Hacking Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/hacking-educati.html

<comment><USER2> All this talk about how "we" need to redesign education hints at a major problem with our current system: it is a democratic institution and not a market. Therefore, "I" cannot decide on a change in the way "my" child is educated, rather "we" must decide on changes in the way "our" children are educated.

Group decision making is a phenomenally slow and stupid process, filled with all sorts of interest groups with all kinds of different incentives. The slowness and stupidity of this process is why education feels like it is stuck in the past. This is also why school choice advocates are so passionate about their issue. A school choice program would allow each parent to pursue educational choices which he thinks would be best for his child. He could choose some new educational model without first asking permission from the rest of society to do so.

Technology is great. It is making real change on the margin. However, it can only do so much good while children are inmates in a system designed by a public bureaucracy for 40 hours a week.

<comment><USER3> I think you have a strong predilection for solutions that advocate the complete rearrangement of society - with no path to achieve it and no guarantee that it will provide any benefits until the transformation is complete. While they might provide you with a certain feeling of righteousness they seem to be useless.

Children already spend a large amount of time on optional education activities that do exist in a market. If we improve these it might just provide a path to better education within the public system.

I'd like to see the ways we train people in music, sports and with special needs extended to the core subjects like maths. In those cases a specialist in the learning of that subject will see the child perhaps once a week but oversee and dictate the practice that child undertakes.

<comment><USER2> I have a strong predilection for systems with incentives to make a good product. This is especially true when the product is as important as education. Maybe you are right and our time would be best spent on developing ways to educate people by working around the public school system rather than trying to change it. For example, you could pay a tutor in the marketplace to provide the service you mentioned in your last paragraph instead of convincing all the voters in your school district that it is a good idea.

I do think the benefit of these optional activities will be limited as long as the 30-40 prime hours spent in school each week are of such low value. And in general I am opposed to such waste.

Politics does require a lot of work to make any useful changes. However, I don't think ending the public monopoly would be impossible. Voters managed to do it in Sweden and the Netherlands.

My purpose was more to point out a relevant fact about our current educational system than to encourage everyone to drop their startups and start lobbying their state Congress.

<comment><USER3> My point is that many advances can be had without getting rid of public education, those advances are not of only marginal utility and they do not compete with changing public education. You frame everything in terms of libertarianism unnecessarily and dismissing positives because they don't advance your ideology seems unwise.

<comment><USER2> I think we both have valid points. If the internet were as developed when I was in school as it is today, I would have still been bored in school but I would have learned a lot more after I got home from school. On net, I probably would have been better educated.

We CAN still improve education while the 30-40 hours spent at school each week are a complete write-off.

I still think we would have a better world if that were not the case.

<comment><USER3> I agree, especially since I support voucher systems.

In truth though, I think technological and other improvements in education will lead to the education freedom we both want, rather than the other way round. Innovations in learning could render the whole public education system outdated, whereas at the moment alternatives don't impress me.

<comment><USER2> I apologize, I've edited my comments on this thread substantially because I misread your comments the first time around. Also, I have a tendancy to post a "first-draft" comment and then edit it to be better over time, which is annoying to others because every draft is public.

<comment><USER3> No worries, I get that, I think the thread still makes sense. Always in this sort of thread I'm left wondering whether the initial conflict (when I generalize about your opinions) is a necessary sort of dramatic tension to draw out further discussion. I guess any opinion has unstated qualifiers, but starting with them seems to unsatisfying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One one side, I feel resentful because academic professors and teaching assistants are crucifying Wikipedia as some source bizarre source of information that is the result of 13-year old children wreaking havoc on articles. Contrary to popular belief, the Wikipedia articles go through a review process. Even edits I've made that I felt were accurate had been reverted minutes later by a Wiki editor.

I typically make it a point to tell the whole class that Wikipedia cites many of its claims. Not all of the citations are 100% accurate, but it's a start for doing research. It gives you a high-level overview, and gives you a place to start compared to the messy online library systems. I go to one of the most research-intensive schools where every professor is required to be doing research in addition to their curriculum. And our online library is a bad place if you want to get a high-level view of the problem you're looking at.

On top of that, this article is dead on. I remember ranting about this topic back in 2006:

[http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education- is-...](http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-is-broken/)

<http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/school-sucks/>

<comment><USER5> > Wikipedia articles go through a review process

About three times I have looked through the past revisions on substantial wikipedia articles and each time it was clear that the revisions generally made the article worse. The general pattern is that an expert occasionally writes meaty, high quality sections and then these either get deleted or eventually made incomprehensible. Edits almost always degrade the prose.

I do not understand the wikipedia fanboism. It's fine for basic facts, and great for pop culture, but better informational articles on almost any complex topic are available elsewhere. I do not think wikipedia is working very well and hope that the more closed system some of the original founders started a while back comes out on top.

edit: I just looked up that new, more closed version of wikipedia and from a quick examination it is much better than wikipedia. Compare:

<http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/War_of_1812>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Ohio, the way of funding public grade schools (by giving local property taxes to local schools) has been ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court _four times._

Education inequality is directly linked to income inequality, and our government has failed to solve this problem. Essentially, what we have here is the _forced inter-generational transfer of socioeconomic status._

Privatization of schools would not fix this. Free markets fail to find the global optimum in many situations; these situations are called market failures. We need to design systems that benefit societal welfare over individual welfare in the education, healthcare and government sectors.

Injecting technological innovation into the lives of students will not adequately address education inequality (unless you build something that provides students good food, safe homes, and loving families). If you give all students access to, say, MIT OpenCourseWare, it might boost everyone up by the same level, but it will not address the educational gap between the lucky and the unlucky.

We must not allow _luck_ to play a part in education: children deserve to be enabled to reach their full potential, and not be permanent victims of arbitrary systems of distribution.

Edit: If you downvote, write a reply.

<comment><USER2> There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way. Educational markets are another. These methods should be embraced.

Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.

Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather, parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their parents likely did.

The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.

But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education.

Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life better.

<comment><USER6> What is your opinion of the local property-tax education funding system? Education redistribution already occurs in that system; shouldn't we at least redistribute education more equally?

<comment><USER2> I think a government-run system has incentives that are going to produce a lower quality educational product for everyone. I am for educational markets. Subsidizing the consumption of education by poor people through something like a voucher program would likely mean higher quality education for poor and rich alike compared to the government-run model, for the same price.

I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is the problem that should concern us the most.

<comment><USER6> Does it bother you that children are limited by the arbitrary socioeconomic status of their families? Again, luck is determining what any child is able to become.

<comment><USER5> I see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.

<comment><USER7> If culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This really hit home with me. I'm suffering from poor teachers who are bored and don't care and a system that only wants my money.

I also was amazed that this came out a week after I started working on something that can solve this problem and do many of the things he mentioned. It makes me feel like my idea is 110% more valid, and that is exciting.

<comment><USER8> If you don't mind sharing, what are you working on? I'd really love to know. (I understand if you don't want to say though)

<comment><USER9> alternately, assuming it software, is there anything we can do to help? If not, be sure to share the idea again once it reaches that state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this is the most important point:

 _You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers._

The biggest cost is also the one that is often the least efficient. Add to that the power of the teaching union and the system stays in stasis.

I'd like to believe technology can make a big difference, but I'd be satisfied if we're merely able to fill some gaps.

<comment><USER11> Read "Disrupting Class" by Christensen:

<http://tinyurl.com/6a9vmf>

Christensen is a business school guy, but he understands how technology can disrupt well established markets. In the book above he covers technology and education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In one of the comments, Fred writes "I'd like to do to standardized testing what napster did to the music biz".

Napster as a phenomenon was possible because the cost of distributing music had fallen close to zero. But testing is different than music, because the value of test material as a reliable measure of proficiency is lost as it is propogated, while the value of an MP3 is preserved, regardless of how many times it is copied.

After all, test material, unlike songs, is subject to cheating. All it takes is a Google search to compromise the reliability of an assessment.

If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever before.

<comment><USER13> > If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given > area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever > before.

I wonder if it was possible to take a block of text, and automatically generate question&answer pairs from it using some kind of AI software (probably bayesian networks combined with grammar rules).

<comment><USER12> Question and answer pairs would be too difficult to do automatically, or semi- automatically.

Fill in the blanks would be easier, since all you would need to do is isolate a correct answer, and then retrieve wrong answers. And then make an interface that would make it easy to crop or edit the quiz item in a few seconds.....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Resting on the assumption that it's the system that's broken and not the kids?

<comment><USER15> "There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels" -- attributed to both Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant

Whether it's the kids or the system that's "at fault," a system designed to help kids should adapt to help them even if the requirements for that change.

<comment><USER14> you're right but what concerns me is being trigger happy with change while lacking in requirements, which is my impression of the original post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Blaming the educational system without even a mention to family values is the same old ineffective approach we've been taking for years. A good education starts in the family. Good students have a positive attitude toward learning and they understand the importance of an education. Parents have a responsibility to develop these values in their children.

</comment><comment><USER17> Open-source educational resources, e.g. video lectures, semantically organized testing materials, etc. will definitely be ubiquitous in the future. The real sticking point will be in society and individual's perception of the 'legitimacy' of online self-education versus, for instance, a college degree.

<comment><USER18> This is a major deterrent to hackers considering whipping up education 2.0. Who would bother with it when they are busy with their real classes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> people who criticize wikipedia are insecure</comment>


Ask HN: Money as a motivation for keeping an app installed? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a start-up with a bunch of people and wanted feedback on some of the things.
Context: Indian Market
There seems to be no good platform which connects companies/startups to customers for surveys and feedback especially if the company is concerned about feedback from a certain section of users i.e. based on age or location.
My Questions:
1. Would you keep a simple app on your phone/tablet which pushes surveys and feedback to you. It would reward you with some nominal amount of money. ( what would be that amount for you ? )
2. I know these kind of money making apps go viral in their initial phase. What do you guys think of the long term sustainability of such an app. <comment><USER2> 2) This type of apps already exist for quite some time. A quick google for 'do surveys for money' easily comes up with half a dozen apps. My advice is that you focus on the local market and UX and adjust your app accordingly based on feedback as the best path to long term viability is happy users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, the Indian market is still new and no such app has gained traction and user base till now. SwagBucks is one of the leading apps/websites in this area but they are not present in Indian Market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Maybe a similar model to this to cater to the lower end?

www.techexplanation.org/2014/03/make-free-call-from-phone-without- internet.html?m=1</comment>


A fullscreen desktop application resembling a sci-fi computer interface - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui <comment><USER2> Blessed contrib has a pretty cool "retro future" look. I wonder if it's made it's way into any movies:

[https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib](https://github.com/yaronn/blessed- contrib)

There's also "Hollywood Terminal" [https://www.tecmint.com/fake-hollywood- hacker-terminal/](https://www.tecmint.com/fake-hollywood-hacker-terminal/)

<comment><USER3> But... Can it take input from two people hacking on one keyboard? [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ)

<comment><USER2> Painful, but I watched it to the end. Urgh. "DOD Level 9 Encryption" and pretty sure their "fix" was unplugging the monitor.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if the actors realize just how dumb these sorts of scenes are when they're filming them.

<comment><USER5> I suppose they don't realize it.

To be fair, I can only tell when it's computer-related nonsense, but I absolutely cannot tell if (for example) medical dramas such as Grey's Anatomy are at all realistic, barring reasonable artistic licenses to make a scene more dramatic. The surgeons could be doing something as silly as "hacking the same keyboard" and I wouldn't know. The computer-related scenes in medical dramas are dumb enough that I suspect the medical stuff probably also is, but I can't tell.

<comment><USER2> My mother, a nurse, likes House. She says there's plenty wrong, but enough right that it's not too distracting.

<comment><USER6> Wasn't there this trivia that comedy hospital series Scrubs was actually the most technically correct medical show?

<comment><USER7> Yes, but it was mostly accurate in its coverage of life working in a hospital if anything.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anyone is interested, here's a post about the original graphics and interface design from the movie by jt nimoy:

[https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/tron-legacy- effects-...](https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/tron-legacy-effects- blog/)

<comment><USER9> I feel that the 'Tron: Legacy' and 'The Martian' interfaces ar the high water marks in this category ...

Here is a full treatment of the Martian screens/interfaces:

[https://territorystudio.com/project/the- martian/](https://territorystudio.com/project/the-martian/)

<comment><USER10> Someone once made a HAL 9000 screensaver for the Mac.

The author spent an incredible amount of time matching the fonts and animations to the film _2001: A Space Odyssey_.

Unfortunately, he was too good at it, and got a nastygram from the people who own the rights to the film, so it's no longer available.

But I still have my download that I run on my machine, and it's very impressive in a very retro-cool way.

<comment><USER11> Oh man ... I remember the time that I was thinking seriously about doing Plymouth theme of HAL9000. The idea was having a little window showing dmesg at boot, and random HAL900 stuff on the other fake screens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let me just mention [https://www.rainmeter.net/](https://www.rainmeter.net/) for desktop customization.

while i'm just using some of the system metric widges, some people go all in and reskin their complete desktop. unfortunatly windows only.

<comment><USER13> iStatMenus is great on macOS for any types of system stats.

<comment><USER14> And Conky for Linux (and others?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These type of desktop modifications were very popular in Linux in late 90's early 2000's.

My Linux KDE desktop featuring Tron Legacy theme [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKFR6fnxlKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKFR6fnxlKg)

You can also totally overdo the cool effects. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE)

[https://youtu.be/zk0EAEWok94?t=246](https://youtu.be/zk0EAEWok94?t=246)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ftpcHD3378](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ftpcHD3378)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc_i_love_sci_fi_movie_interfaces_so_i/)

<comment><USER17> oh hey, thanks! I'm excited this is something people still remember. I hope people get behind this, it's a lot more accessible and there seem to be a lot of people trying it out.

Studios keep pushing the UIs visually but we need to keep up with the ridiculousness

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I compiled it (takes a while there's a lot of native modules) and ran it on a Surface Go. Here's a video:

[https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/1065615451940667396](https://twitter.com/mikemaccana/status/1065615451940667396)

Short version:

\- Task manager, CPU cores etc works.

\- Touchscreen keyboard works

\- Yeah the globe is the location of your public IP plus socket connections (ie Get-NetTCPConnection / netstat)

\- It's slow, and Ctrl C doesn't work. It's not going to replace Terminus (or ConEmu, if you haven't heard about Terminus) as your main terminal anytime soon. But it is fun.

<comment><USER18> >> Ctrl C doesn't work

Also confirming it works on MacOS, High Sierra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Man, I would just love to see this in action on a MS Surface Studio. I anyone here has one of those, please, please install this and take a photo

<comment><USER20> I have a surface book 2, will test it tonight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks nice, but sad to see "electron" in top processes on screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh man, I love this.

It's so cheesy! I'm glad you didn't cut corners with the UI elements, all of it is accurate and functional.

Super cool. I will have to use it the next time a manager comes to my desk.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just an FYI that the antivirus on my work machine blocked it due to ping sweeping, which I'm guessing is related to the globe. So it's probably harmless but if you don't want to get a call from your IT dept I'd save it for your home machine.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is the "network endpoint" displaying the location of the remote servers there is/was an open connection to? That could be an interesting feature!

One could even imagine opening a website from the globe view.

<comment><USER25> It does does exactly that. Visit Hawaii.edu in a browser and watch a pin pop up in the middle of the Pacific!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Related reading [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14939255)

</comment><comment><USER18> >> If you have a physical keyboard wired to your computer, pressing keys IRL will illuminate the virtual keyboard: please remember to not type any passwords if you are recording your screen!

Maybe just disable that on password fields? :3

<comment><USER27> I feel like this is appropriate here: [https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/)

Or do you have an idea how you would programmatically determine whether input was not echoed due to password, game, or just so that the app can do some pre- processing before displaying the glyph?

<comment><USER18> Oh, I at least simply mean on text fields that are formatted, e.g. in CSS, to be password-type fields.

It may even be possible to write a hook into the Terminal client, so, e.g. when the user is asked for sudo permissions, it temporarily disables the glow on the keyboard.

I'm talking about basic solutions that may not cover all the angles, but can cover the most common points. But heck, it's open-sourced, so I know I could implement something like that myself if I wanted to, so I'll shut up. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks nice, but does it have that super important "hacking" sound effects every Hollywood blockbuster incorporates into their computer UI scenes?

Anytime I hear those sounds the movie is ruined for me.

Sorry, I just had to let it out.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love it, 3 features I'll like to see, and I might hack on when I'm done with my current side projects.

toggle keyboard so it doesn't flash. toggle to hide the keyboard. toggle to retain original shell colors

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm so happy something like this exists. I absolutely love TRON and anything that relates to it. I was really sad that Disney didn't push for a third movie.

<comment><USER31> Has that been canned? The cartoon TV series[1] was amazingly deep considering it was a kids show but that was cancelled after the 1st season because Disney wanted to focus on a 3rd movie. From what I read, those involved with the cartoon weren't happy (and neither was I, for that matter).

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1812523/)

<comment><USER32> I just want to second that TRON: Uprising was really good. Definitely the high water mark of the franchise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's cool but struggled on my laptop (i7-8550U clocked at 3.0GHz).

Glad you finally wrapped up your project! Hope it was fun and informative.

</comment><comment><USER34> Take a look at [http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/](http://tracesof.net/uebersicht/)

Übersicht lets you run system commands and display their output on your desktop in little containers, called widgets. Widgets are written in JavaScript + React's JSX.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is actually, not bad as a UI.

More fleshed and could be a good alternative to the regular shells.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great work! Reminds me of some things I have seen in this subreddit: [https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/](https://old.reddit.com/r/FUI/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting! Reminds me of Enigma. I wonder what ever happened to Enigma after the 2.0 release. Those were the days! I think around 2010 was the peak of Linux desktop customization craze.

</comment><comment><USER38> This would be pretty awesome as a background window now that I think about it! Love this.

</comment><comment><USER39> Aww, why was the title changed? Copyright concerns? That's a real shame if so.

<comment><USER18> The previous title was also inaccurate as I believe it actually labelled it as something like 'TRON OS' \- the issue with that, of course, being, this isn't an OS, but an application.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I wrote the title, it uses 'interface' or 'UI'.

It's inspired by edex as well as Tron:Legacy but I wanted to keep it short.

New title is less relevant and needless meddling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A small part of me has been waiting for this for seven years now. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER41> How about just installing Linux and i3 window manager?

</comment><comment><USER42> interesting - I'm seeing more and more Linux software packaged as AppImage.

Works brilliantly on a single click install.

</comment><comment><USER43> Its funny how to make something look 'advanced' or 'sci-fi' designers tend to spam pointless crap all over the UI.

</comment><comment><USER44> those nested setTimeout fn calls are hard to read. I would extract their bodies.

</comment><comment><USER45> not unlike my current setting of several tiled xterms with black background :}

</comment><comment><USER46> love this. super cool design

</comment><comment><USER47> Off topic, but I think it's the first time I see emojis in commit messages. Nice to see that it works, but I don't know how to feel about it.

<comment><USER38> With recent(-ish) support for color emoji in Gnome terminal, where I work has fully embraced emoji driven development.

Kidding aside, it's fine but on older terminals (read: default terminal in ubuntu 16.04) they cause display issues, so they fit a bit better in the README.

<comment><USER48> > emoji ... cause display issues

Well, that gave me a stupid idea.

[https://github.com/lloeki/he_comes](https://github.com/lloeki/he_comes)

Whatever.</comment></comment></comment>


The Cowboy of the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_of_the_nsa_keith_alexander

<comment><USER2> This is what bothers me the most:

 _While it 's a given that the NSA cannot monitor the entire Internet on its own and that it needs intelligence from companies, Alexander has questioned whether companies have the capacity to protect themselves. "What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks," he said recently at a security conference in Canada. "I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in."_</comment>


The Apple Watch's cure for notification overload? More notifications - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2908827/opensource-subnet/the-apple-watchs-cure-for-notification-overload-more-notifications.html?nsdr=true

<comment><AUTHOR> Smartwatches targeted at fixing people's compulsive reactions to smartphone notifications only make the problem worse.

After the user has been buzzed and buzzed by the Apple Watch, alerting of yet one more notification, the only choice is to turn off all notifications except those from which the user is willing to accept constant interruptions.</comment>


Ask HN: Did LinkedIn started selling user emails last month? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed in the past few weeks, I started getting automated emails from random job platforms and recruiters like "We've noticed your profile on LinkedIn and registered you on our (competing) website etc...".
What makes these odd is that the email is sent straight to my personal email. It's not going through LinkedIn to a random generated email like it used to.
However the personal email is not part of the public profile, they shouldn't have been able to scrape it in the first place.
That leaves only two explanations. Either LinkedIn started selling user personal emails away or company found a way to get private info from profiles? <comment><USER2> I advertise a lot on LinkedIn- they aren't selling your email address (at least not that I've seen).

It wouldn't be in their financial interest to do so. Their goal is to get you to do outreach on their platform, which requires use of credits (which aren't cheap). Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

So, safe to say it's some other way they are getting your address.

<comment><USER3> > Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

And selling them without permission would also probably land them the largest fine in the history of data protection law.

'I saw you on LinkedIn' is a decent intro for a spammer even if it isn't true, and a lot of email addresses are linkable to LinkedIn profiles vs email harvesting tools, including both emails you've actually put on LinkedIn and emails elsewhere on the internet or in easily-guessable email@example.com formats.

<comment><USER2> There are now a ton of websites where you can buy email addresses, like hunter.io (and many others). Getting emails isn't all that challenging these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I noticed I got one the other day. It was an aliased email tied only to LinkedIn.

I was wondering the same thing, especially since I've since changed the email since the 2012 breach.

</comment><comment><USER5> Or the recruiter came to your profile, saw your last position and tried contacting you at firstname.lastname@example.com. It's been happening to me a lot since November, when I switched jobs and got an email address just like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Or your email address is in another mailing list that was sold by another company.

That or you're still using the same email address that was disclosed in the 2012 data breach that LinkedIn suffered... which is easily obtainable.

</comment><comment> Joe-CFOHub Have you tried hunter.io and seeing if your email can be scraped with tools like that?</comment>


Free Online Courses from Top Universities - happy-go-lucky http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses <comment><AUTHOR> [https://edx.org](https://edx.org)

[https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm](https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)

[https://oli.cmu.edu/](https://oli.cmu.edu/)

[https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning- initiative](https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative)

[https://online.stanford.edu/courses](https://online.stanford.edu/courses) (This one is kind of but not entirely just an edX front-end now.)

Berkeley used to have a treasure trove of free lectures, but then they got sued because they didn't have subtitles, and so took them down. lbry archived most of them:

[https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures- rescued](https://lbry.com/news/20000-illegal-college-lectures-rescued)

[https://oyc.yale.edu/](https://oyc.yale.edu/)

[https://www.online.caltech.edu/](https://www.online.caltech.edu/)

[https://ocw.jhsph.edu/](https://ocw.jhsph.edu/)

<comment><USER2> You missed Coursera and Udacity

I know there are dozens more but I think of Coursera - Udacity - EdX as the big 3.

<comment><USER3> Does Udacity even have free courses anymore? When looking at the website, I see only nano degrees for which one has to pay. If they still offer the free courses, they've buried them quite effectively under all their non-free stuff.

(Also, I thought the quality of the Udacity courses was mixed - there was one on robotics that had quite nice content, but horrible Python implementations one had to work with.)

<comment><USER2> yes they do, and you can filter by the free courses in their engine:

[https://www.udacity.com/courses/all](https://www.udacity.com/courses/all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We recently imported around 10,000 free MOOCs and categorized them with topics at [https://learnawesome.org/](https://learnawesome.org/)

<comment><USER5> Looks interesting. You may want to make the "Browse by Topic" view the default, instead of the blank grey screen.

I found a dead course link: [https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7b...](https://learnawesome.org/items/e03a9b40-d16c-424b-98a0-55c7bc177b5b-numerical- methods-finite-difference-approach)

And a course duplicated 3 times on [https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d0...](https://learnawesome.org/topics/8ae28f64-31d9-448f-9d94-b9d028000898-numerical- computing): Computers, Waves, Simulations: A Practical Introduction to Numerical Methods using Python

<comment><USER4> Thank you. Fixed all of this. We do have an open issue for this: [https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/118](https://github.com/learn- awesome/learn/issues/118)

Hopefully, some fellow HNers might find this an interesting project to hack on and make it better. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow that's a nice list! It would be even nicer to have some clear indicator for each course whether it is free as in beer, or free as in freedom (openly licensed and downloadable).

For example all the iTunes audio courses say "This course material is only available in the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad" so limited as to whom can access.

<comment><USER7> That some of these courses are only available over iTunes really makes me wonder what the institutions that make this content available only over iTunes are thinking.

Surely they realize that not everyone uses iTunes, and putting the content in a walled garden would not make it as available as putting it in a downloadable, open format on archive.org? Or do they just not care?

<comment><USER8> You are absolutely right. There is far more content on YouTube that should really go on archive.org.

Here is an unfortunate example from not too long ago. [http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw](http://aduni.org/courses/sicp/index.php?view=cw)

I don't think these videos can be played any more.

<comment><USER5> Well the video plays for me with SMPlayer, but not the audio. Some .rm files play audio fine. The video quality of these is pretty low though, so hopefully they have a higher resolution master to work from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tell me uni won't be different in 20 years. Why would we push our kids to maximise test scores to get a high score on their last year of secondary school (like internet points) instead of teaching them to learn anything? Food for thought and something I have been struggling with lately

<comment><USER10> I fully agree and something that I have been internally debating for around a year now. My son will (potentially) be going to University in two years, but I have heard, from friends, that the amount of contact hours is dramatically reducing. One friend has a son on a 'foundation' course and he has 4 hours of teaching a week. Another, doing a full-time business degree has 9 hours. My own opinion is that with the advances in technology, the old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it. That, coupled with nearly 50% of school leavers going to university now in the UK, makes me feel that the quality is being eroded.

Unfortunately, my concern is that if my son doesn't follow the status quo then that will leave him at a disadvantage in the job market. As an employer myself though, I interview a huge number of people who have degrees and who aren't really that capable, so it is very difficult to determine quality.

<comment><USER11> "The old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it."

I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at university?

<comment><USER12> I've attended seven colleges/universities over 40 years, big and small, public and private, in-person and online.

In all in-person large schools, lecture to passive students runs 90% of classes. The essential problem is, any class with more than about 30 students is too big to enable interaction from students. That means only maybe 10% of senior / grad classes even _might_ break the mold of "shut up and sit there while I talk".

In-person small colleges have it better. Few courses there exceed 50 students. But more and more courses there are taught by journeyman profs, which causes instructional quality to vary from year to year.

However MOOCs aren't necessarily any better. Due to their remote delivery and being recorded, _all_ human contact is lost aside from a few text messages to TAs (if you pay). In many, even grading is often automated.

In short, I agree with the sentiment that post-secondary education MUST change. But as they stand now, MOOCs are not the answer. (Other than significantly reducing tuition, which is no small achievement of course.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great list, well done! I can recommend Andrew Ng for everything on AI subject related. His video "Artificial Intelligence - Machine Learning" is nice introduction to Machine Learning.

</comment><comment><USER14> edx.org is just awesome. When I decided to learn programming I found on it the CS50X course from Harvard, which gave me (4 years ago) a great foundation which then allowed me shortly after to land my first job as dev. I will be always grateful for the quality free content they put online.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was excited to see a class on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy", though i see it's just an archive of the course material -- lectures and readings.

Lectures and readings are great, but it's a far cry from learning what the material really means without the discussion section. MOOCs are good for learning facts-and-figures type things, and it's an OK way to learn the tools of the trade (including the trade of programming). But the thing that makes a top university really "top" is the interaction, challenging your thinking and learning to read and understand closely, not just study a craft.

I'm very excited by what they're doing at Signum University[1], which is working on college-level classes without the overhead of a campus. It's not free; you can't really teach an in-depth education for free. But the direction it's going, you'll be able to get all the things that we prize about a four- year college (the things that many employers consider more valuable than somebody who studied at a place like Devry).

[1] [https://signumuniversity.org/](https://signumuniversity.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a date of publication for this post and updates? This list may seem comprehensive to an outsider but it could be a drop in the bucket since the list was last updated-- possibly years ago.

I recommend checking out class-central.com, one of the first MOOC aggregators, for an updated collection.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there some organization that fact checks these online courses, so that we can know which contain actually valid, true information and which are just some professor's opinion on the subject?

<comment><USER18> > just some professor's opinion

A professor who is, say, in an economics department is a person whose opinions on economics have some value. Of course people build up different reputations over time so YMMV, but I'm personally interested in reflecting on what Schiller has to say about the subject.

<comment><USER17> "If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

George Bernard Shaw

Shiller is well known, but many of the courses in economics are by professors that are not well known from lesser universities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The majority of classes for Georgia Tech's computer science Masters degree are available online for free on Udacity. I highly recommend the ML and RL courses, as well as the CV course.

<comment><USER20> +1

It's the top 7th ranked CS program in the world too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone have a favorite data structures and algorithms course?

<comment><USER22> I'm new to data structures and algorithms. Saw this fairly new course from UCSD+HSE mentioned in one of the comments here. I'm finding it pretty interesting.

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures- alg...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's also Academic Earth.</comment>


Prosecutor posts as accused killer's fake girlfriend on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/prosecutor-posts-as-accused-killers-girlfriend-on-facebook-gets-fired/ <comment><USER3> What we're seeing here is the crux of the problem with allowing police (and prosecutors) to lie to a person in order to obtain a confession.

It's unethical.

And once you teach this bastardized ethics to police (and prosecutors), they now think LYING is a perfectly acceptable means to an end.

And then you see crap like this.

<comment><USER4> When I was in HS and I learned that police could lie I was floored. Obviously it is unethical, but I think it causes ethics rot: I think the scariest thing about telling police that it is OK to lie is that it sets up the standard that normal rules social of social conduct don't apply to them, and what are laws but very formal rules social of social conduct...

In this case I am impressed with the Cleveland County Prosecutor for letting this guy go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really hard to judge without knowing the rest of the case. Lying to suspects isn't unethical. Intruding into a suspect's personal life by potentially destroying relationships is a much tougher proposition.

Imagine the situation where the man is actually innocent, and his girlfriend(s) go berserk on him because of the ruse.

<comment><USER6> It's pretty disturbing to read things like this:

 _" Unless I could break this guy's alibi a murderer might be walking on the street. There was such a small window of opportunity, I had to act fast."_

The guy has obviously decided that this man is a murderer, and needs to be convicted, and thus it's okay to take "extreme" measures to break an alibi.

Sometimes this results in guilty people being convicted, but it also results in wrongful convictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"... assistant county prosecutor Kevin Filiatraut discovered the Facebook transcripts in the file and questioned Brockler about them."_

And if he hadn't put the transcripts in the file, no-one may ever have known.

</comment><comment><USER8> Although the outcome here seems good the opposite could have very easily been the case. There's a reason why "due process" is treated as a sacred principle in democratic countries. From Wikipedia:

When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due-process violation, which offends against the rule of law. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process_of_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process_of_law))

<comment><USER9> For police to lie to a suspect - or anybody else - is not against the law and AFAIK does not violate "due process". Giving false testimony however - <USER2> two girlfriends were about to do - is a crime, called perjury. So the prosecutor actually prevented two crimes from being committed.

<comment><USER7> _" So the prosecutor actually prevented two crimes from being committed."_

Do we _really_ know that? It caused the women to "go crazy", perhaps crazy enough to want to hurt the boyfriend, which they could do by withdrawing their alibi.

We simply can't know from the info in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The guy who wrote that blog item apparently doesn't know what county Cleveland is in. I suggest reading the cleveland.com material. I wonder why people link to the blog instead of the actual story, it's not behind a paywall.

[http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/06/cuyahoga_co...](http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/06/cuyahoga_county_prosecutor_fir.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't see the problem here. He did not intimidate, falsify evidence, or otherwise violate due process.

His job is (was) to uphold the law, not his boss' moral code.

<comment><USER12> It sounds to me as if what he did could be considered witness intimidation. Lawyers are considered to be officers of the court, and are held to a higher ethical standard than police officers, who are allowed to use deception to gather evidence.

This prosecutor is probably lucky that the only thing that happened to him was that he got fired. He could just as easily have been referred to the Bar Association for sanctions, including disbarment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see a lot of difference between this and any police or government sting operation.</comment>


PopSockets turned a simple lifehack into $169M in revenue - <AUTHOR> https://jilt.com/upsell/popsockets-growth/ <comment><USER2> Odd. Never seen anyone using this in the wild. Is it just convention tchotchke fodder?

<comment><USER3> When I went back to Canada to visit my family at Christmas, my neice's friend (14 years old) had one. Definitely not a techie, or from a techie family. I thought it was pretty clever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never seen this one before. The folding rings that acts as stand and the magnets are more common

</comment><comment><USER5> Seen a couple of my friends and family with these, never really thought about where they came from though, quite interesting to see how big it is

</comment><comment><USER6> >PopSockets is currently moving over 10 million products a month, with a unit price of just $10.

10 million units per month at $10/unit? I call bullshit. That would put them at $1,200,000,000 per year.

I've seen them around, but maybe 1 per 1000 people. Amazingly successful, but someone screwed up the numbers.

<comment><USER7> Maybe... but consider my counter-anecdotes 1) almost everyone uses them: I am a mid 30s professional and I'd say 1 out of every 2 people I work with has one - judges, law clerks, attorneys, judicial assistants, clients, all of their children... and 2) I see them all the time for promotions, from radio stations to non-profits giving them away at fairs, and bands both big and small selling them at shows. So those are two segments that are buying huge amounts of product in bulk. I doubt it will last, and would not be surprised if the numbers are inflated a bit, but right now they are hugely popular. Heck, my State Bar Associaiton even had dozens at a CLE recently, and I went to an Indian Child Welfare Act Conference 2 months ago and the tribes had stacks of them and were giving them out for free as well. It is _the_ new hot advertisement/brand placement(?) avenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm 30 and I'd say 50% of my friends use one. They're super convenient.

-sent from my iPhone SE with indents in my fingers

<comment><USER9> I see people using them all the time. I tried with my current phone but I took it off once I realized it broke my wireless charging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I never saw a use for it, but I'm still an iPhone SE user. Kids and adults in my area use them though.</comment>


The robots of CERN - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-robots-of-cern <comment><USER2> Direct link to the video displaying TIM, the "Train Inspection Monorail". Fascinating!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxKRW1Z2lWo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxKRW1Z2lWo)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tech inspecting tech. Nice. Too bad its vision doesn't look like the Terminator's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvRb9jZ9wFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvRb9jZ9wFk)

<comment><USER4> On the upside this one won't steal your clothing and your motorcycle.

<comment><USER5> Nor your boots! :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pastel, build better websites with sticky-note feedback - <AUTHOR> https://usepastel.com <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a free alternative, Genius has a web annotator service [0], available either through their site or self-hosted. Registration is required to make annotations, though.

[0]: [https://genius.com/web-annotator](https://genius.com/web-annotator)

<comment><USER3> Genius is definitely a great way to annotate and share text on the web. Our tool is built with web creators in mind (think freelance web developers, web designers, agencies, startups etc), and is more optimized for that use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really cool idea!

However, I don't think this works very well on websites where you have to interact to get to other pages.

I just went to Google, searched something, and left a comment on one of the results, but I couldn't view the comment afterwards.

I can imagine many websites that this could be a problem for, such as an authenticated experience or a wizard where the step isn't captured in the URL explicitly.

But I'll keep this in mind for getting feedback on static pages for sure!

<comment><USER3> Hey thanks! One of the founders of Pastel here. Re: viewing comments on apps with complex state, it's something we've thought a lot about, and it's tough. Our current solution is to take a screenshot and attach it to every comment so that you can view the application state as it was when the comment was left. Not necessarily ideal though. Do you have thoughts on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool! Almost like Mixpanel in that any event can be caught, only this is for tagging notes on sites. Well done, it looks very promising. Does it work on full JS Single Page Applications?

<comment><USER3> Thank you - I love the comparison! To your question, Pastel does work on JS SPAs. I'm actually using it currently on a React SPA (we like to dogfood our product internally).

<comment><USER5> Hot diggity that's awesome dude. Was it hard to make? You strike me as ninja- on-the-stratosphere with something like this

<comment><USER3> Haha thank you! Honestly yes it has been, and continues to be a tough product to build. The first proof-of-concept iteration was not bad, but getting the thing working correctly in most browsers has been difficult. We've learned a ton about browser internals along the way though, and it's been a lot of fun. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love it. The design is beautiful and the tool makes perfect sense. Pricing seems a tiny bit prohibitive to me seeing as there are free alternatives.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! We're actually exploring creating a free tier with a link creation restriction. Additionally, we have a 50% discount for students, teachers and non-profits on our paid plans.</comment></comment>


The perfect man is a geek with facial stubble... - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1251929/The-perfect-man-geek-facial-stubble--womens-secret-turn-ons-revealed.html

<comment><USER2> Now all I need to do is reconcile all this with all the other contradictory stuff about what women find appealing and I'll be rolling.</comment>


Connect to free public WiFi wherever you are with WiFire. Now available on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getwifireapp.com/wifire-is-coming-soon-on-ios-sign-up-as-a-beta-tester-and-earn-wi-points/ <comment><USER2> So, that is either "now available on iOS" as the title suggests or a call for beta testers (as the web page suggests) or a crude way to collect mail addresses (because the "beta signup" really leads to a waiting list form).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a call for beta testers and we'd like to hear what users worldwide have to say about WiFire. We will send you a TestFlight invite once we have your email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> WiFire uses the new iOS 9 NEHotspotHelper APIs so it's a very slick experience right from the Wi-Fi settings screen on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting! How does this work exactly?</comment>


An Open Love Letter to Our PC Fans - <AUTHOR> http://www.ironhidegames.com/post.php?id=103

<comment><USER2> I like the _Kingdom Rush_ games a lot, and wish Ironhide Games nothing but further success.

That being said, this letter is cloying. A letter where you tell someone you care about that you don't have it in you to be with them isn't a love letter, it's a "Dear John" letter ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_John_letter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_John_letter)). For the recipient, those two types of letter are very different!

It would have been 100% fine to just say "look, it would take a huge effort to bring Origins to PC, and we don't have the money or the energy for that." There's no need to dress it up in shiny happy "we love PC!" platitudes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard this a lot in the games industry -- _" For each version, the programming was done from zero. We can't stress this enough."_

That seems so wasteful and challenging, anyone from the industry care to comment on how a studio would get itself into a situation of effectively zero reuse of their code?

<comment><USER4> I'm going to preface this post with a note that, yes, there are surely good developers in game development, this is not a universal thing, etcetera etcetera.

Ass properly covered, I'll be real: I'm never surprised to see this because "code reuse" is generally the sign of reasonably advanced developers and I don't know a single person in game development I would hire for a role outside of it. It's not just NIH--that's a problem but one slowly going away. It's more just a fundamental lack of understanding of software engineering and building Good Code. As time goes on I've seen gamedev acquaintances poorly reinvent most of the wheels that the rest of the world takes for granted--even something as simple as serialization for save data and network transport (but no schematic validation, because "schemas suck") was trumpeted to me as this Big Crazy Great Thing. Which contextually it may be, but I kind of feel like the state of the art for stuff not involving pointer munging is about a decade behind everybody else.

So, code reuse? Gotta make good code first.

<comment><USER5> I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough.

I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in general to be full mobile gaming company. Before it was quite standard Agile style company: Scrum, code reviews, TDD, cross-functional teams (front end devs knew how servers works in general), focus on quality over quantity (one dev, rotated weekly or biweekly, focusing on fixing bugs), separate concerns.

After going full game-oriented, company hired couple of people from gaming industry into higher positions - tech leads, project managers etc. Over couple of months, people with many years of experience in those big companies dismantled what was standard for me, using combination of two arguments:

\- big names don't do it, so it must be wrong \- it's a waste of time

Before I quit, there were no longer code reviews (waste of time), all testing was to be handled by QA team (waste of valuable dev time), ship with issues (waste of time to fix minor bugs when can add features), single system responsibility (one dev to write code for client server protocols, one dev for UI, one dev for assets etc, that's gow big names do it).

At one of the last talks with "industry veteran", when I mentioned those things - and how negative, in my opinion, those changes are, his response was "so you are saying that whole gaming industry dev practice is wrong". At that point I thought he's right and I sound full of crap, now I believe that yes, AAA companies are simply bad development practises shops.

My guess as to why is because AAA is very strongly driven by deadlines and marketing, where you cannot simply delay release (Christmas shopping spree is coming). This idea I saw articulated on HN first and I agree with it.

<comment><USER6> If the AAA practices had been so bad then, by now, we had Agile-TDD-etc shops taking their lunch and driving them out of business. As of now there is just one studio practicing Agile, Blizzard. If it is not known, Blizzard is also famous for incredibly long projects and missing deadlines. I had personally observed collapse of two Agile AAA studios, who, while doing pretty well by the industry standards, did not have the super-profitable titles to hold them up during 5+ years of development cycle. So I believe we have the AAA practices not because game programmers are stupid but because studios that don't use them are not around for long.

<comment><USER5> I was not implying that game programmers are stupid, sorry. I meant that they way it was told in the company how AAA do it sounded similar to what I learned about how big companies done it 10 or something years ago. Coming from agile workplace, I think there were things that could have been kept in place to improve quality of life for developers and art teams. I'm not sure if I can express what I mean correctly. For example, why the dreaded "crunch time" in gaming is treated as norm, while in modern web/mobile shops its believed that something like this is going to result in worse quality over time?

I could see arguing here with myself that AAA games are usually "ship and forget", with some bugfixes only. Maybe because company I was working in was not AAA, but small (by industry standards) f2p mobile shop, where applying AAA ideas is not that great (in my opinion). I mean that's where your product is more along lines of web apps - you are going to constantly add content, update code base, refine features, so focusing on quality in long term is better. This, thought, I was not able to articulate clearly and properly to AAA veterans.

I feel like not all ideas from current practises can be applied to big gaming studios, but saying that I believe it can be improved. This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Why two companies you mentioned failed? I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile, maybe their games were just not that good, or IP was boring? Still you sound like you have more experience than me here, I'm trying to wrap my head around whole AAA industry thing. I'm ranting about it so much because making games was way more entertaining than web/mobile, but the industry is so poisonous for pure developers that I had to quit to regain my sanity :)

<comment><USER6> I am not sure people outside game industry do not crunch. A brief search shows that the term existed long before the modern game industry or any game industry at all. Same goes for "overtime" \- the term is even codified in laws. I assure you nobody treats crunch as a normal mode: even people who are forcing unnecessary crunch understand that it's something unordinary and often do it just because it is not something normal (to show how good they are at management, to extort a bigger budget, to undermine their political rivals etc).

>This may need time and risk that companies that are big enough to be called AAA are not willing to take.

Infinity Ward, the original home of $1B+ games, had about 100 people at the time of the split from ATVI and founding Respawn. It's about the same size now as well as the Respawn. Media Molecule is just a few dozens. Size does not make a AAA studio.

And you don't even need to show the best practices right at the AAA level - start small and if it's any good people will copy you or, at least, you should be able to grow yourself.

>Why two companies you mentioned failed? >I think we can assume there might be more reasons to that than only being Agile

Indeed, it would be naive to blame Agile on destroying multi-million businesses. Agile seems to be just a symptom. It could be that the management sees that the development process is failing and tries to improve it with a well advertised technique, for example. Or that some Agile enthusiast gets too much power due to the weakened culture. What I was trying to say is that very few AAA studios practice it now and the ones that did in the past are not in the business any more.

Also, there is no single AAA development way. For example, Valve's practices are very different from Bungie's, which are different from the R*, which are different from ATVI's COD teams etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they settled on Unity, why not make a PC version? It shouldn't involve ground-up rebuilding of everything. In fact, they've already targeted the most restrictive environment, so it's relatively downhill to produce. They could easily get it on to the Playstation and Xbox platforms as well.

<comment><USER8> _> If they settled on Unity, why not make a PC version?_

I guess they are too exhausted at this point. Even with Unity there are bugs specific to each platform and supporting that takes time.

<comment><USER9> Not really. Going from Mobile back to PC is very very easy (PC to Mobile is another story). If your game already works on mobile, it will 99.9% work on PC. The amount of platform specific Unity bugs is actually quite small, in my experience. Especially with 2D games that aren't using crazy shaders (in my experience, most of the platform specific bugs are GPU shader crashes, especially on Android. And again, that's only on Android. PC has far less buggy GPU drivers than Android).

You might need to adjust some screens so they work better with a mouse instead of with taps, but this game doesn't use multi-touch or anything that can't be done with a mouse so I don't see an issue with that.

You also need to write platform specific IAP and notification code, but again, going to desktop you won't have notifications, and writing platform specific IAP code is not that big of a deal, especially compared to porting your entire game.

Short story is, these guys chose their engine very poorly. They had already experienced cross platform issues in the past, and seems like they just decided to ignore them until it was too late.

I have no sympathy.

<comment><USER8> I found a bug in Unity which happens on Linux on XFS partitions larger than 1 TB. Such kind of bugs are clearly system specific and hard to debug / support unless you have that configuration set up. Responsible developers take obligation to support their product. If someone intends to produce something and forget about their users - that's close to garbage.

In my case I bought one game and was hit by this bug. I contacted developers with strace data and got no response. Then I contacted Unity developers and they actually got back to me and confirmed that it's indeed the case with large XFS partitions (they had to set up that test case to verify it). They produced a custom build of Unity player of the same version with patch backported, and I was able to run the game.

Now, those game developers obviously don't care about supporting such cases, yet they sell the Linux version. I don't appreciate it on one hand, on the other hand may be it's better than not having that version at all. But I can see a point of some being exhausted and trying to avoid bug reports for systems that they can't properly support.

<comment><USER9> That's unfortunate that the game developers did not get back to you. They should have at least given you a response. There is no excuse for that.

The proper response from a Unity game developer who wants to sell a Linux version but not support it is pretty simple- just offer refunds for anyone who has problems. 0 work and problem solved.

Also, good Unity developers know there are platform specific issues (and how to solve them). I'm not saying platform specific bugs don't exist. They're just rare. When they happen, post on the Unity forums or Unity Answers site. Unity employees _will_ read it, and get back to you. The support is great. This is why you use Unity. Let Unity do this work for you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like a lesson in avoiding non portable technologies. Something like SDL + OpenGL could help preventing a lot of such problems.

</comment><comment><USER10> I do wonder why more people don't make use of a C physics engine (portable everywhere, including browsers via asm.js), and code the logic in a higher level language which can compile down to C (like Python via Cython.)

I guess the problem is that you need different rendering code? OpenGL works on PC and mobile, but you'd need to mock it out for WebGL. Has someone already done this for asm.js?

Presumably there is some other huge hole in my thinking...

<comment><USER11> That is the goal of Haxe[1] I've always thought it is a good idea. That may be under appreciated.

[1]: [http://haxe.org/](http://haxe.org/)

<comment><USER12> Haxe looks really cool, but the last time I looked at it, the documentation left a lot to be desired (most of it assumed familiarity with the Flash drawing APIs).

It does look like the situation has improved since then, but I'm guessing that documentation is a big reason for Haxe being so underappreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do these games have a large following? I tried to play one once and found it to be a pretty typical "You've played a few levels, now you have to pay to win."

<comment><USER14> Aren't these the guys advertising during NFL games? I hope they have a large following.

<comment><USER15> with kate upton? Thats a totally different company/game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I looked into 2D engines for iOS a couple of years ago and I remember reading on one of their websites that I shouldn't worry about porting to other platforms before the game has reached popularity. The context was probably Android and not PC, but still, this seems to be exactly what was going wrong here. If they would have chosen Unity (or any other cross-platform engine for that matter, e.g., Cocos2D-X) over Cocos2D-iPhone, there would be a PC version today.

This seems to be a bit of a recurring thing where we evaluate technologies wrong very early and punish ourselves in the long run. The fact that Twitter once was a Rails app comes to mind.

I can't recommend enough to write software for the best case scenario. You shouldn't have to replace your entire toolchain once the thing you dreamt about happening actually happens.

<comment><USER17> I kind of agree with their original thought, if the game can't succeed on one large platform then being portable is irrelevant. If it does succeed then porting is an additional cost but it's a cost you can weigh up and choose to do or not do, you have the choice. That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Game co's often hire out the porting, so they can still exploit a platform without splitting their focus. Aspyr has made a living porting popular games to the mac.

<comment><USER19> Aspyr also do a lot of the recent Linux ports. I love Aspyr!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Key line that sticks out:

> _In three years we had made five versions of our two games. For each > version, the programming was done from zero._

<comment><USER20> <strikethrough>Well, yes. Because mobile is such a walled garden of anticompetitive language and platform wars, it's hard to write portable applications. They eventually came round to Unity, which has a cost, but does let you deliver to all the platforms.</strikethrough>

Besides, it's only 2D tower defence. The artwork probably took longer than the game, and at least that's portable.

Then there's the question of which platform is most profitable. I've heard that the profitability order is iOS > Android > Web > PC for this kind of game. Maybe others have experience of this.

Edit: well, I guess there's no quicker way to get correct information than to post incorrect information!

<comment><USER21> C works just fine on all of the (non-web) platforms you mentioned. It might be a little long in the tooth for some, but it still gets the job done.

In my spare time by myself in the last 4 years I have built a complete cross platform engine from scratch for Desktop and Mobile. If one person can do it their spare time in 4 years, a couple of programmers working full time could do it a lot more quickly (I also deliberately reinvented the wheel in a lot of places I did not need to).

<comment><USER22> We have a game written in C++ that compiles to, and runs on Wii/WiiU/PS3/PS4/X360/XOne. Every one of those uses a different compiler, but all build from one IDE(VS2012). But then it was built by close to a hundred people,so it's not really the same.

<comment><USER21> Oh yeah, of course there are big engines that also do that (with much more platform support), I was just using my own experience as an example to show that you don't even need a huge team supporting it. I remember back in the day working on a PC/Wii/X360/PS3 engine, that was fun but definitely a lot more effort.

I develop with GCC rather than VS, but I have much the same setup with a single makefile that can build for different targets instantly, e.g.

> make (for PC) > make android (builds and deploys to a connected android > device)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't think that's the whole story. Most likely the numbers just don't add up for IAP-less Steam versions. Kingdom Rush Steam sells for $9.99 (and was available for less if you pre-ordered). I don't know about Origins, but Frontiers has obscene IAP price-wise. Purchasing all heroes costs $40 or so, plus there is always the opportunity to buy gems for items which make it easier to progress. (Gems also accumulate as you beat levels). In fairness, this is all optional and you can beat the game without it. They kept adding increasingly difficult post-game levels though, which no doubt have tempted many to buy stronger heroes.

PS. I think they should fix the bugs in KR Steam first anyway, which was pretty much abandoned.

<comment><USER24> I've completed everything in Frontiers, mostly through Origins. It's a lot of fun (after settlers, my most favorite iPad game) - and it never even occurred to me to do an IAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Meh. I always assumed mobile game companies ported to PCs just to squeeze more product out of their creation. You might as well complain about your favorite Game Boy game not being ported to the SNES (with 4 shades of olive green graphics).

<comment><USER26> Bad example.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I think it's sad that PC support is finished I certainly get their point about feeling exhausted.

On the other hand, the use of bold and non-bold was driving me nuts. I feel it's up to the reader to decide what is important in the text, not the making of certain sections of bold, it was hard for me to read.

After awhile, as I wanted to read the whole thing, I copied into a text editor to read.

<comment><USER28> They did not say that they are finished supporting the PC, just that there won't be a PC port of one specific game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Weird. They should be sitting now on a wealth of experience to allow them to write the next version in a more-or-less portable fashion.

My guess would be that the actual reason might be the lack of reliable distribution channels and/or rampant piracy. Though there _is_ Steam, which seems to work just fine for a lot of game devs...

<comment><USER30> "Though there is Steam"

Google for steam tower defense

click steam web page link

"Showing 1-10 of 101 results"

Trying to be the 102nd competitor. That's tough. I can see the disinterest. Can you split a very old market 102 ways while making a profit? Frankly, probably not.

<comment><USER24> Kingdom Rush is totally separate calibre of Game. I've played probably 20-30 Tower Defense games, and KR keeps you coming back because of the incredible attention to quality, details, balanced game play, etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is why I am such a advocate of Unity, I know it didn't work out for them, but if you stage it right you can easily port to about anything worth porting to. I tend to start out with Desktop since it has the highest curve for quality and performance, and go from there.

<comment><USER32> The great thing is that there are a _ton_ of good cross-platform options available now, not just Unity. From commercial alternatives like UE4 to solid open-source libraries like SDL2, or just using OpenGL ES.

If you have even the slightest inclination to release on multiple platforms, you should be building it as cross-platform from the beginning. There are very few reasons not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> These guys need to really study the recent information put out from Microsoft about how they make Office for as many platforms as they do.

I think a lot could be done to make the core of the game more portable. It's just not being done for one reason or another.

<comment><USER34> Well, you could start by linking to it yourself.

<comment><USER33> Sorry, here is the discussion of the video:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678936)

<comment><USER34> Thanks, I missed this, and it sounded interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've never played Kingdom Rush, et al, but I've read reviews of some games that were ported to the PC and the keyboard / mouse control were almost unplayable.

Or they highly recommend you play with a gamepad.

</comment><comment><USER36> Doesn't Blue Stacks work fine for Android emulation on PC?

BTW IGN is giving away Kingdom Rush Frontiers promo codes for iOS, limited availability.

</comment><comment><USER37> QOTD: What are we going to do for the next year? Eat pizza until we learn to speak Italian by osmosis?

</comment><comment><USER38> To me this post reads as "We were really surprised by our success and have been running in circles." They've foolishly made a ton of versions instead of learning how to write cross-platform or at the very least how to port from the beginning. Crazy.

</comment><comment><USER39> This seems potentially very shortsighted, as difficult as it must be to measure exactly how much of their success on mobile was due to the free advertising on Armor Games, in and out of game.

<comment><USER40> As an anecdotal data point, I own the last few versions of the Kingdom Rush game on iOS, and I'd never even realized that they had a flash version until I read this post.

<comment><USER39> Do you recall how you found the first version that you purchased? What I'm wondering is if the free marketing on sites like Armor Games was a key part of the initial push to be discoverable on the app store rankings. Of course, the existing mobile user base may all the captive audience they need to accomplish that at this point.

<comment><USER40> This was a few years ago at this point, so my memory is fuzzy. I have a sense that I may have seen someone reviewing it (the iOS app specifically) and decided that it sounded appealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like how there are commenters who feel entitled to a PC version.

</comment><comment><USER42> Thumbs down. Those answers were disingenuous:

> Should we make a PC version? Absolutely!

cool.

> Can we make it? Nope.

should have been Yes.

> Are we focusing solely on mobile from now on? Not at all.

Nice misdirection. The question should have been:

> Did we decide to focus solely on mobile? Yes.

Then the rest of the article explaining why.

<comment><USER9> 100% Agreed. They had already been bitten by cross platform issues in the past, and instead of deciding to address them and choose a cross platform game engine for their new game, they just ignored them.

Short story is, they chose their engine poorly, and are now making excuses. Very disingenuous blog post.</comment></comment>


Rogue Wave acquires Zend - <AUTHOR> http://www.zend.com/en/resources/news-and-events/newsroom/press/3683_rogue-wave-software-acquires-enterprise-php-leader-zend-acquisition-broadens-enterprise-strength-across-top-five-development-languages <comment><USER2> I didn't realize Rogue Wave still existed, since I haven't heard of anything they've done since their C++ STL implementation that was once popular. Looks like they've been on a bit of an acquisition spree with about one per year since 2009.

This probably won't have a huge effect on PHP since it's much less Zend- dominated than it once was.

<comment><USER3> I used the Rogue Wave pre-STL C++ libraries.

I developed a poorly-performing NoSQL-like DB library using their BTree, serializer/deserializer, file-interface, and collection library components. Records had a primary index (for storage order), multiple indices, arbitrary binary data payload, arbitrary-sized values in index "columns". It worked reliably but there were file fragmentation issues and delays during "vacuum" operations. This was in 1995 / 1996\. I was junior and didn't know enough about system-level concerns, having come from a more computer-graphics / algorithms / math background. The company didn't want to shell out for expensive canned solutions. Our product sold well enough, but I learned a lesson.

<comment><USER4> Me too, at around the same time. Mine was an object storage backend for desktop applications. It had MFC-style object graph serialisation and, IIRC, simple indexing. It also had similar performance issues to the ones you mention. I recall enjoying working on it.

However primitive it looks now, Tools.h++ was ahead of its time back then. Just having a decent string class (with copy on write) was nice to have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great news for the steadily diminishing population of PHP engineers who haven't heard of PHP-FPM+Nginx or PHPStorm

<comment><USER6> Not sure what you're referring to, are you thinking of HHVM? FPM is part of the standard PHP implementation and uses the Zend engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like a bizarre acquisition to me. Where's the overlap in Rogue Wave's libraries and PHP?

There's good people at Rogue Wave though, and I'm sure they'll be good stewards whatever the strategy turns out to be.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really don`t know who is Rogue Wave. But I wish them good luck and hopes that they heps Zend to achieve new goals, for the sake of php.

</comment><comment><USER9> Glad Zend open sourced their PHP opcache before this, well that and their PHP7 work too.</comment>


CSSmania: Our way of fighting SPAM with submissions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cssmania.com/post/18244313430/our-way-of-fighting-spam-with-submissions

<comment><USER2> I sure hope these guys ran this plan past PayPal. A high refund rate is a risk trigger at any payment processor. It's seen as a possible sign of there being some kind of fraud or widespread customer dissatisfaction going on, which might be a predictor for an onslaught of chargebacks. If they haven't vetted the plan in advance and had someone add some notes to their account, it could lead to another "PayPal froze our account and we have no idea why" story.

They're a payment processing company, not a free security deposit holding service. Visa and MasterCard also enforce maximum return rates (as a percentage of processing volume), so PayPal has incentive not to allow this kind of use of their service.

<comment><USER3> Aren't there services (Square, Amazon) that let you place a hold on the funds and then either release or charge it? How does kickstarter do it?

<comment><USER2> Authorization holds generally only last 1-5 days (there are special rules for some industries that let them do it longer) -- Kickstarter is probably just doing a quick $0 auth to check if the card is valid and storing it to auth & capture again when the project is committed. They're not holding an auth for your commitment the whole time. That'd tie up money/credit in your account for a project that might not ever be funded.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand the motive and for sites like Etsy, charging to list certainly helps with some poor quality (it doesn't stop bad listings initially, but eventually when your stuff does not sell you don't come back).

However, a lot of people genuinely think what they list is good (just watch an episode of a talent show audition and see how surprised people get when you tell them they are shit).

So you'll still get loads of people submitting, but you'll have the added time-sink of dealing with those people who thought they were good enough, lost the $10 and now opened a case against you on PayPal.

My advice would be (if you're going down the charge route) to simply charge everyone for submission and don't give the money back whether they make it or not.

</comment><comment><USER5> They could have just hired someone with a little design sense at oDesk. A designer from Philippines would have probably cost them like $5/hour. All they would have to do is approve the selections already made by the review guy(s).

<comment><USER6> Then they wouldn't make any money - which is I feel the subtext of this blog post...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I say just keep the money. It's a reasonable deterrent for junk. And if you're doing a ton of refunds on paypal (or any other payment service presumably), you will eventually get banned.</comment>


Verifone pulling out of Square's market, says it's not profitable - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3004001/verifone-pulling-out-squares-market-says-its-not-profitable

<comment><USER2> I think this author doesn't understand the long term vision for square, or I don't.

I was lead to believe the card reader and payment processing was just a way to get into businesses. The opportunity is to give them data on their sales to helps them more effectively run their businesses.</comment>


Show HN: Stark – Improve Your Home Instantly (Beta Testers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.joinstark.com/?utm_source=forum&utm_medium=hn&utm_campaign=beta <comment><USER2> ...What is it? All your page is doing is asking for an email address. I even gave it my email address, and I still don't know. Then it asks me to share. Why would I share it, I don't know what it is?

<comment><USER3> I agree, it needs a better value proposition. It's more like a h1 call to action.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our service provides bespoke interior design/decoration advice. We are currently looking for beta testers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> WTF is it?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Our service provides custom interior design advice so you no longer have to spend ages crawling Pinterest.

We are currently looking for beta testers to test the service free of charge.

<comment><USER5> You need to put that on the freakin' signup page because with zero clue what you do why on earth would I hand over my email?!?!?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Added the info to the site</comment></comment></comment>