Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse? - <AUTHOR> Past few days(weeks?) I find myself more and more frustrated with google search. It seems to frequently omit the most important keywords I'm typing. I constantly have to click "Must include 'Keyword'", because more than half the links on the first page miss it, even if it's the first one out of 3 words in my query.<p>I'm not the kind of person who thinks about search quality, this is the first time in my life I have ever noticed it being frustrating. <comment><USER2> It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost".

For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" \-- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better.

It just gets worse and worse for technical searches too, I find. Searching for stuff like datasheets for chips and vintage obscure computer programs and peripherals rarely returns anything useful without "wrapping" "everything" "in" "quotes".

<comment><USER3> They have a Verbatim mode which doesn't do that (as much?), but you have to click on Tools → All Results → Verbatim every time.

Alternatively, if you can edit the URL used by your browser, you can just add "tbs=li:1" to it; for Firefox, you can add it as an alternative Search engine by running this on the Console:

      window.external.AddSearchProvider("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/popthestack/1530165/raw/c99a1c5e6e783aecffa432397a527f557944926d/google-ssl-verbatim.xml")

This doesn't invalidate the overall point, of course, it's just a personal tip.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I used to have verbatim mode as a separate and default search provider in Firefox, but I had to stop using it as my default -- I find sometimes it's just too verbatim and it's like using Altavista in 1996 all over again.

I feel like Google a few years ago had struck a decent balance between trying to be smart (sometimes automatically including synonyms to your search terms, etc.) while still respecting your actual search terms. Now it's way too far gone in the "assume user is a total idiot and doesn't know what he wants" direction.

<comment><USER4> Yes Good Point - I've noticed many more missing terms in the past few weeks. Extremely irritating - Problem is Verbatim mode is buried and cannot be defaulted and does not work with Time Filter, Time Filter is often essential for useful searches. More control for advanced users is settings is required, Mobile first layout still annoys me on Safari iPad, so much so that, I have to iCab Browser - lets you change the user agent and lots of useful options such as Text Sizes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some point.

I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses.

Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so instead of similar images, or other instances of a photo, I get results like "beach" or "bicycle" or "city". This is so frustrating and completely useless. I'm sure anyone is capable of typing "mountain" in the search field to find generic photos os mountains.

So that got me back to tineye.com - I just with they had a larger coverage of the web =[

<comment><USER6> I see that particular un-feature as a consequence of undue focus on ML that automatically generates image tags. While it's impressive for a system to be able to auto-tag billions of images at high accuracy, these generic tags are almost always useless as search terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube.

For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested.

My recommendations also getting less and less relevant.

They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working system.

<comment> pure-awesome Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google.

I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

<comment><USER8> It's OK. It works well for me for common things that are easy to find. Restaurants, wiki entries, etc. But for example a new paper published today in Nature? Even searching for the whole title in quotes with DDG will not return it. Gotta go to Google for that.

<comment><USER9> DDG index is not as fresh as Google's. That and local, location specific searches are what I use Google for these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "must include" functionality makes _zero_ sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I _wouldn 't have included it in the search._ Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.

<comment><USER11> I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature. Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in dialect etc

<comment><USER12> I search for "suicide" (for my work) very often. It _fucking sucks_ that Google seems to think "death", "died", "murdered" etc are all valid synonyms. It means that for every single search I do I need to do extra work.

I miss the days of +forced +terms.

<comment><USER13> Surely using quotes around the term does the trick?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems only a matter of time until Google is just an interactive yellow pages. Why would you spend millions trying to index peoples personal blogs etc. when companies will pay thousands for the spot in the results and give you the link to put up? All they need to do is maintain their position as the default internet portal.

<comment><USER15> People advertise on Google because of the massive audience, and that audience exists because of quality organic search results. They are not going to mess with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's trash now. I noticed this a few months back:

        The final straw for me is that it now "helpfully" drops
        search terms on my behalf. I was already using DDG for a third
        of my searches. I'm going all-in now. For people who don't spend
        much time online, maybe what Google is doing works for them.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18266966)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think Google is focusing on the friendlier natural "human" queries. I noticed this some time ago when I'd ask it in a "lazy" way because I'm tired or distracted. E.g. "What day is Mother's Day?", or "What time is it in London?" I've noticed it seems to be more and more optimized for this sort of query as time goes on, to the point that I use the quote modifiers in many (most?) of my searches and the other modifiers more frequently than I used to.

I suspect that the people who've noticed this and feel frustrated have, like me, been searching on Google since back when it was on its way to unseating Altavista/Yahoo/etc (or maybe somewhere between). But I don't hold it against Google because they're optimizing for the widest possible audience and if it makes it easier for most people I'm ok with being a little inconvenienced. As long as adding quotes or other modifiers kicks in the old/advanced search I'm ok with that price for something I not only don't pay for, but don't click on the ads for either.

<comment> pure-awesome I remember the days when I had to include "AND" and "OR" between words in the queries.

<comment><USER17> Nice! I remember when they finally added spellcheck. Probably a (welcome) contributor to my decreased ability to remember how to spell many words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It feels like maybe Google had a changing of the guard and a new batch of engineers are making decisions and missed out on a transfer of knowledge from the previous engineers with both search and SEO.

I'm seeing my search results show less and less of what I'm looking for, it's like google search is forgetting how it used to work.

The same with SEO, I'm seeing sites ranking again on the first page that have useless content using all the tricks/ghosts of SEO past. It seems all the legacy SEO hacks/tricks filters that had been in place at Google have been removed recently.

I was a huge fan of Google, but I'm definitely seeing a decline in quality of the SERP.

<comment><USER15> Don't forget that the web is changing. There is more junk produced every day and Google needs to combat search engine spam and blackhat practices. This means changes and not seeing search results you are used to.

<comment><USER18> Double True, but I'm expecting to start seeing thousands of keywords in the footer of sites white text on a white background. It's like SEO is coming full circle. Just surprised Google is allowing ancient SEO tricks to work again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A good solution to all this $search_engine misery is to use something like Searx [1] as an in-between. This gets rid of most of the profiling - especially when using a shared instance run by someone you trust (to avoid being profiled by the Searx instance, self-host and have family members and friends use it) - and gives results from a whole host of search engines. Configure all your devices to use that instance and you no longer have to cope with any single $search_engine's 'new and improved' algorithms, instead being treated to a search salad with ingredients of your own choosing.

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like someone in Google had a successful feature launch :) good for them on delivering something to production!

</comment><comment> ur-whale The quality has indeed declined drastically for pointed technical queries versus "where's the nearest hot dog stand" type queries.

Two possible explanations:

1\. The latter is much more of a moneymaker.

2\. I don't think there is anyone left at Google that actually understands how the search engine works these days.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have the same feeling, I have to click "must include keyword..." to get better results. I thought it was because I use google.co.jp since I moved to Japan a few weeks ago, so I was guessing Google tried too hard to correlate the results with my new geographical area. It seems I'm not the only one.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not sure if it was in the last weeks.. I would say in the last months. But google searches without verbatim mode are increasingly useless.

</comment><comment><USER23> Now you mention it, yes. I've been seeing this for a few weeks. It seems often the most salient word in my search phrase is ignored.

</comment><comment><USER24> Totally! Actually not 'worse' as such, but search results are more centered around earnings, rather than around providing information. You can't blame them for that, but by shifting focus they can expect a shift in public too.

</comment><comment><USER25> I commented on a different post a few days ago with my thoughts about why this is happening, in my opinion it is a problem that has evolved over several years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111306)

A Search Quality engineer at Google responded to me but I didn't find their arguments very convincing (nor did a number of repliers).

I have switched over completely to Searx on most of my devices, and by telling it to weight results from Bing, DDG and Google I feel I get better results than from any of those search engines alone.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree. Google has consistently gotten worse imo - I believe the general move towards third-party 'trust' verifiers, and Google's obsession with 'relevance' (as in, relevance to _me_ ) has destroyed the entire point of a search engine. I rarely use Google these days except to quickly re-find something I discovered somewhere else. I never really use it for finding information these days - just getting a link to something I already know exists. If I had a better way to search my bookmarks, I'd probably use that instead.

</comment><comment><USER27> Similar. I can't quantify, but I seem to be getting less useful results, certainly on the first page, and often beyond. I'm not sure it's not just perception though because I've not kept any log and it's also possible there are genuinely no matches to the searches I've been doing.

<comment><USER28> Also similar. What do we mean by "recent"? I feel like it got a lot worse a year or two ago, and has been consistently bad since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This question has been on my mind too and I'm glad someone thought of asking on HN.

Google has been returning really obvious results that one expects to get based on search history, other internet usage, etc (much like Netflix's matching). So much so that in order to find really unexpected gems of info I need to really spend a great amount of time searching a lot of different websites (hacker news, reddit, linkedin, corporate affairs data, marketplaces, truecaller, etc etc).

I feel like we need a new search engine now that there are so many different types of search results (blogs / media, aggregators / marketplaces, directories, social profiles, company websites, etc). One that lets us take more control over the type of results one can expect and more importantly one that doesn't show you what you expect to see (after being heavily influenced by your previous activities).

Also, Google may have millions of results for every keyword, but the quality of those links deteriorates quite fast, post 3rd page results are just crap.

I genuinely believe that Google worked and innovated when other search cos were wasting users' time by not rendering results quickly, but today we need something that better suits the complexity of the web and doesn't heavily rely on usage histories, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just search using "". For me it didn't change, as the way I search by using "", + etc since I started googling didn't change and it is even obvious in some ways that maybe I could just ddg all the way.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have had the same feeling for months and not limited to Google, sadly DDG suffers from the same. Search result quality has been getting worse and my search queries contain more and more quotes just to get back to a previous level. What I miss is a tick box for "power users" to disable spelling suggestions, search terms omission and similar "features".

</comment><comment> pi-victor I use DDG but when i wanted better results i used google. It gets harder to differentiate, they both miss the point.

Granted search engines are no psychics, you also need to better phrase your searches sometimes.

I remember Google used to return way more accurate results a few years ago. I guess privacy regulations, increasing demand for higher ad revenue have made it a lot worse than it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's just worse in different ways (and better in different ways as well). As Google's index grows it shards across more machines. The odds that latency will affect the result of a particular query increase simply because more machines and network connections are involved. So there's caching.

Because no one wants to wait forever (delay is indistinguishable from failure), Google returns the best results it can obtain within some time threshold. Unfortunately, the utility of a search term is often its rarity relative to other search terms and the rarity of a search term makes it less likely to be cached nearby. If "nobody ever searches by that term" it is more likely not to be indexed or on a far away partition. Think of adding a Korean character to a string of English search terms : In Korea : In the US.

</comment><comment><USER33> Google left for another dimension and they needed all their computing power for that, so they resorted to this trick. The results we see are from a NN previously trained on the real google, which is now hosted by a computer in the janitor office.

</comment><comment><USER34> It definitely did. As a complete outsider (albeit one who has done a bit of contract work at Google a few years ago), it seems that they are going all in on ML-driven personalisation, rather than an "objective best match" approach.

</comment><comment><USER35> Google search has gotten worse and DuckDuckGo has simultaneously gotten better! I have (again) been using DDG for the past few weeks and I type "!g" once a day at most. Very exciting if this seeming trend holds.

</comment><comment> jim-jim-jim Glad I'm not alone. It's so bad I'm actually _using_ DuckDuckGo these days, instead of instinctively typing in g! before all my queries like I usually do.

</comment><comment><USER36> Absolutely it got even worse in the past few weeks after an earlier, perceived drop a couple of months ago.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've noticed a lot of crappy youtube videos being inserted in the search results. These videos are far from relevant from the search query.

Unfortunately, duckduckgo and the like aren't still as good as google else I would've shifted to those search engines a long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER38> I had an issue this morning where I wanted to download some youtube videos for offline viewing and they were already deleted. I used google to try to find other copies and it found nothing. I used bing and was able to find all copies.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have suggestions how to find good tutorials/blogposts? I am interested in startup world, but when I search for things like "how to find startups ideas" I am tackled with lots and lots of content marketing, or poor medium posts.

(I know of firstround search and I think this is the best you can get. I was thinking there should be a website that aggregates articles linked on twitter by people from VC/founders world, but I don't think there is one sadly)

</comment><comment><USER40> Interestingly enough, I was JUST today thinking to myself, has google auto- suggest been consistently degrading or is it just me?! Now my thinking is there is some over-engineering going on (for lack of better articulation) as type auto-suggest as well as speech-to-text are just plain "off base" \+ your observation of search results, I'm sure they're all on a common, core "function" ; )

</comment><comment><USER41> I have encountered this with YouTube which prefers to offer me garbage results back rather than searching all my keywords. E.g I was searching on a react topic and all I got back was 'x reacts to this'. It looks like it weighed the word 'react' much heavier than the others even though the other words were essential to getting a useful result..

</comment><comment><USER42> Indeed, that's one obnoxious "feature" that has become omnipresent (as in in every search) lately.

</comment><comment><USER43> It seems to be weighting recent web pages a lot more since a year or more. It's annoying to search something and get 10 pages of recent pages rather than something from a year ago mixed in somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER44> I am noticing an effect of "my searches don't get better as i add and change keywords". Becoming more specific has become difficult. thankfully there are alternatives

</comment><comment><USER45> For me it's been getting consistently worse for years, not weeks or months. Is there an 'exact search terms only' search engine out there?

</comment><comment><USER46> Several days ago Google Search slowed down significantly for some of the queries I was making.

Several search queries took 2-4 seconds to return results.

</comment><comment><USER47> pretty much garbage at this point, I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I tried Duck Duck Go and Start Pages but they are not as good. I am testing Yandex, so far it's really good and performs like old Google but I don't know what are the implications of me using Russian search engine :/

</comment><comment><USER48> Mobile searches are even worse. First page is occupied with links to search within huge portals. Nothing relevant.

</comment><comment><USER49> Are there any alternatives? I am ok with indie, slow, paid, not-super-accurate options.

</comment><comment><USER50> What's the business model of it anyway? Is it providing you good search results?

<comment><USER51> Search's business model is showing adverts at the top of the page.

<comment><USER52> and knowing about everything on web

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> No, good as always :) But seriously, yesterday I wanted to deploy my beta to a fresh server install and I did like 10 google searches of various server and tool issues. I got it all resolved and the beta is running but I didn't stop at how bad these results are.

What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?

</comment><comment><USER54> Since Google+ is pretty much gone, now is the time to bring back the + operator.

</comment><comment><USER55> Can you give a single example?</comment>


Google Targets Content Farms With Major Search Algorithm Tweaks - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/24/google-targets-content-farms-with-major-search-algorithm-tweaks/

<comment><USER2> A far superior article on SEL, and it's not just because I submitted it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2260840>

Hasn't it basically been the Hacker News calling card that Techcrunch is terrible now? Yet it's still getting rewarded for sub-standard writing w/ lots of HN pageviews. Hopefully this works itself out in the next couple hours.</comment>


Collaborative web development - <AUTHOR>

Hi, with other two (or possibly more) guys I am going to build a web application. We live in three different cities and we would like to find a good way to work together.
We would like to use some version control system, but we are not sure that this would be a good idea for web development. I know about Git and I thought we could use Gitosis to make a repository on our server, but we think that this may slow down our work.
Often, when we have to adjust some code, or some graphics, we quickly modify something, save and refresh to see what happens. How can we accomplish this with Git/Gitosis?
How do you usually work in team and mantain code? <comment><USER2> I'd definitely use version control.

There's no reason you can't make quick updates with version control. You'll each have a copy of the whole site (maybe with test databases) on your dev machines, and should be able to make the update, test it on your dev machine, then commit the changes to the repository.

<comment><AUTHOR> What one of my friends says is that he usually makes some change directly on the code on the server, click CTRL-S and I can just refresh the page to see what he did.

With Git, for example, you modify the code on your machine, then save it, that you have to commit and push. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER2> You're correct. But you should be able to test the code on your machine and make sure it's correct before committing it.

Your development machine should be able to run the same code as your server.

Making changes to the public site is a very bad practice. What if your code has errors in it?

Version control also keeps everyone up to date. Before making a change to the site you'll download the most up to date version from the repository, that way your local copy has everyones changes, with comments about what they've done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I'm not thinking about making changes to the public site. At the moment there is no public site, so I'm just thinking about a good development practice. I think that when the site will be public we may have a development copy of it on the server itself. I think we need to try it in practice, because we also have many doubts about resolving conflicts and merging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Typically, a dedicated box on your local network serving up an SVN system works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you suggest SVN over Git?

<comment><USER2> Do you want centralized or decentralized version control, do you plan on doing a lot of branching, and are offline commits important?</comment></comment></comment>


The 100:10:1 method – the heart of my game design process - momo-reina https://nickbentleygames.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/the-100-10-1-method-for-game-design/ <comment><AUTHOR> This has some relation to the "Disney Method" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_method)) where one delays self-criticism until after one has engineered out the problem, and delays engineering things out until one has dreamed up ideas. Of course the Disney Method is cyclical, and requires returning to the dreaming- up state and on from there.

This also reminds me of how 35mm street/photojournalists work (see, for example, Garry Winogrand, or Josef Koudelka, or Robert Frank). One makes tens of thousands of images, culls them down via work prints to hundreds, then choose a few dozen to print well as the final work. The final images appear inevitable, though it's unclear if there was something magical in the moment of the photography, or the culling process is the secret. See [http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert- frank/the-...](http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank/the- americans-1955-57.html) for an example of Robert Frank's contact sheets and how he homed/honed in on an image.

EDIT/ADDITION: A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, photography has all sorts of parallels. Most people are shocked to find out that shooting ~1-2k images on an outing is normal.

95% of the time I won't know if a shot is "worthwhile" until after I cull/process but it's all about setting up environments that promote the chance of that happening.

Major respect for the people who used to do it in Film, much more discipline and technique required back then.

<comment><USER3> How does this work for video though? I remember reading somewhere there is about 3 hours of film shot for every hour of final product. That's more than some might think but not close to 100:1

<comment><USER4> There is significantly more planning behind video than most still photography. Scenes are story-boarded, shots are carefully set up, lighting is adjusted, etc.

When you look at video that was not carefully planned the ratio of hours shot to hours used goes way up. The Blair Witch Project had a ratio of about 12:1 and while the video from that film was effective it was hardly outstanding from an artistic point of view. Shot-on-location documentaries like Happy People or Welcome to Leith have similar ratios. Even though they're carefully shot, the ad-hoc nature of collecting footage for a film like that makes it necessary to amass a huge amount.

<comment><USER5> And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming ([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia)). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.

On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ ([http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/](http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty- towers/))

<comment><USER3> I dont know what TV editing workflow is like, but 25h doesn't seem outrageous to me. I would budget 2h of edit/mix per song when producing an album. I'm sure there are many who spend way more than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I assumed this was about video game design, and it took me a minute to catch on that it was board games.

Phase two of this approach, developing 10 prototypes over the course of 6 to 12 months, sounds incredibly labor intensive. Perhaps prototyping board games is easier than prototyping video games. But this seems like it would be a difficult phase to get through, either as a side project, or doing it commercially full time.

<comment><USER7> Not really, or it shouldn't be. If you have a few hours to spare each day on this hobby and you sit down each day and make a video game that you want to make, in very short time you might have five or ten different games that you've come up with, especially if you're impatient or have a number of different ideas.

You have to consider that a prototype can be very, very rough. If it takes 12 months to make a prototype of a video game, then that's the wrong way to go about making a prototype. This is assuming that the core premise of the game doesn't involve inventing something impossible or solving the halting problem. Even if it involved something tough, you would just have to "fake it" until you figure out what you want to make, anyway.

You should also pick a platform that lets you do things easily, and limit the time you spend. If what motivates you about a game idea is the art and you spend most of your time designing characters or worlds, then after a while you have to treat that as your prototype or put in the minimal effort to combine them, instead of making cut-scenes and making a Final Fantasy game from everything.

The audience for the prototype isn't the final audience either. Maybe it can be friends if they're uncritical but you should really just make it for yourself if you're still in the picking an idea phase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the people talking about automated or evolutionary design of board games, this has indeed been tried. The most successful one I know about is Ludi¹) which produced the game Yavalath²), which I think is a pretty darn good game.

¹) [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf](http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf)

²) [http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/](http://cameronius.com/games/yavalath/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Could be interesting to adapt this slightly for a small scale one person startup-generator and give it a shot. I usually try to work on one idea but... 1) Identify 100 problems worth solving 2) Narrow down to 10 and build MVPs for all of them in parallel 3) Go deeper on the most promising one(s)

I think the key is how to go from 2 to 3. I feel like an idea worth trying is to not focus on growth and instead monetize all 10 MVPs from the start and focus on the one(s) that can get to cash flow positive the quickest.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love Fogus's take on 100:10:1. As opposed to this highly linear ever- winnowing flow, Fogus uses 100:10:1 as a way to keep a list of spitballed ideas, a list of things he might want to work on that all have sincere promise, and one thing picked to focus on. Instead of being process driven, focusing on getting one thing done well, Fogus lets himself switch among his 10 picked items. The 10 is a way to swap out when interest wanes. _100:10:1, my approach to open source-_ [http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my- approac...](http://blog.fogus.me/2015/11/04/the-100101-method-my-approach-to- open-source/)

This process speaks to me a ton (a whole lot more than Nick's rigorous phased development process). When my attention and care for an interesting, creative project wanes, I can either dig in my heels and try to make myself code, or preferably I can switch to some other promising piece of development. Having a deck of other ideas decreases the context switch time- when a project is in a lul, there's already other great gems prepped, and one of them can re-inspire me.

Quite the contrast. I wonder how much of it is due to Fogus's focus on developing open source software, versus Nick' focus working on physical board games.

<comment><USER11> Discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513015)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >> Based on some selection criteria (which depend on my design goals and which I discuss below), I pick 10 of the 100 concepts

I used to try this as a teenager with QBASIC. I'd start writing down game ideas, but I'd always pick the 5 or so that I already knew I wanted to make. So why write down 2 pages of them?

I would probably have been better off drawing them out of a hat, working on them for a day and then just seeing where each one went.

<comment><USER13> The idea is to consider anything in the first round. You can be more creative that way. Writing it down makes you do more than just think about it and dismiss it. Then you have to come back and review the list which gives it a second chance. How many great ideas just come and go because we don't dig deeply enough on them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At first I was thinking that the methodology described appears to be waterfall approach to innovation with bing bang brainstorming and selection.

All 3 games I have seen are quite innovative pieces which took the author years to implement and perfect. The games are quite impressive, and are equivalent to innovating "chess".

On the other side one can argue, an incremental evolutionary approach to innovative games, or an agile approach would fit the current times, better, due to the rapid rate platforms maturing and disappearing. For example, I could take "chess", or mahjong and create variations to it in quick iterations with a focus on process.

<comment><USER15> Man, if only we could come up with a good "fun to play" metric for board games, I'd love to play a board game that were produced by a genetic algorithm.

<comment><USER16> You should probably check out the "Evolutionary Game Design" book, which does exactly that. The resulting game, Yavalath, was actually published and is indeed quite nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Basically just spitballing ideas. Pretty classic process for anyone creating things. Throw out a ton of ideas, and see if any stick. I try to get a new web project developed every month, if it gains some traction, continue development, if not, moved on to the next idea.

<comment><USER18> It's good to be reminded of this process though. I tend to try to take on an epic project that I think is a good idea and then am crushed when it turns out it doesn't work.

<comment><USER17> The road to success is paved with failures!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting read and approach, though you'd have to be pretty committed to pursue it in the 10 stage.

It's interesting that he talks about software, I've thought a couple of times if it's possible to produce generic board game design software but I'm still not sure.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced- game-d...](http://www.peachpit.com/store/game-mechanics-advanced-game- design-9780321820273) has an online editor for storing values in containers, then with rules for moving those values eg.

every turn, +1 food every turn, 50% chance of .. etc

it's pretty detailed, worth looking into

<comment><USER20> Agreed, it's an excellent book. The Machinations tool is available here: [http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/](http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Motown used a similar method where songwriting teams had to deliver x number of ideas per week and then the best ideas were pulled out for demos. The best demos were produced.

<comment><USER22> Late night comedy shows also. Many of the comedy writers interviewed on JR Havlan's excellent podcast "Writers' Bloc" [0] recount how writers or teams of writers will be given assignments - e.g. "Write 10 jokes about Trump's last speech" \- then they'll pick a few, refine them and go with the best one.

[0][http://writersblocpodcast.com/](http://writersblocpodcast.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This had me thinking how could I apply this to features of my side project.

I am not sure if I can. The first thing that came to mind was a set of micro services that provide some feature. These micro services would be composed into a UI using some type of bandit algorithm

</comment><comment><USER24> Very similar to how I design a game for Ludum Dare. Of course, I do this in the first hour after they announce the theme.</comment>


Why You Should Hire Me - <AUTHOR> http://www.meangeme.com/1/post/2013/08/why-you-should-hire-me.html

<comment><USER2> > I'm dedicated.

> I think Blog Every Day in August is a prime example of how dedicated I can > be.

Sorry. It's not self-evident that blogging every day equals dedication. Some might go so far as to say that blogging can only be a preliminary to productive activity.</comment>


Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/07/entrepreneurs-guide-to-customer.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to pick apart this post as a piece of really brilliant marketing. It gets so many things right:

* Link to a review

* Reviewer puts book in context of things I've already read. Gains trust.

* Incentive to evangelize -- the product is like this awesome book I've read, but easier to read. Everyone should read that awesome book, but it's too hard. Maybe I can convince them to read this.

* HN is the absolute perfect, laser-focused market for this. By definition, I want to read this book.

* The pricing sheet looks like a 37signals page--it's comforting and familiar

* DRM-free instant delivery.

This is actually the fastest (other than maybe at a grocery store) I have ever made a purchasing decision. It was under 60 seconds.

Damn, I wish I had marketing skills like this.

<comment><USER3> Only thing remaining is positive customer feedback on the book. Awaiting your evaluation. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very happy to see a 4 steps like book aimed specifically towards startup founders, I learnt a lot from 4 steps but it always had its feet in the enterprise sales side of the line.

Will also be nice to have a well finished / properly printed book, Blanks insight and advice is amazing, but the microsoft word diagrams left something to be desired.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi there.

Thanks for the kind words.

Please feel free to let @brantcooper and me (@vlaskovits) know what you think of the book: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could anyone point to/share a discount code? Thanks!

<comment><USER7> LEAN ($6.25) SLLCONF ($5.25)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great introduction to customer development that all startup founders should read (along with Four Steps to the Epiphany).

</comment><comment><USER9> How many pages has this book? I don't see the number anywhere. Could be my fault though.

<comment><USER5> @macco

There are two versions of the book. The Bootstrapper version is 75 pages, and The Startup/Enterprise Versions are 90 pages (include a presentation about CustDev that evangelists can use internally at their orgs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great marketing, great sample, and timely content.

I just bought a copy. I'd be very interested to see the sales volume data after the HN submission.

Can I convince you to do a aftermath blog post?

<comment><USER9> Do you know the book from Steve Blank? What are the difference between them. Is it worth a buy, if you own the "Four Steps to Epiphany".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I literally said "wow" as I went through the sample. This is a beautifully made PDF and I'll be sure to buy it soon. Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this looks gorgeous in fullscreen mode. Can't wait to start reading :)</comment>


Startup Idea:  Collaborative flying of real model planes with video cameras onboard - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it'd be a great business, but a fun site that would get dugg for sure. I tend to doubt there's much staying power in audiences viewing great fliers. The big draw would be actually controlling the plane (hard to scale) and viewing pilot POV to a lesser extent.

The live stream is mostly easy since you can just use wireless cameras and relay the stream from a computer on the ground. Do you know anything about making the remote computer-based control actually work and also not crash? I haven't flown RC airplanes in some years, have things advanced this far? The military remote computer controlled stuff required some pretty fancy engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> One possibility is to not have a computer-based control at all.

Instead, the plane's owner would be responsible for taking over whenever necessary to keep the plane from crashing.

As for scalability, I think collaborative control might be fun, particularly if your influence varies based on your skill level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> that's a really interesting idea. the biggest questions i have are.... 1\. how much will it cost? for equipment, sensors, etc? 2\. is anyone willing to pay for it?

If you don't want to ask anyone in particular, you can ask yourself other feasibility questions like: -how heavy will it be? will it affect the flight of the plane? -how much do current planes cost? how does that compare to the cost of adding a camera device? -how many people fly planes? how many planes do they have? -how often do people crash planes, and why do they crash? how expensive is it to fix? how does this cost compare to a camera that could prevent a crash?

my initial guess is that there is no feasible business model there, but what if you twist your idea around a bit? such as sharing videos of airplane flights? and modifying video equipment so that it could be installed on model airplanes? that could potentially be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the onboard camera is a problem, then I could just have a camera on the ground.

The idea here is to allow people to profit from their hobby by letting thousands of people fly their planes.

And those people can do so from the comfort of their homes at their computers.

You might have a free service where people fly a plane together in a collaborative way. If you want more control over the plane, then you will need to pay. You might be able to fly for free if you can demonstrate that your flying skills will draw a large audience.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone tried a startup like that?

A computer would take over whenever the flight inputs become unreasonable/unsafe.

You could reward people with reasonable flight inputs by giving them more control over flight inputs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thinking about it some more, you could have a revenue sharing system where people who build model planes can let others fly them (perhaps collaboratively) through this service. They would get a share of the profits.

Moreover, the owners of such planes can take over flight inputs whenever they are not safe. It's their planes after all.</comment></comment>


Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/deep-tracing-of-internet-explorer/

<comment><USER2> Knowing John Resig, we'll get a blog post in 6 weeks showing a 30% speedup in jQuery in ie6 and 7. This man is a machine.

<comment><USER3> 30% would be an unfair expectation to set for John :)

<comment><USER4> under or overestimate?

<comment><USER5> Under. John is known for his insane optimizations, achieving speed ups of up to 800%. [http://blog.jquery.com/2007/07/01/jquery-113-800-faster- stil...](http://blog.jquery.com/2007/07/01/jquery-113-800-faster-still-20kb/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think dynaTrace guys did something insane. Kudos!

Believe me I was doing some IE stuff (BHOs) and working with their COM extension model is one of my worst experiences (right after creating installer using WiX system).

btw. check out my web-dev tools at <http://binaryage.com> :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> That is pretty incredible. I thought that the "Develop" menu and JavaScript profiler in Safari were great, but this deep tracing tool looks even better.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how this gets such detailed information about network and DOM events without injecting debug signals into the browser binaries?

<comment><USER9> Can't you do this through COM? (Isn't that the point? I dunno, I've never programmed windows stuff...)

<comment><USER10> Yes. You can do nearly all this stuff just by hooking into MS's published interfaces. I've done many pieces of it myself, but seeing it tied together like this so comprehensively is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have any tips for memory profiling tools, other than the one mentioned in the article comments? (<http://www.softwareverify.com/javascript/memory/feature.html>, Windows-only, Firefox-only, non-free)

</comment><comment><USER12> How hard would it be for browser makers to make the kinds of information this tool needs readily available (instead of the tool maker to write very low- level code, basically a giant hack) and how much work would this save for the makers of tools such as dynaTrace?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is head and shoulders above Fiddler 2 for giving you a complete picture of what's going on.

<comment><USER13> Some tools I use

      Network
       WireShark (Cross Platform)
       Fiddler 2 (Win32)
         (Inject into SSL Requests)
      Browers Instrumenting
       Firebug (Firefox)
        FireQuery
        FireRainbow
       Html Validator (FireFox)
       Selenium IDE (FireFox)
       LeetKey (FireFox, mucking with URLEncoding/Base64 etc)
       Internet Explore Developer Tools (IE of course)
       Chrome's built in tools
       Safari's built in tools</comment></comment>


Why Bricks and Clicks Don't Always Mix - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/business/19digi.html?hpw

<comment><USER2> Blockbuster didn't fail because they didn't get into the online model fast enough. Blockbuster failed because of their pricing/fees model and lack of selection and business model. Netflix's business model is incredibly smart. Even before the online streaming, they were able to have an extremely wide selection because they didn't have to have stores carrying all of the movies in convenience locations, since they were mail-only. And allowing customers to keep the movie(s) as long as they want made customers happier than getting fees.</comment>


Now GoDaddy requires written authorization to transfer domains - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//bitelia.com/2011/12/ahora-godaddy-requiere-autorizacion-escrita-para-mover-los-dominios&hl=en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8

<comment><USER2> This is not new. Here's someone complaining about the same message in 2009: [http://www.nullamatix.com/godaddy-nightmare-express- written-...](http://www.nullamatix.com/godaddy-nightmare-express-written- objection-to-transfe/)

It does show bad customer service on GoDaddy's part but it isn't some conspiracy to prevent SOPA protestors from leaving.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got this on one of my domains too, and it was because of the private whois information (Domains By Proxy). After I removed that, it worked just fine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a Google Translate link because I can't find any article in English. If someone finds it, please submit.

</comment><comment><USER4> I transferred mine today without any problem.</comment>


Coursera Raises $64M in Series D Funding - <AUTHOR> https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-funding-series-d-64-million/ <comment><USER2> I don't usually have such strong feelings about a for-profit entity but I hope they do really well, and so does Udacity.

(And, I suppose, EdX)</comment>


Largest network of cortical neurons mapped from ~100 terabytes data set - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/largest-network-of-cortical-neurons-mapped-from-100-terabytes-data-set <comment><USER2> How large was the previously mapped network? It seems that cortical neurons are the most common neurons examined for this sort of thing. $18m seems small, especially when compared to the $1b that OpenAI has raised.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone blogging about their new niche web app? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I'm wondering if there are any HNers out there just starting a new niche web app as a side (or full time) project. And is anyone blogging about their experiences? <comment><USER2> I'm not blogging but we are a new niche start up targeting the school sector in the UK, <http://www.studentreport.co.uk>

If you know of any teachers/schools that'll benefit from an app like this, do pass it on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a college student working on a niche web app, a multiple choice test maker for teachers. Dev blog: <http://www.deveneur.com> App: <http://www.girps.com></comment>


How I Write: Start with a Series of Sincere Sentences - <AUTHOR> https://markan.me/series-of-sincere-sentences/ <comment><USER2> I don't know but it seems like a poor article. From what I know, every time you write an Idea, you should always conclude it with an example explaining your point. Like for example, take your first guideline * Once idea per sentence At the end, you could add an example to explain your point.</comment>


A German Couple Winds Up on U.S. No-Fly List - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-german-couple-winds-up-on-the-u-s-no-fly-list-a-1227620.html <comment><USER2> >> In September 2014, the list of people not allowed to fly into the U.S. or through U.S. airspace contained 64,000 names. Before 9/11, only 16 people had been on it.

Oh. So there are ways to quantify the rise of paranoia in US security agencies following 9/11, after all.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole idea of a "no fly list" is absurd. People have their rights restricted without being accused, much less convicted, of any crime. It's astonishing it's passed constitutional muster (for US citizens anyway).

<comment><USER4> But wouldn't it be more absurd to wait until _after_ someone hijacked a plane before putting them on the no fly list?

<comment><USER5> No, it wouldn't, under the United States Constitution and the American justice system with its roots in common law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation)

But it does seem the modern American ethos seems to be one that is losing its courage and backbone, with more and more people preferring security theater to freedom on principle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The little story at the very end of the article is ominous. If an airline wants to refuse boarding they can say "you are on the US no-fly list" because you can't easily check that you aren't -- unless you are willing to risk buying another ticket just to make sure.

<comment><USER7> The other option is to openly record the conversation when you are guven such a ridiculous reason. Might not hold up in a court of law but it will sure hold up in the court of social media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about a EU no-fly list for personal of the US Intelligence Community. I mean, don't even cross our airspace. 0o

<comment><USER9> Going to be hard and would be ineffective. For one, America still has several military bases in Germany alone e.g. Ramstein, which was used by the CIA in the Milan kidnapping [0][1].

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

[1] Black Hat talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwGsr3SzCZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwGsr3SzCZc)

<comment><USER8> If it was easy and effective, I would not really want that either. Just some counter pressure against these practices.

I just feel that there should be mutual respect of our countries citizens. We don't stop Americans from visiting our country or our neighbors countries. We don't ask for their passwords on entry either.

I'd like the same rights to visit your country as you have visiting mine.

<comment><USER10>
      We don't stop Americans from visiting our country

You're sure of this? Have you actually checked?

Heck, for one example, the UK has banned an American radio talkhosr just for his commentary, with no criminal charges on either side of the pond. A nation is entitled to choose its guests (aside from diplomats).

<comment><USER11> Are you talking about Alex Jones?

He doesn't seem to be on this list, but please add him if you can find a reliable source:

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

<comment><USER12> Michael Savage. While I agree he's said some pretty terrible things, I do find it kind of weird that he's on that list when so many other similar people aren't. They should really either remove his name or add like 50 other names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It has become rather embarrassing to be a tax-paying US citizen.

</comment><comment><USER14> You have to read the story to understand what really happened.

They have German passports, but are of Kurdish, Tunisian and Turkish origins and have had previous travel issues.

<comment><USER15> Yes, their previous travel issue was being interviewed at the Turkish border, a friend of his admitted that he was not a fan of Erdogan. Come on. The US based on that complaint put them on their nofly list. That's a banana republic violating their own constitution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This doesn't make sense to me. Eurowings flies non-stop Munich to Havana, and there is no _need_ to cross US airspace on that route, nor would that be relevant with no stops in US airports.</comment>


Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/disgruntled-employee-kills-journalspace-with-data-wipe-2009015/

<comment><USER2> If you read the original post, the supposed "disgruntled employee" worked for lagomorphics, not JournalSpace, and there's no evidence said employee was involved in the data loss, just conjecture by JournalSpace.

Flagged for being incorrect and not adding anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> There don't seem to be new facts in this article, but it discards the "catastrophic OS flaw" theory and selects the "disgruntled employee" theory though it appears to conflate it with a historical disgruntled employee. It seems this is possibly shoddy reporting rather than new information.

Back at journalspace, I notice that if you buy their domain names they will throw in 6 months of free hosting on the same machines that destroyed their business. How generous.

</comment><comment><USER4> The original journalspace announcement was discussed here, btw: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762>

</comment><comment><USER5> If true, the disgruntled employee belongs in jail.

<comment><USER6> What I can't fathom is whether this person realized that there were any legal ramifications to doing a data wipe?

Did he think they'd just ignore the fact that he just killed their business?

<comment><USER5> Criminals often have poor impulse control, and let their emotions govern their actions without worrying very much about the consequences of their actions. This is particularly accentuated in those criminals who are also affected by psychopathy, for which the consequences of their actions towards other people are irrelevant.

<comment><USER7> How do you know the full story of it? A lot of startups in the valley now are totally dicking their employees out of equity and doing "firing layoffs" instead of really laying people off.

How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in some kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

I can think of quite a few startups these days that deserve a similar fate to happen to them.

Journalspace sounds like one of an army of web 2.0 startups that aren't going to survive the coming years anyways and go broke. Maybe the founders can now focus on better projects. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

<comment><USER5> > How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in > some kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

It's irrelevant. If you have a dispute with someone and you feel he is treating you unfairly, it's your right to leave and/or sue him, not to burn his house down. If you burn his house down you are a criminal, no matter what he did to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand -- they seem to have been hosted by someone else; did the hosts not do backups or did the employee somehow delete those too?

Seems like at least two things went wrong.

<comment><USER9> It looks like automated backups is an add-on service, not part of their base hosting package.

<comment><USER10> As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their off-site SAN. I was not amused.

First rule of backups: trust nobody!

<comment><USER11> There's an infinite variety of problems that can exist with backups. Back in the early eighties I had to restore a file from a backup that was more than a year old, but couldn't read the tape (even though it was the same drive that created the backup). We called in our Field Engineer and he hooked an oscilloscope up to the tape drive and adjusted it until we were finally able to read the tape. It took most of a day.

<comment><USER9> Backups almost seem to be a running joke. Whenever we've done a restore of a db from backup the plan is basically "try to restore from the latest backup, if that doesn't work, try the next latest one and so on until you find one that works".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remember that scene in The Matrix where Cypher kills Switch and Apoc by unplugging them. "Not like this."

Wow. What a way to go.

</comment><comment><USER13> and here is the link to the guys who fked them over:

<http://www.lagomorphics.com/>

Its funny that they listed Journalspace under their "notable clients" section.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting problem: how can you get to having backups if the person whose responsibility it would have been to take care of backups is the one who screws you over.

I guess this calls for technical CEOs...

<comment><USER15> The two-man rule?

First one who snitches on his coworker gets a bonus?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> having no tape backup is a crime

<comment><USER17> I thought tape backup had died out (good riddance 40MB QIC tapes).

This article: <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=267> from 2 years ago calculated that tape becomes practical when you have more than 10TB to backup, I imagine it is even worse now, that is you need to backup even more data before tape becomes the economy option.

Maybe there is some recent advance in tape technology?

<comment><USER11> Tape is a long way from being dead. We have tape libraries directly attached to our SAN and they backup 160 GB per tape. Because of data retention laws (we are a government agency) we need to archive backups for years, which we do off-site in a data vault. For SOHO use though, disk-to-disk backups generally are cheaper and faster, but it's still important to store backups off-site.</comment></comment></comment>


Code Is Political - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/code-is-political <comment><USER2> I had hoped the article would talk about how code being used in the real world has political ramifications (e.g. software used to spy on people). Instead I get a potpourri from the interesting to the stupid:

\- قلب: The English language bias in computing is huge, and even though e.g. Java allows for Unicode identifiers, its keywords are still in English.

Microsoft's Excel on the other hand has localized function names. Perhaps because it's meant to be used by end users who would simply not accept English names, whereas programmers are (for one reason or another) expected to know English.

I really started to notice this when reading a review of the C++ library boost.locale, where the reviewer criticized the library because it assumed software would be either written in English and then translated into other languages or translated into English and from there into other languages[1][2].

Incidentally there seems to be a really active C++ community in Japan, with a Japanese translation of Boost's documentation[3] to hardcore metaprogramming libraries such as Sprout[4].

\- transCoder: Somewhat interesting as an art project. However conflating binary-based computers and gender seems far-fetched. Furthermore, there are or at least were analogue computers.

\- Feminist programming language: The linked blog post is very light on content. And of course "Software engineering consists of one agent (the programmer) giving commands, and another (the computer) ... obeying them"; after all it's about telling a machine what to do so I don't have to do it myself.

\- 4chan: The less said about the misogynist, racist denizens of /g/, the better.

[1] [http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2011/04/180223.php](http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2011/04/180223.php)

[2] Rant in Japanese here: [http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=ja&to=en&a=h...](http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=ja&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fcpplover.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F04%2Fboostlocale.html)

[3] [http://boostjp.github.io/](http://boostjp.github.io/)

[4] [https://github.com/bolero-MURAKAMI/Sprout](https://github.com/bolero- MURAKAMI/Sprout)</comment>


Waza - Heroku developer conference - $300 - Feb 28 - <AUTHOR> https://waza.heroku.com/2013

<comment><USER2> Is this for developers with apps running on Heroku or developers of Heroku add-ons and such? I think it's the former, but I am not sure.

<comment><USER3> It's a general-purpose web developer conference put on by Heroku. Last year was the most ridiculous conference I've ever been to (it had a sake opening ceremony, catered sushi, Rob Pike, and a rock concert)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPDbzpZS_gg>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz4EHZufii0>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went last year -- it's a very high quality, general-interest web engineering conference.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a personal view on conferences

The higher level the issue debated, the less value there is in a conference (higher level - not necessarily 'closer to the metal')

As such

Python conference - sign me up! Django or Pylons conference - ok Pinax conference - don't waste my money

Because it gets more specific, less flexible every time.

A conference on CSS/HTML5? Looks cool. A conference on LESS? C'mon

Especially for $300 dollars

</comment><comment><USER6> You got to hand it to Heroku for their site design.

I particularly like their understated google map marker as the icon to click to find the location.

</comment><comment><USER7> Where is the schedule? am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER8> $300 to go see this joker? <https://waza.heroku.com/2013/speakers/aaron- patterson>

Have these people lost touch with the value of money? If Im paying $300 for one day I better learn a shit load not have to listen to some dude bull shit me about his "street dance offs".

I mean maybe that guys actually legit and is just trying to be funny. But im honestly frustrated at how expensive all these conferences are, for a free lance/startup person its way too much.

<comment><USER9> Heh. I think it's funny that you think $300 is a lot. I'm in the mid-west and $300 is still not a lot for a one-day conference.

<comment><USER10> $300 is cheap for a conference where great speakers give great talks about about focused topics that are relevant to your career and/or interests. $300 is expensive for a conference where some "cool" hackers spend the day cracking in-jokes and showing silly slides.

<comment><USER9> Then you obviously think this conference isn't for you. Too bad you can't just accept that, not by a ticket, and leave the judgement at home.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The high-risk, high-reward world of selling random stuff on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/amazon-sellers-marketplace/index.html <comment><USER3> I list trading cards (YGO, MTG) on Amazon, in addition to TCGPlayer.

Amazon is very lucrative because I can list commons at $0.01 where there's almost zero competition and make all of my money on shipping. I do this at high volume and have a high amount of repeat business/trust. I aggressively price the more expensive stuff and it works out well. YGO in particular is very good on Amazon because the secondary market for non-rares is shit for that game. Players have a hard time getting the low-value cards they need without opening new product or doing bulk buys.

I can often get 5x-10x what I would for some things (cheaper products that sell at higher volumes) on TCGPlayer because the market (customers & expectations) is different. Plus the feedback is a lot better. The fraud rate on Amazon is a fraction of what is at the card game sites.

<comment><USER4> How do you make money on shipping? Do you use first class mail or media mail? Whenever I sell used stuff on amazon I end up losing my shirt on shipping.

<comment><USER3> First Class Mail. You set a shipping rate on Amazon that covers your costs and then some, for most shipping conditions. Free shipping is the sucker play (except for boxes/cases/etc)

I do not bother with Media Mail ever (except internationally with certain repeat customers). It is too slow and makes buyers unhappy.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I always do "free shipping" but I guess that's my mistake...

<comment><USER5> I think this kind of market is the exception instead of the norm. It sounds like the cost of business is time, not inventory.

Thus, charging for shipping instead of inventory makes more sense.

<comment><USER3> You've nailed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has a (not so surprising) resemblance with the current state of app development for Google's Play Store.

This is discussed e.g. here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/9n88wv/the_futu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/9n88wv/the_future_of_android_development/)

<comment><USER7> It's really quite unnerving that Google (and Apple) has the potential to destroy any of the numerous mobile-first companies out there with effectively the flick of a switch. An entire company could be shut down, and many jobs ended, just by having their app suddenly deemed to be unacceptable. I'm looking forward to seeing what the EU will try to do about it.

<comment><USER8> Having your business model around Google is not a good idea. Try to be as independent as possible.

If you really depend, you are in high risk and should be ready to be shut down at any time.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like obvious advice in theory, but in practice you will run into a lot of problems.

Google's Play store has a quasi-monopol on Android app sales, alternative app stores make up a small fraction in the promille range.

<comment><USER9> Make a web app in addition to your native apps? Then if they pull the native app you can direct people to the web app. I think Uber has this?

<comment><USER10> Could you make an app that just installs your web app in the launcher so the user only uses your webapp directly? iirc that can't be pulled as easily by Google.

<comment><USER9> I've done that - it's a pretty poor experience in practice.

<comment><USER11> Why is that? What has been your experience?

<comment><USER9> I found it harder to make a clean, smooth user interface. Lots of workarounds to make things fit into the right place, to make the right thing in focus for user input. I'm not a professional front-end developer so maybe I just wasn't any good at it, but achieving a basic level of quality was much harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lately, i use shopify and private label the stuff from China.

I sell exclusively through Facebook ads.

Around 20K per month revenue with 70% margin.

This is in UK only. I've no idea how to move product to the US and sell there.

I've not found any company which can take my products from UK and store it in a wharehouse in the US then dispatch them to address i specify.

Lemme know if you know about any such company.

<comment><USER13> If you can get a USA company to do store-and-dispatch for you, why can't the Chinese sellers do that in the UK?

Aside: I was looking at something, cables for a multimeter IIRC - <USER2> shipped from China than the delivery cost from UK providers; I can't get my brain around that. It means Chinese shippers are getting cheaper shipping for the Euro stretch than local shippers? (Local providers aren't overcharging the shipping AFAICT).

<comment><USER14> Related to the aside: It has been this way for a while. Check out ebay listings for < $1 USD shipped. Pretty much anything you could buy in a dollar store and more can be shipped to your door for less than a dollar if you are willing to wait up to 30 days sometimes. That entire inter-country shipping system is broken. From what I understand, they hand off the package with no fees going to the USPS. I believe it is that way for most tiny packages.

<comment><USER15> It's not that no fees go to the USPS, but the fees that go to the USPS are pre-negotiated by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which is a multi-national organization within the UN that the USPS is a member of.

China is considered a Group III country by the UPU, which is a "mid level developing country". Other countries in that group include Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand. The US is a Group I "Industrialized" country. Shipments from a Group III to a Group I country equate to about $1 - $1.50 USD per pound (it's not a linear scale and per/lb rate fluctuates based on total weight).

<comment><USER13> That's really interesting; thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
        was stuck with 600 stackable baby formula
        dispensers in her garage

Is this an over-dramatization, or is Amazon really that much of a monopoly, that you cannot get rid of inventory at all elsewhere?

I can understand that other marketplaces might not be efficient enough to turn a profit. But just selling the inventory at purchase price?

What alternatives are there? Ebay comes to mind. Anything else?

<comment><USER17> The key word her is "stackable" so the seller is focusing on volume selling which is very effective with amazon's one listing per item policy. If the item is very popular then having 600 of some item could be a weeks worth of inventory. Whereas on other sites, you would have to list on site and then everything is seller-by-seller....so if people don't see your listing or your price isn't good enough then you get no sales.

but yeah, that's just how it is. Selling products on ebay/amazon is not a guaranteed source of income so those types of businesses are inherently high- risk, especially if you are focusing on a specific product line or niche products.

<comment><USER16>
        so if people don't see your listing or your price
        isn't good enough then you get no sales

Again, I understand how that can prevent a profit.

But how does it hinder you to put ads (I guess both Ebay and Amazaon have those) for your product and sell it off for half the price?

I'm not addressing that she might have to fold her business. I'm only addressing the being stuck with inventory part. That makes it sound like she had to throw it away or something.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, sellers do that all the time. You can liquidate. There are also Facebook groups where sellers bulk liquidate.

The fact that they were stuck with inventory in the garage just means they had no idea what they were doing.

<comment><USER19> "Stuck with" is a colloquialism. It's just saying that she'd planned to make X profit and instead will end up with a loss. There's plenty of ways to make a loss: sell it at a discount (near or below what you bought for) or spend so much effort making sales that your opportunity cost is more than your profit. The article's point isn't about how she's going to get rid of her useless inventory, so it just uses the shorthand that she's not selling at Amazon and has no immediate profitable back-up plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, there are a lot of screwballs in the Amazon marketplace, and as a regular Amazon customer, I'm quite happy that they stick up for me. It's also clear that Amazon needs to improve their system for vendors. Shutting a vendor off without some form of human contact or rapid appeal will ultimately hurt their marketplace.

I once had to file an A to Z complaint, and the vendor called me personally asking me to cancel the complaint. In this case, the vendor was a bit of a screwball and entered into Amazon that he shipped me the entire order. I only received part of my order, and after a week of emailing back and forth, I realized that the vendor never had the missing item in stock.

On the phone, the vendor pushed really hard on me to cancel my A to Z complaint. I flatly told the vendor that Amazon listed the item as delivered to my address, and he never shipped it. I then told him he needed to work with Amazon to resolve the problem. He should have never called me in the first place. Instead, he should have been able to work out the problem with Amazon.

At that point it became clear to me that Amazon might be a bit too heavy- handed with vendors. Even though the vendor was clearly in the wrong, and clearly a screwball, the fear in his voice of an A to Z complaint made me suspect that Amazon is too heavy handed in handling disputes like mine.

<comment><USER3> If there's anything I've learned from selling on Amazon, it's that both buyers and sellers are willing to pay a premium for the smooth experience that Amazon provides.

Literally everyone benefits. I honestly don't know how Ebay, PayPal, and retailers stay in business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are some strategies to prevent Amazon from destroying your business, but you have to be very careful.

I know people who make 3k+/month with a 3-5k+ investment. They don't really care that it doesn't work anymore for that specific product after 4-5 months. The ROI is crazy. But most people don't know how to do this properly and lose money. For these people it's basically gambling and I wouldn't recommend it. It's hard to pull it off consistently.

edit: OT - is it just my perception or is HN more interested in passive income sources lately? (also making passive money with SaaS like the projects on indiehackers.com)

<comment><USER21> Being interested in passive income is a new trend, over the past 10 years. Nothing wrong with it, but everyone I know with spare money and a little ambition is trying to flip houses or buy rental properties. Or sell things for Amazon. Or run a delivery chain for Amazon.

<comment><USER22> Looking for passive income is not a new thing, investing and rent-seeking are pretty classic ideas

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where I grew up small businesses could be "turned off" by the local government at the drop of a hat if they competed with the businesses of the well connected, the owner offended the wrong person, etc, etc. It would all eventually be "made right", sometimes in court, but because most business was seasonal many businesses would fold in the time it took for things to be "made right".

Is having an algorithm flag you and ruin your business and source of income with no warning and inadequate recourse really that different from the status quo?

<comment><USER24> Yes. Government, even moreso local governement, is supposed to be subject and an expression of the will of the people. The multinational corporation is barely so.

When the company screws you over, you'll have no recourse. This is the libertarian dream.

<comment><USER23> Amazon can't send cops to my house if I decide I'm gonna keep selling my product on eBay or register for a new Amazon seller account. If you keep trying to run a business that's been condemned by local government eventually cops will show up and stop you from running that business.

The stakes are lower in the case of Amazon. You're not renting shop space. You're not sitting on as much inventory. You can jump ship more easily (kind of hard to relocate your business to another location). The trade-off is that they can also kick you out more easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know a couple of people who have done this with some success. It's basically a game of front-running since you'll never compete on price, unless you own the factory or have a real sweetheart deal.

Your only hope is to pick up the pennies on your race to the bottom, especially with your platform (Amazon) liable to compete with you, in addition to some very hungry foreigners who can live off of much less than you due to pitching power disparities.

</comment><comment><USER26> [meta] 4 popups + 1 "read more" \+ 1 autoplay video on mobile. The experience is quite subpar here, probably the worst offender I've seen in a while.

Edit: added 1 extra popup that appeared on changing tabs to write this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reading this , selling on Amazon sounds like online gambling.

As soon as you start to win they cut you off.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm an amazon merch seller. Less risk but still crazy rules. I had a successful shirt, then copycats sold my shirt for less. I made a complaint to take down their shirt, and amazon took down my shirt instead. No matter how many times I email them they won't undo that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Amazon is also not fighting for customers, afaik. If something goes wrong, they dump you instructions on how to make it a task for the local police. And then they repeat this again and again.

</comment><comment><USER30> I call it 'Dancing with the dragon'. It's thrilling most of time and you sometime think you tamed the Dragon. But you only get burnt once ...

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there a startup opportunity here for a company that focuses on being an Amazon substitute for suppliers that have been kicked off Amazon?

</comment><comment><USER32> People who drop ship stuff and/or resell bulk inventory for chinese manufacturers act as conduits for copycat and/or counterfeit merchanidise.

</comment><comment><USER33> Warning autoplays video. Blocked site.

<comment><USER34> I use a Chrome extension called Mute Tabs By URL (1). It doesn't stop the video, just mutes the audio. Quick and easy to add sites.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mute-tabs-by- url/b...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mute-tabs-by- url/bpokcenamldgbghabnklpmbkkcgcgdld)</comment></comment>


Harvard Study Shows Apple Slows Down Old iPhones to Sell New Models - <AUTHOR> http://www.anongroup.org/harvard-study-iphones/ <comment><USER3> > Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends > could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked > multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time.

This isn't news.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am skeptical that apple would be that shortsighted. If there was a smoking gun here, it would likely kill their smartphone business. I will share an anecdote that I hear at every release cycle for each new idevice:

Stepson: Hey, my phone is glitching and slow. I think I need a new phone.

Me: Really? let me take a look. <tap through a few apps and settings>. Hmm I dont see anything wrong, other than you are connected to the wifi network that is about 300 feet away from you.(My inlaws have a wide open wifi network in their house)

Stepson: oh, ok, but its still glitching. I need a new Phone!!!!!!!

Me: whenever you are ready to pay for it in cash since you still owe about 600 for that one...

Stepson: :(

<a few weeks later>

Stepson: hey I dropped my phone, I need a new one...

I am convinced that apple has built a time released lubricant into their phones that causes kids to drop them when the new models are released....

<comment><USER5> It says right in the article that the most likely cause is the way Apple only makes sure new OSes work well on the newest devices. I've found this to be anecdotally true myself.

<comment><USER6> Anecdotally I've found the opposite, within acceptable terms.

I have an original iPad mini running ios9 that honestly was better on 8 - <USER2> there is no maliciousness there: it's extremely old hardware that happens to have been supported for updates longer than it "should have" because it was in a new form factor (iPad 2 internals squished into a mini size)

<comment><USER7> This sounds like the same conclusion as parent, not the opposite.

<comment><USER6> I did say "within acceptable terms" and qualify why I think it's reasonable that the iPad mini doesn't perform as fast as a new device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's more to the "study" than plotting google search traffic and iPhone release dates, right? While it's a compelling graph, do they take metrics from devices?

Personally, when someone releases a new version or model of something I have - car, computer, phone, etc - I notice all the flaws and problems with what I have. I assume it's me attempting to rationalize "you know, maybe I should look at that new one.."

</comment><comment><USER9> This is clickbait and (low quality) speculation. Should we allow this type of story to appear on the front page?

</comment><comment><USER10> I was an engineer at Apple for a while and I never got the feeling that this was malicious behavior. New features and ever increasing codebase always makes things slow down, and speed of old devices was never the top priority; instead, new power hungry features were often released to take advantage of new hardware speeds, so it's not surprising to me that the biggest iOS slowdowns coincide with new hardware releases.

</comment><comment><USER11> Apple sells their old models as the low-their versions of their phone. I highly doubt they are intentionally limiting these device that they sell.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've wondered if the reasons why Apple changes their UX so much, in small and big ways, is so they the new phone becomes "your" phone. You're forced to learn new swipes, taps, etc. Overtime the muscle memory makes other (and older) phones feel awkward. Often it doesn't seem like Apple needs to do this, but it could explain why.

</comment><comment><USER13> This clickbait article links to a dailymail article posted in July 2014 as the source, which links to a NYTimes article posted 2 days earlier in 07/2014 as the source.

The article in NYT is about a phd student from Harvard showing the correlation in Google Trends wrt "iPhone slow"keyword and concluding that the Google Trends show a correlation and cannot be concluded that "Apple slows down old iPhones..." as it is in the title.

So much for a "Harvard Study".

</comment><comment><USER14> The study's methods are flawed, but I've had multiple experiences with iPhone users in bars asking me if I can do something about their recently updated iPhone being so sluggish (which they demonstrate to me, it's real), they all bitch about the inability to undo the update and how this is going to force them to replace what was a perfectly good phone.

It's too bad this study is useless since it just harms the very real upgrade treadmill case against apple.

</comment><comment><USER15> Showing Google trends for a keyword is now considered a "study" ?

Personally I've noticed that my iPad slowed down after upgrading to iOS 10. I wasn't planning on upgrading but a restore forced me to. I believe it's because devs develop on latest devices and tend to ignore the older ones.

</comment><comment><USER16> There isn't a gun, but there is smoke. I think the title is misleading for sure, but it seems reasonable that further testing could be done to prove this is accurate.

In fact, I'm hoping someone will followup with actual performance tests.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a 2014 story (and also utter nonsense.)

</comment><comment><USER18> After buying new Apple computers for 25 years and iPhones for 10 years now I can attest that they've done this.

My wife has recently been complaining that her iPhone 6 is getting slow and has with everyone she had before it.

I will give Apple credit for not obsoleting my `09 Mac Mini as fast as they did every Mac I purchased before it, but it's definitely on that path now because it won't run their latest OS.

Not sure if I'll buy a new one. The "Mini" is the only thing they have that I'd consider and if they don't keep one in the $500 range I'll build a Linux box and use it going forward from here.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hahahha wait so the study is just, "more people search for this"? This doesn't show anything. Show me an actual speed test pre/post software update.

</comment><comment><USER20> Samsung doesn't update the software on their old devices.

This leads to security holes for sure, but my older Samsung devices running old Andriod versions are actually pretty snappy.

To bad there isn't a middle ground, but I guess that would be expensive to maintain old OS versions.

</comment><comment><USER21> The study examines search queries, rather than actually examining the hardware's performance. It is quite possible that this is a psychological effect, particularly since the (rumoured) release dates of new models are well known.

</comment><comment><USER22> Youtube video where the IOS speed is tested on all compatible iPhones: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMAcZFNq0bI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMAcZFNq0bI)

</comment><comment><USER6> Software that does more things can run slower on older devices: news at 11

<comment><USER23> That's true, but what we really need to know is what are the typical performance benchmarks that are required when launching a new software update? And does Apple change its internal performance requirements for older phones when new phones are released.

If internal documents from Apple showed that Dev's were allowed to release code that performed badly, but only at certain times of the release cycle, that news would be huge.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

Comparing to Samsung is just a joke - how often do android users even get the choice to update, not to mention how Samsung releases may or may not match up with Google (Android) ones.

<comment><USER24> My 4 year old Samsung received an update to 7.0 last month, and a security patch the week after. I agree android patching is poor compared to apple, but a lot of fault lies with the phone companies refusing to pass updates onto the end user rather then the company making the phone.

<comment><USER25> Your experience is accurate and makes the point.

Android releases are not generally available at a consistent time. Apple marches software release in lock-step with hardware release.

When you write an article citing a "study" based on a spike of Google searches, the Android based metrics will be more spread out because implementation of the new software is more spread out. A "study" should control for that sort of variance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The most likely explanation is new phone buyers googling their first time setup problems, isn't it?

</comment><comment><USER27> Relative the the newer models the older models will be slower ...

</comment><comment><USER28> In other news, the ocean is wet.</comment>


Show HN: Lighthearted, novice-friendly, storytelling-focused roleplaying game - <AUTHOR> https://playmirage.io <comment><AUTHOR> This is a little hobby project I'm working on, and I'm really proud of how it turned out.

Mirage is a lighthearted, social, easy to learn roleplaying game, focused on storytelling, improvisation, imagination and creativity. Your goal is to make up and play out a fun story. You will go on adventures, complete quests, find treasure, slay dragons, and gain awesome powers.

Mirage is made for the people who, like me, enjoy the social/creative aspects of Dungeons and Dragons, but don't like the countless arguments over the intricate rules, the painfully slow combat encounters, and all the tedious arithmetics.

It's perfect for people who want to get started with roleplaying but have no experience, and it's great for getting your non-gamer friends or kids into RPGs. It's great for improvisers and storytellers who want to focus on playing a fun long-form improv game, without the complicated rules getting in the way.

The rules are very simple, but deep and interesting enough for the experienced players to play over a long period of time.

Players can create a character and begin playing in 15 minutes. For GMs we have a collection of adventures that are easy to prepare and run: [https://rpgadventures.io](https://rpgadventures.io)

You can play it in-person or over discord. It's super fun, and I hope you guys enjoy it!</comment>


"Holy Grail" Bugs in Emulation, Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://mgba.io/2017/07/31/holy-grail-bugs-2/ <comment><USER2> I suspect a lot of these bugs, especially those related to timing, were not intended specifically as anti-piracy/anti-emulation; given that the games are developed for a single platform, it's common that programmers would naturally explore and exploit the full capability of the platform, whether officially documented or otherwise. Relying on instruction, CPU-GPU, and even cartridge access timings is thus perfectly reasonable.

One way to get "perfect" emulation is to completely reverse-engineer the system down to the transistor level, wherein the timing relationships between all the components are revealed. I believe this has been done only for a _very_ small number of game consoles, of which I'm aware of are the Atari VCS/2600[1] and NES[2]. Even a GameBoy hasn't been analysed to this level, much less a GBA or DS.

Also, this: [https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break- al...](https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your- emulators/)

[1] [http://blog.visual6502.org/2014/10/atari-2600-simulation.htm...](http://blog.visual6502.org/2014/10/atari-2600-simulation.html)

[2] [https://github.com/SourMesen/VisualNes](https://github.com/SourMesen/VisualNes)

<comment><USER3> Yeah some of this do not seem like bugs, but more like devs making full use of their sole and direct access to the hardware while the game is running.

After all, the Nintendo hand held line may well be closer to the NES and C64 than a modern PC or smartphone.

A lovely example of a bug in a game that may as well be intention is a use after free memory bug in the DOS version of SimCity. This went uncaught during development because DOS didn't have the checks in place as modern OSs do. But trying to run it on Windows and you get an error.

So what Microsoft did in the name of backwards compatibility and user friendliness was to program and exception for the SimCity binary.

Similarly the stability of Win9x was kinda compromised by how the cmd window had virtually all the capabilities of DOS. This to the point of being able to poke various BIOS memory areas.

<comment><USER4> The article is about bugs in emulators, not the games they emulate.

<comment><USER3> It is more about emulation accuracy than out and out bugs.

It is about how certain games behaves in ways that may or may not be bugs in a strict sense, but still go outside the expected environment set down by the hardware documentation while still functioning on the actual hardware.

So be it cmd in Windows, or Dosbox, if one want to run the unmodified SimCity binary from back then it will have to allow it to access ram after it was freed. Because when it worked back then, but do not work now, where is the incorrect behavior (or bug if you will) actually located?

<comment><USER4> The goal of an emulator is to reproduce the behaviour of the original machine, whether that behaviour was expected by it's designers is irrelevant. If it can't do so, for whatever reason, then it's a bug as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It didn't occur to me until I was developing a Game Boy Color game to understand just how difficult it would be to create an accurate emulator.

For Infinity ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12291850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12291850)) we employed a number of tricks, notably changing video parameters mid-render. For example, when walking around on the overworld, the screen looks tilted. This was done by adjusting the camera's X offset after each scanline.

Before this experience, I would have thought all an emulator needs to do is emulate the CPU, and render video frames as fast as possible based on video memory. Instead, the GPU needs to be fully emulated too, drawing pixels from top to bottom and left to right, at exactly the rate expected of real hardware and in sync with the CPU.

Speaking of hardware tricks, one neat thing we discovered during development was that if a cartridge isn't present, then reading from the ROM memory area returned zeros. This was possible to do if your code was running from RAM and could survive a cartridge being taken out while it was running. This only worked with Game Boy Color (and not original Game Boy) because Nintendo removed the safety lock from the power switch. There is actually code in Infinity to do something with this, although it is unfinished. Just another ridiculous thing emulator authors would have to support somehow. :)

<comment><USER3> The GBC is basically a handheld NES. And changing parameters mid-scanline was a trick on various microcomputers as well (i think it was used on the Amiga to push up the number of colors you could use by swapping the pallette).

And i am not surprised that a non-cartridge would read zeros. I suspect the GB(C) was set up somewhat similar to the C64, where the cartridge connector on the back was basically wired to certain RAM pins on CPU.

<comment><USER6> > The GBC is basically a handheld NES.

Do they just have roughly comparable computational power--or do they actually share some chips?

<comment><USER7> They don't share chips, and the GBC should be much more powerful than the NES.

The NES had a CPU based on the MOS Technology 6502 running at around 1MHz, 2KB of RAM, 2 screens of video tile memory, and 2 sprite layers, with support for 64 sprites, max of 8 per line.

The GBC had a CPU loosely based on a Z80 running at about 4 or 8MHz, 32KB of RAM, smaller resolution, more colors available (and more displayable on-screen at once), fewer sprites (40), but more displayable on one line (10).

<comment><USER8> _> CPU loosely based on a Z80_

Emphasis on "loosely". It's a weird thing.

[https://realboyemulator.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/the- nintend...](https://realboyemulator.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/the-nintendo- game-boy-1/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part one can be found here: [https://mgba.io/2017/05/29/holy-grail- bugs/](https://mgba.io/2017/05/29/holy-grail-bugs/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Given clock speed isn't improving by leaps and bounds, will we get to a point where if becomes fundamentally impossible to emulate certain types of game systems on general purpose computers?

<comment><USER10> Games for high end computers trivially satisfy this.

<comment><USER9> They re-compile them though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny that these things are mostly referred to as 'emulator bugs'. It would be more accurate to call them bugs in the game.

It's a bit like the situation with C, where some code depends on a specific outcome of undefined behavior.

With this, I don't mean that the programmer of the game is to blame. If you are developing for a single system, it is reasonable to use some of the properties of this system. In this specific situation, it might even be of interest for Nintendo, since it makes it harder to pirate games.

If one would like to avoid a situation like this, it seems best to develop for an emulator with unreliable properties (the principle of fail-fast: crash and let the developer know that he makes an assumption that is not guaranteed to hold), but which implements the ISA faithfully.

<comment><USER3> Nah. These are emulators built not to just run the games, but to be have as closely as possible to the real hardware companies were shipping for years.

This means that if a game that worked on actual hardware is not working in emulation, the emulator is no behaving accurately enough compared to the hardware.</comment></comment>


"Ask HN: Review my Startup" in real life (Wash DC, June 21) - <AUTHOR>

Want to try something new? The next HN Readers meetup in DC is going to take the format of an "Ask HN: Review my Startup" post, but in real life.
If you are an early-stage startup, this is a great chance to get face-to-face feedback from Hacker News readers on product strategy, technology choices, website design, target customers, etc. All HN readers are welcome to join.
The Meetup is on Monday, June 21st at 7pm at the Foggy Brew Pub (in the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel), near the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station, very convenient to the Blue, Green, Orange, and Yellow lines.
RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/calendar/13768657 <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link: <http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News-NOVA-DC/calendar/13768657></comment>


Friendship formation is different online than in real life - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/social-instincts/201905/how-do-we-choose-our-online-friends <comment><AUTHOR> Key quote from the article:

 _What might this mean for everyday life? Well, it suggests that the friendships we choose to pursue from online profiles are much more likely to match our ideal standards for what a friend "should be." However, when it comes to choosing friends in live contexts—either in person or in an online chat—it seems we toss ideals out the window and rely solely on instinct._</comment>