When bad UX is good - <AUTHOR> https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-05-02-when-bad-ux-is-good <comment><USER2> There is a wide range of intentionally "bad" design in vogue, where "bad" may be one or more of:

\- Opaque, confusing, vague or misleading

\- Garish, over the top or ugly

\- Ironically reminiscent of older design trends that were embraced in earnest at the time

In video games, "retro"/pixel art styles are wildly popular, sometimes because story and gameplay are more important to the creators, sometimes because it was seen as a nearly lost art.

In web design, there have been several recent waves of "retro" trends embracing the styles once found on Geocities/Angelfire or even the original Myspace. There have also been several variants of "brutalist" design with oversized and unusually placed design elements, clashing or exceedingly drab colors. Such brutalist design has been embraced even by mainstream sites like Bloomberg, and in a lot of ways the novelty has worn off and it's just part of a resurgence of design diversity across the web after a long period of uniformity.

In other GUI software, intensely oversaturated colors (like those found in iOS since its "flat" redesign) were mocked mercilessly when introduced but seem to have almost become commonplace.

Like anti-humor, anti-aesthetic is sort of an oxymoron (as TFA points out). It turns out a lot of things that seem like they would be unappealing are actually quite appealing to at least a subset of the population. I am quite fond of a lot of "brutalist" design and find intensely oversaturated colors (in balance) pleasing to look at.

<comment><USER3> to me pixel art revival ticks a few boxes:

\- it's toyish, games got an adult tag since ps2/ps3 but to me games are games.

\- it's abstract, the run for photorealism can jump over the shark too. I like to play with representations and not absolute recreation of a thing. When playing honestly, I don't even have the time to enjoy the specular reflections or whatever BDR shader you cooked. It's mostly impressive on still images.

\- it makes people seek other ways to surprise you instead of relying on the usual ultra capable 3d engines that often do the same thing but different skins.

<comment><USER4> It's also convenient for low budget indie game devs. Pixel art is cheap to produce and 2d games are much easier to develop.

<comment><USER5> Quality pixelart is more expensive than 3D assets. You get all angles and bone based animation from a model while you have to draw every animation frame in every angle manually with 2D approach. On top of that a 3D world brings easier customisation and reusability of assets.

<comment><USER6> Is quality pixel art more expensive than _quality_ 3D assets? I really don't think so.

<comment><USER7> Poor quality 3D assets still work OK. Poor quality pixel art is very ugly. So if you can only afford poor quality, 3D is much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a weird read. I think what the author means is that sometimes your design needs to "step out of the way" of someone else's design. This happened all the time for me in my early-20s doing band websites where there was usually album art, merch, logos, etc etc that were highly stylized... was it a bit of a challenge to deal with those assets? Sure... but when I realized that I just needed to "get out of the way" as the UX strategy things got easy.

Frankly, looking at the site that is being discussed I would call it "good UX" for being simple and "getting out of the way" of the original artist's work (which is the point of the site anyway). I do criticize making me download 2-3Mb pictures when they should be thumbnails though - but really outside of that gaff it's a fine site.

TLDR: Going on a "bad UX" rant feels disingenuous/silly when most designers would absolutely consider this good UX for getting out of the way of the original artist's work.

<comment> claes-magnus Your estimate is correct: I try to keep out of the way best I can. The covers are amazing if you ask me. It would be stupid to 'compete', and I am not even a designer. Besides, they did not want the 'professional' feel - they wanted the 'shop' described in the about page. As they add more content, the site will look like this shop and will be hard to use. This is why I use the oxymoron.

But I guess I tried to make a more general point. Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated. Both in terms of technology and interface. Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional. And professional often means the quite opposite of personal. Headache Comix just want to post stuff. Actually, one comment was that they don't care if things, in the end, would be hard to find given way more content. And that the people reading the magazine expects this. No, even wants it. Like walking in a museum as they should be (in my view), paintings all of the place - not perfectly aligned, not perfect degrees and lots of whitespaces and so on. :) I don't know if this explanation helped to clarify my take here, but... yeah.

I guess this is your point also, kind'a. And thank you btw! But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then? :) Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones. That's the beauty of the Web if you ask me.

<comment><USER8> Before I respond to your points - I conflate UX and design in my mind as I see UX being a subset of design by definition.

> Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, > well... pages, in general, are overly complicated.

You're not alone in this, and good design is achieved when you can't take anything else _away_ from something because the only components that are left are necessary to function.

> Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional.

Ain't that the darn truth =|

> But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an > important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated > without good reasons, what then?

As a design-capable engineer I think you're painting with too wide of a brush in this blog post... and even against your own interests/ego. Sorry to get preachy but I love engaging people on these topics for learning.

You state: "and I am not even a designer" \- but you clearly are capable of solving a visual problem in a functional way. At some level, you are now a designer. And, frankly, it feels like you're dealing with some impostor syndrome here.

Your post felt like it was weird with "bad UX is good" then positing a very good example of UX that problem solves in an appropriate way for both your client and your audience. You did an outstanding job of creating functional design, which is aesthetically pleasing, given the constraints of the web/the original art/etc. The simplicity of it all means that it is functional to both your client and your audience - _I can 't stress this enough._

If I were to write a post on your post it'd be entitled, "designer hits mark 100% for client/audience but isn't sure it's good design because we over- complicate UIX in 2020". Or, "Let's all stop being so pretentious because people are conflating simple functional design with bad design..." Sorry if I sound aggressive. It's just a damn good site and I refuse to even remotely label it as "bad" outside of your image optimization issue.

> Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more > 'professional' ones

You're talking to someone who browses neocities daily because it's interesting so 100% agree!

\---

All-in-all sorry if I was too harsh but I think you're being too harsh on yourself by writing this. As a 15 year design professional - You nailed it, and I'll be happy to crucify anyone who thinks otherwise. This is the definition of "good design". Period.

Just - whatever you do. Keep doing what you're doing - we need more people with your same design ethos out here building great tech experiences that are respectful and tasteful like your Headache Comix site. <3

PS: Fix those darn images. <3

<comment> claes-magnus Thanks! Will fix the images. Promise.

Imposter syndrome. I feel it all the time as a programmer. But I don't if it's a necessarily bad state. Doesn't it matter how we relate to it? This is my view. Only if we give in, and don't try because we feel imposters it's a bad state. I am not saying it's a good state, but still - it's a state that can very productive! Well, another discussion... but it's a very interesting one.

<comment><USER8> Confidence will get you everywhere - be confident in your skills! People buy into people - not tech/resumes.

I struggle with the same thing myself... SOME impostor syndrome is healthy and it sounds like you are handling it in good way =)

<comment> claes-magnus I agree. On the other hand, the world would be more... Nice... if confidence did not rule everything. But yeah, you're right

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A favorite from a local pizza shop that opened recently [https://dinostomatopie.com/](https://dinostomatopie.com/) \- very much intentional.

The design credit tucked in the bottom links to a nice writeup on making this site, but currently has an cert error - [https://www.madebyneversink.com/](https://www.madebyneversink.com/)

<comment><USER10> Their pizza may be good, but if their website exhibits all the worst features of GeoCities from way back when, they are certainly never getting any business from me.

You wouldn't buy a vehicle made yesterday that had all the worst features of the original Ford Model T, would you?

<comment><USER11> Your analogy would perhaps make sense if there's a documented causal link between a pizzeria's shitty website and the quality of their pizza. Did I miss some ground-breaking research on the matter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Berkshire Hathaway's site is interesting. [https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/](https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/)

<comment><USER13> I'm not in on the joke... Why is there a Geico ad? With no affiliate parameters, even?

<comment><USER14> > GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides > coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 > million policy holders as of 2017.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nothing the author brings up is really "bad UX".

"Bad visual design" or "ugly", perhaps (though I don't think so), but User Experience is only very loosely correlated with "looking good".

If the end result is good for the user, it's not bad UX.

(Similarly, you can be a great graphics/web/UI designer but horrible at UX)

<comment><USER16> I do consent. It's actually about having an experience – as a user, which is why we may understand it as a user experience, intentionally a rather strong, opinionated one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd argue that the 'bad UX' he talks about here _is_ good. It's good in the sense that it fits with the theme. Just as <insert tech company here> has a modern, 'good UX' website, to convey that their products are cutting-edge, the 'bad UX' described here fits perfectly with the magazine's theme.

<comment> claes-magnus Thanks. That was my intention, for good and bad perhaps. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >The only difference between the Web of old and the modern Web is that the wild Web sometimes is harder do find due to the instrumentality of the Google search engine, for good and bad.

For a brief period of time, every human with an internet connection had access to a significant portion of the sum total of previously-preserved human knowledge. Web 2.5 has pushed us backwards. After several years now of being unable to easily find relevant results using Google, DDG, etc., I had the crushing realization that, near 30 and for the first time in my life, _less_ truly useful information was available to me, to the average person, than had been before.

This should scare people. Powers that are obfuscating both their rationale and the mechanics of their means are making a play for our collective knowledge base.

<comment><USER19> Can you provide some examples of this? What types of information are you looking for? Personally I have not found this to be the case, for example I have effortlessly gained tons of information from instructional videos on YouTube that would have been much harder to obtain otherwise.

Are you saying that informational resources are being forcefully taken down? Or that their rankings are artificially lowered in search engines?

<comment><USER20> search for some exotic aircrafts on google (e.g. "Polikarpov I-3", "Polikarpov Il-400") - all you will find is wikipedia, scale-model ads and the odd pinterest (which isn't usable without an account and often doesn't show what was advertised on the page). I saved some pics when I was building the scale model some years ago and I'm unable to find half of them in a google image search today after scrolling so far that google is putting in non-I-3 polikarpovs for like all pictures... Also I think there was at least one "book" on the type but I'm unable to find any in the first 10 google search pages (who does that today...). For the latter I've had "bookmarked" an altervista-blog full of pictures - it's still ranked high in pictures, but basically invisible in search.

Duckduckgo is worse, it only has wikipedia-fakes...

And after this small experiment I'm reall frightened and staring at my bookshelf for resolve, in parallel searching for the HN article where people recommend "civilization rebuilding" material...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a good post and it came at a perfect time. I am currently developing my own personal website. The aesthetic of this one is in the ballpark of what I am shooting for. I am also planning on including a section for writing.

I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!

<comment><USER22> A highly relevant thing for your search is something known as the Jamstack [1].

People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.

To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation: \- Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility. \- Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.

[1]: [https://jamstack.org](https://jamstack.org) [2]: [https://www.staticgen.com](https://www.staticgen.com)

<comment><USER23> I second Hugo. It builds my personal site in 71ms. Coming from JS-land, it was so fast I thought it was broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On this page: [http://headachecomix.com/about](http://headachecomix.com/about), the image headache1big.jpg is 1584 x 2153 and has a size of 3,594,579 bytes. This takes a long time to download on a slow connection. This is definitely bad UX, but I seriously doubt it was intentional.

There's deliberately bad aesthetic, which I don't mind, but this is bad design because it wastes bandwidth. The image could be resized to the display size without losing its visual impact, and it would save users a lot of time.

<comment> claes-magnus A valid point. Will fix!

The archive is intended to be like so by request. The idea would be caching. They count on people to clicking on all the covers. If it's this is the case or not, I don't know. But their target groups is very narrow on the other hand.

This 'argumentation' is not valid though in the case with the picture at 'about'. And that's my fault. I will fix this.

So yes, you're right. One could argue the same is true for the images at the 'about' page. But yeah...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >What I mean with an anti-aesthetics, is that they wanted the design to look good but not too good. They wanted a specific sentiment for the site and this sentiment excluded 'professionality'.

The right word for it is appropriateness I think. Texture created by randomness is appropriate in this case, of the kind you find in actual comic stores that get packed with stuff organically over time. Or think of your room when you were young, it's an anti systemic human touch.

<comment> claes-magnus Yeah, and I can't disagree with anyone who enjoy deltron3030. ;) Deltron 3030 is an epic album!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > They wanted a specific sentiment for the site and this sentiment excluded > 'professionality'.

I think sometimes people can be less trusting of the "professionals", and instead prefer something a bit more independent.

In a previous role we'd built some flashy new landing page + initial flow designs, highly polished, to replace some pretty ugly ones. Our customers were perhaps people who'd had bad experiences with some of the big brands.

As everything at the company was very data-driven, we put the new designs live in an A/B test with the existing ones. It didn't take long to get the statistical significance to prove that the old scrappy designs converted way better.

That was an eye-opening for me; Always done A/B testing where I can since then.

</comment><comment><USER27> My favourite example of bad UX that worked is MySpace profile customization.

Customizing your MySpace profile was done by pasting chunks of CSS into one of the fields on the "edit profile" page. It was an accidental "feature" because they didn't understand XSS - but they added filtering and kept it.

This is a TERRIBLE way of offering customization. But it worked, because it encouraged people to share tips. Having a custom profile became a status symbol, and friends would help each other figure out how to do it.

It occupied this weird space where a difficult flow with a desirable reslt encouraged social participation and gave people a huge sense of achievement if they could figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://lingscars.com](https://lingscars.com) is one of the epitomes of this sentiment. (The mobile site is very different, best to see the desktop one for the full experience.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone anyone says 'aesthetic', I instantly feel like they don't care about usability or UX. I use reader mode most of the time on the web, for almost every page, and I've never thought that I wanted to see some flashy colors, fancy fonts, or moving/animated elements.

When I read an article, I want to get the content immediately, in a dark theme, with a readable font and size/spacing. Instead, i get 3 popups, 2 banners i can't close, a bright white background, some crap webfont, several MB of ads and social media garbage, etc.

The web has _devolved_ from what it was without the 'flash'.

<comment><USER30> Good for you. Most people, however, care a ton about the aesthetics of a webpage. And most people don't even know what reader mode is. Also, not sure how your second paragraph is at all related to the article.

<comment><USER29> Any citations to your claim that most people care 'a ton'? I think most people would prefer simpler stuff over the flash if they could see the benefits but i have no proof, so i won't claim it's a fact.

The reader mode note was simply to say I prefer the text only style.

The second paragraph is there because this article is talking about a simple web page, and I'm complaining that more sites don't do simple styles.

I'm not sure why you had to be so condescending about my comment, maybe you're a designer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> (The actual title doesn't phrase it as a question.)

<comment> claes-magnus You're right! Sorry, missed this. :) It should not be a question mark in the title. There is none in my post

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A good few years ago now, I was working with an illustrator/artist developing a few websites for bands like Cuff The Duke, PS I Love You, and Bahamas.

Nothing was shared between sites, lots of cutting up pngs for link headers, cryptic navigation, all that stuff I have to avoid doing now.

It was probably the most fun I had working with a designer.

</comment><comment><USER33> One of my favorite UX anecdotes is how apparently Snapchat is purposely made to be confusing to keep older people from using it. I'm not sure if it's ever been verified but anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that if that was the plan, it has worked.

</comment><comment><USER34> > _" The Web is built to house both megacities and small taverns. And we know > it works just fine."_

This is a great analogy for the web, hopefully it will remain true without succumbing to authoritarian control.

<comment> claes-magnus Thanks. :)

This makes me worried as well. Even though I know this, I always tend to, at the moment, forget the limitations some countries have. China, Russia, Iran, and others.

There such tendencies, or views only (so far), in Europe where I live, that seems to think this is a good thing. Not as extreme perhaps. But like: in relation to values x, y, z the content and values a, b, c are bad and because they are bad they should be removed. And no, not speaking about things like child pornography.

The difference between liberal values in general and others is that liberal stance (interpreted very broadly) allows criticism of the liberal stance, while we know from history that totalitarian states and ideologies such as communism, fascism, and so on solve things with bans and by burning books.

I know what kind of world I want my children to get older in...

I'd rather have them interested in communism at 15 and radical. That they have the possibility to browse the Web for texts on communism than an authoritarian control saying communism (or some other ideology) is wrong and removing such sites. And the Web is best aligned with a liberal stance. I write more about my view here: [https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-28-the-web-is- ama...](https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-28-the-web-is-amazing). But I want to add - even though I've been active in the Swedish liberal movement for a while - that market economy when too far also threatens the Web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like this post a lot. It's rambly, but you can tell that the author has been mulling it over for a while and it just feels very personal. It feels like I just got a glimpse of the workings of the author's mind.

<comment> claes-magnus Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Craigslist stands as a solid example. It's been the same forever, and I'm glad. It's simple, I already know how to use it, etc.

Kudos to them for not falling into the productivity trap of constantly changing UIs.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can't believe such a simple site somehow ended up with node and markdown thrown in. Why would PHP or even plain HTML not be sufficient?

<comment> claes-magnus Markdown is way easier to use for people who don't like technology. And I don't PHP. Perhaps it would've been better but I did not suffer from writing 30 lines of code. However, I guess it would be possible to still combine Markdown with PHP? But even though you are skeptical, I think most people (especially people who are not familiar with technology) prefer writing Markdown...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Shouldn't this be called bad UI and not bad UX? Actually, not even "bad UI". More like "rough design".

<comment> claes-magnus I don't think so, but perhaps you're right. UI is included in UX as one of many considerations. Depending on what consideration should be emphasized we may need strong UI, or we can solve things like I do on my blog (herebeseaswines.net) - I deliberately put "about" and the "archive" at the bottom. :) In my view aesthetics is a more problematic term. But it is very useful, in aesthetics we have arguments on we have arguments on why things are (as someone say they are). In this, we have to have many considerations. For instance, I try to justify the aesthetics of blog here: [https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-21-the- aesthetics...](https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-21-the-aesthetics- of-my-blog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> any 'bad UX' is a 'good UX' if people actually can use it.

</comment><comment> ah-zeep i like how the contact emails resolve to "404", nice touch

<comment> claes-magnus Haha! I fixed this one straight away. :)</comment></comment>


Server side logging to Chrome console from PHP and Python - <AUTHOR> http://craig.is/writing/chrome-logger <comment><USER2> Another excellent option, if you'd rather not have to use Chrome dev tools:

<https://github.com/mgood/flask-debugtoolbar>

It will include a fixed positioned panel on your page including a bunch of server-side inspection, including request vars, environ variables, and logs. It works with Flask, and there's a version for Django as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://getglimpse.com/>

      > Glimpse gathers and presents detailed diagnostic information about the
      > behavior and execution of your web application.

      > It is used in a similar manner to client side diagnostics and debugging
      > tools (such as FireBug or Chrome Developer Tools), but instead focuses on
      > concepts such as server configuration, model binding, url routing, and
      > execution profiling.

Currently implemented for .NET; it has a pretty shiny cross-browser UI which might be useful as a target instead of the Chrome console.

<comment><USER4> They should really put some screenshots on the website, everybody wants screenshots... had to use Google Images to see how it looks ;)

For everybody who also wants to see screenshots, found some in this blog article: [http://blog.getglimpse.com/2013/03/27/glimpse-1-2-released-w...](http://blog.getglimpse.com/2013/03/27/glimpse-1-2-released- with-support-for-entity-framework-ado/)

The interface looks quite nice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic. There have been a few times where I've thought to myself it would be handy to have a view of server-side events in the inspector. Very eager to spend some time later today to get this set up.

</comment><comment><USER6> Happy to see this here, been using ChromePHP for quite some time now. The _only_ complain I have is how it lacks support for styled logs[1], since it could come handy to apply different colors to different segments of the logs when they start to build up, but otherwise I'm a fan.

[1] <https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani/posts/TanDFKEN9Kn>

<comment><USER7> With the new version I added support for setting some colors! Right click on the extension icon and select options. I may add more options in the future as well.

<comment><USER6> I was talking more about the ability to style specific log lines programmatically. So that one could have sql queries blue, redis commands red, etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You may want to mention that the Python library is not thread-safe, since it essentially uses a global variable to store the logged statements until the middleware writes them to the response. Shouldn't be a problem when used with a development server, though.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I will add it to the GitHub wiki. I should also point out that in general this stuff was not designed to run in production.

<comment><USER9> In general, it seems like people have a hard time understanding what doesn't belong in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this with ChromePhp and it works fantastically well. It sends all of the data as part of the page's header, so you don't have to worry about something hacky like injected console.log calls.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this a bit like FirePHP (except FirePHP has more browser support) ?

<comment><USER6> Yes, but FirePHP was definitively not available for Chrome when ChromePHP (now Chrome Logger) first came out, and as far as I can see (<http://www.firephp.org/>) it doesn't officially support it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very useful if you don't want to or can't use xdebug for PHP.

<comment><USER6> Actually if you implement logging extensively throughout your app, you might find you need to use xdebug much less. I used xdebug often before implementing ChromePHP, but nowadays I rarely do, since the vast majority of the issues are easy to pinpoint with the logs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have been using this for a while debugging PHP. Amazingly useful.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! I basically rewrote the extension, added Python support, support for colors in the console, and added a tech spec to make it easy to implement the protocol in any language.

<http://craig.is/writing/chrome-logger/techspecs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there anything like this for Ruby?

<comment><USER7> It's an open protocol so someone just has to write a gem for it. My friend Kevin at VHX is working on a ruby port.

<https://twitter.com/ksheurs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how hard it would be to use the reflect package to make this work in Go?

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't be that hard. You just need to encode the data in JSON and BASE64 and add it as HTTP header. Just look at the existing libraries, they don't seem to be that complicated.</comment></comment>


An Aerial Laser Display Capable of Projecting 3D Objects in Mid-Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/11/an-aerial-laser-display-capable-of-projecting-3d-objects-in-mid-air/ <comment><USER2> What happens if try to pet the pretty butterfly? Can I focus the point into someone's heart and make a death ray? Come on, we're all thinking it.</comment>


PE - the Portable Executable Format on Windows - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE

<comment><USER2> For anybody that is interested in executable formats and how they are created and used, the manuscript of the book "Linkers & Loaders" by John Levine is available for free (<http://norfs.sourceforge.net/linkers_and_loaders.pdf>).

</comment><comment><USER3> But isn't the PE format already well documented by Microsoft? <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463119>

Does this site brings anything new?

<comment><USER4> Site bring anything new == Not really

But, we must be polite.. it is rare to see the word PE appear on HN ;-).

Also better err documentation available at other unorthodox sources.. as Peter and Kris would attest to _ grin _.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A prize up-vote goes to the first comment on this link to tell what MZ stands for without Google ( please be honest ;-)).

<comment><USER3> I had looked that up before, it stands for the initials of a guy at Microsoft working on the DOS format. :)

<comment><USER4> Greg takes the win !

<comment><USER5> Happens to be this gentleman <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski>. Though I never worked with 'Zibbo' directly, I heard several legends of him - a lot of him centering around how he is one of the nicest people around. Which is unusual given the time at Microsoft he did a lot of his best work in.

<comment><USER6> Channel 9 did a great interview with him a few years ago. It was a good chance for us non-Microsofties to see the man behind the MZ.

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Behind+The+Code/Mark- Zbikowsk...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Behind+The+Code/Mark-Zbikowski- From-DOS-10-to-Windows-Vista)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Playing to Lose: How Competitive Tetris Players Approach An Unwinnable Game - <AUTHOR> http://chrishiggins.com/w/2013/02/03/playing-to-lose/ <comment> T-hawk This article doesn't go at all into the details of why NES Tetris is unwinnable and doomed to fail. Let me plug that gap.

The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time, the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about 250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about 310.

Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations. Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations. <http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline>

So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000. So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines must be achieved as Tetrises.

Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.

<comment><USER2> Gameboy always felt cleaner to play, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, the writing of this article is superb. I never quite got into the super competitiveness of gaming myself (for record breaking and etc) but the story alone has intrigued me as well as let me take a glance inside the lives of the players. I don't really know what else to say but the way the article is written was truly engaging.

<comment><USER4> Thank you! Writing the article, I was struck by a few constant themes: everyone in this community is VERY NICE, they are VERY COMPETITIVE, and the game is BRUTAL. The game itself is punishingly hard.

To me, the central revelation was that the game was so fatalistic that only nice people could survive it. And when those people get together to play each other, it's a huge party. I wanted to tell a human story about people who just happen to be extremely good at Tetris.

<comment><USER5> Many thanks for the piece, Chris. I enjoyed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I play too much tetris I start thinking about the blocks all the time and find it maddening. I wonder if these guys can ever stop thinking about the blocks or if it just becomes so hard-wired in their brain that they lose consciousness of it.

<comment><USER4> There is a well documented thing called the Tetris Effect, where you see the blocks in dreams or when your eyes close. There's been some neuro research on it. When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some point the brain seems to filter it out.

My impression is that these players are spending a lot of their conscious energy on the next-piece box, constructing the stack, and just staying calm. I think the majority of what they're doing is near instinct at this point, since they play so much, they just kinda "know" the right move for any given situation. Or at least, most of them. A max out game is a combination of random luck and extreme skill/practice.

The documentary "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters" (steaming free on Hulu) has more on all of this. Disclosure: I wrote parts of that film. Ben Mullen is one of the main subjects of the film.

<comment><USER7> I think this extends to any video game or virtual world you spend a lot of time in. There have been periods in my life when I dreamed about healing party members, and when I catch myself instinctively checking nearby rooftops for snipers.

Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually exclusive...)

<comment><USER8> I didn't check the roof for snipers, but I had nightmares of heavy cavalry charging at me in the open field while I was one of the poor underequipped peasants. That's what Total War games can do to you :) BTW - a heavy cavalry charge is very scary, I don't recommend standing in its way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Enjoyable article! I don't play NES Tetris so much but I do play Nullpomino. I only do the 40-line clear race. 38 seconds is my best so far but I'm a long way from the WR.

Holy cow, I just looked up the current record, and it was actually set today! MicroBlizz says in this video description (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24>) that he finished a game in 20.28 seconds. It will be neat to see who is the first sub 20! (MicroBlizz or Lapsilap).

<comment><USER10> 38 seconds! I play nullpomino 40 line too and have been stuck at the 1minute mark forever.

<comment><USER9> My top 10 times are all between 38 and 39 so I've been stuck here forever too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "I never played for score, only for meditation. :)

I remember passing level 29 on two or three occasions, always a freak happening. I can't find a video online of anyone doing this without tool- assist though." - a friend of mine, who is really, really rainman-good at NES Tetris.

<comment><USER4> The subject of Level 30 is discussed in great depth in "Ecstasy of Order." Without spoiling anything, let's just say Thor is the guy to watch. There is a bonus feature on the DVD that might interest you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related Tetris god video on YouTube. This still amazes me every time I watch it [http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eQOswiAGLU4&desktop_uri=%...](http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eQOswiAGLU4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeQOswiAGLU4)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what the people in the article think about tetris friends and if any of them play on there. I used to play that a lot, but hit a barrier and was never able to get past my high score of 728,514.

</comment><comment><USER14> A strange game.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to play TwinTris on the Amiga a lot: one the best version of Twintris ever (there are several videos on YouTube showing it). Very smooth 50 frames per second "pixel perfect" animation (but that doesn't translate very well in a YouTube video) and an amazing soundtrack.

But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you were playing.

I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting worse and worse.

At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had "lost" to the display bug.

: )

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems this whole sport exists almost entirely for the generation of people who were exactly 8 years old when Tetris came out.

And the sport will die when we run out of functioning NES consoles and CRTs.

<comment><USER16> You need to read up on American Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just downloaded The Magazine app. This is the kind of stuff I love to read.

That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.</comment>


Hitler "Downfall Meme" gets taken down - <AUTHOR> http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/04/hitler-downfall-meme-gets-dmcad/?l=en <comment><USER2> I don't think Hitler would take kindly to hearing this news... It's a shame we'll now not be able to see his reaction.

<comment><USER3> I think this is the third thread I've run across in the last few minutes where the top voted comment (by a lot) is some witty rejoinder, rather than an actual interesting comment or consideration.

Not saying it should/shouldn't be like that, just making an observation (far be it from me to dictate to the community how it should act), and am surprised to see it on Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> This is a reasonable comment. I'm further surprised to see you being down- voted.

<comment><USER5> When I saw this appear in the queue early in the morning, I thought to myself, "God, I hope this doesn't get front paged, it'll probably be full of Reddit- style one-liners."

Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always wonder what the hidden backstory is behind these kind of things. Is it:

a) They were not aware of the downfall stuff on youtube until this point and, when they discovered it, they were horrified and promptly removed them

b) They were aware from the beginning and hated it from the beginning and it's taken them 2 or 3 years to work through the process of taking them down

c) They were aware from the beginning and they loved/tolerated it but something changed their mind recently and now they want them removed

d) It's not actually the film company filing the notices but some elaborate 4chan troll

e) something else

There are no boring hypotheses that I can think of. Every hypothesis has something weird associated with it so I'm really curious which it ends up being.

<comment><USER7> It seems the videos were removed automatically. Maybe only now Youtube's software caught that up and the producers forgot to tell that they want to keep the videos.

But that's just a wild guess on how things work there.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83766)

Specifically: What happens when Content ID identifies a match?

If Content ID identifies a match between a user upload and material in the reference library, it applies the usage policy designated by the content owner. The usage policy tells the system what to do with the video.

So, I'd highly suspect that just now the content owner set the policy. I can't believe that the filter is multiple years out of date, and just now catching up. They wouldn't all be flagged at once, if the processing was that slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't today his birthday? (Random factoid lodged in my brain)

<comment><USER10> 20 April 1889

Well done, Sir !

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Odd. I remember reading that the director was impressed with what people ended up making of his work, and laughed about it.

<comment><USER12> The director probably has about as much to say about the use of the end product as the janitor. Witness OK Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wonder how many people bought the actual DVD because of all those videos?

<comment><USER14> It's always seemed odd to me when the owners of the media from which some internet meme is based destroy the videos that made them popular in the first place, given that it would be completely unknown without the meme. The artist's biggest enemy is not piracy but obscurity.

<comment><USER15> _The artist's biggest enemy is not piracy but obscurity._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is actually pretty sad, since the director of "Downfall" approves of the usage. [http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/01/the_director_of...](http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/01/the_director_of_downfall_on_al.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wonder how quickly somebody is going to create one about the downfall of the downfall meme...

<comment><USER7> Bam. It's already here. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fAQKa8rU_4>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is the article trying to suggest this is fair use under parody, at the end?

Seems like it wasn't really qualifying. Taking 5 minutes wholesale out of a movie and overlaying text is a tough sell for "parody", which typically involves shorter duration.

I hope someone challenges this ruling. It'd be interesting to see if we can expand what parody is.

<comment><USER19> Artists like Weird Al use entire songs for parody, so I don't think a 5 minute clip would be too long.

<comment><USER20> Artists like Weird Al get permission from the original artists, they also don't use any original material, typically. For what it's worth.

<comment><USER21> Although they aren't legally required to. Al does it as a courtesy. He specifically gets permission from the artist now, because when he did Amish Paradise he'd received an okay from Coolio's label, but later learned Coolio himself was upset about the parody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just in case you haven't seen one of these, this one's a decent example: [http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththegl...](http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/sketches/16796-hitler- spoof)

</comment><comment><USER23> There are some copies of the popular ones with less views still up. This was the best one IMO: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUjaW4ZtdN0>

</comment><comment><USER24> Das ist ein nukular buttfail.

The "meme" is a major advertisement for the film, and free for them. I know a lot of people who have rented or seen _Der Untergang_ whose first exposure to the film's existence was the Hitler spoofs.

It's not my fault that the media corporations can't figure out a way to make money off the new distribution mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER25> So this is basically the DMCA protecting us from an unfunny copypasta meme? Awesome.</comment>


Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/08/bio-high-tech-treatment-for-ebola-may-have-saved-two-us-citizens/

<comment><USER2> This article seems to side-step the Bioethics questions. It seems as though giving the treatment may have been unethical, and probably was only performed because it was in Liberia, as opposed to on American soil. I am concerned with the article's early statement, that the treatment"can work effectively," because that does not seem like an appropriate thing to say at such an early point in trials.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems kind of like a last ditch effort. According to CNN, the speculation is that the death rate is so high that there wasn't much to lose. It sounds like the doctor was conscious and involved in the discussion to administer the drug to himself and the other victim. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.</comment>


Ken Perlin's home page - <AUTHOR> http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

<comment><USER2> I took Ken Perlin's undergraduate graphics course in 2002 or 2003. Back then, Java was the only way to execute code in a browser that did something useful in a reasonable amount of time.

More than anything, it enabled a pretty unique pedagogical experience. Every week we'd have to make something which related to that week's topic (diffuse/specular shading, geometry manipulation, inverse kinematics, z-buffers, etc). There were no other content restrictions.

To "submit" our assignment, we'd have to publish the java applet on our personal page. Ken would go student by student and open up the week's projects on the projector, then play around with it a little. If you pulled off something cool, you'd talk about how you did it. If you didn't master the thing (happened to everyone at least once), you'd talk about what was broken, and other people would chime in to help you figure out what was wrong. It was fun either way — detective work without looking at the source.

Most importantly, the whole atmosphere was super-collegial. I learned a ton and it felt like the right way to teach computer science — build things, critique, rinse and repeat. I didn't get much sleep that semester ("WHY THE HELL WON'T THIS RENDER!!!111!!!one" was a common refrain in chat with my coursemates) but it was the best class I ever took.

Plus, Ken drives vim like a fucking boss. Like, he'd enter some arcane vim incantation ":ad8723bsd9asasfd" and _bam_ , a ray tracer appeared in his buffer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Turning his courses into a MOOC would be useful.

[http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2013/oct30/](http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2013/oct30/)

[http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2014/](http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2014/)

</comment><comment><USER4> So many java applets. The dark corners of modern web. I'm never ever going to run one of those again in my browser.

<comment><USER5> Oddly my java installation refuse to run those applets for some security reason, it has been like this for any other applets for a long time now. I don't think I even want to try to fix it. java is sad.

what's more depressing is that I'm in an internship in some pharma research company, and we're using java. I really need the job experience and the degree, but it's weird how sad I feel to sit in front of java code. Coding is not fun anymore, and it makes me so unproductive. I need to hug a C programmer.

<comment><USER6> Java is alive and well, but Java Applets are dead. And enterprise Java is depressing.

Some projects that make Java more fun/relevant:

[https://playframework.com/](https://playframework.com/)

[https://jersey.java.net/](https://jersey.java.net/)</comment></comment></comment>


China Applauds UK Move To Restrict Access To Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.rfaunplugged.org/2011/08/16/china-applauds-uk-move-to-restrict-access-to-social-media/ <comment><USER2> "Hey UK, welcome to the club of repressive nations".

Nice work, China: this is pretty much the most effective indictment I can imagine of Cameron's idiotic response.

<comment><USER3> > Nice work, China: this is pretty much the most effective indictment I can > imagine of Cameron's idiotic response.

I agree, but they'll probably claim it's different when _they_ are the ones doing it. After all, they only want to silence _rioters_ , while China wants to silence _protesters_.

Or something absurd like that.

<comment><USER2> Indeed they do. The awful Nadine Dorries MP was on the radio only yesterday explaining that it's OK when _we_ do it because _we're_ a democracy and _by definition_ the good guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another reason why far reaching demands for censorship from government officials are a very bad idea: You lose all the little leverage you had over countries like China when you demand less censorship from them. They will just point at the statements and accuse you of hypocrisy. European politicians will be laughed out of the building when they come to China with demands of less censorship.

</comment><comment><USER5> The title should be "Xinhua Applauds UK Move To Restrict Access To Social Media".

The relationship between Xinhua and the Chinese government is complicated. Treating them as synonymous is a little clumsy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

\-- Douglas Adams.

<comment><USER7> Spawn more overlords!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> China to UK, "Would you like knowledge sharing? We have plenty of experience in hanging and executing civilian."

"Hell yes, we surely need that knowledge. Next time around we are going to let the riots run its course and then use your experience to hang as many as we can.", UK to China.

</comment><comment><USER9> UK is supposed to be one of the most socially advanced countries in the world. It is sad that Cameron has to give out such comments and China...there are no words for what china ever does.

<comment><USER10> _supposed_ by some.

Their parliament seems to have been effective in prohibiting that use of footage of parliament be used for parody. [see recent blackout of a John Stewart segment]

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course they would ... I can understand why China, as the government entity, benefits from a strict control of information flow, but that still doesn't mean that people benefit. If a billion people one day decided to throw a revolt, that would be very troubling for China and the rest of us, so securing peace in the country is important, but not this way.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really wish countries wouldn't fuel China's fire(wall). Statements like this by idiotic prime ministers and presidents, etc. just make it seem like the fight toward freedom of information is one not really worth fighting for when its not in a particular politician's best interest.

That is exactly what is happening in China...

</comment><comment><USER13> Stamp of approval! That's like being commended on human rights by Syria.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear." \-- Thomas Huxley

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice one antr!</comment>


Why people buy the wrong house - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/buying_the_wrong_house.php

<comment><USER3> > _The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 > or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a > while._

Not to mention that a 45 minute commute for 200 working days a year would cost you about $1800 in gas a year. You can get a damn fine hotel room for Grandma and Grandpa when Christmas rolls around for $1800.

<comment><USER4> The primary reason given by the small sample of empty-nesters I know who have moved into the city was not: for the restaurants, for the food, for the culture, or for the night life. The reason they decided to move into the city was because their children were living there and they could walk over and see their grandkids.

<comment><USER5> My parents have said that it's so they can travel without worrying about someone breaking into their house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unconvincing. The article doesn't really explain why people make bad decisions, it just describes the sort of decision which people might make and then asserts it's wrong.

Anyone who did decide to commute for an hour _just_ so they could have a spare bedroom that their parents can stay in once a year, of course, is making a stupid decision, but living in a house instead of an apartment has plenty of other advantages.

<comment><USER7> The article is based on a small section in the linked PDF, which is based on a conclusion the researcher made by reading a newspaper article about the Dutch housing market. So, yeah - unconvincing. In the heavily McMansioned areas of the USA, people are commuting to a suburban office park, not a city center. Thus, the housing choice is going to be between different suburban developments, not between a gated community and an apartment downtown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The tradeoff I have seen is more extreme - it's more like tiny one-bedroom or studio with no outside space (balcony or deck) in the city vs. McMansion with an hour commute. I think that sellers/landlords,etc completely understand the "weighting" and have largely arbitraged away any advantage that city centers offer.

<comment><USER8> Right, the author neglects to mention that most people would be willing to spend a lot more of their income on a mortgage payment then they would on apartment rent. Where mortgage counts partially toward savings rent is just flushing money down the craper 100%. If you spent the same amount on rent as you did on a house payment you could probably get a pretty nice place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'According to Dijksterhuis, these people are making themselves miserable because they failed to properly "weigh" the relevant variables when they were choosing where to live.'

Just because this person has a particular set of priorities, doesn't mean I have the same ones. I don't mind commuting, but I do dislike cramped living space.

Also, this has nothing much to do with the mortgage crisis. That was caused by people who probably shouldn't have been borrowing _any_ money, borrowing a shed-load and then defaulting. I bet most of them would still have been out of their depth if they'd only borrowed half as much.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the author of this article doesn't realize how the decision making process happens.

Husband: I'd like to be close to work, perhaps 30 minutes away.

Stay at home Wife: I want a big house so I can play Martha Stewart and show off to my female friends. If I don't get what I want, it's a sign you don't love me.

Incidentally, some long commutes aren't bad. If your commute has exercise, sun, a river view and lots of beautiful women, you don't mind an extra 20-30 minutes:

[http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_riverside_park/v...](http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_riverside_park/vt_riverside_park.html)

<comment><USER11> They never mentioned the issue of kids, either. For most of the folks I know who chose to live in the suburbs (including my parents), the decision factors were:

1.) They want their kids to be safe.

2.) They want their kids to go to a good school system, so they can get into a good college and make lots of money later in life.

3.) They want their kids to have a lawn to play in and grow up surrounded by greenery.

4.) They want their kids to make friends with other people like themselves.

I grew up in the suburbs, and am really glad I did. I wouldn't want to trade treehouses for sidewalks, touch football games on the lawn for skateboarding in the park, or my small exurban charter school with a graduating class of 32 for a large public high school with a graduating class of 2000. The good school system has paid off too - both my sister and I started at salaries that were roughly what my mom retired at.

<comment><USER12> I moved from city (Chicago) to suburbs 2 years ago, here was the breakdown:

1) safe - there's plenty of safety in the city if you can afford it. It's usually the tradeoff with space.

2) good schools - <USER2>

3) this was a downside of the suburbs - I'd much prefer a nearby park that I don't have to own, mow, etc. I ended up buying a new house with a very small (2800sf) lot, most of which is covered by our house

4) My kids are still small, but we've got the same variety of people here as in the city (basically traded white & black for white & hispanic)

The biggest issue that forced us to move was $/sqft. We could afford a one bedroom in a city neighborhood we were comfortable with but not a 2br. We moved and although my salary is much higher, we have another kid and we'd need a 3br soon.

Space, Commute, Safety, Schools. Pick 2 (or 3 if you're lucky). We traded Commute+Safe for Space+Safe (schools aren't spectacular where we moved but our kids aren't school age yet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> People drive too much and sleep too little. Studies show this time and time again and yet people rarely weigh the cost of commuting and alarm clocks correctly.

</comment><comment><USER14> OP overlooks the real reason people have leaned toward the bigger house for the past 50 years (and it has nothing to do with bathrooms or Grandma). It was because it was generally accepted financial advice and because it worked.

The general rule was "Buy the biggest house you can afford, and then, when the time is right (5 years or so), take your equity or flip, and do it again. By retirement time, you should be sitting on a tidy next egg."

A lot of older baby boomers have earned more in their lifetime from this strategy that from all their jobs combined!

Then people forgot about the phrase "you can afford" and starting breaking the guidelines in a boom market. They also forgot about the busts, when this strategy goes on hold.

When you blindly follow "rules" you don't understand, you're just an accident waiting to happen.

<comment><USER15> It's always seemed like that general rule was a not so subtle way of saying, "you cannot possibly be trusted to manage your assets responsibly, so you should tie them up in a house, so you can't do anything stupid with your money". Certainly real estate is historically a reasonable investment, but almost never the best one. And the additional upkeep costs: new roof every 7-10 years, lawn care, time spent cleaning 1000 extraneous sq feet of rooms, the opportunity cost of all that extra crap to fill up your McMansion, plumbing, electrical, etc.

It's also worth thinking about the fact that if you followed the trend of the past ~20 years, and moved further out of the city with each new "upgrade", the reasonably sized house you left first is probably more valuable than the McMansion you live in now, because people are returning to cities and paying more for that convenience. And the suburban mega houses are steadily dropping in price.

But, I agree. It all really went pair-shaped when people imagined themselves getting rich by flipping houses, and so spent more than they could afford-- imagining that they'd flip it before the mortgage payments caught up with them, and make huge profits. Calling it "gambling", and treating it the same way, would probably not be incorrect. I think it's the same mindset that gets people in trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here are some of my personal opinions on the topic...

I completely agree shorter commutes create happier workers. I also think employees are less likely to leave a job if they live close, happy or not... And of course, for most people, commutes are a waste of time, and thus to be avoided whenever possible. But, when it comes down to it sometimes there is no way to avoid commuting (family, a great job opportunity, $$$$, inbetween homes, etc).

I prefer living in the city. I don't understand why most people prefer a "McMansion" as it's been referred to. To me it makes more sense to live in the city and have a cabin/condo to get away on the weekends and holidays. Then again I don't have any kids (yet). And it seems that the McMansion neighborhoods seem to have better school districts, family oriented communities and are safer. So I understand living in a McMansion for those reasons. What I don't understand are the single or kid-less couples who still insist on the commute and the McMansion. Maybe it is partially a societal difference. I don't see my residence as an especially good investment, and that may differ from most people.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the comments.

> Behavioral economics of this sort only seems interesting when it offers > productive tips to rectify the mistake. So how do you get people to weight > the commute time appropriately?

Startup idea?

<comment><USER17> blueroof.com has a widget that links MLS data to local listings in Salt Lake.

Methinks there is potential for a web startup to sell such widgets...

<comment><USER18> Good luck with that.

MLS data is not created/accessed equally between states/regions.

FYI - The transition is being made from MLS to RETS, www.rets.org.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> its kinda like the "take the job making less money but closer to home to save money" but from a different angle

</comment><comment><USER20> we sacrificed an extra bedroom in order to live closer to work and in a better city. we have no regrets at all, we love our area and having a quick 30 minute bus ride to and from work without having to drive at all is a blessing. eventually we'd like another bedroom but that may not happen for a long time!!</comment>


Four Python Books That I Recommend to Every Beginner - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dreamcatcher-its-blog/four-amazing-python-books-that-i-recommend-to-every-beginners-44b4324cb6bb <comment><USER2> Book links are affiliate links (tag=wasi0013-20)</comment>


NASA Saves nearly $1M Per Year By Using AWS - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/nasa-saves-nearly-1m-per-year-by-using-aws.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmazonWebServicesBlog+%28Amazon+Web+Services+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> Cool, but $1M is nothing for NASA. Their greatest gain in using the cloud is agility. They don't have to procure hardware months or years in advance. And they can run intense computing jobs real fast and release the instances. 1,000 hours of computing in 1 processor costs the same as 1 hour of parallel computing over 1,000 processors.</comment>


The Final Countdown [on EU copyright] - <AUTHOR> http://WWW.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2011/09/the_final_countdown.html

<comment><USER3> We really need a democratic system where we can hold politicians more accountable for their actions, or where we can have a more direct influence on huge-impact policies like this one.

What we have now is clearly not working well, and no matter what are the reasons you vote for someone initially, they still end up doing their own back-deals that many times it's not what the people voted them for. How do we fix this?

<comment><USER4> Use the Swiss system : when a petition reaches a given threshold of signatures, have a referendum. If the 'yes' wins, it becomes a law.

It is easy to add over our current system, it is democratic, it respects all institutions. I don't understand why this idea doesn't have more followers.

<comment><USER5> I'm very wary of a system like this. It's not working so well in California, for example, where - although its more complicated than this, obviously - <USER2> basic end result is that the people keep voting for low taxes, but also more services, and the ring-fencing of parts of the budget.

<comment><USER4> Well in Switzerland they have low tax but manage to finance a high quality public service.

If you think people will primarily vote for lower taxes, why are you surprised that they would vote for any crackpot who promises to lower them (e.g. Tea Party) ? Representative or direct democracy, if your voting population is made of idiots, you are doomed anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An attorney at swedish record association (Ifpi) says among other things 'some of the people performing for records in the sixties are old now; they have a hard time and need the money'. No comments necessary. [http://www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur-och- nojen/article1542053/rd...](http://www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur-och- nojen/article1542053/rdquoFullstandigt-orimligt-beslutrdquo.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> any idea on what to do against this?</comment>


4 bit computer built from discrete transistors - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.io/project/665-4-bit-computer-built-from-discrete-transistors <comment><USER3> I always like to point out the telegraph relay computer[0] built by one Harry Porter. I think that pretty much takes the cake for retro hardware. It also brings up the question of how early a binary computer could have been built, since the relay was invented in the early/mid 1800s[1] and Boolean logic in 1847[2]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wPBcmSb2U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wPBcmSb2U) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay#History) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole#Symbolic_logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole#Symbolic_logic)

<comment><USER4> For some reason it took 90 years for Boolean switched hardware to appear - originally invented by Shannon in the US and Zuse in Germany in the late 1930s.

It's interesting to wonder why it took so long, and what would have happened if it had been invented much earlier.

The first may have been because Boolean algebra was very obscure and unlikely to cross the path of the electromechanical and telegraph engineers who worked with relays.

The second I can't even begin to speculate about - although the first FET was patented in 1925, so in theory it would have been possible to build a solid state computer not long after.

<comment><USER5> Let me don my tinfoil hat and say that one of the major functions of a computer back then was fire control for artillery, later seconded only by cracking Axis encryption. Maybe anyone who tried to source 10,000 reliable relays in 1938 got a knock on their door...

[tinfoil hat off]

<comment><USER6> I don't think that is as crazy as it sounds. Remember, back then, the commercial potential of a "computer" was for the military.

Even if you had the idea & concept back then, AND the money to build it - <USER2> would you do with it? You're not using it like we use computers today...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went to see this 16 bit processor a few months ago. It's stunning to see. [http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html](http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to point out that this is common at many universities for compsci undergrad students as 2nd-year project (although usually done simulated in Xilinx ISE and ISim).

It's definitely interesting to do these things (I'm currently taking abovementioned course at my uni, designing first a 4-bit harvard architecture processor in Xilinx, and, after that's done, in 2 weeks starting with designing a DLX in Xilinx), but it's even more amazing to see someone actually build these things IRL (and thereby prove that these are actually useful skills to have!)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you like this, you might appreciate the very retro homebrew CPU webring:

[http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/ringhome.html](http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/ringhome.html)

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's the ring Harry Porter is on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to design and build whole systems from TTL logic in the 70s and 80s. The most integrated part was the ALU from AMD, otherwise, it was mostly NAND and NOR gates. Great fun, especially cause we knew how everything worked.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just recently there was another project building processors with discretes, a 6502: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703596)</comment>


This is What Most Likely Happened to Mt. Gox - <AUTHOR> https://chrispacia.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/this-is-what-most-likely-happened-to-mtgox/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is clearly largely speculation, but its interesting speculation nonetheless.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best practices to apply in large react-hooks code base? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> \- refrain from using hooks everywhere, instead, prefer using them in « container » type of components to separate the hard logic from the soft one (cosmetic logic, such as color changes, hiding / showing parts of the UI)

\- Hook-based context is a godsend, but similarly, should be used only when needed (to provide deeply nested components with specific props): passing props around is not a bad thing and makes you think more of your architecture (going through the pain of passing props down might be painful and makes you reflect on the choices you made when designing a specific part of the app).

\- Folder structure

These rules are not about performance (modern frameworks deal with that equally well: the user code is the culprit and there's no one-size-fits-all advice to improve that), but rather to keep your sanity. It will also help when writing tests as they will be nicely siloed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks that is useful.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Where to order business cards? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'd like to pick up some simple, but good looking business cards for meetings. Does anyone have suggestions? (Note: I don't care for Moo cards) <comment><USER2> I've used both vistaprint.com and overnightprints.com.

Overnightprints has better paper stock and printing options (e.g. rounded corners), but I wasn't super-thrilled with their print quality. Vistaprint may have been better at printing, but their card stock was flimsy.

That said, they were both okay, and pretty cheap, too (vistaprint is the cheapest, once you factor in minimum order sizes).

</comment><comment><USER3> Very happy with our cards from overnightprints.com, the price was very reasonable and we always get compliments on the cards (I think they look a lot more expensive than they actually were).

</comment><comment><USER4> I wrote up my experience with Overnightprints here: [http://geekstack.com/blog/quick-and-easy-do-it-yourself- busi...](http://geekstack.com/blog/quick-and-easy-do-it-yourself-business- cards/)

Hint: It was great!

</comment><comment><USER5> Vista Print. And 'splurge' for the thick or glossy stock. Also, google 'Vista Print Coupon' before - you can always get 20-25% off.

</comment><comment><USER6> PSPrint.com is good, cheap, and local if you're in the bay area.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://searchyc.com/%2522business+cards%2522>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163191></comment>


Automatic cloud-based image improvements and effects - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/automatic_cloud_based_image_improvements_and_effects

<comment><AUTHOR> This blog post introduces Cloudinary's image improvement filters and effects. With these new capabilities, you can embed better looking images in your websites and mobile apps with ease. You can also mix and match multiple improvement filters together to create "artistic" results. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Django and .NET sample code included.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best podcast episodes you've listened to? - <AUTHOR> Episodes as opposed to channels. <comment><USER2> Multiamory (ep.147) - Relationship R.A.D.A.R (I actually use this at work now too. There's also ep.97 which is their first iteration of the idea)

Tim Ferris Show (Oct 8 2017) - Interview with Esther Perel

Reply All (ep.102-103) - Long Distance (Investigating a telephone scammer)

How I Built This (Feb 13 2017) - Lyft: John Zimmer

The Greater Good Podcast (Mar 30 2011) - Srikumar Rao on Happiness at work

Its really hard to try to recall specific episodes, but these are the ones that came to mind and that I could track down the info for

<comment><USER3> How I Built this is really great in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. The Knowledge Project: Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Radical Honesty

2\. The Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins

3\. a16z Podcast: On Morals and Meaning in Products, Business, and Life

[1]: [https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading- decision-...](https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading-decision- making/)

[2]: [http://podcasts.joerogan.net/](http://podcasts.joerogan.net/)

[3]: [https://a16z.com/2018/03/20/morals-meaning- entrepreneurship-...](https://a16z.com/2018/03/20/morals-meaning- entrepreneurship-humancapital/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY)

</comment><comment><USER6> Zardulu - Reply All [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply- all/zardulu](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/zardulu)

</comment><comment><USER7> Invest Like the Best, Albert Wenger (ep 32, 3/13/18)

</comment><comment><USER8> Dan Barber's TED talk about ethical foie gras farming. It's not a podcast but it also doesn't really on video much</comment>


Show HN: Hyperlink Battle – Two links compete for your vote every day - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyperlinkbattle.com

<comment><USER2> Cool idea, and nice design. Thx for bringing that good ol web back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Loved the app, and the links it provided.. One problem though, after voting for a link where the success image is posted, give me a link to go to the next battle.. It took me a while to see the alphabets on top and click through it.

Also it would be nice, if the total score is displayed after voting for a content. Anyway, nice work +1

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, thanks for your feedback @avinoth we'll try to improve it :)

<comment><USER4> I think making the top alphabet section more accessible when scrolled down on the page would be the way to go. Maybe make it fixed at the top (or bottom).

That way after I've checked out the links, voted, etc, I won't have to scroll up to go to another alphabet, and then scroll back down. I'd imagine once you reach letter Z, a new user would find that flow a bit annoying.

Cool website though! I love Every Frame a Painting. That guy has awesome analysis on film!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey great initiave, an awesome throwback to the hyperlink era.

<comment><USER6> > an awesome throwback to the hyperlink era.

What does this mean? I use hyperlinks hundreds of times every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat, but the lowres font is kind of ugly.

<comment><USER7> even the ugly has some beauty</comment></comment>


Weibo Purchases Majority Share in Twitter and Becomes Tweibo - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chinesefood/weibo-purchases-majority-share-in-twitter-and-becomes-tweibo-7d7e24fe97d4#.vmb5koyip <comment><AUTHOR> When this does happen, it will decrease possibility of global conflict by some measure, because much more of humanity will be able to write and read the thoughts of the other part of humanity.</comment>


Introducing DNS Resolver, 22.214.171.124 (not a joke) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/dns-resolver-1-1-1-1/ <comment><USER2> No mention of IP v6 at all in the post but luckily they did better on their docs at [https://188.8.131.52/](https://184.108.40.206/) It is 2018, IP v4 isn't really something you should use other than as a fallback.

"For IPv6: 2606:4700:4700::1111,2606:4700:4700::1001"

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727869)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well. Time to reconfigure all my Meraki gear.</comment>


A Shrinking Pie? The IPv4 Transfer Market in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/a-shrinking-pie-the-ipv4-transfer-market-in-2017 <comment><USER2> Just in case people wonder how ipv6 is doing: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

<comment><USER3> Interesting, it's gained about 10% usage in the last year (~10% to 18-22% globally). Not bad!

<comment><USER4> Eyeballing that chart though it seems to have slowed down in the last half of the year. Also interesting the pattern of slowed down adoption in the beginning of each. I wonder what's up with that.

<comment><USER5> Was thinking the same, but more eyeballing also makes me think there's always a slowdown or even dip in Jan/Feb. That seems even stranger.

<comment><USER6> Maybe people buying new IPv6-capable devices at the end of the year during the holidays and then fewer buying them over the next few months?

It's also interesting to note the difference between weekend and weekday IPv6 traffic (~18% vs ~20%). Businesses are apparently far behind consumers in adopting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you need to set up even a very small ISP, you will still need to have a relatively sizable v4 ip pool.

Why a radical solution - NAT64 sees much better traction with anybody, but largest ISP's than a "soft landing" solution of 464XLAT favored by big co. is that:

1\. Setting up a nat is a 5 minute exercise.

2\. It appeals to beancounters because freed IPv4 blocks can be profitably sold.

3\. Skype/netmeeting/netflix broke? Not our problem - ISP says. You can see that the proportion of big to small ISPs is much lower outside of USA, and the West in general. And fewer of them bothers with things like direct peering with CDN networks, installing youtube cache appliance or dealing with Neflix openconnect, unless being paid to do so.

<comment><USER8> Make it mandatory for ISPs to offer leases (at regulated prices) of their last mile to competitors. All of a sudden, the barrier to entry for new wired ISPs drops.

Then, when an ISP fucks up sufficiently, competing ISPs can actually jump in and fill the gap. That last mile is what is building the internet monopolies.

<comment><USER9> Wasn't that what the US had with DSL? Copper lines had to be made available. Locally, cable was always faster so that's what we went with. DSL was cheaper though. Anyone recall what the experience was like?

<comment><USER10> In California, what is now AT&T offered retail DSL below the cost to wholesalers, and was very slow to offer 'uverse' (adsl2 and vdsl, for speeds over 6Mbps) to wholesalers. For ADSL1, it was a compelling offering, the data portion of the circuit was delivered to the wholesaler, so they could deliver things like straight Ethernet over ATM, instead of PPP over Ethernet, and had different IP routing than At&t, for uverse, it was basically a normal att account billed to the wholesaler. Getting problems fixed could be problematic because of dealing with one company that had to deal with another; otoh they were experts at dealing with att, because they did it so often.

Also: the FCC decided line sharing didn't apply to cable internet pretty early in the lifetime of cable internet. Then when DSL companies complained (through courts) that that wasn't fair, the FCC said we have enough competition between cable, DSL, and power line (yeah) so DSL companies don't need to line share either; only voice needs to be line shared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meanwhile my ISP Excitel is happy with CGN only :(. They don't even announce IPv6 on their routing table.

The moment someone else offers equivalent speed 50Mbps symmetric Unlimited for $13/Month, I will be out.

<comment><USER12> My god, I have the privilege of paying $60/Month for 4Mbps - not symmetric

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hetzner is involved in many of the non-related entity transfers.</comment>