What causes the sound of a dripping tap and how do you stop it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180622104736.htm <comment><USER2> This is at least the second time that tap dripping was involved in a scientific study.

The first that I know of is when some Santa Cruz (hippie capital) students set up electronics to record the timing of drips for a paper. They were going to break the pattern down to understand it. They tried and tried but the pattern always seemed random.

With the help of other researchers they discovered it was caused by chaos. This was the first time that chaos theory was described, although Feynman had noticed that some equations behaved weirdly when banging on his calculator.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Is this the paper?

[https://doi.org/10.1016/0375-9601(85)90065-9](https://doi.org/10.1016/0375-9601\(85\)90065-9)

<comment><USER4> Yes. There's also this book:

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/dripping-faucet-as-a-model- cha...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/dripping-faucet-as-a-model-chaotic- system/oclc/507926680)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One clever solution I've seen, if you can't fix it right away, is to tie a string from the spout and hang it down to the drain. The water runs along the string instead of falling and dripping.

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of a home I saw once with large rusty chains used as down spot channels from the rain gutters, it was pretty neat looking.

<comment><USER7> Rain chains are common in Japan, and decorative as well as useful.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My solution if I can't fix the leak is usually to place a sponge or cloth under the tap.

</comment><comment><USER9> As long as we're asking plumbing noise questions, I'll ask one that I've never managed to find a satisfactory answer to.

When I turn on the hot water, such as in a tub or a sink, some cold water comes out before hot water does. (I have to wait for the water to "get hot", which of course is not really getting hot, it's flushing cold water out.) I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining this, but I can hear when the water is hot. The only way I know how to describe it is that it sounds a bit calmer. Why is that?

<comment><USER10> I saw a video about this recently: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I have literally wondered this since I was a kid, and this is the first satisfying explanation I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ITT people are so clever in creating a workaround but are unable to perform basic maintenance. Replacing washers is a fundamental skill

<comment><USER12> Stop using taps that need washers. All the taps in my house (in Norway) are over thirty years old and none of them drip. The reason is simply that they use a cartridge with ceramic mating surfaces.

<comment><USER13> > Stop using taps that need washers. All the taps in my house (in Norway) are > over thirty years old and none of them drip. The reason is simply that they > use a cartridge with ceramic mating surfaces.

Cartridges (ceramic or otherwise) fail for a variety of reason. Gaskets come in some fairly standard sizes and cost a few pennies to replace. Cartridges typically cost $20-$40 each, are quite non-standard even from a single manufacturer, and some manufacturers will require special tools to remove/install their cartridges. Plus a cartridge will still typically have gaskets that can fail (e.g. I recently had a diverter valve that was part of a cartridge leak and flood the under-sink area).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Put a dishrag under the drip-point, how difficult can it be? It will asorb all drip sounds. Let the drops fall onto a dish-rag.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Cambridge University video linked to from the article with water drops being filmed "using high-speed cameras and high-sensitivity microphones": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iP3Dwy0RSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iP3Dwy0RSQ)

</comment><comment><USER16> So a polyurethane mat with spikes pointing up to break the surface before impact would quiet it.

<comment><USER17> Like the fresheners in urinals have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a bit disappointing that we need high speed cameras to figure this out. I would have expected simulations to be sufficient.

<comment><USER19> I think the 3D fluid dynamics simulation required to find this might be a much. I always figured "water droplets smashing into another surface" was sufficient. My dripping taps never seem to drip into a puddle of water, but on the sink surface. With the high-speed capture work from years ago on why droplets splash back from dry surfaces (because air), I'd have also assumed air would play a role in drops making noise when falling on water.

My point: I don't think we could have simulated this effectively; I think a thought experiment would suffice; but ultimately, high-speed would be a necessary step to observe what either experiment predicted.</comment></comment>


FCC planning to open up 1200 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed / Wi-Fi usage [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363451A1.pdf <comment><USER2> Other than the 1200Mhz [0] from the 6Ghz Band, the requirement of 6Ghz Certification ( New WiFi Chip, Antenna, and FCC Certs ) means that WiFi 6E brings opportunity to fix everything that went wrong with WiFi 6.

The Current WiFi 6 clients and router have OFDMA problems, some are not turned on by default, some require firmware upgrade which you can guarantee wont happen with lots of users, many do not support 80+80Mhz / 160Mhz.

Without some of these features, current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax is nothing more than WiFi 5.5 or a slightly improved 802.11ac Wave 2.

I hope next generation WiFi6E client [1] and Router fixes all these problems.

[0] 1200Mhz only in US, Europe and UK are only getting 500Mhz and are on similar time frame with US. No idea on the scheduled in rest of the work.

[1] [https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan- blue...](https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/wireless-lan- bluetooth/bcm4389)

<comment><USER3> It just hit me that all of what is now sold as WiFi 6 does not in fact have a 6 GHz radio. The incompetence is breathtaking, it's been a year since they revamped all of their naming and it's already fucked again.

<comment><USER4> The intent of "Wi-Fi 6" is to start versioning Wi-Fi numerically (i.e. the next major rev will be Wi-Fi 7) instead of the IEEE's ever-lengthening 802.11 alphabet soup.

It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.

<comment><USER5> Then why is GP referring to 6E? Sounds like more alphabet soup, to me.

<comment><USER6> That's actually fairly standard naming in networking, like cat5 cables, cat5e is cat5 but after fixing a few bugs in the standard. Cat6 came out later and supersedes cat5 and cat5e.

Think of it like 6.1 instead of 6E. Minor revision to the existing standard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Partially true. 6E is specific to 6GHz and not a revision of Wi-Fi 6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real question is really "why isn't most of the spectrum like this?" \- people sharing it rather than it being sold off to private holders to be owned

<comment><USER8> To understand the thinking find a copy of the 1959 paper "The Federal Communications Commission" by Ronald Coase. See [https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927](https://www.jstor.org/stable/724927) (pay-walled). It's the thesis behind the modern property-rights spectrum regime, and has bled over into many other federal regulatory regimes.

As interpreted by many modern, mostly conservative, regulators and scholars, the idea is that by giving private property rights in spectrum you incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies.

There's plenty to critique, especially as it applies to spectrum. See, for example, the famous Salon.com article summarizing David Reed's arguments: "The myth of interference" (2003), [https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/](https://www.salon.com/2003/03/12/spectrum/) But if you want to understand your adversaries' thinking, Coase's paper is the place to start.

<comment><USER9> > incentivize not only more efficient usage through price signaling, but you > incentivize research & development into more efficient technologies.

As with software patents, I think there's an argument to be made that this is no longer true. Digital modulation schemes are leagues more efficient than older analog techniques, both in terms of power and bandwidth. Spread spectrum schemes in particular are even reasonably resistant to being plopped on top of each other.

The spectrum ownership scheme allows established players to sit around on their asses using loud, inefficient modulation schemes with huge dead zones in between channels because they don't need to do any better than that.

I think radio technology would be better across the board if spectrum were open, and if people had to compete by using better, more efficient, more interference-immune modulation schemes, or risk getting stepped on by someone else. If we had a system like this, the noise floor would just slowly increase in heavily used parts of the spectrum, rather than what we have now, which is a whole bunch of legally mandated quiet zones punctuated by huge narrow carrier spikes.

The technology to do this exists... you can go buy a broadband SDR and put together a system like this in GNU radio fairly quickly for experimental purposes, but it's not really legal to actually _use_ this anywhere.

<comment><USER10> The thing is, that the QoS and power efficiency of e.g. LTE isn't attainable if you have uncontrolled interference. It's a general issue with far-side crosstalk.

<comment><USER8> Interference is largely a property of the specific scheme. 5G schemes are better than LTE when comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. aggregate bandwidth on the same bands in the same geographic area), whatever comes after 5G will continue moving the ball forward, and the theoretical limitations on how much further we can keep kicking the ball are still out of sight.

Thus the question isn't what regulatory regime is best for squeezing the most out of LTE, but rather what's the optimal pace of radio communications evolution and how to achieve it. That's a drastically different type of question that almost certainly has a drastically different answer, or at least a much more complex answer.

<comment><USER10> Then make it so that frequencies don't get blocked for this long. Make it so that a company has to re-bid every once in a while for spectrum.

Instead of just giving it away or making it all free-reign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good. Let's see if this actually happens and if Europe follows (I doubt the whole 1200MHz are free here, at least not on paper)

The big fuckup of almost every regulatory body around the world was to not unlicence the analogue tv-whitespace in the 600-800MHz band.

At this frequency it's possible to build reliable local mesh networks. 802.11 is horrible inefficient through - why not mandating some open new standard with better usage of the bandwidth? It would still be a big win for a lot of communities.

But LTE happened and there was a lot of money to be made to sell the spectrum to big corps...

<comment><AUTHOR> 802.11 is inefficient? What are you talking about. It is more efficient than cellular systems in terms of bits/second/Hertz. Unlicensed does not mean inefficient.

Europe is targeting 500 MHz towards the end of this year.

<comment><USER11> > 802.11 is inefficient?

CSMA/CA basically says: hear a few milliseconds if someone else is sending something and if not send yourself - this is a problem with noise and lot's of networks. LTE assigns timeslots and can omit the problems - there are better solutions now than CSMA/CA like OFDMA¹

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is- ofdma-a-...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3315056/why-is-ofdma-a- magical-feature-in-the-802-11ax-standard.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At 6 GHz. This is super exciting. I have a huge backlog of fun wideband radio projects (radar, spread spectrum, etc.) that I've never been motivated enough to start because it would technically be illegal.

<comment><USER12> This does nothing to make your projects legal. "Open" spectrum like this only allows you to operate certified devices where the vendor made some assurance that they actually stick to their band and power limit, and don't interfere on some random harmonic.

To build your projects you need a ham license, and if you have that you have the ham allocations.

<comment><USER13> > _This does nothing to make your projects legal. "Open" spectrum like this > only allows you to operate certified devices where the vendor_

Yes, most radio transmitters are certificated (including Part 15 transmitters like Wi-Fi routers), but homebrew devices should still be possible under Part 15 without certification. Part 15 allows the use of unlicensed radio transmitters built for personal use, not marketed, not constructed from a kit, and built in quantities of five or less, without going through the process of certification by regulators. See [0].

However, whether it can be implemented within the technical requirement and limitation of Part 15 is another question. Usually, Part 15 is very limited, it may or may not be usable for your project, unlike the amateur radio service (Part 97), which is a more powerful service.

> _actually stick to their band and power limit, and don 't interfere on some > random harmonic. To build your projects you need a ham license._

Same for ham. The only difference is that certification by a regulator is not needed, and the technical standards that need to be satisfied is different, but regardless of what service you operate in, you must test your equipment by yourself to ensure the technical requirements are not violated.

[0] [https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/what-are-the- us...](https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/what-are-the-us-rules- about-unlicensed-low-power-transmissions)

<comment><USER12> Admittedly I'm hazy on the details, I just stowed away the bottom line ;).

AFAIR what it boils down to is that if you have a ham license, there is a presumption that you know to some extent what you're doing (15.15.a?); so if you do break something it probably makes the distinction between "reckless" and "accidental".

Honestly if you do it well the question won't come up. So either you learn your shit well enough for it to not matter, or you get the ham license for insurance at the cost of at least proving you got the gist down. _shrug_ :)

<comment><USER14> You don't need a ham license to build and operate things under Part 15.23. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/15.23](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/15.23)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The practical impact to my knowledge is very high bit rate communications (many gigabits?) at short distances and indoors.

<comment><USER2> On a 2x2 160Mhz capable devices you are looking at 2.4Gbps, that in real world should be closer to 1.6Gbps.

So not really _many_ gigabits, but good enough for most of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this going to become a widely adopted Wifi/etc band or is it US-only?

<comment><USER12> Your guess is as good as anyone's; it's US-only but I would expect some other countries / regions to follow for at least part of the band if not all of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do most routers and other wifi devices need a new frontend to leverage the new band? Or could they conceivably receive a firmware update to unlock this?

<comment><AUTHOR> New front-end hardware is required. Bunch of companies already announced equipment availability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious how Ajit Pai squares his faith in the property rights-based Coase Theorem approach to spectrum management with increasing the unlicensed bands. It's probably a dissonance a politician (despite his background, that's what Pai effectively is, now) can't be bothered with.

<comment><USER18> What's the dissonance? By granting the public the rights to use more spectrum, one can imagine greater adoption and usage of the spectrum.

<comment><USER8> Well, here's a dissenting opinion by Pai from several years ago where he opposes unlicensed usage of UHF white space spectrum. [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pd...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-68A2.pdf)

The cynic in me notes that unlicensed, Mhz-range spectrum would have been a game changer and created a serious challenge to incumbent cellphone and broadband companies. Unlike Mhz spectrum, the 5Ghz spectrum he mentions (as an alternative) in that old opinion and the 6Ghz spectrum in the recent notice is limited to private usage within a building. You can't do anything long range, not even from down the block--at least not in a commercially viable way. Using unlicensed Mhz spectrum you could provide competitive broadband directly from the street (if not further), removing all the expense of leasing or running wires to people's homes or paying extremely costly fees to incumbent cellphone companies.

I reconsider what I said about dissonance: there is none. His past and current positions are consonant with the view that rivalrous spectrum usage is best resolved by auctioning private property rights in spectrum--the classic Coase approach. By effectively being limited to within structures, 6Ghz spectrum isn't rivalrous even from a person in Pai's perspective.

Note: I went to George Mason Law school which has a faculty that's extremely active in the FCC spectrum debate, and I know Pai is intellectually (and in some cases personally) friendly with some of that faculty. The faculty are vehement advocates for private spectrum auctions. I've had more than one intense debate advocating for more unlicensed spectrum usage and none of them were the least bit kind to that approach. But that was 10 years ago; perhaps opinions have softened since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jeppesen-io This is fantastic. For urban living, in appartments, 5Ghz is great in part because of the shorter range.

Roughly speaking, how many WIFI chanels does 1200 Mhz give? How does this compare to 5Ghz?

<comment><USER19> Historically the channels were 20MHz. More recently 40MHz and I don't know if ac goes wider?

1200MHz of bandwidth is _a lot_.

<comment><USER20> 80MHz is common, 160MHz exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > the full 1,200-megahertz available in the 6 GHz band

Can someone explain this to me? Doesn't 1 GHz = 1,000 MHz?

<comment><USER22> One is frequency, the other is bandwidth. So 1.2 GHz of band width in the 6GHz band.

The actual frequency band is 5.925 GHz to 7.125GHz[1] which is 1.2GHz from bottom to top (that is how "wide" the band is)

That spectrum is broken up into channels that can be up to 160 MHz wide which allows for a lot of data all at once, but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz does do don't think of it easily covering your house.

[1] [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354364A1.pdf)

<comment><USER23> > but 6 GHz has an even harder time getting through walls and stuff than 5 GHz > does

I was under the impression that the higher the frequency, the more energy the wave has, and thus does a better job of passing through walls. Is that incorrect?

<comment><USER24> It's actually the opposite. Shortwave (3-30Mhz) goes around the world whereas a high frequency such as 5G (5Ghz) cell data you have to have a node on every light pole.

Shortwave is 100 to 10 meters wavelength compared to 5G which has wavelengths measured in millimeters.

<comment><USER25> A radio station emitting long waves can be heard almost anywhere on earth. With poor quality, of course. I used to listen to radio stations at 20 000 km away for fun.

<comment><USER26> With a decent enough antenna setup, the quality isn't poor. I've had stations come in super clear from eastern europe while I was sitting in southwest Wisconsin using an antenna that was just a bunch of speaker wire thrown up into a tree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> the real question is "when"

i've lost faith over the years after buying into whitespace and cbrs; when neither happened in meaningful ways. The FCC is a shitshow

<comment><AUTHOR> Formally be approved on April 23. New devices should be available late summer.

CBRS and TVWS requires database which takes many years to craft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Title is a bit misleading, this is not about [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23-centimeter_band)

<comment><AUTHOR> Title does say "of", 1200 MHz of spectrum. It does not say in 1200 MHz band.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would that allow SDR?

If yes, that would be a game changer...

</comment><comment><USER30> That's for whwat is called "WiFi 6E" [https://www.wi-fi.org/news- events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-br...](https://www.wi-fi.org/news- events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-brings-wi-fi-6-into-6-ghz)

</comment><comment><USER31> Great, some more wifi to add to the electrosmog soup we already live in. When are we going to start taking into account the health effects?

<comment><USER32> We already do. There aren't any.

<comment><USER33> To be pedantic, there are the thermal effects, which is why the EIRP is limited to a number low enough that the normal blood circulation can take away the extra heat, even in more sensitive parts like the eyes.</comment></comment></comment>


Rising CO2 won't make trees grow more, study suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/co2-trees-1.5000709 <comment><USER2> A number of problems with this method of study, and the headline is misleading.

The real question is whether there will be more biomass and more photosynthesis in response to more CO2, not whether individual trees grow more. The climate skeptics don't say tree trunks will get wider, they say there will be more plant biomass.

And also this is adding in confounding variables and saying more CO2 could change precipitation in certain places, and thus cause lower growth. Other studies that show more growth with more CO2 are using greenhouses to control for confounding variables.

And even if you are trying to answer the question in terms of a holistic analysis, you can't just study one forest in Canada and then make any kind of conclusion.

You'd need to study trees from most of the major forests, and look at the density of the foliage in each.

<comment><USER3> Several of the reports I've seen have said we _will_ get more biomass, but most of it will be plants we generally refer to as weeds.

<comment><USER2> Makes sense, considering that most of the plants we have already match that description.

<comment><USER3> Most of the plants in residential areas, sure (but only if you think grass is a weed).

Not so much in reasonably well-run parks or woodlands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like it's a bit more nuanced than the headline would suggest. More CO₂ only means more growth when CO₂ is the limiting factor on growth in the first place. Water, nutrients, and sunlight all play a role as well.

<comment><USER5> Bingo. While not usually the limiting factor in nature, it can still be a benefit when it is. Just ask all the 1000s of pot growers literally burning propane to produce it indoors and vent it to atmosphere. Grr.

<comment><USER6> I did not know they did that to produce CO2. Very interesting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll point out that the sunniest parts of western Quebec get fewer than 1900 hours of sunshine annually. [1] That's fewer than any point in the contiguous US. Cedars metabolize O2 -- not CO2 -- in the absence of sunlight. That makes this possibly one of the most biased and possibly misleading selections possible for both location and organism under study.

[1] [https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Canada/Quebec/sunshin...](https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Canada/Quebec/sunshine- annual-average.php)

</comment><comment><USER8> Anecdote: When I artificially inflated the CO2 in my aquarium, my plants grew like BANANAS. Something like 4x the speed, and about 2x as big leaves, etc. It was quite something amazing.

<comment><USER9> In terms of geologic history the CO2 levels now are lower then they have been. It's not surprising that plants respond very positively to higher rates of CO2.

And it's been proven to be true many times.

I guess what the study is trying to address is the positive aspect of CO2 rising enough to counter the negative aspect of CO2 rising to the plant biomass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be curious how they explain the fact that greenhouses typically add co2 for faster growth?

( disclaimer I believe in global warming with all my heart)

<comment><USER11> Greenhouses are controlled environments where everything else is abundant too. In more natural environments, plants are limited by availability of water and nutrients in the soil.

On top of that, plant growth can be reduced by heat stress. They also have to contend with insects and disease, and may not have good defenses when climate change has brought invasive organisms to the area.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but what that suggests is that the existing established understanding is correct (or at least still plausible): even if the particular trees studied here aren't CO2-limited and don't grow more with more CO2, total plant biomass will or at least might (outside of climate change denial fantasies this doesn't mean increases in CO2 will automatically be neutralized by plant growth, because it doesn't imply that the size of the effect is necessarily sufficient to clear the additional CO2 once long-term equilibrium is reached, doesn't tell you how long it takes plants to reach the new equilibrium when CO2 levels have reached a new plateau, and even if it did all that wouldn't help when CO2 levels are constantly increasing and plant growth can't catch up.)

<comment><USER11> Sure, if everything else is ideal then many plants will grow more with more CO2. Even this study's authors don't deny that; they say that other factors will often not be ideal:

"climate change is generating warmer, drier conditions that could make them grow less in many places"

Overall, conditions are definitely getting warmer on average, and many places are also getting drier, sometimes with occasional very heavy rainfalls that wash away topsoil.

Another factor I didn't mention is forest fires, brought about by drier conditions, as we've been seeing in California.

<comment><USER12> I'm not taking issue with the study or it's authors, just the presentation of the article, which very heavily spins it, especially up front, as contradicting the existing understanding broadly, when it really doesn't.

It's important, because the fertilizer for anti-science attitudes exploited by groups like climate denialists is a false impression of radical flip-flops in science conveyed by popular media which uses exaggerated contradiction to overplay the impact of stories and draw eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some people should stop pretending that biology is easy and straightforward. Growing faster means taller, not necessarily wider.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe it doesn't speed up cedar tree growth but it certainly affects algae and fern growth.

[http://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/as-a- co2-sequest...](http://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/as-a- co2-sequester/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Plants may grow more easily, also wildfires may burn more easily, areas may get more water, also areas may get less water. Areas may be hotter, but also areas may be colder. The specific results that humanity gets depends on the particular weather patterns that we end up with, which are very difficult to predict, and thus the future holds a great many studies and predictions, most of which will be wrong in their specific results.

This is a subject of interest to scientists, but not to the general public, because nothing being studied here changes the central message in the slightest, which is that we are undoubtedly headed for climate apocalypse and we are accelerating into it rather than decelerating.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well as far as Dan Britt's talk goes, trees haven't noticeably been adjusting for thousands of years.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM)

</comment><comment><USER17> Related: [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rising-co2-levels- might-...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rising-co2-levels-might-not-be- good-plants-we-thought)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also related: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/carbon-dioxides- boos...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/carbon-dioxides-boost-to- trees-may-not-offset-its-climate-impact/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Study means little as it takes a specific forest in Canada. We should probably look at Amazonian forests, California's redwoods, India's Vindhyas and Namibia's rainforests too.

<comment><USER19> The basics of photosynthesis are more or less identical across green plants. All the cool evolutionary shit has been going on in preserving water and capturing light, pointing at CO2 probably not being a limiting factor.

Even the one neat CO2 trick I remember was really a hack to preserve water: some desert plants have a mechanism to store a day's worth of CO2, allowing them to close pores and prevent evaporation.

Anyway, if you're looking for a counterexample, I'd switch environments altogether and try again in bacteria, algae, and maybe grasses. While I doubt there would be much of a difference to trees, the first two are at least a few degrees further away from them in the deity's org chart. All three categories also strike me as possibly being more relevant than trees in terms of total biomass, although that's just a hunch that may be completely wrong.

<comment><USER20> Different groups of green plants have significantly different photosynthetic cycles (notably C3, C4, and CAM) which respond very differently to changes in CO2 concentration. For C4 plants (about 3% of plants) the current CO2 concentration is at the point of saturation. C3 plants (85% of plant species, including most trees and grasses, and staple crops such as wheat) have rates of photosynthesis proportional to CO2 concentration to about 1000ppm or so. (The desert plants you mentioned use CAM cycle, but overall their contribution to CO2 consumption is small.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is the right amount of CO2 to have in the atmosphere scientifically speaking?

<comment><USER22> An amount similar to levels before human impact.

<comment><USER23> There have been times "before human impact" when atmospheric CO2 was _way_ higher than it is now, though. You'll have to be more specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Do plants in cities grow faster than plants in rural areas?

<comment><USER19> Cities tend to have more air pollution, but the difference in CO2 and O2 are neglible.

I once ran the numbers for O2, which is proportional, and it came out to roughly 10m of high in the atthmosphere. I. e. climb a tree in the countryside and you're at O2 pressure similar to a city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've heard this argument before from climate change deniers. From a laypersons point of view I wonder why would you assume more CO2 makes trees grow more? More oxygen doesn't make humans grow more, in fact it becomes toxic.

<comment><USER26> Trees are made of carbon, humans are not made of oxygen (humans are also made of carbon).

<comment><USER27> By mass, trees contain more oxygen than carbon. So do humans. Water is 89% oxygen by mass. Cellulose is 49% oxygen by mass. Dry wood contains a bit more carbon than oxygen, but living trees do not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The headline is clearly wrong. Maybe they should have said "current trees". The tree tech has already been invented to circumnavigate present restrictions in tree biological restrictions. Very clickbait-y.</comment>


Royal with Cheese: A King's Quest Primer - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/28/9023667/kings-quest-history <comment><USER2> This is a fine basic plot overview, but if you really want to get the full backstory of how the original King's Quest came to be, I recommend this piece from The Digital Antiquarian:

[http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmaking-and-remaking- of-s...](http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmaking-and-remaking-of-sierra-on- line/)

A note of warning - if you're of a certain age, be prepared to get sucked in. It's a massive trove of some of the best written and researched longform content on the history of PC gaming I've ever seen. Sierra, LucasArts, Infocom, Origin, Broderbund, Commodore, Atari... it's all there. Great stuff.

<comment><USER3> You're completely right. I started reading this on my commute and am thoroughly enjoying it. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I miss most about the old point and click adventure games, that is sorely lacking in modern video games is the humor.

Modern video games are so dark, and take themselves so seriously, it is just tiring.

<comment><USER5> LOL, point and click. More like press F3 and type LOOK UNDER THE BRIDGE

Oh, they were the good old days and to your point about humour, the responses from Space Quest to text commands it didn't understand were a perfect example: "Pardon me. This program is too stupid to glean your desire from such a wonderfully crafted sentence. Please try something else."

[http://spacequest.wikia.com/wiki/SQ3_transcript](http://spacequest.wikia.com/wiki/SQ3_transcript)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can play the 1983 King's Quest (in your browser!) here [https://archive.org/details/a2_King_Quest_1983_Sierra_Save](https://archive.org/details/a2_King_Quest_1983_Sierra_Save) Unfortunately they don't have the others (or at least they're not up and running yet).

<comment><USER7> You can get them all on GOG too, along with all the other Sierra classics:

[https://www.gog.com/mix/sierra_quest_games_1](https://www.gog.com/mix/sierra_quest_games_1)

[https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory](https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory)

<comment><USER8> Careful, I bought some and they were worse versions than I played. Can't recall the details, but I think KQ5 was not the CD version and KQ4 was the original graphics with some game ending bugs version too. Maybe GoG updated them since.

<comment><USER7> I've beaten KQ 1 through 4 from GOG, 4 definitely has some bugs and took several restarts - the whale sometimes didn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Like the hand painted textures. Good to see Sierra return. Hero's Quest next?

<comment><USER10> Do you mean the Quest for Glory series? The original designers having been working on a spiritual successor through Kickstarter: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/hero- u-r...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/hero-u-rogue-to- redemption)

I backed it, but it's been slow going, and they've already run out of money once (and rather controversially had a _second_ kickstarter to raise more money), so I'm not very optimistic. Video game projects seem to flounder on Kickstarter unless they've already got a decent playable demo made before they start raising money.

<comment><USER11> Hero's Quest was the original name, the EGA version of the first one was released under. Due to Sierra not trademarking it, the name had to be changed to Quest for Glory. 1 and 2 are still some of my favorite games of all time, if you haven't played the VGA port of 2 that was done by agd interactive I strongly recommend it.

<comment><USER10> Quest for Glory 4 was always my favorite of the series. I loved the darkness and lore of Mordavia, and had a huge crush on Katrina. 2 was the first one I played, but most of my memories of it involve dying, getting lost, and was there some time-based mechanism in that game? I feel like some of my failures were based on not getting to certain places by a certain time... I was only 10 years old, and some of those puzzles were pretty difficult.

I haven't replayed any of them since around the time 5 was released. I am definitely going to have to look up that remake.

<comment><USER12> I _loved_ QfG2. I even hand-made a map of the entire city and labelled where everything was. It made traversing the mirror city a lot easier. I also got really really quick at typing "ask about".

Fun game. That "Suleiman" answer later in the game was total bullshit though. I only learned that through one of those red-cellophane sierra hint books and never could figure out how you were supposed to know that.

It's been a _long_ time, but I think the time-based things might have just been a day/night cycle?

<comment><USER10> Oh man, I never had one of the red text hintbooks, but I do remember paying my parents back out of my allowance to call the 1-900 hint line a few times.

It's amazing some of the things that don't exist anymore in this modern world of internet and gamefaqs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I may have just skewed memories/expectations but the graphics in the earlier games are excellent compared to what I remember at the time. I'm thinking specifically of the screenshots of:

KQ5 (1990): [https://cdn1.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/OIoS9JrnCaaX60mJWfECdJjtVus...](https://cdn1.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/OIoS9JrnCaaX60mJWfECdJjtVus=/1000x0/filters:no_upscale\(\)/cdn0.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3900566/KingQuest5.0.jpg)

KQ6 (1992): [https://cdn2.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/kZopVZ3ZIoxfkmLrQXeKxlmiVto...](https://cdn2.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/kZopVZ3ZIoxfkmLrQXeKxlmiVto=/1000x0/filters:no_upscale\(\)/cdn0.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3900554/kq6_garden.0.png)

<comment><USER4> KQ5 also came in an EGA version, so you may have played one with significantly worse graphics than the 256 color screenshot you provided.

[http://scummvm.org/data/screenshots/sci/kq/kq5-ega-1-full.pn...](http://scummvm.org/data/screenshots/sci/kq/kq5-ega-1-full.png)

<comment><USER13> Ahhh gotcha. Still that EGA screenshot is pretty nice. I think it's running on an emulator that's applying some smoothing algorithm, but nevertheless I'm impressed

<comment><USER14> Not Sierra, but I accidentally bought the EGA version of Monkey Island despite having a VGA card (I didn't realise there were separate versions and only saw the sticker on the side when I got home), but they did a really nice job on the EGA version: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0BX6n1CUAARP_S.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0BX6n1CUAARP_S.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Definitely brought back memories to see that Sierra loading screen at the beginning of one of the play-through clips. I spent an embarrassing number of hours playing Lords of the Realm 2 and Civil War Generals on my first PC. Also Half-Life, which I believe Sierra published.

Damn, I would love to see Civil War Generals on GoG...</comment>


RSA protests by DEF CON organizations, Code Pink draw ire - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57619614-83/rsa-protests-by-def-con-groups-code-pink-draw-ire/ <comment><USER2> > Juniper says pulling out of a conference out of protest is "first world > outrage." #RSAC

Ugh. Considering Juniper has been one of the router makers named in the leaks from NSA for having backdoors, comments like that just makes them seem more complicit. If I were them I probably wouldn't try to sound like I'm on NSA's side in moments like these.

RSA itself seems to be even worse at this. Just look who they're allowing to crash the party:

[https://twitter.com/HackingDave/status/438434358311919616](https://twitter.com/HackingDave/status/438434358311919616)

<comment><USER3> The guy came off as somewhat of a twat based on that. OK, people are dying in Africa. Does that make NSA spying ok?

He ended a little better by making the point that we should be doing more than just talking, we should be building technical defenses against such things as NSA spying. It's a reasonable point, but I think he was just trying to be edgy in his talk.

<comment><USER4> If the NSA put their resources towards educating and empowering third world children instead of perpetuating their oppression and spying on them, they could easily fund and equip the "One Supercomputer Per Child" project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Loved the anecdote about Kevin Mitnick getting turned away from Chevy's. I hope he's doing some serious sleeper cell business or something, I've still got a few Free Kevin stickers in a closet.

<comment><USER6> There was a long time when we made 'Put Kevin Back' stickers because despite his public proselytizing he is really a media-loving fool with minimal actual skill.

But mostly, we did it as a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, so _THAT 's_ what all that was about! What wondering why all the RSA backpacks & badges were floating about.

I walked past that chevy's today; they gave me this: [http://i.imgur.com/7gEk58c.png](http://i.imgur.com/7gEk58c.png)

</comment><comment><USER8> Amazing how grown-ups can de-evolve so quickly to middle schoolers. "Seriously, like o.m.g. did you ___hear_ __that kevin got turned away by hackajar at that party??? "

Don't get me wrong - I'm on the same page as everyone about a lot of this stuff, but gods be damned, the infosec/hacker community can be so childish sometimes.

<comment><USER9> Turning Kevin away makes no sense at all.

<comment><USER10> They're turning away everyone who doesn't have the appropriate badge. See [https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/buyout-chevys-during- rsa...](https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/buyout-chevys-during-rsa- conference) \- "Who: Only BSidesSF, TrustyCon and "Expo Only" RSA Badge holders will be allowed in to eat".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I passed the Chevy's in question today and I thought the sign read "Free lunch for RSA attendees".

Weird.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was a volunteer for the organization that was passing out the badge ribbons, and we got through a box of 1000 ribbons pretty quickly. Only got yelled at by one rsa guy. Everyone else was pretty receptive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Keeping people out of a Chevy's is a mitzveh.</comment>


The Gospel According to Peter Thiel - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/peter-thiel <comment><USER2> I have a difficult relationship with Thiel. On the one hand, it is hard not to agree with some the quotes found in his Zero to One book ( "the most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself" ).

On the other, Palantir, based on what we know about it, is the embodiment of what I do not want in society. I am not sure I am happy what he did with Gawker debacle.

In other words, I am kinda interested in his gospel, but I am not sure I like what that gospel results in.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Gawker situation was crazy and vindictive, he not only bankrupted the company but many of the employees personally.

<comment><USER4> And yet, Gawker was not a positive force by any stretch. Its hard to reconsile two vile things when they seem to have worked out for the greater good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The ideas presented in this article, such as universities being bad, align closely with right-wing anti-intellectualism.

There's nothing about university education that turns you into a submissive drone as the article suggests. It's just thinly-veiled anti-education, perhaps even fascism. Heck, Thiel seems to want to run a floating city - perhaps with himself as the dictator (the article doesn't say).

Thiel is just another "I've got mine, fuck you" billionaire who doesn't want to give scraps to the little people. The ideas are being fluffed up as enlightened, but all I see here is someone paying for followers/disciples/high risk high reward investment opportunities. It's easy to come up with radical experiments when you've got billions in the bank to cushion the failures.

Unlike someone like Bill Gates who is trying to improve the state of the world, Peter Thiel sees it as his playground to poke and mess with.

As a benefactor of two degrees from a top-ranked university and the whitest- of-the-white privilege career path of _Hedge Fund Manager_ , along with a perfectly timed startup with no chance of replication if it were attempted just 10 years earlier or 10 years later, I have to believe and assume that many of Thiel's libertarian ideals are based on hypocrisy and willful ignorance. Change just one input variable and he would not be a billionaire. If he were not so fabulously lucky he would be just another one of the conformist worker drones he abhors.

I'd like to think that we can see through this ruse - in reality, he's just a wealthy guy who thinks he deserves his status, that it was 100% earned, which in turn validates a bunch of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. After all, only an incredibly enlightened smart person with "good genes" could be so wealthy and successful in the eyes of much of the self-unaware rich. [1]

[1] [https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-18043-001](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-18043-001)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thiel is against women having the right to vote because he doesn't like who they vote for. Knowing this makes Thiel fans angry, because they worship wealth.

<comment><USER7> [https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1054898254649802752?la...](https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1054898254649802752?lang=en)

<comment><USER5> I don't think the full context makes him look much better.

I don't know how one argues that the full quote isn't making the argument that women's suffrage was a net negative.

As we learned from people like Donald Trump, you don't have to directly say sexist/racist things to be sexist/racist.

Not only that, the idea being presented is completely unsubstantiated. It's just lumping women into a group based on their possession of ovaries.</comment></comment></comment>


Ash HN: am I wrong thinking that ip v6 is the solution to Netflix ban on VPNs? - <AUTHOR> My understanding is that Netflix mostly detect VPNs by flagging ips being used by multipe accounts at the same time.
I also know that some (expansive) VPNs are still working with Netflix by proving a unique ip for each client, solving that issue.
The problem is, with the shortage of available ip v4, they've become quite expensive and no VPN can provide you a unique ip in each country. Most of them provide you a unique US ip and some a unique UK ip and that's pretty much it.
With the virtual infinity of ip v6,  wouldn't that be cheaper to provide unique ip adresses in all countries and make it nearly impossible for Netflix to flag it? <comment><USER2> Who IP address ranges are given to is not any secret (arin, ripe and so on had databases on this) and there is nothing special to block a block of IPs instead of just one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, in that case, how are those VPNs still working right now with dedicated ips manage to hide from Netflix?

<comment><USER3> they use unpopular dedicated hosts that netflix hasnt blocked yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think that's the only way they flag VPNs. If that was the case, student accommodations, hotels, offices and the like would be flagged pretty quickly.

I do believe one of the things they check is if the IP address belongs to a datacenter range (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCE, OVH, etc) or to an ISP providing Internet access. It is just the opposite of what some anti-spam RBLs do :)

<comment><AUTHOR> All right, we'll see how it goes in the next couple of years.</comment></comment>


Agile Anti-Patterns in Non-Blocking Development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sprint.ly/post/43576389119/agile-anti-patterns-in-non-blocking-development <comment><USER2> You can't ship process but here's my process... :-)

People don't really understand what process means.

To the point: people over process still applies today just as well as it applied when the manifesto was written. You can suck the life out of your team by forcing them to do things they don't believe make sense (and probably don't make sense).

Face to face is important. Different time zones? Find the right time of day. Use Hangouts or Skype. There are obviously many other complementary communication tools.

Individuals have always been asynchronous but collaboration helps get the best out of people. It's a mix. The Agile manifesto doesn't say be in each other's face all day and don't let anyone get any work done...

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of an old essay by Steve Yegge about Agile: [http://steve- yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Both the quotes from the article are hilariously vacuous: "You can't ship process." and "You have to be agile in your approach to agile."

<comment><USER5> The latter is perhaps overly condensed, but there seem to be folks who never progress beyond a dogmatic phase of applying agile techniques. I.e. using feedback to apply the correct tools to the problem instead of forcing a static approach to the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > At Sprint.ly we're big fans of shipping.

Who isn't? "Yeah, shipping? Not really that in to it."

</comment><comment><USER7> When I clicked on that title, I honestly expected a parody.</comment>


The 3DO: The birth of my cynicism - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20171218/311849/The_3DO_The_birth_of_my_cynicism.php <comment><USER2> I don't quite follow the point the author is trying to make. He had an experience where something he paid a bunch for turned out to be nearly worthless, so now he hates all video games? But not really, he just doesn't like the industry?

It sounds to me like he is just cynical in general. I am mid-thirties, have been playing video games since the 80s, and still love them with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid.

Sure, I play a lot less. I don't have nearly as much time, with a full time job, a wife, and a kid. It is still my go-to free time activity, though.

My buddies, married with children themselves, and I play together online one night a week. It is our way of maintaining our social bond through families and living far apart. We are closer because of games than we would ever be otherwise.

<comment><USER3> I bought loads of silly machines over the years - CD32, CDTV, CDi, 3DO, Jaguar...

It feels a little bit like we are in a little golden age of video games.

I've just finished up BotW (amazing), maybe 50% through Mario Odyssey (amazing again), I've got Rayman Legends to play through and Splatoon 2 to get stuck into, in between the odd game of Rocket League. That's just on the Switch!

On the PC I've got countless games I've bought for next to nothing in steam sales to find time for, Cuphead, Just Cause 3, Metro, Wolfenstein to finish and highly acclaimed indy titles galore...

Then I have tons of retro games I'm eager to play for the first time, or play through again, easily accessed and for next to nothing.

My biggest complaint is also the lack of time I have to digest it all.

<comment><USER4> Is it a golden age, or do games get generally better as technology improves? They are bigger, smoother, more complex, better connected, and so on. That's why I don't quite follow this article either. Games are _objectively_ better. Perhaps he doesn't find them as fun or as engaging, but that's less to do with the games and more to do with the person.

That and the DS/3DS is probably the richest game console to date in terms of sheer volume of quality content. If you can't find a game you like on the DS, you might not like games.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi This is highly subjective so probably some people will strongly disagree, but I do think there have been significantly better and worse "ages" in videogames. It's not been constant progress.

For example, I'd say 1999-2005 was a quite crappy age. Dominant consoles were Playstation 1 and 2, the first XBox and the Game Cube, which of course had some fine outlier games but nothing compared to the mind-blowing catalogs of e.g. the SNES or the Neo Geo, which were brimming with gems, many of them are still widely considered among the best games of all time.

In the PC, after breakthrough games in the previous years like Daggerfall, Quake, Master of Magic, Doom, Civ II, Ultima Underworld, Fallout, Warcraft, Starcraft, GTA, etc., most of what dominated the market in that decadence period were sequels of those and others, and unoriginal games.

This opinion is not just due to my being a cranky old timer wanting people to get off his lawn. I do think the situation improved a lot from 2006 onwards. Team Fortress II, the Wii, Portal, Minecraft... were truly revolutionary concepts in the late 2000s in different ways, and indie games began to flourish with titles like World of Goo or Braid (or said Minecraft). Fast forward to now, and we have the Switch, Pokémon Go (geolocation games), and a blooming indie universe. I do think we are at a golden age, it would be a great time to be 15 again and have lots of time for videogames.

<comment><USER5> I find that statements like this serve only to reflect the writer's nostalgia.

The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single game coming out today.

<comment><USER6> And perhaps it's fueled by nostalgia, but games like Super Mario 64 and Final Fantasy VII are still acclaimed today despite their aged tech and the creation of better successors. And in some ways they are timeless, in the same ways NES or Atari classics are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo-Geo, and WebOS and other assorted platform failures along with the successes of OSX, Android, iOS, Xbox, psx, and nintendo left a strong imprint on why and how I develop software platforms. I learned you can't just promise radical new opportunities, you have to have them ready and usable on launch day. This allows users to buy in on day one and be generally happy. Then this motivates third party developers which then snowballs into more users and then the platform achieves takeoff velocity.

Ultimately all successful platforms are a collective ecosystem experience, but they start just between the user and the first party developer.

Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO, promising lots of new expertise's but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.

<comment><USER8> > promising lots of new expertise's but demonstrating little to no day-one > practicality.

That exactly describes why I can't stand the MVP trend.

<comment><USER9> The V is for viable, but too many people seem to never get past the M.

<comment><USER8> Oh no, they totally get the minimal part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sort of story just happened en masse with Destiny 2 players. The game ($60) as a social multiplayer space kind of hit a dead end after everyone beat the campaign, with further milquetoast content gated behind DLC and loot boxes (all paid of course)

The whole thing of children being socially incentivized to invest huge amounts of money in devices that might fail for fear they'll be out of the loop with children slightly richer than them is a huge bummer. This problem doesn't really exist for TV, movies, books, and card and board games. I'm starting to wonder if PC and mobile gaming really should win out against Nintendo and Sony, morally...

Another good personal story about how we interface with videogame: [https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision...](https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision- to-get-rid-of-my-past)

<comment><USER4> There was a time when card games were about how much money you had rather than how good you were. Many games have introduced rotation, which has helped, but it's still an ongoing investment in the game and it's still a few hundred just to be competitive on Magic night at your local shop. But they did find the balance point that seems fair. I think video games haven't found that yet.

I'm really torn on DLC, game expansions and the like. On one hand, $60 for a new game every year is lots when I could spend $25 on a game I already enjoy. But on the other, it's an excuse to limit content up front in order to milk users. I think it's a matter of perception and companies that find a fair balance will be successful.

<comment><USER11> Continuously buying booster packs is only a problem only with games like Magic.

There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion now and again. And the vast majority of board games don't require constant investment.

<comment><USER12> I bought Dropmix for my niece for Christmas. It's an NFC-based card game made by Harmonix and Hasbro. It's actually an interesting music mixing game that works really well... but..

While it comes with 60 cards, the biggest criticism that I've seen about the game is how expensive the booster kits are and how they are packaged. To get all aspects of a song, you may have to buy multiple booster packs. I get that the song rights are built into the cost, but they cost as much or more than individual songs do off iTunes, and one card usually has only one part of a song (i.e. vocals, guitar, percussion, etc).

<comment><USER11> I was thinking more like Arkham Horror, or Android: NetRunner.

Not to be gender normative, but that probably doesn't help you.

<comment><USER4> With netrunner I'm not continually buying packs, but rather data sets and expansions. Plus with rotation I need to keep that up. There's no randomness, but there is ongoing cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not just well written, it's actually quite ballsy too as I am currently acknowledging to myself how I would never ever have the courage to come clean and come up with a blog post explaining how I bought the Atari Jaguar in the 90s, and ended up basically in the same situation.

</comment><comment><USER14> > It really is kind of irresponsible and sort of dumb in a way to buy a > console really early in its lifespan. But maybe that's what it is to like > things. Being a little bit dumb - believing in something, even when maybe > you know you shouldn't.

So true.

</comment><comment><USER15> The author shows us how he felt, and tells us "this is what it's like to like things."

But that doesn't seem right at all. I like reading books, and I like watching some shows and playing video games. I'm not invested in _owning_ them, or in the community experience of watching what everyone else recently has. This is what it's like to define your identity by what you own and by what you participate in. Like a Cubs fan, maybe—you can do that, and you can care about winning, and you can care about having popular opinions, but maybe you should pick one of those three.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reading the title I though it would be talking about 3D0, the team behind Heroes of Might and Magic, and how they screw up the HOMM3 steam remake because they lost the source code.

I could have related since it's one of my favorite game ever :)

</comment><comment><USER17> On the other end of this emotional spectrum I have always loved watching games evolve with me and what you think is now the best is kids stuff compared to what comes next. Mortal kombat and doom enraged parents at the time and now the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in the 80s. Part software evolution and part hardware coming together each year to push the envelope, more sprites, more triangles more pixels more frames. I can afford whatever system I want now but when I was a kid a 180$ sega was like winning the lottery.

<comment><USER18> > now the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in > the 80s

It _has_ blown away people who got started on '80s hardware. In particular, I'm pretty sure that Jeff Minter has made comments specifically saying how amazed he was at the sheer per-pixel computational power on the Xbox 360.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember a time when the only way to play video games on my computer was, if I programmed them myself. Like, there literally wasn't any other way .. the system I'd chosen to hang my chops on (Oric-1/Atmos) wasn't that well supported by the nascent industry at the time, and so .. it was either write my own shit, or forget about it.

So, I grew up a coder.

While, in the meantime, my C64- and Amiga- using friends, with all their amazing software choices, didn't have to do anything but consume, consume, consume. And, eventually, "upgrade to a Nintendo" for their gaming needs.

See kids, this is what happens when you ship computers that no longer have development tools/compilers/REPL's onboard!

Seriously though, I think the "3DO Moment" for me was when I realised I always preferred to spend time with computers if there was a compiler onboard, or some other way to build software for the thing. Anything less is just a door opener.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some video games are great. Video game culture is... not great. I think this guy is upset with the culture and companies in gaming rather than the games themselves. Surprised he didn't say anything about loot boxes.

<comment><USER10> He did say that many games are great on their own. But isn't it an inherent feature of console gaming itself, that young people need to invest tons of money to keep up with their peers, taking on the potential risk of the console's failure?

<comment><USER21> So, I think there's a couple ways to look at it.

If you have (nearby) friends who play, and you're dealing with physical games; if you get a console around when they do, you can share newer games and reduce the risk of buying terrible games at full price. You'll probably buy some of the great games at full price so you can do multiplayer games though.

If you don't hang out with people who play, you can just buy a year late, and get the benefit of lower prices, more finished games, and a clear indication of what's cool and what isn't. You might miss out on online features/community, but that really depends.

Was it stupid to buy the 3DO for $700? Probably. But, it wasn't much more than the Neo Geo home console, and the games were probably cheaper?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Was just reading about the 3DO because I was gonna write an emulator. Wikipedia and others point to steep price tag, the spec-only-third-party hardware approach, and that they didn't collect many royalties from the games as the reasons for the downfall of the 3DO. But as I looked around and read, it seemed they were super proud and stingy with the tech (expensive devkits iirc), and the tech was about 2 years too early and just a bit before the 3D revolution that came with 5th gen consoles.

<comment><USER23> There's just no getting around the price. It was (inflation adjusted) $1200 plus games.

Remember when gamers were upset the PS3 was $600 even though it was also a Blu-ray player? Remember when the Xbox One tripped out of the gate because it was $500 and not $400 like the PS4?

$1200.

There were other mistakes. You're right development was expensive. It wasn't as powerful as the PS and Saturn that came later much cheaper (the Saturn was also considered too expensive at $400... which was $300 less than the 3DO). They didn't have pre-built franchises to lean on like Mario or Sonic.

But MAN was it expensive.

<comment><USER12> It didn't have Mario or Sonic, but looking back, you could argue that it laid the foundation of next generation of EA (like 'em or hate 'em) titles.

FIFA and Road Rash were vastly better on the 3DO than they were on 16 bit machines at the time. I remember being in awe of how great FIFA was on the 3DO, and the 3DO version of Road Rash was easily my favorite version of that game.

If I'm not mistaken, Need for Speed was first introduced on the 3DO. I remember there being quite a few good games on 3DO (mostly from EA and Crystal Dynamics), including what might have been the closest thing to an arcade version of Super Street Fighter 2 turbo.

But yeah, the 3DO was ridiculously expensive. Having said that, so was the Neo Geo home console. I had a few friends who were really into the SNK 2d fighting games at the time, and they'd be plunking well over $100 per cartridge.

<comment><USER23> It was affectively EA's console, they tried to support it well. And it was obviously WAY more powerful than the 16 bit machines.

NeoGeo at least had an argument, it was literally an arcade board you could buy at home. To the group of gamers who wanted that stuff there was a strong reason for it to exist and an explanation for its cost.

If they had gotten a couple of killer titles maybe it could've done better. Or if the price had fallen faster before the system was declared "dead" by the public. But by the time that happened it was just too late.

$700 was three SNESes and a game or two at the SNES launch price. But this was three years later so you could probably buy a few more games.

It was just an obscene amount of money, especially for what was still considered a "kids toy" until more into the PS2 and XBox.

<comment><USER12> IIRC, I grabbed the 3DO in 1995 for around $500 CAD (and the dollar was weak against the USD at that point). This was just prior to the North American release of the Saturn and PS1. It's been so long but I think I got a Japanese import of the PS1 prior the North American release for about the same money a month or two after getting the 3DO. At the time, a friend and I had opened up a video game shop, and until the PS1 releases really started ramping up, the 3DO games were actually pretty popular with the kids who came into our store.

<comment><USER23> I remember seeing them in stores before and after the PlayStation came out. I was always kind of interested in it and liked playing with Gex some of the other games, but it was totally academic because I knew that even after price drops ($500, or $400) it was never going to happen for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For $750 bucks you did get an arguably perfect version of SF2 Super Turbo. For my friends and I that was amazing.

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be interesting if this could be quantified into a hard number- the damage hype does to the overall market, by disillusioning players.Seems marketing is not a victimless crime after all.</comment>


Ask HN: best way to get $10k in 2mths? - <AUTHOR>

Throwaway acct for obvious reasons; been on HN for a while now.
Been trudging along on a startup for a few mths, (still in development).  Long story short; got into startup chile but from all accounts, I'll need 10k to fully access the 40k allowance (because it is given as reimbursement after the fact).  Prob is, I'm dead broke with no other job or any savings left.  I've been trying to think of the most efficient way to raise $$ but my mind keeps freezing with panic.  I've tried finding short term contracts unsuccessfully.  All I've come up with is working at retail stores for the holidays which wouldn't make enough.  I'm of business background and although I can do basic web dev for my startup, (+worked in non-web IT firm before) I'm not a developer.
I'd appreciate any suggestions. <comment><USER2> Friends and family loan? If I were in your shoes, I'd talk to my gainfully employed brother or that uncle who once told me that living abroad was the most important thing he ever did and that I had options if the scholarship fell through (it didn't).

Assuming you're a middle class American, many people you know have $10k sitting around somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'm trying to structure how to approach F&F circle without burning bridges. Because although I'm optimistic about my startup, I know it could go either way (up/down) or at least take longer than expected to bloom, so I don't want to falsely promise "I will repay by X date".

Also, anyone whom I think may have close to 10k is probably in terms of assets (eg house), not sitting in accts, plus they have expenses (mortgage, family, etc).

<comment><USER3> I think you're underestimating the ability to raise money from F&F.

First, I'm sure you have friends with lots of cash, but the beauty is that you don't need 10k from one person -- You could get 1k from 10 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2 credit cards with 5k limit each.

Do you own any other assets. Car etc, sell those. Even random stuff around your house can probably raise a few thousand.

<comment><AUTHOR> No assets (like car/house) to speak of. Getting rid of old laptop and few things but expecting only few hundred dollars back.

I've thought about credit cards but assumed I couldn't get them because I have no official income?

<comment><USER5> I'm probably going to get downvoted here, but they usually do not verify income (or anything really) for credit card applications in the US.

(As a college student I just used my parents' incomes, using a broad interpretation of "household income")

<comment><USER6> Nope. This is good advice. Although some have become aware of this in the last year or so and started cracking down in it requiring verification after approval. I learned everything about this from reading the forums at <http://www.creditboards.com>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might sound crazy but could you come up with a way to ask for the money on kickstarter.com and repay everyone with interest as soon as you get the allowance? I'm not sure how your allowance works or how fast the turn around but you would only need 500 people to spare 20 bucks.</comment>


Moving away from GitFlow - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NiklasGray/20170927/306445/Moving_away_from_GitFlow.php <comment><USER2> "No shared view of the product. Since everyone is working on a long feature branch of their own, there is no consensus view of the state of the product. Managers can't look at it and get a feeling for what is going on. Features get no "free" QA testing from other developers, because only the developer working on that branch will see them. It is only when everything is integrated (in a scramble, just before the release) that the true status of the product is known."

This "free" QA testing is NOT free. It is in fact what branching is _meant_ to remove. You don't want to mix your dev's development and integration work, they are completely different processes.

What you need is your QA team(or your devs with their QA hats on) actively merging all "ready" branches into an "integration" branch and testing that. You need people to be able to signal "yeah, my branch is stable enough to be merged for integration testing" or "no, don't merge my broken branch that I'm still working on, you'll just waste your time". Incidentally, that's what a pull request is.

The integration branch is mentioned in gitflow but not really expanded upon. I agree with the author that the way they present master/develop, there's not much benefit to develop. However, you need a branch where you're continuously integrating(cough).

This is "extra work" that you need to do, but there's no way around it. You can "do it for free", essentially forcing every dev to be a QA at the worst possible time, disrupting their own workflow, or you can separate it as its own workflow. Whatever works for your team.

<comment><USER3> I read Gitflow differently. Feature branches should be merged to develop as soon as possible. This lets others integrate the changes into their features, current and future, and build upon it instead of having a single multimerge from hell later. [0]

Release branches are where you do integration testing of all the merged features. If you have fixes, you merge them into the release branch. Then, once it's OK'd for release, you merge those patches down to develop. Note that this is also exactly how hotfixes work, as they're just a different type of release.

[0] And yes, you will find bugs in other people's code... I don't think anyone is claiming that _source control processes_ can fix that. And if they are, I will call them a silly goose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant article: [http://endoflineblog.com/gitflow-considered- harmful](http://endoflineblog.com/gitflow-considered-harmful)

In particular, this rings true to every complex source control process I've used that isn't actually enforced with software:

 _You could of course say that all of these mistakes are the result of human error, and if the same people just read the documentation and learned from their experiences, everything would be fine. But I have seen these mistakes being made so many times, by otherwise competent developers, that I don 't buy this argument. There's a saying I love: "If one person tells you you have a tail, ignore them; if a hundred people tell you that, look behind you". If these mistakes happen over and over again (and I can confirm based on my experience that they do), made by different people in different circumstances, then there's no rational alternative to admitting there has to be something fundamentally flawed about the method being used._

</comment><comment><USER5> PRs on my team are done at the request of the author, who maintains full responsibility for the code. When review is complete, the author merges when they are ready (they have full access rights). The author has the right to ignore whatever feedback they want, since they will share the burden of whatever bugs are introduced. However, merging bugs knowingly and/or ignoring feedback is frowned upon.

Reviewers are expected to provide whatever type of review the author requests, including manual testing and review of system impacts. Their comments do not require a response from the author, unless they ask questions. It is frowned upon to comment too much on code formatting.

In practice, our developers submit PRs for just about everything. Most PRs are small, and most feedback is addressed. Reviewers are thanked and given kudos for finding issues. Knowledge is shared, and the codebase is improved. I'd estimate that 90% of our bugs are caught in review.

Product quality has improved drastically since we implemented this practice. Developers consistently state that our PR process is their favorite part of the job. They get to share their work, get feedback, and become better developers.

<comment><USER6> > It is frowned upon to comment too much on code formatting.

Do you have standards for those though? Like gofmt, prettier, ide formatting configs, etc? I and many others can be rather ocd about maintaining a consistent code style, although I will admit that it's far too easy to focus on that in code reviews (low-hanging fruit). Which is why it should be automatically enforced by tooling so it isn't a distraction during reviews.

<comment><USER5> > Do you have standards for those though?

Yes, we try to follow industry standards for code formatting as much as possible, but we also try not to be too picky about formatting if it doesn't meet those standards exactly. Usually authors will make the same formatting mistakes multiple times, so rather than comment on each and every badly formatted line, we try to comment on the type of mistake once and note that there are other instances in the same PR.

I agree that auto-formatting is the way to go. The big thing holding us back from using those tools is that we'd first need to reformat the existing code, otherwise the we'd wind up with a lot of unrelated formatting changes in our PRs (assuming that whole files are formatted when saved, rather than just new lines). Certainly not an impossible feat, just something we haven't done yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Basically they took the easy way out of just pushing code to the master and letting the consumers worry about consequences instead of fixing the actual problem (which was long living branches caused by other underlying issues with general processes). Not really a huge fan of that.

<comment><USER8> Nothing prevents you from having a constantly synced "master" branch and a carefully curated "release" branch. Nothing, except the effort required for curating.

But between that and the pain of having several long-running parallel dev branches that tend to diverge, cross-pollinate in weird ways, have hard time merging to the production branch, etc, my choice is obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand how any of the problems mentioned are related to git flow (or even to feature branches, which is what they're really complaining about)

And I don't see how they're any better off all committing to master

eg

> Merge problems become hairier and hairier. With everybody working on a long- > lived branch, there will be multiple conflicts once they eventually merge. > Large scale refactors are discouraged because they will "break everybody's > branches".

How is that different if everyone commits to master? As soon soon as someone does a large-scale refactor you'll break everyone's "master" and have merge conflicts. It's no different.

Their real problem is not knowing how to manage a team of developers, making huge PRs etc etc

<comment><USER6> The secret there is to not do large-scale refactors, but break them up into smaller units of work. The author also mentions that big changes happen behind feature flags, to enable parallel development.

<comment><USER10> Feature toggles work great most of the time. But it's kind of hard to put a feature toggle on a refactoring. Sometimes the new features involve refactoring shared code that was otherwise stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Skipping code reviews for faster pushes to "trunk" does not sound like a stable solution. Why not just encourage faster reviews and smaller diffs..

<comment><USER12> As explained in the article: Because experimentally, "smaller diffs" cause people to nitpick on pointless things like whitespace instead of performance, features, and future-proofing the architecture (i.e. the fucking point).

<comment><USER11> This means code review process is completely wrong. All these "nitpicks" should be automated by linters and code review should be more about implementation, structure, performance, etc..

<comment><USER12> Yes, it does mean that code review is completely wrong.

If you read the article, they suggest strongly that it is hard to get a "correct" code review process (perhaps because it encourages the nitpickers, or perhaps for other reasons).

If you've got a bunch of experienced people spending a year on it that can't solve it, perhaps they just can't solve it.

And at that point: What's the difference between something that's wrong, and something that they can't do right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gitflow makes sense if you have long release cycles and want to backport bug fixes to a stable release.

If you are deploying code multiple times a day then it only results in a bunch of meaningless merge commits

</comment><comment><USER14> I use gitflow because it helps split up my development work from others on my team that need a code base that Just Works (tm). I want them to be able to checkout master and have no issues. From this point of view, my colleagues are also my customers, and I use master as a release branch - this is beyond all else, most important for me.

Further, it makes sense to have separate 'feature' branches coming off of develop that can be experimental in nature and scrapped at any time instead of rewinding the develop history to a stable point.

EDIT: I mean to split it up for my colleagues because they are not in primarily code-related functions and don't need to be editing the source.

</comment><comment><USER15> You get the feeling that they don't even work on the same project, just a bunch of files in a repository. And supposedly they are a small shop.

They have huge organizational problems.

Relevant link, Conway's law

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

<comment><USER16> > And supposedly they are a small shop.

They were a small shop and they are now part of Autodesk. Autodesk is a big shop. Hence problems. Hence article.

Edit: they _were_ a small shop and then _were_ aquired by Autodesk (they have since moved on).

<comment><USER17> No they left Autodesk and are running a company called Our Machinery.

[http://ourmachinery.com](http://ourmachinery.com)

<comment><USER16> I read the article as "these are the lessons we learned in 2014 at BitSquid/Autodesk and we apply them now at OM for the same reasons".

Updated my previous post: should be past tense in both cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We tried GitFlow for a while but it became hell on Earth to manage it. So we came to this alternative, which is way simpler and is working like a charm. I've made a post about how to implement and use it here: [https://hackernoon.com/still-using-gitflow-what-about-a- simp...](https://hackernoon.com/still-using-gitflow-what-about-a-simpler- alternative-74aa9a46b9a3)

</comment><comment><USER19> My belief is that it's long-lived branches that are the problem, since trying to keep diverging code-bases in synch is a huge source of pain. Switching to branchless development is probably an overreaction, though.

<comment><USER20> I'm no proponent of long-lived branches, as such, but isn't holding branches like that in synch that exactly what `git rebase` is for?

It's all product specific, naturally, but I've had occasions where isolated multi-month branches made sense... They got rebased before merging, though, so all refactoring and merging pain was taken on the side of the divergent branch and the post-squash post-merge history was really clean. Even major code-base wide refactorings should be trivial to incorporate as long as you're not working at distinct cross-purposes with other people (which is a planning issue).

It sounds like encouraging regular rebasing of diverging branches would be the solution here.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but that's work that people have to remember to keep doing, and if they fall behind, the pain gets worse and worse when they do finally have to merge. Some teams seem to do fine with this, but I've seen it go pretty badly, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So... It seems like, from the list of grievances, all they really needed to do was get rid of pull requests and just allow people to merge. I never understood pull requests vs merges to be a required part of Gitflow. Atlassian seems to agree with me:

[https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing- workflows#...](https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing- workflows#gitflow-workflow)

"After adding a few commits, Mary decides her feature is ready. If her team is using pull requests, this would be an appropriate time to open one asking to merge her feature into develop. Otherwise, she can merge it into her local develop and push it to the central repository..."

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand how people find GitFlow to be complex or slows them down. If feature branch is long lasting just merge regularly from develop branch so you don't end up with a tough merge when the feature is finished. Apart from that, just trust your devs. People are not stupid, gitflow process is sane and simple, nobody will start pushing to master like crazy if you allow merges without pull reviews. If you dont trust the devs to do the simple tasks right, do you trust anybody in your organisation? Do you check every step/change your devops/sysadmin/dbadmin make?

<comment><USER22> The problem with GitFlow is that it takes a fairly common and sane master+feature/bugfix-branches approach and makes it needlessly complicated with the whole develop+master branch split and some dubious recommendations like 'git merge --no-ff myfeature'.

<comment><USER23> But preserving merge commits isn't a dubious recommendation, it's just about creating a consistent history. One could consider it a stylistic choice but, at least for me, it does make the history more readable.

<comment><USER20> Combined with squashing and rebasing git flow leaves a very nice history... I can imagine if you're slamming a bunch of uncurated commit messages along with lots of merges you're gonna see a chaotic history.

A consistent history is a must-have with a distributed team, IMO. GitFlow's tooling is nice in that context to enforce consistent operations across environments and teams where not everyone is 100% perfect with Git.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _No code review needs to be passed before pushing to trunk. It is the > responsibility of the developer to write good code._

Yowsa! This sounds like developers who get code reviews write bad code…

<comment><USER25> The first job I ever had, I had brutal code reviews from a great developer. I never enjoyed them, but appreciate them now.

I haven't had code reviews since, until my new job. Where every PR is supposed to be code reviewed. I really enjoy the idea that someone will find problems in my code and suggest better ways to do it so I can further develop my skills. I also spend lots of time coaching junior developers, and like that I can review their PR's to see if my coaching is helping, or if they still need help with concepts.

Writing solid code bases without code reviews seems like a fantasy. Deferring code reviews until a huge new branch is complete and expecting a busy engineer to review the whole thing, and then suggest improvements, and have the original developer then decide to rewrite the entire branch to incorporate them, also seems like a fantasy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's this thing I say sometimes... "Which kneecap would you like to get shot in".

Gitflow vs trunk-style is a kneecap kind of decision.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if solution to `PR commentary is lost.` would be simply to dump all the information created during code-review into some metadata in the commit itself. We also have this problem at RhodeCode that basically code-review in pull request puts lots of valuable information into the code review tool rather then the source code itself.

Interesting idea to try out for us

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting article. There's really no best way to do this and it depends on the project and team in my opinion. How big is the team? How experienced is the team? How likely is it developers working on separate features are going to cause merge conflicts? How painful are merges? How big an impact is it if a bug gets on to production?

</comment><comment><USER29> To me using feature flags for what are effectively branches just feels wrong.

<comment><USER30> Wile I disagree with skipping the code reviews, one main advantage of the feature flag part of the strategy is you don't have to constantly rebase and your code goes through a production ready code review. Feature flags may not feel right, but they minimize risk spectacularly, which is the ultimate goal that any solution should put first. The use of the word "feature" is misleading to me and makes it sound like they should be used for new features only and not changes or rewrites of brittle code.

<comment><USER31> Plus the whole feature flag "solutions" and "tooling" people complain about is wrong. Once that you are forced to put your (small) changes to production all the time, you will start thinking about backwards compatibility in a whole new way.

It's not about feature flags, it's about shipping constantly and knowing after each step if you've made a mistake or not.

To me personally, this method is a huge pill against headaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another Best Practice becomes "Hell On Earth", film at 11</comment>


The Flawed Terms in VC Deals - <AUTHOR> http://babblingvc.typepad.com/pjozefak/2009/08/the-flawed-terms-in-vc-deals.html <comment><USER2> For those that don't know what a drag along clause is: <http://www.investorwords.com/6495/drag_along_right.html>

<comment><USER3> "A right that allows majority shareholders to force minority shareholders to accept an agreement"

I don't understand. Wouldn't the majority be able to force a decision regardless of whether they have this clause or not?

<comment><USER4> It's generally applied where a 2/3/supermajority would normally be required for approval of organization-altering decisions -- a drag along allows a simple majority to force approval.

The concept is taken from partnership law, where dissolution can be forced upon all partners even if only a handful of partners vote for it -- the partnership assets are liquidated and the proceeds distributed.

A drag along basically forces the organization to liquidate if the majority shareholders want to -- and prevents the minority shareholders from taking any steps to challenge it.

Drag along provisions are generally unenforceable in America if they prevent the minority shareholders from filing court action to challenge the transaction, or otherwise prevent minority shareholders from exercising rights under the law or under the contract which are not expressly waived in the language of the drag-along provision itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting read, but I would have liked to hear more about which terms are generally put in as boilerplate, and which the VC will most often invoke in order to manipulate situations they don't care for.

Also, hearing that the original founders make for the best exit is very interesting indeed, obvious as it may seem. I'm very curious about how he defines "best exits"...</comment>


Show HN: Personal finance guides to manage all aspects of your financial life - <AUTHOR> https://www.askfinny.com/money-guides <comment><USER2> Dunno about the US but in the UK we have [https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/](https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/) for info like this

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure why to sign up. It makes me suspicious of the angle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. Just wanted to let you know we ask people to sign in because we also answer users' questions and we want real people using the product. BTW, it's super quick if you use your Google or FB credentials.

<comment><USER3> I don't want to SSO with a site that I don't have any idea of the quality or whether it will serve my needs. I can't view more than subject headers without signing in - at least give me an idea of what signing up gives me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks interesting but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do on first impression. It's just a list of a bunch of finance related topics, and upon clicking one it just repeats the name of the clicked icon. This may be because I'm on mobile, but I'm just not sure how to use this site. Thanks for posting though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Use the search bar--search the topic you're interested in.

<comment><USER4> I did happen to use that - but when you click on the topics it asks for a log in. I'm not well versed in the financial world so I was hoping this tool would be a little more transparent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey this is pretty good and does not require any sign-up (hope will stay so)!

Great job

<comment><USER6> This feels a bit confusing to me (what should I be searching for?) and it does appear to require a signup to access any of the content:

"You need to log in to get the answer."

<comment><USER7> Same here, a bit confused as well. I found that there are descriptions for each "guide" if you switch from tile view to the list view under the search bar. But I am also receiving the login prompt to see anything useful. How does this compare to something like bogleheads or personalfinance?

<comment><USER8> Not only that once you've signed up you have to get "premium" to view the answer. BS

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great resource!

<comment><USER10> based on what? You must really like it, it's your 2nd comment on HN and first in 9 months.</comment></comment>


Bayes's Rule - <AUTHOR> https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq <comment><USER2> From their homepage: "Similarly, at our prototype's present levels of scalability we prefer that you not post Arbital links to Hacker News or Reddit front-pages."

<comment><USER3> Arbital co-founder here: once we upgraded our DB, we were able to handle the HN traffic pretty well, so we are going to remove the "don't share" warning.

Thanks for posting it though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please read before continuing on to this site.

I've been messing around with this all morning, and the creators have a built a really cool math education product based on customized paths and gamification.

However, they specifically state that "at our prototype's present levels of scalability we prefer that you not post Arbital links to Hacker News or Reddit front-pages."

I don't want to flag because this such a cool product and I think a lot of people in the HN community can benefit from it, but I also don't want to upvote because it seems like a lot of people are getting a broken site due to these scalability issues, which is not fair to the creators.

So if you run into problems with the site, please keep this in mind, and come back to give it a fair run later.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty cool, and the idea of generating a course based on the learners level is really interesting.

I'm viewing on mobile and Latex doesn't render and it keep talking about tabs, but it is unclear what tabs it is referring to.

</comment><comment><USER6> I get a blank page with a search bar

<comment><USER7> Ditto.</comment></comment>