Why we still love board games - <AUTHOR> http://timharford.com/2010/07/why-we-still-love-board-games/ <comment><USER2> Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QnHbzVY...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QnHbzVYOm- cJ:timharford.com/2010/07/why-we-still-love-board- games/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

German-style boardgames are my favourite hobby. I've played probably 300+ different ones now. Perennial favourites include Agricola, Dominion, Ora et Labora (relatively new), Age of Steam and Titan (played this to death in the 90s, not so much now but I still love the game).

For me these games are a sweet spot between traditional family games (which tend to be largely luck-based and not very "deep") and the truly deep games of Go, Chess and even Bridge, probably even Poker. The former group is (for me) unfulfilling. The latter group is (again, for me) a massive time sink.

You can play a lot of games online now but honestly I don't like that. For me, it is both an intellectual and a social activity.

German style boardgames have been around for many years but they saw a renaissance that probably began with Settlers of Catan in the 90s that then exploded in the 2000s with Carcassonne and Puerto Rico and what came after.

It's a great hobby, particularly if you can find people to play with (physically) in your area, which doesn't tend to be a huge issue in urban centers.

EDIT: to clarify what a "German style" game is (commonly just called a "Eurogame"), it's basically a set of principles. Eurogames:

1\. Tend not to be elimination games (all players generally are in the game until the end);

2\. Tend to de-emphasize or eliminate direct conflict where your side or units or whatever directly attack those of other players;

3\. Tend to minimize luck to varying degrees. Some games (eg Caylus) are perfect information games; and

4\. Tend to take 1-2 hours to play;

5\. Typically have a central board and a bunch of brightly coloured wooden pieces; and

6\. Are often played by 3-5 players but can often be played with 2, occasionally 6, rarely more.

These are not hard and fast rules. Contrast this with what are called "Ameritrash" games (which isn't as derisive as it sounds).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for telling us about your favorite hobby, how many you have played, where it fits in your personal spectrum, that it has been around for many years, and giving us some titles!

But, what is a German-style board game?

<comment><USER4> German style board games are so named because of the influence of a few designers in Germany, and because of the popularity of some games in Europe.

Luck is reduced. Planning and skill is increased. They can be short fun easy to learn games for a wide age range (Carcassonne; Bohnanza), or they can be harder more in depth games that take longer to play (Le Havre).

Usually there's an element of competing against the game itself, not just against other players. Usually they avoid player elimination (unlike monopoly).

Ticket to Ride is a great game. You have some destination cards. You draw train cards. You use the train cards with your train counters to build routes (for points) on the destination cards. Routes consist of a bunch of shorter routes, and these are limited so other players can claim them. The luck comes in drawing good destination cards, and what train cards come up. You can try to cobble other players by claiming their routes, but you really need to claim your routes. (This isn't a great description. See Board game geek for better.)

Carcassonne is a 'simple' "draw a tile, place a tile" game. You need to build towns or farms or roads, while stopping your opponent doing the same.

Monopoly gets harsh treatment among some people. I tend to agree. If you play it properly (with all the auctions, and with the intent to drive other people out of the game) it's okay, but vicious.

<comment><USER5> I think you rather classified "modern" board games, not "german style".

On the other hand, do you know a modern non-german board game?

<comment> hendrik-xdest There are quite a few. From the top of my head: Pandemic. Even non-European is not unheard of. For example my all-time favorite: Robo Rally (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboRally>)

<comment><USER6> Space Alert is another interesting one: <http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert>

Sort of cross-over between Pandemic and Robo Rally... you play and win/lose as a team like in Pandemic, but much of the mechanics is "programming" your actions like in Robo Rally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something I found quite nice was a web series by Wil Wheaton: TableTop (<http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/>) which basically consists of a round of people playing a board game, explaining the rules and generally having fun doing so. The nice part is that you can experience how the game is played and whether you might like it or not – much better than just with a verbal description or review on Amazon.

Of course, for cities that have such a thing, a dedicated board game shop where you can try out games is even better, but those seem to be rare, even in Germany.

<comment><USER8> Minneapolis has an embarrassment of riches on this front. We have game shops everywhere and dozens of public groups that meet regularly. There's also a monthly gathering that typically runs Friday to Sunday (16 hours each), and sells out its 90 person capacity almost instantly.

The groups are very newbie friendly, which is typical for this hobby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting to me is new board games aren't just variants on existing games; there's noticable innovation in board game "technology". If you ever play board games from the 80s and 90s, they often feel dated and clunky, even more so than video games from the same era.

I recently went back and played some classic Avalon Hill games that were popular when I was a kid. I can't believe me and my friends spent so much time playing them when we were younger. Depending on the game, a full game might take 5 or 10 hours. For many games, the majority of the time is spent rolling dice, looking things up in tables, and moving stacks of counters around. And that's when you're lucky enough to have a chance to do anything -- there's often half an hour or more of dead time when you're waiting for other players to make their moves. By contrast, if you play a game of Dominion, it's possible to finish a game in 15 minutes. You'll have to make a larger number of important tactical and strategic decisions than you would in most six hour long games from the 80s and there's zero idle time [1].

Even with games that use modern game technology, you can see a noticeable improvement over time. Puerto Rico introduced a move selection system that allowed for serious tactical planning (10+ moves ahead) in a lightweight [2] game that could be finished in half an hour (with experienced players). But, the game wasn't perfect. One weakness was that the player turn order was fixed and very important. If you play a game with one weak player and three strong players, whoever goes after the weak player is almost guaranteed to win. Conversely, if you have one strong player, whoever sits down to the left of that player is going to get crushed.

Caylus fixed that by building a mechanism to change turn order into the game itself. Caylus was wildly popular for a year or two, but it's rare to see people play it now. Ironically, the game designer was too good at removing the element of luck for the game to be popular. If you ever played on BSW (an online board game service), you probably ran into 'Alexfrog', who had a record of something like 431 wins and 2 losses. You can predict, with very high probability, the outcome of the game based solely on who's playing, and most people don't like being crushed by the same players over and over again. Another issue the game had was that the gameplay was almost purely tactical. There were only a few viable strategies, so games all had a similar feel to them.

Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it also means that anyone can win any given game.

It would be fun to sit down and draw out a board game tech tree. It might hard to make a decent visualization, though, because of the huge span, plus a high degree of multiple inheritance.

[1] There may be some idle time with certain strategies on some of the newer expansions, due to the incredible amount of shuffling required. You can avoid this by playing here: <http://dominion.isotropic.org/>. I tend to play on isotropic even when playing face-to-face games because it's 2x faster normally, and there are some pathological cases where it's over an order of magnitude faster.

[2] I'm using 'light' to refer to how cumbersome and complex the game mechanics are. Examples of 'heavy' games are Enemy at the Gates (which has over 1000 counters) and ASL (which has something like 500 pages of rules).

[3] Both games do this by strongly randomizing the initial state of the game, and adding a small degree of randomization throughout the game. Technically, Caylus also randomized the initial state, but the initial random state in Caylus was minor; it was just barely enough keep you from pre-computing an opening book, the way you can in chess. Even in Dominion tournament games, where most players have played thousands of games, it's common to see wildly divergent strategies, because neither player has played on a board with a similar starting state, so they both have to figure out the best strategy in real time. I always cringe when that happens, and I realize I'm playing an inferior strategy. It doesn't really help that you can see what they other player is doing, because if you realize that her strategy is superior and try to switch, you'll be doing the same thing, but N turns behind, which is pretty much a guaranteed loss [4]. Your only hope, at that point, is some combination of superior tactical play and luck.

[4] Well, not always. A hybrid strategy can work in some cases. It depends on the strategies and the stage of the game. It depends is a safe answer to pretty much any strategy question, which is what makes it interesting.

<comment><USER10> > Agricola and Dominion fixed the problems Caylus had by adding significant > randomization. Not only does that add strategic variety to the games [2], it > also means that anyone can win any given game.

While Agricola and Dominion do a pretty darn good job of it, it's often a matter of individual opinion whether adding randomization is a 'fix' or not. I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no matter what my level of skill is. There's a balance to be had between having guaranteed good strategies, too much of which makes a game feel stale, and real randomization, too much of which makes a game feel like glorified gambling to no effect.

What you really want is just some way of ensuring that you don't play the same situation twice, so that some mental exertion is always required, while keeping the playing field level. One way to go about it is to just devise a game with sufficiently complex positions that players are likely to create new ones on their own- that's what Chess, Go, and Hnefatafl do, despite being very lightweight. Another way is to find some means of randomizing positions that doesn't too seriously impact player standings- that's what randomized Nim does and what Backgammon tries to do. A third is to make game progression depend on player judgments/voting, which magnifies the social aspects of a game; it's a form of randomization, but fundamentally different from, say, rolling dice or drawing shuffled cards, and there are very few popular games I know of that make use of it (Dixit is the only _board_ game I know of, though there are card games like Taboo and Apples to Apples). It seems to me that modern board games tend more and more towards the randomization approach (sometimes with good reasons to do so given the simulation conceits of the game- i.e., agricultural productivity in Settlers). This makes sense because its easy to do, especially in the context of trying to make games that play faster- randomizing starting conditions is a great way to save the first ten or twenty opening moves prior to interestingness that you'd go through in a fully deterministic Chess-style game, even if there's no further randomness- and especially if you're willing to be lax with the requirement to not obviously upset player standings by random chance. But I wonder if we're missing something by not doing more exploration of the space of "interesting" deterministic games.

Incidentally, Tsuro is an interesting edge case- as the board is built during game play, I'm not sure if that counts as randomized initial conditions, or continuous randomization. While Tsuro is the simplest example, there are several games similar to this, like Infinite City or Wasabi. I was recently introduced to a Tsuro expansion that added dice rolls that alter the previously-played board tiles, and it was pretty uniformly considered by the players to be inferior due to over-randomization destroying any real reliance on individual skill.

P.S. Most of my recent exposure to modern games comes from periodic sampling of board game events run by my university SF&F club, so it's entirely possible that there are filtering and selection biases in the kinds of games that I have seen. I would certainly not mind having my entire argument torn to shreds by being introduced to yet more new games that I was not previously familiar with.

<comment><USER11> > I hate playing a game where I feel like I could lose by pure chance no > matter what my level of skill is.

I've discovered this is a crucial element in social games. Because the implication is that someone could also win by pure chance no matter what their skill level is. That makes the game a lot more approachable for people of all skill levels, and makes it easier for a room full of people to have fun together.

Compare with another game I'm particularly fond of, which has absolutely no random element: Go. Considered on its own merits and ignoring any outside factors, it's easily my favorite game. But my usual Go partner moved across the country a while ago, and since then I almost never get to play Go. And when I do, it's really not very much fun. I've been playing it for so much longer than anyone else I know that we both know going into it exactly who's going to win and by how much. There's just no excitement in that. Sure, Go has a fantastic handicapping system and if we wanted to put out the effort of figuring out an appropriate handicap we could even the odds. But for most people that (quite justifiably) feels terribly condescending, so we're not going to do that.

<comment><USER12> Exactly - it's like the difference between chess and poker. Both are popular but poker is more widely played because differences in skill are less apparent (especially to an unskilled player)

People who don't like randomness mixed with skill just need to stop measuring themselves by the outcome of a single game.

<comment><USER10> > People who don't like randomness mixed with skill just need to stop > measuring themselves by the outcome of a single game.

It's not measuring yourself, it's the emotional experience of playing that one game. If you _can_ play the same game a bunch of times, such that the randomness gets smoothed out, that experience is different from the experience of just playing one game. There is thus something to be said, I think, for games that are explicitly designed to be played in a tournament style. For example, Mexican Train Dominoes- you're _supposed_ to play it in 13 rounds, so even though you may get completely screwed over by bad draws on any one round, it's highly likely that everyone ends up on even footing overall (except for that one time I got a double 6 five rounds in a row...). Or Hnefatafl- it's empirically unbalanced, so standard practice is that you always play two games switching sides.

Hnefatafl has another interesting option for redressing unbalanced skill levels, though; each player can simply bet at the beginning on how many moves they think it will take them to win. If you play beyond the lowest number of moves wagered, that player loses. It's a similar idea to handicapping in Go, but extremely simple and requiring no negotiation such as would seem condescending. Unless, of course, you want to be a jerk about it and just always overestimate your move count on purpose.

<comment><USER13> > "Mexican Train"

That's offensive to those of us that use that to describe a sexual position!

But seriously, I agree with you. Since I only played it about once a year, I usually forget to play it very conservatively and get a large score. You don't have to win a single round to win overall, but people seem to forget what the real metric is with the excitement of winning a round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Worth noting the article's a couple of years old, as anyone who plays Dominion will realize.

I'm always amazed at how much innovation is going on. With board games you'd think that the best ones would all have been figured out decades ago, but it seems like more are being invented than ever.

<comment><USER15> The variety and refinement in game mechanics is great. Browsing BoardGameGeek by mechanic[1] can be useful for new board game selection.

[1] <http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love this article. I think the end captures it perfectly - there's really nothing else that gets the same social interaction as board games.

At work we use board games on a daily basis for team building, usually play a 1-hour-or-less game over every lunch. It's amazing how quickly you get to know someone and how those relationships build and blend into your work as well. You can see how someone teaches a new person how to play the game, how they interact with alliances and respond to attacks from other people.

Some 1-hour games we play for reference, if anyone's interested:

Dominion - Already discussed in another post :) (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion>)

7 Wonders - Drafting based card game where you interact with your immediate neighbours (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders>)

Race for the Galaxy - Card game where action choices enable other players (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-for-the-galaxy>)

Lords of Waterdeep - D&D themed worker placement game (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/110327/lords-of-waterdeep>)

Stone Age - Most "german" game of this list, worker placement and resource gathering with dice (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635/stone-age>)

Space Alert - co-op game where the main game mechanic is "communication" (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert>)

Galaxy Trucker - fun tile-based spaceship construction game (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker>)

The Resistance - 2 out of the 5 players are secretly spies (<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance>)

I wrote this list out in a bit more detail on my website: <http://rtigger.com/blog/2012/12/14/board-games-are-great/>

<comment><USER17> Could you suggest a good board game that is playable turn by turn? We are a group of friends in very different time zone, and playing a turn based game, about one turn a day works nicely.

We have played Tigris & Euphrates, and it works great, but would be looking for something different.

Thanks.

<comment><USER18> Take a look at VASSAL (<http://www.vassalengine.org/>) and the games it supports - between that and Dropbox, I find that playing turn based games over the internet is made a lot easier.

How many of you are there? How much complexity and/or depth do you like? At the deep (deep) end, 18xx and specifically 1830 plays well as PBeM (with a Java app called Rails), or there are games like Here I Stand that play well PBeM, or war games. Pretty much anything which doesn't need much interaction between players during each person's turn works well (especially if you can trust each other to roll dice for each other where needed).

If you want some more suggestions, feel free to drop me an e-mail and discuss further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I absolutely love board games and card games. And I love to think about game mechanics. If I would not be a web developer I would love to work with this kind of game development.

I have developed a version of Magic the Gathering which is played with a normal 52 card deck (one deck per person) with much more simple rules and good strategy (better?) and less luck. I have played it around 100 times and the rules are finalized. I think I should translate the rules to English.

A note about Monopoly, the new card game Monopoly Deal is actually quite good as a family game with simple rules and around 20 minutes.

<comment><USER20> I'm very curious--is there a way for me to play this game? I'd love to get the rules from you and try it out. I loved the mechanics in Magic when I was younger, and I'd love to not have to buy all the cards and worry about building a deck, and just be able to play the game with my fiance without telling her it's Magic.

<comment><USER21> <http://code.google.com/p/magarena/>

Magarena is a GPLed program to play almost Magic: the Gathering. There is only a small rule modification to simplify AI calculations: the defender chooses how combat damage is distributed, not the attacker.

Magarena doesn't have ALL the cards - only close to 3000 - but it has disturbingly good AI. Several AI algorithms to choose from, in fact. It plays like a bastard, and despite having a few flaws (sometimes it performs suicide attacks, it doesn't save cards for later, is bad with activated abilities and doesn't guess what card you might have in hand) you will dearly regret underestimating it.

More cards are coming, but each new mechanic needs to be coded separately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quinns from Shut Up & Sit Down did a fantastic talk about the current "Board Gaming Golden Age" at GameCity this year!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921146>

</comment><comment><USER23> Haven't seen these mentioned yet, and I recommend both:

Powergrid: Unique because there are no dice involved; a game of economics

Steam: Unique because there is a bank (partly tied to your score) that you can borrow against to build pieces faster

<comment><USER24> I enjoy Power Grid with a larger group (4+) people, but with a small group, the game really drags. This is unfortunate, because my usual gaming group consists of my fiancee and myself.

<comment><USER25> Which 'german' style board games do you recommend for 2 people? It's often just my wife and I, and it seems like most popular eurogames are best with 3-4 people.

<comment><USER26> Take a look at [http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/67262/near- perfect-2-playe...](http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/67262/near- perfect-2-player-games-top-25-who-occasionall)

edit: for what it's worth the game my wife and I end up playing most of the time when we have 45 minutes to kill is Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers, which isn't on the list.

<comment><USER27> My wife and I bought Carcassonne because it could be played with only 2 people. But it's one of our favorite games because it's never the same game twice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would have never expected a thread like this to pop up on hacker news :)

Anyway I have to weigh in and suggest to try a game I produced with some friends (by co-founding a publishing company): Al Rashid (<http://www.yemaia.com/al-rashid> \-- <http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/127282/al-rashid>).

I think most people with a development background are naturally disposed towards liking eurogames, and in my case to work on one :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Lately I've been buying some of my child board games like Monopoly, Cluedo, Hotel and such...

I noticed that people are going back at this type of games, and I can see it why. It's an awesome excuse to invite some friends to your house, setup a game, get a few drinks and just play, talk and have some fun.

You can't do this with videogames.

Also, you'de be amazed at how much a good strategy boarding game can reveal of someone's personality.

<comment><USER14> Seriously, try some modern, German-style boardgames like those described in the article - settlers if you play with people who pay attention, something slightly less interaction-heavy (san juan?) if you don't. You'll be amazed how far game design has progressed since the ones you remember from childhood.

<comment><USER30> Couldn't agree more. German-style games make Monopoly etc look positively archaic. Two great starter games are Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. I'm a big fan of Ticket to Ride as well.

There are a couple of things that make these games so good. Firstly, they're extremely well balanced - unlike Monopoly, it's rare for one player to pull ahead to the point that it's impossible for anyone else to catch up with them.

Secondly, they tend to come to an inevitable conclusion - a game of Settlers will virtually never last more than an hour and a half due to resources / space on the board depleting over time. I've had games of Monopoly last 6 hours or more, by which time everyone is fed up and wishes they'd never started playing.

<comment><USER14> I've never been able to stand Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride falls firmly into my "meh" category - with multiple players you optimize your chances of winning by taking a lot of routes, and it's then mostly a matter of luck whether you get a set that overlaps enough to complete. Settlers is good if you play it with people who pay attention, but if not you can easily be waiting half an hour while everyone asks everyone else several times over if they want to sell them any grain for their sheep.

So yeah, I've mentioned San Juan; Citadels is similar and conveniently is playable for 2-8. If you're a group of programmers then Roborally is fantastic (just ignore the life tokens).

<comment><USER4> > Ticket to Ride falls firmly into my "meh" category - with multiple players > you optimize your chances of winning by taking a lot of routes, and it's > then mostly a matter of luck whether you get a set that overlaps enough to > complete.

You score points if you complete the route. You subtract tat route's points if you do not complete the route.

Thus, taking extra cards is a gamble - do you gain 12 points for completing a route or lose 12 points for not completing a route?

<comment><USER14> Yep. But if you treat the game as win/lose then your best strategy is to increase your variance, which you do by taking a whole lot of tickets. Since many ticket routes overlap, it becomes a game of pure luck - the game is mostly determined by who happened to get tickets that overlapped, and all your efforts in playing won't overcome such an advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not strictly a board game (nor German-style), but I'll just mention the card game Set too (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(game)>). It's quick to play, both adult and children can play together, and you can play against each other or work together to find the sets. We've brought it to a ski trip with two other families, and it was a hit.

Maybe it is well known, but I hadn't heard of it until I read about it here on HN (Peter Norvig had simulated the odds of not finding a set, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1303797>). Having played for a while, I ran my own simulations. The results differed a bit from Peter Norvig's. I wrote it up here: [http://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities- revisite...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisited/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I've always had this hypothesis that if a country has a strong cultural background in games people tend to have good critical thinking skills c.p. The case study for this would be Germany.

Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an excellent thing to do to foster their development (sadly in this day and age it almost seems spending any time with your kids puts you way ahead of the curve already as far as parenting goes). It's fun, too.

Crowdfunding seems to work pretty well for board games btw. And I wouldn't be shocked to hear that passionate board gamers make good startup guys (poker players seemingly do)

<comment><USER33> > Either way I'm pretty convinced playing board games with children is an > excellent thing to do to foster their development

Planning. Simple arithmetic. Social interaction. Patience. Sure, that's going to be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Also enjoyable is building and designing a board game from the ground up.

Similar to software development in that you need constant iteration, _much_ different in that it takes forever to implement and test those iterations.

</comment><comment><USER35> The _Ludemetic Game Generator_ [1] is an amusing, and often inspiring, fictional game generator. It randomly combines BoardGameGeek.com's game category and mechanics keywords to create a new game. Some random examples:

* _Web Tycoon in Space_ : Categories: Expansion for Base-game, American Indian Wars, Mythology. Mechanics: Commodity Speculation, Hand Management.

* _Popbid_ : Categories: Music, Territory Building. Mechanics: Auction/Bidding, Modular Board.

[1] <http://kevan.org/ludeme>

</comment><comment><USER36> My daughter has been an avid board-gamer for several years and just started the 3D board game club at the University of Alabama. Look it up if you're in the area and want to find a group to play with!

[http://cw.ua.edu/2012/10/29/3d-board-game-club-introduces- ne...](http://cw.ua.edu/2012/10/29/3d-board-game-club-introduces-new-way-to- interact/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Junta is an example of a older well playing board game if you have 5-7 people. Especially good for a mature crowd and with appropriate props like hats and sunglasses.

<http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242/junta>

<comment><USER33> If you have seven people who like that kind of game, and have enough time on their hands, the 1900 variant of Diplomacy is also worth a try. But make sure they can separate backstabbing in-game, from behaviour in real life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My main problem with board games is that they're too expensive sometimes.

<comment><USER32> If I'd do a ROI analysis on all my board games most of them beat out lots of other social activities.

If an average game lasts maybe an hour and you play it with an average of 3 players that's 3h of entertainment per play. 10-15 Euros per hour of entertainment seems very reasonable so most games actually tend to pay for themselves after just one play if oyu look at it that way.

<comment><USER24> And with sites such as boardgamegeek, there isn't as much risk involved unless you're buying just-released games.

I've had my copy of Dominion for over three years. I got it on sale for $30. I've played literally hundreds of games since I bought it.

Granted, I've added expansions over the years. But let's assume I paid full retail price for the game and four expansions: around $225. I've played at least 300 20-to-60 minute games. Conservatively, 100 hours of gameplay time. $2.25 an hour to entertain myself and 1 to 5 friends is an amazing value proposition.

<comment><USER8> BoardGameGeek also has an active secondary market, lowering the risk of new purchases. Unless the game is utterly terrible, you'll be able to recoup some of your money.

The user auctions there fetch high enough prices that I would not hesitate to sell there as opposed to eBay. They also have their own marketplace where users can sell games at fixed prices, but the organic "hey I want to sell these, who wants to give me cash" lists of games[1] are quite successful.

[1] [http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/66420/metalist-for- geeklis...](http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/66420/metalist-for-geeklist- auctions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I miss playing 8 board, 5 flag roborally marathons.

</comment><comment><USER3> On iPad: how do I get this in the google cache??

<comment><USER40> The link to the original content on FT would be easier: [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1aab09a4-8fb2-11df-8df0-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1aab09a4-8fb2-11df-8df0-00144feab49a.html#axzz2F1syyIU9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Board games are discrete and closed, often in a well-thought-out and beautiful way. It's generally intended as a social experience, but the discrete world makes the game possible to take apart and analyze, so that if you want to dive deep into the game, you can. It's up to you what kind of experience you want to have. If you want to play today and forget who won tomorrow, that's fine. On the other hand, if you want to get analytical about why starting that external conflict in a game of T&E was such a good (or bad) move, you can do that as well. In a continuous, real-time computer game, you can't as easily reason "to the bottom" because the mathematical microstructure is hidden, and often emergent.

Germany, Hungary, and to some degree, France, have a really strong (tabletop) gaming culture, which is a really cool thing. I tend to think that games confer a lot of benefits not just for "weird gamer types", but for everyone. It's a lot easier to get to know people over a board game than when there is nothing "in the center" to talk about: can people really carry on a 2-hour conversation about the fucking weather? I'm a weather geek and even _I_ would prefer not to (possibly because I know from experience that it bores most people).

I actually think there's space in the world for a "board game cafe" niche. Instead of board games being a fringe activity that require corralling people, I don't see why there couldn't be a revival of the culture where a person can walk into a coffee shop at any time and find a game.

<comment><USER32> I love to analyze games and as a programmer there's quite a bit of neat stuff you can do due to the discreteness. Build DSLs for the game logic or strategy, the whole field of AI, modelling of games as FSM, Petri Nets whatever seems interesting.

There are quite a few of these cafes. They have game collections and you can rent a table+game and pay for the drinks. You can also bring you own etc. the atmosphere is usually pretty nice/relaxed.

<comment><USER41> Are you taking this Coursera course, in April?

<https://www.coursera.org/course/ggp>

It looks really interesting.

<comment><USER32> Pretty nice wasn't aware of this course. A colleague of mine actually has a student that is doing a paper on GGP this semester.

I'll sign up for it but will mostly just follow along and not treat it like a real course (that's kind of how I do all my online courses).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Notes on GDPR Compliance of Matrix.org (With Data Leak Disclosure), Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/libremonde-org/paper-research-privacy-matrix.org/tree/master/part2 <comment><USER2> As always, it is worth nothing that these things are being conducted by individuals who have had a falling out with the general matrix community for a number of reasons and have since worked on a generally hostile fork. It is in their best interest to make these documents as damaging for matrix and matrix.org as possible.

That won't change any facts, which I can't comment on the validity of, but it's important to keep this context in mind while reading these and any future documents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for bringing our "failing out", which has an impact on the Personal Data leak itself, so I really hope people will look into it.

As for "with the general matrix community", I believe the amount of projects and people we talk to, and still are in rooms with (which are public) will be the proof of that.

I hope you'll enjoy the read, since we believe this is not the first data leak of this kind and that your personal data might very well have been leaked if you're a Matrix user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What was the point of redacting the name of the operator in Annex A "for privacy" and then linking to a blog post that clearly states the author's name saying "the same operator made this blog post while we were talking"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because our document could be collected and processed illegally under GDPR. That the operator makes the conscious choice to have their name listed on their own organisation's website they are from is their own choice. Their organisation is processing their data, not us. They have the right to object to that, and the right to erasure of their personal data if having their name is listed.

They were not given the choice to be part of our publication and therefore, we have no lawful basis to use their name since 1) they did not give us consent and 2) they would not have understood (we didn't say) nor expect (it was a private chat) that we will use their personal data - making Legitimate Interest not possible.

The only way we could be GDPR compliant for being Accountable and not break a lawful basis was to not use their name but the name of their role under their obligations towards us, and linking to the blog post instead (Accountability of what we claim).

<comment><USER3> Still doesn't seem necessary to point out that it was the same person writing the blog post, could have just said New Vector released this blog post around the same time. Just seems underhanded, but that isn't much surprise coming from someone with a clear vendetta against NV because you want people to switch to Grid. These papers are nothing more than marketing documents for your fork.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess then New Vector is actually our best sponsor: they always give us those very important things to write about, like a personal data breach that has a federation-wide scope.

They certainly are generous! I'll ask them to renew our contract!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best cross platform mobile development framework for native apps ? - <AUTHOR>

{updated} What do you think is best cross platform mobile development framework for native apps ?<p>(It should support both iOS and Android)<p>Is there one which lets you develop your apps in Java ? <comment><USER2> For what: websites? native apps? Are there any features you see your app needing that you couldn't do with html5 / javascript?

</comment><comment> saiko-chriskun phonegap seems to be pretty standard.

</comment><comment><USER3> MonoTouch?</comment>


Why Video Gaming Will Take Over - <AUTHOR> https://www.matthewball.vc/all/7reasonsgaming <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel this entire article was written through the prism of a gamming addict. It's very simmilar to the cable news channel viewers that see every minor political event as the end of the world and believe everyone else in the world feels the same way, but in reality most people couldn't care less.

The truth is many people do spend lots of time and money playing video games but eventually they get bored and lose interest, then they find another game to consume their time and bank accounts.

I would think that age demographics would shed a more impartial light on the true amount of gaming consumption as compared to other forms of lesure activity. I have a sneaking suspicion that Millenials, the largest demographic since the Baby Boomers might be skewing the numbers and once this current generation of gamers grows up, start families and begin enjoying life rather than seeking an escape, gaming will not "Take Over".

I would also like to point out that the person writing this article chose to spend their time creating this long post rather than playing a game.</comment>


Artificial intelligence has the verbal skills of a four-year-old - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/161383-artificial-intelligence-has-the-verbal-skills-of-a-four-year-old-still-no-common-sense <comment><USER2> The title is a bit of an overstatement.

It can recognize vocabulary words as well as a four-year-old. Not much more.</comment>


How Leo and Gertrude Stein Revolutionized the Art World - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/how-leo-and-gertrude-stein-changed-the-art-world/ <comment><USER2> I live 5 blocks from where these two grew up in Oakland. I've always seen them as role models. I admire their work greatly, and seek to replicate it in video game preservation.</comment>


Robinhood Desktop – Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://www.stockstalk.club?source=hn <comment><USER2> > Built on top of Electron

> Fully Native

I don't think that's the commonly accepted definition of Native

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does this require an account other than robinhood?

</comment><comment><USER4> Does it / Will it support options & crypto?

<comment><USER5> It supports any stock you have on Robinhood so once you have crypto on Robinhood it will show it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> does it have realtime chart?

<comment><USER5> Right now it has real-time tickers. For charts to work I need to find a good reliable real-time historic data as Robinhood does not provide history as part of their API, still looking on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author here, I wrote Robinhood for desktop out of the necessity of staying up to date with my Robinhood investments.

It's open source - [https://github.com/sagivo/StockStalk](https://github.com/sagivo/StockStalk)

Like you, I spend most of my day in front of a computer and I need a quick way to see how my Robinhood portfolio is doing.

StockStalk will show you your status on the mac bar (green/red) and click on the tray will show you how each stock is doing. I also plan to allow buy and sell directly within the app. This way there is no need to check your phone all the time and get notified via desktop notifications on sharp changes. At the moment I have a mac and windows versions but linux is coming soon.

Important to notice that no sensitive information is sent to anywhere. the credentials are all stored locally and sync directly with Robinhood API.

Take a look and tell me what you think. Hope you'll find it useful as it's for me.

<comment><USER7> I'm reading your TOS right now. I'm not well versed with this type of jargon but what is this [https://www.fancyhands.com](https://www.fancyhands.com) ? Also, from the privacy policy, it seems like you'll be able to sell anonymous data. How "anonymous" would this be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great, now i can see how badly i'm doing all the time</comment>


Map Your Google Location History - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/chrisalbon/code_py/blob/master/matplotlib_map_your_google_data.ipynb

<comment><USER2> For those who don't want to do it themselves: [https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0)

<comment><USER3> Actually, the Google-provided version restricts you to only 30 days. If you're interested in everywhere you have been, ever (according to Google), then this is quite awesome and you get much more options with _how_ you display that data and what else you can incorporate with it.

<comment><USER4> You can go back further by modifying the startTime parameter in the download link.

[https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=14...](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=1400003200000&endTime=1410159600000)

<comment><USER5> Oh my, a hacker. Better be careful.

[http://theblot.com/man-jailed-because-feds-dont- understand-c...](http://theblot.com/man-jailed-because-feds-dont-understand- computer-hacking-7717221)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did something similar with that data a few months ago using qGIS, postGIS, and OSM data:

[https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/lines.crop.png](https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/lines.crop.png)

[https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/points.and.lines.cr...](https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/points.and.lines.crop.png)

[https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/too.many.points.png](https://packetfire.org/projects/qgis/img/too.many.points.png)

The data is definitely not completely consistent. Trips I took are missing, even though Google plus made auto-awesome stories with pictures taken there, and got the locations correct in those. There are also some points that shouldn't be there. It shows me in Michigan a few separate times (a few hundred data points at various times), to which I've never been. It also puts me at 0 Lat/0 Long a few times, but the reason for this is pretty obvious, just confusing when I first saw it mapped. Also there's quite a bit of "teleporting" from location to location, even though I had my phone with me and was using it when I was traveling between them.

The third image, on the other hand, is seemingly way too much data at one place. It's my workplace at 1 meter resolution. You'd think they could merge it down to a few points a day at the most, but for whatever reason, there are on average 200 points per day there. It just astonishes me how much data there is at some places, yet in others massive chunks seem to be missing.

I started working on a write up of how I did all this, including the bash scripts I wrote to parse, clean and transform the data, but one thing came up after another, and I haven't gotten around to finishing it. If anyone is interested, I'll finish that up and post it this week. I still have to finish up my scripts to clean the data of the "teleporting" and the places I haven't actually been. It was definitely a fun project, and now I have an interactive map of (some of) my past travels and habits. qGIS was interesting to play with, learning bits as I went along trying to get it to display properly and actually render what I wanted to see. Definitely gave me a new level of respect for anyone that does cartography.

<comment><USER7> I have messed around with mapping my location history and had some similar problems. Apparently I have been to Essex, UK although I have never been there in my life.

I tracked down the teleporting problem to the fact my tablet was at home and turned on. It seems you can't set location reporting per device, it is either on or off, so you end up being in two locations at once. I was going to look in to trying to remove problem points be setting a distance or speed threshold. That brings the problem of knowing which data point to keep and which to drop though, which I have not got a solution for yet apart from requiring user interaction.

<comment><USER6> In my case, my phone is the only device should report location data, and the times on either side of the teleport were correct, it just seems to be missing the trip itself. As far as removing the points, there seem to be plenty of points at the a similar time and location, so removing either one wouldn't be an issue. However it's currently one continuous track, and removing a point would break that.

My idea was to use speed as the constraint, give the points on both sides a label, and have the line between them be transparent. I just need to figure out that last part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to get your data programatically, Google do _not_ provide an API.

You'll need to "borrow" your own cookies. I documented the process at [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/extracting-your-own- location...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/04/extracting-your-own-location- information-from-google-the-hard-way/)

<comment><USER9> You can just use Google Takeout, IIRC.

<comment><USER8> Takeout does not provide an API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used a heatmap API with 2+ years worth of Google Location History data to make this last year: [https://plus.google.com/+sahaskatta/posts/5bbn9D9ZzuP](https://plus.google.com/+sahaskatta/posts/5bbn9D9ZzuP)

<comment><USER11> This inspired me to do the same. If anyone wants to try, I put my implementation up on github: [https://github.com/olane/locationheatmap](https://github.com/olane/locationheatmap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I built my own version of this about two years ago:

[https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a- path...](https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path.html)

Python code available here: [https://github.com/djc/galatna](https://github.com/djc/galatna)

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool script! I just tried it out myself and it seems that Google's location history is actually really spotty. It missed several of my trips (during which the phone was active and responsive) and it also included some spots that I've never been to. I double checked the JSON and the problem is on Google's end and not the script.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've done this before by just downloading location history as KML and then hosting somewhere and directing google maps at it in an embed etc. works fine.

</comment><comment><USER14> So apparently I've been to Hong Kong... first I've heard of it. Also there seems to be no record of my visit to Canada last year.

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one whose location data is missing?

<comment><USER16> Maybe you've disabled the feature?

[https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3118687?hl=en](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3118687?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> how does python know what map data to use?

<comment><USER3> It's fed in by the JSON file that was downloaded in Step 1 from Google when you request an archive of your data.

From the site: # Create a dataframe from the json file in the filepath raw = pd.io.json.read_json('/Users/chrisralbon/Downloads/Location History/LocationHistory.json')</comment></comment>


St Andrew's College - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/st-andrews-college

<comment><USER2> The line

> To read them back in, you fed the tape into the terminal and it simulated > typing your source back into the computer.

reminded me of this story (which came at a much later date):

> A senior NASDAQ official saw Peterffy's setup and said Peterffy was breaking > the rules: All orders had to be entered through the keyboard. He gave > Petterfy's group one week to fix the problem.

> Peterffy and his engineers came up with a solution. They built a robot with > rubber fingers that typed entries into the keyboard.

(from [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/27/159992076/a-father...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/27/159992076/a-father- of-high-speed-trading-thinks-we-should-slow-down))

Edit: It's a side note to the posted story, but it's interesting to me that we replace technical limitations with policy limitations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey Aurora.. If only my family had the money to send me to SAC! Williams had to do, instead.

<comment><USER4> Scholarship, my friend...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On a side note, I wish private schools (specifically like SAC, UCC, Crescent and others) would start showing the importance of programming at a young age.

</comment><comment><USER6> "If you do things that make people happy, you will find a way to your own happiness."

While this has been true, in my limited experience, it can be a slippery slope. The, possibly unintended, message I got from the post is more along the lines of "Do things that you enjoy. You'll probably bump into a few people who enjoy the things you've done, which will make you even happier doing them."

</comment><comment><USER7> wow, saw this come up on HN, did a doubletake. Toronto/York Region/Canada represent.

</comment><comment><USER8> SO, this guy WROTE the original 'Adventure'? I saw it first in FORTRAN; how did that happen - he talks of programming in BASIC.

<comment><USER4> I did not write THE adventure, I wrote AN adventure. I'm neither that old nor that creative!

Other games:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text- based_computer_ga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text- based_computer_games)

<comment><USER9> Yes, but now I know who to blame for all the time I lost playing TREK :)

(Thank you!)

<comment><USER8> Anybody else play TTYTRK? PATROL? COMBAT? all Basic games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> leverbak</comment>


AI Generated News Articles - <AUTHOR> https://sdan.io/nrn <comment><USER2> SimCity 2000 had a random newspaper article generator that would tell you stories based on stuff happening in your city.

[https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware- screenshot.php?gi...](https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware- screenshot.php?gid=630&idi=YWJhbl9pbWdfc2NyZWVucy9zaW1jaXR5MjAwMC0zLmpwZw==&tit=simcity-2000)

[https://procedural- generation.tumblr.com/post/134086657418/s...](https://procedural- generation.tumblr.com/post/134086657418/simcity-2000-newspapers- simcity-2000-doesnt)

[https://lparchive.org/SimCity-2000/Update%205/](https://lparchive.org/SimCity-2000/Update%205/)

[http://blog.cocoia.com/2007/creative- interaction/](http://blog.cocoia.com/2007/creative-interaction/)

</comment><comment> bigbird-media We're going through the HN hug of death. We're focusing on scaling it (but I'm a HS student running this on an old desktop my dad gave me on my family's slow internet, so not sure how far scalability will go for me... going to see if I can get some cache'd page link here).

<comment><USER3> Hmm. If you stick it behind cloudflare, you might be able to leverage their caching. But I'm not sure how that works when the pages are dynamically generated.

You could also spit out the html to disk and just serve that behind nginx. Even on slow net, that might help.

Trying to think what else would scale...

<comment> bigbird-media It's behind Cloudflare :). Images are also behind a CDN I made... which historically has reduced load times for me (but with this much traffic not so much).

<comment><USER3> Oh, that might be why. If you configure cloudflare to serve the images, that seems like it could help. It'd be quick to test it out, too. [https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/202775670](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en- us/articles/202775670)

<comment><AUTHOR> What I did is: notrealnews.net is behind cloudflare

All images on notrealnews.net are behind a CDN I made at: [redacted] (like all the images are hosted there and then I utilize Cloudflare to cache them [0])

[0]: [https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configur...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/tutorials/configure- your-cdn/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Question about your product: besides "gaming the system with creating fake or duplicated + slightly modified content" what is the value of this?

Question about you: did you ever consider using your skills to do something that will help humanity to solve actual problems we are facing?

Proposal: let this grow as a honeypot and publish a list of your customers after some while, so we can spot the "quality journalists" \- that will be fun!

TODO for everybody: integrate fake news detector from sites like this into ublock-origin. Make them invisible.

<comment> bigbird-media In a world where disinformation and clickbait journalism is prevalent, we want to allow content creators to have that same rapid pace (pace of how quickly they make content) but make sure it's factual/credible and demonstrates value.

Here's how we do this: Suppose a journalist as X amount of time to create an article (we're talking about lower-tier/repetitive journalism, which consists of a majority of journalism) They have two options:

1\. Write some relatively bogus article to drive clicks

2\. We write a majority of their article within seconds and they spend the X amount of time editing our article/regenerating it. We're planning on implementing fact-checking algos in end so after they're done editing, we ensure the content is legit.

We don't want to replace journalism. We just want to automate lower tier journalism (clickbait, repetitive sports articles) and hope they utilize their time ensuring the content is substantive to their audience.

<comment><USER5> Makes a lot of sense, I do hope you succeed.

Also, I work in the academia, something like this would be very helpful also in that area.

<comment> bigbird-media Thanks for the support! You can always email us at firstname.lastname@example.com if you'd like to know more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am new to this space but after reading about your goals for this AI, does this mean that most news sites are just copying facts off one other?

Secondly how does fact checking work in cases like this with AI? I would imagine fact checking would get progressively more difficult as more articles become AI generated.

My biggest fear is, we will have one AI generating a fake story and and acting as the root node, then other AIs creating news off those this node and we will have fake stories spread in various forms like branches creating misinformation.

<comment> bigbird-media 1\. I'm no journalist, but I'm fairly sure there's some news sites that break the news first and then others follow (either through primary or secondary sources)

2\. I haven't implemented fact-checking algos. At the moment I'm not planning to use AI for it, just simple cross referencing (not finalized).

3\. When we do start momentum, we'll get on board a highly specialized ethics team and safety team. We're not a state actor or influenced by anyone so we're just creating gimmick-y articles on the internet for now. We'll eventually combat those issues if and when similar services pop up.

One reason we want to be first is that we know state actors are going to pop up soon. Singapore, Russia, Philippines, the list goes on for which they want something like us to control propaganda. We're hoping we'll be able to gain enough momentum before they start (or get further along than they already are at) to set a good solid standard. But with all things, this will take time and deliberation.

<comment><USER7> At risk of sounding rude, "we'll get to the ethics" later doesn't sound reassuring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like they're utilizing a version of GPT-2 : [https://notrealnews.net/about/](https://notrealnews.net/about/)

<comment><USER3> I wonder how they're choosing the photo to go with the article.

Most of the photos match really well. I wonder if the results are cherrypicked and a human is matching photos with the articles, or if it's totally automated.

<comment> bigbird-media We use Google's Custom Search API.

We're basically taking headlines off RSS feeds (such as Wired, TC, NYT) attaching images through the Google API, and posting them.

You can learn more: [https://notrealnews.net/about](https://notrealnews.net/about) or [https://bigbird.dev](https://bigbird.dev) or email email@example.com!

<comment><USER9> Hi, the articles are very readable so if its AI writing this count me impressed, but the explanations on bigbird.dev don't give me a lot of confidence, since their is a lot of focus on big bird templating the news and letting a human edit it... I would really like to see transparency in whether something I'm reading is machine generated (from what source material?) or human edited (by what human?)

And just because I'm being critical, this line at the bottom of your site claiming 20,000% growth 1 day after launch is... just making me think of how 1 is infinitely more views than 0.

<comment> bigbird-media When we do get customers, we'll definitely ensure it's stamped that it was generated using our engine :). If we actually get somewhere with this (in terms of funding/customers), our _first priority is getting in a specialized ethics team on board_

Right now we've heard that for time-sensitive info (like sports) it's easier to generate an article from us and edit off of that to get the point across. We're still implementing fact-checking algorithms to ensure quality and credibility. (check out Wapo's Heliograf [0])

And yes, you've caught on! We were doing like 50 page views to one day 10,000. I'll remove it soon because as you've explained, it doesn't make sense.

[0]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2017/09/01/the- washingt...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2017/09/01/the-washington- post-leverages-heliograf-to-cover-high-school-football/)

<comment><USER2> >first priority is getting in a specialized ethics team on board

Sean Spicer is available!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Writing vs Curating.

Do we need to rewrite what's already written? How does this prevent bad actors? Over saturation with "good" content?

What if wr curated the most valuable human-written content with AI? So that humans can build trust with the [AI] entity. I think this type of curation is how we prevent bad actors.

Writing by AI should be used similarly to improving the quality of images video by filling-in-the-gaps. We already have too much "not duplicate" content if you ask me.

<comment> bigbird-media If you give us a title: "Woman breaks world record in March of 2020". We'll give you a pretty decent article about it. So we're not rewriting what's been written; we're generating content itself.

We not working with anyone at the moment. When we do we'll announce it publicly and work with an ethics team to ensure we're only supporting good actors (we know bad actors are on the look out for services like us).

<comment><USER10> > we're not rewriting what's been written; we're generating content itself.

I'm not sure I see the distinction.

Where are you getting the facts from? Unless you're creating completely fake content, then it's seems like it's going to be a re-write of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really impressive as a HS student great job!

Another way to augment how the news is written instead of focusing on templates you could also to do something like autocomplete.

Recall that GPT-2 is designed to predict the next word in a sequence. If you did conditional generation on the front part of the sentence then you could autocomplete the rest of the target sentence. (have up to five autocompleted versions that have the best sore).

<comment> bigbird-media Yes, I was thinking of implementing that and probably will soon. Usability wise, it make sense (and supports our mission statement), but in practice that means we need a GPU always available to do that (currently using Colab, meaning GPUs are scarce and I only have time to generate full articles rather than be able to attend to users' needs).

If this project does go somewhere, that'll be my next feature.

<comment><USER12> Since you are student you should look into Google cloud credits and use preemptible instances with GPU

<comment> bigbird-media I did :). And Google didn't give me any (mostly because I'm not an official "researcher" under a professor.

I do use GCP all the time though (make new accounts and utilize the sweet $300 in compute).

<comment><USER13> Try github student pack free DO hosting credit, needs a credit card tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. I was thinking about this space earlier today.

How long does it take for a submission to post to the site? I understand the dashboard is probably an internal tool, but it is quite.... opaque. Also, what does "Domain to Publish To" mean? I get why Not Real News is on there but I don't understand Techcrunch et al.

<comment> bigbird-media 1\. We have a job queue: publish whatever you want and one of our generator workers will take care of it eventually (we don't have any GPUs so we're relying on Colab... meaning turnaround time varies a lot... we have to manually start them up)

2\. Yeah that's not right. Should read "which author do you want to publish as" (I'll fix this after traffic dies down, don't want downtime :) )

Basically, if you want to read rewritten articles of TC news, you'd go here: [https://notrealnews.net/author/techcrunch/](https://notrealnews.net/author/techcrunch/) or Wired news: [https://notrealnews.net/author/wired](https://notrealnews.net/author/wired).

We want to make that distinction for organizational purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> @OP this looks interesting project.

\- Can you share what kind of tech stack you used?

\- What is the source/basis of the generated news?

\- The site looks slick and beautiful doesnt look like WP what have you used to make it? (Not related to project directly but liked the UI so asked.)

<comment> bigbird-media Thanks! I promised some people that I'd write a blog post (and I will soon), but here's the basics:

Article lifecycle goes through job queues. This was because: wanted to learn queues :) and because I'm running this operation with Colab to create the content (so in the event Colab fails or goes down, I'll be able to requeue in my dashboard).

Source is just headlines. I just take headlines from RSS feeds and generated both articles and headlines based off that.

I used Ghost. I could've used WP, but haven't used WP before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the New Hampshire article:

> "The money is going to come in," Mr. Sanders told ABC News. "Our voters are > willing to spend two dollars to spend 60 or 70 bucks to go vote. That's > nothing to be afraid of."

</comment><comment><USER17> Considering that it is not real news I suggest you to block the articles from being published in search engines using robots.txt or meta noindex.

<comment><USER18> robots.txt won't stop links being indexed.

<comment> bigbird-media I previously made the website private and plan to do so later this week (there's going to be a password lock).

Otherwise, I'll go ahead and go into Google Search Console an ensure nothing is indexed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> bigbird-media Reposting this comment just in case it goes down again:

This is an article taken directly from my site:

Title: Will Apple, Facebook or Google Control The AR Momentum?

Article: "I wouldn't be surprised if one day or another somebody says, 'This is the future of gaming,'" reports Facebook's head of virtual reality Omid Kordestani. And Kordestani admitted his past job of building from within the company is atypical for a big CEO (typical of Facebook) who may need to shape the future of a business outside the core team. He may find out how much of the potential of AR is already in its top app Facebook, where developers can shoot 3D models of stuffed animals or preschool objects in front of anyone's faces, and how deeply Google was disrupted when its failed to move fast enough on VR before Facebook entered it.

But what it's possible for Facebook and Apple to do is to lead the charge to develop a hardware- and/or software-independent AR ecosystem of platforms and apps. An Android-powered AR headset, which seems like it's on its way, could eventually compete with Google Cardboard, and maybe provide its own open- source AR platform. Why not have Windows Embedded system OEMs build AR goggles and similar headsets, as they already sell hardware that can run augmented reality apps?

That could attract hardware companies like Dell, Asus, HP and Lenovo, as well as game consoles like Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation. If Microsoft can muscle AR technology directly into the living room, it could make Oculus Rift obsolete. It could also entice developers away from Google's $99 Daydream View AR headset which depends on smartphone technology, by throwing its weight behind hardware based on Windows 10. Meanwhile, Apple could cut out the middleman by making a standalone AR headset, although it already has a separate ARKit platform to create AR-themed apps for the iPhone and iPad. That way it could create a high-end AR headset for hardcore users like the kind of top manufacturers like LG, Sony, Samsung and Asus produce for their televisions and other gear.

At the same time, we'll probably be stuck with Google's Cardboard and Facebook's Cardboard for a while. Google Cardboard's track record is decent, and the ability to use Cardboard makes it easy to download and use a few AR apps that show other content than just pictures or blocks of text. Cardboard also does an excellent job of getting the platform out to more people than any other headset, with 45.8 million devices activated. But that's less than half the number of Android-powered phones in the world as Android was running in early 2017. And from a hardware perspective, Google has a big advantage over Facebook, with plenty of current smartphones on its Cardboard list, including phones from Chinese manufacturers Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Coolpad.

Then again, Google's Cardboard headsets have started rolling out to more devices, and Google has been open about the likelihood of an Android-powered Cardboard headset, touting the dual displays and better cameras that now ship with the Pixel. While the hardware definitely isn't there yet for it to take the lead in AR, Google seems to be confident it can make it happen and give users the compelling AR app experiences they want.

Meanwhile, neither Apple nor Facebook has the fragmentation problems with apps or hardware needed to dominate AR, which could be killer differentiators. Apple, by the way, has super serious ambitions to produce its own AR technology. The growing possibility that Apple is making such a headset may finally make it uncomfortable for Apple to cede this killer platform to Google.

When a platform war erupts like iPhone and Android, it's going to take everyone's best devices to achieve victory. There may be companies that switch allegiances, but that would only make it more possible for Apple, Facebook, and Google to enter it just as one platform would. But how long will that last, and will Apple, Facebook or Microsoft be the ones to seize the battlefield?

I don't touch/favor "good" articles. I just posted the latest one at the time.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is really unethical.

<comment><USER20> Being up front that these are AI generated and keeping people posted on how far along this technology is, is probably the more ethical thing to do.

<comment><USER19> Just wait until someone clones the website and removes the domain, then it gets quoted in some tabloid and then that is posted on a forum, then tweeted and finally the tweet is posted as news somewhere.

Additional point: the problem is not even the false stories themselves, it's the undermining of legitimacy in real news that it provokes.

<comment> bigbird-media What is "real news"? Anyone with some Wordpress experience and a domain can make their own "news site" and publish "real news".

I don't want to confirm or deny this: Singapore, Russia, China, and other countries are already doing this at a far more malicious and massive scale.

We're at least hoping people would understand how "AI generated news articles" look like, so one day they can spot them and know that the news you're reading is not real news.

<comment><USER2> The "what is real news?", "truth isn't truth!", "it's impossible to know anything for sure, so nothing can be said to be true or false!" arguments are kind of played out these days.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/11/truth- isn...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/11/truth-isnt-truth- rudy-giulianis-flub-tops-s-quotes-year/)

Giuliani: And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth ...

Todd: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go like ―

Giuliani: No, it isn't truth. Truth isn't truth. The president of the United States says, "I didn't —"

Todd: Truth isn't truth? Mr. Mayor, do you realize, what, I, I, I —

Giuliani: No, no, no —

Todd: This is going to be a bad meme.

Giuliani: Don't do, don't do this to me.

Todd: Don't do 'truth isn't truth' to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most fake news is generated by humans and then spread on social media. But the rise of robust systems such as OpenAI's controversial GPT-2 point toward a future where AI-generated articles are close enough to the real thing to obfuscate nearly any issue.</comment>


Ron Conway's Confidential Investment Guide: The Tech Megatrends - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/13/ron-conways-confidential-investment-guide-the-tech-megatrends/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that looks at that chart and thinks _"huh?!? half those spaces are already saturated"_?

Sure, that's his manifesto to fund now (ie companies funded today probably were founded chosen 6+ months ago, and those ideas would be fresher then). Plus he gets to pick the cream of the crop.

But would anyone on HN seriously consider starting a startup _today_ based around check-ins or a Groupon clone? Both spaces seem totally done to me - there are plenty of startups in those spaces and so you can only compete on niche (thus smaller market) or if you can totally disrupt with a genius idea (unlikely). And in both of those areas (and others in Conway's list) you have first mover advantage and network effect against you.

Seems to me the trick is to consider what will be on his _next_ list and start working on that now.

<comment><USER3> _But would anyone on HN seriously consider starting a startup today based around check-ins or a Groupon clone?_

Maybe the steamrolling Zynga of the Groupon space hasn't yet arrived.

<comment><USER4> its groupon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm reminded of the Chinese Box discussion (related to Turing Tests?): put a man in a box, and give him an English -> Chinese phrase book. Feed him phrases on strips of paper in English - his job is to look up the phrase, write the Chinese equivalent on the back, and hand the paper back. Voila - you have a translating machine. But can we say the machine is able to translate from English to Chinese?

Knowing Conway's investment guide in no way qualifies you to pick the right people or ideas to invest in. It's a Chinese Box, and you don't speak Chinese.

(You know, for metaphorical instances of 'You' and 'Chinese'.)

Edit: It's the Chinese Room Argument by John Searle - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room> . Searle saw it fit to give the man a whole room to complete his tasks!

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's because I've been reading HN, but this seems pretty backwards- looking to me.

<comment><USER7> Can you name a portfolio that is more forwards-looking than Conway's?

<comment><USER8> His real one.

<comment><USER6> Above is a worthy question and one decent answer to it. I don't think Conway is disinforming here, but he probably is indeed giving names of more well- known companies and keeping some newer names closer to his chest.

I'd say Conway is also behind the HN curve because of what he does. An angel usually comes into the picture months or years after the team has formed and a few ideas have been hatched, iterated, and pivoted upon. So my answer to the question is, probably YC and its clones, and a few companies like Google who work very hard at fostering innovation - the common thread being a focus on picking good people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Agreed that its generally backwards looking and at times just strange (urban entrepreneur?? really?), but there were a few points that resonated with me: 1) Conway's point that UI/UX is becoming far more important. Hipmunk seems almost entirely based on taking a crappy UX and turning it into an awesome one; there's lots more room for disruption in other industries as well 2) Point that there's a data issue-- there's tons of social information and monetization strategies are still work-in-process

<comment><USER10> Do you think with all the screen scraping tools we're seeing come out these days, that there will be a lot more of "taking a crappy UX and turning it into an awesome one"? Not talking about to the heights that Hipmunk have taken it, but maybe somewhere between Hipmunk and all the different instant search tools we've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I fear TC is going to dribble this out, one barely-readable slide JPEG at a time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Where does Flipboard fall in this chart?

Social? Flipboard is primarily a consumption experience with limited commenting and sharing mechanisms. Granted, those features exist, but are not the key focus.

Mobile? Because it's on an iPad? I wonder if Ron is actually talking about in- your-pocket iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. and not larger laptop replacement products such as tablets.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmmm... 6 out of 7 of those fit Foursquare. I'm not so sure that this is 7 megatrends and not just one or two.</comment>


Headphone Mode = Do Not Disturb - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@PeachSquared/headphone-mode-do-not-disturb-a4cfe5d64308 <comment><USER2> Sorry, I cannot agree with this sentiment.

You are paid as a servant of the company and that duty includes responding to and assisting your co-workers.

Perhaps they are interrupting you because their work is more important than yours, perhaps not. But that's not your call. Raise it with your manager, don't resort to being ignorant.

If your environment is not conducive to achieving assigned tasks then raise that too with your manager, don't resort to being ignorant.

I have several friend who are commercial pilots, they wear headphones all the time when on duty. But they will absolutely give attention to anything their cabin crew asks them, no matter how trivial, because the team is what ensures a safe flight.

<comment><USER3> > commercial pilots, they wear headphones all the time

Err, that's because they use those headphones to communicate with ATC and other pilots. And protect their hearing.

> You are paid as a servant of the company and that duty includes responding > to and assisting your co-workers.

That... depends. If your job includes some mentoring, absolutely. If your job is go get a feature out the door by Friday, you can't necessarily afford to be interrupted by Tony from sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of the people on my team have headphones in all day every day... that makes all the time Do Not Disturb.

This post shows that you don't trust your team to communicate. If someone is interrupting so often it is disrupted it is up to the team to communicate that. And if need be, have a manager mediate.

You should also be able to tell someone who interrupts you at an inopportune time that now is not a good time and ask them if they can wait.

On the flip side, the rest of the teem should know that other people's time and concentration is important / expensive and be respectful not to interrupt when not necessary.

Programming especially is a team sport. Doing this is not being a team player.

I'm all for social cues to tell others now would not be a good time to disturb you. I just think this kind of absolute is not the right way to do it.

With that said, if it works for this particular team. More power to them.

Edits:

Also, I have headphones in all the time because I like to listen to music. But I don't mind be interrupted (I'm a manager, it's my job to keep people moving and if they are stuck I want to know). So am I only allowed to listen to music when I'm in DnD mode?</comment>


Worst Copyright Law in History? - <AUTHOR> http://infojustice.org/archives/27344

<comment><AUTHOR> new panamanian copyright bill drafted

\- no judicial due process

\- fines of up to $100K

\- fines go to gov't, nothing to copyright holder

\- gov't staff can get bonuses from the fines, of up to 50% extra on top of their base salary</comment>


Google Badwolf: Temporal graph store abstraction layer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/badwolf <comment><USER2> This sounds like it might be similar to an open source [http://www.datomic.com/](http://www.datomic.com/), which also stores temporal quads.

I'd have to read more to know how they really compare.

<comment><USER3> I think using the term open source alone can be a little bit misleading: [https://my.datomic.com/downloads/free](https://my.datomic.com/downloads/free)

<comment><USER4> "similar to an open-source [version of] datomic, which also stores quads"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the author is reading:

> Covariant: Given two types A and B, A covariant B if B is a A. In other > word, A covariant B if B is a prefix of A.

Taken from here: [https://github.com/google/badwolf/blob/master/docs/temporal_...](https://github.com/google/badwolf/blob/master/docs/temporal_graph_modeling.md)

Co(ntra)variance only makes sense if you define a subtype relation first. And I think that's what you wanted to define here.

After skimming through the docs I think what you want is: A is a subtype of B if B's path is a prefix of A's.

<comment><USER6> @thwd Thanks for the comments. I (author) have filled [https://github.com/google/badwolf/issues/6](https://github.com/google/badwolf/issues/6) to revisit the defintion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> for everyone who doesn't understand the 'temporal' part - it's something you want in a lot of places but haven't done it because it's fiendishly tricky to get right. read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database) for a good intro.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know how this compares with Cayley? [https://github.com/google/cayley/](https://github.com/google/cayley/)

<comment><USER9> Cayley author here. Reached out here: [https://github.com/google/badwolf/issues/4](https://github.com/google/badwolf/issues/4)

I've been doing graphs for a long time, and I'm not quite sure I get what a 'temporal triple' is exactly (or what its use case is) from the docs. But I'm willing to learn!

<comment><USER6> BW author here. Ack. Will get back to you on the GH issue asap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this better than just using any SQL database?

Also, considering that only in-memory storage is shipped here, is this an internal Google project that was only partially released? Or a work in progress?

<comment><USER11> It's a triple store that doesn't suck.

If you want to know the advantages of triple stores, there's a lot out there.

One key strength is that triple stores have a "schema as data" approach, meaning that schemas can be made to follow rules on the fly based on the data contained within them. Nothing that application code can't do, of course, but the entire purpose of these kinds of databases is to find a way to have data be as self-descriptive as possible.

<comment><USER12> > One key strength is that triple stores have a "schema as data" approach

Schema as data is historically a fairly important element of the relational model.

<comment><USER13> > Schema as data is historically a fairly important element of the relational > model.

Not really. You derive a schema from data already stored in a relational database by looking at multiple, non-data places. I'm not sure I would necessarily consider that "schema as data" especially since many of the things you would need to automatically derive a schema may not be present in an optimally performing RDMS. For instance you need foreign keys to understand relationships but I've seen many times where performance is improved through handling foreign key integrity through the application versus at the database level.

<comment><USER12> > You derive a schema from data already stored in a relational database by > looking at multiple, non-data places.

No, the schema is itself stored in tables; conceptually, while the structure of those control tables needs to be immutable (that is, the data in the control tables that also relates to the control tables needs to be protected against modification), in an ideal DB following the model, schema changes that can be done through DDL are logically equivalent to executing DML against the control tables and can be done that way, as well; in practice, several RDBMS's do allow this, though typically they only allow superusers to use DML against system tables, even though normal users may have permission to make equivalent changes through DDL.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough but when you consider internal structures as "data" I think the phrases loses some of its power; you could effectively make this argument about any type of meta data system at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> whats a "temporal" graph store?

<comment><USER15> It appears to be triples qualified with timestamps, possibly to expire them.

... I only looked at the github for 20 seconds

<comment><USER14> > ... I only looked at the github for 20 seconds

your explanation wasn't good...

<comment><USER16> I think you meant "thank you for trying to explain, since I was too lazy to Google it for myself"

<comment><USER14> no, i didn't. i got as much as that explanation from reading the github. i just didn't understand what a temporal graph store is used for.

thanks for offering a productive contribution to the discussion!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Password Sharing Isn't a Crime, EFF Tells Ninth Circuit - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/password-sharing-is-not-a-crime

<comment><USER2> My employer's IT department asks me for my credentials, and logs in as me, to fix issues for me, with my permission. Am I a criminal? Are they criminals? Can I have their desk when they go to prison?</comment>


Signal App Downloads More Than Double Since Trump's Election - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/4/4/15124316/americans-privacy-signal-downloads-chart <comment><USER2> I'm just curious, but didn't the NSA have a way to get the content before it was encrypted, hence it's still a moot point?

<comment><USER3> If a user has access to your physical machine (or just to the OS remotely) they can intercept data between the keypress and app sending it, you are correct that any encryption is less effective in that case. What Signal and other apps like it are good at, is making sure nobody can read it when it's sent between your computer and another. If your computer is not compromised, as far as we know any message sent with Signal is secure.</comment></comment>


Why Garmin watches have become common in some segments of tactical aviation - <AUTHOR> https://theaviationist.com/2019/10/23/update-heres-why-we-saw-so-many-garmin-smart-watches-at-mcas-miramar/ <comment><USER2> Consumer GPS devices have a speed and altitude limit [1], which I initially thought should preclude using it in a fighter jet, but I was wrong (only something extreme like an SR-71 would hit this limit):

> ...a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the > device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; > 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[3] This was > intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile- > like applications.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls#Legacy)

<comment><USER3> That makes sense - the limits are designed to stop you guiding a missile with one, not guiding a jet plane.

<comment><USER4> It also is kinda misguided.

If you have the capability to acquire/build a ballistic missile of that class, you most likely can (will) build your own GPS/GNSS receiver. Hell you can take a software defined radio and make your own software-based GPS receiver that does NOT disable itself at those described thresholds (some folks have done this for extremely high-altitude balloon experiments).

Selling it of course is another question.

<comment><USER5> Or even reverse engineer the firmware to remove the restriction. I'm also guessing that there are plenty of Chinese made gps devices that don't have that limitation. Simply because, why bother. Assuming you can find one accurate enough on AliExpress, I'd say there is a good chance it has no special restrictions.

<comment><USER6> This is also what I would expect the reality of the situation to be, regardless of policy.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention that one would assume if someone can make a GPS-guided missile, they can sure as hell alter/find a workable GPS for their purpose...

It's not Joe Average will try to make a missile with a GPS from his Garmin watch...

<comment><USER8> But any number of non State actors would. The IRA or ISIS or Hezzbollah for example. They probably don't have the tech capabilities to RE their own GPS firmware, but non-orbiting rocket science isn't that hard. Iron Dome does okay against simple rockets, but a big guided rocket (V2 size) would be a different problem entirely.

Obviously drone attacks make use of GPS, and it's a worry to many -- for example, there is frequently GPS jamming when Putin is visiting somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am no fighter pilot, but I (used to) fly airplanes, floatplanes and helicopters. A watch with a 12 day battery life makes little sense to me as I find it too easy to forget to charge it. Even if you put it on a checklist, it may be too late to charge it when you are about to go.

For my flights I mostly use an automatic Glycine 24hr watch with a second dial set on UTC for "Zulu" time. If the watch is running at the beginning of the flight (confirmed with a checklist) it will continue running during the flight.

I have to admit that this Garmin MARQ looks lovely though :)

<comment><USER10> I fly sport planes and the battery in the iPad I use to augment the cockpit has a 5 hour life. I definitely have the "charged iPad" on the checklist, I don't make assumptions and I make sure to charge it before flight. I use it for GPS altitude only as I have 2 baro altimeters and an old Garmin GPS, but the iPad's GPS is usually more precise to indicate current height above ground. A 12 day battery life for a smartwatch I would only wear when flying is more than enough. I would not wear the smart watch on the ground, my regular watch is running without any maintenance for 21 years (Citizen EcoDrive).

<comment><USER11> Probably a silly question, but why can't you charge the iPad in flight? Surely planes have some sort of socket like cars?

<comment><USER12> Curious why you think planes surely have outlets in them?

We're not talking about jetliners here. We could easily be talking about planes that are suitable for clear conditions only.

<comment><USER13> My light plane has six 2.1A USB ports for charging use plus several others dedicated to avionics updates that can also charge. In addition I have three 24V cigarette lighter "outlets" which have two dual port USB adapters. So... Plenty of on board charging foe the six seats. Not hard to retrofit. I only wish I had more!

<comment><USER12> What's the plane and did it come with these or did you or someone else add them?

<comment><USER7> It's trivial to have such things for your plane (talking about small planes with propellers etc used for hobby flying, commercial aviation of course would have specific requirements) -- it's getting them to pass the relevant regulations that's the deal. Eg.

[https://www.aircraftspruce.com/menus/ps/ipad_usb.html](https://www.aircraftspruce.com/menus/ps/ipad_usb.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Glad they are using stock watches. Usually when something goes through the usual procurement channels you will get a watch that took ten years to develop and costs 100k each.

</comment><comment><USER15> Still, the most badass Garmin ad is the photo of GPSMAP mounted in the cockpit of the Russian SU-24, while it flies close to the NATO's airspace without transponder switched on.

<comment><USER16> Where can I see that picture?

<comment><USER17> Possibly these two: [https://twitter.com/garmin/status/669341873895563264](https://twitter.com/garmin/status/669341873895563264)

<comment><USER18> Wow! This reminds me a lot of that old "Americans spent millions of dollars developing a pen that could write in space, and the Russians used a pencil" story.

<comment><USER19> NASA or tax payers didn't spend the money, Fisher did and the pens cost around $3 USD [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write- stuff/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When the Strava heatmap issue came to light i recall seeing many tracks on military runways and wondered, "who's out there doing laps on the tarmac? So this makes sense now.

<comment><USER21> No. People in deployed areas often run on runways. The Garnin watches aren't transmitting and they aren't connected to Strava.

<comment><USER22> At least half of Garmin watches are connected to Strava. They do transmit through Bluetooth, ANT+, and/or WiFi.

<comment><USER23> It's not a direct connection. You must log into your Garmin Connect account and configure it to push to Strava.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In general, you can bring a watch but not a phone in some areas. An aviation friendly watch does a nice job of being visible (bonus visible in the dark) as a watch. Bonus as a timer. Extra bonus if it can give you zulu time with current time, as that is asked frequently.

<comment><USER25> If it's going into a secure facility it doesn't matter if it's a phone, an iwatch or a garmin, if it has a radio and/or nonvolatile memory, it's not going in.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. So would a mechanical watch be ok, but an electronic one not ok?

<comment><USER26> An electronic watch is ok. Just not with cellular, wireless or bluetooth, USB capabilities.

<comment><USER27> How would you tell? Assuming someone's being sneaky, that is.

<comment><USER28> WIDS or some other spectrum monitoring; or random physical checks. But mostly policy controls and background checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why didn't the pilots just descend when they encountered a failure with the environmental system?

<comment><USER30> The canopy was thickly coated with ice. When you're blind you can't VFR. They couldn't use ice-obstructed instruments either, so a rapid descent would have endangered their plane and other aircraft. They did the right thing, suffering frostbite and cooperating with ground control to preserve life and property.

<comment><USER29> I wasn't questioning whether they did the right thing. I wanted to understand why the obvious solution of descending (which is what commercial airliners have done successfully on numerous occasions when losing cabin pressurization) didn't work in this case.

<comment><USER31> Given Washington's geography, the freezing level on the west side of the mountains would have been far higher than on the east side. They might not have been able to descend below freezing until they crossed over the mountains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER33> Absolutely, but as a frequent visitor on this site, this is my first time becoming aware of Garmin's being used this way. I think it's broadly relevant even if it is PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Way back in the day, I was curious if my TomTom (like generation 1 or 2) would work on a normal flight. Then one day when travel from Durban To Johannesburg (South Africa) I took it out of my bag and switched it on and was amazed to see we were travelling over 700km/h

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't this a huge OpSec failure? To bring third-party gps tracking devices on your fighter jets?

<comment><USER36> They're receivers, not transmitters.

<comment><USER35> Let's check that: [https://buy.garmin.com/en- US/US/p/608613#specs](https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/608613#specs)

Ok, says they have Bluetooth and WiFi. I'm not sure I would trust the firmware not to be vulnerable to 0-day data exfiltration once the device is back in base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Submitted at the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16530839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16530839)

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting call sign that pilot has in the picture.

</comment><comment><USER39> Love my Garmin. I charge it... every Monday, or so.

<comment><USER40> Yup! If I'm going to do a 15 mile run on Saturday or something crazy I will top it off before, but's it's pretty good at battery life. Too reason I don't have an Apple Watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How well do these LCDs operate in the cold?

<comment><USER22> Most Garmin watches use transflective displays (different from LCD) and are generally rated to operate down to -20ºC.

<comment><USER42> They're also being heated by the person wearing them

<comment><USER43> Only barely; you would strap them around the outside of your flight suit on an extra long strap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Good ad for Garmin. I prefer Suunto - greeter precision and less bells and whistles.

<comment><USER45> Suunto is Finnish, the military likes to use US companies.

<comment><USER14> Garmin is Swiss now.

<comment><USER46> Yes, but the HQ is US based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > _The fog inside the aircraft iced over the instrument panel, forcing the > pilot and electronic warfare officer to use a Garmin watch to keep track of > their heading and altitude_ […]

The obvious question is: Why does the instrument panel have this failure mode, and is issuing Garmin watches really the best fix?

<comment><USER48> The real failure here was the "catastrophic failure of [the aircraft's] environmental control system". It nearly killed both of the crew.</comment></comment>