Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility <comment><USER2> "The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress."

This is an extremely flawed initial assumption. There is no requirement for chance to be centered around zero. Consider rolling a dice: sometimes you'll get more than the mean, sometimes less, but you'll never roll a negative number. You can certainly win on chance in the long run, that's the foundation of casinos and insurance companies. It's hard to imagine a scenario where trial and error can possibly lead to knowledge regressing.

Consider randomly digging holes in the ground: after enough holes you will eventually strike gold, and you will never lose physical gold in the process. However, you may lose significant time, wealth, and effort that could have been better converted to gold. The optimal way to strike gold is not to dig more, shallower holes, but to learn enough geology to understand where gold is likely to be found and concentrate your prospecting there.

No experiment could ever possibly hurt scientific knowledge. People tinkering will certainly make occasional discoveries. In a brand new field with a lot of low hanging fruit, these discoveries will be numerous and the cost will be low. But in a developed field where people have a good idea where the remaining discoveries are likely to be found and the effort to conduct such experiments is substantial, targeted approaches become optimal. Reducing the unit cost of experiments is always nice, but is not generally feasible. This strategy of "convexity" is a very poor substitute in the real world for understanding.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's badly written in a way to provoke controversy, but fundamentally, I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here?

In simple terms, he's just saying that it needs to be safe to take chances in order for it to be worthwhile to take chances. As you say, science is an example of a system where it's often safe to take chances, because you don't risk losing any knowledge from a failed experiment. (But that doesn't mean there are no costs! You can lose time and money. And I'll also point out that some experiments can be dangerous.)

In any search, whether you can find something interesting is going to depend at least partly on the landscape, so understanding the landscape better will improve the search process, along with your estimates of whether it's worth doing at all. Calling this property of a desirable landscape "convexity" doesn't, in itself, help you understand the landscape, but it doesn't seem wrong?

<comment><USER4> > Yeah, it's badly written in a way to provoke controversy

I'm not sure it is worth my time to read something that is badly written to provoke controversy, even if it does make good clickbait.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I used to go out of my way to follow links to Taleb's writing, but then I kept running into pieces like this one, where it wasn't clear if he knew he was fundamentally (if not subtly) wrong. He seems to welcome controversy, and his recent childish attack on guy from 538 means I won't give him more than a paragragh to convince me the rest of the piece is worth my time.

<comment><USER6> I hate it when smart, competent people become famous, and a few years later they become total loons. Happens way too often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone surprised by the notion that ratcheting is critical for consolidating gains made from chance events? I thought that was a trivial observation (maybe my biologist bias is showing here).

<comment><USER8> It might be obvious but worth saying anyway. Giving something a name can help you use it as a unit of work, or reason more effectively/accurately/mechanically.

A lot of arguments are built on abstractions like "competition" and "chance", and having a short list of common exceptions to those heuristics on hand is pretty useful. Now when discussing federalism in the U.S., I'll not only wonder whether there are free-rider problems or economies of scale missed out on, I'll also think about whether local decisions are effectively "locked in" forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance)"

If this was modified to "chance alone" then it might be correct. The way it's worded now makes it sound like chance cannot contribute to long term gains, which is clearly false. Evolution depends on chance (generation of diversity) followed by a selection process and clearly that works pretty well.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Chance + opportunism can lead to plenty of long term gains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The basic point of this article seems valid to me.

The point the author is trying to make is that the structure of the payoff function matters a lot. Specifically, you need it to be convex for a try-and- error (or random walk) process to become very rewarding.

For example, think about fuzzing C programs, which has been proven to be very productive in terms of software security. But why is it so productive? This is essentially because a bug in a C program can have a quite significant implication (e.g. remote code execution), thus its payoff function is extremely convex. If there was no such property, fuzzing just wouldn't be so much rewarding (This explains why fuzz tests are less used for programs written in memory-safe languages).

The author believes this idea of "convexity" can explain a broad range of phenomena in the human world. I'm not so sure about its applicability, though.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't he basically saying the economics of research works up to a point but there is an inflection point after which it's broken?

And he's saying you can't just keep the model as is, but you need to make certain adjustments to the incentive structures.

It's becoming blindly obvious that this is the case in psychology at least with the replication crisis and the "publish or perish" mentality. We can see these things playing out.

Does the economics of the scientific machine need to be revisited and tweaked? I'd say there is a good conversation to be had about that. I can already see a little evidence of a minor self-correction, but given economics drives absolutely everything then yeah I'd say it's likely there are some changes that would produce different results that might be better than what the current system is producing. Though it's not easy to compute ahead of time whether changes themselves would have unintended consequences.

He probably needs to spend more time trying to explain things to 5 year olds to offset his "I am so smrt" persona.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think an important way to understand the optionality/convexity is to imagine science without it. Here is a paper about that: [https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf](https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf) \- the idea is: what if there are inventions that could destroy our civilisation? One example of such invention would be a bomb as powerful as an atomic bomb - but from materials and technologies readily available to anyone. Surely there would be terrorist/mafias/suicidal individuals who would build and use them.

</comment><comment> jf- From the title I assumed that the author was going to make a different point: that understanding a problem does not mean that said problem can be represented by a convex function, i.e. it still may have many local optima that a problem solver may get stuck in, rather than a single global optimum.

So, I expected some more general point about theoretical understanding of a thing being distinct from the actual computation of that thing, and that theoretical understanding does not necessarily lead to optimal outcomes.

I wish he'd made that point instead.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not certain where the author wants to go with this. Comparing research with an Airplane flight seems not correct to me.

Also

> By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be > chance)

Heh. The whole universe might be made by "chance". It is, in fact, quite possible that the total energy of the universe is 0. Our existence is a fluctuation.

Define long term gains. Since infinity is out of our possible reach, it is possible (though unlikely) to make long term gains just by chance. Especially, if you have a large audience. Some of them will get lucky.

</comment><comment><USER15> "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."

</comment><comment><USER16> > _A "1/N" strategy is almost always best with convex strategies (the > dispersion property): following point (1) and reducing the costs per > attempt, compensate by multiplying the number of trials and allocating 1/N > of the potential investment across N investments, and make N as large as > possible. This allows us to minimize the probability of missing rather than > maximize profits should one have a win, as the latter teleological strategy > lowers the probability of a win. A large exposure to a single trial has > lower expected return than a portfolio of small trials._

Isn't that YC Combinator in a nutshell?

</comment><comment><USER17> I read the article in full but still have no idea what he is trying to say. Perhaps someone can explain what he is talking about? Because as far as I'm concerned its postmodernism meets statistics.

</comment><comment><USER18> Amazing how Taleb can write such utter banalities and yet utterly believe he is writing novel and important things.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure he thinks what he's writing is novel. But he does seem to think it's important and if you consider his earnings as signal, he does have signal in that direction. To whom is it important? Not academia. But probably socially, it is. You have to convince a lot of people before you convince a politician...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The writing style of this article strikes a tone that seems overly eager to place an eloquent vocabulary on display.

      Hey guys! Look at all the
      big, big words I can use!

      Don't I sound smart???

Seriously. It's like they wrote, and proof read the original draft, then performed a search/replace for any polysyllabic synonym they could opportunistically inject.

Why do they need to _sound_ smart? Is it really because they know they've got nothing to say? Is this an SAT reading comprehension test?

You could sum up the sentiment with an anaology to paraphrase the concept: " _defensive programming is no replacement for accomplished programming skill_ " (to borrow a concept comparable to investing)

Big words, small mind.

<comment><USER21> This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"

Could you please not create accounts to break the guidelines with?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://theweek.com/articles/453558/nassim-taleb-used- hero-b...](https://theweek.com/articles/453558/nassim-taleb-used-hero-but- today-hes-just-plain-wrong)</comment>


Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/14432.full.pdf <comment><USER2> Yeah I died a couple times now. This is what we call the afterlife. That moment after you die stretches out to what feels like forever. It is important that we make people fee confortable in the moments before death. The contentment stretches out forever. If you are sad or angry, that stretches out too.</comment>


Ask HN: Are any of you at X where X is some college? - <AUTHOR>

I recently discovered a fellow Hacker News reader at my local community college. It was a very pleasant surprise and I really enjoyed talking with him. I'm posting this in the hopes that others can be similarly surprised. <comment><USER2> I've seen a few people from UT (Austin) post here, but I do not know them. Hit me up (firstname.lastname@example.com).

<comment><USER3> I'm from UT as well (CS major). Are you graduate/undergrad, and what degree?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else going to Golden West College?

</comment><comment><USER4> University of Waterloo (CS Major)!

<comment><USER5> Likewise! (currently a first-year)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm at UC Merced. Doubt anyone else is but it would be awesome if someone was.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any currently in UC Berkeley? I'm an undergrad here at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER8> Went to Wake Forest and William and Mary, now live in Denver.

<comment><USER9> W&M + UNC for me (:

<comment><USER8> Neat - when were you at W&M?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Indiana University? I know a couple of you are on here.

<comment><USER11> Graduated from the IU MBA program, lived there for a few years after I graduated while I started my first company. Feel free to contact me anytime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Student at Penn State majoring in CS. Anyone else???

</comment><comment><USER13> Carnegie Mellon? I'm starting this fall in CS.

<comment><USER14> I'm starting this fall at either CMU or Stanford; not sure yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Texas A&M University here, anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER16> Amherst College, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER17> Mass College of Pharmacy

</comment><comment><USER18> Northwestern

</comment><comment><USER19> Harvard GSAS

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a long shot, where long → ∞. But I am at Ganpat University, Mehesana, India. I am in the engineering college (formally UVPCE) anyone from there or any of the Ahmedabad college? Would love to meet.</comment>


SunEdison at risk of bankruptcy, unit says; shares plummet 60 percent - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sunedison-inc-terraform-global-risk-idUSKCN0WV160 <comment><USER2> You can go down the financial "shenanigans" red flags checklist with SUNE

\- complex accounting structure that includes many sub companies funneling money and debt from one to another, check

\- late on filing their financials, in fact today is the last day they have to file to be in good standing with the SEC, check

\- huge amount of debt relative to revenue, check

\- SEC investigation into their accounting practices, check

\- rapid growth in the past that was mostly due to heavily financed acquisitions, check.

\- high short interest ratio, check.

Though to be fair to the last point their SI has come down alot in the past couple of months as the stock became too expensive to hold borrow, and now that its at 50 cents/share, its not longer a good short target as the upside/downside is no longer that compelling. People probably have KBIO still fresh in their minds:)

<comment><USER3> I wonder why or perhaps how SUNE became a hedge fund hotel? Does it have anything to do with the factors you mentioned making it more "attractive" to certain types of hedge funds?

" _Mr. Einhorn is not the only one to have suffered a blow from SunEdison last year. And he is not the only voice to go up against the company, which has become a so-called hedge fund hotel, with more than 160 hedge funds in the stock in September, according to report by the research firm Novus._ "

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/business/dealbook/david- ei...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/business/dealbook/david-einhorn-gets- a-seat-on-sunedison-board.html)

<comment><USER4> It might have to do with increasing state subsidies for and regulations requiring renewable energy[1] as well as major, image-sensitive investors like CalPERS wanting to get rid of their fossil fuel holdings. These could both increase the price of SUNE et al relative to a straight business fundamentals value.

[1]: e.g. [http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-jerry-brown- clima...](http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-jerry-brown-climate- change-renewable-energy-20151007-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone who follows /r/wallstreetbets on reddit has probably heard a lot about this company recently. I didn't read most of the posts but it seems that most of them either hit it out of the park or went home tail between their legs on this one.

(I never day trade because I don't want to toss my money in the trash but it's interesting to follow)

Edit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/4clo1y/i_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/4clo1y/i_took_out_a_second_mortage_and_yolod_sune/) seems many of them lost

<comment><USER6> Serious question about /r/wallstreetbets: is that sub a parody, or a collection of people with undiagnosed gambling issues?

<comment><USER7> Funnily enough, viewing what you're doing there as "trading" comes a long way in hiding your gambling habit from both yourself and others. So much so, that certain extremely short running "binary options" trading platforms at least here in Germany do little to hide that they're offering a completely legal and unregulated form of gambling by showing plumbers and haircutters "earning money" by "trading" on these platforms in prime time TV ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heard an ad on NPR popcast show about "invest in solar" with 10% guarantee return.

Wonder if that's related to this?

<comment><USER9> I don't know about 10%... but SolarCity has a Bond programme.

[https://solarbonds.solarcity.com](https://solarbonds.solarcity.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, I guess SunEdison couldn't get a monopoly on solar energy. Who knew?

</comment><comment><USER11> wish I had bought put option on this. PBR (petro Brazil ) may also be at risk

there are probably a couple dozen such energy,mining ,drilling, etc companies that may fall 50% in a week.

A 4 cent investment ($4 per contract) can turn into $1-1.5 ($150) if the timing is right</comment>


In Piracy Debate, Trying to Decide if Sky is Falling - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/technology/in-piracy-debate-deciding-if-the-sky-is-falling.html

<comment><USER2> "Piracy has put the impetus on media companies to more quickly strike deals to make television and movies available on the Web legitimately. In 2007, Erik Flannigan, now the executive vice president of digital media at Viacom Entertainment Group, pulled up the Google search page on a giant screen at Viacom's Times Square headquarters. He typed in "South Park" and took senior executives on a tour of Web sites offering pirated episodes.

Today, Comedy Central makes every episode of "South Park," "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" available free online. The efforts, Mr. Flannigan said, put a big dent in piracy. As for the television industry as a whole, Mr. Flannigan said: "You might not like the windows, or that shows go up and come down, but it's a far cry from where we were."

Still, Comedy Central shows do not make billions in syndication or in DVD sales like some TV series. The industry has been reluctant to make available shows like CBS's "The Big Bang Theory," which sold for $2 million an episode to Time Warner's TBS and Fox. That makes piracy a tempting option.

"If they don't make content available where consumers are, they're just shooting themselves in the foot," said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and the head of the SV Angel investment fund."

CBS' concerns stem from the fact that if the web delegitimizes a television channel's status as the go-to source for viewers, then the whole process of the concentrated industry's livelihood, one which they have established as essential to stay afloat, let alone profit, is irreparably diminished.

If advertisers do not think the money they paid in the past is what they need to pay TBS now, given other advert opportunities, they will to want pay less for commercials, which support TBS' model, and would bungle up their plans. (TV Industry would go off of Nielsen ratings, which were strong estimated guesses of # of ppl/demos tuning into particular programming; this information provided Advertisers an idea of where they should their energies and money, for maximum appeal.)

TBS will want to pay less because they won't rake in as much from commercials, pissing CBS off since they rely upon $2 mil/episode syndication deals of their most popular properties to subsist and survive.

And CBS won't want to spend as much on their properties (production budgets, salaries, etc) because they will be uncertain if it will even pay off. We are past the days of Must-See TV Thursday and 30 Million Viewers for 30 mins of Friends. Sorry Burbank, they are not coming back. \---- At least Comedy Central recognizes their new competition in distribution and knew to bite the proverbial bullet and stream for free what is going to be out there for free, no matter what. Because of that, they build up brand loyalty (less and less of an influence on TV, more and more of one online) and can make money advertising -- centralizing properties, distributing, and payoff -- within the company. Establish an optional low-cost subscription fee for complete access to their library, and enough people will pay for it to justify its creation, too!

I am 21 years old, and hardly anyone my age watches TV. They WILL subscribe to Hulu, and they WILL subscribe to Netflix -- but look at the volume of content, and the amount of control the viewer has with those services! The television is a box of content that asks for passivity from the viewer, especially in choice availability. That does NOT work in The Game anymore.

Those that look to "Remember When" and long for systems of the past are individuals who are losing to progress, because they did not -- or COULD not, in much of Hollywood's case -- look past their at-present business models for more innovative means necessary for industry survival.

Now is the opportunity for independents all over to seize the unprecedented access to the consumer they now have and make a living doing it.

People do not care if Paramount Pictures made a movie or Uncle Regis' buddy two towns over did -- they just need it offered to them, they want it when they want it, and above all, they want it to be worth their time. Anybody can do that, and anybody can make money off of that.

\--stepping off the soapbox--</comment>


[video] Introducing Backtastic - cincijs August - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cincijs.com/post/26566206490/july-backtastic-and-a-new-location

<comment><USER2> CinciJS has hosted a couple great talks on backbone recently. Here's the other backbone talk, on performance, from our August meeting: [http://blog.cincijs.com/post/28877033821/august-backbone- per...](http://blog.cincijs.com/post/28877033821/august-backbone-performance)

Sadly the audio didn't come out great on this one, but the talk was interesting, and the gem is worth checking out <https://github.com/gaslight/backtastic></comment>


Show HN: Diagnose 3D Print Fails Before They Happen - <AUTHOR> https://printnoser.dieterbrehm.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> My friend and I wrote an algorithm that uses linear algebra to reliably diagnose 3D print fails, before they get bad. The algorithm and data are all open and linked.

Our most successful algorithm correctly detected all prints and failures that we've tested so far. It uses a Fourier transform of accelerometer data, which means that it converts from a raw vector acceleration signal to the power levels carried at different frequencies of oscillation. Ultimately, we look at the overall trend in the frequencies of oscillation to calculate whether the print is beginning to fail.

We designed and analyzed three techniques for testing, and ultimately chose a regression on the frequency domain of accelerometer data. A commodity cellphone accelerometer was more than accurate enough, sampling at <100Hz.</comment>


MSUAA documentary of their visit to SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/33733944

<comment><AUTHOR> Update on the two entrepreneurs followed in the documentary.

Brett Kopf participated in the ImagineK12 incubator and presented at TechCrunch Disrupt on his startup <http://www.remind101.com>

Bryce Colquitt pivoted and has just launched <http://www.musicsnob.me>

Know both of these guys and I am one proud Spartan.</comment>


Pictures of NASA's 2005 Deep Impact mission, where we scarred a comet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/multimedia/gallery-index.html

<comment><USER2> lol, it really cool but i can't help feel silly for being around when the best our civilization can do is throw rocks at bigger rocks to see what happens...</comment>


Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel - <AUTHOR> https://gkbrk.com/2016/05/hotel-music/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great story. I can relate to it from start to finish!</comment>


The iKettle, the Eleven-Hour Struggle to Make a Cup of Tea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mark-rittman/the-story-behind-the-ikettle-the-eleven-hour-struggle-to-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-why-it-was-all-769144d12d7#.ddbfuqerw <comment><USER2> Can use hadoop, but doesn't know that a dhcp server has logs so you can see what IP a device is on? Whatever.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Now the Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts..."</comment>


DHS uses email intercepts to question US citizen about her sex life - <AUTHOR> http://papersplease.org/wp/2014/02/25/dhs-uses-email-intercepts-to-question-us-citizen-about-her-sex-life/

<comment><USER2> _First, CBP officers grossly exceeded their jurisdiction. Dr. Dr. Von Der Haar's US citizenship was never questioned, she wasn't trying to enter or or ship and goods in or out of the country, and she was never accused of any crime. In general, immigration (as distinct from customs) offenses are handled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, not CBP. We're curious what basis CBP will claim for its officers' authority to detain and interrogate Dr. Dr. Von Der Haar._

Completely wrong. CBP stands for 'Customs and Border Protection' and CBP is most definitely empowered to scrutinize arriving travelers for immigration eligibility, possible immigration violations, etc.: [http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/port_activities/o...](http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/port_activities/overview.xml)

I'm not ensording their actions in this case but it's entiely possible that they drew their conclusions based on what the Greek vistor was having shipped to the US. If he, a recent arrival, appeared to be shipping personal property (eg furnuture or other residential-type stuff) then it's not surprising that they'd question his stated intentions of visiting the US for a short period. This sort of thing is common enough that questioning a US person about whether a romantic relationship existed is SOP and doesn't require any special access to email.

</comment><comment><USER3> (1) The lawsuit challenges the detention and questioning of Dr. Von Der Haar, not that of her Greek visitor. Dr. Von Der Haar wasn't an "arriving traveler" or shipping or receiving anything.

(2) According to the complaint, the CBP officers had obtained email messages and read from them during their interrogation of Dr. Von Der Haar.</comment>


Chrome for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/chrome/id535886823?mt=8

<comment><USER2> Why is this new?</comment>


We Crowdsourced $1m in 2 Wks. Help Us Hack Money Out of Politics May 31-Jun 1 SF - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamdemocracy.us/h4d2?

<comment><USER2> Now that's some progress from last time. Good to see it coming along</comment>


Show HN: Facebook response to Lovestagram. Our Valentine's weekend project. - <AUTHOR> http://www.fbmyvalentine.com

<comment><USER2> "It will get you laid"? I know Valentine's Day is kind of a soulless, transparently commercial cash-in on human affection, but way to take it to the next shallow level.

Otherwise, cool.

<comment><USER3> And way to alienate 50% of your potential customers with (completely unnecessary) heavily gendered marketing, despite the fact that romance is not gender-specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> Women get laid plenty, too. This was intentionally not gender-specific. I apologize if you were offended in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After adding a name, it spins endlessly, not showing anything but the red ribbon, while playing an Ingrid Michaelson song that I'm quite sure you don't have the licensing to play.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice!! Good job Michael and Eric!! I just scored a few much needed extra points with Stephanie. (Much needed because I took her to see "The Grey" last night.)

*Note to self. When faced with "The Vow", and "The Grey" on night before Valentines, choose "The Vow".

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm getting an error when creating a card.

"Application Error - An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome, sent to my gf. Thanks and nice work!

</comment><comment><USER8> Requiring my Facebook credentials to log in guarantees my non-participation. I realize I'm in the minority for behaving that way, but there is a nonzero number of potential users you lose when you charge the fee of privacy at the door.

Which makes me think: it would be really interesting to see the demographic breakdown of people who behave similarly.

<comment><USER9> It's called "FBMyValentine". I mean, I think it's to be expected. In case you were wondering, it uses your friends list, and then uses photos of you with your significant other.

Without Facebook signin this would be a dramatically different (and far less compelling) product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just showed it to my gf who found it very cute. Thanks for this, well done. =)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Eric from Motiv.es and I made this to help everyone this Valentine's Day. :)

(I know there's an issue with the video in Safari, working on that now).

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll be playing this song on repeat all day :)

</comment><comment><USER12> video not showing in Firefox (on platform ubuntu xfce)

<comment><USER12> turns out it's not OS related, firefox not working on both Windows7 and ubuntu

<comment><AUTHOR> Just tested Firefox on Win7; the video isn't supposed to be there. It's just used for playing the music in the background.

<comment><USER12> ok. What I get is only a blank screen with a red banner that reads my note, and background music. Is there anything I am missing here? a slide show of pictures or what?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be a slideshow of pictures you and your friend are tagged in on Facebook together. Here's an example: <http://www.fbmyvalentine.com/cards/462bb3ca>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife didn't care for it :( but my girlfriend loved it!

</comment><comment><USER14> Privacy policy?

* Oh, I see it's in the FB app acceptance thing...sorry, haven't accepted a FB app inawhile.

<comment><USER15> Good lord. It's the point of the application.

<comment><USER14> Right...but it's not clear if there's anything else needed/going on...I think the non-FB-like branding of the button threw me off (and the few times that I've ever used a FB app it's been from inside FB).</comment></comment></comment>


359000 Results? Google Is Faking Search Numbers to Appear Big - <AUTHOR> http://www.epictions.com/blog/search-engine/google-faking-search-numbersc <comment><USER2> So the author

1\. does not understand basic Google search strategies (for instance: Using apostrophes to search for exact Matches 2\. then deduces that any "result" must be an exact result and not just a subset of any n-gram of the words entered in the search query 3\. after which he tries to load a lot of results, only to get pinched out by Google's "likeliness filter" \- which also protects Google from too costly deep-text searches (which in the vast majority of use cases are not beneficial to the user anyway) and then 4\. finally accuses Google of fraud and "growth hacking" \- thus starting to play bullshit bingo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link appears broken. I think the "c" at the end of the link is a typo. Correct link is [http://www.epictions.com/blog/search-engine/google-faking- se...](http://www.epictions.com/blog/search-engine/google-faking-search- numbers)</comment>


Almost 700k Californians moved out last year, many ended up in Texas - <AUTHOR> https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2019/12/10/almost-700000-californians-moved-out-of-state-last-year/ <comment><AUTHOR> ...140,000 people moved to D-FW last year

</comment><comment><USER2> Many Californians are also moving to Las Vegas. The cost of living is significantly less - and this includes rental prices. I have seen prices under $1,000 per month for condos and townhomes: [https://homereviews.com/us/nv/las- vegas/homes-for-rent/](https://homereviews.com/us/nv/las-vegas/homes-for- rent/)</comment>


Dell IdeaStorm - <AUTHOR> http://www.ideastorm.com/

<comment><USER2> This is actually about 3 years old. I PM'd this product at salesforce.com, for which Dell was the first external customer. We initially designed it for salesforce.com's own community. The product is now known as Salesforce Ideas. I'm no longer at salesforce.com, so this is not a shill :)

Many good things came out of this community. Dell started selling Linux pre- installed on their laptops for instance, that was an early win. You can see what they are doing at [http://en.community.dell.com/dell- blogs/b/direct2dell/archiv...](http://en.community.dell.com/dell- blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/tags/Ideas+In+Action/default.aspx)

<comment><USER2> I designed this product to solve some of my own frustrations as a product manager, so here're some of my thoughts:

Apart from the huge PR value (Dell, salesforce.com, Starbucks & whitehouse.gov all got a LOT of press from these) that communities like these bring the company, they are very good at some things that traditional roadmap planning processes suck at: 1\. De-duplication: When communities coalesce around similar popular ideas, it's easy to understand patterns of requirements. Traditional request processes are black holes for this reason. 2\. More Democratic Prioritization: Since there isn't a good way for smaller customers to coalesce, PMs are often stuck implementing requests from their largest customers. This solves that problem. 3\. Partner promotion: As a platform provider, you want to be able to support complementary partners. Unfortunately, partners often don't know what to build, or have poorly targeted products. If you were building in the force.com ecosystem, you could start your customer development right in the salesforce.com community. This was important to me because I had a lot of friends in the partner/developer community and wanted them to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is this a good example of transparency, or an admission that you don't understand your market?

EDIT: Hey downvoters, this is a genuine question. I think the idea is good, but most of the activity is from open source fans, which is great but they represent a small subset of Dell's market. Many of Dell's potential customers won't get involved - they'll just buy Apple.

<comment><USER3> I think taking this step shows that you're smart enough to know what you don't know. For companies like Dell, etc. they know they need to open an avenue for input on their work. It's good 'ole listening to your customer. It's like a "How am I driving?" sticker, but it gets positive input in addition to the negative. In all, it's input, and any company that recognizes that they need to listen to their customers understands their business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow! I wonder how this will work out, given the Model-T/faster-horse analogy.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand: IdeaStorm has been there for years and years.

EDIT: A quick perusal of their archives shows posts from mid 2007.

<comment><USER4> Oh, didn't know that. I was referring to Dell using it as a way to figure out what the market wanted from new products, and the analogy being, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse -- Ford"

<comment><USER6> <http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/>

<comment><USER7> <http://www.ideatorrent.org/> open source program ...

"IdeaTorrent is what can be defined as an "open innovation software": it lets people submit their ideas, brainstorm them, and vote on them. The most popular ideas and requests are then easily assessable."

Demo: <http://www.ideatorrent.org/ideatorrent>

Question: Do you Know - similar - Open source Idea management program ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the same vein Best Buy created <http://bestbuyideax.com> and made the engine free and open source at <http://bbyidx.com>.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, one of those ideas has a LOT more upvotes than the others. It's a really good idea.

If dell implements that one idea, I'll consider this website a success.

Cell phone manufacturers, take note!

<comment><USER10> I wonder what happened to the agreement everyone here in Europe had in 2009. Even Apple agreed with the USB-Charger.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10274953-94.html>

EDIT: Ah they (all) got time until 2012.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is old... This is the same engine as starbucks ideas, salesforce ideas, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> When is Salesforce going to release this as a standalone product?

</comment><comment><USER13> I have an idea for Dell: sell the company and give the money to the shareholders.

<comment><USER14> For the downraters: <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html> . The parent comment isn't a troll, it's just a (slightly obscure?) joke.</comment></comment>


Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10000-percent-faster <comment><USER2> Wut? That joke is still around?</comment>


New Ruby news site, RubyFlow.com released - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyflow.com/

<comment><USER2> Peter, what differentiates RubyFlow? I like RubyInside because you cherry pick relevant items and I like RubyCorner because it's comprehensive. Where does RubyFlow fit in?

<comment><USER3> RubyCorner is very good, but only covers a certain set of blogs. Sometimes those blogs post non Ruby content, so there's noise.

Also, RubyCorner does only cover blogs (not counting the video / photo sidebar) so you don't tend to get latest updates on libraries, and links to things outside of the Rubysphere. You also only get one link per hit, whereas on RubyFlow you can bind together a bunch of related interesting pieces in one go, or provide context.

Context is the final part. When posting you can write what you like and provide a little context to the links. This makes it a lot easier for you, as a reader, to know whether something is worth clicking. The problem with sites like Hacker News and Reddit is that you're going entirely on the headline. Sometimes you want more than a headline.. just a single sentence of context or a bunch of related links will do.

Hopefully that answers the question! Effectively RubyFlow's style is a cherry- picked, hand-written for context and quality alternative to browsing the social bookmarking sites, like Ruby Reddit : <http://ruby.reddit.com/>

<comment><USER2> Very cool, thanks for answering. I just checked it out and found a few nice libraries there I didn't know about, so it's already earned a spot in my bookmarks. ;)

<comment><USER3> By the way, if you have any ideas for other niches this sort of site could work well in, I'm all ears. The only two I'm personally interested in doing so far are Rails (separate to Ruby) and Python, but I think there's a wide range of people who might like to make such sites themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not parameterize it and let anyone do just that? Just a thought...

<comment><USER3> Dilution. But.. maybe!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see it includes a link to the freakishly ignorant "Ruby's Not Ready" blog rant.

Not a compelling start.

chris2 (of Rack and Tumbleblog fame) has a nice rss feed populated with announcement posts to ruby-talk: <http://vuxu.org/~chris/ruby-talk-ann.rss>

Suites me better than filtered content (at least until someone does a good job of focusing on the Ruby radical underground).</comment>


Playstation 3 Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.edepot.com/playstation3.html <comment><USER2> I always found the PS3 fascinating - it's so exotic, so wild, so crazy that the current generation seems prosaic (but I guess the current generation is way easier to program, so...)</comment>


Interpreter for a simple Lisp, Written in Prolog - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/triska/lisprolog <comment><USER2> It seems that it takes far fewer lines of code (and correspondingly simple program model) to implement LISP in Prolog than both imperative and functional languages.

Once I asked a Prolog expert at a conference "Prolog is truly mind-bending and powerful, but why don't we see it used more often? where are the jobs so I could get one" and they said that for those who use Prolog in production it is a real competitive advantage that they don't want to announce to the world; plus some are state actors and quasi-state actors who use it for huge scheduling and optimization problems and like their secrets secret. I think I believe that.

<comment><USER3> " they said that for those who use Prolog in production it is a real competitive advantage that they don't want to announce to the world;"

with due respect to prolog (which is a mindbending language), the proponents of every niche language say the same thing. "it is so powerful that users don't talk about it and that is why you don't hear about it"

I've heard many variants of this with respect to Forth, for example.

The reality is that devs can't stop talking about the languages, tools, and frameworks they use.

The simpler explanation is that next to no one actually uses prolog in productions, because it is, well, a _niche_ language (which doesn't take away from its coolness)

Color me skeptical about "secret weapons".

<comment><USER4> I use Prolog in production. :-)

I know many people that do too and don't talk about it unless you move in the Prolog world.

Here's a stock broker using it [https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/files/Elston_SecuritEase.pdf](https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/CHR/files/Elston_SecuritEase.pdf)

Java Virtual Machine specifiction is verified using prolog ", implemented the Prolog verifier that formed the basis for the specification in both Java ME and Java SE." [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-0-pr...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-0-preface7.html) Prolog code -> [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.ht...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.html#jvms-4.10)

[https://kylecordes.com/2010/the-prolog- story](https://kylecordes.com/2010/the-prolog-story)

IBM Watson was written in C++ and Prolog

<comment><USER2> Thanks a ton! I was hoping to hear more about people like you when I wrote that comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is old code, but it has sparked a great discussion here.

In the 1980s I spent months writing a prototype planning system in Common Lisp (which is a primary language for me, and I wrote a CL book for Springer-Verlag back then). Even though I was a Prolog novice, I was able to rewrite my entire prototype in Prolog in one week. Admittedly this was because the second implementation of something is always easier, but also because Prolog was such a good fit to this particular problem.

I remember reading The Fifth Generation Computer about Japan's AI efforts - enjoyed the book but it didn't really click for me, mostly because I had a Lisp Machine and considered that the `one true path` for AI development at the time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Prolog was one of my favourite languages during my degree, to the point that I participated in some logic programming championships.

Would like to have some excuses to actually use it on my daily work.

As side note, until our compiler design lectures decided to switch the required implementation language to the newly arrived Java, it was possible to choose whatever programming language to implement our assignments.

However Lisp and Prolog were off limits as they would make them too easy!

</comment><comment><USER7> This brings back fond memories as writing a lisp interpreter in prolog was the final project for my survey of programming languages course in university. Didn't know people would still be doing it 20 years later.

<comment><USER8> As someone who is implementing a Lisp interpreter (admittedly in C#, not Prolog) I've decided that this sort of project is somewhat analogous to restoring a classic car. It'a a good way to get a handle on earlier times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was a fairly common project when I was in University, except we had to do Scheme in Prolog. [https://github.com/FigBug/scheme](https://github.com/FigBug/scheme)

Prolog was a mind bending language. Some things that would be so simple in another language were so hard, and somethings that would be hard, were so easy.

I never really got my head around Prolog, just enough to get the assignment finished. But I do remember it as being one of the more interesting assignments I did, interesting enough that I've managed to keep the code for 20+ years.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suspect that an optimization problem I will have to face in a bit of time might be a good fit for Prolog. What would be the best resources for a quick, relatively high level overview/introduction, then a more involved guide for learning it?

This question has been asked elsewhere, but is there a way to pass data back and forth with other languages, and let them control the execution flow? A C interface would seem like a good IR to target.

My apologies if I used the wrong terminology, I am not intimate with the more academic nomenclature.

<comment><USER11> Here's a nice and simple one: [https://xmonader.github.io/prolog/2018/12/21/solving- murder-...](https://xmonader.github.io/prolog/2018/12/21/solving-murder- prolog.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Some online books... require you to manually translate Prolog programs to Lisp forms that are no longer valid Prolog syntax._

I thought Lisp was commonly used to create domain-specific languages with different syntaxes. Wouldn't this be old hat for someone experienced with Lisp? (Asking because I don't have a lot of experience with Lisp.)

<comment><USER13> Often Prolog implementations in Lisp used a lisp-like syntax. They were not concerned with reading standard Prolog code.

Several implementations support(ed) standard Edinburgh-Prolog syntax. For example the LispWorks implementation of Prolog supports both: [http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/KW-W/html/kwprol...](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/KW-W/html/kwprolog-w-135.htm#marker-869240)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> a more complex attempt at a Common Lisp in Prolog:

[https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp](https://github.com/TeamSPoon/wam_common_lisp)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a weird nit, and I might be wrong, but isn't the "pl" extension usually used with Perl scripts?

<comment> def- Prolog uses .pl and because of the Perl conflict occasionally .pro: [http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=fileext](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=fileext)

I still found a

        autocmd Filetype pl set syntax=prolog

in my vim config from my Prolog days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Funny. Chapter 24 of Paul Graham's _On Lisp_ is about implementing Prolog in Common Lisp.

<comment><USER16> It's obligatory for any Lisp book to include a Prolog implementation.

<comment><USER17> Interesting. Do you know why?

<comment><USER13> Implementing some kind of Prolog (and also other logic formalism) was common in the AI boom. Some were primitive (for example only using Lisp-like syntax), some were quite extensive (then also providing Edinburgh-Prolog syntax). Most AI tools included some reasoning facility, often in the form of some Prolog. The two commercial Common Lisps (Allegro CL and LispWorks) still offer Prolog implementations.

One of the more extensive treatments of implementing Prolog-like features can be found in "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" (PAIP) by Peter Norvig.

Book and code available here:

[https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp](https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp)

<comment><USER18> "Prolog is similar to Lisp on the main points." (ibid)

<comment><USER19> In my opinion, this is true for _some_ main points, but definitely not for all of them.

A key difference between the languages is in how easily you can _reason about_ programs. In Prolog, if you program in the pure monotonic subset of the language, you get certain algebraic guarantees that are not available in Lisp. For instance, for pure Prolog code and a declarative reading, removing a goal can at most _increase_ the set of solutions, and removing a clause can at most _decrease_ the set of solutions.

In Prolog, these guarantees can be used to test and debug your programs by logical reasoning. In fact, to a significant extent, you can even _automate_ debugging due to these properties. Such techniques were pionereed by Ehud Shapiro in his 1982 PhD thesis, _Algorithmic Program Debugging_ :

[http://cpsc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/tr237.pdf](http://cpsc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/tr237.pdf)

The thesis is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it! Specifically, quoting from page 155:

" _Although Lisp is considered a high level language, it is not clear that it encourages precision and clarity of thought. As one Lisp hacker puts it [91]: "Lisp...is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it...and it still looks like a ball of mud!". This aspect of Lisp is the hacker's delight, but the theoretician's nightmare. It is known that one may implement without too much effort a reasonable Prolog in Lisp. However, the issue is not implementation — the issue is the method of thought. Based on my experience with both languages I maintain that one's thoughts are better organized, and one's solutions are clearer and more concise, if one thinks in Prolog rather than in Lisp._"

Another key feature of Prolog is that _constraints_ blend in seamlessly, leading to an important declarative programming paradigm called _constraint logic programming_ (CLP). This is the key reason why Prolog is frequently used to solve combinatorial tasks in practice, and often an important motivation for buying a commercial Prolog system.

<comment><USER13> > Although Lisp is considered a high level language

Lisp is generally not restricted to a particular 'level'. It also comes out-of the box with support for different programming paradigms - but no particular language support for logic programming.

> if one thinks in Prolog rather than in Lisp

Lisp supports high-level programming in logic by zillions of extensions. This has been popular throughout Lisp's history. Thus if we have a problem which is best solved by some kind of Logic, then it would be great of the Lisp system could be programmed in terms of that logic - which is not unusual.

That said, a programming language built from the ground on some logic formalism like Prolog is a great tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This can probably done with CSS. Also assembly language. You can do it with assembly language as well.</comment>


AMD to open source execution and compilation stack - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMzQ

<comment><USER2> Open-sourcing things is good, but can anyone clarify what exactly this software _is_?</comment>


C++17 Filesystem – Writing a simple file watcher - <AUTHOR> https://solarianprogrammer.com/2019/01/13/cpp-17-filesystem-write-file-watcher-monitor/?qwert <comment><USER2> Guys, don't do this. There are OS-specific APIs to do this stuff efficiently. No, that's not portable. No, those APIs aren't "nice to use". But it's the "right" way to do it.

When you do that kind of stuff, keep in mind that many programs modify files by writing to a temp file and then renaming that file.

On a secondary note, "modern C++" needs to be stopped. This is absurd:

std::chrono::duration<int, std::milli>

Just say no. Don't include stuff like <chrono> or <functional>. Ignore Bjarne's opinions. Don't read books by Scott Meyers. Being effective with C++ means understanding its "powers" and then _not_ using them.

<comment><USER3> I agree and came here to comment that you should _not_ use this code.

The code has sleep calls and polls the filesystem. The nonportable OS support will actually block and have the kernel wake you up when there are actual changes - and not wake you when there is no change - much kinder on the CPU!

Just say no indeed, to polling the filesystem with sleep calls. (Maybe as a last resort if the OS specific support is unavailable?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Those files have so many "std::" references. Would this not be a good case to utilize "using namespace std"?

<comment><USER5> It's a header-only class[0], and "using namespace" in headers is discouraged.

[0] [https://github.com/sol- prog/cpp17-filewatcher/blob/master/Fi...](https://github.com/sol- prog/cpp17-filewatcher/blob/master/FileWatcher.h)

<comment><USER6> But one could use it scoped to the _FileWatcher_ class or to each member function, or is my C++ too rusty?

<comment><USER7> I think it's too rusty, unless I'm misunderstanding [https://abseil.io/tips/153](https://abseil.io/tips/153). It says,

 _The vast majority of C++ users think that the using-directive is injecting names into the scope where it's declared. ... In reality, the names are injected into the nearest common ancestor of the target namespace (::testing) and the usage namespace (::totw::example::anomymous). In our example, that's the global namespace!_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> std::unordered_map has method count(), C++20 will be probably just a wrapper for the method.

[https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/unordered_map/co...](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/unordered_map/count)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you confusing _.count_ with _.contains_ ?

<comment><USER8> I'm saying that map.contains(x) == bool(map.count(x))

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 I see what you mean now.

<comment><USER8> Great! :) My initial comment wasn't clear, sorry for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> watch ls</comment>


Police Boss Unloads on Smollett Over Alleged Race Hoax - <AUTHOR> https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/chicago-police-blast-jussie-smollett-phony-attack-bogus-police-reports-cause-real-harm <comment><USER2> I hope they throw away the key. He's done more harm to the downtrodden than any Klansman ever could.</comment>


Ask HN: Monitization via Job Boards? - <AUTHOR>

I have a niche tech resource site with 115K uniques a month. I've been trying various monitization strategies (ads, affiliate programs) with limited success.<p>At the moment, I'm looking into job boards (Job-a-matic, JobCoin, JobThread, etc), and wondering if they're worth trying. Have you had any success with these widget-ish job boards? Would I be better off building my own pay-to-post job board, or are these job networks really worth the 30 to 70 percent they take? <comment><USER3> My understanding (note: limited) is that some of the more _profitable_ job boards have been DIY - 37 Signals and Fog Creek [1] come to mind.

It seems that they offer a small number of job ads at any one time - <USER2> boutique nature of the offering increases their value. So if you only want to sell, say, 5 - 8 job ads a month at a fair price, DIY might be the way to go.

If, however, you want to ramp up the number of jobs shown and the overall revenue (as opposed to price per ad), then a 3rd party job board which also provides some job ads may be the way to go.

[1] [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be- th...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-thanks-or-no- thanks_Printer_Friendly.html?partner=fogcreek)

</comment><comment><USER4> not a big deal to just create your own. there are good things available out there. ex:

<http://www.jobberbase.com/></comment>


How the BBC News website has changed over the past 20 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41890165 <comment><USER2> How wonderful to see the BBC General Election site from 2010. Me and one other guy built the whole output because the World Cup was on and all the main staff were working on that. The other engineer even had to make the results service work on Ceefax [1]!

We had over a billion hits in 24 hours to the statically published JSON file that updated the results every 15 seconds and we could even control the client poll rate from that file just in case.

Over a weekend we built the first version of the BBCs live page amongst other things. It was terrifying watching constituencies declare for the first time; about as close to a live performance of web development as you can get.

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

[2] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/) (slightly broken now...)

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea One thing I've always appreciated about the BBC website is that the old articles are still in the old style of the time. For example: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3559050.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3559050.stm) or [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/574132.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/574132.stm) (there might be a way to reliably find more examples, I'm not sure).

I'm not sure whether this is by design or if the content was too tightly coupled to the style to migrate, but I like it. I think in the relevant RFCs it says that a URL should always point to the same thing, so it's good that they don't try to update them.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say it's by design - more of a fun consequence of the way the BBC's web platforms have been retired so far. Most of the retired platforms generated static content (some XML, some HTML) so when the platform needed to be switched off it was relatively trivial to archive all of the content. In about 2013 the website was transferred piece by piece to a dynamic platform, which it (mostly) still runs on.

The current platform is already slated for decommission some time in the next couple of years and there's still no cohesive plan for how pages on that platform will be archived. My guess is that they will be rendered on the new platform(s) indefinitely, since everything is driven by a CMS API now. I think it's kind of a shame - there's something nice about being able to look back in time without the pages being distorted through the lens of the wayback machine.

<comment><USER4> I really hope they will archive statically rendered pages. It matters that you are able to see old websites in their original form.

EDIT: does anyone know whom we might contact at the BBC to encourage them to do this when they make the transition?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was a web producer (front end developer) and then web developer (CMS template developer) for BBC News online 2000-2004. It was my first job in tech at 18 and arguably still my fondest time in the industry. I led some of the redesign from single column to the more modern design we see today.

I'm now startup founder and a VC - v far from the non-profit public service nature of the BBC.

Happy to AMA if anyone had any questions.

<comment><USER5> An interesting part about BBC News's tech stack, which was touched on in another comment here, is that we didn't have the budget to serve dynamic pages and so everything SPG'd (statically page generated) as we called it so it could be served statically from the production web servers.

It meant an incredibly novel use of Apple WebObjects - which was set up to render all of the versions of the story (flavours, I think we called them) via the WOA and then FTP them to production. We used this system to produce not only web versions but content for interactive TV output and I believe even Ceefax at one point.

Another curious fact now: most of the BBC News website was coded in Objective C in the early 2000's, to much chagrin as it meant us developers having to learn this 'dead' language when really we wanted to use the Java version of WebObjects instead. Many of the devs went on to have leading roles in the UK iPhone development industry when apps were enabled for iPhone given the amount of experienced we all unknowingly had received in what suddenly became a much- sought after language.

<comment><USER6> I wish I had a specific question to ask, but honestly I'd love it if you just told more stories about this period in your life!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hardwired widths, inaccesibility on small screens etc. were always annoying, but in many respects, I'm retrograde enough to actually prefer the clunkier designs and layouts of the paleolithic web-era. No-nonsense, unambiguous, clearly delineated sections, and a healthy emphasis on content over form.

<comment><USER8> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always understood that if you write basic, un- styled HTML, you get flexible widths and small screen support for free. You have to deliberately decide to make it worse by hardwiring widths and element sizes. Is this not true?

<comment><USER7> Oh, absolutely. And all kinds of horror were perpetrated against html in the nineties.

My point was that _even so_ , I found - and find - lots to like in the websites of yore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wayback Machine allows browsing website history by year. Press year, instead of arrows:

— The New York Times: [http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes.com:80/)

— WaPo: [http://web.archive.org/web/19961220172326/http://www.washing...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961220172326/http://www.washingtonpost.com:80/)

— Financial Times: [http://web.archive.org/web/19970607125328/http://www.ft.com:...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970607125328/http://www.ft.com:80/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, although I wish they'd shown the whole of the historical pages. I'd like to work out when the front page dropped below 50% actual news stories (as opposed to 'The X that Y', 'Must See' and other buzzfeed type stuff). It's clear that in 2003 it was still nearly 100% news, but the later ones are cropped so you can't tell.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised how professional the site design looks even in 1997, also with rich media link like audio and video.

</comment><comment><USER12> I interviewed to work as a web dev for the bbc back in tye very early 2000's. In the interview I said I was better at going away and thinking about things rather than making decisions off the top of my head. I think that's why I didn't get the job.

As far as I know, it's the only tech interview I didn't get offered the job.

Tough crowd!

</comment><comment><USER13> And still no https

<comment><USER14> With a site like BBC News integrating with lots of different internal services, it can be more difficult than it seems on the face it to enable HTTPs, but I'm sure it's coming soon, other BBC sites have enabled HTTPs.

<comment><USER3> There's actually not much to stop the rollout of HTTPS on the BBC News site now. In fact, the major hurdles were overcome nearly a year ago. The final hurdle is convincing the product and editorial teams that enabling HTTPS is more important than whatever features they want to build.

<comment><USER14> Ah - fair enough. I made some assumptions based on some of the hurdles seen by some of the more recent moves to HTTPs on smaller BBC sites, not of any real knowledge of the current situation.

(FWIW, your article from Dec 2016 played a part in me joining the BBC recently as a developer, and I know of at least one other developer currently at the BBC who also was motivated to apply after your article :))

<comment><USER3> There are hurdles for sure. I guess I'm just publicly venting my frustration at having HTTPS on one of the world's biggest news websites be under- prioritised for years and years :)

I'm really glad to hear that btw. I wish I could have stuck around for longer!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you deployed a sahred SQLite on NFS (or AWS EFS)? - <AUTHOR> I've been considering running a shared SQLite between bunch of EC2 instances over EFS. I was wondering if somebody already has experience of doing it at scale. Is it a good idea? How many QPS should I expect? I know EFS fixed bunch of issues to make things work in 2017. <comment><USER2> Use postgres instead

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean Postgres on EFS? Or Postgres as in Aurora/RDS?

<comment><USER2> Postgres on GCP is best, def not a network filesystem</comment></comment></comment>


Elevation Dock with Lightning adapter - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/11/30/elevation-lightning-adapter <comment><USER2> Check out the dock plus, another kickstarter project that is designed specifically for the iphone5.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dockplus/charging- dock-f...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dockplus/charging-dock-for- iphone-5)

The FAQ at the bottom specifically mentions that it is not just an adapter on the existing lightning cable.</comment>


Show HN: What would Paul Graham do? - <AUTHOR> http://wwpgd.com <comment><USER2> pg would probably use logic, experience and a little bit of gut feel to figure out the best way to solve an issue, not refer to a single source of someone else's writings.

Stop worshiping the man like he is a god. His essays are not bible scripture, and in many areas they would actually be the completely wrong course of action to take.

pg's thoughts are only one segment of knowledge that a person should be receiving and performing their own analysis on. If you agree with _everything_ pg says, you have set him up as your personal demi-god and are dangerously ignorant. I suggest reading something other than him for a while.

(Note: replace pg with any particular author or method if you choose.)

EDIT: You can usually tell when you've hit on an uncomfortable truth when the reaction is fiercest. Irony: pump in "Trouble" to the tool under discussion.

<comment><USER3> Why are you assuming they are worshiping him? They simply made a fun little app to search through his essays. Your comment seems rather ill-tempered and misplaced. Did you even try the app out or are you just on a rant about how you don't think people should make decisions based on the information of a single source? Either way, I'm not sure how your comment is a helpful contribution to this particular link.

<comment><USER4> I really think HN has a habit of taking everything uber-seriously and has a hard time accepting things as light-hearted jokes or fun projects.

<comment><USER2> The issue is that a lot of HN has a habit of taking pg too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears to work. I asked it where to go for lunch, and the first reference to lunch it found was Oren's Hummus.

<comment><USER6> I asked about clojure and it didn't find anything. Here there is a thread on HN that asks the same: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690026> .

PG, in case you are still around here, which is your take on clojure?

<comment><USER5> It's the Lisp dialect I usually recommend.

<comment> mck- Have your views on Common Lisp changed, since you wrote your ANSI Common Lisp?

<comment><USER5> Not really, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is kind of creepy. The online equivalent of building a shrine.

</comment><comment><USER8> Props for putting a compelling spin ("WWPGD") on a rather mundane function (searching a back catalog). Marketing FTW! :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've just spent about 15 minutes reading an article by Paul Graham written in 1993.

This site is terrible for my productivity - very well done you evil person you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very fun little tool. It would make it exceptional if you would include a small tidbit of information beneath each listing to say why the particular essay matched the query.

<comment><USER10> Yup if you could bold the matches Google-style that would be awesomely helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be nice to see more of this for different persons and to compare different people writings on the same subjects.

<comment><USER12> Exactly what I was thinking.

A search engine with "author:" and "topic:" refinements to contrast the writing of various folks on some topic or in reaction to some event.

I'd love to scan through a combined timeline of posts, essays and quotes comparing several folks - something like Google trends that is "source aware".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> PG would probably go to wwpgd.com to find out what to do.

<comment><USER14> RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "What should I build next?" linked me to "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas". Alright then.

</comment><comment><USER16> I searched for some common swear words and found out an old thread on HN where someone picked a fight with PG. So I guess it is a nice search tool.

</comment><comment><USER17> So disappointed - the only question which matters - <http://wwpgd.com/?q=daddy+or+chips> [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=daddy+or+chips&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER18> The naming, though may sound cheesy to some, is a great marketing tactic to get noticed. You can of course think of <<fill your favorite trusted source>> person here.

But if you want people to notice & get some traction, knowing where and who would notice it makes a huge difference. I would say it is a nice marketing hack.

@aakil great job guys. :)

EDIT: This got covered in techcrunch!

</comment><comment><USER19> nice litte app :) I don't why some people are bashing this, I think its actually useful. I especially like the idea of what would X do, and then having a searchable repository of links to X's writings/ideas/thoughts. Also as a side note, since your using bootstrap why not just fluid it so it looks nice on iPad and mobile, that would be the icing on this nifty little cake :)

<comment><USER20> Thanks! It was pretty much exclusively used by @aakil and I so there was initially nearly no styling. I've added some responsive design now though! Let me know if it looks wonky on tablet as I don't own one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> suggestion: show some examples. I honestly have no clue what should I input on the search field.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. My first attempt was <http://wwpgd.com/?q=how+do+you+cook+steak%3F>, and nothing came up. I guess I don't know who Paul Graham is yet.

<comment><USER23> I enquired as to the best color for the bike shed, but virtual PG was unable to give me any advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TC W13 folks:

<http://wwpgd.com/?q=dinner>

> Organic Startup Ideas

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool!I just wonder how you came up with such a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's it built with?

<comment><USER27> <http://builtwith.com/wwpgd.com>

<comment><USER28> That doesn't answer his question. BuiltWith relies heavily on response headers, which are easily faked, and often not descriptive on the actual tools used. Many use nginx, varnished, even apache to run their applications, regardless of how they were built. It is a nice tool though, I'll admit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Worry.

</comment><comment><USER30> Actually, this could be the template for something extremely popular. It could be called WW_S, the _ would be anyone in the family (or anyone in the world).

For a family where the father has gone away on an extended business trip, WW_S would scour the Internet and local files for anything the father said. Then, when the children want to get Dad's wisdom, they can by typing in or asking a question - even if he's not physically available.

What about a famous author or celeb? WW_S would spider up everything he or she has said and through a prediction algorithm formulate answers to questions, much like WWPGD.

Heck, you could even do it with characters like Sparky the Bear or Santa Claus. Basically, white label it.

I'm in a rush and typing this out on my phone, but hopefully you've got the gist.

<comment><USER31> This will only work if we document almost everything we do online. A large part of our life and thought process is still offline, so the answer to "what would X do" will most likely be extremely dependent on the situation and context X was in when he/she made that statement.

<comment><USER30> Seth Godin would work better than my aunt Gertrude, because Seth creates a lot of online content that reflects his own thoughts, so YMMV for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was very disappointed to find no advice on hats, badgers or zombies.

</comment><comment><USER33> dumb...</comment>


Unreal Engine 4.8 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-48-released <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who finds massive friction trying to learn the heavy GUI editors of both Unity and UE? I've been a hobbiest game programmer for 15 years, I studied computer graphics in college, I could probably write a software rasterizer in my sleep. I've been using Blender for quite some time, even in some semi-professional work. I've lead numerous projects from start to finish in all kinds of industries, including a few in raw, physical simulation. I've even built my own video game controllers.

But whenever I start one of these programs and start trying to go through their tutorials, they want you to go through some convoluted set of menus and toolbox windows to basically do nothing but edit a scene graph. And they have their own terminology for everything. And then I go cross-eyed.

And it's not even "terminal vs. GUI" talking, I actually _like_ Visual Studio. I just want to model in Blender, export models to game-friendly formats, write code, and import them in the game, like every other project I've ever done, like a normal game project.

But even UE's "Expert-mode, C++ template" involves heavy, heavy use of their GUI, which might be relatively stable today, but it's still a hog on resources and terrible buggy compared to even Visual Studio, which itself is no lithe figure. I tried exiting out of the editor and loading the solution directly from Visual Studio and running a build just seems to... open the UE editor again!

I'm not a beginner, I don't want beginner's tutorials, and I _especially_ hate video tutorials. I want something I can read that isn't just "click this menu, now open this tool window". What the hell ever happened to writing code?

<comment><USER3> I make games for a living and for a hobby and the switch to Unity in both contexts has been painful for all the reasons you mention. A foreign and often confusing UI, arcane and undocumented interfaces (at least UE4 has source), and tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been _especially_ frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five.

All that said, after getting over the learning curve and embracing the technology somewhat (even Blueprint/Playmaker over code sometimes!), I've found that the power available to me is well, well worth the cost.

<comment><USER4> Fully agree.

Once you get in to the mindset, blueprints really aren't that tricky. They aren't the best way to tackle all problems, but they certainly make doing a lot of things very easy once you accept how they function, their limitations, the workarounds and commit some time to learning/practicing working with them. There's certainly an overhead in discovering how different elements of the engine talk to each other and behave together. Really it's no different to any other programming language.

On a multi-monitor set up, the real time debugging is pretty sweet for seeing what's going on and where it's going wrong.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, are you advocating UE or Unity? (I presume it is the former).

<comment><USER4> Actually neither specifically.

I prefer UE4 - it seems to have a better technological core and I prefer their approach to many different elements in the engine.

Unity is great as well, don't get me wrong, they've had a lot of money for licences/upgrades out of us over the years.

I personally struggle to see how they will keep up with UE4 long-term unless they address some of their built-up historic technical debt quickly. I think even though they are both to some extent 'free', competition is still healthy and should be actively encouraged.

<comment><USER6> I feel the technical debt is in UE's court. They're an engine designed for 100+ person teams where they assume you're a AAA developer and have lots of programmers to support your artists/designers.

Unity is an app for making games.

The difference in approach leads to vastly different experiences. It will be far easier to make Unity pretty than for Unreal to start being good at editing, good for small teams, good mobile, .. basically good at the things Unity currently does better than Unreal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm happy to see an emphasis on grass and foliage systems for open worlds. I have a soft spot for open worlds after discovering Morrowind in my teens. I don't think I completed more than a couple main quest items; just snuck and thieved my way to god status /nostalgia

<comment><USER8> You may like Witcher 3. Probably the best open world foliage out there today: gorgeous colorful world that feels alive.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/)

[http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_la...](http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_lands-34742_en.html)

Screenshots and videos don't do it justice, you have to see it in motion, with sound effects, real-time uncompressed, with things moving in the wind, full of animals, changing daylight and weather.

<comment><USER9> The quests and the voice acting are epic too. Best RPG I've played in ages.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried Divinity? Brought me right back to my Baldur's Gate days.

<comment><USER11> The best way to look into such games imho is to watch a Youtube Lets Play and jump a few episodes in. Official gameplay videos by the producer usually show Best Of scenes, which does hide the boring parts.

Search for "$GAME lets play". Filter for "playlist". Watch.

Divinity: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFz...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFzVU04nVTBYrAs)

Witcher: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf0f2NXPeIvJqtLBSG9_nBTMM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the size of their team? How do they operate to produce so many features / fix every release? Larger team usually have tons of issues in terms of individual efficiency. This is clearly not the case. And this is all C++??

This is madness!

<comment><USER13> Massive crunch culture where Tim checks the lot for cars late at night and on weekends and complains when there are not enough cars there.

<comment><USER14> What's your source for that? Do you know someone at Epic or have you worked there?

<comment><USER15> Dunno if what he said is true or not, but when I was a member of IGDA, I left after the board refused to kick out Tim Langdell (that is a trademark troll) and Michael Capps.

Michael Capps is Epic president, and he ended admitting he joined IGDA board in first place to stop IGDA from forcing studio hands in fighting crunch, when Capps joined, IGDA most high profile work was to try to fix the crunch culture, Epic felt threatened, and pulled that stunt (send Capps to join IGDA and undermine the efforts against crunch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to see a nice Tribes clone, given the license holder is leaving the franchise out to rot.

<comment><USER17> Same here. Tribes 1 was one the best games I've played, to date. It was extremely fast paced, had an amazing team dynamic, and the character movement (skiing and flying) was beautiful. I haven't found anything comparable since.

<comment><USER18> Projectile physics were one of my favorite points (besides the open environment). You had to be aware of your own motion vector if you wanted to accurately place a shot with most weapons. Sadly, later installments (T:V, I'm looking at you) never quite had that same feeling. That was probably _part_ of what made it relatively unfriendly to newbies from other shooters, but I felt it made the game a bit more intense and required a bit more focus rather than strictly mindless button-mashing.

<comment><USER19> Didn't they have a weird compromise in terms of projectile physics and the player's motion? I remember reading about it and thinking that doing so would make it harder to use than doing it physically accurately but I forget the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1\. What a huge update.

2\. Not related to the update, but was wondering what do people who have worked with UI frameworks in C++ (i'm not one of them) think about Unreal's Slate UI Framework. Seems pretty slick to me (Coming from web dev and win forms) and highly customizable, though rather verbose.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've spent a fair amount of time with UE4 now, and there is good... and bad.

good:

\- You can debug everything.

\- If you dont know how something works, you can step into the source and see right away (unlike unity, where performance issues are a mystery).

\- Its really pretty.

\- The material editor is powerful and amazing.

bad:

\- Everything else.

\- Compiling C++ of a small project for a single file change can take 20 seconds.

\- C++ should be fast right? This engine is _slow as balls_ on every platform without a brand new graphics card and cpu. The reflection system, GC and blueprint interaction is powerful...but speed was a major disappointment for me. Use on next gen consoles only.

\- Poor cross platform support. Hot reload (ie. reload the DLL with your project code in it while the editor is open) works on windows and 'kind of' on other platforms; and not with plugins (that means if you change a C++ file you have to restart the editor). Some features (eg. 2d physics with box2d) are only implemented on windows; there no way of telling what is implemented for what platform short of reading the engine source.

\- Integration of 3rd party C++ libs should be _the_ killer feature... but its not. The build toolchain (UBT) requires _every header file_ to have the same first include. Rtti and exceptions are disabled by the build tool. Fork fork fork, edit edit edit. Dynamic linking and runtime DLL loading should work, but it doesnt (everyone just links to .lib files, see point above...).

\- There are plenty of other little annoyances, but probably the only really major one is building a 'production' target. The build toolchain is a massive sprawling mess of C# code (yes, all the UE4 build scripts are C#), which often obscure linker and compiler flags dropped in via command line arguments (but only from that platform) or hardcoded. ...but if you change any of the UBT source code to customize your build, or even add some debug logging... you have to rebuild the entire engine from source, which can take 40ish minutes.

To be fair, if all you use is visual blueprints and you never have to do a build, you miss a lot of these pain points. For designers, its great.

There's a lot of love out there for building things using blueprints; but someone has to do the hard work of the low level C++ to support that.

... if you work with this engine as a developer, you have my sympathy.

Hit up #unrealengine on freenode. At least you'll have the rest of us to cry along side with.

<comment><USER22> No rtti or exceptions is because most console platforms don't support them.

<comment><USER21> I'm not arguing, I'm just pointing out it makes integrating 3rd party libraries troublesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is their story on mobile deployment any better yet? I switched off of Unreal Engine because it required overly beefy phones, outrageous download sizes, and slurped down huge amounts of battery, even for something trivial like Tappy Chicken. Is this situation getting better yet? Is Unreal Engine a good choice yet for someone focused on mobile deployments?

<comment><USER21> No.

Well, yes. Now you can actually build for ios and android, which wasn't possible before with modifying the UBT and sacrificing 3 goats.

However, its still no real improvement in workflow or speed.

<comment><USER24> What's a good engine to build on for cross-platform support these days? If you wanted to dev a game that worked on smartphones, tablets, and PCs?

<comment><USER25> Unity. I just switched to it and the workflow is great for us (2 dev team)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any details on what the improved Depth of Field affect achieves? I just implemented a physically accurate DOF effect for WebGL here:

[https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f](https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f)

</comment><comment><USER27> What the heck is time scrubbing? Both serious and amusing answers required.

<comment><USER28> The time bar and "current location" elements of a video player are commonly called the "scrubber". Thus, when you record multiplayer video, you have full control over playback.

Or maybe you mean the tool that lets you rewrite your miserable failure with no kills and make it look like you won the match with no deaths.

<comment><USER29> It isn't multiplayer video, it's actually a replay that is played back in- engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's getting harder and harder to recommend anything other than UE4.

<comment><USER31> I don't think that's quite true yet. While I vastly prefer UE4 to Unity (and would recommend UE4 in most cases), it would be a mistake to underestimate the value of the huge amount of paid and free content that exists for Unity. Furthermore, UE4 gives the option of Blueprints (which many find insufficient or clumsy) or C++ (which can be very intimidating). UnityScript/C#/Boo sit between the two, making it preferable for those who want to write actual code, but don't want to deal with C. Furthermore, UE4 is still very developing expected features. Until 4.8, you couldn't do SSR on translucents, couldn't do graphics profiling on OS X, and couldn't switch splinesmeshes from being open to closed without corrupting your maps, etc. I love UE4, but it's still got a lot of ground to cover.

<comment><USER30> You're absolutely right about the content and tutorials available for Unity, that's a humongous boon. But that's a gap that will rapidly close, especially after UE4 dropped the subscriptions.

I was very wary of Blueprints, but after playing a bit and seeing just how they work, I was sold. Same with using C++ natively; it seems daunting, but you're calling the same methods your Blueprints do, it's almost drop-in easy.

Definitely it's gonna need to make some progress, but the gap is closing.

<comment><USER31> I love blueprints, but I've never actually touched the C++ part of UE4. I might have to take a look at that to see if it's as good as you say!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Are there any current games using unreal engine 4? It seems this has been hyped for a long time but no real games have come out.

<comment><USER33> The engine is pretty new, so most games that use it are currently in development. The current #1 seller on Steam , ARK ([http://www.playark.com/](http://www.playark.com/)) is UE4 based and it's already generated $10 million in revenue after being in early access for 1 week ([http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark- surviva...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-survival- evolved-has-already-generated-usd10-million)).

Some high profile games that haven't shipped yet include Fable Legends, and the new Gears of War from Microsoft, Flood in the Flame, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and Eve Valkyrie. Epic is working on at least two games, the open source community driven Unreal Tournament and Fortnite. It's pretty successful for an engine that has only been widely available for a little over a year.

Wikipedia article with full list of notable games ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_4))

<comment><USER21> ...but with trail blazing on a new engine, come some pain points, as this post about ARK's terrible performance points out: [https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark- Sur...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Survival- Evolved-Low-fps-becaue-of-UE4-or-due-to-no-optimizations)

To be fair; if you're not a AAA developer with a good team running a multi- year cycle, I'd be pretty hesitant to recommend UE4 for a project right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Still the prohibition on use in gambling applications, just as Crytek does. And Unity is $200K/year for gambling.

I use Unigine instead. It's absolutely great. Rough edges but it looks great and is easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER35> great company.</comment>


I mortgaged my future with a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/02/22/mac/

<comment><USER2> This is so true. I wonder if Apple realizes how many of us feel this way?</comment>