Ask HN: Do you buy related domains early on (.net, .org, similar spellings)? - <AUTHOR>

When you buy a domain do you buy a lot of related domains (.net, .org and other similar sounding names).
I assume there's a chance that a competitor could buy these and take some traffic from mispellings, etc.
But if you don't know how successful your app is going to be, this can be a lot of upfront expense. <comment><USER2> Yes, absolutely. It's a lot cheaper than buying them from some guy riding on your coattails a couple of years later.

If 16 bucks decides the go/no go on something like that you are probably looking at a hobby project, not a business.

One way around this problem is to have a bunch of generic domains that you do your first trials on, if you find that something 'has legs' you can always decide at that point to come up with a good name and get a complete set of domains.

It also will help to stop phishers that will use the .net or .org version of your domain in a spam campaign to tell people that their password may have been compromised and other jokes like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd actually wait a couple months, and then buy in stages.

If you're still working on it after 6 months, get the .net/.org/etc Consider it a present to yourself for crossing that milestone.

I personally don't buy misspellings, but I will get ones that have a phonetic similarity (for instance, we have both doleaf.com and dewleaf.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> When I started out I owned just the .com, for years.

These days I would seriously buy the big three for so much as a good turn of phrase in a blog post. (If you're going to coin the next "Long Tail", own the domain and you'll own the idea by default.) Registering the big three for two years costs far less than writing a blog post does.

I don't typically worry about typos or adjacent domains unless they're extraordinarily likely to cause confusion (chinesenewyearbingocards.com vs chinesenewyearsbingocards.com -- I bought that after I was incapable of even writing my Apache config without mixing the two of them).

The competitor with every plural variation of my domains can enjoy the extra 10 visits a year he gets from them. I have better things to do with my time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Earlier this year I worked on a domain name finding site called Domain Pigeon. When I was telling people about it over email or AIM, people kept spelling it "pidgeon" like you would spell "fridge". I bought the domain name domainpidgeon.com and directed it to the actual site.

Kind of ironic, given the site was for finding good domain names...

<comment><USER6> Linguists might spell it "pidgin" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> not always. I usualy grab .com, .co.uk and .net. I get .org if I thikn in the future it might work for a organisation / charity but I dont redirect to the related site.

I dont buy misspellings usually....

What I do do though is if I think of an idea and find a good domain for it I grab the domain; I think I have around 50-80 domain names (not unique; that includes the TLD variants) sat waiting for my projects to go on them.

</comment><comment><USER8> equally important these days, register the relevant twitter account

<comment><USER9> You have to be careful to do major registrations quickly. I registered the twitter account (made a tweet), registered the facebook account (added only some very basic profile information), and then went to register the Google account only to find out it was already taken. My company name was (random two digit number)[no space](uncommon word). I did extensive searches in Google and other places before I decided to use it.

It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not realizing that would happen before hand.

I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish ownership over the accounts.

Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to buy all of them but these days I usually go .com, .net and .org. I'll also do any spellings that I think are useful. For example, I have a Twitter app that uses a bot under the username glu. I was originally going to call the app gluenote but I thought people might have an easier time with the name if it was directly related to the Twitter name so I got both gluenote and glunote. It turned out to be a good decision. For the $8 I think it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's pretty cheap to buy domain names so if you have the $20-$30 to buy the domains do it. Why not.

Much better than to have somebody see you, recognize potential and buy your other domains and then demand some $15M for it. Of course the odds of this happening are quite low, but nevertheless, in the event that you make it it's a small price to pay to avoid the future headache.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't forget the WWWDOMAIN.COM typo... I think TechCrunch recently had a story about that.

edit: Yah, it was TC that had the story... just visit <http://wwwtwitter.com> to check it out.

</comment><comment><USER13> I quite like seeing what showed up on cederman.net (I've had cederman.com for 10 years now)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd buy all at once, i won't pay extra for something i'm getting at lowest price.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd always buy .com+.net+.org+.co.uk The rest aren't that big a deal.

<comment><USER16> Why .co.uk? Is it actually that popular, or is this UK bias?

Like for myself, would I replace .co.uk with .ca?

<comment><USER15> oh sorry, slight bias (I'm in the UK), also I thought that if you search on google.co.uk it gives some preference to .co.uk domains.

<comment><USER17> Same if you search google.ca it gives better for .ca domains.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Metaphors in Negotiation - <AUTHOR> http://adrr.com/adr4/metaphor.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Actually using these techniques is difficult and takes a lot of practice, even though most of us do it to some extent by accident.

One of the keys is to use what Psychologists call "Miller's Law" to identify the dominant metaphor being used by the other party. Miller's Law says "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of."</comment>


Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162 <comment><USER3> Note: This article is from 2007 and is quite prescient.

It's completely shameful how bad the specified read error rates are now.

It's to the point that if you read an entire disk 4TB you have a 32% chance of one bit being wrong!

That means hard disks can no longer be considered reliable devices that return the data written to them, you now need a second layer in software checking checksums.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4TB+%2F+10^14+bit++in+%...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4TB+%2F+10^14+bit++in+%25)

For extra money they sell hard disks with 10^15 reliability instead of 10^14 - this should be standard!

<comment><USER4> I think we have very different definitions of 'completely shameful'. One bit wrong in four _trillion_ , on a device that only costs a couple of hundred dollars?

<comment><USER3> It sounds good doesn't it? But then you compare to the size of the disk and realize that it's not actually that good.

The shameful part is that they actually sell the 10^15 drives - and not for a ton more money either. They simply bin drives and the better ones are rated as 10^15. Instead of doing that they should figure out what's different in the manufacturing of those and do it across the board.

<comment><USER5> Yeah... shameful. I am sure that there is something simple that all the drive manufacturers are just overlooking in their process that would take them to 10^-17 BER.

When was the last time _you_ created a physical artifact for sale? That had even just part per billion malfunction rates?

It isn't as easy as these guys make it look by a long stretch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is already well known in enterprise storage, and one of the solutions is erasure coding. Some products implementing this exist today and others are currently in the works. Basically you go to something like 20+5, instead of 4+1. Of course this only makes sense when you have 50+ drives in a tray.

[http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/what-comes-after- rai...](http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/what-comes-after-raid-erasure- codes/a/d-id/1232357)

<comment><USER7> Practically yes, erasure coding solutions do tend to have a lot of hard drives. That's probably because their efficiency really makes them much cheaper for people who are buying lots of storage, for a small setup the cost of the drives themselves isn't that significant. But mathematically it works with smaller numbers. You could have an 8 of 12 setup and be able to sustain the loss of 4 drives while only storing an extra 50%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was an update in 2013:

[http://www.zdnet.com/has-raid5-stopped- working-7000019939/](http://www.zdnet.com/has-raid5-stopped- working-7000019939/)

And based on a sample size of 1, it looks like desktop 4tb drives still have an URE of 10^14:

[http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product- content/barracuda...](http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product- content/barracuda-fam/desktop-hdd/barracuda-7200-14/en-gb/docs/desktop-hdd- data-sheet-ds1770-1-1212gb.pdf)

Then there's of course SSDs:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8)

Yeah, no. I don't think it's fair to compare raid0 and raid5 for durability -- but ssds seem to have very low ure-rates, and you can now (almost) reasonably get 1tb ssds. Not sure about how long they can be realistically expected to last, though. Long enough (2-3 years) for when you'll probably want to replace those 14 1tb ssds in raid6 with a three 16 tb ssds in raid1 with one hot- spare?

<comment><USER9> You could get a bunch of 840 Evo drives, say, 7 of them, for around $3500, for a 6TB raid5 that would probably get at least a gigabyte a second even with parity calculations overhead.

Though ZFS and Btrfs solve the unreadable bit problem with extent checksums, so you really don't need to worry about mechanical disks, yet. You would need two URE's in the same block to kill the checksumming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I lost data to this kind of problem[1]. The linux dm-raid handles these kind of failures extremely poorly (or did at the time), even when one following all available tutorials. (When I reported my experience one developer said I should have set a cronjob to recursively md5sum my / every week or so - <USER2> exactly user-friendly, and not mentioned in any of the tutorials). When you attempt to rebuild a dmraid array, even a raid6 one, expect to lose all your data.

Now I use ZFS (on FreeBSD), which handles these kind of errors much more gracefully; if there's an isolated URE you might lose data in that particular file, but it won't destroy the whole array.

[1] Yeah yeah, RAID is not a backup. I'm talking about data I didn't consider worth the cost of backing up, as a poor student at the time.

<comment><USER3> > I should have set a cronjob to recursively md5sum my / every week or so

If you use Debian then install the debsums program which will do that for you for non-user data and report any errors.

You should also install mdadm and set it to check the array every month.

And finally install smartmontools and have it do a short self check every day and a long one (i.e. a full disk read) every week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't use any storage level redundancy at all. I found that misconfiguration (my fault, on two occasions) made it more unreliable that just a single disk. I rely on cloud backup, and I'll take the hit if/when I need to rebuild my machines

<comment><USER12> Raid is no replacement for backups in any case!

For most people it's better to make a nightly copy to other HD. Raid is for saving downtime on HD failures, doesn't save you from accidental rm -r, word processor corrupting your thesis, GPU driver crash corrupting your filesystem, box getting owned, etc.

<comment><USER13> i think what he means is, down time isn't a big deal since recovering from back up is quick enough in his case. I never found raid 5 particularly helpful because: #1 hard disks tend to fail at the same time #2 systems fail to give warnings on bad disks ie everything is working, no red flashing lights, things go boom, restart, just kidding, lol you got 2 bad disks. #3 redundant servers > redundant disks for uptime #4 cloud

but thats just me and my use cases

edit: when i use raid, i use raid 10 or raid 0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The storage efficiency gains from RAID5 are not worth the risks, and when you go to RAID6, you lose even more efficiency.

You're better off with RAID10 (only need to read one drive to replace, not all the drives). Better performance all round too.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure I fully understand why RAID10 is better than RAID5. Reading the RAID wikipedia article, they seem to imply that a typical RAID10 setup uses n*2 disks, where each block of data is written to two drives.

But how does that help in the case of drive failure? If a drive fails, then as size increases won't the exposure to a URE also increase? Is it better than RAID5?

<comment><USER16> When a drive in a RAID10 array dies, then the data on that drive is still directly available on a drive that's not protected by redundancy, and the other half of the data is still protected. Rebuilding the array requires reading a single drive without error. Rebuilding a RAID5 requires reading _n-1_ drives and computing parity without error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can't wait for btrfs. Benchmark from today:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L5bVGU95D0Cu1gJoQhBh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L5bVGU95D0Cu1gJoQhBhCSTd0uVATi05-UYKcORfTiI/)

<comment><USER18> Is BTRFS really still at the "do not use in production" phase? I'm surprised it's still considered unstable. Seems like a case of the "google beta's"

<comment><USER19> Russell Coker's reports of his experiences with BTRFS give me the screaming heebie-jeebies, no matter how up-beat and positive he stays about it: [http://etbe.coker.com.au/tag/btrfs/](http://etbe.coker.com.au/tag/btrfs/)

<comment><AUTHOR> What about ZFS?

<comment><USER20> ZFS has been around a bit longer than Btrfs, which the ZFS proponents claim has allowed for it to become more stable. Watching the commit logs of Illumos (the open-source derivative of Solaris) most commits seem to be related to adding features or reducing IO latency variance. Problems with lost data are few and far between.

As an appeal to authority, a number of companies currently trust[1] their data to ZFS, Joyent probably being the most well know of them. I store my personal data[2] on ZFS, though my needs are modest.

[1]: [http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies](http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies) [2]: [http://www.awise.us/2013/03/10/smartos-home- server.html](http://www.awise.us/2013/03/10/smartos-home-server.html)

<comment><USER21> And the list at [1] doesn't include rsync.net, who's business is providing reliable off site disk storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Never used anything but RAID 1 on my Synology NAS. Had a drive fail there once and rebuilding the array was as simple as swapping it for a new one (took a few hours but it was truly "plug and play" and no data was lost).

Do the things mentioned on the article imply that a system like the Promise Pegasus2 R6 12TB (6 by 2TB) Thunderbolt 2 RAID System ([http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE152VC/A/promise- pegasus2...](http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE152VC/A/promise- pegasus2-r6-12tb-6-by-2tb-thunderbolt-2-raid-system)) is actually not guaranteed to survive 1 HD crash when configured in RAID 5? I'm a bit confused now, would appreciate any help there...

</comment><comment><USER23> So my understanding is that the problem is that the raid driver throws an error when it fails to read a bit, asserting that it can't read the whole array.

Does this mean that since it's the raid driver itself claiming "Hes dead, Jim", that most filesystem-level protections will be ineffective since the array itself is "dead"? Of course, if your filesystem leveraged multiple RAID arrays as independent disks, it would have a chance.

For software raid at least, could it not leverage some kind of Hamming or Reed-Solomon code so that it doesn't fail hard like this?

</comment><comment><USER24> Shrink the RAID group size? 7 x 1 TB disks in RAID5 gives you 6 TB usable space. With 2 TB drives use a 4 disk RAID group. You're still protecting the same 6 TB (at a small loss of efficiency), but eventually cost catches up (if 4 x 2TB isn't immediately cheaper than 7 x 1TB it won't take long till it is). This more than covers the reliability decrease of the higher capacity drives.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am not an expert on the topic, but nobody seems to have mentioned RAID-Z. [https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z](https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z) Can anyone comment on this?

</comment><comment><USER26> This is just looking at the physical layer for consumer drives. Any SAN is going to be using something with less errors. Also every year storage costs continue to drop. Double parity, or eventually triple parity are cheaper than ever to implement.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I put together my home 8-disk server back in 2009 it was pretty clear to me I needed to protect against 2 failures. Even if you just look at the 12 hour recovery times.

How much does this change if you are using modern SSDs?

<comment><USER28> I believe that SSDs fail differently, in some respects. If your SSDs "wears out", you may not be able to reprogram it (write to it), but you may still be able to read from it.

Edit: Apparently this is wrong. Read comments below

<comment><USER29> My experience as we use SSDs for our embedded solutions and sometimes have very frequent writes is that when it goes the whole partition is pretty much hosed. I'm not sure what exactly fails but it seems like the file system index or journal goes and then the whole partition is mostly useless. We use a write filter to avoid writes to OS partition (writes redirect changes to memory) so it is mostly readonly but it still can fail and and when it does the system is unrecoverable. Other partitions may still be seemingly okay but we just replace once a failure is spotted. Disk based drives usually don't fail as catastrophically in my experience but do have more errors.

Having said that we have been using them for past 5 years and only have had a dozen failures in that time over probably 500 deployments. And I think several of those were service replacing because they could not determine a root cause. Fortunately, we don't really have to try to recover anything from the drives but it does cause downtime when they fail.

<comment><USER13> what is your gut feeling on failure rate vs standard disks?

<comment><USER30> I think it probably depends on the quality of the SSD firmware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if amazon has counter measures to this? Or should I expect to see this kind of (un)reliability replicated in a VPS / "cloud" environment ?

</comment><comment><USER32> For now we can get away with other tricks like ZFS's ditto blocks but at some point the whole redundant storage system will need to be re-though.

</comment><comment><USER33> This article brought to you by the cloud. ZDNet..</comment>


Without a Vaccine, Researchers Say, Herd Immunity May Never Be Achieved - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/24/894148860/without-a-vaccine-researchers-say-herd-immunity-may-never-be-achieved <comment><USER2> How do you explain deaths in Sweden, UK, New York and other hotspots hitting essentially zero?

<comment><USER3> Sweden had 10 deaths yesterday, the UK had 123. While that may sound like "essentially zero" when compared to the US, it's not.

The decline in deaths is due to the decline in cases which in turn are caused by improved preventative measures such as social distancing and masks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hard to get herd immunity from something you can get multiple times and which seem to be more deadly subsequent times.

<comment><USER5> > Hard to get herd immunity from something you can get multiple times and > which seem to be more deadly subsequent times.

what's the evidence of this?

<comment><USER6> I heard anecdotes of reinfection with worse symptoms on subsequent infections a few weeks ago; this looks to be the article [1]. I haven't heard widespread confirmation or studies showing this yet.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting- covid-19-twic...](https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting- covid-19-twice-reinfection-antibody-herd-immunity)

<comment><USER7> There are false negatives and positives in the tests. In Macaques they could not reinfect them, so this doesn't seem that likely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which Countries Are the Stars of World History? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-countries-are-the-stars-of-world-history/ <comment><USER2> I'm so old that I can remember when this publication was about science.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably all the European colonial powers, Russia, China, and the US.</comment>


Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18aging.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all

<comment><AUTHOR> "In 2004 Dr. Sinclair co-founded Sirtris with Christoph Westphal, a scientific entrepreneur. Helped by growing interest in the sirtuin story, Dr. Westphal was able to sell the company last year to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million."

<comment><USER2> That's a pretty good exit for 5 years of really hard work.

It's the ultimate product too, _everybody_ needs it at some point. Whatever the price you set they'll come.</comment></comment>


Integration of Twitter - <AUTHOR>

Do you think Twitter will ever integrate with emergency services?  It could get involved with telematic systems in automobiles to communicate through GPS/Navigation screens the location of emergency vehicles to reduce the number of crashes with the public...<p>What do you think? <comment><USER2> Are there an appreciable number of crashes with the public to make this worth while?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there are several hundred crashes nationwide. Largely, people cannot see or hear the flashing lights/sirens...

It would definitely be something worth investigating...I'd be happy to talk more if you are interested!</comment></comment>


The CIA Is Sharing Declassified Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cia-celebrating-its-cartography-divisions-75th-anniversary-declassified-maps-180961419/?utm_source=keywee-facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=keywee&kwp_0=299086&kwp_4=1167645&kwp_1=531375?no-ist <comment><USER2> Related is the story of Soviet maps. The Soviets had engaged in a monumental effort to map the world and then during the collapse in one of the republics the classified stack of maps got in the hands of Westerners:

[https://www.sovietmaps.com/](https://www.sovietmaps.com/)

Here is a longer article about it:

[https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war- maps/](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/)

And also the map of San Francisco from the 80s:

[http://i.imgur.com/SdmmFUd.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/SdmmFUd.jpg)

<comment><USER3> What are the little planes on the San Francisco map? Surely there aren't 12 airstrips in the San Francisco bay. Unless that includes helipads...

<comment><USER4>
       Take a look here

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

      The Bay Area has 3 international airports, 2 federal airports, 8 General aviation towered airports and 15 General Aviation non-towered airports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really curious why this 14 mile strip of Antarctica is censored:

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/70%C2%B010'04.0%22S+87%C2%...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/70%C2%B010'04.0%22S+87%C2%B043'57.5%22E/@-70.1507513,87.6467429,19851m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d-70.1677778!4d87.7326389)

Satellite map images with missing or unclear data:

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

<comment><USER6> Google will censor just about anything if a government asks them to and claims it's for national security. Hell, they even do it for the uber-rich independent of government.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure that any US person or organization that doesn't comply with matters supposedly pertaining to national security will go the way of Joe Nacchio and Qwest.

<comment><USER7> Fife Symington concurs. Although, "security" has nothing to do with it. You are either "in" or you're "out".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fife_Symington#Second_term_.28...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fife_Symington#Second_term_.281995.E2.80.931997.29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The maps: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/albums](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/albums)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a bit surprised that this one was declassified given the sensitive nature of the content.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/5988128522/in/album-721...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/5988128522/in/album-72157632812220423/)

<comment><USER10> Wait, was this actually classified to begin with?

If so, it's a case study in how that power is misused...

<comment><USER11> The dog is probably one of the bomb-sniffing dogs that work at a CIA building or campus. Any information about the security for CIA locations, I'm assuming, is going to be very well protected information so this is going to include any pictures of the security forces. The picture is just a dog chewing on a stick but the dog is part of the security force and therefore the picture becomes classified. It probably didn't need to be classified. We aren't using some sort of super advanced, secret machine to detect bombs, it's a regular yellow lab. It was probably included in a bunch of pictures that included information regarding the tactics or tools available to the security forces or pictures of secured areas (that aren't generic grassy areas) so the whole group was classified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> These are incredible. I'm especially impressed with how high res the scans are. Time for some new office posters!

</comment><comment><USER13> Sweet planimeter a ways down the page at [https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/sets/72157674852500522](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/sets/72157674852500522)

</comment><comment><USER14> Have they been uploaded to Wikipedia (Commons)?</comment>


Math Duo Maps the Infinite Terrain of Minimal Surfaces - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/math-duo-maps-the-infinite-terrain-of-minimal-surfaces-20190312/ <comment><USER2> This is some of the best maths writing I've ever seen. It really gives you an accurate feel for the results they've derived.</comment>


Stack Does Gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/stack-does-gaming.html

<comment><USER2> I don't think gaming will work for Stack Overflow...too general...all those gaming forums he mentions tend to revolve around a single game or a series.

And Stack Exchange just doesn't subcategorize well...yes they have tags...but if you have a question about a specific game, you are more likely to go to thatspecificgameforum.com rather than posting on a general site hoping someone there actually played the game in question

<comment><USER3> Also a very large aspect of discussing gaming is subjective. More general gaming sites involve people talking about their favorite games, best game in <genre>, etc. Stack Exchange sites are really anti-subjectivity, which reduces a lot of the potential discussion for gaming. Take this question for example: [http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/2168/relaxing- game...](http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/2168/relaxing-games-for- ps2-closed)

<comment><USER4> For the right games, discussing parts of the game is also really hard and require quite a number of elaboration to get done properly.

Just check out the number of theorycraft there is about starcraft BW and 2, about the Civilization games and so on. I just cannot see how this would fit into such a simple question/answer-system, given that quite often there is no single answer. (Consider e.g. Broodwar: What is a strong opening build as zerg? Well.. there are around 3-5 possibilities into 2 possibilities into 2-3 other possibilities, and there is a certain dependency on the enemy and the map. Good luck fitting all of that in a single answer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Take this with a grain of salt. He in an investor in Stack Overflow after all:

<http://www.unionsquareventures.com/investments/index.php>

<comment><USER6> ..which he disclosed clearly in the first paragraph of his blog post.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't make it any less true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would use the site if I could say: I want to only view things related to starcraft, or warcraft, or whatever.. now, there are too much random question about things I don't like/don't know.

<comment><USER9> Isn't this the point of tags?

[http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/world-of- wa...](http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/world-of-warcraft)

<http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/starcraft>

<comment><USER8> Yes but this only works if the question is tagged. For instance, to take your example, there are more result for "zerg" than for "starcraft" which is illogical in my opinion :p

You are right that tag gives huge flexibility.. however, maybe a little bit less flexibility with more static section would be easier for gamers. I.e. tagging zerg,rush in the section StarCraft or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find Stack Overflow's new gaming site to be quite underwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had no idea USV invested in Stack Overflow. I thought Joel was strictly against VC capital, and his arguments were dead on (dramatic difference in risk aversion). Besides, I was under impression that SO never really needed external cash...

I wonder if they asked him "Why did you change your mind, Joel?" after they were done with their PP deck. That must have been awkward. :P

<comment><USER12> Joel's thinking re taking VC for SO: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I miss the old layout of AVC's site, with the funny little painting that I always assumed was of him. It felt really homey. For some reason this one makes me feel like I just walked into a big warehouse with too much open space and high ceilings.

Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER6> For me, the Stack sites rely on gentleman-like behavior - from the no need to sign up through to collaborative rather than discursive/bitching nature they are trying to foster.

Gaming seems to be at odds with that - most game forums seem to be infused with pre-pubescent tweens and teens discovering the _'art'_ of griefing for the first time. Sure there that isn't everyone who uses game forums, but these people shout the loudest.

I very much doubt this will work in Stack. But then what is the cost to them in trying out a few new verticals? I would like to see them try 10 risky verticals with the aim of shelving 5-8 that don't work after 12 months.

<comment><USER14> Maybe the "gentlemen gamers" haven't had a suitable forum to congregate. Wasn't there just a study that said most gamers were adult men? If so, this will be tailored to them much better and give them the tools to deal with the tweens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really understand the need that this is addressing? As others have mentioned, this is completely subjective territory. In order for subjective opinions to carry ANY weight, one must take into account the person answering.

Smaller, focused forums are much more suited to produce useful answers on highly subjective material. They generate more relevant content to participating parties because both asker and answerer are more likely have some knowledge of the other.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Gamers love to earn points, badges, and status."

I am completely sick of them. They scream "you are being fooled" to me - namely, you are doing work in exchange for play money.

<comment><USER16> I would say "Gamers love to earn _relative_ status". There's definitely a desire in many for some sort of ranking system, and then it's _competition_ instead of _grinding_.

But yes. Useless achievements are useless, and annoying when they're used to unlock extra things. TF2 is handling it _relatively_ well, but it's definitely gained a bit of grind to me since they started adding unlockable weapons / hats / etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I feel like someone should tell his son about <http://gamefaqs.com>

<comment><USER18> My favorite part about GameFAQs is that it's hardly about actual FAQs anymore. It's mostly walkthroughs, guides, maps, other content that doesn't really match a Q&A format. The forums are another popular location, but I wouldn't call them "FAQs" either.

There is a Q&A product called "Answers" attached to GameFAQs that doesn't seem to be as popular as their Walkthroughs offerings. For some games, however, they seem to be moderately well populated:

[http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/928790-final-fantasy- xiii/answer...](http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/answers)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Engineer won't approve my PR - <AUTHOR> I've encountered this situations a few times where, once I've joined a team, an existing senior engineer (often the one seen as a lead, but never officially recognized as such) rejects relatively minor things on my PR (these are not things in the coding spec, usually both function, usually it's an argument of the form "What if x then y then z happened?", sometimes I think my preference is slightly objectively better)
In these situations I try to tease apart if this is  psychology thing ("asserting dominance" or "hazing"), because the way these engineers argue in PR is often very black/white.
For reference I'm more senior career-wise than most of these engineers, but it happens most when I'm new to the company. The last thing I want is 1-hour arguments over minutia or a protracted mutual suspicion. The problem is worse for me when the engineer is remote.
Of those who have been in that situation and conquered it (i.e. the other person would admit they have things they can learn from you / considers you a friend), how did you do it? <comment><USER2> When you are new, you should be given a lot of leeway to ask questions. So, perhaps you should set aside potential motives and use these rejections as opportunities to ask questions.

Something along the lines of: "I've worked at a lot of places, and none of them have ever done the on-boarding process perfectly. One thing I try to do is to document some of the problems encountered as well as the solutions or mitigating factors. It will definitely help me become a productive member of the existing team with the existing culture, but all future employees will benefit as well. Can you help me understand the thought process that went into this rejection, what I missed, what I did wrong, etc?"

You would hope that management recognizes the long-term benefit of such an exercise and would support you. It also places a fair burden on the rejecting engineer to explain him or herself.</comment>


Apple will reportedly introduce 16-inch MacBook Pro as soon as tomorrow - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/12/20962038/apple-macbook-pro-16-inch-release-date-rumor-november-13 <comment><USER2> I own a Sony laptop from 2009 with a 16.4 inch screen (1080p), the difference in readability between that and a more modern 14-inch screen at the same resolution is enormous. 15's are ok but still inferior. Hope that other laptop manufacturers will re-introduce 16's, especially with thin/light designs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure why people are so excited by this. It seems fairly obvious this is just going to be the 15inch with a smaller bezel. Hopefully the resolution of the screens get a nice bump though. The only thing that would make this a real game changer is a fixed keyboard and no touchbar.

<comment><USER4> The exciting part is Apple is rumored to ditch their infamous butterfly switches and maybe even the touchbar, though the latter seems less and less likely

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But will it keep the touch bar?

</comment><comment><USER6> This makes it sound unprecedented, but there used to be a 17" model.</comment>


Ben Nanonote: Copyleft Palmtop - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_NanoNote

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was an interesting product and found it while browsing Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/NanoNote-copyleft-hardware-pocket- comp...](http://www.amazon.com/NanoNote-copyleft-hardware-pocket- computer/dp/B0064URJNQ/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3C7CXFBRYJBKB&colid=R9B9UXG9EO9T). I don't mean to have a referrer on the url if there is one, so strip if out if you know how.</comment>


I Do Not Like Go - <AUTHOR> https://grimoire.ca/dev/go <comment><USER2> Go from the very beginning has irritated me, for these reasons and more. There is already a lot of Rust love around here, but I would recommend giving it a chance over Go.</comment>


How Samsung broke my heart - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/4/2998464/how-samsung-broke-my-heart

<comment><USER2> The disappointment that the Galaxy S III is. To be frank, Samsung has never been the innovator. They copy well and hit the right price points and feature sets. It's over to Cupertino now to lead again. Sorry Seoul, you blew your chance.</comment>


Startup Failure Rate: Ultimate Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate <comment><USER2> I wish FuckedCompany still existed.</comment>


Ask HN: Is a free plan worth it or not? Trying to figure out our pricing - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We (me and lleger) are Supportbreeze, and we're trying to figure out our plans for our launch next week. Our major contention is concerning free plans. We're debating whether or not we want to offer free plans at all. On one side, we see the value of offering a free plan: great entry vector, good promotional value, something that our competitors don't have, etc. However, on the other hand, we don't quite see the usefulness of a free plan on a business app, considering all plans come with a 30 day free trial and that it would affect the rest of our plans. We're concerned that it's a sinkhole that won't have any real benefit.
The main thing we think we'd lose by nixing the free plan is the influx of people that will simply start using our app instead of ignoring it if it were paid-only. Knowing that at some point they will need to start paying, is a trial enough enticement to sign up?
What are your thoughts? Should we abandon the free plan in light of our free trial period? Are free plans absolutely necessary, even for business apps? Thanks all! <comment><USER2> First of all, I recommend reading Don't Just Roll the Dice if you haven't already: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/25050778/Dont-Just-Roll-the- Dice-P...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/25050778/Dont-Just-Roll-the-Dice-Pricing- Techniques)

This was talked about earlier today (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613852>). Unless your app requires a whole pile of non-paying users for network effects, free accounts don't seem to bring in much value. If you want customers who are going to pay at some point in the future, trials seem to make more sense than perpetually free versions.

You could of course try running without a free plan to start, and add one if no one's taking you up on the free trials. But for those people who use the free trial but walk away without signing up, I doubt a free version would have resulted in a future conversion from them. More users equals more support; free accounts could destroy your business.

<comment><USER3> link that actually lets you download the pdf [http://downloads.businessofsoftware.org/dontjustrollthedice....](http://downloads.businessofsoftware.org/dontjustrollthedice.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like a BtoB venture. Who are your target clients? If they're well funded/profitable/high end then all you need is the 30 day refund program. If they're bootstrapped start-ups who need to pinch every dime then a limited free account is necessary and then aim for the up-sell.

I struggled with this question myself as all the advice I got was for there to be a free account. You know what? I don't like free. It doesn't make sense in business. It may work with Youtube (ad sponsored and still loses a boatload of money but G has deep pockets) but we've seen many who tried free ended up going paid or free and limited (Hootsuite just recently). There may be nothing worse for your business than going paid and limiting what people had come to expect for free (seen this time and again).

Besides, people take advantage of free. They demand support and effort with nothing in return. If you fail to support them well you risk a bad rep. A bad rep will sink your business. However, if you are paid from the start, turn out a great product, and support your clients well, you'll earn a great rep which in turn builds your business.

Go with paid from the start and have a 30 day refund policy. That way people can try it all out, you can find out exactly what their needs are support- wise, and if any ask for the refund to leave you will know exactly why and can address those issues.

It's time to end "free".

</comment><comment><USER5> Make a free plan that is very restrictive. You want people to be able to quickly assess whether or not the tool is useful to them. People are use to being able to trial software first (it's been done for years now). Allow them to try all the features, but not have any ability to use it for real production use. So let them accept 5 support requests, perhaps.

Alternatively, if you don't, you have to have great screenshots and screencasts. Chances are you will risk losing a lot of potential clients otherwise.

<comment><USER6> How about having a dummy-demo. Basically give the user a taste of the UI without the functionality, ie. just send the user a static html page to get a feel of the interface and how it would work. Of course, it depends on what you are offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Free plans will likely not give you all the benefits you think they will: [http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans- dont-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/)

</comment><comment><USER8> My margins are always really tight. I rarely part with money willingly.

When crossbrowsertesting.com announced their launch a while back, I used their free service just enough to become convinced that supporting them was worth the monthly charge; I've been a paid user ever since, even though I only use it occasionally.

So, I think that if you offer a compelling service, something that provides more value to your customers than it costs them, then a free plan should pretty much only be considered a "demo" of your service. If you've got a good product, then even misers like me will pay for it.

edit: Oh, and also: for a service I'm working on right now, I've decided to use "early adopter" pricing. It works like this: pricing starts at $X / month; for every new subscriber, all previous subscribers receive a $.01/month discount. If or when the monthly prices ever drop, it will drop by the same amount for all subscribers. So, the sooner someone signs up, the sooner they'll get the service for $5/month -- or even free. I don't know if it'll work, but there it is.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't see why you shouldn't start off with a free plan available. Like you said, a free account is a great poe.

If you're having low conversion rates from free to premium accounts, you could always experiment with hiding the free account registration - <http://basecamphq.com/signup> \- or completely removing it. Ruben Gamez has a wonderful write up of his experience on this topic [http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans- dont-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/)

</comment><comment><USER10> How much beta-testing have you done? I'd work with a free plan at first, simply because the value of your first 10-100 customers isn't the money they bring in; it's the information you learn about your own product.

On the other hand, this is an easily reversible decision either way, but starting paid-only is probably easier to change. In the worst case that nobody notices you, you can always add in a free account in a few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER11> In all honesty, if you don't have a free plan, you will never get my business. There are way too many apps that I love to fully support financially.

Especially for a business app. My product <shamelessplug>[http://userping.com</shamelessplug>](http://userping.com</shamelessplug>); is my first bootstrapped company, and while I'd love to be profitable enough to fully support all the great apps I've come to depend on, right now we're broke, so I have to choose between using your app or paying for another month of hosting. Pretty simple decision.

So, my vote is always for a free option. I think you should feel free to really lock it down and restrict the offerings because anyone who can't afford to pay for a service probably doesn't need 200 user accounts. They probably only need one or two, which should theoretically not cost you very much.

That's my $0.02. I very rarely even try services with a 30-day free trial. I'd hate to get hooked on something that is going to rape my tight budget.

<comment><USER12> _if you don't have a free plan, you will never get my business._

That made me chuckle. Unless you _pay_ for a product, you are _not_ giving him any business.

Don't get me wrong; I can totally see where you are coming from. I'm pretty much in the same situation. However, you and I are clearly not Mark's target customers, so it's a bit unhelpful to ask him for a freebie. How does it help him?

To make money, one needs to sell to people who can pay. There are plenty of businesses out there, who will pay money to solve their problems. Broke startups selling free apps to other broke startups is not a business model.

<comment><USER13> You are very much correct. There are users, and there are customers. Listen to your customers. Users matter too, but "please give me this feature for free, because I might sign up down the line" isn't cutting it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Go with a trial instead of a free plan. If your users find value in your service, they'll buy. Put a feedback form on the page that notifies them their trial has ended. If they don't pay, they might complain and give you feedback.

Also, you can collect emails with a free/trial plan, so use that to get feedback and/or try to sell to them again after you pivot on the initial feedback.

</comment><comment><USER12> If your app is good enough to charge for any features at all, then you should probably just go ahead with paid plans with free trials. You can make it really cheap for early customers (and keep it cheap for life for them) and slowly increase the price for new customers - call it the cheapium model.

The value of initial users is finding out what's actually useful to them (what they would pay for) and any major bugs/issues in your product. But you have to be careful you are not listening to the wrong users (who never intend to buy anything from you).

You are selling to businesses, so you probably need to focus more on direct and ad-based selling rather than going "viral" among the wrong userbase.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the approach of GitHub: free hosting for open source projects. Maybe something similar could work for business apps - if not software related, free hosting for nonprofits.

<comment><USER16> That's a little different. GitHub's "free hosting for open source" just means "free hosting for public repos". They never actually verify that the code is licensed in any sensible way, whereas others (Google Code I think) actually requires you to select an open source license.

In short, GitHub doesn't at all verify open source licensing, they just allow unlimited free accounts if you accept _de facto_ open source. "Free hosting for nonprofits" requires actually verifying (or requiring the user to assert) nonprofit status, which is a lot more difficult.

<comment><USER13> That's a killer feature for github, because it essentially means that they have no free model. If I'm making a company project and want to collaborate using github, there is _zero_ choice. But, since I'm already familiar with how great it is, due to the free public repos, I'm more likely to buy.

Sounds like they have their model cut out perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> how about collecting a credit card, and advertising that you won't charge them for a month?

this way they get 1 month free, and you get to add customers into the funnel.

<comment><USER18> Best advice I've heard on fixed-length trials:

"[A] fixed-length trial discourages users from using your product - why invest time & effort in something that will disappear in 30 days[?]"

<comment><USER19> This is bad advice. It discourages only the people that do not find value in your app to eventually pay.

I've been running a 30 day trial with my app since 2003, we've grown double digits every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In our experience (examprofessor.com) setting more severe limits to our free plan boosted paid sales 2x, which was very welcome. We started with a free plan, one exam, unlimited students. Later, we limited the free plan to one exam w/ 10 students and many of our clients jumped up to a paid plan.

I think if you do have a free plan, seriously limit features in a manner that encourages clients to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER18> The only thing I have to add to this discussion is that not having a free plan puts more pressure on your marketing pages.

You'll need to try that much harder to make sure your homepage, tour, etc. are as simple and straight-forward to understand as possible, because people won't be making up for where your marketing pages are lacking by signing up and trying things out for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for all the responses guys. We've decided to drop the free plan in light of the prescient advice herein.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's easier to switch from paid to free than otherwise.</comment>


Minimal OpenGL 3.3 Core Profile Demo - <AUTHOR> http://nullprogram.com/blog/2015/06/06/

<comment><USER2> This is cool, and I'm glad to see he switched to GLFW which is the best choice IMO. If you'd like an equivalent article/sample minimal project for modern OpenGL (4.1) written in Go, I recommend:

[https://github.com/go- gl/examples/tree/master/glfw31-gl41cor...](https://github.com/go- gl/examples/tree/master/glfw31-gl41core-cube)

If you already have Go installed, you can try it easily, just:

        go get -u github.com/go-gl/examples/glfw31-gl41core-cube

It will compile and run on OS X, Linux and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given his switch to GLFW.

I really don't get why the official OpenGL documentation still uses GLUT on its examples.

Khronos should really update those books, additionally with an helper matrix, texture and shader loading library to avoid every OpenGL beginner to re-write the same code before a triangle gets shown.

Yes there is the [https://www.opengl.org/sdk/](https://www.opengl.org/sdk/), but it is just a dump of libraries that won't help beginners easily.

Which is only going to get worse with Vulkan (around 600 LOC for the triangle).

<comment><USER4> > Which is only going to get worse with Vulkan (around 600 LOC for the > triangle)

Does this really matter? Vulkan isn't meant for beginners, nor should it be. Beginners would be much better off served using OpenGL, or on a higher level API that sits on top of Vulkan/DX12/Metal (actually, Metal is probably friendly enough for a beginner to use... but that's neither here nor there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's nice to see some content for modern OpenGL -- it's been a while since I've done any raw GL programming, and I understand the newest specs are finally deprecating the mess of APIs that have accumulate. Last I saw there were many different ways to render polygons (immediate mode, display lists, vertex arrays, vertex buffer objects...) and I can only imagine it's a nightmare for people just getting started.

<comment><USER6> I spent the last few months struggling with modern OpenGL myself - using GL ES2 which doesnt even provide access to the deprecated OpenGL 1 stuff. I wrote about it here to help others trying to pick it up from scratch: [http://seshbot.com/blog/2015/05/05/an-introduction-to- opengl...](http://seshbot.com/blog/2015/05/05/an-introduction-to-opengl- getting-started/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow that's great to see the absolute bare necessities to use modern OpenGL distilled into one nice blog post.

</comment><comment><USER8> This uses gettimeofday() for timing purposes which has been deprecated for a few years now. I believe it's not reliable as it can be changed by other processes running alongside your application (like ntpd for example). A better alternative is clock_gettime() with a monotonic clock.

<comment><USER9> Since the demo now uses GLFW it could call glfwGetTime, which uses clock_gettime where available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great! I last looked at OpenGL on the desktop a decade ago and it was tedious. GLFW looks awesome. But looking at the example code for it, I saw this:

        if (!glfwInit())
            return -1;

Why do this? Is there some kind of amazing thing in the C/C++ world that doing this unlocks? It just seems like an inconsistent, dangerous accident waiting to happen.

<comment><USER4> Uh, what exactly about this is questionable?

Only think I can think you could mean is the lack of curly braces, but that's so common it can't be it.

EDIT: Unrelated sidenote: GLFW doesn't really make OpenGL itself any less tedious, only setting it up.</comment></comment>


Who Made That Paintball? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/magazine/who-made-that-paintball.html

<comment><USER2> What a trip down memory lane!

Growing up as a teenager in the late-90's and early 00's, I went deep into paintball.

A lot of friends of mine today kind of chuckle when I tell them I used to travel and play in a national tournament series, but what a blast it was!

There's great history here. The big American league at the time I got involved was called the National Professional Paintball League (NPPL). The flagship competitions were 10v10 capture the flag, and they also had 5v5.

The NPPL at the time was broken down into Pro, Amateur A, Amateur B, and Novice, with 8 or so tournaments per year culminating in the World Cup in Florida.

There was a pretty exciting ecosystem at the time, with tons of exciting paintball marker innovation happening as markers were making the switch to electronics for the first time with the WDP Angel (a European company), the Smart Parts Shocker, and others to follow.

Not to mention the mechanics of the old non-electronic markers like the WGP Autococker and the Automag. The geeky bits of which would absolutely fascinate all the technical minds of Hacker News.

(for example, check out some of the cut-out animations of the mechanics of some of these old paintball markers. Customizing and tuning and adjusting were a total blast back in the day. Way cooler than pogs! [http://www.deadlywind.com/paintball- animation](http://www.deadlywind.com/paintball-animation))

<comment><USER3> I was deep into paintball too in high school and college, nothing national but traveled with the university club to other universities.

It's been a while since I played any serious paintball, but to me the biggest downside at the time was the arms race. Obviously the tippman full auto was banned from competitive play, but after that it was pretty much up to your wallet. I remember getting my Bob Long Autocoker and feeling invincible. Then some guys started showing up with Angels and holy crap I was intimidated. Compressed air vs CO2. Quality of paintballs. Even some of the gear with neoprene to give you a bit more 'bounce' it all added up.

Paintball was the most fun when we started, everyone with a tippman rental.

After our group started diverging on total spend it because obvious it was getting unfair. Eventually we all bought tippman pro carbines and required the same paintballs be used and all on CO2. Not getting CO2 freezing was part of your strategy! We had much more fun after we removed the arms race, even at the expense of not being able to tinker and customize.

The Angel guys could go to pub games and light up the poor schleps if they wanted :P

<comment><USER2> That's awesome. Were you NCPA?

Funny enough - when I was entering High School around 2002, paintball was in the middle of a big growth phase, and as part of it, the NCPA seemed to have enough traction that there _almost_ seemed to be a chance that players might start to have a hope to get college scholarships to play ball.

Definitely relate to you about the arms race. Though I enjoyed the tweaks to my Autococker including the Eclipse E-Frame, by the time I got out of the sport in '04 or '05, Intimidators and the DM series really took it to the limit.

Technically they were "semi-auto" but were walkable up to 14-15 shots per second and in the X-Ball style play, people were literally going through cases of 2000 in single matches.

Insane price ramp. Crazy to think it all happened within the span of a decade.

<comment><USER4> It is a small world. I was the president of The Ohio State paintball team for a few years. I also helped the NCPA with a website refresh back in the day. I would have never though that topic would come up on HN.

I spent more money on paintball in college than I care to think about. I has one of the first "new" shockers. It was one of the first red ones, the serial number was below #50 if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER2> Hah! I actually started playing paintball when I was in middle school in New Albany, Ohio.

Did you ever play at the Splatterdome in Colombus by chance? I remember seeing a shocker there for my first time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back in the mid eighties, before the craze really took off I was in a small group who were mostly military and a few off base civilians who spent way too much time and money on this. We had two competitions, standard capture the flag which in some ways probably led to my enjoyment of Doom so many years later and hit man. Hit man was simply that, everyone put their name in the hat and five bucks. Only rules were, you could not shoot someone in uniform or at work. Take the target name from your hit.

Lots of hilarity and some good bruises but those were mostly remedied by disallowing freezing the paint balls. Some really unsettling conversations with local and base police, paint ball guns can look like a gun in the dark and if you alter their color it can lead to problems. Most of us had that old standard green CO2 powered model whose name escapes me.

Speaking for myself, I never even took the hit man game as anything more than fun, we never had anyone freak out about losing. Most took pride in just not getting tagged by the next meeting and i think only once did someone take the pot, it usually ended up as that weeks pizza.

Laser tag was definitely not the same, the primary difference being it doesn't hurt if you screw up.

<comment><USER6> The green plastic paintball gun was the "Splatmaster".

<comment><USER7> I had one of those! I modified it with a metal disc on the back of the cocking mechanism to make it easier on the hand, and put an extended length magazine on there (you had to aim up between shots so the balls would roll into the chamber)

pic: [http://www.vintagerex.com/museum/NSG%20-%20National%20Surviv...](http://www.vintagerex.com/museum/NSG%20-%20National%20Survival%20Games/Splatmaster.html)

I too dropped out at the start of the arms race. Just couldn't afford to keep up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That bit in life where people repurpose equipment in ways the original manufacturers never considered. I hate the term but in this case "thinking outside the box" comes to mind.

What's more interesting is that even the people that "thought outside of the box" didn't think there was any more to it other than a bit of one off fun until they had a massive response from an write-up published in an a magazine.

<comment><USER9> The interesting point here is that they apparently weren't thinking when they did it... They were playing and observed how much fun it was. I wonder if any amount of thinking or even experimentation could have bridged the gap from the clusters of ideas before and after their original paintball duel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a sport, but lately it's been kind of a tragic story. I started playing around 2003, and played competitively in Canada through to what basically became the sport's peak.

In 2007 we were playing division 1 in a league with Impact - they'd later become a pro XBall team - and the first 7-man tournament in that division, we spent $750 per person for paint and entry for the weekend tournament. We shot more than 30 cases (that's 60,000 paintballs). We squeaked by into semis, and then got annihilated.

It made me realize that (a) being competitive at the highest levels of a sport requires incredible dedication on the part of everyone on a team, and (b) nobody would start playing paintball if they knew the endpoint of it was to drop a grand on a single weekend of play.

The dynamics of play got especially rough for new entrants - if you didn't have the gear that let you shoot fast enough and accurately enough to put in someone who was posted on you, you'd get stuck and frustrated. The more paint in the air, the fewer strategic options you had (other than putting more paint in the air), and the more prohibitively expensive the sport got.

I still love the sport but it set itself up to die the moment there was a recession, which, of course, came in 2008.

<comment><USER11> Why don't they limit the rate of fire of guns in games to limit the financial ruin?

<comment><USER10> They started to, eventually. I think there's a 10 balls per second cap at the lower divisions of one of the bigger US leagues. But in most of the leagues I was in, there were no ramping modes - you'd just shoot as fast as you could, which was rarely more than 12bps.

Any rate of fire lower than that and it changes the game pretty dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone notice a downfall of paintball after the 2008 recession? I think that era was the peak in terms of innovation and public participation (I'm pretty sure NPPL was broadcasted on ESPN/Fox).

<comment><USER13> As some other people already pointed out, Paintball is just too expensive for a lot of people. I really wish I could play again regularly, but I don't have the money for it.

<comment><USER14> It got to the point when I was playing that everyone was using $1200 guns and at that point my $200 marker isn't really much fun anymore. I think the increase in tech and cost of markers cause a lot of people to be turned off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Paintball was fun but can lead to scarring. I got a scar on my bicep from one, it finally faded 10 years later and another one, my 2nd time playing.

I covered up much better but got hit on the finger and received a ball-shaped scar (it also faded since then). I don't think it's common but possible if you have thin skin.

That being said, I don't think it's a great idea to increase the pressure on the gun.

<comment><USER16> I played paintball only once and managed to get shot square in the throat. It didn't leave a scar, but it did bleed a little bit, and freaked me out _a lot_ at the time—for a few minutes anyway.

<comment><USER17> I've also experienced getting nailed in the throat with a paintball, and for a real brief time I got worried that it damaged my windpipe. The other most painful hit I took was right in the "webbed" part on the hand in between fingers - my hand locked up in pain!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Always wondered: why do paintball guns look like they belong to Spaceman Spiff, while Airsoft (another paintball-style sport using plastic BBs) rifles are models of real military weapons? Is this a reflection of the psychology of the participants, or a necessity due to the different ammo requirements?

<comment><USER19> You've basically answered your question. It is possible to get rifle themed paintball guns (the rifle from "Aliens" is popular), but they don't add much except weight. Since the ball are delicate, the ammo has to be top loaded to fall into the chamber. It's basically a combination of physics and practicality. If you're going to run and sprint for a couple miles, weight becomes the enemy.

<comment><USER18> Airsoft has running; weight is still an issue there. I don't see that as an important difference

<comment><USER20> From what I understand (Paintball player, never airsoft) people who want to play airsoft are usually lumped into the category of "milsim" where it's tactical and basically recreating police/military tactical maneuvers. "Paintball" which you mean as speedball, is a much faster paced and flashier game in the sense that style is definitely a factor in the decisions being made because the field of play is wide open:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4jXOhH_oiU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4jXOhH_oiU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah, memories. Hanging out on pbnation, talking shop about the latest markers and modifying the ones you had. Funny scene, I can imagine it has changed since I stopped (early 00's).

Paintabll was the first technical interest of mine that inspired me to put my business hat on; I very quickly realized I could make money fixing, upgrading and maintaining other people's markers. Was tons of fun. Smart Parts was my specialty, Karnivore my favorite marker... oh the days!

Too much damn $$ though.

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember playing a game very similar to paintball back in the 1970s. One of the other participants has written about it on her blog: [http://www.chicagonow.com/soapbox-momma/2014/06/my- friends-a...](http://www.chicagonow.com/soapbox-momma/2014/06/my-friends-and- i-invented-paintball-in-1978/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The cost with paintball is prohibitive though. Now that every paintball marker is set up to shoot 25+ ball per minute you spray away a lot of money during a full day.

<comment><USER24> Almost no field allows you to shoot 25 bps. Most are limited to 12-15 bps and 300 feet per second or less. Cost is ultimately up to you. We have plenty of recreational players that come out spend $20-$40 for 5 hours of fun. I really depends on the field. Find one that caters to recball and you will have a good time for the cost per hour.

<comment><USER25> It's been a while since i played so i haven't been up on the technology but...how is it possible to cap the bps? Is that an "honesty rule" or do most of the mid-high end markers let you set bps now?

<comment><USER23> The high end ones can set the BPS in the electronics (usually in the grip).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Konami Code for any website - Unicorn Blitz - <AUTHOR> http://jmhobbs.github.com/Konami-Unicorn-Blitz

<comment><USER2> Sparkles, nice work! This looks very, very inspired by Cornify (<http://cornify.com>). I also added the konami code to the Cornify script last year (<http://www.cornify.com/js/cornify.js>) for another example that doesn't have dependencies.

Those 'corns are looking pretty sparkly. Mind if I use them on Cornify?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome to them, I got them at <http://www.webfetti.com/MySpace/Glitter/Animals.jhtml>

<comment><USER2> You have great taste in unicorns, I have to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just something fun for Friday.

</comment><comment><USER3> I put it on <http://linkup.com/> a while ago (I require the start/ENTER at the end of the code), but nobody even noticed. I figured a picture of Chuck Norris on our "professional" website would catch the boss' attention and make us take it down. Nope. So it remains a joke just for me (and now HN).

And that's alright.

</comment><comment><USER4> I never get tired of these... always surprising to see what people come up with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> one I made a while back that has a customizable key sequence: <http://github.com/kylebragger/konamicode>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! I love jQuery, but I wanted something with no dependencies so people can just drop it right in. I'll add a link to yours though, thanks for sharing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggest steps that can help to stop the trolls in an online community? - <AUTHOR> <comment> at-fates-hands I used to manage a few online communities and you're always going to have trolls. Here's some ways you can control them.

1 - Moderate comments and remove any comments you don't like. Make a rule that all comments need to be approved before they will be posted. This will cut down on about 60% of the stuff you'll see.

2 - Shadwo ban users: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning)

3 - If Shadow Banning doesn't work, then target and block their IP addresses. If you need to, warn them you will contact their ISP and let them know.

These are the big three that always seemed to limit the trolling behavior I saw. Only in extreme cases do you have to do #3.

<comment><USER3> Note that the worst, and most sophisticated trolls will just keep a second well-behaved account to monitor the actual forum as others see it; so it won't be more powerful than a ban to them. Forcing you to 3) as you say.

Someday we'll have shadow banning deluxe - not only will the troll be seeing a different forum, but they alone will see fake A.I. generated responses to them that will cause the troll to waste endless amounts of their time continuing to troll-debate. Time they can't spend buggering around with someone else's forum.

Sadly, by that time, we'll also see A.I. auto-troll-programs appearing in large numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's probably best to start defining what factors contribute to trolling of an online community.

What particular communities are more susceptible and why?

Let's first tackle the non-sybil form of trolling and think about individuals.

Consider the differences and similarities between a community like linked in vs say 4chan? These are as far apart on the spectrum of communities as I can currently think of. Is one of these communities more easily trolled or duped than the other? Why might that be?

I hypothesize a community like linkedin would be more difficult to troll as you must offer personal data or spoof personal data in order to be let into the community. Certainly this isn't impossible to circumvent, but requires a greater degree of commitment. This commitment is essentially a subconscious time value calculation as well as a calculation of social cost. The logical conclusion is that the social cost of being a troll on Linked in is difficult as there is a very real and immediately perceivable lost opportunity cost.

Let's take another example of online discourse and hold a single variable constant, identity. Consider a discussion forum for a college course where students are asked to participate in discussion of class material learned from a physical lecture hall VS topical online discussion on a facebook group. Both groups are forced to offer up some form of personal identification. There is one difference between the groups and that is face to face interaction. My hypothesis is that the first group has a larger social cost tied to being a troll on the discussions and perceivable punishment from acting in bad faith vs facebook where the social costs can be diminished and mostly result in being unfriended. Even removing the possibility of lost tuition dollars as punishment (aka you attend free college) I would argue that the per capita rate of trolling would be diminished compared to facebook.

To summarize my hypothesis with in the original scope, if an individual does not perceive the social costs for their actions with in any community their propensity for becoming a bad actor should increase.

<comment><USER3> Not quite a troll, perhaps, but an interesting sock puppet: [https://theweek.com/speedreads/764714/dizzying-story- david-j...](https://theweek.com/speedreads/764714/dizzying-story-david- jewberg-fake-pentagon-official-stirring-antikremlin-sentiment-abroad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another bad rule I don't advise: insist on a peer-reviewed journal reference for literally everything said. There are a lot of problems with this, too many to list, really.

One is that inevitably it is only fully applied to statements that contradict the current prejudice, whatever that is; blocking the very sort of up-to-date knowledge you hope to find in a forum.

Another problem is that accomplished trolls will badly distort or reverse the takeaway from an opaque study and drop then drop that as a reference. The moderator can't possibly devote the hours to police that.

But yes, I've actually seen this system tried in a forum.

</comment><comment><USER3> Humans need intermediate punishments. It's how we work. (Homeostasis and all that.)

Therefore Facebook (etc) ought to provide a very automatic "time-out" system for moderators allowing them to one-click to create a temporary ban (a week, a month) for a user that reinstates that user automatically after that period _without_ further action by the moderator. Automatic tracking of past penalties and auto-escalations (if desired) to harsher punishments up to a ban would be a good idea, too.

A quick display of relevant stats regarding that user would be helpful right then, too; giving you some rough idea of how valuable past contributions by them have been. (Sometimes what looks like a troll is just a fact that few people, even in the field, know.)

Manually managing such a system works but Lord is it a ton of fiddly (and unnecessary) work for the moderator.

One of the advantages of this is that mild penalties can usually make the point with little risk that a bad penalty decision will permanently piss-off a valuable contributor.

</comment><comment><USER3> A bad "solution" I've seen more than once in health user groups - <USER2> disagreement (but allow contradictory threads.) "If you don't like what you see, just move along to the next thread." This removes any chance of limiting fake news, and takes trolling to a whole new level since the first big lie wins, in any thread. So not that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Make people pay for a user account

<comment><AUTHOR> Do people will really pay? I am not sure about this one.

<comment><USER6> worked for SomethingAwful

<comment><USER4> Not to be a snarky, but this worked in 2002(?) to combat 12 year old trolls.

The point it really speaks to is

What is an appropriate barrier to entry for an online community where two conditions are satisfied?

1\. The online community can scale. 2\. The online community is susceptible to what is essentially a sybil attack.

It may be the case these two conditions are inversely related and can't be simultaneously satisfied.

In the case of SA the admin correctly identified that 12 year old trolls aren't willing to pay 5 dollars to troll. This is an economic barrier to entry that just doesn't apply in the current landscape.

<comment><USER7> The current landscape _also_ includes 12 year old trolls who aren't willing to pay 5 dollars to troll. If a barrier stops some but not all trolls, it's still useful.

The problem with charging is, I probably wouldn't pay for the privilege of posting here. I suspect I'm not alone. If you charge to deter trolls, you deter (some) trolls, but you also deter some fraction of real users. It would result in a different community.

<comment><USER4> Let me put a few caveat on why 5 dollars in 2002 DNE 5 dollars in 2018 for a 12 year old.

       Ease of payment, when SA instituted this barrier a young troll intent on disruption had less of a problem coughing up 5 dollars for an account, and more of a problem finding a means to pay this 5 dollars. This is not the case for today's youth. See Xbox live and twitch donations if you don't think I'm being fair here.

       Scale-ability, which you directly touch on. Enforcing an upfront cost is a very real value calculation one must make prior to having extracted any value from the service and something most people my self included are currently adverse to. This directly impedes a communities ability to scale.

I can completely relate to your idea that I wouldn't pay to post on the forums. For years I had friends telling me to sign up and I always just shrugged and responded MEH why would I pay for that sort of thing? I didn't understand (at the time) the point or the reason for doing this. My (and many people's) value structure was in-congruent with the owner of SA.

Moving forward, people have to value the idea of an online community free of trolling in order to even put a price tag on that idea. I would find it very hard to believe that

a.) enough people (I'm talking an order of magnitude equal to the number of facebook users) value a troll free environment

b.) that, said people would have a unified enough of an idea of what an act of trolling is such that focused discussion doesn't boil down to pointing fingers. Maybe this point would merely resolve it self over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ban users early and often. Make signing up for accounts difficult (pay real money, require phone number verification, etc). It needs to cost the user money(or time) directly (they need to keep finding phone numbers that aren't banned, etc etc).

<comment><USER9> >Ban users early and often.

OP is referring to an online community not an echo chamber. Therefore, your advice does not apply IMHO.

<comment><USER3> Not understood. There may (or may not) be an argument to be made about the difficulty of sorting between trolls and those with unusual but accurate knowledge, but you haven't made that argument. I'd be interested to hear it, but you've gotta make it.

I've never seen a never-ban policy and can't believe it would work; the conduct of genuine psychopaths online can be truly extreme and not just uncivil, but designed to prevent the forum from functioning. Persistence- bullying is one of the nastier forms this takes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Depends on the type of troll.

Meatball wiki has a bunch of information about this. Here are a few.

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/UsAndThem)

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor)

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye)

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/DissuadeReputation](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/DissuadeReputation)

</comment><comment><USER11> vBulletin online forum had a way for admin to quietly disable user. Making his posts invisible to anyone but himself.

So proud troll keep moving full steam ahead with no harm to anyone.

They called this feature: "Tachy goes to coventry"

<comment><USER12> That's fantastic! Thanks. I didn't know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A.I. to detect Character Disorders - since people with Character Disorders tend to be very repetitive and characteristic in their behavior (hence the name.) People with Character Disorders can't be remotely cured and won't temper their behavior in any way that truly matters.

<comment><USER3> It's not well understood that many trolls don't see themselves as trolls (even though they thoroughly are.) For example, narcissists who just can't allow themselves to be contradicted and really take the gloves off if they are, or who want to simply take over a forum to hog all the oxygen and glory. Sadly, such people are not a smaller problem than conscious trolls. In fact, they may be far harder to discourage since they lack insight into their behavior and won't necessarily act with any prudence. You can't even count on them to be self-serving.</comment></comment>


Bing Crosby and the Tape Revolution (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://theaudiophileman.com/bing-crosby-tape-revolution/ <comment><USER2> Bing Crosby gave the necessary 'VC' funding to start production of tape recorders with sufficient fidelity to pre-record his radio show.

He was motivated by 'laziness': he wanted to spend more time at home or playing golf than the strict schedules of a weekly live radio broadcast permitted.

<comment><USER3> Ever notice a lot of automation and innovations are motivated by laziness. Maybe not laziness in the sense of to lazy to do something, but in the sense of it is so mundane i don't want to do it.

<comment><USER4> I have been telling people this for a while now, but I either fail to get my point across properly, or people think I am just making excuses.

Either way, I wholeheartedly agree with you!

<comment><USER5> You need to compare it to someone inventing something like a windmill. In ancient times, someone was crushing grain with a rock. Pretty tedious work for little reward. Then someone figured out a way to use a bigger rock by rolling it. Then they hooked a mule up to it. Then they hooked up bunch of vanes so the entire process was automated. No on had to feed the mule or move the rock. The process isn't really a product of laziness, its a product of how you can be more productive with your resources.

The time you put into building better tools is an investment into your productivity. You could sit there and manually edit spreadsheets for eight hours or you could spend a couple hours writing a tool to crank through them in ten seconds and you can move on to another task. As long as it takes less time to build the tool than the cumulative time of completing that task and any future similar tasks the tool could be used for, you have progressed just the same as early man did making tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a interview with Jack Mullin where he recalls the time he almost took a wrong turn on his way to liberating the two Magnetophon elements that eventually transformed AMPEX from a wartime motor manufacturer to the cornerstone of Silicon Valley it would eventually become: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olg5OMBil84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olg5OMBil84)

</comment><comment><USER7> Essential is the contribution of Les Paul: [https://www.historyofrecording.com/Les_Paul.html](https://www.historyofrecording.com/Les_Paul.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The German WWII history of the tape recorder is quite interesting. From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetophon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetophon)

> Adolf Hitler used these machines to perform what appeared to be live > broadcasts from one city while he was in another. A cache of 350 of these > tapes was released years later when they were found in Koblenz.

> Magnetophon recorders were widely used in German radio broadcasts during > World War II, although they were a closely guarded secret at the time. The > Allies were aware of the existence of the pre-war Magnetophon recorders, but > not of the introduction of high-frequency bias and PVC-backed tape.)[9] > their intelligence experts knew that the Germans had some new form of > recording system but they did not know the full details of its construction > and operation until working models of the Magnetophon were discovered during > the Allied invasion of Germany during 1944-45.

> American audio engineer Jack Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and > fifty reels of magnetic tape from a German radio station at Bad Nauheim near > Frankfurt in 1945. The allied forces were traveling through Germany during > WWII when they first discovered the device. The Allies then handed the > Magnetophon over to Mullin.[10] Over the next two years Mullin modified and > developed these machines, hoping to create a commercial recording system > that could be used by movie studios. American popular vocalist Bing > Crosby...

<comment><USER9> I also recommend "Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony" where Morita recounts the early days after the war of what became Sony. They decided early on to develop a tape player and it is interesting to read the crazy things they tried, having no domestic source of tape and almost no resources, working in a bombed-out area of Tokyo. It took them several years to develop tape and then a recorder, and eventually they developed the expertise to make smaller and smaller devices culminating in the Walkman.

As an aside, Steve Jobs was an admirer of Morita and the Sony Walkman could be seen as a precursor to the Apple iPod. Also Apple's efforts to make ever- thinner and compact devices could also be related back to the Sony efforts to make ever-smaller and compact devices, this being perceived as a key part their success during Morita's time.</comment></comment>


Android 10 breaks Termux: no apt install - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-Android-10 <comment><USER2> Just wait until 11. I've been testing it on my Pixel 2. Lots of apps will need to change access patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had Google phones since G1, I now use Pixel 3XL. This is the first time I seriously thought of switching off Android for good. What's puzzling is that I can't allow an app to run downloaded executables even if I know what the risk is. They could make it had but possible, like unlocking the bootloader.</comment></comment>