Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/114128403856330399812/posts/iVc7e3tipcF <comment><USER2> Its funny, because reading this had me chuckling.

I too created ChromeOS :-) Let me explain;

So I joined Google in 2006 (December) and one of the things I had pitched to a few folks before joining was something I was calling "JaDE" which was short for "Java Application Development Environment". Nearly everyone I pitched it to thought it was just a 'thin client' ala Citrix's offering, and Brad Templeton called it a 'diskless workstation' as he knew my history with Sun and Sun's flirtation with that sort of thing in the early 90's.

I didn't think it anything like that at the time, thinking instead of it as a sort of appliance like client rather than diskless (it had local flash storage), it was basically what smartphones became, but with a keyboard and display[1]. When Android was being developed and a number of people in the platforms area were getting excited about it, I talked with the Android folks about forking it into something along the ideas of my JaDE concept. They weren't very receptive, they had a phone to build. I did the usual stuff, created a p page [2], put some stuff in the wiki etc. Also saw Jeff Nelson's previous work (which had gone nowhere), read the politics around the whole Android effort at the time and abandoned my efforts to push it any further.

Other projects inside of Google with that level of detail did get pushed further by people interested in moving the ball down the road. When one of the platform folks left to join this "secret" group which turned out to be ChromeOS I was amused because yet another group of people had figured out what, by then, was a pretty obvious idea. Since I happened to have a compatible ASUS Eeepc at the time I downloaded one of their early builds and played around with it. When they got some traction inside the company the Android group went ape shit (as expected) and that led to some interesting changes.

But lets come back to Jeff for a moment. He was at Google for 2 years according to his LinkedIn profile, which means he joined, got slotted, and left. (a common path sadly). But he is also currently the CTO of 'stealth startup' which means he is out pitching to investors with his co-founder(s). Its so much better to pitch as the 'inventor of ChromeOS' than it is as '2 years at Google, then consulting for 4 years.'

I clearly remember he had a 'p' page for his project (I found it when I was thinking about my version of the idea) so he may be assuming that someone read it and said "Hey this is a pretty good idea, we should build this." And started building it. Since it was never a good idea at Google to give anyone else credit for your ideas perhaps Jeff is making some unwarranted assumptions. I could easily see him believing whole heartedly that he invented it, just like I can believe nobody in the ChromeOS group has ever heard of him.

Google is just that kind of place.

UPDATE: see the patent claim in a sibling comment, that is priceless!

[1] Yet another case of being too early!

[2] Internal database of "projects" being worked on.

<comment><USER3> Fascinating story, Chuck, thanks for the insights.

One dumb question: can you translate "got slotted"? I'm guessing it has to do what team you end up in, but I have a feeling there may be a more nuanced meaning to it?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, Google tried to solve the problem of 'mismatched' titles in their own unique way. Since "Senior Engineer" at some persons previous job might not compare to what Google called a "Senior Engineer", Google delayed determining what your "pay grade" was until after you had done some work.

So Google would hire you, you would spend 6 months being useless trying to figure out what the heck was going on, then you'd get on a starter project or some first "real" project, and 12 to 18 months later your manager would put you in front of a committee of folks who would look at your work output, and then pick what "slot" you were.

If you were slotted "lower" than you had been hired at, they had a talk with you (and it meant you couldn't get a pay raise until you had been promoted twice). It also had an annoying tendency to slot people who had been "Principal Engineer" or "Distinguished Engineer" at a previous company into "Junior Engineer" at Google, which really pissed them off (and sometimes lead to "management action" in the form of a formalized "performance improvement plan").

Basically the more senior you were, the more likely you were to wash out. Since Jeff was a "Principle Engineer" at eBay prior to Google I'm _guessing_ that this was his path as well. Probably got slotted as 'senior engineer' (which is three levels below Google's equivalent of Principal Engineer) and said "Screw this, I've paid my dues already, see ya!" But that is just speculation on my part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to admit that I love stories like this as well as the Tesla refutation of that NYT review.

I think my interest in the nature and impact of our reliance upon human testaments first developed when I became engaged in theological discussions.

Here we are with all our instant access to information, our pictures, our videos, our blogs from the man on the street, our DNA samples, etc., and we can't figure out if one guy got legitimately stranded by his electric car or if another guy created a new Operating System -- yet you can go to church on Sunday and listen to lots of people who will swear all day long that a woman was impregnated by the sole deity of the universe two thousand years ago. This knowledge is based upon a translation of a story written many years after the supposed event took place.

Bizarre.

</comment><comment><USER5> My impression from what I've read is that Jeff did work on a linux fork which was known as Google OS internally (I think there were even public news about google working informally on a "Google OS" in 2006-07), but that never really catched on and was never turned into an actual product. Years later, the idea of a web-first Chrome OS appears, and either a) someone reused Jeff's work to build the core and nobody paid much attention to it or b) both things have absolutely no connection and Jeff is mistaken in assuming his work was turned into Chrome OS.

<comment><USER6> If a single person at Google understood/reviewed the 'Google OS', and then later also authorized/reviewed the 'Chrome OS', then the strong form of your (b) option, "absolutely no connection", is impossible.

Even without explicit sharing of code/people/documents, the earlier project would have served as an investigatory prototype and proof-of-concept, that indirectly encouraged or dissuaded certain later directions. So these 'true father' disputes get into shades of meaning and clashing-but-valid perspectives pretty quick.

<comment><USER7> At some point you need to draw a logical line, lest you arrive at Linus Torvalds inventing ChromeOS since he wrote the kernel for it way back in the early 1990s.

I have no knowledge of ChromeOS history other than what has been published here, but from my reading of these things it does seem pretty disingenuous for Jeff Nelson to claim to have 'invented the Chromebook'.

<comment><USER6> The wording "invented the Chromebook" is aggressive, especially for collaborative projects that collect many contributions and work on shared themes. But, journalistic accounts and promotional bioblurbs typically dumb things down, in exactly this way.

And, if at any point Google asserts that Nelson's '662 patent covers the Chromebook/ChromeOS or similar products from other companies, then it's a defensible statement, at the level of fuzzyness that's used in these contexts. It should be interpreted as, "invented [key enabling technology for] the Chromebook"... like when people talk about who "invented the iPod" or "invented AdSense".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google+ doesn't have permalinks for comments, otherwise I would have linked to Antoine Labour's comment towards the bottom. Says he is the most senior engineer still working on Chrome OS and has never heard of Jeff Nelson.

</comment><comment><USER8> The title of this submission: "Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS"

Quotes from the actual article:

"I'm somewhat skeptical of this."

"It would be nice if some Chrome OS folks more knowledgeable than I could shed light on this, because I truly don't know."

Analysis: The linked article has one developer (not "Chrome devs") confessing that he simply doesn't know what the facts are (not "den[ies] Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS")

Conclusion: _Don't write your own submission headline, you will get it wrong._

<comment><USER9> There are other Chrome developers commenting on the linked post, and they deny Nelson's role.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I don't think that's very prudent of them. This happened seven years ago, and as they say, many of the involved people left. What if one of them did have a meeting with this guy?

<comment><USER11> Well, for starters, one of the guys who commented has been there since the beginning. As for the rest, this is very unlikely. Think about this for a second. They'd already started a project called ChromeOS, and they then decide to have a meeting with this guy about the idea of a web browsing laptop (or whatever)?

That doesn't make sense.

I have my own recollections of when/how the ChromeOS project started (since they asked for legal and open source advice ), and it pretty much matches other folks in that thread. I never heard from this guy, and I had heard from now-executives (they were just regular folks back then :P) about the idea/plan.

So, while theoretically possible still, it's pretty unlikely. I expect this is simply a case where a guy thinks what he did got used elsewhere, and it wasn't.

There were a lot of independently developed projects that did kinda-the-same thing back in 2006-2007.

<comment><USER12> And yet his name is on the patent: [http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,239,662.PN.&OS=PN/8,239,662&RS=PN/8,239,662)

<comment><USER13> The patent in question has nothing to do with Chrome OS, beyond the very generic notion of thin clients.

<comment><USER11> What he said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's some sort of patent involved - <http://www.google.com/patents/US8239662> \- "Network based operating system across devices", filed in '09, issued in '12, assigned to Google.

<comment><USER2> Oh that is sweet! Google was finally waking up to the patent reality after 2007 and encouraging folks to file patents on their projects. (I've got one filed for a laser pen pointer toting telepresence robot somewhere out there) It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent guys who dutifully filed them and voila, "invention" of ChromeOS without having written a single line of code of it :-)

Reading through the claims it does look like ChromeOS uses those concepts so I guess Jeff gets the last laugh after all.

<comment> jeff-nelson I tend to agree that Google doesn't file enough patents.

For such an innovative company, with hundreds of different products in several industries, and many of the best and brightest employees anywhere, their patent portfolio is miserable.

Regarding, "It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent guys who dutifully filed them and voila"

Well, for one, this wasn't just "ideas". I created an operating system and used it myself for over a year, pitched it to management, sent it to a company wide email list, and got head count assigned to the project.

Aside from that, Google has been very contemplative about what patents to file or not file.

Without going into any great detail, I wrote 2 patents on my Google OS operating system - and only the one was ever perfected.

I wrote 3 or 4 other patents on unrelated projects that were all filed as provisional patents and allowed to expired.

At least 1 of the expired provisional patents was very, very commercially valuable, in my opinion, but Google apparently did not recognize that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's his LinkedIn profile by the way: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonjeffrey> It looks like he's pretty sure of his connection with Chrome OS.

<comment><USER10> I don't think most people can see anything there other than that he worked for Google, since we're only 3rd degree connections.

<comment><USER5> Right, here's the summary he has on his profile verbatim then:

"Mr. Nelson invented Google Chrome OS while working at Google in 2006. He has 19 years of experience in cloud computing and Big Data analytics. He has written two books and many magazine articles on Java and cloud computing. He has extensive experience in search, SEO, and eCommerce industries, building highly scalable web services, and leading world class engineering teams at such companies as Google and eBay. He holds a Masters Degree in Applied Mathematics."

<comment><USER10> Does it say when he left Google?

<comment><USER5> According to his profile:

Member, Technical Staff Google, Inc. January 2006 – January 2008 (2 years 1 month)

<comment><USER11> MTS is the name that was given to folks who hadn't been slotted yet. So either he got slotted and didn't like his title enough to list it, or he never got slotted (which would be very odd for 2 years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jeff-nelson Hello all. I am the Jeff Nelson under discussion.

I am not surprised some people are calling this claim into doubt since its was work done back in 2006 and 2007. It sounds like many of these questions are being raised by people outside of Google or individuals who joined the project after 2007.

First, let me reassure you that while I was not able to walk out of Google with my email history or design documents, Google sent me long correspondence about the Chrome OS patent after I left Google. I don't believe this correspondence is covered by any NDA since it was sent to me after I left Google, and I have retained all of that correspondence.

I published the work called "Google OS" on a company wide email list in April 2007, with subject line "Google OS", and received hundreds of positive comments from other engineers at that time. I also held a tech talk on "Google OS" in May 2007. Anyone at the company in April 2007 will likely retain a copy of the original "Google OS" email, search for subject line "Google OS" in April 2007.

The operating system that I invented, as described in the April 2007 email on a company wide email list, was a webapp-centric chopped-down Linux with a Chrome browser front-end. The operating system had almost no applications installed on it, instead all of the functionality came from webapps; performing any operation on the desktop launched a Chrome window to one of many webapps. The original April 2007 version of the operating system that was published on a company wide email list was substantially identical to the publicly released Chromebook product, as was the writeup in the original 2007 email.

Further, back in 2007, I had meetings with Jeff Huber (VP of Google's consumer products group), Larry Page (now CEO), several other directors and managers, and even presented a techtalk - all of these meetings on Chrome OS project. By the end of 2007, I was working with a product manager, and together we were able to convince management to launch the Chrome OS project and assign head count to the project by the end of 2007. In August 2007, my product manager and I even met with an external hardware vendor to have exploratory talks regarding their interest in distribution a Chrome OS laptop.

All of this is verifiable both from the email record, such as the April 2007 "Google OS" email to a company wide mailing list, and also by those who met with me on Chrome OS in 2007, including Larry Page himself. Further, I retain the hard copies of the correspondence with Google that was sent to me after I left the company on the subject as well, which I don't believe is covered by any sort of NDA.

I hope this clears up some of the controversy. Again, I am not surprised that many of you who either worked on Chromebook or joined Google after 2007 have never heard of me. Once I left Google, there would have been no reason to continuously bring up my name as the original inventor, and I have chosen not to come forward until the patent was finalized and published. I apologize to those of you who may have been confused by this.

So to summarize: 1\. I wrote the original Chrome OS and published it on a company wide email list in April 2007. 2\. I wrote the patent in 2007, which is now accepted and published by the USPTO as of August 2012 and shows my name as inventor. 3\. I convinced management to launch and assign head count to the original Chrome OS project by the end of 2007.

<comment><USER15> Would you mind posting (potentially redacted) copies of those emails, just so that we can get an idea of what was involved in GoogleOS? It would be nice if some of the people you worked with piped up to tell us more about this too. I suppose that they will see what is happening and do so some time soon anyway as this is getting quite a bit of exposure.

For everyone else, here's confirmation of the patent - Jeff's name is indeed on it: [http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,239,662.PN.&OS=PN/8,239,662&RS=PN/8,239,662)

> Inventors: Nelson; Jeffrey (Mountain View, CA)

This seems legitimate to me and, frankly, the responses from Peter Kasting and other Google employees look to be immature and childish. Perhaps most Google employees are not as professional and high caliber as they appear on the surface.

<comment><USER16> There were jokes made in that thread, but can you point to any of Peter Kasting's actual comments that would qualify as immature and childish? I only know Peter's work on chrome/webkit bug reports and occasional sites where "pkasting" shows up (he has a single comment as an hn user), but I've only known him to be communicative and supportive, and this is more than a small overreaction to paint him like this when all his post amounts to is "this doesn't sound right. anyone know more?" and his additional comments are specific and not emotionally charged. Hopefully the irony in your post isn't lost on you.

As for the patent, it doesn't seem all that chromeos specific, actually. For instance, the claims are very focused on an OS that is or can be stored server-side, with the client fetching an image from the server (that includes the user's preferences?) on startup and dumping it again at shutdown. The patent process tends to make ideas more generic as they are recorded, but even a generous interpretation of this doesn't really cover chromeos or the OS he described in the blog post (at least the part he most emphasized, the idea of keeping everything in RAM). ChromeOS doesn't get OS updates that differently than other operating systems (and certainly not as new images every time it connects to the update server), and the preferences sync system stands totally separate from the rest. This doesn't invalidate the blog post, but I don't really think the patent backs up the specific claim of "inventing chromebook".

<comment><USER15> Yes, you're quite right about Kasting - it was late at night and my focus was lacking. Unfortunately, I cannot correct my comment above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Success has many fathers ... although I guess it remains to be seen how much of a success Chrome OS turns out to be. I for one am rooting for it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Now this is just ridiculous.

Everyone knows that Al Gore invented ChromeOS.</comment>


Is it immoral to only spend 50% of the time at work productively? - <AUTHOR> I feel that people often make a big deal of somebody using 5 minutes of Facebook a day during the boss' time. I have the feeling that the average person only works 3 hours effective per hour, most people don't do that much and lie to themselves.
Should I feel bad for feeling that I should not feel bad about spending 4 hours a day productively as I still seem to get paid more and be more productive than most other colleagues.
At school I was told that when people start working their office work, that they work so hard and people have it so bad, but I feel lots of us are being extremely moralistic and hyper-critical of others, making them feel quilty, while being quiet lazy themselves.
Should I really work my ass of 8 hours per hour or should I just feel good with myself if with working 4 hours per week the results are better than average anyway? <comment><USER2> I don't think it's immoral, but I do think being unproductive is fairly boring. I mean, I'm in bed with the flu, and I'm extremely bored shuffling through social media. I can't for the life of me imagine why you'd rather spend time on Facebook than working on something, assuming you have an interesting job.

If I'm engaged with something productive, it'll make 8 hours feel like 4, if I'm trolling social media it'll make 4 hours feel like 8.

Most people aren't productive for 8 hours a day though, I think 4 is probably the low average, but not by much.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are very few jobs that allow one to be productive most of the day (and almost invariably they are low-paying). This is indeed shocking to discover in your first jobs after college, etc.

Rather than goofing on FB, I'd look for ways to learn new skills (that ideally somehow might help your employer in the future). Or, alternatively, to find side projects that might aid the organization.

Ultimately it's your manager's job to determine whether you're sufficiently productive. Not yours.</comment>


Why Linear Search Is Better Than Binary Search - <AUTHOR> http://posterous.com/#spaces/shenglong/posts/70628387

<comment><USER2> I'm confused - this seems to be about posterous spaces - what does it have to do with binary and linear search?

 _Added in edit: I guess the correct item is here:_ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005652></comment>


Figuring out keystroke-input modification for a newly disabled family member - <AUTHOR>

A young family member just came out of a 2 month-long coma after being blindsided by a geriatric driver.  She has significant brain damage, which has introduced a huge "shake" into the movements of the one arm/hand she can control.  She's not expected to get better in that regard.
She keeps trying to use keyboards & tablets, but due to her limited motor control, she cannot effectively type, which seriously frustrates her.  Basically, she hits the key she wants too many times, along with a "constellation" of the keys around the target.
I'm wondering if there is a programmatic solution to this that would allow her to type.
My conceptualization of the problem is that the program would need to buffer all of the keystrokes coming in, and "screen" them by assuming for a character to actually be accepted as input, it must be his a certain number of times (i.e. and adjustable threshold).  Basically, imagine that if, while brain-damaged, you want to type  "hi", you're going to hit the constellation of keys around the "h" key N times, but fewer than the number of times you successfully land on the "h" itself.  Repeat with "i".  The output looks something like "ughhjyhyhhhhh" and "uiuioiiioi".
I feel like you could try and measure a user's individual keystrike accuracy through a few trials of typing something like our above "hi", which would then adjust thresholds appropriately, allowing other programs to ignore the mistakenly pressed keys.  You could give the user a sort of customized "landing pad" where they need to hit their choice key somewhere between, say, 4-7 times before it actually registers, which would screen out all of the others key that get accidentally pressed in the attempt.
Once a character gets accepted as intentionally struck, clear buffer and continue.
This leads to my questions:
1) Is this possible?
2) How difficult would it be to implement on a laptop or tablet (no OS preference).
3) Does this seem like the best way to go about solving this problem (user cannot accurately strike keys), or am I overcomplicating it?
Thank you.
Additional disclosures: I'm a weak programmer (basic python, basic java), and have never written anything that didn't stand by itself (i.e. no OS interfaces, hooking, etc).  I'm way out of my depth -- I just want to help give her back some quality of life.  Also, she can't speak right now, so voice recognition is out. <comment><USER2> I forgot the name or term but there is that "characters appearing on the right of the screen and the user navigates a pointer through them to form words" thing which if I recall correctly was meant as easier input method for disabled people.</comment>


Ask HN: How to scan and archive slides and photos? - <AUTHOR> I have a few thousand slides and photos that I would like to scan and archive myself. Currently I'm considering a scanner in the Epson Perfection V550 Photo range and writing a small program to store and tag the image blobs.<p>I wonder what others use and what works well, both for hardware and software? Any recommendations, dos and don'ts, etc. that you can share? Thanks :) <comment><USER2> 1) scan at a reasonable resolution. Don't scan less than 4k resolution (3840x2160), and not more than 200-300 dpi for the largest print you'd want to make (really, an 8x10 print will look fine at 150dpi, which is only 1200x1500, but you may want to be able to crop after the scan, so more pixels would allow that). Know that there won't be enough latent image content in the slide to warrant > 20MP, even if it's on high quality 35mm velvia slides.

2) pick out a handful of different "exemplar" slides from your collection (a portrait, a group shot, a landscape, ...), and for each, try out the built-in auto exposure, auto image quality enhancers, and auto dust removal features. Some work great, some turn your scan into a posterized mess, and some will only work well for certain shots.

3) put your slides into yyyy-mm-dd directories, or name the image something like `yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss.jpg`. Some software (like PhotoStructure) will infer the captured-at time based on the date encoded in the file name or parent directory of it's missing from the exif metadata. You may want to pre-sort the slides by date to make this easier.

4) if you're going to edit all of them after scanning, use TIFF. If you aren't, use JPEG at a high quality setting (like 95%).

5) clean the slides beforehand if you can (research how to do this safely). It's a lot easier to make a nice scan if the source was cleaner to begin with.

6) see if you're scanner supports batch or gang scans. If you've got 3200 slides and you can do them in batches of 8 or 16, that's a lot less fiddling than doing every one, one after another.

7) take your time. You'll burn out of you do too many in one sitting, and not finish.</comment>


Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving-present-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta <comment><USER2> > Btrfs has been removed

I'm still incredibly sad about that, especially as Btrfs has become a really solid filesystem over the last year or so in the upstream kernel...

Reference: [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/html/8.0_beta_release_notes/removed_functionality#file_systems_and_storage_5)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, Btrfs is uniquely capable and important. It has lightweight snapshots of directory trees, and fully supports NFS exports and kernel namespaces, so it can easily solve technical problems that currently can't be easily solved using ZFS or other filesystems. Btrfs is also used now for ChromeOS's Crostini Linux application container.

<comment><USER4> Notable: Btrfs is used for _all_ of ChromeOS and the crostini container is just another volume.

It's incredibly robust, really confusing why RH would be pulling this.

<comment><USER5> It was never emphasized, and probably rarely used by their customers. Prior RHEL release used ext4, then xfs by default. People who run RHEL don't want to think about what filesystem to use. They want standard, stable, reliable -- not dozens of options and features.

<comment><USER2> When you're pushing the container stuff, Btrfs becomes extraordinarily valuable. Being able to snapshot a base thing and then layer on top, and do trivial rebasing, as well as cheap replication of container volumes is _very_ useful.

On my Fedora and EL7 systems, I use Btrfs for the OS and for my containers for those purposes. It's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Release notes here: [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/html-single/8.0_beta_release_notes/)

For those that matters, MongoDB is not included because it uses Server Side Public License: [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/html- single/8.0_beta_release_notes/#web_servers_databases_dynamic_languages_2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Too bad it doesn't come with Python 3.7, only 3.6. Fedora 29 managed to switch to 3.7, although it was released just two weeks ago.

<comment><USER7> I'm more surprised by the fact that no Python is installed by default on a Red Hat distribution

[https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/html- single/8.0_beta_release_notes/#web_servers_databases_dynamic_languages)

<comment><USER8> Wasn't python required for YUM to function correctly? Or has DNF been written in something other than python?

<comment><USER9> Platform python see comment above

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain...

Bingo!

<comment><USER11> This made me cringe so hard when I read it.

Sounds like a IBM Watson promo already :D

<comment><USER12> Red Hat marketing was already playing buzzword bingo before they got bought :D

<comment><USER11> Probably right. I think I might just be paying attention to it now looking for IBM-isms :)

<comment><USER12> You get that with any large company, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The big takeaway for me is that they consider Podman ready to use because it's honestly amazing. A fully featured container engine that doesn't need any elevated privileges or a central daemon -- using just Linux namespacing features. Once people realize the implications of having containers just being something you can run like any other program with zero fanfare I expect adoption to explode.

<comment><USER14> There still seems to be some confusing overlap in their tools. For example, what is the difference between "buildah" and "podman build"?

<comment><USER15> `podman` keeps the compatibility with Docker CLI params, so `podman build` is a wrapper around `buildah bud`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > It also includes a new TCP/IP stack with Bandwidth and Round-trip > propagation time (BBR) congestion control, which enables higher performance, > minimized latency and decreased packet loss for Internet-connected services > like streaming video or hosted storage.

I suspect Red Hat didn't rewrite the TCP/IP stack, so can someone translate this from marketing into nerd? Google doesn't seem to know.

<comment><USER17> BBR is just an algorithm that tries to figure out the best sending rate of TCP packets. So you don't have to wait for every ACK after a PSH. it was added the the linux kernel a couple of years ago, good to see it in RHEL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm excited to see Apache bumped to 2.4.35 with HTTP/2 support.

Also, PHP has been bumped from 5.4 to PHP 7.2, which will be extremely nice to have out of the box.

<comment><USER19> They didn't really have a choice, PHP runtime versions have aggressive EOL dates these days.

<comment><USER20> They might, but ISPs still aren't in a hurry to support v7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The linux box sitting on my desk at work is running RHEL6 (which is really starting to get super annoying). My IT dept is just now starting to roll out RHEL7.

<comment><USER22> That RHEL6 will still be supported with security and stability patches until 2020.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, they based on Linux 4.18! Good for them! I was worried they'd pick 4.14 or earlier, which would have been regrettable in terms of keeping the speculation attack mitigations maintainable.

<comment><USER24> I wonder why not 4.19 which I thought was an LTS kernel?

<comment><USER25> Red Hat backports features aggressively and is one of the largest contributors upstream. The kernel version or whether it's LTS upstream doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> gcc 8.2! Being on gcc 4.8.5 for RHEL 7 instead of 4.9 was a minor pain point for some c++11 or newer libraries when developing. Nice to see them jump all the way to the 8.x series.

Also great to see xfs gain COW support in RHEL, they are working to make up (in features) for dropping btrfs with xfs. We'll see how stratis works out.

<comment><USER27> gcc 8.2 is also available for RHEL 7: [https://developers.redhat.com/products/developertoolset/over...](https://developers.redhat.com/products/developertoolset/overview/) It's included in the subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how many companies will either not upgrade to RHEL 8 or seek to leave RHEL because of the acquisition by IBM.

<comment><USER29> The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

<comment><USER25> So I work for Red Hat and the truth is no one will know until after the acquisition, but there are certainly no plans for that, nor have I heard anyone even discussing such a thing. CentOS is a valuable part of Red Hat and an important part of keeping users in the ecosystem even if they're not paying us, so it wouldn't really make any sense. IBM aren't stupid (despite nonsense that people write online), and Red Hat is a cash machine and they'd be stupid if they messed with a proven model which works.

<comment><USER30> Seems like supporting and incorporating RHEL support into IBM's business is the reason they bought RHEL. They effectively grew their business contracts with the addition of all the RHEL contracts.

If anything, I would expect business as usual for their business customers. It was a really obvious market move in hindsight.

<comment><USER31> my guess is they bought redhat because it bought coreos. and ibm wanted that, too.

<comment><USER9> That's a big premium over this what? 250 million?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Linux containers, Kubernetes, artificial intelligence, blockchain and too > many other technical breakthroughs to list all share a common component - > Linux

Erm what? Only two of those are built on Linux. If there's too many to list at least don't list unrelated technologies.

<comment><USER33> Anyone know what AI and blockchain it has?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Rust, python 3.6, great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER35> Here is a download link to the DVD iso (rhel-8.0-beta-1-x86_64-dvd.iso) for those that are interested:

[https://red.ht/2ROrd80](https://red.ht/2ROrd80)

</comment><comment><USER36> Yay finally 4.18 Kernel in RHEL.

</comment><comment><USER37> I guess if you cross a Red Hat and a Big Blue dinosaur a big purple dinosaur could be the result...

[https://i.etsystatic.com/5700633/r/il/ea2ba9/1552167872/il_5...](https://i.etsystatic.com/5700633/r/il/ea2ba9/1552167872/il_570xN.1552167872_fvki.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER38> Finally no Python 2.7 anymore!

<comment><USER39> Well, not exactly, you can still get it, it just isn't default :) [https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/14/python-in- rhel...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/14/python-in-rhel-8/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> With the AppStream, does that mean Software Collections is no longer needed?

<comment><USER39> Not really an "either or". However, AppStream provides similar functionality. See this post: [https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/15/rhel8-introduc...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/15/rhel8-introducing- appstreams/) for more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there anything public on release date aims?

<comment><USER42> When it's ready. If there's one thing Red Hat have been pretty good at it's being conservative and not worrying too much about schedule slips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thought for a moment I read IBM Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, anyone else?</comment>


Tyson Joins Bill Gates, Cargill to Invest in Lab-Meat Producer - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-29/tyson-joins-bill-gates-cargill-to-invest-in-lab-meat-producer <comment> noah-kun When talking about lab-meat solutions, folks list many benefits. But those same benefits exist with much, much cheaper vegan and vegetarian solutions that are already on the market. Whilst others are spending millions on lab- made meat substitutes, I've been eating economical meat-free meals that taste, to me, often indistinguishable from meat-containing dishes.

These menu items expand even more for Westerners when you extend into Indian cuisine, which reaches new levels of flavour, often without meat as well.

It's another area in which the solution teased by Western capitalist culture is over-engineered and over-priced, and the better solution is much simpler and just involves looking at what those outside our comfort zone have devised already.</comment>


Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/password-sharing-is-a-federal-crime <comment><USER2> When are we going to get people in government who have the slightest clue about computers?

<comment><USER3> When we become the old people running the government (and the old people always voting for them).</comment></comment>


ACM Urges Obama To Include Computer Science in k-12 Education  - <AUTHOR> http://usacm.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=663 <comment><USER2> First off, I love ACM as an organization (not to say I get along with all of the members of our chapter). I volunteer time every year at our conference. And I like education, sort of.

But it's bad enough that drop out rates are >50% for engineers in the US. You think you're going to figure out how to teach it to younger students if you can't even understand why half of everyone loses interest in higher education?

I have a hint: don't take Vannevar Bush so damn seriously. Yes, math + science + analysis == good. Especially when most of our CS and engineering programs were designed during the Cold War. But we also got rid of our practice and drawing coursework.

I'm not buying the iPhone because it's the "best engineered device." Somewhere along the lines, our engineers forgot what the hell art, design, and usability was. It's one of those things you don't want to take to the extreme. People wonder why the CS jobs go to India, it's because CS is not difficult. Creativity and innovation is, I don't see many companies outsourcing that (ok I realize I just made a really vague generalization, but if you look into my comment history, I do go into more detail).

I will say that it's extremely rare to find the guy who can not only code, but design too. I have only met a few in my life, and they're always the most respected people at a company who are incidentally the most desirable to all the others.

<comment><USER3> You seriously need to appreciate the distinction between CS and coding. Let me break it down: computer science is really difficult. It's not the CS jobs that go to India. It's the coding jobs.

Also, here's something you many not know. K-12 CS education in India is actually pretty good. My school started computer science in the fifth grade. Internalizing the Turing machine (even if it is not formally explained) at that age gives you a huge advantage should you decide to become a computer scientist later.

So how come India doesn't produce good computer scientists? Actually we do. If you look at the top CS conferences, the proportion of Indians is pretty high compared to the number of people we graduate. It's just that Indians choose to move to the U.S. to do research because there are no good government funded research programs in India.

Next up, innovation and design. I think PG pretty much answered that one. It doesn't matter if you have talented people, if you don't have a nurturing environment like Silicon Valley, it's just not gonna happen. There's not much incentive for an Indian firm to innovate because our business climate is just so bad. Success depends more on how well you can bribe government officials than on innovation.

That leaves coding jobs. If you teach everyone how to code, of course you're going to have a lot of coders who aren't particularly good designers or computer scientists. That's what we have. Many of my friends who are actually good tried to kick it in one of the outsourcing firms, couldn't take the boredom, and left to go to grad school or do something else. It's a self- perpetuating cycle.

To summarize: K-12 CS education is not hard, and it's important for producing good computer scientists. You just have to be prepared to accept that not every kid will be interested.

<comment><USER2> Computer Science is a discipline applied to something, such as doing coding at a startup. Most CS students turn out to be coders. Not many people, for example, are going to go off and write new compilers and program in MIPS assembly. Most will end up doing the typical Java and C/C++ development stuff. My roommate for example doesn't have any interest in AI or machine learning or data mining (although I'm not necessarily referring to those fields as being easily outsourced).

The complaint I'm making is one that has been voiced already by many universities, including my own (Illinois.edu). It's the reason schools like Olin College are getting built and considered by Newsweek and Kaplan as "one of America's next Ivy League schools." It has nothing to do with computer science being difficult, it's because it's not interesting. This isn't about how to distinguish CS from coding, it's about fixing the outdated curriculum from the Cold War when we basically said "forget drawing and practice in the Computer Science and Engineering degrees, we're strictly math science and analysis now."

Java and C/C++ development is what most CS students will end up doing (coding). Those are the people I'm talking about; I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. If you think success is all about bribery, you (as defined by Michael Arrington) have a losing attitude and have no place in Silicon Valley. Not my words, but Mr. Arrington's. And I for one side with him in saying that hard work produces more results than flattery.

My point is this: nobody wants to learn coding with zero application. I'm saying that higher education doesn't have it right because 50% of students dropout, so you're going to try and move it into k-12 and expect better results? How on earth do you propose to do that exactly?

<comment><USER4> This is an interesting exchange between Mark Guzdial and Alan Kay: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKVUNBWIDAS9YQ>

The focal point of the argument seems to be whether CS "education" and "vocational training" should be separated.

P.S. Nice to see another UIUC student. I've been accepted there and would possibly end up enrolling unless I get into some long shot universities. How is the scene there?

<comment><USER2> You are coming in at a good time, actually. We are just now launching the iFoundry program, keep your eyes on it. E-mail me sometime, I'm always interested in meeting people from HN at school. Check out my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have personal experience with this.

I'm a highschooler (junior now), and I took an intro Java class freshman year, AP Comp Sci soph year, and I'm TAing a Java class right now.

There is very little learning of Java going on in any of those classes. Part of it is that the teacher doesn't make it a very hard class, but also even among the people who try and do all of the assignments the majority just don't get it. They don't get the simplest things.

And it's not that my school gets a lot of people who just are "stupid" or unmotivated. It's a charter school that you have to apply to and take a test to get in. Its focus is math, science, and tech, and it's like 42nd (something close at least) public HS in the nation according to US News and World Report.

But a lot of them just don't understand programming. They have functions explained to them, and they're shown some examples like areaOfSquare(int side) and areaOfRectangle(int length, int width), and half of them ask me for help on the first one areaOfTriangle(int base, int height). And most of the rest ask the people that I helped for help.

Or I fix a curly brace issue (I hate Java, for the record (ok, hate's too strong)) for the same person almost every day, but she can't figure out that maybe she should try adding a curly brace to the end of the file before calling me over.

This incompetence is even more true now that Java is offered to all freshmen. For my freshman year, unless one did a very long, annoying, inane set of assignments to show that you know how to use MS Office, freshmen had to take a class teaching them how to use Office freshman year, and only after that could they take Java. So the people in Java were people who actually wanted to take it, not just people trying to fulfill their graduation requirements.

Back then, about half of the people in Java actually tried (the rest were basically the seniors who had stopped caring), and around half of the nonseniors who took Java would go on to take AP CS.

The ratios have tilted a lot more towards incompetence now.

Programming is something that not everyone understands, and teaching those that just don't understand programming is a monumental task.

All schools should _offer_ at least one programming class, but making it a "Core Component Of Science And Math Education" is a mistake. A lot of people would just do badly and not learn anything.

<comment><USER6> _Programming is something that not everyone understands, and teaching those that just don't understand programming is a monumental task._

I've taught basic programming to a lot of people, and I find that the problem is on the other side:

 _Teaching_ programming is something that not everyone understands, and learning from those who just don't understand _teaching_ programming is a monumental task.

Students come in with different views of the world - some of them have the metaphorical analogies in place to understand scope and curly brackets as "boundaries" or "bags", others don't. Explain it to them.

<comment><USER7> We had this discussion on another thread and concluded that Java's a very bad introduction to programming. To understand even Hello, World requires an enormous amount upfront:

        class HelloWorld {
            public static void main(String[] args) {
                System.out.println("Hello, world!");
            }
        }

What's a class? Why does the name of my class have to be the same as the name of the file (and why do I have to rename it on the disk if I change it?) What's "public", "static" and "void" mean? What's an array? What're arguments? Why is String capitalized when main isn't? What is this System business, why can't I just print? Why do I have a semicolon on the end of that line?

If you want to teach people you've got to start from the freedom of using a suitable language, which means to all practical purposes LOGO, BASIC or Scheme.

        10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"

Or

        (display "Hello, world!")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would say taking personal finance would be a higher priority. I think we should require a proven understanding of compounding interest before giving out a credit card, car loan, or mortgage.

Understand pure CS seems to me less exciting for most students (especially for those that can't pass algebra) than getting into some engineering, where they can build real stuff. You have to mix theory and practice to maximize (and compound?) student interest.

</comment><comment><USER9> "A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate." \-- Unabomber Manifesto, Ted Kaczynski

(Personally, I think that the notion of a core curriculum is mistaken,, but so is much of public education, and I don't know which small concrete steps would be best to move it forward.)

</comment><comment><USER10> On the one hand, I think it would be great to live in a world where some basic level of "code literacy" was expected of all adults--just like today, every adult in the industrialized world is expected to be able to read and write, and Ph.D.s in education have put a great deal of effort into figuring out how to teach that skill to the kids who Just Don't Get It.

On the other hand,

(1) as jmtame says above, we don't seem to have a clue (yet) about how to teach programming to college students who Just Don't Get It

(2) if we put CS _in_ to the K-12 curriculum, then something else needs to be taken _out_ , and I'm not sure what deserves the boot.

<comment><USER11> "Ph.D.s in education have put a great deal of effort into figuring out how to teach that skill to the kids who Just Don't Get It."

Actually, Ph.D.s in education have done a generally appalling job of researching how children learn to read. There are a few happy exceptions, but I would look more to Ph.D.s in linguistics or psychology (harder disciplines, and more evidence-based, than education in general) for advice on how to teach children to read.

Here are some sound resources on reading instruction:

[http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard- Bloom...](http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard- Bloomfield/dp/0814311156/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Language-Development-Learning-Read- Sci...](http://www.amazon.com/Language-Development-Learning-Read- Scientific/dp/026263340X/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete- Science-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science- Based-Problems/dp/0679781595/)

So, yes, the problem with introducing programming into the K-12 curriculum is

a) figuring out how to teach it well to learners of that age of varying backgrounds and interest levels, and

b) figuring out what else gets crowded out of the curriculum.

<comment><USER10> I don't want to get into a debate here about what the best techniques for teaching reading _are_ (not to mention how to get teachers in the classrom to actually _use_ the techniques); my point is just that everyone in the system agrees that the schools have a duty to teach literacy to every kid who is biologically capable of it.

150 or even 100 years ago, I don't think this was the case; if a child didn't learn to read in primary school then it was considered the child's failure, not the school's, and the kid just dropped out and got some job that didn't require literacy.

<comment><USER11> My ancestors 150 years ago and even more recently learned to read before they started school, as is noted in their diaries or recalled by my oldest living relative. And Horace Mann noted BEFORE he started campaigning for compulsory school attendance in Massachusetts that by his estimate most inhabitants of Massachusetts were literate in English. (He wrote articles in the journal he founded, the Common School Journal, which I have looked up, saying that.) The origin of the compulsory-attendance school system as we know it today in the United States was not to ensure literacy but rather to accomplish other social goals promoted by Mann.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-greer K-12 curriculum should be weighted more towards programming practice than theory. Understanding the craft of programming, good UI design, and how the web works will be relevant to kids for their whole lives. Turing machines, big O notation, and discrete math are all interesting, but emphasizing them over coding would be like learning number theory without knowing how to add and subtract.

</comment><comment><USER12> To use an analogy with cars - everyone should be taught how to drive one, but not everyone needs to know how to build or fix one.

</comment><comment><USER13> isn't that already included, or was it just my district? Wouldn't put it past them, very rich town, so the school district had money coming out of it's ass.

Maybe it was just an elective. But my high school did offer 2 different "computer science" classes. The basic one was pretty much intro, and taught Visual Basic. And then had an advanced class where they taught us Visual C++. Basic stuff forms, calculations(accounting stuff) and then for final had a project to make a game.

Personally I don't think they need to teach it as a core requirement...CS is a class for the geeks, do you really want people who barely pass basic Algebra, to start wrapping their minds around C++? Especially when they have 6 other classes to stretch their mind.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if programming might not be an easier introduction to symbol manipulation than algebra. They could get the feel for variables and algorithms in a more concrete way. The transition to algebra would not be so mind bending for a lot of the kids.</comment>


200 times more COBOL transactions today than Google searches - <AUTHOR> https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/legacy-issues-200-times-more-cobol-transactions-today-than-google-searches <comment><USER2> Maybe, but how many transactions get kicked off by a single Google search?</comment>


Why Americans are avoiding the doctor: high costs - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-americans-are-avoiding-the-doctor-2018-04-04 <comment><AUTHOR> Congruent with this: [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/16/16357790/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/16/16357790/health-care-prices-problem)

I wrote about this further here: [http://seliger.com/2018/03/27/preventive- care-doesnt-save-mo...](http://seliger.com/2018/03/27/preventive-care-doesnt- save-money-bankruptcies-arent-widely-caused-lack-insurance-fqhcs/) but I find it baffling that mandated price transparency isn't on anyone's political agenda. The political right should like transparent pricing because that's a basic component of free markets; the political left should like it because it will help people, especially people who might otherwise not be able to afford care, pay less through comparison pricing.</comment>


How to escalate privileges and steal secrets in Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/02/12/plundering-gcp-escalating-privileges-in-google-cloud-platform/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see some kind of tool for sysadmins showing what can be accessed from where. Pretty much this article, but automated.

</comment><comment><USER3> really excellent article! I thoroughly enjoyed it :).</comment>


New Zealand: Up to 85 cases of illegal spying uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10876344

<comment><USER2> There's a real lack of context in that article so it's worth mentioning that a less generic thread about this exists here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6093710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6093710)

<comment><AUTHOR> Problem is that these long-form postings are rarely getting to the front page unless they are about personal issues. If both of our posts get buried try submitting each of the articles over the day and I am sure we can get one to catch on.

It seems to me that there are probably only a few dozen people actively voting in the newly submitted category, so it takes a bit of luck to have the right kind of people lurking at the right moment giving their vote.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My 12yo Dev This Game and Released to iOS/Android/HTML5 Using LibGDX - <AUTHOR> http://pizzascripters.com/gravitylines/

<comment><USER2> Yeah ... just lost 10 mins trying to play this. Super sticky. Frustrates me in a way I haven't felt since Flappy Bird was released. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Flappy Bird and Geometry Dash were his inspiration for making the game. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a great concept!

</comment><comment><USER4> Well it crashes my browser Chrome 42.0.2311.90 (64-bit)</comment>


Myst creators launch Kickstarter to bring every game in the series to Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/myst-creators-launch-kickstarter-to-bring-every-game-in-the-series-to-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> The Kickstarter is only for the physical stuff. Making games run on newer versions of Windows was done by GOG.com and will be released even if Kickstarter fails.

<comment><USER3> Only if it's abandonware right?

<comment><USER4> GOG has never been an "abandonware" site. Everything on GOG has always been appropriately licensed from the IP owners. The early focus was digital distribution of out-of-print titles (hence the original name "Good Old Games"), but it has always been a retail storefront.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those that love these kind of games, the modern day interpretation is (the creator of Braid) Jonathan Blow's Witness.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/)

That said, I really wish the creators remake these games for the mobile. These kind of puzzle games dont have any of the FPS requirements that today's mobile phones cant handle. The beautiful scenes that Myst was well known for can easily be rendered on a 4 year old phone as well.

But most importantly, touch and gyroscope opens up degrees of freedom that was previously impossible to conceive. Imagine an AR like Myst.

<comment><USER6> Just to iterate on your comment, while The Witness is one of my favorite games and very close in spirit to the Myst, the closet game after many many years I was able to find is Quern:

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thou...](http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thoughts/)

If you like Myst, give it a try, you want be disappointed.

<comment><USER5> oh wow - thanks for this.

And its Linux supported too!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they say Linux, I'm in.

<comment><USER8> Or even better IMHO something web-based [that can be used on Linux]. At least the first one is basically hypermedia. (Was it based on Hypercard?)

<comment><USER9> Yes, it was built in HyperCard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Link to the actual KS: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/myst-25th- an...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/myst-25th-anniversary- collection)

They've already surpassed their goal.

</comment><comment><USER11> The earlier games in particular used pre-rendered 640x480 graphics, so I'm curious about whether they will be re-creating the graphical assets to make use of modern display resolutions. Could be a lot of work depending on the state of the source material and dependencies. Riven, for example, was rendered using a package called Mental Ray which was discontinued last year.

Whatever, I'm almost certainly in on this.

<comment><USER12> The assets for Myst at least should be in decent shape, or at least the ones used in the real-time 3D Myst Live (I think that was the title) remake from a few years back.

I seem to recall hearing that there wouldn't be a similar Riven remake, due to loss of the source assets from that game. I assume the new package will be using the same GOG versions you can get now, with the original stills.

It's also worth checking out the fan-run Starry Expanse project[0], which is an attempt to manually recreate the entirety of Riven in a modern 3D environment. Progress is very slow, but already looks quite impressive.

I'm really excited to see that they've finally got the rights to III and IV, which I always felt were the technical/visual peak of the series.

[0] [http://www.starryexpanse.com/](http://www.starryexpanse.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone that has never played Myst, how does it hold up in a modern setting? It always looked like a game that needed a VR remake.

<comment><USER14> I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. I ended up needing about 2 or 3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily, though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of a screen). I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI.

If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're stuck).

<comment><USER15> Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though; after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven is the end of the series.

Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.

This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you need to work with.

There are a few exceptions... a _certain pair_ of double doors was a pretty cheap trick, for example.

What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small) revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering technology _and_ first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.

<comment> sjm-lbm I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's _really_ pretty graphically, and the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is throwing at you.

It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the compromises made to make it realtime.

<comment><USER4> Myst 5 also suffered from the fact that it was a "third season" excised at the last minute from Uru Live (on strange experiment network GameTap).

The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru: Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.

All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor" compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with "Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).

(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)

[1] [https://mystonline.com/en/](https://mystonline.com/en/)

<comment> sjm-lbm Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example: during Riven's development, Cyan hired a guy named Richard Vander Wende, who had previously worked on Aladdin at Disney. Much like Aladdin, he made color grading a focus of Riven - most images tend to be unusually warm or cool, dark or light, etc. in ways that communicate a mood or something about the world you are interacting with (even if it's not something you yet know about the world you are interacting with). Stuff like this is, IMHO, unusually effective in a game like Riven - the player is often too busy looking for a switch or button or whatever to consciously absorb little details like that, but there's a way that I feel like that communicates the mood of a location in a way that's very emotional and brilliant. The effect may work better on me than other people, but it's one of the reasons why Riven is the highlight of the series for me.

There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between Aladdin and Riven.

(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out, and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005, before GameTap's Uru launched)

<comment><USER4> I think that there was still a lot of things that could have been done in real-time graphics even at the time of Myst 5's release that weren't done simply due to the business economics that the Uru engine (Plasma) didn't support them, in large part due to the compromises Plasma made to support real-time multiplayer physics.

> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point > out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted

I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.

You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.

<comment> sjm-lbm Sorry, I didn't mean to be pedantic in that way - more like I'm just gleefully geeking out about Cyan being in the news a bit. Your overall point above was completely correct.

<comment><USER4> No worries. Yeah, I could probably talk about Uru for days, given the chance. Might be about time to plan a fresh trip down to the cavern. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These games would be perfect for the Nintendo Switch!

Edit: I just noticed they released the original Myst on 3DS back in 2012.

<comment><USER17> This is entirely the reason why I'm a PC gamer.

Steam games are cheap, old games are cheap, lots to choose from.

Nintendo(or other consoles), full price 60$ games, 40$ on sale. First party games are the primary buy, and those are few and far between.

The last Nintendo console I owned was the GC, I havent looked back. There are enough cheap games for the PC that I dont miss out on the last 2 zelda games.

<comment><USER18> It's not only about price, PC game compatibility goes back a lot further than console or mobile games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have an old version of Myst IV and Myst III, and they run just fine on my windows 10 installation. Totally thrilled by this project though :) The series (and especially Riven) kept me in front of the computer for a loooong time in my youth.

<comment><USER20> What black magic did you have to do to get Myst III to run fine on Windows 10? I tried it a couple months ago and it was so slow and janky and low-res that it wasn't playable. (Maybe because I was using a USB CD drive?)

<comment><USER19> I don't remember doing nothing special really. For the slowness, see my other reply. I usually don't run directly from the CD drive.

The one that gave me the most troubles was Riven (before I got it from GOG). For this one I had to do some mumbo-jumbo to finally get a full screen yeah.

<comment><USER20> Huh, I wonder where I went wrong. Exile just... didn't function. But then, I was trying to run it on my shiny new VR rig, so it might've just been hardware compatibility. :/ Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is just a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested if the Miller's ...revisited Myst a little. That game was a significant part of my childhood.

<comment><USER22> > Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is > just a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested > if the Miller's ...revisited Myst a little.

Cyan Worlds already did this multiple times. I just want to mention "Myst: Masterpiece Edition" (adding 24 bit true color graphics instead of 256 color 8 bit graphics), "realMyst" (adding 3D graphics and (small spoiler) na nqqvgvbany ntr pnyyrq "Evzr") and "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" (better 3D graphics).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> SCUMMVM already has support for older Mysts on newer Windows version, why do we need a kickstarter again?

</comment><comment><USER24> What I'd like most is a VR port of Riven. How good is their VR game?

</comment><comment><USER25> "You hold a gun like a guy who plays _Riven!_ "

</comment><comment><USER26> IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

<comment><USER27> Indiana Jones reference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Will there be another kickstarter in the future for Windows 11?

EDIT: From the KS page, "A Word to Mac Users" This does not lead me to believe it's going to be something like an SDL2 port but a one off port. I hope I can be proven wrong.

EDIT2: Another World/Flashback was ported a while ago, but that was built on a VM, which is very cool: [http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php)

<comment><USER29> There isn't going to be a "Windows 11" according to what Microsoft has said.

Instead new versions of Windows are released as updates of Windows 10.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-1...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-10-spring- creators-update-everything-you-need-to-know)

Does this mean that Windows 10 apps released today will run on the latest "Windows 10" years in the future? Only time will tell I guess, but if there is one thing Microsoft has been good at historically it's been backwards compatibility. Not perfect, but still so good at it that they deserve recognition for that. Credit where credit is due and all that, even for an operating system that I generally don't like and don't want to use.

<comment><USER30> Hmm, that's interesting as new versions have driven hardware sales - and vice- versa - in the past. Wonder how hardware companies will adapt?</comment></comment></comment>


CNC bacteria swarm builds tiny pyramid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/09/cnc_bacteria_swarm_builds_tiny_pyra.html

<comment><USER2> I'm waiting to see the impressive applications. The video, probably representing their single most successful effort, shows six "bricks" being more or less jumbled together and called "a step pyramid". This is not exactly state-of-the-art micron-scale manipulation; and why move around imprecisely with thousands of bacteria, when you can use the same magnetic field for much more precise manipulation with a single microrobot? (E.g. <http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/MagneticMicroRobot/> )

<comment><USER3> Notice, that making more bacteria is much easier than making more nanobots.

<comment><USER2> They're not nanobots, they're microrobots of very simple construction (one metallic claw). You only need one, and they're much more precise.</comment></comment></comment>


WhatsApp is Down - <AUTHOR> http://outage.report/whatsapp <comment><AUTHOR> It is the biggest outage since May 3rd.

<comment><USER2> Otherwise know as the "Day of the App-pocalypse"</comment></comment>


TTY-based group scheduling (the 200+ line linux patch that does wonders) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/415740/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1910085>

<comment><USER3> I just thought of a feature. Instead of posting a link to a previous discussion, you should be able to "merge" a new thread with an old one. Perhaps the new url and post could be added to the previous post, but the discussion itself would be more "persistent". Sometimes there is more to say, sometimes the original discussion is worth revisiting, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> totally agree, I just reposted this here because I thought this article at LWN gave a lot more details than the previous ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Agile Doesn't Work - <AUTHOR> https://uxplanet.org/why-agile-doesnt-work-641710709e6e <comment><USER2> None of the criticisms are actually about Agile.

Written by an "Agile coach"...</comment>


Would you play this game to learn more about HN contributors? - <AUTHOR>

To learn more about interests of HN contributors, one could use a matching game where you try to match submissions with submitters.<p>Would you play such a game? <comment><USER2> It's 'contributor'.

I try to learn about others here by reading their submissions, possibly their homepages and projects listed on their profiles, a game that would match people with their submissions would be pretty hard on those with less than perfect memory.

And google would allow you to cheat :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nope.

</comment><comment><USER4> No - the idea might make for a fun Twitter app, though.</comment>