A Pedagogical Analysis of Online Coding Tutorials [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Kim2017CodingTutorialEvaluation.pdf <comment><USER2> I wish the authors — or any authors — studied which courses actually deliver results as opposed to what they ought to deliver.

For instance, immediate feedback ought to deliver learning. So they looked at which courses give immediate feedback.

But it would be even better if somone looked at which learners actually learned. You took the course now build xyz. Or pass a test or something.

There might be a difference in the sorts of "immediate feedback" that are effective. It's an indirect proxy of what you are after.

<comment><USER3> Author of the paper being discussed here. I'd love to study what students actually learn too! As we note in the paper, the analytical approach is a limited, indirect proxy.

Unfortunately, as others have noted, doing this is intractably hard. We've reached out to dozens of coding tutorial companies, but none want to share their visitors' contact information (understandably). We've tried contacting students on our campus and others to find people who've used tutorials, but few have. If you have ideas about how to contact tutorial users, please share!

The even harder problem is measuring learning. There are essentially no reliable, valid measures of any knowledge of programming (exams in courses are mostly unreliable, invalid measures). It's something we're working on in my lab, but it will take years, as it has in math and physics education.

Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington [http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko](http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko)

<comment><USER2> I love that the author of the paper responded to this. Thank you HN, and Andy.

I suspected it was hard or else, I assume, you would have done it. But I thought it was hard because getting everyone to take a standardized test before and after the courses would be hard, not because even the contact information was not available!

Also, what do you mean exams are unreliable? Is there something you can point me to. I did not know that was the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like a great deal that one of the considerations the authors make is adapting to prior knowledge. (3.1) describes what they looked for in detail. In their summary, "None provide personalization based on prior coding experience or learner goals, other than rudimentary age-based differentiation." Its hard to overstate the importance of prior knowledge. Prior knowledge has some of the highest effect sizes in educational research. In other words, what you already know going into it is going to determine how much you learn. It's rare for other factors to have the same impact on the results as prior knowledge. And yet, even given decades of learning science research, its pretty rare to see much of any attempt in Western learning to account for prior knowledge. It would be a refreshing change of pace to see some of these coding tutorials work in preemptive assessment to figure out where to focus the learner before getting into the "how" of it.

Disclaimer: I'm working on sagefy.org

<comment><USER5> For your website, sagefy, how do you plan on being able to "assesses" the student's prior knowledge?

It seems to be a double-edge sword if you plan on using assessments (the only way I can think of to assess prior knowledge) to do it because people want immediate satisfaction. Unfortunately if you told people to take a 25 question pre-quiz before starting the course I am sure most would simply leave the website.

<comment><USER6> You could make the pre-quiz part of the "immediate satisfaction" by calibrating the questions so that the learner can feel good about their current knowledge without making them spend a long time solving difficult problems. Making a quiz fun is probably easier than doing the same for the actual learning part, which might require much more time before seeing any satisfying results.

Another way to assess knowledge would be to give the learner topics of varying difficulty to select from; it's unlikely that they'd choose something so easy that it'd be boring and in case the topic is too hard, there should be an escape route to something easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Instead of lecture based courses, I'd like to see more an adaptable textbook style, where a learner creates their own path of learning.

A simple example is a user manual online, [http://support.casio.com/global/en/wat/manual/5411_en/](http://support.casio.com/global/en/wat/manual/5411_en/) . The topic of each section is clearly indicated and when parts of another section are mentioned a direct link is given. In this way the information is presented as the reader wants it.

The book Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, provides a brief description at the start of book of what a chapter contains and suggests reading orders based on what the reader is looking for. These are examples of the reader choosing order.

Examples of relevant questions is in Maths textbook Mathematical Techniques: An Introduction for the Engineering, Physical, and Mathematical Sciences 4th Edition , where sections contained check your understanding boxes. In these boxes a problem relaying on the information in the section was given followed by a full worked out solution. The sections ended with more problems related to the immediate section followed by questions that involved knowledge from pervious chapters. In the way same code examples could be presented and at the end of chapters a build your own program challenge.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've created probably over 100 video courses, hundreds of tutorials (written and video), for networks like TutsPlus (Envato), DigitalTutors, Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com, and my own site / yt channel.

I've always been a huge proponent of example-based learning, and less about theory and generalized concepts.

Still, though, I think the online tech ed space has a lot of growing up to do. In time, we'll all wise up to provide better experiences for learning. Until then, for the most part, we're stuck with:

1\. Google: "How to do X in Y" 2\. Watch 3 different videos or read 3 different articles 3\. Apply it. 4\. Run into a snag. 5\. Google / Stackoverflow

<comment><USER9> To me untangling abstractions is always more difficult then building them up from the given premises. In other words, I believe generalizing from a given example to any level of abstraction is a straightforward process, but descending from built-up heights of abstraction down to the level of examples is a bit more involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was a very interesting read. As developers, let's face it, university was a tiny fraction of our knowledge. Most of it is ad-hoc real life problem solving, followed by seeing someone else's solution and saying "wow that's neat" and getting better that way.

</comment><comment><USER11> We're teaching recipes, when really we should be teaching self-sufficiency.

Too many new learners are stuck unable to make the leap out of the browser based IDE and into running their own code locally on a machine or on a server.

<comment><USER3> Author of the paper being discussed here. Re: self-sufficiency, our evidence agrees. You might be interested in this paper from my lab, which successfully attempts to teach self-regulation skills to novices:

Loksa, D., Ko, A. J., Jernigan, W., Oleson, A., Mendez, C. J., & Burnett, M. M. (2016, May). Programming, problem solving, and self-awareness: effects of explicit guidance. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1449-1461). ACM. [http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Loksa2016Programmi...](http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Loksa2016ProgrammingProblemSolving.pdf)

Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington [http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko](http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the link I'm just reading your paper now, using Cloud9 IDE is an interesting choice which I am not sure is beneficial to the learners..

I think self-sufficiency should include building a local environment you can work work in without having to rely on some SAAS / Cloud service based IDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IMHO the problem with coding tutorials is they usually target people that have little to no idea about programming essentials and teach them just the very basics like key primitive concepts (what classes, variables and functions are etc), language syntax, frameworks elementary basics etc.

Is there even a single tutorial that a self-taught undergraduate coder (who has already went through a number of simple tutorials, can code a number of languages like Python and C# and use GitHub) can take to learn how are real- world apps made, what do professional (professional ≠ veteran, it just means a person who earns their living doing it, working in a team usually) coders actually do all day long at their workplaces, what are they meant to know, how to solve interview puzzles and everything enough to go and get a coding job with reasonable ease?

As far as I know many companies need coders that can join a team and start writing/maintaining plain ordinary code, not necessarily brilliant code, just code that is readable, maintainable, reasonably fast and reliable and solves simple tasks it (a particular piece of code) is meant to. As far as I know a huge portion of people can potentially learn to do this with ease (you don't need IQ>150 for this, 100 is enough, even 90 will do which means the majority of the population). But people don't know how. And knowing a programming language syntax and being capable to code a simple script for yourself isn't enough: 99% of people who speak a language and can write a simple essay have no idea about how to write a novel (not necessarily a best-seller, even a mediocre one) - they are to be taught to structure it, introduce and develop characters, describe places and situations nicely, bake an idea in, maintain suspense, organize their writing process etc - it seems arcane to them while it essentially is just a number of plain and simple principles that can be outlined in a single manual. If only somebody having both the knowledge (skill) and the talent to explain would bother to write one and wouldn't write a huge tome practically obsolete by the release date instead.

<comment><USER13> The problem would be picking all the bits of tech, so much of what you're talking about is stuff you learn when you start working with your first big ball of mud.

Lets use java for simplicity. We're going to do a non trivial app thats web based so we dip into the exciting worl of java EE.

Learn about maven eclipse jax-ws jax-rs cfx tools wsi tools Hibernate stuff DB stuff. Probably need to throw spring boot or cdi onto the pile of things to be a little familiar with.

Then you need to teach how app servers work. getting one setup. which computer/ os etc.

Zooming in take the build process, 'Setting up jenkins' Thats a big tutorial all on its own. you'd need to know Git or SVN or one of the others.

then you step into building a CI pipeline, Building a test suite, functional, unit and integration test. building reporting ontop all of that.

That would be mega tutorial series. And the moment you finished it, people would start pulling strips off it for being out of date. Or they would attack it for language and tooling choice.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps a good list of all the subjects with detailed commentaries could do. One could go find tutorials on specific parts then given the knowledge o what to look for and what's that about. May be short (yet illustrating the way it's done in the real world) examples on particular subjects could be included.

<comment><USER13> That would be one way to go, and probably a pretty good one.

But yeah, the churn in the industry is crazy, so it would be some work to compile a list that's coherent and orthodox that didn't go out of date the moment you published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is something we spend a lot of time thinking about at Launch School. You need the right pedagogy for the right phase of learning ([https://launchschool.com/pedagogy](https://launchschool.com/pedagogy)).

Most article writers aren't differentiating their audience enough, making their articles difficult to read for most people. There is a huge variance of "beginners", for example. Further, most developers who write these articles don't have a holistic learning framework in mind. Lastly, I'm seeing far too many technical tutorials just for SEO or attracting eyeballs lately. These articles are great for attracting attention but are typically technically shallow and add to the confusion rather than help.

<comment><USER5> Agree. Most of the tutorials I see seem to be written entirely to generate ad revenue rather than actually be a quality educational resource. Google's algorithms only promotes this type of garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting read! I've not heard of "Gidget, Lightbot, Code Hunt, and tutorials provided by Code.org" before, but the paper seems quite comprehensive.

<comment><USER16> This paper was written by the PhD advisor of the creator of Gidget, which appears to also have been funded by the NSF and Microsoft (like the research in the paper).

Probably not a big deal, but I thought it was an interesting connection.

<comment><USER3> Author of the paper being discussed, and of Gidget here (along with collaborators). The work was primarily funded by a grant I received from the National Science Foundation:

[https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1240786&Histori...](https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1240786&HistoricalAwards=false)

After the research, I raised some money through a Microsoft Research grant to support some additional work and pay for bandwidth for a decade. Just $4,000 left until I have to pull the plug :( If you like Gidget, please make a donation to support our skeleton crew.

Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington [http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko](http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the hard work Andy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Summary: Every online coding tutorial is a lecture. They might pretend to be a little interactive, but the learning path is railroaded, and doesn't cater to individual progress.

<comment><USER5> The reason it is like that is because it is very efficient to have lecture- based learning. The second you add individualized progress to the course it begins to become a huge programming logic problem.

<comment><USER18> It's not necessarily so difficult. There are blindspots, they need to make more videos to cover them. Take a survey of questions in the forum and make new videos covering those topics. These videos could be optional. The learner can then watch as much as needed, thus, the course adapts to the learner.

<comment><USER5> It is difficult because to develop the programming logic side of it involves knowing programming and how to implement a system that takes in student data, analyzes it and then creates a new learning path/customized learning materials.

Most people creating educational content simply do not have those skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been reconnecting to the academic edtech space for the past year. After spending the past 20 years in both industry and academic online learning, academic behaviour remains a bit odd:

1) Academics in education talk about the use of technology in education but often don't know how to use technology in depth.

Story: In attending the World Conference of Online Learning - held at a very capable hotel - there were no power bars for laptops, and no sessions were recorded. Less than 5% of 1500 attendees (academics) carried or used a laptop or tablet for notes. Typing fast to take notes received comments. This was one of the leading conferences (apparently) in the world. Over 100 countries, 500 speakers, and 200 sessions.

2) Some academics seem to regularly trash education that technology may be in fact delivering well for students beyond the Academic's ability to understand.

One talk I attended at this conference was a Ph.D. essentially skewering how Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language. The arguments may have had merit, I found it hard to take the talk seriously, well, because the millions of users reporting a positive learning experience with tools like Duolingo is well known. Learning to speak a language is incredibly valuable for many people.

3) If academic's don't use the right terminology...

It's a little baffling why academics use the word pedagogy when speaking about the use of technology in education.

Pedagogy is how children learn, not adults. Andragogy is how adults learn.

"Pedagogy", "improving learning experiences", "improving student outcomes"is on a long chain of lean startup type groupspeak where people continue doing what they do but sprinkle a little innovation dust on what they're doing. Want to upset an academic? Correct them in using Andragogy instead of Pedagogy as a non-academic.

4) Innovation in Education + Technology.

Technologists can learn education easier than educators will learn technology. These two groups need to come together, or as I suspect, educators competent in understanding the capabilities and possibliites of technology will need to exist in higher learning. The rate of change in society may be hard to keep up with a tenure seeking mindset.

5) K-12 educators seem a lot more tech friendly than post-secondary educators.

Post-secondary educators seem often threatened by technology replacing them, and fail to recognize that improved digital learning experiences will be like better text books.

If our educators aren't levelling up on tech use, they wont be able to help the students of the future.

<comment><USER3> As a Ph.D. in higher education with both a computer science and learning science background, I can confirm many of your claims. Most education researchers and practicing educators have a weak grasp of computing and it's powers. And indeed, many faculty outside of computing are terrified of computing. There's no context for them to learn about it. I respond to these troubling trends by collaborating with people in other disciplines, sharing my expertise. Right now, I'm working with faculty in our College of Education, in Psychology, and many interdisciplinary researchers with backgrounds in Feminism, Anthropology, and other fields. Interdisciplinary research will save academia; the National Science Foundation has shifted to a strong expectation of interdisciplinary teams. I'm hopeful.

Other claims you made are wrong. That people report positive learning experiences with Duolingo is not evidence that they can read, write, or speak a language. In fact, there are several studies of Duolingo that show the exact opposite: there's massive variation in learning outcomes, and it really only supports the most motivated and resourceful of learners. But that's what research is for: to test assumptions with data.

Andy Ko Associate Professor University of Washington [http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko](http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko)</comment></comment>


Tailwind CSS V1 - <AUTHOR> https://tailwindcss.com/ <comment><USER2> Great news, we're using it at [1] and like it very much. Congrats to Tailwind team.

[1] [https://db.nomics.world/](https://db.nomics.world/)</comment>


Why Side Projects Are Hard – Psychologically Speaking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-hard-psychologically-speaking-1672331ead79 <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, I find the last 30% of a side project is always the hardest.</comment>


List of Lists of Lists – Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists <comment><USER2> Very meta!

Also, technically, this HN article, via the link -- is a _" List of a list of a list of lists"_ (!), even though it (as of this writing) only contains one item at the highest list level... but a list of one item -- is still a list! <g>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wikipedia has a _list of Liszts_ (it redirects to _Liszt (surname)_ ) but it's not on the list of list of lists.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of the Lists of lists in undocumented MS-DOS.

</comment><comment><USER5> a tree

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia should have a tree view, or somebody should make a graph you can view of Wikipedia in Neo4j or something</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any small-to-medium-sized Go team need a contributor/project lead? - <AUTHOR> Save for June-December of 2016, I have been a solo developer going back to 1994.
I'm applying for jobs in Denver.  The most frequent rejection reason I hear (for Sr. Engineer positions) is that, while they don't doubt my Go/Node skills, I haven't proven I can work with or lead a team.
I'm looking to rectify that mistake.  If you have a Go or Node project you're looking for help on, please reach out.
(If you have a job offer, resume is available upon request.) <comment><USER2> As the Task creator and main maintainer, I haven't being able to find the time to work on all the things I'd like to

Take a look the the issues: [https://github.com/go- task/task/issues](https://github.com/go-task/task/issues)

There are many ideias, and many of them requires discussion with the community since there are many ways to implement them

If you like the project and are experienced with Go, I'd love to have more help

<comment><AUTHOR> Are the issues fully up-to-date or is there more to know before diving in?

<comment><USER2> Better mention in the issue that you're working on it, and ask if you have any doubt

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds doable. I'll prepare for 1.11 with #119 and get familiar with the code base, then pitch in with others.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What about a paid torrent search engine? - <AUTHOR> A year ago, skytorrents (skytorrents.in) was launched with the promise of being ad-free. They started paying server bills from their pockets but due to its massive accumulated popularity, they turned towards donations.
Well, that also did not help much and they have shut down their website. My question is instead of donations, why not a subscription model? I would be happy to pay a dollar per month for that service. I know that this is not an out of the box idea and I am just curious about problems of this.
Related Article: https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents-dumps-massive-torrent-database-and-shuts-down180221/
Mirror site: https://skytorrents.lol/ (I assume they are probably using the skytorrent torrent dump) <comment><USER2> You expect people that want copyright content for free to pay for a service that links to copyright content? Wrong audience... Some other ideas:

1) mine crypto for you via CoinHive to get access to torrent file downloads. 1,000 hashes to download one torrent file. you can further the idea and people can trade 1k hashes for one torrent download per "account", so they can build up an account with you to use 2) go to crypto faucet and submit payment to your wallet 3) run ads but has to unobtrusive since google chrome will block annoying ads

as for hosting cost, you can try offsetting some bandwidth by using IPFS for web pages and/or torrent file themselves. keep your costs down and you might be able to run lean and actually pay for your dedicated server cost. check out ovh or online.net

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) torrents mean free stuff therefore nobody wants to pay 2) service cost of processing $1 payment would consume (most of) it probably 3) low trust

It still amazes me why BitTorrent hasn't got standarized distributed index yet. But there is a hope in Tribler research project: [https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-use-a-blockchain-to- boo...](https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-use-a-blockchain-to-boost- anonymous-torrent-sharing-180129/)

</comment><comment><USER4> In contrast to the other responses, I actually think this is not a bad idea. Doesn't it exist already in the form of private torrent trackers? I do not pay for usenet, but it sounds similar.

</comment><comment><USER5> paywalls don't work, the conversation rate is 1-2%</comment>


Ask HN: Would/do you pay for an uptime service? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an idea for an improved uptime system that only charges you when your site goes down. Is this something that you'd be interested in paying for? It would be tied to your paypal account and if your site went down and was validated to have gone down by 2 or more of our servers on different networks you would be charged a fairly small amount (say a $1).
Would you pay for this, if not, why?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Please clarify ... are you just _monitoring_ uptime? Or, are you actually fixing things when they go down?

All my major providers (Rackspace, SoftLayer and EngineYard) provide good monitoring and 2 of them (RS and EY) usually fix things before I even have a chance to take a look.

With SoftLayer and some of my Linode VPSs, I'd be willing to pay for monitoring+resolution. I travel a lot so it would be cool if I got a text message like "Server 3 is not responding to HTTP requests. Reply with Y if you'd like us to investigate." ... that way I have the option of looking myself or having you look.

That's probably more service work than you want to do, but I think there's a need for "managed" work like that with so many cloud/VPS providers around.

<comment><AUTHOR> My idea actually covers 2 major concerns that I've had in the past.

1) Keeping the "Rackspaces" of the world in check (I've had intermittent outages with them and other hosts that they never reported) and when I call them up and tell them they usually refund some portion of my monthly bill.

2) I'd like to monitor sites for additional server issues (http error codes, maybe even add future tests for alerts when speed is a concern)

I wasn't thinking of fixing issues as I think that type of managed service would be very difficult to coordinate between varying hosts.

I know there are services out there that currently provide 3rd party monitoring but the idea here is that you don't have to pay unless there is actually a problem in which case you can probably end up contacting your host to see what went wrong and potentially get a refund for some or all of your monthly services (per your contract with the host).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just being devil's advocate, but it would be in your best interest to take sites down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, hadn't thought of that, but are you referring to orchestrating DoS Attacks, etc?

<comment><USER3> Yeah or whatever it takes to make money.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: AI-based LifeTracker helps to do right things got 1200+ upvotes on PH - <AUTHOR> https://lifetracker.io/ <comment><USER2> i think it can be very useful

</comment><comment><USER3> +

</comment><comment><USER4> looks cool</comment>


Does it pay to be kind to strangers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151125-why-are-we-so-suspicious-of-being-kind <comment><USER2> The premisse seems broken - im not against kindness, im against eating food i dont know where its been.

<comment><USER3> "That initial mistrust was a common theme for each of the following 13 days – in which she tried to offer strangers an umbrella on a rainy day, pay for someone's parking ticket, and let fellow shoppers jump ahead of her in checkout queues. "Suspicion was the strongest reaction throughout," she says. Each time, it was only when she offered a rational explanation – such as the fact she was waiting for someone at the checkout – that people would accept her offers. Looking back, Mann now explains it as "stranger danger". "We're brought up to expect strangers to put one over us," she says."

However the deeper premise goes unexamined: all the correlative studies between gi ving and lon term happiness and health and not one discussion of whether healthier, happier people give more.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Turned down for job at a few companies but unable to find reason - <AUTHOR>

I have been applying for technical job positions at various companies including Amazon, FlipKart, Morgan Stanley, Google, Microsoft, MeetUp, Groupon, Zynga etc., but have been rejected without even interviewing.  Probably my resume is too thin, but I can't be sure.<p>Has anyone faced such a problem earlier?  If so, what did you do? <comment><USER2> A few comments.

You're applying to companies that are going to receive thousands of technical resumes. If you look at yours from their point of view what do you see? Why would they want to hire you rather than another person?

You have java and javascript. Great. So do thousands of others. What did you do with them that would make you stand out? Did you deploy an innovative use of rule-based tech on Google/Amazon cloud to launch a new product/increase revenue by $X?

Formatting aside (I presume you cut and paste from Word or whatever), your resume is primarily a set of general statements and a list of technologies (I'm also assuming the elided pieces are a list of companies/promotions you've had). These tell me some things about you but I don't know anything about what you've actually done with those technologies nor do I get an appreciation of the passion that you state.

For a resume, although you need to include some basic fact (college, employers etc), a laundry list of things, be it technologies or employment history or whatever, makes for dry reading and doesn't paint the picture of a passionate technological achiever that I assume you want.

My suggestion is to take each stage in your career and give an example of how you used technology to solve a problem/create an opportunity. Be specific and keep each one down to a few short sentences but try to ensure that you've captured at least some of the key moments that you've been proud of. BTW if you have contributions in the public domain, these can work just as well (or better).

One final point. People don't just use the resume when they recruit. They'll Google you. Is your online profile, esp the first few entries, what you want to project? If you blog, are they rants or thoughtful discussions on the subjects that you've said you are passionate about? Are your public tweets/posts libelous?

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your honest advice. I will work on those aspects and update the results.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A rough resume from my original one.

[http://sidgaming.neocities.org/CrackResume.html](http://sidgaming.neocities.org/CrackResume.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you post your resume and then we can tell you something more specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted a link to resume, any suggestions?

<comment><USER3> I agree with @lucozade.

This resume does not stick out at all. It needs more smak and pow.</comment></comment></comment>


Graphtreon – Follow the progress of Patreon campaigns - <AUTHOR> http://graphtreon.com/ <comment><USER2> I had no idea how much money was getting pushed through Patreon until now, wow.</comment>


Big Sur and the Temptation of the App Store - <AUTHOR> https://anderegg.ca/2020/06/23/big-sur-and-the-temptation-of-the-app-store <comment><USER2> I agree this is a short-term risk, but in the long term people will build (or incrementally re-build) their apps on Swift UI which is not iOS-specific. A few years from now, iOS apps _not_ built with Swift UI will probably start feeling non-native, even on iOS, as I'm sure Apple will be adding features to Swift UI rather than building them into UIKit. (eg widgets)</comment>


Twitter now lets marketers access every public tweet ever made - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2015/08/11/twitter-now-lets-marketers-access-every-public-tweet-ever-made/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty much what Gnip offered, but with an usable API.

My company did request an historical sample to GNIP one year ago: we had to contact the sales and send them a query blind-written following their docs. Then they run a job and gave a link to download the ZIP. I can imagine high paying customers to have direct access to their API. Still it was pretty much evident, than the extraction time was significant (say from 1 to 3 days).

The main difference thus appears to be speed. Still, you need to contact sales, so I can't say nothing about the new prices.</comment>


Why Sonic the Hedgehog is 'incorrect' game design - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/why-sonic-the-hedgehog-incorrect-game-design <comment><USER2> IMHO the article is right that Sonic is a terrible platformer, because it's not a platformer. It's a speedrun game. It's all about memorizing the map and being able to make twitchy inputs to get the biggest rewards. It's a fundamentally different kind of game than Super Mario Brothers, even though they look superficially similar.

<comment><USER3> But Sonic fails as a speedrun game too. There's always some slow moving platform you need to time jumps around that breaks a thrilling run through a level. Not to mention that finding the chaos emeralds is almost impossible if you just plough through each level.

<comment><USER4> Chaos emeralds are just achievements they don't impact game play.

<comment><USER5> Yes they do, collecting them enables you to turn into Super Sonic (in Sonic 2+)

<comment><USER4> Article is in reference to the original game where they just change the ending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or perhaps people get quickly tired of the same formulaic garbage. Endless superhero movies in every scene that go exposition, cgi action, witty one liner. Repeat.

That nearly every 3 minute pop track follows the same formula as the scenes in every James Bond movie.

Some things are just popular. Snakes and ladders technically isn't a game. You have ZERO agency in the outcome of events but it's based upon a game that's been played at least since the Indus Valley Civilisation 3000 BC. It's when committees and statisticians get involved that the fun goes away. Hence the endless reboots and sequels of exponentially more funding yet almost always fall short of the originals.

<comment><USER7> A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same.

Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server.

Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P

<comment><USER8> At the same time, I've seen almost no PvP games based on randomness that really end up working. Hearthstone has a huge RNG element - which deck you're up against, what cards you get etc. People minmax their decks from rank 20 and below (out of 25), and while there is some difference in decision making it really doesn't fulfill the dream of having many different viable strategies and the ability to use them - usually 3-5 "meta" decks that everyone knows about are more powerful than most.

Thats why I think co-op games end up being far more satisfying, since they don't have to balance out a player vs player arms race.

<comment><USER7> For a physical example of one that does, I found I quite enjoy Magic The Gathering draft games (everyone's given 20 mana of their choice then forced to assemble a deck on the spot from a bunch of sealed, random booster packs that get opened and passed around in an orderly fashion).

In most cases you can still make a viable deck, but everyone will have to deal with largely mediocre cards they wouldn't have picked given the chance. Granted the system isn't perfect, but it seems to effectively level the playing field and encourage creative deck-building. Not sure if Hearthstone has an equivalent mode.

<comment><USER8> They do, and its called arena - It costs $1.50 to do a round and you're out after 3 losses. Its entirely luck based since the only people winning (its a tournament format) are those that get a lot of really good cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The notion that a work of art could be "incorrect" is absurd on its face. Just because a game (in this case) does not remain confined to accepted norms does not make it "incorrect". The use of this word is pretentious as all hell, as if the author is the be-all-end-all of art criticism.

If one does not like a game, we have a word for that: "bad". There are plenty of bad games to analyze. Why the author picked _Sonic the Hedgehog_ is beyond me.

As he said: it works. Therefore, to twist the word "incorrect" to its breaking point as he does is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> The fact that he put the 'incorrect' in quotes indicates that he likely agreed with you on the use of the word and the you probably missed the intent of his use of it.

Unlike 'bad', a subjective word indicating opinion, 'incorrect' is objective: anything can be incorrect according to a certain set of parameters, and the author is selecting a particularly traditional set here from the book in order to frame the discussion.

He's not implying that Sonic is bad. He calls it a masterpiece!

It's quite likely he's also a Lorde fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can find several other examples of games that are "incorrect" in much the same way, and I don't just mean Sonic knockoffs. Doom is pretty much a seminal moment in game design, and it looks nothing like the "ideal" design of Mario. I think the game design principles that are being tossed around here are very, very far from being universal.

<comment><USER12> It's not even clear that they're correct for the one example they go by. It's difficult to argue that "teaching" is essential to good design; to me it's just important for on-boarding (that the "tutorial" stages aren't canned info- dumps and dreadfully slow, interruptive, and staged events that treat the player as incomprehensibly incompetent).

I'm more inclined to the idea that good design is found in the ability to explore a ruleset, and the ruleset being interesting enough to justify exploring it. The art, music, themes and such all supplement the exploration of that ruleset (or even help define it). Good "levels" push you to explore the ruleset in ideally unintuitive ways, and lays the foundation for further exploration in future levels.

Ideally, the game shouldn't "teach" you how to play. It should simply exist as a world, and its rules, and you'll figure out the rest. Incentivized to explore particular areas of the world/rules, but thats about it.

Bad design comes from limiting your ability to explore. Rules that appear general (applies to all NPCS), but it turns out you can't punch the kids, because. You can normally jump around as much as you want...but this particular area you have to sit down and walk because its movie-time. You can run around as much as you wish, but here there's an invisible wall because you're not at the designated level for it.

Or the lack of things to explore. Poorly designed procedural generation games like No Man's Sky and Borderlands come to mind. The generation rules constantly produce different/new things... with little difference to your actual ability to interact with the world. It gets boring, fast, because it's not affecting the ruleset to any interesting degree. But a proper roguelike on the other-hand has you forced to explore corner cases of the ruleset every time you find a new enemy with some special combination of [dangerous] skills. The roguelike ruleset is potentially interesting (and expansive), and the procedural generation pushes you to explore all its corners. No Man's Sky has a much more limited ruleset, and the generation leads you to explore all its corners... very, very quickly.

And then ofc you have other aspects like compositional rules and feedback loops that allow the player a much freer exploration, of the world, to the point that you have genres defined around it (eg simulations, grand strategies, etc).

<comment><USER13> Other than the guns where is the procedural generation in Borderlands?

<comment><USER12> The guns is the only procedural generation, but also where the meat of the marketing and gameplay was meant to revolve around.

ofc, the guns were entirely uninteresting three hours in, and so what you're left with is the relatively weak level design, coop mechanics and mechanically simple enemy design. These would have all probably been fine, maybe even good, if the guns actually offered what they meant to: constantly changing gameplay (and so you'd see interesting combination of native mechanics + the new gun's mechanics).

Instead you just have a weak coop shooter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All great art violates some existing genre conventions — if it doesn't, then by definition it's generic art.

<comment><USER15> What conventions did Michaelangelo's David violate?

<comment><USER16> Using the grandparent's understanding of "generic", art could be generic, yet still exceptionally good/well executed.

<comment><USER17> I was reading a comment on a jazz album and it essentially said "expertly done but doesn't move the genre forward so meh."

I think people forget that sometimes you just want a good, standard jazz album.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I loved Sonic on Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive/Genesis and was completely thrown off guard when I played Sonic Generations on the 360 decades later ("whoa how can anyone keep up with that pace?").

Once you embrace that pacing (which has been there all the time) you'll be able to appreciate that special kind of game/level design. It seems that Team Sonic was able to apply that principle to Quote a good number of titles with the IP.

Back in the days the controller would have been soaked in several people's sweat ofc and there were no persisted save points. If you want to improve on persistence, priorities and quick decision making: Go play these games on their original hardware (or at least don't use the emulator's snapshot abilities).

</comment><comment><USER19> Another retrospective look at Sonic's design (2014):

[http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most- overrated-g...](http://redlettermedia.com/pre-rec-sonic-the-most-overrated- game-ever/)

<comment><USER20> That was a really good analysis of Sonic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Sonic is incorrect game design

Roguelike also require repetition to learn and master, in conjunction with skillful assessment. Games are the exploration of a fixed environment to discover and exploit linear optimizations for abstract goals.

Historically, this has been a training tool for children and students, to prepare for life challenges. e.g. Wargames are for those who are students of war. There's nothing inherently wrong about the game design of Sonic, which is why the conclusion does not fit the stated premise.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would also like to point out that one of the greatest parts of the Sonic games IMO was the ability to enable the in-game debug mode, allowing edits to the level with various sprites. A definite source of childhood curiosity with gaming/code/design.

[http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode](http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Debug_Mode)

</comment><comment> git-pull For anyone here who wants a very well-made nostalgic dive into the art / feel of Sonic the Hedgehog, namely Sonic & Knuckles, I recommend this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdxQmgC2Bhw)

</comment><comment><USER23> By this logic, all on-rails shooters are 'incorrect' game design.

</comment><comment><USER24> Green Light is just a bad song.

</comment><comment><USER25> Or, "Why The Guardian does not understand Sonic games."</comment>


Qt Quick, create Qt apps with Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qtquick.html <comment><AUTHOR> Install Qt 4.7, download Qt Creator 2.1 (<http://qt.nokia.com/developer/qt- qtcreator-prerelease/>) and follow the tutorial ([http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtcreator-2.1-snapshot/creator- qml-a...](http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtcreator-2.1-snapshot/creator-qml- application.html)), it's really a great tool.

</comment><comment><USER2> As a QT programmer already, I'm excited by this approach to creating 'hybrid' applications.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not immediately clear:

Where and how could I deploy an app like this? What are its dependencies? Does it run in the browser or an OS? How do I set up the environment to compile it?

<comment><AUTHOR> You need the QML runtime (<http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qmlruntime.html>) which you can embed in any Qt C++ app or deploy on mobile devices. The idea is that you code the app in C++ and code the user experience with this language, writing bindings to your models on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another interesting connection between Qt and JavaScript is QWebKit which allows you to run web applications (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) within a GUI widget.

QWebKit also allows you to add custom GUI handlers to events like clicks to certain links, or to prefix each loaded page with a certain piece of JavaScript.</comment>


New book is tawdry account of how Facebook was founded - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/25/technology/founding_of_facebook.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009062512

<comment><USER2> I can't find a good source right now, but I'm pretty sure koala meat is poisonous.

<comment><USER3> Well, if this book is meant primarily to be "fun" ( -the publisher), then I doubt that issues like "good sources" is in their priorities.

<comment><USER2> And indeed, it _is_ fun to imagine those jackholes dying of koala meat poisoning.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Meteor 1.4 - <AUTHOR> http://info.meteor.com/blog/announcing-meteor-1.4 <comment><USER2> Still no SQL. Sigh. I moved on to React Native</comment>


Don't do it – The gimmicks developers use to make their apps stickier - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/11/18/dont-do-it-the-bad-things-developers-do-to-make-their-apps-stickier/

<comment><USER2> There's also "make deleting an account so difficult that most people won't bother."</comment>


On Being a Senior Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/ <comment><USER2> Part of the problem is the interview process.

So so so many "senior engineers" get hired because they can traverse trees with their eyes closed but when it comes to writing solid designs and the desire to dig deep, they fall short.

There was a time when senior engineers could wrench open a compiler to figure things out. Now, these guys are useless without some rockstars maintaining the underlying infra.

</comment><comment><USER3> To me, senior engineer is that point when you have hit your stride, you are very good at what you do, and the next level is where you start to mentor younger engineers and let them take credit for your ideas/insight.

That's what Steve Kleiman (Sun/Sparc/vnodes/threads) did for me and he was definitely well past what we called senior staff engineers.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are the captain of the boat or even one of the officers that comes with risks and rewards. My perspective is that there is increased exposure to potentially career ending outages as you move to the top technical positions and that should be recognized.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Generation X (and even more so generation Y) are cultures of immediate > gratification

uh huh. thanks for that.

Does this guy even remember his 20s anymore?

> I've worked with a staggering number of engineers that expect the "career > path" to take them to the highest ranks of the engineering group inside 5 > years just because they are smart. This is simply impossible in the > staggering numbers I've witnessed

Pretty common at the big companies. 5 years is quick, but it's the start of when people start to hit senior in larger numbers.

If you won't give them something, someone else will. Remember that, and maybe reconsider your biases.

> What then? "Super engineer"? Five more years? "Super-duper engineer

Depending on where you are, staff/principal/distinguished/fellow/partner/etc...

If your engineering ladder ends at Senior that's a failure on your part honestly.

When is it appropriate to call someone a senior engineer? When they hit 65? When they are the most experienced engineer left? When they come in and announce that they are no longer going to attempt to expand their skills in any way?

If you want to stick in SE 1-6 before senior then go ahead. It seems like what the complain is really against the the typical bands we see at a lot of companies nowadays.

<comment><USER6> It's really nice to be able to call yourself _senior_ after mere five years, when you haven't even seen a quarter of the possible deployment scenarios, much less seen their long-term results. You can't find anything like that in any other skill-based profession.

<comment><USER5> And yet companies worth hundreds of billions had put the title to people after that long every cycle.

Complaining about this is putting way too much emphasis on naming.

<comment><USER7> The rule in computer science is that naming is one of the two hardest problems that we face.

Which is why it is really important to get it right, or at least make a serious attempt to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, there is a lot here that I think is good. A lot of this is about what a good developer should and shouldn't do, so I think some attention to what their employer should and shouldn't do is in order.

A good developer should be okay with making estimates in order to be relied upon to build important things- so far so good. But if you're the only person left, who handles a workload that should be enough for three, and random shit pops up all the time where someone is yelling at you that this must be dealt with, and nobody actually knows what they want so the idea of what is being estimated upon will change 4 times before it's done, and oh yeah our dev infrastructure is broken in various ways........ you see what I mean. There is a point at which committing to ship something in a given amount of time, even when all that other shit happens, is really just a brick in the wall of burnout.

Point made. But more generally there is little thought paid to what employers should be doing to hold up their end of the bargain, and ever more paid to what employees should be doing better.</comment>


A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem - <AUTHOR> http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6364/793 <comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating, a 30% to 50% improvement on existing nearest-neighbor search / Locally Semantic Hashing via bio-mimicry of the fly olfactory system. The pre- release paper[1] is very readable as the author is seeking to map neuroscience observations directly to computing algorithms and uses clear language.

[1] [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/25/180471](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/25/180471)</comment>


Is Groupon's Bizarre CEO Ruining His IPO? - <AUTHOR> http://gaw.kr/nAjhLr

<comment><USER2> Read this analysis of Groupon's business, and I think after you do (and factoring in the company's CEO 2 years ago was a MUSIC STUDENT): <http://www.privco.com/private-company/groupon-inc> ...and I think you'll see the answer to your question is: duh.</comment>


Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion - <AUTHOR> http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/03/27/brain-scans-link-concern-justice-reason-not-emotion <comment><USER2> _" During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly linked with emotional processing were not affected.

The conclusion was clear, Decety said: "Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitively driven.""_

While this is a very interesting study, that conclusion does _not_ follow from the previous paragraph. I'd even bet that specific claim is not made in the original paper but was convenient to state in a non-peer-reviewed news story.

fMRI studies are extremely easy to perform and, frankly, if you put someone in a brain scanner bits of the brain will light up. I know this because my PhD was on the topic of human emotion and decision-making and I used fMRI (as well as PET). I'm going to skim the paper now and see if my earlier statement holds up.

EDIT: As I suspected, their claim is not made (even slightly) in the peer- reviewed work. I still find the study interesting but I see flaws in the study design as there isn't an attempt at a baseline condition which (imho) is important for any claims about emotional processing.

<comment><USER3> fMRI psych studies were debunked by the dead fish paper years ago. (In short: investigators misreport the measurement apparatus's random noise as significant results.) Why does the neuro community still publish fMRI psych papers? Is it is a case homeopahy where the quacks are the ones doing the peer rebiews and the entire specialty is a most cause?

<comment><USER2> fMRI is a tool. Just like every other tool it can be wielded skilfully or incompetently and in the case of fMRI you must do your stats properly (c.f. the Multiple Comparisons problem [1]). There's nothing out there that 'debunks' fMRI as a tool.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem)

Edit: Indeed fMRI allows us to do things we had no hope of doing before, e.g. communication with those who are otherwise in permanent vegetative states [2,3] (that guy was my co-supervisor).

[2] [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402.abstract)

[3] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8497148.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8497148.stm)

<comment><USER4> If Adrian Owen was your co-supervisor, you should know better than to say that fMRI allows you to communicate with patients in a vegetative state. VS means, by definition, that the patient is unresponsive. Communication via fMRI or brain computer interface is still only possible with patients that are conscious (e.g. locked in, or in a minimally conscious state).

<comment><USER2> _" VS means, by definition, that the patient is unresponsive."_

And IIRC they _were_ VS until such studies demonstrated that actually not all of them were (which was my point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For some reason fMRI terrifies me in the sense that it will be misused to predict human behavior. The idea that we can effectively read your brain leads to the assumption that we can understand the behaviors, and I think that is false.

<comment><USER6> I understand your fears. Look at how lie detector (polygraph) tests are still used and how the public generally assumes that they're a reliable indication of veracity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity)

As with many technologies, though, you can't be a Luddite and slow progress because the general population might misunderstand it.

<comment><USER7> My grandfather, who was chief detective for the PD in the town in which I grew up, broke my childhood heart when he explained to me how unreliable polygraph tests are. I had seen so many thriller films and detective films that relied on polygraphs, and then one day he said something to the effect of "Those are all B.S., we see guys every day that can fake their way through a lie detector and smile while he's doing it. I don't trust them and I don't trust any man who does."

<comment><USER3> It's politically sensitive to admit, but the most-legitimate value of polygraph is in scaring people into telling the truth (which cannve verified in other ways). It has many other problems, though, like scaring innocent people into flade confessions, or scaring people into divulging their legitimately private info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to original publication: [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4161.abstract](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4161.abstract)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reasonable people driven by reason, study reveals.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anybody else think of fair people as pretty people and not just people as the article states?

<comment> chestnut-tree Yes, I thought the title _" Fair people are driven by reason, not emotion"_ refererred to pale-skinned or white people ("fair-minded" would have been a little bit clearer). The actual headline on the linked article is _" Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion"_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well the justice system is exactly there to negate any emotional reaction from the crowd. It's even completely isolated from the democratic process, and that's how decisions are made to be the most fair as they can, even if a justice decision is never a good one, always a necessary one.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't find this study credible. The folks I've met who react strongly to justice appears to me to be running through some intense emotions. Those emotions tend to be highly concentrated to a point where it appears to be reason, but they are still forms of emotions.

<comment><USER12> It's obviously created for political reasons. Science is dead because it used to take us closer to truth, not obfuscate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fairness is inherently rational so I don't understand why this is some kind of revelation.

<comment><USER7> Is it? I wonder how one's sense of fairness is altered by their relative emotional state? For instance, someone who has been emotionally compromised by seeing scenes of brutality may well vote a harsher penalty on the perpetrator of a similar act than someone who has not (I'm thinking childhood abuse, rape, that sort of thing). Note that I am in no way saying that abuse or rape is justifiable or anything, or that there shouldn't be harsh penalties, I'm just saying that I wonder if someone who has experienced a brutal crime may have a stronger "justice response" to similar crimes than someone who has not. My reason for thinking this is to consider how rapes are handled in the U.S. where many (male) lawmakers treat it as a relatively minor situation while at the same time they have never, and likely will never, experience anything similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought it meant 'fair' people as in people with light hair, skin and eyes.

<comment><USER15> yep me too, I was going to email it my wife to say here was the proof I was more rational than her :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love how unambiguous the political implications of this are, even though they're never mentioned.</comment>


Steven Furst's role on Babylon 5 was a remarkable example of a sci-fi sidekick - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/18/15826064/steven-furst-babylon-5-vir-cotto-science-fiction-sidekick <comment><USER2> Babylon 5 should get way more love. It was ambitious in a way it's contemporaries weren't [1]. The fact that J. Michael Straczynski wrote the majority of the episodes is both unheard of and shows in how consistent and well-crafted the universe is. Pretty much every character is complex, motivated, and portrayed expertly.

It was the first TV show to regularly use CGI. Unfortunately, it hasn't aged well compared to Star Trek. If you can tolerate that, I can't sing the series's praises high enough.

[1] With the exception of Deep Space 9, and there's always that rumor that they stole the idea for DS9 from B5...

<comment><USER3> I think one of the problems is B5 is not really episodic, it's a serial story that you really need to be following. But back in the 90s, this was pretty hard to do over such a long period of time.

It's meant to be binged, or at least watched without missing an episode. And it's that good to be worthy of it.

G'Kar lives!

<comment><USER4> A Babylon 5 being created in the age of breaking bad and game of thrones would be amazing.

<comment><USER5> It also can be argued that the age of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones only happened because Babylon 5 was ahead of its time enough to scout some of the territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like too many involved with Babylon 5 are dying far too young.

When Richard Biggs died, I was sad, but I thought a revival could still be possible and be enjoyable. When Andreas Katsulas died, I knew any revival would suffer without his presence.

Now at some point with Jerry Doyle, Jeff Conway and now Stephen Furst have passed beyond the veil and I've come to realize that I don't want any more Babylon 5 -- except for a TOS/TNG-like remastering with new CGI -- I'd pay a lot for that.

I feel almost cruel pointing it out because they were limited print runs and you can't really buy them (no digital copies exist as far as I know, and the print copies are costly) but there exists an amazing set of books ([http://www.cafepress.com/b5books](http://www.cafepress.com/b5books)). Each volume has copies of a few scripts from the show, but the real magic is a series of stories written by JMS for every book and each episode of B5. They go into detail about the production of the show and production of television shows in general and just how ground-breaking Babylon 5 was in general. The show was just as revolutionary behind the scenes as it was on screen. The books go into great detail to explain what happened to season 5 and -- at the risk of a BuzzFeed-style headline -- it's not what you think.

As a consolation prize for those who cannot read those books, I suggest Claudia Christians Memoir (Babylon Confidential [https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Confidential-Memoir-Love- Addi...](https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Confidential-Memoir-Love- Addiction/dp/1937856062)). It's quite good -- even and especially the non- Babylon 5 parts.

Each of these deaths from Babylon 5 leaves me profoundly sad because I highly doubt I will ever see another show that I enjoy as much as I enjoyed Babylon 5. I'm not sure that anyone will make another show with such depth and intricacy, though I will be watching the final two seasons of Game of Thrones with deep anticipation.

<comment><USER7> _It seems like too many involved with Babylon 5 are dying far too young._

Don't forget Michael O'Hare. Not that he had much involvement after the first season, but still, dying at age 60 is much too young.

Also Tim Choate. A bit player, but I really loved the character. _Yes. Yes. Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other people 's needs. Very sad life. Probably have... very sad death. But... at least there is Symmetry_

<comment><USER6> I did forget Tim Choate, which is sad, I loved Zathras. At least a different Zathras lives on, somewhere, sometime.

I had no idea Michael O'Hare died :(

While I know his departure from the show was unplanned, I admire the skill with which JMS wove his departure into the fabric of the show. He took what would have been a liability to any other writer/showrunner and turned it into a huge asset. For example, the whole Lyta/Talia/Lyta situation was entirely externally dictated to him, but he managed to turn it into some fantastic storylines. I am still sad about not exploring any Ivanova romance plot lines. Marcus and Talia fighting for Ivanova's affection would have been amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Cats!"

[https://youtu.be/PZ66wHRhe2U](https://youtu.be/PZ66wHRhe2U)

</comment><comment><USER9> God bless, and may flights of Vorlons sing him to his rest.

<comment><USER2> Spoiler!

<comment><USER9> Yes - now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I only watched Bab5 for the first time last year and it launched straight into my top 5. There are some old sci-fi shows that can be easily watched in spite of dated graphics (Bab5, ST:TOS, ST:TNG) and some you can't (BSG).

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know where Babylon 5 can be streamed (legally)?

<comment><USER12> [https://www.go90.com/shows/babylon5](https://www.go90.com/shows/babylon5) (U.S. Only)

<comment><USER11> Thank you!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vir!!!

</comment><comment><USER14> Vir was possibly my favorite character on B5. I'm going to have to go watch the whole thing again.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8MjQ5Z7ZNo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8MjQ5Z7ZNo)

<comment><USER16> The original fruit ninja</comment></comment></comment>


Tessel 2 Announced - <AUTHOR> https://tessel.io/ <comment><USER2> The most amazing thing here is that they are offering the option to purchase optimized Tessels with different modules baked into the main board, and you can get as few as 10-99 of these optimized Tessels for as little as $35 each.

This has huge potential if you want to create your own Tessel powered device and resell it. I love that the Tessel people are making hardware as easy to work with as software.

A combination of 3D printing and optimized Tessel really opens the door to all sorts of interesting, cheap, low volume, internet connected hardware.</comment>


Trolls Are Real - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/effector/32/3 <comment><USER2> We've been targeted by a patent troll and as a small business (less than 5 employees) it absolutely shook us to our core. Thankfully a lawyer took us up pro bono and the trolls backed off. I'm saddened to think of all the businesses that weren't as lucky. This needs to be fixed.

<comment><USER3> why not provide some details? at least how you got in touch with the nice lawyer, that might help others.

<comment><USER2> Sure. All I can recommend is to contact the EFF. They had some lawyers willing to work with us. The lawyer who did end up working with us was from California and specialized in patent trolls. I'm outside the office right now so I can't tell you specifically who it was

You may also be able to strike a deal with the patent trolls. We were able to take them down to 40k from 100k. That was still ridiculous for us but if you're paying a lawyer or paying the troll it's all the same to a business working on thin margins. We heard stories that they would accept as little as 10k.

For what it's worth the patent troll that targeted us is no longer operating under their original name. They were taken down by the EFF representing a vape company if I remember right.

<comment><USER4> > but if you're paying a lawyer or paying the troll it's all the same to a > business working on thin margins

and this is why patent trolls exist

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reference: Speech given by USPTO Director Andre Iancu to the Eastern District of Texas Bar Association [https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/10/19/iancu-risk- takers-pate...](https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/10/19/iancu-risk-takers- patent-troll-narrative-orwellian-doublespeak/id=102474/)

<comment><USER6> Yikes, thats pretty bad.

In a single brush he dismisses those small business horror stories as "fairy tails". Not to get to political, but the with the current us political environment it's not entirely surprising.

Also using last century examples ( IBM and 3com ) is a little strange.

<comment><USER7> It is political. Andrei Iancu did not appear from thin air (nor did Ajit Pai), they are political appointees.

Maybe we don't discuss the proximate cause of the problem for some strategic reason, I don't know. But when we don't, we spiral into unproductive discussions about the innate morality of all patents. Maybe that's good but isn't going to solve anything in the foreseeable future.

And for the record, my biggest worry too is a fatal patent shakedown for my unlaunched startup. Actually I'm surprised the trolls haven't started selling "insurance" given the climate of fear they've created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The patent system was broken from the start. The incentives are all wrong, as USPTO officers get paid more, the more patents they approve. It's like paying fishermen for the fish they didn't catch.

<comment><USER9> > paying fishermen for the fish they didn't catch.

TBH that doesn't sound like an awful bad idea.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean? Why?

<comment><USER11> Ocean fish are a well-known example of the tragedy of the commons, where too many independent fishermen will wipe out the local fish population, leading to less fish for everybody. This is traditionally dealt with by

(1) Informal norms among the fishermen as to how much fishing you should do. This system is not resilient to immigrants, who don't know the local norms (and may, not unreasonably, feel that the local norms already allot all of the fish to established fishermen), so fishing communities are often fiercely resistant to newcomers.

(2) Legal limits on how much fish you can catch. The idea is that an authority will determine the total quantity of fish to be harvested, and then allot rights to harvest smaller quantities than that piecemeal. Under this system, taking fish without an appropriate license is a crime.

You could move to a system more like our agricultural subsidies (paying people for the pigs they didn't raise), by giving money to anyone who owns a fishing trawler but didn't bring in any fish. But that seems obviously insane compared to the permitting system.

<comment><USER12> (1) Informal norms among the fishermen as to how much fishing you should do. This system is not resilient to immigrants, who don't know the local norms (and may, not unreasonably, feel that the local norms already allot all of the fish to established fishermen), so fishing communities are often fiercely resistant to newcomers.

"Informal" cultural norms operate as laws on a small scale, maybe a pre- industrial community and a lake (or grazing commons, like various feudal Europe examples). Any scale that implies depleting oceanic fish is a way to big for this. I would be surprised if any modern era conventions applied to ocean fishing for migrants to have any influence at all.

<comment><USER11> The ocean is all connected, but fish don't magically equalize their distribution by the law of fish gravity. If you double the number of ocean fishermen working out of Galveston, the supply of fish near Galveston will suffer.

Cultural norms generally operate on a small _group of people_. In the modern day, it doesn't take very many people to catch a ridiculous number of fish. So depleting ocean fish is better handled by cultural norms now than it was 500 years ago, when catching a lot of fish meant fielding a lot of boats.

<comment><USER13> > If you double the number of ocean fishermen working out of Galveston, the > supply of fish near Galveston will suffer.

That greatly depends on the type of fish and is not generally true. Many species of fish spend different parts of their lives at different locations. Tuna, salmon and many other pelagic fish travel pretty big distances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Haven't been affected by this issue but I'm dreading the future where a lot of hard work building my company is wiped out by people like this. Fairly demotivating as an individual and terrible for innovation based economies.

<comment><USER15> 100% this. It's exactly one of the biggest of my concerns at the idea of starting a software company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Of course lobbyists are behind the weakening of patent laws. Something really has to be done about the lobbying problem we have in this country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Patents are meant to protect you from bigger companies muscling you out. They have however found a loophole by acquiring as many patents as possible hoping that will scare you. That strategy however doesnt help against trolls. So they lobby to weaken the patent system to make it easier to steal ideas from small startups.

<comment><USER18> Patents aren't "meant to protect you from bigger companies muscling you out".

That's a common story told to justify them, but US patents are meant to do what the US Constitution says about them: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

Many people who do small startups think patents are a net negative for small startups.

<comment><USER19> Their investors sure like them though.

Patents are business assets that can be very important for valuation during exits or funding rounds.

In most cases, due diligence auditors are going to want to see a company's patent portfolio. A bad or weak portfolio may not tank the deal, but it certainly impacts valuation.

I have seen this first hand, if BigCo is choosing between two or more companies to acquire, they are more likely to select the one with the stronger patent portfolio.

edit-to-add: trademarks are very important too -- and often overlooked by startups until it is too late. Trademark trolls are real too.

<comment><USER18> Investors like patents and trademarks in the "better to have some than have none" sense. That can be still be true even when the patent system is a net minus for small startups.

Source: filed a lot of patents and trademarks in my small startups, they were useful at exit, still hate patents with a passion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This may mean it's a good time to re-read the history of SCO and their patent claims on Linux:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes)

<comment><USER19> That was copyright not patents.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the correction! I'll likely leave the comment to stand as-is, since perhaps it's still vaguely relevant, but I appreciate the note.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Re Patents (Just get rid of them entirely!)

Please prove me wrong that they aren't effective and are a myth.

Processes of how to do things often come down to engineering and math; if given the same goal a solution is likely to be similar at it's core as for any given problem there is probably an ideal bound and variations of effort will produce similar results or results optimized slightly to different circumstances.

(Yes, this is copied from a different post I made last night with respect to all sorts of intellectual property issues.)

<comment><USER22> How would you incentivize drug research without patents?

<comment><USER23> Government funded. Drug research is an obvious benefit to every single person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Patents going back to 7 years instead of multi generational would fix most everything.

</comment><comment><USER25> True. I recently got an email from someone claiming they had reason to believe I was infringing on... I wrote back "I believe you have no reason"

</comment><comment><USER26> Can't even access the article with javascript turned off.

<comment><USER27> Turn JavaScript on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > ... patent number 10 million and celebrated that milestone with a signing > ceremony at the White House with President Trump ...

Aha! Now we know why it was extra-important to pluck #10,000,000 out of normal order.

[https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent- no-10000000.html](https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent- no-10000000.html)

[https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent- no-10000000.html...](https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent- no-10000000.html#comment-410229)

</comment><comment><USER29> Patent trolls would be OK if they couldn't go after small companies. What's worse is they prioritize small companies. In fact, buying patents and then suing makes IP from fundamentally valuable. I am generally OK with that, but not when it discourages startup ecosystems which are a huge source of real innovation.

What I'd love to see would be the democrat party to refocus their policies to shift towards small business against large corporations. Re-invent the American Dream. This could tie in well with the green new deal. Rather than talk about jobs, talk about the tens of thousands of small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER30> Trolls are definitely real, and we need reforms, particularly at the PTO, to cut down on the number of bad patents. At the same time, there are companies who make lots of money free riding on other peoples' IP. And that's also a huge problem. For example, YouTube became a multi-billion business ripping off content companies. YouTube doesn't create a product-it's just a middle man for content produced by other people. YouTube makes more money by weakening the protections available to content producers (and unsurprisingly Google is at the forefront for watering down copyright law). Huawei built a business ripping off the designs of Cisco and Juniper, and now are using their leverage to try and compete with those companies in the US.

That problem becomes particularly acute as the US switches more to producing IP. The EFF's myopia is to fail to realize that a balance needs to be struck. A world where you can release a chip or a drug or a jet engine and have a Chinese company immediately copy it and sell a competitor at a fraction of the price with no consequences is one that's not good for Silicon Valley in the long run. Our competitors overseas can recreate YouTube much more easily than they can recreate Hollywood. India still hasn't been able to create a jet engine domestically, even though HUL has been able to design and manufacture most of the rest of a jet fighter.

<comment><USER31> > A world where you can release a chip or a drug or a jet engine and have a > Chinese company immediately copy it and sell a competitor at a fraction of > the price with no consequences is one that's not good for Silicon Valley in > the long run.

I have no problem living in a world where the government is unable to exact violence against people for copying data.

This seems to me to be an entirely artificial crime whose existence has been important for humanity so far, but which is now a human rights affront.

<comment><USER32> I genuinely do not understand your position.

Let's say a U.S. company spends a billion dollars creating a chip design. You think that it should not be illegal for other companies to steal said chip design and manufacture it because it is just "copying data?" So the company that invested to design has to compete with a company that stole it, and therefore can price it lower because they don't have to recoup that investment?

Just because something can be copied more easily now than when it required a bunch of photocopying doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be) a crime.

<comment><USER33> Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should _not_ be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills.

I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig.

Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.

<comment><USER32> Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons.

the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right?

Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age.

That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>