State of Starfighter - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.starfighters.io/t/state-of-starfighter-may-14th-2016/6647 <comment><USER2> If this doesn't allow successful candidates to skip the onsite interview, then what value does this add? I had the exact same criticism for TripleByte. If I spend the time going through a non-direct link to a company, there has to be some value along the lines of skipping onsites which are the bane of our existence as programmers these days. If going through starfighter doesn't help us with this, then there's no value, I can just email the company and get a phone interview pretty quickly.

<comment><USER3> If you're primarily interested in getting a job, and can cold email a company and get an instant onsite, then going for that is a _totally_ valid option. The most time-efficient way to get job offers is to get introduced to hiring managers (self-intro if necessary), make a good impression on them, and ask them to jump you along in their firms' hiring practices. I've said that here for years; I'll continue saying it.

There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview. Those are three subtly different problems. We are a partial way to address them, and other problems besides.

a) A very talented engineer might not have a resume/background/etc which pings the radar very hard at a software company. If you do, great, more power to you. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone without a great educational pedigree whose last couple of jobs look something like "IT at insurance company. Responsibilities: rebooting printers." or "Network administrator: CISCO routers, light systems administration." That person might _also_ be able to black-box cryptosystems, find RCEs in Rails given a day of effort, or program trading algorithms, but the company won't find that out because they likely won't even be offered a phone screen.

b) You know how impostor syndrome is a thing? Oh boy, do a lot of very talented engineers have it. If you can program, many desirable companies like e.g. Stripe would love to make your acquaintance. If they don't offer you a job they _will not feel like talking to you was a waste of time_. There are a lot of people who _do not get this_ and benefit from being told some variant of "I understand that you feel like you've still got lots to learn. I've got lots to learn! And I've been doing this for 12 years! But I see from your demonstrable performance that you're _actually good at this._ The folks at Stripe trust my judgment about this -- if I'm making a mistake about this, well, that's on me and not on you. Why don't you have a call with $PERSON there? I predict that they are super-inviting wonderful people who will want to geek out with you about tech stuff; if a job offer happens after that, wonderful. But I can almost guarantee you that no job offer happens without you talking to them."

c) Many engineers are afraid of selling themselves, for personal reasons/cultural reasons/etc which our community unfortunately frequently amplifies. Even if you tell them "All you need to do to get a job is a) meet a hiring manager, b) convince them you're not an axe murderer, c) get a coffee date and do your thing, d) say yes to the job offer", they're not willing to take the clearly valuable first step of sending an unsolicited email. I am totally willing to send a (very) solicited email on one's behalf, if I feel like a candidate and a client could have a productive conversation together. I'm also pretty good about writing that email.

Also: for the right kind of person, the challenges are fun, in the same way that chess or poker or Starcraft or sudoku are fun. Except with more REST API.

<comment><USER4> > There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email > $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not > believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of > an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing > $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview.

And, it seems to me, the traits involved in doing those things are _also_ not what a lot of companies _intend_ to be looking for in hiring developers, so its in _companies_ interests to find a way to adapt hiring so as not to implicitly bias it in that direction (if they were hiring people for sales position, that bias might be _exactly_ what they want...)

<comment><USER5> But in a lot of cases, it is. I prefer a high-functioning communicator with decent programming skills over a top-notch programmer who can't communicate.

<comment><USER4> > But in a lot of cases, it is. I prefer a high-functioning communicator with > decent programming skills over a top-notch programmer who can't communicate.

I would suspect that the specific subset of communication skills tested implicitly in a system biased toward people's drive and ability to successfully cold-email potential employers is generally neither the same subset of communication skills that are important in actual work of technical staff in most development teams nor a subset which serves as a good proxy for those.

But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER6> There are some places where writing kickass software, demonstrating it, and clearly and honestly answering technical questions about it will cause a person to perform effectively in their job.

There are other places - a surprising number of them - where effective internal marketing and sales skills are needed. Those are probably the communication skills that patio11's clients are lacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your biggest problem is that I have read several quite long blog posts about Starfighter, and _I still don 't understand what it is_.

I am a developer, I like to believe of above average intelligence, I'm your captive audience. If I don't get it, what are the chances the rest of the world will?

<comment><USER8> +1. My stream of thought is "it's some game and I guess trading is involved? Is this some sort of old school BBS game? Fuck, I have no clue.."

<comment><USER9> Step 1: read the API docs. Step 2: write an API client Step 3: Connect to a level Step 4: Lose loads of money Step 5: ??? Step 6: Profit! Note: I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ and wrapping a websocket client in R.

<comment><USER10> > I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ > and wrapping a websocket client in R.

I always assumed detours like that (assuming you are referring to doing/starting that because of the game) would be one of the most useful benefits to playing. It forces you to have to explore areas that you might not normally get into based on your job and interests.

<comment><USER9> Completely, its been a lot of fun, and I surprised myself by enjoying reading the RFC (full disclosure, I always liked doing that).

That's what I'm taking it as a license to do. I mostly do statistics/analysis for a living, so building automated systems is pretty new (and fun) for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I totally do not understand the reason for starfighters existing. Who is it aimed at? Mediocre engineers? Those targeting hedge funds?

First of all, as a boss, I would never hire someone from starfighters without an additional interview. Too many ways for one(s) to game the system. The current interview process may have faults, but it works out OK for the vast majority of the field. Are Ptacek & co trying to fix a problem that's simply not there?

As a software engineer, why would I even consider wasting my time with starfighters.io when I can simply go do as many traditional interviews as I want, with the top 10 companies in my field (that are also not using starfighters.io), get multiple job offers that I can use for leverage/negotiation, without having middlemen parasitize off of me. And this is exactly what starfighters.io is, a middleman. Historically, middlemen have been tolerated (yet always seen as parasites) whenever they ABSOLUTELY HAD to be there.

Ptacek's background is in computer security (Matasano). Rumor has it that whatever success they had came from consulting (penetration testing). The single product that they released that I am aware of, a firewall rule manager, didn't seem to go anywhere. One has to wonder what he's doing with starfighters.io.

<comment><USER12> > I would never hire someone from starfighters without an additional interview

This is the crux of my issue with the product as well. I'm entirely uncertain what a Starfighter candidate gets me as a hiring manager. I'm not going to blindly hire someone because they passed a few levels in an online programming game. The fact that the candidate is technically competent accounts for only 10% of what I test a candidate for in an interview.

<comment><USER13> A very reasonable and predictable attitude. Which raises the question: what does this get engineers, if it takes a lot of time and doesn't save any in the interviewing phase?

Personally, I hate resumes with the fury of a thousand winds. They say nothing important and decontextualize every important thing I've done in my career. But this won't help unless the Starfighter crew has managed to negotiate _something not so small_ with hiring managers who are skeptical of everything (it is kind of their job to be skeptical, sort of?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thank you for being so open and honest. A lot of people look up to you and I think it is a good thing for them to understand that one does not spontaneously become a patio11 and that the struggles continue on even after success (however that is measured).

I have some questions below, though I understand if you prefer not to address the topics therein.

> The components to this include an emulated AVR microcontroller, an emulated > hardware device built out of three of those microcontrollers, a scratch- > built C compiler, a scratch-built fully-functional debugger, and an in- > browser UI to tie everything together.

I'd say you guys jumped into the deep end of the pool and your goals from a technology standpoint were ambitious, to put it politely. Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Did you have to invent these wheels or where there other options you could have leveraged to accomplish the same goal? Is the technology you are building part of your competitive advantage? Having seen in-browser consoles and programming environments, I just have to wonder what the advantage is of coming at the recruiting problem from a hard computing perspective. As a programmer, that is the way I would approach it as well, since that is where I would feel I am making the most impact, but that would simply be to make me feel useful and not to move the company along, necessarily.

Also, I detected a hint of discord in yours and tptacek's posts during and after your release. Would you say that the process has put a strain on relationships, even if temporarily?

<comment><USER3> _Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again?_

Oh goodness yes. If I had a do-over, I'd run a straight-up recruiting company with ~0 lines of code written for 2~3 months on the strength of our personal networks, figure out how that works, launch a single tech tree far closer in scope to e.g. Stripe CTF 3 than what we launched, fold candidates developed from that into the recruiting stream, then scale engineering and recruiting in parallel. Instead we went into hard-core dev mode for ~10 months to do something which derisked the business a lot less than being recruiters for a month would have.

Co-founder relationships are co-founder relationships. It's been a stressful year getting a totally new thing off the ground. I think thats a comes-with- the-territory sort of thing based on the reports of literally every founder I know; it is new territory to me. Maybe someday I'll write more about that, but for the moment, still have to figure out recruiting first.

<comment><USER15> First off, this is perfect.

      Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again?
      Oh goodness yes.

To founders, if you don't answer the question this way, you're not pushing yourself/your team enough. If everything is going perfectly right, be scared or get another job.

@patio11 [Unsolicited advice from a fellow founder]

> All three of us were working as recruiters for it, but Thomas and Erin were > also full-time on development for Jailbreak.

Have one person own recruiting, which I'm guessing is you. That is priority number 1, 2, and 3 for you no matter how little you know/like it. It sounds like you learned this really well (we fucked it up initially as well — the dangers of all-technical co-founders.)

For other founders:

As an early startup, you have two goals:

1) Acquire users.

2) Build something users need.

You should always be doing something towards one of those two things. If you have more than one person in the company, there should be one clear owner for each. Set metrics that are just out of your reach. As J. Cole said, "If you don't aim too high, then you aim too low."

Do not stop doing either of those two things until either your sleep schedule is on fire (for goal 1) or your servers are on fire (for goal 2.)

Do not hire, talk to press, design a new logo, talk to investors, join a softball league, speak at conferences, or bring on a social media manager until shit is on fire. That's what product-market fit feels like.

Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire. Then fire yourself from positions (via hiring) to put out the fires.

<comment><USER16> > Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful > company until your small team is on fire.

I was a "founding employee" of a very successful company and I don't think I would have ever classified anything as being "on fire". I also slept 8+ hours a night because I like sleeping and never worked on the weekends because I like enjoying weekends. The company did well because when everybody came to work they were ready to come up with great ideas and execute them quickly.

I don't think your comment is complete off-base, I've met a lot of people who "play startup" and spend time doing things that aren't actually helpful to their company but feel like they are (going to conferences, perpetually talking to investors, etc). These people probably aren't going to be successful. However, it also isn't true that the only way to succeed is to ignore everything else in your life and devote yourself fully to your startup.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't work 80-100 hours at your startup if you want to. If that is bringing you personal satisfaction and you are efficient at it than more power to you. But that lifestyle is not a requirement for startup success.

<comment><USER15> I (personally) think there is a significant difference between a founder of an early-stage startup and employees.

The best equivalent is parents of a newborn. Do you get to not feed your baby to preserve work/life balance? No, because its survival depends on you. You do whatever it takes. That doesn't always mean working 80+ hours per week. Sometimes it means a vacation to preserve sanity, but there is a certain bar (and a high one, at that) for being a good parent.

Once things stable out, you can start to diversify your life. But until then, there are so many things constantly going wrong or unknown.

That may be an unnecessary pressure I put on myself, but my bar for starting a company is "all in." It's just too hard, with too small of a likelihood of success, to waste time half/90%-assing.

<comment><USER16> That's great if that belief motivates you to work hard on your company. Whatever makes you happy. Your advice just isn't as broadly applicable as you think it is. Companies never really "stable out." In my experience the bigger and more successful the company got, the harder it was. More people to manage, more people depending on the company's success, endless recruiting, etc.

The goalposts are always going to move too. You are going to think "oh, once we just get to this milestone everything will be great". Then you'll reach that milestone and you won't even care because there will be something new you want to achieve. Over and over again.

Companies are good at sucking you in and taking over your whole life. That is why the advice that the company must take over your life is so wrong. You should try to be in a softball league and force yourself to take vacations, because you are going to be more efficient and happier that way.

I wouldn't be surprised if the two biggest causes of startup failure are burn out and/or stress-related founder break ups. In retrospect, I think the biggest challenge in the early years of what ended up being a very successful company was staying motivated and positive through the 2.5-3 _years_ it took to get any sort of serious traction. It's really hard to work at something for so long and have very little tangible success to show for it. Things that distract you from the sad reality and help you push through are your friends, not your enemies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Copying my comment from last time which went unnoticed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448323)

Thomas and Patrick: First, I want to thank you for trying to address one of the most frustrating part of a developer's career.

As you know very well, after Silicon Valley, it's the finance companies in NYC area who pay top notch developer salaries. Even though I am a competent developer, it was quite a struggle for me to break in to the finance industry (They only wanted to hire people with finance experience). It took me a little while but I was able to break in. Now I am over that hump but I am faced with another problem. I have been working in 'Back office' for hedge funds for several years and would like to transition to 'Front office' and I am faced with the same problem again. I am not able to switch roles because I don't have experience working in the front office. The Stock Fighter CTF is a perfect way to demonstrate the relevant ability to prospective employers. Do you guys have any plan to work with hedge funds/investment banks for your recruiting platform?

<comment><USER3> Yes. Something like 90% of our client roster is software companies; most of the balance is finance firms. (There are some companies that are a bit of column A and a bit of column B.) Some developers are under the impression that we _only_ work with finance due to the theme of our first game, but we care about finance like Blizzard cares about orcs -- it is a convenient backdrop on which to hang fun gameplay, stories, and a few pedagogical goals. (Mostly engineering-oriented rather than market-microstructure oriented, but if we totally change the tenor of HN HFT threads I will be _very happy indeed_.)

Many of our finance industry clients/prospective clients have, shall we say, more process requirements to adopting new vendors than typical software startups have, and rather less reason to trust that we know what we're doing. This makes the sales cycle longer.

Medium-term, I'd love for us to be a good place to get developer jobs in the finance industry. If you were hypothetically in a conversation with me _today_ about opportunities constrained to finance (and not FinTech), I would not have as many options as I want to have, but I'd hypothetically recommend keeping in touch and/or waiting for consequential announcements later in the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for pushing the human element of recruiting forward. Instantiating the Recruiting post by Mr. Ptacek is perhaps the best good any small group of people can do for tech at this point.

That being said, I lost a lot of interest when it started seeming like finishing the game had a low chance of leading to anything. If your retrospective says, when we started, we should have only done recruitment and gotten that at 100% before writing any code, why is your near term plan to launch the low level tech tree environment, followed by the challenges? Shouldn't the plan be, oh, hey, let's put that completely on the back burner, and get like ten stories of employees who are comfortable with us telling where and how they got an awesome job?

</comment><comment><USER18> I have two takeaways from this article:

1.) Your organization is in a rough state right now (for any number of reasons, some outside of your control), and you're likely to have more difficulties going forwards.

2.) You haven't successfully placed a single developer into a job yet even though forty thousand people have signed up.

Both of these statements might be inaccurate, but those were the main things communicated. I'm much less likely to open an account having read this, and I don't understand why new levels are being released when the recruiting pipeline currently seems like the bottleneck of the business.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the #1 issue this is going to encounter is that companies aren't going to trust it enough to hire top players blindly or with only a culture-fit interview, and most top developers aren't going to want to invest in finishing all the Starfighter exercises if it just means they're going to be put through the gauntlet again for each individual company they're put into contact with. (Certainly _some_ top developers will still participate, just for the fun of it, but probably not enough to make it into a really sustainable high-impact business.)

I really love the idea, though, and I want to believe that with enough perseverance this issue could be solved. I think it mostly centers around trust. Starfighter just has to establish itself as an extremely reliable recruiting platform.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am wondering why you are not selling your product for what it is. You have made a game/CTF engine/whatever. This is your expertise and what you have spent the most time on. Sell the game.

I don't quite get the recruiting angle. How is this related to the above other than the assumption that your game helps identify smart people? Leave it to _other_ companies to approach you rather than you approaching companies.

</comment><comment><USER21> "We're going to be stepping up our operational tempo as a recruiting company, rather than sinking back into the dev cave where we're comfortable for weeks at a time."

Without respect to whether this is the right move in this situation, which it may be, I'd like to point out that, as 'advice', this is suspiciously trendy lately. I can't count the number of times in the last month where I've had people who have never seen or used our product tell me that our product is already good enough, and we need to spend more time doing growth or sales stuff.

</comment><comment><USER22> I finished all of the Microcorruption challenges relatively quickly (I'm on the first page of the "Hall of Fame"). Yet I have no idea how to approach the 2nd level of Stockfighter ("Choc a Block"). It's frustrating and I don't enjoy that game. Given that, I don't see how Starfighters could possibly place me in a reasonable role.

<comment><USER23> I felt similar. Especially since Patrick said that something like "the first levels of Stockfighters are so easy, most devs should be able to beat them in 5 minutes with cURL only". It actually took me three days to beat chop a block, because I couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Then I beat it, but more due to luck I guess, because my bot couldn't reliably beat it again.

Edit: What I want to say is: Don't get discouraged too quickly. If you enjoy it somewhat, it's kind of nice to figure out how to win :)

<comment><USER24> Ditto on the "don't get discouraged". I've gone through a few levels now and part of it has been perserverance (and sometimes a lot of thinking & sketching ideas over coffee).

The "5 minutes with cURL" comment is definitely offputting if you get stuck. Ignore it. Consider it a convenient lie that helped motivate you to start, but don't kick yourself over it.

As for the unreliable bot - many of my first solutions were something unreliable. Then I went back and improved the code's reliability / performance. Having a stroke of "luck" is usually just a first insight into what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems like there are 2 very simple metrics that make everything else pretty irrelevant.

For applicants - how many who "pass" get jobs?

For employers - how many positions did you fill?

I found it odd that the blog post intentionally left that out. Getting someone an interview is not a good metric!

And as someone who has spent a fair bit of time on both sides (it sounds like the founders have minimal experience actually applying for jobs) it is a huge mistake to interview serially. Companies take their sweet time getting back to you (weeks is not uncommon), and their initial offer is not as good as it could be. When they know that they are competing for a candidate, they are very quick to move on a candidate. This helps the whole "follow up" problem solve itself. While it might seem like it requires more mental bandwidth, it probably requires less. And customer satisfaction goes _way_ up. For someone job hunting, every passing hour waiting for an outcome can be brutal.

Also, I am simultaneously impressed and confused by the technical investment. It's fantastic work, but doesn't seem like it is helping to increment #1 or #2.

</comment><comment><USER26> In my experience with marketing two-sided marketplaces you need to focus your messaging / outreach around the more scarce asset, the "catalyst asset", let's call it.

The catalyst asset in this case is developers.

If Starfighter's system / gamification can actually identify incredible developers, that are also amenable to looking at job offers, the recruiters will be banging down your door.

Right now the Starfighter landing page is recruiter centric, the "For Engineers" and "Play Now" are low contrast menu items at the top.

Further confusing the issue for your catalyst audience is that your player- centric funnel is called Stockfighter.io and yet most of the mentions (including this one) are of Starfighter.

I think you'd get a lot of engineer's attention if you kept it as simple as "Play engineering games developed by experts. Winners get a better job."

PS - Considering how many times you guys have been / will be at the top of HN why don't you consider adding a "Try Starfighter. Get a better job." button to the right side of the blog as a call to action so all these lovely clicks aren't wasted?

<comment><USER3> The day we can credibly promise "Winners get a better job." we will have that exact sentence on our website, tended to by a team of people whose only responsibility is finding more players, paid salaries out of the stupefyingly large rivers of money that sentence implies. A pre-requisite to being able to truthfully say it is figuring out how to run a quirky take on a recruiting company.

Until we feel comfortable on that, we don't have to maximize for reach, and certainly don't want to overpromise. ("Come use our fake stock exchange. It may not crash! Some people find it intellectually interesting! There exists a non-zero possibility that you might have a fun conversation with a geek in which that stock exchange and your career goals will feature prominently." is about what we can promise right now.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Incidentally: should you ever go in to get a bank account at a Japanese > bank, remember to edit your company's website to take the words I rob banks > because that is where the money is. off your homepage prior to the initial > customer interview. Irony doesn't translate well. ("NO NO NO, we're not bank > robbers; we're a video game company! Honest!" "What, like Nintendo?" "... In > a manner of speaking, almost exactly like Nintendo.")

This is hilarious. BTW the quote is really there - [https://www.starfighters.io/ctfs](https://www.starfighters.io/ctfs).

</comment><comment><USER28> Just a heads up to the Starfighter team browsing this thread: going to starfighter.io with uBlock Origin results in the job listings being blocked.

EDIT: it appears starfighter.io is different than starfighters.io.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm genuinely excited about a recruitment firm where the people can actually code. It's an industry that needs some skills, even just basic ones like calling back people that you said you'd call.

So often you get guys who have no clue talking about things they don't understand, deciding who gets to apply where. This is terrible for both employees and firms. They also charge way too much money as a middleman. No way it's worth 1/4 of a salary to filter a list of candidates. Especially when you just do it by the staircase method. That's the one where you throw the pile off a staircase and choose the ones on one step.

I really hope recruitment doesn't turn you into douchebags. Here's some choice tactics I've come across:

\- They call you, the employer, with the perfect candidate. Guy checks all the boxes, top degree, top employment history, looking to move for more interesting work. Half an hour before the interview, he cancels. But luckily the recruiter has some other guys available, and why not talk to them since that time is booked anyway?

\- They call you, the employee, saying one of your colleagues is leaving and mentioned you. He's got a top job lined up, just send your CV. (Why bother harvesting CVs though, if you're gonna do like in tactic one?)

\- They bomb your LinkedIn with an employee's CV. Your LinkedIn say nothing about you wanting to hire, or what technologies you use.

\- They put out generic ads to get CVs. Not real jobs, just imaginary jobs.

Anyway, I'm hoping there's going to be some real value added from you guys.

<comment><USER3> The last few months have been an interesting mix of learning empathy for some of the pathologies of the recruiting industry and being absolutely slackjawed amazed at how bad some players [edit in response to reply: meaning, actors in the recruiting industry] are.

An example of the former: I now totally understand why recruiters frequently forget elementary facts about individual candidates or jobs. They're often juggling multiples of both at once, at numbers which overwhelm the working memory of almost any human, for weeks at a time. I had a very nice conversation with (making up facts) Cindy the Pythonist and Sandy the front- end engineer one Tuesday, minutes from each other, and three weeks later had about twenty minutes of the conversation with Sandy go by before realizing that I was giving her advice for Cindy's situation, to her amazement. I do know that React is not made of Python, and I've recently shipped a retail stock trading site built in it, but from Sandy's view of the conversation it probably sounded like I was scatterbrained, incompetent, or scatterbrained and incompetent.

I thought I could fix this with better notes or a database, but I think it has to be fixed with process improvements, because the amount of task-switching I was doing was making it impossible for me to keep each of the X0 stories I was telling straight.

I don't anticipate us adopting lying as a business tactic. Telling the truth seems so much more straightforward.

<comment><USER30> "being absolutely slackjawed amazed at how bad some players are"

Can you elaborate on this? Were the results you're talking about just flat-out "I can't code FizzBuzz" or something else?

Personally, I created an account, started reading the directions, then realized I had no interest in the problem domain and decided to wait for the next one. It helps when the problem gels with you. I wonder if that had any role.

<comment><USER3> Sorry for imprecision -- I meant "players in the recruiting industry", not Starfighter players.

It is probably the case that at least one person who can't FizzBuzz has signed up for Stockfighter, but it's highly unlikely that I end up talking to them regarding career options, and even if I did I'd phrase things more like "OK, so you've got a fun couple of years ahead of you; let me recommend some resources for learning more about programming" rather than being contemptuous of that. Our industry does way too much of that; no need to add to it. Plus, we intend to be in business in 3 years, and even starting from "can't Fizzbuzz" if you're dedicated you could be a _really_ interesting person to try placing in 3 years, so I'll happily spend a few minutes buying a call option.

(I guess that's closer in actual practice to a put option, as I'd be selling the candidate's availability rather than buying it, but you get what I mean by the joke.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I remember this thing from back when it was launched. I only solved like 3 levels, but I did it entirely in Lisp. Which brings me to the following observation: since there's no way to see the source code, it's not possible to check if the person legitimately solved the task or just used somebody else's code.

<comment><USER32> your source code is checked on the last level

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting. I must have misread something early on because I thought Startfighter was launched to improve recruiting of coders and stuff. I didn't know about games and such. Does that factor into recruiting or is there a nice post showing exactly what it's about? Tptacek?

<comment><USER3> This is our perpetual messaging conundrum: are we a game company or a recruiting company? Yes.

When we talk to our clients, we're a recruiting company which uses online challenges to a) source and b) pre-qualify very good engineering candidates.

When we talk to engineers, we're a company which makes fun engineering-y things you can do on the Internet. (Hack a stock exchange through it's REST API! Code a market maker! Buffer overrun a C program running on an AVR microprocessor to corrupt a FIX message to steal a billion dollars!) And we can also, potentially, introduce you to a job if that is interesting to you. Our estimation is approximately 95% of our users are not in the market for a job at this exact moment in time.

You can see the two-sided messaging on our website:

For companies: [https://www.starfighters.io/approach](https://www.starfighters.io/approach)

For engineers: [https://www.starfighters.io/players](https://www.starfighters.io/players)

<comment><USER34> I understand the trading game aspect and the recruiting aspect... but then why is it called 'Starfighter'? That name doesn't seem to be related to either and makes the think there's some third aspect I don't know about.

<comment><USER33> Let me try this one cuz I was hoping tptacek and patrick were cool enough for it to be true:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7NaxBxFWSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7NaxBxFWSo)

They used a game to recruit warriors to protect the galaxy or universe or something. Lost with my memory. I remember loving the movie when I was younger. Gotta rewatch it some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Meanwhile starfighter.io points a job search page which shows jobs from indeed.com...

</comment><comment><USER36> "This site can't be reached" right now.

Interesting - I can ssh to a server of mine and read it.

So maybe it's getting blocked by the firewall here. If that's happening here, perhaps it's happening elsewhere too.

</comment><comment><USER37> Confusing, at first I thought this was about the F-104 Starfighter, than I thought it was a new science-fiction computer game but I never thought about a recruiting firm.

I hope I'm not alone.

</comment><comment><USER38> Question to the proprietors: How would you prevent proliferation of solutions to levels on github, etc, as has happened with Thomas's cryptopals challenges?

</comment><comment><USER39> How many users have you folks gotten to register?

<comment><USER3> Only about ~40,000 or so, but I wouldn't pick that as one of the top three metrics I'd be interested in. It's like hits. I don't even know how many hits we've gotten, and frankly no answer to that question matters to me.

(Good candidates for metrics that I should be worrying about might be "number of players who hit our internal bar for outreach", "percentage of that population who would like Starfighter to give them options", "count of successful placements", and "revenue." You'll understand if I don't publish a /stats page with those numbers updated in real time, even though the thought certainly crossed my mind a time or three.)

<comment><USER40> I was looking for the most important metric in the article - how many jobs have you filled so far?

I have limited bandwidth for free-time coding, and anything has to compete with my own side projects and "list of things I need to learn/revise to keep head above water in notoriously mercurial industry".

If I were to invest time in Starfighter, I'd need to know that, assuming I do my part and finish the game with a reasonable score, that a) it will land me an interview and b) it will do sufficient pre-vetting of my skills so that the interviewer doesn't need to throw whiteboard curveballs. If I saw some kind of metric on job placement I might think it's worth spending time on. Otherwise my time would be better invested in improving my Github profile and resume and building my network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> @patio11 Do you play starfighters? How do you ensure that the product is fun for the end user?

</comment><comment><USER41> Blog post is crashing my mobile browser: chrome on galaxy S5. Anyone else having this problem?

<comment><USER42> Hmm that device is modern enough, latest Chrome version? Any plugins?

<comment><USER41> Most recent chrome. No mobile plugins (that I know of). Coming back a day later (after a reset) the site is slow to load and scroll, but is not crashing every time.

Maybe just the forum webapp (Discourse) that is just too heavy for mobile like aeorg mentioned.

<comment><USER42> Weird, the Galaxy s5 should have enough power to run modern JavaScript apps. Have not seen this reported elsewhere in the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another website that can't just display some html without javascript...

</comment><comment><USER44> Any competent developer I would like to hire would be spending time building stuff with their skills instead of playing games with it. No disrespect to the players, but just saying if you're good at something you should use your gift to produce something useful instead of using it to consume what someone else built.

<comment><USER45> Hey now! :)

Tinkering with things is a fantastic way to learn. And a desire to tinker for the sake of understanding is a really good tell for a smart problem solver.

Every job I've had has been because I played around with some technology for fun, and then ran into people who had a need for it.

Playing with code can also be relaxing. In my normal work, the code that I write needs to be reliable, maintainable, and performant. Buy playing stockfighter is a way to have fun without the burden of any that. I can do really stupid stuff, just for the joy of it. Heck, I hooked up a spam filter to one of the levels and won. Or built a minecraft stockfighter hologram visualizer.</comment></comment>


Game Accessibility Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/

<comment><USER2> To this I'd add: Make tutorials optional!

Nothing irks a veteran RPG player more than an NPC's condescending, non- skippable takeover of the controls to show you how to equip an item.

And some of us like to replay our games, especially on higher difficulty settings (another thing the guidelines recommend having) -- we don't want the game to talk to us like n00bs if we've already beaten it!

Also, many of the suggestions listed under Advanced are rather questionable for games that don't specifically target disabled players.

Adaptive difficulty isn't necessarily a good thing. Besides entertainment, people play games because they want to be competitive with others. In single- player games, this competitiveness usually takes the form of comparing achievements, progress or high scores.

With adaptive difficulty, your progress in a game ceases to be an objective measure of your ability; thus, adaptive difficulty alienates competitive gamers.</comment>


Show HN: Bigroom.video – better video social events - <AUTHOR> Hello Hackernews!
Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new way to have social events over video (https://bigroom.video).
As with the rest of the world, my last company transitioned to being completely remote with the rise of covid. We tried to emulate our old lunchroom and bar happy-hour dynamic over Zoom, but found that we could really only have one person speak at a time. With a 20 person Zoom lunch, this turns into each person telling a story one-by-one, people stepping on each others' toes, and a loss of the small dynamic conversations that would normally happen at any social event.
Bigroom has two major features that help bring the dynamism back to socializing.
Dynamic channels let you break off into a separate conversation with one click. At any social event I've been to, people are always separated into groups of 3-6 and individuals bounce between those groups. Dynamic channels allow this behavior without the rigidity of Zoom breakout rooms.
Whispering temporarily mutes your audio to everyone except one person. Click-and-hold on someone's video to start whispering, and let go of your mouse to stop. It's possible for two people to have a complete 1-on-1 conversation within a large group of people by whispering to each other.
Bigroom works on desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with mobile support planned. On the technical side, Bigroom consists of a web client and a websocket server, both written entirely in rust. I used the elm-like yew framework compiled to wasm for the frontend and async-tungstenite for the websocket backend. The entire client app compiles down to <1MB.
Bigroom is completely free, with premium features coming in the future.
Looking forward to your feedback!
-Kevin <comment><AUTHOR> [https://bigroom.video](https://bigroom.video) here's a clickable link since HN doesn't parse URLs in the description :)</comment>


An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/incidents/mmdbljlglnfd <comment><USER2> Glad to hear something official on this...5 or 6 days is way too long to go without something more than "We're working on it" and some light details. I understand that it's likely an all-hands-on-deck hair-on-fire situation over there, but those of us who rely on Linode for our own businesses have been largely left in the dark.

When our customers are emailing and tweeting us and they just want to know when we are going to be up, and all we can say is "We have no idea, we don't know why this is happening or what's really going on", that's pretty much the definition of a worst case scenario from a customer service standpoint.

As someone whose business relies on Linode currently to function, I am sympathetic to Linode's plight...this is the equivalent of someone coming and setting off a bomb in your factory; not exactly something that you can always plan for even if you have prevention measures in place. But they would have kept a lot more of my sympathy long-term if they would have communicated better with their customers in the first place...

EDIT: And it looks like the attackers decided to start things back up again, as Linode.com is unavailable...

<comment><AUTHOR> We know that we've dropped the ball here. To be frank, it's just been extremely difficult to take our people off of mitigation long enough to write something more coherent than "they're attacking our webservers", "they're attacking our core routers", etc.

> And it looks like the attackers decided to start things back up again, as > Linode.com is unavailable...

They're watching our status page for updates and starting new attacks when we resolve previous ones. There's been an almost 1:1 correlation lately.

<comment><USER3> > it's just been extremely difficult to take our people off of mitigation long > enough to write something more coherent

This always rings hollow to me, and yet I hear it over and over.

A company like Linode surely has at least a dozen people who can be on call in a situation like this, probably much more. All it takes is for one engineer or even a product person... Heck a technically-minded support person could listen in on the war room meetings and get enough information to post something better than "we're fixing it".

5 minutes of blogging every six hours would be plenty.

And yet, people always claim it's impossible and there's no time. Frankly I find it frightening... If you are coding that fast that no one on your team has five minutes to step aside, take a breather after six hours of coding and summarize what the team just spent the last six hours doing, I shudder to think what kind of panicked alarmist interventions you are making.

There's no excuse for silence. There just isn't. It's a gross failure on the part of management to prioritize the responsibilities they have to your customers customers. Full stop. Sure, the engineers can't be expected to remember to tap out to blog. But if that's the extent of the accountability structures you can assemble during a crisis, that is a serious organizational failing, particularly for an organization the size of Linode.

<comment><USER4> I would say that 5 minutes of blogging every 6 hours is just as likely to cause more harm than good. Wording something badly could lead to far more fear and confusion than the present situation if taken out of context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't believe people are criticising Linode:

1 - Attack mitigation was mostly successful. As I thought and they have confirmed, the attack vectors evolved continuously.

2 - They had to deal with this over Xmas. Anyone familiar with such a job knows what this means in terms of human resources, knowledge distribution, organization of technical response and communication with 3rd parties.

3 - Linode is not Nagios. If you don't monitor your own infrastructure don't expect Linode to SMS you because your site might be down. Linode resources were focused on fighting the DDoS, as they should, and provided regular updates through their status site, as is expected. Everything else is nice-to- have, but no a must-have.

4 - In line with what others said, I had 7 hours downtime in my London VPS. That is an uptime of 96% in the last 7 days. Considering restless DDoS ongoing over holidays, I'd say that is pretty good.

I'm sorry, but what happens to Linode sucks, but it is an eventuality anyone with assets depending on this service should have counted with, because it can happen everywhere. Cannot blame Linode if your HA strategy does not exist, or you never thought of a way to gracefully fail over to a second provider if your business depends on >96% availability.

<comment><USER6> 1) They were caught with their pants down. Their DDoS playbook was probably either outdated or not full fleshed out. This is somewhat excusable if you're a content provider. It's not excusable if you're the cloud/colo/datacenter provider. This is literally your raison d'etre. Cue the "you had one job" memes.

2) Netops people don't get Christmas off (1). Our teams are working all year, all day, every day. Netops isn't HR or marketing. It's not super difficult to arrange a conference call with your transit providers, DDoS mitigators, etc. This is old hat to them.

3) Completely agree.

4) The downtime was a lot worse if you had multiple instances in more datacenters. Or put another way, the bigger the Linode customer you were, the worse it was.

(1) I've had a router die every Christmas or New Years for the past 6 years. Never had one die outside those windows. They must angry at me for what I've put them through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My message to the attackers (in case they happen to read HN):

Fuck you. I will continue to be a Linode customer. Not sure what your goals might be but you will not succeed.

Frankly, and I am going to be politically incorrect here, these are the kinds of cases where I wish there was a "special forces" kind of task force to hunt down these pieces of shit and put them out of their misery.

This amounts to financial terrorism of the worst kind. It affects small and large companies and creates untold losses across the board. It is entirely unproductive. The world would be a better place if the pieces of shit who engage in this sort of financial terrorism simply didn't exist.

Happy New Year.

Linode folks: I'm renting another server next week. Don't need it. Just want to support your effort and, in a tiny way, help mitigate losses. I might just give it to the kids in the robotic team I mentor so they can play around in a real server environment.

<comment><USER8> > Frankly, and I am going to be politically incorrect here, these are the > kinds of cases where I wish there was a "special forces" kind of task force > to hunt down these pieces of shit and put them out of their misery.

Oh, it's certainly in the capability of the FBI and the NSA to hunt them down. Even child fuckers inside the Darkweb got busted.

The problem is priority: unless either child porn or a huge US company is involved, the three-letter-agencies don't give a shit about this kind of crime.

<comment><USER9> Which is a shame, because some action would probably dissuade future attempts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the update and the hard work. You all work a job that requires a lot of sweat and tears that goes unappreciated from many levels of our society. Making the internet work is hard work.

Know that you're in good company here and that we're rooting for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> We appreciate this more than you know. Many of us have had the holidays ruined by these utterly relentless attacks, and it's a difficult thing to try and explain to our loved ones. Support from the community really helps.

<comment><USER11> When I noticed this on Christmas Day (and saw my suspicions confirmed on the status page), my first thoughts were along the lines of "Wow, that's going to ruin Christmas for a lot of Linode families this year." My heart sunk for you guys. I can't even begin to imagine the stress it's placing on friends, relatives, and immediate family members. (The inevitable "But it's Christmas..." comes to mind.)

I just want to say that I switched this summer to Linode from DO for my personal sites, and I've been very happy with your services. I plan on launching a few more things in the coming year, and these attacks have galvanized my resolve to continue supporting you through all of this. Thanks for everything you guys are doing, and keep up the good work!

I know it's unlikely to ever happen given the nature of these attacks, but I really do hope the perpetrators are found, brought to justice, and locked away for a long, long, long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My London Linodes' stats from the past 7 days: 40 outages. 6h25m downtime.

What upsets me the most is that customers haven't heard a single word from Linode. If you weren't watching their status page (and have server monitoring on your servers), you'd be clueless.

The least they could do is to email affected customers about what's happening, and the time frame they need to fix it.

But one week of continuous issues is just not good enough.

<comment><USER12> That being said, I love Linode, and will not use any other primary provider for my servers. They have been dead stable the past years before this happened, and never had any bottlenecks (e.g. overselling servers like other providers). And I feel sorry for the network engineers trying their best to fix this. The missing information is a Linode Customer Relations issue, not the engineer's.

Happy new year to everyone. And looking forward to a great 2016 at Linode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) Why in the world are you exposing your router control planes to the outside world? That should be ACL'd off (in stateless firewall rules and routing engine) to only allow access from a few IP's.

2) Your transit providers should be defending their infrastructure. I've never seen a transit provider allow an attacker to take out their /30 serials or IX addresses. This is their network after all. If attackers try to hit the serial between customer and provider, you just readdress the serial to RFC1918 space. You don't really need a routable address there other than to make traceroutes easy to read. If they attack farther upstream in the provider's network, you just add ACL's at the provider edge. Nothing external will ever need to reach a provider's core. This is basic, basic stuff.

Next time, don't only run your network on house bandwidth (HE, TelX, etc). Or in other words, caveat emptor.

<comment><USER13> I want to cut Linode some slack they have been great but those were my thoughts when the employee above divulged that info. It all seems a little like using cold fusion to run your whole shop..

People dont need to jump ship they need plans in place to deal with problems like this, even just a rsync.net account.

<comment><USER6> Judging by the downvotes I got, there are people on HN that must think you should expose your router's control plane to the Internet. That or they expect transit providers to not protect their network.

There's no intelligent discussion left here. It's devolved into a sympathy vote. "You said something mean about Linode. I love Linode. Downvotes for you."

If Linode had posted the update to NANOG, it would have been more productive. I don't often say that.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may want to go pinging around some of your own tier 1 crossconnects. I bet you'll be surprised.

<comment><USER6> They all respond because I asked them for it. About half didn't upon turn up. It's super trivial for them to null route them or readdress in rfc 1918/4193 space.

Or are you referring to xconnects inside their network? That's up to them to work out and I've never seen a provider just abandon their network while under attack.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may want to reconsider. CoPP only goes so far, as we've learned the hard way.

<comment><USER6> I don't run Cisco, but thanks for worrying about that. Also, stateless ACL's should protect against overrunning the control plane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Link to original thread, which has been getting comments up until today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686)

</comment><comment><USER15> > a bad actor is purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to > significantly damage Linode's business.

I wonder what size investment this is taking, and what the end-game is for the bad actor. Unless Linode's mitigation tactics are increasing the bad actor's costs, what's to stop the bad actor from continuing the attacks until Linode goes out of business?

<comment><USER6> Stolen credit cards go a long, long way in AWS and GCE capacity.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. Plus, botnet capacity was cheaper than AWS last I checked where it was around $1 a machine. So easy to pull this off on the cheap that it could be anyone for any reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Greetings.

I know I migth come late, but being one of your very satisfied Customers, and having experienced this type of issue multiple times with other providers that didn't even bothered to even ackowledge that there was an issue, I can say that I wil remain with you regardless.

Also to those saying "I have all my business running at Linode so this is unacceptable", I only says this: You get what you pay for, and for a VPS Service you won't find better than Linode, and if you have something critical running for YOUR Clients, than it is YOUR responsability to ensure resiliency against this type of situation. Linode is a VPS provider after all, and the reason why you are making money out of someone who doesn't know enougth to go to the VPS hoster themselfes.

Good luck making a profitable business and milking your Customers running on AWS or AZURE. You'd be broke and in debth at the first DDOS and Over-Bandwith charge from any of them.

I work at a service provider myself, and I understand what you guys had to deal with the last 10 days, and you have my full support.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm a bit surprised to see the update from someone who is not senior management/C-level (as far as I can tell). Where is the communication from the CEO/CTO?

It seems a bit unfair to have this fall on Alex's shoulders. I could be way off base, happy to be put right. I'm sorry to hear about your ruined holidays. Hopefully you'll get some time off soon :)

</comment><comment><USER19> That's crazy... I have a linode box with several low-traffic websites on it, old projects I've wanted to keep around for archival purposes. I picked linode because I wanted root access and they were cheap but really just because I wasn't sure of better options. I suppose there is always t2.nano.

<comment><USER10> You get what you pay for. t2.nano isn't as fun as it sounds. Just wait until someone soaks up all the available instances surrounding yours and starts generating CPU steal on your box, thus making everything in your OS take 50-90% more time to complete. I've seen this happen on t* and m* instance types and it's especially the case when they're the smaller sizes in that instance class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Linode has always been a great host. Sure they've had their growing pains but I've never been more happy with a virtual hosting provider, even their support. But yes, days without communication is not a good thing. Let's hope they learn from this.

</comment><comment><USER21> ISPs already spend plenty of money on DPI and HTTP injection gear. It would cost next to nothing to do basic egress filtering and detecting+throttling known compromised customers.

And yet, we still get DDoS attacks. Why?

<comment><USER22> Because these days "botnet" can easily mean "botnet of compromised Linux servers" or "botnet of WiFi routers". The biggest DoS attacks are often based on exploiting UDP based protocols and so you end up being attacked by ISP/university-sized DNS or NTP servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the lesson here is don't rely on one supplier. I have my tiny infrastructure spread over three different suppliers in different geographical locations. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Edit. This is in no way a criticism of linode. The worst outcome is if we all end up with one monopoly supplier. I have deliberately avoided using the big player in this space as I want support diversity. This makes my job harder, but it is better for us all if we don't put all our eggs in the one basket.

<comment><USER14> Have you done a write-up of how you've managed to keep a real-time sync of assets/database? Or are you hosting static websites?

<comment><USER24> This is what I'd like to know too. It's easy to suggest mirroring your infrastructure on multiple providers but in practice it's very difficult. Multi-master SQL in particular is non-trivial and that's just one piece of the puzzle. We have MongoDBs, CouchDBs, Redis, and Elasticsearch -- each with varying difficulty and costs to cluster.

<comment><USER10> You're definitely not mirroring your infrastructure any time soon :). Not to say that it's impossible because I don't believe in impossible, but that's quite a stack to replicate.

We have much the same stack at Reverb.com and I focus more on creating a disaster recovery plan than tackling a mirror of our infra. I'm focusing on bringing up our stack in another region of AWS if we would ever need to rather than mirroring everything.

Sometimes a mitigation plan is far more useful than building in excessively complicated redundancy.

<comment><USER24> That's interesting and probably more in line with what I need to do. It wouldn't be difficult for me to bring the entire stack online in another datacenter, but if all of your customer data resides on (for simplicity) a master SQL node in Linode-Dallas and that datacenter goes offline, how can you bring that backup node online when you can no longer access the Dallas machines?

Are you suggesting to have a slave ready to become master in the 2nd datacenter? If that's the case, my main area of uncertainty is: if you promote a slave to master in a 2nd datacenter and that new master accepts writes, you then have a brutal problem of propagating writes to the old master when he comes back online.

The whole thing may exceed my capability right now but I think having a disaster recovery is far better than a mirror now that I think through it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rast-a Out of curiosity: why is it so hard to track the real origin of DDoS attack, who's behind them and what they are after?

<comment><USER25> Imagine the scenario: person A sends a malformed DNS request to a bunch of DNS resolvers, asking them to send the response to person B. Now imagine that person A is actually part of a large botnet, being controlled by person C, via some smoke-and-mirrors.

If you're person B (under attack) it's pretty difficult to track through all of that to person C. You'd need a lot of cooperation from people (likely in many different countries) who really just want to go back to their normal business. They're likely also charging for the traffic, so they're not really that bothered, and they're each only seeing a small proportion of what person B is seeing so they don't see it as much of a problem (so aren't likely to be inclined to get involved).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How do botnets still exist? Wasn't that a problem that should have gone away with Windows XP?

<comment><USER27> Windows XP hasn't gone away.

<comment><USER26> So are the botnets that still exist mainly running on the legacy XP boxes?

It says here that it's roughly 10% of machines. It's safe to assume at least half are infected. But aren't they mostly third world?

[https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market- share...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market- share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0)

<comment><USER27> Android too.

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=android%20botnet...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=android%20botnets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> jsonip.com is hosted on Linode. It's been averaging roughly 6mb/s inbound for months, but in the last week it's been about 8.5. I'm not sure if the uptick has anything to do with the DDOS attacks or not.

<comment><USER29> Did you also run jsonip.org? I used that occasionally (not programmatically, just when I wanted to see my IP) and it started returning a 502 a few months ago.</comment></comment>


What small businesses make the most millionaires? - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1013/what-small-businesses-make-the-most-millionaires.html <comment><USER2> Real estate.</comment>


Gene linked to autism undergoes changes in men's sperm after pot use - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-gene-linked-autism-men-sperm.html <comment><USER2> n=24, split into two 12-man cohorts.

Why do i feel like this lacks statistical power?

<comment><USER3> Because it does, but is interesting enough to warrant further investigation.

What I cannot grok is for which group autism is more or less likely</comment></comment>


Meander: a procedural system for generating maps of rivers that never existed - <AUTHOR> http://roberthodgin.com/project/meander <comment><USER2> Oh a post about Houdini, my favourite software!

Results looks amazing, though I wish algorithms were explained more in detail.

I think there are couple of more methods available for generating such rivers, approach taken by Guerilla Games is pretty good as well: [https://www.sidefx.com/community/horizon-zero-dawn- guerrilla...](https://www.sidefx.com/community/horizon-zero-dawn-guerrilla- games/)

<comment><USER3> Why is it your favorite? I watched Houdini 17 and 18 sneak peeks and they are impressive, but I wouldn't be the first to be fooled by demos.

<comment><USER2> I do indie game development, Houdini extremely speeds up game development process by combining python programming, procedural generation, and conventional 3D asset modelling into one single software package.

It must've increased my productivity at least 5x fold, and it costed around 250 USD, which is really cheap compared to other 3D software packages.

Basically I just use Houdini to do everything from terrain generation, static mesh modelling, rigging/animation to VFX. It doesn't have good sculpting capabilities, so zbrush is needed for organic character modelling.

Most amazing thing about Houdini is that it let's you basically code entire asset generation and baking process via python.

I'm 100% sure Houdini will take over entire gaming industry, I doubt conventional modelling software like Maya or 3D Max will be utilised in new game studios, though older ones will still use them due to initial investments they made.

<comment><USER4> Hi! Thanks for your thoughts, they are really interesting. Do you have any examples of your Houdini to game content or could you recommend any good learning resources for using Houdini in this way?

I've been sharpening my blender skills for content creation and while I enjoy it, it's quite slow.

<comment><USER2> Game I'm making is still under wraps but for example: I got multiple building, door, control terminal, and signature variants all developed in Houdini. Doors have to open whenever a player within guest list comes near the door. Assume there are 100s of combinations you can make with these variants. I can just select the variants I want in Houdini, combine them within Houdini, click to a button I programmed in python that says bake and it will output a nice TOML file that automatically gets read by UE4 and I can just drop a blueprint that already exists within UE4 to world space and I'll have my combined building show up on the planet literally immediately.

Honestly Houdini is so complicated it will probably take you three months to get to basic proficiency and you will need to learn python if needed. I mostly used YouTube tutorials and documentation itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Robert Hodgin used to go by flight404 back in the days of Flash. I remember seeing him speak at a Flash Forward conference at the Masonic Center in SF awhile ago. I believe he also helped develop the Cinder library for creative coding... cool to see this popup on HN :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This whole website is an absolute gold mine. 1) It's like someone finally worked on all the ideas I've had, 2) it's absolutely gorgeous in every respect. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Forget the rivers, I love every single thing about this

</comment><comment><USER8> Fun fact, Albert Einstein wrote a paper explaining why rivers form meanders and tea leaves accumulate in the center of a stirred cup.

[http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/005/03/0105-0108](http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/005/03/0105-0108)

<comment><USER9> His son Hans is responsible for a whole body of work in river engineering.

[https://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/news/life-and- pioneering-w...](https://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/news/life-and-pioneering- work-hans-albert-einstein)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it the maps that never existed, or the rivers that never existed? What does this title mean?

<comment><USER11> Author is creating a simulation of natural river meandering over time, and generating maps of that behavior in a style reminiscent of that used in a report by the US Army Corp of Engineers in 1944.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> fyi, your "modified bitangent" is just the second derivative.

<comment><USER13> The second derivative of a circular arc points inwards, whereas the figure shows the "modified bitangent" pointing outwards. Maybe it's the negated second derivative, but without the exact formula it's hard to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really beautiful. Are prints available?

</comment><comment><USER15> That's a lot of work, and a beautiful result. I'm just not sure what the purpose is.

<comment><USER16> Actually I wonder if it might be a significant contribution to the field of hydrology. For example, for use in floodplain modeling after landscaping, or water resources work.

<comment><USER13> Not really, since he's just trying to create a visually pleasing result and can ignore a lot of phenomena that would change the exact course of the river, like the water speed, water level, erosion resistance of different materials, slope of the terrain... (The example of a circular "river" meandering should be a pretty big hint that it's not physically accurate.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool.</comment>


Berkeley strips name from its law school building, citing namesakes racist views - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/01/30/berkeley-strips-name-its-law-school-citing-benefactors-racist-views/ <comment><USER2> Unpaywalled article directly from Berkeley: [https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/30/boalt-hall- denamed/](https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/30/boalt-hall-denamed/)</comment>


Swedish music festival to go 'women-only' following string of sexual assaults - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/swedish-music-festival-go-women-only-following-string-sexual/ <comment><USER2> So much sensational journalism around this story. First of, Emma is a satirical comedian and her (two?) Instagram posts need to be taken w a grain of salt.

Secondly, it's not replacing a 50k festival.</comment>


How to Make a DSL, Hygienically - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubypigeon.com/posts/how-to-make-a-dsl-hygienically/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> What you implemented is not a DSL. It's an API.

> In Ruby, DSLs are typically just Ruby code. These are much easier to > implement, because you don't need to write a parser or anything like that – > you just use the parser built in to Ruby.

There. You admit yourself that you haven't written a language, but a programmatic interface in Ruby.</comment>