Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers - <AUTHOR> https://vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers <comment><USER2> I need to send this to the people who designed the website for one of my favorite local pizza places, Dino's ([https://www.dinostomatopie.com/](https://www.dinostomatopie.com/)) -- they did _really_ well, generally, but no matter how hard you try, some things come through: the fonts rendered as text are perfectly crisp at whatever absurd DPI this Chromebook has.

<comment><USER3> This is better than 50% of websites out there today. I can find all the buttons, the functions of things are clear, and I know how to contact the owner. The menu is text instead of PDF, and the whole thing appears to run properly without javascript enabled.

<comment><USER4> The brilliance goes beyond the web design. From that menu:

"DINO would like you to know that more than three toppings will be expensive and won't be any better."

<comment><USER5> dangerous

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ligatures are missing :(

Look at the IE5 screenshot. The second last line has the word "finibus" and notice how the "f" and the "i" seem to be combined together. That's a ligature. In contrast in the body text of the website I don't see any. The word "file" in the paragraph right above the screenshot is missing that ligature.

Kerning is, well, also wrong. So wrong that I literally trouble reading the body text, but I have no trouble reading the text in the IE5 screenshot. (Bad kerning: once you see it you can't unsee it.)

<comment><USER7> Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs at the base run together... just like they do for the "in" and "ni" pairs following.

(It was _possible_ to render a real fi glyph, but only by using the Unicode presentation-form code point U+FB01; IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures in Latin script, and even if it did, Times New Roman did not have the OpenType support for that.)

It does appear that the IE5 screenshot shows significantly tighter letter spacing in general than the body text, which is why we see the "fi" glyphs touching in IE5 whereas they're separate in the text of the page. I guess that's probably related to size-specific glyph metrics or hinting that is snapping the glyph advances to a narrower width than the "fake-bitmap" font produces.

<comment><USER8> > Actually, IE5 didn't do automatic ligatures; what you see in "finibus" is > simply an "f" glyph and an "i" glyph which are close enough that the dot of > the "i" nestles into the top-right of the curve of the "f", and the serifs > at the base run together.

That's actually a really neat solution in the absence of explicitly defined ligatures... since there is no antialiasing, it only needs a little care when designing the font at the pixel level and choice of kerning and the result will be indistinguishable. fi is a very geometrically natural ligature though, i wonder if it doesn't work so well for others that are too dissimilar to their components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hello! Co-founder here – wow, front page, that's flattering!

We have indeed still got a bunch of visual glitches we couldn't iron out, including the one ~saagarjha has reported to WebKit! We had assumed it was our font being broken, but i'm keen to follow that one.

Otherwise getting hinting right on all browsers in high-DPI has basically been impossible. Maybe we should simply recommend everyone use a Windows 98 User Agent ;)

<comment><USER10> Great idea! One could embed windows 95 a la [https://win95.ajf.me/](https://win95.ajf.me/) just to run IE within the page with all the right rendering. Or a subset of custom font rendering to a canvas :)

<comment><USER11> [http://charlie.bz](http://charlie.bz) accomplishes that idea but without a lengthy download by using a VNC session into QEMU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Impressive research work (and results)!

I actually went through the same experimentation when I worked on the fonts and the website at [https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc- fonts/](https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/). I ended up with a slightly different solution - the Bits'N'Picas converter, which works very much like potrace-pixelperfect, and takes either .png or actual bitmap fonts as input: [https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas](https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas).

What would be ideal is if the bitmap strikes themselves could be rendered in the browser - not really a tall order since they're part of the TrueType specs, and a rasterizer is supposed to use them when they exist. Unfortunately, it turned out that most browsers run the OpenType Sanitizer on the webfonts they parse, and it removes certain tables including the ones that specify the bitmaps. :(

<comment><USER9> Oh wow, i've stumbled on your site before. It's a masterpiece, and was definitely an inspiration for the work we talk about in this blog post.

Super interesting, what you're saying about the OpenType Sanitizer – i'd wondered why it appears you can't use bitmapped fonts in browsers (although another commenter claims you can – i don't know either way).

I'll have a look at Bits'N'Picas, thanks for the heads up!

<comment><USER12> Thanks, appreciated! I'm planning an update soon - speaking of which, I might take a page from your own site with the custom scrollbars. :)

AFAIK bitmapped fonts can be rendered in-browser, but only if they're installed on the host (aka the 'old' way), not as css webfonts. Embedding bitmap strikes in a TrueType font is a neat trick used by e.g. Terminus, and by many CJK fonts shipped with Windows, etc., but the browser sanitizer thing just strips them - more info here: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/57930594](https://stackoverflow.com/a/57930594)

(Unfortunately this type of font has its pitfalls even outside of the browser. E.g. Windows makes you jump through a completely unreasonable series of hoops to make them work: [https://int10h.org/blog/2016/01/windows-cleartype- truetype-f...](https://int10h.org/blog/2016/01/windows-cleartype-truetype- fonts-embedded-bitmaps/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ha, this website seems to trip up the WebKit layout code ([https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211679](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211679)) and cause large spaces to appear randomly in the middle of paragraphs that go away when you select the text…

<comment><USER9> We had noticed this early on indeed, but no idea what's going on. Thank you for reporting it — we didn't think of raising it against WebKit since we assumed they'd be Doing The Right Thing™.

<comment><USER14> It's not just your website, mind you. I've been seeing it for quite a while even on other website but I've just been too lazy to report it ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> LOL! Funny how doing something in 2020 takes ten times the resources for doing the same thing in 1995. Every pixel on these fonts is now a complex vector path.

<comment><USER16> > _ten times the resources for doing the same thing_

Is it really ten times the resources, and really doing the same thing?

My computer today uses much less power than what I had in the '90s, and cost less too. It has an internal 4K display and two external 4K displays.

My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by line.

Today all my monitors are high-DPI, everything scrolls instantly, and those vector fonts are what allow for crisp, detailed, and readable text on each display.

Don't get me wrong, I think this '90s font site is a wonderful exercise in nostalgia and CSS ingenuity and is very cool!

But you couldn't get me to go back to those days.

<comment><USER17> > My '90s computer had a single 1280x1024 CRT where I always had to tweak the > focus and alignment to get readable text. With no GPU, scrolling in an > editor was always an exercise in patience, watching the text repaint line by > line.

I don't intend to insult, but to me this came across to me as a kid larping as someone who used computers in the 90s.

Computers have improved by hardly imaginable magnitudes, but latency and interactive responsiveness for simple tasks like text editing is not generally one of them.

Whenever I go into the attic to dig out a really old machine to pull something off it, I am immediately struck by how much more responsive the interface is compared to current systems.

I respect that your experience is different but I can't figure out how that could possibly be.

<comment><USER18> I remember text editing UIs struggling when the machine was otherwise overloaded.

Although that started happening much more when text editors started to be written in garbage collected languages more often, which I put in the current century.

I still get that today if I use an old machine and/or a fancy text editor.

<comment><USER19> Emacs has always been written in Lisp, and it's possible for badly written code to make it lock up. Not a new complaint on low RAM machines where the gc and paging interact badly. But you need very low RAM by today's standards.

<comment><USER18> Carefully worded with "more often" because I knew emacs was an outlier. I was never an emacs person myself so I don't know it first hand, but in do know people used to call it a resource hog a long time ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh I hate antialiasing. I absolutely cannot stand blurry fonts. First thing I do on a Linux box is install the ambiguously licensed "mscorefonts" and disable antialiasing everywhere possible. That is explained in the font-howto that may be a bit outdated now.

Verdana for the interface, Times New Roman, Courier New for monospace ... aaaaahhhhh!

<comment><USER20> The first thing that comes to my mind is: Are you joking? But I wonder to myself: what does he call blurry fonts. Anti-aliased fonts, of course. But I've never seen them as blurry and I guess most other people don't, otherwise we'd not like them better. Don't you think there could be a sight specificity? Do you have extremely sharp eyesight?

<comment><USER21> It's taking time to get used to. Windows did and still does very strongly hinted fonts. When I first started using Linux blurriness annoyed me greatly, but after few years I don't care anymore.

<comment><USER22> You can get strong hinting by changing hintstyle to hintstrong in fontconfig. It doesn't match Windows completely, but for some fonts it's close.

Infinality-fontconfig used to be the thing for emulating the font rendering of other operating systems, I haven't kept up since freetype merged the various interpreter tweaks that used to be proprietary. I'm sure you can pass options to fontconfig/freetype to tweak it to your liking.

I stick to hintslight now and I'm perfectly happy with the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The naïve potrace output looks _very_ 90s in a grunge typography sort of way. I donated the archives of _Serif_ magazine to the Scripps College library a decade ago which included a large collection of 1990s type specimens but I'm pretty sure that there was a T-26 face that looked very much like the sample that they showed from potrace.

<comment><USER24> Not quite the same, but in the 1990s Neville Brody released a font called 'Autotrace' that consists of several variations of a badly traced sans-serif [https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff- autotrace](https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-autotrace)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Converting bitmap fonts to TrueType is far, far too hard in 2020. I've tried to do the same on numerous different occasions with FontForge and gave up every time through things just not working or hard crashes. I either got lucky by finding someone else who had already converted the font to TrueType somehow, or used a different font altogether. Since bitmap fonts are starting to become deprecated[0] in some window managers like i3 this process is starting to become a necessity.

Maybe there should be a library-based approach that provides the same functionality as potrace.

[0] [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386)

</comment><comment><USER26> As a fun little Easter egg, you can get the classic Mac font Chicago (the system font all the way up to Mac OS 9 and early iPods) in HiDPI glory on all current Apple devices. Use Latin characters with the Thai-language font Krungthep.

Putting it in your CSS works out of the box, but to use it in your terminal or word processing app, you have to go to the fonts app and enable non-latin fonts and then select it (but it is already installed).

</comment><comment><USER27> You can still use bitmap fonts on the WWW.

That said, most of the 90s webpages didn't look like that. Images were used instead. For example:

[http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2202_166608](http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2202_166608)

<comment><USER28> Lots more examples [https://twitter.com/wayback_exe](https://twitter.com/wayback_exe)

Edit: for contrast with more personal sites, try [https://twitter.com/gifmodel/status/456761420319686656](https://twitter.com/gifmodel/status/456761420319686656)

<comment><USER29> I'm always amazed at how universally terrible graphic design was during the 90s, and I mean at the level of big-name corporations (not GeoCities laypeople). In-house Designers at these businesses (or contractors at the equally big-name firms they hired out to) were presumably well-educated and steeped in the history of the medium, but churned out nearly unintelligible, ugly garbage. Most of the design principles that have given us the mostly tasteful (if bland/inoffensive) modern web were solidified in print by the 1960s. I know the tooling wasn't there yet browser-wise to do anything crazy, but even the image-based graphical elements are just so foreign and weird, like the product of a generation so enamored with the capabilities of Photoshop that they didn't question unnecessary filters, drop shadows, and the placement of text.

<comment><USER30> Many elements were owed to CRT displays and larger pixel sizes, so rather domain specific. E.g., the mandatory drop shadow typography wasn't to be seen in print. On the other hand, I wouldn't like to witness modern screen design on a CRT. Moreover, the 1990s came just after a massive retro design trend in the 1980s and there were still some informal reference to 1950s design around, countered by a rather blocky "who cares" trend (probably rooting in free- style/low-end design as featured by April Greiman in screen design and new electronic trends in print as by Emigre Graphics), even featuring illegibility. At the same time any custom elements had to match the few "probably installed" type faces (Times/Times New Roman, Helvetica/Arial, Verdana, Courier/Courier New, maybe Symbol). Moreover, fonts rendered in sizes relative to OS presets, most probably what was 12px on a Mac rendered like 14px on Windows (which is huge on a CRT in 72dpi standard resolution), and custom elements had to provide visual stabilization to accommodate the design to the various forms of rendering. Last, but not least, the entire environment of the presentation was rather blocky, from OS elements to the housing of the CRT, and you had to accommodate to this, as well.

<comment><USER31> Yes, the drop shadows introduced in Win98 (IIRC) really helped readability of filenames on top of desktop wallpapers. It was a much nicer method than just backgrounding the text with a fixed colour like Win95 did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> An admirable effort. Looking at the IE5 screenshot, compare the kerning of 'ff' in the word "efficitur" (first line) to the 'ff' in "different" in the sentence following the image. It's slightly different. But still, a job well done!

</comment><comment><USER33> In both Chrome and Firefox On Windows 10 at 100% zoom in the browser and 100% screen scaling this looks blurry; the pixels in the font don't line up with the pixels of my monitor unfortunately.

<comment><USER34> Here's my screenshot, 100% zoom, Debian/kwin_wayland; [https://i.imgur.com/tu1V1pp.png](https://i.imgur.com/tu1V1pp.png)

Firefox 68esr (left) is crisp but has too tall characters(?) resulting in a gap in lowercase 'o'.

Chrome 80 (right) has this problem and is blurry in addition.

<comment><USER35> Quite likely this is because Firefox 68 didn't support subpixel positioning so it aligned all glyphs to full pixels. Chrome 80 (and Firefox 76 in some configurations, or if gfx.text.subpixel-position.force-enabled is enabled) uses subpixel positioning if possible, which improves kerning of normal fonts, but in the case of these "retro" fonts, it's harmful. Maybe it's possible to adjust the glyph metrics so they're aligned to full pixels even if subpixel positioning is used, but I'm not sure if this can be really be done so it works everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amusingly, i have antialiasing disabled in Windows 10 (though sadly not everything respects the setting - but Firefox does) and it took me a while to realizing what was going on :-P.

But then i thought to try enabling it and it turns out it looks blurry here (100% scaling in case anyone wonders, since i saw others mentioning non-100% scaling). Firefox, Windows 10.

I wonder if it has anything to do with cleartype settings or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER37> The next step is emulating a CRT monitor to get the fundamentally analog nature of the display right: Even if the computer thinks in pixels, it was still ultimately controlling a complex analog waveform being sent to some number of electron guns steered by magnets. Higher-resolution later computer monitors came closer to imitating pixels, but analog TV didn't try; it just had lines and interlaced fields. Old games took advantage of the analog nature of TVs to smooth over their graphics:

[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786)

</comment><comment><USER38> Most (but not all) of the text is slightly blurry for me on Linux with a HiDPI display at 200% scale, using grayscale antialiasing: [https://user- images.githubusercontent.com/7930239/81491203-4...](https://user- images.githubusercontent.com/7930239/81491203-4156ef00-9240-11ea-9142-8323c6f42704.png)

I'm using Chromium, but the "-webkit-font-smoothing: none" style doesn't appear to be changing anything.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the report! I wonder if that only works on macOS...

<comment><USER39> Firefox on macOS also gives me a blurry result on a retina display. However it seems to work great on macOS in Safari and Opera (Chromium).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-nikolaev I think, they might want to use this font editor: [https://fontstruct.com/](https://fontstruct.com/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Very cool.

I know this is a tad off-topic, but, it's sort of related since it's about fonts.

I've been looking for a good "serial killer typewriter" typeface, similar to what's used in the credits of the TV show _Supernatural_ , but I haven't found anything that looks particularly good. Does anybody have any recommendations? Free fonts would be preferred, but I'm willing to pay a bit for the right look.

</comment><comment><USER41> I switched to Safari as I've got my default browser set up to ignore all fonts (right now using Computer Modern for everything), but the display gets a bit weird -- while fonts are rendered the way they're meant to, it seems the line breaks in the code cause some whitespace in the text.

[https://i.imgur.com/v80wKdf.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/v80wKdf.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Wow, thank you for putting 2 and 2 together! We have been bothered by these weird spacing artefacts, but we never figured out that they correlated to line breaks in our source code! That's insane. This gives us a lead to investigate.

And here i was thinking HTML was a bit like LaTeX – mostly whitespace- agnostic! Just shows you what spending too long in academia will do to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I know in the Blink engine (eg: Chromium) I've seen it render various Asian typefaces without any anti-aliasing, eg: Dotum (including the Latin characters). I've often wondered why that is.

Perhaps whatever causes that rendering might be of use in cases like this, since it would also allow zooming/higher font sizes.

Edit: although it may only display as such on Windows only, come to think of it.

</comment><comment><USER43> As a child of the $PAST in the UK, I lived in three overlapping Internet worlds. Acorn RISC OS 3, Mac OS 7.5 at home and increasing amounds of Windows 95/98.

The Acorn ecosystem was way ahead until it suddenly wasn't. But my first webppage in about 1996 was made on an Acorn machine and, as far as I recall, the text was antialiased back then.

<comment><USER44> Here are some screenshots of RISC OS 3, including the anti-aliased fonts [1].

In 1992, on a 640x480 CRT, fonts rendered on RISC OS were excellent. Losing this when I switched to Windows around 1995 was a big step backwards.

NB if viewing on a HiDPI screen, the browser will blur the image at it scales it for the webpage. Instead, look at [2] and zoom the page to 50% -- that's exactly how I remember it, except half the size.

[1] [https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#text](https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#text)

[2] [https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/Text--AA-sub- pixel.png](https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/Text--AA-sub-pixel.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Regarding the complaints on both kerning and blurriness that you're getting in the thread: the original font likely included a ton of kerning and hinting info, but it might've been all stripped when going through the conversion process. Seeing as character metrics should be practically identical to the original, you might want to copy that info into your result font—if that's possible (I think it should be, but dunno about tool support).

However, there will probably still be a problem if the intended font height doesn't match the actual one in the user's browser—and you can't control that with accuracy to a pixel (CSS pixels aren't screen pixels).

</comment><comment><USER46> Recently I came across [https://512pixels.net/2014/04/aqua-past- future/](https://512pixels.net/2014/04/aqua-past-future/) and was overcome with nostalgia for System 7.

Maybe it's just that a Mac IIsi running System 7 was my first computer when I was seven years old, but I think there's a timeless beauty to the operating system that no later release has really captured.

Some more images here: [https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac- os](https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os)

Those folder and control panel icons just slay me.

<comment><USER45> You can run it in emulators. I was doing that on Android recently, to play Deja Vu.

However, you probably cherish more your memory of the system than the actual thing, and emulators don't help with that.

<comment><USER46> I should probably do that.

Actually, my Mac IIsi still works last I checked, but that was about ten years ago!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Funny idea, but it failed: [https://i.imgur.com/fXGEGCi.png](https://i.imgur.com/fXGEGCi.png)

Strongly hinted fonts of win2k era looked quite nice, but this is just blurry mess.

</comment><comment><USER47> But font antialiasing was available starting from Windows 95 with Microsoft Plus!. I don't remember for sure, but I doubt browsers were exception and didn't use system-wide font antialiasing.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anti-aliasing isn't enough, because of hinting. So they had to use FontForge to recreate old-looking fonts! I really like the retro scrollbar as well.

<comment> amiga-workbench The scrollbars are done properly using CSS pseudo selectors too. I was half expecting to find some javascript sludge but there's none to be found.

<comment><USER16> And they are almost spot on, very nice work.

The only issue I noticed is that the up/down buttons don't have a "pressed" state as they should. The arrow should move down and to the right by one pixel (with some appropriate redrawing of the border - I would have to look up the details on that). But even with that one nit, very nicely done!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Cool project! When are the custom cursors? :)

</comment><comment><USER50> This is nice and reminds me of the early/late 90's. Was curious what motivated you to bring back the past!

<comment> con-cat Thank you! We're both lovers of retrocomputing, and I think especially right now it's easy to feel nostalgic for simpler times. We wanted to capture a bit of the wonder and weirdness of the early web, before corporate walled gardens took over and made everything look the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's a nice exercise, but please be aware that using that font in your website makes it terribly hard to read for users who need to zoom in. As in, enlarged pixelated letters are even harder to read then blurry ones. Bitmap fonts are only good on exactly the original size they're designed at.

</comment><comment><USER52> non-antialiased fonts is still how I prefer fonts to render on my low-dpi screens by a large margin

<comment><USER53> I spent a bit of time yesterday installing Proggy fonts on my T420 to get crisper characters while cramming more on the small screen :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This font looked perfect on Firefox on Android, but when I read it on my desktop (Firefox on Linux) it looks wrong. It seems as though the scale is wrong, and the character 'o' gets a white line though it.

</comment><comment><USER55> scaling up a font just so autotrace won't create curves out of the pixels? sounds like a hack compared to finding a program which converts pixels into squares.

<comment><USER56> Autotrace is the wrong apporoach here imo. Yes, fonts usually consist of quadratic curves, but they perfectly well support straight lines (and as a result the files will become pretty small, too). There is no reason why the original pixels cannot be converted with full precision using horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe the tool that can do this was not available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Just in terms of creating a convincing 90's look, the "blobby mess" actually wasn't that bad!

</comment><comment><USER58> Btw it's possible to get this font? I would love to use that on my personal blog :)

</comment><comment><USER59> I can appreciate all sorts of tech nostalgia, but reading the intro my first thought was "wow this is cognitively impairing me" and then "please don't". Achieving it is surely a feat, but the actual effect is to make it as hard now to use my computer as it was over 20 years ago, because the type is illegible.

<comment><USER9> That's fair enough, i think it's a matter of taste, really. For me, it evokes a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time. Not that it necessarily was, and definitely not that it was better – i was a kid back then, so that has definitely coloured my memory of it all.

I see this more as a "just because we can" art project, than anything else.

EDIT: it also occurs to me that i have tons of respect for the hours of effort that would've gone into making fonts back then be beautiful at such small DPI. I think it's a good example of constraints producing interesting/good/impressive art. But i should avoid waxing too philosophical!

<comment><USER59> I have a ton of respect both for font design in any constraints and the reverse engineering effort required to produce old pixelated text in modern web browsers. But it still made it significantly harder for me to read, and I hope this isn't something anyone will try to reproduce for real world use, because it's not just a matter of taste at that point, it's a matter of accessibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does it switch between Bookman and Palatino based on User-Agent?

</comment><comment><USER61> My head hurts from just trying to read the first few paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER62> The font blurs slightly on my Windows 10 machine at 125% zoom.

<comment><USER63> If you zoom to 200% it should look sharp again :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> FontForge is awesome! Used it a couple of times

</comment><comment><USER65> great read. I recently turned my website into a windows 95 clone, but I haven't done anything special for the fonts yet (it's a work in progress) but this made think about it. thanks

</comment><comment><USER66> Sorry, but the font is way off. there are holes in the pixels

</comment><comment><USER67> <blink><marquee>this Web Site has been visited 1,337 times</marquee></blink>

<comment><USER68> It is not the earliest time of the web but marquee text, loud colours, visible separators ("hr"), grey color gradients to give a 3d-look, elaborate page visit counters, "cgi" in urls, guest books and "under construction" gifs are what I remember of the web of times long past indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> WWW should never have enabled use of custom fonts or colours. The fonts and the colours used for particular elements of a page should be configured system-wide. I always block web fonts anyway.

<comment><USER70> If that's how you like it, you can configure your user-agent as such and get that experience today.</comment></comment>


Microsoft to Tie Executive Bonuses to Company Diversity Goals - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft-to-tie-executive-bonuses-to-company-diversity-goals <comment> tuna-piano If there was an equally qualified man and woman- choosing the man over the woman because he is a man would be considered sexism. Choosing the woman over the man because she is a woman is considered progress.

Asians are way over represented at Microsoft vs our country. We need to boost the white percentage as well.

To me, race "diversity" is a foolish kind of diversity, because of how shallow it is. I don't think skin color makes you a different person, so I don't really think that more people of different colors in a company makes anything better. And I guess that makes me the bigoted one?

<comment><USER2> If it's shallow then wouldn't that imply it has no bearing on whether the person is qualified, and the pools of candidates of a certain race or gender are all equally qualified? If so, then why are diversity quotas a problem?

<comment><USER3> Just because race or gender has no factor in whether a candidate is qualified does not mean that qualified candidates are equally represented among races and/or genders.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but the GP suggested that weighting based on race or gender is a _problem_ , which implies that qualified candidates are unequally represented. Why would this be so? Is there evidence to support it?

They also suggested that the white percentage needs to be 'boosted', because there are too many asians? Why would that be? What are the correct numbers?

<comment> tuna-piano I think it's pretty clear that qualified candidates are not equally represented. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, socioeconomic, educational, etc. But take a look at the SAT scores by race, or chosen academic majors in college. I'm on mobile with bad internet so I can't link to actual figures now.

And my (sarcastic) logic for white percentage boosting is the same as Microsoft's black percentage boosting goal. Asians are significantly over represented at Microsoft (and most of the big tech cos) vs our US population. Microsoft wants to increase the black/Hispanic employee percentage to get more in line with the US distribution. They should also want to do the same with whites, which leaves the Asians set to be decreased significantly.

<comment><USER2> I see, that makes sense. If you're certain that qualified candidates are not equally represented, are you certain that lowering the asian percentage and raising the white percentage wouldn't lower the overall skill level of the Microsoft workforce? How do you suggest to counteract this effect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. Not to mention a great way to open yourself to law suits and massive animosity among your employees.

<comment><USER2> Why "rather than their ability"? Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so?

<comment> tuna-piano When the criteria for a job is aptitude, experience, etc then of course it's ability over diversity.

When diversity is a qualification along with aptitude and experience, people are right to question.

A parallel discussion (and recent litigation) for college admissions is happening as well. Many black people admitted to top schools are only admitted because they are black. The stats show that black people admitted to some top schools need much lower SAT scores, while Asians need much higher (vs whites). This might not be the most polite way to phrase the situation, but it is absolutely true.

<comment><USER2> So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these black students?

Are their grades lower? What about their post-graduation job outcomes? Do they cost the campus more money? How much money do they make the campus by playing on basketball and football teams for the university? What do the on-campus crime and harassment statistics look like if broken down by race and gender - do the diverse students cause more trouble or less?

If you're going to say something like 'they were only admitted because they are black' and then 'absolutely true' I hope you're prepared to back it up, otherwise you just sound racist - and I'm sure that's absolutely not true!

<comment><USER5> > So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their > skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are > normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these > black students?

No, he's saying that they were selected over people who performed better in the interviews and other selection criteria because of the color of their skin/gender/religion/...

Now in some way that's equivalent, in the sense that they would not have been selected if not for their skin color (they would have been third or fifth on the list where the top spot gets hired), but in other ways it's not. It does not mean they don't have any ability at all, for instance. Just less than would be required if they were white males. And I'm sure if executive compensation is tied to this, that there will in fact be cases of no ability at all, but I doubt it will be the common case.

And we all know the methods executives will use to hit their targets while lying about this, for instance to make sure it looks fair, when it isn't. Going in and changing interview reports and scores after the fact to make sure they "didn't select based on skin color", except it'll be blatantly obvious for their colleagues that's exactly what happened. And in fact I bet those other team members will have to work more, harder and ... to compensate for the lower abilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Big chance to poison the well - did you not get the promotion or job because you're not a diversity hire, or was it because the other candidate was better? I've seen Intel do this and animosity increased by a huge amount.

<comment> tuna-piano And the reverse - did that person get the job because he/she was the most qualified, or because he/she was in a certain class of people?

(And would also make the person who got that job question themself)

<comment><USER2> This is literally just a sorting problem. Diversity quotas imply using a candidate's minority status as part of the sorting key, _not the only sorting key_. You're still picking a highly qualified candidate, not some random dude off the street. Think about it for five seconds, please :(

<comment><USER7> As soon as you tie a persons bonus money to it, it isn't. You are no longer looking at the highest quality candidates, but the ones that match the minimal qualities. And since race/gender has no impact on performance (my asumption), this is a bad key.

But, as someone that can check the minority checkbox, woo!

<comment><USER2> Bonuses at a company like Microsoft are typically based on an employee's performance - how well they met their stated goals, etc. Obviously, if a company goal is to have a diverse workforce, whether or not that happens is going to influence the bonuses of the people responsible for it. If this is an unacceptable outcome, you're suggesting that diversity can't be a company goal, period.

Like I've said before, it's a sorting problem - if implementing an algorithm correctly requires sorting some values to the top and some to the middle, you shouldn't get full credit if your implementation _doesn 't do that_.

We're not talking about soviet russia production quotas being exploited here, just about adjusting the way candidates are found and ranked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course there's a danger to the company in this. " _My bonus is tied to my diversity goals. I 've tried hard, but I'm way behind and my reporting period is almost up! Quick, bypass the standard screening and qualification checks, and hire a bunch of people in underrepresented groups_"

<comment><USER9> That's true, but any incentive structure at all has similar hazards. (Ever seen the software quality bar lowered in order to meet a deadline?) So long as the company does have standards, and processes it trusts to enforce those standards, it's possible to guard against that failure mode, just as you'd guard against any other employee misbehaviour.

If you do have employees (or execs) bypassing the process or lowering their standards in order to meet short term goals, that in itself is a cultural problem the company would want to address.

 _Edit_ : it's worth noting that every manager who has more planned work than they can execute with their current head count _already_ has a short-term incentive to lower their hiring bar and get someone in the door quickly. Managers get measured on executing to plan, so that's probably a stronger incentive than any bonus structure.

So my point isn't that lowering the bar to game the system will never happen, but that it's a failure mode that already occurs and that the system should already have defences against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Satya Nadella was born in India. I am 100% sure this policy is not going to apply to Microsoft's nine offices in India which are 100% one race. If you don't think this is about anything other than using race politics for corporate power, ask why diversity isn't important in Microsoft's other locations.

</comment><comment><USER11> I work for a fairly large company and they are doing this too (just for gender though). The way I see it you can either have diversity goals or you can be a meritocracy. To be honest Im not 100% sure which is better - I want to say meritocracy but then you have the Enron's that were meant to be the smartest guys in the room. But as a white male I see my career here quite limited due to me not being their preferred demographic.

</comment><comment><USER12> That is already part of their job as managers. So what's next? Getting a bonus for showing up at work? Or maybe getting a bonus for playing less golf? Or perhaps a bonus for interrupt people who do real work with more useless meetings? Actually the last one isn't needed. They already do that. A lot.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem isn't at the executive level, it's at the schools.

The expected levels should be set based on what was happening in the education system, not the population in general.

I work at a place where this bullshit is happening and it's clear they're putting barely qualified people based on gender. In the end the company, all its employees, and the people it serves will be harmed.

Instead they should work on getting more diversity in the STEM degrees and fix root cause.

If they truely want it to be fair they should use "blind interviews" voice changers over the phone, written exams, etc... Not bullshit targets and incentives.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have dislike anti-discrimination laws for a while now. For example, one of the methods used to enforce them (particularly in things like hiring) is statistics, most of which assumes employees are interchangeable commodities. Not to mention the problems with "performance" reviews and "PIPs" too. They were designed back in the 1960s for things like manual labor jobs. I am willing to suggest a compromise to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Won't this attach a stigma to those hired (who aren't white/asian male)? It's quite literally a quota.

</comment><comment><USER16> lol this is not how you become diverse...

<comment><USER2> How do you, then? What's the secret?

<comment><USER17> Bottom up, not top down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't it illegal to make pay based on a protected class?</comment>


Using DNA to Solve NP-Complete Problems (1995) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/591d/33325588c1e92236cbd912b8282e714b5b5e.pdf <comment><USER2> I co-wrote a thesis which touches this type of problems. The idea is that DNA is a very concentrated and massively parallel computing medium. However after all it's only kicking the can along the road. Citing myself:

«If we had a computer based on chemistry working a million times faster, then we could add twenty more variables to the SAT problem (the dual logarithm of a million is roughly 20). This is better, but not much better. If we want to add 100 more variables, we would run into problems. Suppose we need 2^100 water molecules with a molecular weight of around 18, then they would weigh 18·2^100/NA ≈ 38·10^6 grams or around 38 tons (NA being Avogadro's number). With a few more variables we would need more water than there is available on the earth. This is the limitation of the memory for time tradeoff.»

PDF: [https://goo.gl/J22sZP](https://goo.gl/J22sZP)

<comment><USER3> Excuse my naivety but I don't follow.

You need 2^100 water molecules to do what?

DNA has 4 bases, so any strand of 100 pairs can be encoded 4^100 ways. Granted DNA weighs a lot more than water.

I'm having a hard time understanding how a calculation can be encoded and performed. Can anyone provide an example of how this works?

<comment><USER2> This was only a thought experiment to show that even an absolute massive parallel approach with gazillions of computing entities doesn't really solve NP complete problems. Even if we could use a single water molecule as a simple computing entity, for problem sizes of about a few hundred variables or more we wouldn't have enough water in our whole world.

So it's ultimately hopeless without even going into detail how to use water as a computing medium.

However, for SAT there are practical solutions with heuristics back-tracking for many instances. So don't get worked up too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote an article that explains this result with pictures. You might find it helpful for understanding it: [https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/a-brief- introdu...](https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/a-brief-introduction- to-dna-computing/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The key insight from Adleman is that DNA complement binding allows for massively parallel "brute force" for the HPP. This exploits the fact that chemically, complement pairs will "find" each other given enough time, so if we encode all pairs into complements, then we know that every matching corresponds to a path.

An unanswered (although touched upon; unanswered I suspect because it is in the source paper) question in the paper is: why does this not mean P=NP if we only require O(m) test tubes and "mixing" operations on a formula of size m? The answer I suspect (I haven't read Adleman's paper) has to do with the amount of time it takes for the "mixing" operation to work. I would imagine that as the number of clauses increase, the number of DNA strands in the test tube increases, and the time it takes chemically finding your complement would increase exponentially. I'd be interested in the real answer though.

<comment><USER6> On a slightly pedantic note, even if the mixing operation were truly constant time, it would have no impact on P?=NP. There is no reason to believe that all computers that can be physically constructed are deterministic.

<comment><USER7> A physically-realizable system for solving problems that are NP in polynomial time, mass and energy would be very economically interesting, just as quantum computers are for Shor's algorithm and simulated annealing. (despite the fact that we can't yet perform Shor's algorithm at scale and at as far as I know some people still raise doubts about whether D-Wave's product truly outperforms computational simulated annealing or truly does anything "quantum")

It also gives us insights into one of the other interesting questions of our day: Is simulating a physical system of polynomial size in P, or not in P? If you find that polynomial-size physical systems can solve problems in NP but believe that P≠NP, then you would also believe simulation is not in P.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. I didn't mean to imply it wouldn't be interesting. It just wouldn't have any impact on the question of P vs NP from a logocal perspective.

Also, with respect to your physical system argument, I'm not sure I agree. Any computer that actually exists has some probability of making a computation error. With that in mind, simulating a physical system with a step that involves becoming a physical system is likely not a valid argument from an algorothmic reduction point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember the first time I saw a talk on this stuff. I was fully expecting to see pseudoscientific bullshit, and it was really surprising / exciting to see a serious, semi-practical scheme instead.

<comment> Ar-Curunir To followup, this is work by Dick Lipton, a very respected complexity theorist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought it would be more of a joke article:

1) Start with DNA in a primordial soup

2) Wait ~4 billion years

3) An intelligent lifeform will create an A.I. that can solve it

<comment><USER6> I never thought it would work, but the last hundred years or so really sold it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tl;dr per my read

1) Convert the graph representation to a biological encoding that leverages DNA's complement binding.

2) Shake

3) Read unique newly bound sequences that contain your desired properties (e.g. start at X, end at Y), which will by chemical properties include all possible answers with high probability

The encoding seemed the tricky / novel part.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand this.

How is the DNA encoding the computation? I understand base complementing but how exactly does this result in an answer. If it were possible why didn't they do an experiment?

<comment><USER11> Read the paper of the inventor. It is easier. Adleman, L. M. (1994). "Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems". Science. 266 (5187): 1021–1024. Bibcode:1994Sci...266.1021A. doi:10.1126/science.7973651. PMID 7973651.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There seems to be so much potential in alternative computing technologies. Why is nobody setting out to build one? (with the obvious exception of quantum computing)

<comment><USER13> Perhaps you could suggest some alternative technologies worth investigating? This DNA computation method is interesting but would only be useful for a narrow range of problems. There's DWave's quantum annealer which is showing a distinct lack of promise. Quantum computing will arrive eventually and is well studied.

Most alternative techniques I've seen try to use some analog technique to solve a difficult problem. The problem is that scaling the size of the problem requires ever less noise and more accuracy of these techniques and we quickly hit a wall in every case. Memcomputing, for example, can't practically encode more integers than we can test using silicon processors. There's no version of the fault tolerant threshold theorem for analog computers to fix this deficiency.

So really, of all the alternative technologies I've read about, it's only DNA based methods that I'd really be interested in seeing more of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> (1995)

<comment><USER15> Thanks, updated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty sure this is 'fake' and a old article.

Why is DNA better than silicon? Is it magic?

<comment><USER17> Have you read the article, or are you just responding to the headline/title?

 _EDIT:_ Seeing as I got a downvote I thought I'd expand on my question. You asked:

      > Why is DNA better than silicon?
      > Is it magic?

The article says clearly what the advantage is of DNA over silicon - it's at the very top of the second page where it says:

      > ... biological computations could potentially
      > have vastly more parallelism than conventional
      > ones.

Secondly, the article isn't "fake" in any sense of the term - it's written and published by an eminent researcher in the field of computational complexity. It's a very clear exposition of the techniques used to solve NP problems with physical systems, including an analysis of why this doesn't really work, and why it's unlikely ever to work.

Yes, it's "old", although for some of us it's not that old, and given comparatively recent excitement about using slime-molds to plan "optimal" transportation networks, clearly it's still relevant, and not well enough known.

So my question still stands - you seem to have dismissed this quickly, and I wonder if you've actually read and understood it, or are you simply reacting to the headline/title?

<comment><USER16> > ... biological computations could potentially > have vastly more parallelism > than conventional > ones.

I think it's all the same. There is no magic to biological?

> you seem to have dismissed this quickly, and I wonder if you've actually > read and understood it

I think I did read it first time quite well, my problem is it's tiring to re- talk about old articles , but to be honest rereading things that logically don't make sense I don't do, so maybe I'm lazy.

<comment><USER17> There is no magic, and the article makes that clear. It might win on the constant because of the potential parallelism, but even that's not clear. But if it _did_ win on the constant, the amount of potential parallelism is huge! It's just that we never seem to be able to take advantage of it "properly."

But the thing is that this idea keeps getting re-discovered, with people getting excited all over again. This article is a clear debunking of the hype, and has value in being able to point people at it and say "Look, it's been done, it doesn't work, and here's the explanation. If you've done something really new, then you need to make it clear why it's different from this 20 year old work."

Having said all that, I'm not sure what it is you're claiming doesn't make logical sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kong Launches AI/ML Features to Automate Microservices Management at Scale - <AUTHOR> https://konghq.com/blog/kong-brain-and-kong-immunity-released/ <comment> z-z-z-z Do Kong Brain and Kong Immunity work together or are they separate services? Can I get one without the other?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are two separate products that work together as part of an end-to-end solution. You don't need to get both, but obviously using both would yield the greatest benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> when will these be fully released?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have a definitive timeline for making these generally available. We're going to make sure that anything we make GA has been fully battle tested.</comment></comment>


Seeking hacker to set up Arc News Forum - <AUTHOR>

It's probably a day or two worth of work for someone who knows what they're doing.  If you are interested in job contact me fn (at) altgate.com or via my blog at http://www.altgate.com.<p>Thx! <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, if anyone is interested, I've got the basic forum up here

<http://news.virid.us:8080/news>

Now I need to figure out how to tweak things like color, text, ports, etc. (or find someone who know who can do it)...any takers?

</comment><comment><USER2> Any reason you can't go with <http://slinkset.com> ?</comment>


Soylent Really Green: Meal-Replacement Startup Raising at $100M Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/01/07/soylent-really-green-meal-replacement-startup-raising-at-100m-valuation/

<comment><USER2> Maybe they can use this money to speed up the turnaround time</comment>


'Netflix for piracy' Popcorn Time saved by fans - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25949340 <comment><USER3> > _Mark Mulligan, an analyst and co-founder of Midia Consulting, said this > should give content creators great cause of concern._

> _" The next stage of piracy, and one rights holders need to be really > worried about, is when the pirates start behaving like the rest of the > internet and start making great user experiences."_

Couldn't really disagree more, for a long time the user experience has been one of piracy's biggest selling points, second to (or possibly even above) affordability.

<comment><USER4> A few years ago, the piracy user experience was far and away better than the legitimate user experience. Things then started to change: Netflix, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, etc etc. The legit services are - with three exceptions - now in most cases better and easier and smoother than the piracy alternative. But the three exceptions can be fairly major:

1\. Price (well, duh). Netflix is cheap imo, Spotify is cheap, but piracy is still free.

2\. Spread of content. Less an issue with Spotify which has just about EVERYTHING but more so with video services. Piracy has any movie, any TV show. Netflix (and other services) only have those they've signed up.

3\. Availability. Netflix is great in the US, okay in the UK, tolerable in other places. HBO Go is only available in a few countries. BBC iPlayer only in the UK. It's patchy.

But: the signs are there than when content owners and distributions services can get their act together, legitimate distribution is a _better_ user experience than piracy. That's only been the case for the last year, eighteen months. Mulligan appears to be casting aside many years of history when piracy was the only game in town. Popcorn Time has a great UI and is simple to use, but it's now playing catch-up with paid services when for a decade or more, piracy was streets ahead in ability and usability.

<comment><USER5> The fact that I have to use the truly terrible Netflix player to watch Netflix content is why I'd always choose a pirated .mkv version any day of the week. In fact, I've sometimes bought games and movies and then later used the pirated version because of how much better it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reasons why existing video services do not work for me and I've tried Google Play and Amazon Instant so far:

\- Lack of on-demand high quality (true 1080) option: Google Play is 480 and Amazon Instant is blurry on a big screen. Besides Amazon states in their TOC that they can change quality as they see fit at the time of a video being played.

\- Insistence on specific playback tech. Amazon Instant mandates Silverlight and the playback is choppy on my media centre PC due to Silverlight's graphic acceleration issues.

\- Lack of audio track (and often subtitle) options: in UK that's English only. I want to be able to watch films dubbed and have a selection of translations that are already available.

More generally I am opposed to the prepackaged nature of the paid service offered and lack of control over how and what I can watch.

Some alternative ways of viewing the content offer me great choice and full control over:

      1. Title I choose to watch.
      2. Video quality.
      3. Audio quality.
      4. Audio track.
      5. Subtitles.
      6. Streaming vs. download, so I can make the best use of my connection.
      7. Hardware and software I am using for viewing.

In other words these matters are decided based on demand, instead of someone's opinion of what the demand should be.

<comment><USER7> If you're concerned with quality, why not "purchase" the movies in a marketplace like iTunes or Google Play?

<comment><USER6> "Purchase" doesn't quite reflect modern TOC, I believe the more exact term would be "pay a premium for a longer term license to view video content that is revokable at vendor's will; neither continued availability nor immutability of the initially licensed content is guaranteed".

I would really prefer to pay per view instead and retain a high degree of control over my hardware and software configuration as well as having a reasonable choice of options in terms of video quality, various subtitles and audio tracks.

Ideally I'd be able to buy audio track or subtitles separately to combine with the video content for viewing (plug-in), then there would be a robust market of competing translations.

<comment><USER7> That's why I put "purchase" in quotes... as it doesn't mean what most think it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'Netflix for piracy' Popcorn Time saved by being free software.

</comment><comment><USER9> Screw Netflix!

$7.99 per month and they don't even have the last half of season 5 - <USER2> Bad.

Many movies are unavailable to US viewers, as services such as [https://hola.org/](https://hola.org/) have shown us.

Large selection? It seems like every movie _I want to watch_ is "Unavailable for streaming..." or is viewable for an additional $10 fee through their DVD service.

I like Popcorn!

<comment><USER10> Just VPN to the UK and you'll have the last half. Although I'm sure I read about it coming to the US at some point this spring

<comment><USER11> Or just pirate it - using a VPN is against Netflix' TOS, so since you'll be in the wrong either way, there's no reason for doing it the expensive way.

I like what Netflix does, but as long as region locks exist (not Netflix' fault, of course) there won't be a service that's both good and legal.

<comment><USER12> Or just buy it on DVD

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My stance, as a Netflix and Spotify subscriber is: I'd be happy to pay double what I'm paying right now if you would give me the content. If I had the ability to get the US Netflix library selection(Ireland here) for 16 euro a month I'd be delighted. Remember also, that we pay much more than you guys in the states do. You pay 60 euro a year, whereas we pay 100, and you get more content than we do. I don't get why they don't want my money.If I can't find it on netflix/spotify I'll check iTunes, which is usually a dead end, and then finally I'll pirate it. Why not let me pay 8 bucks a month for HBO access aswell, I'd happily do it!

</comment><comment><USER14> feel the need to chime in here... The reason this is taking off is because the content providers are signing sweetheart deals with the services. If I could pay one source a manageable amount to stream whatever I wanted (even if I had to pay per view), I would take it in a heartbeat (sorry Amazon Prime, you don't have everything). But alas, capitalism fails us here and we're left as consumers to break the law in order to get what we would pay for otherwise. Seriously, People are not all going to get Cable TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Red Box, Warner Brothers, and Hulu Plus in order to have access to 80% of movies released before 1995. In the past we had video rental shops VCRs and DVD players, they're all going or gone now. If the industry wants to stay profitable, they need to either become more cost efficient (sorry Brad Pitt, but you need to take a paycut with the rest of us) or provide us with an easier means of accessing the content online. What's happening here is not too different from the disruption caused by the original iPhone to the carrier market. They're still reeling from it even though they should have expected it. Let's see how long it takes content providers to figure out how to stay relevant without additional government regulation.

</comment><comment><USER15> If Popcorn Time "went legitimate", how much per month do you think would be a reasonable price?

I'd happily pay $30/month if it worked on my TV -- I'd just buy a digital antenna for local OTA broadcasts.

Even $50/month wouldn't be too horrible. I believe that $30 is the "sweet spot", though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Netflix in Denmark: Price "79 kr" (14.72 $) 1.700 movies

Netflix in America: Price (7.99 $) over 14.000 movies

Makes no sense

<comment><USER17> Netflix in Ireland (and Uk roughly the same price) : 6.99 € (or 7.99)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would suggest that this is by far the biggest possible advert that popcorn time could want.

</comment><comment><USER19> We've had streaming torrent players for a decade here in mainland China.

</comment><comment><USER20> So when we will see new page for the project build by community?

<comment><USER21> [http://popcorn.cdnjd.com](http://popcorn.cdnjd.com)

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I can see very little reason for people to use this other than they don't want to pay money for movies.

Netflix is cheap, has a large selection, is available in several countries and its geo-block is easy to bypass with a Chrome plugin meaning you can get full selection from any country. There are also other streaming services in various countries. Not to mention the large number of countries iTunes Movies are available in. Obviously new releases can only be viewed in the cinema but if you really want to see something that's not too big of an ask - or you can wait a couple of months.

There are always people trying to justify piracy and although I disagree with it I can see their frustration at times but movies are incredibly convenient and cheap to access. Is there a 'valid' reason to use something like Popcorn Time?

<comment><USER22> Netflix is not so good. Specially if you're not in the US and you don't speak english. Here in the Netherlands the selection is very limited, you rarely see subtitles in languages other than dutch. You can use a proxy to get US Netflix, but that's illegal and doesn't work with a smart TV.

The Popcorn Time or XBMCTorrent experience is so much better. You get a huge selection of movies and series in high definition, with subtitles and audio in any language at a distance of a click.

I would pay many times what Netflix charges for a legal service like this. So would many other people.

<comment><USER23> _You can use a proxy to get US Netflix, but that 's illegal and doesn't work with a smart TV._

This is by no means a good solution, and perhaps still illegal, but it does work. I used to do that for Pandora:

You can run a VPN client on your router connected to a server in the US and add routes for Netflix to go through that connection. That way all devices on your home network should be able to connect to Netflix.

Or some other geo-ip-restricted service. You just need to sniff out their IP blocks.

You set it to reconnect automatically and it's not even that inconvenient. Although you do have to pick networking up as a hobby.</comment></comment></comment>


Death by Derivatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.damninteresting.com/death-by-derivatives/ <comment><USER2> That was a nice read. I like these pieces about the historical context of financial instruments.

 _> Michael Lewis details one such practice in his book Flash Boys, where market makers use superior networking technology to change the market price of a security after a customer sees it and places an order, forcing them to trade at an inferior price._

This is a potentially misleading description of HFT algorithms. HFTs cannot see a customer's order before it executes on an exchange. They cannot "jump in front of" an atomic order. HFTs only have insight like this at the inter- exchange level, i.e. in latency arbitrage. But by default a customer's order won't be routed to multiple exchanges unless there is insufficient liquidity to complete the order on the first exchange (which, if that's routine, means you're likely an institutional customer). Alternatively, if they submit several orders, HFTs will (logically) adjust their prices in response to the new order book activity, which would result in price slippage for the customer.

<comment><USER3> HFTs == market makers. You need market makers in order to have a functioning, liquid market. Absence of market makers -> higher volatility.

Market makers can lose a lot of money under certain market conditions. Their profit margins are rather small. Market makers are practically heros.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit naive to equate the two. Plenty of strategies can be found that leverages high transaction speed and volume that aren't market making.

What defines market making is the fact that you buy and sell the same commodity at the same time, taking advantage of the spread to make money.

Two other rapid transaction arbitrage strategies involve market manipulation, in which trades are placed that are designed to fool other trading algorithms into believing that the price is going to move a certain way, and statistical arbitrage, which searches for temporary price differentials across exchanges.

Neither of these two strategies create liquidity on the market, that is, offers more opportunities for anyone who wants to buy or sell to do so. Instead they seek to create, and/or exploit opportunities.

<comment><USER2> _> What defines market making is the fact that you buy and sell the same commodity at the same time, taking advantage of the spread to make money._

You need not be a formal market maker to increase liquidity. Technically speaking even retail customers will receive small transaction fees for increasing liquidity in certain circumstances where it's particularly lacking. More generally speaking, any strategy that rapidly connects two parties is market making, even if the two parties are not immediately next two each other in the strategy's trading queue.

 _> Two other rapid transaction arbitrage strategies involve market manipulation, in which trades are placed that are designed to fool other trading algorithms into believing that the price is going to move a certain way_

Market manipulation is not a good term to use for this, and it's a fairly serious accusation to levy against a trader. Market manipulation is an illegal activity that typically involves cornering or collusion. More abstractly, this is a net improvement in price discovery, because one party notices that another party can be fooled (which means their algorithm has a glaring pricing inefficiency). In repeatedly taking money from the other party, the other party becomes incentivized to stop executing that strategy. Once there is no counterparty to take that trade anymore, the inefficiency has been traded away, and the market is now (likely imperceptibly) more efficient.

 _> Neither of these two strategies create liquidity on the market, that is, offers more opportunities for anyone who wants to buy or sell to do so. Instead they seek to create, and/or exploit opportunities._

This creates liquidity. Any situation that increases trading activity increases liquidity by definition. You do not need purely symmetric market making to improve overall liquidity - if many low latency trades are being executed, and they are finding counterparties, the liquidity of that market is increasing as a result of the volume. HFTs do not buy and hold, which means they are rapidly connecting buyers and sellers, even if it individual securities are bought and sold asynchronously.

<comment><USER3> This is a very good answer.

I suspect too that HFTs do not buy and hold simply because the cost of holding must be very high for an HFT, e.g., transaction fees may be higher when you mean to hold, and anyways, whatever you're holding is burning a hole in your pocket, much like cash does for an investor -- it represents a missed opportunity.

I also don't see how offers/bids that no one wants to take exploit anything. If they are unreasonable then they are noise that a) can be filtered, b) costs the HFT something. If they are reasonable then they may end up in an actual trade (improving liquidity). Either way they help price discovery!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Indeed, the string of early derivative traders taking their own lives grew > long enough that one writer gave it a name: the "crimson thread of suicide."

I fear the day that Bitcoin & friends come crashing down.

<comment><USER6> During the 2014 crash there were details of suicide hotlines pinned to the top of r/bitcoin

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you haven't yet, read his story on Colonel Sanders. You can thank me later.

[https://www.damninteresting.com/colonels-of- truth/](https://www.damninteresting.com/colonels-of-truth/)

<comment><USER8> That was an awesome read. Never knew the Colonel was a real person. A little sad how they managed to screw him over with no stock considering he founded the company. Good news though as of late, is that KFC is going back to its roots: [http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2016/04/04/kfc- redo-...](http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2016/04/04/kfc-redo-stores- return-to-colonel-chicken-method.html)

Might have to try it again :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Damn, I clicked on the link thinking it would be an article on murderous calculus...

<comment><USER10> Well here's the first related joke that came to mind: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o1rsw/a_calculus_jo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o1rsw/a_calculus_joke/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The scale of today's derivatives market is almost too vast to comprehend. > It's measured in trillions of dollars.

The commonly stated notional value of the derivatives market is sort of a nonsense number. It's based on (very roughly speaking) the number of derivatives contracts times the value of their underlyings. This means that if you had, let's say, a billion binary contracts that paid out one cent if Apple was above $180 in one month, this would have a notional value of like $175B, even though the maximum amount of money that changes hands is $10M and the market value of the contracts is even less than that.

I looked actual estimated market value of all derivatives contracts a while back and it was something like 1.5% of the stated notional value. It's still really big, but iirc substantially smaller than "normal" investments like stocks and commodities. Not saying the article's wrong, it is indeed trillions of dollars even after accounting for this. Just an interesting thing that isn't usually mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _The scale of today's derivatives market is almost too vast to comprehend. > It's measured in trillions of dollars. Traders, aided by the most > sophisticated software money can buy, place bets — billions per second — on > the future prices of every manner of stuff._

My grandpa can't comprehend how bitcoin has "created value out of nothing" but really the finiancial world has been doing it for ages.

<comment><USER13> > the finiancial world has been doing it for ages

Well, not really.

Financial instruments like stocks and bonds are real legal claims on the real assets of an entity. They are not creating value out of nothing, they are transferring ownership rights.

Derivatives are a zero-sum game. There is no value out of nothing, the money you make is your counterparty's loss.

Seignorage is what the government does when it creates dollars (or when bitcoin is created). That truly is creating money for nothing.

<comment><USER14> > Seignorage is what the government does when it creates dollars (or when > bitcoin is created). That truly is creating money for nothing.

Institutions such as banks and credit unions are also able to create money 'from nothing', via lending.

When they make a loan, it's not as though they deduct the amount loaned (or any part of it) from someone else's account, and typically they're allowed to make loans totaling many times (9x? 11x? I forget) the amount of deposits they possess.

<comment><USER15> How could they make loans multiple times the deposits they have unless they too are borrowing money from somewhere?

<comment><USER16> They just do.

> Because banks hold reserves in amounts that are less than the amounts of > their deposit liabilities, and because the deposit liabilities are > considered money in their own right, fractional-reserve banking permits the > money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying base money > originally created by the central bank.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional- reserve_banking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking)

It is literally just paperwork.

Fractional-reserve banking is the greatest scam ever, or a pillar of our economic system, depending on whom you ask.

<comment><USER15> I think one of us is confused. Your link says they can loan out money that people have on deposit even though they technically owe it to depositors. They only need to reserve a fraction of what people have deposited (so better hope they don't all withdraw at once). It doesn't say they can loan out MORE than had been deposited.

<comment><USER16> You asked "how" not "whether". I'm not an economist, I'm some dude who read a book once, so I don't really know what's going on. That said, _if_ the banks "loan out more than had been deposited" they do it by ledger legerdemain.

<comment><USER15> They... don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A more ironic title would be "Death by Securities".

</comment><comment><USER18> It's funny how people consider government intervention and centrally managed economies to be terribly inefficient, yet nonody counts the collective revenue of financial institutions as (at best) a necessary inefficiency of a market- based system. Same for advertisement, deadweight loss, artificial scarcity etc.

It's pretty obvious that free markets (with a few guardrails) work better than anything else we've tried so far. Yet there's so much overhead spent on managing the system, one wonders how anything ever gets done...

<comment><USER19> Financial institutions are not a product of the free market — they are heavily regulated by government.

On top of that, the currency that has been given legal tender status by government, and the currency used as the basis for calculating capital gains tax, just happens to be issued by the central bank that's willing to monetize the government's debt. What a peculiar coincidence.

<comment><USER20> Financial institutions predate government regulations. Their general role is cash flow management (ex: Loans) or risk mitigation (ex: Insurance).

<comment><USER19> You're right. I should have written "contemporary financial institutions".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Solo Founder Discrimination - <AUTHOR> http://blog.contentdj.com/2012/11/17/the-solo-founder-discrimination/ <comment><USER2> OK, no. I appreciate the support for single founders, but this isn't a supporting argument.

> If books can be written by one person and become successful. Why can't > startups?

Because books and startups have nothing in common? Lots of successful endeavors are done by a single person, but that doesn't put the efforts of a single person vs. a team on the same footing, /especially/ as the problems increase in difficulty. Here's a better example:

"If children can be raised by one person and become successful, why can't startups?"

Sure. There are many children who have been raised by single parents and have become very successful. But that doesn't mean /statistically/, this is as easy as having both parents.[0]

The point that is being made counter to this is very simple: Yes, starting a startup can be done by one person. As can a lot of things. But statistically speaking, there are more successful startups that have multiple founders than single founders. You already provided the pie charts in support of this argument! Now to be fair, correlation does not prove causation, but the point is generally: Starting a startup is hard. Understanding the needs of your customers and both developing a solution to meet these need and reserving time to convince them that you've met their needs (selling) is very, very hard.

One of Ryan Carson's arguments (#2) was in essence that having no co-founders means you can top-down dictate leadership. I don't know about you, but I'm not always right. I've never actually met anybody who's always right. Having a team who's on equal footing with you allows you to vet concepts before they catastrophically destroy your company.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: Yes, you can do it without a [co-founder], but that doesn't mean it's to be done.

A good co-founder will almost always make your business more successful. And that's all there is to it.

[0] [http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalcon...](http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalconflict.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps I should rephrase this.

The odds of getting onto the NYT as an author is the probably the same as creating the next billion dollar company. And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web app. So, if productivity gain has improved so dramatically, perhaps we should question our decades old assumptions.

It's easy to bring up example like Steve Jobs and Wozniak. But creating a web app nowadays is considerably easier than building the first PC. Even marketing is easier now. So, why is it that we still hold the same belief about starting companies?

<comment><USER2> > And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of > effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web > app.

That I agree with. Well, I agree as much as I can, because I haven't written a book, but I have written a few web apps (and have started a company). Let's say for the sake of discussion they're reasonably similar, even if perhaps they aren't.

Yes, creating technology is a lot easier than it used to be. Marketing is probably easier as well. But I don't believe whatsoever that building a web app is the same as building a billion dollar business. There are a few examples of business which got lucky, fine, but having started a startup myself, I can say (in line with many others, pg included) that running a company is so much different -- and so much more difficult -- than just hacking up a web app.

Steering a company to massive success requires so many difficult decisions and skills that often have nothing to do with your core competencies (unless you're one of those mythical creatures who can 'do it all'), that you need the support of at least one other person who is either A) better at it than you are, or B) can work together with you to figure out how. Those mythical creatures are the 11% in the pie chart, but the other 89% of us need more manpower behind the wheel.

Whipping up a Rails app in a weekend is not the same as running a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> The hardest part of starting up is at the beginning. I think once you raise lots of money and have reached product market fit, whether you have a cofounder is not all that important. Yet, the solo founder discrimination starts at the beginning stage. Sure, there is data to back it up. But the sample size is small to begin with given how reluctant they are at funding solo founders. I think the biggest reason is probably once past YC, VC and other investors don't fund solo founders. It's really hard to break the conventional wisdom that all the large companies are started by a team. What I am trying to point out is that this conventional wisdom is deeply rooted in a time when the cost of starting up is very high. So, the real question is if you can build a prototype, gain traction and make revenue, why is it still frown upon that you are a solo founder.

<comment><USER2> > So, the real question is if you can build a prototype, gain traction and > make revenue, why is it still frown upon that you are a solo founder.

I believe the reason is because the odds of you taking this product and turning it into a company are less in your favor than if you had others to consult in your business practices. It's less about "startup cost" and more about having two or more heads in the problem space. There's a reason that critical applications often have multiple people running the show -- it's too easy to make a mistake and it usually requires more than one head to get right. It's not impossible, just hard.

So from an investor's perspective, think of it this way:

You're approached by 10 companies. (Or in YC's case, hundreds.) Many of them have a "prototype, traction, and revenue". They all look reasonably appealing. So which do you choose? The ones with multiple very smart founders? Or the ones with a single smart founder? Which of those will be more successful? Which will be able to more effectively hunker down around the whiteboard and come up with some new brilliant ideas when the times get tough?

OK, how about a harder one: You have one company with a bunch of smart founders but only a concept, and you have another company with one founder but a "prototype, traction, and revenue". Now which do you choose? This gets more difficult, but I'd argue the former choice will have a better chance at success, given equal capability of the founders. The former has validation in the form of N people believing in their company, and the latter has real customer validation. But the former has better /potential/ in terms of coming up with something valuable, whereas the latter has more potential to fail at scaling their business. This of course depends on a lot of factors though, and maybe the latter's prowess in building a prototype, gaining traction, and making revenue is convincing enough that they can make it through the long haul.

Case in point though is that for a VC, it's a numbers game. And with all else being equal, if you can invest in 4 smart people instead of 1, your odds of return are higher.

Also, to your first point, after you're making real revenue and/or have funding, nobody cares about how many "co-founders" you have. This is true. They care instead about how many people are on your team. Ends up really just being a semantic distinction based on your company stage :P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your examples all seem very flawed. Startups solve problems, problems that MANY people (customers) have.

Writing a successful book is not the same sort of problem solving. Neither is founding a religion. And developing a programming language may solve a problem that one developer has the time and dedication to solve.

Startups with multiple cofounders have multiple views of the a problem and will have a better chance of finding an optimal solution (wisdom of crowds) vs a single cofounder.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are serious about solving problems, you should be talking to customers rather than talking with your cofounders. So, is the value of having cofounder more of an emotional support given that you can equally just hire someone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is the same reason "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", namely its a variation of conventional wisdom (now).

Which, perhaps, is also to say its a combination of factors:

1) Herd mentality (also known as 'social proof')

2) Porfolio theory (diversification of ideas, attention to details)

3) Network effects (iff younger teams, 2x rolodexes >1x)

4) Adverse selection (co-founder is a vetted hire; early hires are hard; and may imact outcome disproportionately).

So not entirely irrational either.The question is: is it remdiable and is such remidiation cost-effective? Two considerations: must be so for <investors> as well as for <founders>. But yes, a heuristic being overly generalized, is it seems to be a variation now of cognitive bias.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think all this solo-founder talk is missing a key thing that even Ryan Carson acknowledges in his post. You can't do it alone forever.

I think this may be part of the investment bias. The same reasons why you will eventually need to promote people to very high positions in the company, could be the reasoning behind starting with people in those positions, or having them in place by the time you go for funding and essentially making them founders at that point.

Keep in mind, I'm a solo founder.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I mean. I hired a designer and an intern to work on my startup. I am not working alone. But then I don't have a cofounder. And this is being discriminated in the investor world.

Why is that? Is it because it's harder to control from an investor's point of view? I actually think it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Like 001sky mentioned. The conventional wisdom is that you should have a cofounder in order to be successful. And it's really hard to break this once it's THE conventional wisdom.

So single founders don't get investment, so they are less successful. Then it shows in the data...

<comment><USER5> I don't read the data like that. What's missing in that data is how many solo founders there are compared to non-solo.

I think you are assuming that their are an equal number of solo-founder companies as multi-founder companies, but I don't believe that is true. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that 80+% of companies that are looking for funding are multi-founder. If that is the case, then the odds of getting funded as a solo-founder are equal to the odds of a multi-founder company.

However, we also need to consider how we qualify those companies which are likely to get funding or ready. Many solo-founder companies are not ready, but by the time they are ready, will possibly have added a co-founder.

Either way, the advice I think should be just to keep doing what you're doing. If YOU think you need a co-founder to be active in the company, you get one, if not, you don't. Investment shouldn't come as a result of that decision, unless investors are thinking that you can't do it without a co-founder, and they might be right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "If team is so important, how come the world's biggest religions were started by one guy."

We don't know who founded any of the biggest religions. We know almost certainly that Jesus wasn't a real person because the story of his life predates him by hundreds of years. We know that hinduism wasn't founded by a single person. Buddha and Muhammed may have been real people, but there isn't any definitive evidence. And Steve Jobs had a co-founder.

<comment><AUTHOR> Steve Jobs didn't build the PC. Wozniak did. I am not trying to build a rocket in today's age. I am launching a website. And I know how to build it myself. I can hire a designer to help out with design. I can hire interns to work on marketing. Why is it such a taboo that I am a solo founder in the investor's world?

<comment><USER5> I think maybe you are getting downvoted because you are mis-understanding the co-founder relationship. Steve Jobs didn't build the PC, but he knew how to get market it and get investors involved and run a business (or at least he was learning at the time, which gave Woz the opportunity to keep building and coding).

The company is nothing without a product, so in that case you are correct, but often the co-founder relationship isn't everybody building, it's sharing of all the responsibilities necessary to run a business.

Just to note, I'm a coder, so don't think I'm some MBA guy trying to justify my value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure the book analogy is appropriate. Books require concerted effort until publication, then nothing (this is changing but still the case, at large). Start-ups require constant maintenance and improvement. Care to comment on that?

<comment><USER8> I've written a book (non-fiction), and work for a startup. The latter is considerably more complex than the former.

It's often better to write a book by secluding yourself in a room or cabin. You can't run a startup that way.

A book has a clear ending. A startup does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a dream, a purpose slated only for you.You cant bureaucratically design how nature will channel talent and let it flower.The single founder plan hurts those who are very good at winning an argument by doing than by talking.They might be hoping to show something works in order to get others on board.Putting a rule that they must come in with someone deprives them of that opportunity to show what they are worth.</comment>


Fundamental Attribution Error - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

<comment><USER2> This looks like the old _"Don't judge and you will not be judged"_. Whenever I read an explanation about why not judge, it basically boils to this: you don't know the context of someone else's acts.

However, regarding every day matters, I think that we always make judgements about different facts based on partial information. That's the way things are and there's no way around it. Most of the time, a driver running the red light is a _bad driver_. If in a particular instance he was a husband taking his pregnant wife to the hospital, that's a different story.

<comment><USER3> So it should be: "Judge, but include error bars in your judgament".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like there have been a lot of psychology-related Wikipedia articles submitted lately without any sort of context. Not a complaint -- I always find them interesting -- just an observation.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The very idea reminds me of the bitter joke that when people say "it's not you, it's me", they mean "it's you". And that some speakers have said "It's not the circumstances, it's you," for example here: ([http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Its-Not-the-Circumstances-Its- Yo...](http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Its-Not-the-Circumstances-Its-You)). So:

Summary of fundamental attribution error: If you're pointing at people and saying "It's not the circumstances, it's you," often enough it is actually the circumstances.

You will be performing "correspondence inference" when supported by evidence and committing "fundamental attribution error" when not supported. To avoid fundamental attribution error you need to take care to obtain sufficient evidence. You have to consider and control for confounding factors, correlation in the absence of direct causation, and sheer coincidence.

<comment><USER7> How do you distinguish between circumstances and the person himself?

<comment><USER8> By knowing the circumstances, and how other people normally respond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first example is someone running a red light with "good reason", e.g., taking a patient to a hospital, and how if "Alice" knew this she would not consider the "runner" a reckless driver.

Bollocks.

Never drive in haste. Ever. Unless you are trained driver of an emergency vehicle operating under emergency conditions.

Otherwise you are being a reckless idiot and endangering others.

Alice is right to conclude the other person is reckless. Distracted by an emergency perhaps, but reckless nevertheless. (Trained responders are trained first to not put themselves in danger: The "runner" was in the business of creating more victims....)

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Seeing those submissions, I'm really tempted to link <http://lesswrong.com/> material.

But I wouldn't know where to start.

</comment><comment><USER10> The reverse case <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias>

</comment><comment><USER11> Probably you'll like this post of mine with some good resources about logical fallacies:

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/113250814961864918365/posts/XUa7...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/113250814961864918365/posts/XUa7J5k3tzy)</comment>


Show HN: My company's new turn based strategy game for Android - <AUTHOR>

Hey, it's been a long time in the making, but we're finally ready with our public BETA version of our Android application. We're anxiously (and nervously) awaiting your feedback, so please lay it on us. Our biggest fear is hearing nothing.
The game is called Super Tic Tac Toe. It's a new take on the old, boring tic tac toe that more often than not ended in a cat's game. The game board is a large tic tac toe board with each square comprised of a smaller tic tac toe board. You and an opponent place your marks on the smaller boards, each move dictating where your opponent may move next (and vice versa), to achieve victory on the larger board.
You can Connect With Facebook, but if you'd rather not, you can create a normal account in our system. You can add and play any of the developers / founders (usernames: nuri, Gootz, QippArgent) or invite your friends and play against them! Please, check out the application and leave us your feedback! You can leave a comment here and myself or QippArgent will try to respond as soon as possible, and feel free to send either one of us a private message as well.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cannygroup.superttt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UGTWHg_wUM <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea.

I'll play a couple of games on paper with my son and let you know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, thanks. The idea actually spawned from one of our cofounders discovering this game in college and playing it with his friends on paper. Even if you don't download the app, let us know what you think of the game itself! Here's a good run-down of the "official" rules as well as a standalone java app you can play on your computer with your son:

<http://scheinerman.net/jonah/supertictactoe.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _what_ is this: <http://imgur.com/SZtC9>

and why did it show up while playing ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey philsnow,

We currently use MoPub as our advertising network, and that is an interstitial advertisement from them. I'm thinking we should probably add something to the market description stating that this will happen after you make a move.

<comment><USER3> thanks for the reply,

I don't know anything about MoPub, but do they let you do anything at all about styling the interstitials? I assumed that this was some kind of beast- trading sub-game or something bolted on (or whatever it was, I thought it was content provided by you guys) because it doesn't say, e.g. "ads by MoPub" anywhere on that screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a problem at all, and I am taking a look at their documentation to see if that is possible. I think it is, great suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do I really need to create an account to play this game?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, yes. Several people have brought up that this game could really be played without an account (for people that just want to play one game at a time, and don't care about leaderboards in the future, etc.) so we are definitely taking into consideration developing a feature that would allow instant gameplay.

<comment><USER4> A "Play as guest" button would be really helpful!

A tip: name the game as Super Tic Tac Toe. That change can benefit you on search and rankings (because of SEO).

<comment><USER5> Guest play is a great idea! Thank you for the feedback. We did debate the name, but landed on SuperTTT because there are too many traditional and other alternative tic tac toe developers naming their applications Super Tic Tac Toe, although none of them are this game. We are however the rightful owners to supertictactoe.com which links to our superttt.com site :) Check that out too! We love feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment>