traffic. You can have really enjoyable learning experiences working with games at a lower-than-intended level, but keep in mind that any time not learning is only about as well-spent as time playing video games... it's fun but incredibly addictive and they're already at "Pwn Adventure 3" so there's no end in sight!

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&oldid=646787903)

<comment><USER7> FYI, HN seems to bork that link. Tried replying with the "correct" link and something was reformatted to make it no longer work.

<comment><USER8> It's stripping the period from the end of the url.

Perhaps the permalink to the current version will work:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&oldid=646787903)

Edit: yep works.

Wikipedia will also accept without any parameters so just adding an ampersand to the end should work: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LL...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc.&)

<comment><USER6> It works! Good job, thanks for the info. Updated the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Code Hero, a game I once worked on -- [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero- a-g...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-game-that- teaches-you-to-make-games-he)

We need more games like this!

<comment><USER10> I remember playing this at PAX one year, it was a cool concept. Is the project dead now?

<comment><USER11> Dead. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero- a-g...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-game-that- teaches-you-to-make-games-he/posts/788367)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well this looks fun. I'd be interested to hear about how they go about sand- boxing the server (perhaps for the previous games so as not to ruin the fun).

<comment><USER12> There's no sandboxing on the server since all the challenges this year were essentially exploiting the trust relationship between the client and the server (or required reverse engineering that was just hard regardless of where the logic was). We certainly didn't /intend/ for someone to directly exploit the server, though it's always a possibility in these sorts of games. If so, they deserved the points they got (not all the flags were available even if you did hack it as some challenges were outside of the game).

It was also somewhat mitigated by the fact that the game was deployed on AWS instances just for that weekend and it was easy to bring up new instances any time we needed it, so someone cracking the server could certainly cause trouble, but there really wasn't any long-term damage they could do.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, sounds like it was a lot of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first challenge makes me think of the first Diablo game, in which all your player stats were hosted locally for online gameplay, so if you edited your files and gave yourself the best weapons locally, you were invinsible (or rather powerful) online as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> So is it a felony to play this game as intended?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

<comment><USER8> I am NOT a lawyer but: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Cr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Criminal_offenses_under_the_Act)

      1) it's not a government server or data.
      2) pretty sure they've authorized you to access the server.
      3) see 1)
      4) no fraud involved.
      5) playing the game (as intended) is not causing damage.
      6) no commerce involved.
      7) no extortion involved.

So no, I'd hazard that it is not a felony to play this game...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I once "hacked" an online game called bombermine and made myself a god(or at least able to kill anyone) by exploiting a few bugs I found:

[http://imgur.com/a/QeYJ7](http://imgur.com/a/QeYJ7)

Some day i should do a writeup about the man in the middle thing i had to build to make this possible

</comment><comment><USER16> What you should learn from game programming about security is to:

      Never thrust the client!

I'm baffled that in games like Minecraft, the server sends all blocks to the client, instead of just the blocks that are visible. Or that you can give yourself any weapon and infinite ammo in DayZ. etc ...

<comment><USER17> To be fair, it's very hard to do, especially in a sandbox game - the computer has not only to have a good model of the world, but also a model of how the client sees the world.

And in Minecraft it's not really a problem, because the game is more cooperative than competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember years ago in a multi-player shooting game. I switched clothing index in the client code. So to me the enemies are wearing vivid jungle color while running in snow scenes and bright white color while hiding in jungle scenes. Easy to pick them up at a distance with my machine gun. I was Pulverizer.

</comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of the silly tight melee formations in Myth 2 that were necessary to compete online.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hack'n'Slash goes MMORPG!

<comment><USER12> Our first previous version of the game (ghostintheshellcode.com/#pwnadventure2) was also a 3d hackable MMORPG and was released earlier than Hack N Slash. So really it was more like PwnAdventure went 2d. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone played RoboWar for the mac?

Anything comparable out today with a community?

</comment><comment><USER22> We generally call that cheating, not hacking, but whatever.

<comment><USER23> It certainly _results_ in cheating, but the _process_ is hacking.

<comment><USER24> I'd argue it's not actually cheating if the game is meant to be played in such a fashion.

<comment><USER23> If the goal of the game is to cheat, you're still cheating. It just happens to be the main mechanism of the game.

<comment><USER25> If you are using the game as it is intended, you are by definition not cheating.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Three 20-year-old programmers build a working Obamacare website in just days - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497637/Three-20-year-old-programmers-build-working-Obamacare-website-just-days-government-do.html

<comment><USER2> A working website.. .and then you read that it "doesn't try to do the more complex operations that the government site will offer - such as actually applying for insurance coverage".

Nice PR for the guys, Im sure it'll help with their day to day. but really, its just a few click thoughs aint it.</comment>


A Racist Attack on Children Was Taped in 1975. We Found Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/nyregion/racist-video-rosedale-queens.html <comment><USER2> Heartbreaking stuff.

The difference between 1975 and now is that we have constructed neighborhoods that make it easier for people of different backgrounds to never interact.</comment>


My Perspective on Go - <AUTHOR> http://zhen.org/blog/golang-from-a-non-programmers-perspective/ <comment><USER2> > Unlike other languages where you can just create a directory and get > started, Go wants you to put things in $GOPATH.

I've seen this complaint a lot and don't agree with it. Go just want everything to be accessible through $GOPATH, it doesn't have to _be_ there. Here's how I organize my code:

\- I have all my dev in ~/dev. Anything goes here, whether it's go, ruby,... it's my workspace

\- I put $GOPATH where it should be, in ~/.local/share/go

\- Whenever I need to go get something, it ends up in ~/.local/share/go/src/domain.com/author/package, as expected

\- When I need my package to be in $GOPATH, I just symlink ~/dev/project to ~/.local/share/go/src/github.com/rakoo/project, so it is visible in $GOPATH

After that everything works as expected (modulo some minor quirks I have to do at go install time), and you don't have to have a specific workspace just for go. It's also minimal enough (once per new project) that I'm not too bothered by it.

<comment><USER3> Even easier: just put your files in a directory and run 'go build' in that directory. If you have libraries, put them down lib/lib_name/lib_name.go, and your build from the root directory will work fine. The compiled lib files will not be in your current directory, but that's usually OK.

For a working example, have a look at the logstash-forwarder code structure, it's how they do it, and you can build that from any directory you want.

And if you really want to set up go path in your current directory, use a make file and set up a target with 'env GOPATH=$(pwd) go install'

<comment><USER2> 2 problems:

\- libraries are duplicated left and right. If I want to use the same library in multiple projects, it will be in each project's lib (note that this is how you'd vendor, but it's something else)

\- resetting env for each command you run sounds heavier, and the day will come when you will forget to do it and you'll run into problems.

<comment><USER3> Duplication depends on how you pull them in. For 3rd party libs, you'll pull them in via 'go get', and they will reside in the normal GOROOT, which is appropriate. It's just the libs you write for the particular project which would go down the local lib directory.

Resetting the env isn't my preferred choice, but if you put it in a make file, it becomes hard to forget. Especially if you are in the habit of reusing make files between projects with a few customizations, which is my preferred setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me that criticism you quoted seems really misguided. A person who doesn't want to see performance measures from new users will never understand how they (the new users) are typically using the language and where the most common performance blocks are at the newbie stage.

<comment><USER5> It's important to understand how new users are using the language, but new users of the language should not be focusing on performance before they learn the language well enough to know what is idiomatic and what is not, which was the original criticism.

The criticism is well-grounded: it's rather tiring to see endless "performance benchmarks" that test little more than printing to the console[0], or create artificial programs that are direct line-for-line translations of another language, and don't represent what an actual developer would generally write.

Think of it as a from of premature optimization - literally.

[0] Not in Go, but I can't count the number of times I've seen people use these comparisons for languages like Python and Ruby. It's incredibly ironic, because these languages really just farm out to the same underlying C libraries for this functionality, so it's testing _something_ , but not really the performance of the actual language features.

<comment><USER4>
        It's important to understand how new users are using the language, but new users of the language should not be focusing on performance before they learn the language well enough to know what is idiomatic and what is not, ...

See, that's a chicken-and-egg problem. This was my original point. How do you come to understand how new users are using your language and where they're taking performance hits if you keep telling them not to try to write performant code?

<comment><USER5> First you teach them how to write idiomatic code (non-performant), and then you teach them how to make the idiomatic code more performant.

It's very common for new users (in any language, not just Go) to try to jump right to the end, but focusing on performance before understanding basic language building blocks is a recipe for frustration, both for the new users _and_ for the language designers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >In a way, I consider that to be an advantage coming in to a new programming language, in that I have no preconceived notion of how things "SHOULD" be. _I can learn the language and use the constructs as they were intended, and not have to question WHY it was designed that way because it's different than what I know._

>I just _could not get my non-functional mind to wrap around the functional Scala_. And since I really didn't need to code (nor the developers want me to), _I gave up on learning Scala._

>I've barely heard of generics, communicating sequential processes, and other _"cool"_ and _"advanced"_ concepts.

Emphasis added

</comment><comment><USER7> "For me personally, I don't know any better. I have never used generics and I haven't found a situation where I strongly require it."

Sounds an awful lot like [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox)

<comment><USER8> I've found that generics are really only 'necessary' for building libraries. If you are writing applications or utilities, then you probably don't need it very much.

<comment><USER9> Generics aren't necessary at all, but they are a powerful addition to the means of expression a language offers and have use cases beyond collections. So while it's not a deal breaker, it's definitely sad and hard to understand why they left them out. Especially when you know Java's history and the pain they went through when they finally added generics.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, true. I feel disappointed whenever anybody tries to tack generics onto an existing language. You can never really tell if it is done correctly or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it true what he is saying about a single binary? Go doesn't do dynamic linking?

<comment><USER11> Currently Go only statically links libraries. I _thought_ I read in one of the roadmaps that they want to do dynamic linking down the line but I cannot seem to find that source anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I haven't used this extensively, but in my attempt to optimize the integer compression library, I added different C and assembly snippets to try to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of Go. It was fairly easy and straightforward to do."

Ah, the famous integer compression library modifying non-programmer :)

<comment><USER13> haha. I think the title should read, "Go: From a Non-Programming,Masters in Computer Science,7 years penetration testing, quite proficient in Pascal-C- Perl-PHP-Java-JavaScript, high performance MQTT broker implementing total Noobie Perspective"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a non-programmer with a masters in Computer Science...

<comment><USER15> And for being non-technical he's good at technical writing. Could this be a case of anti-pride?

<comment><USER16> or may be he doesn't like fixing friend and family computers, so claims to be non-technical.</comment></comment></comment>


AI helps to diagnose skin cancer - <AUTHOR> https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/artificial-intelligence-tool-promises-earlier-detection <comment><AUTHOR> AI used for early diagnosis of skin cancer by University of Waterloo and the Sunnybrook Research Institute. The technology could be available to doctors next year.</comment>


Oldskool Demo on a 7 Segment Display - <AUTHOR> http://www.plingboot.com/2017/02/oldskool-demo-on-a-7-segment-display/ <comment><USER3> > Notice there's a lot of pixels here that don't map to any segments, 30% that > will never be displayed.

Unfortunately this problem, the slant (italic) added by the hardware, and the bias introduced from mapping the horizontal lines (A, G) to the "left" pixels only, causes artifacts in the output. A good example is the left side of this[1] image, where the bottom of the 7-seg displaying "F" has a large jump rightward to the "1" below it.

To get around these problems, aalib[2] renders each glyph that it will use, and for each block of pixels to display calculates nearest glyph. This automatically provides anti-aliasing for any shape glyph. As you already have the error (remaining distance to nearest glyph) for each group of pixels, it is also easy to add dithering to distribute the error across the image.

[1] [http://i1.wp.com/www.plingboot.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/0...](http://i1.wp.com/www.plingboot.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/cubez.jpg)

[2] [http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/](http://aa- project.sourceforge.net/aalib/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is ever so slightly thread-hijacking but I've been wondering something slightly related for a while now: what's the downright cheapest way to get into really really big LED matrixes? Like the kind used for signs (of various sizes; let's say I'm referring to around <2ft sq).

The major issue I'm completely ignorant of is how to get enough I/O that can drive the LEDs directly - I'm assuming something with lots of direct drive I/O and no intermediary components would be the cheapest way to do it (?).

I understand multiplexing is the only way to survive at scale, but for small displays (say, 5x30 (= 150 LEDs)), what solutions would have enough I/O to drive each LED emitter individually, without scanning? I've always wondered what a truly flickerless LED matrix would look like. *

(* Several years ago I had an odd incident where after using a scientific calculator I'd see weird swirling patterns overlaid on top of whatever I was looking at. The LCD itself was not faulty or damaged, and I couldn't see any flickering at all. Considering LCDs run at 30-100Hz, the whole incident (it stopped after a while, I have some theories as to why) made me curious what a truly DC-driven LED matrix would look like.)

<comment><USER5> As it turns out this is getting pretty easy. A de-facto standard has emerged for these[1] LED modules, both in interfacing and in mounting. I used a couple in a LED clock[2] which can also tell time in QR Code[3] :-). Basically at $25 each you're looking at $3,750 in modules for a 640 x 480 display that in the "P3" (3mm dot pitch) size would be 1.92M wide (75.6") by 1.44M tall (56.7").

All of the LED driving is taken care of by the module, except for multiplexing the 'lines'. So these work by having drivers for one 'line' or LEDs (or 2 lines on the 32 LED high modules). You shift out the bits to them on a 16 pin plug. My clock as using an STM32F4 chip on a 1Bitsy[4] and was doing 240 FPS. Since these micros can be easily paralleled and synchronized you can drive an arbitrarily large sign by adding about $25 per 16 panels. Feeding them all data is a bit more complicated but not terribly so.

[1] [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3mm-Indoor-SMD0606-rgb- led-d...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3mm-Indoor-SMD0606-rgb-led-display- module-192mm-x-96mm-64-32-pixle-Video-images- picture/1641364020.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_3_10065_10000073_10068_10501_10000077_10000074_10503_10000032_119_10000030_10000026_10000023_431_10000069_10000068_10060_10062_10056_10055_10000062_10054_10000063_10059_10099_10000020_10000013_10103_10102_10000016_10096_10000056_10000059_10052_10053_10107_10050_10051_10106_10000097_10000094_10000091_10000007_10000050_10084_10000101_10083_10000100_10080_10000047_10000104_10082_10081_10110_10111_10112_10113_10114_10000089_10000086_10000083_10000041_10000044_10000080_10078_10079_10000038_10073_10000035_10070_10122_10123_10121_10126_10124-10503_10501,searchweb201603_2,afswitch_3,ppcSwitch_1,single_sort_1_default&btsid=0207e271-5f2c-489f-be15-a3aced211e7a&algo_expid=0eab590f-806a-4601-9f5c-1656aa91ca24-0&algo_pvid=0eab590f-806a-4601-9f5c-1656aa91ca24)

[2] [https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/794023527720620032](https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/794023527720620032)

[3] [https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/794025248203022336](https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/794025248203022336)

[4] [https://1bitsquared.com/collections/embedded- hardware/produc...](https://1bitsquared.com/collections/embedded- hardware/products/1bitsy)

<comment><USER4> _Wow_, that is truly impressive. $3.7k for a ~2x1.5m² _RGB (!!)_ display - <USER2> no added costs (besides a like <$50 interface controller setup). Nice!

Hmm. I wonder what the weatherproofing (particularly heatproofing) on these things is like. I know of a time/temp display high up on a building (probably around 1x1.2m²) that is constantly corrupted, I'm wondering if it's the 40°C days around here (Sydney Australia) that keep hitting it...

It's fascinating watching how QR encoding shifts and changes data - some of the time updates just adjust a few pixels, some of them adjust the whole barcode. I wonder what the source data for each frame was (but not terribly so).

So... if I understand right, these are line-buffered? You send it a line's worth of data, hit "go", and it redraws that line? 240FPS is _good_ , wow.

One question: in the first couple of "ticks" of the second hand on the first clock video, I noticed how there appears to be a minor bit of "LED bleed" where some of the LEDs don't switch off for a couple fractions of a second. Curious, I had a look at the video frames: [http://imgur.com/a/EVYB2](http://imgur.com/a/EVYB2). Is this an intrinsic problem in the driver system or perhaps a camera or encoding/compression glitch?

<comment><USER6> You can get an 80 inch TV for the same cost and roughly the same dimensions.

I am curious to understand what this can offer that a TV can't

<comment><USER7> 1) a LED "wall" is far brighter than a comparably sized TV, that's important when you place stuff high on a building

2) An ordinary TV is designed to be looked at from the front, a slight angle skews the colors and if it's extreme enough the screen gets totally unreadable.

3) A TV eats up tons of power, a LED wall not so much.

<comment><USER8> Regarding point 3: At 150 modules consuming about 25W each, your LED wall is consuming about 3750W max. An 80" TV will consume about 300W.

Power consumption of the LED wall will, however, be highly dependent on the displayed content. A white screen will consume most, a black screen basically nothing, but displaying only dark images is not exactly what LED walls are usually used for.

The equation is simple: The brighter, the more power you'll need, and an LED wall is, as you say, far brighter.

<comment><USER7> With a LED wall, only the lit pixels will consume power - the backlight of most TVs is full-on all the time. Only exceptions (iirc) are OLED TVs where the pixels themselves generate the light, and TVs which have their background light partitioned to achieve true(r) black by turning down all-black areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Now, I wonder if I can get an old calculator to play the accompanying 4 track MOD?_

Add some music and the demosceners at pouet.net might get interested in seeing it; they have a "wild" category for hardware/exotic demos like this.

I agree with the second comment there about replacing the verbose chain of if- statements with a single expression; my first thought upon seeing that was "this really needs to be simplified"; likewise, the second part with 7 nearly identical lines shifting left and then right by the same amount, then multiplying by 255(?!) can be simplified to a loop; the way it looked with lines for B and C having a slightly-different mask constant is misleading, since it looks like a copy-paste error. Here's an (untested) attempt at simplifying the code:

        int yoffs[] = { 0, 1, 3, 4, 3, 1, 2 };
        shift = 6 - ((digit&3) << 1);
        for(segs=0,i=0;i<7;i++)
         segs |= !!(screen_buffer[bx+yoffs[i]][bx]  &  1 << shift+(i<1||i>2) ) << 6-i;

<comment><USER10> > they have a "wild" category for hardware/exotic demos like this.

Revision 2017 has a Wild competition coming up in mid-April as well:

[https://2017.revision-party.net/compos/other](https://2017.revision- party.net/compos/other)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was an art project done a few years ago using 7-segment displays and animations, looked quite cool too:

[http://hackaday.com/2013/11/21/7-segment-display-matrix- visu...](http://hackaday.com/2013/11/21/7-segment-display-matrix-visualizes- more-than-numbers/)

</comment><comment><USER12> From the name plingboot I detect an old-skool BBC Micro fan :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Add some PWM for grayscale effects.

</comment><comment><USER14> Very pretty. Nice effect!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's amusing but a bit underwhelming, he's simply mapping a grid of pixels to segments, he's not taking the shape and orientation of the segments into account at all.

<comment><USER17> This style of comment isn't very good here because it comes across as putting down someone else's work. Some of that is just cultural and linguistic convention, of course, but on HN it's important; we know from long experience how it affects the community.

It would be easy to rework this into a good comment by expressing your point additively rather than as fault-finding. For example, mention "shape and orientation of the segments" as the next thing to take into account and add some information about how one might do that. Then you're helping all of us learn.</comment></comment>


FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/announce.html <comment><USER2> For most simple servers/projects I use Debian/some sort of linux, so I'm pretty unknowledgeable but curious about the BSD side of things.

What are the advantages/differences of using bsd over any other linux distro?

Edit: For anyone interested, I actually Googled the question and found a pretty interesting article: <http://www.over- yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01>

<comment><USER3> That article is still fairly good of a read, with a couple things slightly out of date, which I will note here simply for pedantry or anyone interested.

BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.

While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, __binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular __. Specifically, `freebsd- update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.

ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:

      pool: zroot
      state: ONLINE
      scan: none requested
      config:
    	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    	zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
    	  ada0p3    ONLINE       0     0     0
      errors: No known data errors

<comment><USER4> What benefits ZFS brings on a single drive laptop? I was informed it is mainly designed for high traffic file servers with redundancy and so forth.

<comment><USER5> I run btrfs on my main arch installation. Have for ~6 months. If you get the fsck.btrfs tool (it is upstream) you eliminiate the only real showstopper with btrfs on Linux.

You get the online compression (meaning you use less space _and_ read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.

<comment><USER6> I follow the btrfs development because I'd love to have at least the features of ZFS on Linux. However I would not dare (yet) to use it as a replacement for my current home fileserver (which owns ALL my data).

Does btrfs provide cifs export like ZFS ?

Edit:

from the btrfs wiki [https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable....](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable.3F) :

Is btrfs stable? Short answer: No, it's still considered experimental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in high throughput/low latency networking, netmap ( <http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/> ) looks really exciting in combination with a userspace TCP stack (e.g. unetstack). Pity I have no applications that could use it, would love to experiment.

<comment><USER8> Not sure I see why you would want to use it with a userspace network stack, I am sure at that point kernel networking is going to be faster. Netmap seems more useful for bridging, logging and UDP applications to me...

<comment><USER7> Localizing packet processing significantly improves cache performance, in addition to avoiding copies and context switches. Receiving data from a socket almost always necessitates it being copied from a SKB to userspace memory, and prior to that from the driver's rx ring to a SKB. Grep for all references to 'cache' in <http://lwn.net/Articles/169961/> which is Van Jacobsen's earlier work on a system of comparable design. Another (insanely more complex) implementation is <http://www.openonload.org/>

<comment><USER8> Ah thanks for that, hadn't realised that was a use case too, only started looking at this stuff the other day...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty nice feature list, for a point release. Make sure you check out the new stuff coming in FreeBSD 10: <http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD10>

<comment><USER9> More user-friendly page: <http://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10>

<comment><USER10> It will be interesting to see whether variable symlinks can bring some Plan9ish filesystem elegance to *nix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Please note that precompiled third-party packages are not available for 9.1-RELEASE at the time of release. See the Availability section below for further details."

"With the exception of systems relating to the building and testing of packages, all FreeBSD.org infrastructure has now been brought back online. A full audit of the third party package build infrastructure code ("pointyhat") and package testing infrastructure ("redports") continues, and neither system will be brought back online until audits are complete."

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm very happy to see the new ZFS enhancements imported from illumos, but I am very sad to see nothing about DTrace.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use FreeBSD on my servers, most of them with ZFS. I wish there was some facility (like in Solaris) than as soon as a harddisk in a mirrorset fails, a spare is automatically swapped in. I will probably have to write that myself ;-)

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily :-) There's a ZFS fault management daemon up and coming in version 10. Look at the very bottom for the link to the source code in this page: <http://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although my research in this case only consists of a quick google search, I can't seem to find any information on the Capsicum (sandboxing) project. I think I read somewhere that they were going to be publishing a userspace library / make the feature non-experimental etc in 9.1. However, I see no mention of it at all in the release notes. Does any one know what the state of that project is?

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are good, popular and cheap options to run FreeBSD in a VPS? (From the three should I pick any two?)

<comment><USER15> Tilaa (<http://tilaa.nl>) is my go-to for a few reasons. It's not as popular/well known as it _ought_ to be, at least in English.

There's also ARP Networks (<http://www.arpnetworks.com>), which seems to have a good reputation, and RootBSD (<https://www.rootbsd.net>), which seems expensive for what you get. I haven't personally tried either.

<comment><USER4> Tilaa looks excellent! Thanks for the pointer. Can you please describe your experience with them in some detail?

<comment><USER15> I don't have the energy to type up a big long thing. Been with them over a year no problems encountered in that time, network seems stable and performant, they do not appear to oversell. If you have specific questions I'll try to answer them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Which version of ZFS does 9.1 implement (could not find any info on that) ? Want to replace OpenIndiana b151 with FreeBSD 9.1 and reconnect my ZFS storage...

<comment><USER16> v28 - the last version released under the CDDL. You should be fine.

<comment><USER6> Moved on to ZFS on Linux. FreeBSD does not support sharesmb.

<comment><USER16> Something wrong with Samba?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really would like not having to choose between Gnome Shell and ZFS. :-(

How is device (ethernet, wireless, Intel GPU) support on laptops?

<comment><USER18> I'm running FreeBSD-CURRENT on a Thinkpad X220 and have no issues with any of the built-in peripherals. This laptop has an i5-2540M. The e1000 Ethernet is supported by the em(4) driver and I have a "Centrino Ultimate-N 6300" supported by iwn(4). The Intel GPU support was merged back to stable/9 in time for 9.1.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, how about suspend/resume?

<comment><USER18> Right now suspend / resume is non-functional from a user's perspective: that is, suspend works, and I can resume, but the screen does not turn back on. I hope that this can be fixed for 9.2.

Some related recent links: [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2012-Dece...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2012-December/038530.html) <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query- pr.cgi?pr=kern/174504>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No kvm virtio drivers?

<comment><USER21> For 9.1 they are available as emulators/virtio-kmod; 9-STABLE has them in the tree (I used both recently).</comment></comment>


App Engine's High-Performance Image Serving System - <AUTHOR> http://www.listry.com/blog/2010/08/app-engines-high-performance-image

<comment><USER2> Nice article. I didn't realize GAE had that ability.

Are you using it on your Listry site? I ask because your site doesn't have that many images on it.</comment>


What Email Looked Like in 2009 in Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/blog/2010/02/what-email-looked-like-in-2009-in-numbers/

<comment><USER2> _Compare that to The United States Postal Service (aka snail mail) that delivered just over 200 billion total packages in 2008._

Wow. Go USPS.

I'm sorry, but delivering 200 _billion_ physical objects is so much more impressive than nearly any amount of electrons.

<comment><USER3> While the Email number caused no more than a "meh", I am seriously impressed by the USPS number.

200 billion is about 650 per American. That's crazy.

<comment><USER4> And most of it is the bulk commercial mail that goes straight into the trash can.

<comment><USER3> Ever heard of spam? :)

<comment><USER4> Ever heard of filters?

Oh, wait, I _can't_ filter bulk commercial mail - their fees are the USPS's bread and butter. I have to take it out of my mailbox, flip through the flyers, the envelopes that are faked out to look like some sort of official notice, the credit card offers, etc. etc. etc. and dig for the one or two items that are actually for me...and then throw the rest away.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but that's not really the topic here, right? I guess you lost track.

<comment><USER4> Neither is lauding the USPS.

A government program to shovel unwanted ads down the public's throat is not impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many of these emails were of the type "SomeJerk has tagged a photo of you on Facebook!" or "xXx-linkinpark92-xXx has responded to your comment on Youtube"?

</comment><comment><USER6> If you take away spam, that still leaves us with 47 billion messages for 1.4 billion users. That's more than 33 per day, which seems a lot to me.

<comment><USER7> It actually sounds about right. It will include maillist messages as well as automated emails. Throw in the fact that mail will likely follow a power law distribution with a small number of users receiving the bulk of email and it seems plausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, that means 72.9 trillion spam messages. So sad.</comment>


Richard Feynman on SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hkmurakami.com/post/14999889426

<comment><USER2> Richard Feynman never said anything about SOPA and I find it distasteful to try to leach off his name this way.</comment>


97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/97-things

<comment><USER2> While I think it is great to put together information like this and I look forward to it becoming more useful as it is expanded, these wiki pages are currently woefully short and contain generalizations that could do more harm than good.

Some examples:

\- Only the Code Tells the Truth: "Remember that useful code is used much longer than ever intended."

The author was trying to make the point that you should name variables, methods, etc. well and write code that is not too spaghetti-like, such that those reading your code will easily make sense of it. This statement doesn't convey that.

\- Speed Kills: "Professionals do not write bad code — ever."

The point that the author is trying to make is that you should take your time with coding. But professionals do make mistakes, including writing bad code, and they learn from them.

\- The Golden Rule of API Design: "That's where the Golden Rule of API Design fits in: It's not enough to write tests for an API you develop; you have to write unit tests for code that uses your API. When you do, you learn first- hand the hurdles that your users will have to overcome when they try to test their code independently."

The point the author is trying to make is that you should _use_ the API you are writing. That is not what is necessarily conveyed.

\- Write Tests for People: "It is also a good idea to test your tests."

What this means is tweaking the test/etc. so it fails under each circumstance that it is supposed to test, as much as that is feasible to do. But it sounds like the author is saying to write tests for your tests... Noooooooo! Don't do that, unless absolutely necessary, or an infinite loop of writing tests for tests awaits.

There are a number of other generalizations in them, but basically- there is good intent there, but it is way too early to be looking to these for guidance. Please contribute to them, though.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Slack down? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> yes.

PS. good hack to confirm if something is down - is to perform a quick Twitter search on "xxx down" :)

</comment><comment><USER3> yes (kindly from Los Gatos).

One of my team member just wished a slack-free day, and it has come true!</comment>


Ask HN: Mac users still on High Sierra, why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My network's admins block the upgrade with a program that watches your App Store use.

</comment><comment><USER3> My main computer is a 2008 Mac Pro.

</comment><comment><USER4> My 2010 Mac mini won't run Mojave.</comment>


New logo - <AUTHOR> https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new-logo <comment><USER2> Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie:

"Firstly, it's not change for the sake of change."

Unfortunately, due to the nature of company politics, this kind of thing usually happens because a new CMO or other exec comes in and needs to "mark their territory". Marketing in tech right now is having a big problem with people rising to the leadership ranks that really don't understand the basic fundamentals of the craft.

<comment><USER3> There is just so much wrong here.

Can anyone explain why all the 'incidental' graphics on the website are printing press related (halftone dots, mis-registered colors)?

What the hell unique lineage does slack trace to the printing press? Also how does that align with the new ultra generic could be any kind of business logo.

And let's not even talk about that sweet negative space swastika.

<comment><USER4> _> And let's not even talk about that sweet negative space swastika._

Oh god, cannot unsee.

Edit: It's not even negative space. I just see it as a swastika.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on. There are other logos like that. Do you see a swastika on Google photos?

Why not "look at that sweet negative space windmill"?

Eye of the beholder, I guess.

<comment><USER6> > _Oh come on. There are other logos like that._

Yes -- on asian temples...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria, even as far as a generic colorful squarish logo. It's gone from "# means Slack" to "I guess that's Slack...?"

<comment><USER8> Agreed, the '#' had a long history of indicating a channel, like on IRC, and by extension text-based communication.

<comment><USER9> And for those not familiar with IRC, the association of "#" with Twitter hashtags says "communication" too.

<comment><USER10> And for those not familiar with early Twitter, the hashtag was not a feature of the platform, but a shorthand way to indicate a topic. This of course was recognized and formalized by Twitter soon after, but I find it fascinating that it was a feature essentially developed by the users and more simply recognized by the platform later.

<comment><USER11> > a shorthand way to indicate a topic

And I imagine it was also inspired by IRC channels.

<comment><USER3> 100% slack is essentially evolved irc.

<comment><USER11> The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."

<comment><USER12> I'd bet that quite a lot of early Twitter users were also IRC users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> More interesting for the HN crowd I think is the article from the actual design company that did the redesign: [https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack](https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack)

<comment><USER14> What do you think it cost to get this slack logo designed from a company that prestigious? I see they also did rolls royce

<comment><USER15> $100-250k range given this includes logo, brand identity, motion design, comprehensive visual design system.

<comment><USER16> No. It'd be closer to $1m.

<comment><USER17> Seconded. In these type of high visibility projects and prestigious consulting companies usually charge in hundreds of thousands and in millions for a single deliverable (narrative document, logo, brand). The whole process might months to a year with several people involved from the agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it's supposed to look like little message bubbles, but I get kind of a "squirt emoji" vibe from it.

Edit: apparently HN doesn't support emojis. [https://emojipedia.org/splashing- sweat-symbol/](https://emojipedia.org/splashing-sweat-symbol/)

<comment><USER19> Ohhhhh, message bubbles! That explains so much.

Except Slack's UI doesn't use message bubbles. I wonder, is this a signal that that's about to change, or is it just artistic license?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [warning: cannot be unseen]

There is a swastika hiding in the negative space in the middle of the logo.

<comment><USER21> Quite the contrary, I can't see it.

<comment><USER22> [https://imgur.com/MIg6FpN](https://imgur.com/MIg6FpN)

<comment><USER23> That's really tenuous. Like, you really have to try to see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just refreshed my desktop app and I have to say I am not crazy about the new default avatars. It is entirely possible I just got accustomed to my team's collection of colors and shapes, but the current ones have much less variety resulting in them all blending together. I wonder if this is a partially intentional dark pattern to get us to move away from the default avatars.

<comment><USER25> This to me is hands-down the worst part of the rebrand. Harder to distinguish (why is everyone in my company's default avatar just different colors of the same shapes?) and in many cases probably took away something that people had become attached to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every company must have a logo with four colors -- some variant of red-green- blue-yellow. It should also fit into a square, and the colors must stay separate, splitting the square into 4 parts if possible.

<comment><USER27> Is this good advice or satire?

<comment><USER28> If you had to ask, please don't ever design logos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I liked the old logo since it represented one of the most iconic features of the Slack, that is channels. This new one seems really generic and I can't associate it with any of the killer features in Slack.

Nonetheless, least props to Slack team to putting reasons on why the logo needed to change, instead of a generic "we wanted to go to new horizons with our product" or "the old logo was getting behind the new design trends" or something else.

</comment><comment><USER30> I miss the octothorpe (#) -- it was a clever reminder of Slack's origins in IRC, where channel names start with the same symbol.

(Technically, in IRC, they could be prefixed with an ampersand (&) as well, but nobody ever did that. Great for making super-secret channels, though.)

<comment><USER31> In case anyone's wondering about the difference, a &channel is local to the IRC server it's created on, while a #channel is globally usable across the IRC network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe if it was for a company named Splat . . .

> We'll not bore you with the design thinking

With a logo like that, you had better at least link to it. Oh, you did. But the link's label was just "Pentagram," so I thought it was to the company's home page, not its specific story about this work.

I understand their complaint about the complexity of color, though I disagree. I thought it was beautiful, maybe worth the complexity.

Regardless, they seem not to know that the new logo is more complex, and therefore harder to be distinctive. They have traded complexity of color for complexity of shape. If you concentrate on the logo in outline, you can see that it has so many lines going so many different ways, all tightly packed, that the overall impression is a drop of rain after hitting the pavement.

It's hard to make good logos. For people whose only job is to make logos, it might in fact be harder. They're tempted to overthink it. They go through 40 revisions. The first two or three are often the best. This was the case here too, based on Pentagram's development artifacts. After a while your secret reasons behind each jot and hook overwhelm your judgment.

Maybe the best thing is to take a month off after you think you've got it, to get a fresh pair of eyes. All those fancy reasons you came up with to justify it fade away. Like, what are those raindrops around it? Oh, you say they're supposed to be speech bubbles. Well, they kind of look like speech bubbles now that you mention it. But not really, because speech bubbles are shaped differently when they contain actual speech. These look like drops. Scattered around the logo like that, it looks like what happens when you drop something.

</comment><comment><USER33> PSA: If the new sidebar is a little too aggressively purple for you (it was for me), the "Aubergine classic" sidebar is the old style

<comment><USER34> Thanks! First thing I did this morning was re-calibrate my monitors...didn't realize there was a rebrand. Whoops :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> After working with Pentagram in the past, I can't say I'm all that impressed. Most times they tend to completely lose the concept they were trying to go after, and this is no exception to the rule. The beauty of the original hash logo was that it harkened back to the tags and IRC channel names. You can't see the hash in the new logo, and frankly, it looks like a blasted swastika.

</comment><comment><USER36> Logo aside,

I appreciate the quick blog post much better than the old Uber brand which tried a bit too hard to explain every thought behind each part of the rebrand.

[https://www.uber.design/case-studies/rebrand](https://www.uber.design/case- studies/rebrand)

<comment><USER37> imo, it's better to get a longer post that provides motivation and idea behind the redesign. Slack just told us the reason why they're doing it -- for consistency -- but doesn't explain how they landed at their symbol at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My colleague's first comment: they should have invested that into developing a dark mode.

A pity that Slack's still lacking such a seemingly easy to implement feature.

However, I like the new logo!

<comment><USER39> [https://github.com/caiceA/slack-black-theme](https://github.com/caiceA/slack- black-theme)

works ok

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why do companies insist on rebranding every few years? Is it just to keep the in house design team busy? The old logo was memorable and has established Slack as a recognisable brand. Why change it when there is no shift in direction of the company or product?

<comment><USER41> >Is it just to keep the in house design team busy?

Yes, that's essentially it. Most projects are make-work to some extent when you're paying for people's time in monthly or yearly increments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It looks like a google product now. If I could stop seeing you the swastika, it'd be better.

The # at least was related to the channels and showed some relation to chat programs because of IRC channels.

I'm sure they had their reason for this change, I'm just not sure if it was a good reason.

<comment><USER43> You have to squint to make it out, but there is a resemblance: [https://i.imgur.com/mqEs2MQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/mqEs2MQ.png)

I'm not sure if it's enough to call it a mistake though. (My mistake for not spotting the entire thread discussing this...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Look, I get that the four outer dots are probably supposed to look like speech bubbles.

But they look like squirts. Emoji squirts. Which are associated with sexting. And squirting is kind of associated with sex in a lot of people's minds...

I'm trying to keep an open mind. But the logo is four squirts around four lines of roughly phallic proportions and rounded ends.

Seriously. This was literally the first thing I saw when I saw the logo. And judging from some of the other comments here, I'm clearly not the only one.

Really suprised this got approved.

<comment><USER45> Any line is a penis and any droplet shape is female ejaculation? Stretching it a bit, I think.

<comment><USER46> I don't think anybody was suggesting the droplets were female ejaculation. Male, more likely, since we're dealing with four big penises.

And stretch though it may be, GP isn't alone in seeing this. Whether people continue to see the phalluses and associated droplets in everyday usage of Slack, that remains to be seen, but good design doesn't need time to run its course so that people stop noticing the bad bits.

I recall when I designed a logo for the radio station at which I worked. The concept was a flat circle with a cutout of a set of headphones. Unfortunately, the headphone cutout was a bit too low on the side, so what was supposed to be the space in between the headphones wound up looking like a bloated penis. It can happen to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Congratulations Slack!

To me, it seems a bit useless though, but I don't have any relevant knowledge about Marketing nor Corporate Design to provide useful feedback. There's probably some value in a re-brand even though the company is not facing any criticism for their colors, logo, and slogan.

> _It was also extremely easy to get wrong. It was 11 different colors—and if > placed on any color other than white, or at the wrong angle (instead of the > precisely prescribed 18° rotation), or with the colors tweaked wrong, it > looked terrible._

I stand corrected, these are good reasons to justify the rebrand.

That being said, I felt a bit scared this morning when I opened Slack and found that the colors were slightly different to what they used to be, I freaked and thought someone had hacked my corporate account, then I went looking for answers and found this post, my heart was immediately at peace.

I hope this change brings them more opportunities to grow.

\---

EDIT: Interestingly, their "Release Notes" says version 3.3.6 [1] but 3.3.3 [2] in the download page.

The :slack: emoji is also showing the old logo. I wonder if they are going to change "slackbot" avatar as well.

[1] [https://slack.com/release-notes/osx](https://slack.com/release-notes/osx)

[2] [https://slack.com/downloads/osx](https://slack.com/downloads/osx)

<comment><USER48> > I freaked and thought someone had hacked my corporate account

I don't understand.

I had a coworker that had similar reactions to things. "My stuff is missing" = immediately wants to call the authorities, without asking the roommate. Which had moved the stuff due to some petty squabble.

Similarly, this. You had default avatars. Default avatars got changed. Why would someone go to such trouble and make them immediately known? It is more likely to be a change by Slack themselves. Because they provide the default avatars.

Now, if you got custom avatars, and they all got replaced with some activist banner? Ok, hacking gets higher probability.

Not trying to criticize, I just want to understand the line of thought that leads to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Shouldn't these multi-million-dollar design firms have a checklist that includes:

* [ ] Doesn't look like 4 sets of you-know-what arranged in a circle

* [ ] Whitespace between elements doesn't look like swastika

Someone mentioned these, and now I can't unsee them. Way to go, Slack.

</comment><comment><USER50> I really like their last logo. It was recognizable.

If they really just wanted to change it, they could have just simplified the colors. Oh well, now they just look like every other generic company (it reminds me of bank logo but I can't remember which one).

</comment><comment><USER51> Just reloaded my work slack. For a good couple of moments I thought my clumsy fingers accidentally changed the the color balance on windows.

<comment><USER47> Indeed, I freaked out a little bit as well.

Interestingly, some Slack groups that I'm part of still have the old colors.

      Theme: Aubergine
      *(Old)* Normal Color: #4d394b
      New Background Color: #3f0e3f

Reference: [https://i.imgur.com/RtUXm6V.png](https://i.imgur.com/RtUXm6V.png)

<comment><USER52> Interesting to see Google is a Slack customer (google.slack.com). Thought they had a competitive product?

<comment><USER37> In hindsight, it's a shame that Google didn't put more resources into their productivity ecosystem and create a single, tightly-integrated app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Since Slack changed default profile icons too, I recreated mine in CSS: [https://codepen.io/anon/pen/VqNXXP](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/VqNXXP)

</comment><comment><USER54> If it's not broken, don't fix it. If you have to argue whether it's an improvement, it's not an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER55> People complaining about performance since ever?

Solution:

Let's spend loads of money on a new logo!

<comment><USER56> Let's see if the IPO earns them enough (to do another rebrand (back to the old logo shape)). Then maybe they'll think about the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> * We Don't Sell Saddles Here – Stewart Butterfield – Medium || [https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c5952...](https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d)

> The answer to "Why?" is "because why the fuck else would you even want to be > alive but to do things as well as you can?". Now: let's do this.

They hired someone really fucking good at making ugly lower-case As.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's four penises.

<comment><USER59> each with their scrotum. forming an svastika. at least is raibowy.

<comment><USER59> *rainbowy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> It really does look like a swastika.

</comment><comment><USER61> Feels like preparation for going public.

<comment><USER62> That or starting a new major product offering, visually they're no longer boxed in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What about the features that existed in the last favicon ?

We used to be able to see if there was new messages, or if someone tagged you, directly in the favicon without opening slack, now it is impossible.

You are forced to go check slack all the time to see if there is something new. I'm disappointed :'(

<comment><USER64> That's still working for me, although it looks a little different than before. New messages show up as a white circle in the upper right. Being tagged shows up as a red circle in the same spot.

<comment><USER65> I guess it might work with the app. Running slack as a pinned tab in my browser however, it's close to invisible [https://imgur.com/a/VgL2fMu](https://imgur.com/a/VgL2fMu)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This seems like it tracks with the rumours/suspicions that they are planning to go public soon. It's likely that the impetus for their stated desire to to clean up and consolidate their branding, could be that aforementioned upcoming IPO.

</comment><comment><USER67> Am I the only one who is kind of irrationally annoyed that they push an update of the app for a mere logo? They even mention in their update notes that nothing else about the app has changed. I know it's a raindrop in the ocean compared to all the HD movies being streamed, but 7 MiB times the total number of installations for what is probably less than 50KiB if properly optimized feels wasteful (7 MiB being the Android version, I don't know if this is the same on all mobile phones. Also, I'm probably being overly optimistic about that graphic being optimized)

</comment><comment><USER68> It really looks like a 99 Designs special.

</comment><comment><USER69> This new logo is a departure from their old art style that was everywhere in their old project, the game Glitch. (Interesting that it was exactly 11 different colors, like the 11 Giants in Glitch).

</comment><comment><USER70> The new logo makes them look like a boring, stuffy company that caters to enterprise clients. Of course they chose this branding, but maybe this is also what they deserve?

</comment><comment><USER71> Microsoft is red-green-blue-yellow

Google is red-green-blue-yellow

Now Slack is red-green-blue-yellow

Who is next?

<comment><USER72> eBay?

<comment><USER73> I was about to say that, you beat me to it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gamma-male Love it! Surprised by the negative reactions. The original logo feels a bit cheap and not well thought while this one has more purpose.

</comment><comment><USER74> I think it stinks and prefer the old one.

</comment><comment><USER75> Before, Slack was associated with such a universal, recognizable symbol: #.

The symbol was and is a part of their product as well.

Now it's just a multicolored blob.

I feel like this would be equivalent to Starbucks dropping the mermaid.

Then again I'm not a professional logo designer who gets paid hundreds of thousands dollars per "project", so what do I know.

<comment><USER76> >so what do I know.

More than they do, apparently

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> too complicated. The mind goes to the left and stays there. Not that "slack" is not read but still

</comment><comment><USER78> Is anybody else reminded of the old Hasbro electronic Simon game? Same 4 colors, same basic orientation.

</comment><comment><USER79> I must be the only one but it resembles CNBC...

[http://wcontest.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/06/1529781727_;w...](http://wcontest.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/06/1529781727_;w=600;h=315)

</comment><comment><USER80> So, with that out of the way I wonder if they will be able to implement a "dark" theme now. I asked a couple of weeks ago if they had some new themes on their roadmap and they had a vague reply about putting it on the list. :fingers_crossed:

</comment><comment><USER81> I like it, looks very "Googly" though.

I hope they release new desktop and mobile apps soon

</comment><comment><USER82> Reminds me of logo of The Swedish International Development Cooperation: [https://www.sida.se/English/](https://www.sida.se/English/)

</comment><comment><USER83> I saw the favicon change and I thought a plugin was messing with the page.

</comment><comment><USER84> Ignoring the actual shape/design - they went from 11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself). This isn't much of an improvement because printing any swag/tshirts will require a full 4up press (or four spots, depending on how they choose inks) - which is still quite expensive.

The old ChallengePost logo used 4+ colors, which meant every shirt we printed came at a $2-5 premium over a single color.

When we rebranded to Devpost, we came up with a 2 color design (so we could do spot colors), which was an improvement - but I still wish we had gotten down to 1 color.

<comment><USER85> >11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself)

I was confused by this claim in TFA. I see 4 colors of lines in the old logo, plus 4 colors where the lines overlap. 4 + 4 = 8, obviously. Even if we counted text and background (which doesn't seem commonplace when discussing how many colors a logo has) that only brings us to 10. I get why 4 colors is preferable to 8, but I don't know where the number 11 is coming from. Anybody know what I'm missing here?

<comment><USER3> Why is four colors preferable? I mean yeah in 1980 that means 9 runs through the press, today four at best... and who the fuck cares it's all screens today.

Honestly the old logo is four colors visually, you brain is shortcutting the overlaps because it understands them.

<comment><USER85> It's not all screens, a logo needs to work irl. The Pentagram post linked elsewhere on this story shows a couple mock-ups of irl advertising and product branding. Want T-shirts to give away at recruiting events? Your T-shirt supplier will charge more for more colors. Fewer colors also generally make a design easier to replicate freehand, and you want amateurs to be able to easily convey your logo. A special case may be made for the old intersections being easily reproducible in some mediums, but consider non-aerosol paints and things get messy.

Aside from physical constraints, I think there is a general argument to be made for simplicity. If something is more complex, there should be a reason for it. Otherwise, toss out the complexity. What is the reason for having more colors? There are other ways to convey overlapping lines, and I would argue that some of them are less complex, though it would be a lengthy argument -- it isn't exactly obvious how the complexity of an additional shape can be measured against the complexity of an additional color, and you can ultimately just subjectively weight one of those factors heavier than other and come up with a different answer. But I think the general case for fewer colors being less complex is pretty sound.

[Edit for grammar]

<comment><USER86> > Fewer colors also generally make a design easier to replicate freehand, and > you want amateurs to be able to easily convey your logo.

You don't _ever_ want people to be re-producing your logo (and especially free-handing it!). That is why they pretty much all have a "brand" page to pull assets from: [https://brandfolder.com/slack/logos](https://brandfolder.com/slack/logos).

<comment><USER85> You almost always don't want your hired professionals doing freehand reproductions (there are exceptions -- a stated goal of the NASA worm was that it should be easy to freehand on NASA property), but you certainly want amateurs reproducing it in the wild. If your logo is so ubiquitous and simple that children draw it in their school books (think Nike, Pepsi, McDonalds, NASA again, etc.) then that's free advertising. This sort of non-sponsored advertising exists on a continuum, and it's usually beneficial to the signified organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> The old logo looked like an extension of 23AndMe's logo and the new logo looks like a Google product logo with four ducks in a circle.

I like the old logo better.

</comment><comment><USER88> The new logo makes it seem that Slack is a waterpark, rather than a tool for messaging and collaboration.

Looking at the new logo again, I also think of sprinkles.

</comment><comment><USER89> Changing the logo doesn't help our team. I wish they'd used that money to get group calls working on iOS, speed up app on MacOS etc.

<comment><USER90> Funding the space program doesn't help the infrastructure, education and much needed aid for Opioid epidemic that's rampant in our country; therefore, we shouldn't fund NASA.

This is a wrong way of thinking.

You may have heard of the term "Throwing more developers at a problem doesn't help or too many cooks in the kitchen."

Slack should absolutely work on those issues - I agree, but not by sacrificing the rest of the business needs such as Branding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> With f.lux the new default purple looks horrible.

</comment><comment><USER73> I just liked the old logo based out of hash tag - naturally so close to messages. In fact, the logo was the brand for Slack.

</comment><comment><USER92> The logo is whatever, what I don't like about it is that the desktop app is now the blueish color vs the old black.

</comment><comment><USER93> The logo works, but that purple background in the app... it will take some getting used to for sure.

</comment><comment><USER94> It's always a little sad to me when technology companies make sure a big deal about logos, marketing, and brand. Im not sure if I disrespect them more but Id rather such focus be on the technology aspect of what they do vs the look at the font we made, or the logo marketing put together.

<comment><USER95> It's not an either-or thing. Slack engineers are still working on the technology aspects.

<comment><USER96> Hmmmm... yeh, but when _any_ company starts messing with their branding, it frequently turns out to be _not a good sign_.

<comment><USER95> Meh, it depends.

Large companies often do it. Microsoft has rebranded their visual assets a bunch of times. Doesn't seem like it was particularly ominous. Some companies in very competitive verticals are often _built_ on their branding.

Some companies do waste a lot of money on debatable rebranding efforts (Uber / HP, etc.). It's a mixed bag.

<comment><USER76> Except Microsoft's Windows logo is merely an evolution of the previous, which keeps the brand identity but refreshes the look, this one is not. The new Microsoft logo builds off of their existing brand and brands. Same for Apple, same for basically every big brand, even Google. Slack...messed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Looks like a derivative of this. I feel like I've seen a company using this logo but am spacing out.

[https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-arrows-logo- designs-...](https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-arrows-logo-designs- image18888634)

</comment><comment><USER98> It looks a lot like the Google Photos logo turned upside down to me.

<comment><USER76> Or the Microsoft logo with circles. I honestly think it looks terrible (the Slack logo, not the Microsoft logo.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> > Firstly, it's not change for the sake of change.

Are you sure about that chief?

</comment><comment><USER100> I wonder how long it took them to go through this redesign.

</comment><comment><USER101> The "TL;DR" at the bottom should be at the top!

</comment><comment><USER102> Looks good imo. Not much else to say about it. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER103> Is it just me or does it resemble a swastika?

<comment><USER104> Nope, that one is all you

<comment><USER105> Nah it definitely does. It doesn't take much, just four things rotated at a 90 degree angle

the whole thing looks sorta swastikaey but its especially the negative space that jumps out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> I like the new icon, but prefer the old font.

</comment><comment><USER107> Why would they chose a swastika for a logo?

</comment><comment><USER108> Using that pre-IPO money I see

</comment><comment><USER109> Meh (I tried to come up with a more insightful critique, but let's be honest...)

</comment><comment><USER110> I thought TL;DRs were supposed to be at the top of a post.

</comment><comment><USER111> They did all this but still no dark mode.

</comment><comment><USER112> >Firstly, it's not change for the sake of change.

Actually yes, it is.

</comment><comment><USER113> Sucks. Don't like it.

</comment><comment><USER114> Like, why am I seeing this on hacker news.</comment>


3 things that weren't leaked before the Google Nexus announcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2987667/android/google-nexus-smartphones-announcement-chromecast-tv-audio.html?nsdr=true <comment><AUTHOR> This announcement was packed with details about products for consumers - <USER2> just one for both consumers and developers - Google Voice leaped ahead of Siri with the announcement that the Google API will be opened to independent developers, letting them create voice-enabled apps.</comment>


What do you believe about Programming Languages (that you can't prove (yet))? - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1439

<comment><USER3> There's a quote in that thread that says something I've come to strongly believe over time:

"Just to pick a single thing on the list, it takes at least as much time to analyze what a system is doing under debug. In other words, after you write the code, you spend at least as much time wondering what the system is actually doing, even if the code is nearly all correct.

Starting about three years ago, I started telling folks you not only had to write code that runs correctly, you also must provide some kind of support to see whether code is running correctly. Even if there are no bugs, some emergent effect at runtime will puzzle you, and a long time can be consumed by tracing the cause and effect back to appropriate roots. When you work on a team with several other folks, after the first agonizing bug shows up, you can spend a lot of time proving your part of the system does exactly what expected, and didn't play a role in the observed chaos.

Lately I seem to spend most of my time in forensic system analysis as a local coroner for other folks' code fatalities. I never had an ambition to be a code coroner.

It would be enormously helpful if a language -- and not just one particular development environment -- had explicit support for generating evidence of what and how a system actually got from one point to another."

<comment><USER4> Pure functional programming should be a good start for such a system. At least states are explicit (and usually relatively simple) there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cannot jump back into my 23 y/o mind but my 32 y/o mind firmly believes with experience as proof ::

Simple solutions are Best.

XML is evil and should never have been released

Reading your _own_ old code is hard, for the _love of G-d_ please make it simple

And so most controversially ::

\- Try to minimize the intricacy of any lamda-ultimate code you write. Y Combinator[1] with closures is great now... 6 months you won't be able to remember it.

\- If at all possible invoke lisp / functional heart within an easy to follow procedural harness.

\</comment><comment>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_combinator> not PGs company of the same name

<comment><USER6> "XML is evil and should never have been released"

Wow. Most loathing of XML seems to come from the misuse of XML. For example, defining application config files.

On the other hand, the number of robust parsers and relative ease of understanding of at least essential XML (let's skip the parts tied to doctypes for now) opened up a world of Web services.

Granted, BigCo and friends came along and tried to taser that with WS-* and the like, but the cat was out of the bag.

Nowadays folks may refer json to xml, but that's just building on the ideas kick-started by those devilish pointy brackets.

To stay on topic: What do I believe about programming languages, but cannot prove: That simple, well-intended languages will inevitably be misapplied. This misapplication will create headaches and heartbreak for people, and the language will be blamed for these woes as if it was meant (and thus poorly designed) for those uses along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clear code is better than clever code.

</comment><comment><USER8> That in terms of 'effort -> usefulness', they are all 'flat' - i.e. generally equal in terms of usefulness and the effort required to attain some form of use. There are no single words that are more powerful or more significant than others - and all languages merely contain a collection of 'favoured words of a flavour', which as a whole don't really represent a greater or lesser degree of effort in regards to learning to use them. The thesis is this: All words are equally difficult or hard to learn and use.

Thus the effort required to use Assembly is equal to the effort required to use C or Python, with more or less equal boundaries in terms of the number of words and terms you will learn for any particular language. You can take two days to learn nothing but one language, and another two days to learn nothing but another language; the degree to which the progress of both of these periods is 'equal' is driven not by the words or language features themselves, but instead by _your personal interest_.

The average assembly programmer has to construct a taxonomy as equal in terms of effort as that of a Python programmer.

Now, bare with me here, because while I truly believe that 'all languages are flat', it is also a 'truism' that "personal interest drives the peaks in the effort curve".

That is to say, if you're not interested in Assembly, but you are interested in Python, it is your interest - not language features - that will be what drives the peaks and shallows in terms of the 'effort graph' in learning either Python or Assembly. This is not a function of the _language_ , but instead of personal interest. I don't believe there are, for example "stupid people who can never learn Assembly and therefore must learn Python while there are 'more intelligent' people who easily become more proficient in Assembly" .. instead it is: "this person could learn either language, but their personal interest inclines them towards one over the other".

All languages are equal. Not all interests are equal. The degree of interest in a language drives its effectiveness in usage over that of another language.

<comment><USER9> I'd like to see you rewrite the Mathematica code I write every week - <USER2> assembler (on any architecture) in less than a year.

I believe you're missing the entire point of programming languages.

> All languages are equal

Only in the mathematical sense. In exactly the same sense that a pile of small rocks ( _calculi_ \- where the word _calculation_ came from) is equivalent in processing power to a Pentium.

<comment><USER10> I think the point is, if one were interested enough to do so, writing Assembly language code that 'does better' than Mathematica on tricky maths problems would - eventually - get as easy for one to do, as it is for you to use Mathematica.

<comment><USER9> I don't buy this for a minute.

No matter what your mental horsepower, a high-level language will allow you to accomplish more with a given amount of effort.

You are essentially arguing that tools don't matter, that a steam shovel ultimately offers no improvement over brute strength. Several millenia of human history beg to differ.

<comment><USER8> Words are not steam shovels. Steam shovels require a _great_ deal of energy and effort to use properly.

Words, on the other hand, require very, very little energy to be useful. That is the point - the effort and energy required to learn what "(void _)func(void_ );" is useful for is equivalent to the energy required to learn what "jmp %ax" is useful for ..

You cannot compare word-working with hard working. Words are flat - they all require a similar environment in order to function, namely that of a fertile mind and the interest to watch them grow in the name of usage.

<comment><USER9> I tried to think of something to say, but all that came out is: _Not even wrong._

I _really_ wish that it were somehow possible to force you to walk the walk and code only in assembler for the rest of your life. If all programming languages are truly equivalent, just why would this fate be so terrible?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Error driven" software development - <AUTHOR> http://webtigerteam.com/johan/en/blog/error_driven_development.htm <comment><USER2> An amazingly high percentage of the effort in coding goes into error handling, particularly if you think of error handling as an afterthought.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is as much an alternative to writing tests as brakes are an alternative to a drivers license.</comment>


Firefox Developer Tools: top requests and upcoming features - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/devtools/2012/03/19/top-requests-for-firefox-developer-tools-march-2012/

<comment><AUTHOR> I love that they are going to add Copy/Paste to the style inspector, but why can't they stick it in the Firefox 12 beta?

I don't want to have to jump right away to FF13 alpha for that.</comment>


In VR boys learn best when teacher is a drone, girls better from virtual Marie - <AUTHOR> https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2019/virtual-reality-research/ <comment><USER2> Repeat after me: There are no behavioral differences between boys and girls.</comment>


4 Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining  - <AUTHOR> http://www.gilzilberfeld.com/2011/12/4-warning-signs-that-agile-is-declining.html?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post

<comment><USER2> This is where I would say in that "done right" agile works. The problem is "done right" is very subjective to the team in question.

If you have the right team, discipline for practices, and the right leadership it works wonders. I've seen it.

The problem it that it's misused like I said in my post. It's not understood. And therefore will lead to the conclusion, that not only it doesn't work, we were conned to believe it did.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agile _is_ snake oil. And I've never seen it done well in either the public or private sector.

All starts with good intentions -- but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Then you discover someone doesn't actually know what they're _really_ meant to be doing.

Agile sucks. I saw a huge team over two years produce absolutely _nothing_ despite the cash being spent on the project.

I did a spot of cowboy coding over a week on this, just for fun (I was working on a different project but understood what their team was supposed to be doing because it had overlap with our work), and had a fully working model up and running with full database and business logic in place ... demoed it and it was extremely well received. Then it was immediately buried to save the dev team managements' face.

I left shortly after that. This is the kind of shit nobody needs.</comment>


Show HN: Sass-link – an easy way to compile sass in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/slymax/sass-link <comment><USER2> Can it export and import?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes imports work but only with absolute urls</comment></comment>


Personalized children's books – Scalable? $10k a day target - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazingfables.com <comment><AUTHOR> I spent 6 months writing my first 8 books and to try self-publishing within the personalised content space. Hope to make $10k a day because I think content is scalable as long as it is good enough. Thoughts? Feedback on how to improve the product very much welcome!</comment>


Blockchain's Hype Is Dying According to Corporate America's Earnings Calls - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/utopiapress/blockchains-hype-is-dying-according-to-corporate-america-s-s-p-500-earnings-calls-citations-56b97771ce58 <comment><USER2> If we can count on one thing that never dies, it is companies like IBM embracing buzzwords like AI and Blockchain and leeching millions from brain dead Non-IT companies that drink their consultancy koolaid.

It's kind of predictable to hear a Buzzword and add five years to the time it became a buzzword and you can search IBM + buzzword to see that they are the top results.

<comment><USER3> Is there anything that can be done to combat this phenomenon? (I doubt it, but hoping ...) It seems enormously destructive and wasteful for society...

<comment><USER2> Sadly no. But luckily its self correcting. While traditional companies drink koolaid and aim for short term share price bumps, tech behemoths continue to eat their lunch. In a few decades (4-5), there might not be any traditional companies left to drink the koolaid.

<comment><USER4> Well, it's the tech behemoths who become the IBMs on that time scale...

<comment><USER5> If The IBMs have no one left to scam, they are no longer IBMs.

They'll settle for some other kind of awful, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I compare the 2017 crypto hype to the dot com bubble, people finally realized the potential but the real life value isn't there yet, lot's of scam ICOs just like all the companies that raised money during the tech bubble. Just like the dotcom bubble people said internet/tech was dead, there are people saying blockchain is dead. I think that out of this batch there will be the Google's, Amazon's, etc that emerge and actually deliver real world value as opposed to just hype

<comment><USER3> No evidence of any useful non-Bitcoin blockchain applications so far, so no reason to expect any Amazon/google type successes. If someone figures out something useful to do with "blockchain" it will probably blow up quickly.

<comment><USER7> TIL that MakerDAO, DAI, Digix, dydx, dharma protocol, 0x, derivatives tokens, Augur, and Aragon aren't useful.

<comment><USER8> I've never heard of any of those, so I looked up the first one, MakerDAO. I'm pretty sure that's a "crypto asset".

"Dai is an asset-backed, hard currency for the 21st century."

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but it's a stablecoin pegged to the USD. This allows other projects, like dydx to create derivatives products based on this peg. You have other protocols that use the DAI peg to create stock market derivatives. Today, I can trade ETH for a token pegged to AAPL's stock on the blockchain.

<comment><USER9> I can do that for free on Robin Hood with dollars that I already have. Explain why I should care.

<comment><USER7> I remember showing a friend this really crappy online video stream in the late 90s, and I think he said something like "How can this ever be useful? I can rent a DVD and watch high quality video without any interruptions." He wasn't wrong.

<comment><USER10> So it is a coin that is backed by the law system of the country you may not be residing in?

<comment><USER11> Yes, but right now it's much more stable to be holding that than one of the pure crypto assets. Anyone can make a stablecoin backed by another country's currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Blockchain is Dying"

Someone may eventually be right, but the number of times these words have been uttered is astounding.

<comment><USER13> It is a little more nuanced; the hype is dying (or so the writer believes).

<comment><USER12> I understand and agree. It's just a "water is wet" article.

There's no profit in current bear market = there's no hype.

<comment><USER14> The benefit that the technology brings, sans speculation, should be the same regardless of whether it's a bear or bull market though. What about blockchain technology development that isn't tied to a tradable token?

<comment><USER7> There is an EIP 1337 "Subscription Services on the Blockchain" that I think will supplement/replace tokenomics. It's what it sounds like, a decentrilized subscription protocol that allows builders to monetize their d-apps with ETH based on recurring payments to access the services.

This is essentially the first step to web 3.0 and a universal login.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best time to Buidl.

<comment><USER16> the number of people who got lucky on bitcoin and now feel like they are validated enough to try and give any level of financial advice is super funny

<comment><USER7> Building d-apps is now financial advice?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Original article (with more data than this comment piece): [https://www.axios.com/corporate-america-blockchain- bitcoin-f...](https://www.axios.com/corporate-america-blockchain-bitcoin- fervor-over-fb13bc5c-81fd-4c12-8a7b-07ad107817ca.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Crypto is going to come back with vengeance.</comment>


Can any one explain the Si Valley fascination with (driverless) Automobiles? - <AUTHOR> Having read a lot about the technology I think that true, SAE level 5 driverless cars are not on the near horizon. Maybe they will never come to pass. If and when they do it seems that current industry leaders such as GM, Toyota, etc, will have the economic comparative advantage  starting from integrating  incremental automation features (e.g. lane tracking assist, etc), into mass produced auto-mobiles. What explains the SV tech industry's fascination with driverless cars over the past 5-10 years? Where did it originate? It seems that there about 100 other areas where silicon valley could innovate, why did the SV big companies choose this seemingly quixotic quest? I am interested in what is behind it from an economic history perspective. You may disagree but it seems to me that silicon valley expectation and hype are even further diverged from reality now than they were during the dot-com boom 20 years ago. Is it a problem of too much easy money to fund Juicero-like startups? What explains it?<p>Wouldn't Alphabet shareholders prefer a dividend to wasting money on projects outside the company's areas of core competency on dubious products? Surely people understand that exponential growth can not continue ad infinitum and that it may be better to take profits than just piss away money. <comment><USER2> Two things

1\. Economic productivity gains are measured in trillions per year globally. Expected value for the research is good. Transportation costs are significant bottleneck in the economy. They make up roughly 8-9 percent of GDP. Wages are becoming the bottleneck in transportation costs. Internet economy can increase productivity but but if the end people who deliver packets, move pizzas, or transport anything have hourly wages.

2\. R&D into autonomous cars is related to autonomous robots, robot vision etc. Google is betting heavily into AI and driversless cars can be seen as one piece of the puzzle. Navigation in real environment and spatial understanding of surroundings is core technology in many other things.

</comment><comment><USER3> 40,000 people in the US were killed in car accidents in 2016. Millions more were injured. Seems like a worthwhile thing to disrupt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does silicon valley think they can do anything, regardless the industry, better than the incumbents? It is easy to disrupt (when capital is cheap) but harder to improve. I think expectations of technological progress have become untethered from reality (as happened in the last dot-com boom and bust 20 years ago). This time the bust may be even worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> It also seems to me that improving public and mass transit would be a more proximate solution to traffic deaths. Every one will die of some cause or another. as medicine improves the share of deaths due to accidents should increase. Even with increasing medical capacity to treat diseases traffic deaths only account for 1.5 % of all annual deaths. Maybe silicon valley would be better to spend its talents improving health care and preventative medicine. But that is not as sexy to pitch to wall street and the public as Jetsons fantasies. Recently Silicon Valley's contribution to healthcare was Theranos, who Tim Draper still believes was unfairly maligned by the press.</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe Password Breach: What You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eventbrite.com/adobe-password-breach-what-you-need-to-know/

<comment><USER2> When I got the email from Eventbrite, my first thought was "oh cool, nice to know they're taking these things seriously", closely followed by "wait, this is really creepy". Still not sure if this is a good thing or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really curious what proportion of large password breaches we actually discover...</comment>


Photos from Medellín's march for social leaders - <AUTHOR> https://latinamericareports.com/12-photos-from-medellin-march-for-social-leaders/2788/ <comment><USER2> These photos beautifully capture Colombia's relentless spirit and unwavering passion for peace and justice in the face of its community leaders being slaughtered by the hundreds.</comment>


10/Gui: A 1-D multitouch window system, very simple looking - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/6712657

<comment><USER2> The website, which currently has basically nothing other than the vimeo video, is here:

<http://10gui.com/>

I'm impressed, but I don't know how well it'll work, switching from the gesture surface to the keyboard and back and forth.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535></comment>