"Defense Distributed" aims to develop truly 3D-printable firearms - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ6Q3BfbVBU

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. You also don't need a firearm to kill. But this technology can surely bring a little revolution in the way we consume products. And I think it will have a much bigger impact than just being able to print a firearm or not (should it be possible)

</comment><comment><USER2> Besides my obvious reluctance to pull the trigger on something I built from a zip file on the Internet, surely this just stops dead when you ask if you can print gunpowder? No.

Receny there was a Tedx talk with this as the main hook - a lot of FUD around how these new technologies will unlease waves of terrorism and crime. It smacks of similar stuff -the old ways of killing people have been working fine for centuries.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        for contributor in contributors:
            precrime_arrest_queue.append(contributor)</comment>


Anomalous Properties of Water - <AUTHOR> http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_anomalies.html <comment><USER2> Actually this is just a page on a larger website about water: [http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_structure_science.html](http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_structure_science.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> I have been looking for a deep analysis of the different types of water, especially the different isotope combinations.</comment>


Non-nullable types for TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/pull/7140 <comment><USER2> Too bad that "strictNullChecks" is not the default behaviour. Because this is the only really sane default, and is one the the things I loved so much in strongly types languages such as OCaml, F# or Haskell. It reduces so make case distinctions (and forgotten if/switch checks) to the only places where these are really used.

Also, "strictNullChecks" is kind of optional security, which is almost always a bad idea in the long run.

Maybe they did this for backwards compatibility? Are there any plans to make "strictNullChecks" the default in the future?

<comment><USER3> Since this is a brand new feature that isn't even accepted into the language yet, it obviously can't be made default. If they decide to make it the default behavior, there would need to be a period where the old bahavior is depreciated and triggers warnings, but not errors.

I hope the --noImplicitAny option will become default.

<comment><USER4> One of the most touted features is "your JavaScript is already valid TypeScript" (or pretty close), so I think they will keep the defaults so that JS developers can just change the .js to .ts and be up and running with as little friction as possible.

<comment><USER3> Well, with the last release, typescriot supposedly can compile plain js.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/What%27s-new- in...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/What%27s-new-in- TypeScript#including-js-files-with---allowjs)

That should make it simple to treat ts more strict than js.

<comment><USER5> > Well, with the last release, typescriot supposedly can compile plain js.

How does the ability to compile plain JS alter its goal of being a JS superset?

<comment><USER6> Because it can compile plain JS using the rules present under plain JS, such as nullable and undefined-able types by default, regardless of the rules it's using to compile TS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Google Closure type system is much saner on this front already. A variable of a declared type cannot be undefined. Nullable and non-nullable types are distinct: primitives are non-nullable by default, with an option to make them nullable (?string, ?number, etc.), and types deriving from Object are nullable by default, with an option to make them non-nullable (!Object, !MyType, etc.)

Of course JavaScript itself does not have a notion of nullable types, so touching any native API interfaces naturally leaves you with a bunch of nullable types where you may well know the value will never be null, so you are left trying to decide where to do nothing, where to add an assertion, and where to add a conditional branch. This ambiguity comes through the Closure API in many places that it would be nice to have a non-nullable type guarantee, but I suppose the library has evolved over time and further must be adaptable to a range of coding styles.

<comment><USER8> > and types deriving from Object are nullable by default

So what's the point then?

<comment><USER9> You can flip the default. Back when I was using Closure Compiler, it was the expected convention on my team to mark most of your type annotations non- nullable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm really impressed with how quickly the Typescript team is adding new features - it feels like every time I check in on them they have something new in the works that I really care about. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like a good punch right into one of Facebook flow's advantages. Very glad to see both static typing alternatives for JS evolving.

</comment><comment><USER12> > A type guard for a dotted name has no effect if any part of the dotted name > is the target of an assignment within the guarded code. For example, a type > guard for x.y.z will have no effect if the guarded code contains any > assignments to x, x.y, or x.y.z.

This is interesting to me because it is:

1) Unnecessarily conservative.

        let x = { y: { z: intOrNull() } };
        if (x && x.y && x.y.z) {
            const z = x.y.z;
            x.y = null;
            // z is of type "number?" when it could be "number"
        }

2) Not sound w.r.t. aliasing.

        let x = { y: { z: intOrNull() } };
        let x_ = x;
        if (x && x.y && x.y.z) {
            x_.y.z = null;
            const z = x.y.z;
            // z is of type "number" with a value of "null"
        }

</comment><comment><USER13> Really glad to see this. I encountered the use-before-declaration "feature" of TS, and I just assumed it was a bug, which I filed. I was flabbergasted when I was told it was by design, to match JavaScript.

The issue: [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5822](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5822)

<comment> tom-lord Funny how the conclusion is basically "Don't use `var`, use `let` instead" \- even though almost all documentation/examples exclusively use the `var` keyword!

<comment><USER14> From Ryan Cavanaugh's comment[1]:

> (...) there's already the let keyword available for those who want saner > scoping rules. We should definitely update the docs to use let everywhere, > though.

[1]: [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5822#issuecom...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5822#issuecomment-161079139)

<comment> tom-lord Yes, however that was 3 and a half months ago -- and as far as I can tell, there's been no movement towards doing so.

<comment><USER15> It's been fixed for a few months in the Handbook repo ([https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript- Handbook/pull/119/fi...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript- Handbook/pull/119/files)), but the new updated Handbook hasn't been pushed to the website yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Supplier List – Top 200 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> There is so much information here. It is interesting to see how these suppliers look like something you'd find on Alibaba. Given how massive these companies must be (despite of how they appear to be), I doubt if they'd answer to low volume inquiries.

I found the guys that make Apple's USB cables: Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (Foxlink) [http://www.foxlink.com/web/en/portfolio-item/usb- cable/#1474...](http://www.foxlink.com/web/en/portfolio-item/usb- cable/#1474880269882-4b38d309-c778)

iPhone boxes!? Brilliant International Group Ltd [http://www.brilliant- group.com/products_electronic/](http://www.brilliant- group.com/products_electronic/)

Sim card trays: Chengdu Homin Technology Co., Ltd. [http://www.cnhomin.com/](http://www.cnhomin.com/)

Watch/Camera glass: Biel Crystal Manufactory Ltd [http://www.bielcrystal.com/](http://www.bielcrystal.com/)

iPhone Haptics/Speakers module: AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. [https://www.aactechnologies.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&...](https://www.aactechnologies.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=lists&catid=21)

Then you come across something truly extraordinary: Catcher [http://www.catcher.com.tw/technology.aspx](http://www.catcher.com.tw/technology.aspx)

Catcher has a market cap of 7 Billion USD. They own and operate 18,000 CNC machines, the largest fleet of CNC machines in the world. This is probably where iPhone case and Macbook Unibody is manufactured.

Edit: I found a video of Catcher: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UknhWoL6GWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UknhWoL6GWQ) Edit: Tons of information on Catcher

<comment><USER2> I read an article a while ago (probably via HN) about why Apple probably wouldn't switch to making ceramic phone cases - they've invested so much in CNC machines, basically occupying a CNC manufacturer's entire production for years. I mean milling a million phone cases A DAY. Those are scales I just can't imagine.

<comment><USER3> I was wondering the other day, at what point these huge product launches make life more difficult for Apple and their suppliers vs the positive benefit (community attention, PR, etc).

You release, say, a new phone today, for sale today. It costs $800. You will keep making and selling the same device for the next 364 days (at least). Over the next year, the parts become less expensive because newer technology is always coming out. So it makes sense for the buyer to pay $800 for it today versus $800 for it in 364 days when we are 1 day away from the release of something incrementally better for the exact same cost.

In order to have large enough supply to satisfy the Day 1 demand, you have probably been producing and stockpiling the item for weeks, which has all kinds of inventory and storage costs. For the next month or three you can produce flat out to (try to) satisfy demand, but there is a backlog for awhile, which, at least in theory, harms demand/customer experience. Then, once you process the backlog, you have to scale back capacity for the next (say) 9 months, until a new product comes out.

Now, of course, there are good things about this. You can probably produce products flat-out for 4 months. You get huge internet-wide buzz, much to the dismay of those who hate hearing about nothing but Apple's Magical (TM) new products for a week or two before and after the Big Reveal. You get PR all over the internet and newspapers and TV. Some demand is almost certainly induced by the sense that if you don't buy on day 1, you might have to wait some unknown amount of time before supply catches up with demand.

So, I don't know, but I'm really curious about all of the considerations taken when making decisions like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is an interesting list!

I picked one of the 3M addresses at random (the one in Medina, Ohio), and 3M has a web site listing the categories of stuff produced there: [https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/plant-locations- us/medina/](https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/plant-locations-us/medina/)

(It would be cool if each supplier was required to post this sort of info, to really get a feel for how much physical plant it takes to make/build/assemble certain things.)

So I'm guessing that each address on the list is an address that either ships parts to Apple (or to an Apple rep or manufacturer, like Foxconn), or is an address that receives stuff on behalf of Apple (for example, to do assembly).

That would also be an awesome visualization: A map showing things moving from supplier to sub-assembler to assembler to distributor to store to customer.

<comment><USER5> Why would it be required?

Now you know where to rob labels and adhesives. It would massively increase security cost, and risk of getting contaminated products.

That's why most companies keep locations of their data centers top secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did they post this? Is there any larger context to this list? Is this a routine thing? Do other companies post this? I've never seen something like this published, although I haven't really gone looking...

<comment><AUTHOR> Refer to: [https://www.apple.com/supplier- responsibility/](https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/)

They are publishing their audit results and environmental impact assessment which is where I found the supplier list. I am actually really impressed with their GSM team - they've done a really thorough job. I am not sure if others - Microsoft, Samsung, Google, etc are doing the same or publishing their results.

Kudos to Apple, seriously amazing.

<comment><USER7> For this kind of information you can look at rankabrand.com

> 9\. Does the brand (company) have a published list of direct suppliers that > have collectively contributed to more than 90% of the purchase volume?

Microsoft, "Microsoft provides a list of its top 100 supply chain partners.", [2]

Samsung, "Samsung does not provide a list of direct suppliers"

HP, "HP publishes a list of suppliers that represents over 95% of its production supplier spend.", [3], HP even discloses what type of product they procure and how many workers work on HP manufacturing lines

[1] - [https://rankabrand.org/electronics/Apple#detailed- report](https://rankabrand.org/electronics/Apple#detailed-report)]

[2] - [http://bit.ly/1EWC6XW](http://bit.ly/1EWC6XW)]

[3] - [http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c03728...](http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c03728062)

edit: formatting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, a lot of companies listed in China are actually Taiwanese companies having their manufacture processes in China. If certain company have locations in both countries, I think it's very likely a Taiwanese company.

<comment><USER9> How does this work anyway? China doesn't recognize Taiwan as independent state and breaks up diplomatic ties with those states that do.

<comment><USER10> Likewise Taiwan formally does not recognise the People's Republic. Both sides see themselves as the rightful Chinese government (especially [only?] when the Kuomintang is in power in Taipei).

What happens is both sides have special procedures to deal with each others which allow to control and enable travel and trade without recognising the other side's claims while recognising people as Chinese, not foreigners.

<comment><USER11> > Both sides see themselves as the rightful Chinese government

Tricky subject here. The statement might sound true but has very very different sentiments on both sides.

For the Chinese gov., Taiwan is a province of China, "the rightful Chinese government" extends its jurisdiction over all Chinese territories, including Taiwan. However, from Taiwan's perspective, Taiwan and mainland China have two different governments (the stress is on "Taiwan is not part of China", not there is only one rightful Chinese gov,). In fact, if you ask anyone in Taiwan today, they are more likely to refer to the island as Taiwan (instead of "Republic of China") and themselves Taiwanese.

<comment><USER10> The formal position is the same on both sides.

When dealing with legal matters (like travelling or trading) this is what counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you happen to have access to a Bloomberg terminal, the SPLC command gives you similar (though less comprehensive) info for whatever company you're looking at.

<comment><USER13> Where do they get the data? Third party research?

<comment><USER14> Probably in a similar way to Panjiva: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjiva#Data](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panjiva#Data)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One small error on the list: The Chemours Company 7685 Kiln-DeLisle Road, Pass Christian, Massachusetts, USA

That should actually be Mississippi not Massachusetts. It is probably the source for the white pigment used in many Apple products as it is one of the largest TiO2 plants in the world.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why did Apple share this? Is it a legal requirement?

<comment><USER17> For backing up their supplier responsibility claims, I'd imagine.

<comment><USER18> Was it only in reaction to recent criticism or does Apple release their supplier list yearly?

<comment><USER19> It looks like they've been doing it since at least 2012: [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/technology/apple- releases...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/technology/apple-releases- list-of-its-suppliers-for-the-first-time.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A quick count of occurrences of region names (might not be exhaustive):

China 358

Japan 137

USA 66

Taiwan 54

Korea 35

Vietnam 22

Philippines 17

Malaysia 17

Thailand 16

Singapore 14

Germany 11

Indonesia 6

India 6

Brazil 5

Czech 3

Israel 3

Mexico 3

France 3

Austria 3

Belgium 3

Netherlands 3

UK 2

Italy 1

Ireland 1

Norway 1

Costa Rica 1

<comment><USER21> I made a map: [https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0N2SZ/1/](https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0N2SZ/1/)

<comment><USER20> Most of the China based suppliers are located to the east of Heihe-tengchong line[1], i.e. the east half of China.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe–Tengchong_Line](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe–Tengchong_Line)

<comment><USER22> As the Wikipedia article you linked to points out 96% of China's population lives east of that line, it would be really odd if most of Apple's suppliers weren't also east of the line.

<comment><USER20> If you break these numbers down further to city level, most of them are near the coastline.

<comment><USER23> Naturally; the coastline was the location of major trade ports, and major trade ports are where business grows. It's no coincidence that the Chinese special economic zones all sit around the coast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would be interesting to see Apple take a page from Walmart and require all their large suppliers to have an office near their headquarters.

Walmart revenues are around double that of apple, but they likely have a lot more suppliers and much lower spend per supplier than apple.

</comment><comment><USER25> I made an interactive map with all the suppliers here: [https://ssobczak.github.io/apple_suppliers/analyze_suppliers...](https://ssobczak.github.io/apple_suppliers/analyze_suppliers.html)

Repository with the code and a CSV containing all the suppliers geolocated is here: [https://github.com/ssobczak/apple_suppliers](https://github.com/ssobczak/apple_suppliers)

</comment><comment><USER26> I bet you could make a decent return building a stock robot that just bought / sold all of these every year based on whether they appear on the list.

<comment><USER27> The returns will be more or less correlated to Apple stock, which is easier to get into and have significantly more volume if you want to play with options.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure that small '3M' company is that tightly bound to Apple stock.

Joking aside, a lot of the supplier listed her don't seem to be the main branch, but the exact branch supplying Apple. So the company stock should really not be that tied to a specific vendor.

In particular considering that if something were to happen to Apple, any other hardware manufacturer could take the opportunity to contract them, making it neutral.

<comment><USER27> One small company is not, all 200 taken together, almost surely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this a list of suppliers of hardware only? As in, it doesn't seem to contain things like marketing companies or software contractor suppliers?

</comment><comment><USER30> Do you know how to find such lists for Microsoft, Amazon or Google? I tried finding one for Google but quick Google search didn't find anything.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks! Interesting share. So many Chinese suppliers

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish there was a spreadsheet version of this.

<comment><USER33> If there's value in it, and there is, I garuntee there are a dozen people who have, as of the writing of this comment, already produced such spreadsheets.

Perhaps what you want is for one of those to be publicly acessible?

<comment><USER29> Wasn't that implied?

<comment><USER33> Of course, but if it was public, that would decrease the value of any individual's pain-stakingly produced copy. Maybe try open-sourcing it on a Google Sheet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be great if someone copied all of these into a custom map on Google Maps so it could be browsed interactively.

<comment><USER25> I made the map here: [https://ssobczak.github.io/apple_suppliers/analyze_suppliers...](https://ssobczak.github.io/apple_suppliers/analyze_suppliers.html)

Repository with extraction code and a CSV with all the suppliers geolocated is here: [https://github.com/ssobczak/apple_suppliers](https://github.com/ssobczak/apple_suppliers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> They don't license anything from synaptics? Sounds unlikely...

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised Gigabyte isn't on this list. From Hackintosh forums it seems like a lot of their motherboards are Gigabyte-made, or for some reason are incredibly similar to Gigabyte boards.

<comment><USER36> Definitely not. Any similarities are more likely to be a consequence of the limited options you have designing an Intel-based system in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Interesting, they listed BYD Co., Ltd. there. BYD is one of the largest Chinese automobile manufacturer. It must be somehow related to the Apple car or development of self-driving software.

<comment><USER38> No. BYD is neither one of the largest car makers of China nor does this imply cars at all. If you buy an electric toothbrush at German drug store "dm" for €20 and rip it apart, you'll find a BYD li-ion battery. [https://imgur.com/gallery/kp6eULc](https://imgur.com/gallery/kp6eULc)

BYD batteries are everywhere.

<comment><USER39> > BYD is neither one of the largest car makers of China

Off-topic note: BYD used to be the largest Chinese passenger car maker in 2008-2013 but has declined significantly in recent years compared to competition. It's still #1 for EV car sales global though (Chinese bought 4x more EVs than US).

[1] [http://carsalesbase.com/china-car-sales- data/byd/](http://carsalesbase.com/china-car-sales-data/byd/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Who is the supplier of OLED screens?

<comment><USER41> Samsung

<comment><USER40> Interesting, I thought it was Universal Display Corp ($OLED).

<comment><AUTHOR> UDG sells IP.

<comment><USER42> udc also supplies phosphorescent emitter materials manufactured by ppg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> anyone here good with the stock market and would know how to leverage this list?

<comment><USER44> This info is already known, and therefore already priced into those companies stock price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is it telling that supermicro is not on this list?

<comment><AUTHOR> They stopped doing business with them in 2015. This report is for 2017.

<comment><USER46> Small nit - 2016*

[1] [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek- got...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong- about-apple/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am just wondering about the countries which are NOT on that list.

<comment><USER48> What are you implying? Spain and Sweden is not on the list for example.

<comment><USER49> Yes, the list doesn't tell the full story, because it only lists suppliers of "materials, manufacturing, and assembly". That is it doesn't include, for example, software suppliers and patent licenses. Ericsson, which is a multinational with headquarters in Sweden, has a network technologies patent license deal with Apple.

<comment><USER50> I'll bet that's related to the stuff they get from ST Micro (which used to be part of Ericsson)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Feels like Apple are really are taking the "You never let a serious crisis go to waste" quote to heart.</comment>


Chat with Khan Academy's Founder, Sal Khan - <AUTHOR> http://afraj.com/chat-with-khan-academys-founder-sal-khan <comment><USER2> Khan Academy appeared as a remarkable thing: a self paced single page app of sorts, readily apparent to the user in it's construction. That simplicity was it's greatest quality. That was the entire power of it: a person happened across the site and realized in a flash that they were just one click from learning something they had considered unobtainable. No login needed: just start learning. Flash forward to now: it's another heinous and bloated maze, hidden behind a login. That was what happened when Sal allowed it to be developed into something completely different. I don't blame him, not knowing the full story. I am very grateful to him for creating the initial version. This has been a major travesty.

<comment><USER3> I don't see the maze you're referring to. You still don't need to log in to see the videos.

On the top bar is a drop down of all the subjects which leads to the videos. It took literally one click to get to the Algebra 1 videos.

<comment><USER2> I realize now that mousing over the top shows the drop down. The maze is still there compared to the single page presentation of before. I tried to bring up an example on the wayback machine, but it seems that the early versions no longer render properly. The magic of the early version was that you could see the taxonomy of the videos laid out in front of you, and hence, in a sense, the taxonomy of the subject. Now it's the search model. I believe strongly in the power of search, but the problem with it is that you can't get a sense of the structure of the topic.

<comment><USER4> I remember this, and agree the treeview was really great. It helped the learner understand the context and purpose of a topic and a visual representation of what is "coming next", if they choose to keep on that learning path.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta Steps Down  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/10/myspace-ceo-owen-van-natta-steps-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> If I were CEO of MySpace I'd embrace the demographic that still regularly uses it. Make it the "bar/pub/club" of the Internet -- Facebook is staid and stately (well, perhaps only compared to MySpace) while you can let loose on MySpace... you can decorate your name, your page, there's loud music and bright things everywhere, it's a party.

<comment><USER3> That sounds fine, but what does it really mean they should do? MySpace grew so large because people logged in every day to stay in touch with their friends. Now they login to Facebook. How do they convince people to start coming back to myspace.com?

They have to be _something_. A profile you don't care about, and that none of your friends look at, is not going to cut it. It doesn't matter how exciting and party-like their site appears.

<comment><USER4> 1\. To find the newest bestest bands of tomorrow...today 2\. To find the best parties in town tonight 3\. To find insider view of upcoming Hollywood flicks and television.

All huge industries. Each one of them pretty much forced their way into MySpace. And now it seems like their strategy is to kick them out--not outrightly, but by killing the culture.

DO make sure when people post crazy HTML stuff it doesn't include a virus OR hurt the user's proc usage.

DON'T try to kill your creative culture by making it another facebook-like UI.

<comment><USER3> Your circle of friends solve #1 and #2 better than anything else, and they're on Facebook. I'm not aware of #3 being particularly in demand.

I think the verdict is in on hideous MySpace profiles: not very many people cared about them at all, and almost no one cared enough to stick around on MySpace for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He was CEO of Myspace for less than a year (who could blame him) and a CEO of another company for only 5 months.

Sounds like hes not fit for the position.

<comment><USER6> Or that he's in a volatile industry.

<comment><USER3> Or he chooses jobs badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the one hand, Myspace has done nothing but swirl down the drain during his tenure. On the other hand, his task was monumental, and who knows what bureaucracy from Fox he has to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER8> who wants to be captain of a sinking ship?

<comment><USER9> CEO of Myspace would look good on my resume and I suspect it pays well, has a good health care plan, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait, it's not Tom?

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone still uses myspace ?</comment>


Lessons learned A/B testing with GAE/Bingo - <AUTHOR> http://bjk5.com/post/28269263789/lessons-learned-a-b-testing-with-gae-bingo <comment><USER2> I really like the idea of having many different metrics that you automatically track for every test you run. I've been telling people to do that for years, and saying that the fact that standard A/B test frameworks don't is good enough reason to roll your own.

However suppose that you have 20 metrics you are following, and you run 20 tests. The odds are that by chance 4 times you'll have tests showing 99% confidence on random metrics for random results. This is just a side-effect of having many tests and many metrics.

Therefore if you find yourself in that situation, you should be very predisposed to assume that random results you were not expecting on random metrics that seem unconnected to your test really are due to random chance. Because the odds of weird chance results are higher than you would have guessed.

<comment><USER3> Amen to that. This is an issue we've been very aware of recently, and we're discussing various possibilities for mitigating.

The point about using historical graphs instead of single significance numbers reduces, but does not solve, the likelihood of making a mistake due to one of these chance results.

<comment><USER2> Historical graphs do not actually help you at all. The conditional probability of seeing a particular historical graph is fixed once you state the current number of observations and significance number. In particular the historical graph gives you no information about the true underlying probability that you did not already have if you know the number of observations and the current significance number.

<comment><USER3> Say your current significance number currently claims 99% significance in favor of alternative A.

A historical graph can show you that 12 hours ago, there was a stat sig in favor of alternative B (we've seen this plenty of times).

Some metrics take a while to stabilize, and the more metrics you have, the more likely you are to run into these particular situations (as you mention above). A graph helps you understand recent variability in the metric.

<comment><USER2> Recent variability _shouldn't_ matter. Assuming you don't have have some external factor driving variability (like an email program), the only statistically important fact that past variability tells you you is an indirect estimate of how many people you have in the test. But _that_ is a number that you already have direct access to.

If this this does not seem true for you, then you need to review how you are doing your stats. Because something sounds fishy. Perhaps, for example, you are plugging in the number of times the target event happened instead of the number of people that the target event happened to? Then observations are correlated, which throws off your statistical tests? There are a lot of ways to do the stats wrong, and I like to comment that if you do, then you'll come up with wrong answers - and believe them.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. You're absolutely right that it's an indirect estimate of how many people you have in the test and doesn't add any extra information.

The only thing I'm suggesting is that looking at a graph that is wildly fluctuating up and down can be more helpful and easily accessible than asking someone who isn't an expert in stats (I raise my hand) to look at a number of participants and immediately understand its effect on this specific experiment's variability.

No, we are tracking the number of people that the target event happened to -- but we've also tracked the number of times it happens, and as mentioned in the article, we are aware that these specific metrics are extremely outlier-prone and are looking into ways of improving this. All advice welcome, your tips are much appreciated.

<comment><USER2> If you're using a chi-square or its better relative, the g-test, then outliers do not matter.

If you're using ANOVA or Student's T-test, don't do that. They assume that you're sampling from normal distributions and you are not.

What you should do is truncate extreme outliers, then use a z-test. Start at [http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab- testing/index.html#asli...](http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab- testing/index.html#aslide94) and use the arrow keys to go through about 2 sections to for details on that.

If you have any questions, shoot them to email@example.com.

<comment><USER3> This is awesome help, thank you very much.

<comment><USER2> You are welcome. Glad it helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the suggestion to do A/A tests. A lot of Seth Roberts-style n=1 studies I've done on my nutrition, athletic performance, memory, etc... lead me to completely erroneous conclusions due to not setting the significance threshold high enough before acting on an experiment.</comment>


The man who made 'the worst video game in history' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35560458 <comment><USER2> Talk about screwed up priorities. Atari spent $21 million on ET video game rights, $5 million on an advertising campaign and gave 1 programmer, 5 weeks to deliver something that would justify that cost. No wonder they went bankrupt!

<comment><USER3> In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind.

Perhaps they could have made two games in parallel so if one failed, they'd still have a spare.

<comment><USER4> Instead of force feeding the genius, how about giving him a competent team of 10 average programmers, and 15 testers / players ? This way, the genius if free to imagine great games, not fiddle with screenbuffer bits and lose all contact with reality.

<comment><USER5> Well, adding people to a project that's already impossibly late will make it even later.

Atari had plenty of people imagining great games; they didn't ship much content that was compelling, and were generally held in contempt by the "real" game programmers (e.g., the folks in the coin-op division).

Also, the 2600 has no screen buffer. It's all real-time raster generation with the CPU in cycle-by-cycle lockstep with the beam. Game design on the 2600 is _very_ tightly bound to what the hardware is capable of. For instance, you can't just say "I want this game to have a spinning blue cube that defends against enemy fire," you have to see if you can make one. If you're a Real Programmer, maybe you can (and you might ship a killer game).

If you're a poser in marketing or management who's wondering what all the fuss about this programming stuff is about and why the hell people are complaining about those blue cubes you demanded, you run the company into the ground doing design that way.

<comment><USER5> One fine day someone in the Home Computer marketing division decided that "Games involving shooting things are bad, we're going to stop making them."

Six months later there were massive purges in marketing.

Not soon enough, IMHO. I might respect a moral position, but mayyyybe you should have a business plan to back up your moral stance (if that plan is "We're going to go out of business because our resolve is strong" then, okay, I'll respect that too -- but _say_ it so we can at least have a discussion about your continued employment). The games that resulted from that decision were horrible and never even paid for their development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! [http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/)

<comment><USER7> This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?

<comment><USER8> Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history.

The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.

The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.

But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing- beam](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam)

Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat expands on the theme, as Video Olympics did.

Combat is, to my mind, the only game on the 2600 that really holds up to this day. It's still fun, despite it's graphical limitations. For its day, it was the Super Mario Brothers of the Atari: that cart you could always turn to for fun.

It's elegant in its simplicity, extremely deep in its variations on a theme, and even offers a few asymmetrical playing options: one player can be given a different set of planes from the other.

Combat is the Go of computer games. Oh, and all the graphics are drawn in 1's and 0's. Same for the numbers on screen: big binary sprite maps. Here, look! [http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/combat- illus-150dpi.png](http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/combat- illus-150dpi.png)

<comment><USER9> I played combat ... With my _mother_. The day we got our 2600. It was accessible, simple, and as a child, made me see my mom in a whole new light. I'm 40 now, but feel like a little boy realizing that his mom is _fun_ whenever I see that game come up.

Thanks for the memory :)

<comment><USER10> >> I played combat ... With my mother.

80's kid here. My mom could always kick my butt in a small set of video games. Galaga, Ms. Pacman, Tetris. But she can't beat the first couple levels in Super Mario Brothers to save her lift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a cool story. I'm actually really amazed he managed to make a game that sold 1.5 million copies (@ $40 per unit that'd be $60mil) in _5 weeks_. As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and low level.

It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.

If I made something in just 5 weeks that sold 1.5 million units, I'd be proud of myself! hehe, and as others have pointed out, it isn't actually the worst game.

<comment><USER12> > As the sole programmer. In an era when programming was far more tricky and > low level.

In the same era, early 80s, kids across the UK were single-handedly writing games packed into 1-16k, some of which (Manic Miner being a prime example) sold in their hundreds of thousands in the UK market alone.

There was some pretty amazing programming skill going on back then.

<comment><USER11> That sounds pretty interesting. Do you know if anyone has written on that history yet? It sounds like it'd make a great article in one of the tech magazines.

<comment><USER13> Lots and lots. There are and have been any number of Kickstarters for whole books covering various older game developers.. Also another source that springs to mind is the Llamasoft blog [1] - Jeff Minter behind Llamasoft fits the profile above perfectly.

There's also a number of magazines devoted entirely to retro gaming, such as retroGAMER [2] that regularly have articles and interviews with the people involved.

[1] [http://minotaurproject.co.uk/](http://minotaurproject.co.uk/)

[2] [http://www.retrogamer.net/](http://www.retrogamer.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to learn much more about this, watch the movie, "Atari: Game Over": [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/)

<comment><USER15> Let me save you some time. Atari: Game Over on Netflix ~> [http://www.netflix.com/title/80042198](http://www.netflix.com/title/80042198)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If we're going to rate Atari games adjusted by the level of effort and time put into them, I'd say this is one of its better games. This is one developer coding non-stop for five weeks straight, and he had the temerity to push back on Spielberg's ideas. I wouldn't say he caused Atari's demise, but rather he almost saved the company.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm not blaming someone with a limited time and very limited hardware for not putting up an all-star game

Of course, not all of the time was coding, there was a lot of hand-drawing stuff, converting it to numbers, paper calculations, testing, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article:

* Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive!

* Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number?

* Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now.

(Link to poster: [http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1972/production/_...](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1972/production/_88241560_976_etposter.jpg))

<comment><USER19> It sometimes blows my mind that this would be $100 in today's dollars, or $12.50 per kilobyte.

<comment><USER20> $100 is a normal (Xbox One/PS4) game price in Australia.

<comment><USER21> 100 AUD is 71 USD.

<comment><USER22> Wow. That's really expensive.

Is it a 95% fun tax?

<comment><USER23> Where did you get 95% from? The normal new game price on Amazon seems to be $60. The Division and Far Cry Primal are both $60 for both systems.

It's an 18% "fun tax".

<comment><USER22> It was just an observation that Ozzies seem to get screwed by both corporations and their own government these days.

95% I plucked out of my head, as an extreme percentual screwing value! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What, not "Desert Bus"?[1][2] (Now available for IoS and Android.)

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the- very-w...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/desert-bus-the-very-worst- video-game-ever-created) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr7EhL6Jpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr7EhL6Jpg)

<comment><USER14> Played that game for a good hour and a half at least. Fun for the whole family.

Also, Desert Bus for Hope raises money for charity: [https://desertbus.org/](https://desertbus.org/)

At time of writing, they've raised $3,112,329.72.

More info here: [https://desertbus.org/about/](https://desertbus.org/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's not forget, the same person also created the best-selling original title for the Atari 2600: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yars'_Revenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yars'_Revenge)

<comment><USER26> ...or that his biggest failure still sold over a million copies.

<comment><USER27> We can all aspire to fail that badly!

<comment><USER26> I certainly do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another contender for the title of worst video game:

      Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was critically panned.
      The game's criticism is largely directed at its
      "blatantly unfinished"[2] state: lack of collision
      detection and frequent violation of the laws of
      physics, frequent and major software bugs, poor
      visuals, and severe lack of functionality. As a result,
      the game is now widely regarded as one of the worst
      video games of all time.

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

<comment><USER29> There's a long list on Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_for_negative_reception)

A close friend of mine worked on PaintBrawl, which made the list (#2.11). PaintBrawl is a first person shooter but used paintball guns since WalMart wouldn't carry violent video games in the 90s.

<comment><USER30> Every play Splatterball on AOL? That game was great for the time.

<comment><USER31> i loved splatterball. iirc it had an hourly charge too, well worth it ;D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This guy's job is what originally attracted me to software engineering... the idea you could be so good and important to a company that they just pay you to pump out something awesome and let you do it. Granted this focuses on a failure, but he had many successes and the failure is Atari's fault for pushing an impossible deadline.

Of course times have changed and this isn't a practical scenario anymore, and likely for good reason. But it still reminds me of how a simple DOS game that a man could do on his own was state of the art. Sure there's the odd app like Flappy Bird that goes viral and garners success, but that's the luck of the lottery, really. It's different from back then.

I miss that simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER33> Custer's Revenge has to be the worst Atari 2600 game ever created. Overt racism and sexism combine with bad game play in one rape-y package.

<comment><USER34> Except that it was never really distributed per se and mainly became available via illegal ROM downloading channels. So whatcha been up to?

<comment><USER35> Wikipedia claims 80,000 sold copies...

<comment><USER34> damn, i should have checked.

Found out there are some other games in that genre, some quite a bit more shocking. :O

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There was an interesting write up in 2013 of someone who reverse engineered the game to develop a fix for the main flaws in the gameplay:

[http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixing-the-worst-video- game-e...](http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixing-the-worst-video-game-ever-e- t-for-atari-2600/)

It's quite an interesting read and exposes some of the concerns that must have been present in designing games for incredibly limited memory at the time, including where to put the patched instructions.

</comment><comment><USER37> I still don't get why this game is so maligned. It was one of my favorite 2600 games! The only game I liked better was pitfall.

<comment><USER38> Since E.T. fell in pits over and over this comment makes a lot of sense..

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My wife remembers that game quite fondly. May be hip to dis it now, but a lot of people did enjoy it.

<comment><USER40> I also remember really enjoying it as a six or seven year old. I remember how excited I was when I figured out how the forest and the government linked to the various screens with the wells, and which directions would guarantee you fell into a well and which didn't. Bouncing in my chair excited.

Then again, I had weird taste in video games when I was a kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Personally, while I'd say ET was a disaster in a lot of ways, I've always thought the talk of being the 'worst game ever' is just ridiculously overblown.

I mean, for the time it was moderately impressive on a technical level, and as dull as it ended up being, it wasn't really all that broken as far as bugs go.

No, if you want something a bit more worthy of the title, try Big Rigs (mentioned below), Action52, Superman 64 or Sonic 2006. Something that is literally broken beyond the point you can easily repair it, and which were a lot less impressive for the time they were released in.

<comment><USER42> Burnout for DS was laughably bad.

Rise of the Robots was extensively hyped, but was a terrible game. (Winnable by mashing A.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Of course this game did not lead to the 'videogame crash' of 83, other videogame areas like the arcades was doing just fine, and home computers as well.

The problem was that the console games of the time were incredibly poor in graphics/sound, and typically also in game play.

Consumers wanted better games than what the console hardware at the time could produce, once something came along which was a technical leap compared to the Atari, Coleco etc, it did fantastically well, this was the NES.

</comment><comment><USER44> Here's a great piece on how E.T. can be fixed with a few relatively minor changes:

[http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/)

As much grief as Warshaw has gotten for E.T., it really is an amazing accomplishment that he put it together in five weeks. (This is particularly true, considering the extreme resource impoverishment of the 2600 platform.)

</comment><comment><USER45> To be described as 'the worst' in any genre on an international site does, of course, warrant a degree of scale that separates you from those who are, really, probably no better than you.

The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching each week and as far as I know no extant copy has survived - we'll never appear on a "worst TV shows of all time" list.

So almost by definition on a site like BBC.com, 'the worst video game in history' means 'which also sold tens of thousands of copies [2]', which is a measure of success and recognition most genuine failures won't achieve.

[1] Someone actually called the station and left a voicemail to that effect. I took it as a compliment - it meant he'd watched the whole show, because nobody calls to complain if they just changed the channel. [2] Or, in ET's case, 1.5 million.

<comment><USER41> That's a good point about any list. Best game ever, worst game ever, hardest level/boss/game ever, you name it. The percentage of works or parts of works that ever become popular enough to get noticed is dwarfed by the (couple of hundred) times larger number that simply fall off the radar or never get any attention in the first place.

I mean, what's the hardest game ever made? Probably if you're really picky, some ultra obscure shoot em up or kaizo esque Mario ROM hack. But the average list will only name titles like Battletoads, Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, because those are the ones many people (including the authors) have actually heard of.

<comment><USER46> I would think that a "worst [item] ever" list would generally be limited in sensible ways, such as with a video game, having the requirement that it actually be commercially sold. Obviously, any amateur could make some crappy little game and give it to his friends and no one would ever know or care about it; when we think of "the worst video game in history", we're going to naturally assume that it's a commercially-sold game. So some Mario ROM hack would not qualify, IMO. Even better would be to limit it to games with some decent amount of distribution.

Same goes for movies: a "worst movies" list would probably be limited to movies that actually made theatrical release, not someone's home movie, or even a straight-to-DVD movie.

<comment><USER41> To be fair, that doesn't actually limit the number all that much:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGameGene...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGameGenerations)

And much of:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGamesOth...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Horrible/VideoGamesOther)

And everything on Hardcore Gaming 101's Weekly Kusoge series here:

[http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kusoge/kusoge.htm](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kusoge/kusoge.htm)

There's also the fact a lot of games are distributed pretty well (and sometimes even sold), legality be damned. Is there any more legitimacy to a bad (and likely illegal) app store game featuring characters from Mario or Pokemon than a game mod or fan game featuring the same thing? People sold Doom Wad collections in boxes in shops at one point, does that count?

Even assuming only legal retail games, there's an awful lot of somewhat obscure shovelware that could fill up an entire (very long) list. Like the tons of PS2 and Wii shovelware (the latter's games were often ported from the former) by companies like Data Design and Phoenix Games.

Like:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8QzQp57oI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8QzQp57oI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8qbSISQI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8qbSISQI4)

A worst game ever list would be incredibly hard to make to any decent degree, simply because you have so many possible choices to include on it, especially if you go looking outside the most popular titles.

<comment><USER46> You've got a point. Maybe the worst-of list should be limited to games that achieved a certain amount of sales, to keep the obscure stuff out. Also, personally I'd be more interested in worst-of lists if they were restricted to certain years, or perhaps even certain platforms. For instance, a worst-of- NES-games list would be much more interesting than a list that comprised all video games ever, since I stopped paying attention to games after the mid-1990s. Or a list of worst-of arcade games from the 80s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Hah! The worst? Penn & Teller's _Desert Bus_ is the worst. By design. From the wiki page:

>The bus contains no passengers, there is little scenery aside from an occasional rock or bus stop sign, and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly, and thus requires the player's constant attention. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player then has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance lasts. Although the landscape never changes, an insect splats on the windshield about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light fades, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights

</comment><comment><USER48> The narrative has always been about hubris, to some degree, but shifting the blame to E.T. was always a distraction from some of the bigger lessons.

Atari had reached a point where it thought it could print money in perpetuity regardless of what it did. And that was true for a while. But you can't screw customers over forever. Eventually they bail, and that's what the big "video game collapse" was all about. Poor quality products being pushed at absurd prices. The lesson here is for startups with lock-in or few competitors: it doesn't take much to have it all fall apart. Make the best product you can.

I mostly marvel at the fact that this was done in 5 weeks. That's absurd. And while it was, objectively, a "bad" video game, there were far worse. They just weren't as high-profile. The second lesson is for developers: always appreciate the fact that you live in a world where patches, releases, and iterative development allow you to retroactively fix the things you had to do in a hurry.

</comment><comment><USER49> I only recently watched the episode of Code Monkeys that tells this story. I did not know this was based on a true story. (I would not have suspected that a company would only assign a single programmer to such a big title, and on such a crazy schedule. Although, now that I think of it, I guess game industry veterans can tell lots and lots of these stories...)

</comment><comment><USER50> To be fair, people have made worst games in recent times. The fact we are hanging on to ET as The Worst of all, is a bit unjust. If someone can screw up a game with today's technology they deserve the title even more than a game created in 5 weeks on very limited tech.

</comment><comment><USER51> There is a very nice documentary if anyone wants to hear from the actual game developer - [http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/)

It's on Netflix as well.

<comment><USER52> I enjoyed this a lot. Especially the bits from the developer! And the comments about how technically unique the game was at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I remember learning about this game on a G4 special, and seeing Warshaw's spots talking about how it was made. I wasn't alive when this game was released, but it seems to be very frustrating to play. But hey, that's what you get on the first try when you rush things ( _cough_ JavaScript _cough_ ). I'm glad to see someone's "fixed" it just to see what it would have been like had Warshaw been able to get the time needed to really complete the project. It looked like a great idea, just a terrible execution.

</comment><comment><USER54> Some amazing takeaways from the article:

\- 5 weeks development time, one person.

\- 5 mio 1980-USD marketing budget.

\- 4 mio units produced

\- 1.5 mio units sold

The units probably listed at 15-20 USD (corresponding to 50-60 USD at today's prices) and cost around 5-6 USD to produce.

Amazing facts if you have any idea on how the game industry work today.

In particular the little resources spent at development stands out. Showing that video game development back then probably was more akin to making a board game or a toy than the huge software development projects it is today.

<comment><USER30> It sold at 40$, according to the image in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> > "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion- > dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more > complex."

Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?

<comment><USER56> Quite a lot, turns out. The demoscene does miracles in 4k. [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938)

<comment><USER57> Might be better to show some actual Atari 2600 demos:

[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Atari+VCS](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Atari+VCS)

Here's one of the higher-ranked 8k demos:

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=32203](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=32203) (YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogMZn87hkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WogMZn87hkk) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is a great video review of the game [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DTjLG3usQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DTjLG3usQo) (if you want skip the intro the actual gameplay starts at around 2:00)

</comment><comment><USER59> The guy single-handily coded, in 5 weeks, a video game that sold 1.5 million copies! I'd like to be responsible for this kind of screw up any day :)

Granted that the sales were probably mostly due to intense marketing and ad campaign.

</comment><comment><USER60> I was 8 years old when the game out and I actually enjoyed the game, bugs and all.

</comment><comment><USER61> I can't imagine any sane person actually blames him for his work and not the company that decides to put one developer in charge of writing such an important game in such a short space of time.

</comment><comment><USER62> I would like to read the story of "Big Rigs"!

</comment><comment><USER63> ET from Atari had a better cover than game. (But that was actually true with most games from the era. Just double true with this "game".)

</comment><comment><USER64> I didn't remember people still being that hairy in '82\. I thought we were mostly cleaning up by then, unless you were in a band.

</comment><comment><USER65> So Atari spent $21,000,000 to buy the rights and $5,000,000 on marketing but having more than 1 developer on the project was too much...

<comment><USER66> To be fair, I don't think multi-programmer gamedev teams really existed back then. You can't divide work very meaningfully when your whole application consists of eight kilobytes of assembly with zero room for abstraction or good coding practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Gotta say, ET was not all that bad. But my expectations were low after playing too much Big Bird's Egg Catch.

</comment><comment><USER68> Anyone else remember the "E.T. Comes Back" text/graphic adventure for Apple II?

</comment><comment><USER69> Well, the tale grew in the telling. Howard used to say that nobody else would take the project because the deadline was so short. He thought it was worth a try. Now the story is, he was hand-picked by Spielberg. Ok, Howard.

</comment><comment><USER70> I used to like this game.

</comment><comment><USER71> that is not Beat Takeshi

</comment><comment><USER72> Worse is better [1].

[1] [https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is- better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)

</comment><comment><USER73> Here I thought I Wanna Be The Guy was the worst video game.

<comment><USER74> Of all the memes IWBTG has created, "bad game" is not one of them. (the deliberate difficulty of that game has in fact created a new _genre_ of games, leading to things like Super Meat Boy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> No, the man who made the worst video game in history was Hideo Kojima with Metal Gear Solid 2. Hardcore fans of prior game(s) felt a combination of let down, shock, and anger at the details. Imagine my surprise when I find out it very well could've been an ingenius plot to screw with the players. As others noted, the games overall plot against the protagonist was what he was doing to the players. Start here on a nice analysis here if you're curious why MGS2 had the effects it did:

[http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM3.htm](http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM3.htm)

<comment><USER76> MGS2 is quite possibly the best example of a postmodern video game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-2YuPGYabw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-2YuPGYabw)

<comment><USER77> I had a feeling that link would be George Weidman before I clicked on it. Was not disappointed. =) Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the more amazing things I've ever played, and George's video about MGS2 is awesome, if a little bit overwrought. I was a big fan of Metal Gear (I'd emulated an MSX to play the originals), loved MGS, and liked MGS2 when it came out, but that might have been because it was _more Metal Gear Solid_. Despite being a "hardcore fan", as the OP would put it, I never felt disappointed or betrayed by MGS2. And, in retrospect, I've learned to like it more by what it tried to do. Ambitious games deserve respect for their ambition insofar as attempts to push outward and expand gaming as an art form, and MGS2 pulls off its goals better than it probably should have.

Today, I find it's one of the better popular-gaming litmus tests for whether or not somebody treats games as experiences to which critical analysis can be applied. (One doesn't have to like the game, there are lots of reasons not to even if I happen to, but does one get the thrust of it?)</comment></comment></comment>


City life is as much about moving through landscapes as being in them - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/01/secrets-worlds-happiest-cities-commute-property-prices

<comment><USER2> This is an edited extract from Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_City)</comment>


ATT Sells 200,000 iPhone 4S's in 12 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/07/att-alone-sees-200000-iphone-4s-preorders-in-first-12-hours/

<comment><USER2> I'm not surprised people knew it was coming and they probably put off their purchases until now.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone needs Recruiters for hiring help? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Shoot me your pitch. Email in the profile.</comment>


The role of order in natural law, or Foundations of Inference - <AUTHOR> http://pirsa.org/10050054/

<comment><AUTHOR> The presenter has a finalized set of slides here: [http://knuthlab.rit.albany.edu/presentations/knuth- isbra10--...](http://knuthlab.rit.albany.edu/presentations/knuth-isbra10--- final.pdf)</comment>


Educational Websites For Lifelong Learners - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@imaginetta/150-educational-websites-for-lifelong-learners-71c1d8e94843 <comment><USER2> Great work - but 150+ websites sounds quite overwhelming! My suggestion would be to classify them based on format. For me - podcasts (for when I'm travelling/commuting) and interactive video tutorials work best when I'm trying to assimilate new concepts in a focused manner.

</comment><comment><USER3> People interested in this might like a project I'm working on - [https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com). This is a search engine designed so that you can explore and discover interesting talks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've included Find Lectures in the updated list at [https://everlearners.com/resources/](https://everlearners.com/resources/)

<comment><USER3> Great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The sites are divided into the following formats as well as topical categories: Books Articles Podcasts Videos Courses

Hope that helps with the browsing :)

<comment><USER4> You should include Platzi on Course

[https://courses.platzi.com](https://courses.platzi.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the opinion of Project Gutenberg, these days? Works that are out of copyright, but there are many of those that are pertinent to a broad, lifelong education.

Although I see now that they, too, are blocking access via VPN. Sigh...

[https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I had forgotten about that one. I've added it to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.youtube.com/user/TodayIFoundOut](https://www.youtube.com/user/TodayIFoundOut)

This is an interesting site that I recently discovered.</comment>


Ask HN: Who invented Base58 Encoding - Flickr or Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> A commonly held view is that Satoshi Nakamoto invented Base58 encoding for Bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base58
However, a Flickr discussion about Base58 encoded URLs exists from April 2009: https://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157616713786392/
Did Flickr deploy their Base58 encoded URLs before the Bitcoin white paper was published on Oct 31, 2008? <comment><USER2> No, Flickr did not deploy base58 encoded URLs before October 31st. 2008

I wrote that code, registered the flic.kr short URLs, and helped draft the initial OAuth spec to facilitate posting photos from Flickr to Twitter (having worked at both Obvious, Twitter's parent company, and Flickr)

It's _possible_ though extremely unlikely that I had read the Bitcoin whitepaper. However the Bitcoin addressing scheme isn't explicitly referenced in the whitepaper, and looking at my bookmarks, it looks like Bitcoin wasn't really on my radar until 2011. (I'd encountered PoW systems with hashcash and freenet, earlier, but that's orthogonal to this conversation)

The inspiration, as far as I can tell was the logic we put into generation gift codes as part of our 2006 launch of "Give the Gift of Flickr" \-- which probably means it was George Oates idea, who was the lead Flickr designer and master of all things UX.

For anything more definitive you'd have to find someone who had access to the old Flickr SVN repo.</comment>


Video for Kindle - <AUTHOR> http://www.frisnit.com/?p=142 <comment><USER2> That's a clever way to radically compress a video! It's like a final-video- back-to-storyboard converter.

One blemish on the in-page player is the 'loading' dialog that pops on each forward-frame.

The player could also benefit from an auto-advance feature... perhaps a fade from frame to frame? (How much faster than realtime could a show be watched this way? I've occasionally tried to watch a Tivo'd show at 2x with captions on, but captions get missed or excluded by the onscreen controls.)

Certainly could try doing a slideshow-plus-audio, too.

FYI, the PDF is about 23MB, 528 frames each 30-60KB each. IIRC, a standard- definition ~22 minute sitcom from ITunes runs 250-300MB in size.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's fantastically impressive.

Using that to enable people to catch up with episodes of TV they've missed, but in less time that it would take to watch the episode would probably be very popular.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of "Microserfs", where the protagonists take to watching foreign movies on fast forward.

<comment><USER5> Watching most movies at 1.2x normal speed is undetectable vs 1x, and a lot of TV is perfectly watchable at 2x normal speed.

I used to use MythTV for this - it meant my 15 minute breaks from work could fit in a whole show of something and I wouldn't feel tempted to 'just carry on watching to the end of this episode'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps somebody could create a service and send new episodes automatically to the free Kindle e-mail address that pushes via WiFi.

That way, once a new episode comes out, boom, it's on your Kindle ready to watch with no intervention on your part.

<comment><USER7> Such a service would probably quickly run into copyright problems... which is a shame, since it's not directly competing (per se).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome idea. One obvious problem I noticed when flipping through the example is the motion blur. I wonder if there are any algorithms that can reduce that given several frames of motion.

<comment><USER7> Rather than reducing motion blur on an image, it would probably be easier to choose a non-blurry frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is quite innovative, really.

</comment><comment><USER10> Works well enough that I got sucked into the show in the middle rather than finishing the article ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is seriously cool stuff! I'd love to see this ported to work more broadly; Perhaps anime might be a good usage;

There's a lot of material out there with subtitles due to the language barrier.. Wow. This is just really nice.

<comment><USER12> FYI, Most TV has subtitles (aka closed captioning) for the hearing impaired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to watch films/tv episodes on my kindle this way. Although half of the enjoyment is in watching an actor perform - I find it a struggle to spend any significant time watching television. Whereas, I could consume an episode fairly quickly in this format.

Although I'm sure a lot would be lost in translation. Could you imagine watching Scrubs in this format? Or House?

<comment><USER14> I can imagine Seinfeld and possibly The Simpsons would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't own an eReader and therefore have never had this problem but it's still a really nice idea and it could be popular.

I assume that keeping up with Eastenders is laborious at the best of times so this could take some of the load off :P

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if there are other possibilities for this? Such as, you could use it to produce print versions of educational videos for distributing to poor rural areas...

</comment><comment><USER17> Just to test it I ran through the embedded viewer, but it wasn't that much faster than watching it (based on the timer in the corner).

Still very cool idea, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Forget all the fuss about 3D this is much better way to see movies

</comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome, I would pay for this as a service.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER21> Very impressed.</comment>


Jon Bon Jovi slams Steve Jobs for 'killing' music - MSN Music News - <AUTHOR> http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=635420&affid=100055 <comment><USER2> _...the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it."_

That's what "kids these days" refered to as _the problem_ , which we handily solved, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quit your bitching JBJ! Instead of wearing dirty, threadbare headphones in order to "get lost" in music chosen solely on the basis of van-transposed cover art, now I can decide that I want an album from an obscure Norwegian band with 27 fans and I can download it to my phone from anywhere on earth-- and I'll pay half the price of a vinyl.

Don't get me wrong, I love record shops. But I love iTunes and AmazonMP3 too. And while changes to the music industry have hurt a lot of good people, Jon Bon Jovi is not one of them.</comment>


Building an Anti-Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/snormal <comment><USER2> Unfortunately (maybe), you will learn that users will use your platform however they want to use it, and will demand you reverse basic ideas if it starts to grow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It will certainly be interesting to see if users stick to the intended purpose of the social network.</comment></comment>


Landmark Court Decision Impacts Businesses Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://join.leaflet.co/blog/2018/9/27/major-decision-impacts-businesses-everywhere <comment><USER2> For someone not American, can you explain the significance of this?

<comment><USER3> Fewer spam texts (I hope).</comment></comment>


400 Years Shakespeare – First Folio Tours US - <AUTHOR> http://www.folger.edu/about-the-first-folio-tour <comment><USER2> Saw it at Notre Dame this week!</comment>


The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment - <AUTHOR> http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature

<comment><USER2> "Since then, while the population of France has doubled, French forests have also doubled. In other words, forest loss decoupled from population."

Meanwhile in France permanent meadow area shrank by 6.3% between 2006 and 2010 and by 3% between 2009 and 2010 alone.

it's ashamed that people who care about environment tend to get obsessed about forest and forget about the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> One could say that meadow is not a very common natural state for Europe. Historically it was mostly forest and wetlands... You have figures about what those meadow area are replaced with?

As for the cause, it may be because of the end of EU subsidies to set aside a percentage of the fields...

<comment><USER3> Historically animals like deer kept meadows open.

<comment><USER4> Yes, a dense forest is not always good for the native species. Deer or bears, for instance, need these small deforested pockets to survive. I think that was one of the problems of preventing all forest fires. Now, in certain places, there are controlled fires to clear certain parts of forests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author should go to China to see how the environment has been "liberated".

The western world has outsourced pollution to the third world, thinking that it would stop at the borders.

The more I read western news (and make no mistake, I'm a westerner) the more I'm under the impression of reading the "Pravda" back in its glorious days : "sleep well people everything is OK".

<comment><AUTHOR> The author focuses on land use, and forest area is actually growing in Asia.

[http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/forests_2012](http://www.earth- policy.org/indicators/C56/forests_2012)

The bad players are actually South America and Africa wrt deforestation, Oceania is about neutral and forest growing everywhere else.

<comment><USER6> Total forest cover is a crude statistic. Primary forests in Asia, where the majority of biodiversity resides, continue to be felled at alarming rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The call to action is: we need to move to fish farming not wild caught.

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems like an odd article given that global warming is not reducing. I hope the article was true, but it doesn't seem so. Adding some forests in Europe is good, but the deforestation is happening in the Amazon and other forests in other parts of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure even a 100% forest coverage could deal with the amount of CO2 we dump in the atmosphere currently...</comment></comment>


On Naming Apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tapstream.com/post/24542193450/on-naming-apps <comment><USER2> The order of keywords having an effect on placement is an odd variable for the App store algo.

Another helpful hack is to rename your company. Instead of Tapstream, an example would be 'Stock Market Data Insight'. Packing in the keywords in a name is great because;

A) it's visible to the viewer in the iOS store list view

B) adds clarity + confidence in the product solution / offering

C) has lots of index weight. Far more than just the keyword field.

<comment><USER3> What's the easiest way to rename your company in the app store?

<comment><USER4> Renaming your company is a paperwork-intensive process - you need to provide proof to Apple that the new name is registered as a company and owned by you.

Details: [https://developer.apple.com/support/ios/account- management.h...](https://developer.apple.com/support/ios/account- management.html)

(Giving your app a new name is trivial, on the other hand, and can be done when submitting an update in iTunes Connect.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. How does company/organization name work when one doesn't have an LLC or anything else "official"? Perhaps one can just use their name.

<comment><USER5> I believe Apple require you to use your name when you don't have an official company name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish I could say that I was different from the masses, but I've definitely demonstrated a very strong preference for apps with "HD" in the name. That much will make me more likely to click on the app in the store to learn more. Ultimately, the screenshots are more likely to sell me than any other single factor (name, price, universal?, feature list, company, ratings).

Good screenshots give me an impression of not only what the app does but -how- it does it. I tend to shy away from apps (not tweaks, though) in Cydia that sound great but have no screenshots. I wonder if such a thing is true for most other people or if getting people to click through to the app details page is the only hurdle for most people.

Frankly, I feel that names would be less important if the app store gave the user more control on how to drill-down and filter results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I feel the same way and think all of those are important, but popping up on search after the name change was definitely surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't say that I am surprised. People generally like catchy names. I mean, who likes to look like an idiot trying to pronounce their favorite app?

"Yea man, you have got to try this new app called budgerigar!"

Sure...

</comment><comment><USER8> What, were Stockly, Stockstagram and Stoc.ks already taken?

<comment><USER9> Don't forget instastocks!

<comment><USER10> Or stocks.io</comment></comment></comment>


'Dancing with the Stars' voting hacked for Palin?  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023485-71.html <comment><USER2> First the "successful underdog" phenomenon is common in these shows. Look at any one of these reality shows and there's always someone who gets "picked on" by the judges (because they're in way over their head) and gets pity votes because of it. Nikki McKibbin, Diana Degarmo, and so on...

Second all the anecdotal evidence of cheaters seems to indicate the cheaters are idiots. ABC has already said they track IP addresses and block proxy sites so the guy who thinks he's a genius for voting 300 times with fake e-mail addresses didn't really impact the results.

Finally in my experience with people who actually have the skill to game this system I've found way, WAY more of them hate Sarah Palin than like her. I can't off the top of my head think of a "hacker" who counts him/her self as a Palin fan.

So this story is kind of stupid.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I think it's much more likely that the Palinites are simply maxing out the votes they're allowed to make IE 10 calls (per phone number - note that a psycho fan in your average household could easily pull off 50 votes by using their cell, their spouses their kids and their home phone), texts, emails, etc.

I remember back in the UK the reality shows used to limit it to 1 vote per type, but they still suffered huge problems like this. It sometimes seemed like the best person often failed on the Idol shows, but were picked up by a huge agent on a better contract than the actual winner (IE better sign on bonus, not forced into tours, etc.). IIRC Simon Cowell actually wanted a non- compete clause put into the contracts to prevent this, however I don't think anything came of it and he's now leaving American Idol - likely in part because of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Tom Bergeron to Bristol Palin Conspiracy Theorists: 'F*ck You.' "

[http://www.movieline.com/2010/11/tom-bergeron-talks-to- movie...](http://www.movieline.com/2010/11/tom-bergeron-talks-to- movieline-1.php)</comment>


Life after the Google Penguin. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theclixgroup.com/google-penguin-update/ <comment><USER2> It's so hard to know where to even start. Google algo changes usually knock you silly, but this one has completely stunned me. I've had hundreds of sites completely destroyed by this. Old sites, new sites, thin sites, thick sites, affiliate sites, brick and morter sites. It's all over the board and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. I'm so tired of Google.</comment>


Modernizing MediaWiki with libraries - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/29/modernizing-mediawiki-with-libraries/

<comment><USER2> I've recently launched a wiki based on MediaWiki, which is the first deployment of MediaWiki I've done in about a decade. I have been really impressed. They've got technical debt, sure, but they're doing an excellent job paying it down, and moving forward without ever throwing away the whole project and starting over. I spent a lot of time evaluating wikis before relaunching this one (it was running on TWiki for years, on DokuWiki before that, and was a static site generated from DocBook XML or DocBook SGML before that), and was surprised to find MediaWiki was such a clear winner.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, given the resources behind it and the size of it's userbase, but I still had notions that it would be like the MediaWiki of old: Slapped together rapidly, always barely ahead of the demands of WikiPedia and never having time to clean up and fix the warts.

I wrote a simple module for it, as well as an importer (using existing libraries to go from TWiki to MediaWiki markup, but we had some complexity coming over from such an old/large wiki), and found it really nice to work with. I don't like that it stores content in the database, rather than on the filesystem, but they provide such a nice import/export tool that I forgave them. And, performance is good; at least as good as the TWiki it replaced (which was also sufficiently fast), and much faster than some of the other similarly busy sites I maintain (this site gets about 60,000 visitors a month and a couple hundred thousand pageviews, and runs on a modest 4GB VM alongside several other sites).

In short, MediaWiki is a great example of an old project aging very gracefully. I'm happy to be working with it again. I'd become frustrated with wikis after several painful upgrades of TWiki that kept breaking things further and further until the site was barely functional Likewise, while DokuWiki and MoinMoin were great tools and I've used them to good effect a number of times, they haven't really seen the kind of advancements MediaWiki has had.</comment>


Ask HN: When do you start using microservices in your sideproject or startup? - <AUTHOR> Microservices have lots of benefits (from isolating code, to letting different teams work independently). But they also have costs (e.g. complexity of deploying and debugging). In your sideproject or startup, have you been using microservices from  the start, or did you find there comes a point when microservices make more sense?<p>Any thoughts on when the scale tips over in favor of microservices ? <comment><USER2> Ask yourself, how does additional complexity benefit your MVP/startup? And how many teams are working on your side project. There's your answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> About the time your engineering team becomes so big that the overhead of managing ops for all those services becomes less expensive than the communication between teams working on a monolithic codebase.

If this happens before you have several dozen engineers, you're probably doing communication wrong.</comment>


The Fountainhead and Software Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ard_adam/the-fountainhead-and-software-engineering-d991b269af2e <comment><USER2> Besides being a ridiculous article, this is a double duplicate:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17788546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17788546)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16893214)</comment>


Uproar Over Purported Ban at C.D.C. Of Words Like 'Evidence-Based' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-trump-banned-words.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> This has been covered extensively on HN already: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15937017)

</comment><comment><USER3> * science-based

* fetus

* transgender

* vulnerable

* entitlement

* diversity

* evidence-based

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with this move. But I also am not outraged

* science-based

* evidence-based

Unnecessary. Anything the CDC produces better be science based already

* fetus

annoying, but synonymous words exist

* transgender

Are some diseases suddenly targeting people based on their identified sex? If no, the CDC has no business discussing this anyways.

* vulnerable

Subjective words have no place in scientific discourse

* entitlement

* diversity

Political words also have no place in scientific discourse

<comment><USER5> I am incredulous that the current administration wants to ban the use of the words 'science-based' or 'evidence-based' because they are "unnecessary" or redundant. It seems far more likely that this is the same kind of political maneuvering that led Gov. Scott to instruct Florida officials to not use the words "climate-change." It's a deliberate attempt to obscure facts from the public.

<comment><USER6> Please don't be fooled by the branding.

Evidence-Based Medicine[1] is a particular movement that makes particular claims about _what_ sorts of evidence are better than other sorts of evidence, and how we should (re-)structure clinical practice to revolve around these.

In other words, EBC != evidence-based medicine. It strongly emphasizes large- scale studies at the expense of other types of empirical knowledge, namely the direct clinical experience of the practitioners.

What might be the harm in doing so? Why shouldn't we all rely only on large- scale meta-analyses to guide treatment?

1\. There are important clinical questions that are difficult to measure in a double-blind clinical framework; the risk is that _we end up optimizing what we can easily measure over what is truly important, the health of the patient_.

2\. It increasingly risks turning doctors into assembly-line technicians that are only there to take the indicated 'evidence-based' tests and treatments. It takes agency and decisionmaking effectively from the hands of doctors and transfers it to large research bureaucracies, which may or may not be asking the right questions.

It increases the social and informational distance between the patient and the point of decision-making -- which we've seen can have disastrous consequences (for example, in planned economies), when that distance impeded the smooth flow of information.

3\. It presupposes the the studies and meta-analyses in the research pipeline are a good decomposition of the current state of medical knowledge. E.g. if there's an analysis that says 'treat a person with diabetes with treatment X', then that approach would work well, regardless of the specifics of the actual patient at the clinical level. Patients don't come cleanly with a single diagnositic label; most people with chronic conditions have more than one, for example.

Note that the _methodology_ and _effectiveness_ of Evidence-Based Medicine has itself not been subjected to rigorous large-scale scientific evaluation; we are literally being asked to take on faith that this _particular_ 'EBC' implementation of evidence-based medicine will be better.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence- based_medicine#Limita...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence- based_medicine#Limitations_and_criticism)

<comment><USER7> It provides a reasonable framework for testing its own efffectiveness. If you don't think it works, just do the experiment and compute the statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've read articles now on three news sites about this. All of them cite "CDC analysts" but provide no names or credible sources. If these analysts are upset, why aren't they providing their names? Why do newspapers allow these anonymous sources?

<comment><USER9> They aren't anonymous to the newspaper, the newspaper is protecting them.

<comment><USER8> I understand that. What I don't understand is why. Without naming names, this is just gossip, not journalism.

<comment><USER10> Because these people are career government employees. If they are specifically named, under this administration their career is likely ended.

And unlike the tech industry, people in these positions don't job-hop constantly.

They want the public to know about this [I can think of many unfavorable adjectives] behavior. But they don't want to lose their careers, put their families at economic risk, etc.

Acting as (responsible) intermediary in such circumstances is a time-honored and proven role of journalism, in the U.S. and other countries.

P.S. I'll add that the U.S. scientific community had a good, close look at such behavior as a preview, in the neighboring country of Canada under the Harper government.

To the point where they were collaborating with Canadian scientists to back up data before the Harper government erased it.

They are not merely reacting emotionally. They've seen Conservatives' (on either side of the border) play book for this for nigh on a decade, at least.

<comment><USER8> I agree that journalists protecting sources is important for some matters (e.g., Watergate, the Pentagon Papers). I think the allowance of anonymous sources has swung too far in the other direction, allowing for gossip as news. Journalists need to hold their sources to a higher standard and make clear that they must accept some risk.

<comment><USER10> In this case, there is no need for such risk taking.

As I understand it, the journalists have been supplied with copies of the specific document(s).

They can then ask the relevant administration whether the document is genuine.

If the adminsitration does not deny the legitimacy of the document, there's your proof. (These are not classified documents. There's no "we can't respond" cover for them, in this case.)

This is also a common journalistic practice.

I'd also expect them to pursue multiple sourcing for the story. Although, with the document(s) at hand, and the course I described possible, that's not strictly necessary.

P.S. I'll add that, more broadly, document sharing is not without risk. The government as well as private entities have taken to distributing "marked" documents that can be tracked back to original recipients. Not in all nor anything like the majority of cases. Just some specific ones.

That marking can be overt, or covert. The latter case can include slight variations in content that, particularly if someone has only one exemplar, can be difficult to detect and at best only suspected.

Anyway... speaking VERY generally, a central if sometimes unspoken role of ANY organization is mitigating risk to its participants.

I would not expect anything different from journalism. I would not expect people to take on unnecessary risk. When people name themselves in such circumstances, it's to accomplish something additional. That doesn't seem to be needed, here. I don't see much reasoned doubt of the story, and I've yet to see a denial from "the government".

Ok, too much caffeine, here. Sorry for my runaway keyboard.

P.P.S. I can't yet reply to your reply, but I wanted to say, "fair enough".

With the caveat I already added, above -- apparently, while you were replying -- that original documents sometimes have to be presented in an information- retaining representation, where overt or covert marking may betray the source.

(For example, the woman in Georgia who landed in jail... this past year or so. Win-something or other? The press didn't screen the documents she provided, and they were readily traced back to her. Then apparently corroborated by FBI using system access logs. Apparently, because at the time I last read about it, methodologies were not being confirmed.)

<comment><USER8> I didn't see a document. I would love to see one. I want to see the administration held accountable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sold raises seed from Google, Greylock and Matrix to automate selling - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/backed-by-google-ventures-greylock-sold-launches-a-mobile-service-that-takes-the-hassle-out-of-selling-online/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/backed-by-google-ventures-greylock-sold-launches-a-mobile-service-that-takes-the-hassle-out-of-selling-online/ <comment><USER2> The ebay app ebay couldn't build.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the app!! and the video :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty looking app</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favourite fitness and training app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> On the paid front I do:

Down Dog / HIIT by the same company.

[https://www.downdogapp.com/](https://www.downdogapp.com/), $39.99/yr for random autogenerated workouts and yoga routines and other apps all included in the price.

On the free side:

The staggering amount of content on youtube. Search for HIIT and sort by recently uploaded. Fantastic high quality content and more variety then one person would ever need all for $0/yr.

</comment><comment><USER3> For weightlifting I still haven't found anything better than google sheets for planning, and pen and paper for tracking workouts.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use [https://ewolo.fitness](https://ewolo.fitness) :)</comment>