Vulkan Raytracing Tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://iorange.github.io/ <comment><USER3> Hopefully the lists expands! I've been meaning to take some time off to focus on GPU programming and Vulkan seems quite attractive.

<comment><USER4> I would advise against starting learning real-time rendering/an API for real- time rendering from raytracing (not last because of the fact that you wound need special support from your GPU or a driver fallback). It would be better to start from standard rasterization techniques, possibly with a less explicit API such OpenGL or Metal. [https://learnopengl.com/](https://learnopengl.com/) is decent enough from what I have seen.

<comment><USER5> Do you know of any resources for learning 3D basics? I just want to understand the pipeline for how a camera with a frustrum translates simple vertex objects to be rendered on a 2D canvas (the parameters, and the relevant math).

<comment><USER6> If you're looking for textbooks, the two big ones are "Real-Time Rendering"[1] and "Physically Based Rendering from Theory to Implementation"[2]. The former focuses on techniques used in real-time rendering (frames per second), while the later focuses on those used in offline rendering (seconds per frame). If you want something more bite-sized, you might try "Ray Tracing in One Weekend".

The first 3 chapters of "Real-Time Rendering" and all of "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" are freely available on the authors' website for free or pay what you want.

[1]: [http://www.realtimerendering.com/](http://www.realtimerendering.com/) [2]: [https://www.pbrt.org/](https://www.pbrt.org/)

<comment><USER7> Physically Based Rendering looks great. I know that one of the authors - <USER2> Pharr - also has some great blog posts about "ispc", a compiler he wrote while at Intel: [https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc- all.html](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/30/ispc-all.html). If he was involved in a book in an area I was thinking about studying I would buy it in a heartbeat</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toka: A Chatroom-based Community - <AUTHOR> https://toka.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Create/join a chatroom, invite your friends, and talk about any topic! Also, please provide any feedback here :)

<comment><USER2> Nice site, well-designed; however, I do think it will face a chicken-and-egg type of problem unless you can scale very quickly though.

<comment><AUTHOR> So right now we are using a MongoDB replicaset which can be scaled. We are going to move to AWS soon instead of a single node for the web server. I think the most difficult thing to scale might be the actual chat server, but we've done some load tests and it can manage at least 500 concurrent users right now. Scaling the chat server will be the first thing I work on after finishing the last remaining basic features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> this seem very cool, so this is like a modernized/mainstream version of IRC then? thanks! -vivek

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! That's the direction we are going but we have some ideas to take chatrooms to the "next level" so to speak. Right now we just want to be another option that's easier to keep up with : ). I assure you that I am not a graphic designer so I appreciate the comments on my attempt to make it look nice xD. We may do a small color palette change and/or some design changes when the core functionality and scaling gets taken care of or at least address and pre-planned.

Please feel free to send me any suggestions and or feedback via firstname.lastname@example.com. We have a long list, but I definitely want to do what it takes to make it a lot more accessible/useful than irc and/or any other chatroom platform.</comment></comment>


Humraz Auctions: EBay for Real Estate with a (Price) Difference - <AUTHOR> http://www.humraz.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This will be an interesting site to watch, if they can attract enough liquidity (and keep the scammers out).

Background article: <http://classified.independent.co.uk/property/article2677003.ece>

<comment><USER2> _gasp_ There are scammers on the intertubes?</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Always have a way to reach you in your profile - <AUTHOR>

I was browsing around this evening when I came across a thread looking for freelancers. Being a freelancer(or trying to anyway) I clicked and saw several companies that were looking, but nothing that matched my skill set. There was one post though I saw that piqued my interest. It was a New Orleans based developer looking for work. I'd seen another "who's hiring" thread yesterday offering a great position to people willing to relocate to New Orleans. So I figured "why not pay it forward?" and I copied the link to the original post, with the intent of forwarding it to this person. They have no way to be reached on their profile page. So let that be a lesson to you. Always have an email or other way to reach you in your HN profile. You never know when someone offering 20% equity and a founding position in a funded startup will come your way. <comment><USER2> Related: The 'email' profile field is only visible to PG (and maybe other YC people?)

PG, can you please s/email/email (not publicly visible)/ on /user so that people stop getting tricked by this?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really agree. If you use some goofy username, then sure - maybe you need to do that. If you just have your username equal to your actual name, then they should be able to find you quite quick.

I don't like putting my email on a page that spambots can scrape at will. Sure, you can obfuscate it with a (d a_imy oyo (AT) gma il) but humans can pick that out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not everyone wants to be reached. Not everyone wants job offers or to become a cofounder for someone's startup.

Of course, if you post a message trying to hire someone, you should have a way for prospective people to get in touch. But, still. That isn't always the case.</comment>


The unreasonable effectiveness of quasirandom sequences (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-quasirandom-sequences/ <comment><USER2> Glad you liked this one. ;)</comment>


Show HN: SmartPodX – Hyper-Scale Computing Immersion Cooling - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUGHvtgS47Y&t=1m08s <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! Datacenters and cloud providers consume 6% of the global electricity (more than India) and generate 4% of the global CO2 emissions (more than 2 times commercial air travel). After 2 years of hard work, we've been able to finally introduce the first Open Compute and hyper-scale compatible Computing Liquid Immersion Cooling solution this morning in the Open Compute Global Summit in San Jose, CA.

With this technology we have a ~1.03 Power Usage Effectiveness even in extreme and hot climates, we can achieve densities of more than 100kW per rack footprint, enlarge the lifespan of the IT hardware and more. You can check out the technical specs on [https://submer.com/smartpodx](https://submer.com/smartpodx)

We'd love to hear your feedback. Many thanks!</comment>


Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer - <AUTHOR> http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty limited view of distributed systems engineering, particularly at the high-end. Some topics that are essential for designing efficient, massively distributed systems:

\- Greedy routing theory i.e. protocol design that is robust in a Nash equilibria sense. It still amazes me how many distributed systems are built on protocol designs that are provably unstable and inefficient.

\- Space decomposition data structures. The only class of data structure that is efficiently distributable at massive scales due to their mathematical relationship to space-filling curves. Hash tables are often inadvertently implemented as space decomposition structures but there is a much richer and more expressive universe of data structures that exist.

\- Game theoretic schedule awareness. This is a concept sometimes used in massively parallel systems for HPC but distributed systems designers seem to be unaware of it. It allows extremely high throughput by eliminating much of the need for distributed coordination with respect to accessing shared resources because every process can dynamically schedule its operations based on its modeling of the decisions of other schedulers it interacts with such that it almost never conflicts. I've never seen a paper on it but people have designed systems based on it (hell, I've designed a number of massively parallel systems based on it).

\- Practical topology. On the surface it is about understanding how to maximize the throughput of a fabric of switch fabrics and most messaging patterns used in distributed systems today are naive at an elementary level; HPC has a much better understanding of packet flow optimization. There is also the more theoretical algebraic topology that hints how you efficiently do computational operations over space decomposition structures (mentioned above) with minimal data motion. Algebraic topology is enormously relevant to massively distributed and parallel databases but I rarely meet people who understand it outside of Oracle and similar (not that most of them are using it well).

A lot of distributed systems were engineered without any awareness of these things. Most of their fundamental weaknesses follow from that. The kinds of distributed systems that you can design if you really know the above topics greatly exceed the capabilities of popular distributed systems used today.

To reduce it to a simple metric: if you can show me a competitive algorithm design for the Graph500 benchmark, you actually understand massively scalable distributed systems. The efficiency at scale demonstrated in that benchmark is so far beyond common distributed systems because the designers of the top entries actually understand the above points I raised.

<comment><USER3> Instead of providing resources, continuation, or even references to these topics for interested minds to dive into, I find bashing and gloating. Or am I reading this completely wrong?

Don't get me wrong, it's good to point out the writing's shortcomings, but as you appear to be knownledgeable in the field, please don't force others to begin from the bottom. Share your knownledge.

<comment><USER4> Took a little bit of reading but the OP is founder of company [0] making a massively scalable geospatial database. This is the closest article [1] I can find which has anything close to details. It lists the following technologies:

* A low level stack that bypasses the OS for at least disk IO (supposed to provide a 2-3x throughput increase)

* "polymorphic" space-filling curves for distributed parallel indexing

* hyper-dimensional spatial sieves [2]

* Allen's Interval Algebra to parallelise SQL statements

More discussion on some of the OP's previous hacker news posts [3].

[0] - [http://spacecurve.com/](http://spacecurve.com/)

[1] - [http://www.it-director.com/blogs/Bloor_IM_Blog/2014/7/how- do...](http://www.it-director.com/blogs/Bloor_IM_Blog/2014/7/how-do-you-map-a- sphere-to-a-plane.html)

[2] - [http://www.google.com/patents/US20090182837](http://www.google.com/patents/US20090182837)

[3] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482151)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've found these video lectures by professor Seif Haridi to be really useful. [http://www.ict.kth.se/courses/ID2203/video_lectures.html](http://www.ict.kth.se/courses/ID2203/video_lectures.html)

Edit : [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL700757A5D4B3F368](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL700757A5D4B3F368)

<comment><USER6> Just for the reference, with AdblockPlus enabled, the Youtube link images on that page are hidden (at first I couldn't find any videos).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You must go beyond FLP impossibility. The problem with just stopping at understanding FLP is that it assumes too little about what is available. No assumptions of synchrony, no assumptions of clocks, then sure, consensus is impossible in the presence of faults. The real interesting question is, what realistic assumptions can I make to overcome FLP? I believe the CAP theorem is similar.

Also, if you're interested in cryptocurrencies or distributed systems with "greedy" participants, that's another class of problem that goes a level beyond byzantine consensus. The difference is that you cannot assume that even the "good" participants are running the officially sanctioned software, but rather you must assume that there may be colluders who attempt to game the network.

Byzantine generals problem + game theory -> ?

<comment><USER8> Here's one paper on the intersection of Byzantine fault tolerance, altruiusm and rational behaviour from UT Austin: [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/download.php?uid=63](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/download.php?uid=63)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article doesn't directly mention network partitions and split-brain syndrome. Luckily there is Aphyr's Jepsen series [1] with both theory and practice.

[1] [http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen](http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is really awesome. I've been spending my nights on improving my understanding and was wishing for a resource exactly like this. I've been going through Prof Aspnes (of Yale) notes - [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/469/notes-2011.p...](http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/469/notes-2011.pdf)

A question to the HN folk - For a programmer who spends his day time writing web applications and no systems experience, are there any good project ideas you guys have to better understand Distributed systems? I was thinking of implementing Paxos in Go / Scala but something more practical would be better.

<comment><USER11> I've been looking at MIT's Distributed Systems class which uses Go (posted here about a year ago).

Original Link: [http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/labs/lab-1.html](http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/labs/lab-1.html)

HN comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192650)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article is the best introduction to the topic in my opinion: [http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Rediscovering-Distributed- Sy...](http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Rediscovering-Distributed-Systems.pdf)

Another good reference for understanding distributed databases is: [http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf](http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> I would like to know if any site reliability engineer or sys-admin or someone in any (dev)ops role ever seeks the help of distributed systems theory. I have seen many of the real-life systems that are listed in the article thrown in as a recommended reading for preparation for many job interviews. I've just never managed to figure out in what situations or scenarios (especially troubleshooting-related) the knowledge of the design or the design principles behind a distributed system comes really handy for a person in any of the roles I mentioned above. Any enlightenment will be greatly appreciated.

(EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it would be nice to read a detailed post about how someone who maintains a big distributed system handled a major troubleshooting or scaling problem and how, if any, distributed systems principle or theory came handy in that exercise.)

<comment><USER14> I don't have time to write a detailed post, but would a book recommendation work? :)

"The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems", coming out next month, provides a good viewpoint on how distributed systems design knowledge is useful to someone in a sysadmin role. (I've read a preview via Safari Online and found it an excellent resource.)

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Cloud-System- Administrati...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Cloud-System- Administration/dp/032194318X)

<comment><USER13> Thanks! I bookmarked this one a few weeks ago and can't wait for it to come out next month.</comment></comment></comment>


Quantum tic tac toe: A teaching metaphor for superposition in quantum mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tic_tac_toe

<comment><USER2> I've thought that the best metaphor was just probability theory with complex number... anyone else like to chime in on that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Too complicated.

<comment><USER4> Too complicated to teach quantum principles or too complicated to be fun? Actually, I don't agree with either. It seems to illustrate the concepts pretty well, and (on a 3x3 board) the game space is far smaller than that of chess.</comment></comment>


Yii PHP Framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.yiiframework.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm still not convinced by the use of nothing but 'Hello, world' for the performance comparisons. Sure there may be some cases where you only need similar functionality, but since Yii's advantage comes from lazy loading features like DB libraries, what happens when those libraries are actually used? In real-world scenarios, those performance improvements may be nullified.

Also, a reason given for the lack of database handling comparisons is that different frameworks may deal with databases in different ways (some might be really good at creating queries, some might be good at caching, etc). Ok, so turn caching off and most remaining differences should show differences between the frameworks, _which is what you want_. I could make my own framework and avoid doing a benchmark like Yii's because "some frameworks provide lazy loading, some don't".

<comment><USER3> I think bootstrap time is an important comparison since it gives a hard boundary on how fast the framework can operate. If even running a "hello" app is too slow, then the whole framework becomes useless, no matter how much you streamline and cache your application.

<comment><USER2> >If even running a "hello" app is too slow, then the whole framework becomes useless

Except Yii claims to be fast because it lazily loads extra functionality, such as DB classes and sessions, commonly needed features in most apps. Assuming they use autoload, it would actually suffer a performance hit since autoload is notoriously slow and the other frameworks already have loaded the needed classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone here using Yii for a production (or near production) application yet?

I'd be curious to hear about it. Am using CodeIgniter now, but parts of it bug me sometimes.

<comment><USER5> I run www.trackmycv.com and www.finddjs.co.uk on it as well as several company intranets. I've been using it for about 18 months, in my opinion it's the quickest, cleanest PHP framework out there. It's got loads of features, it's well documented, sanely laid out and fully extendible, can't recommend it highly enough</comment></comment>


Reducing the Stress of Being On-Call - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zenduty.com/blog/2019/11/29/Surviving-On-Call <comment><USER2> Ideally you reduce the hours you are on call. Even though I'm just a writer most of the time I was forced to be available on Skype, Slack, Flock etc. all the time as a remote worker.

Guess how that impacts creativity and productivity. Exerting control is actually harming your business not the other way around. Create a distraction free work environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree wholeheartedly with you here.

I'll also say that there must be a strong focus on reducing toil and building resilient systems, to begin with.</comment></comment>


Scientists further refine how quickly the universe is expanding - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-refine-quickly-universe.html <comment><USER2> The paper is [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.12097.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.12097.pdf) for anyone interested.

The results aren't actually that interesting. The posterior on H0 (the rate that the universe is expanding) is not at all competitive with the current best methods. They get 67 +/\- 6 whereas things like Planck have error bars on the order of 1. Checkout their figure 5 to see the different error bars.

That is not to say the paper is bad at all! The method they use is pretty cool and not common (at least I haven't seen it used before, though they do mention there have been people looking at this for a while). Also, as the main source of concern for cosmologists is systematic errors, having multiple ways to measure things is very important. They call this out in their intro, "As discussed by Suyu et al.(2012), multiple paths to independent determinations of the Hubble constant are needed in order to assess and control systematic uncertainties"

I'm not sure this is a great general interest article as AFAICT there are no big picture take aways from the paper. Again, this is not to say that it is not a good paper - I found it pretty interesting! - but the cool parts are that this is a good measurement of H0 using a less common technique.

One weird thing about the article is

> In a paper published Friday, Nov. 8, in The Astrophysical Journal, Clemson > scientists Marco Ajello, Abhishek Desai, Lea Marcotulli and Dieter Hartmann > have collaborated with six other scientists around the world

I see the article was written by someone at Clemson, but it is a bit odd in a non-Clemson publication to explicitly call out a bunch of secondary authors, and not mention the primary author until much further down. In general in astrophysics, the vast majority of the work (except in very large collaboration papers) is done by the first author.

</comment><comment><USER3> "What we know is that gamma-ray photons from extragalactic sources travel in the universe toward Earth, where they can be absorbed by interacting with the photons from starlight," Ajello said. "The rate of interaction depends on the length that they travel in the universe. And the length that they travel depends on expansion. If the expansion is low, they travel a small distance. If the expansion is large, they travel a very large distance. So the amount of absorption that we measured depended very strongly on the value of the Hubble Constant. What we did was turn this around and use it to constrain the expansion rate of the universe."

<comment><USER4> Does that quote say photons absorb photons? I haven't heard about something like this before.

<comment><USER5> Because they are electrically neutral, there is no direct interaction between photons, which is good, because it allows us to see each other even when there is light coming from all directions. At low energies, that's the end of the story as the interactions via intermediate particles are incredibly unlikely.

However, think about how an electron and a positron can annihilate into two photons. As the electromagnetic interaction is symmetric under time reversal, the reverse reaction should be possible, as long as sufficient energy is available. So an extremely energetic photon can combine with a photon from the background starlight and turn into an electron-positron pair, essentially being absorbed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just wanted to mention that there are indications that universal constants e.g. fine structure constant, gravitational constant etc. are time varying [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- variation_of_fundamental_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- variation_of_fundamental_constants)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sure thing...

[http://cosmology.info/database.html](http://cosmology.info/database.html)</comment>


Deploying a massively scalable recommender system with Apache Mahout  - <AUTHOR> http://ssc.io/deploying-a-massively-scalable-recommender-system-with-apache-mahout/

<comment><USER2> Mahout & EMR is a powerful combination and I can also recommend boto library for managing it. If you are using these together, be sure to use hadoop version 0.20 when running a jobflow. If you are dealing with explicit data, like star ratings, Pearson correlation might get you better results.</comment>


When Even Crashing Doesn't Work - <AUTHOR> http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/when-even-crashing-doesnt-work/

<comment><USER2> Though this is Bruce's personal blog, the equivalent post on AltDevBlogADay is at [http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/07/06/when-even- crashing-...](http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/07/06/when-even-crashing- doesnt-work/) and has more discussion, etc (and is one of the best programming blogs to follow at the moment, IMHO).

</comment><comment><USER3> EnableCrashingOnCrashes is one function in my utility library that really, _really_ shouldn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER4> How much of Windows is either bugs or bug-compatibility shims these days?</comment>


Hackers Can Take over Your Car's GPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-19/threat-of-gps-spoofing-for-autonomous-cars-seen-as-overblown <comment><USER2> > "These marketing claims are simply a for-profit company's attempt to use > Tesla's name to mislead the public into thinking there is a problem that > would require the purchase of this company's product," a Tesla spokesperson > said.

The for-profit spokesperson doth protest too much?

<comment><USER3> I'm not the for-profit spokesperson, you're the for-profit spokesperson!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline really is "Hackers Can Take Over Your GPS".

Unless your GPS receiver is hosting its own model of what the GPS constellation SHOULD be based on your location and the current time, and can beamsteer its antenna elements to null out the spoofing, you're wide open to having someone just spoof GPS with a low power transmitter. This is old, old, old news.

<comment><USER5> Old news with no effective remedy and a steadily dropping barrier-to-entry. "Also works on Teslas" is the new (but unsurprising) part.</comment></comment>


Obama Twitter Town Hall Infographic & Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://Obama.twitsprout.com

<comment><USER2> I could see a whole range of useful applications for a tool like this. The first thing that comes to mind... stock picks. Looking forward to seeing the outcome of this Obama poll.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool infographic guys! Looking forward to see if some of these predictions come true.</comment>


The Anti-College Is on the Rise - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/college-anti-college-mainstream-universities.html <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I'm an automotive diesel mechanic by trade, and chose the anti college 15 years ago.

Trade school cannot continue to be a four letter word in american households. HVAC, plumbers, machinists, welders and electricians are all facing massive shortages and offer a skilled, well paying job with benefits. These are all 1-2 year with an apprenticeship and the opportunity to build something you can be proud of.

<comment><USER3> I'm just gonna vent for a sec out of envy: As someone who did the software route, there are days I deeply wish I had done this sort of thing instead. My neighbor is a welder, lives in a house the same as mine, doesn't work crazy hours without getting paid overtime, doesn't spend weekends keeping up with the latest welding technology or practicing esoteric welding techniques just to pass an interview (as I sit here learning Rust because my team is starting to use it and practicing interview problems because I'm trying to transfer internally at the company). His boss probably doesn't pressure him to go give talks at welding conferences off hours as publicity to the company. Or come in on Saturday's to listen to presentations on what other parts of the welding org are working on. I'm tired of a career that consumes _my life_. I so truly just want to clock in, clock out, work about 40hrs/week and have time for my family. But I'm scared to do that in my industry, it just moves too fast and it's too easy to feel left behind, especially where I'm at in it--a weird limbo between programmer and manager where I'm expected to know how do to things without being allowed time to learn them. I loved programming when I was younger, and I still do, but my god I hate this industry. I daydream about taking a pay cut just to be able to go live in like... Cheyenne, WY or something and not be a part of the tech rush. Once I pay down my house a bit and can afford to start over with my family somewhere else, I just might. /rant

If any software folks who understand where I'm coming from wanna chime in on that, I'd love to hear about what you did about it... Or maybe I'm just a negative nancy, that's plausible too.

<comment><USER4> Counterpoint: he is destroying his body. He's pretty commonly lifting heavy things and exposing himself to hazardous chemicals. Depending on what kind of welding he's doing, he's breathing smoke from all kinds of different paints and oils. There are fume extractors/ventilation, but they don't remove everything.

My dad and grandpa are both plumbers. My grandpa destroyed both his shoulders. He's had one replaced, and needs to have the other one done. My dad is well on his way to destroying his shoulders too.

<comment><USER5> I'm kind of tired of the trades "break your body" argument.

I think just as many bodies routinely get destroyed in office environments—especially in tech. You know the trope. Sitting all the time under artificial light breathing nasty "inside" air staring at screens in open office environments with a lot of mental stress. Etc.

In each case, blue collar or white, proper care can be taken to avoid these injuries. Especially in blue collar trades.

<comment><USER6> I think your last point holds true, but it's really not an equivalent amount of stress you're putting on your body in an office. You can always go outside more after work and remain physically active to counteract the damage you're doing by sitting in an office all day, but if you're in a physically intensive trade, you can't avoid the damage you're doing by remaining less active after work.

<comment><USER7> Also you're going to have less energy to do the physical activity you _want_ to do.

I paved roads for a summer at 18 and even though I was a very young energetic kid, I was barely getting anything out of my evening workouts or soccer games with friends after 10 hours outside shoveling asphalt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm almost thirty with a degree in philosophy. College was easily the worst financial decision I've ever made. It's scary to reflect on how I made that mistake as a teenager. The people I've met that were able to successfully leverage the advantages of a college degree fall roughly into two categories: 1) people whose parents had the money to support them financially but also the sense to guide them with respect to a career; and 2) highly ambitious people with a plan. The problem is that there was a generation of students (myself included) that thought a university education led to a well-paying job. I know how incredibly naive that sounds. But it was also the understanding of many parents without formal education encouraging their children to attend. But I think in general there's an increasing awareness that this isn't the case and now we're having these anti-college conversations.

<comment><USER9> I'm have a master is philosophy and don't regret it for a second. Helped shape my thinking in so many ways and was probably one of the largest contributors to my ongoing success as in software development. I've known a surprising number of philosophy majors in software, so I don't think it's an accident that it helped me. Seems like philosophy may be one of the better areas of study to help get your brain working in ways that are conducive to software.

<comment><USER10> I used to hate Philosophy and think it's something people who can't do anything do. My vision changed lately and I think Philosophy and theoretical thinking is important.

However, abstract theoretical thinking without an adjacent skill (like software development), is probably useless in the market today. This is probably why the OP didn't find financial success.

Suggesting a philosophy career is then a bad idea. Suggesting a CS + Philosophy career might be a decent one though.

<comment><USER9> Oh, for sure. Philosophy has pretty much 1 career path, acedemics, and it is pretty cutthroat and pays poorly. I figured out that didn't appeal to me in time to pivot into software development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Several things irk me about this article

First, the proposed educational experiences sound like more silly adventures for kids with money (or debt) to burn. You could learn more about life and yourself by working at McDonald's for a year.

Second, it fucking annoys the shit out of me that when articles like this talk about "the liberal arts" they really mean humanities. I have yet to meet someone who espouses the merits of a liberal arts education who realizes that it technically includes math and the natural sciences. How many English majors takes statistics? How many History majors take discrete math or more than the most basic math requirements needed to graduate? Bet it is less than 1%.

I am all for a liberal arts education as long as it has equal helpings of math and the natural sciences along w/ English, philosophy, etc.

Have you really "learned to think" from your humanities education if you have no understanding of calculus, probability, statistics, or physics? If you have never learned how to design and conduct an experiment?

A "good" university education is simple and not sexy. High quality courses taught by passionate teachers. Nothing else. No student unions, no sports teams, no academic or emotional counseling, no beautiful buildings, no study abroad or fucking trips to Alaska. Which basically describes university studies in central Europe and Israel.

Not very sexy so no NYT articles about it.

I actually attended a pricey "liberal arts" college where I majored in computer science. I am currently in the OMSCS program at Georgia Tech and the quality of education I am receiving through it is much better at less than a tenth of the cost. We have better discussions on Slack than I did sitting in seminars w/ a bunch of rich kids 20 years ago. No picturesque campus to stroll through though :)

<comment><USER12> Your second point seems really overblown. Language evolves, embrace and accept that. People seem to be using the words humanities and liberal arts to mean the same thing these days.

<comment><USER11> bullshit, the removal of natural sciences and math from liberal arts reflects today's math-phobia and fear of doing hard things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good. But on that note, there are ample opportunities to get an affordable education in the US. You just have to make 2 simultaneous decisions. 1) Go to a public school, 2) Stay in-state.

Why the hell are so many people choosing non-public and out of state schools? Do people really think that double the cost gets you double the returns?

<comment><USER14> I'm in state and in a public school and I'm in huge debt. Family used to make a lot of money. Drugs and situation ruined my family just as I was going to college. FAFSA only takes "$year -2" income into account so my $0/month income family was being given the support that a 6-figure family got. Had to take out a 30k loan at >20% APR since no one could co-sign for me except my mom and she'd been evicted 2 times, stopped paying her bills, and had no income so it's all i could find from Sallie Mae.

"Just do x" doesn't help when the game is rigged from the start.

I'm doing everything right:

1\. Work during school (on campus & industry) 2\. Getting good grades 3\. Applying for FAFS 4\. In state 5\. Engineering progression (IT) 6\. Not dorming (except first year because of family situation) 7\. No meal plan

I'm levereged over $100k in this degree. Hoping to finish soon. I know my situation is nonstandard but this misinformation is just polluting the dialogue on this topic and it's something that really hurts people like me.

<comment><USER15> Your situation is insanely rare, it's not fair to think what you're living through is what people should be talking about as an average.

<comment><USER14> I acknowledge that in my comment. I'm trying to say that you can do all of the traditionally "correct" things and still end up with an unacceptable amount of debt. This to me signals that the traditional wisdom in this area is not the full story and limiting our conversation to "Just stay in state and go to a public school" _full stop_ is not a helpful method of introspection.

<comment><USER15> Yes, you can get hit by a metaphorical bus. It's sad, I'm sorry you're having to deal with it, but it's not relevant to the aggregate conversation.

"Just stay in state and go to a public school... also don't be insanely, one- in-a-million unlucky." <\- does that feel better to you?

<comment><USER14> If I was reviewing code of a junior developer and found a very specific case that would break the code they submitted I'd ask them to go back an fix that bug. If they came back, providing a solution similar to yours, it would look something like this:

        if (input == null) {
            return;
        }
        doWork(input);

I would still refuse to accept this situation. Hacking out the error case isn't fixing the root problem. This is similar to this discussion.

The conventional wisdom used to be correct. You used to be able to avoid massive debt by staying in state and attending a public college. This is not the case anymore. I know plenty of people who aren't in as bad of a situation as I am and received similarly low financial support from the government and the university I attend.

Focusing the conversation on "what to do" is not helpful. Focusing on "why do you have to" is helpful.

Why do you have to pay ~30k/year, minimum, to live on campus with the most basic meal plan at a state run college?

The out of state tuition for my college (NJIT) was $6,214 [0] in 1998, the year after I was born. This year the out of state tuition is $32,750. This does not count living expenses or textbooks. The college also mandates you have a laptop with some hardware requirements. Using chronicle's "Adjust for Inflation" tool it seems that my college's tuition grew at a rate of >300% above inflation.

I'm not going to make any comments here as to why I think this is, though I do have opinions, but I will state that "just stay in state" ignores this. This is a trend common to most public colleges. If this trend continues for NJIT (of add ~$1k/year to the tuition for in and out of state) in 18 years, when the next gravypod comes around, they'll be even more screwed.

[0] - [https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and- fees](https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-fees)

<comment><USER15> > This is not the case anymore.

Yes it is. Full stop. Local community colleges are _vastly_ cheaper than many universities, and the credits match up 1:1. Working full time, getting an AS, transferring to a university to earn a BS is still a _very_ viable path.

Following this path it's not only possible, but expected that one walks away completely debt free with their BS at the end of four years.

Just because _you_ didn't do the right things (or even if you did and still got very unlucky) doesn't mean the rest of us can't have a fruitful conversation about how things will work out for the _vast_ majority of people.

You need to understand this, or you'll forever be trapped making terrible coding analogies on the Internet, not being understood. Literally none of the numbers or situations you cited are relevant to this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The mainstream college culture needs to die, no question. It's my opinion, however, that "hippie wilderness getaway for upper middle class kids to find themselves" is just profiteering from disenchantment.

>They will take on 15 to 20 hours a week of manual labor in Sitka >all at an affordable price >found the program in order to give young people a taste of the education he received at an older countercultural experiment, Deep Springs College >Deep Springs — a tuition-free, highly selective two-year liberal arts college >Our goal is to make our credits transferable to four-year institutions upon accreditation

So in order to further the spirit of a tuition-free liberal arts college, is charging "students" an as-yet unrevealed fee, working them for four hours a day covering almost every single non-management job at the Sheldon Jackson Campus, with absolutely no set curriculum or accreditation or transferable credits.

This is by the far the most transparent scam I've ever seen make it to HN.

</comment><comment><USER17> Luckily I'm from a country where university is still reasonably affordable .. in fact, since I left, they've made it so fees are government-funded for the first few years. Even though I did have a student loan, it was at least interest-free.

I think university education should be seen as an extension of all earlier education. If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?

Personally, I think the time I had at university was massively useful to my educational development. Even though a lot of what I learnt during that time I consider to be "self-taught", the university environment seemed much more conducive to self learning than the working environment, where you do what your company wants for 8 hours a day then spend the rest of the day trying to defocus.

Just like primary and secondary education, it seems insane to me to just think about tertiary education as some concrete monetary investment. If you give everyone the opportunity to spend a short amount of time (like 3 or 4 years, out of a career period of 45 years) focusing on a particular field of their choosing, surely there must be a massive benefit there to society.

Edit: Also, it should probably be pointed out that a lot of research that happens at universities is used in industry, so if the university system continues to be undermined, you can expect these gains to be lost. We're probably mostly programmers, right? Try pointing to a significant feature of any programming language (old or new) that isn't taken straight from academia.

<comment><USER18> > If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll > start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, > because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?

Yes, this age is something we _should_ wonder and re-wonder often over time. Is all the delayed adolescence of the current state desirable? Do all people need 4 years of high school? Do all degrees need to take 4 years for wildly different fields? Would many people benefit from a "work study" version of high school instead? Etc.

<comment><USER17> I really dislike the idea of providing a monetary incentive for kids to stop going to school. People who are not well-off are going to be pressured into taking this path, causing a further arbitrary wealth gap within the population.

<comment><USER18> That's a good thought and big concern.

But the alternative path is not necessarily one of less learning. Many people, both gifted and not, detest academics and feel school is a kind of prison or CAFO. This would give them more options. It would give bullied kids more options too, or kids looking to get away from gang activity in their (bad) school.

<comment><USER19> > But the alternative path is not necessarily one of less learning

The problem is this still doesn't solve the wage gap. Businesses look for concrete ways to determine someone's skill, and a Diploma/GED and college education provide them easy standards to set for who can even get to the interview process. Not many CS jobs will take anyone who only lists "self- taught", even if they have some amazing code work linked (this is especially true for recruiters).

<comment><USER20> I can relate- as a 16-year-old teenager with soldering abilities, knowledge of OS X, Windows, and Linux (including data recovery) it was quite saddening / depressing (I honesly don't know the right word to describe it) to hear that I _couldn 't get a job, or even an apprenticeship_ at any of the local computer repair shops because I wasn't old enough.

This isn't a 1:1 comparison, because being young is a legal problem, but I definitely feel your pain- and the pain of others in that situation- it's a serious downer and quite demoralizing for someone to say no just because you don't have a certificate (in this case, a DL). It's honestly really hard to get someone to take a chance on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How many people in the US have come across the Open University? They do distance learning courses in a range of subjects, and has a reputation built over the last 50 years. Costs money but nothing like a private US degree.

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

It's actually the largest university in the UK, and has thousands of overseas students.

<comment><USER22> > Costs money but nothing like a private US degree.

I mean, public US degrees also cost nothing like a private US degree

<comment><USER23> Depends on whether the student is an out-of-state or in-state student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm currently pursuing an MBA. There's a huge body of research that shows raw cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of a high performance hire.

That is sometimes, but not always, correlated with educational attainment.

Source eg [https://hbr.org/2017/10/what-science-says-about- identifying-...](https://hbr.org/2017/10/what-science-says-about-identifying- high-potential-employees)

<comment><USER25> Pity you can't just test for this and hire [1].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> College is the idea of paying someone to force you to read a bunch of (mostly useless) books.

Just read books and google if you don't know what to read

And choose a field that does not require a degree to work

This way you save your time and money and probably will end up being more successful

<comment><USER27> >And choose a field that does not require a degree to work

The problem with this is, more and more employers are wanting a 4-year degree for ANY job, even basic office work because 1/3 of the country has at least a 4-year degree.

<comment><USER28> Specifically, employers look for a degree when the market for a particular line of work is saturated. Practically speaking, an employer can only evaluate a handful of people who are vying for a job, so filtering out everyone without a degree is a quick, and legally accepted, way to cull applicants down to smaller numbers.

The problem is that if you are trying to compete in a saturated market, you are already going to lose as there is always someone who is better, faster, and willing to work for less money, leaving the degree to be of no great benefit to you, with respect to getting a job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's long past time for the wealthiest country in the world to make education free.

<comment><USER30> Free? Who pays?

<comment><USER31> Done right, educating people should lead to them being more productive and producing a richer society. Done right, it's an investment that produces more wealth than it costs.

Somewhere there's a point where it costs more than it produces, dependent on how much time the person will spend being a more-educated person before they die, and I expect also dependent on the precise education being imparted, but I'd be surprised if that line was where the free education cut-off currently is.

<comment><USER32> It seems like a lot of the excess value will be captured by the person who attended college, if that's true aren't they the very person to pay for it? If it isn't why bother with it at all?

<comment><USER31> Done right, they produce more wealth and some of that wealth goes to society. It's not just that they pay more tax; they also simply produce more wealth, which is not a zero sum game. Over a lifetime, society benefits and the person benefits. Everyone wins. Done right.

Stretching the discussion a little, we could ask the same question about all education. Why is any of it free? But the benefits to the United States (for example) of almost everyone being able to read and write (for example) are incredible. If a large proportion of the US population had dropped out of school before being able to read and write (because of the cost), the US would be extraordinarily less wealthy. Everyone would lose out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> People I have worked with who have graduate level education (masters or doctorate) are extremely well prepared when performing as a software developer. The education can be in any academic discipline.

People who have a bachelors degree are less prepared to work as a software developer. Counter intuitively this lack of preparation is magnified for those with a computer science degree. Most of my computer science coworkers have historically had weaker communications skill, such as describing details with precision objectively or documenting a simplified set of instructions. I am so under whelmed that basic reading and writing are something I would test for in a job interview.

In addition to weak communication skills I have also observed less flexibility or willingness to learn unfamiliar skills from computer science skills undergraduates. It's as though these students believe they know all they need and the employer should adapt to the set of techniques these employees were taught. I have had heard somebody on HN describe this as lame duck syndrome. I have observed this enough that it biases me in opposition to job candidates with a comp sci education.

<comment><USER34> Those little quirks can be eliminated through proper employment screening. You can implement personality screening, skills verification exams and so on. Assuming the screening is effective, these undesirable candidates can be eliminated quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A lot of people in these comments are forgetting which types of employment took the biggest hits in the past few recessions.

<comment><USER36> Were you around in 2001 after the dotcom crash? It was really difficult to find work. I know a few web devs that never worked in the industry again.

<comment><USER34> I graduated from high school in 2006 and was determined to study computer science when I went to college but by the time I had graduated I decided to just go with accounting because I had heard so many horror stories about how there were no jobs in tech anymore. I viewed accounting as something that might not pays much as a programmer but it would surely get me a job because every company needs accountants. Nowadays, being employed in accounting, I kinda regret it because my true passion was computer science.

<comment><USER37> Never too late to start! Seriously with so many online resources and/or coding boot camps you can totally do it.

My company has three engineers who have done boot camps and two who are self taught coming from other industries including myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good. I think the university system is outdated and there should be other institutions to train people for the workforce.

</comment><comment><USER39> I went and failed school programs several times as an adult, in a country where those programs are free. The last 2 programs I went to were 1 year programs. I already have programming skills yet they did not give me the "degree" because they might have perceived a lack of motivation. Those programs were web oriented and I'm more focused on industrial programming.

I tend to dislike higher education as a general rule because it's more a process of fitting in and obeying a teacher, instead of focusing on the subject matter. I don't care that much actually because I know I'm already skilled at programming. I might not be an excellent programmer, but I can do a lot of what's required.

While education is important, I have put a lot of personal time to learn more and more programming skills after the year I failed one, 8 year ago. Yet the job market is constantly focused on "the degree", while everybody knows that self-teaching is more important in programming. I don't get hired and it's always a matter of trusting a new guy who doesn't have professional experience and can only talk about his skills.

Personally I don't have a lot of faith into the market and the market doesn't have faith in me. So yes, I have plenty of reasons to say that people going into higher education are lucky, privileged or just obedient people who are not yet capable of learning new things, or did not have to waste so much resources to learn things they could do at home.

In the end, you will either have large companies with normative, schooled people, or start ups, who will always struggle to start products because they have no resources.

I'd say that higher education can be bad because normalization slow downs innovation, so in the end, degrees become privileges. People who are taught skills but don't use them to improve society and constantly encourage obedience are a brake on society. In an age of inequality, degrees are seen as rent seeking. People get degrees for comfort. Other people won't seek degrees because they don't want to obey to a system they see as lame and evil.

<comment><USER40> I feel the same way. I went straight into the workforce with 17. Now 5 years later I feel like I absolutely need that degree to advance my career or to simply avoid my resume being thrown out. So I went back to school and I bet you can already guess what happens. Now that I have to spend at least 25 hours a week studying I barely have time to work on my software skills. I used to learn stuff like writing compilers, work with FPGAs, read up on machine learning, etc... You can argue that maybe I focused too much on individual topics and a CS degree covers many more but at the same time the lack of a degree isn't what's hindering me from working in these areas. I'll finally be done with school soon and then I can go to college next year and I definitively am going to specialize in topics that I am unfamiliar with such as robotics. However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more opportunities during the job hunt.

<comment><USER41> > I feel the same way. I went straight into the workforce with 17. Now 5 years > later I feel like I absolutely need that degree to advance my career or to > simply avoid my resume being thrown out.

> However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial > web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more > opportunities during the job hunt.

I started working in the field professionally around 18 or 19, and I'm begging to fear this same thing. If I do decide to go back to school, it'd be in hopes that I can escape subfields that bore me to death, but I feel the reality is that there just really isn't any real job market for the things I'm interested in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is nothing new, St John's College in Annapolis, Maryland has been educating this way for years (tutorials and no grades). The only question is if it will become more widespread in the face of the erosion of the quality of higher education.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's not about blue collar vs white collar. It's about working for yourself or being an employee. Corporate culture is 'anti human', anti-planet, and anti- social. When you have to use energy to demonstrate your 'adherence to policy' that is waste. Furthermore, corporations make you spend that energy from your private store.

</comment><comment><USER44> Say what you want, but a college degree is still necessary for high paying jobs.

<comment><USER45> No it isn't? It is necessary for _some_ high paying _careers_ , like working in medicine. But, I am certainly a software developer, for a very large company, pretty happy with my paycheck, and I have no degree. Nobody even ever asked me about it.

Whether or not it helps is another story, I am not claiming a degree is literally useless. I am however a little rubbed the wrong way by claims that you _need_ a degree to ever have a job that pays good, that seems false.

<comment><USER46> Not having a degree in CS certainly limits how far up the ladder you can go. For most jobs at FAANG companies the #1 requirement is a degree. You can be the highest level senior developer at a company but you'll never make director or vp without a degree.

<comment><USER47> Agree, this is exactly the reason why M. Zuckerberg is not a VP.

<comment><USER48> Zuckerberg never had to interview at Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> That really reads more like something centering more on some personal philosophy than something that would challenge traditional education.

<comment><USER50> Yes, to me this is the very worst version of counter-culture. This isn't challenging the elite instititutions, it's even one step up the ladder, like some 70s hippie experiment of the privileged who roleplay as workers in some retreat in the mountains reading Plato. Gender segregation and overly strict "no alcohol" policies included. it's rebel roleplaying.

If people want practical experience and physical work the organisers of these institutions should go to Switzerland, learn how the apprenticeship system works and bring it back to America so people can be set on a viable career path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> You may also consider studying in a country like Germany, where they heavily subsidize education even for immigrants.

</comment><comment><USER52> Joe Biden said it himself, he didn't like how elitist America is becoming. I couldn't agree more and couldn't be happier to see people choosing a career in the trades. They can be high paying and stable.

</comment><comment><USER53> No college. No debts.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't think the gimmicky travel to Alaska, take a gap year, or having "a way to talk about one's higher purpose in the world" is important at all. What is important is having cheap tuition and solid courses. As much as people bash on college, it's still important. I don't have a college degree and it's been impossible for me to find a 'real job', though some of that may be due to my age. This is despite having a decent amount of programming and freelance experience. Overall college is important if you want to go down the traditional job path smoothly, I think these people are focusing on the wrong thing.

<comment><USER34> Completely agree - having solid courses that teach relevant theory/skills is extremely valuable. We simply need to make the means by which we take such courses more efficient and therefore lower cost.

The bigger issue here is that employers have gravitated far too much towards the college degree as a signal device for a quality employee which effectively shuts out alternate forms of education. Employers need to be willing to hire people who are smart but don't have a college degree. If someone self-studied all the subjects on their own and it is clear they are on the same level as a college grad then they should not be excluded from the hiring process.

It is almost like we need some sort of "SAT" for various subjects. That way if someone is really smart then they can just take this SAT in whatever subject to evaluate their knowledge. We sort of have this already for certificates but it seems like employers don't place much value on them compared to a college degree. There are exceptions but they are mostly outliers IMO.

<comment><USER55> It is basically illegal by federal law to test potential employees for their overall intelligence. It is considered racist, the term being 'adverse impact' in this case.

Corporations effectively outsource intelligence testing to colleges, as they have no other choice to obtain info about their future employees' abilities.

<comment><USER56> sorry no its not a IQ test as far as SAT, PSAT and the other tests..see Mismeasure of Man by Gould for why!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Who goes to college to work in tech anymore?

<comment><USER58> Most people who work in tech? Do you think the number of Google engineers with a degree is above or below 50%. Take a guess.

<comment><USER59> Do you think their employees make up more or less than 50% of the population of engineers in Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER60> As a whole nearly 50% of all people in SV have a B.S. or higher and over 70% have some college experience; it's the third most educated place in the country.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/25/silicon-valley- is-3rd...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/25/silicon-valley-is-3rd-most- educated-region-in-america-study-says/)

<comment><USER57> I would argue that a significant proportion of those in tech have that do have degrees, hold degrees that are irrelevant to their profession.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Source Analysis for C#  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/05/23/announcing-the-release-of-microsoft-source-analysis.aspx <comment><USER2> Meh. I ran it and it has lots of reported things that are not real problems.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Improve Typing Accuracy - <AUTHOR> I have been using a keyboard for a long time, but I struggle to type accurately. I am more a 'touch-typer' than a 'hunt-and-pecker' but my accuracy is poor. There are two particular times when I find this frustrating. I work on the command line quite a bit, and invariably I will make a mistake and the command doesn't work. Correct it, but make another mistake. Again it doesn't work. I could slow down, and that helps, but at times it is frustrating. Also, it makes using slack/irc/etc frustrating because most of the time my sentences contain some mistake that makes me sound like I am struggling with the language when I am a native speaker!<p>I know that it sounds like a should simple do more touch typing practice, and maybe that is the answer, but the problem is that when I do exercises online I actually have pretty good accuracy. That includes typing practice in code and not just English. I am hoping that some of you might have suggestions or ideas that I have not thought of.<p>(you have no idea how many times I hit backspace while writing this!) <comment><USER2> Perhaps you could try hitting the correct keys. :)

I am myself a touch-typist not using all ten digits, but still getting around 90-110 wpm typing English on online testing sites (though not a native speaker).

My error rate is usually pretty small (1-3%), but I "feel" when I miss a key and quickly correct it automatically.

I find that the rate of my typing is sufficient for the work I do (software development), so I am not bothered about improving further.

You obviously don't think your typing speed is sufficient (thus the typos), so I believe you should invest in proper hand placement and practice: if you can't force youself to do it, just get one of those split ergonomic keyboards.

There is nothing like being forced to deal with it to make you improve :)

(Any typos here are due to phone "keyboards" :)</comment>


Success is All in a Day's Work - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/yourlife/18699

<comment><USER2> the more I interact with the business world the more I realize that there are talkers and there are doers. You become successful not just by being a doer, but by surrounding yourself with other doers.

The nice thing about doers is that it's very easy to spot if you know what you're looking for.

<comment><USER3> The bad thing about doers is that they're scarce.

And not just in the business world either. Talkers are everywhere and it annoys the * out of me.

(btw - while it's true that you can spot doers and talkers from miles away, I know one guy - only one - that is that rare creature: a talker who actually does as well. amazing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah yes, fluffy pablum from the man who stared in Expelled, the movie about why big science is a big conspiracy to keep down THE TRUTH about intelligent design.

<comment><USER5> Are his words any less valid because of that?

<comment><USER6> Yes. It isn't exactly a challenge to find great artists and writers who worked prodigiously through their lives and remained poor. I'm sure Vincent van Gogh appreciates Stein's patronizing explanation of how the world works though.

<comment><USER7> true, many great people worked hard throughout their lives and still never achieved success in their lifetime. But on the other hand I can't think of a single great personality who made it WITHOUT real hardwork.

<comment><USER8> Maybe (I am not a historian). But it is a trivial statement that working harder is the road to success. Also, perhaps as a 30 year old you should hang out in bars at times nevertheless. What is he supposed to write about?

Still - this work harder thing is like the dieting tips in women's magazines. We've all heard it about 1000 times before, but somehow we still need to be reminded of it from time to time.

<comment><USER9> >But it is a trivial statement that working harder is the road to success.

My preferred despair poster explain perfectly your statement.

<http://www.despair.com/incompetence.html></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Android Security Bulletin–July 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2020-07-01 <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. 2.10 MB update for my Pixel 3 brought it to QQ3A.200705.002.

Still no updates for my Nexus 5.</comment>


Casual games site OMGPOP (nee iminlikewithyou) raies $5M from Bessemer - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090310/investors-bet-5-million-on-casual-game-site-omgpop-hope-users-start-paying-up/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations to Chuck, EJ and team. Love the concept, business model (I believe it's still in the works) and in general the branding behind the company. Still preferred GAYmes as a decent alternative (courtesy Jason Oliver) ;)</comment>


Nasty Bug Lets Hackers into Nearly Any Android Phone Using Nothing but a Message - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/27/nasty-bug-lets-hackers-into-nearly-any-android-phone-using-nothing-but-a-message/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9954686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9954686)</comment>


Bullfrog After Populous - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2020/09/bullfrog-after-populous/ <comment><USER2> When people ask me what game developer I'd like to work for I used to say either Lucasfilm Games in 1987 or Bullfrog in 1990. Bullfrog had a huge amount of prestige amongst Amiga gamers. It might not look like it now, but everything they did appeared original and innovative at the time. Peter Molyneux was seemingly up there with Sid Meier as one of the great designers of the era. It was only later that he soured his reputation.

I remember Bullfrog's programming tutorials in Amiga format [0]. If that was all you had (it was all _i_ had) then it wasn't enough to let you write your own games or learn enough to get a job.

I got my parents to buy me a book on 68000 assembly to go with it, only to find that the Devpac assembler from the tutorial didn't come with any of the OS include files, so I couldn't get past the second chapter. These kinds of setbacks were typical.

When I think back to those days, I loved the Amiga community and magazines, I loved the seemingly accessible, informal world of game development, but it was so damn hard to just climb the first step and learn to code if you didn't have much money.

[0] [https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901...](https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901/page/n61/mode/2up)

<comment><USER3> For me it would be Steve Barcia [0], the creator of Master of Magic (MoM) and Master of Orion II (MoO 2). (MoO 1 wasn't as great as the 2).

I surely played thousands of hours just with these two games, over 20+ years.

A while ago I tried to get in touch with him (among other things I started a tech podcast and I wanted him as a guest), but I couldn't find any way to contact him. I messaged him on Linkedin, but never responded.

What a pity. I would have loved to ask him how was his life when he developed these two games.

Fun fact: MoM has an incredible mod, called Caster of Magic, built by this lonely Japanese developer. [1]

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

[1]: [http://seravy.x10.mx/Wordpress/?p=2027](http://seravy.x10.mx/Wordpress/?p=2027)

<comment><USER4> Master Of Magic was and is such a masterpiece (and MoO 2 as well). Some of the older games, while often heavily unbalanced with clunky user interfaces, have so much better atmosphere and setting than many of the newer games. Maybe it's that it used to be much more about craftsmanship and telling a story, than just trying to make as much as money as possible.

My all time favourite game is Alpha Centauri and I would have loved to be around to see how they designed the tech tree among other things. It still feels like an excellent sci-fi novel wrapped as a game. Wish newer games could attempt something like that. Although I have to say many times an RPG game attempts something like that, the quality of their story leaves a lot to hope for.

Darkest Dungeon is one of the newer games that has successfully created great atmosphere, similar to those older games. Yet sadly I at least got very quickly tired playing it, with dull grinding of the characters who would keep dying by random crits.

I guess also because multiplayer has become so prevalent that it's not even necessary to create great storylines anymore. People will be satisfied by the interactions they have playing other humans and its never-ending challenge by the changing metagame and such.

<comment><USER5> The attention span of players today is much smaller than it used to be and there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, so I believe that these facts changed what mainstream games are supposed to be. But we have the indies :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A random fun note about how Peter Molyneux was able to start Bullfrog, sourced from Wikipedia[0] and mentioned in this blog's previous post[1]:

Molyneux tried to sell a game years earlier but failed so instead started a baked bean export company called Taurus Impex Limited. Commodore International mistook it for Torus, an established networking software company, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten free (still unreleased) Amiga systems. Taurus then designed a database system for the Amiga and the profits let Molyneux and Les Edgar found Bullfrog Productions.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux#Early_career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux#Early_career)

[1]: [https://www.filfre.net/2016/06/peter-molyneuxs-kingdom- in-a-...](https://www.filfre.net/2016/06/peter-molyneuxs-kingdom-in-a-box/)

</comment><comment><USER7> > For all the changes it evinced over what had come before, Syndicate was a > typical Peter Molyneux game in other ways. It started out thoroughly > entrancing, but went on way too long, with only a handful of fixed mission > types on offer as you slowly — very slowly — took over the world. By the > mid-game, you had discovered most of the cool gear and cybernetic > enhancements, and what had started out fresh and exciting had begun to turn > into a bit of a grind. Thus Syndicate became another Molyneux game that far > more players started than finished.

I'm not following this part, and a similar comment with Magic Carpet. I completed both games and never had this feeling at the time. There's enough new stuff and variety in the missions to keep it interesting until the end.

> At bottom, Theme Park is a nasty, cynical little game, amoral if not > actively immoral — a game where your concern isn't with the happiness of > your guests at all, but strictly with the amount of money you can extract > from them; a profitable theme park with miserable patrons is not only > possible but the only practical road to success. This is the kind of game > where you over-salt the patrons' fries to get them to buy more soda, which > cups you stuff to the brim with ice to… well, you get the picture.

I just took it as silly fun as opposed to some kind of social commentary.

<comment><USER8> He is partially right about Syndicate. You used to max out your characters mid-game and the gameplay after that was usually "just persuadertron everyone until you have a goblin army and attack". There wasn't much variety in missions. However, I don't remember getting bored by the game either. I was just sad that it got too easy and repetitive after a certain point.

<comment><USER9> Minigun was the default weapon from somewhere around mid game.

Some levels had enemy snipers. The last level had gauss gun enemies. That's it as far as level variety goes in that game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Peter Molyneux cut my hair once at a Friday meeting in 2003 while I was interning at Lionhead on Black and White 2.

It was a very interesting company, full of brilliant people. Demis Hassabis wasn't there anymore, but Alex Evans was, and he was my demoscene programming idol at the time. I didn't hesitate to get both their autographs before going back home!

<comment><USER11> ...cut your hair?

<comment><USER10> There were a bunch of internal mailing lists including the "water cooler" lhsocial, and one day (I was 19, please forgive me) I wrote that I had no idea where to get a hairdresser and anyone with scissors is welcome to have a go.

So he called me out in the middle of a Friday all hands meeting and, well, kept his side of the deal :)

<comment><USER12> That is so cool. I love serendipitous stuff like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's also the "Populous Classic Game Postmortem" from GDC: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaK6y5kdro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaK6y5kdro)

Tons more vids like this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The flamethrower in Syndicate was the best. I can still hear the screams. Also being able to 'persuade' large groups of people to form a human-crowd shield was quite delightful.

<comment><USER15> Indeed, and while it sounds very violent, Syndicate is an awesome game that still holds up extremely well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If this caught your interest, I highly recommend the Kim Justice youtube series on Molyneux.

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

<comment><USER17> I was just watching another mostly Molyneux centered documentary: 30 Years of God Game History | Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, Spore and more [https://youtu.be/gt4-tBFIcsI](https://youtu.be/gt4-tBFIcsI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I was 16 I beta-tested Black & White at Lionhead Studios, and met Peter Molyneux and his team. They were my heroes at the time, as I dreamt of one day being a game developer. I stayed by myself in a B&B, testing the game all day, reading my coding books and copies of EDGE magazine :)

I remember Peter telling his team that if the game went well he'd take the whole team (around 40 people, IIRC) on a big yacht. It was all very exciting!

Peter came and chatted with me and the other tests (most of who were about 10, and friends of the kids of the other developers), and asked about my interest in programming. I told him I'd been working on a snakes like game, and he said he'd love to look at the code, which sadly I didn't have (no laptops back in those days, and I didn't bring a floppy).

I never ended up becoming a game developer. I discovered web development, and startups, and never looked back :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Populous, Powermonger, Magic Carpet, loved them all. Dungeon Keeper (which the article doesn't mention) is still one of my top 10 games.

Black and White... OK, yeah, I enjoyed them, but it always felt like the full experience wasn't developed. It talked the talk but never walked the walk.

then... Godus. Yeah. Good concept, I played > 50 hours on it. but it never delivered at all.

It's like the more able the hardware and software was to deliver Molyneux's vision, the less deliverable his vision was.

<comment><USER20> > Godus. Yeah. Good concept, I played > 50 hours on it. but it never delivered > at all.

That was a painful year or so. So many restarts and hopeful explorations only for it to.. never in any useful way ever give the game it promised.

A shame, as the basic mechanics were seemingly all there - I never could wrap my head around what went wrong.

The worst of it though is I now can't stand to listen to a childhood hero's bullshit.

It's ok, I still have Populous II and Syndicate on WinUAE

<comment><USER21> The first time I heard a musician refuse to interpret their own song, I found it odd. It made a little more sense as I got older and heard more examples.

When I started seeing people talk about the personalities behind video game franchises, it made a _lot_ more sense. We don't need all of your vision, just some clues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, I don't have much else to add to the discussion, apart from that my company is located in a co-working space in Guildford, in an office one floor directly below where the Bullfrog offices moved after Populous. We do have their original floormat [0], and a lot of stories, courtesy of the original Glenn Corpes who worked on the artwork for that game.

[0] [https://imgur.com/a/YBzp0tc](https://imgur.com/a/YBzp0tc)

</comment><comment><USER23> No mention of my favourite game of all time Theme Hospital, or project lead Mark Webley :( Nor the company he and Molyneux started which lead to the widely popular game Fable

<comment><USER24> Barf cascades! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have to say, I loved Theme Park more than the author did. Even at the age of 12 (I think?) when I got it I understood the cynical take it took on the whole industry and found it endlessly entertaining. I haven't replayed it since (and judging by the article, won't!) but I've got a lot of happy memories. By comparison Rollercoaster Tycoon never grabbed me, despite the fact that I enjoyed Transport Tycoon a lot. It just didn't have the spark Theme Park had.

<comment><USER26> Same here. I tried to replicate the experience when developing SimAirport; I'm happy with the way the game turned out overall, though there will always be lots of things I want to tweak/change/improve. That said, Theme Park was and still is probably the most memorable & engaging gameplay experience I've ever had. I can still _vividly_ recall building the "water slide" around my park to improve guest happiness, etc. Many prefer Theme Hospital or similar, but Theme Park will always be the game that really had an impact on me far more than any other game ever has.

<comment><USER27> I knew it must have been a man of culture behind it, sim airport strikes that nostalgic cord of mine like few other modern tycoons

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "How do you play this game?"

"The area shown has lots of hills and valleys. Your first job is to raise and lower the land to make it flat."

"That's the game?"

"Just for the first few minutes."

</comment><comment><USER29> Powermonger was a cracking game, played it on the Amiga. Definitely unique graphics of the time, decent gameplay. I remember that and Mega lo Mania being great games of that time and genre. Populous I never got into that much, seemed like Elite in the procedurally generated sense but with Elite it was less obvious.

<comment><USER30> oh man, megalomania.. like nuclear war, so simple but so fun..

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Theme Park was one of my favorite games as a child.

I enjoyed it immensely building out a theme park at first, for a long time. I constantly didn't do well though and always end up pretty much bankrupting on my first park, let alone expanding to other cities.

One day I read some sort of cheat/guide that to have a profitable park, you build Duck Shoots, and make the prizes worth less than the cost for each play, and make the winning percentages 100%. I put the Duck Shoot right at the entrance of the park and build the rest of the park around it. Every guest who comes in plays the Duck Shoot first and is happy they won, and I make a profit from every guest, and everyone is happy with a balloon prize.

This was my first lesson about its immorality. Strangely, the game became less fun after that. I was able to make profitable parks and expand to other cities. Then I stopped playing; and over the years, every time I tried to pick back up the game again, I find myself going through the motions of setting up that Duck Shoot trick because it was the only way I know to make money running a park, and then I quickly lose interest after that because all the researches and stuff were just a lot of work and it was boring having the same 4 rides until researches complete. It was a little bit like real life...

</comment><comment><USER32> I really loved Powermonger when I was a kid. I'm surprised it didn't take off to be more popular than it was.

<comment><USER17> Yes, there were so many little details like looking for pigeons leaving to see if there is a spy in your town.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ahh I've gotta find my buddy Glenn and tell him the game he did the artwork for, artwork which Royal Mail then minted _on a stamp_, is top of HN!

</comment><comment><USER33> I played a bunch of Populous on Amiga as a young child, thinking a lot about ideas of God and civilization. It was a very unique experience for me to play that game; an awesome and terrifying feeling. It didn't explain anything. You push a button, sometimes it does nothing (not enough mana or whatever), sometimes the whole earth would shake and lives are destroyed. The feeling of satisfaction when castles are formed.

I remember the launcher desktop icon would be a hut. But when you double-click it turns into the castle. So friggin cool. Just the sense of _mystery_ behind it all.

<comment><USER17> The early EA games on the Amiga really had some magic about them, down to the box designs and the tone of their ads. It really felt like a whole new era with new possibilities was on the horizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For me, Syndicate really changed my life. I had a Commodore 486 SLC, with 2 Mb RAM. But I'd seen the game at my friend's house, so I _knew_ that I _needed_ this game in my life. There was only one thing to do, and that was to kill sweet pink piggy, and off to the store I went to buy 2 more megs of RAM. And then... Minigun-toting cyborgs!

</comment><comment><USER35> I expected to see Dungeon Keeper on that list. A remarkably cheeky, dark and funny game which I played way too much as a kid.

<comment><USER7> I liked a lot about Dungeon Keeper but there was just zero strategy or challenge to it. The combat ruined it for me - if someone invaded your dungeon, all you had to do was pick up 20 odd high-level monsters and drop them on top of the invader. All the monster stats, spells, special abilities etc. became meaningless.

Not sure how it would work with RTS style movement or even turn based combat but being able to instantly teleport your units to where you needed them didn't make any sense to me in terms of game design.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, the combat was pretty much an afterthought. They didn't even bother to rework it in the sequel, they just added a token nuisance in the form of monster dropping stun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hi-Octane remains one of my favourite racers, and Syndicate Wars (yes, post-EA purchase) is still a fantastically fun game.

<comment><USER37> Hi-Octane was great. And it was built in just 6 weeks[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi- Octane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Octane)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's a little too much hero worship in this article for my taste. Molyneux is not some wide-eyed dreamer whose hopes keep getting dashed by the mean nasty world. He's a serial liar who may have started out simply being too hopeful but has spent the last fifteen years lying to gain investors and happily screwing as many people on the back end as he can get away with. For example, he built the entire premise and hype over his Cube mobile game about having one single winner who could share or keep the prize. Bryan Henderson won it and the prize turned out to be a major role in Molyneux's next game Godus. Except giving out prizes doesn't make Peter any money so he told Henderson to go fuck himself and never contacted him again.

<comment><USER39> Henderson didn't receive money since Godus was not profitable — which is not surprising, since it wasn't that good.

I don't think it's fair to call a developer a `serial liar` when they say they are working on a great game and then fail.

Failing is commonplace.

<comment><USER38> That is not true. Henderson was promised a role as "God of gods" and one percent of revenue during his tenure. Molyneux simply decided not to implement the role of God of gods in the game and gave Henderson nothing. In his BAFTA acceptance speech he admitted he "makes up game features on the spot to keep game journalists from falling asleep". Peter Molyneux is so full of shit his eyes are brown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I used to hear Magic Carpet sounds in TV shows and movies quite often once. Not anymore though.

<comment><USER41> Yes - the speeding "whoosh" sound reminds me of it every time: [https://youtu.be/m3zsPl4Ampw?t=607](https://youtu.be/m3zsPl4Ampw?t=607)

<comment><USER40> Yes. That was it!

I always wondered how that happened. No copyright?

<comment><USER42> There were sound effect samplers that went around on CD back in those days. Presumably purchasing the CD came with a license to use the effects in your projects. There was also a wind noise sound that found its way into many different game and motion picture productions that I always instantly recognized.

<comment><USER43> I remember the pig noise (farm?) from Warcraft 2 would crop up in all sorts of random places

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Flood is treated unfairly. It has a nice difficulty increase and is an enjoyable platformer with a few twists. Water fills the levels gradually and you can stick on most of the walls. It has a really neat aesthetic too.

I've actually gone back and played the game and it's held up surprisingly well.

Long play video of the game : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EbGjm_x808](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EbGjm_x808)

</comment><comment><USER24> Peter Molydeux:

[https://twitter.com/petermolydeux](https://twitter.com/petermolydeux)

[https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/1287527427355410439](https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/1287527427355410439)

@PeterMolydeux: Imagine a dating sim where you answer questions about yourself but then find you're playing as the love interest. You discover that 'you' are actually an amazing and wonderful person and fall in love with yourself.

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

Peter Molydeux is a Twitter account presented as a parody of the game designer Peter Molyneux. Created by game artist Adam Capone in 2009, it posts audacious game design ideas in the style of Molyneux. The account presents Molyneux as a tragicomic character with unrelenting, creative ideas that are continually received by an apathetic audience. Over time, the account evolved from a Molyneux-based persona into a list of potential game concepts. A common theme of the tweets is the untapped potential of emotional game experiences. Molyneux came to appreciate the parody, and has since met Capone in person.

I imagined him going through the supermarket with a digital recorder and coming up with ideas while shopping ... And over dinner, he's rearranging his peas and saying. 'Is this giving me a game idea?' And his wife is saying, 'Shut up, Peter. Just eat your food.' –Capone (Molydeux) on Molyneux

Some of the parody account's proposals include:

A racing game in which the player controls the road instead of the vehicle

A Kinect game in which the player must cry to open a gate

An eight-person online multiplayer game in which each player controls one leg of an octopus

The final segment of a war game, in which the player pauses in silence at the tombstone of each KIA recruit

A 3D adventure game in which the amnesiac player awakens in a museum with a room dedicated to each year of the character's life

The player holds a radioactive baby, which acts as a torch in a dark environment; rocking the baby increases its luminescence

The player pretends to be blind and must walk into objects to avoid suspicion

A bear must hug people in order to live, but crushes the people he hugs

A pigeon carries sentimental objects to businessmen to persuade them not to kill themselves

A divorced father sneaks into his family house to help with chores without alerting them

When the player kills henchmen in one game, the player sees recurring images of those henchmen's crying children in an unrelated sports video game

A version of Street Fighter in which streets fight other streets

<comment><USER45> > An eight-person online multiplayer game in which each player controls one > leg of an octopus

This could be fun. Depends on the controls and lag. Offline mode please!

<comment><USER46> Octodad has an offline 4 player mode like this. It's actually pretty hilarious. I've played it with my 3 sons a few times, and it's especially great if you randomize who has what limb after each achievement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where is Project Milo?

We may have Final Fantasy 15 and The Last Guardian, but who cares when mankind's greatest achievement is still nowhere to be found?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcSxnBlW0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcSxnBlW0A)

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

</comment><comment><USER47> As little kids we used to play Theme Park with a friend of mine. After we got bored with the game we used to create parks called sth like "Filthy sh*tter" and try to make them the most hideous places ever. No cleaning service, garbage lying all around, kids throwing up on the pathways and so on. For some reason this felt as rewarding as building a fully functional park...

</comment><comment><USER12> Populous II was one of the first video games I remember loving wholeheartedly.

Molyneux rolled big dice and often lost. When he won, though, he won big.

</comment><comment><USER48> Have there been any recent games as good as populous? I was thinking about this and how good the game Dungeon Keeper were

<comment><USER49> Empire Earth II (and I guess one as well) - is a similar experience that I have enjoyed for many hours since retiring the Amiga.. not so modern these days sadly. I found one of the cdroms for it not long ago.

If someone would please make Empire Earth III happen, it would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER50> Empire Earth III did happen. But even the studio who made it tried to bury any trace of it. It was huge flop.

<comment><USER49> So we need an EE 4 then! EE 1 and 2 were really good and I'd prefer to play them over most games I've looked into since.

Wonder what similar / modern current RTS would be close?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just one piece of art that I miss in the article

[https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions#/media/...](https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions#/media/Fichier%3ABullfrog_Productions_Logo.jpeg)

</comment><comment><USER52> Speaking of weird old and unique games, does anyone remember Lords of Chaos?

Its a 1v1 Wizard game where you spend the early game summoning creatures, exploring the map and picking up ingredients before brewing potions and fighting your enemy before the map explodes around you.

<comment><USER53> Loved that as a kid on the spectrum, a great sequel to chaos. Iirc you could actually hot seat 4 players on some maps?

Check out chaos reborn on steam for a reasonable modern update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wish they had gone into to talk about Dungeon Keeper.

"Micro piglets stalk your dungeon, beware!"

</comment><comment><USER55> I still remember beating Zeus in Level 999 of Populous II by spreading the plague to all his followers. This memory feels strangely up-to-date in our days of a world wide pandemic.

</comment><comment><USER56> It astounds me that there isn't a mobile version of Populous.

It seems like the perfect interface for it, and I can't understand why there wouldn't be a market for it.

<comment><USER20> I think this is what they really intended Godus to become - a sort of idle clicky grind game with pleasing, but essentially shallow, interaction, and no more.

Unfortunately, some of us were caught up in Molyneaux's breathless inflatory hype and thought it was going to be Populous X.

\- ed

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Syndicate was their best game - thanks Sean Cooper

</comment><comment><USER24> I love his earlier games (especially DK), and his games deeply influenced The Sims (especially Theme Hospital, which I stayed late at work playing obsessively into the night while working on The Sims architectural tools), but how Peter Molyneux neglected that poor kid who he promised to make a god was unnecessarily and unforgivably cruel. How hard would have it been for him to simply pick up the phone and apologize?

>The Game Designer Who Promised to Make a Man God. It's not going so well.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nze9gg/the-game- designer-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nze9gg/the-game-designer-who- promised-to-make-players-gods)

>The God who Peter Molyneux forgot. For Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson, the prize inside the cube has been anything but life-changing.

[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who- pe...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-peter- molyneux-forgot)

>The god who Peter Molyneux forgot wants his cut of a new game bundle to go to charity instead. "It felt very bizarre to me."

[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-26-bryan- henderso...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-26-bryan-henderson- the-god-who-peter-molyneux-forgot-wants-his-cut-of-a-new-game-bundle-to-go-to- charity-instead)

>The Man Who Promised Too Much

[https://kotaku.com/the-man-who-promised-too- much-1537352493](https://kotaku.com/the-man-who-promised-too-much-1537352493)

>Serial over-promiser Peter Molyneux promises to stop over-promising. Designer breaks a year of self-imposed press exile with reflective interview.

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/serial-over- promiser-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/serial-over-promiser- peter-molyneux-promises-to-stop-over-promising/)

>Peter Molyneux's God Game Is Looking Like Yet Another Disappointment

[https://www.wired.com/2015/02/molyneux-godus- kickstarter/](https://www.wired.com/2015/02/molyneux-godus-kickstarter/)

>Peter Molyneux interview: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'. The veteran game designer is at the centre of a raging controversy over his new game Godus. He says he is finished with the press.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter- mol...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux- game-designer-interview-godus)

>The Lesson of Peter Molyneux. "Sooner or later the bullshit has to stop."

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter- molyne...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyneux/)

>Why Peter Molyneux's Godus is Such a Disaster

[https://www.techspot.com/article/964-peter-molyneux-godus- di...](https://www.techspot.com/article/964-peter-molyneux-godus-disaster/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Nobody liked Flood? I loved it! Dropping tons of bouncing grenades into a shaft was fun!

</comment><comment><USER59> Peter made such great games: Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White.

</comment><comment><USER60> > new genre which the media labelled the "god game"

I haven't picked up PC Gamer in a while, but I remember a few years back, all the "Sim" and "Tycoon" type games were under the genre: Management

<comment><USER61> From now on, I shall think of "prayer" as "speaking to the manager".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't understand why the article claims that Theme Park's view on such parks is cynical, as if "theme parks did not focus on user experience". They don't. Every single theme park out there has hours of waiting lines to do just anything. How is that even a good experience to begin with?

<comment><USER63> This comment is such a broad generalization that it boarders on useless.</comment></comment>


Gaming interview skills – 80/20 advice - <AUTHOR> I am a contractor, and having moved countries most of my references and connections are now moot. Always been in the top 20% of my colleague pool and confident enough in my skills outside of brainshops like google et al.<p>It seems in London (my new home) job hunting is heavily weighted towards algorithm tests and whiteboard questions. If I give myself this summer off with a 3 hour a day study window, what is the most effective thing I can do purely to game interview skills. <comment><USER2> I am biased, but this is a question that we ask everyday to ourselves: [http://interviewkickstart.com](http://interviewkickstart.com).

We don't think interviews can truly be gamed though. They are much like a date, where often the person's true personality will come out before committing to a long term relationship.

They can however be practiced, the concepts can be brushed up and confidence can be built, with the rest left to your interviewers to judge.</comment>