Ask HN: Weebly blocked in India? - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying to access Weebly from India (Bangalore). I just get a blank page and nothing else.
I've tried it across multiple ISPs - BSNL, ACT Broadband. ACT Broadband gave a huge message saying 'This site is blocked'. However, other ISPs (Airtel) it seems to be working.
Only when I tried it from multiple locations did I realise that this is a problem across Bangalore. I was wondering if this is happening all over India or just in this city.
Can anyone else confirm? Any idea what can be done about this? <comment><USER2> It seems to be blocked for different ISPs. In Chennai, I tried BSNL and Airtel, and got the blank page. For Aircel, it said this site is blocked due to DOT guidelines. But at the moment it seems to be working and has been up for the past 2 days. There is no news anywhere about why it's blocked or who asked for it. It looks like DOT went overboard again like they did to Blogger.com years ago - blocking the entire domain instead of relevant subdomains.</comment>


Johnny Lee (of wiimote hack fame) was involved in Natal - <AUTHOR> http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html

<comment><USER2> Microsoft has poured lots of money into basic research R&D over the years, which did not seem to pay off much in terms of popular products. Apple, Nintendo, Google, etc. seemed to come out with more innovative products, despite spending nowhere close to what Microsoft spends on R&D.

This looks like a big exception to that. Johnny Lee, as a recently minted PhD, certainly knows the state of the art in this field, so if he says it is way beyond what other researchers are doing I believe him.

If they can deliver the kind of sensing, voice and face recognition in the demo, along with higher end graphics than the Wii, they should easily own the next generation of consoles.

<comment><USER3> This isn't about the next generation of consoles, this is about the next generation of input technology.

Apple won multi-touch, so Microsoft is going to push the conversation ahead to gesture-based ubiquitous computing devices. Once they get the cameras small enough they can just stick these things on Accelerando-style glasses or a wifi-enabled necklace akin to the sixth sense TED demo- that's when we have true ubiquitous computing.

<comment><USER4> But is "true ubiquitous computing" equal to "the next generation of input technology"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Holy crap. I hadn't bothered to look at the video about this project yet (I thought only Nintendo cared about the way I want to game, since XBox and PS3 distinctly lack all the stuff that makes gaming fun for me on the Wii). But, that is simply astonishing. I knew the Wii-mote wasn't anywhere near the peak of technology in this direction, but this is dramatically cooler than I expected in the next couple of years.

So, when can I buy it? I'd buy an XBox to play games that are controlled this way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm paranoid but isn't he basically saying that the demos don't reflect what's possible today in a shipping device i.e. the proverbial "vapourware".

Other comments, here and elsewhere, reflect everyone loving this, yet when I watch the demos I think a) that's not actually possible, and far more importantly b) even if it was possible, it doesn't look like fun.

<comment><USER7> I was watching the conference live, and I had the same reaction: "There's no way this actually works." Then they brought out a lady who did a live demo with it... I can't find that video right now, but it was very similar to this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vWzzoLHrM>

Notice how you can clearly see the on-screen body mapping to the person's body. Between that and the fact that I doubt they would make such a big announcement if it didn't already work fairly well, I'm now on the "this probably works" side.

<comment><USER8> You can find the video you're talking about here: <http://www.youtube.com/xboxprojectnatal>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is phenomenal, but devil is in the details in terms of sensitivity. They have to be using a really phenomenal camera and processor to get any real level of precision.

<comment><USER10> I can't speak for the camera, but it should be remembered the XBox360 is no slouch when it comes to processing power: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Central_proce...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Central_processing_unit)

"The CPU, named Xenon at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM. The CPU emphasizes high floating point performance through multiple FPU and SIMD vector processing units in each core. It has a theoretical peak performance of 115.2 gigaflops and is capable of 9.6 billion dot products per second. Each core of the CPU is simultaneous multithreading capable and clocked at 3.2GHz. However, to reduce CPU die size, complexity, cost, and power demands, the processor uses in-order execution in contrast to the Intel Coppermine128-based Pentium III used in Xbox which used more advanced out-of-order execution.... A 21.6 GB/s front side bus, aggregated 10.8 GB/s upstream and downstream, connected Xenon with the graphics processor/northbridge. Xenon was equipped with a 1 MB Level 2 cache on-die running at half CPU clock speed. This cache is shared amongst the three CPU cores."

I don't think the processor will be the problem. The camera could be.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, the devil in this design will be the camera. From the video it looks like they're using two. My guess will be one high resolution to produce reasonable pictures and live video (as they show) and a lower resolution companion to triangulate from. I'd also guess that the companion sensor will be placed further away from the main sensor in the final project.

Who knows, they could have a secondary sensor that you place on the side of the TV, away from the main sensor module. Distance between sensors is usually the key to reduce processing requirements.

It's their project vision, so who knows what they'll have to do to get the job done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where is the second camera? To gleen 3 dimensional data from a single 2 dimensional image is hard, and requires intense algorithms. Two cameras makes it easier but still hard.

I would love nothing more if they would publish this and or open it up to community development.

<comment><USER13> 3DV, the company whose 3D camera technology MS bought a few months ago, has published some papers on their technology. I haven't read them, so I cannot vouch for their depth (no pun intended).

<http://www.3dvsystems.com/technology/tech.html#1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> gimmicky

</comment><comment><USER15> Holy fucking shit.

</comment><comment><USER16> i'm not understanding the optimism. i'm sure natal will be another major step forward like the wii was. what it will not be is a quantum leap. the video was clearly ridiculous.</comment>


Earth and Sun - <AUTHOR> https://ciechanow.ski/earth-and-sun/ <comment><USER2> This is absolutely superb - just brilliant.

This is a personal reflection on the way it's presented. I'm sure that there are people who already know some of the content, and I found myself skimming over things, nodding, and thinking "Nothing new here." Then realised that there was something I missed, or an explanation that was especially nice, and I had to go back and re-read, wondering what else I might have missed.

So I found it all very smooth, clean, informative, but there was no story, no arc, no narrative, nothing to make me want to sit with a coffee (or other beverage of choice) and simply _read_ like a novel. There wasn't the "Hook; Narrative; Reveal" structure that keeps the reader involved.

Which is a bit of a shame, because the bits I did take time over are really, _really_ nice.

It's really nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a beautiful, well designed and informative explanation of the complex earth / sun relationship. Well done!

One thing I would love to see is the path of the sun across the sky for different times of year, and different locations on earth.

Here in Seattle, the difference is fairly dramatic between winter and summer, and I've come to realize that the sun is never directly overhead, not even in summer. It would be interesting to see the difference between polar regions vs in the tropics also.

<comment><USER4> At my school we had this weird climbing frame called the "Pipehenge". I climbed on it for years before we eventually did a class on it and learned that it was an astronomic map: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM4d02tjTqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM4d02tjTqk)

<comment><USER5> Looks they are no longer made, or are they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's like I just read an epic story, still under impression ...

Quote: One day we'll colonize other planets, those planets will have different suns, orbits, and rotations periods, yet a simple second will forever be tied to Earth and Sun.

I would definitely give my 'best web page 2019' to it. Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to know what tools were used to make these. Works great on mobile, usually these things break pretty badly, I didn't see any bugs

<comment><USER8> Looks like it's just hand written javascript and webgl [https://ciechanow.ski/js/earth_sun.js](https://ciechanow.ski/js/earth_sun.js)

<comment><USER9> One of the many ways you can tell how much passion went into this beautiful piece

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember spending a lot of time playing with a planets-and-gravity simulator on the Mac when i was a kid. I wrote a crappy clone of it as an applet for one of my first jobs!

This is the best web-based equivalent i found with a quick search:

[https://hermann.is/gravity/](https://hermann.is/gravity/)

And this is a rather fine tutorial on writing your own:

[https://css-tricks.com/creating-your-own-gravity-and-space-s...](https://css- tricks.com/creating-your-own-gravity-and-space-simulator/)

<comment><USER11> I played with a simple program like that for the Amiga when I was younger, and then I discovered that there was an O(n log n) algorithm[1] rather than the obvious O(n^2) one. Never was up to writing a program to use it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used it on an iPad. For me, this was a beautiful example of how to leverage the strengths of a touchscreen to present information. (too often, I find myself shaking my fist at how we've "bolted" a magazine onto a high-dpi display)

Wonderful stuff... thank you for making and sharing!

</comment><comment><USER6> Very good made! I recently started astrophotography, it is a lot of fun. Just learning all those different stars and galaxies, it's incomprehensible how big is the space. Nice thing it's really doable to appreciate it live from your backyard. A lot of technical things are still desirable, a big opportunity for innovative ideas.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. What a great explanation. I'd love it to be translated in other languages so I can have my younger kids spend some useful screen time on it!

</comment><comment><USER14> Very well made and very educational!

An often used algorithm for the calculation of the apparent sun position (given a date and latitude/longitude of the observer) is SPA of Reda et al. [1]. If you're interested, I wrote an Android app (Sun Locator [2]) that implemented this algorithm.

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X0300450X?via%3Dihub)

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.genewarrio...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.genewarrior.sunlocator.lite)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is what the web is for. Charming, intimate. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER16> Very nice visualization. It'd be interesting to see it extended to the galaxy, as in [https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the- ear...](https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-earth-sun- and-solar-system-in-the-milky-way.888643/)

</comment><comment><USER17> > The Earth rotates around its axis from west to east, or, when seen from > above, counter-clockwise.

 _North is not up._

When seen from above the South Pole, the Earth is rotating clockwise.

But really doesn't make much sense to talk about the rotation of a sphere by analogy to a 2D clockface. The Earth rotates from West to East; that's all that needed to be said here.

<comment><USER18> Dont all maps have north 'up's? I'm curious if there are maps that invert this.

<comment><USER17> We're not talking about a map here, we're talking about the real thing, the Earth, hanging in space.

(But yes, there are many maps that don't have north at the top).

<comment><USER19> Your just using your preferred frame of reference.

It seems reasonable to call north up because that frame of reference is how maps usually look.

To subsume your frame of reference, we could say the Earth isn't _hanging_ in space, it's in free fall around the sun.

There are other frames of reference at progressively larger scales.

Edit: Also, the word 'hanging' usually implies an 'up'.

<comment><USER17> > Your just using your preferred frame of reference.

No I am not. What I said was that they should have left it as just that the Earth rotates from West to East (no frame of reference). I only talked about how it would look like from above the South Pole to show that the described anti-clockwise direction of motion was _relative_ to the frame of reference that was being, unnecessarily, assumed.

The Earth has two poles and they are equal, just like with any (approximate) sphere. If you are going to describe how the Earth's rotation looks from above one pole then you should also describe how it looks from above the other. But once you describe it from both poles it becomes obvious that you're not really imparting any useful information because, while it looks clockwise from above one pole it looks anti-clockwise from above the other. Better to not use any frame of reference at all. We _know_ that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. With just a little thought it is then obvious that the Earth is rotating from West to East and that is all that needs to be said.

<comment><USER19> > Better to not use any frame of reference at all.

Ok

> We know that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

You didn't even try!

<comment><USER17> Frankly, it's pathetic that you play games with the words I use - 'hanging', 'rises' \- which everyone understands are not actual descriptions of reality and _don 't_ engage with the argument at all, which is about reality.

<comment><USER19> You started it:

> North is not up

<comment><USER17> You remain blind to, either willfully or unconsciously, my argument. Instead you come back with puerile rejoinders.

Look at the original quote from the article - "when seen from above". There was an assumption there that seen from above means seen from above the North Pole. Thus an assumed frame of reference _when none was needed_.

I do not assume seeing the Earth from above means seeing it from above the North Pole. Neither would an astronaut, who don't have to assume, they live the experience of seeing the Earth from all orientations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't upvote this enough. Beautifully crafted website

</comment><comment><USER21> Last couple of months I started thinking about sidereal vs. solar year. The first one is determined by distant stars, the second one by our Sun.

The thing I'm thinking of is if small deviations accumulate over years, how night sky is changed at the same date across, let's say, 20 years?

<comment><USER22> If you think that can get complicated, check out the different global geodetic reference systems. Between the Earth's precession, plate tectonics, the Earth _changing mass_ cyclically (collecting space debris and off-gassing atmosphere), and the fact that the center of our planet is a freaking wobbly blob of molten iron, well, things can get tricky.

Then there are the different eliosoidal (and soon geoid with NVD22) shapes that are the basis for every other reference system, most based on similar, but slightly different geodetic network adjustments. Some systems, like NAD83, remain relatively fixed in reference to a particular land mass (North America Datum 1983). Some will then progress with the land mass as it moves on the Earth's plates, others will remain fixed based on a (the) prime meridian, or in reference to the center of gravity of the Earth as it shifts, or in reference to Polaris, etc.

So now you have multiple measuring systems each referencing different geometric/geodetic/astronomic points/lines, and further it matters what time it was when you defined those points/axises. WGS80 is the basis for many modern systems, including NAD83. ITRF is similar, but defines a yearly amount of progression since ~1980 to account for things like continental drift. They coincided around the time when they were defined, and have been diverging some number of millimeters per year since then.

Once you agree on a definition of a system, you further have to define _how_ to measure it. Will North be a point in time, or a rolling average? Will the center of gravity of the Earth be based on changing rate of Earth's rotation, or with respect to a geodetic benchmark or network, or maybe based on millimeter fluctuations in deviations of the orbits of the NAVSTAR / GPS satellites? Should Euro/ Chinese/ Russian / Indian versions of GPS satellites be taken into account?

I'm over simplifying things, as there are additional layers of complexity involving the actual tools for surveying and measurement, the precise steps for any network adjustments or translations, rounding rules and certain geometric assumptions made for different types of math, and way, way more. (You can't actually stretch a tape measure around the equater.)

Take all of that, _and then_ contemplate how all of this is spinning around arbitrarily in space. Sidereal vs solar is only one of 100s of aspects of how we measure these things. _It 's not just time, but also geometric space_.

Everything's relative.

<comment><USER22> Also, you can try to explain this to people, most of whom will complain that it's way too complicated, and we don't need anything to be that precise. They say it's ridiculous.

Then you can ask the same person for directions to their house, and they'll turn around and text you GPS coordinates to 12 digits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is excellent. I had been wanting to see something like this for a long time. It was difficult for me to imagine the orbit of earth around the sun, and nothing I found showed it well. Thanks for making this!

</comment><comment><USER24> Amazing how he got the clouds to stand still for an entire year :)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is excellent. Are all the interactions custom made?

</comment><comment><USER26> This is so excellent. Put it on school curricula!

</comment><comment><USER27> Excellent visualization of these astronomy concepts, amazing job, my sincere congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure if it's related but I can't seem to understand the international date line.

<comment><USER29> The international date line is needed when you use local times instead of UTC, because the local date is incremented on midnight local time. So, if it's October 19 just after your local midnight, every timezone to the east should also have October 19, while every timezone to the west should still have October 18 because they haven't had local midnight yet. But that doesn't work, since east ultimately meets west when you track both directions far enough. So by convention we have defined a line (or rather a crooked boundary between timezones) where the date jumps back a day in the calendar when you pass over it in an eastwards direction.

<comment><USER28> Thanks but that much I understand. I guess for people living in that border it doesn't make sense to me how they can jump back and forth 24 hours.

<comment><USER29> If I had to live there, I think I would campaign for using UTC only, and forget completely about local time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> really good, I wonder if there's a "Earth and Moon"?

<comment><USER31> If you would like to make it yourself, check out my library! [https://github.com/ryanseys/lune](https://github.com/ryanseys/lune)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Are all the interactive infographics custom made? Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER33> wow. Excellent read. much respect. Labor of love.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the best I've seen till date;

</comment><comment><USER35> This was fantastic! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER36> Excellent work!

</comment><comment><USER37> this is wonderful</comment>


RobinHood: tail latency aware caching – dynamic reallocation from cache-rich - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/26/robinhood-tail-latency-aware-caching-dynamic-reallocation-from-cache-rich-to-cache-poor/ <comment><USER2> Partial discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18307077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18307077)</comment>


Ask HN: Open source hotel booking software - q-base

I am looking for, preferably C#, hotel booking software. Ideally it should be able to handle lots of hotels, only booking, no payments but most of all I am just looking for a good starting point. Someone must have had this issue before, it cannot be necessary to build from scratch.
As the description probably reveals I am looking for open source, free or with the possibility to buy the source code.
Other types of booking software might be altered into handling hotels, so if anything comes to mind, please let me know. <comment><AUTHOR> For my book on full stack JavaScript, I was looking into a small website for a cinema, which could be extended to hotels/rooms possibly. In fact, Airbnb has open-sourced their Rendr stack, which might give a nice foundation for your project too. An overview on my book is here: [http://pipefishbook.com/references](http://pipefishbook.com/references)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi, Have a look to [http://lastroom.com](http://lastroom.com) Maybe it could be interesting for you. It's a free cloud based software for companies of any size, to book hotels worldwide and have a better management over the travel expenses of the organization.

I hope it fits with your needs.</comment>


JAI Primer: A Programming Language for Games - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/jailanguageprimer/ <comment><USER2> _As of this writing there are no public compilers for Jai, so all information in this text is collated from Jon Blow 's YouTube videos. _

Until the language is actually released, at least in an alpha version, writing a tutorial is just speculation. Anything can change in the actual language implementation.

That being said, the author initiative is laudable if you don't want to watch a few hours of Youtube videos.

<comment><USER3> I have a friend who writes a lot of C++ code for signal processing, software sound synthesis mainly.

Watching Jon Blow's videos I could tell this was something my friend would be interested in, because the problem space is very similar: you need realtime performance, can't afford even the slightest garbage collection pause, etc. However, I could not tell my friend "go watch videos for six hours".

Thanks to Jorge Rodríguez, I can email my friend a document that will take him less than half an hour to read.

<comment><USER4> This is what Jon Blow said about C++ on Twitter: [[https://twitter.com/jonathan_blow/status/561371202350878720](https://twitter.com/jonathan_blow/status/561371202350878720)]

"If you want to never get any work done, use a programming language like this: [https://isocpp.org/blog/2012/11/universal-references- in-c11-...](https://isocpp.org/blog/2012/11/universal-references-in-c11-scott- meyers) "

I used to enjoy programming in C++, even though I always thought it was too complex. Too many things to learn and too many approaches. For example, I never could grasp template-meta-programming thing. May be I didn't dedicated enough time, but that's the point. If it takes so much time to learn the language and its complexities, you have much less time to program "things" with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rule of thumb for doing a programming language: Write the debugger first. Or at least, very, very early. This will inform you of poor choices you've made, and you're going to need a debugger anyway.

<comment><USER6> What poor choices are revealed by writing a debugger in particular?

At this point, he compiles Jai to C, and the compiler isn't too gigantic yet, so there's not a huge surface area to look for compiler bugs.

<comment><USER7> > What poor choices are revealed by writing a debugger in particular?

Well, for one, you can't just transpile to ANSI C, compile, and end up with sensible debug symbols in your binary. You'll end up with debug symbols for the C code, not the original language. So you end up writing in one language and debugging in another. This is one reason most new languages target LLVM.

<comment><USER8> Compiling to C with #line directive actually gives a good enough debugging experience, similar to compiling to JavaScript with source map. This is _much_ easier than generating debug info, even with LLVM.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's good enough. You can't inspect variables, types will be wrong, any namespacing you're doing will leak into the debugger, single step won't give you the right semantics unless your language is extremely close to C, gdb pretty printing won't know how to print your language's values, etc.

Backtraces will sort of work (although the name mangling will leak through), but little else will. You really need to generate DWARF directly in your frontend in order to have an acceptable debugging experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love the idea of seamlessly switching between AoS and SoA for data types.

<comment><USER11> For those who don't follow, the acronyms mean "array of structures" vs "structure of arrays". These are two orthohonal ways to represent data, both of which have advantages which make them attractive. Being able to switch the same data around between the two is cool and innovative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The #run directive addresses some major pain points for me. Is there anything analogous in other languages?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, similar constructs exist in D and Nim.

I don't know well enough how they compare to give any thorough analysis, though.

<comment><USER14> I don't know what Nim do but AFAIK in D you're (voluntarily) limited in what you can do at compile time because in effect with Jai compiling a program is running it, so this can have security implications..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm excited for Jai, and if it ever makes it out into the world I look forward to building some games with it.

However, I just see C++ continuing to get better and better for games programming. The recent appearance of the Core Guidelines [1] (and the eventual codified form for compilers) will be a huge leap. I wish we had full #run-type control over the compile phase, but full constexpr support is a step of the way there.

1\. [https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...](https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md)

</comment><comment><USER16> Aside from the aos/soa I feel like Rust hits a lot of the same points.

Nice to see #run similar to elixir macros.

<comment><USER17> Yep, a lot of people have noticed that. He's mentioned Rust in a few of his videos (and the compiler devs are always taking notes about his grievances) but he doesn't seem interested in working with the Rust community in any way. He considers Rust too ideologically opinionated to be of use to him.

<comment><USER18> > He considers Rust too ideologically opinionated to be of use to him.

He's not wrong. The rust community approaches everything from the standpoint that we should be forcing devs to code in a particular way because safety. What I like about Blow is that, so far, he's big into giving the dev options along with some (completely optional) syntactic sugar. The focus is on functionality, not ideology.

<comment><USER9> > The rust community approaches everything from the standpoint that we should > be forcing devs to code in a particular way because safety

No, I'd actually be perfectly fine allowing the safety features to be turned off, and have suggested it several times. Nobody has seemed particularly interested, though, because what people tend to find is that safety ends up being good for _productivity_ as well.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that's entirely true. We had many people interested in turning off bound checks with compile option, but it was rejected.

<comment><USER19> Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

My favorite Hoare quote given at his ACM award speech in 1980, referring to his work in Algol during the late 60's:

"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to - they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

<comment><USER20> In Jai it is easy to, for example, have bounds checks on during the entire development process to aid in finding bugs, then turn off bounds checks in a dozen critical loops for testing and release, then turn bounds checking on in one loop that still proved crash-y.

Blow has said many times: he doesn't think the language should be prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot, because sometimes that means preventing you from doing what you want to do.

He usually asks: what is something simple we can do that will give us 90% of the benefit, without adding a layer of overhead. Rather than Rust's "Safe All The Things!" approach, bounds checking is just another tool you can use or not use as is appropriate for the context.

<comment><USER21> Most Common Lisp implementations, for what it's worth, take this approach as well. For tight loops where you've removed the invariants and proved its bounds removing the run-time checks can give a non-trivial performance boost to production systems.

<comment><USER22> If you mean the (speed 3 safety 0), it's more in line with pcwalton's idea to have a switch for generally turning off safety checks, not just bounds checks - because the other checks typically affect performance more.

<comment><USER23> Most of the checks affect compile time performance in a minor way, but also have no runtime overhead. The borrow checker is an entirely compile-time thing, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Watching him occasionally stream his sessions shows me that what he is doing is just funzies.

His tooling is so far behind anything all other languages have that I would never bother to learn this language, because it was "for games."

If I wanted to make a game I would learn any engine using any number of language bindings.

<comment><USER13> He's been working on this project mostly alone for only a few months, how can you possibly expect the tooling to be on par with anything else.

There's a reason it's not released.

And it's great that you can just pick up an engine, but someone's gotta write that engine, and there's a reason triple a studios aren't using unity for major releases; you'll never get quite as good performance out of a general purpose engine as you would from a custom one.

<comment><USER6> Hearthstone (by Blizzard) is a Unity game, not that performance is a huge concern for card games. It's a pretty thin client mainly for displaying the animations/artwork while most of the logic runs serverside.

Still, it's a very profitable game by a triple A company.

<comment><USER25> Hearthstone isn't what anyone would normally call a AAA game though. Until the end of the beta they only had 15 employees working on it.

They basically had to use an established engine because they didn't have the budget to build their own.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much equity to give to developer (pseudo-founding)? - <AUTHOR>

Hey Guys,
About to begin production on a project, and rather than take cash I offered, the developer I am working with would like an equity stake. Currently, there are two founders who are putting in money, and one doing all practical (management) and creative (customer facing, UI/UX/collateral and so on) things.
Still uncertain if developer will be a founding CTO or just a contract developer. Perhaps you guys can help me with an answer for both scenarios?
Many thanks. <comment><USER2> The prevailing sentiment here seems to be that in a case like yours, where the developer is clearly part of the founding tripod (business, UI/UX, backend), be prepared to treat him like a co-founder if that's what he wants. Which it sounds like he does. If you trust him enough, make him the third co-founder and split the equity evenly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Validate if he/she's a good fit for your team first. Usually it takes time. Equity has a permanent effect and you don't want to make a decision in haste.

<comment><USER4> Ok, let me drill down into to a little bit. You say, "equity has a peramanent effect". But don't most equity contracts have a vesting period, and thus if you fire the engineer before the vesting period is up well the person forfeits that equity?

... seems like this is not so peramanent. Unless I'm misunderstanding something and need some education in this (and if I am, please let me know, as I've had this happen to me on at least one occasion and maybe I'm owed some compensation after all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would add a vesting period based on him reaching milestones. Don't fight over the details. Fair exchange of value.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good. Happy to share in equity. Will confirm if he wants to be a founder and go from there. Cheers!</comment>