Total cholesterol and all-cause mortality – a study among 13M adults - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y <comment><USER4> The study methods don't seem to indicate whether they adjusted for statins!

If they failed to account for statin use, then they will get the wrong answer due to confounding by indication.

[https://twitter.com/skathire/status/1110909549811322880](https://twitter.com/skathire/status/1110909549811322880)

 _Edit: Found it - they are_ not _accounting for statin use! None of their conclusions seem warranted._

<comment><USER5> FYI this is discussed in the conclusion:

> First, the use of lipid-lowering medication was unaccounted for. The risk > associated with high cholesterol might have been underestimated. However, in > Korea, IHD mortality accounted for only approximately 5% of all-cause > mortality, and only 10% of people with hypercholesterolemia received lipid- > lowering therapy[39]. Therefore, the impact of not considering medication > use is likely to be modest, and the TC levels in this study generally > reflect levels without lipid-lowering medications

<comment><USER4> And yet, if you look a the twitter thread I pointed out, it turns out that in a large biobank of 500,000 people, their aspiration is refuted: if you fail to account for treatment effects, the association results will be inverted.

<comment><USER6> But,

> only 10% of people with hypercholesterolemia received lipid-lowering therapy

Wouldn't this be much higher in the UK cohort? Also,

> The sex- and age- specific levels of TC in the current study of Koreans were > lower than those reported in other high-income countries, including Japan, > England, and the US

Which would reduce the effect (relative to what was found in the analysis of UK data) even further.

I don't think it adds a whole lot to talk about the confounding variables of this nature - it's an observational study, so of course it will have all sorts of confounding variables. If you are going to make a strong case that controlling for a specific confounding variable would reverse the relationship though, you should quantify the impact. It's unclear to me that statin usage would make a large difference, given that the study notes it wasn't a popular treatment.

My general feeling is that these types of studies tend to end up measuring overall health - given that most of the factors that lead to high cholesterol level were controlled for (BMI, physical activity, smoking status, drinking, etc) - and the average person in any population is relatively healthy and well-adjusted to the common diet, any large deviation from the norm in any direction statically makes it likely that the subject has some health issues.

What would be interesting to see in a meta-study is whether the optimal level of cholesterol either was consistent across populations that had very different averages or it tends to be near the median in each population. The former would be evidence that it's an independently meaningful biomarker; the latter would be evidence that it's just measuring how normal you are.

<comment><USER4> You don't think that talking about confounding by indication is important? Confounding by indication inverts the entire discussion section of the article.

<comment><USER6> Again, observational studies are going to have all kinds of confounding variables - if you're going to make an argument that one of them is important enough to reverse the conclusion, you should have some evidence and certainly more than a just-so-story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cholesterol / lipid science is a mess. First it was LDL-C that was bad, then that doesn't actually correlate, then it's LDL-P, oh wait, then it's LDL size, and then it's ApoB that's going to "clog your arteries". Once you dive into the "hard" science like pathology of atherosclerosis, you'll find that the lipid hypothesis makes no sense.

We have drugs (PKCS9 inhibitors: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1615664](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1615664), bile acid sequesterants, CETP Inhibitors: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1609581](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1609581)) that can lower LDL to 10-20mg/dL — the later even increased HDL. No impact on cardiovascular mortality. The studies all use composite endpoints.

What might cause Atherosclerosis?

\- Bacteria

\- Bacterial lipid byproducts

\- Endothelial damage from toxins (lead, mecury, etc)

\- Endothelial glycation from high blood sugar (Diabetics have a lot of CVD)

\- Bad genetics resulting in excess hemodynamic stress at coronary branch points (fun fact: CVD only develops in a few specific spots)

\- Autoimmune conditions (higher rates of CVD in this population)

What most of these things have in common is they trigger the activation of the immune system.

<comment><USER4> Just so other readers are aware, this view of cholesterol and lipidology is far outside the mainstream medical understanding of the topic.

LDL-c is bad. LDL-p (the particle number), LDL size, and ApoB (which is the protein part of LDL) are all very well correlated with LDL-c. So, while some people prefer one measurement or another, they're all proxies for one another.

We have lifelong exposure to our genetics-and-diet-induced cholesterol levels, whereas clinical trials run for a few years. The long-term follow up of the statin trials show mortality reduction. PCSK9 inhibitors reduce all-cause mortality, and the long-term follow-up of the PCSK9 trials may or may not show the same for cardiovascular specific mortality. However, everyone in the field thinks they will, because those with loss-of-function PCSK9 variants live longer with less cardiovascular disease. Also, adjudicating the cause of death is hard - autopsy, if done, overturns the diagnosis nearly 60% of the time[1].

Cholesterol isn't the only risk factor for cardiovascular disease, so other things (like autoimmune conditions) will contribute to risk as well, but this isn't an either/or phenomenon.

1 = [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12913844](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12913844)

<comment><USER7> > "PCSK9 inhibitors reduce all-cause mortality, and the long-term follow-up of > the PCSK9 trials may or may not show the same for cardiovascular specific > mortality."

Check the evalocumab trial I posted, ACM was actually slightly worse in the PCSK9 side of the trial.

> "LDL-c is bad. LDL-p (the particle number), LDL size, and ApoB (which is the > protein part of LDL) are all very well correlated with LDL-c. So, while some > people prefer one measurement or another, they're all proxies for one > another."

Yes, this tends to be true, however discordance between them is possible - <USER2> generally not a good thing.

> "Cholesterol isn't the only risk factor for cardiovascular disease"

Sure, but I think the whole of the field has rabbit-holed on lipids for too long, ignoring actual causal factors.

<comment><USER4> > "Sure, but I think the whole of the field has rabbit-holed on lipids for too > long, ignoring actual causal factors."

LDL cholesterol is by far the best established causal risk factor for coronary artery disease.

> "Check the evalocumab trial I posted, ACM was actually slightly worse in the > PCSK9 side of the trial."

All cause mortality was significantly lower in Odyssey: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1801174](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1801174)

<comment><USER7> > LDL cholesterol is by far the best established causal risk factor for > coronary artery disease.

Is it causal, or is it a risk factor? I'd say at best it is "necessary but not sufficient". CVD risk calculators don't even take LDL-C into account, that's how good of a marker it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My question is that whether the U-shaped curve found here is caused by similar phenomena as the J-shaped curve previously found for alcohol. That is, for alcohol, individuals who drank no alcohol tended to have disease or be recovering alcoholics, and so that association made it seem that drinking no alcohol was less healthy than drinking some alcohol. Here too, is it possible that having low cholesterol is associated with individuals with disease? We don't know what caused different individuals to have low TC here.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. In fact, because statins have such a powerful effect on cholesterol, there is a good chance that a bunch of the people in the low cholesterol strata are taking statins. So, at the risk of being a broken record in this thread, these results are likely to be confounded by indication. That is, the low-cholesterol groups are enriched for people who have low cholesterol because they are taking statins. And they are taking statins because a physician has deemed them to be at elevated risk of disease (or already have disease), and are thus more likely to die.

<comment><USER9> If moving "high risk" patients to lower cholesterol levels does not decrease mortality, why bother with statins?

<comment><USER10> It could be that it reduces mortality, but it's still above average.

<comment> village-idiot Last time I'd read into it, statins didn't move mortality numbers for most members of the population.

Edit: they do decrease your risk of a heart attack a bit, but the increased incidence of cancer and diabetes actually eliminates the benefit for most users. The only people who showed any measurable reduction in mortality were non-elderly patients with a history of cardiovascular disease.

[https://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-evidence-continues-to- mo...](https://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-evidence-continues-to-mount- against-statins/)

<comment><USER4> This is a mix of outdated and simply wrong information.

<comment> village-idiot I'm unconvinced by your unsupported assertion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find it strange that research of this scale is looking exclusively at a compound metric. TC is HDL (apo A-I), LDL, VLDL, IDL (apo B) and few more things. Its different proportions of these things that define how healthy your cardiovascular system is, not the total sum. To complicate even more - <USER3> things are usually measured as concentrations (mass/volume) while much more important metric is particle count, but that's not easy/cheap to measure.

Considering how complex this system is, measuring TC is like measuring average body temperature in the hospital.

It's cool that they found a U-shape but this approach just makes patients(and doctors) hack the TC number without understanding how that affects lipoprotein composition and, subsequently, patient's health.

<comment><USER12> "much more important metric is particle count"

That is really interesting, do you have a source you can recommend for reading further?

<comment><USER11> There is plenty of research, but here's more consumable version: [https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol- pa...](https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-iv/)

The whole series is a gold mine tbh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Current recommended 'healthy' level is below 200, while it looks like the study found 200-240 is the best range. Is this accurate? Should people that have under 200 get it up to the 200-240 range? Or does it depend on family history of heart disease?

[https://medlineplus.gov/cholesterollevelswhatyouneedtoknow.h...](https://medlineplus.gov/cholesterollevelswhatyouneedtoknow.html)

<comment><USER14> In fact it looks like below 200 mortality increased? And it was worse to have low cholesterol than high in most cases... very odd.

<comment><USER15> Animals need cholesterol for their cell membranes; particularly for neurons. It's a precursor for Vitamin D, testosterone, and estrogen and is needed in the blood to help transport fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K).

It doesn't seem at all strange that there should be an optimum level that is non-zero.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So if I am understanding the results correctly, lowering cholesterol beyond a certain limit can increase morbidity. The results are not at all surprising. The science behind cholesterol and statin drugs is not settled science. Drug companies are making 100s of billions of dollars selling statin drugs, and this money flows to researchers too, so the truth is very hard to know. "It's almost impossible to find someone who believes strongly in statins who does not get a lot of money from industry," says Dr. Rodney A. Hayward, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. Read more here: [https://medium.com/@petilon/cholesterol-and- statins-e7d9d8ee...](https://medium.com/@petilon/cholesterol-and- statins-e7d9d8eea983)

</comment><comment><USER17> As a somewhat overweight male approaching 60 with elevated cholesterol who has been on and off statins for years, the ridiculously inconclusive state of this research is very depressing.

I finally decided to stop taking them as they have annoying side effects and the cynic in me believes the science may have been pushed a bit off center by monetary incentives to the makers of these patented treatments.

<comment><USER18> I have absurdly high LDL levels, but can't tolerate them because they make all of my muscles stiff -- which consequently lead to a foot injury. My doctor considers me allergic to them, but I haven't been able to get my insurance to pay for another other treatments since they require that I also be on statins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 12m adults in the study of which 600k died in the following 10 years—is that normal or was it a high risk group?

<comment><USER6> 600K / 12M = 0.05 or 5% over 10 years. This means roughly 500 deaths / 100,000 annually. According to CDC ([https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm)) the death rate in the US is 850 deaths / 100,000. These aren't exactly apples to apples but that seems enough to say this doesn't look especially high-risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why use total cholesterol instead of LDL?

<comment><USER21> Probably because it was the only available measurement for such a large sample (12.8M).

<comment><USER22> Isn't LDL and HDL measured with TC all as part of the same test?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is the TLDR?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it irony its posted by 'pizza'</comment>


A social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos <comment><USER2> Just like a real democracy, some participants are more equal than others.

<comment><USER3> Looks like there's a revolution going on already [https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/42](https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/42)

<comment><USER4> The pull request for equal voting weights just got accepted!

<comment><USER5> I don't see this as a good thing for an online democracy, since people can make alternate accounts very very very easily.

<comment><USER2> There's an age requirement to vote.

<comment><USER6> But how does this work in practice? I could (theoretically) create 5000 github accounts and have full control over the repo in one month [1].

This means I could create a pull requests which gives my main account absolute voting rights unless other real people try to organize over 5000 accounts to vote no. While this can happen in the real world as well (just look at Turkey), it is quite hard to achieve (you first need enough people to support you that you can gain such power).

In the internet, creating accounts is pretty easy and unless github flags my accounts (which can always be circumvented), there is no real democracy just like with Bitcoin when the most determined/resourceful person has the most power. That's because they either managed to create enough accounts, or in bitcoins case, have custom hardware to control the creation of bitcoins as well as (almost) all transactions.

While the idea is pretty interesting to do that automatically, a better approach IMO is to have humans decide what to implement and what not because humans tend to be able to spot fake votes when there is no meaningful discussion why something should be changed. And thanks to the wonderful nature of free software, if a maintainer starts to prioritize their own agenda over the community, the community tends to just fork the repo and do their own thing. This is the best example of democracy I have seen so far. People are able to discuses what they want to do and if they fell their interests are no longer supported, they can just do their own and bring other over if they feel the same way.

[1]: the current minimum age is 1 month according to [https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/blob/master/settings.py#L3...](https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/blob/master/settings.py#L39)

<comment><USER7> You could also create your own repo on Github and not destroy something else.

<comment><USER6> That's not the point. You do not design your server in a way that it is easily hackable because people can just set up their own server and not destroy something else.

I wish we lived in a word where that is not necessary and all human beings work together instead of against each other. But we do not live in such a world. Creating valid thread models and pointing out disatantages of systems that malicious parties will exploit is therefor necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of [https://github.com/illacceptanything/illacceptanything](https://github.com/illacceptanything/illacceptanything) which came up on HN a couple of years back [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338088)

<comment><USER9> I updated the video feed and added a synthesizer

anythingbot.org/video

anythingbot.org/nonlanguage

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool, I really like this idea of Nomic-style open-source code governance. I previously built a similar project: [https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanythi...](https://github.com/botwillacceptanything/botwillacceptanything)

</comment><comment><USER11> It may be possible to mitigate the "create 5000 dummy accounts" attack by steadily increasing the age required to vote, much like in Larry Niven's Struldbrugs Club membership.

Obviously the harshest, most stringent approach would be to block anyone whose account was created after the time of the PR merge. But this would prevent new players from participating.

You could also increase the age requirement by one day every two days, or have a logarithmically increasing requirement.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am the author of a similar game, called Nomyx: [http://www.nomyx.net/](http://www.nomyx.net/) In Nomyx, the players can change the rules of the game, while playing it!

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. I had a similar idea but for 'political policy' rather than code. Basically, a kind of social network where people work on editing a single corpus of text, making 'merge requests' and voting. It used a statistical technique called a sequential probability ratio test to work out whether a user's change should be accepted or rejected. [http://brendonboshell.co.uk/voting- system/](http://brendonboshell.co.uk/voting-system/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's like the code version of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic) !

<comment><USER15> There's also a Haskell-based one called Nomyx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks very similar to [https://github.com/botwillacceptanything](https://github.com/botwillacceptanything)

<comment><USER9> And the activity looks very similar to a neuron firing! This is, in a sense, THE BASIC LEARNING UNIT a.k.a. neuron. If you think about the way water flows through a river (the water KEEPS ERODING THE RIVER! How can this possibly work ?!?!!?) or the way a neuron counts the "votes" from other neurons like an automatic electronic computer, you can see similarities in scale!

If you have any questions, you can send a PR to [https://github.com/anythingbot/anythingbot/](https://github.com/anythingbot/anythingbot/) or create an issue or ask in a reply here. My email is

email@example.com

And there is a video feed.

BWAA TV: Bot Will Accept Anything TV

[http://anythingbot.org/video/](http://anythingbot.org/video/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitch Plays Github

<comment><USER18> Github plays Github

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discarding votes after `rebase` commits looks like a pretty bad problem now: [https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/26](https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/26)

</comment><comment><USER20> Would be interesting to see whether it could be turned in to an anarchy, removing all references to the democratic process, and allowing all pr's to be merged.

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/48](https://github.com/chaosbot/chaos/pull/48) "Need more chaos" proposes this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone tried to build a code version of Wikipedia?

<comment><USER23> Not the same thing, but Lunyr is building Wikipedia on blockchain technology: [http://lunyr.com](http://lunyr.com)

<comment><USER24> They speak against centralization then right in their whitepaper they have:

> Lunyr may make changes to the size of the LUN pool, LUN distribution and > other related matters that it believes, in its reasonable judgment, are > beneficial to the LUN platform growth and development, or it considers > reasonable under the circumstances. Keep in mind that any corrupt behavior > would be irrational for Lunyr to do. Lunyr will be holding onto LUN and any > decisions that dilute the value of LUN and devalue the knowledge base would > be harmful to Lunyr.

So they say that you shouldn't use the centralized solution, but it's okay for Lunyr to maintain control because it's in it's economic interests.

Okay.

Not to mention they include ads, this just sounds like a worse version of wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      ## Some things it could do

      * Provide some useful service to people.
      * Be malicious.
      * Recreate itself in a different programming language.
      * Break itself and die.

Hate to be pessimistic here, but I'm guessing the last option will happen fairly quickly.

<comment><USER26> At the time of writing this comment, that's only happened twice so far. See the Death Counter portion of the readme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> programming by committee?

</comment><comment><USER28> Would the Linux Kernel be classed as a dictatorship in this case?

<comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life)</comment></comment>


Codecademy's Joke  - <AUTHOR>

In an introduction to an objects course the team of Codecademy placed a javascript joke. I am not a member of the team of Codecademy but found it pretty funny. Here is their joke:<p>"We at Codecademy love to joke around. Obviously different things make different people laugh. This first 'joke' is super geeky because it involves coding! And it'll only be funny if you knew the TV show 'Batman'. But we loved it and hope you do too! Copy this code into the scratch pad and run the code!<p>Array(16).join( 'hero'-1) + "Batman"; <comment><USER2> more like:

        Array(16).join("parents" - 2) + "Batman"

</comment><comment><USER3> If you know that a string minus a number results in NaN, you don't need to run the code to get the joke ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> watch WAT, it's awesome and includes the same joke :-)

<https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat></comment>


Hold the 'Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich':The Post-Recession Developed World - <AUTHOR> http://www.professorhollybell.com/2012/05/14/hold-the-double-irish-with-a-dutch-sandwich-in-the-post-recession-developed-world/

<comment><USER2> This reads like a sanitized version of a US Chamber of Commerce wish list for US laws. Especially the section on "Intellectual Proprety". I mean, really: strong "IP" laws _and_ protection from "frivolous" lawsuits? Wow, that's great for entrenched businesses, they get the state to enforce draconian "IP" laws, and they get a free pass on getting sued.</comment>


Ask HN: What tool to use for building a Linux app installer? - <AUTHOR> My company has a piece of software they want to demo to potential buyers by getting them to install the software on their machines.  The software we produce binary rewrites other applications (e.g. Apache webserver and Apache Kafka) so it involves pulling something off the web, reading the configuration of the machine it's being installed on, getting some user input, creating some config files and copying some files.  We will go across mostly Ubuntu and CentOS/Redhat machines.<p>I know the traditional ways of doing this are shell script or shar files.  Is there something more common and easier to use that is commonly used today (e.g. SNAP packages)? I'm looking for ease of use on our end, extensibility and flexibility and the ability to extend to multiple applications over time.  For various technical reasons, containers are a non-starter for us. <comment><USER2> Basically this is what configuration management does. So, why not use Ansible, esp. ansible pull ( [https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible- pull.htm...](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-pull.html) ). You'd prepare an ansible playbook, and your users would pull that via git. Should tick most of your boxes.

Incidentally, I'm currently working on a project/product to make that sort of thing easier, esp. in terms of flexibility and easy of use (for both end users and developers). It's not finished yet, but use-able. I haven't figured out how I do licensing yet, but I'd need some beta testers with real problems soon...

Anyway, have a look at Ansible pull first, maybe it does what you need it to do. Ping me if you need some pointers. I also have a few scripts lying around that make bootstrapping that type of things easier.

</comment><comment> UK-Al05 .Deb .rpm packages?

</comment><comment><USER3> Snaps with a reasonable rationale for it can be unconfined (they require the user to acknowledge that with —classic on install). Think a config management system, which needs to be able to read and write all over a traditional file system. That would work for you, and be cross platform, but the snapcraft community would need to be convinced that it's not a Trojan horse vector.</comment>


Engineering tour de force births programmable optical quantum computer - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/engineering-tour-de-force-births-programmable-optical-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> > _The [two qubit] gates are about as reliable as any others you will find in > the quantum computing world, which is to say that operations complete > successfully around 93 percent of the time. For comparison, ion-based > quantum computers are at 95 to 99 percent and superconducting quantum > computers are around 90 to 95 percent. [...]_

Those comparison numbers are incorrect. Ion-based and superconducting-based groups have reported two-qubit gate fidelities of 99.9% [1] and 99.4% [2] respectively.

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04600](https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04600)

[2]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4848](https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4848)

<comment><USER3> I don't know if there's a sensible way to define "typical" gate fidelities, and I agree "90 to 99 percent" is misleadingly low, but picking some of the highest reported numbers (possibly achieved in specialized non-scalable set ups) is also not very representative. The engineering of gate quality is too messily intertwined with the rest of the device.

<comment><USER2> The article is also reporting numbers for a one-off setup that has scaling challenges, so it seems appropriate to compare against that type of number.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like optical quantum computing, it feels hands on, like it's almost something you could build in your garage. Linear optical quantum computers just need waveguides, beam splitters, phase shifters and mirrors (no disrespect - I know it's not trivial to make work). You set up your circuit and fire your light through it and measure the system at the end.

It's a nice way to think about quantum computing. You aren't allowed to do any measurements half way or you will destroy your superposition. It's a bit like a pure function, no IO allowed until the very end.

Also I know three of the people on the paper, good to see them getting some mainstream attention for a nice result.

<comment><USER5> > You aren't allowed to do any measurements half way or you will destroy your > superposition.

This is true of all quantum computations. It doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is.

<comment><USER2> It's actually extremely common for quantum algorithms to have measurement operations halfway through. But they apply to individual qubits, not the whole system.

For example, error corrected quantum computation involves continuously measuring particular stabilizers in order to catch when they flip. Another example: measurement can reduce the cost of uncomputation (e.g. [1]).

[1]: [https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2018-06-18-74/](https://quantum- journal.org/papers/q-2018-06-18-74/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bingo, straight across the middle. See that, I never thought I was going to get optical and quantum in the same headline but there you go. You never know with bullshit bingo.

</comment><comment><USER7> A cool implementation of a deep ANN using a similar system: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02365.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.02365.pdf)

(the nonlinear units and the backprop are done on a classical computer).

The paper also points out that thermal cross-talk between the thermo-optical phase shifters can limit gate fidelities or conversely the smallest spacing between the waveguides.</comment>


Try Topaz (Rebol inspired language) - <AUTHOR> http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/topaz/try-topaz.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the github[1], it compiles to javascript and runs on node.js.

Edit: Here's a presentation on the language[2].

[1] <https://github.com/giesse/Project-SnowBall> [2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBJHMkN9qJ4>

</comment><comment><USER2> The demo console does weird things in iCab on my iPad. First, it brings up the print dialog; then it reloads the page. It works fine in Safari. I've never seen anything like that happen before.</comment>


Anonymous found the organization responsible for gangstalking - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q-eiH41nhY <comment><USER2> One google search of GangStalking and I'm pretty certain it's a schizophrenic explanation for their paranoia.</comment>


DoD: Turn Off Your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Watch GPS - <AUTHOR> https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/turn-off-your-fitbit-garmin-apple-watch-gps-now/ <comment><USER2> I occasionally did onsite support many years ago for some weird proprietary equipment.

One military site had the rule that nothing electronic left the main gate site without being handed over to the guards, processed, and i believe destroyed before it left (not that you ever saw it again anyway). They were serious...

You drove to the site knowing it would all be gone and a strong warning not to turn around if you were near the gate because you just remembered you had your phone in your rental car.

We went through a lot of equipment.

But that site as far as anything I could have done, secure. I don't even know what the faculty looks like as it was blind folds and guards all the way to the equipment (well you could see the bathroom....with an MP.. there).

I feel like those kind of policies are the way of the future. There is no other way at this time.

<comment><USER3> _I feel like those kind of policies are the way of the future. There is no other way at this time._

For military, yes. For civil, that's going a bit too far into the dystopian realm.

<comment><USER4> > For military, yes. For civil, that's going a bit too far into the dystopian > realm.

Destroying the devices might go a bit far, but there are plenty of jobs that require things like phones going into a drawer before a shift starts. Not everyone is always on all the time.

<comment><USER5> I've got friends who work at places where company policy says that any electronics you travel to China with can never be connected to the corporate network again.

They don't destroy the devices, but all travel phones/laptops are "burners" and get given away instead of ever used for work again.

<comment><USER6> Why? Couldn't you just format the drives if you were that paranoid? Are they worried about some kind of hardware bugging or sub OS exploits while the owner is not looking?

<comment><USER7> Quite simply yes. A modern "computer" is made up of multiple layered CPUs and OSs at this point. WiFi, sound, ssd, GPU all often have embedded cpu and firmware that could get "enhanced" and survive a recore

<comment><USER5> Hell - even the _batteries_ have embedded cpus and firmware...

[https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-19/dc-19-presentations/...](https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-19/dc-19-presentations/Miller/DEFCON-19-Miller- Battery-Firmware-Hacking.pdf)

(Note slide 116 there - about 7 up from the end: "Attacking the OS kernel")

[https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2099616/black-hat-charlie- mi...](https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2099616/black-hat-charlie-miller- explains-apple-battery-hack)

[http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/smbusb-hacking-smart- batteri...](http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/smbusb-hacking-smart- batteries.html)

<comment><USER8> In the end, if it runs code, you cannot trust it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This leaves out an important part: in sensitive areas like a SCIF. All they're really saying is that modern smart watches can have similar capability to phones—we don't allow those, so we shouldn't allow the new watches either. Pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER10> That's not what this article is about at all. Anything that has any sort of transmission or recording capabilities has been banned inside of secure facilities for as long I can remember, fitness devices aren't something that would need to be covered by a new rule. They don't want you wearing devices that share GPS coordinates because it makes it simple to get accurate locations of buildings and troop schedules. Instead of blindly firing mortars into a base, just look for where the GPS signals cluster at night and you probably know where everyone is sleeping. See a signal that goes from the troop quarters to the base perimeter, then goes back a few hours later? Probably someone on guard duty, now you can start figuring out when the shift rotations happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related previous discussion from 6 months ago:

"Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249955) (267 comments)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty old news [0], I wonder why it took this long for an official statement.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military- bases-f...](https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases- fitness-trackers-privacy/)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I remember reading this.

Doesn't this really only apply to devices with GPS?

<comment><USER14> MEMS gyroscopes are a useful inertial navigation system that can be accurate enough. Some intelligence can be gathered with just pedometer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Title should be "Turn off your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple watch GPS in operational areas"

<comment><USER16> Attacker: "Yeah so they told them to turn off their GPS devices when they go into operational areas so we just searched where there were holes in the GPS data and bingo we figured out the secret base's location."

By producing or removing signal, above what would have occurred normally information, leaks out of the system.

<comment><USER5> Check the "hole in the Strava data" maps at the bottom of this article:

[https://charliesavage.com/?p=1173](https://charliesavage.com/?p=1173)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My favorite is the person who logged a bike ride at Area 51 using strava

</comment><comment><USER18> reading the article about no phones/cameras/mics allowed makes me wonder what will happen if we ever get to the in eye AR word some of us envision where there is no turning that stuff on since it's embedded in your head and you're likely as depended on it as I am on mdn and stack overflow

</comment><comment><USER19> One can't even sync Fitbit without the GPS on. I just want to count my steps, and bluetooth is not enough? For at least Fitbit, the rule should be not to own one.

<comment><USER20> That's because for Bluetooth pairing, Android requires location services to be on.

It's not fitbit, that's the problem with Android in general.

<comment><USER19> how come I don't need location services for some of my other bluetooth device?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> reminds how both sides - Ukraine and Russia - (as the telecom companies on both sides were either the same or tightly integrated, technically and financially, and had [easy] access to real-time tracking data as well as to registration data) tracked cell phones carried by the soldiers and volunteers of each other (like a bunch of cell phones of Russian paratroopers moving from their base in Pskov and coming to Donbass :). Especially during the first few months of 2014 until the people finally realized that the tracking had been going on and had actually even been used in real time to direct fire at them.

Also, the leader of Chechnya, Dudaev, was killed in 1996 by tracking his satellite phone signal - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_leg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_legacy) (more detailed and more conspiracy style version - 2nd paragraph at [https://jamestown.org/program/alla-dudaeva-describes- being-i...](https://jamestown.org/program/alla-dudaeva-describes-being- interrogated-by-litvinenko) )

</comment><comment><USER22> The ways of finding out information about militaries is getting more and more convoluted and hard to prevent

</comment><comment><USER23> So would this preclude anyone with a medical device form working there? say like an insulin pump?

<comment><USER24> Which part of the article makes it sound like they could be talking about insulin pumps?

<comment><USER25> The part where insulin pumps are electronic equipment. It's becomming more and more common for devices like insulin pumps to upload data automatically to other devices. It'd be hard to get location data I think from glucose logs. But SoCs are getting more and more features, and an insulin pump that also tracks steps is not a huge stretch of the imagination, especially if the power draw was tiny.

<comment><USER26> > The part where insulin pumps are electronic equipment.

That's not a part of the article.

The article and memo clearly focus on geolocation data. Not a feature I can find in insulin pumps after a cursory search.

<comment><USER27> Not by default.

An attacker could change that.

<comment><USER28> An attacker in the building could just keep geolocation on on their regular device. That's not the point of this exercise

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll go out on a leg and ask - why not brute force and use signal jammer. Or in SCIF, jam all incoming signals, except for the ones they want to whitelist. If there is wifi, whitelist devices that can be connected to it.

<comment><USER30> A jammer doesn't fix the fact that these devices could still record whatever when inside the facility and just transmit the acquired data later once the wearer goes outside.

<comment><USER3> The point of jamming GPS is that these devices then do not know what their location is, so the records wouldn't show anything.

<comment><USER30> The risk is not limited to location data. Leaking any audio or video could also be problematic. I also wonder how much location data could be inferred with accelerometers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm kind of surprised that they published the memorandum here, especially with contact information. I suppose I don't see how it would be a security risk, I just assumed it would have been.

</comment><comment><USER32> So, it takes the DoD about a month to write such a simple memo? Was there a preliminary "while we investigate this, turn it off" memo? If not, how, how does that compare to other countries?

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought this was going to be some security issue with GPS in general. This is really just aimed it DoD employees.

</comment><comment><USER34> They should hire Amish people ...

<comment><USER35> You joke, but I believe I read something about the CIA hiring a lot of Amish. Compared to the general population, their priorities are different meaning it's a lot harder to corrupt them. Unfortunately I can't find any citations (maybe it was a comment here?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is like how cellphones are forbidden in planes because their RF emissions- unsecure, unworkable and dangerous. Security theater at best.

A proper solution is technological, not social. Selective location GPS jammers, only letting through a different frequency or encryption for military GPS.

<comment><USER37> > _A proper solution is technological, not social_

If the last decade had a TL; DR, it would be "technology offers second-rate solutions to social problems." If your soldiers lack the discipline to turn off their phones on command, you've got a bigger problem than RF leakage.

<comment><USER38> A good solution to people forgetting is to remove the need to remember.

Disobeying is a social problem. Imperfect repetition is not.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Model 3 Owners Vent About Polar Vortex Affecting Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-02/freezing-cold-means-love-hate-relationships-with-electric-cars <comment><USER2> Having owned a BMW 3 series and a Tesla Model S. The problems are pretty much the same, in very cold weather.

Once in my BMW, the gas plug froze stock, os i Couldnt get gas.

The biggest difference, is that i can remotely start the AC/Defrost the Tesla, with my phone. I do that 10 mins before i Drive, and everything is fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Counter anecdote:

I have a Model 3 in New England and I love it. My range is about 30% less than it should be due to the cold but I kind of expected that and I just plan my trips accordingly. Like most M3 owners (I think) 99% of the time I charge at home anyway.

Pre-heating definitely takes it's toll.

The flip side of that is it pre-heats faster than any car I have ever owned. 30F to 70F in 15 minutes. And as a bonus I can pre-heat it in my garage without poisoning myself.

I haven't had the door handle issue. My understanding is it is a lot to do with the fact it is recessed and there is nothing to grab onto to break the ice / plus the ice can get behind the handle. But the window sticking issue... I had an Audi with a frameless window and that happened on it too.

BUT... and this is a big but... I have a garage for my car and the coldest it has gotten this year where I am is -3F (and that was in the middle of the night). Which is nowhere near as cold as the polar vortex temperatures.

Edit: My biggest complaint with it is actually the build quality. The gap between the door and the frame is huge in some places and the exterior paint quality leaves something to be desired. Plus for some odd reason the web browser in the dash sometimes requires a system reboot to work which sounds like no big deal but there are a lot of cool web based "apps" for Tesla cars. But overall, I am extremely happy with my purchase.

<comment><USER4> i think you'll find that the M3 name is already occupied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So what is the exact problem?

Batteries - everybody knows that the voltage drops in cold weather. This is of course big issue in the electric cars, but is an issue with a gas cars too. Bellow -20C, you will start to feel that it's harder to start a car, even with rather fresh battery.

Car door handles, what the hell is this problem? You need to lube door handles and door rubber gaskets (sorry if terminology is wrong) for probably every car if you do not want to have _any_ trouble in seriously cold weather. Stickier door handles or door freezing to the car's body is usual occurrence for me every single winter.

<comment><USER6> "Car door handles, what the hell is this problem?"

Teslas have door handles that work differently from ordinary cars, and that seems to cause problems with freezing weather. Different models have different mechanisms, but the root cause seems to be the desire to have the handles lie flush for the sake of appearances.

<comment><USER7> Actually I think it has less to do with appearance and more to do with efficiency as every mm counts in an electric car drag coefficient.

<comment><USER8> Why wouldn't ICE cars be equally affected by car drag coefficients?

<comment><USER9> They are, but range is not as big of an issue with ICE, so less pressure to optimize drag coefficient

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Winter temperatures are just something people should be aware of if they're thinking about electric cars. If you live in a place that often has extreme cold during the winter, an electric vehicle may not be your best choice.

Any vehicle can have difficulty in extreme cold, though with an ICE engine, if it starts, it's generally okay after a short warm-up, and gasoline doesn't lose range by getting cold.

<comment><USER11> It's not really just about being able to "start". Winter temps can affect fuel/energy efficiency of ALL cars regardless if they are EVs or not. ICE cars can lose somewhere between 22-34% in range.

Source: [https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml)

<comment><USER4> i think its worth noting that at least the summary presented on this page could be sliced into two sections

1: different usage of accessories to make the occupants comfortable, e.g. warming up interior for longer, running heated seats... 2: physical changes that affect the overall car: denser air resistance, higher rolling resistance..

the one point that is specific to an ICE engine is friction from running colder oils, the rest seem to apply to both ICE, hybrid and electric vehicles, the latter two more so.

overall the takeaway seems to be that most losses in an ICE vehicles are not about the powertrain, whereas a hybrid/electric vehicle has almost all the losses of an ICE vehicle but with significantly more battery degradation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I paid $60,000 to not drain my battery so quickly."

thats your own damage, dude.

</comment><comment><USER13> Friendly reminder that at -40C(-40F) the air is 27.5% denser in comparison to room temperature, so highway range should be affected roughly proportionally.

Also at least a few times in my life during a cold snap I arrived to a car frozen shut. It is this thing that happens sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Handles seems no fun.

As for loosing some battery charge overnight - if possible, car should be plugged. It heats the battery after all and it is very good for overall battery health and longevity.

<comment><USER15> You're so very wrong. You're suggesting how to potentially wear-out and overcharge li-ion battery tech, not improve it. [https://batteryuniversity.com/index.php/learn/article/how_to...](https://batteryuniversity.com/index.php/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries)

<comment><USER16> He's spot on. Tesla vehicles heat up a cold battery pack when charging and IIRC Tesla suggests an upper charge limit of 80% for daily driving to minimize any additional wear from keeping it at a high state of charge all the time. The best approach is to plug it in and have it only charge to 80% and leave thermal management to the car, it will heat up the pack if it needs it instead of just charging it cold.

<comment><USER14> It even heats battery even unplugged. Thus draining those miles at night.

Tesla really does good job to keep the battery in shape.

[https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation- dat...](https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do batteries suffer permanent damage from getting that cold?

<comment><USER18> I don't know about Lithium batteries, but lead-acid ones have an interesting thing where their freezing point is much lower if they are fully charged. The acid concentration is higher and works like antifreeze. If you let it go flat the concentration drops, and the physical expansion from the water freezing just destroys the thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get why this is even a story. This is not exclusive to Electric Cars.

TLDR: (Internal Combustion) Car Mileage Drops By 22~34% In Winter For Short Trips [https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/coldweather.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER19> Tesla's door handles - designed in California.

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess Prius is not affected. But Prius is borning.</comment>


Fake documents could spur an AI arms race - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90230758/fake-documents-could-spur-an-ai-arms-race <comment><USER2> for some of these documents it seems like it would be easier to just contact the relevant agency and see if the claim checks out on their end

<comment><USER3> Hi! Oisín here from Inscribe.

That is a great point and one we are actively considering.

Contacting the relevant agency is not always possible, and in the cases where it is possible response times can be incredibly slow and usually requires the express permission from the customer to contact each agency.

We are solving this problem by validating the customer's documents immediately, thus enabling faster turnaround times, and the technology we have developed to do this can detect fraud that is undetectable to the human eye.</comment></comment>


Uber CFO Steps Down - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/03/16/uber-cfo-steps-down/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Right now, the happiest thing I can think of is driving my daughter to school and swim practice."

Ironic but nonetheless understandable statement coming from an executive of a driving service.</comment>


How safe is it to contribute code to privacy/security tools like Tor? - <AUTHOR> I realize the US and other governments have targeted or harassed some people involved with Tor, but maybe it was only because of their other activities.<p>Have they targeted anyone just for their technical involvement with privacy and security software? <comment><USER2> Allegedly the NSA tried to spy[1] a Tor developer in the past. That said, I believe that contributing to such a product would figure nicely on any CV.

[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140124/10564825981/nsa-i...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140124/10564825981/nsa- interception-action-tor-developers-computer-gets-mysteriously-re-routed-to- virginia.shtml)

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can do a quick search on Twitter to see Tor developers and evangelists "incidentes" with authorities. You can expect being "bothered" in airports and police asking you for your laptop and disk (and even decryption keys).

Other than that, it is pretty impressive to put on a resume, or to get a few thousand followers on Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tor is still mostly funded by US govt, why would they publicly harass you with contributing?

Only advice if you fear any backlash is to contribute Anonymously. Using Tor and a unique nickname.</comment>


Underscore.go - <AUTHOR> http://tobyhede.github.io/underscore.go/ <comment><USER2> Underscore was chosen in JS presumably because it is a valid variable name that isn't used for anything. Underscore in Go actually means something, which is why this is actually _double_ -underscore, which makes it even visually more confusing.

The approach is interesting, but I'd _really_ rather see a better name.

<comment><USER3> Module systems really ought to allow renaming on import. (Such as: rename individual functions, add a prefix to all of the functions, or even do a regexp style replace of all existing prefixes if any.)

But unfortunately, from a quick glance it looks like Go's doesn't, is that correct?

<comment><USER4> You can rename the package on import [http://play.golang.org/p/V01jD_EZyX](http://play.golang.org/p/V01jD_EZyX)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Underscore is not a perfect fit for JS, but it's close enough; if you like coding in the style Underscore promotes, Underscore.js makes Javscript programming simpler.

Underscore seems like it would _not at all_ be a good fit for Golang. Golang really wants you to just use a for-loop.

<comment><USER6> It seems that enough people are tired of such a verbose idiom in 2014 to merit a library like this.

I really dislike being _that_ guy, but there's no reason why a language, today, shouldn't implement a decent map shorthand construction. For loops and unnecessary visual burden for a large variety of tasks and give no hint to the semantics of the code within a loop (is my loop doing a map, a transform, a reduction?).

<comment><USER7> It depends on the level of abstraction with which the language was designed.

Go was designed for systems programming, and the code is intentionally verbose. A few extra characters, brackets, and syntactic constructs are a small price to pay for more control in performance-critical applications.

JavaScript was designed for the web to make authoring interactive pages easier. The web benefits as an ecosystem to have commonly-used abstractions for lower-level data transformations and common tasks.

So yes, there are reasons why a map shorthand is not needed. Mostly because it doesn't do anything a loop cannot, and the ecosystem in which it was developed does not benefit from it.

<comment><USER6> A systems programming language would never come with a baked-in, hardcoded garbage collector incapable of soft realtime applications and such a limited scope in utility, not such a constrained set of concurrency primitives and such a basic type system.

Seriously; LuaJIT achieves greater performance and has more abstractions in place; Rust fills the niche of systems programming languages _easily_.

I just fail to see the long-term utility of Go in a space where you have upcoming, high-performance languages like Julia and Rust, all while V8 and asm.js continue to improve in performance, LuaJIT wipes the floor in sheer speed for a dynamically typed language, C++ gets saner abstractions every day and the Erlang VM gets such a nice language as Elixir in the space of critical distributed apps.

Go would be interesting if you were at least getting something interesting out of that garbage collector in terms of type system goodness; as it stands Go is only slightly safer than C in that regard.

And by the way: what the hell does not having a Map() function have anything to do with performance? C++11 has std::transform which goes as fast as anything else. Any functional traversal of data structures can be trivially turned into an internal representation with the same performance characteristics as a loop. It's the biggest cop out ever.

<comment><USER8> > A systems programming language would never come with a baked-in, hardcoded > garbage collector incapable of soft realtime applications and such a limited > scope in utility, not such a constrained set of concurrency primitives and > such a basic type system.

\- Mesa/Cedar (Xerox PARC)

\- Modula-3 (Compaq/Olivetti)

\- Oberon/Active Oberon (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

\- Sing# (Microsoft Research)

\- D (Digital Mars)

<comment><USER9> Presumably you're contesting the garbage collection point? However, the statement was a conjunction of that and:

\- not such a constrained set of concurrency primitives

\- such a basic type system.

I imagine those languages have a good type system and/or good concurrency primitives (i.e. possibly making up for their GC "penalty").

<comment><USER8> My main point was GC, yes.

Actually the original Oberon type system is simpler than Go's. Its later revision Oberon-07 is even simpler.

All the other ones I mentioned, have better type systems than Go, even support for some form of generics.

Concurrency depends on the language, but you get a mix of threads, co- routines, tasks, active objects and processes, overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the term for unpythonic in the Go community? This seems to be it. By the way it isn't using gofmt. [https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/un...](https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/underscore_test.go)

It shows that the author knows how to code go, but I get the impression that go programmers are more picky about idiomatic code than even python programmers, so if the author wants to get into go development, the author should probably stop that and work on something more idiomatic.

<comment><USER11> goop. just kidding, i made that up, but i hope it sticks

<comment><USER12> It won't because "goop" is already a dependency manager for Go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Go community is still small enough that any packages like this that get promoted become cringe-worthy if they are not idiomatic. If someone is coming from a javascript background and this is the first package they see, it might give them the wrong idea about Go.

While this could be considered pedantic idolatry by some, Codegangsta's very public admission on his experience with Martini (and now Negroni) show that this is a something to be considered when launching shiny new baubles.

In my opinion, the more attempts at stuff like this, the better. This is how we all learn!

[http://blog.codegangsta.io/blog/2014/05/19/my-thoughts-on- ma...](http://blog.codegangsta.io/blog/2014/05/19/my-thoughts-on-martini/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh hello. Library author here.

Underscore.go is a mostly WIP that I hadn't intended to go live on HN :)

The general feedback so far is __ is annoying, I thought it was cool and if people were annoyed they could fix it on import. But I might be quite wrong on this one.

The directory layout is going to change and I am working on a branch at the moment that splits the whole thing into a file per algorithm, which makes things much easier to work with.

<comment><USER15> You should make the library installable with "go get" (yes, "__" is an ecosystem-hostile import path), and remove .go from the repository name.

<comment><USER14> Yep. Both points are top of the todo list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not quite as interesting to see an _ clone after watching this critique of _ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3svKOdZijA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3svKOdZijA)

</comment><comment><USER17> Neat. I like that you can add your own type specific functions.

I was interested in seeing the implementation of the Parallel Map, but on a quick browser through the source, could not find it.

If you're interested in other works in the same space, I think think the the Gen library ([http://clipperhouse.github.io/gen/](http://clipperhouse.github.io/gen/)) goes a long way towards providing type-safe, idiomatic, Go code to achieve the same effects.

<comment><USER18> It doesn't appear that it is complete when compared to the listed functionality on the site.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but gen is more general for type-driven code generation. It's implemented as pluggable 'typewriters', which anyone can create: [https://github.com/clipperhouse/gen/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md](https://github.com/clipperhouse/gen/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

The default 'genwriter' package does LINQ/underscore stuff. If someone wanted to go further with it, they could create a new package (or extend that one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If there's a `src` folder in your repo, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER21> Why?

<comment><USER20> [http://golang.org/doc/code.html#Workspaces](http://golang.org/doc/code.html#Workspaces)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Similar to [https://github.com/markmontymark/underscore- go](https://github.com/markmontymark/underscore-go)

</comment><comment><USER8> Love how the library takes advantage of Go's generics to expose parametric functional programming.

[https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/un...](https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/underscore.go#L59)

[https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/un...](https://github.com/tobyhede/underscore.go/blob/master/src/underscore.go#L85)

</comment><comment><USER23> As a shameless, related plug, here's a clojure-like seq library I wrote for go:

[https://github.com/mediocregopher/seq](https://github.com/mediocregopher/seq)

It isn't quite as pretty as this one is, but it does support (thread-safe) lazy sequences.

As someone who writes lots of go code, I don't think either of these are actually _necessary_ , although they may be fun to use in some cases.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have done something similar in the past: [http://ahmetalpbalkan.github.io/go-linq/](http://ahmetalpbalkan.github.io/go- linq/) ([https://github.com/ahmetalpbalkan/go- linq](https://github.com/ahmetalpbalkan/go-linq)) this also has filter/map functions (where/select in LINQ) I haven't used reflection but callers should make type assertions needed.

This doesn't make things very slow but not very faster either. When you need performance, a code generator like this can help: [http://clipperhouse.github.io/gen/](http://clipperhouse.github.io/gen/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Using the function as the first argument and the iterable as the second, makes it easy to curry functions. A port of Ramda ([https://github.com/CrossEye/ramda](https://github.com/CrossEye/ramda)) would be better for this reason.

<comment><USER14> Thanks that's an interesting idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> -1 on double underscore. Very off-putting.

<comment><USER14> Yeah. Feedback received. Changing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ew, now you can have an awkward weak implementation of some FP ideas in Go too.

Yeah, I'm a bitch.

<comment><USER28> yo dawg, i heard you like FP...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> really cool, thx for this. just what go needs imo.</comment>


Real US debt levels could be 2,000% of economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/real-us-debt-levels-could-be-a-shocking-2000percent-of-gdp-report-suggests.html <comment><USER2> Curious all this analysis of debt with much discussion of costs with no discussion of recent tax cuts, or even the word tax in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Our biggest product is our debt... Awesome</comment>


Why Apple stock is down today? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestreet.mobi/story/12881012/1/why-apple-aapl-stock-is-down-today.html

<comment><USER2> non-mobile link if anyone is looking for it: [http://www.thestreet.com/story/12881012/1/why-apple-aapl- sto...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/12881012/1/why-apple-aapl-stock-is- down-today.html)</comment>


The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587 - <AUTHOR> https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-most-wonderful-map-in-world.html <comment><USER2> I had a chance to visit David Rumsey and his map collection (which this map is a part of) at his home in 2013. The breadth of that collection and this man's dedication to maps is fantastic.

This is a picture of his 2013 digitizing setup: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhodes/9066129105](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhodes/9066129105) which he built in what was basically his garage. I don't remember much technical detail about it.

I believe (part of?) the collection has since moved to Stanford.

The collection's web site is a great resource and fun to explore for anyone interested in maps. There's even a link to view part of the collection in Second Life.

<comment><USER3> My favorite map in his collection is the 1838 "Atlas von Central Europa", a 1:500,000(!) scale map of the entirety of northwestern Europe.

[1] [https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...](https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~295714~90066389:Composite --Atlas-von-Central- Europa?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=w4s:/where%2FEurope;q:Europe;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&trs=1820)

<comment><USER4> If it's a map of northwestern Europe, why do they call it "central"?

<comment><USER5> The title is in a Germanic language, it is centered on their home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those that are into maps and for one reason or another haven't learned about it yet I highly recommend the Mapire.eu website, which is basically comprised of old Habsburg and Austrian-Hungarian maps. This late 1700s Habsburg map [1] of almost half of Europe is a thing a beauty once you zoom into the details.

[1] [https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century- firstsurvey/?layer...](https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century- firstsurvey/?layers=osm%2C163%2C165&bbox=524663.7621494494%2C4628262.667727999%2C3655524.440710269%2C7563444.553878767)

</comment><comment><USER7> I whipped up a little interactive, high-rez version of the map for you all, here: [https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/urbano-montes- planispher...](https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/urbano-montes- planisphere-1587)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fantastic - thanks for making it. Mind if I add a link to it to the original blog post?

<comment><USER7> Of course not! Go right ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I downloaded a very high-resolution version of this map and created a 1m x 1m "poster" in my office. Accompanied with an illuminated magnifying glass, I often take a nice break from the computer monitor to examine the odd details Monte provides in his pictures.

<comment><USER9> any case this high-res is available?

<comment><USER10> It's linked in the article [https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...](https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~303661~90074314:Composite --Tavola-1-60---Map-of- the;JSESSIONID=a7feac82-4865-4483-bf66-104b58836234?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%2210130.000%22%3Bsort%3APub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&mi=0&trs=94)

I also had it printed, but as a 170x170 cm tablecloth :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I initially thought the map was the one also available in Marble maps, the KDE project. However, it turned out to be the behaim globe. This would probably make a worthy addition.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is by far one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Not only because it's so detailed, but because we still have it 400 years later in such pristine condition.

On that vein, as a 25-year-old it's so incredibly hard to imagine that this was made just under 20 of my lifetimes ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating! Would it be too much to hope that some day Stanford university would make a hi-res version of this map available on the internet? I would absolutely love to study it in detail!

<comment><USER14> [https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3...](https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~303661~90074314:Composite --Tavola-1-60---Map-of- the;JSESSIONID=a7feac82-4865-4483-bf66-104b58836234?qvq=q%3Apub_list_no%3D%2210130.000%22%3Bsort%3APub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No%3Blc%3ARUMSEY~8~1&sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&mi=0&trs=94)

<comment><USER15> Surprisingly the mobile zoom in works ok. Lots of amazing finds in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Among other things, this map really demonstrates the degree to which the Spanish state dominated the world in the 1580s."

It's worth mentioning it was the crown, and not the state, the actual ruler.

</comment><comment><USER17> > There's even an interactive version of the map available to explore via > Google Earth.

Does anyone have a link to this?

<comment><USER18> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCiJ6BpN30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCiJ6BpN30)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is ripe for a illustrator to touch up and apply to a 3D model.

<comment><USER19> Oh I see there is already a version. More fool me.

<comment><USER20> link?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Should make us all realize how little we know.</comment>


Real Money Fantasy Gaming for Finance - <AUTHOR>

StockBattle.com just launched their new finance real money gaming website. Just like FanDuel and DraftKings but for Finance and the Stock Market. <comment><AUTHOR> This is my website. I would love to hear any feedback or ideas that anyone has for our competition platform! - Lee Lowden

</comment><comment><USER2> Link seems to go to this comment page rather than the site itself. Maybe you submitted the story wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> @lnanek2 I'm new to HN - Not quite sure how to post the link. www.StockBattle.com

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com !</comment>


Ask HN: Why is world of warcraft so successful? - <AUTHOR> Why is world of warcraft so successful?  What about it made it that it became the largest and most profitable MMO game of all time?  Is it the first MMO that tried to appeal to non-hardcore gamers?  Or a lot more than that?  The reason why I ask is that I would like to try to replicate it's social & 'marketing' ideas to a facebook app. <comment><USER2> My son and daughter were both into this game for about a year before they lost interest and decided they would rather save their money or spend it on other things.

I think the thing they liked the most at the start was the fact that there were a relatively large amount of things they could do and discover and then share and showoff.

But after they played for a while I noticed they stopped wanting to show me neat new stuff in the game and instead tell me about the people they were playing with. I was really surprised when I learned that my then 13 year old son was regularly spending hours online with armed service personnel stationed in Europe, disabled diabetics from Iowa in their 40's, thirty-something gay couples from Palo Alto, off-duty nurses from Los Angeles, etc. In short just about every kind of person he would never otherwise consider part of his social group.

So personally I think the real reason it is successful is that it seems to be able to create the same kind of opportunity for shared experience across cultures in much the same way early radio and television did.

</comment><comment><USER3> I played it for quite a while, which is really unusual for me (I generally get bored of a game after about 20 minutes.) There were a few factors for getting it:

\- My friends were going to play it. So I added my pre-order to the list.

\- It was really easy to get into, with some fun intro quests.

\- The point and click skill level was really low.

The reasons I carried on playing were (somewhat) different:

\- I made lots of friends and acquired power and influence (establishing a raiding guild.)

\- Regular rewards. Damn you Pavlov and your accursed bell.

\- Customisable interface. It was my game in their environment.

And the reasons I left:

\- I felt I had gained as much out of the leadership experience as I was going to get.

\- My other projects were being neglected and I wanted to catch up.

\- Frequency of reward dropped (as I mostly had them all).

All in all it was a pretty worthwhile. Certainly managing a raiding guild, running an engineering team, and herding cats have many things in common. (Scarcity of loot/loot/fish for example.) And after a year break from personal projects I bounced back into it with a vengeance and extra energy - I got a book published, passed the first of my finance exams, and got back into programming all at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, you have no idea why it's successful, and yet you want to replicate it on a facebook app? A facebook app is not a mmorpg, so you'd have to understand in depth the success of WoW to map it onto a completely different environment, drawing analogies from one world to the other.

It would be the same to ask, Why is the Porsche so successful? I want to replicate its ideas on a facebook app...

<comment><AUTHOR> The app is a game, it's social, it's networked. It's more like, why is toyota so successful, i want to replicate it's ideas for a motorcycle company...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is WoW successful?

(1) They started with the successful and highly addictive Everquest format.

(2) They used a small number of classes, carefully and creatively allocating abilities to each one in order to make that class _fun to play_ : either solo or in a group. They also tweaked the mana/melee balance to be more flexible and interesting and combat was generally faster paced than in other MMORPGs.

(3) They set the bar for failure lower, and the penalty for failure was less punishing. This encouraged less-hardcore players to experiment more and try different things, rather than always sticking to the safest tactic.

(4) They designed for PvP from the start.

(2) + (3) + (4) = Replayability. People log in to play WoW because it's _fun to play_ not just because they want to hit the next level.

(5) They used frequent, incremental rewards so that players logged out always having felt as if they accomplished something.

(6) They started with a huge Warcraft fanbase, and marketed to their audience with hip, exiting videos and information.

(7) They kept system requirements LOW. They focused on getting realism through animations and colorful symbolism rather than high poly counts. They avoided the "uncanny valley" of character models while delivering a game that players could play on the hardware they already owned.

(8) They marketed the game worldwide.

(9) The game loads quickly, once it's patched. You can decide you want to play WoW and be online in a minute or so. (Others may be better now, but when WoW came out EQ took 5-10 minutes from desktop to spawning in-game)

(10) Instanced content made it easy to avoid the more annoying social aspects of an MMORPG. Fighting for spawns was fun in EQ, but that's not needed in WoW because the combat engine is better.

</comment><comment><USER6> \- Quality. Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail.

\- Approachability. From newbies to hardcore players, it entices them in and keeps them entertained.

\- Sociability. More times than not, people just chat while standing around and make friends. Or join guilds and participate in the bigger quests.

\- Addictive. For the Diablo hack and slash crowds.

<comment><USER7> "Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail."

This isn't literally true, but the point you're getting at is. They take the time to do things well. This is seen by how often they delay releasing games, patches, etc. Very few businesses have the balls to say, it's not ready and we're pushing back our deadlines.

<comment><USER8> Right. They don't _perfect_ everything. But they always do an impressive job. Far better than most. Here's something Raph Koster recorded Rob Pardo (Blizzard VP) saying at a conference once. I thought it was good:

"The Blizzard polish. Polish is the word associated with us in reviews. There's this big assumption that polish is something you do in the end. That we're successful because we spend 6-12 months at the end polishing. We do get more time, but we do the polish right from the beginning. It's a constant effort. You have to have a culture of polish. Everyone has to be bought into it and you have to constantly preach it. if you leave it to the end, it'll be more difficult.

You'll get a lot of "why does it matter that this feature is polished? It's so small." But people notice 1000s of polished features, not the single polished feature."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The reasons are manifold.

1\. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.

2\. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.

3\. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.

4\. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game.

</comment><comment><USER10> Having spent half of the past 10 years addicted to MMO's, I can tell you:

Addiction via immersion and frequent incremental rewards.

One: you immerse the user in the game environment so that all of their attention is focused on the game world.

Two: using that focus, you provide a system wherein there is the constant availability of incremental rewards. In games like WoW, every single minute spent goes toward achieving a specific incremental reward. You kill a monster: you get a reward (loot + experience), you go to the nearest town: you get new quests. The key is to have a near-term action (< 5 minutes) available to the user at ALL TIMES where they can achieve some kind of small reward. Larger incremental rewards (levels, skills, raids) are available to keep attention once the smaller rewards become rote.

Look at anything that's ever been called addictive- not just video games. I bet that they share these two traits, and their addictiveness is directly proportional to how well they accomplish these goals.

Can these be applied to a facebook app? Maybe. Would you look sleazy trying to do it with a facebook app? Definitely.

<comment><USER5> Everquest was just as addictive as WoW. In many was EQ and Final Fantasy XI were both more addictive and more immersive than WoW, yet WoW's success dwarfs them both. It can't be the only explanation.

<comment><USER10> WoW was much better at linking together the big rewards than EQ or FFXI were (I've played all three, along with Asheron's Call 1&2, Dark Age of Camelot, Ragnarok Online, Eve Online and Lord of the Rings Online [Good God!]).

With EQ, big rewards were frequently too far in between (especially hell levels and gaps between major "new spell" levels), which led to people quitting when their addiction waned (ie, minor rewards were considered rote, major rewards non-existent or too far away). Also, the end game (at least until Velious) wasn't nearly as developed as WoW's is, and relied on raids held by huge guilds or even the entire server. This led to higher-level players frequently not having access to any near-term rewards, and eventually losing the addiction.

FFXI's problem was with lower levels. The reward for gaining a level didn't seem as important as in either EQ or WoW. Equipment never seemed like a major reward either, as most players essentially rented equipment from the auction houses.

<comment><USER5> Retention rate doesn't account for WoW having 10 million subscribers and climbing while EQ maxed out at 400,000 or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Points that come to mind:

\- The leveling curve is just about right. At the beginning you gain levels very quickly, and with them new and exciting abilities. You always feel like you're making progress, be it with better spells, better gear, getting to adventure in new zones, etc.

\- It's very casual-friendly. When you're logged out you earn "rest XP" which, upon logging back in, lets you level faster, so you don't have to play in large chunks of time to make progress. It's also pretty easy to level all the way up to 70 (max level) playing by yourself.

\- There's a surprising amount of humor (pop culture references, etc.) which is a nice bonus.

\- There are lots of things to do even at max level - this wasn't as true in the past but you can do daily quests, play in one of the four PvP battlegrounds, join an arena team, do raids, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> VOIP isn't it. Only the hardcore had third-party VOIP applications like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and in-game VOIP is a very recent thing.

Instead, I can break the game's success into three aspects: initial install, short-term retention, and long-term retention.

Getting people to even pick up a game (or register with a webapp) is one of the hardest parts. World of Warcraft came into the space with a huge lead in that respect. With the established base of extremely loyal fans, and giant brand recognition in its space, it was sure to get massive attention. The vast majority of new products cannot hope for a thousandth of the eager launch-day users WoW had. Blizzard reaped the fruits of years of brand-building and marketing.

Short-term retention is covered in other comments. The game runs well on old hardware, looks pretty due to great art direction, plays smoothly, doles out a lot of quick rewards, and so on. Over the first few weeks, the player is bombarded with tons of fun things to do and sharp increases in character power.

Long-term retention is the real magnet, though: the game never becomes a chore until the very end. All the way to the max level, the player is led from locale to locale, challenge to challenge, in a masterly display of game design. Compare the solo-friendly WoW leveling experience with the infamous "hell levels" of Everquest.

And what's more, people seem to keep playing at the maximum level, even if they are NOT tackling the high-end raid content. (For the uninitiated, a "raid" is an extremely difficult, often murderously difficult game area whose enemies can only be defeated with a level of teamwork, personal skill, and above all _time investment_ beyond the capabilities of most players.)

Raid gamers are not where Blizzard is making its bread and butter. Instead, the people WoW is retaining are the people who are doing repetitive, seldom- updated content in exchange for slow, incremental, but guaranteed rewards. For example, there is a Capture the Flag team-battle level that has not changed in years -- and people still play it, over and over, in exchange for a handful of points each time. Thousands and thousands of these points can be traded in for a top-notch weapon.

The final major retention pull for WoW is the social aspect: after a while, you aren't playing so you can have fun. You're playing so OTHER people can have fun. You don't want to let down your team, so you log in for scheduled events whether you like it or not. This afflicts raid and "casual" players alike, to different degrees.

So, you want to make a Facebook app that taps into the same qualities as WoW? Make it extremely fun to use at first; give users a sense of reward and increasing power/ability; then make the rewards come slower and slower, in less and less value, for the same amount of work. Just like the diminishing returns from a drug addiction... oh, and somehow monetize it.

<comment><USER5> I agree with most of this. EQ's "hell levels" are something of a red herring, however, given your point about the game becoming dull. Hell levels were more of an annoying glitch. Everquest didn't become dull because of hell levels, it became dull because most classes didn't have enough to do in typical combat situations.

Big penalties for failure, a low tolerance for minor mistakes, and a limited set of tools for players to win with meant that typical combat scenarios tended to have very little variance. Players usually did the same thing every time. In WoW there's a lot more room to experiment and recover from mistakes without losing the battle. The result is that for most people, battle tends to be more dynamic.

<comment><USER13> There's also a huge install base in Internet cafes in China and Korea. College kids spend a huge amount of time socializing online there, which is where the major marketing push is made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Short answer: you can't.

Long answer: some of the answers in this thread would in theory apply to any MMORPG, but the obvious reality is that most MMORPGs aren't huge successes like WoW.

Some of my best guesses: \- great art direction. All the locations, characters, monsters and weapons are colorful and unique. Look at any screenshot and chances are you can tell at a glance WHERE in the game world it is - that's not true for many games out there. \- Blizzard has perfected an effort/reward system more finely tuned and addictive than that of any other company out there. It started in Diablo and they perfected it in Diablo II - WoW is just a continuation. Advancing is easier than in other games, but you know that the next reward is just around the corner so you play "just 5 more minutes". In addition, the rewards somehow avoid being repetitive - it doesn't feel like you're just replacing a 5 with a 6 somewhere, like in other games. As another poster mentioned, it's incredibly Pavlovian. \- Something for everyone. WoW actually manages to be engaging for both casual and hardcore players, for two friends or a couple playing together and for a large clan who know each other from previous games.

I don't think Blizzard put in any really innovative ideas in WoW, but their execution was far, far beyond what anyone else has done. Of course, after all their previous hits, they also had the resources to pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome thread. Compare this to your own business models folks, there is gold in understanding how Wow because such a powerhouse. You may not be able to apply all the principals, but just a few can make a world of difference in your start up.

We often talk about community on our sites. You ain't seen real community until seen Wow after you've played any serious amount of time. I have many real-life friends that I've met in real-life through playing the game.

</comment><comment><USER16> WoW is a commercial success, but I have to say "Is it a moral success?". Is it good for people to get so immersed? To spend their life playing a game like this?

I've seen a lot of people get absolutely addicted to the point where they will do nothing else.

I think the best thing in terms of profit, and worst thing in terms of decency etc, is that the game never ends. You never win.

Personally, I don't think games like WoW are healthy.

<comment><USER17> It takes incredible amounts of time, but when you get to Tier Six gear or the highest-level PVP rewards, the game is pretty much over and you can't go any further.

<comment><USER16> I thought they kept building new worlds and challenges etc? I haven't played it though...

<comment><USER17> they add instances occasionally and new gear every 5-9 months, and there's another expansion pack in the works (wrath of the lich king).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think that it comes down to the same reason Civ was such a popular franchise. Whenever you finish one thing, there's another thing to do. Oh, just a few more points until I level... oh, I can finish this dungeon and get a new sword. There's also the social aspects of that - you do a dungeon with some friends, get involved in their dungeons later so it has a social motivation for returning as well. I think you also get emotionally attached to your character, and don't want to see him deleted by canceling your account.

</comment><comment><USER19> i think it's simply that Blizzard actually thinks about what they're doing. i played various MMORPG's, and many of them had such obvious game design no nos -- like losing experience upon death

it's as if the companies were just shoving together a collection of "challenging things," and thinking they were making a game

so i guess those companies were trying to manufacture games, while blizzard crafts them

</comment><comment><USER17> I play WoW about 20+ hours a week (Selecta on Spirestone) and I have played through most of the pre-expansion pack content, so let me comment on this from personal experience.

Things that make WoW successful are part of many good games:

1) Feelings of accomplishment - you come back to a character every time that you yourself built up. The persistent nature of the game (rather than a first person shooter where every game is a blank slate) is compelling.

2) Working with others to achieve a common goal - it's fun to team up with people and take on hard bosses that none of you could defeat individually, or even in smaller groups. The later stages of the game feature god-like foes that require dozens of people working in very, very tight cooperation to defeat, or else _everyone_ will certainly be killed (Sunwell Plateau, etc.). In other words, 50 people randomly banging on the harder bosses will not suffice because the bosses are so powerful they can simply divide and conquer. It really is challenging.

Many games have those qualities. What makes WoW better than them?

Well, basically WoW corrected a lot of EverQuest's flaws. That's basically it. They had the second-comer advantage in that. It had Blizzard's name behind it, too (Starcraft, Diablo - both highly successful franchises in their own right).

Plus, there's a real in-game economy, with a value-added chain and everything (gather or buy raw materials -> turn them into a valuable item -> sell the valuable item at a higher price than the cost of the materials). The game's currency is valuable even up to high levels in the game (although there are many guilds sitting on hundreds of thousands of gold with nothing to really spend it on -- it doesn't scale _that_ high). But, it is definitely valuable to have thousands and thousands of gold.

You can't easily "replicate" something you have absolutely no comprehension of.

Don't fucking try to treat it like a business application, because it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's mostly escapism. Everyone here has a lot of reasons why people are choosing this form of escapism over another like television or some other MMORPG, and a lot of them are good ones, but in the end it just comes down to the game being engaging enough that it makes you forget about all of the troubles in your life for a few hours while you play it.

I would argue that most people who engage in it (or any other form of escapism) for a large number of hours are depressed.

<comment><USER21> Unfortunately for me, I agree..

Of course the reasons why it works so well as "an escape" are what people have listed in this thread already.

<comment><USER20> Yes. I think it's very valuable to ask why people cho0se this form of escapism over another, like sports, television, body building, or any of the others available. There are more and more every year.

But if you want to replicate it, I think the biggest thing to understand is that it is escapism. That was the not very well-received point of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The social element, the rich and expandable storylines, and the relatively low hardware threshhold to play it. Internationalization helped a ton, as well. In China, it's a pop-culture phenomenon -- advertisements for other brands use WoW characters a lot.

And, of course, Blizzard/WoW has a sustainable business model.

I have to say, however, that the UI and some of the complexity related to tools and weapons is a bit of a turn-off, and is probably a barrier to more widespread subscriptions, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, one thing that definitely contributed was that Blizzard had already established the scene for with Warcraft III, so people sort of knew what type of world to expect. Also, Blizzard's other games (Starcraft and Warcraft mainly) were a huge success, so that gave WoW more credibility.

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot of good thinking about design of virtual worlds can be found in the archives of the mud-dev and mud-dev2 lists. They've run for ~10 years and include many of the game designers of the current hit games.

</comment><comment><USER25> There are many reasons why it is successful. However for me the most salient reason is that it strongly appeals to casual girl gamers. This demographic can elevate a game to the stratosphere a la sims.

</comment><comment><USER26> it appealed to both hardcore and casual gamers, and at least for a while, was successful in that respect. it didn't require the latest and greatest gaming rig to run it and enjoy it. there is a huge social aspect to it, which i think luckily coincided with the development of solid VOIP technology to make it more than just text-based communications. it came from an established company with a guaranteed fanbase -- it didn't have to build itself up from the ground level.

i used to play.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can't explain, playing WoW.

</comment><comment><USER28> It offered people who are too scared of living to get out and do something in the world an addictive way to enjoy the illusion they have accomplished something without requiring them to engage in life?

If you are really sitting around thinking "I want to know how to put ideas from WOW into facebook" you have bigger questions you should be concerned with then "why is WOW so successful." Like "Where is there an actual problem I can solve?" "How can I use my logic and critical thinking skills on my process of deciding what problems to be concerned with and what is important in life?" "Why the hell do I even exist in the twenty first century, with this limitless possibility, and what do I really need to get done before I die?" and "Is mixing facebook apps with WOW really better for the world, from a big picture perspective, then suicide?"

I think if you focus on those other questions, this WOW question will clear itself up like magic.

</comment><comment><USER29> WoW has very repetitive PvM gameplay (so do its competitors). No one seems to mind very much. I guess Blizzard's designers understand what most people want in a game much better than I do (I love Warcraft 3. I tried to play WoW, but got bored.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Addiction.

</comment><comment><USER31> I believe it is laced with crack.</comment>


NVIDIA's Optimus is primed for new Apple MacBooks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/02/nvidias-optimus-is-primed-for-new-apple-macbooks.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a wonderful hack to get around the lack of a license to talk to the processor directly: use the weakness of an integrated graphics chip, where it uses main memory as a framebuffer, to bypass it seamlessly by simply writing to memory.</comment>