Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-source/ <comment><USER2> Hey all. I was the second engineer at famo.us and was later chief architect. I have many stories, but I won't go into any of them :-)

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS ([http://samsaraJS.org](http://samsaraJS.org)), and there is another community effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for contributors!

<comment><USER3> Please write your stories down even if you don't share them with anyone. You may change your mind years later and the brain has a way of blotting the craziest stuff out over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money.

I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that.

I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things that were described in the Reconsider article that was posted the other day [https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f](https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f)

<comment><USER5> I think that essentially their pitch was that they would become _the_ development platform for building apps. If they had considerably grown the number of apps on their platform, and gotten lots of positive developer buzz, they would have easily gotten more funding, even if they weren't making any money yet.

The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed. One of the biggest problems that I see that people underestimate is that most (not all, but most) great native mobile app engineers _don't_ want to build cross-platform apps. They tend to be "platform partisans", either loving Apple or Android, but not usually both. They always want to become experts in the latest and greatest platform technology. Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross- platform technology either. If you want to be featured in the App or Play Stores, you've got to have a native app that uses the latest iOS or Android features.

I see lots and lots of cross-platform mobile solutions on HN, but I rarely see people considering the incentives of both Apple and Google, and the mobile developers, when it comes to evaluating these solutions.

<comment><USER6> The incentive for developers is that you don't write the same code twice.

Of course this applies to developers whose goal is to create software, as opposed to those whose goal is to bill hourly.

<comment><USER5> That's only an incentive for developers if they individually are writing the code for both platforms. Many (most?) shops where an app is the main product (or a very important piece of the main product) have separate iOS and Android dev teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will never understand how startups like this get money with such incompetent leadership.

Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4)

<comment><USER8> I've always disliked Techcrunch but I'm starting to realize how valuable their "Cribs" series is. They have the very best documentation of a dying culture of spoiled founders aimlessly running startups like a daycare for adults. I wonder how much longer people are going to be pulling this off for. Investors need to wise up and start giving their money to people who are mature enough to be modest and efficient with their company's resources before they've proven themselves as a business.

<comment><USER9> I seriously get the feeling people are just looking for any excuse to criticize Famous. I don't see what's wrong with their office. What's objectionable? A couple of $5 nerf guns? A cheap Lego board for project tracking? Or is it the fact that people aren't packed in as tight as they are at a place like Facebook (which is ironically something people on HN love to criticize)? The crappy makeshift studio they have? Seriously. Their office seems pretty normal.

The only thing you might find objectionable is the expensive SF location, which the article notes they got on the cheap at below-market rates, or the printer (the printer is probably only 1-2 thousand dollars, less than a Macbook).

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I don't see what's wrong either. The CEO is a fantastic interior designer. And his LinkedIn self-summary[1] is a real piece of art in its own right.

I find it hard to believe any of what this former employee wrote[2].

[1] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen- source/?fb_comment_id...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen- source/?fb_comment_id=1000213700000381_1000304419991309)

<comment><USER9> A non sequitur. I said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office. I didn't comment on the company at all (the company is clearly in the dumps).

<comment><USER10> > I said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office.

Just because _you_ said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office doesn't mean others agree. Outside of bubbleland, most people are going to struggle to understand why the CEO of a company that almost certainly doesn't have a cent of profit spent any time whatsoever thinking about how he could avoid "boring noise panels."

"Why not make this a piece of art as well on the ceiling?" Really?

When will folks learn[1]?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778832)

<comment><USER9> And you know it was he who personally spent his time buying those noise panels (and not, say, the office manager) because...?

My broader point is people are just trying to find any excuse to uncharitably interpret anything just so they can to crap on the company.

<comment><USER10> "One of the things I wanted to sort of like inspire people with that worked here is you always feel beautiful while you're here." Those are the words of the chief interior designer himself.

Bottom line: this company crapped on itself. You're deluding yourself if you truly believe office managers are driving decisions to waste time and money on stupid sh*t like beautiful noise panels.

<comment><USER11> It's easy to criticize a figure who has made mistakes over his/her values that are unrelated to those mistakes. It seems that may be happening here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Open Source ≠ Business

> Newcomb himself admits it was a "divergent brainstorming process," saying > "We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model > around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn't do it."

What a load of shit. This has nothing to do with open source.

It's more like people don't want to pay for another JavaScript framework that claims to be better than the current web stack which at the end of the day, ends up reimplementing most features a web browser already has, but in WebGL. In the article, Steve even admits "We built a shitty game engine".

Recently, there were a few other attempts at reimplementing most of the web in WebGL, I think Flipboard had an article.

Let me point out, this is hard. You wind up with some of the features HTML/CSS already has that's faster, but a ton of missing stuff you end up needing at some point.

For example in WebGL, layout is non trivial, rendering text correctly is non trivial, events are non trivial. These things are an afterthought when working with HTML/CSS.

People love to shit on HTML/CSS and blame it for their problems, but at the end of the day, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.

Don't blame open source because it can't rescue your product. Great products and care for the community foster great open source communities, not the other way around.

<comment><USER13> Also trying to be faster than HTML/CSS is a hard game, the developers of Chrome and Firefox, etc are constantly optimizing.

<comment><USER12> Just wait until you see what Servo can do. Parallel layout is sick. [https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for- pa...](https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-parallelism- and-concurrency)

<comment><USER14> Sorry but I try out servo EVERY day and it will take a long time until this will be stable.

It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant. It misses a lot of CSS2.1, CSS3 and JavaScript feature's. Static sites working better and better (and are way way faster than firefox).

However I think that servo is the right step, however I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster.

<comment><USER12> > I try out servo EVERY day

Cool, thanks for helping out! I hope you're helping them by reporting bugs when you find them.

> it will take a long time until this will be stable

Sure, it's a WIP. That's to be expected. Expecting otherwise is unrealistic.

> It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant

[https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big- mil...](https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big-milestone- for-servo-acid2/)

> and JavaScript feature's

Maybe DOM bindings, but Servo ships with bindings to SpiderMonkey, the JS VM used in Gecko, so all of the Language JavaScript should be there.

> I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be > faster

Check out the top story on proggit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla_is_hiring_3_engineers_to_work_on_servo/)

<comment><USER14> Currently we are not testing against our application always, but I sometime try it out and its working aweful.

also on acid2 i get different results every day/week. sometimes i'm good somtimes not.

Yeah servo gets more support, i still think it takes at least another year (or more) to ship it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Man, famo.us.

I dove in because i try to get a balanced view of things before I make up my mind about things, and there was some stuff in there that I really liked. I tried building something with it, and it didn't really work out.

But even worse was the way that they interacted with their open source community.

It was completely cathedral-style, for a long time. And just as they became more bazaar-like everything dries up from them. Nobody was on irc, nothing on the issue queues. The only thing we heard was more promises for x integration, and y integration.

Eventually the community got fed up and called them out on it, to which they finally admitted that they had started a complete rewrite behind closed doors to use 'mixed mode' css3d and webgl rendering. 6 months later, they released their new 'engine' rewrite, and an additional 'framework' on top of it, which really did not seem fully baked.

They subsequently made a really big deal of helping found the jquery foundation, and organized a jquerySF conference that had them on stage promising to replace major jquery widgets with drop-in famo.us ones.

And then nothing. Commits stopped, feedback stopped, slack channel was closed. News started filtering out of devs working there leaving one after the other.

The entire thing did teach me some important life lessons, though =) At least there's a few mistakes i won't make again.

</comment><comment><USER16> _Famo.us' 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It's now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps._

Yikes. If ever I wanted a paragraph printed on a poster to scare me into working harder, this is probably the one.

<comment><USER17> I would be wary of assuming the problem was that they didn't work hard enough.

<comment><USER16> Oh, I'm not saying that it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18>
      > Newcomb describes it as "one of the toughest decisions I've ever had to
      > make because it meant letting go of some people." Stressing the firings
      > weren't easy for him. "Before I made the decision, I drove scar from San
      > Francisco to Baltimore and back to think it through," he explains. "I took
      > eight days."

I have fired people. It is brutal. I have been fired. It's worse. So managers, please: Never solicit sympathy for the pain of firing people.

</comment><comment><USER19> I never understood how they could claim "this is not html5" and "we have a direct conversation with the GPU", when it appears to be just a bunch of <div>s with style="transform:matrix3d(0,1,2...)"?

<comment><USER20> Steve said a lot of things that smelled _way_ off to anyone technical. I remember calling him out on that specific "this isn't html5" line he liked to parrot years ago.

He either knew he was bullshitting, or he didn't have enough technical understanding to actually understand his own platform, and if pushed on anything remotely technical, he'd basically just throw his cofounder into the ring to overwhelm everyone with the (admittedly very clever) optimizations they were doing at their rendering layer.

I ran _fast_ the other direction, the whole thing gave off a horrible vibe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen.

The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.

<comment><USER22> My biggest issue with it is that they made a great demo yet they didn't really have a useful framework. They kept things hush hush for too long , with a lot of teasing and by the time they released something, people moved on.

Compare to what ionic did, and i'm not a big fan of it, but the ionic team demonstrated the usefulness of their framework quite fast with concrete apps.

As for making money obviously, you make money with consulting, cloud services,tools for professionals and co, but you need a community at first place. Famo.us never had a one.

<comment><USER21> You basically hit the nail on the head.

That said, they were in fact making an effort to increase adoption with initiatives like Famous University, famous-angular and various project demos and usable widgets.

The answer to why they struggled to increase adoption so much isn't that clear to me, but what I do know is that they had a lavish office in an expensive part of SF, free food and a relatively large, well-paid staff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wait, you're telling me a VC funded JavaScript framework didn't work out?

<comment><USER3> Didn't work out YET. They'll bounce back!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clickbait use of "Fired" \- It's a pet peeve of mine when headlines used the term to create more drama. The correct term for terminating an employee due to business reasons as opposed to "cause" is laid-off.

</comment><comment><USER25> Famo.us to me was always a platform/framework or even a language more than it was a product or service.

I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that.

This could have been an amazing framework built by the open source community instead it's now just another growth before revenue scheme that went wrong.

Sad.

<comment><USER26> Famo.us founder was a Powerset co-founder, which had an highly successful exit to Microsoft. This pattern often _explains_ generous funding of outlandish ideas.

<comment><USER27> (for those like me that don't know Powerset:) Powerset worked on made natural- language search engine.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They always seemed so smug about themselves and their lackluster product. I'm not the least bit surprised. I wish them the best though.

</comment><comment><USER29> At least the employees who got canned weren't being paid as poorly as Gumroad's employees: [https://web.archive.org/web/20141224195227/https://angel.co/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141224195227/https://angel.co/famo- us/jobs)

Of course, Famo.us' employees seemed to get a lot less equity, but let's be honest: I'd rather make $175,000/year and get 0.05% of nothing than $75,000/year and 1% of nothing[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008)

</comment><comment><USER30> > What makes our product offering unique is that our apps can be built without > coding

Oooh... that's going to be a tough argument to sell to people.

<comment><USER31> I think most of us remember the DreamWeaver days of WYSIWYG editors. Products like squarespace have been hugely influential, I'm the type who would normally nope out of using such a product but I've recently become an advocate for the better ones in a number of situations.

Will it take over like they said it would ten years ago? Hell no. Will it gain more market shares as people apply it to the right problems? I think so.

<comment><USER30> True, I think there's been a trend towards less programming for specialized applications. But in a way you're making my case for me anyway: If what you are saying is true then the fabulo.us claim of being "the first" is false regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "We have about five years of money in the bank, so now it doesn't matter what happens in the market"

First time I heard of 5 years runway....

<comment><USER33> I'm more amused by how that statement makes it sound like the runway is the goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Famo.us business should be selling books and webinars on how to raise crazy money. They are definitely awesome at that.

</comment><comment><USER35> Hype to usefulness ratio of 1000:1

</comment><comment><USER36> Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of knowing that should fall on the team, not the investors. I think it was disingenuous to seek funding for this idea. GitTip or another OSS funding model would have been far more appropriate. A cross platform animation library should not have paid employees, and was an unfortunate choice for investors. (They burned 30 MILLION working on an open source animation library?!). It sounds like a few dozen people were lucky enough to get Bay Area salaries to meander around a broken idea. I don't think an investor would have the technical experience to realize the technology both would not work well, not solve the right problems, and not be marketable. They fired a dozen people? How many more are left?! Anything built by the remaining team should not be done under the Famous brand. It was disingenuous of the founder to pitch it as a fundable, profitable idea and use techno-speak to wow investors for something that many developers in the industry could see right through.

<comment><USER37> Not really sure why investors shouldn't be expected to be able to do due diligence on the startups they invest in.

<comment><USER36> UI development is so specialized now that I bet you could sell enough snake oil to lots of investors who would have a hard time verifying if your idea has profit potential or not.

I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees. It's one thing to sell snake oil, it's another not to even try to build a working snake oil prototype on your own time without taking someone else's money and burning it.

<comment><USER9> Do you have inside information we don't know about? You know for sure he didn't put his own money into the venture?

<comment><USER36> No, I have no more information than is in the article, but I have no reason to believe otherwise.

<comment><USER9> If you don't know whether or not the founder put his own money into it, then don't say things like: "I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I predicted this:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689406](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689406)

</comment><comment><USER39> For a company that's building UIs their website in Firefox is unreadable due to the horrible font: [http://imgur.com/8ANC4bH](http://imgur.com/8ANC4bH)

I don't hate thin fonts - for example in bigger sizes it looks good - but the thin an small combination is a bad choice. In Chrome it's a little bit better but I still won't read it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ex-famo.us (pre-pivot short-term contractor'ish) here. It's sad to see famousJS go to the grave, but I'm excited to see dmvaldman's samsaraJS ([http://samsaraJS.org](http://samsaraJS.org)) evolve into something great (cakaaaaaaw!). The pre-pivot famo.us was inspiring to work with and I was humbled to see all the projects being created by both the in-house and external teams.

It was an exciting place to work, for all it's ups and downs. Besides the product itself, the office, albeit ungodly expensive given it's location and size, was the perfect place to be productive and push yourself well into the night. There were spots you could work collaboratively next to others as well as little nooks you could "hide" and get some comfy undisturbed privacy. The ambiance of the place worked beautifully to be both creative and technical, together or individually. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's an expense that easily justified the potential reward.

On the other hand, the social culture that Steve crafted, often reinforced by his example, didn't sit right with me personally, nor did it sit well with many others. "Toxic" was an unfortunate word thrown around quite a bit while I was there. I do hope he takes time off to honestly...subjectively... reflect back on how he chose to treat people he calculated could be useful to him in the moment as opposed to those who were not.

On the flip side, when child-like dreamer Steve came through, speaking about his passions and what inspires him to do what he does, he was, in those moments, a really enjoyable guy and motivational figure to work for. I'll be casting an unpopular opinion here, but I do think the guy has it in him to lead another company to success, as long as he takes a cold, hard, unbiased, and honest look at himself to fully understand why famo.us, not just the product, but more the culture he crafted, failed with him at the helm.

The most important takeaway from my stint there was working with the incredible team and crafting the friendships I did. The level of talent that many of the original engineers had and the amazing personalities behind said talent gives me no worries that those who were let go will move on to something far greater and hopefully, personally rewarding. I already know that quite a few have! :)

[http://www.thefamousgroup.com](http://www.thefamousgroup.com) \- Dat logo, though.

</comment><comment><USER41> Another ex-famous person here (again, short-term-contractor).

The folks focusing on the techcrunch cribs video and drawing damning conclusions from it are, rather predictably, chasing a red herring.

For what it's worth I actually felt more productive, focused, and relaxed (in a good way) in that office than in any I've ever worked in before or since. The high ceilings made a remarkable difference. The mix of open and private spaces worked. Going to work in a place that felt like a higher-class version of your home but where you could collaborate with your coworkers was pretty amazing. It was basically what co-working spaces always try to be but can never fully pull off. It doesn't make sense to complain about the damage open plan offices are doing to productivity and then get angry at someone who does the opposite. Granted, you don't need a semi-luxury penthouse. :) But I think the office was an under-appreciated reason why they were able to get (and retain) a lot of great engineers. It was in general a very sane, reasonable environment to do good work in, in contrast to most offices.

jondubois, aikah, and others are on the right track. Making money off a front- end framework is a long shot. The monetization plan (to the extent there was one) was always heavy on optimism and reliant on a lot of things going very very right.

That's not to say it was impossible, though.

The reasons famo.us failed are the reasons most startups fail: 1\. They didn't do nearly enough to truly understand their users and meet their needs 2\. They didn't communicate or collaborate well or consistently enough internally.

I could say more about both 1 and 2, but I'll wrap it up there. The real narrative of what went wrong is one that's familiar and pretty generic. The subplots of what they were trying to build and who was involved just makes it all a bit more interesting to speculate about.

p.s. dmvaldman is the man – you should check out his framework and say hi.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm not sure you're allowed to call that a pivot.

</comment><comment><USER43> "micro-app", a landing page you have to download from an app store. What a stupid idea.

</comment><comment><USER44> Back when this got released, I thought "there's no way this is going to work". It was just too slow while hardly doing anything impressive. And it was billed as if it is actually faster than doing things normal way.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why on Earth would they have a smushed iPhone 6 on that landing page for famous.co?

</comment><comment><USER46> Making a business out of open source is hard. Especially for front-end related stuff. I think it's much easier to build a business around backend technologies - On the backend, there are more opportunities for things like enterprise plugins and integrations (as-a-service).

Also the frontend space is insanely competitive. There are a lot of really good frontend frameworks that most people have never heard of.

</comment><comment><USER47> As an early intern, I wonder if the stock that I got after being let go from these guys will ever be worth a lick. :-/

<comment><USER48> Cash out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> To be honest, nothing about this has ever made sense to me. And I'm a JS developer.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think, with the three javascript videos I had to click away while trying to read this article, I vow to never read techcrunch again.

I think they're exploiting their relationship with HN, and their need should be re-evaluated.

</comment><comment><USER51> It kinda looks like he somehow made $31M selling "mystery boxes"....

<comment><USER52> Whoa, tell me more about your mystery boxes, I'm intrigued. Are they disruptive?

<comment><USER3> Can you think outside them?

<comment><USER53> You have to sacrifice a cat to find out.

<comment><USER33> You might have to sacrifice a cat to find out, but you won't find that out until you open the box.

<comment><USER54> In mother Russia, cat sacrifices you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Aren't these the guys who implemented their own UI toolkit on top of WebGL because "HTML5 is slow and our stuff is GPU-accelerated"?

</comment><comment><USER56> Like Gumroad, a company like this should not be staffing up to 20+ before finding some traction or at least some product/market fit.

</comment><comment><USER57> Honest question: Is it normal for SV companies to be taking "beer breaks" during the work day?

I found that a bit strange.

<comment><USER58> They're going for the Ballmer Peak:

[https://xkcd.com/323/](https://xkcd.com/323/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> How did they get a hold of famous.org? Should startups be spending money on domains like that?

<comment><USER59> In this case, yes, they should. Assume they spent 15.5 million on their javascript framework and 15.5 million on the famous.org domain.

The domain has a value of ~$25,000 (-99.8% return on investment).

The javascript framework has a value of $0 (-100% return on investment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Obligatory Jared Dunn: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA)

</comment><comment><USER61> Actually where did they spend those 31m??

</comment><comment><USER62> Can someone please explain what an "app engine" is? Is it 4-stroke or straight 6? Does it come with a cat back exhaust?

In all seriousness, to me a framework is just an opinoited way of doing things that makes a bunch of decisions for you so you have less to think about. It hinges on the fact someone has uncovered some useful abstractions that make the act of coding less tedious.

I checked out their demo and while it looked fancy, I didn't see any compeling reason to use it over plain html/css or three.js if you need fancy 3d stuff.

Also, calling your product "shitty" isn't the best strategy. Geeks see self- deprecation as a sign of weakness.</comment>


Show HN: SemVer Sentry: Protect open src projects from backward-incompat changes - <AUTHOR> https://www.semver-sentry.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

In my work as a PHP developer I sometimes get frustrated when I or a teammate gets the "release version" wrong of a library that we use, and a backwards incompatible change gets released under a "minor" or "patch" version bump. This usually causes breaks for the unlucky person who updates the dependencies when, if everybody stuck to true semantic versioning, everything should work exactly as it did before.

I'm working on this proof of concept to help; it analyses proposed changes in a GitHub pull request and gives a breakdown of the types of changes (backward incompatible or no, etc). Based on this it recommends what the next release of the project should be.

At the moment it only works for opensource PHP projects, I invite you to give it a spin on an opensource project you may be working on. Feedback would be hugely appreciated.

Many thanks!</comment>


Playing Starcraft 2 Might Make You Smarter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/19/playing-starcraft-2-might-make-you-smarter/ <comment><USER2> I will be the first one to admit it, I do occasionally play games as a means to relaxation and I bought StarCraft 2 yesterday. Long story short, playing against other human players on ladder is among the most stressful things I have experienced in a long time. There are thousands of things that can go wrong, am I about to run out of supply? Are all my production facilities currently being utilised? Are there enough workers getting minerals? How about gas? When will the gas and minerals run out? You may have noticed that I was just talking about the economic aspects above. Now add the complexity of an intelligent opponent that is out to kill you and your stress levels are about to go through the roof. StarCraft is multi-tasking decision-making and micro- management heaven (or hell for some of us) and I am not the least bit surprised if coping with the pressure can actually somehow benefit you. It is a fun, but goodness me, Blizzard did make one heck of a complex game.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly my experience. I occasionally watch big tournaments and a couple of years ago decided to have a go myself. When I was growing up I played a lot of Westwood RTS games so I thought I'd be able to get to a level of basic competency fairly quickly.

I was completely wrong. That game is killer, stressful and mentally exhausting (for me). It became clear to me that either I could make SC2 my full-time pursuit and become passably decent in perhaps a couple of months, or I could stop playing. I chose the latter.

People who make an earnest effort to improve often talk about "ladder anxiety" \- the fear of playing ranked games. I didn't understand it at all before trying to play, but I do now - it's a complex fear that combines fear of letting yourself down with fear of being embarrassed in front of a peer and fear of losing some of the rank you've been diligently working up.

I can completely understand how it's a rewarding, challenging pursuit for some people, but for me it draws from the same pool of focus, willpower and determination I use to get actual work down. I'd rather play a twitchy FPS in my downtime that, for me, draws from a different source.

<comment><USER4> That's the type of experience that is a big turn off for me in games as well. People spend so much time studying the mechanics and economics of the game that eventually, pretty much every match plays out in exactly the same form. For RTS games, the build trees often get set in stone. Deviate from the one feasible tree and you might as well just be giving up because after a few minutes your opponent has just enough units to wipe you (and, since you didn't follow the build tree, you won't be able to counter it in time). For team FPS games, if your team gets good enough, the first few kills almost always determine the winner of the match, because whoever wins the first wave controls map flow. They control weapon drops, ammo drops, and they probably have the spawn points and probabilities memorized too.

I suppose there is a certain mathematical attraction in pushing a game to its limits like that. But I've never been able to actually _enjoy_ playing that way.

<comment><USER5> I usually don't log in, but your post had some common noob misconceptions about Starcraft and I wanted to clear them up before people take them as fact.

>People spend so much time studying the mechanics and economics of the game that eventually, pretty much every match plays out in exactly the same form.

Maybe on ladder, but in a tournament you will never see the same Best of 3 on a map... ever. That's the beauty of a tournament setting - the players are mostly playing _each other_ and trying to metagame one another. On ladder, that's a problem that is solved by new maps in the map pool. Yes, maps get learned and then players will learn if pressure builds or fast expoing are strong on the map, but even then players can metagame their opponent on those maps (like going for a super early all-in on a map that favors macro play). SCOUTING IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL IN THE GAME. Players with phenomenal mechanics like ForGG & MarineKingPrime lose professional games constantly because of their bad scouting, on the same maps, vs the same opponents, because their opponent is doing strategies to counter what they usually do. It doesn't play out the same, ever. (although MKP needs to stop going CC first on the low ground and losing :) )

>Deviate from the one feasible tree and you might as well just be giving up because after a few minutes your opponent has just enough units to wipe you (and, since you didn't follow the build tree, you won't be able to counter it in time).

Starcraft 2 has harder counters than SC:BW did, but SC2 still has maintained the beautiful quality that SCBW did in that you can counter any strategy with a number of options, and each has their benefits and disadvantages to you as the game progresses. It's a commonly stated and completely wrong opinion that the game is so figured out that there are exact responses you must do in certain situations. When you're lower league (Bronze to Diamond) it will help to play more robotically, but as you get better you must be willing to throw your opponent off and respond to what they're doing unexpectedly. It benefits you to have the "knowledge" advantage in that game, unsurprisingly.

I'd like to mention that I've been Masters 8 seasons in a row, so this post comes from someone who has invested a lot of time into the game. Hopefully I didn't come off as too much of an ass but given how complex the game TRULY is, when people try to simplify it and then paint the game negatively for that simplified aspect... well I can't be having that. =]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this article is a bad summary of a _VERY VERY BAD_ summary ([http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57600089-76/study-40-hours...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57600089-76/study-40-hours- of-complex-starcraft-is-good-for-the-brain/) ).

Firstly the candidates were only selected from people who usually played less than 2 hours a week (interestingly no male candidates were selected due to the lack of ones that fit that criteria). The research was for 40 hours _and that 's it_. There is no talk about the possibility of diminishing returns if you play it for several years, or whether you get brain rot because other parts of your brain go unused.

I'm not saying that Starcraft doesn't make you smart, I'm saying next time link the research and not a Tech Crunch article. If you do play Starcraft the only rationalization you need for playing it is that you enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Back in the days, I spent an enormous amount of time playing Warcraft III competetively, and was somewhere in the top 100 globally.

There are definitely things that I have learned back then while playing RTS games:

\- how to hold a team (clan) together and generally work as a team

\- training a _lot_ and working hard on myself

\- learning from my own failures (and analyzing my own replays), because in a 1vs1 situation it was always me that fucked up when I lost. I could never explain or rationalize that away.

\- dealing with stressful situations and as ridiculous as it may sound, overcoming fears by using builds (changing strategies) I am not comfortable or confident with when all other plans failed.

But I wouldn't go as far as saying that RTS games make you a smarter person. It's always a question of determination and willingness to work hard, as it is in any other field where you choose to work in.

One factor in RTS games that might help facilitate determination is infrastructure.

In RTS games you have the infrastructure to compete with eachother on equal terms, which you simply can't do in many other fields you might be interested in as a kid because of barriers that prevent you from entering.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't doubt that playing Starcraft will build mental abilities. But if someone is playing Starcraft to become smarter, then they should probably think about other activities that will give you the same benefits in a faster and more domain relevant way.

It's a great game. I love watching it. And I support professional players because they provide a source of entertainment. But it's not anything more than that.

<comment><USER9> Like what activities? If you don't like it, don't play it.

The key point is that playing SC2 seems to improve skills beyond the activity itself. Not a lot of activities have been shown to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just got HotS a few days ago and started to write about the parallels I see to running a startup & building a great product.

Not ready to play ladder yet but I'm motivated to get there :)

<comment><USER11> Yes, I think one of the first things you learn playing Starcraft is how much you suck at management. You play and it feels right as your play at your maximum pace. And later in the game or when watching the replay you discover how many mistakes you've made and how many things you just forgot to do and didn't even notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And IME it stresses me out badly, so it's a trade off for me.</comment>


How to Be Successful (Sam Altman Re-Imagined for Advertising) - <AUTHOR> https://www.marpipe.com/blog/how-to-be-successful <comment><AUTHOR> Sam Altman, ex-president of Y Combinator, investor in AirBNB, Dropbox, Zenefits, Stripe, Reddit, Istacart, Optimizely, Soylent, and founder of OpenAI, wrote an eye-blowing, mind-opening piece last year titled "How to be Successful."

While most of the 13 points gave advice to individuals running businesses, one stood out as highly relevant to businesses themselves.

In fact, it was the very first point...</comment>


Twitter Employees Get Google's 20% Time… For The Entire Next Week - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/twitter-hack-week/

<comment><USER2> The iPad/Arduino powered Kegmate at Yelp[1] is the result of a Hackathon, which are regularly scheduled. The most recent one was expanded to two days because we found that one day just wasn't enough. It's a lot of fun and many people work straight through to power through implementing their ideas. A lot of interesting, good things have come out of these events. You can work on _anything_ , you need to present it to all the other engineers at the end, and we encourage you to work with people from other teams that you might not normally get a chance to work with. For weeks before hand, people are coming up with ideas, drumming up support/finding other people who are interested in the same idea to work with, and judging effort to make sure they are working on something can be demoable at the end. I got a chance to get involved with doing some embedded development, which I'm interested in but don't normally get a chance to work on.

There's been a lot of fun things, and a lot of productive things. From Kegmate to a MUD that simulated the office environment to unexpected reporting tools that help out other departments.

[1] [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/08/yelp-makes-beer- more...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/08/yelp-makes-beer-more- fun.html) (previously posted on hacker news)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you spend your Twitter/Google 20% time doing something non-technical that matters to you or your community? Like helping out a local charity, drinking beer, or gardening for your disabled neighbour?

<comment><USER4> I don't work at Google, but when I interviewed there I asked a similar question and they said something like "your supervisor should be consulted about what you work on". So I bet not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that one week a year is actually... 2% time. A full 20% would work out to about 2 and a third months a year. Regular "hack" time and private project time is good, but 20% time is so quantitatively different that it's fundamentally qualitatively different as well.

<comment><USER6> Having everybody do it simultaneously seems like a good way to avoid the problem at Google where 20% time has become known as "120% time".

<comment><USER7> Except this is probably worse - there is an end-of-the-week show and tell! Engineers always come up with very cool yet non-trivial ideas. And as with almost all software projects, the last few days before show and tell will be crunch time - either to simply get it running, or to add those last few cool features.</comment></comment></comment>


Don't let TC39 add smoosh and smooshMap to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/staltz/prevent-smoosh <comment><USER2> Context: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- flatMap/pull/56](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56)

This entire thing is just dumb. I would actually double down and _let_ them name it smoosh because they will surely make some non-FP friendly design choice in semantics anyways.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a bit bizarre; but perhaps less bizarre than making the language spec specify the thing be named "smooshMap". (!)</comment>


Ruby-jokes/job_interview - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ruby-jokes/job_interview

<comment><USER2> I really hope nobody has ever actually asked candidates to write quines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like an upgrade from HQ9+ <http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B>

</comment><comment><USER4> That does not look like a quine to me.

<comment><USER5> Well the quine function sure does.

<comment><USER3> I don't know Ruby, so this is probably obvious, but: Why does quine() need an argument? What good is __FILE__ there?

<comment><USER5> Even though you don't know ruby, you should really check out the source code. It's very simple. __FILE__ is a reference to the current file name.

If you'd looked at the source code, you'd see that it's actually a pretty cheap quine, since it has access to that magic variable. You could do the same thing with just:

puts File.read(__FILE__)

<comment><USER3> Oh man, i was just thinking of this in terms of a REPL and didn't think of incorporating it into a file. duh :) thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > => "I have a special interest in modular mobile startup platforms."

Sounds legit.

<comment><USER7> Shit, I think that might be what we actually do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Also, most job interviews are dumb, and we felt the need to point this out."

+1.

Also, I'm happy to be working in an industry where you can get a job without these kind of job interviews.

</comment><comment><USER9> The attention to detail cracks me up. It even has a test suite!</comment>