Godot at GDC 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://godotengine.org/article/godot-doing-well-gdc-2018 <comment><USER2> I gotta say Godot is one of those open source projects I want to see more commercial adoption of. Not only is it well done, it is miles ahead of the commercial offerings and everything from the tooling to the engine is MIT licensed. You can do plugins not only for the engine, but the tooling itself! This means that you're not limited only by what is already available through the standard IDE they built (which is really already great) but by your imagination entirely. You can code plugins in any native language you so desire as well thanks to GDNative (this includes Rust, D, and more).

Also don't forget, they've got the latest of Mono available to you, so modern C# features at your fingertips, no more C# 3.5 like a certain industry slowpoke...

<comment><USER3> Unity can use .NET 4.6 now. It wasn't because they were slowpokes, xamarin would not license it to them until they were acquired by Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> As a fulltime Unity dev, this doesn't matter much to me, because it doesn't address the major pain point for larger Unity games. This .NET upgrade does not include a modern garbage collector, and the garbage collector update has been "maybe next year, but definitely not now, because it's hard" for as long as I've been using Unity.

Workarounds exist. That's great. I don't care. Workarounds don't address the default experience of writing idiomatic C#.

I've considered switching to Unreal, but that has GC built into it a little too much. I know nothing about its characteristics, but it makes me wary. This thread makes me want to investigate Godot. Can anyone provide a one-sentence summary of the GC situation there?

<comment><USER5> Sure!

Hopefully a more experienced Godot dev will jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here..

Godot uses reference counting, but additionally supports a function which you can call on an object which will cause it to become 'unmanaged' by the reference counter, allowing you to free its memory on your own terms (or leak the memory, if you're not careful).

Godot 3.0 added support for Mono, but I'm not sure how that works. I'm guessing that game objects in Godot are still reference counted, but now you also have memory allocated by the Mono runtime which will be garbage collected.

<comment><USER4> Ironically, no amount of care towards memory management could approach even one tenth of the care and attention I'm required to devote to memory management in Unity (and, FWIW, also in actual Windows .NET) to avoid frequent dropped frames. This is exactly what I was hoping to hear, thanks!

<comment><USER6> While I hear generally about garbage collection causing dropped frames. I've had this happen to me in HTML5 land. I haven't heard about it as much with Unity, that C# was fast enough, and the under the hood pieces are C++ anyways. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong channels :). I'm curious if your game project is 3D, and what sort of intensity you tend to have with it.

<comment><USER4> It depends entirely on the details that affect the GC. The biggest factors are the size and structure of your heap data. If the game uses a lot of memory, the GC will try to collect more often. If the heap data is large and graph- like (lots of refs to refs), it takes longer to walk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My kid who's in high school watched a few Godot tutorials on Youtube and then created a nice/simple game in about 24 hours.

We walked me through the whole process and it is amazing the whole system is free.

<comment><USER8> > it is amazing the whole system is free

Speaking of which, they have a Patreon. Anyone interested in the prospect of contributing financially to the development of Godot, check out [https://www.patreon.com/godotengine](https://www.patreon.com/godotengine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is my personal opinion about Godot vs Unity.

Background Unity:

\- I've used Unity for small to medium sized commercial industry projects (3D, VR Tours etc.).

\- I've used Unity for a 2D Gamejam.

\- Various Unity research projects.

Background Godot:

\- I've started using Godot v2.1 with little preparation successfully on two Game jams (2D) [1]

\- I've contributed smaller additions and bugfixes to Godot in the past months, in order to help the 3.0 release and also to understand more of the internals.

\- I am currently working on a bigger 2D game in Godot 3.0.

This is my _personal_ experience and opinion: First of all: For sure Unity is great and I would not hesitate to use it again in future, especially for 3D (without having much experience in Godot 3.0 3D environment).

However it has drawbacks compared to Godot, especially for 2D which is my main focus:

\- Terrible 2D support in Unity (for retro/pixel perfect projects). It's not that it is impossible but you need to know and work around many aspects to setup something that works. Same setup in Godot needs literally two clicks. Units in Godot are pixel units. Perfect.

\- No Nested prefabs in Unity. Check out their GDC 2018 keynote (end). It is even a joke to them. Well, to me it isn't. Godot does nested instances and it is a great productivity gain.

\- (Open/Public) Source code access in Godot. That probably only applies to people with C++ experience but it was great that I was not stuck since I could dive in and find and fix my problems. Often I found other people with the same problem, and sometimes a PR to fix it, so I could build it from their PR before the official merge and could go on doing my work.

\- Source code state/community for Godot. Godot has a pretty non-idealistic style of code. It's not heavily abstracted. And while one could argue if it always has best design choices at least it makes it very easy to dive in. My PRs and fixes were gratefully accepted, it is a very open and productive community. Discussions on Github were constructive in my experience.

\- Unity has second class Linux (editor) support. To be fair: it seems to gradually improve. Thanks for that btw. But whenever I try I get showstopping weird issues. Every build is a different problem. In contrast: Godot under Linux is flawless. To be honest: Unity Editor does much more under the hood. And again: I personally do not care. I am focused on 2D and I feel I pay a lot extra.

\- GUI. I know that there is now a new GUI framework in Unity but I feel like it made things worse. I have a hard time getting the results I want as compared to Godot's GUI system. Not impossible per se, just not as intuitive as I would like it. Godot's GUI frameworks works similar to Qt Designer. Simple layouts and widgets.

\- Nodes and scripts (Godot) vs. Objects and Components (Unity). I have found that the nodes available in Godot make it very easy to come up with various setups. There is just a bunch of (useful) functionality build in. Especially their viewport/offscreen rendering on top of canvas mixed with GUI and shaders make things pretty easy. No need to script for various scenarios + the benefit of these nodes being native.

\- 2D Physics. Unity uses box2D (like?) physics. Godot has a custom physics engine that works pretty much like old school arcade physics. It is a perfect starting point for platformers etc. without the sacrifice in control. If your game is NOT an angry birds clone then probably a box2D like physics engine is not what you want.

I was quite surprised myself that Godot boosted my productivity so much as compared to former workflows.

Initially one of my first doubts with Godot was GodotScript. And I must say I was wrong. It is a great little language which helps iterating quickly. And if you are not happy with the performance, you can use C++ or C# or anything else with GodotNativeScript (around 2.6x speedups with C++ in my measurement[2]). I for myself kept GodotScript as iteration speed is more important to me than native performance, especially in the initial stage.

The big negative point as already pointed out is that Godot has few proven examples of successful bigger projects. Therefor platforms may be another issue. But having the source code under control helps, plus there is a drive that hopefully spawns more interest and support in future. Godot deserves it.

To conclude. For 2D I have not found a better tool than Godot. Please disagree if you like but give the tool a fair chance.

[1] Small Godot based Game jam projects: [https://itch.io/profile/stateoff](https://itch.io/profile/stateoff)

[2] Personal benchmark of GDNativeScript: [https://twitter.com/StateOffGames/status/944878511801753601](https://twitter.com/StateOffGames/status/944878511801753601)

<comment><USER10> How's the interplay btw GodotScript and C++? (and the several other scripting options they give you)

I've played a bit with Unreal, so I'm not very qualified to have opinions, but I really like how the system is mostly a C++ stack. The Blueprints are in effect extending underlying C++ classes. The "FFI", if you want to call that, is pretty clean and easy and if you want to write C++ it works very well with the rest of the system. It definitely could be cleaner... not exactly git- clone, cmake, make, make install... there are magic macros, some C# that does godknowswhat and over all it's messier than I would like.

But with all the scripting that Godot supports it seems like it'd be even messier still? You'll have some assets in C++ some in GodotScript and some in C#. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER9> (Please correct me if any of the following is imprecise, as I am not a core dev of Godot)

Languages are roughly stacked like this:

1\. Internal scripting

Godot internally (C++ source) makes a distinction between core and modules. So many of the functionality that do not necessarily belong to the core engine are modules.

You are free to write your own extension to and modules to the editor (for example custom Node types). There is also an EditorPlugin API so you do not necessarily have to get your hands wet in the engine API itself if not necessary. Btw. the latter API is also exposed in GDScript.

Anything that implements script_language.h as a __module __is considered part of the editor (e.g. exposed in-editor script support etc.)

In 3.0 that would be GDScript and C#.

2\. GDNative

Additionally 3.0 introduced GDNative which in essence is an API that exposes the internal C++ API that makes up the In-Game scripting as C symbols. This has the benefit that C can be bound to anything. Going this route even the C++ API is bindings created through C :-). More details here [1].

It is a relatively new effort but so far the following languages are supported (not making claims about stability/maturity here):

\- C (just the API itself via the shipped headers)

\- C++ [2]

\- D [2]

\- Rust [2]

\- Python [3]

\- Nim [4]

\- Possibly others?

Once you have a library that can be hooked into you load it in the editor for each individual platform you try to target.

That being said: There is no heavy boilerplate-magic going on. I've setup a CMake file to handle C++ plugins without big issues. There is no real hot- loading AFAIK but you do not need to restart the editor since it loads the libraries in play mode.

This is a sample of the GDNative API [5].

Here is a manual setup with C [6]. While the tooling improved meanwhile (e.g. in editor tools to set the libraries) it gives you a good overview how the GDNative API works.

Hope that makes sense.

[1] GDNative Architecture [https://godotengine.org/article/look-gdnative- architecture](https://godotengine.org/article/look-gdnative-architecture)

[2] Main GDNative Language Bindings [https://github.com/GodotNativeTools](https://github.com/GodotNativeTools)

[3] Python via GDNative [https://github.com/touilleMan/godot- python](https://github.com/touilleMan/godot-python)

[4] Nim via GDNative [https://github.com/pragmagic/godot- nim](https://github.com/pragmagic/godot-nim)

[5] GDNative C++ API Sample [https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot- cpp#creating-simpl...](https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-cpp#creating- simple-class)

[6] C example of GDNative (Godot Docs) [http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/plugins/gdnativ...](http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/plugins/gdnative/gdnative- c-example.html)

<comment><USER11> I wonder if one could couple it to Swift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love Godot right now. I have made a ton of progress on my game in the last two months using it. Highly recommend it to anyone wanting to pick up game dev as a hobby.

<comment><USER13> I started using Godot recently. Do you have any good tutorials to recommend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> SimulaVR (Linux VR Desktop written in Haskell) is currently in the process of integrating Godot into its rendering loop.

In order to do that we've been making Haskell FFI bindings for the Godot API. If anyone's interested check out: [https://GitHub.com/SimulaVR/Simula](https://GitHub.com/SimulaVR/Simula)

<comment><USER15> Are the Haskell godot bindings in a usable state? Very interested

<comment><USER14> They're not in a usable state yet but will most likely be by the end of the month. They are being generated in one shot via Template Haskell, and will be located here: [https://github.com/SimulaVR/godot- haskell](https://github.com/SimulaVR/godot-haskell)

Drop by [https://gitter.im/SimulaVR/Simula](https://gitter.im/SimulaVR/Simula) to discuss this at any point. There are some other Godot people involved in this project as well if you have any questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm keen to try Godot.

The only thing I'd like to see soon or at least on the roadmap is Switch support. Other open source toolkits, like Monogame, have included it. I believe Love2D also supports it now, or at least has a partner that will build projects for it.

<comment><USER17> Mate I wouldn't really worry about Switch support. Even if you could port your game to Switch, Nintendo has a tight ironclad gate on the "indie" titles that make it in the store.

And if you're thinking homebrew, the only thing you could run your game on would be a Switch devkit.

<comment><USER18> It's not unrealistic to worry about Switch support. You seem to be coming from the perspective of a hobbyist game developer, which is fine, but anyone running a serious game development project should at least consider the cost of potential console ports, even if it seems inaccesible to a hobbyist.

<comment><USER17> I don't think you've tried submitting a game to Nintendo like we did, for 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have an opinion on Godot Vs Unreal Engine?

<comment><USER20> Unreal is great for graphical fidelity. It also has tons of stuff built in because of Epic's own use of the engine. Things like multiplayer support, replay recording, and mobile support are there right out of the box. Plus the engine has been widely adopted (it was used to make PUBG and Fortnite), so you have an active community of amateur and professional game devs who can help you.

While Godot has been adopted by some studios, most stick to their own engines or use Unreal/Unity due to the lack of some of these features (or just a lack of adopters in general, which becomes a chicken-and-egg problem).

However, I'd love for Godot to become as full-featured as Unreal. These are exciting times that we live in.

Edit: Actually Godot also has multiplayer support out of the box in 3.0! It's getting close in terms of features.

<comment><USER21> I don't think graphical fidelity is a good argument for any engine today. People are making movies with Unity[1] and Godot has demonstrated[2] all the bells and whistles you could want at least if you intend to target consumer PCs that exist today.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptlVErsL-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptlVErsL-o)

At least for anyone developing a video game right now, unless you know of specific rendering techniques you need that Unreal has that the others don't, there is nothing you can really come up with that one can do the others cannot.

That being said, I'd imagine in a benchmark of GDNative vs Unity vs Unreal Unreal would probably win, Epic has way more than enough cashflow to throw tons of engineers on optimization that Godot just doesn't have. It wouldn't be an orders of magnitude difference, though - we are talking optimization of already tight render loops, and Godot benefits highly from having a tiny renderer.

<comment><USER22> I'm working full time in unity, but the game is 2d and I don't have much reason to learn about 3d rendering. I'd love to at some point...

From my perspective, and probably many other amateur game developers who are making all three engines popular, I think the big difference may just be that ue3 comes out of the box with a bunch of random postprocessing things turned on. The base ue3 scene looks amazing, with lots of interesting materials and textures, whereas the base unity scene is completely empty space with an ugly blue-grey gradient horizon (which I've seen unchanged many times in game jams and indie game competitions). Regardless of potential, most indie devs similar to me don't care enough to make their indie games look good because they're busy making them fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this a good engine to begin game programming with? I am an experienced web developer with deep interest in interactive stuff.

<comment><USER21> Yes, absolutely. Probably by far the optimization between being able to do anything you want while being dead simple to do it in. "Easier" engines like rpgmaker or LOVE severely limit what you can accomplish with the game, while more established engines like UE and Unity have a lot more front loaded scaffolding to do.

<comment><USER24> > more established engines like UE and Unity have a lot more front loaded > scaffolding to do.

This, in my opinion, is Godot's biggest advantage. UE and Unity are a lot for a new user to contend with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome! I have played with godot before, and while it has some sharp edges I am thrilled to see an opensource engine coming together so well. Great job to all involved!

<comment><USER8> Been following Godot for a good while but never tried it myself. I support them on Patreon anyway though, just because I think it's important that we have a truly open source game engine like Godot :) Did you try Godot 3.0 yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks great! I've heard of Godot quite a bit and have been meaning to check it out.

Boy do I feel like a dummy though... I thought it was "Go"dot and it was built with and/or uses Go(lang). Can't say I wasn't just a tiny bit disappointed!

In any case, I just checked out some of the videos and the IDE in particular looks pretty amazing. Will check it out for sure.

<comment><USER20> You can actually use Golang with Godot to code gameplay using some open source bindings[1] for GDNative.

[1]: [https://github.com/ShadowApex/godot- go](https://github.com/ShadowApex/godot-go)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Any good tutorials to learn this ? I want to make an outrun like game but no experience in this area

<comment><USER28> Here are a few YouTube channels with tutorials:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaPQ5uLX5iIEHUCLmfAgKg/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaPQ5uLX5iIEHUCLmfAgKg/playlists)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/playlists)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChv- gaPlKNROf6iMDhxIpUA/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChv- gaPlKNROf6iMDhxIpUA/playlists) (Godot 2 videos but good)

You can also find more links here: [https://godot- engine.zeef.com/andre.antonio.schmitz](https://godot- engine.zeef.com/andre.antonio.schmitz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm really excited about Godot. I started using it and saw the limits of the 3d stuff that is there right now but I'm excited to start using it when really good 3d animation libraries become available which seem to be lacking at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER30> I first discovered Godot when working on an ambitious game. While my ambitions have tempered, my stance on Godot hasn't. It's been a great product to turn out 2D games on, and I am looking forward to trying out some 3D projects with the v3 Renderer. It's not going to replace Unity or Unreal for any ambitious AAA-level title, but it can't be overlooked for rapid prototyping or 2D games.

Godot is also the first project I've ever given Patreon funding for.

</comment><comment><USER31> I read most of that press release with no idea if Godot was a real thing or if it was an eloborate riff on _Waiting for Godot_

It took clicking around their site a bit to realize it's actually a real thing. I think.

</comment><comment><USER32> re: "The Gambling Industry is Largely Moving to Godot."

I don't know, seems like the author should have at least mixed feelings about this? It can't be prevented with an MIT license, but it doesn't seem like great news?

<comment><USER33> I'm surprised gambling needs 3D at all…

related: AMD is making embedded products for gambling now (look at their YouTube channel)

<comment><USER34> They have very flashy, AAA-style graphics now. Check out Konami's pivot:

[https://www.casino-review.co/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/CR16...](https://www.casino-review.co/wp- content/uploads/2016/08/CR167-Konami-Europe-1-696x392.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult - <AUTHOR> http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-engineering-is-so-difficult/ <comment><USER2> It's easy to say that communication is key, because it is, but all else being equal, if your team can't execute projects in a distributed, remote environment as well as it can in a centralized place, then it's not as good at communicating as you think it is. Dragging a failing remote team into an office isn't going to magically make them successful, and scattering a successful team across the world isn't going to suddenly make the project fail.

I personally find the very disconnected nature of the teams I lead in my consulting work actually forces us to communicate in an open, concise, discoverable way that would be good for any type of team, but that co-located teams get to cheat out on because a weak team member can always ride his stronger teammates' organizational coat tails with nosey interruptions and annoyances.

We _have_ to think things through and write clear specs, because we can't use body language to clarify and count on the people involved in the meeting to just remember the attitudes expressed. We _have_ to be good about change management, because we can't just turn around and ask someone to "get out of a file" or do whatever we want to the database whenever we want to. We _have_ to keep meetings to a minimum, because you just can't have a productive, two-hour phone call.

These are all good things for non-remote teams, too. But they cheat and don't follow good practice.

<comment><USER3> This and the top comment nails it down that if your team is not delivering the stuff in remote model then they most probably wont deliver in collocated space as well. I am not very sure why people still refer to year 2000 time of offshoring difficulties till now. For last 14 years I have been in working in the offshore(software and infra outsourcing) model. And I can vouch for the model to be very workable while it will have some extra work for either USA partner or for India partner (Mostly on Indian side as they may not say no even if USA side offer to take extra efforts). In my opinion the following has made the life much better for me and hopefully for my partners.

1\. Have the key folks (leads/project managers) travel and stay with team for at least 4 weeks in a common place. 2\. Do not force video (leave the mode of comms to peoples preference (video / email / call)) 3\. Allow decision to be made over text chat and have it added to project decisions in weekly meetings 4\. Identify couple strong people per 15 members team and have relationship where they will tell you before deciding like 6 months in advance and allow people to leave. They will come back later. And wholeheartedly develop them even if you know they will leave, with one condition that they will develop one more person like them for the team. 5\. Have good leader in India who can speak open with out fear of a westerner (I find this a most difficult one). This is a real deal maker between peace of mind and micro managing and going crazy. 6\. Be open t listen to same idea that your team thought and decided to ditch from your offshore partner. (we can go for full blog post on that)

I think this would take the team long way. Please remember either USA side or India will have to lose 3 evenings a week, irrespective of SRS, Comm tools and so on if you need a successful delivery.

<comment><USER3> EDIT ADD: There is no additional issues in managing remote worker than it is with regular in office . It is just kind of issue, it is definitely manageable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My experience is that engineers often:

        * hate meetings
        * prefer slack/hipchat/etc even if seated adjacently (myself included)
        * work asynchronously

So the main friction is in the interface between engineering and other disciplines. Remote works well so long as non-technical leadership has a local lead they can interface with.

<comment><USER5> The communication skills of other non-engineering team members can often suck in the digital domain. Empathy by text message can be hard to have. A combination of on-site and remote often works best. Learning the language of other domains can take a long time. The role of people who interface and translate between domains is important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have always worked remotely. My company works this way, my employees work remotely.

IMHO it is not hard or difficult per se, but you need to design your company around it, like with other things.

It is also an area that needs more study in order to develop fully.

Probably if I had a conventional company and I had to transform or convert it to remote, it wouldn't work. There would be vested interest against the conversion on some people, some people would not believe it is not possible(people tend to believe that if you don't look busy to others you are not working) or managers will fear their employees slacking.

When you create a company that makes money from day one remotely, you have not this problem, as you organize around it and it is not optional.

In some ways it is weird. If you go out of your house to get your children from school because you did not spend 1 hour commuting to work, 1 returning from it, society could believe you are not working at all.

They are often surprised to see you have money, and much more money than they have.

But I suppose it is not different from an old farmer watching people sitting in a chair in the city call it "work".

<comment><USER2> >> In some ways it is weird. If you go out of your house to get your children from school because you did not spend 1 hour commuting to work, 1 returning from it, society could believe you are not working at all. They are often surprised to see you have money, and much more money than they have. But I suppose it is not different from an old farmer watching people sitting in a chair in the city call it "work".

Oh man, I run into this constantly. I think my in-laws may have finally gotten over it, as they probably figure their daughter couldn't have afforded three international vacations this year on her own.

I don't tell people I've cut my hours back to 20/wk. Most of the people I know just aren't ready to hear "I work less and still make more than you."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The more interesting thing about this story is how all of the examples are tied together in an already well known way stated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, " _The Mythical Man-Month_ ". You may have heard the adage of how adding developers to a late project only makes the project more late. The reason is communication overhead. One developer can produce some number of lines of code in a given day, so you'd expect adding more developers would result in more lines of code being written -- essentially O(N). Unfortunately, there is communication overhead and it increases complexity at O(N^2) as well as being an even bigger drain at the start when bring new developers up to speed with the existing group. If you take a step back, all of the remote working patterns presented in the article as working are essentially ways to eliminate the need for communication.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a former life as a corporate software developer, I distinctly remember having to get up at graveyard-shift hours to infrequently coordinate with some of our Indian team members.

Some minimal time-zone overlap is never overrated. I think it is hard to beat real-time communication over chat or voice - asynchronous delays break up any flow in collaboration and turn it more into throw the requirement over the wall and listen for an echo the next morning.

<comment><USER9> I found that up to +/\- 4hr works , other makes life really hard For example we have team in Singapore 12 hr diff , every communication is so delayed that is really painful

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe the key to making remote work work is that everybody has to work remotely, or as if they were remote. If you have meetings and other communications happening face to face, then the remote people, to a greater or lesser extent become Cowboys, through no real fault of their own.

<comment><USER11> Every so often I have to take myself out of the office without warning the team and see just how far we have strayed from our remote communication ideal. It's generally pretty humbling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very good writing. A few comments:

"as a product you're betting that your API design is robust enough that groups can remotely work at their own pace or velocity. The core question is why would you want to constrain yourself in this way? "

I am not certain which constraints are implied here - to me an API that facilitates such a work is _simple_ and _understandable_ which to me are admirable qualities.

Perhaps the challenge then is to split the architecture into small enough testable units which communicate through the simple APIs? Once again, this sounds great.

But in practice simplicity, understandability and good architecture are reachable by experience or trial and error so I suppose it would require either a situation were a known pattern is reapplied to new business requirements or one where there is ample time for designing and prototyping with these qualities as explicit design constraints.

"how to balance resources on each side of the API."

I suppose the best situation would be then an API that supports a directed graph of rensponsibilities. Like a plug in system, for instance?

"...however you find you can divide the work across geography at a point in time, it simply isn't sustainable. "

So I suppose to make remote working work software architecture and team management need to be linked on a very intimate level? This would be nice in any situation, I think

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting food for thought here, but the difficulties of remote engineering are not fundamentally any more challenging than any other collaboration obstacles. Obviously having all the stakeholders sitting in the same room is the platonic ideal of a team, but to me this is a secondary concern after getting the absolute best people we can.

I think the author is a bit out of touch with how startups operate. Personally I'll take a crack team made up of five best people sitting in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Bangalore and Tokyo over a special team with a powerful corporate mandate ensconced in Microsoft's Redmond campus.

If everyone is good at what they do and has their eye on the ball, then communication can be managed from anywhere, but if you're dealing with the political reality of operating in a major corporation then you need all the help you can get.

<comment><USER14> Agree. It's interesting to compare the remote worker debate with the open office configuration debate- they seem like different degrees of the same problem.

I find it interesting that I myself am all for remote workers, but have had nothing but horrible experiences with workplaces where everyone has their own office. Pondering this a bit I think it's because every workplace I've been in with individual offices (Microsoft and others) also seemed to be very old school in terms of communication software.

<comment><USER15> Could you please elaborate a bit on what sorts of horrible experiences you had with the individual offices arrangement? How frequent were your team meetings? Did you guys use Slack-style chat softwares?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > If I had to sum up all of these in one challenge, it is that however you > find you can divide the work across geography at a point in time, it simply > isn't sustainable. The very model you use to keep work geographically > efficient are globally sub-optimal for the evolution of your code.

I think this is true of any organization, geographically divided or not. These are the challenges of organizational structure, and I've seen them affect organizations in a single location just as much as organizations with remote engineers.

In my mind, the single most important thing to do is to re-evaluate and adjust the structure early and often. The way you divide up work today will almost _never_ be sustainable - regardless of geography. The trick is to help everyone understand and expect those changes to occur frequently.

</comment><comment><USER17> What I always wondered with remote work is how do you prevent angry ex- employees to "share" their code-base with the rest of the world (dump it on The Pirate Bay) or with your competitors (in this case you may not even know that they did it).

Of course if they live in a first world country you can probably sue them (and hopefully it could refrain them from releasing your code) but if they come from countries where the law is an abstract concept there will be no brake to exacting their revenge.

<comment><USER18> That problem exists for local work in the same way, no? If you can 'git clone' onto a dev machine, you can also copy that git repo to a USB stick.

Efficient dev environments can't be totally locked down, because often people need to experiment with some parts of the environment (for example to reproduce bugs that only happen in some environments).

<comment><USER17> Yes but unless the local employee anticipated to be fired, most of the times they won't have made copies of the work.

When you tell them they're fired you can block them from physically accessing their dev machine.

Of course if you work on an open source project this problem go away, every employee is mandated to release their code ;-)

<comment><USER2> As a general rule, when talking about risks, you want to evaluate the cross section of Likelihood vs. Impact. Sometimes, you ignore high-impact risks because the likelihood of them occurring is just so low that it doesn't make sense to do anything about it, especially if there isn't much you _can_ do about it. Like, "a meteor could strike our office, killing everyone inside". There's just nothing you can do about it[1], and if it does happen, there won't be anyone left to pick up the pieces anyway.

So I think you're underestimating the likelihood of employees copying code (it doesn't take anticipating being fired), and overestimating the impact it would have (it really won't do a damn thing)[2].

Every job I've had, the project code has somehow ended up on my personal computer. It has been a combination of factors. Generally, it goes that I get sick and declare I'll work from home. Either the company had provided a laptop or they hadn't, in which case I would have to use my personal PC to work. If a laptop was provided, the hardware was slow, or the tools installed were not my favorites (or particularly bad), or issues with the VPN connection/antivirus/corporate spyware software made everything slow. So in almost all cases, I've ended up with everything copied anyway.

And when I left the jobs, I had immediately deleted it. But even if I hadn't, even if I had taken and used the code (illegally), it really wouldn't have impacted the company. It's not like I would have been able to approach the clients and gotten them to go with me: typically the client owns the code anyway, I wouldn't have needed to copy the code. It's not like I could have started a competitor all on my own off of the company's own code base. And finally, the vast majority of projects just aren't that novel: why would I potentially throw myself into a den of thieves and lawyers for what is probably a crufty POS that I could replace in a weekend of caffeine fueled mania?

[1] oh, except, you know, not forcing your team to be co-located.

[2] This leads me to believe you are probably more the businessy/MBA type, rather than the engineering type. It's usually the MBA type who is most fearful of someone stealing the IP. The engineers who actually make the IP rarely consider it a threat.

<comment><USER17> > _This leads me to believe you are probably more the businessy /MBA type, > rather than the engineering type._

Sorry to disappoint I'm of the engineering type. I'm also of the paranoid type though ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> all this WFH fud. its total bullshit. i work on a distributed team and i do video conferencing, pair programming (screenhero) and chat all day w/ them. I talk to these coworkers more than I ever did my onsite cohorts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's almost impossible given human biology to expect excellent architectural/engineering decisions from remote teams. You need the in-the- flesh discussions, whiteboarding, leadership, etc.

<comment><USER2> So then, how does FOSS fit into your notion of human biology?

<comment><USER20> Good model for maintaining an existing codebase, but not for designing good ones from the ground up. It works best with a singular leader (or geographically centered leaders) who can make the overall architectural and engineering decisions.

<comment><USER21> How about the Linux kernel? Essentially, it began as something very basic in 1991 when communication methods were much different than we have today (e.g. video conferencing, etc.)[0]. There are many other examples of high quality open source projects that were born or greatly improved on the Interwebs, e.g. Git, Apache, ...

\---

[0]: [http://oldlinux.org/Linus/911010.pdf](http://oldlinux.org/Linus/911010.pdf)

<comment><USER20> This is speculation, but I think if Linus had a team a tenth of the size of the kernel team in one physical location they could get just as much done.

I'd love to see negating or supporting data either way, it's just my opinion that if you want a _team_ of engineers (as opposed to a singular dictator) to build you something amazing (C Language, SR-71, Saturn V) they need to be in the same physical location and see each other face to face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only thing about remote work that is different than local work is communication paradigms. Specifically, whereas you could normally poke your head around a corner and interrupt someone to ask them something trivial, with remote work it's harder to forcibly intrude on them and get instant feedback. And I think that's what people have a hard time grasping: how to 'work' without instant feedback?

Of course we all own a telephone, so the instantaneous-ness is always there. But timezones create a mandatory delay to availability which can't be easily worked around. So whereas people are normally very accustomed to working via a continuous flow of real time communication, they now have to learn to communicate via delays and compartmentalize decisions and production.

Some people can't deal with this. So they start to find ways of splitting up work by location. But eventually, things get out of sync, because they never learned how to communicate in a new way. This then creates things like a mandatory daily meeting just to figure out what's changed in the last 24 hours, or red tape designed to keep people from making decisions on their own, or a lack of any kind of tape, or a breakdown in leadership, or the inability to accomplish tasks independently, or lowered morale, etc. This lack of being able to cope with communicating and working asynchronously is, I believe, a sort of stagnating death spiral that (without seriously competent self- starting workaholics) just results in mismanagement and tepid progress.

As a contrary example I like to use the open source development world. They work on different parts of different projects in different regions all the time. They self-organize and come to consensus quickly, and are led by a small team of well established hierarchy that makes quick, decisive executive decisions. There is basically no bone-headed executive level muddling with your work, nor contemptible middle-managers fighting for power, nor tepid low- level engineers waiting for someone to make a decision. Everyone just gets shit done because they all have one goal: to ship a good product. That's all very nice because you aren't part of a corporation, and you feel like your contribution matters more.

But in a corporation, you have to deal with all the usual corporation bullshit, in addition to now working asynchronously. I think this is where the big breakdown occurs in practice; two different sets of problems (asynchronous communication, and corporate bullshit) add up to a more complicated way of working. If you're very lucky, everyone will be able to work the same way and things will go smoothly. But in practice, not everyone works the same way, and thus bugs crop up in the work due to process incompatibility.

So why is remote engineering difficult? It's not; it's just a specific skillset.

</comment><comment><USER23> I worked at two companies where everyone worked remotely.

I think one of the big differences I noticed is that I never felt like I was that close to the rest of the team. We talked a few times/week through Webex or Skype, but it's just not the same as being there in person.

Communication was also a big issue. It's not impossible to have good communication remotely, but I've rarely seen it in practice.

<comment><USER24> The missing part might have been Empathy.

<comment><USER23> I think you are onto something here. One of the things I remembered that really bothered me about my last remote job was that the boss would constantly change the scope of the project right before the deadline..and extend the deadline even further.

I was never part of many of the decision-making meetings with the boss and my project manager and I felt like the manager never had our back. After we met onsite for our first bi-yearly 1-week meeting, I realized that he didn't really have any choice in the matter and did in-fact fight for us when these decisions were made.</comment></comment></comment>


Marc Benioff and his wife are buying Time Magazine - <AUTHOR> https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/16/media/salesforce-marc-benioff-time-magazine/index.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001786).

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to understand the working of HN - maybe I know why this story was marked as "Dupe" and another one not? Thx

<comment><USER2> It's a bit random, but we try to give priority to the one that was submitted earlier.</comment></comment></comment>


Any hackers on HN from Charlotte, NC? - <AUTHOR>

I am in charlotte and will like to connect with local entrepreneurs.. <comment><USER2> I'm also in Charlotte, but more of just an interested guy than a hardcore hacker/entrepreneur. Email me if you get something going, it's in my profile.</comment>


Asperger's Syndrome on Screen and Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/04aspe.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> Why do they insist in calling it "a disorder"? do extroverts suggest we need to be cured or something? I want my Asperger's pride parade. Aspies of the world, unite! ;)

<comment><USER3> Asperger's != introversion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Asperger's is not introversion.

<comment><USER4> Aspies are often outgoing, but they have a lot of trouble socializing. That is what I am like, and it is pretty tough. How is it not a disorder to be unable to do something that is necessary for your happiness?

<comment><USER3> Introversion is a _personality trait_. Introverts can socialize, but we prefer one-on-one environments or small groups to crowds, we prefer spending more time with intimates to meeting new people, and in general, we see social life as a cost rather than a benefit.

Asperger's, from what I've read of the subject, is a _cognitive issue_ ; Aspies don't read social cues that neurotypicals ( _including_ introverted neurotypicals) pick up on without even thinking about it, and therefore have trouble socializing _even when they want to_.

It's like the difference between people who don't read a lot of books because they prefer to spend their free time watching TV, and people who don't read a lot of books because they're dyslexic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google thinks the sun is 15.81 light years from earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=distance+earth+to+sun&oq=distance+earth+to+sun <comment><USER2> Google was also quite confident that the alphabet starts with J and ends with G. [https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/86609697117344972...](https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/866096971173449729)

Just tried it again, now it both starts and ends with A. 50% improvement ain't bad.

</comment><comment> d--b Distance Earth-Sun = 1 AU

1e6 AU = 15.81 light years.

Somebody did not pick up the 'e6' part...

<comment><USER3> Pretty much. The sidebar references Wikipedia's List of brightest stars [1]. That table has the distance from Earth to the Sun in lightyears. So maybe a parsing problem with 0.000015813. On the January 21st this was changed from 0.000 015 813, so it may have been parsing that wrong.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars#Main_table_of_the_brightest_stars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Huh... with JavaScript off, I get the answer "Distance from Sun: 92.96 million " (presumably miles) on the right hand side. With JavaScript on, I get the wrong answer from the title.

Edit: Actually, it gets the same answer on the right side with JS enabled; didn't notice that earlier. So just the instant answer is missing in the JS- disabled case.

Also, here's a screenshot for posterity (with JS enabled): [https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png](https://i.imgur.com/8kyI523.png)

<comment><USER5> Screenshot from Brazil: [https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png](https://i.imgur.com/ODEtS0Q.png)

<comment><USER6> [https://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun](https://www.google.com/search?&q=distance+from+brazil+to+sun)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google seems to think that Earth is Gliese 412

 _Gliese 412 is a pair of stars that share a common proper motion through space and are thought to form a binary star system. The pair have an angular separation of 31.4″ at a position angle of 126.1°.[12] They are located 15.8 light years distant from the Sun in the constellation Ursa Major. Both components are relatively dim red dwarf stars._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_412)

<comment><USER8> It's still cloudy here in Austria, I'll count the number of suns later when the clouds are gone.

<comment><USER9> Not so cloudy in Burgenland, I only see one. But I don't have a telescope with a sun filter to scientifically prove it.

<comment><USER10> I got confused at your mention of "Burgenland" together with your nick, which led me to find out that "Burgenland" and "Burgenlandkreis" (Burgenland county) are two different counties in two different countries:

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

<comment><USER9> Well that's new to me too. Thanks for the links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As of this posting, if you put a "what" in front of the query, it returns the correct average distance. I suspected the parser, even if it was learned, is sensitive to the query format.

Despite what the press teams of large companies will tell you, our ability to model language is still in its early infancy.

</comment><comment><USER12> If they're gonna push their silly instant answers, they'd better make sure the results are correct...

<comment><USER13> Google Search so aggressively massages my queries that it's become almost unusable.

I recently searched "80's rom-coms" and an instant answer came up on top. It was a list of 90's rom-coms. Similar, yes -- but not at all what I typed, and completely useless to me.

<comment><USER14> bing seems to get this right in both instant search and otherwise.

<comment><USER15> I'm slowly switching to Bing--not because Bing is getting better, but because Google is getting worse. Google consistently ignores key terms in my queries, and searches are getting slower and slower. Remember when Google used to have that little timer in the top-right corner of the search results? Not anymore...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wolfram alpha for comparison: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+e...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+sun+to+earth+in+light+years)

<comment> d--b WA thinks the distance is 0.9843 AU...

<comment><USER17> That is probably the current distance. 1 AU is the mean distance.

<comment><USER18> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit):

 _"Originally conceived as the average of Earth 's aphelion and perihelion"_

[https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical- unit](https://www.britannica.com/science/astronomical-unit):

 _"a unit of length effectively equal to the average, or mean, distance between Earth and the Sun"_

I wondered whether the two are equal. A bit to my surprise, they are ([http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon- gordon/RecentArti...](http://www.farmingdale.edu/faculty/sheldon- gordon/RecentArticles/average-distance-in-ellipse.doc))

(If we take into account that earth moves faster near its perihelion, I think that will break down)

And, nitpick, nowadays, the AU apparently is exactly 149,597,870,700 meters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not only is Google "borrowing" content from others to show directly in the search results, more often than not it's completely wrong. Either because they have failed to parse the data correctly, or because it's from some shady web page (happens when googling stuff related to vaccines for instance).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Earth distance to sun" gives the correct answer: [https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=e...](https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=earth+distance+from+sun)

<comment><USER20> Interesting. It says 149.6 _million_ km, which is correct.

[distance earth to sun in km] gives 149.6 _trillion_ km, which is 15.81 light years.

</comment></comment><comment> nv-vn the magic of machine learning, everybody

<comment><USER21> they are using AI, not machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure I like Google's attempt to solve global warming.

</comment><comment><USER23> My son likes to ask our Google Home the distance to different planets. The numbers, though generally technically correct (sun has worked in the past), are misleading as some are minimum, some average distance and some maximum.

For example "distance to mars" says 54.6 million km, which is the theoretical minimum. "distance to venus" says 261 million km which is maximum. I believe it was Jupiter that previously gave an average distance but now I'm seeing minimum.

<comment><USER24> By the "[maximum] distance to different planets" do you really mean literally that, or do you mean the maximum distances to their orbits?

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't those be the same? The periods of each planet's orbit aren't factors/multiples of one another, so eventually any two will be at opposite points in their orbit.

<comment><USER24> The maximum distance between two ellipses is not the same as the maximum distance between all pairs of points on them right? Like just imagine measuring the maximum distance from a circular orbit to itself. One measure would give zero (zero separation between the orbits) and the other would give twice the radius (individual points can be 2R away from each other).

If I'm doing this correctly I think the max distance between two points would come out to max_x max_y ||x - y|| whereas the max distance to the orbit would come out to max_x min_y ||x - y||.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A little parsing error here, a little parsing error there...

</comment><comment><USER27> Someone should win a bug bounty for that one !

</comment><comment><USER28> But it seems to get it right if you ask the same question in the opposite order [https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun](https://www.google.com/search?q=Earth+Distance+from+Sun)

</comment><comment><USER29> Have a glimpse at the kind of errors we will be facing with the machine- learning AI in the near future.

How do we debug them and how do we know there is an error to correct in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER30> Google's systems do not, "think."

<comment><USER31> Having interacted with a lot of computers over the years (including Google's for the last several of my employment), the machines at Google come as close to thinking as I've ever encountered. Two or three times a day they come up with answers that I cannot begin to comprehend how they arrived at. Sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are dumb, and sometimes they are merely mad.

They give every coworker I've ever had a run for their money on catching my fuckups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We should send satellites to Alpha Centauri before Google figures this out.

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo If you google distance between Sun and Earth, Google gets it right.

</comment><comment><USER33> the AIs are coming to kill us any day now

<comment><USER15> At this rate, they're more likely to jump off a cliff than kill anyone.</comment></comment>


Acoustic Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging - <AUTHOR> http://www.computationalimaging.org/publications/acoustic-non-line-of-sight-imaging/ <comment><USER2> More excuse for Hi-Fi enthusiasts to install acoustic panels: "Honey, have you seen that article on HN? I'm installing these for our privacy."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is called sonar... it has been around for a very long time.

<comment><USER4> > This is called sonar... it has been around for a very long time.

You're thinking of direct line-of-sight detection of objects. This paper is seeing around corners things that aren't directly visible to the sound sources, it's a very different thing that requires a big computer and a reconstruction phase.

<comment><USER5> They're using a wall as a mirror ... it's not that much different from direct line-of-sight sonar if you ask me. Just flip the scene across the mirror (virtual image), and you're back at plain old sonar.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Light, sound and RF all bounce off walls. Yes it takes some more computation to figure it out, but at the end of the day you are plotting the rebound of sound off of an object. Sonar</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bankrupt Solyndra Caught Destroying Brand New Parts - <AUTHOR> http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/01/19/bankrupt-solyndra-caught-destroying-brand-new-parts/

<comment><USER2> I work in the glass business, though we don't do the low iron glass used by companies like this and I don't know any specifics about Solyndra. That aside, it's entirely possible that custom glass would be useless to anyone else. Especially if it was tempered glass, which cannot be cut after tempering (it shatters when you attempt to cut it). The article also mentions that they tried, but were unable to find a buyer. It's possible that this glass was in a size only they could use and anyone else would have to redo their manufacturing process to use it.

That said, you can recycle broken glass and even get paid for it. I don't know if they're doing this or not, but it's probably more worthwhile than seeing if someone else needs exactly the same custom glass as you do.

Finally, unless that was a some kind of standard stock size (in which case you should be able to sell it directly to other parties), I really don't think the factory would want it back. We do mostly custom-sized lites of glass and when an order is cancelled or returned for whatever reason, it goes into the dumpster and gets recycled. There's almost nothing you can save most of the time and yes, I've searched through orders just to see if there was anything we could salvage. You're not likely to find _anything_ you can save.</comment>


New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited Uber for $100 - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/09/27/unlimited-uber-rides-new-york-100-dollars-subscription-october/#4ae5c247570a <comment><USER2> While this is interesting, Manhattan is the least useful area for this since the subway is already so good. A dense area with a poor subway system seems more helpful (but I'm assuming less profitable)

<comment><USER3> Nah, Uber in Manhattan is useful. There's a reason there are 12,000 cabs. Sure, if i'm near the proper subway line to get me somewhere quickly it's great. However, there are plenty of times the subway isn't the best choice.</comment></comment>


How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? - <AUTHOR> http://rameznaam.com/2016/04/12/how-cheap-can-electric-vehicles-get/ <comment><USER2> With all this happiness they need subsidies Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll need to pay attention to the time scales of when things get cheap, also there's built in limits on the subsidies, not much more than 200,000 vehicles per manufacturer, which meshes nicely with the idea of learning rates as manufacturers scale up.</comment></comment>


"Bastard Operator From Hell"-style excuse generator - <AUTHOR> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/%7Eballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl <comment><USER2> >I'm not sure. Try calling the Internet's head office -- it's in the book.

:)</comment>


Forever Storage - <AUTHOR> http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2010/06/12/forever-storage/

<comment><USER2> The novel about this is Neal Stephenson's Anathem... where people strive to keep just the necessary information alive (like, "Where did we store the atomic waste a couple of 1000 years ago?").

No matter how your data is going to be stored, it will eventually have to be copied to another medium. And if you want to store it "forever", you _will_ get data corruption, either because of transmission errors or because the storage medium fails. Keeping the data redundant is not enough for guaranteed data safety, as no matter how many copies you create, one day all of them can fail at the same time.

But you can take steps to ensure that your data is realistically safe for say a 1000 years (which is not by any means "forever", but then who but an archaeology AI will read your data at that time). The Long Now Foundation is thinking about stuff like this (<http://www.longnow.org/>).

An interesting question is, how do you ensure that your data will not be intentionally wiped out, because it is deemed (religiously, politically, legally) offensive? A metal band's CD cover is now considered dangerously close to child porn here abouts (Scorpions, Virgin Killer). That may be enough to make some people erase your data for decency's sake. A dead man can not fight a cease and desist order.

A different view on the matter would be: you are going to die, and your data is going to die eventually. And even if it is around, it's likely that no one will want to read it anyway. But your existence will have consequences for the rest of (human) history, as just by living you provide an input to the human race. This input may be in the form of biological data (children) or pure information (a blog article about "forever storage" which inspires the next great startup founder to do great things). Just go on, do something positive besides leaving a huge carbon footprint and atomic waste that lasts for a million years.

<comment><USER3> Long Now's Rosetta Stone is the perfect project. Monel, their chosen alloy, doesn't seem to have any issue being stable for 1000 years. Their human- visible text is obviously too bulky to store a reasonable database of 500GB or 1TB, but no reason it couldn't support a more compact encoding.

(Alternately, you could use optical storage and hope redundancy and ECC will be enough. For example, if you want to store 500GB, you could take 20 Bluray 50GB drives, split it all into 25GB chunks, and then generate 25GB of ECC data, such as <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive> files. Do this every year, and you'll be able to correct files back and forth between archive-sets as well as within individual disks. Even if the Bluray discs degrade, there ought to be enough of a trace left for things like electron microscopes to pick up.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if there could be a distributed/open solution to this... not so easy probably. Some Bit Torrent style distributed storage comes to mind, where you have to provide x*the ammount of data you would like to store to others, with y% availability.

Like a data-storage ponzi scheme, but it might be sustainable because storage and bandwidth keep getting cheaper.

<comment><USER5> Tahoe LFS seems to fit the bill....erasure coding for the win!

<http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technically I agree this is completely possible, the challenges are more likely to be economic. How do you make sure the company exists 1000 years in the future? That question poses itself especially for a potential startup providing this service, but would even be relevant if an established company were to do it.

If I were to trust anyone with doing this, it would probably be the catholic church. Can't think of anyone else with a sufficient track record.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, surviving a societal collapse is pretty hard.

I think a societal collapse, in which you assume the basic structure of of Capitalistic motivations failed, might only have 2 real outcomes:

* Star Trek: Money becomes mostly pointless, and you hope with the altruism of other humans, the data is restored.

* Mad Max: Welp, sucks for your data, it'll be lost in the sands of time.

I think the more important perspective is, if you can make the first 200 years, the chances of someone else picking up the data increases massively -- right now most data is created and destroyed in years, never mind decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If what you have is truly worth preserving for that long, transcode it into <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA> (several times over to allow for mutations) and splice it into sperm/egg/embryo cells at fertility clinics. Let your "progeny" multiply across the planet with Nature taking care of replicating your data through space and time. For retrieval: I suppose that in the distant future, DNA databases will probably be preserved for easy lookup by sequence and thus so will your data.

The human genome is ~6B base pairs = ~3B bits = ~357MB. Only 1.5% constitute protein-coding genes. Let's say some of that "junk DNA" is actually useful, we could still get away with ~200MB of payload per human cell. Further scaling can be obtained by targeting other organisms with large populations (bees, rabbits, cockroaches, mosquitoes, bacteria) or even synthesize new viruses or parasites that hitch along to humans for an evolutionary ride while preserving your data at the same time ...

(Disclaimer: I'm in the middle of an X-files marathon)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's very easy to keep the _data_ intact, if you know when, exactly, you want access to it again: as in the book referenced in the article, The Forever War, just put the _data_ on an object in space, relativistically accelerate it, and set it for a return course in X years. From the object's frame of reference, much less time (and degradation) will pass.

Or, even simpler: find a reflective surface X/2 lightyears away, and shoot coherent light at it with sufficient power.

The real problem is preserving the _information_ , which degrades even faster than the data. Even communicating a very simple message[1] across more than a 1000-year gap turns out to be nearly impossible, as it will be intentionally misinterpreted in the direction of whatever will make the finders happy.

[1] [http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place- of-...](http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor)

<comment><USER8> _It's very easy to keep the data intact, if you know when, exactly, you want access to it again: as in the book referenced in the article, The Forever War, just put the data on an object in space, relativistically accelerate it..._

It's "easy" to relativistically accelerate something!? (Macroscopic, not fundamental particles or ions.) This is the old wag about how, in Google engineer speak, "trivial" means the theory is known and all that lies between now and implementation is 300 million dollars of planning and engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Preserving data for future historians is a good thing but why is it so important to preserve _your own_ data? Do you really think that's what will be the most valuable to them? It seems better to contribute to projects like the Internet Archive.

Also, the value of data depends partially on its scarcity, and I expect data about us won't be particularly scarce. More data is better, but when doing a bulk analysis, 10 terabytes of family pictures will not be all that different from 10.1 terabytes of family pictures.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the best way to guarantee your data to live on is to get it in a form you can save for the future as easily as a photo album.

Some time ago I saw (maybe even here on Hacker News) something about "setting your data in stone"...

<http://primera.eu/millenniata/millenniata-en.html> is what I found quickly about it now, there is/was a bigger explaining page with a heat and ice test of this medium.

</comment><comment><USER11> A few years ago I won a (very small) business plan competition for a company describing a consumer backup service like this one.

The kicker is figuring out what would happen if the company stops trading for whatever reason (e.g. bankrupcy). Although I didn't follow through with it, I think you can build a reasonably safe winding-down process that at the very least returns the data to its owners.

<comment><USER12> I was thinking about this. You don't charge people to add data - just to remove it.</comment></comment>


Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games - <AUTHOR> http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/01/death-of-level-designer-procedural.html "Procedural content generation is yet to set the game industry on fire. It has featured in one of the greatest games of all time, Diablo and it's successor, who directly trace their roots to roguelike games such as Angband. But the recent implementation of random level generation in Hellgate: London did little to inspire people that this method works well for game level design. But bubbling under the surface of the industry, and very much evident in future games like Spore is a methodology that like most technologies has been underwhelming in the short term but in the long term will have profound consequences for how games are designed." <comment><USER2> I remember reading an interview with one of the authors of Rogue where he said that one of the big motivations for them was designing a game that they could play. Most games at the time were interactive fiction, where if you know the solutions to all the puzzles, it's no fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> Death of the game programmer: procedural content generation in games.

<comment><USER4> Death of the game programmer: procedural _game_ generation.

<comment><USER3> No, I'm saying that's not the end of level design in the same way that using procedures in programming is not the end of game design. It just pushes the design to a higher level.</comment></comment></comment>


Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html?mwrsm=Facebook <comment><USER2> I'm a little confused by this article.

There was no suggestion that these systems were built to intentionally produce certain outcomes for particular races or sexes, which leads me to believe that these outcomes are "pure" effects of the ML algorithms that use race or gender as inputs.

Assuming this, is the author suggesting we -should- be coding racism and sexism into these systems to achieve "fair" outcomes? She didn't come out and say it, but I'm not sure how else to read the article. This sounds absurd to me, and would be acting against what machine learning is supposed to give us.

I'm assuming women are shown less ads for highly paid jobs because other ads are, in general, more profitable to show (and by extension more relevant on average). One thing I like about AI is that it doesn't suffer from biases in the same way we do. Why would we want to make it do that?

<comment><USER3> This one stood out to me:

> A very serious example was revealed in an investigation published last month > by ProPublica. It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of > recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black > defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was > also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.

Is skin color even something that is fed into the algorithm? It could just as well be other factors like number of convictions or socioeconomic background. Just because it produces an output that worse for black people does not make it racist.

Aside from that, do we want it to be fair or do we want it to be right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Considering it is an opinion piece from the times, I am going to guess that very little actual research went into this.

Let me see some code that alludes to racism or sexism and not just an analytical algorithm that says yes, this guy that has a long history of being arrested has a good chance of being arrested again.

I highly doubt that biometrics are being used to assess these things when proven data is exponentially more reliable.</comment>


The Growth of Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://blog.quillbot.com/subreddit-growth-over-time/ <comment><USER2> Reddit was great, many years ago, although there are many sub-reddits that are still excellent today. Moves they've made in the recent years, like hiding vote counts, were to improve growth, but it has also enabled more astroturfing and censorship (widespread).

More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've grown, the quality of the content within sub-reddits and discussions within those communities, have fallen dramatically.

<comment><USER3> it never occurred to me before, but seeing it in a chart like this it really seems like Reddit has basically just turned into Gamers and their side interests, politics, and a few vestiges of old Reddit, like AskReddit, which at this point might as well be their own separate site for what all they have to do with the main demographic.

The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are basically gamer adjacent. Many of those technology subs are just about building PCs and stuff, which is largely gaming related or correlated. Even a lot of the politics is invariably linked to Gamergate type stuff. The Entertainment section is all genre fiction, anime, etc. Stuff you would expect a gaming forum to focus on.

The dedicated meme parts of the site are gone. The interesting stuff that fits in no particular category are gone. If you had told me 4 years ago that one day I would come to miss the derivative rage comics and image macros in the face of the unrelenting stream of toxicity that the site would become I wouldn't have believed you.

Just look at this joke post [https://external- preview.redd.it/dv9xRUyCUzzan5wZnVBCmmHIriH...](https://external- preview.redd.it/dv9xRUyCUzzan5wZnVBCmmHIriHsSYajwIJ6fAu- Vh8.png?auto=webp&s=c4d42004c487dd362c7b54e60a933e0bafcb66d3) from 6 years ago. It all seems so innocent compared to what it is now.

<comment><USER4> Strange that you say the dedicated meme parts of reddit are gone. In my mind they're more active than ever, between /r/me_irl, /r/prequelmemes, /r/deepfriedmemes, and if you really want the old fashioned stuff /r/adviceanimals is still surprisingly active.

<comment><USER5> /r/dankmemes, /r/bikinibottomtwitter, /r/teenagers are also meme heavy and make it to the top of /r/all regularly, not to mention the variety of spin off meme subreddits (lotrmemes, dankchristianmemes, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In many ways, Reddit reminds me more of the "old internet" than Facebook or Twitter. There seems to be better discussions, more variety, and even quite a bit of experimentation going on within certain subreddits. It feels like a freer place and that much I like. I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences, but it certainly feels more exploratory than the other two.

<comment> rigged-system When it's gone, the "old internet" will be gone

<comment><USER7> Well, it might not be "normie compatible", but there still is 4chan, which is a lot "old internet". I can understand that people do not like it and why it is that way though. But the point is: There are still sites out there which are like the old internet. They are obviously just not mainstream. They never were really (except reddit maybe). You just gotta find your little niche place and maybe look around every now and then, but they still exist.

Edit: No, i don't talk about /pol/. No one likes the right-wing /pol/-scum. That's not 4chan.

<comment><USER8> /pol/ may be the most salient and influential political forum on the internet (a recent study showed /pol/ produces the most reposted content seen elsewhere online). To describe it as "right wing" is like saying YouTube comments are right wing. It's unmoderated, not right wing, there's a big difference (see /r/the_donald if you want right wing). That said, these days it's full of shills shilling shills. I prefer to hang out on the other, more apolitical and better moderated 4chan forums like g, tv, and o.

Addendum: to say /pol/ isn't 4chan is both true and false but it's kind of weird and unfortunate you felt obligated to apologize for using 4chan because /pol/ exists. Just because /pol/ tolerates witches doesn't mean 4chan's a witch site for witches populated entirely by witches.

<comment><USER9> the_donald is mostly shitposting. If you want an example of right wing you'd be better off with [https://www.reddit.com/r/conservative](https://www.reddit.com/r/conservative).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is interesting that the #1 story in HN is decline in FB and the #3 is growth in Reddit. Personal anecdote, I have shifted all my FB screen time to Reddit. Not out of any agenda, but perhaps to interact with a more diverse group of people. Bold prediction: FB will try to acquire Reddit soon

<comment><USER11> For me I've moved from Reddit back to Digg, Reddit seems to be the worst parts of Facebook combined with the worst parts of Twitter. The redesign is horrendously busy, the comments are trite or vicious, and the v.reddit videos either autoplay or never play when you click on them.

<comment><USER12> I'm in the same boat, but I didn't go to digging, but came back here. The new redesign, coupled with the realization that I spent far too much time with the same arguments showed me that Reddit is broken now.

Why can't I just have a nice link aggregator with decent discussion? HN is great, but it doesn't have as much content as other platforms. I just want to discuss politics, hobbies, and lifestyles with the same level of discussion we have here, why is that too much to ask?

<comment> ux-app > "...why is that too much to ask? "

because it's bloody hard to create civil, thoughtful communities. HN is interesting since the general user base seems to have learned to self- moderate, buuuut, it has made HN a pretty dry place (boring maybe?).

I have found some absolute hilarious gems on Reddit. The wit and humor of some users really catches me off guard sometimes, but the issue with Reddit is that there is just so much low effort garbage to sift through to find anything interesting/funny. Reddit seems to have converged on to a low effort meme-fest for the most part. I've gone to the effort to customise my sub-reddits to match my interests, but each community seems to very quickly become a repetitive echo chamber, so there are not many new/unique POV to explore. For example I sub to /r/Australia and it's basically the same content re hashed over and over (NBN sucks, Libs suck, House prices suck, magpies are annoying, here's a picture of a Kookaburra etc.)

So Reddit isn't really for me any more and I spend little time there. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that I get more out of just sitting in the sun and letting my mind wander.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reddit has a number of systemic issues (poor tools for moderators, hard to get rid of bad moderators, huge amounts of astroturfing)

It's a shame that they are 'good enough' to prevent much growth in the competitors, leading the cool tech made by competitors to often become exclusively filled with content that would be banned on reddit.

</comment><comment><USER14> Some pretty poor categorization of some subreddits in there. gamesofthrones, mylittlepony, thewalkingdead, and BigBrother are in sports (asoiaf is in entertainment). sysadmin and techsupport are in hobbies/occupations while buildapc is in tech section. tumblrinaction, kotakuinaction, and blackpeopletwitter are in entertainment. DebateReligion is in news/politics, not discussion (with other debate subreddits) or lifestyle (with other religion subreddits).

The hierarchy is on GitHub: [https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory- Skeleton/blo...](https://github.com/MetASnoo/Subreddit-Directory- Skeleton/blob/master/subreddits.txt)

But it's not in a structured format and tough to verify. There's no methodology for the current organization, and it doesn't look like it matches the actual graph.

<comment><AUTHOR> The base classification structure was borrowed from r/listofsubreddits sub directory: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/listofsubredd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfSubreddits/wiki/listofsubreddits). However it was modified a bit in order to even out the clusters, size wise. Keeping it unchanged would make more than half of the subs entertainment. That being said, some hiccups were made during the formatting, and the purpose of the repo is to fix/enhance any mistakes people spot.

<comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see them classified by subreddits where the a significant amount of comments are driven from live events (thinking of the big sporting subreddits and some of the e-sport/gaming ones) vs subreddits that are almost completely based off non-live events (i.e. AskReddit, Sex).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I get a lot of auto completes for "site:reddit.com" when I search for anything in the Chrome search bar or just in Google Search. I find reddit answers to be less likely to be advertisements or affiliate marketing. Honestly not sure where I would find information otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER17> I use reddit on my mobile browser without logging into to an account. Recently when clicking links or images in the mobile view a pop-under will appear freezing the site until I select the prominent first option (to download the Reddit mobile app) or the second option to continue using my mobile browser. Because I am unauthenticated this preference does not carry over to page reloads for things like jumping to a different subreddit, leading me to experience this pop-under over and over again.

Needless to say it's cut heavily into my reddit usage. I genuinely believe they raised a bunch of money, hired a bunch of engineers and managers, convinced the C-levels a re-design was necessary, and then implemented a subpar re-design with a giant middle finger to users all in the name of ads. Glorious, world improving, ads.

<comment><USER18> It's incredibly annoying. I've built out my own mobile website for interfacing with Reddit because of it. Update after update the mobile.reddit.com keeps becoming harder to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Over the past few years, both Twitter and Reddit have seen a huge growth of bot accounts. I'd put an asterisk next to any growth* figure by either company.

</comment><comment><USER20> t_d at its peak was almost as big as politics, now that was not something I expected. Before SandersForPresident was archived when he lost the nomination it was about the same size as t_d.

Would be really neat to select a single sub or group of subs and generate a line chart of the same data.

<comment><USER21> It's interesting that it peaked at 1.5m comments/mo in late 2016 and it's shrunk to 820k comments/mo. That's a huge drop. It sort of makes sense, seeing as the election ended, but that activity decrease is far larger than any other subreddit, even political ones.

<comment><USER22> r/the_Donald was "quarantined" by the admins, so it cannot be discovered by users in the same way as other subreddits. That cut off a lot of the organic growth that you would normally see, and it cut off users who might normally see r/the_Donald on the r/all or r/popular wander in to comment/argue. People who are not already subscribers just no longer even see anything at all from r/the_Donald.

<comment><USER21> Where did you see that it was quarantined? As far as I know their sticky posts can't appear in /r/all anymore and it was excluded from /r/popular.

<comment><USER23> I think he's using "quarantine" in the practical sense rather than the Reddit- specific terminology sense.

The only distinction at this point is that the subreddit doesn't have the yellow banner or verified email on account requirement. It is quarantined in the ways that count, such as inability to hit the front page regardless of popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Number of comments seems like a bad metric. A lot of these are informal subreddits where the most common comments are going to be "lol" or users collaborating to complete a sentence one letter at a time as part of some meme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree. This skewed metric is why r/AskOuija is massively overrepresented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For those interested, I've done a similar (far less pretty) analysis on Hacker News:

[https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity- gr...](https://austingwalters.com/trends-on-hacker-news-activity-growth- community/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Reddit for me is an acceptable middle point between the community-specific vBulletin forums of the 2000s (largely deserted now), and modern social media. You can explore a wide variety of topics (like on social media sites) while keeping anonymity and a sense of community (in dedicated subreddits).

When people say Reddit is 4chan-lite, I see where they're coming from. They're not signed in, so all they see is r/all, which has about the same quality level as the front page of Youtube.

The trick to it is to install the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension and start blocking the subs that frequently post low-quality/hate speech/just plain irritating content. Block a sub from your home page once, it never comes back.

Wish I could say the same for Youtube. I swear, you watch ONE Bill Burr standup clip, and your recs are suddenly full of "feminist gets pwned by redpill logic" and other "viral" garbage videos, each of which has to be manually set to "Not Interested".

</comment><comment><USER27> The day they force the new design (remove old.reddit.com preference) is the last day I use Reddit.

<comment><USER28> I had a pretty strong reddit addiction and the redesign was fantastic for me- it completely cured my addiction! The redesign is just so awful and I hate using it so much that all I had to do was opt-in to using it and viola... 3 hours a day back in my life which I now use for the gym and to clean the house. It was an awesome change for me personally. No more reddit timesink!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if Reddit has surpassed Twitter, Snapchat, etc, for the title of most popular non-Facebook social network. You rarely see anyone do any kind of comparison of them.

<comment><USER6> Is Reddit really considered a social network and not just a discussion forum?

<comment><USER12> It has:

\- user accounts and profiles (users have their own "subreddit") \- friends list (and block list) \- live chat \- personalizable feed \- communities

So yeah, it's a social network that looks a lot like a message board, and it has been getting more and more social features.

That's the reason I'm leaving Reddit. I liked how it was a while ago, but the recent changes and the culture just aren't my cup of tea anymore. Discussion is still mostly okay, but there's just far too much noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sometimes when I lurk on Reddit it appears that "the internet" is giving helpful and respectful comments to someone who, say, alleges that her husband had been sexually assaulting her.

When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments!

In other words, an OP (probably like many OPs) has a limited amount of time to get feedback on Reddit about a pressing problem. And mods/downvoters cannot react quickly enough in that period of time to appropriately moderate the responses.

Imagine OP's "Reddit time" (let's say an hour) as a rectangle in a video game that starts at 100% and drains to 0%. Let's say those dregs comments drained 15% of the OP's total time or energy participating on Reddit.

Now, suppose a lurker reads the thread later when the mods/downvoters have caught up with all their work. The lurker's default view is only the quality comments. This misleads the lurker by hiding the 15% time-or-energy hit the OP had from interacting with the dregs. The lurker likely assumes that participating on Reddit requires less time or energy that it does in reality.

Now the lurker tries out posting for the first time and starts to experience the 15% time-or-energy hit from the dregs comments. The more impatient OP is about reading comments, the more likely OP is to increase that wasted time-or- energy by interacting with the dregs.

Worse, that 15% time-or-energy hit includes content that would be beyond the pale for in-person social interactions-- it's mindless trolling or misanthropy which nearly no one would utter face to face. Some of it-- like accusations that the OP is an imposter-- is unique to social media.

Worst of all, that poster probably started as a lurker. So their decision to post in the first place was based on a view of Reddit that radically downplays the costs of interacting. I mean, I don't see any clear warnings on first post that let the poster know "shit will roll in" faster than the mods can flush it.

The obvious solution is to throttle all posting activity so that participating on Reddit slows to a level approaching those tree people from Lord of the Rings. (The larger time slices would actually get rid of whole class of problems, like the internet sleuthing BS that happened after the Boston bombing.) But I'm sure Reddit wants to encourage OPs to increase their # of responses for maximum buzz, so I don't really see any non-manipulative practical solution to this problem.

<comment><USER31> These days it feels more and more like <50% of the downvoted comments are trolls/jerks, and the majority are just people who might disagree with the hivemind.

<comment><USER30> That could be, and the same logic applies.

The upshot of my comment was something like this: lurkers likely interpret a post as the OP being on some sort of mountaintop. In this view the moderators and voters are spread out along the mountainside, helping some hikers reach the top and hindering others from getting there. Thus, it looks to the lurkers like the mountaintop is a place where "unwanted" commenters have been stopped from climbing up and only "desirable" discussion occurs. (For whatever definition of "unwanted"\-- it doesn't matter and we'll come back to that.)

To the OP, however, the experience is much more like a parking lot where anyone who wants to can walk up and interact with OP. _Later_ the mods and voters come in and "clean up" the lot so that it appears to onlookers that there were no "unwanted" interactions with OP-- only "desirable" discussion.

Now, let's assume 100% of downvoted comments are actually good faith actors who happen not to agree with what you call the "hivemind."

Because of the manipulative design of Reddit, here's what will happen:

* people who agree with the hivemind point of view and don't want dissenting opinions will _overestimate_ how good Reddit is at facilitating "desirable" discussion. They will do this because the OP's interaction with dissidents is hidden from them.

* people who disagree with the hivemind point of view will _underestimate_ how much interaction OP had with dissident points of view. They will do this because OP's interaction with dissenting opinions is hidden from them.

Hivemind peeps lose because they want OP to have what they consider a pleasant discussion when in reality OP is expending considerable energy having what they would consider an unpleasant discussion.

Non-hivemind peeps lose because they develop an exaggerated sense of the problem of dissidents not being heard. They were heard by the OP, but the non- hivemind peeps don't see that interaction.

OP loses because the hivemind peeps consider the discussion a success and overlook the problem of OP (and many others) expending energy on the more adversarial interactions. But OP loses again because OP's adversaries don't credit OP for interacting with dissidents!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel like reddit is one of the most underestimated internet properties in existence. It gets almost no attention except when specific incidents that explicitly involve it occur. But by and large it is completely ignored by the mainstream media, celebrities, politicians, just about everybody. I think it's role has been drastically underestimated in the 2016 election interference, for example. Facebook and even Google have taken flak over that, but hardly anybody really seriously interrogated how powerful TheDonald was both directly and indirectly (through how it created a nexus and community to energize real Trump supporters).

Reddit just exists, sitting there in the background, steadily growing over time, but never seemingly even trying to raise its own profile. Yet (or perhaps because of that) I certainly spend far more time there and get far more value from it than any other social media site.

</comment><comment><USER33> One of the major reasons reddit became popular initially is because of Digg. Digg had content that was 2-3 days older than reddit (many posts from Reddit got reposted to Digg). Once people started figuring that out, combined with the Digg censorshop scandal(1), reddit took off.

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

<comment><USER34> This. Was thinking that all the Reddit regulars of yester-decade were originally from Digg myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One of the hallmarks of recent Reddit growth has been its mobile redesign. It aggressively nudges you to download their mobile app and it takes a few seconds longer to open any page (used to be instant with the old design). I presume they're doing this because their app has better user tracking (hard to disable tracking inside an app) and far less people are using ad blockers that work for apps too.

<comment><USER36> Thankfully, there are third party apps that are great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Love watching the sports subreddits fluctuate throughout the year depending on which sport is in season.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd like to say 'good job' on reddit, but they grew despite making a horrible job, like the redesign. I 'm glad it's doing well anyway.

</comment><comment><USER39> The problem I have with reddit is that they are manipulating public opinions through bolstering topics that further their agenda.

<comment><USER40> In what way do "they" do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Very interesting to watch the sports subreddits fluctuate in size as their respective leagues come in and out of season.

</comment><comment><USER42> What's reddit's DAU? They used to disclose that publicly but they took it down years ago.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just looking at the gaming section I wonder how much subreddit popularity leads sales or vice versa.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is another post about comparing subreddit growth [https://blog.quillbot.com/subreddit- trends/](https://blog.quillbot.com/subreddit-trends/). One could compare this to historical sales data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Personally I wonder if Reddit can do something about the low quality of their comments in the big subs. All comment sections are full of idiots making bad puns. It's terrible, much much worse than youtube ever was or that twitter currently is.</comment>


Ask HN: Changing usernames - <AUTHOR>

Hi folks<p>Quick question.  Around the time I was signing up for HN there were some OpenID related issues and I was unable to access the original account I created (with the handle that I use everyone else on the web).  Ended up creating this account, which has worked, but it's always been strange seeing this handle up against my name because I don't use it anywhere else.  Any suggestions on whom I could contact to merge the two and bring some balance to the Force? <comment><USER2> Just create a new one - that's what I did:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nextmoveone> \--> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=auston>

</comment><comment><USER3> email pg <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374196>

<comment><USER4> I emailed pg with this request back in March - I got back a response saying that there wasn't a mechanism for changing a username. Though it would be nice if that has changed in the meantime.

<comment><USER5> Once he explained that usernames were recorded in many different places and that it would be very difficult to change them all.

Hacker News is great, but the software behind it makes me a little uneasy

<comment><USER6> It's an experiment (written in arc: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)> and good experiments are supposed to push the boundaries and make you a little uneasy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>