Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 <comment><USER2> At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned.

There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.

<comment><USER3> I've never used Hypercard and I just can't fathom the love for it.

If nothing matches Hypercard, why don't people use it (or some opensource copy) of it? So many seem enthralled by it but the reality is no one seems to want to bring it back.

<comment><USER4> Well, the main reason no one uses Hypercard itself is because emulating classic MacOS is a pain and a half.

I haven't explored all the copies, but the ones I have seen tend to be less featureful and/or less user-friendly than the original.

Furthermore, probably the best modern software that's similar to Hypercard in its overall flexibility and power is...the web. Back in the day, Hypercard was _it_ ; there wasn't really anything else in that space. Nowadays, there's still nothing that's quite as awesome or matches all its features, but there _are_ things that are much closer and do a lot of the same things that are much more accessible than emulating or reimplementing Hypercard.

<comment><USER5> Emulating Mac OS classic isn't particularly difficult these days. I use sheepshaver with great success. I actually DO use it to run my old hypercard games I wrote in elementary school.

<comment><USER4> Last time I tried using Basilisk II, I managed to get it to be stable (running System 7 in an emulated...IIsi, I think?), but if I ever tried to change _anything_ beyond adding and removing disks, it just wouldn't run.

I haven't tried SheepShaver much, I admit, because most of the stuff I want to run was written for 68k and runs poorly or not at all on PPC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Author of linked piece speaking. Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point, just as they did in 2011:

Hypercard wasn't a gem of graphic design (1-bit colour, plain line graphics) or of programming language design (one of the many laughable attempts at "natural language programming") or of high-performance number crunching... but it was _simple_. I.e., the entire system was _fully covered_ by ~100 pages of printed manual. It _fit in one 's head_. (And did not take 20 years to fit-in- head, either, an intelligent child could become "master of all he surveys" in a week or two.)

Where is the _printed_ manual for the current MS VB, or the WWW's HTML/JS/CSS/etc stack (yes including _all_ browser warts), or for any of the other proposed "replacements" ? How many trees would have to be killed to print such a manual, and would it fit in your house? Could you read it cover to cover, or would die of old age first?

<comment><USER7> Do I recognize your name and writing style from Kuro5hin?

<comment><USER6> Doubt it: I have not written at Kuro5hin. (Possibly linked there at some point, however?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When Hypercard was new, you could use it to create user interfaces that _looked_ and _felt_ exactly like all the other Macintosh applications of the era- within a reasonable margin, anyway.

Basic expectations are now higher. UIs are more visually complex and subtle. You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures. UIs are expected to reflow to devices with different screen sizes and dot pitches. Users expect their programs to give them up-to-the-minute information from the internet, with slick animation and nuanced typography. With flexibility comes inescapable complexity.

Could you make a tool as easy to use as Hypercard, and let modern users create useful applications for themselves? Sure, but the results wouldn't be nearly as nice as the applications built with conventional tools that live alongside them. I have a tremendous fondness for Hypercard, but I don't think you could ever make something today which was empowering and full-featured like Hypercard was for _its_ day.

<comment><USER9> _You can 't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures._

I mean, why not? If I'm a small business, and I need a custom (in-house) app, AND I could do it myself with little training, I'd rather do that then not have the business. (Again) how many businesses run on Excel Spreadsheets? Not every business can hire a programming firm to make a boutique app that's used by 100 people.

But I'm also one of those, "Why did FileMaker Pro die?" kinda person. And I still write Perl. I'm a weirdo, but I'm a pragmatic weirdo that likes to get stuff done.

<comment><USER10> I do a lot of freelance and I can't tell you how many businesses I've worked with who had some need that was just a smidge more than their current software would allow. If there was something in between using an interface and learning a full-fledged programming stack from first principles, it would go a long way.

Part of this goes towards getting people -- both today's mainstream developers and users -- to think hard about what using a personal computer should mean.

I can't think of a better definition of programming than "telling a computer what to do." That should be the first hint.

<comment><USER11> That's part of the reason why Emacs has this kind of cult following. There's always something you need that's "just a smidge more" than your Emacs can do, but it's _very_ easy to just code up that missing bit. It might be not for casual user (requires learning some basics of programming), but then again, the legend goes that secretaries used to use Emacs and like it, for similar reasons people like Excel today - they need something extra, they can make it themselves on the spot.

<comment><USER12> And another thing people should learn from that, never underestimate secretaries, accountants etc.

It is often good to limit what non admins can do to the system, servers, their computer os etc.

We should also limit who has access to sensitive data.

But I think often companies could be more productive if they taught their employees to script a bit.

<comment><USER13> > And another thing people should learn from that, never underestimate > secretaries, accountants etc.

It is difficult for the modern developer to think of users as anything other than dumb cattle, because doing so would raise ethical concerns about their high-engagement eyeball-farming products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There were many reasons why Hypercard died:

Hypercard was very much a product of it's time. Software was far less complex so it was much easier to create a general purpose development tool for end users. The author argues that attempts to recreate Hypercard try to do too much, that is because users expect more of software today. To give you an idea of what I mean: I used Hypercard to create a cookbook for a family member in the mid-1990's. You could enter recipes, search for recipes, and even export them to HTML. While this would have been an amazing accomplishment a few years earlier, the program was a relic of a bygone era the moment that it was written. Adding useful features, such as uploading those HTML files to a web server, may have been possible but would have required extensions to the language. Plenty of extensions existed, which is how companies like Cyan managed to produce an amazing for the time multimedia game (Myst) on what most people viewed as a stack of programmable black and white index cards. Yet extending Hypercard to reflect the technology of the 1990's would have transformed a product for everyone to an incomprehensible mass for anyone aside from developers. And the 1990's were primitive compared to the 2010's, never mind the coming 2020's.

In a similar vein, people's interests changed. The mid-1990's brought the web, so people were far more interested in developing for the web. The early days of web development were quite accessible, was focused upon content (much as Hypercard was) and allowed people to embed programs within that content (much as Hypercard did). While Hypercard may have been better for some things and certainly provided a better development environment, it was also obsolete.

As much as I loved Hypercard, the reality is that it was neglected rather than buried. It's longevity could have been improved without increasing complexity, such as adding colour or allowing multimedia files to be embedded (without resorting to third-party extensions). On the other hand, it would have died off eventually. The trajectory of web development shows how a once simple and accessible platform can become so complex that it takes a dedicated student to learn.

<comment><USER10> Another thing to think about is the metaphors used. Stacks, cards, and interactive objects on cards were really good metaphors that fit holistically in the Apple personal computing systems of the late 80s/90s. You're right that a lot of the computing environment has changed (eg the Internet is like a natural resource and should be assumed). Whether it is needfully more complex is another matter.

A key question for designers today is this: what are the metaphors that would work for today's computing environments in a similarly holistic way, allowing users to become "authors"? This is something different than a modern Hypercard clone. I think when people want that old "Hypercard feeling," what they really want is this holistic nature, power, and ease of use for regular users -- not simple clones of the old thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I was a kid, at the beginning of the 00s, and I was beginning to experiment with computers, I imagined the future of computing to be about reducing the complexity of software development as much as possible. I now realize that I dreamt of something exactly like HyperCards. A world where machines could be programmed using something resembling natural language and where anyone could create and share software. At the time, the closest thing I could find was a Word document where I dragged and dropped buttons to create a pseudo UI and then imagine that it worked. I wish I had access to something like this.

I believe that by not having a tool like this, we are taking away from the majority of the population, and in particular the young, the possibility of shaping computers for their own needs. A decision has been taken: the user has to be a passive consumer. It's a mistake and I am really sad about it. It feels, to me, as if there was a decision, intentional or not, of keeping the creation of software as a privilege of a few and not a right of everyone.

<comment><USER16> > A world where machines could be programmed using something resembling > natural language and where anyone could create and share software.

This is a silly pipe dream almost as old as computing, which reappears every couple of years in a new guise. When COBOL came out, it was promoted with exactly that promise, and there were people who seriously claimed that within a few years there would be no more professional programmers. More recent incarnations of the pipe dream were "fifth-generation programming languages" and "model-driven development".

In reality, what keeps "the creation of software as a privilege of a few" is not a lack of the right tool, but the lack of the _mindset_ of producing unambiguous, complete instructions and developing your requirements to a state where it's possible to give such instructions, and facing the many mistakes you end up making on the way.

That is actually something very difficult to do, and which Average Joe will _never_ learn, no matter what tools you give him.

<comment><USER17> A more practical goal is to program in a language or API close to the domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amid the ranting, the one thought-provoking statement was this:

> The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One > where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has > been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal > computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A > world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.

HyperCard made Macs function as personal computers (the original notion behind the term) and not as digital appliances (video editors, gaming rigs, media boxes... etc.)

<comment><USER19> All programming environments do that. And Apple continues to this day to give away a free programming environment for your Mac.

<comment><USER18> All programming environments do that for programmers. Not all do that for people who aren't software developers.

Case in point: Some of the finance people I work with build incredible spreadsheets. Formulas upon formulas that turn their special spreadsheet into what is really an application. They're programming, but that isn't how they think about it (I've asked). They're just Excel power users.

HyperCard aficionados were the same way. They were programming with the assumption that they just knew HyperCard really well.

You wouldn't be able to sit Douglas Adams (were he alive) in front of XCode and get the equivalent of his HyperCard stack out: [https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode](https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode)

The reason is that it requires a dramatically higher investment to create in XCode. "Just learn Swift" doesn't really cut it as an alternative.

<comment><USER20> As an example, a decade ago I taught art students how to code. They had Macintoshes. I had them download Emacs then taught them Emacs Lisp. As insane as that sounds, it was interactive, easy to install, and interesting. They were able to write programs in the REPL after the first class. I wouldn't have dared to have put them in front of XCode or some equivalent IDE.

<comment><USER21> Why didn't you use MaxMSP or Processing?

<comment><USER20> A fair question. An easy answer is that I thought Lisp was pretty cool, and that the students were capable of it. And, pragmatically, I was experienced with it, unlike MaxMSP or Processing.

But there was something philosophical: I liked the idea of introducing them to the feel of fundamental computer science, rather than a nice layer over computers for artists. (And what artists actually use those nice layers?) I wanted them to experience an open source ecosystem (unlike Max), and I felt that the Java-base of Procesing was off aesthetically -- too many layers over the machine.

Thinking about the OP, I do wonder what it would have been like to teach coding-for-artists with Hypercard. One thing I love about Emacs Lisp is that it is only grudgingly visual. That it returns computers to something which sends output to a TTY. It gives people who have grown up with a GUI a vision of what computers were like before. I like that Emacs (and Lisp) are things with a history and touch on earlier eras of computer culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's a special case of a more general trend: the complete abandonment of what were once called RAD (rapid application development) tools.

Microsoft also killed WYSIWYG Visual Basic (pre-dotnet), quite possibly the most productive GUI builder ever made. Not quite as clean as hypercard, but another example of that bygone era when the user was the customer and not the product.

The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, and it seems pretty solidly locked in. Still I do see a push to replace spreadsheets with opaque SaaS tools that do specific things.

<comment><USER18> My first real software dev job was with Visual Basic 3.0, then Delphi 1.0. This World Wide Web thing was about to happen, but hadn't quite yet. Compuserve was where the cool kids hung out, and I ran a WildCat BBS with a buddy out of his basement.

RAD was rad, for a while.

<comment><USER21> WWW was in effect for many years before 1995, although that was its take off year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> His acknowledgement of the elephant in the room ("... shit soup of HTML/Javascript/CSS...") is prescient for 2011. Today it's even worse. How many versions of lipstick on pig are we to endure (Backbone, Angular, React, Vue..., Bootstrap, less, sass...) before someone actually makes a sane UI development toolkit?

Think of the children.

<comment><USER24> The problem is the web was designed for documents not apps. And JS wasn't designed for what it does now. The closest thing we had to a sane development toolkit was Adobe Flex. Someone came up with that and it was ok. But other more powerful forces particularly Apple made it disappear. Google is in charge now maybe it's up to them.

<comment><USER25> But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it.

It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equivalent of an store catalogue, which is a document.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author seems to attribute malice to the death of Hypercard, something akin to "programmers only stand to lose value if users can help themselves".

I think a far simpler explanation is not that control to the ability to program has been intentionally deprived from users, but rather that the vast majority of users have no wish to have such a tool, and that Steve Jobs recognized this.

I think that some proof of this exists: Excel, Visual Basic (and its formbuilder), Applescript, Autohotkey, etc all exist.

Those tools are all intentionally approachable, as was hypercard, and yet the vast majority of iphone users would not wish to deal with those tools or ecosystems. They would much prefer a company do something called "software development" and give them a working specialized application.

It seems more likely to me that Hypercard was eventually seen as a dead-end, not as a threat to the existence of selling apple software. Sure, you could spend significant effort on building a tool that is powerful for novice users (letting beginners create basic automation and forms easily), but less powerful for experts (providing less powerful design, abstraction, and programming features than more typical programming languages).

<comment><USER27> It was apparently gone before Jobs got back, but the same point still stands. The people who put together accounting systems and the like in Hypercard were unusual in being willing (and having the time) to put forth the effort of building anything complex. They're almost certainly the same people who would have put something together in GW-Basic, because they needed what they were building.

I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be _happy_ to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely _won 't_, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report- designing, anyway.

It's like they have jobs of their _own_ to do or something. It's like division of labor _makes sense_ and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.

Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually _everyone_ could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.

<comment><USER11> > _But they almost entirely won 't, even when given software designed to let > them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or > report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without > needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do > all the form-building, report-designing, anyway._

Did you interface with the individual workers, or company as a whole? My experience is that usually, the software _doesn 't_ let workers do what they need, the workers end up working around it with Excel, and at some point information will trickle down through two departments and three layers of managers that some piece of software they're paying for needs adjustment.

> _It 's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like > division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny > organisation._

Exactly. But their jobs are almost never correctly captured by software, so people get creative and invent their own workarounds. The unending popularity of Excel is a great example of this. Asking someone else to fix your software for you has large communications cost and time delay; asking programmers has also a large monetary cost.

<comment><USER27> _My experience is that_

And mine isn't. Among some of our clients, being able to do anything in Excel is an unusual skill. Among others, they do nothing more than basic spreadsheet work, using nothing more advanced than cross-sheet references. In twenty years of this job, I haven't run into _any_ of the fabled Excel spreadsheet apps. I'm sure they're out there, but I'm also sure there's plenty of the world that doesn't use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Owning a Mac was a very self-selective thing back in the day, and at the time the "bicycle for the mind" ethos was a deep part of Apple's marketing. HyperCard fit that perfectly. So, if you had the money and inclination to buy a Mac, you were also buying into a philosophy and a promise. That meant that regular people, not professional developers, were engaged and interested in making the most of their (expensive) machines. HyperCard was simple to use, and the return on investment in learning how to build with it was immediately clear.

Imagine you're a botanist with the spare money to buy a Mac. You could spend a few hours with HyperCard and put together a beautiful plant database, full of pictures and hyperlinks. I love those kinds of stories from the HyperCard era, and it's a vision of the power of computing that still resonates today, and is a big reason why stories on HyperCard are perennially popular.

In today's smartphone era we have millions of pre-made apps ready to consume and use. It's amazing in many ways, but if you think Xcode, or JavaScript and HTML are the natural successors to HyperCard than you don't really understand what was so magical about HyperCard.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hey, I took some time to write a reply to that post showing a modern day alternative:

[https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day- hyp...](https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day- hypercard.html)

I posted another comment linking to a modern day HyperCard that was downvoted without any explanation? I don't understand why it happened. Can someone tell me?

</comment><comment><USER30> Hypercard was a very general purpose app, but it was a bit of a "jack of all trades, master of none". I loved Hypercard, but it was never really an actual good solution for any of the things you may want to do with it.

1) Lots of people tried to use it for making games, but anyone who tried quickly ran into its limitations. There were a handful of neat Hypercard games, but when I tried to see how they were made, I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would you bother with Hypercard at all?

2) Another common use case were simple databases, like an address book, or a stack for all your music cassettes, or something like that. But it lacked search tools and a way to work with bulk data, so it wasn't really a good solution for databases. Filemaker was much better for databases.

3) Or you could use it for simple specialized calculators, like a currency converter. But it was a lot of work to set it all up correctly, and Excel was actually a lot more useful for these kinds of tasks.

<comment><USER10> > I saw that they made heavy use of XCMDs and XFCNs -- custom extensions you > had to write in a compiled language (Pascal? C?). At that point, why would > you bother with Hypercard at all?

Hey, don't forget about shareware culture! You didn't need to code up these XFCN/XCMDs yourself. You could try and buy them! There was a whole ecosystem of developers making these things (WindowMaker anyone?) and it worked pretty well for what it was.

</comment></comment><comment> vincent-toups May as well plug a similar article I wrote like 10 years ago now: [https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs- smalltalk/](https://procyonic.org/blog/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk/)

I actually passed a few emails back and forth with Alan Kay for this.

I short version of this piece appeared as a letter to the editor in the New Yorker, too.

<comment><USER31> > The certificate for procyonic.org expired on Thursday, June 6, 2019.

> Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE

<comment> vincent-toups Oops! Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 1\. What's the equivalent of HTML5 canvas in Hypercard?

2\. Suppose there's a little dataflow drawing program somebody else wrote in Hypercard. I want to add a binding for my own transient card to pop up on keyboard shortcut, gain focus, steal all input events, then go away on another keyboard shortcut (and return input events to their original bindings). How do I do that?

3\. Suppose Hypercard flourished into the 90s and early 2000s. How would this alternate-reality Hypercard have dealt with the pop-up ad problem?

I'm sure there are answers to these questions. However, a theoretical Hypercard that solves them-- plus all the other myriad problems that come from existing on a weaponized internet-- would make this tech much closer to the complexity of the modern web than to the original Hypercard.

<comment><USER33> For your #2:

HyperCard is primarily mouse-oriented; I don't believe there's a way to add keyboard shortcuts (without writing an XCMD in another language like Pascal). Instead you'd add a button into the other stack (probably on the background) to 'go to "UtilityStack"'.

This would take you to the first card of the stack you'd created, which naturally takes over since it's the one being shown (no need to explicitly 'steal' events). Once you're done there, either use Go > Back (Cmd+B, I believe) or have a button on the card with the script 'go back'. This takes you to the previous card the same way that the back button in your browser would, and likewise events now go to that card with no explicit rebinding required.

<comment><USER34> I think you could add keyboard shortcuts. You could definitely add menu items ([http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/menu/menu.html](http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/menu/menu.html)) and you could intercept keydown events at the stack level.

<comment><USER33> Huh, interesting. They must have added that in a later version than I was using, my copy of "The Complete HyperCard Handbook" doesn't mention "create menu" or keyDown handlers at all. Thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another article that pops up regularly on HN, on this relevant topic:

The coming war on general-purpose computing

(previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872364))

There are a number of admirable attempts to create the "next Hypercard" on the web. I haven't encountered one that really sticks, but as an old(er) timer who remembers the earlier era of personal computers - where the user was really the user, not "used" \- I see that it's an important dream to keep alive, especially in our current cultural context of an increasingly exploitative web.

</comment><comment><USER36> Loper-os seems to suffer from the same problems as a lot of "unix hater"/lisp weenie types: while he does point out real flaws in the computing of today, he seriously lacks in a competent, coherent, non-vaporware alternative. His blog is now nothing but bloviating about bitcoin

<comment><USER6> Author of linked site speaking. Are you sure you are reading the same page? I had half a dozen articles re Bitcoin, the last in 2014...

<comment><USER36> Your most recent article, [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3440](http://www.loper- os.org/?p=3440) is tagged bitcoin, and in fact if I click on the tag, I see an awful lot of articles written in the last few months [http://www.loper- os.org/?cat=42](http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=42)

<comment><USER6> I do have a multi-chapter series on constant-time integer arithmetic -- indeed tagged incl. "bitcoin", as it is meant to be used in (among other places) a rework of the client.

You evidently spent at most 3 seconds reading the link; wouldn't kill you to spend 5 seconds and see what is behind the tag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a pretty incendiary and bitterness-laden rant. I enjoyed the trip back in time but the last paragraph, for me, pretty much nullified any actual points the author was trying to make.

<comment><USER38> I empathize with your feelings, but iobjectively, if an author makes three good points and then pours toxic emotional sewage all over them, the good points are still the gooid points.

We may not want to read the author esposuing them any further, who needs toxic sewage? But the sewage cannot nullify a point that we recognize as true. Its truth is independent of whether the author is a goofd or bad person. Its truth is independent of whether the author argues it well or poorly.

It's unfortunate when good points get covered in toxic emotions. I wouldn't say that we should read such things whether we like it or not, but having read them, I say we take the good points and repackage them in less vitriolic prose.

<comment><USER37> It undermines his judgement. He makes sweeping, subjective arguments, which isn't inherently a bad thing but it means those arguments are more than just cold facts. The amount of heated emotion he apparently has around this subject means that his ability to draw conclusions from "soft" information is compromised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657).

</comment><comment><USER40> I also had an early accidental contact with HyperCard, and sort of learned the basics without knowing it. I was looking for something equivalent to show my 12 year old, who is into Minecraft and generally open minded about learning geeky stuff (they've had Sketch and electronics basics in school, likes to plays with LEDs, 3d print, etc). I found Sketch a bit too limited, despite a few attempts, it didn't work out for me.

I don't know much about game programming, but we ended up exploring Unity 3D. There are tons of videos online, it works well under Linux, and you can do lots of different things with limited programming. Probably not perfect, it's just for playing around, but curious to hear other experiences.

<comment><USER41> If Unity worked out well then Godot could be a good choice. It's conceptually simpler but is still very powerful.

<comment><USER42> I had just signed in to suggest Godot myself. :)

For the GP, here's the Godot web site: [https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/)

While Godot has its idiosyncrasies, in terms of being a tool that made it possible to actually get something done and _playable_ , I've been pleased with the results I've gotten from it so far.

The ability to export to HTML5 in addition to desktop & mobile is great for getting a project in front of people quickly--particularly useful for things like game jams: [https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em- up](https://rancidbacon.itch.io/sheet-em-up) (which I created as my first game jam entry :) ).

Godot is also released under a MIT license and has multiple full-time developers working on it (supported in part by monthly community donations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here's what Atkinson said about it in 2002:

[https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have- been...](https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-what-could-have-been/)

More clues in this (2016?) _Twit_ interview (including the phrase 'Sculleystink' at about 16m in):

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

<comment><USER44> I am a fan of Leo, but he also tends to fall on my nerves with constantly interrupting people. Atkinson is great in just not letting that happen, FUN!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think Web killed Hypercard. Hypercards were kind of components and that was their power. Create onbe card at a time then connect them together. But so were/are web-pages.

But you could not connect a hyper-card to another card created by another author executing on another machine. That was the mind-blowing concept of web and it quickly became clear that that is what we wanted to do, not dabble with our own stack of "hyper" cards.

For one thing web was not tied to Apple hardware

</comment><comment><USER46> Hypercard's "letting regular people build useful things" ethos lives on in IFTTT, Zapier and Microsoft Flow. In 2019, it's not super useful to many people to be able to mush together some buttons and textboxes into a desktop UI, but it's fantastically useful to be able to mush together their email, calendar, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, Alexa, home automation etc.

<comment><USER11> Sorta, kinda, not quite.

That's the problem with SaaS - they take your data, silo it up, and expose through highly limited and tightly controlled APIs. Sure, I can make IFTTT save a copy of every picture I upload to Facebook into my Dropbox account (or at least I could, I think it broke). But I can't make it save that picture _in original size_ , because someone didn't expose some option, or an endpoint. Or I can't make IFTTT save all the reactions to my post into a CSV in the format: <<datetime, which post, who, what reaction>>, because such endpoints again aren't exposed or integrated. Etc.

I get that IFTTT & folks are doing the best they can, but the companies they're trying to "mush together" made their money on preventing interoperability, so it's still very far from both what could be and what _used to be_ possible.

<comment><USER47> You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter.

[https://nodered.org/](https://nodered.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Business and engineering rarely goes hand in hand. So you made something that never wear and tear, boss orders you to redo the formula so it has to be replaced more often, resulting in more sales. Or you made something that enables the user to create infinitely amounts of what your company sell, boss tells you to erase all copies of it. etc.

</comment><comment><USER49> "If you disagree with my barely-argued opinion, you're autistic" isn't a great way to close an article

</comment><comment><USER50> Hypercard was obsoleted by the www. To survive it would have had to become a visual HTML editor. If you are looking inside the Microsoft backcatalog it is not VB that was the Hypercard heir, it was Frontpage for consumer-and Infopath for business applications.

</comment><comment><USER51> archive.org now has the ability to run uploaded Hypercard stacks in your web browser.

Example:

[https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25](https://archive.org/details/hypercard_autodiagnostics-25)

</comment><comment><USER52> I tried to get a license for SuperCard (it had color), but had to use resedit + HyperCard to add color textures... Miss those days (not so much)

off topic (but same era) I loved MacProject... yet another Claris step child software. Moof!

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

</comment><comment><USER52> Hey I just noticed that SuperCard is still alive and offers HyperCard migrations:

[https://www.supercard.us/](https://www.supercard.us/)

(SuperCard was a commercial HyperCard alternative)

</comment><comment><USER53> I spent a lot of time as a 7 year old playing around with Hypercard. Gave me a lot of good early exposure to building interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER52> Okay this may be unpopular, but I felt like Microsoft VB 3.0 (for me) was a better version of HyperCard on a worse platform.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wonder why there was a "Scripting language" dropdown menu, was anything but HyperTalk ever possible?

</comment><comment><USER55> From my perspective, HyperCard lives on in 2 distinct branches: webapps and PowerPoint.

</comment><comment><USER56> LiveCode is pretty nice. If you want something _fast_ & crossplatform it is kind of hard to beat. I find the language awful (far too verbose for my taste) but I would say most people here would have that going in 1 to a few days to be productive. The forum is active and people answer fast when stuck.

</comment><comment><USER57> How hard would it be to port HyperCard to Qt? No reason we can't have it back.

<comment><USER38> If the LiveCode people can get HyperCard running on *nix, I'm sure HyperCard could be ported to Qt.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I could imagine Playgrounds app turning into such a thing

</comment><comment><USER59> Uhm, I have grown up with Macintoshs and I still use them. So, my comment has at least double the emotional intensity compared to the author's. ;-) In all seriousness, I say this because it is clear that his post is mostly based on an emotional attachment to a tool, not on critical thinking.

Maybe I misunderstood, but if I understood him correctly, the premise is that Hypercard would still be around if it did not collide with Steve's vision of a world of dumb users and smart engineers. This is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. Are you willing to learn?

First, Hypercard was created when 13" 256-color displays were state of the art (actually even earlier) and there were exactly two devices to interact with your Macintosh: a keyboard and a mouse. So, for simple tasks, it was quite easy to create a tool that would allow you to stick together a simple program using clicks and a verbose scripting language. Nowadays, however, general purpose applications are supposed to work on a variety of devices, from 4" phones with touchscreens to desktop-Macs supporting 27"\+ screens being used with traditional keyboards and mice. Maybe this will change in the future, but if you want to precisely describe a structure (GUI-compontents) in a generalized fashion, a textual representation (e.g. react-components), so far, is just superior to any GUI-tool that is around.

When hypercard was created, VCS (such as git, svn, etc.) weren't really a thing. Most software was developed in about the same way as you created Hypercard projects: You made changes to your main copy and that's that. Today, you don't even think about starting a software project without having vcs in place. Similarly, when Hypercard was created, many software methodologies weren't a thing: Unit Testing, Integration testing, etc.

Now, I am a software engineer, and while I never wrote Hypercard applications myself, I once found myself maintaining an Filemaker-Application. Filemaker, I reckon, is very similar to Hypercard in that you plug together your app using a GUI and some overly verbose, pseudo-simple scripting language. And, needless to say, this was an absolute disaster: In the beginning, it was a simple tool that automated a couple of tasks and it was created in a very short period of time, thanks to the easy-of-use of Filemaker. However, as with all other tools, it grew in complexity. Now, ever tried to track changes in the source code using Filemaker-files? Ever tried to unit test Filemaker-code?

And don't get me started with the absolute ludicrous idea to use programming languages that resemble a natural language. Claiming that this is as effective as using an abstract language is akin to describing complex mathematical facts using only a natural language—while possible, it is completely unfeasible.

</comment><comment><USER60> Where is the eval call in the hypertalk script? Is it "value of" applied to a string, i.e. "value of value of card field"? (I assume it's not simply "value of" since that doesn't seem like it would work for the operator buttons in the example - or does "/" or "+" evaluate to itself?)

This seems like a good reason to kill the language at least, in the Internet- connected era. In a language that's supposed to read like English, eval should be "dangerously execute untrustworthy text from ... as program instructions" or something, not a polymorphic call to a common operator accidentally applied to the wrong type.

</comment><comment><USER61> The fallout from being able to used to cause people to suffer brain damage when opened also probably contributed</comment>


Foursquare's Dennis Crowley can't stop believing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/dennis-crowley-takes-another-stab-at-explaining-foursquare-a04894b7874b <comment><USER2> > A mixture. One of my proudest moments at Foursquare was March 2011 at South > By Southwest. In my keynote there, I described it as if we just pulled a Mr. > Miyagi on you guys. You think that you're checking in to get points and > badges — and meanwhile we just made an awesome personalized local search > engine for you! You think that you're washing a car but you're really > learning karate! This is what we wanted to do all along. From that moment, > Foursquare was about search and recommendations — a smarter search engine > that learns about where you go. But by that point, people were so into the > game stuff that they either couldn't see or didn't see it.

This is so incredibly arrogant. It's not that people couldn't see it or didn't see it, it's that they didn't _want_ it. The game features made 4sq unique and fun. People don't want a "personalized local search engine" because there aren't millions of restaurants and bars around where they're at right now. It's just not that big of a problem to find a place to eat and yes, while they do an ok job helping out if you are looking for that, so does Yelp.

<comment> k-mcgrady I disagree. I don't know anyone who thought that gaming stuff was fun. It was silly and a waste of time. Foursquare now is great at recommendations - something people actually need. I don't think it was necessary to rip the checkins out of it and into Swarm but I think the people who actually found that fun and a vocal minority.

<comment><USER2> My anecdotes are the complete opposite of yours :)

My friends loved checking in and earning badges and none of them think the recommendations are great.

<comment> k-mcgrady :) Strange. I don't understand why they split the app. If they kept it together all our friends could have been happy.

<comment><USER3> Some background on their rationale: [https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/the-lego- block-exercise-4c7d6...](https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/the-lego-block- exercise-4c7d60eeb38f)

<comment><USER2> It reads like they keep wanting to back the product into their theories regardless of if there's a market for it or if their existing user base wanted those changes. My personal feeling was they discovered that the gamification angle was successful but the market wasn't huge so they got pressured into a change in direction to a (theoretically) larger market by their investors. All of these interviews and pontifications seem like justification for that move. It doesn't seem to have worked out well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That office makes me shudder. I feel like I live in a palace in my cube.

<comment><USER5> All the modern "People Operations" research by Google, Facebook, and others, has concluded that the garment industry a hundred years ago had it exactly right:

[http://ursulinemagazine.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/jfco_...](http://ursulinemagazine.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/jfco_1-18-1_3feb456327.jpg)

<comment><USER6> What research is that? All the research coming out recently has been saying that open plan offices are bad for productivity.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google- got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/)

There's a big difference between a manual worker and a software developer.

<comment> k-mcgrady I think - and hope - the parent is being sarcastic.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't kidding about Google and Facebook. Facebook has been "open plan" since forever, with rows of monitors on long tables, and Google has talked publicly about their research on optimal collaboration environments, which concludes that you need to pack engineers densely so they'll share ideas (and then have some common public space as well).

Unfortunately I just spent 5 minutes trying to dig up the original articles, without luck.

<comment> k-mcgrady Oh yeah, sorry I didn't mean to dismiss that part as sarcasm. I've seen those articles too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I were Foursquare I'd admit defeat, drop Swarm, do a big push to relaunch Foursquare with a new app (if nothing else just to get people interested again) and think really hard about a killer feature to lure people back into the app.

One aspect that's really underplayed I think they could go with as a complement is diary and life tracking. It could be very interesting to have as an experience where you could relive where you've been and done.

<comment><USER8> you mean what Timehop does?

<comment><USER7> Timehop is pretty limited in its scope, I'd do a fullblown diary & life tracker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The split between foursquare and swarm was awful. It was rather useless, and all my friends that used foursquare dropped it at that moment.

I myself dropped it because the new version required me to install Google Play Services/Framework - something I had no interest in doing.

I currently don't know _anybody_ who uses foursquare. The "game" part faded, and the "finding a place" part moved over to Yelp.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm counting them out, data from 5 years ago isn't all that useful

<comment><USER11> Yeah...It's been less than a year since I've left New York but even then, so many places have closed down/opened up...and this is completely independent of the downtrend in user-supplied data to Foursquare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't help but feel that releasing Swarm was akin to giving someone a lateral "promotion" within an org to remove them from a space you don't want them in any longer, like Milton being moved into the basement in Office Space. They wanted to pivot, but with check-in so core to their identity, they had to move it to the basement so the rest of the core app could flourish.

Does anyone here actively use Swarm or any other Ambient Social Network? Why & what is your take? Like the various other Ambient Social Networking apps that came before it (Highlight, Sonar, Banjo), it would seem to suffer from a severe chicken and egg problem.

<comment><USER13> I use swarm, and the reason I use it is timehop.

The ambient social networking is a side benefit, that ramped up following my adoption of foursquare, and is slowly tailing off as everyone drops swarm. It's nice as a source of real time recommendations from people you trust, and as a source of small talk, however it's not that important to me. But tracking myself from a year ago is generally rewarding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's hard not to hate on foursquare at this point. I mean how much press and mind share have they squandered that could have been better used by other start ups trying to get over the hump.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not counting FourSquare out yet, just because of the strength of the data they have. Of course, that makes them a very tempting acquisition target, and I expect it'll happen sooner or later.

<comment><USER16> Their data is getting more and more stale by the day. They rely on users for that data, so as the users go, so does the relevant data.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the specs of your programming computer? - <AUTHOR>

Today I saw the Mac Pro 2013 tear-down at various websites. I find myself developing my applications on a 2008 and 2011 computers. To be specific:
1 - The iMac
* Intel Core 2 Duo ("Penryn") - 2.8 Ghz, 64 bit * 4 GB RAM * Graphics ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256 * 24 inch screen * SSD 60GB
2 - The Macbook Air
It is a 2011 model, which has slower CPU (1.8 Ghz) but same specs as the iMac above.
and 3rd I have a FreeBSD 9.1 VPS which has configured ruby + vim + my plugins which I can use from my latest toy, a Samsung 11 inch Chromebook.
I don't play games, I do the occasional family video with iMovie, browse the web use office suites, LATEX and mostly write code in Ruby. I don't feel the need like to upgrade, at all.
I wonder what other amateurs and professional programmer's desktops are like, please share your specs :-) <comment><USER3> My day job which is mostly C# programming these days I have an Intel Core i5 processor (don't remember the speed off hand) 64bit windows 7 pro, 12 GB Ram and Dual ATIs (don't remember which) for 3 monitor output. Could have a fourth if I ever wanted to.

At home I have a Intel Core i5 processor 2.8Ghz, windows 7 pro, with 4GB Ram. I do mostly php web dev or I RDP to my work computer if I need my day job setup for off hours working from home.

Right now I'm on a laptop doing some php dev and its a Core i5 with 4GB ram.

Nothing fancy, and these days not really top of the line since all the machines I use are at least 2 years old now. The oldest is this laptop which I think is about 4 years old... so not too bad, just not shiny anymore. But then again, hardware gains have been outpacing software demand for most users over the last few years and with more things moving to the web I think we'll see refresh cycles get longer and longer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Fedora running on an Intel Core 2 Quad, 8GB RAM, Intel 320 SSD, ATI FirePro V4900 ([http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati- fire...](http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati- firepro-3d/v4900/Pages/v4900.aspx)) w/ 3 displays.

I switched from 2 Nvidia cards (2-head and 1-head) to 1 ATI 3-head card because the Nvidia drivers stopped liking that two-card combo after Fedora 14/GNOME 2.

The only issue I have with this setup is too many Chrome tabs (100 or so) can bring things to a halt. Does anyone know a trick to deal with the Chrome-tab issue?

<comment><USER5> If you don't mind me asking, what do you need a 100 tabs for?

<comment><USER4> As I'm researching topics, I open a new tab for each link I follow. This creates a "stack" of open tabs that I pop down through later.

<comment><USER5> That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 13" retina mbp with 512gig ssd and 8gig, external 30" dell monitor w/ das keyboard when working at my home desk.

A variety of dev including C/C++, C# (windows in a parallels vm), Python, Node and Erlang. Typically have multiple VMs available when doing dev - <USER2> FreeBSD, sometime Ubuntu.

My MBP is a unix machine I don't have to worry about. Things just work.

With some embedded work, I do need to jigger with drivers, but I don't do a lot of those projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> At home I user my custom built desktop running Arch Linux. It has a Sandy Bridge i7, 8GB of RAM, a GTX 660, a 64GB SSD for boot, and two 1TB HDDs for extra storage. I primarily do Go, Haskell, and Ruby development when at home.

At work and when on the go I use a 2013 MBA with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Most development at work is iOS game development along with the occasional helper program written in Go or C++.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm focused on Android apps in an amatur capacity, using Eclipse (soon switching to Android Studio). My laptop has a Core i3 M370 CPU, 8gb of RAM, integrated graphics, a 120gb Samsung SSD and runs Ubuntu.

This setup is more than sufficient for my needs, everything is smooth and very stable - I've never had any issues that I can recall.

</comment><comment><USER9> 2013 15" Retina MacBook Pro

1TB PCIe SSD Flash Storage

16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM

2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost to 3.8GHz

Intel Iris Pro Graphics

NVidia GeForce GT 750M w/ 2GB GDDR5 Memory

Use this for work/personal/everything

</comment><comment><USER10> php developer with some photoshop for the design side.

Macbook Pro 2ghz i7 with 8gb ram is my primary dev machine. A Thinkpad Core 2 Duo runs windows 7 for IE 9 testing, a Alienware Core 2 Duo runs Windows 8 for IE 10 testing are around here somewhere. iPad 3, multiple iPhones and a Galaxy Tab for mobile testing are in the house also.

I do feel the need to upgrade to a Retina Macbook Pro soon. I'm actually kinda surprised some of the websites I've built haven't complained of the lack of retina ready images on their websites. That, and my work flow has a lot of files open at one time (multiple PSDs, php files, web browser tabs, etc...) - more power / ram the better.

\-- I don't like VMs

</comment><comment><USER11> C#, JavaScript. Only things I care about: SSD Drive (visual studio loves SSDs) 8GB RAM Support for 3 widescreens (as long as I have decent video cards, performance isn't that important) CPU doesn't matter much, anything within 3 years is fine.

</comment><comment><USER12> I develop node.js and Django apps on a 1.6Ghz, 2GB ram, 11inch netbook after my old workstation with a C2D went bad. It's slow, but can get work done. I won't recommend others to work with this though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Being a beginner, I'm using an Acer C270 Chromebook with Crouton to develop on Ubuntu with Sublime Text 2 to write JavaScript (Node and client-side).

</comment><comment><USER14> Macbook Pro (core 2 duo) from a few years ago. 16 GB of RAM to satiate Mavericks, Eclipse and Chrome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hm, apparently everyone is using huge amounts of RAM, which makes sense. Nice, thanks :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> rails/django

core 2 duo, 4 gb ram, 320 gb hdd, integrated graphics, debian</comment>


Trump: No computer safe from hacking - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-no-computer-safe-from-hacking-233093 <comment><USER2> "Hard to prove"... unless it's the Russians or North Koreans then it's easy to point the finger.</comment>


What happened to the dinosaurs – Google Search says it's a plot by evolutionists - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=What+happened+to+the+dinosaurs <comment><USER2> God is my SEO.</comment>


Chile's salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry - <AUTHOR> http://oceana.org/blog/chile%E2%80%99s-salmon-farms-may-use-more-antibiotics-any-other-meat-industry-%E2%80%99s-big-problem <comment><USER2> Do you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry?

You're not! Here's a simple easy trick you can use to reduce its impact on the world: eat less meat.

You don't need meat in 3 meals a day. Reduce it to 1 meal a day and you've already reduced your antibiotics impact by 2/3\. Cut down to one meat meal a week and that's a 96% reduction.

You're not powerless. Vote with your wallet and your stomach.

<comment><USER3> When has this attitude _ever_ been the solution to a shared-resource problem? I'm not being snarky, I want to know. It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield, doing nothing other than establishing who is morally responsible.

<comment><USER4> It's like solving traffic mortality by telling people not to drive.

<comment><USER5> no, it's like telling people to stop driving cars at 100 miles per hour inside city. makes sense.

<comment><USER3> We do that, but with laws and signs and police and stuff. Not with stern admonition.

<comment><USER5> so if there would be a law restricting meat consumption then everything would be fine?

<comment><USER6> It's been done in the past. Church laws forbidding the eating of meat on certain days have been a thing. Of course, most people who have the means would choose to eat meat as often as possible, and so you get things like fish not being classed as meat (leaving aside other considerations like these sorts of restrictions acting as subsidies to merchant fishing fleets, with knock-on effects for early modern naval preparedness).

Or people just ignore stupid, unenforceable laws and net respect for the law as an absolute is decreased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Consumers are key to change

Consumers are given responsibility for too many things. When I buy something I have to check how it impacts the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, worker impact, company social responsibility, price, antibiotic usage, palm oil usage, health impacts, allergens, various toxins, suspected list of toxic substances, company reputation, etc.

When will it end? IMO this doesn't scale... This needs regulation, I'm fairly sure the EU is doing it's part, where is the US?

<comment><USER8> >When will it end?

When you want it to end. You're putting those burdens on yourself.

<comment><USER7> No, the people who say that this is up to the consumers, rather than being a regulatory issue.

Those people are doing big-corporations a favor, by trying to shift the burden to me, who we all know can't possibly do this.

<comment><USER8> Except we don't operate in some sort of unrestricted free market. There are agencies like the FDA that enforce food and pharma standards - so you can trust that nothing at a grocery store will poison you. There are laws, regulations and trade deals that govern how commerce is conducted. What you're doing is injecting personal, arbitrary and capricious standards _on top_ of the already existing massive regulatory framework and then complaining it is too hard. No kidding! Don't do that then or at least don't be a martyr about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article does not mention that Chile received a lot of investment from Norwegian fish farm industry. After strict regulation and enforcement in Norway started to affect profits the industry looked for other countries where local laws are not that strict or can be ignored.

</comment><comment><USER10> "The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism."

\- Sir Alexander Fleming

</comment><comment><USER11> Humans are squandering antibiotics for the most inane uses, rapidly growing superbugs and resistance along the way. This will become a major public health crisis if nothing is done about it sooner than later.

<comment><USER12> > rapidly growing superbugs

We can outsmart them. We have biochemistry and flocks of 30 year old PhD students. They have a random number generator.

<comment><USER13> Not "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.

<comment><USER14> The sad thing is that this understates the parallelism of the evolutionary process by ... many orders of magnitude. A single human gut has on the order of 100 trillion bacteria. Also, the gp poster seems to be unaware of plasmids and conjugation process, too. (unless it was sarcasm that went over my head, which it very well may have been)

<comment><USER12> I would gladly take 1000 vacuum tubes over 100 trillion random number generators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In 2016, Chile had a massive algal bloom that killed an unprecedented amount of fish.

The salmon industry was held accountable for it, but the issue was just deflected and blamed on El Nino.

</comment><comment><USER15> Salmon seemed abundant and cheap, relatively, at Chile's coastal restaurants and I guess now I know why.

Perhaps I'll pick something else on the menu the next time I visit. I wasn't a great fan of deep-fried seafood empanadas or ceviche but paila marina was tasty!

</comment><comment><USER16> Ok. so, as a Chilean, what can I do, other than stop eating salmon altogether?

</comment><comment><USER17> Fish farms are concentration camps for fish, same goes for the rest of the meat industry. The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without. Many still don't, it's just more effective to let 20% or so die if it allows stuffing more animals in the same space. Did anyone really think we would get away with treating animals like that and not have to face the consequences? Just say no, really. It's a disgusting, harmful habit; much more so than tobacco and alcohol. And down- voting me for telling you what you already knew isn't going to save you.

<comment><USER18> I don't think you need to invoke concentration camps here, true as it may be in some cases.

They use antibiotics to make them grow faster. That's half the reason.

<comment><USER17> What's the difference then? Piling up living beings in awful conditions to kill them in the most cost-effective way is pretty much the definition of a concentration camp. And making them grow faster than they're supposed to at the expense of everything isn't very nice either.

<comment><USER3> They're not people. Concentration camps are for people. At least we don't eat them alive, like their other natural predators.

<comment><USER17> At least they have a chance to fight for their survival, which makes all the difference. If it's horrible when done to humans, it's horrible when done to animals. And as long as we keep doing it to animals, we shouldn't expect to escape the same fate ourselves; Karma 101.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, if you fear karmic retribution that makes sense. I don't, so for me the shoe remains on the same foot. Other people are more valuable to me than animals, and also more dangerous. The stakes are higher and therefore the moral considerations are more prudent (or karmic, if that's your bag).

<comment><USER17> Karma has nothing to do with revenge, karma is just another word for consequences. Every action leads to reactions; if they didn't the universe would have descended into chaos in no time at all. And thats how we learn, by acting and studying reactions until we get it. One of those lessons is recognizing the value of all living beings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is the antibiotic? How long does this compound last when deployed? If something is highly reactive (causing the death of bacteria) is it not a reasonable starting assumption that it would not last long once deployed? If it is long active, where is the evidence of this compound causing antibiotic resistance?</comment>


Show HN: Headline - <AUTHOR> http://headline.adammenges.com

<comment><USER2> Would be cool if you could show a screenshot or online list of the most recently added articles. Then I could see if I'm interested in them.

How many do you add a day? Does it use a certain tag in Pocket so that I can keep it separate from my other stuff?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I'm a little hesitant to pollute my Pocket feed with a bunch of articles I haven't even seen an example of.

<comment><USER4> this works for me precisely because i use readability/instapaper first. since pocket is neglected, it gives it purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why base the entire service on a browser plugin that the user may or may not have ?. Is the pocket browser plugin popular amongst the techie circle ?

<comment><USER6> I think it could be. I run a variety of email newsletters and get several people a year ask about Pocket integration (this doesn't sound like a lot of people but in terms of the overall number of such enquiries I get, it is - other services are never mentioned).</comment></comment>


WWW 2007 Program (which papers do you like? which ones might make for compelling startups?) - <AUTHOR> http://www2007.org/program/alldays.php <comment><AUTHOR> To get things started, here's one that I like:

A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia

<http://www2007.org/program/paper.php?id=692>

<http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~luca/papers/07/wikiwww2007.ps>

<http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~luca/papers/06/ucsc-crl-06-18.pdf></comment>


Destination asteroid: NASA probe arrives at ancient 'mini moon' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/destination-asteroid-nasa-probe-arrives-at-ancient-mini-moon/2011/07/15/gIQAsOxdGI_story.html?hpid=z4

<comment><AUTHOR> For many reasons, DAWN is one of the coolest spacecraft in the Interplanetary fleet.

<comment><USER2> Evidence, please.

How does it stack up to Cassini or New Horizons?

<comment><USER3> Firstly, Dawn uses ion engines for primary propulsion, this enables it to rendezvous with two separate asteroids, something that has never been done before. Secondly, Dawn's primary science instrument is an incredible imaging spectrometer right out of star trek. It will create a high resolution global map of Vesta (and later Ceres) except at every pixel it won't merely record greyscale data or even a few color channels it'll record an entire high resolution spectrum from visible to IR wavelengths. It's secondary instrument is a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, capable of probing the sub-surface compositon of the asteroid.

In terms of raw high-tech instrumentation, New Horizons is close, but Dawn's use of electric propulsion sets it apart.

Personally I'd rather not pick favorites, but Dawn is definitely the van guard of a stunning new generation of scientific spacecraft.

<comment><USER4> More about the ion engines:

<http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/ion_prop.asp>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-hawk Last line isn't quite accurate: _If successful, Dawn's double-destination mission will mark the first time a spacecraft has orbited two bodies in the solar system._

Of course the Apollo manned missions orbited both the Earth and the Moon, so we certainly have precedence for thrusting out of one body's orbit into another.

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope it doesn't end up in the belly of some huge creature.

Seriously, this sounds amazing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is NASA's press release. [http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_to_enter...](http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/spacecraft_to_enter_asteroid_orbit.asp)</comment>


The Guardian stopped accepting Internet traffic from Russia - <AUTHOR> The Guardian firewalled itself from Russia. Personal observation. Why would they do that? The Independent and the Economist are OK. <comment><USER2> Looks like war to me</comment>


When too much inhibition freezes ducks and bunnies into their perceptual place - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychonomic.org/news/news.asp?id=336958 <comment><USER2> Hm curious. The first time I saw the original duck/rabbit picture years ago I could not decide which it was and it was sometimes rabbit, then duck. As described in the article.

When I see the picture now I can just think "well it is both". I find it interesting that this changed over time.

The others are strangely enough just one interpretation and no other.

The abstract duck/rabbit variant is just a rabbit in this picture for me.

cowboy/Indian: Lady that looks away, nothing else. this is one of the interpretations when I original learned about this (in my mother language). I forgot the other option. Never heard of cowboy/indian; must be cultural thing.

face/mother: just a face, where is a mother o0

mouse: well yea I see why people also see a man, but c'mon really the mouse has much better matching than a man - in my view.

The first duck/rabbit picture is completely different from the other four sketches. It just made with much more quality and is actually ambiguous. The other ones are just way to much on or the other side and hence unambiguous.

<comment><USER3> > face/mother: just a face, where is a mother o0

The left half has a woman (the eye is her face), the right half has a baby, seemingly on fire.

<comment><USER4> What about cowboy Indian? All I see is face looking right. And for mouse man I can't find the mouse

<comment><USER5> The two circles on the left are the ears.

I can't see the cowboy either but I think the face looking right is the Indian.

<comment><USER6> nice one</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck - <AUTHOR> http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-sliding-scale-of-giving-a-fuck <comment><USER2> To generalize: "pick your battles".

</comment><comment><USER3> adopting this methodology internally now. this should solve more than a few arguments. thanks.</comment>


Steve Jobs preps for an early TV appearance - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/24/steve-jobs-preps-for-an-early-tv-appearance.html

<comment><USER2> wrong title? or wrong link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, thanks for that, c/p malfunction. The one I really meant was: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2925845>

This link is also interesting.</comment></comment>


Roxette singer Marie Fredriksson dies, aged 61 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50730052 <comment><USER2> About 15 years ago I traveled to Sweden for work. I booked my hotel in a real hurry, not really paying much attention to what or where it was. I arrived jet lagged and feeling like crap, but was pleasantly surprised that this was a beach resort! I went to the basement bar to grab a beer and try to adjust my internal clock. When I got to the basement, it was a virtual shrine to Roxette. I later discovered that the hotel was owned by Per Gessle - the Hotel Tylosands. I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Halmstad, Sweden.

<comment><USER3> I recognized the hotel about halfway through your story. But then again I live and work in Halmstad. Nice coincidence!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was at the last tour they did together. And I was shocked.

Marie sang beautifully, but two Roadies had to steady her coming onto the stage, she sat on a barstool for the whole show, never leaving it, the Roadies took her backstage, and then the same for encores.

That was when I decided this would be my last Roxette show. I'd rather have my memories than see Marie this agonized.

Thankfully they cancelled the already-announced extension of the tour and Per has been doing solo shows since.

Rest in peace! Your music—including your solo albums—means a lot to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a great story about how Roxette struggled before achieving international success. They made several attempts in the U.S. and in Japan. They even released Listen to your heart in Germany. But no one wanted to hear their songs outside of Sweden.

One day an American exchange student from Minneapolis moves back from Sweden and drops off his favorite Roxette album at the local radio station. The manager promises to play it but weeks go by and nothing happens.

The student goes back to the radio station to collect his record and the manager feels bad because he promised to play it. So he pops it into the record player. The Look receives great feedback from listeners who call in asking about the song. The manager makes a few copies on tape and distributes them to his colleagues in Miami and New York.

The record company finally realizes it has a hit on its' hands and officially releases the song in panic. Shortly afterwards it sits on the number 1 position of the Billboard Top 100.

Some time later Roxette is asked to make a song for low budget movie called Pretty Woman but they are absolutely swamped with work. They respond that they can't fit it into their schedule but offer the movie company a song that flopped in Germany - Listen to your heart.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Pretty Woman

Not "Listen To Your Heart", but "It Must Have Been Love", which had been released as "Christmas for the Broken-Hearted", but since the film doesn't play around Christmas, they had to rename it.

The lyrics stayed the same except for "and it's a hard Christmas day" \--> "and it's a hard winter's day"; for some reason the winter here didn't matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> RIP Marie. Roxette holds a special place in my heart. Theirs was the first cassette I bought as a kid, back in '91, having saved all my pocket monies for months. I listened to 'Joyride' so many times that summer that I wore out the tape. As I listen to the album right now, I feel this void this day.

<comment><USER6> Same. "Crash Boom Bang" was the first CD I ever bought, also saving up them monies for some time. It was a few years later though, probably '94-ish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> RIP to this wonderful artist. Roxette was a huge part of my teens and her singing will always be special to me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had a flashback of myself, in my early teens, programming in AMOS on a Commodore Amiga 500, while listening to their 1991 album "Joyride".

<comment><USER9> Weird. When I listen to songs I first heard 20 years back I take myself that far back. I have a song that takes me back to me, mother and late father in a foreign trip. I don't play it often since each listen brings the safe memory into harsh consciousness and dilutes it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Look Sharp" was the first CD I ever bought. Their music has such a positive feel to it. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really like Roxette when I was a kid. Their songs are very melodic tone and very easy to understand for ESL. I bet that people have heard of June Afternoon, Spending My Time, Vulnerable, Listen to Your Heart, Fading Like a Flower ...

Miss you and RIP Marie!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great shame. Roxette weren't very trendy when I was at school, but time has proven that their music has lasting power.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of my favourite bands. :(

Getting old sometimes sucks. Hope you keep singing wherever you are.

<comment><USER14> Sometimes it doesn't. Way too much death around me in the last couple of months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> RIP Marie. Her voice was beautiful and had a unique signature to it. They still are one of my favorite bands. Many of their songs had so much emotion poured into it (happy, sad, depressed, excited, in love). The songs were so original and unique. As a band, Per and Marie were a perfect mix. It's sad to see her passing.

</comment><comment><USER16> My favorite Roxette story is that they were known as Roxette every where in the world, except Japan. They were known as Rockers there. (This apparently being due to the name Roxette being close or similar pronunciation to the Japanese word for Diarrhea :)</comment>


Practicing Ruby journal moves to open-access, 68 free articles already available - <AUTHOR> https://practicingruby.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the guy who runs Practicing Ruby. It's not an academic publication, but it is more than just a blog -- most of these articles involve a lot of research and development work.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them!</comment>


Rules to Lead by from the Man Who Defined Google's Product Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/42-Rules-to-Lead-by-from-the-Man-Who-Defined-Googles-Product-Strategy

<comment><USER2> Great list. The only thing I'd add is 'Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics'. I've seen too many projects held up for want of a nail.

Anyone who's worked for a larger organization knows that you'll have weekly team meetings hammering on the developers to get project X out the door on time. Then the developers will walk out of that meeting and spend three weeks trying to get the tools and equipment they need from IT with zero backup from leadership.

</comment><comment><USER3> > #1 Be a broken record. ... > #5 Stop talking, already.

Also, 42 rules? Would of been nicer to have just the few important ones perhaps.

<comment><USER4> > #1 Be a broken record. ... > #5 Stop talking, already.

Heh, I was going to comment on that as well. I think this shows something about the merit of taking advice at "face value" and not applying your own discretion and judgment to its application.

I also disagree to some extent with #10 and #13. What he calls "bustling" and "energetic" I call "distracting" and "annoying". And while I'm a big believer in the value of face-to-face communication, I think working-from-home has a role to play as well. The problem, in my mind (and I don't pretend to have a definite answer to this) is how to find the right balance between expecting people to be in the office, and allowing them the flexibility to work from home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> #4 Tell stories.

Great leaders are great teachers. And great teachers are great storytellers. "Narrative is how we learn. If you want to be a leader, you will teach and tell stories. The two are inseparable."_

When I hear this I can't help but think, narrative fallacy. Narrative may have traditionally been "how we learn", but recent research into biases and heuristics (Kahneman & Taversky especially) suggests it's not entirely reliable.

This bit of advice doesn't go into much detail on how telling stories is essential to leadership. Anyone have any experience on just what is meant here, and whether narrative fallacy is a concern?

</comment><comment><USER6> > #23 Don't hire specialists.

I hope his definition of specialist is wrong considering that he himself is a specialist. Perhaps what he means is "hire people who can learn and adapt." After all, you won't get anywhere without people who have deep knowledge in particular areas.

</comment><comment><USER7> _#31 Consider the customer._

Seems google has gotten away from that. The Nexus 4 has a couple of very bad bugs that have gone unfixed for a long time. I feel really bad that I recommended a good friend get it, because these bugs have really damaged his enjoyment of the phone.

<comment><USER8> They've gotten away from it?? Here's a list of things they consider important, and #31 is the customer. And it's not even that strongly worded.. it's 'consider' the customer. In fact it says, "If there's a doubt about what to do, consider your customer's perspective." Literally saying the customer is an afterthought, only to be considered if you aren't sure what to do.

It doesn't sound like it was ever very high on their list to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> #10 Crowded is creative. #13 Show up.

I couldn't say I agree. It flat out dismisses companies that do perfectly well while having remote teams. I guess it depends on if you have a company that focuses on discussion more than say building something.

</comment><comment><USER10> Lots of valuable one liners in there. I think being at google though he missed a few that are too obvious to mention there.

#43 Start with something that works and then iterate often to improve.

#44 If your project involves engineering then involve the engineers in the product specifications, don't trust marketing or MBAs to do it alone.

#45 Simplify as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is a bad egg? How do you identify and purge the bad eggs while laying off the kill switch?</comment>


Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, he can rob the world. - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/11/12/give-a-man-a-bank-and-he-can-rob-the-world

<comment><USER2> Give a man a tweet, he can steal it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sharing is caring.</comment></comment>


Color of atoms (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/inquiring/questions/colorofatoms.html <comment><USER2> I can't even begin to list all the things confusing (or perhaps totally wrong) about the Dept. of Energy's answer:

> _atoms do not have colors_

Then why do group of atoms (eg. gold) have a color, but not an individual atom?

> _If the electrons give out exactly the same light as they absorb, the > substance is "colorless"_

Shouldn't the answer be "white" rather than "colorless"? Colorless sounds like transparent or clear to me.

He uses absorb, reflect, and emit inconsistently. Surely, there has to be a clearer explanation somewhere on the Internet?

<comment><USER3> > Then why do group of atoms (eg. gold) have a color, but not an individual > atom?

I think the point is the question implicitly assumes you can take an atom, blow it up to the size of a softball, and then observe what color the softball is. It's correct to reply that atoms are actually a smaller-scale phenomenon than color, so the color of the softball is "not applicable". (With the correction pointing out that sometimes individual atoms _do_ exhibit "colored" phenomena, although it's not the same as most colors, and doesn't apply to most atoms.)

"If the atoms don't have color, why does the substance" is a great philosophical question, similar to the question of why words have meaning, but not letters. By analogy I'd probably start with something like "atoms make color, but that doesn't mean they have it".

<comment><USER4> The words:letters analogy was great and helped me understand this better. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, my first thought jumped to gold and the 5d->6s transition that is well-known for needing relativistic consideration to correctly predict the yellow color.

I don't think the answer given is a great one, but I like that they sent a correction.</comment>


ScummVM 2.1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.scummvm.org/news/20191013/ <comment><USER2> Emulators are one of the best things to ever happen to gaming. They can expand your library by tenfold on newer systems. No amount of appreciation would be enough for the hard work of the people who make these (and make them available for free!)

Now someone get on making Monkey Island 3 please.

<comment><USER3> ScummVM isn't an emulator though. It's a game engine implementation for modern OSs.

<comment><USER4> Is ScummVM not an Scumm emulator?

As I understood it the difference between a VM and an emulator is that a VM runs cpu instructions directly, which seems not to be the case here.

<comment><USER5> SCUMM is (was) the scripting language used to implement game logic in the various Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games. The engine was referred to as SPU (SCUMM Presentation Utility). So it's not like the whole engine was written in SCUMM. Audio, graphics, video, fonts, walkbox handling etc was in native code, of course, and especially in the first games a lot of stuff was hardcoded in the engine.

It doesn't really make sense to call it a SCUMM emulator, ScummVM has a reimplementation of the whole engine.

Of course there's also other engines in ScummVM, some based on the original source kindly donated to us by the developers, but most created by painstaking disassembly.

ScummVM does have emulation for various pieces of audio hardware but that's the only part I would consider emulation.

<comment><USER6> BTW, some of the later games use Lua for scripting instead. In fact, Grim Fandango was the first major game to use Lua!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a "scumm restructurer" (scummatlas) that takes the games binaries and outputs all the scripts, room data, etc... In a readable form. And the scummvm documentation and source code was invaluable.

<comment><USER8> This looks really neat. Are you aware of any similar projects for the z-machine games, at all?

[https://github.com/ktzar/scummatlas](https://github.com/ktzar/scummatlas)

<comment><USER9> Not sure if these fit what you're looking for, but there are a couple of disassemblers for Z-Code files:

\- Disinformation: [http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if- archive/infocom/tools/](http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if- archive/infocom/tools/)

\- Reform: [http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if- archive/infocom/tools/re...](http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if- archive/infocom/tools/reform/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From its home page: "ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed! ScummVM supports many adventure games, including LucasArts SCUMM games (such as Monkey Island 1-3, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, ...), many of Sierra's AGI and SCI games (such as King's Quest 1-7, Space Quest 1-6, ...), Discworld 1 and 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Beneath A Steel Sky, ... and many more."

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm excited for the Blade Runner support. Been wanting to play that game since watching Ars Technica's fascinating little video[0] about it.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkwpa5YPhx8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkwpa5YPhx8)

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have a up to date how to available how to get ScummVM on iOS? The release notes mention some changes to the iOS version. The wiki page [1] is for iOS 7 which is super old. Additionally the whole setup requires downloading some library pack...

[https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Compiling_ScummVM/i...](https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Compiling_ScummVM/iPhone)

<comment><USER13> I've done it semi-recently, but I compiled all the dependencies myself instead of using that library pack since I figured it was probably out of date. It's tedious but not too bad if you are familiar with cross-compilation. It's not really something the ScummVM team seems too concerned with since they can't put the app up on the App Store.

I'm gonna have to compile it again to get all these neat new changes, maybe this time I'll try to make a Docker container that does all the work.

<comment><USER14> If you could get a build deployed to AltStore ([https://altstore.io](https://altstore.io)) that would be amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> macOS binaries seem to be 32 bit only, so not working anymore after catalina update :(

<comment><USER16> The 64-bit binaries were temporarily pulled due to an issue with Sparkle (auto-update framework), but they're back online as of a few minutes ago.

"macOS 10.7+ 64 bits with Sparkle Disk Image" on the downloads page, might have to refresh.</comment></comment>


One Player's Quest to Beat the Seemingly Endless 'Desert Golf' - <AUTHOR> https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3nnv4/one-players-21000-hole-quest-to-beat-the-seemingly-endless-desert-golf <comment><USER2> It says in the article that he's been playing it for four years and has racked up 300–400 hours game time. That's a bit less than the 'obsessive' realm some people are placing this in, in terms of daily play.

      (400/(4*365*24))*100 =~ 1%

He could easily rack up that game time with about 20 minutes per day. Granted, to do that each and every day for 4 years is still quite some undertaking, but it's not like he's spending every waking hour obsessing over it.

(This only sprang to mind because I instantly compared it to my 160+ hours of game time in Breath of the Wild, a game I've only owned for a couple of months...)

(Edited for formatting of the napkin-math)

<comment><USER3> Off Topic... but what are you doing in Breath of the Wild?

I thought that game was 50 hours to beat. Are you going for 100% complete, or is the game more difficult game than I realized?

<comment><USER2> I'm not _really_ going for 100% complete, but I am going for 'complete as much as I possibly can'. From what I've heard, 100% complete would really be a grind, but I'm still totally enjoying taking my time and discovering new things. Some days you want to fight, some you just want to explore the world.

For example, there's an element of the game where you photograph various animals/objects and attempt to collect an example of each and every one. Now and then I take some time out and just roam the landscape, honing my photography skills. The next thing I know it, hours have passed and I'm thinking to myself "what am I actually supposed to be doing again?" It's a game to get lost in, big time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Example of impossible hole, that ultimately gets beaten by sheer persistence and luck:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&atb=v83-1__&ia=v...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&atb=v83-1__&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=R2TQcFk52JU)

<comment><USER5> I remember reading how this hole was impossible to get past some time ago. They eventually did it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm confused. The article says that, before the recent update, hole 14,758 was impossible. But I made it to hole 28,890 before getting stuck in mid-2016. [0] After the update, I resumed playing, and am currently on hole 31,923.

So either I got a different layout for 14,758, or it's not impossible. And obviously, I've also never encountered a level with endless water. Is it possible that the procedural generation is not identical across all devices?

[0] [https://karlvonl.livejournal.com/8174.html](https://karlvonl.livejournal.com/8174.html)

<comment><USER7> I think it's just that every player has different holes - so your 14758 hole was different the the impossible 14758 hole

<comment><USER6> But I thought that the game was at least intended to have consistent procedural generation across all devices; how else would the author's manual removal of impossible holes work? Or why would certain hole numbers be notorious for being difficult/impossible? All discussion of this game seems based on the assumption of consistency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is a beautifully minimalist game. With such an economy of mechanics, features and elements, it can be at the same time relaxing, exciting, frustrating and rewarding. Every now and then there's a "feature" (a cactus, something unique) to remind you that the game could have more, but it doesn't want to.

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, I'm always a little jealous at people who possess that amount of persistence at something. It would probably get boring for me after hole 23.

<comment><USER10> The most discouraging part is that counter showing every shot you have ever taken. It changes a foolish shot that you can laugh at into another mark on your permanent record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish that the domain summary said 'waypoint.vice.com', since they have a very different style to vanilla Vice.

<comment><USER12> Much like the mother-focused offshoot of Vice, Vice Baby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Semi-related, I'd highly recommend the game "Freeways" by the same game author:

[https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways](https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways)

<comment><USER14> I haven't played Freeway but it looks like similar'ish to Mini Metro[0] which I've wasted an indecent number of hours playing.

[0]: [https://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/](https://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's impressive how this game spread. I've first read about it in Grubers iPhone X article on daringfireball.net. Then suddenly it was mentioned by xkcd and now appears in other news and finally HN. Great marketing strike. It's also a fine game with a fair price. To be recommended.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I would pay for such a game. There are similar depth but more beautiful games for free.

<comment><USER16> For those of us who are less informed, could you recommend a couple of them?

<comment><USER9> Sorry, can't provide more details. My relationship to these kind of games is Ruby Tuesday like, come, have a little fun, go. But usually it's just a few weeks until the next friend suggests such a game. I incorrectly assumed that would be the same for everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how much the author earned from this game.

</comment><comment><USER18> The question is how to detect an impossible game ?

<comment><USER19> I would approach it the opposite way. Create a battery of random shots, pick an "interesting" one using some heuristic, and then put the hole there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What an utterly bizarre hobby.

<comment><USER21> [https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-player-hits- level-99-in...](https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-player-hits-level-99-in- the-first-rea-1794171766)

<comment><USER22> The Final Fantasy series has spawned a lot of "stories" like this one over the last 30 years.

A notable one being related to the MMO Final Fantasy XI, with the "Maat's cap" item being created by Square Enix to praise a player who achieved the maximal level on every job available in the game. Which back then needed hundreds of days of slow and frustrating grind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems to me like it's trivial to detect that a hole is impossible/really hard.

<comment><USER5> How would you do it then? Run every possible sequence of hits? That's not going to work, too many possibilities. Level 17509 was reckoned to be impossible for a long time but then someone did it.

<comment><USER20> Actually, I did this for a 3-D minigolf game I made about 20 years ago. The algorithm isn't hard. You have a rather small parameter space of possible hits (direction plus velocity). In my game it was a 3-dimensional parameter space. For his, it would be a 2-dimensional parameter space. The output is the distance from the hole to the ball when it stops moving. This is just a minimization problem. Try a bunch of experiments and refine the better ones. Worked for me.

It is technically true that it's possible there might be a solution that your search won't find. But I never found an example of that occurring for my game. So if you follow this, you may inadvertently throw out a hard level that has a solution, but you'd never present the player with a level that has no solution.</comment></comment></comment>


Automation could replace 1.5M jobs [in UK], says ONS - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47691078 <comment><AUTHOR> Just in England and Wales so not including Scotland or Northern Ireland.</comment>


$100s of Millions of Dollars Printed Everyday, Where Does the NEW Money Go? - <AUTHOR> https://achainofblocks.com/2018/09/04/where-does-money-come-from-who-controls-all-our-money/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686354)

<comment><USER3> I was really hoping this was going to be like, a discussion of how the Fed allocates and distributes new bills as it exercises monetary policy, and then it was just an article about blockchains.</comment></comment>


Keep a Changelog - <AUTHOR> http://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/ <comment><USER2> See discussion on the front page [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17631326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17631326)</comment>