Source: RIM begins laying off high-level staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/rim-begins-laying-off-high-level-staff-source/article2386012/

<comment><USER2> Mr. Heins (new RIM CEO) says _"we are undertaking a comprehensive review of strategic opportunities including partnerships and joint ventures, licensing, and other ways to leverage RIM's assets and maximize value for our stakeholders."_

Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying stuff like "maximize value for our shareholders"?

Steve was obsessed with providing a user experience that blew people's minds and designing products that changed the world. And he did, repeatedly.

RIM's leadership has no vision, and so there is no chance they will survive.

<comment><USER3> That's code for "we're talking to other companies about what we have that we can sell them."

<comment><USER4> The best deal is to sell the enterprise integration bits to Microoft, or the whole company to anyone who wants it, if there is anyone.

<comment><USER5> I would buy it, if the price is low enough (less than or equal to the money I have in my account).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"It is very clear to me that substantial change is what RIM needs," Mr. Heins said on the call with investors._

Compared to (just a few months ago):

 _"I don't think that there is a drastic change needed."_

Oh, RIM.

<comment><USER7> I believe he clarified later on that what he meant by no drastic change needed was that selling the company was not on the table. However, I think his position on that may have changed now anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The crazy thing is, this is _good_ news for RIM. If Heins really cleaned house with the execs and he replaces them with people that can see reality, that's probably the only chance for RIM to stay an independent company.

It's not clear that is what will happen. But at least now there's a chance.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rick Mercer's bit on RIM: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm0gqBjDmg8>

<comment><USER9> Scarily like the Nortel situation, only consumer facing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like RIM needs to get worse (in order to shake off all their dead wood) in order to eventually get better, since their board clearly has no clue, no care for their fiduciary responsibility, etc. I wonder if that can happen, then BB 10 launch, saving them from doom, before Android, Windows Phone, or iOS win the enterprise market.

I'd be willing to bet on low-end Android or WP devices taking the non- corporate blackberry market away (BB were the cheapest smartphones in the third world), leaving just the corporate/security/managed devices market up for grabs. This still belongs to RIM but is fast moving to other devices.

<comment><USER11> Odd as it may seem, I fully expect iOS to take over Enterprise. They're already dominating as personal devices among the people who would be making those decisions, and I see it as an inevitability that they'll eventually be adopted officially.

<comment><USER10> I do, too. There are some lacking management tools, sadly, but have the best hardware right now.

In the Bring Your Own Devices world, you pretty much have to support iOS #1 and Android #2 (pretty much all Android users in corporate environments will take a free iPhone if that's cheaper for the company than also supporting Android; the reverse, no). I haven't seen anyone except tech companies actually buying iPhones at the IT level for distribution, but plenty of people given a corporate phone buying allowance will do so. And, IT departments DO buy iPads, so supporting iPhone + iPad is easy.

It is sad that Apple doesn't care about the enterprise market directly; even if they just had a closely-allied company like the old Claris to build the management tools, consulting, etc., it would make it a lot easier to use iOS and macs in corporate environments.

<comment><USER12> > It is sad that Apple doesn't care about the enterprise market directly;

Considering the group configuration tools they provide, I don't think that's an accurate statement.

<comment><USER10> Those tools are a nice start but not as good as BES or some third party tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This might be a good step, but we still haven't heard a plan from RIM on how they plan to adapt to the changing landscape. A shake up of upper management is good in principle, but it isn't an end to itself.</comment>


5 Axis Milling Machine Making V8 Engine Block - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsmiIeAkE-o

<comment><USER2> Cool link, cool vid -- Im so glad this wasnt some javascript thing taking the metaphor too far :). Seems like a waste of metal tho -- anyone know why this would be done? (other than to show off 1337 cnc skillz?)

<comment><USER3> The metal chips are typically not wasted (it is trivial to wash and melt them into a new billet). Milling from scratch gives you a stronger (and more expensive) part than if you were to cast and machine it.

Ever watch Apple's unibody MacBook Pro video? They use the same technology to machine the cases on our laptops.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the info. Why is machining stronger than casting? it seems to me that to make a billet you'd need to cast that first...

As a related question: Is one method more energy efficient than the other?

<comment><USER3> > Why is machining stronger than casting?

One reason is that billets are far less likely to have pores and other defects (caused by air bubbles) than a casting.

> Is one method more energy efficient than the other?

Which is more energy efficient depends on the application and expected life of the part. Casting several cheaper parts and paying to replace them may or may not be cheaper/more efficent if you look at the entire process (including shipping and human interactions with the part).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paper - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiftythree.com/paper <comment><USER2> I really want to love this. iPad hardware just doesn't deliver.

The problem isn't that nice drawing software like this doesn't exist, it's that styli on iPad still _suck_. The capacitive screen (even on "new" iPad) only has about a 6mm capacitive resolution, so you're stuck fudging the fck along with a sausage for a stylus. Ars had a good review[1] on the current state of styli, and they said much the same. I've personally owned about four iPad styli and none come close to what I am capable of with an old Graphire.

We need pressure sensitivity, finer resolution, and proper calibration for this to work well. Everyone wants to replace drawing stuff with iPad (including myself) but until iPad supports Wacom-esque pressure sensitivity, feel and resolution on iPad everything you do there will likely be too rough compared to what you could get with a Bamboo on Painter/Illustrator or what could be drawn directly on paper, scanned in and retraced with said Wacom. Even the Galaxy Note / Lenovo Tablet / etc. are better for this.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2012/03/does-the- stylus...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2012/03/does-the-stylus-still- blow-it-on-the-new-ipad.ars)

<comment><USER3> Has anyone tried one of these? <http://adonit.net/product/jot-pro/>

It looks like a somewhat different design than all the other styluses, and so might work better, but I haven't seen any direct reviews except their marketing material, which is hardly impartial.

<comment><USER4> While looking for a precise stylus I came across this one as well: <http://www.cregle.com/> It looks like it solves a lot of the gripes with normal capacitive styluses, but I haven't tried it.

<comment><USER2> This is the same hardware as the XO stylus in a different case. Same OEM for both. They look great, the demos are wonderful, but user reviews say that they don't work well in the upper third of the screen and require frequent recalibration.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I hadn't seen the XO before. It's too bad these ultrasonic styluses don't live up to the hype. I would love to take notes on a new iPad and ditch the paper notebooks completely. It'd be sweet if Apple shipped a solution, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just downloaded it and gave it a spin with my Bamboo stylus. Here are my impressions, FWIW:

* First impression: Nice tutorial, nice animations when picking a notebook. Great idea to do your app planning sketches as its own notebook.

* First impression while writing: Nice inky strokes, I like the colors.

* Second impression: Hmmm...this seems a bit laggy compared to Noteshelf or Penultimate. <flip over to those programs> Yup, definitely laggier (I have an iPad 2). Probably only a few milliseconds lag, but noticeable.

* Third impression: I like the rewind interface instead of an undo button. Very cool.

* Fourth impression: No zoom or magnifying glass? bummer.

* Final decision: Nice, impressive, innovative UI but unfortunately especially the lagginess will cause this to not replace Noteshelf as my default go-to notebook. The lack of zoom is also a bummer, since with a magnifying glass you could add so much more detail, it makes up for the iPad's lack of pinpoint accuracy.

3.5/5 (edit: just realized i'm not on the app store so I can give decimal ratings :P)

P.S. Also, a "hand guard" area to ignore touches as in Noteshelf would REALLY be nice to be able to draw without having to make sure you never touch the screen with your hand while drawing.

<comment><USER6> I had incredible difficulty with the rewind/undo interface. Almost as often as I bring up the rewind UI, it'll do some other action instead, like drawing little dots, or zooming in/out, or bringing up/dismissing the tools palette.

When the dialog is finally brought up, it doesn't respect my finger motions. I'll drag my one finger a full 360 around my other finger but the pie chart moves less than 5 degrees in total, jerkily. Or, it flaps forward and backward rapidly as I smoothly move my finger in one direction. Maybe there's a heuristic that's trying to pick a "pivot" finger and a "rotating" finger, and it's picking wrong each time. I dunno.

Willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because the rest of the app is so well done, but, this brokenness of such a key feature makes a bad initial impression.

<comment><USER7> It sounds as if you're rotating one finger around the other? The idea is to use two fingers together (like one big finger) to do a pan in a circular motion.

<comment><USER6> In all my messing around it did not occur to me to try that. Thanks! Solution blinders in action! I suppose a little animation would have gone a long way towards clearing that up initially.

Even doing it correctly, I still feel it's a little too slow, and still relatively easy to flub it into closing the book. I applaud the idea, though.

<comment><USER8> I had exactly the same problem - I agree that a little animation would go a long way here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't tell at first if this was an app or just a sarcastic advertisement for actual paper as an alternative to tablets. Maybe that doesn't say much for my powers of observation, but it's also a testament to the product. At first glance, a white iPad running this app is not unlike a pad of drawing paper. Good job.

<comment><USER10> I still can't tell what the heck the product actually is. Is it a new tablet? A remanufactured iPad? Some sort of stylus. Some sort of app? Something offered by Tumblr?

<comment><USER11> It's a drawing app for iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The app looks really, really cool, but I think this input lag demonstration by Microsoft has really spoilt me in the same way that I can no longer look at mobile devices without Retina and not cringe.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4>

<comment><USER13> What are the chances that real hardware response will get down to the 1ms range in the near future? I'm thinking that each interface, from the touch pad to the CPU to the display, will introduce significant lag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bought this this morning. I'm a figurative artist, for over 30 years, and this is a very nice tool. Especially for a version 1.0. The stroke dynamics are very good, and I'm running this on a first generation iPad. I've been sketching with it off and on all day, and have really grown to like it.

Things it needs:

* Pinch zoom in and out. Gotta have this. It works great when you are drawing at the scale of the whole page, but detail work suffers as the sampling of the device isn't good enough. (Nor are my fingers! This is why artists and illustrators often draw and paint as large as possible.) When they add zooming, and they say on their website they are, they need to be sure and adjust the tool's scaling to match the view.

* The limited color palette is fine, but I need to be able to pick the colors.

* More tools are a given, especially since the program itself is free and they are making their money by selling extra tools. I've already plunked down my eight bucks for all that's available.

The minimalist interface is fantastic. When you are drawing, and I'm speaking as a person who draws observationally, you want the tool to be as spacial and object oriented as possible. This doesn't mean you have to mimic "real world" drawing tools, but it _does_ mean that the interface needs to not emphasize numerics and linguistics. The organization needs to be _very_ simple; from a drawing point of view, if I have to drill down through a series of hierarchies I might has well type in menu selections from a command line. My attention needs to be on my subject and my drawing, not on a UI.

YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER15> So if Wacom starts supporting iPad with styluses, will you guys repurchase another iPad if you already had one?

<comment><USER16> In a heartbeat. A decent pressure sensitive iPad/droid/windows tablet for <$1000 would get my business tomorrow.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the Samsung Slate 7 around 1k and uses a Wacom digitizer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $2 per tool? This is not a free app, this is a bait-and-switch. Just charge $15 for the app, guys.

<comment><USER19> If they had gone with the traditional free lite version / paid premium version model, you would lose all of your drawings when you upgraded. This is just a free trial for the real product which can be unlocked at any time with minimal friction. Personally, I prefer this to having to hunt in the app store for the "premium" version if I decide to make the switch.

Doing this also gives the developers the option to introduce paid updates in the future, which is potentially good or bad.

<comment><USER20> As of iOS5, free and paid versions of apps (or any apps by the same developer) can share data, so the issue of losing data when upgrading has been solved.

There is also no reason the developer can't link to the paid version direct from the app - no heed for hunting.

I don't mind them charging in-app for features in principle. but I found that the free version wasn't enough for me to draw anything serious so it didn't really let me try out the app.

I think it would have been better to go with a fully featured free version with say, just one notebook with limited pages. That way users could use the app fully, and upgrade if they used it enough to need more capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> PIXAR animator @MR_Scribbles toying with it <http://shfp.tumblr.com/tagged/MadeWithPaper>

<comment><USER21> And all of tumblr 'paper'ing <http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/madewithpaper>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks really nice and well designed.

I really want to see a MacOSX version of this, there are not really any good minimalistic drawing programs on the Mac app store yet..

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious about the bluetooth 4.0 LE pressure-sensitive stylus (<http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/03/blue-tiger-stylus/>); I've started to get really excited about 4.0 LE for electronic leash and other applications.

</comment><comment><USER24> I actually don't like the rewind interface. It is an innovative way to use circular gestures, but it was frustrating to use. I'd rather have a circular context menu.

I do like the moleskin feel to it and the graphics. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER25> How come the "nice designed" web sites is always the same, with the same font, large images, and soooo long to scroll. It's like a statement saying "we mind about design, we just don't have any creativity."

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems to me the problem for detailed drawing is more of a hardware than a software problem at this point. It's very solvable on both sides it's a matter of timing the solution to hit the market when the major players in the pad space get to the right level of support for detailed styluses.

Clever alternative input methods to take an end run around screen resolution would be amazing if they're accurate enough.

I'd love to see someone give paper this 1 paper-cut.

</comment><comment><USER27> It looks amazing and hats-off to the developers, but ultimately an app like this is limited by the lack of pressure response.

</comment><comment><USER28> Follow the link, watch the video that pops up... some guy walking around fiddling with a tablet. What's being sold here? The tablet? Some software? Services? No idea... watch for thirty seconds... still no idea... click the "about" button... more pictures of someone's shoes. Maybe they're selling shoes.

</comment><comment><USER29> (Business hat) I wonder what would prompt someone to make yet another drawing app for the iPad? It's a fairly full space with entries from the major players, and the market of skilled artists is fairly small and is never going to blow up into a #1 hit.

</comment><comment><USER30> I haven't played with this yet, but have to say the video splash on <http://www.fiftythree.com/> 's homepage is awesome. So much more effective than some LaunchRock splash photo.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, this has the best paper-flipping ui I've ever seen, kudos!

</comment><comment><USER32> This app is being reviewed / hyped by every MacBook/ iOS site. No matter how good the UI is, they have pulled off a massive PR coup. How did they do it?

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks really, really nice. Gorgeous UI.

But I kinda consider the ability to choose my own colors to be a critical feature in my drawing programs! BALEETED

</comment><comment><USER34> First time I have thought:

"I am going to get a stylus for my iPad."

</comment><comment><USER35> Is it limited to 9 colors or is it just me that can't figure out the right gesture? It also seems to lack a setting for brush size.

<comment><USER36> I noticed that too but then I kind of felt like that's the point. Simple. Kind of like having a box of 9 crayons instead of a box if 200.

The more options they give you the more time spent use them instead of drawing?

At the same time though, I do wonder if the sketchbook UI is really the main point. Going through images 1 at a time or with a grid of thumbnails in Art Rage or Sketchbook is much more cumbersome than this one pinch to fold, flip to next page, tap, draw.

It doesn't ask you to load or save, it just acts like paper which is quicker.

I wonder of those other apps added that type of feature if the limited options would still be a positive or a negative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's funny how much more interesting drawing and writing become when you can do it electronically.

</comment><comment><USER38> The zoomed out view reminds me of the microsoft courier. Why hasnt anyone made that into an app?

<comment><USER38> Oh [http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/29/2909537/paper-drawing- ipad...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/29/2909537/paper-drawing-ipad-app- fiftythree-brains-behind-courier)

and again

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X41qLxp4QhE>

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't have an iPad but I can still appreciate the fact they will support using a stylus.

</comment><comment><USER40> This looks really great.

Makes me wonder if its time to actually pick up a stylus...

</comment><comment><USER41> Great app, guys. I love the design of the app and your website. Really fits the whole artistic New York hippie vibe. Keep up the good work and ignore the inevitable onslaught of negativity you read here...its par for course lately.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is the kind of thing that makes me want to learn to draw.

</comment><comment><USER43> mmm looks delicious. I have been an avid user of the Sketchbook Pro way-of- things since Studio Paint. I have ordered a stylus to try this on my girlfriends iPad.

</comment><comment><USER44> What stylus are they using in their promo video?

</comment><comment><USER45> LOVE the rewind feature - nice work guys

</comment><comment><USER46> UI is really Awesome. Good Job Guys.

</comment><comment><USER47> How do I go back to the main menu?

<comment><USER48> Pinch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is there an android version?

<comment><USER50> Unfortunately no. In an interview with The Verge one of the developers said that they were open to the idea of moving to new platforms, but that their resources were too tight for the time being. Imagine this on a future version of the Galaxy Note. Perfect application for the increased fidelity of the Note stylus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Beautiful design!

</comment><comment><USER52> Very well done guys! The UI is top notch.

</comment><comment><USER53> Great intro video. It really explained the app well and was in no way irritating (a rare feat for demo videos!).</comment>


Micro saas ebook - <AUTHOR> https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas-ebook/ <comment><AUTHOR> Found this on indiehackers and thought it was pretty interesting.</comment>


Saga: iOS App With Siri and Foursquare Features that Writes Your Life - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2012/08/09/saga-ios-app-with-siri-and-foursquare-features-that-writes-your-life/

<comment><USER2> There was a similar app called PlaceMe which was a little more creepy and was eventually taken out of AppStore

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Big Brother for your own eyes :)

</comment><comment><USER3> A must-have companion</comment>


America's awful airports: A new ranking - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599801-new-ranking

<comment><USER2> It would be nice to see a list of the airports in question (not that I have any doubt about the awfulness of US airports, having been a twice-a-week- traveling-consultant for 2+ years).

LaGuardia would be my personal nominee for US Airport Hell, but I'm sure there are others...</comment>


Affine transformations - <AUTHOR> https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/affine-transformations/ <comment><USER2> Nice article, but a tiny bit weird that it calls affine transforms categorically non-linear, and then shows an affine matrix, which is linear by definition.

Affine transforms are linear intermediate transforms in one dimension higher than the source & target spaces. They're intuitively (rather than algebraically) non-linear because we move from 2d to 3d then back, or from 3d to 4d then back.

It can be helpful to think of the translation as a (linear) skew in the added extra dimension.

<comment><USER3> For linear functions (in the article's second, linear algebra sense), the image of zero must be zero, and that doesn't hold for (most) affine functions, so makes sense.

Note that he shows the trick of making affine functions linear by tacking on one more dimension.

<comment><USER2> > the image of zero must be zero, and that doesn't hold for (most) affine > functions

It does hold, always, in the higher dimension. And I feel like that's the most important thing to clearly understand about affine transforms. The entire beauty of the augmented matrix is that you get a class of non-linear transforms in 3d by using linear transforms in 4d. The article was nice, I'm nit picking something that was nearly there. It'd just be nice to be one teensy bit more explicit about what's going on here.

<comment><USER4> But affine transformations are indeed not linear. The augmentation trick creates a new, linear transform in n+1 dimension, which is related but different to the affine transform in question.

The categorization in the article seems correct.

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly, you're right. The article is correct, it's just not telling quite the whole story. Affine transforms aren't linear, and their augmented matrices that do the same thing are linear. In practice, it's both, and it's precisely cool because it's both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really liked this post. Although I knew the "correct" definition of linearity I'd never considered that linear regression is not in fact linear (though you can transform it as blt says).

<comment><USER6> Yeah its one of those handy hacks. I like these because they allow changing the input data to be a substitute for a different algorithm/formulation. Transforming the input is often easier to do under a deadline than deploy a well tested new algorithm.

All that said, the typical regularized version of linear regression with the 'append 1' trick is no longer equivalent to the affine version one may have in mind. The difference is the weight that corresponds to the appended dimension would be regularized by a typical implementation of a regularized linear regression. Unless, of course, special care is taken to remove regularization on the appended dimension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> w.r.t. the "affine regression" comment - you can reduce affine regression to linear regression by adding a constant feature whose value is 1 for every data point, or by centering the data on its mean. So it's a fairly mild misnomer :)

edit: of course, I agree that we should not say "linear function" when we mean "affine function" in general.

<comment><USER8> That reduction is in fact how I was taught linear regression, now I understand why!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really love the translation "hack". The 2D plane is mapped onto the z=1 plane, and then we apply an x-y shear in 3D space. This keeps the 3D origin at the origin, but shifts around the z=1 plane without distorting it, so that when we project back to 2D it looks like a translation.

</comment><comment><USER10> So.

In geometry an "affine vector" (c,v) is said to be the vector v tangent to c -- no longer a vector, a "tangent vector". In your neural network this would be the weights tangent to each bias. If you keep c fixed

        Tc[V] = {(c,v) | c fixed, forall v in V}

is clearly a vector space.

Here's the fun part: if you tried to consider

        T[V] = {(c,v) | forall c in R, v in V}

this is no longer a vector space. But it's a fun structure: at each c, Tc[V] is sorta like (homeomorphic) to the Cartesian product

        {c} x V

this is a fiber bundle. For example: a torus is near each c the cartesian product of a point and a circle; a "circle squared" is a donut.

Now, we don't need to restrict ourselves to c+v _x -- we can consider sigmoid(c+v_ x), which will have tangents (derivatives) to b at each w. For fixed c we still have a vector space with the derivatives dsigmoid/dv, and varying c you have a sigmoid fiber bundle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Going on the thought that interaction aids learning, I recently put together a very crude interactive jsfiddle to help visualize 2-d matrix transforms here: [https://jsfiddle.net/holoopooj/31yt1ytp/6/](https://jsfiddle.net/holoopooj/31yt1ytp/6/) You click and drag in the left graph area and see the transformed vector on the right. The matrix values can be changed at the top. I've only tested in chrome on desktop. You may have to vertically expand the lower right pane to see all of the drawing area.

</comment><comment><USER12> A nice discussion of the extension of the linear transformation matrix. The classic example and use case of this is 3D transformations that include Translation (as well as the linear shear, scale, rotate, and reflect).

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

I vaguely remember that the Minkowski space can also be written as an affine, but not particularly how or why, since it should be translation independent? It seemed that the raising/lowering tensor notation is always used.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone unpack the definition of an affine subspace for me, it's been a while since I took point set topology:

A subset U ⊂ V of a vector space V is an _affine space_ if there exists a u ∈ U such that U - u = {x - u | x ∈ U} is a vector subspace of V.

I'm unpacking this to read

A subset U of a vector space of V is an _affine space_ if there exists an element u such that U - u, which is exactly equal to x - u for all x in U, is a vector subspace of V.

If I'm reading that right, the right side of the equation is a paranthetic expression, so is it necessary?

</comment><comment><USER14> Excuse my ignorance, but in calculus I've seen some "affine solution" \- does this just refer to its form? What is the relevance?

<comment><USER10> So. In calculus both the derivative and integral are linear operators:

       D[a*f(x)] = a*Df[x]
       D[f(x)+g(x)] = Df(x) + Dg(x)

and the indefinite (without limits) integral is an "antiderivative", right? I.e. y(x) = I(f(x)) is the solution to

       D[y(x)] = f(x)

Here's the problem: there are multiple solutions to the case where f(x) = 0. Indeed, for any constant y(x) you have

       D[y(x)] = 0

This is why you're drilled in engineering classes to always add a + C to your indefinite integral. The solution to an indefinite integral is always a class of functions -- the part without +C continues to be linear, but you have to tag that along.

This is also why Initial Value Problems like

        D[f(x)] = g(x)

always need an initial condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm tempted to go through this carefully given that affine transformations tagged with cost functions are used in MR image registration/normalization all the time.

<comment><USER10> Affine transformations are also cost functions used in taxis and nightclubs. You pay for an entrance and then a fee per drink.</comment></comment>


Code together in real time with Teletype for Atom - <AUTHOR> https://blog.atom.io/2017/11/15/code-together-in-real-time-with-teletype-for-atom.html <comment><USER2> Lovely seeing Nathan and co ship this.

Interestingly enough, this feature is the primary reason behind Atom itself existing. We saw the first internal demo of "Atom" (I believe it was "Thunderhorse" at the time) 6-7 years ago, and the main idea was real-time collaboration on code. That sorta took a backseat for awhile as GitHub started to recognize that a collaborative editor was pretty swell in its own right, but glad to see that it's finally all come full circle.

<comment><USER3> This one single feature could potentially have the largest impact on my workflow in 2018. As much as I love async task management. Real-time collaboration with remote team members should be fascinating ;)

<comment><USER4> I guess the next step would be something along the lines of Google Wave where you could playback the "conversations" and see the learning process develop.

<comment><USER5> Damn I miss Google Wave

<comment><USER6> It was opensourced, but apparently nobody wanted to maintain it for free. [https://incubator.apache.org/wave](https://incubator.apache.org/wave)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it only a coincidence that real-time collaboration is being announced both for Atom and VS Code ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704376)) at the same time?

<comment><USER8> Why is there breakneck competition here to offer the best free code editor?

<comment><USER9> I guess that when users make the habit of using the free tool, then the company that provides it can easily embed other convenience habits that could potentially lead to a future sale.

Both Microsoft and Github have commercial products to sell at a later stage, VSCode has now integrations with Azure, I don't know about Github integrations on Atom but the potential is there.

When the user is using your free tool you are one step closer to provide something additional that is so convenient that is hard to say no, even if is paid.

<comment><USER10> They're working on making Atom + Github to be a 1-1 association in your Git workflow. See [https://github.atom.io/](https://github.atom.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every time I see one of these "code together in real time" announcements I remember SubEthaEdit, which did this flawlessly 14 years ago, _and_ released the collab part as a library that other apps can use: Coda uses (or at least used, I haven't used Coda in years) it and is/was compatible for sharing.

[https://subethaedit.net](https://subethaedit.net)

<comment><USER12> Too bad it had a terrible name...

<comment><USER13> Why do you think it's bad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure this is wise, but I started a test portal 252510f8-e474-45e0-bec1-5714435fa305 if you want to give it a whirl.

Edit: it's still working great even with 15+ people - very slick!

Also, here's the madness in repo form - [https://github.com/mrspeaker/teletest](https://github.com/mrspeaker/teletest)

<comment><USER15> I'm curious, how was the performance with all of that happening? (i'm assuming at some points you had 10+ people in there at once?)

<comment><USER14> I just stopped sharing the document. I was just running it over crappy cafe wife for 2.5 hours, max ~20 people, always 5 to 10... performance seemed fantastic - didn't tax my lappy at all. Very impressed!

[Re-shared it at 28e6c3b4-754c-44ef-9406-869604db9db5 - it would be good if you could keep a UUID somehow, but I guess that's unfeasible]

<comment><USER16> Someone please build a game around this premise. 15+ people having fun in a shared simulation is prime territory for game ideas.

<comment><USER17> Which premise? Isn't that just re-inventing multiplayer gaming?

Or do you mean targeting web games, much like was discussed in this HN post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264952)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> See also Floobits, which is a fully-realized, production ready service that allows collaborative real-time editing of your editors entire workspace.

Floobits has plugins for all major editors, including Vim and IntelliJ, as well as Google Hangouts.

[https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/)

Disclosure: I used Floobits a few times and think it's awesome 10/10

<comment><USER19> Floobits does not work. I've tried it several times hopefully. It simply doesn't do anything.

Please enlighten us to how you got it to work at all. I use neovim.

<comment><USER18> It's worked great for me in Sublime and Intellij. I've never tried it with Neovim :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My team at the Node Knockout hackathon implemented an editor-agnostic version of this feature last weekend. I guess it is an idea whose time is come.

[https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist- colony](https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony)

For me, the editor-agnosticism is the most important feature I would want my live coding experience to have. My team uses a mixture of Vim, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, and Atom, and we have configurations we are comfortable with. It's too bad that this seems to be happening well within the confines of each editor's ecosystem, and not by some common protocol that all editors could share.

<comment><USER21> The team behind this feature think that editor-agnosticism is also really important, that's why they split up this project into atom-teletype and teletype-core. AFAICT the 'core' library could be used to implement a package in any of the electron based editors.

<comment><USER22> Could the protocol implemented by teletype-core be (easily) spoken by a non- electron editor, or is there an inherent impedance mismatch where e.g. the protocol structures its data in ways amenable to DOM manipulations of text but not to other text buffer formats?

<comment><USER23> The protocol isn't coupled to the DOM or Electron in any way. The one thing that makes it easier to implement in electron is that it uses the WebRTC standard for peer to peer connections.

<comment><USER24> WebRTC is a beast of a protocol to implement, and so far browsers have had the canonical implementation. There's a few C++ libraries out there, but even then it's a lacking ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So glad to see that they've implemented this algorithm in JS! [https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt](https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt)

I've tried implementing a very similar algorithm (one could say it's the same approach) in the beginning of this year, but had one remaining issue with concurrent overlapping deletions that I couldn't figure out (and the paper I was basing the algorithm on didn't account for it: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474034616...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474034616301811)): [https://github.com/jure/rgass](https://github.com/jure/rgass)

Weihai Yu's implementation does account for it, however: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2660398.2660401](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2660398.2660401) , but his implementation is in Lisp, and I've never had the stamina to work through it for that one edge case.

Kudos to the team at GitHub, I'll be studying this implementation closely.

<comment><USER7> I found this blog post on this subject very approachable: [http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- collab...](http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- collaborative-text-editor.html)

<comment><USER25> That's a nice blogpost! It does describe char-based CRDTs nicely, but the RGASS/teletype-crdt algorithms are string-based, which brings a lot of headaches, as you can have insertions that split existing nodes, etc.

<comment><USER7> Would love to learn how the two approaches differ from each other. The string- based one _sounds_ more space efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of that rant from last week about how computers are less functional these days than they were in the 80's. The reason is that the Amiga had cooperative document editing way back when. (Sorry, can't remember the programs that supported it.)

/Some version of AmigaDOS also had truly relative timestamps. So you might see a file last accessed "Christmas, 1991."

</comment><comment><USER27> I have the same idea on Sublime Text about 4 years ago, but due to the Sublime API restriction at that time, it's dead on 2014. I have no idea is the Sublime API now well enough to implement this feature? My project: [https://github.com/learning/SublimeTogether](https://github.com/learning/SublimeTogether) And a screencast: [https://vimeo.com/96316581](https://vimeo.com/96316581)

<comment><USER28> I'd pay for that if you ever make it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Sharing the same physical machine is impossible for remote teams" \-- if only there was some kind of network that would allow people to log into a machine remotely...

More seriously, though, in the mid-90s, I worked at a place where most work stations were Sun Sparcs. One way of "coding together" was that one person did an xhost+ to allow a second frame of an Emacs running on a second person's machine to be opened on the first person's display. It was used only very rarely, though.

<comment><USER30> Wayland destroyed that 20+ year old X feature though

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This looks really neat. As a side note, it bothers me a bit that they haven't used an actual URI, e.g. tty:xxxxxxxx-xxxx-... That would allow for nice hyperlinks from web pages and chat rooms.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you wish this existed in a SQL editor, we have it in PopSQL ([https://popsql.io](https://popsql.io))

</comment><comment><USER33> "participants all keep their own custom key bindings, packages, and themes."

what happens when two different people editing the same document have two different settings for # spaces per tab character? whose takes precedence? (Or would there be a possibility of inconsistent spacing depending on who is adding a tab?)

<comment><USER34> I would guess that tab -> spaces happens locally, and then the spaces are what's sent over the wire. So it would be whoever inserted the tab. (What other possibility could there be?)

<comment><USER35> Why would spaces be sent over the wire?

<comment><USER36> Why wouldn't they be? How else would you envision indentation working?

<comment><USER37> Well, one of the people in the scenario uses tab characters, not spaces.

<comment><USER38> Why would someone do that? _ducks_

<comment><USER39> Because indentation is subjective (and is different from alignment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For VS Code there's sockscode, it's a little bare, but works well! [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=shyykose...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=shyykoserhiy.sockscode- vscode)

</comment><comment><USER41> Yet I'm still not able to save a file when it's on a network drive: [https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11911](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/11911)

</comment><comment><USER42> Atom's detriment with this post is that there's 4 paragraphs of text before I can even see what this feature looks like, and even then it's gifs on how to install the feature.

<comment><USER43> The marketing site does it better [1].

[1] [https://teletype.atom.io/](https://teletype.atom.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How does this work? Does the code that is typed go through a cloud service? I guess that would stop a lot of people using it in work.

<comment><USER45> In the case of Atom, no - it's peer-to-peer - github servers are only involved with initial connection. Probably the same for VS code, but not looked.

<comment><USER44> Ok, that's pretty cool. Thanks - had a quick scan of the page but didn't see that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's amusing to see this while building in Second Life. The Second Life build tools are a 3D CAD system with real-time collaboration in virtual reality. Several people can be editing the same set of 3D objects simultaneously. Others can stand around and watch, from different viewpoints.

Doing this for text is trivial by comparison.

<comment><USER47> Your comment led me to figuring out if Second Life is still really a thing. And I can't really figure it out. Apparently Linden Lab has over 200 employees so there must be some revenue on it. But is the user base growing, and how big is it?

<comment><USER46> The user base is flat, but the revenue keeps coming in. About 250 employees, down from a peak of 350, and about $66M in revenue.

Linden Labs is developing something new, called "Sansar", for virtual reality users. It's closer to a video game than a simulated world; it's a platform for "experiences", which are essentially third party games. Whether that works out depends on whether VR gets any traction. Second Life also might get a boost when the new Amazon "Snow Crash" series airs. Second Life is the closest thing to the "metaverse" of Snow Crash.

Second Life is interesting because it is an Internet system that isn't the World Wide Web. It's not HTTP based. It doesn't use HTML or Javascript. It's a huge system of its own. It has a social network, with members, groups, and text and voice chat. Strangely, about 40% of avatars never move; they just use the chat functions.

There's a whole world in there that is totally independent of Google and Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I can appreciate your efforts here. It isn't trivial to put something like this together but I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious: Face to face is far superior to a solution such as this one for what I think are self evident reasons. You're better off, by orders of magnitude, getting on a plane or train and going to see your code buddies.

When I'm coding with someone we're not usually on the same files or piece of code anyway. And I don't get any value from seeing them type away at the code file that they are focused in, or knowing which file they're in beyond the name. It's a simple "hey mate what line are you on?" question.

I get excellent value from talking to and seeing the other devs face to face figuring out where their head's at and what 'page' they're on. That's the stuff of a proper realtime and face to face code sesh IMHO.

<comment><USER49> Being together in person doesn't solve the problem of wanting to edit the same code simultaneously. For some projects, git is enough, but for something really small this seems like it would really help.

<comment><USER48> I'm not saying it isn't a legitimate problem but I've never had it.

For me, if we're not using git I could get the other dev's latest changes by simply doing a file copy of whatever I needed and then get it into my own environment. I work offline with most of my dev mates. We are rarely ever coding at the same time of day given time zone differences and sleeping patterns.

If we're a small team we're probably quite aware of where the other one is in the code and what they're working on. I don't need real time for that.

I think being able to see the other dev type in real time in the same file doesn't solve anything for me and may in fact be distracting and counter productive. I'm not sure 'real time' fits here.

<comment><USER50> "We are rarely ever coding at the same time of day given time zone differences and sleeping patterns."

This is to aid pair programming. I work on a remote team as well, but there are times we pair when hashing out of a particular issue that either myself or one of my teammates is having. It's far quicker to do this than to work disconnected and go back and forth, esp. if it may impact the schedule/sprint. In the past I've worked with devs that had as much as a 10 hour time difference and we literally scheduled times where our schedules crossed so we could pair on a specific issue. One person drives at a time but it's common to switch back and forth so tools like this are helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have never tried real time collaboration. What scenarios are there when you need real time collab. I know technical interviewers prefer this. Do you think it causes distraction when you have 2 people writing code on a same file. I would rather one finish and then do my stuff.

<comment><USER52> Ever been to a hackathon? It's hard to coordinate over Git when you're just getting started on a codebase and there's barely anything for the 3 other people to work on. I've used Cloud9 for this very successfully in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> A lot of effort put into "dumb" text editors, but we still don't have (to my knowledge at least) a truly cross-platform / cross-backend IDE that will allow you, for example, to open .sln/.cmake/.make/whatever projects/solutions and provide you with a nice interface to change project settings or even compiler used. This could save a lot of development time and improve productivity, and I'm sure it's a much more useful and common use case than collaborative editing.

<comment><USER54> IntelliJ is pretty close to what you want...

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Really gave atom a hard try. Back to notepad after a few months. The add-ons are the only advantage, but are grossly overshadowed by the resource consumption this behemoth requires.

<comment><USER56> Yeah, someone complains about the resource usage in every Atom post.

I feel likes it's a rehash of emacs vs vi debate from 30 years ago. Emacs needed many megabytes more than vi so people wouldn't use it.

As time goes on the resource usage becomes less of a problem. My 4 year old laptop has 16GB of RAM and I don't really worry about it. I'll get 32GB or 64GB in my next computer. I never liked quibbling over memory. My time is much more important to me and I want the best tools. I also want them to swim in RAM.

<comment><USER57> Yes, Emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How silly this sounds today.

I wonder why do those people even care.

The only time I look at my resource usage is when apps start to behave funny. Or when it's an app that I am developing. Other than that, why should one care?

One argument could be made that they are using memory wastefully. Not sure that's the case. The baseline memory consumption is higher, so what? It's a tradeoff. It's easier to build a better editor using browser-based tools, as much as I like Elisp. Over time Atom and VSCode will close the gap.

Now, if there is a memory leak, or memory increases non-linearly with the workload, than it could be a problem. VI and Emacs are pretty great with large files (Emacs not so great with long lines), browser-based editors usually do not work as well. But there is no reason they shouldn't, it just takes engineering effort.

<comment><USER58> A text editor using 600 MB of RAM to open a file is ridiculous. That with a couple of Chrome tabs grinds my laptop to a halt.

<comment><USER57> Why? Unless that pushes you to swap, that is not the cause for your slowness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I miss subethaedit

</comment><comment><USER60> Curious if this supports multiple-cursors (as in multiple cursors per user through ctrl/cmd+d, etc)? If so that'd be awesome!

<comment><USER61> It does indeed.

<comment><USER60> Beautiful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Am I really the only one on this forum to think that live shared coding is a terrible idea?

The only pro for this is there are no conflicts, so merging is easier. However, live conflicts are still bound to happen if 2 people want to work on the same section of the code, right?

And the cost of this is the total unability to debug...

I don't get it...

<comment><USER62> I've only done direct pairing twice. It can help come up with a game plan and get new people in the company up to speed, but it is terribly terrible stressful.

I don't like it. I think small services, incremental changes, strong tests and solid code reviews all work much better. Especially the tests and code reviews. At my last shop the company had an internal Gitlab and we used the Gitlab CI. Reviews + CI really helped keep the coding standards pretty high and helped younger devs not make beginner Scala mistakes coming from a Java background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Is there anything like this for sublime?

<comment><USER64> Apparently the protocol can be implemented by any editor, so hopefully we'll end up in a glorious future where this works in lots of browsers (including VSCode, who just announced their own version of this)

Edit: can _in the future_ , not now. So we'll see

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What would a git commit look like when two distinct programmers have inputted characters into the file?

<comment><USER66> One common way to attribute multiple authors in a commit is to add a `Co- authored-by` commit message trailer. You can read more about git commit trailers at [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers](https://git- scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers).

As an example, if this was a commit message, the trailer adding my attribution would be like this:

`Co-authored-by: FirstName LastName <email@example.com>`

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> If you haven't seen Colaboratory from Google check it out. This, but for jupyter notebooks.

[https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html](https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't use it at all, but hasn't emacs supported this since the 80s or 90s?

<comment><USER69> Not sure if there's been a way to integrate separate emacs processes, but it has always been possible to launch a new frame (emacs speak for window) displaying the same buffer, and given network transparency in X, have it displayed on any remote computer running X.

<comment><USER70> You can run an emacs server and operate out over ssh, if you want, sharing the buffers across many remote clients.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Em...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs- Server.html)

Although if you're doing remote editing you probably want to use Tramp.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/](https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The use cases don't need to be remote. Really looking forward to a chrome/firefox plugin that would sync a textarea with a new Arom/VS code buffer!

(Why? How many of you have edited some config/sql query/... in past week?)

</comment><comment><USER72> Google brought out something similar in 2012 [https://code.google.com/archive/p/collide/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/collide/)

</comment><comment><USER73> Back in college (late 90's) I did collaborative class project (in Z notation) with XEmacs and a partner on a remote X server. It actually worked as long as one of us wasn't in the minibuffer.

</comment><comment><USER74> If you wish this existed for web pages: [https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony](https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony)

</comment><comment><USER75> Does anybody know how does undo work with this feature?

</comment><comment><USER76> I can't make Atom work without freezing for myself, I can't imaging using it with more than one person at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER77> This looks like a cool feature to use to teach.

</comment><comment><USER78> That's pretty nice, kudos! By the way, I'm impressed no one mentioned tmux' remote session in this thread.

<comment><USER79> yeah, tmux and vim could do the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Anyone using this to edit Android source files? I need to look and see if Android Studio has anything similar.

</comment><comment><USER81> What software would you use to provide group voice chat for a screen share session? Discord?

<comment><USER82> I've used Riot ([https://riot.im](https://riot.im) , built on Matrix) and it worked very well. Voice chat is still in beta but I haven't had any trouble with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Awesome! It worked with the same github account over two computers as well! This is exciting.

</comment><comment><USER84> This is super neat. Would be awesome debugging with my teammate when I am working remotely.

</comment><comment><USER85> Were Microsoft and Github using some kind of collaboration tool? Calendar syncing perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER86> Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the development teams behind the top two open source editors introduce support for collaborative editing on the dame day, apparently unaware that they were both working on the same thing, and there being no evidence of collaboration between the two?

<comment><USER87> > top two open source editors

I must have missed the announcements for vim and Notepad++.

<comment><USER88> Interesting way to spell Emacs

<comment><USER89> Because Emacs could do that before Atom's devs were even born.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Can Atom be the twitch for coding with view only teletype?

</comment><comment><USER91> I wish there was something like this for Intellij.

<comment><USER92> Floobits works with Intellij as well as Neovim, Emacs, Sublime, and Atom.

I'd like to explore whether Teletype can be used across editors in a similar manner.

<comment><USER60> It's almost certainly _possible_. See under "Editor-agnostic client library", and [https://github.com/atom/teletype- client](https://github.com/atom/teletype-client)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> I so want this for visual studio code now :)

Really cool stuff !

<comment><USER94> You mean something like this?

[https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live- share](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> What had to be done, is done. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER96> Why is Atom still missing in Debian?

</comment><comment><USER97> I just want this in vim.

</comment><comment><USER98> i prefer this over floobits in that i don't need a floobits account, just a github account, which pretty much all devs will already have. it would be nice if there was a way to do this without needing the github account though.

<comment><USER59> With floobits though you can go ahead and use atom while I chill in vim or sublime. It doesn't demand that you both use the same editor.

<comment><USER98> for now. since this is the framework, I think we'll see plugins for other editors soon enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Amazing! Love it :)

</comment><comment><USER100> any way to use this WITHOUT a github account?

<comment><USER101> You can run the server yourself I think: [https://github.com/atom/teletype- server](https://github.com/atom/teletype-server)

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> code in real time with atom?

</comment><comment><USER103> Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER104> I'm using vs code now

</comment><comment><USER105> [A] [T]on [O]f [M]emory

</comment><comment><USER106> How safe is this?</comment>


Zynga 1; Vostu 0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/40303/Report_Brazilian_dev_Vostu_cuts_staff_after_Zynga_copycat_settlement.php

<comment><USER2> "This agreement ended a six-month spat between the two in which Zynga accused Vostu of making near-identical copies its titles."

Oh, that's rich. Vostu's lawyers must be a special kind of incompetent not to point out that this is Zynga's entire business model.</comment>


Zerão - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zer%C3%A3o <comment><USER2> Looks like a small town stadium in Brazil. What makes this particular stadium newsworthy?

<comment><USER2> ok, found it.

"TIL of "Zero", a soccer stadium in Brazil in which the midfield line is aligned with the Equator - zero latitude, which makes each team defending one hemisphere." [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8airs6/til_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8airs6/til_of_zero_a_soccer_stadium_in_brazil_in_which/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good examples of learning through games/puzzles, for adults? - <AUTHOR> Puzzles, games etc with the intention of teaching of some concept or topic. In any format (board games, digital games etc).<p>Any examples? <comment> a-martyn Steve Reich's Clapping Music aims to teach people how to perform a piece of contemporary music from the ground up: [http://clappingmusicapp.com/](http://clappingmusicapp.com/)

[full disclosure] I developed this. We collaborated with London Sinfonietta Orchestra to get the pedagogy right.

We aimed to make a game that is both engaging and addictive, whilst also teaching real musical skill (in contrast to say Guitar Hero :o). The pedagogy and game mechanics did clash into each other during development, we did a lot of user testing to find a balance. Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design was invaluable, as were lectures and posts by Daniel Cook.

It's a hard game, especially for people with no musical background, but nonetheless we had strong engagement.

Players who topped the leaderboard after a few months were invited to perform at a live event. They were pretty good, but then I didn't see them perform before they played the game.

<comment><USER2> Is there any chance for an android version?

<comment><USER3> Right? Or even an online version where you tap the space bar or something

<comment><USER2> Good idea too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I liked Human Resource Machine for brushing up on Assembly language concepts

Microcorruption is a fun resource for learning about reverse engineering, assembly language, and cybersecurity (the concept is that you're going through the assembly code of dev kits of different versions of software-controlled locks to find vulnerabilities that can then be exploited to get into warehouses full of MacGuffins). I've gotten through about half of the stages so far--they get really tough, but it is extremely satisfying to successfully complete one!

I also really enjoyed the couple of Zachtronics games I've played (I've done the first 5 stages or so of Konstructor: Engineer of the People and I managed to get through all the main modules in TIS-100)

Lightbot is a cute app for initial programming concepts through puzzles (program a robot to walk around a grid and light up various squares)

<comment><USER5> Along the same lines, Silicon Zeroes covers a lot of low-level computer science and hardware engineering concepts. I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising instructor has used it for labs.

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/684270/Silicon_Zeroes/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/684270/Silicon_Zeroes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://exercism.io](https://exercism.io)

Learn virtually any programming language by completing series of puzzles. Tests are all written for you. They just made a huge overhaul of their UX, and it's really nice looking. I'm using it to try to learn Rust and Elixir at the moment.

<comment><USER7> Exercism is a great resource. Their tests are thorough and reading other users' code submissions has helped me immensely.

Their new look is a lot less devilish. :)

</comment></comment><comment> 10-6 Coding/Math:

[https://coderbyte.com](https://coderbyte.com)

[https://hackerrank.com](https://hackerrank.com)

[https://leetcode.com](https://leetcode.com)

[https://codeforces.com](https://codeforces.com)

[https://projecteuler.net](https://projecteuler.net) (more mathy)

[https://www.topcoder.com/challenges](https://www.topcoder.com/challenges)

[https://adventofcode.com](https://adventofcode.com)

[https://halite.io](https://halite.io) (machine learning + game)

[https://www.enki.com](https://www.enki.com) (coding challenges on mobile)

<comment><USER8> Are there any on the list here that are best for learning algorithms in a manner similar to a course curriculum and has explanations? I'm asking from a self-taught web dev (django) perspective where I have holes in my knowledge. Some algo books I have so far seem too mathy. While not afraid of math, I understand it better when coding them out myself.

I wish projecteuler would provide more hints/explanations. Adventofcode problems are fun but are random (not like a curriculum). Other websites are competitive programming focused which I'm not sure is comp-sci enough (correct me if I'm wrong).

<comment><USER9> Not on the list, but you might find [http://interviewbit.com](http://interviewbit.com) more structured

<comment><USER10> Yeah, +1 for InterviewBit. Courses here are a way more structured and gamified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So all Zachtronics games. Also Kerbal space program. Fantastic game, you'll learn about celestial mechanics, the basics of designing rockets (and if you keep playing, stuff like the Oberth effect and how to do a nice interplanetary Hohmann transfer )

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://ncase.me](https://ncase.me)

Nicky Case has a knack for explaining complex systems in simple ways through games

<comment><USER13> I think about the network theory one almost every day, can't recommend it highly enough: [https://ncase.me/crowds/](https://ncase.me/crowds/)

<comment><USER14> Wow! That was amazing. I'd love to see that applied to Reddit / Subreddit / User networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Factorio is a fantastic game for learning systems engineering, and thinking in abstractions. It's a crafting game similar to Minecraft, and a building game like roller coaster tycoon (but factories instead of theme parks). It's also very very fun!

This game challenges the player to create more and more complex automated systems.

If you liked Technic Mods for Minecraft, you'll love Factorio.

[https://factorio.com/](https://factorio.com/)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Oh god I've sunk some time into that game! Definitely recommend it, but set a timer!

<comment><USER16> Seconded. Factorio is the sort of game you can lose a few days to without realizing. Very fun, but also very consuming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like Duolingo for language learning: [https://www.duolingo.com/](https://www.duolingo.com/)

I don't think its enough to actually learn language on its own, so it's best used mixed with a more formal method of language learning. It's fun and addictive enough that I actually keep using it, so that makes it good to me.

<comment><USER18> I've been doing Duo (French) for a couple of months, but a I'm not sure I've learnt anything, it just feels like I've reinforced past learning.

I started Chinese, and it just seems so much of a mish-mash - it's like they just randomise testing and eventually you glean enough from the test questions to answer.

With French the closest I've come to learning, that I can point to, is from users answers to comments from other user. And the good and bad are mixed, there's no clarity.

<comment><USER19> Duo taught me japanese characters, but I had a hard time really improving my french grammar from it. There's no substitution for in-person conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I learned a lot about aviation as a kid/teenager playing the Microsoft Flight Simulator. All the important instruments, flight control, radio navigation, flight patterns etc. Good times on Meigs Field.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was playing Flexbox Zombies for a little while and really enjoyed it.

> This is a Mastery Game. Each section unravels part of the plot, gives you > mastery over a new flexbox concept, and presents zombie survival challenges > that force you to solidify your new skills like your life depends on it.

[https://flexboxzombies.com](https://flexboxzombies.com) [free]

He also has a new one called "Grid Critters", which I'm unfamiliar with but it looks like it's a similar thing but space themed and for CSS Grid instead of Flexbox.

[https://www.gridcritters.com](https://www.gridcritters.com) [paid]

His blog is also really awesome too: [http://gedd.ski/](http://gedd.ski/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I found flexboxfroggy ([http://flexboxfroggy.com](http://flexboxfroggy.com)) to be an excellent resource for learning flexbox when I came across it.

Just enough gamification, and enough straight concepts to allow me to build confidence quickly and make it a bit easier to remember the knobs flexbox offers.

<comment><USER23> I used to tutor at a coding class for high school kids and I never saw them more engaged than they had been with flexbogfroggy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not really a full "game", but I found this picture-based Morse code trainer from Experiments with Google a fun and easy way to learn Morse code: [https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/](https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/)

[http://nandgame.com](http://nandgame.com) was posted on HN recently and I found it to be fun and educational: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17508151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17508151)

<comment><USER25> I once had an idea to make a Morse code learning game, where the message would be emitted by a distant warship in a storm emitting flashes of light in your direction :) to add some emotion to the task :) but never really tried to execute on it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I would meet non English speakers they always told me they learned English by playing FINAL FANTASY on super nintendo. One day, after several attempts at learning another language it dawned on me "Why don't I play Final Fantasy in -INSERT LANGUAGE YOU WANT TO LEARN HERE". It works like a charm and you'll find the "translation barrier" will be removed very quickly.

<comment><USER18> I play too much CSGO and was hoping to leverage that to find a group of French players, but I've not really managed yet, still only learning to swear in Russian ... another suggestion is to watch a favourite program on Netflix in your target language. Most adult stuff is too fast/complex for me as yet though, so I'm looking for a kids show (Hello Duggy in French would be _super_ ).

<comment><USER27> Have you seen Muzzy? Animated story intercut with more standard (but still fun) language learning segments. Idea is that you watch the whole thing in one language and then in another.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's [https://vim-adventures.com/](https://vim-adventures.com/) although I never really enjoyed it, it was a fun game for the first 15minutes.

<comment><USER29> I also opened this thread to recommend Vim Adventures. I tried teaching myself vim with standard walkthroughs but it was too difficult to remember all of the different key combinations.

Vim Adventures was so effective because it only lets you use the keys that it teaches you, and slowly expands the key set over time. Well worth the $25 if you want a guided introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Zachtronics and Kerbal were already mentioned, but I accidentally learned to recognize several types of plants from playing Skyrim. We visited the Red Rock Canyon in Nevada at about the same time as I had reached mid game in Skyrim. I saw a shrub and immediately knew it was a juniper. I don't think I'd ever seen a real one in my life before that.

</comment><comment><USER31> In terms of learning hacking, there are CTF/wargames that teach through puzzles.

Gracker: [https://www.smrrd.de/creating-a-hacking-game- part-1-introduc...](https://www.smrrd.de/creating-a-hacking-game- part-1-introduction.html)

Overthewire: [http://overthewire.org/wargames/](http://overthewire.org/wargames/)

Exploit Exercises: [https://exploit-exercises.com/](https://exploit- exercises.com/)

PicoCTF: [https://picoctf.com/](https://picoctf.com/)

P.S. I would love to work on making educational puzzles. If anyone is similarly passionate about it, please message me.

</comment><comment><USER32> Raymond Smullyan's books can teach a fair bit about logic, up to about Godel's theorems and the halting problem (I remember _To Mock a Mockingbird_ fondly), through carefully written sequences of puzzles that lead up to proofs of them.

If you try to go through his books encoding the puzzles and their solutions in Coq, then you'll learn quite a lot about Coq and constructive mathematics also.

<comment><USER33> An interesting idea! I've long wanted to go through more of his books, and I've also long wanted to learn Coq, so that sounds like an interesting combination.

Have you found it worthwhile to learn Coq?

<comment><USER32> I learnt it mostly for the sake of learning something new, I didn't really think at the time whether it would be worthwhile. It's a very specific tool developed by people in very specific fields of CS (type theory, compiler verification, but I could be wrong about this), so I just never felt bad about not having a use for it myself.

Encoding (a subset of) the puzzles as SAT problems for something like z3 would be an alternative to Coq.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _Mazes for Programmers_ [https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Programmers-Twisty- Little-Passa...](https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Programmers-Twisty-Little- Passages/dp/1680500554)

</comment><comment><USER35> There's Euclidea mobile app ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hil_hk.euc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hil_hk.euclidea)) which starts with basic geometric constructions and then really pushes for new approaches.

</comment><comment><USER36> A game of connecting different topics on Wikipedia: [https://thewikigame.com](https://thewikigame.com)

The public game room has lots of general random topics, or you can create a private group and make your own challenges with any topics you like.

This is a personal/passion project of mine (and has gotten fairly popular these days). I'm actively working on improving the game, by adding category specific games, different game modes, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> Introduction to Probability with Texas Hold'em Examples

Not a game but a book about a game, but learning the game helps you learn probability, permutations and combinations.

</comment><comment><USER38> [http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the- peopl...](http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-people/) is moderately idealized CMOS logic design.

</comment><comment><USER39> I played Khan Academys "World of Math"-missions as if it was a game. It really helped with my mental arithmetic and memorizing middle school equations, for which I did understand the concept, but could never remember.

[https://www.khanacademy.org/mission/math](https://www.khanacademy.org/mission/math) (need login)

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://zty.pe/](https://zty.pe/)

A very addictive game if you want to improve your typing.

</comment><comment><USER41> in the 70s on the PLATO system (predates the internet) there was a game called bugs and drugs.

It was a graphical dungeon in orange/black 512x512 where you used medicines to attack diseases. Medical students used it to learn pharmacology.

The PLATO network functionality predates much of the internet.

<<PLATO's most popular game, is one of the world's first MUDs and has over 1 million hours of use.[citation needed]. The games Doom and Quake can trace part of their lineage back to PLATO programmer Silas Warner.>>

</comment><comment><USER42> [http://www.flexboxdefense.com/](http://www.flexboxdefense.com/)

Really appreciated this back when I was first introduced to CSS Flexbox.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have collected a few here. Mostly around topics of programming.

[https://github.com/dakaraphi/development- resources/blob/mast...](https://github.com/dakaraphi/development- resources/blob/master/README.md#game-based-learning)

</comment><comment><USER44> [http://lyricstraining.com](http://lyricstraining.com) does language teaching by having you watch/listen to music videos in that language on youtube and filling in the lyrics. Super fun!

</comment><comment><USER45> We at [http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com) has part of a process where we test designers through a game in which we provide a finished design. Then we change the brief's key element, Eg. premium, fun, serious, friendly, affordable, complex. This game helps us in learning and teaching the principles of visual design. It's currently used internally, but we are planning to launch it for public and making the whole thing open source.

</comment><comment><USER46> Play The Witness (the-witness.net). The game is full of puzzles which each teach you a different concept. It's a great experience to play this game. Avoid spoilers!

<comment><USER47> You don't learn any transferable skills tho, all you do is get better at solving _The Witness_ puzzles.

<comment> teshier-A You may also become a better landscape designer.

<comment><USER47> I think _Dear Esther_ taught me more about environmental design

<comment><USER48> Then be sure to try _Ethan Carter_!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Get started making music" by Ableton is really good !

[https://learningmusic.ableton.com](https://learningmusic.ableton.com)

</comment><comment><USER50> Learn DevOps, Cloud and automation by solving challenges: [https://instruqt.com](https://instruqt.com)

</comment><comment><USER51> Leadership and decision-making through Banner Saga.

How to be social through New York Nights and Miami Nights (mobile games).

Anthropology/History through Civ... Obviously :)

</comment><comment><USER52> Factorio is one of the most stimulating games I've ever played. It forces one to think about not only layout/design of a system but also the project management aspects - which parts to build when, when to take on "technical debt" by building a temporary "good enough" version, etc.

...this is if you don't look up hints/other people's designs, of course.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a neat puzzle game that got posted several months ago, on the quantum mechanics of photons:

[http://play.quantumgame.io/](http://play.quantumgame.io/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905924)

</comment><comment><USER53> Try any popular RPG, or otherwise dialog-heavy game with quests and instructions and such, but switch the language package. For example I did this with the Diablo games to help me learn Polish. A cool part is you pick up a lot of archaic vocabulary that your average native speaker doesn't even know. :)

<comment><USER54> I did this while i was actively trying to learn korean, playing Maplestory 2 and League of Legends on the kr servers

Minorly successful, fun atleast. I'd suggest it

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Bloxels ... [http://home.bloxelsbuilder.com/](http://home.bloxelsbuilder.com/)

And if you are into geopolitics, history, wargaming, classical, etc, 0AD ... [https://play0ad.com](https://play0ad.com)

</comment><comment><USER56> We created Word Genius for iOS and Android: [https://curious.com/wordgenius](https://curious.com/wordgenius)

It teaches facts about all kinds of subjects hidden in a crossword-like game. Free to play, with IAP hints. 4.7 rating.

</comment><comment><USER57> Escape Team is great for learning about team collaboration:

[https://www.escape-team.com](https://www.escape-team.com)

It's a printable, app-supported escape game. There's also a mission editor for creating custom missions.

</comment><comment><USER25> "The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges" (a.k.a. Matasano Crypto Challenge)

[https://cryptopals.com/](https://cryptopals.com/)

 _" This is a different way to learn about crypto than taking a class or reading a book. We give you problems to solve. They're derived from weaknesses in real-world systems and modern cryptographic constructions. We give you enough info to learn about the underlying crypto concepts yourself. When you're finished, you'll not only have learned a good deal about how cryptosystems are built, but you'll also understand how they're attacked."_

</comment><comment><USER58> Circuit scramble is a fun game on Android for learning and visualizing logic circuits. It's not directly relevant to anything I do, but I enjoyed playing through it.

Factorio does a decent job teaching the intuition behind running a factory.

</comment><comment><USER59> I know a lot of other comments are for learning life skills but if you ever wanted to learn Vim in a fun way!

[https://vim-adventures.com](https://vim-adventures.com)

</comment><comment><USER60> Two of my favorites:

1\. Monopoly, with no "house rules" \- play it exactly as written in the game manual. Monopoly was created as a teaching tool about the outcomes of unregulated capitalism, and it is a very, very good teacher. At some point, one or two players will accrue enough wealth to become the clear winners, and all the other players will start a slow spiral into poverty. Over the years people have added "house rules" in an attempt to make the game more friendly and fun, which is completely missing the point. It's not intended to be friendly or fun, it's intended to educate!

2\. The Parable of the Polygons: [https://ncase.me/polygons/](https://ncase.me/polygons/). Arguably not much of a game or a puzzle, but its use of interactive game-ish mechanics makes the story much more impactful.

</comment><comment><USER61> The Incredible Proof Machine for learning various logics: [http://incredible.pm/](http://incredible.pm/)

</comment><comment><USER62> Here's two. One to learn hexadecimal [http://flippybitandtheattackofthehexadecimalsfrombase16.com/](http://flippybitandtheattackofthehexadecimalsfrombase16.com/)

hair-nah, to teach people not to touch black women's hair. [http://hairnah.com/](http://hairnah.com/)

</comment><comment><USER63> To learn Chinese get wordswing. It's an interactive gamebook where you can hover words you don't know. It's amazing.

</comment><comment><USER64> [http://robocode.sf.net](http://robocode.sf.net) / [http://robowiki.net](http://robowiki.net)

Released by IBM in 2001 and still going strong. Learn about geometry, trig, stats, ML, control theory, game theory and more to control robots in a 2D tank-style game.

</comment><comment><USER65> Our company has recently released a boating safety course done through an interactive story. Might be the kind of thing you're looking for:

[https://www.ilearntoboat.com/washington/](https://www.ilearntoboat.com/washington/)

</comment><comment><USER66> [https://brilliant.org](https://brilliant.org)

</comment><comment><USER67> Try Elevator Saga[1] for an in-browser javascript programming game that will learn you some things about distributed queues, potentially.

[1] [https://play.elevatorsaga.com/](https://play.elevatorsaga.com/)

</comment><comment><USER68> www.nandgame.com

it was a couple of days ago on HN, really loved it and learned something from it.

</comment><comment><USER63> Honestly the kid section of bookstores is amazing to me. There are so many hyper pedagogical book/games/labs to learn about anything. I don't know why we don't shop there as adult

</comment><comment><USER69> [https://algebra.sympathyforthemachine.com/](https://algebra.sympathyforthemachine.com/)

Basic algebra, but from a more proof-oriented perspective.

</comment><comment><USER70> [https://david-peter.de/cube-composer/](https://david-peter.de/cube-composer/)

Functional programming concepts in a visual presentation.

</comment><comment><USER71> Meqanic: [http://meqanic.com](http://meqanic.com)

Game that attempts to teach intuition about quantum mechanics and particularly quantum computer circuits.

</comment><comment><USER47> _Car Mechanic Simulator 2015_ taught me the names of the various car bits and that clients never change (something is wrong, pls fix it by checking every possible part)

</comment><comment><USER72> I have been using the wonderful seterra.com to improve my geography, it's the first decent geography quiz that I've seen that has a lot of nice categories

</comment><comment><USER73> With a slightly different approach to the question:

I've learned a lot from coding board/puzzle games into playable programs/solvers: Boggle, Scrabble, Kakuro, etc.

</comment><comment><USER74> [https://blitztactics.com](https://blitztactics.com)

Fast-paced chess puzzles for teaching chess tactics through pattern recognition

</comment><comment><USER75> In the past, there was [http://robocode.sourceforge.net/](http://robocode.sourceforge.net/) for Java.

</comment><comment><USER76> Https://yousician.com teaches you play musical instruments via a guitar-hero like game interface. Also supports your own/community content

</comment><comment><USER77> Robot odyssey (google for binaries and play in dosbox). Intended for kids, but definitely age-appropriate for adults, and hard as nails.

</comment><comment><USER78> [http://isotope.ch](http://isotope.ch) Not about CS, but about chemistry. And in French.

</comment><comment><USER79> The board game Monopoly was originally based on the Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Magie, which was intended to show how property ownership ruins free market capitalism. Land can't be created or moved, so is not a free market (according to Adam Smith). People are forced to pay extortionate rents and have no way to escape.

Not widely known at the time or now, so perhaps not a very successful example.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_\(game\)#Early_history)

</comment><comment><USER80> Kerbal Space Program. You will intuitively understand orbital mechanics after a few days playing this game.

</comment><comment><USER81> I think the Swift Playgrounds are an excellent way for an adult to get a feel for coding on iPad.

</comment><comment><USER82> brilliant.org

<comment><USER83> Those show up with a minute of sponsored distraction inside SO MANY youtube videos (any video about math or puzzles from the last year) that I started to dislike instead of like them

An example of too much advertising having adverse effect, at least on me :p

<comment><USER84> Do you have udemy telling you Python is a powerful programming language before every YouTube video as well?

<comment><USER33> Brilliant is definitely more prevalent in the kinds of videos that I tend to watch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I've had a great time with Rocksmith for learning guitar

</comment><comment><USER86> Portal + Portal 2

115 comments without any mention, is this too obvious?

<comment><USER87> I loved these games. I can't remember learning from them. What have I forgotten?

<comment><USER86> Basic physic concepts, like gravity, friction, velocity or optics. If you were already familar with these concepts then training/experimenting would be a better description than learning. Afaik there were even schools using this game in classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> The Pioneer: Oregon Trail game.

</comment><comment><USER89> pythonchallenge.com

<comment><USER90> I can't emphasize this site enough. The Python Challenge has a special place in my heart. I was a bored C# .NET developer. In my downtime I would poke at a challenge. I learned Python through this site; picking up the standard library as the challenges progressed. From my experience with this site I was able to land a Python webdev position.

pythonchallenge.com changed the course of my career and I'm grateful for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Conversa is a conversational and ideation tool using board game dynamics that we've developed: [http://lifeandeverything.net/](http://lifeandeverything.net/)

By scaffolding good conversations, it helps a group learn _from each other_ as well as _how to converse_. Through our trials, I've been delighted to see how well it works with families. I've learnt much about my children's thinking and feelings.

A bit more info: We believe two things are needed to bring together differing groups into fruitful dialogue. Firstly, a set of clear, explicit, and strict rules that everyone submits to (regardless of existing power structures). Secondly, a relaxed, playful and fun context. These two seem in tension, and yet we integrate them all the time - with games.

Conversa is a tabletop game that helps a group talk about the big things in life in a way that's real, safe, and fun. It's an ideation and conversational scaffold that uses game dynamics to create the right amount of structure to let conversations flourish. It was designed by award-winning game designer, Tim Roediger, from an original concept by Martin Olmos.

Conversa is the anti-Facebook experience. Players meet in person, facing each other rather than their screens. They share an intimate time where it's 'just us', with no wider audience watching or judging. They respond to a prompt creatively, from a limited set of image cards. They get to see each other smile, hear each other chuckle, while tasting a shared drink. Each gets a turn without being shouted down, although no one has to say more than they want to. It's a real game, with a score and a winner. But there's a twist - the points go to the player who opens opportunities for others to speak up. Rather than insults, the outcome is conversation that builds relationships with listening, learning, and laughing.

We've trialled it in organisational contexts and with children as young as eight. We're looking at applications in design, team ideation, project reviews, risk assessment, and more. Below are two examples: Project Management: [http://blog.lifeandeverything.net/post/147037633043/gaming-f...](http://blog.lifeandeverything.net/post/147037633043/gaming- for-project-managers) Focus Groups: [http://blog.lifeandeverything.net/post/147037631598/gaming-f...](http://blog.lifeandeverything.net/post/147037631598/gaming- for-focus-groups)

We are exploring paths to market. We are also exploring ways for larger groups (50-200) to use the game (e.g. company conferences, strategy development).

Disclosure: I'm in the two-person design team.

</comment><comment><USER92> LeetCode

</comment><comment><USER93> Wanna learn history? Pick up some of the Paradox grand strategy games; Europa Universalis, Victoria, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings. A side effect is that you'll pick up a lot of geography by osmosis, which is in my experience, the easiest way to learn that subject - you're looking at maps and borders and terrain features constantly.

Wargaming is in general a good way to pick up information on historical topics. Most developers that are in that niche put a lot of effort into doing the research, and there is typically a lot of information baked into the in- game documentation at your fingertips, not to mention being a springboard for Wikipedia safaris.

<comment><USER94> > _A side effect is that you 'll pick up a lot of geography by osmosis, which > is in my experience, the easiest way to learn that subject - you're looking > at maps and borders and terrain features constantly._

My son loves Crusader Kings 2 (and EU3), and had such an easy time in his history class because of this. He knew the geography of Europe down cold.

He's currently digging into Hearts of Iron IV.

To be honest these grand strategy games aren't really my thing but I should give them a shot. Their systems just seem overwhelming to a new player.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Almost any game by Zachtronics.

In particular:

Opus Magnum

Shenzhen I/O

TIS-100

SpaceChem</comment>


Ask HN: What hourly rate can a solid Python developer be paid per hour? - <AUTHOR>

Assuming a Python developer with full stack experience, Linux/AWS, front end, back end, databases and APIs. <comment><USER2> $75 - $125 assuming direct hire/contract (no middlemen), and you are in the US. It also depends on the length of the project and if 1099 vs w2.

<comment><USER3> Maybe in the valley. On average, US Python developers make between $35-$50/hr.

<comment><USER2> I can't speak to averages. I can only to my own experience here in the midwest. I've had no problem getting $75/hr for ongoing long term projects, and have friends who are in the same boat.

<comment><USER3> I'm just going by what I read on indeed and glassdoor.

EDIT:

Oh, maybe you guys mean contract work or consulting. Yeah OK, but the reason you have to charge so much is all the risk you take on, so that makes sense. I thought maybe it was like, "translated into salary". Most people don't average > $100k a year as a developer, I don't think anyway?

<comment><USER2> You are almost certainly correct that the averages employee salary for a Python web dev is sub $100k/yr. My numbers were for contract/freelance hourly rates and all that entails (increased risk, no benefits, higher taxes when working 1099, gaps between clients).

I'm assuming that's what OP was asking about since they asked for hourly rates as opposed to yearly salary, but I could be wrong :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Concept for a Lightweight Mars Glider [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lochief.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/paper.pdf

<comment><USER2> Ever read the study of atmospheric flight on Venus? It focuses more on sustained flight than gliding to a landing, but it's still the first thing I thought of.

[http://media.cleveland.com/science_impact/other/Landis%20Ven...](http://media.cleveland.com/science_impact/other/Landis%20Venus%20atmospheric%20flight%20study%202002.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I bet the core components would be reusable on other atmospheres. You could imagine spiraling down into Jupiter's red spot or the giant hexagon on Saturn.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you going to submit this to a journal or is it a university project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Independent project so I probably will not submit it to a journal</comment></comment>


World's first solar road opens in France: It's ridiculously expensive - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/worlds-first-solar-road-opens-in-france/ <comment><USER2> Wow. That's a really negative article. Focus is completely on the cost of a proof of concept project. What is the promised ultimate cost? (Not that promises come true or anything...)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to be positive about solar roads. They are a ridiculous concept.

<comment><USER3> Yup, it doesn't make sense to me when there are so many rooftops.

Putting solar panels between tracks on railways makes way more sense.</comment></comment></comment>