Estimate your English vocabulary size - <AUTHOR> http://testyourvocab.com/ <comment><USER2> I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the _non-native_ speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live).

This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-out), and use English on a daily basis. I also watch most movies in English (very seldom for people in a German speaking country to do), read some English novels, and also most non-fiction books I have are in English. Internet use is nearly English only.

Still, I probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker. After 17 years of learning and using the language, and at least 10 years of that using it _daily_.

Ouch.

<comment><USER3> I got a score of 26,000. I'm Finnish, and actually learned French as a second language in school and English as third.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, but English is so prevalent in Finland these days that I wouldn't be surprised if it gained some kind of official status within the next 50 years. Whether in formal meetings or informal bar encounters, people voluntarily switch to English if there's even one non-Finn present. In my field, this happens nearly every day.

I even use English to communicate with Swedes, even though Swedish is the second official language of Finland and I studied it for 6 years... There's no point in limping through the conversation with my childish Swedish, when it's 99% guaranteed that Swedes speak English.

<comment><USER4> Holy wowsers. I grew up in England, and i only scored 14,800 on the test! Although English isnt my native language, i did speak it from a very early age.

<comment><USER5> I was completely honest scoring 16,000, English is my one and only language. Depending on your field/background you could understand more words than this test suggests. Looking up the words that i did not understand coupling them with there relevance and the shear volume of test words or lack thereof makes this test inaccurate in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked was real.

<comment><USER7> I just counted, and you've used at least 12685 dictionary words in HP:MOR [1]. I was expecting it to be more to be honest, but it didn't seem right not to post just because it didn't match my expectations.

It certainly seems unlikely that someone who can produce an excellent 500,000 word work of fiction (aside: thanks very much by the way,) in addition to reams of technical writing, has a vocabulary not in the 95th percentile of the population. OTOH, HP:MOR has fewer words in it than I expected, and even the upper bound of 14795 seems low. Maybe the working is wrong; it's shown below.

        $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
        tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
        sort --uniq | cat - /usr/share/dict/words | sort |
        awk '{count[$1]++; if (count[$1]==2) print}' | wc -l
        12685

        $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
        tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
        sort --uniq | wc -l
        14795

[1] [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality) — Eliezer's amazing Harry Potter fanfiction in case you're missing out.

<comment><USER8> There's a huge difference between writing something targeted at a selected audience, in a given time period, limited range of topics the characters will discuss, etc. and listing out all of the vocabulary words you know personally across all domains of knowledge. Even though HP:MoR Harry has a broad vocabulary, for example, and may use some words not all readers will know, there are still tons of topics (with their own specialized vocabulary...) that will never come up in the written storyline -- even if Harry would know them well.

Harry also presumably does some practical limiting of his vocabulary in conversation, because only shared vocabulary is useful if you're trying to actually communicate and don't want to stop to give definitions all the time.

It might be more interesting to compare the unique word count of HP:MoR against some of the "real" Harry Potter books, if you can get your hands on the text.

<comment><USER7> Thanks to the internet†, I can reveal a surprise: with the same methodology, the dictionary words in the seven real Harry Potter books concatenated is 19,245 and the total unique words is 21,441.

Total word count is 1,122,131 which is longer than HP:MoR by a factor of three. Plotting mean unique word count for the whole, halves and quarters of MoR gives a fit of uniques=168*length^0.3357, which makes sense given Zipf's law. That formula predicts about 18,050 words for a work of the same length as the original HP.

(Edit to add obvious test in the other direction.) The first 386,829 words of the original HP contain 12,255 unique words. The last 386,829 words contain 13,635 uniques. So, its comparable but perhaps slightly more varied (MoR had 12,685).

In light of those figures, is it possible Eliezer's vocabulary is less good than he thinks (Dunning-Kruger)? Especially as the Harry Potter book were written for children and presumably edited as such.

On the other hand, the fact that Eliezer seems to have used fewer words in his writing than you'd expect if his vocab was excellent doesn't mean that his known vocab is poor — he might just not use all the words he knows in writing.

Additionally, given the success of J K Rowling as an author, you might expect her vocabulary to be excellent, so it is conceivable that he's good and she's better.

† I have all the Harry Potter books on a shelf at home. Is torrenting the pdfs at work so I can word count them infringing copyright? I could have done it manually, it just would have taken longer.

<comment><USER9> I thought Eliezer's Lesswrong sequences might give different results. Applying your tests to those (from <http://jb55.com/lesswrong/>), I get 257,646 total words, 11,666 unique dictionary words, and 12,721 unique words (I'm surprised there aren't more unique words, given that the quantum physics sequence is in there). 168*257,646^.3357 = 11,010, so the sequences seem to be at about HP level.

Excellent work, by the way; thanks for the analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those of you concerned with your score, you are deovting an undue amount of your time in discussing the results of what is—let's be honest with ourselves—the literati version of a "Are U A Vampire Or A Werewolf?" quiz.

P.S., 36,700 .. I took this before it got a lot of general circulation, and my standings have improved considerably. I suspect this makes me more worthy of oxygen.

</comment><comment><USER11> 19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even _my age group_ , let alone the general populace (I'm 20).

That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.

<comment><USER12> I must admit, as an American male, a little older than you, my score was also so low, I'm too embarrassed to even mention. All those years of cheating on vocabulary tests (merely by memorizing the words 5 minutes prior to taking the test) in high school did not help. It's one of the those things I look back on in life and regret. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to _catch up_ ?

edit: forgot to mention, while I am a native English speaker, both my parents tend to speak Polish most of the time, while I always reply in English. I have to wonder how much this had an affect on me.

<comment><USER13> Read a lot. In fact, buy a Kindle and read a lot. It has a built-in dictionary which is quite decent, and you'll actually look up words that you would otherwise skim past with a mediocre context-based understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I strongly doubt that their methodology has any validity at all for non-native speakers. Extrapolating from a selection of 60-80 words presupposes a relatively normal developmental history; otherwise one would not be able to draw the primary inference at work here, namely that somebody who knows a definition for "mawkish" knows definitions for all words of similar difficulty and frequency.

Atypical language acquisition (e.g., as a second language, or through a non- standard channel like technology or fantasy literature) disrupts this extrapolation step. For instance, a German programmer that knows the word "polymorphic" via OOP is less likely to know similarly frequent and difficult but programming-unrelated words than British or American peers. So adding, say, 100 to the total would be utterly unfounded. Same thing for a science- fiction nerd: Acquaintance with obscure words from one domain doesn't extrapolate to other domains.

Unless they somehow control for domain specificity and atypical acquisition, let's not get too frustrated. ( _Disclaimer_ : Not a native speaker -- result around median.)

<comment><USER15> Hi, creator of the site here -- I worked for several years teaching English to foreigners, and my own (informal) statistical research has found that native and non-native language acquisition, while certainly somewhat different, is not tremendously different. I've run this test on Americans and Brazilians at all different levels, and the size of the progression from known to unknown words is rather consistent.

That being said, cognates between languages can give an artificially inflated score. I intentionally avoided any words with the same roots in English and Portuguese (my second language), which should hopefully also be true for most Romance languages. This way, you shouldn't be able to "guess" meanings you've never actually learned. However, it wouldn't surprise me if German speakers, for example, were able to "guess" an additional number of words correctly.

Also, the 60-80 words are only what _you_ are tested on -- the word selection on pages 2-4 changes depending on your answers on the first page, so it attempts to narrow down your vocab knowledge "at the margin".

<comment><USER16> There were around 10 french words in the list I got. Maybe more, maybe less, I didn't count exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Their statistic is probably inflated due to linguistic subreddit, where this test originated:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/edlnv/reddit_i_created_this_site_to_measure_the_size_of/)

</comment><comment><USER17> "Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of."

This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.

Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?

I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.

<comment><USER18> Something often missing from vocabulary tests -- and arguably more impressive than raw, crystallized vocab -- is the ability to deduce the meaning of new words on the fly, whether from context or absent any context (in which case, the meaning is ascertained from roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I'd love to see a test of this skill. For instance, I doubt many people encounter the word "reck" in their daily lives. But I'd give props to someone whose brain would quickly draw the connection to the more frequently seen "reckless," thereby deducing that the word had something to do with caution or concern.

Similarly, your point has some validity. Most of the time, we don't acquire language through reading the dictionary; we acquire it primarily through context in the course of reading or conversation. This is why, when pressed to define words, we'll often reach for a string of synonyms, or else provide usage in sample sentences. I bet few people here, let alone anywhere, could render dictionary-acceptable definitions of 99% of the words they know.

(On the flipside, this is also why we forget most of the words we crammed in preparation for the SAT back in the day; we learned them completely out of context and in an artificial way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> lots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i can remember). who knows; just voicing this thought since no one has mentioned it yet.

<comment><USER20> I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :)

I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many people out there that are smarter or more experienced than me, and I've seen other people say similar things.

<comment><USER21> Hacker News is _very_ full of over-confident people, believe me.

During a discussion of 'whether open source contributions were being overly important to job seekers' a while back, a surprising number of HN commenters automatically put themselves in the role of employer, peering dubiously over their glasses at me. Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone.

I don't think SAT verbal is nearly as intensely focused on obscure vocab. I didn't do it, but did do a GRE verbal back in 1994 to get into grad school. For what it's worth, my score on this and my GRE verbal were quite consistent.

<comment><USER22> "Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone."

You inferred this based on user profiles?

<comment><USER21> Correct. Most of the folks in question had filled in enough to be able to be straightforwardly findable in terms of linkedin, blogs, etc. It wasn't rocket science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).

<comment><USER15> Site creator here -- you're right, there's no cheating detection. I ask people not to fill out the survey results if they're not being entirely truthful, of course they are free to disregard the instructions.

But I created the site, less interested in _absolute_ vocabulary size numbers (these vary widely depending upon methodology), and more in _relative_ changes among age groups, SAT scores, etc. And hopefully, cheating would not be correlated to any of those...

But at the end of the day, this is not a controlled, scientific survey. It is a voluntary quiz, though I am doing my best to control for other factors.

<comment><USER24> I'm really, _really_ hoping that you're logging referrer data along with scores - if you're not already, you might consider starting. Even if this is not a source of proper scientific data, it would be highly interesting to see how, for instance, the Reddit referrals do vs. HN vs. Facebook, etc. We can probably all make some fairly accurate guesses about where the high and low performers would come from, but I'd be real curious to see the exact breakdowns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Obvious point : The only people interested in finding out their scores will be the kind of people who think their vocab is something worth competing on. There's no way this is a fair sample across all English-speakers.

<comment> dorian-graph I wouldn't say the ONLY people. This could be the next 'IQ test' where it seems the near opposite, the lesser intelligent ones are who are obsessed with them.

Going by magazines, common forwards and so on it seems the average man loves a good self-quiz.

<comment><USER23> But to remove some of the bias, we'd need approximately equal numbers of above and below average people to be going to the trouble of answering the quiz.

And in the back of my mind, I thought that the bulk of quiz magazines were sold to women, no? (Though I'm probably being too pedantic...)

<comment><USER25> It could be only either very below average and very above average people are interested in self-quizzes, too, so equal numbers alone won't be enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They ought to include some fake but plausible words to correct for cheaters. (Perhaps they do?)

<comment><USER27> Some of those words had a definite brillig quality.

<comment><USER28> Yet, are rather cromulent

ObScore: 36000, 32yo male US-english native speaker. There were a few more I'd seen but wasn't really sure enough to define. I maxed out the SAT verbal section (and got 1 wrong on math, which was enough to drop to 780/800) back in the 1990s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Don't care too much for percentile and age stats at the end.. clearly doesn't represent general pop.

What IS interesting tho, from a language learners perspective, is the vocab size estimation. A metric a lot of us use as a rough benchmark of vocab needed for _fluency_ in a foreign language is 10,000words. Comparing this with what an educated adult native speaker knows in their own language (using my own truthful score of 24k) is pretty interesting.

Would love to have something like this to quickly gauge my vocab in other languages!

<comment><USER30> I agree: the test seems to correctly estimate vocabulary size, but is incorrect in calculating percentile.

I got 12900 (English is my second language) and it seems to be about accurate. I also feel that I'm fluent in English, and it confirms that 10000 words is sufficient for fluency.

The test is also missing professional lingo: where are such words as SQL, lisp, ai, startup, PG, HN and other that we all know so well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The psychology of these things is interesting to me. My reflexive reaction was, of course, "I have to know!" and then my immediate counter-reaction was "This is just intellectual phallometry and is ultimately of no consequence to me."

Of course, I very quickly rationalized away the counter-reaction and took the test anyway, and then considered sharing it with my friends. What drives this?

<comment><USER32> Phallometry is nice when you have the big phallus.

<comment> mkr-hn Unless it's being used by a dystopian regime to decide who poses the greatest threat to the oligarchs.

<comment><USER33> Maui, clearly.

People who lead revolutions tend not to be very humble, from what I can glean from history. So what you're suggesting might work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I scored 38500 - seemed to be a test that would be helped by reading a lot of older fantasy literature, where 'terpsichorean' and 'turpitude' (to give a couple 'terp' examples that spring to mind) are the sort of words that authors like Jack Vance liked to wheel out in order to create a mood.

I'm not sure that the people suggesting that the failure to correlate with the SAT adds much; I don't think the SAT really goes all-out of the more flowery bits of archaic vocabulary in the way that this test did.

My 3rd grade son got 10200, and enjoyed discussing the words he didn't get. I think every 3rd grader should know "mawkish". :-)

</comment><comment><USER34> I only scored 24k which seems low based on the statistics at the end. I also only selected words that I absolutely knew the definition of, even though some I think I knew based on the root.

Memorizing trivia words is just something that has never interested me. Instead I keep a thesaurus and dictionary handy at all times :)

</comment><comment><USER35> <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953>

37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists).

So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.

</comment><comment><USER36> The population is self selecting; I wouldn't trust their percentiles.

<comment><USER37> Not just self selecting, but the scores are basically self-reported. It didn't actually test anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I got 28,800 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38317> So apparently I should be 31 instead of almost 21.

I had a phase around 7th through 10th grade where I thought learning lots of vocabulary would make me smarter, especially words others didn't know well. (And so I'd use them in English essays for Extra Points since your grades are often determined by how little sense you make, because if the reader doesn't understand it obviously it's too smart for them!) I also had a general grammar nazi-ism.

Anyway, I think this exchange kind of tipped me over the edge to stop caring. (Of course that's led to forgetting a lot.)

William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

Of course, having some background in French and Latin probably helps for inferring a few words.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ah, cool I know 80 english words. There must be something utterly wrong with how this test works in opera mini, clicking on continue on page two brought me to page one, going back and clicking continue again gave me just a subset of the choices from page one... (at least I guess it is 80, the number was displayed right over the middle of the word "words" in the result captcha).

<comment><USER2> So you have used up nearly 70% of your vocabulary to write this comment? I have to admit, your proficiency in English grammar is extraordinary given this.

<comment><USER32> Oh, no, he just learnt barely enough words to make that comment and a few similar ones. Quite frugal, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just from getting some friends to do this it seems to me the median score overall and the median score for each age are a bit inflated. Just my thoughts, but I think people aren't being 100% truthful. Although I may just have a poor vocabulary <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36208>

</comment><comment><USER41> "You will never become proficient in a foreign language by studying vocabulary lists. Rather, you must hear and speak (or read and write) the language to gain proficiency. The same is true for learning computer languages."

Coincidentally, I just happened to come across this quote in Peter Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming".

</comment><comment><USER42> I was actually a bit surprised, not by the specific number of words (that seems reasonably fair given some statistics posted above on this thread), but on the percentage ranking. I'm a doctoral student whose vocabulary score was in the 96th percentile on the GRE and I knew every word when I took the WAIS- IV. Here, my score of 28,300 is just a bit above average. Either people are lying (possible) or this curve is clearly not a normal curve representative of the population (most likely). I'm a pretty avid reader, even though most of the older authors like Dickens bore me (thanks ADD!), but the person that came up with those words is possibly the most voracious reader I have ever met.

I also just realized that taking the test primed me to write in a way more intelligently sounding manner than I usually do. Not an LOL in sight!

</comment><comment><USER43> I realise that the ego-stroking scoring is the driver behind this site's popularity , but I would also like to see definitions of words that I missed. It's pretty daunting to spend hours copying and pasting words into Google (well, ahem, maybe it is for some of us!)

<comment><USER44> I felt the same. Also there were some words I thought I knew what they meant, but my definition would only be partially correct.

Also some definitions you can guess at - do these count as part of your vocabulary or not? E.g. Clerisy, can be easily deduced to be the class of clerics, but not sure if I'd be able to say if it was a real word or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700.

I think this test is not very telling for NNSs as it doesn't consider specialist vocabulary which many of us have a lot of of, because of how we /really/ learned the language.

When I left school my English was very average. When I started communicating with email with people from all over the world, but mostly the US, it improved a lot in 1-2 years. When I first went to a congress in the US in my med 20's I was blown away by my aptitude to communicate in that language.

But these were all people from my field. What I'm saying is that the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed by the field I work in -- visual effects (and IT). I believe this goes for many NNSs.

<comment><USER46> > _the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is > severely skewed_

You clearly have a very good vocabulary IMO. However, if I may, I think it should be "pertaining _to_ certain subjects". It can be used without the "to" but sounds a bit conceited to this native speakers ear.

For example see [http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&Word=pertaining). All the literature examples written out use "pertaining to" in some form: "pertaining thereto", "pertaining only to", "to them pertaining", _et cetera_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Very interesting. The details on how it works are here: <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php>

(My result:) <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35795>

<comment><USER48> Perhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for the eventual statistics.

Also worth seeing: <http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Learning to program did help. I could check "shard" and "bloat", which are apparently quite rare in general context compared to words I know.

How about you? Were there words you could check because you encountered it often in programming context?

</comment><comment><USER50> "The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use"

<comment><USER33> It's interesting and humbling to contemplate that I know only about 20% of the words in my native language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Site creator here -- what a surprise to wake up this morning, see my inbox full of messages about this site, and discover that everyone was coming from Hacker News, which I visit every day!

Thanks for all the participation, and comments -- I didn't submit this myself, so thanks, mike_esspe.

I've responded to a few points down below; there's a lot more info on the details of the test at:

<http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php> <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php>

<comment><USER51> Hi crazygringo,

I was intrigued by your estimation procedure and was thinking of a way of playing around with it:

(1) Create a random bit vector of size 45,000. (2) Pick 40 positions in the vector at random and use those positions to estimate the proportion of ones in the original bit vector (so far this is easy). (3) Select an additional 120 positions and use the more sophisticated procedure to refine the estimate from part (2).

I was wondering if you have code or pseudo-code for how you implemented part(3) specifically how you choose the 120 words for extra testing. It seems there are a lot of different natural ways you can do it. Did you write an academic paper about this?

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> 13700 German, 22 years old

I had 9 years of English in school. Because of my hobbies I read a lot of stuff in English. I also watched many TV shows and spent about 6 month living in Australia.

Yet I feel insecure even typing this. Knowing lots of words is one thing. But what makes it hard are all the subtleties you have to take care of when building sentences. I also think that I get grammar wrong most of the time.

Another thing is that my sentences are almost always way too long.

As someone else pointed out before: I don't want my former English teacher to read this, either.

</comment><comment><USER53> Think I have the lowest score here. 16,400 words. English is not my native language but I speak English daily and I wouldn't say my English is bad. Pretty disappointed with the score and also surprised the median is way way higher than I expected.

Edit: And, also to add, I followed 2 criteria for whether I know the word or not.

1\. What's the absolute definition?

2\. And can I find the equivalent or meaning of it in my native language? (which is Tamil, an Indian language, if anyone cares.)

<comment><USER54> I think a lot of the words are ones that you will _only_ ever encounter in reading fiction (and flower/older fiction at that). Also, keep in mind that this test doesn't include field-specific technical jargon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I scored only 20400, but it makes me ask myself: Perhaps I was being too honest? There were certainly words I'd seen before, and could make educated guesses as to the general meanings of, but I chose not to check those off.

I'm Canadian born and raised, with English as my first language. Honestly, I'm surprised to be told I'm that far below the median and average.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Is English your first (native) language, or a second (non-native) language?" my english is actually my 3rd non-native language :)

</comment><comment><USER57> It seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score: <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822>

Edit: I just had a look at the median word count for adults who took the survey. It's around 27,000. I wonder whether that's true or not.. it seems to me that I'm lacking.

<comment><USER58> Methinks these survey takers doth be liars

<comment><USER57> Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Putting aside all the comparing. Many non-native speakers here say they read and watch many things in english. I do that do and I'm quite positive that 95% of all the reading and listening I do each day is in english.

Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely endulge oneself in the language, what is?

Of course, watching the Simpsons all day won't teach me some of the rarely used words. But there must be some stepping stones. I still haven't read Wuthering Heights because I don't want to have a dictionary lying around just to understand the story. And looking up something, reading on and forgetting it at the end of the day is quite common for me.

Also I'm sure that 15 year old americans haven't read that many novels, still their vocabulary is supposed to be larger than most of the well read non- native speakers around here.

<comment><USER46> <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=endulge>

Sorry, couldn't resist. For a minute I thought I'd missed out on an alternate spelling. Then I realised that was unpossible ;0)>

<comment><USER59> Too bad, I'm not from Ohio. But this proves my point. Improve spelling? Increase vocabulary? It seems that swimming in the language isn't enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> 39,000 I use more of the words on page 2 that I should, I'm probably unbearably obnoxious to be around...

</comment><comment><USER61> I was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that.

Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My collection of sci- fi/fantasy books alone probably contain over 100,000 headwords. A single biology text book might be as many as they claim the median person knows. Avid WoW players would similarly destroy the curve (if the test included the kinds of words they'd know instead of archaic religious words),

<comment><USER33> What your friend's dictionary contains a hundred and fifty thousand of are almost certainly not the same thing that the OED contains only a hundred and seventy thousand of. Take a look at a random OED page sometime and see how many words you don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set.

42,500 (<http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216>)

Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...

<comment><USER63> "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker

<comment><USER64> That was one of Dave Sim's favourite lines. I think he thinks he made it up himself, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm a non-native speaker and I fare pretty well with reading stuff but I'm a bit chocked at my result (< 19k).

The thing I find a bit funny is that of all the words I didn't check I've seen almost all of them in books and articles. When I see them in a sentence and in context I do understand them fine but I can't give a definition for them.

I wonder if this is common when reading another language? It might be a better idea to look up the words in a dictionary when seeing them but I just can't be bothered, after seeing them in context a few times I can usually get a feel for their meanings. There are a few exceptions to be sure, adjectives are particularly bad at this.

</comment><comment><USER66> Got 21,500 or so. Even as a non-native speaker I was slightly disappointed with this result. Many of the words were just ridiculously obscure and esoteric, and I haven't even seen some of them anywhere in the literature I read.

</comment><comment><USER63> 37,700 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36826> without cheating and not counting ones that I only thought I could puzzle out.

Maybe working on that English Minor is panning out...

</comment><comment><USER67> I didn't see any science-related words when I took the test. Not sure if this is because of the process by which they made the word lists, or because there truly are not many common science-related words.

<comment><USER68> At <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample> they explain how they chose the words the test is based on:

Quote:

Too limited. Words that are specifically American or British (in meaning or spelling), or slang, or scientific/medical, or anything labeled archaic, or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English. Also, no animals or ingredients, which depend too much on where you live.

<comment><USER46> > _or anything else that isn't part of broad, general English_

So scientific words aren't general English? This suggests that the authors don't think anyone ever talks about science?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm guessing they selected words from a large corpus of written English based on their relative frequency.

It isn't surprising that there isn't any technical vocabulary. Most technical vocabulary falls into one of the following categories: a) Acronyms b) Overloading of existing non-technical words c) Names and other proper nouns d) Phrases longer than one word

There's actually an argument for excluding highly specific vocabulary (some corpuses explicitly exclude textbooks for this reason) because knowledge of them doesn't correlate as well with overall vocabulary.

</comment><comment><USER70> 22,700 <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=38336>

What difference does it make? The site doesn't say what it means in everyday life. I'm guessing if you exclude high achieving SAT vocab nerds, it finds the difference between people who care about the meaning of each word and people who will guess through context because they have no patience for a dictionary. Or people who don't read fancy texts, like the Scarlett Letter for example, after failing to read that I stopped reading books.

</comment><comment><USER71> 29,500, non-native English speaker (but studied in the US). Retook the test and omitted all the words I could not define with total confidence on the spot; the original score was 31,400. The test is peculiar in that the distribution appears to be uneven. Subjectively there is a sharp break between words that one would know from Shakespeare, Tolkien and Dunsany, and words no one would ever know unless they studied the OED. For statistical significance they would need more words.

</comment><comment><USER72> I just just "5,340" as a result, this is an hint for me that I spend too much time trying to improve my hearing skills and too little trying to learn words outside the domain I mostly use English for (computers, programming, technology, ...).

I wonder if there is some good web site that helps you learning new words. An iPhone application will also work for me, but I need one that is able to also tell me the sound of the word. I searched a bit in the past without good results.

<comment><USER73> 7830 here. (Swiss-German native speaker) Like you I don't have enough exposure to other domains outside of programming and technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.

When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.

<comment><USER75> > I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words.

This is what I was thinking. I scored 34K, and _rarely_ encounter a word that I don't understand in regular speech or reading. I also know several thousand jargon words, none of which were on that test. I know what I need to know. Memorizing another 16K words to reach Shakespeare's magical 50K (and feel good about myself) would be a waste of precious mental resources.

<comment><USER64> As someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which was the number I was familiar with).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Along with many of the flaws already adressed, the most relevant for me was "absolutely sure of" and also taking the words out of context. There were a good number of words that I was pretty sure I knew and had I read them in context would have been correct in my meaning and never given it a second thought.

I'm certain that if I took this same test using a base of 'novel in fulltext' vs. 'list of all unique words in the novel', my recog would be FAR better on the novel.

</comment><comment><USER49> 12,900: <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=39955>

I am not a native speaker and I was happy to get more than >10,000, really.

</comment><comment><USER77> Most interesting to me were the words I recognized, but weren't sure of their meaning (e.g. malapropism, which turned out to mean _ludicrous misuse of a word_ ).

BTW: a nice thing about online dictionaries is they have sound files for pronunciation. e.g. <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malapropism> With a plugin, you can highlight and right-click to open in another tab.

</comment><comment><USER78> Speaking English does not expand your vocabulary. You must read to encounter the larger portion of the dictionary. Does this test select for computer-users who don't read?

32800

</comment><comment><USER79> If you found this test engaging, then it might be time to give this a go again... <http://freerice.com/>

</comment><comment><USER80> Pretty interesting, but I do hope they do not try to extract any meaningful statistics based on this. I guarantee you 95% of the people are cheating.

</comment><comment><USER81> I scored far lower than I thought I would, and am genuinely surprised given that I tend to write a lot and have always thought I had a decent vocabulary.

I would love to be able to compare my score to what it would have been before moving to a non-English country and learning/speaking a new language. I definitely feel that a large part of my memory is now dedicated to Japanese and not English...

</comment><comment><USER82> No matter how many I did (I'm fine, thanks), I would love to see a similar system that estimates one's vocabulary using already existing articles.

To put aside the ego matters, I'm curious if there are any interesting correlations for writings published in magazines. For instance, between the estimated vocabulary size and the average price for ads (I bet that there is a huge correlation.)

</comment><comment><USER64> I got 35,900, and haven't lived in an English-speaking country in 10 years. I often get frustrated at myself when I feel like I'm losing my vocab. There were a couple of words on the list that I'm sure I once knew, but couldn't conjure up the meaning on the spot, so I skipped them. I was never a sci- fi/fantasy fan, but I do like to read literature for fun.

</comment><comment><USER83> I got ~12K, but I highly doubt the accuracy... I suspect that I know ~1K words, maybe 2K. I remember hearing that people usually use around 100 or 200 distinct words/day.

According to <http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html>, Shakespeare used ~32K words in all of his works.

</comment><comment><USER84> I got 17,200. I'm 22 with a Bachelor's degree and I was pretty surprised with how low I scored. Anyone in a similar category?

<comment><USER85> 18,100 words, 24 years old, non-native speaker. I've never read a fiction book in English, only technical ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> 14,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!

<comment><USER87> to read your post i looked up the word 'vernacular' in the dictionary

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I got to be in the 1st percentile :-). But well, considering that I have never read a book in my life I guess it figures.

</comment><comment><USER89> I moved to the US from Russia when I was 10, and my vocabulary is a pathetic 18,000 or so. Which is funny, because I consider myself pretty well-read. I usually just infer the meaning of new words through their context without looking them up so I don't feel comfortable saying I know the definition of those words.

</comment><comment><USER90> 43,300. I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than a little with this particular test.

<comment><USER68> At <http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample> they hint at omitting a lot of Latin words:

Quote:

No cognates or false-friends with Portuguese. This probably knocks out at least half the dictionary, since Romance languages have plenty in common with English. False friends need to be avoided as well, since a Brazilian beginner will see "pretend" and assume he knows it means pretender, which actually means "intend." Interestingly, the no-Portuguese rule leaves the test with a strongly pronounced short Anglo-Saxon flavor.

<comment><USER91> Even so, many of the most obscure words are potentially guessable by someone with a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. Funambulist, opsimath, hypnopompic. I don't think a classical education will be much help with cantles and williwaws, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> My result[1] isn't too bad but there's still quite a few words I can learn especially at the end. I did cheat a little since I learned a few of the more curious looking ones when this showed up on /b/ 2 nights ago.

[1] <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36123>

</comment><comment><USER93> Wouldn't a multiple choice quiz with definitions be more accurate? Force people to choose a definition (or none of the above?) to show they actually know the word. You'd still have the issue of cheaters but at least you would know people just don't assume they know the definition of "like"

</comment><comment><USER94> I only got 23k, I'm quite humbled. English is my second language and I'd hoped to have mastered it by now.

</comment><comment><USER95> 40,300 and I am astounded that there were words I hadn't seen before.

Funambulism is my new favourite word.

<comment><USER46> I wonder if any that got it did so because they recognised the word from prior usage? Or instead did they recognise the Latin form and guess it.

By rights a funambulist should be a John Cleese impersonator ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Some of these don't look like real words (e.g. splarge, which is definitely something that you could make up). I assume they're real, though.

Anyway, my score: <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=36192>

<comment><USER97> The word was actually "sparge," a word that any home-brewers have likely come across.

<comment><USER96> Ah, that's why dictionary.com didn't know what "splarge" meant. Apparently "sparge" is a sprinkling - why would home brewers know this? Genuinely curious here.

<comment><USER97> <http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Batch_Sparging>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> I'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500.

Not sure I buy the results though. I would think that the rate of increase would start to decrease quite significantly after high school/college but it appears to stay pretty much linear throughout the data.

<comment><USER15> Site creator here -- That has been the most interesting finding so far -- I certainly didn't expect it. Unfortunately I haven't had enough participation yet from children, or older folks :), to see how it continues to extend in either direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Your sample is heavily skewed toward the literate.

Add Education (None,HighS,BS,MS,PhD) as a research statistic and compare it to the national average. I would bet that your sample is greater than 2 Standard Deviations from the mean.

</comment><comment><USER100> There were some obscure words in there. Interestingly, I only ticked boxes that I could envision Pip Boy (Fallout VG) drawings of. Ending up with a score of ~23k, which was below average.

</comment><comment><USER19> anyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?

<comment><USER68> Actually they have a link at <http://testyourvocab.com/about.php>:

"The companion Brazilian project can be found at howmanywords.com.br"

Which right now just says "Calcule o tamanho do seu vocabulário em inglês / Coming soon"

<comment><USER33> I will be a _lot_ more interested in the Brazilian site when it goes live! I'm not making any particular effort to expand my English vocabulary (having a smaller vocabulary is not among the top ten reasons my writing in English is worse than Shakespeare's) but my Portuguese vocabulary is _muito terrivel_. It would be great to have a way to measure my progress.

Edit: Oh. The Brazilian site is just a Portuguese version of the instructions for the English site? :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> 22,000

Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<

<comment><USER102> No one getting high scores did so because of or despite their education. They did it by having the sort of brain that happens to retains words like uxoricide and reading copious quantities of material in which such abstruse words are employed.

I got a high score and went to public schools in the US, and didn't finish college either.

<comment><USER101> A proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic positive influence on ones vocabulary.

<comment><USER102> At one point, the sun was generally widely accepted to revolve around the earth.

It's likely that education improves one's vocabulary, however there are a lot of variables there. People who go to good schools likely come from families where learning is important in any case, are wealthier, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> I took the opposite approach.

I checked all the boxes on the first page but one, "vibrissae" (roughly, whiskers), and saw even more boxes on the second page and groaned. So I punted, and went back to the first page, reloaded it, and checked only one box: vibrissae.

After finding 17 words on the second page, I left them all blank, following the same methodology. My vocabulary size was estimated to be 20 words.

From this, I deduced that my total vocabulary size was all the words ever known to any English speaker anywhere, anytime - minus 20.

This made me very pleased with myself, even though I knew my assumptions were pretty terrible.

(Interesting that the spell check in my browser doesn't recognize vibrissae.)

</comment><comment><USER104> lampoon: verb: Publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule or sarcasm.

I knew lampoon had something to do with criticism, so I checked the box, but I had no idea that the definition specified a public context. Does that mean I didn't know the word?

I suspect a problem with the test is that it's easy to know enough to figure out the gist of a word's definition without having any knowledge of the specificity of the definition, if that makes any sense.

</comment><comment><USER105> I got 19 800. As a Swedish non-native speaker I thought it was OK. The test needs to also show the averages for non-natives and natives separate.

</comment><comment><USER106> It appears that this is accurate within 4 or 5 thousand words.. I've taken the test a few times, and my results are relatively distanced..

</comment><comment><USER107> I was honest and was shocked by my result being in the bottom third! I have an IQ > 125! I think I need to read more.

<comment><USER8> Self-selected survey respondents != actual population.

Though I suppose, also -- IQ doesn't say much at all about what your vocabulary will be. If you don't read much, or mostly read popular literature, it doesn't matter how clever your are; your vocabulary won't be any bigger than the words you've encountered enough to form (or look up) a definition.

Though it's also worth noting that beyond a certain point, building a broader vocabulary isn't very useful; when you communicate, you generally need to limit yourself to vocabulary your audience knows. Likewise, when you're reading, it's pretty common that the authors using particularly obscure vocabulary are using it to muddy their meaning, not clarify it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Non-natives who have studied English intently may well score higher than natives on a strictly vocab test like this.

</comment><comment><USER109> Oh, I got only 16900. I think I will do the test again each year to see if I'm improving.

</comment><comment><USER110> Finally some use of the GRE English exam that I had to take before joining CS program!

</comment><comment><USER111> 14,000 Words

I am non-native speaker. I guess that's a excuse for such poor score. Need to improve :(

</comment><comment><USER112> I'm a native speaker, and I got a server error. Does that mean I'm illiterate?

</comment><comment> mkr-hn 23,700

27 year old native speaker in the US. I talk good English. I even properize capital nouns.

</comment><comment><USER113> My score was 10,700. Not too bad considering I'm dyslexic right?.... Right? :|

</comment><comment><USER114> I think I did really poorly. My score was around 21,000.

<comment><USER115> I was about the same. I was surprised when I saw the percentiles and averages at the end.

<comment><USER37> The numbers appear to be based on people who previously completed the test. It's a pretty easy test to cheat on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> 20,700, Hong Kong Chinese living in the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER117> Too much clicking.

<comment><USER118> Use tab and space instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> OK, time to read that dictionary book again.

</comment><comment><USER87> i understand why i can't read Alexia Tsotsis articles on Techcrunch without a dictionary, with my shameful 8,560 vocab

</comment><comment><USER22> Vocabulary is trivia...

</comment><comment><USER13> I scored a mere 25,700-something. Based upon my ability to regularly, inadvertently stump spell-checkers and random humans alike, I will continue to assume that I have an above-average vocabulary. :-)

</comment><comment><USER120> Shocking, 9885. I acquired current command on English via Internet, Harry Potter and Klan Academy - and I was pretty comfortable making points in English than in Japanese

I could use some help boosting my vocabulary...

<comment><USER21> If you've been learning words from the "Klan Academy" you should be very careful when you first address an African-American.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> 38,800 here.

</comment><comment><USER122> My god, none of this shit matters! Why does anyone put any stock in any of this kind of thing? The best a test can do is make you feel smug, the worst it can do is totally destroy your confidence. It's a lose-lose proposition.

</comment><comment><USER123> Just a survey in disguise. Anyway, here's my score <http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35380>

<comment><USER124> It's certainly a survey, but I don't know if it's in disguise...

<comment><USER125> And it was optional...</comment></comment></comment>


LeVar Burton Has a Message for Nonreaders Like Donald Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/negxed/levar-burton-has-a-message-for-nonreaders-like-donald-trump <comment><AUTHOR> Click-baity title, but a worthwhile read

<comment><USER2> The intro had me confused. I went into it thinking it was authored by LeVar and then it talks about him watching Roots for the first time and I was scratching my head...

But yes, good read.</comment></comment>


OpenBSD code audit uncovers bugs, but no evidence of backdoor - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/12/openbsd-code-audit-uncovers-bugs-but-no-evidence-of-backdoor.ars <comment><USER2> If your the NSA, what's the easiest way to get people to move away from a system that you can't easily break into?

Start rumors about secret backdoors. By the time the rumor is discredited, it has picked up enough speed that when faced with facts, people will still have their doubts.

<comment><USER3> I know a few people who run OpenBSD, but none of them use IPSEC.

Are there any figures about the number of people running OpenBSD in situations where they're also using its ISPSEC capabilities?

This, to me, seems like it would be the equivalent of claiming there's a backdoor in SELinux or grsecurity, neither of which seem to have particularly widespread adoption among Linux sysadmins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful. An operating with one of the lowest bugs-per-line count just got better. Still behind FreeBSD, though ;D

(What's a little razzing between sibling projects?)</comment>


Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/23/21397369/epic-apple-fortnite-lawsuit-ios-microsoft-developer-tax <comment><USER3> A quick Meta aside: Even if you absolutely utterly and completely loathe Apple for their App store policies, Epic is not the company you want to be backing.

1) They engage in anti-customer behavior by buying exclusives. They don't fund exclusives, they buy exclusives after they've been completed.

2) If they can't get an Indie as an exclusive, they don't want it. They don't want to compete with Day and Date releases.

3) Their war chest is funded by gambling mechanics, mostly gambling mechanics which are actively aimed at minors. While I can understand arguments for "parents should parent" and "adults should be allowed to adult", Epic is based out of the US, and gambling is largely controlled within the US.

4) EDIT: Oh, and their weaponizing their minor-heavy userbase as well against Apple - their trailer and anti-apple skins are being promoted in Fortnight (Rated T by the ESRB).

So yeah. Hate Apple all you want - there's plenty there to hate. But don't let your hatred of Apple push you into backing Epic.

<comment><USER4> > They don't fund exclusives, they buy exclusives after they've been > completed.

I see this a lot but I have yet to come across a good explanation of why this matters, could you explain? From my point of view it doesn't make a difference when the developer gets the money, an exclusive is an exclusive.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention it's a false statement. They do fund exclusives through their publishing arm, and are currently in the process of funding the next games by Remedy (creators of Control), Playdead (Limbo, Inside), and Gen Design (ex Team Ico team, responsible for The Last Guardian and such): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_m4LxDG1D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_m4LxDG1D4)

And according to Skybound Games CEO, Epic was also involved in helping to establish the team that completed development of The Walking Dead's final season after Telltale collapsed, so it wasn't just a case of Epic simply buying exclusivity after the fact:

"We're excited to work together on their latest transformative event with the launch of the Epic Games Store. Epic stepped up to the plate immediately to work with us in order to bring the original team back together and ensure fans will receive the completed season of 'Telltale's The Walking Dead: The Final Season.'""

[https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/telltales-the- walking-d...](https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/telltales-the-walking-dead- epic-games-store-1203093523/)

And really, the same can be said for other exclusive games that are still in development, since money given to the devs is money that inevitably goes into the production of the game. By virtue meaning that they're helping to fund the game, at least in part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strategically, I wonder who has the most to lose if the Unreal engine is basically deplatformed from Apple.

iOS is a huge game market, but how many iOS games are powered by Unreal? macOS is a tiny game market.

For game developers, between this and the ARM switch on macOS, this could be a serious death to gaming on macOS.

I would also expect game developers to be mad at Epic to be playing chicken with their game engine, although that may be unexpected fall out. It might drive some game developers to move to other engines although this is probably a stretch.

<comment><USER7> Apple never cared about games (minus maybe a short period when the G4 came out), and gamedevs know it. Unreal was never a serious contender for iOS. So no serious immediate effect on either side.

In the long run, gamedevs would be even more reluctant to provide iOS/MacOS builds, which doesn't matter at all since people don't buy Macs for gaming.

<comment><USER8> > _Apple never cared about games_

They're currently trying to sell people a gaming subscription service.

<comment><USER7> Ah, wonderful. A platform where Apple can remove backward compatibility even more easily, and which forces you out of the other subscription services.

The big difference between games and other software, is that typical devs also profit from Apple making changes, e.g. Adobe managing to deprecate their previous licences and switch to subscription-only without backlash since it's Apple changing the platform. So Adobe loses a bit from porting, but gains more from new subscriptions.

Old games are almost never ported as is, at best they're "remade/remastered" which is a serious investment. So Apple making changes and choosing their own APIs is a pure loss for gamedevs. That's hardly the only problem but that's a big one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a feeling this was a calculated move for Epic to save face while abandoning MacOS development of the Unreal dev tools. If it really mattered to them, they could remove their TOS-violating hacks from Fortnite and get their developer license reinstated at any time.

Keep in mind that everything here has been gamed out ahead of time by Epic. They knew they would get their app removed for the brazen TOS violation. They knew that it would result in their developer account being suspended, and they knew that it meant their other apps tied to that account would also be locked out.

<comment><USER10> To sue they need to have standing, simply asking and getting a no and then carrying on accepting the old standard won't get you anywhere.

<comment><USER11> I really don't understand why people keep saying this. They had standing because they were a party to the Developer Program License Agreement. They would have had standing even if they weren't because they allege they're being denied use of an "essential facility".

<comment><USER12> They had standing yeah. I think it's about showing reduction in consumer welfare - Apple delisted an app that lowered prices for consumers.

<comment><USER11> Their stunt doesn't actually demonstrate that Apple's commission harms consumer welfare. If it did any retailer with a margin over the price of a manufacturer's goods would also be harming consumer welfare.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I agree, margin over the price of a manufactured good does harm consumer welfare. I didn't write the legal opinions, but it's much more interesting to talk about them this way!

The consumer welfare thing is just one factor of many to make a status-quo antitrust law case a real battle. There hasn't been antitrust victories for consumers in a very, very long time.

<comment><USER11> Then we're in agreement that Epic's breach of the developer agreement wasn't actually required to have standing or to bolster their antitrust claims.

<comment><USER12> Then it should be obvious that, Apple could write whatever it wants in its god damned agreements, it doesn't actually matter w.r.t. anti-trust claims.

Epic had to get Apple to go do an _anti-trust thing_ \- in their opinion. So it's definitely required to bolster the claim.

<comment><USER11> When I refer to consumer welfare I'm referring to the "consumer welfare standard" that is relevant to antitrust cases. Epic's breach doesn't actually aid them in demonstrating that Apple has harmed consumer welfare. The same holds true for Spotify when they charged more on iOS to cover Apple's commission.

<comment><USER12> It will be interesting to see how consumer welfare standard will evolve to accommodate people paying more for IAP because of app store fees. It's likely that it will.

Probably 100% of congress uses an iPhone. 100% of judges. Every lawyer. It's right in their face. 100% of them use Google, 0% use Bing. I don't think I know a single non-engineering professional, English as a first language adult who uses an Android device.

It's not some abstract situation the consumer welfare standard didn't anticipate; it's the now. Nobody is going to sympathize with arguments about choice because that hasn't been true for a while - nobody makes the choice, not among these people, for alternatives, so is there really a choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How can Apple prevent an unrelated dev from publishing something made with Unreal by banning Epic's account? Can't I deploy an app to the App Store with my own?

<comment><USER3> They can't. This is another attempt by Epic at gaining public sympathy for intentionally breaking the terms of their licensing agreement with Apple to publish on the app store.

<comment><USER14> This is a legal argument to a court attempting to get an injunction. It seems to me to have very little to do with public sympathy.

The public really doesn't give a crap about whether or not their is one contract or multiple, or the quality of apples legal arguments, which seems to be some of the core issues raised in this motion responding to Apple's motion.

<comment><USER3> It may also be a legal argument, but it's very clearly a move to gain public sentiment to their side - it's being published broadly by the media, after all.

Epic is painting themselves as the underdogs being bullied by Apple - <USER2> multi-billion dollar _contract-breaking_ underdog.

<comment><USER15> When was Epic ever given a chance to negotiate the terms of this contract?

<comment><USER3> They were given the same chance as you and I are with Epic's TOS for their games/game store.

They wanted access to the iOS market, and the terms were there.

<comment><USER15> Which same chance is that? Please fill me in, I've never negotiated with Epic's game store.

<comment><USER3> Zero. It's take-it-or-leave-it. Standard contract negotiation "tactics" these days.

<comment><USER15> That's unfortunate, maybe neither of them should be doing it?

<comment><USER16> Is it though? If you create a set of rules for your sandbox and somebody comes along and wants to play in it but only if you change the rules and you say "no thanks", that seems totally reasonable. Why should you have to negotiate?

<comment><USER15> The "sandbox" isn't their property anymore, it was sold to the end user when they bought the phone.

<comment><USER16> Maybe this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings of these arguments: those who think this statement to be true and those who don't. You bought the phone, you didn't buy the ecosystem, buying a $500 phone doesn't give you the right to dictate the multi-billion dollar business.

<comment><USER15> But it gives the vendor the right to tax you 30% on all future purchases related to that device, even if you disapprove of the job they're doing in stewarding the ecosystem? Despite that there are plenty of other vendors standing by that would be happy to steward it if given the opportunity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I understand this is an ugly turf war between Epic and Apple, I'm a little confused about certain other app. How is it that Audible (owned by Amazon) let's you "spend credits" that you purchase at Audible.com directly in the iOS App? Are they getting special treatment?

<comment><USER18> It doesn't. Purchases need to be done through the audible web.

Even the amazon app doesn't allow buying kindle ebooks directly.

<comment><USER19> Seriously? Why do Apple users tolerate this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am continuously surprised by the response from a lot of the HN community to this. I would never have expected people to be championing the kind of gate keeping Apple (and Google) have been enjoying for years. It hurts consumers by driving prices, forcing awful IAP business models, and holds back innovation due to private APIs or "policy violations".

These app stores are filled with so much shit these days that it's impossible to find quality software, and the app store model gives these companies little opportunity to differentiate and sell their offerings.

Give me the ability to install apps from any store, website, or platform. Give me the ability to use a device whatever way I decide. Incentive developers to create useful, enjoyable software instead of IAP shovelware. Make it the norm and break users from depending on The One App Store.

<comment><USER21> I've learned to no longer be surprised by it. There are a huge amount of people in this industry who have staked their personal identity in a brand. Apple, Tesla, Google, or whatever. It's no different than the high school behavior I grew up with where you were allowed be one of three types of people: Chevy, Ford, or Dodge.

<comment><USER22> The unusually downvoted answer holds the key to the riddle: it's the hardcoded tribalism making us justify our purchases as if they're political statements.

<comment><USER23> I do think it has to do with spending money. Don't see the same levels of defense for companies with "free" stuff. If Epic had only sued Google in this issue they'd have had more support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want to support Epic, because they're challenging Apple's monopoly. But… I have a feeling they're not doing it to be nice to _us_ , but because Apple's mooching off "their turf" (i.e. us) when _they_ want to be doing all the mooching.

<comment><USER25> There no one to support here. If Epic was to force some kind of change here, expect Epic Pay in every Unreal game whi h may have benefits in the short term but how long does that ever last?

<comment><USER14> > but how long does that ever last?

Forever? Because now there are competing payment providers.

<comment><USER18> How are they competing? Either the court rules that what Apple is doing is lawful, and is the single payment provider, or they decide it's not, and Epic becomes the single payment processing provider for unreal games.

Either way game devs have no choice

<comment><USER14> > and Epic becomes the single payment processing provider for unreal games.

This seems like an unjustified assumption that Epic would attempt to leverage any monopoly they had on game engines to create a monopoly on payment processing. They haven't done this on desktop where they (up to legal issues) could, so I don't see why you think they would on IOS.

Moreover, there is competition between game engines and gamedevs are not a captive audience to quite the same extent as consumers are.

Moreover, if epic wins and they attempted this they would have literally established the precedent for Apple to sue them in return.

<comment><USER18> > This seems like an unjustified assumption that Epic would attempt to > leverage any monopoly they had on game engines to create a monopoly on > payment processing.

Why? That's what they're selling

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No they are not, Epic decided to go all out, thereby risking the all ios business including the Unreal Engine.

</comment><comment><USER27> Any iOS developer at Epic can still use their own developer account, even a free one, to access all of the tools they need. The only thing impossible is _deploying_ their own software like Fortnite. Any 3rd party Unity dev has it's own certificate and isn't hurt by this.

Pretending you're blocked on doing anything for iOS and macOS because the account you use to deploy Fortnite has been locked is bullshit</comment>


BlackBerry Bleeding Developers? Far from it. - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/07/bleeding-developers-far-from-it/ <comment> yo-mf I LOL'ed throughout the article. Yet another example of corporate "Jim Jones" flavored kool-aid they are handing out to employees of a dying corporation.</comment>


Nearest Subway App Overlays Subway Directions On the Real World - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/16/amazing-nearest-subway-app-alters-the-matrix-while-pointing-you-to-the-q/

<comment><USER2> I've seen it demonstrated on Nokia devices before, but it's more available to the public with an iPhone.

I find it clever that they were able to circumvent one major obstacle of doing augmented reality. Usually, you need to interpret something about the video view from the camera in order to figure out where to place the 3D models in the scene.

Instead, they rendered it entirely ignoring the scene, and just used orientation and distance to display the subway signs. That works great for cities like New York or DC, where it's pretty much a grid with no dead ends.

<comment><USER3> Which, in a way, makes it seem less impressive to me. They could've dumped the video feed, and it would function the same. So it's less augmented reality than clever use of the accelerometer and compass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best thing about this is how simple it probably is underneath, and how awesome it looks anyways.

Current user location and database of subway station locations. It's a small enough list that you just rip through all of them and sort by distance. Project badges onto a sphere/flat on a circle depending on the tilt of the phone. Orient on compass location. Overlay display on video feed. Done.

There's no fancy image processing going on, no actual pathfinding, just a nice combination of the new 3GS apis and publically-available data. Good show.

<comment><USER5> One caveat: The iPhone API does not allow for a live image overlay from the camera. If you need a picture, you make the API call, Apple's own UI takes over, and you get a file in return.

To get the "live overlay" you need to hook into undocumented API. Considering how long we've been asking Apple for precisely this feature, I doubt it's going to happen.

<comment><USER6> I thought you could do this...[http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/05/email-n- walk-iphone-app-m...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/05/email-n-walk-iphone- app-makes-it-easier-to-write-email-while-walking.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So is apple approving apps like this now? I was under the impression that they made use of undocumented APIs, and as such, aren't getting into the app store?

If they are approving them, then I'm getting right on this bandwaggon!

<comment><USER8> Worth pointing out that Wikitude has been out for half a year on Android, with documented APIs all round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like everyone forgot to mention _this app has not yet been approved by the App Store._

But yes, rad nonetheless.

<comment> brown9-2 Well I think the interest has more to do with how cool the underlying technology is, the specific application is a little beyond the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an amazingly creative use of all the iPhone technologies, and New York is one of the densest places in the world so this would definitely be very helpful. It's not helpful for locals (who have the lines memorized), but for travelers who get confused and turned around in the maze of skyscrapers... this will be a great help.

I wonder if the technology is easily extensible to take new maps and locations. Post that openly and watch the world start creating further content... not just more subway maps, but more geographical locations (restaurants, hotels etc).

Exciting!

<comment><USER11> When I lived in New York I looked into mass producing a compass that was marked "Uptown/Downtown" (in place of North/South) and "Eastside/Westside" (in place of East/West) with the North/South line correctly aligned at 29.8 degrees from the actual.

You can hand these to visitors and they'd instantly be able to tell which direction to walk when stepping out of the subway.

<comment><USER12> I smell an iPhone app. Uses GPS to determine what city you are in and then displays direction in local terms. I want one. This could even work in Boston where the North End is mostly east of City Hall and the South End is a couple of miles west of South Boston

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Simply incredible, what devices inside the iphone allow it to extrapolate its position so accurately?

<comment><USER14> GPS in a well-covered area is accurate to around 10m or so. Combine that with a smartphone's internal compass and it knows what direction you are facing, so can pop up a floating box in roughly the right direction. Simple idea, and quite a nice indication of where things in the Augmented Reality space are going.

*

Other augmented reality examples:

\</comment></comment><comment>-

\- IBM 'Seer' app for Wimbledon 2009: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZoDmqcZ34>

\- Google Sky map for android: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6znyx0gjb4&eurl=http%3A%...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6znyx0gjb4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eaugmentedearth%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded)

\- US postal service using augmented reality: [http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i388...](http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i388dc3328f74c5ee152e36f2b608b604)

\- Augmented reality t-shirt / twitter mashup: [http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/17/papertweet3d-augmented- re...](http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/17/papertweet3d-augmented-reality-t- shirts/)

... and there's a lot more products out there - google for: ARSights / D'Fusion / Layar / Project Natal / Releas3D / SixthSense / Wikitude

*

Development kits / APIs:

\</comment><comment>-

ARTag - <http://www.artag.net/>

ARToolkit - <http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/>

FlarToolKit - <http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en>

NyARToolkit - <http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php>

<comment><USER15> Sure but getting a decent GPS fix in the metro canyons of big cities isn't a given (even with A-GPS).

You could make a lot of money by solving the problem of how to reliably determine location in major cities indoors and out (and not just relying on known wifi-hotspot triangulation like skyhook does).

<comment><USER5> Just off the top of my head: Google can probably do this quite easily, especially in an augmented reality application.

They already have street view data that's highly accurate, they also have A-GPS data on roughly where you are. They can refine this by comparing the image coming from your phone to known street view images... The computing power behind this would be pretty insane though.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, especially for a mobile device. It's a non-trivial problem and even your solution has the problems as the skyhook solution. The data goes stale and needs to be refreshed continually.

<comment><USER5> Change in landscape occurs more slowly than changes in WiFi networks. But you're right - this is a particularly difficult problem to solve.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are must have and must not have features, in a website? - <AUTHOR>

This question is for hackers and designers.
When launching a site, there is a debate of what features to have and what features not to have. Some features/flows/pages are specific to the site. But, there are common features/pages all sites must have. And some features are definitely a NO.
First time launcher can make a mistake of having or not having a feature.
Can you help identify the list of "MUST HAVE" and "MUST NOT HAVE" features for a site? <comment><USER2> This is quite a broad subject.

I'd say it's very important to focus on usability (navigation, layout, flow) - without proper implementation people will sometime just quickly scan and close the website almost immediately.

Depending on the website I'm working on, navigation usually includes a 'public' menu (main tabs), 'personal menu' (profile/log out), 'reverse navigation' (breadcrumb), 'section' menu (back-end tabs) and occasionally a 'contextual' menu (in content).

If you think along the lines of domain driven design, it is easy to spot different contexts at work.

A very important aspect of any website (and design) is consistency.

Pages would generally consist of at least a Home (sometimes used as a lead page), Lead page/s (where visitors land when clicking ads - sometimes the home page is used instead), Product pages (depending on the company, products or services can be listed here) and a Contact us tab.

The 'about us' should be evident throughout the entire design. Quite a few times I've seen the 'about us' page act almost entirely as a page where potential clients can find the physical address of a shop or service (sometimes include contact information).

Hope this short list helps you out, but that should at least get you started.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with the previous comment...a new site should focus on usability as the site has one chance to create a good first impression and have a repeat visitor. Another good feature to have is a feedback dialog. Site can be vastly improved based on constructive feedback by diligent users.

The site should also be crisp in its message as to what service it is providing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I definitely think an "about-us" page is the most important part of the website - it introduces the who, the why and allows us to get the voice of the people running the site.</comment>


If a build takes 4 hours, run it every 4 hours - <AUTHOR> https://pipelinedriven.org/article/if-builds-take-4-hours-run-them-every-4-hours <comment><USER2> Recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22914197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22914197)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know why HN software shows this sometimes but not everytime?</comment></comment>


PayPal, Venmo to Roll Out Crypto Buying and Selling - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-venmo-to-roll-out-crypto-buying-and-selling <comment><USER2> All those stories about PayPal holding money. The stories will continue but with crypto. No thanks.</comment>


Serious in Singapore - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30friedman.html?_r=2

<comment><USER2> The NYT just crossed a threshold with me: for the first time, as I clicked on the link, I thought as I did it "Ugh, I'll have to log in even to see what this article is about" and clicked on back before the NYT page even loaded.

Next stop: See (nytimes.com) after the link, and don't even click.

<comment><USER3> You don't save simple pswds in your browser!? I haven't logged into nytimes.com in literally years.

If there was a better newspaper, NYT would get fewer of my clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Singapore has some advantages. It is small, so in terms of dollar-per-citizen, its infrastructure burden is lower. It is also located within kilometres of some of the world's busiest trade routes, both north-south and east-west; indeed its port is one of the world's most active.</comment>


Russian Hackers Build Fake Skype, Signal, Pornhub Apps to Lure Victims - <AUTHOR> https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/07/russian-hackers-build-fake-skye-signal-pornhub-apps-lure-victims/158713/?oref=d-river <comment><USER2> That's great, but what is the primary attack vector? Fake app store? Interception of app store connections?

<comment><USER3> Quite a few people (especially non-english-speaking) download APKs from websites to install, rather than using the play store, some areas may even be blocked from the play store because of various US policies.

I've also had to use such a site in the past when using 'free wifi' that blocked app stores to try and minimise bandwidth 'leeches'</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I work for a PTC site? - <AUTHOR> Sorry about the anon acct, but I don't want this traced back to me. I got an offer to do some web dev for a guy who owns a PTC (paid to click) site. I didn't really know too much about this sort of stuff before, but after researching, it feels a little sleazy. Am I wrong about this? Only thing making me consider this is I need the money. <comment><USER2> there is a price point where we will pretty much take just about any job. if this job hits your price point, take it.

also, not everyone on HN has glamorous jobs. you gotta start somewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my concern is that the whole basic concept seems to be to rip people off. I was hoping someone on HN had some direct experience who could either tell me I'm right or I'm way off base.</comment></comment>


Titanium at 1/10th the cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21571847-exotic-useful-metals-such-tantalum-and-titanium-are-about-become-cheap

<comment><USER2> Now we don't need asteroid mining?

<comment><AUTHOR> The cost of titanium is mostly due to refining -- chemically processing TiO2 into metallic Ti. Titanium the element is very cheap and very common; titanium the refined metal is expensive. Supply isn't an issue.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are there no encrypted wrist bands for post Covid-19 infection yet? - <AUTHOR> This is a vital part of re-opening the economy.
Cinemas can re-open for people with the bands for instance. They will be vital in the health care sector.
We ignored organising PPE until it was to late, even with months of notice, why are we still not looking ahead?
There is no evidence of quick reinfection, and in the unlikely possibility it is possible we will quickly realise by formalising the post infection process. <comment><USER2> So we visually label a select group of individuals?

You don't see any problems with this? Doesn't remind you of any former regimes?

</comment><comment><USER3> How would you prevent counterfeiting?

<comment><USER4> I think that's what the encryption is for, how did large sporting events and concerts do it? Maybe it's a task Live Nation or Ticket Master coukd get behind.</comment></comment>