Biased News Media or Biased Readers? An Experiment on Trust - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/upshot/biased-news-media-or-biased-readers-an-experiment-on-trust.html <comment><USER2> Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers.

Example: in my country the most popular news outlet has lots and lots of haters, obviously there will be bias against their brand, but not undeserved, they admitted themselves openly to have manipulated news for political reasons in the past, caused some mass panic and ruined people lives with literal fake news, got convicted more than once for libel, and their reporters and anchors often express their political views openly on air...

<comment><USER3> Is that like CNN threatening to doxx some random nobody because he made a political gif? That they're so biased, they're actively participating in the political game?

<comment><USER4> Context: The POTUS broadcasted the gif. Afterward, CNN claimed to have found the original creator, who CNN had kept anonymous but reserved the right to de- anonymize them if circumstances warranted.

<comment><USER5> It was the conditions of _reserved the right to de-anonymize them if circumstances warranted_ that made CNN look bad.

<comment><USER6> I find CNN's behavior completely reasonable.

Basically, they investigated and then showed _gasp_ discretion. Yet, people somehow think they did something wrong?

The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would _then_ do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started sending death threats or something.

<comment><USER7> > Basically, they investigated and then showed gasp discretion. Yet, people > somehow think they did something wrong?

The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail someone into a particular course of action, and they are using the threat of future blackmail/doxxing to enforce continued compliance from that person.

IMHO, it's journalists' job to report newsworthy facts to the public. It's unethical for them to either hide or reveal facts based on other agendas, which include such small agendas as getting a particular reddit jerk to be a bit more circumspect.

> The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would > then do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started > sending death threats or something.

Was the creator of the gif actually sending death threats and the like, or is that something you made up?

<comment><USER6> > The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail > someone

Now, if CNN actually threatened the guy that's not ok. But, this comes down to what you assumed _might_ have happened, not something that we know actually happened. Another possibility is they called the guy up for a story and he was instantly apologetic on his own initiative.

> Was the creator of the gif actually..

I said "if the guy started" as I assumed he had not done so.

I am simply saying treating such things as _potentially_ serous signs of another _possible_ newsroom shooting in the making is understandable. Not because of his actions are unreasonable, rather because of crazy people also doing similar things in the past. Organizations of this size are already paying people to do this stuff, the guy happened to hit the radar enough that he was next on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What incentive do journalists have to not be biased? They are people and have opinions. Even if the opinion isn't explicitly stated, they often frame the story to inject opinions by withholding contextual information. I see this a lot in topics I'm an expert in. Stories are often biased to maximize rage/excitement to elicit more user engagement.

I think the tools for measuring engagement have led to optimizing toward misleading click bait, and I would say that just about all of America's large media outlets are prone to this (to varying degrees).

<comment><USER9> Even if the journalist is unbiased, the editor is usually the one who chooses the headline and whether or not to run certain stories.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I've seen that problem before when working with journalists on stories. The journalist themselves understood the issue was somewhat grey, and the editor mangled what they produced to be much more biased.

I don't think it's purely about financial incentives to be honest. I suspect that many journalists view themselves as primarily social activists rather than chroniclers, and being able to directly influence society in a major way is effectively seen as part of the compensation package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In another thread, a person replying to a Google blog said software is about trust, because a person can't read millions of lines of source.

Once trust is broken it's hard to get back. So maybe news is also about trust. Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

<comment><USER12> > because a person can't read millions of lines of source.

But a person _can_ read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days.

Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually _needs_ trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance.

The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events.

TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if _they_ want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.

<comment><USER10> A lot of information is verifiable, it's just people don't do it. You're right that it's often because they want to believe.

Read any story that involves Russia and spend a few minutes doing fact checking. Or check back after a week. You'll find the story is very likely to be factually wrong and might have been retracted.

You don't need anything more than Google to reveal that the stories are false, sometimes not even that - just reading the story carefully and watching for internal contradictions is sufficient. But almost everyone I meet believes these stories completely.

For some reason lots of people desperately want to believe that Russia is the bogeyman. They not only won't use simple and easy tools available to them, they actually get upset when other people do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unlike in the orchestra study they mention, the people doing the ratings have no way to differentiate between biased and neutral news articles, since they won't be familiar with the underlying facts involved. The only thing that can really be judged by reading an article is how eloquently it was written. It seems pretty reasonable to use brand perception (in lieu of anything else) to judge bias, particularly in political articles.

</comment><comment><USER14> The news media attempt at gaslighting readers to trust their authority.

We need a decentralized information verification system. The old centralized methods are not working at our current scale.

<comment><USER15> Maybe I am just being cynical but I feel like a decentralized information verification system would be a prime target for abuse. Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth?

I am basing my idea of this off of a blockchain based approach but I am not sure if that is what you are referencing.

<comment><USER16> >Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth?

Even worse -- a decentralized information verification system will endorse the opinions of the few while claiming to be majority-rule.

<comment><USER14> If that were the case, then it wouldn't be embraced by the ever more intelligent public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> The lesson from this and other studies of discrimination is that withholding irrelevant information can enhance judgment._

Most modern news are irrelevant information. You can take almost any article and reduce it to a single paragraph without loosing informative, factual content. So why are we pushed to read the rest?

</comment><comment><USER18> So my take away from this is not that readers are biased or that news is biased, but that we can't give up our own responsibility in identifying the truth. I am aware that news outlets are biased, but knowing that does not mean I can't read articles in those sources and learn from them. It's incumbent on me to put something I read into a larger context, to make educated guesses as to an article's correctness, and to think critically about what is being stated. Otherwise, I will make choices far more prone to some personal bias.

</comment><comment><USER19> I worry if this focus on "bias" is distracting us from the more important question of reliability. Is an article that gives equal time to pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments "unbiased"?

This is much harder to measure because it involves looking at news outlets retrospectively over time. A newspaper that accurately reports what bad sources have said may not be "biased" but can make the public significantly more misinformed.

</comment><comment><USER20> When bloggers, youtubers and social media accuse the media of being biased it looks like a bush doctor accusing the whole medical establishment of malpractice.

Sure, the system is not perfect. But the alternatives are far worse.

</comment><comment><USER21> Biased media:

[https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative- storie...](https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on- bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/)

<comment><USER22> WaPo has become horribly biased in the past four years, it is like a high- quality, long-form Huffington Post. They always have an agenda to push and they don't try to hide it.

<comment><USER23> That's pining for the good old days that never were; the WaPo were terrible before Bezos, and constantly printed editorial as news. All Bezos did was add the horrible linkbait headlines, and the barely-indirect talking up and defense of his own financial and personal interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh, it's the readers that are at fault...not the media themselves. This is like blaming the human condition without realizing said condition also applies to you.

We are all biased. All of us. We are all tribal neanderthals with a thin sense of bias, period. As quickly as old biases are torn down, humans will erect new biases and causes to rally around.

It will always be a battle of in-group vs. out-group from now to the end of time. Not saying bias itself isn't worth fighting. Maybe we can minimize bias.

In my experience, the only way to minimize bias, is to discuss, debate, and digest a wide variety of views.

My main problem with discourse today is that the very mechanism for breaking down bias (debate and discussion) has broken down. You can't debate things anymore without being labelled something atrocious.

<comment><USER25> > My main problem with discourse today

> You can't debate things anymore

I can't stop hearing this "it used not to be like this". Does this erroneous argument has a name?

<comment><USER26> I don't think the argument is erroneous. From talking to people who grew up before the Web became mainstream, they said that since your social circle was typically neighbors and colleagues, there was much more incentive to be civil because you were going to see those same people almost every day. Once the Web became popular with the mainstream, people started to form ideological bubbles because now you could pick your social circle, causing people to grow accustomed to everyone agreeing with them. Once in their echo chamber, they don't need to defend any of their beliefs, causing them to lose the ability to have civil disagreements with people they disagree with, and they don't need to, because they can just stay in their bubble and surround themselves with thousands of people who all think the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember how objective the New York Times was in the early 90s - they would follow the facts wherever they went and in depth - it was a great paper then.

</comment><comment><USER28> Tldr: it is now considered discrimination to think that the NYTimes is biased. Clearly there can be no other reason ...

But ... [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a- well...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known- liberal-bias.html)

THE ONLY REASON I SAID !!!!!!

(When asked what the clearest sign of extreme bias in someone is, the above statement is my answer. If you're thinking of saying "facts have X bias" or "reality is biased" ... You've gone off the deep end)

</comment><comment><USER29> Both, but the media is more "agile" on their morals.

The more I see the more I think many if not most reporters/journalists/media people are sociopaths. definitely not better than politicians.

<comment><USER30> I think we can thank Twitter for exposing this. When you can go to a journalist's twitter page and see their actual thoughts directly (opposed to heavily edited and curated through their media property), you can get a better sense of who they are.

What I found is that there's an enormous amount of group think and yes, sociopathic tendencies among journalists. They also tend to tweet _a lot_ , like 30-40 times a day.

Ironically the archetypal example of this is Sarah Jeong and the New York Times. That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing...

<comment><USER4> _That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing..._

By the best interpretation of this statement, it is highly confused as to what sociopathy is, and may be harmful in its belief that normal human cognitive biases are signs of mentally ill behavior. It makes total sense that people would have inconsistent metrics applied to themselves vs to others. It's normal human psychology.

<comment><USER30> I believe that the NYT _knows_ they're biased and actively tries to conceal that (with articles such as this one). They also try to manipulate their readership and general discourse.

So I'd say it goes beyond just regular, every day human psychology and into sociopathy or whatever the organizational equivalent is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In which we learn again that listeners of Rush Limbaugh are, still, the least- informed people on earth. Also apparently Rush Limbaugh still exists. Look: if someone spends decades ranting about how you can't trust anything anyone says unless it's him, that tells you a lot.</comment>


Lima plug delayed - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices/comments

<comment><USER2> Linking to the comments section is confusing. Also the backlash seems really out of line.</comment>


Chrome is in danger of becoming Windows – everyone uses it, but no one loves it - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-is-in-danger-of-becoming-windows-everyone-uses-it-but-no-one-loves-it <comment><USER2> Have seen lot of developer we stick around google chrome for its amazing devtools. Other browsers are so lacking and still trying to catch up.

One good alternative I can think of is "Brave Browser" it uses chromium and all the chrome extensions work in there.</comment>


The hellish future of Las Vegas in the climate crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/02/las-vegas-climate-crisis-extreme-heat-hellish-future <comment><USER2> if Vegas becomes like this, then Phoenix is in big trouble.

</comment><comment><USER3> New vegas but instead of rads its ambient heat and thirst meter</comment>


Computer system passes "visual Turing test" - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2015/computer-system-passes-visual-turing-test-1210 <comment><AUTHOR> Full text of paper: [https://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full)</comment>


B.C. doctor says perfect vision possible with Bionic Lens - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/b-c-doctor-says-perfect-vision-possible-with-bionic-lens-1.2378961

<comment><USER2> I've been hoping somebody would do this. Presbyopia is a drag. Here's hoping it works!</comment>


Golang code comprehension tools [2015] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ralch.com/tutorial/golang-tools-comprehension/ <comment><AUTHOR> The lure of an IDE! I am having a hard time making up my mind on IDE v/s basic tools that help debug, compile, test, etc.

On one hand, IDE provide the ease of development, especially if you have used one in the past.

On the other hand, _not_ using an IDE (in favor of basic tools) results in simpler and neater solutions.</comment>


Redesigning the Technical Hiring Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/08/30/redesigning-technical-hiring-process/

<comment><USER3> I think this is a fantastic way to do interviews. I could count on one hand the number of interviews I've been involved in where I actually felt like a true measure was taken of my skills and abilities as they relate to the job I would be performing. Instead it just feels like an excuse to trot out a bunch of computer science trivia.

</comment><comment><USER4> Having been through the puzzle dog and pony shows at Facebook and Google, I still have to say that the best interview I've seen was a trial carried out by my last employer.

They hired the candidate as contractor on a one-week term. He paired with the senior members of the team and worked on the code base from day one. He started as a full-time employee two weeks later.

<comment><USER5> This process would be difficult if you had a full-time job already or if there are a relatively high number of potentially qualified candidates, how do you choose who should come work for a week? It may get expensive quickly, certainly for a small startup.

<comment><USER4> All fair points. Given the circumstances it was great, but it doesn't scale. The candidate worked as a contractor and wanted to transition to a full time position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's very refreshing to finally hear of a company that doesn't think that leading a candidate through tree-walking algorithms on a whiteboard is an appropriate test of real-world programming ability. Hopefully more companies follow suit and we can finally put to rest what Malcolm Gladwell would call our "mismatch problem".

<comment><USER7> I don't understand this. Why would you want to work with someone that doesn't have a basic understanding of computer science?

I work with a bunch of people that wouldn't know a tree if it fell on them, and it's amazingly painful. They write amazingly slow-running code simply because they don't even know that there's a such thing as an O(n^2) algorithm.

I've interviewed at Google and the problems they ask are great. They don't care about trivial minutia like what programming languages you know. They care that you can approach a hard problem, apply your knowledge of computer science, and generate a solution that's simple and efficient. That's the kind of codebase I want to work on, so that's the kind of interview questions I would want to ask.

<comment><USER6> What I've found far more lacking in my colleagues over the years is an ability to create clean abstractions and to think architecturally. In most code this is far more important than the ability to roll basic algorithms from scratch.

The Google approach is like unit testing only one specific feature of a candidate. Pulse's approach is more like an integration test.

<comment><USER8> I've had the exact opposite experience. Everyone I worked with was pretty good at all the software engineering stuff, but mostly have been average-to-bad with algorithms, math, thinking outside the box, optimization, coming up with clever solutions, etc. Maybe it depends on where you're coming from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea of actual project-based coding interviews where you get to see _all_ aspects of the candidate's abilities (communication, technical chops, design skills/trade offs, etc).

But I'm a little skeptical about the statement, "And this is so much more scalable..."

Now you have the overhead of possibly paying each person for some work, the paperwork that goes along with it, the management aspect of it if it goes wrong (and it will go wrong, the fact that it didn't in 8 interviews is just the reality of a small data set), not to mention the review time for the team on each project.

I don't doubt that you get better hires out of this process, but calling it scalable is a stretch on reality for companies greater than 20.

<comment><USER10> _I love the idea of actual project-based coding interviews_

The best interview I ever had was a project-based interview with a YC company. We spent 9 hours implementing production code using a language (python) and framework (django) I'd never worked with before. Fortunately, python is close enough to ruby that we were able to successfully complete the project.

The position was a first-hire engineering lead so the length of the interview made sense. Obviously, this isn't reasonable for a normal position, but a scaled down version is a good approach. I would have loved to accept the offer and work with them but had to go with another company in the end. I was moving to SF with my family and needed a higher salary versus mid-salary + equity.

 _Now you have the overhead of possibly paying each person for some work, the paperwork that goes along with it..._

I wasn't paid for this work and wouldn't expect to pay a dev for a 2 or 3 hour interview, which is what I would expect for a normal position.

<comment><USER11> She did mention that Pulse only pays for code or projects that would be used in production. Agreed, paying people for all interviews would not scale. :)

<comment><USER12> Ouch, that may be a serious problem. Are all of the projects intended "for production"? That is, are there some projects that Pulse won't pay for even if they're completed successfully (internal stuff)?

Now you're excluding all candidates who aren't willing to spend some time (a week?) working for what might be free. And some of these candidates will be the highly-skilled programmers you'd love to have, but who won't be willing to jump through hoops when they can easily get a job elsewhere with fewer hoops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm going to be the contrarian voice and disagree with all of this. This type of interview process is seriously inefficient. All of the "soft technical" skills you're measuring with this process can either be judged by a single conversation, or can easily be learned. The only thing about software development that can't easily be learned or enforced is problem solving ability. This is where puzzler type interview questions come into play.

Comp sci "puzzles" are a microcosm of the types of mental processes needed in day-to-day development. Having the developer code on the whiteboard tests communication skills, ability to analyze and handle critiques, etc in one shot, while also testing the most critical skill that can't be learned or enforced later on.

All these "hacking interview" ideas are missing the problem. For top companies, the only problem with the interview process are finding enough good people and the potential false negatives. The process described here just turns the problem of false negatives into the problem of false positives for these companies. This really is no solution.

<comment><USER14> Comp sci "puzzles" are one thing but questions like "how many gas stations are there in Oakland" makes the interviewer look dumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is exactly the approach that I would take if I needed to hire someone.

We need to realize that the 20-year old process designed by MSFT of hiring has been gamed and is no longer useful. Interviewing these days in the Valley seems more like a cat-and-mouse game where interviewees memorize answers to as many algo questions as they can, and interviewers try to one-up candidates by asking them increasingly harder and more ridiculous questions.

Interviewers claim that they care more about how a candidate thinks through a problem, but I know this is bs, since I've talked to people in my company who have interviewed. If they ask a question, and the person doesn't know the answer right away but 80% of the others do, the person already looks deficient in their eyes.

The process that the article talks about is probably the best way to identify good candidates, at least until this is gamed. Hopefully if designed properly though, it will be much harder to game, since you can always change the nature of the project.

<comment><USER16> > has been gamed and is no longer useful

To be fair, if you can game it, the interviewer's doing it wrong. The idea is to ask a question that the interviewee can complete and then work together with them for ideas on other ways of implementing it, trade-offs, demonstrating that they understand the memory and execution model of the machine, talking about how to measure performance issues or representation choices, etc. You're trying to discover by working with them on a problem in the small how they will react when faced with similar problem on a problem in the large. And while I don't claim that A -> B, I do claim not A -> not B. If they can't even talk about the memory touched during binary search, good luck putting them on partitioning an algorithm to run across multiple processors.

If you're just giving an algorithms quiz, you'd be better off just outbidding IBM on their "we will hire everyone from the top 25 ICPC teams" strategy.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure if you've been through interviews recently, but from the experience of myself and my friends who have been interviewing, this is what it seems to be. Based on my experience 1.5 years ago, I quit interviewing until I got enough time to sit down and memorize algos.

A popular question to ask as a stumper is "Given a tree, how do you determine if it is a binary search tree". Either that or "convert a sorted integer array into a BST".

<comment><USER17> Why would you have to memeorize algorithms for those? Without thinking about this I don't know how to it. But I know what a BST is and I could figure this out in a few seconds/minutes, I'm pretty sure.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. If you have to memorize answers to these, you need to revisit CLRS and brush up on your problem solving skills. But this is also an example of how these interviews are gamed. You don't want someone who just memorized the answers and couldn't come up with them on their own, but its hard to distinguish the two during an interview. And in many cases the guy who answers faster from having memorized it can seem like the better candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have been doing some interviewing lately, and only just received my first "prototyping" test, based off a short user scenario. It was almost scarily broad, given the 3 days I had to complete it, but I think that's the point -- show initiative, build something cool, be prepared to defend your decisions.

I was personally happy to spend my time doing it, because it was a direct reflection my abilities, and I controlled the result.

I also recently spent a short 2-day stint working with another startup team that was also very instructive. There's no substitute for seeing a team in action, how they approach decisions, collaborate, etc.

I contrast this with the full-day onsite interview I did at one of the old guard dotcoms, which was disorganized, confused, and muddled -- basically, a huge waste of everyone's time. And to cap it off, after I'd had numerous phone calls, in-person meetings, the onsite interview, and bought an SVP lunch (forgot his new bankcard PIN), I got a quick impersonal phone call from HR saying they weren't going to move forward. Needless to say, I agreed.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am just in the process of applying to find a FT job in a startup and I think that this is the best way that every startup/company should copy in order to interview potential candidates. It makes no sense for me as a candidate to solve top coder/ACM puzzles in a whiteboard as that doesn't correlates with the day to day job that they will be performing. I actually disagree with sites as Interview Street, where they ask tough and challenging problems (Project Euler kind of questions) to candidates. You can't simply judge someone from that kind of stuff. You hire someone to be able to get the job done in a company and not to be a possible candidate for participant of a topcoder/ACM challenge. Kudos to you Jean for starting the initiative! Now I know better the philosophy of the Pulse team and I admire it even more. To other startups, please consider doing the same thing!

</comment><comment><USER20> Why is "resume comes in" always accepted as a given first step?

Redesigning the tech hiring process starts with discovery. You can't keep posting your hiring needs on HN, Github and Stackoverflow and just expect a great person to find you, read more about you, and pull a resume together for you to make _your_ life easier. We expect you to make _our_ life easier because we _know_ we can work just about anywhere.

As I guess pg might say "Go to your users!" to founders looking for help making a decision, you need to go to us if you want to grow your team! We're real freaking people who hate creating a BS piece of paper for you that means absolutely nothing. Find us in person and spend time with us so we can skip this resume crap and focus on actually building things that we both actually enjoy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point--I should have clarified, but this is more often a referral. I should have called it "first point of contact" or something more appropriate. Often we don't get the actual resume in into much later in the process...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We're all familiar with the "phone / phone / half day puzzle fest" interview technique but has anyone ever done any testing on it? At any large company like Google or Microsoft it seems like it would be easy to run some ringers through the process to double check it. Take someone who's a brilliant engineer and asset to any engineering organization and run them through the hiring process in a different group. Give them a cell phone for the initial phone interview and see how they do. I'd be extra curious to see how this would work on employees who hadn't already gone through the traditional hiring process (i.e. people who came in as part of an acquisition).

<comment><USER22> The results would be meaningful but not as interesting as someone who is under more pressure to find a job due to currently being jobless.

Speaking for myself interviews are always much easier when you already have a job and always more difficult when you really want to work where you're interviewing - just an aspect of self-inflicted pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> While coding a small project is a good idea time constraints can often severely limit what you can do. The reason companies ask a series of micro- questions (like Fizzbuzz or "implement a linked list") is that it lets them test a wide range of areas that they're interested in. If you're swapping that for a bigger project there's the risk you might find the candidate spending a lot of time doing one thing without testing them in other areas.

The particular way they're doing it is also a legal nightmare. If they use an applicants work there's a good chance that applicant current employer might have a claim over that code. Even if they don't use the work, but later build something similar themselves what's stopping the applicant suing them over it ? - it's not going to happen today, but if your startup is successful one-day you can bet you'll face lawsuits. Essentially you should avoid having the candidates work on something directly related to your product.

Also if you're going to take this approach it's a good idea to have a standardized project that every applicant does, both because it ensures fairness when you're comparing candidates and because it's much easier to defend if you face a discrimination lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you can make this hiring process work, that's probably a good sign about your code base. It can be difficult to find a meaningful and reasonably self- contained project in a large code base, but if your code is very well organized, it's possible.

The thing I really don't want to experience, ever again, is to be dropped into a horrendous project that nobody else wants to deal with, usually with an assignment along the lines of "nobody ever wrote tests for this - <USER2> tests is a great way to learn a code base, so write some unit tests for this monstrosity", usually followed by a chirpy "Ping me on IM if you get stuck!"

If I were able to contribute meaningfully to a code base during my interview, that would give me a lot of confidence that I'd be able to succeed on the job and enjoy my work day.

The downside to this is that even very a very well organized code base often runs into a glitch that takes a couple hours to debug, and if this happens, you have a new candidate sitting next to a programmer muttering to himself as he messes around with config files trying to figure out out why the paths are all broken.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've spent regular time preparing for programming puzzle style interviews by working through several books. For whiteboard style interviews I've received puzzles that I've studied before or puzzles that are similar to something I've seen before. I feel that how well I do in this style interview is proportional to how many practice puzzles I've done.

But often the work I'd be doing has very little to do with the preparation I did for the interview. For this type of work I've found that a programing project is a much more honest assessment of my skills. And this is good for both the employer and I.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a different process that is I think more efficient:

1\. Hire remotely in any country and region of the world 2\. Don't even look at the resume 3\. Give the candidates a short but difficult unpaid development test 4\. Everyone who passes this initial test gets a job to work on a real project 5\. Everyone we like from the work on the project continues further to work part or full time.

The most important way to evaluate programmers is through getting to see them programming something.

<comment><USER27>
        > 3. Give the candidates a short but difficult unpaid development test
        > 4. Everyone who passes this initial test gets a job to work on a real project

What happens when only the desperate bother with your difficult, unpaid dev test and none of them pass?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The idea is nice, and can work for startups and small companies. However, the companies that interview several hundred people every month (think Google Microsoft, etc.), I am not so sure if this would work.

One way this would work in large companies is if they give the hiring power to individual teams/groups, and then those teams can conduct interviews like this on need to hire basis. But this would require a major shift in how hiring is done in large companies these days.

<comment><USER15> Actually, it probably scales better, if structured a bit differently.

1) Phone screen (1 hr) 2) Give them a project to work on over a weekend(0 hrs) 3) Have someone go through the code (1 hr) 4) Bring them in for lunch, and then a demo session with Q&A (1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for Demo/Q&A x 2 engineers)

This seems like it would scale much better. The person who reads the code can say yay or nay to the demo session, and then whoever is involved in the demo session (probably 2 engineers) can ask questions throughout the demo. Total time would be 5 hrs and I think you would get a much better feel for the candidate afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It will be very difficult for this to scale.

Yes, if you are small startup, it is possible. But imagine companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Cisco etc with over 1,000 positions per month. Add cost overrun. Add team members taking time out of their regular work to manage the temporary projects. And plus, this model will not work if the candidate is currently working elsewhere.

Great concept but not practical if you are large company.

</comment><comment><USER30> brilliant.

I've been working on a side project for a few months now and it got me thinking about how I'd like to hire programmers if the need ever arises and I had sketched out something (in my head) that was eerily similar ...

I think this is the way things should be done, I want to see how the potential hire actually does the job, integrates with the team and deals with other things like version control, getting setup with a database type they may not be familiar with.

It surprises me when companies hire devs (and pay them lots of money) without ever seeing them code.

</comment><comment><USER31> This sounds great. I've been to entirely too many interviews where their questions are completely unrelated to the act of software development. I'm sure they were all put off by my low performance on contrived questions, as well.

My favorite is that, "I would probably Google it," usually means instant disqualification when discussing any problem solving. This, of course, is ridiculous, since the very first thing I'll do is heavily research a subject before implementing it. I want to stand on the shoulders of giants, not sit around building sand castles.

<comment><USER32> Hrm, if someone answers "I'd google it," I consider that to be a completely valid response. Of course it automatically invites the follow-up, what if a google search fails?

<comment><USER33> If Google fails, it is an unsolved problem [1], and therefore requires study and research. A variety of communication mediums (forums, IRC, etc.) exist to communicate with others who are working on solving the same problem.

[1] At least to the extent that the public is concerned. It is possible that some skunkworks operation has solved it in secrecy.

<comment><USER31> _If Google fails, it is an unsolved problem_

Alternative: it's a completely contrived problem. Interviewers _really_ don't like it when you point that out, though. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Having been on both sides of table this process makes more sense than a traditional white board coding problems. In regular interviews one always asks set of known problems so there is a good chance that candidate already prepared for these problems. In a company that I worked for we had a 2-3 day boot camp to hire usually these are new grads so most of the time they are ok with the lengthy process. We used to give them set of projects and allow them to interact with each other and use google to research etc.. .Although this process was good we couldn't sustain as the company grew.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm an unknown indie developer. How can I promote my web app? - <AUTHOR>

I launched my first major web app, http://grapev.in, a few days ago.
Since then, I've been iterating on the app to improve the user experience. However, this is difficult with few users and consequentially little feedback. I published some info about the app to a few sources, including HN, but it's difficult to get a voice heard as a completely unknown developer.
I'd really like to generate awareness of the app so that I can get some feedback and understand how to improve it. It's not a business by any means, so I'm not financially incentivized. Just trying to make something good. How can I go about this? <comment><USER2> In a C4 talk a few years ago, Wil Shipley said that he's asked things like "How can I launch my app to 10,000 people on day one?". The answer is "Well, you can't."

If you haven't put the time into creating a reputation (either for yourself or for your product) and getting people excited about your next release, you aren't going to suddenly find yourself able to tap into a nonexistent audience.

What you can do is grow your reputation by creating great products and growing a community of people who are interested. Launch to a hundred people, and don't be disappointed that you're not a hit by next Tuesday. Overnight success stories are rare, and almost always backed by years of hard work. There's no secret website that you have to submit to and people will suddenly start using your product.

You'll gain users over time. At least in my experience, now is the best time for iteration. You've only got a few users, and you can actually interact with them as people, not just statistics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some ideas / thoughts:

On viewing your site, my first thought was why am I being prompted to log in? I've just landed, the first thing I want to do is find my feet.

I suggest maybe put a recently submitted playlist to the right of the main page. Then have a dialogue with a button with something like 'create playlist' to left.

Allow people to create playlists anonymously if they want - then give them the ability to share it. That might encourage some people to stay on your site and generate content who otherwise may have left. I know you're aiming for social, but how about the ability for people (logged in) to vote up / down playlists being the more social aspect?

Having names / titles for playlists as well, that way someone is likely to create more than one and give them proper labels that people can use in rating them.

I'll be honest, I don't think I can picture myself using this app as is. If I want to share a song with people I know I'll likely send a link in an IM or put it in facebook.

As you're probably aware of, there are plenty of places which do the whole music + social aspect already, so why should I use your service? How is it different and more worthwhile than simply sharing links on facebook / twitter? These are the kinds of important questions I'd ask myself.

I think your application does have potential though. I'd say worry less about number of users or level feedback you have and more about the product you're creating at this early stage. The important thing is to keep doing stuff - keep adding features and refining it.

<comment><USER4> The login thing is also what made me immediately close the tab last time I checked this website out. (He submitted it sometime earlier this week or last.) I just wanted to take a stroll around the site, see what's up, get carded at the door.

</comment></comment><comment> hendrik-xdest I tried your app and liked it. But there is no way to get in contact with you easily. Try to offer a simple contact form to send in feedback. And - I can't believe I am saying that - make it visibly beta.

Because I would really like to use grapevin but have run into some technical problems. First, if I add a track I do not get any feedback of it's addition when using the latest non-beta Firefox. Secondly, if I click a song from the "Edit Playlist" page it will always play the first one and not the one I clicked. Before you do any extensions test your app extensivly. It will help spread the word when more user are satisfied with the service.

The next step in my opinion would be to include more music sources, of course. There is already a lot that is recognized. You might want to consider displaying a different "Missing cover" grafic when the song is available from Grooveshark, though. For example "Das Racist - You Oughta Know" does not show a cover but has the song. While when putting in an unknown German band it displayed the same icon. One always has to check his live page if a song can be played or not.

In my opinion, if you get the feedback function up and do not have any financial targets, it's best to let it grow on it's own.

</comment><comment><USER5> I actually like this site quite a bit. I use Grooveshark all the time and find it difficult to "explore" new music on it. Perhaps if this site makes that easier then I will use it often.

Also, perhaps some form auto complete suggestions as you type in a song name to add to your playlist?

Right now, though, it doesn't really seem to offer anything that Grooveshark itself doesn't.

<comment><USER6> +1 on the auto complete. I don't know Grooveshark all that well. I'm still unsure how to create my playlist... so I type the title of the song? How does it work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would go where Grooveshark users are. Find who they are and reach to them. Use twitter search and other social monitoring tools to find them. <http://lithium.com> has got a good social monitoring tool you can use free for 14 days. Should be plenty of time for you to find enough of them.

Once you found them, ask them if they would part take into grapev.in mavens. Tell them you are looking for feedback from heavy grooveshark users and in return they will be the only ones with early access to some grapev.in features.

Create them a special account, give them a place where they can connect to each other. Make them super fans by iterating and get to market fit with them.

They will evangelize your product for you - sounds like a good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, I'm not an expert or anything so don't take my comments toooo seriously; but the first thing I noticed was that it doesn't look like there's anyway to use your app without signing in via Facebook or Twitter. I'm not likely to do that, especially for an unknown application. I understand it's a social app, so there are good reasons to link it with FB and Twitter, but it would be nice to bypass the signin part in order to see what it's like and whether I like it before committing to a connection with FB/Twitter. Maybe I missed that option, but if so, it wasn't an obvious one.

The point of my comment, I guess, is that if you want more feedback and awareness, maybe you need to make it more accessible?

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like this. I'm actually using it now. Could you not join Facebook Groups and start 'talking' about your website? For example, join some music lovin' group and mention it... or even get in touch with the owners/admins and ask to "affiliate".

Those are just random thoughts, I'm in the same boat as you. :) Good luck!

EDIT: Signed up and everything, but I like to listen to other peoples playlists, however if I'm signed in, I can't find any, because it redirects me to /me and that feature is on the main page ...

</comment><comment><USER9> Breaking off on a tangent here, but for some reason, I cannot get any of the features on the website to work. The added songs don't play (No Song Found), the change URL function breaks the site. When I click on the URL below Share your Playlist, a new tab opens up with a new playlist URL. (I'm on Chrome 8/Ubuntu Maverick)

Design-wise, I would probably not black out the album cover to show the name of the album/artist, but just make it transparent

<comment><AUTHOR> I've stupidly been doing all my dev and testing in Chrome OS X. I tried out Firefox OS X today and located several bugs that were preventing main functionality from working; they're now fixed. Maybe that applies to cross-OS Chrome somehow? (I got other reports about things being broken on Chrome Windows.) If you get the time, I'd be thankful if you could try it out again and let me know if anything's fixed. I haven't figured out the change URL/share URL bugs yet, though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, everyone, for the great, useful feedback. I'm taking all of it into consideration. :) Much appreciated.</comment>


Short story from Panic about spending forever to perfect three pixels - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabel.name/2007/09/coda-toolbar-and-three-pixel-conundrum.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It's always a tough call in these situations whether the improvement is worth all the work (and the time spent away from other, bigger issues). Zooming out a little, though, it's hard to imagine how you could develop a well-designed, elegant product without occasionally pulling your hair out over little things. It's just nice knowing that other people go through the same thing.

<comment><USER2> >And we ended up writing our own very faux-toolbar from scratch.

It SHOULDN'T be a tough call in a situation like this. There shouldn't even be a call to make. I literally got goosebumps when I read that paragraph in the article.

This is a textbook example of goldplating. No, actually... this goes beyond goldplating. It's goldplating combined with reinventing the wheel.

There is NO WAY the extra effort this requires will be worth it. The initial effort to implement it - maybe. The initial effort plus the extra effort to maintain their own faux-toolbar - no way. I'm willing to bet that in version 2 - or at most version 3 - it will be replaced with a standard toolbar.

What happened to KISS? Like I've said in another post - if something is getting more and more complicated as you work on it, it's time to backtrack because there's a good chance that you're doing it wrong.

I'm happy that the designer got nice-looking buttons, but I think the rest of the team dropped the ball on this one by allowing it. I'm not usually this vehement about something, but there's no conceivable way I can be convinced that this was the right decision.

<comment><USER3> It's a shame I can only vote you up once. I agree 100%. The old "if this concerns you, you're done - ship it" doesn't really cover what's going on here.

If this was the most attractive potential feature from an ROI perspective, you're not just done, you sold the company years ago and you're sitting on the beach sipping cocktails, thinking up crazy side projects with the sole purpose of reassuring yourself how pitiful the burn rate is compared to the interest on your vast piles of cash.

<comment><USER4> I've got to disagree here. Touches like this are what elevate software from merely functional to great.

Maniacal attention to detail is what separates the great from the merely good enough. Examples? Dyson vacuum cleaners, the original Macintosh, the iPod, probably any product you really like.

The thing about effort like this is that the few days of extra time invested will be shared by every user of the finished product.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying it's a bad idea because it's too much attention to detail. I'm saying it's a bad idea because it's misplaced. They're talking about taking considerable effort to reskin a standard OS GUI component here - they are standard for a _reason_. I would consider this not just wasted effort, but a negative, if I found it in any of the applications I use day to day.

I'm 100% for maniacal devotion to attention to detail. I live it and breathe it in the games I make. I don't tolerate a single frame of object behaviour being out of place. But you've got to focus it in the right place, and that's what I'm saying is the problem with doing something like this - there are just too many improvements that you could be working on that your users will find much more helpful. I've definitely been too fanatical about what I wanted versus what my users have wanted in the past.

That said, the app in question won a user experience award at the Apple Design Awards, so maybe they're right and I'm wrong. They can certainly make amazing software. But even with that in mind, I stand by what I'm saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I doubt it took 'forever' to create; I interpreted the article to mean it was low on the priority list, not hard to do. Drawing the custom toolbar was likely as straight-forward as it gets.

First, in the desktop programming world, where you may only have about a dozen gadgets to choose from, you must extend a control, use a third-party control, or draw your own. This wasn't about three pixels, this was about making the program look the way the designer intended it to. There is more to programming than just adding features and avoiding bugs.

If you're a startup, you must focus on programming. If you have customers with high expectations and need to make nice screenshots to impress Mac enthusiasts, you should make the software look as special as you can.</comment>


Ask HN: For those who don't have children, what do you do during your free time? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In no particular order:

Reading, cooking, handing out with friends, traveling, sleeping, working on personal projects, running, meditating, trying a new life habit, taking a break, organizing, fixing, improving, hiking, rock climbing, creating a new company, catching up on my field of expertise, cleaning, calling people I like, going to the cinema, going to a show, watching tv shows, testing a different tool, meeting new people, doing something that takes time but saves money, going to an event or a party, going to a museum, doing live escape games, playing laser tags, diner with friends, varying on sex, going to a health specialist, caring for my skin or hairs, choosing second hand cool clothes in a thrift shop, working more hours, helping friends with something...

Kids has nothing to do with what I do though. It's a matter of time. Some people without kids still don't have time. They work a lot, or have a hobby that fill up the day or just do things very slowly to enjoy the moment, or live in area where everything takes more time, or have a big commute.

Some people do have kids but have a lot of money and don't wish to spend time with them, hiring somebody to do it. Other just neglect the kids.

So the thing is more: you created a life with kids, you decided to take care of those kids, you agreed it would take a lot of time to make it the way you think it should be done (e.g: they being sane and healthy) and allocated that time to those kids.

Basically it's just like anything else: you decided to add something, here taking care of the kids, that takes time instead of something else. Kids is just a label to it and is no better, or worse, than any other activity.

<comment><USER3> _So the thing is more: you created a life with kids, you decided to take care of those kids, you agreed it would take a lot of time to make it the way you think it should be done (e.g: they being sane and healthy) and allocated that time to those kids._

This attributes way more intentionality onto having children than actually is the case, in almost half of cases.

In 2011, 45% of all pregnancies in the US were unintended, and 18% of all pregnancies being unwanted [1]. That means that for the nearly 4 Million births in the US yearly (using 2011 numbers), the intentions you state about how to think about time management with the additional kid likely does not apply for about 1.8 Million of them.

Speaking as a father of three, your statement is discounting a number of things - including personality type - and I find that those with kids who do a lot are predisposed to doing so, how they manage that with kids varies by their predispositions.

So its naiive to equivocate having kids to taking on a new hobby or a job - for various social, legal and ethical reasons. They just aren't the same.

[1] [https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended- pregnancy-u...](https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy- united-states)

<comment><USER2> Of course it is. Even if you didn't know that sex lead to pregnancy or about contraception or, again about abortion, you still choose to keep the kids in your life. You could choose to give them away, loose them, kill them, run away. You could keep them but neglect them. Having kids is a giant process in which you are involve all long the way.

You may say that it is unthinkable. But it's just you choosing one cost instead of another. Being a decent human or not is a choice, being a single paying alemony or a couple hating your kids is another choice. And there is a price to all of them. That's what a choice is.

A choice is not about doing whatever you want. That's omnipotence. A choice is chosing what to do with the piece of block the life tetris gave you.

But of course, none of this argument matters because I'm answering to HN readers, a niche a very educated people that know all about pregnancy, contraception, abortion and that having children has a huge impact. This post is, after all, about somebody interested in the process enough to trigger a whole debate it.

So my comment is to be taken in that context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have 3 kids, i often ask myself this in a slightly different form: what the heck did I do with all my time before I had kids?

I don't know. It's like a mental block. I know it involved a lot more reading for fun and videogames, but that's a vague piece of knowledge that lacks detailed memories. I have a lot more fun now though, with the kids. I laugh a lot more.

<comment><USER3> I'm in exactly the same boat.

The conclusion I have come to is that we got way more efficient at doing pretty much everything, or eliminating things that we felt were just a complete waste of time. Which is probably why everything feels rushed all the time (at least to me).

<comment><USER4> Yep, it definitely enforces a lot of streamlining

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Work, side programming projects, fitness, home improvement / yard work, art and music, travel, spend time with other family, video games. I schedule my days because there are endless things to do in this life. Boredom makes absolutely no sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> A question asked by someone who was single once so already knows the answer... This is patronizing, sorry if you don't realize it.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how this question reaches the level of patronizing. Kids take time. Not having them frees up that time — OP is curious how people spend it. What leap of logic am I missing?

<comment><USER8> It's patronizing because the asker did not always have children. Unless they started having kids at a very young age, they clearly have experienced the same kind of 'free time' anyone without kids has. With modern entertainment, it's not hidden knowledge what kinds of activities people do in their leisure time.

That, coupled with the question, offers the implication that they already know what the answers will be and simply want validation that the way they spend their time is superior. That's textbook patronizing.

OP may not have meant it that way, but it's pretty easy for it to come off that way, hence why the question sounds kind of patronizing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Free time?

I'm faculty member at a university. I run a large research lab, and have big dreams and goals with regard to what I want my lab to accomplish. There is always more to do, so I don't really have any "free time." I have found that it is necessary to make time to relax or I'll get severely burnt out. For example, I'll typically stop working 2-4 hours before bed, and I'll occasionally take a weekend off, especially after deadlines. When I take time off, I spend it with my wife if she is around (two-body problem), I watch shows/movies, cook, and play PC games. I also go to the gym for about 5 hours per week, which I enjoy and find useful for both mental and physical health.

To flip the question around, "If or when I have kids, how am I going to still preserve my career ambitions and maintain my productivity as well as maintain a happy family?" This question has been on my mind a lot lately.

Some of my friends with children and who are academics report feeling guilty a lot: Neglecting their career, neglecting their graduate students, neglecting their families, and neglecting their children. There are only so many hours in the day. People tell me that you become more efficient once you have children and/or that you just sleep even less. I've heard others kind of criticize others' success in academia as being due to "not having children," and anecdotally it does seem like many of the most successful academics don't have children, have them after they have already achieved significant success and built a strong reputation, or have stay-at-home spouses.

<comment><USER10> I am also childless these days and doing research. Research is like skin. You never get away from it. But, then, who would want to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Composing and recording music, songs, painting, various crafts, reading, rarely programming, playing video games (though I have less time for them in the last year). I noticed I have much more time available if my husband is away, so hanging out with him too. I have 2 cats, they require some attention too. I would hire someone to deal with kids.

</comment><comment><USER12> Climbing, running, playing guitar, reading, hanging out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Over the last 6 months? Study and teach myself programming (attempting a career change). Outside of that...hiking, kayaking, some socializing at bars etc, short road-trips. Still have many of the same "life-chores" as parents (cooking, cleaning, errands), but they probably aren't as stressful or come with the same time crunch. I think children can be great, but i'm not sure i'm cut out for it 24/7.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tabletop RPGs & board games. I sort of have a pipe dream of writing and publishing my own game someday.

</comment><comment><USER15> Working on side projects. Teaching my Chinchillas tricks is also a very time consuming task, and it helps me learn how their minds work and also how similar they are to my mind sometimes.

Those adorable stubborn balls of fur.

</comment><comment><USER16> Self improvement: reading and writing math, coding, and playing Starcraft.

</comment><comment> andrewl-hn Just overwork and paid extra for that. Gotta make some buck while I can.

</comment><comment><USER17> Social events, the occasional book/movie, tech-related stuff, photography and sports: Hiking and mountainbiking in summer, and splitboarding in winter.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just implementing algorithms for my side projects when I get the time to. I don't do much else, maybe watch movies with a few friends or YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER19> So before I was a father, I incorrectly thought I was quite busy. Mostly though, I would hang out with friends, travel, go see movies, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> Video games and occasionally programming since becoming ill. Before that add cycling and rhythm games to the picture. Life is hard.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nothing

</comment><comment><USER22> I sleep and read a lot. Unless it's going out with friends, or some event. Occasionally partake in marijuana.

</comment><comment><USER23> Booze

</comment><comment><USER24> Practice making children.

</comment><comment><USER25> All the things that you did before you had kids :)

</comment><comment><USER26> reading, hiking, skiing, drawing, deep learning

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious, was OP never childless?

</comment><comment><USER28> hack, make, learn...</comment>


A video game that lets you make video games - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/dreams-the-video-game-that-lets-you-make-video-games <comment><USER2> I've been using Dreams since the beta over a year ago. I'm mostly interested in 3D sculpting and animation, but I've played around with most of the tools. Here's my impression.

It basically attempts to boil down video game behaviors to a fairly small number of simple "gadgets" ("mover", "rotator", various sensors, connectors, cameras, etc, plus the usual logic and programming pieces) that fit together into a pretty general engine. There are also higher level features you can use, such as a flexible human "puppet" with algorithmic movements.

It all runs in a graphics engine that is itself pretty inventive. It does not use polygons, but instead models consist of basic positive or negative 3D shapes blended together, and their surfaces consist of particles that can be configured in various ways.

I can't really compare it with other game engines since I haven't used them, but I think it's much closer to something like Unity than to Minecraft. It's obviously simplified a bit, but fundamentally I think it's all there. You can (in principle) make games in any genre, but really any kind of interactive or non interactive stuff. And then there's the sculpting and animating bit. Oh, and there's a sound and music production environment in there. So it actually contains something like Blender and a DAW too. Plus it's a collaborative platform where people can share, use and remix each others stuff.

I'm very impressed with Dreams. Media Molecule have managed to compress an entire creative suite into a PS4 and made it actually nice to use with a single game controller. All the tools are way deeper than they have any right to be. The presentation is obviously aimed at a younger audience, but if you can stand that it's a lot of fun even to just explore the functionality.

It's not a great programming environment though, at least when you're used to working with normal tooling. You can make reusable components but it's fairly clumsy. The thing I can most compare it to would be LabVIEW.

In the end, to me it's not really about making AAA games or "being productive", but just a general outlet for creativity. I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in Dreams.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the explanation!

> I actually hope they won't start letting people charge for their stuff in > Dreams.

I tend to agree, but I also really like what YouTube has created with the ability to monetise videos: Many thousands of people who are now full-time independent publishers. From the demos that I've seen of this game, it could give aspiring game makers a pathway in the game industry which doesn't require joining a big studio, or learning (relatively speaking) complex tools. But that only works if they're able to sell their creations.

Perhaps if they have strong content moderation (to prevent spammy stuff which tends to occur when money starts getting involved), then they might be able to maintain a great community while creating more independent developers.

After all, Roblox has shown that monetisation in the game-creation space isn't necessarily a disaster.

<comment><USER4> I'd actually be very happy with something like YouTube Premium (formerly known as Red) whereby you pay a monthly subscription to access all of these Dreams games, and a majority of that revenue would be redistributed amongst the creators, e.g. proportional to play time. This would then be quite similar to the current PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation for Dreams was amazing[1]. They started by experimenting with some very outlandish ideas for modelling and rendering their worlds.

It was a very ambitious project. Hopefully Dreams finds success, because I would love to see more of it.

[1]: (slides) [http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...](http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRAPH-2015-sml.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Fascinating, thanks.

Here's the video for the presentation which includes animations: [https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI](https://youtu.be/u9KNtnCZDMI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some other comments here make the assumption that Dreams is like Roblox or Minecraft. But from what I can see it is way more than those games, and a person should be able to tell that without even playing the game. You can watch videos of the content people are creating within Dreams and see just how varied this is in comparison to other tools.

<comment><USER8> Yea, just from reading about Dreams it seems basically like a game engine more than a game, albeit a very accessible one that also highlights user generated content prominently a la Mario Maker.

Game creation tools have never been very accessible and surfacing UGC without the player having to dig for it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.

<comment><USER9> My career has been making game engines. What I've seen created already by the pre-release users of Dreams is incredible. Just scroll through [https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams](https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams) and keep in mind that everything you see was made by random users completely on their PlayStations. No Photoshop. No Maya/Blender. No IDE. Just a joystick.

<comment><USER10> _Two_ joysticks. And that makes a difference.

As soon as I read that article I started watching "How to build in Dreams" videos. The user interface is very unusual yet seems to work. This may be a UI breakthrough. The UI is as complex as the ones in most 3D design programs, but it's much more accessible to the casual user.

<comment><USER2> This may actually be the single most innovative thing about it. I think they've managed to boil down games making to a limited set of functional pieces that fit together in a huge number of ways, and then spent years honing an UI that make them usable with a single game controller. Mind you, the controller does have a dozen buttons (some of them analog), two joysticks, a touchpad and a gyro, so it's not _that_ simple :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their demonstration game, "Art's Dream" is a masterpiece in my opinion. It has such charm. As Vinesauce Vinny said, it will either inspire people to go out and make their own wonderful creations or discourage people who will think they can't ever come close to it.

I absolutely love the asset sharing and reuse works. I love making little games for fun but my problem has always been that I'm no visual or audio artist.

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks really cool for kids. But shame it's PS4 only - looks like the studio was bought by Sony 10 years ago. I'm not sure how much of what you learn here using a PS4 game controller is transferrable when a young person graduates to using "real" desktop tools as they get older.

Roblox (the current 8+ kids favourite) also has some elements of this, but it is quite a trashy addiction fueling virtual currency money making ecosystem - good for the company that owns Roblox but not something that I think is great for kids.

<comment><USER2> Hard to say, but the programming parts are fairly general and low level so the ideas should transfer pretty well. E.g. there are numeric values, mathematical operations, logic gates, etc. It can perhaps be compared with LabVIEW.

My main worry with Dreams is that it is a closed ecosystem, which is always a minus in my book. So far it does not feel exploitative at all, and Dreams does have some cool "under the hood" features such as OSC support. I don't think the studio itself is likely go evil, but in the end they are owned by Sony...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anyone aware any similar product that also pays back game developers and modders for how many people download their games or how many times people used an asset they created?

Modding on PC isn't the best experience since it requires a lot of work on the developer side to create an API for you AND you need to go ahead and learn how this API works by staring at a small number of samples.

If the game doesn't have an API you need to disassemble the game and figure out how to actually integrate your changes but you can't distribute it since you're violating the developer's intellectual property.

However, modding is amazing, it's the best part about PC gaming. Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota, all mods. Modding increases the potential play time of a game in an unbounded way. Why isn't it commonplace for me to be able to command alt click and then just add a new character to the game with 3 basic abilities and then share that to my friends. You can't mod a movie, there is no underlying code you can change freely to add whatever dialog you want or change the position of a camera.

Is there no way to align the economic incentives of players and creators when it comes to modding? How would you split up the pie between modders, original creators and consumers especially considering that modders can increase the size of the pie. What creator wouldn't want to increase the longevity and relevance of their game?

I'm optimistic that more games will be more moddable more easily. Giving modders and creators the tools to distribute their work AND make money off of it, will create a platform that will dethrone Steam and produce memes for ages to come.

If anybody wants to talk more about this, please feel free to email me.

<comment><USER14> Fortnite has the support-a-creator program, where players can enter a creator's code in the in-game item shop to choose to divert a percentage (5%, but they have upped it to 20% once for a special event) of all in-game purchasers to a creator of their choice. The creator can be a map-maker, streamer, blogger, etc.

The program incentivizes continued content creation by creators, and dis- incentivizes moving on to another game, as the creator's SAC revenue would dry up over time.

[0][https://www.epicgames.com/affiliate/en- US/overview](https://www.epicgames.com/affiliate/en-US/overview)

<comment><USER15> For those who haven't tried it - in Fortnite Creative you can create a lot more than fps levels. I've seen puzzle games, mazes, obstacle courses, scavenger hunts etc., and there's a wide variety of differently themed assets available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very fertile ground for 2-3 years, due to game-scarcity.

It's not that Dreams is revolutionary (it's not, just a step forward), but that you can create with only a console.

\---

Game makers are a very cool and exciting product category, but also very old, and never seem to really take off.

Making games is hard, even with teams of experts, the best tools money can buy, and inhouse tooling.

Programming - a subset - is also hard. There was once a fad of programs that generate programs, like _The Last One_ [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_\(software\))

A similar impulse was thinking AI will be easy...

</comment><comment><USER17> Microsoft also tried this with Project Spark in 2013 [1], but eventually closed the project at the end of 2016. It was actually pretty fun to build and play games on box XBox and PC.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Spark)

</comment><comment><USER18> I watched [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh3-7F0SrAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh3-7F0SrAQ) a review of this `game` and wow, some amazing stuff can do - kinda feels like the vibe adobe flash had in the days.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really don't understand how people can make all these incredible things with just a controller and no programming.

[https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams](https://twitter.com/hashtag/MadeInDreams)

<comment><USER20> It supports the move controllers to give a lot of control over sculpting and animation. There's also a fully fledged node based scripting language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This New Yorker article makes it sound like this is something revolutionary. How long ago was Roblox created? That's nothing but a giant game creation sandbox and it lets the creators charge for their content. It's simple and intuitive enough to use that my 10 year old had been creating her own minigames for more than a year now.

<comment><USER22> Wikipedia says 2006, the same year that Garry's Mod was released, another "video game that lets you make video games". There are plenty of other examples too. I'm not sure why this author treats it like a new, revolutionary concept.

The problem with these games is they just end up being a weird middle ground between development tools and games. The "gameplay" is driven purely by the player's creative drive, which results in a somewhat niche audience. The toolset also usually ends up being more accessable than normal development tools, but also much more limiting.

The article doesn't make it clear what is actually special about this game. It just reads like a fluff piece.

<comment><USER23> The limited nature can also make them appealing. A lot of the charm in Mario Maker 2 is the clever things people come up with within the restrictions.

The really enthusiastic creators _really_ learn how the editor and game engine works, for example this document goes into detail about how to take advantage of a quirk of the engine to pull off elaborate constructs:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkN...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlBSyS8WcW4S9NIHG0lGjWkNnISDtfeFhQRSCjnUplA)

<comment><USER24> Was wondering if this was going to be SALTI. We must hang out in the same discord. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> okay, so programmatic behaviors in the game are specified with a graph of virtual wires between "gadgets". It seems like this is the always the metaphor that gets chosen to replace coding in text - but I don't think it's exactly good! How do you refactor? How do you share code?

<comment><USER26> You can't. But people like to pretend we are all just taking a piss with our text-based languages and full-time jobs.

<comment><USER26> I feel that Penny Arcade nailed it when they described the game as:

"Using clumsy tools for days and days to make a worse version of something that already exists inside of someone else's product"

<comment><USER27> If all they can see is people recreating existing things they have a pretty narrow-minded view of this.

Also, people who use this wouldn't otherwise be firing up the Unity editor.

<comment><USER28> I agree with this perspective. It allows people to enter an industry early and then let them grow their skills over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If we effectively are living in a simulation:

"A video game that lets you make video games that let's you make video games"

</comment><comment><USER30> my problem with dreams is that someones time would be better spend learning a proper game engine like unreal or unity

</comment><comment><USER31> Any chance that game runs on a PS4 emulator?

</comment><comment><USER32> I recall it was possible also in Second Life to do the same..so, nothing new

<comment><USER10> Yes, but the building interface is far worse. SL never cracked their UI problems.

Sinespace, which uses the Archimatrix parametric CSG system, is the closest I've seen to this. Stretch a couch, get more cushions but not wider arms. Stretch a wall, get more windows but not wider ones. That lets you create parametric objects with constraints.</comment></comment>