Oh, you're so awesome it hurts? Sorry to hear about your rich people problems.
> the greatest motor race in the world: 24 hours of Le Mans
The entire southern half of the U.S. begs to differ. Personally, I'd go with the Monaco Grand Prix if we're talking cars. If we're talking about "motor races" in general, it'd definitely be the Isle of Man TT. Hell, any one of the 18 yearly Moto GP races is probably better than Le Mans.
It's mortifying that this mixture of insult and irrelevance has so many upvotes. I know everyone's been worried about the amount of politics on the frontpage lately, but I'm much more worried about this comment. Political storms pass eventually, but comments like this rising to the top of HN threads is a sign of real decay.
Whatever you think of DHH, there is an important point in this article, and thanks to the people who upvoted this comment, the people talking about it are relegated to the bottom of the thread.
Well, a lot of discussions in the last few months have top comment which a) was made early and b) disputes some minor technical point in the original article, while not being relevant to discussion.
Maybe making younger low scored/recently upvoted comments sink even slower could fix that?
In the meantime I use Chrome extension to fold those.
Yeah, I know. The underlying problem is the same. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about how to fix it. I wonder if it would work to normalize votes based on how far down the page a comment is. God would that complicate the code though.
Could we also have a communal "hide posts by this user" feature? Over time the aggregate data would be useful to detect who is like this - especially if we can select a reason for hiding a user.
One of my suggestions to solve the mean-dumb-upvoted comment problem:
if a comment is truly so mean or dumb that the moderators choose to kill it, allow them the option of applying a karma penalty to anyone who upvoted it (which should come with an automated warning message so people know why their karma suddenly dropped). It's, in a sense, a way of voting on votes.
People might still upvote such comments, but at least then they'll know they're taking a risk by violating HN standards.
Interestingly enough, in this case that would have worked. If you only counted the votes of the oldest accounts, the comment in question would have had negative points.
The talk about the race is irrelevant, but I think the insult is relevant, if not nice. Perhaps you're still right that this comment shouldn't be at the top, but I have no problem with the sentiment it espouses being at the top. The story reeked of "humble brag" and "first world problems" and there are a lot of comments on this page saying as much. Clearly it was an impression that a lot of people agreed with.
You seem not to understand what the word "relevant" means. To be relevant, the insult should have attacked the point DHH was making. Charitably: you believe the insult was trenchant, and you've confused that for relevance.
The reality is that DHH's material success has little to do with whether setting overly ambitious goals sets people up for psychologically painful failures. If anything, it accentuates his point; you'd think that having DHH's resources would cushion the blow of not winning the 24 Hours Of Le Mans.
The insult doesn't have to attack the point he was making to be relevant to the discussion about the article. The insult was directed at the overall quality of the article and how it was written. That makes it relevant to the discussion about the article. The article came off as whiny with little redeeming qualities, and that is reasonable to discuss whether you agree with his point or not.
Is it not possible that he would have ended at the bottom of the page not the top, and if so wouldn't it have been better for you to stay away to find out, since your comment likely adds many more downvotes to your parent comment?
Please, don't act like this is anything more than feigned humility poorly disguised as a tidbit of wisdom. Even calling it that is generous since he doesn't offer any real insight or solution.
The fact that you fail to understand why so many people agreed with that comment is equally mortifying. Is your blind sympathy for "rich guy problems" overpowering your ability to read between the lines?
So DHH is about to enter an extremely competitive race and he has good odds. I think it's fair to imagine that this has been the only thing on his mind for weeks. He then finishes second which is admirable by any standard and yet he is not happy. Frustrated with this, he analyses his own thinking and writes a blog post about it.
Do you really think that he thought "I'm going to brag, I just need an angle!"? Or, should he simply avoid writing because his situation is more privileged than most people?
If you think Le Mans is not one of the most competitive and prestigious races in the world you are sorely mistaken. To say it is any more or less prestigious than winning Monaco is a purely subjective manner. The idea that the opinion of motorsport fans in the southern US has any weight is laughable. They are generally the most ignorant of other forms of motorsport and least well informed motorsport fans.
It is worth pointing out however that DHH does not compete at the highest level in Le Mans. He is one class below.
> To say it is any more or less prestigious than winning Monaco is a purely subjective manner.
Of course it's subjective, and anyone who would declare a particular race "the greatest in the world" is obviously full of it. Someone just couldn't resist stroking his own ego a little more. I know DHH has a reputation for being arrogant and opinionated, but this post was over the top.
> The idea that the opinion of motorsport fans in the southern US has any weight is laughable. They are generally the most ignorant of other forms of motorsport and least well informed motorsport fans.
I bet you couldn't walk 10 feet at a NASCAR event without tripping over someone who could fix your car. I'd be amazed if you could find a single person like that sitting in the stands of a Formula 1 Grand Prix event.
> Of course it's subjective, and anyone who would declare a particular race "the greatest in the world" is obviously full of it.
Do people not have personal favourites that they might, even with self-realising bias, call "the greatest in the world"? And if you were then talking, or writing, about this awesome experience, wouldn't you easily use those words to describe your feelings, rather than to statistically analyse race rankings?
Considering that I race a modern, fuel injected, turbocharged, AWD vehicle I'd say that they have very little chance of fixing anything on my car. It doesn't have a big sloppy push rod v8.
Modern pushrod designs aren't "sloppy" - when you don't need to rev as high to generate adequate power, you don't need the added valve stability that an overhead cam arrangement provides. Not to mention that a single camshaft actuating pushrods is more space and weight efficient than a set of overhead cams.
But then, that's just my opinion as someone who races a modern, fuel injected, naturally aspirated, RWD vehicle. A vehicle which has a pushrod V8.
I think you are missing the point of the article when you focus on who is having the problems, not the nature of the problems being addressed. Anyone who is trying to be the best can benefit from considering this advice.
Likewise, you are off base both on whether Le Mans is one of the greatest motorsport races, and in focusing in on that seriously non-central part of the article.
What I like is that writing like dhh has done is a good example of how to brag without appearing to brag.
You wrap the bragging around a larger point which acts like the red herring to distract from the bragging. So you get to mention your "fastest and most reliable car, the best-prepared team, and two of the fastest team mates in the business" appearing almost sheepish and incidental.
Or here is another of the same, saying something like this while making a point about anything:
"This experience has been a painful realization of everything that Alfie Kohn wrote about in Punished by Rewards and a reminder of the wisdom of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow."
I have no clue who that is. But it sounds impressive which most things you have never heard of tend to do.
That's how I read it. "I and my millions of dollars and world class team only came in second in an extremely competitive race, and I want everyone to know how that was a wake up call for me to not be so ambitious, because ambition can be poisonous. So here are some other philosophical writings about how to be happy with what you have and not be ambitious."
Not trying to change your mind on what is the greatest race, but I came across this the other day and realised how little I personally knew about this race.
Truth in 24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27F26UA1i6M
The entire southern half of the U.S. begs to differ.
The entire southern half of the U.S. also begs to differ with the rest of the world on when the Earth was formed, whether homosexuals deserve marriage rights, and other things. Hint: they're usually wrong.
Wow! As someone who has lived in the southeast my whole life, I resent that. We have Georgia Tech, Oak Ridge National Labs, and plenty of intelligent people here. Some great innovations have come out of all parts of the south: from Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, Ashville, etc... I can't believe you would make such a sweeping generalization.
As someone who grew up in the southern half of the U.S.: a) you're wrong, b) you're really not helping.
Judging the entire region by the loudmouths just gives them an even louder voice than they had. There are plenty of great people in the south, maybe if you'd shut up with your generalizations and stereotypes they'd engage the rest of the world and drown out the bigots.
Eh, each to their own. In terms of endurance racing, 24 hours of Le Mans is the race. Whether you think endurance racing is the greatest of the types of motor racing.. entirely subjective.
This is a huge problem with a surveillance state. Everyone has something which you can use against them. This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail. Otherwise not. Possible implications to politic balance are astounding.
"This means that if you piss off wrong people you're going to jail."
Except that's not the reality. The reality is that if Obama really really hates someone and wants to make their life miserable, the most he can do it make it hard for him to fly (ie. the no-fly list). The government is constrained in what it can do, surveillance and omniscience doesn't change that.
I don't know what rock you've been hiding under, but that's not even close to accurate. Inspections, vague public statements, IRS audits, being followed everywhere, having all your friends "interviewed", being stopped and having your car searched, all your cash confiscated; these things have been used before by the government. As have being killed by a drone.
Confiscating your cash would need to be done with some kinda of judicial order, so it's not up to the president or someone who you "pissed off"
The drone killing is a seriously disturbing precedent, but with the backlash that's happened I think you won't be seeing that again (at least I hope).
The rest of your examples are definitely tools at the disposal of the executive branch, but they're on the same order of being put on the no fly list (the no-fly-list was more of an illustrative example than a definitive list of what the government can do). Annoying, but not at all equivalent at all to being jailed (as the parent comment stated).
> Confiscating your cash would need to be done with some kinda of judicial order ...
In the US your assets can be seized by the police before you are convicted. This is especially the case with drug related matters. This website has details (and advocacy) http://www.fear.org
That's really messed up. More outrageous than the TSA... Thanks for the link and sharing the information. Why isn't this discussed more? I guess we only talk about news, not our preexisting long term problems (ex: prisons)
> The drone killing is a seriously disturbing precedent, but with the backlash that's happened I think you won't be seeing that again (at least I hope).
Because "backlash" stops people with enough incentive from regularly getting rid of people that inconvenience them.
So the economic crisis finally rocks the US to its foundation. A charismatic but authoritarian leader surfaces (let's name him... I don't know, Hutlor?). Common populace vote him out of desperation based on his promises to bring back US to its place in the world.
A few months later Hutlor shows his true face, the government radicalizes and becomes violent. Hutlor's party does NOT like homosexuals. He does not like people posting on Hacker News either. But the average Joe is not homosexual nor a Hacker News reader, so nobody actually cares.
Then Hutlor's right-hand man comes up with a great idea: they'll just take those nice backups that the NSA collected in their huge datacenters and track down homosexuals (and Hacker News users).
Now you're screwed.
With this I mean: it's not the statu quo but whatever the future might bring.
And they'll have a lot of non-homosexual allies, even ones who don't particularly care for homosexuals, for enough of us remember where the pink triangle base of this organization's logo comes from, and even more will learn.
Is that even relevant? What are you going to do against the SWAT Anti-Homo unit raiding your home alone in the night? Pretty much nothing.
Are the Pink Pistols going to fight the army too? With pink tanks I guess :P (come on, how stereotypical is the pink reference?)
Also: you completely missed my point. Replace "homosexual" with whichever minority you want. Maybe mexicans? Muslims? And their friends too! Whoever they target, they'll be minority and will smear their name and accuse them of America's illness. Desperate people buy that shit.
This quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn'a The GULAG Archipelago provides a start:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
And that's just from a reactionary point defense. Go on the offense---if you're a member of a targeted group, what do you have to lose?---and things get ... interesting.
And when you bring up fighting the army's tanks, you're implying playing the game by the other side's rules. Those of us who are contemplating the awful contingency of a hot civil war have absolutely no intention of doing so.
"Desperate people buy that shit."
And?
Do these desperate people matter at all in such a conflict? Well, they can inform on you, observe you in action or preparation for such, and call the authorities, but otherwise, most people will just want to be left alone.
And by wanting to be left alone they'll give power to the wrong people. It won't be them, so it won't matter.
Seriously. The Holocaust DID happen. Or so I'm told. And under the citizen's tolerance (or blindness, who cares).
What game are you going to play? The game of death. There's no game for you to play. You're just killed or sent to a camp and that's it. You won't stand a chance.
Nazi Germany didn't last too long because the US had too much to lose, but the USSR took 69 years to be dismantled... with how many political deaths?
You're being overly optimistic. I wasn't even talking about a civil war. It's the state and most of the population against some unpopular minorities.
Well, even if it was civil war. Do some research on how the last Spanish Civil War turned out for Republicans.
Yeah, if you think the US is going to go fascist you're living in a fantasy land. You wouldn't just need a depression, you would need the whole fabric of society to unravel and become as poor as pre WW2 Germany.
No country with a high GDP has turned authoritarian. Authoritarianism doesn't work in wealthy countries.
Japanese internment camps were not a fantasy land. The US exhibits fascist qualities all the time. We don't usually call it that but there are certainly examples which could be considered that way.
You mean back when people thought blacks were less human than white and women didn't have the right to vote? Back when a depression meant people starving to death?
We're not the same society we were back in the 1940s.
The constitution of the country, a document which is paid immense lip service throughout the country, and held in high regard throughout the world, lays out very explicit restrictions of what the government can do. And yet all it takes is a handful of terrorists to kill a couple thousands Americans, and that's all it takes to trample it all into the dirt. That is how trivial it is for terrorists to destroy our freedom as it were. Can you imagine what politicians could get away with if the American people were actually destitute? It's more than a bit terrifying.
Ah, but you can also fill in the blank with "the well armed populace".
Maybe not anyone you know, but at least half of the nation, 300+ million guns and more every day. Heck, 2/3rds of the nation lives in shall issue concealed carry regimes, with well over 8 million licenses granted.
This puts constraints on a would be out of control government. Let us hope we don't have to file a claim on this insurance policy.
Well, sure, there's always the armed populace, but that is inherently illegal rebellion against the government, and it would be violently resisted by the government. (And, for the record, almost everyone I know owns guns, and that percentage was even higher before I moved to San Francisco.) But even though founding fathers wrote about the inevitability and even duty to violently resist an oppressive government, that's certainly not built into the government's rules for itself (the Constitution). Nowhere in the law does it say that these laws only need to be followed if you believe them to not be oppressive, or that you are free to overthrow the government if you find it oppressive.
You're wrong. The constitutions of New Hampshire, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas allow for the people to abolish the government.
Please remember that these concepts apply outside US too, where gun ownership and constitution defending the citizens aren't as available. This is one of the reasons why the "but we have guns to take 'em down if needed" is not very applicable argument when talking about these issues. The other being that the means to achieve influence and share of power should be political, and not rely on violence.
Wow, just utterly blown away that someone can live on earth for as many years as you presumably have, and have such a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of how it works...
Do you know where that quote is from? Everything I saw seems to indicate it is from 3 musketeers but I could not find it in the project gutenberg edition or the wikisource version
I also tried to find this some time ago. The older attribution I found is from "Guillaume le taciturne et sa dynastie. Histoire des Pays-Bas" (1852)
It's not exact, it goes like this: "Donnez-moi une ligne,
disait-il, la plus indifférente de la main d'un homme, et j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." and it's attributed to Cardinal de Richelieu. It probably has changed in many ways from quotation to quotation, but that is verbatim as I found it in that old book.
> The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company . . .
Zynga is a gaming company? That's news to me -- I thought they were still in the business of tricking people into paying for the privilege to click things faster.
Is it any surprise that wasn't enough to sustain a company?
One guy had one bad experience as a gameplay tester, and now it's time for all gaming contractors to strike? That's a pretty big leap.
This sounds like a typical story of poor management in any industry: Lack of communication, failure to follow through on performance review policy, hostile work environment, inability to recognize and allocate talent, etc. Then again, we're relying entirely on this guy's self-assessment for that last part. This bit in particular set off some alarm bells for me:
> I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.
Despite his good intentions, he might have inadvertently gone too far and turned himself into "that guy". You know, the one who people see coming from a mile away and think "Shit, here he comes to bug me with a million pointless questions again." Ambition is a good thing, but sometimes they just want you to do the job they hired you for and stop distracting other employees, and those other employees only have so much patience for the new guy who keeps asking questions.
> One guy had one bad experience as a game tester (most kids' dream job)
I have a friend who was a game tester. It's not just a kid's job. If you ever see someone who is good at being a game tester do his thing, you will find out that they are very skilled and many have a wealth of experience in terms of where to look for bugs.
EDIT: Now my friend has moved out of the game industry and into corporate life. The pay is better and the job is more secure.
I think Irregardless meant that this is a job that a lot of people dream about having when they are children. Landing such a job as an adult would serve to realize that dream. This makes it pretty devastating if the job turns out to be a disaster.
Right, also trying to reinforce the fact that we're talking about actual gameplay testing and not something code related (a lot of people might assume the latter since this is on HN).
I'm sure testing games is far more demanding and tedious than kids imagine it to be.
> One guy had one bad experience as a game tester (most kids' dream job)
You might want to rephrase this then, your original wording comes off in a condescending "playing games? for money? he should be glad to have a job!" sort of tone to me.
An underappreciated point is there is a vast difference between creating something vs breaking it. Playing to win is one thing; playing to see if you can fall out of the universe in an obscure corner of a map, or trying every conceivable combination of actions in hundreds of situations, is a very different experience.
i think that also puts a lot of unrealistic expectations on the job that probably get squashed at some point: i'm guessing they consist mostly of the amount of time spent doing QA related "busy work" (bug tracking, tickets, logging, etc ) compared to time spent playing video games
With as many horror stories (albeit some are more amusing than mean) reported at Penny Arcade's from the trenches site[1], the pastebin does not seem all that surprising. Game testers seem to be mostly treated as disposable by the AAA game industry.
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to blame the victim too, especially when he said "I stopped going in, and would show up whenever", but whatever this guy did, the point is that
"they will work you to death and they will promise you potential, but it is for nothing."
At some point, all those questions needs to result in outstanding improvement in productivity for there to be any viable expectation of upward mobility. I kept waiting to see it in the story, which then ended.
> You're either a black/grey hat or a white hat. Either you're a white hat and believe selling to malicious hackers is fundamentally wrong and you wouldn't do it at any price, or you're a black hat waiting for the right price.
> The purpose of reward schemes is to reward white hats, not to compete with the bad guys for the black hat discoveries.
How many other industries are there where individuals with valuable skills routinely volunteer to help multi-billion dollar corporations despite no guarantee of reward?
These people are doing work that typically warrants a six-figure salary or several hundred dollars per hour, and they're doing it almost entirely because it's the right thing to do. And Facebook should reward them well enough that they'll continue doing it, not only because it's good for the security of Facebook and its users but because it's the right thing to do.
I don't know how much Facebook has given to the other 65 people who disclosed exploits this year, but it will be innocent users who suffer most if they all share Yvo's sentiment.
These people are doing work that typically warrants a six-figure salary or several hundred dollars per hour
He spent a day finding the exploit, and got $4500. That scales quite well if he can keep it up.
At the point the exploits are harder to find, Facebook can make a decision as to whether it's important to keep searching as hard, and raise or lower the price as they see fit. This is the market in action.
He might have made more on the black market, but why it would be worth more is important. On the black market, the transaction comes with legal risk. Risk increases payout (by reducing supply).
There would be very little legal risk associated with selling this on the black market. The problem would be finding the buyer. The prosecution would have to prove that the seller knew for a fact that he was selling the vulnerability to a known criminal.
Less money = less incentive = fewer disclosures = less secure.
Facebook is abusing the good will of white hats by offering such trivial sums, and they're reducing the security of their platform in the process. They have how many $100k+ engineers who couldn't find this? And how much does the average security breach cost per record, $100-$200? This exploit alone could have exposed them to millions in losses at that cost.
This is what turns white hats into black hats, and I wouldn't blame the guy for selling his next exploit rather than disclosing it. A famous guy once said "we create our own demons". And then the guy in Iron Man 3 said it. And now I'm saying it.
"Trivial sums"? This is squarely in line with what Google pays for vulnerabilities. Who is paying drastically more for website flaws?
And, because you think the thank-you Facebook offered was too low, you wouldn't blame him for selling vulnerabilities to criminals? Really? Selling vulnerabilities to criminals is itself a crime.
> Who is paying drastically more for website flaws?
Black hat markets, presumably. At least that is the point being made by commenters here. Granted, selling the vulnerability is illegal and immoral, but that doesn't stop it from happening. The 'market rate' for vulnerabilities seems to be higher than what Facebook and Google are paying out.
Why do you "presume" that? Not all vulnerabilities are equally valuable, and the value for a vulnerability is not as straightforward as people here seem to think it is. Or at least, I don't think it is.
I use the word "presume" because I don't frequent black hat markets and I have no personal experience with current pricing. The general agreement I'm seeing in the comments (and anecdotes gathered elsewhere) is that exploits and vulnerabilities command a higher price when sold to black hats rather than responsibly disclosed through a bounty system. (Isn't this what the grandparent and article are implying?)
This makes sense economically to me. In order for it to be worthwhile for a vulnerability discoverer to sell the exploit, the reward should overcome the cost. In this case, the cost is the probability of getting caught multiplied by the severity of the punishment.
Really? That's exactly what you're doing with Facebook - selling a vulnerability to them, which they then pay you for. So, disclosing to some third party ought also to be fine. The morality or otherwise is up to you though, I guess...
EDIT - I just read @tptacek's reply below. I guess that selling to known criminals, with the knowledge they would use the exploit to commit a crime, _is_ going to be illegal most places.
How is it a crime to sell a security flaw? It is just knowledge that you found yourself (as opposed to was told under an NDA, in which case it might have been).
It's not a crime to sell a security flaw! It is, on the other hand, probably a crime to abet computer fraud, which is what you'll have done if you accept money from someone in return for an exploit you had that they subsequently use to break into Facebook.
Simply selling vulnerabilities isn't criminal (it's a bit of a grey area, but if I didn't have ethical issues with the practice, it's so far onto the "safe" edge of the spectrum that I'd be fine with assuming the risk.)
Selling vulnerabilities to people you know to be criminals, or to people a prosecutor can convince a jury a reasonable person would have known to be criminal, probably is a crime.
Joe Sullivan, Director of Security at Facebook said publicly during the SF New Tech Security event this Wednesday that Facebook purchased the Java 0Day run in their training exercise[1]. I guarantee that 0Day was more than $5000.
Long before you disclosed the vulnerability in Onity hotel locks to the public, the startup you had co-founded "licensed" the same flaw to Lockmasters Security Institute, a company that trains law enforcement agencies, special ops, and intelligence agencies in covert entry techniques.
You gave LSI's government customers a pretty big head start before you bothered to disclose that flaw to the general public.
If researchers in this community are going to sell security vulnerabilities to the government, I think that fact should be well known.
daeken's work on hotel locks got a lot of press, but the fact that he had two years earlier sold that info to a company for "law enforcement purposes" hasn't gotten nearly the press attention it deserves.
Martin Muench and Chaouki Bekrar have openly embraced what they do. As much as I dislike the path they follow, I have to at least respect them for being up front about the business they're in.
If you're going to help governments covertly break into people's homes, computers, and smartphones, you should wear it with pride.
What exactly does this have to do with the matter at hand? What did you choose this particular thread to make a point about Cody? Cody was contributing his insight about vulnerability markets, which is something he knows a little about (unlike most thread participants). You seem to have chosen it to make a political point at his expense. That's not neighborly and it's not germane to the issue at hand.
With your response you make the problem even worse, by pointing out other people who made decisions that you, Chris Soghoian, don't approve of but who you "at least respect".
I also think it's a little laughable to suggest that Cody in any way enabled the USG to break into hotel rooms, as if that was a capability they were just champing at the bit to buy from someone like Cody rather than something they've been able to trivially accomplish for the last 200 years.
I've worked with Cody in the past, consider him a friend (despite his different stance on vulnerability market), and have a problem with comments that chime in on threads for the sole purpose of trying to take him down a peg.
Cody, on his own blog, described the sale of the vulnerability as follows:
In 2010, we (the startup I was running with friends at the time, UPM) decided to license the opening technology to a locksmithing company for law enforcement purposes.
If it is "laughable to suggest that Cody in any way enabled the USG to break into hotel rooms", then why would he describe the sale as "for law enforcement purposes"?
I stand by everything I said in my previous comment while noting that you didn't respond to the main point of that comment or the one that preceded with it.
As someone mentioned above, apparently this is the same amount of money that Google offers for security exploits. How is it any different?
Also how much money do you expect? You should expect NO money for doing the right thing. Rewards like these are simply gestures of goodwill and you should thank Facebook for even offering something like that.
Giving such exploits to the black market is WRONG. It's morally unjust. Money shouldn't change the situation any more.
I'd be extremely hesitant to trust these guys with a single cent right now. They requested $400k in their last Kickstarter and received over $3.3 million, but that project (now called Broken Age) is STILL overbudget and delayed [1]. They're funneling profits from other games into it already, and now they're asking for more money so they can work on a new game? Or is this just their way of getting a much needed cash infusion after all other avenues have failed, so they can fund their ailing project and then worry about this one later?
All this on top of the fact that their most recently released game, The Cave, was mediocre at best [2].
> Broken Age was originally planned to be completed in April, but according to the documentary the schedule has been extended until September. The costs of a lengthened development have forced Double Fine to search for more money. Double Fine still welcomes supporters that missed the Kickstarter deadline, but in the documentary Isa Stamos, director of product development, affirms that the studio either has to dramatically increase funding or reduce the scope of the game. In Episode 8, Double Fine’s vice president of business development, Justin Bailey, reveals that profits from the release of Brütal Legend for PC will almost entirely feed into Broken Age.
> Despite the desire to stick within the confines of the Kickstarter money, Double Fine is facing the reality many developers face in the middle of production. Facing setbacks and asking publishers for more time or money is common in the video game industry, but possibly going over budget with loads of crowd-funded money is new territory.
FWIW, inXile, the guys who ran a Kickstarter campain for "Torment: Tides of Numenera" to great success before delivering on the goal of their previous campaign for "Wasteland 2", explained that the company works most efficiently by rolling pre-production talent (concept artists, writers to a degree, etc.) onto a new project when the previous product goes into full-on production, instead of having them sit idle.
But after watching the Double Fine documentary vids I don't get the feeling the same explanation would apply here - employees there seem to specialize less and be more flexible in their roles.
That said, I'll be backing this because those documentary vids are incredibly entertaining. Even if "Broken Age" never makes it out the door or winds up mediocre, I'll easily have gotten enough for my buck to make the exchange feel worthwhile to me (at the same time I'll admit that seems worrying even to me, turning development into a sort of performance art ...).
If you'll allow me to be a bit rude, why do you care?
I mean, it's $20 dude.
I understand the anger and skepticism a person feels when they make $30k a year and back a project for $50 that fails. But I don't understand it on HN. We're programmers and entrepreneurs. We know that timelines and resources are difficult to forecast. We know that companies and projects fail, even when they have millions of dollars to spend. We also generally make enough that $20 lost is negligible.
Yet everytime I look at the comments section for a Kickstarter I see mostly permutations of this comment.
I bet a lot of people on HN don't even make 30K a year. It's a little weird to be assuming that everyone here is working in Silicon Valley making 100K+. Particularly for a site dedicated to early stage startups and tech and the philosophy of being frugal to lunch startups.
Here's how I see it. For context, I backed Broken Age for $100 and have the t-shirt. I typically spend $1,000+ on games a year.
####################
If I wanted a game for my $20 I could:
* Buy 3-5 classic 90s games on GOG.com
* Buy 1-2 indie games on Steam
* Buy 1 AAA game on sale, 6-12 months post release
The alternative of putting my $20 on Kickstarter is relatively well known now. I:
* Get to support an indie dev with a passionate vision
* Get sneek peek access during game development
* Potentially get the final product
And I'm okay with those tradeoffs. I don't back every game project on Kickstarter, but I have backed some. Sometimes my $20 is better spent on released games and sometimes it's better spent on Kickstarter.
The issues raised around Massive Chalice are different. They aren't general Kickstarter concerns - they're specific to this project and this developer. A big part of the Kickstarter experience is that we, the consumers, are shouldering a small amount of the risk of the project. That's not a bad thing, but in the case of Double Fine the risk profile has significantly changed.
For Broken Age (previously Double Fine Adventure), we were dealing with a long-standing game development studio taking a chance on crowdfunding a game that publishers simply wouldn't touch. As far as we knew, they had a history of delivering high quality games.
All those things are still true with Massive Chalice, but now consumers have more data then we had before. We got a detailed look in to the sausage factory. We've seen delay after delay. We've seen a project originally scoped at $400k get overfunded and go over it's new $3m budget. They say we'll get the game in September, but who really knows? I think it's rational to say that those events could instill uncertainty about Double Fine.
So it's not that I won't back Massive Chalice because games projects on Kickstarter are risky. I won't back it because I know exactly how Double Fine has handled a kickstarted game in the past. They've trained me to expect fantastic communication about the project as it develops. They've trained me to get excited to see the sneak peeks. But they've also trained me to expect delays and budget overruns. What happens if Broken Age doesn't sell well? Will they have more Brutal Legend residuals to fall back on? If they run over budget on Massive Chalice, will they run another kickstarter for another game just to make sure they can keep their people employed? I don't know.
And so frankly, I'm not excited about Broken Age anymore. After the 15 months that have passed, the lackluster trailer, and all the delays, I just don't feel the same about Double Fine as I did before. That, on top of seeing the way they've handled the project, and being concerned about the financial situation of the company, I just can't muster $20 for Massive Chalice.
####################
Yes, it's just $20, but games are a ruthless business and there's a lot of other places my $20 could go. At this point, instead of supporting Massive Chalice, I'm going to buy a new skin in Dota 2. Or maybe I'll buy the Humble Indie Bundle 8. Or maybe I'll buy whatever is on sale on Steam this week. Who knows?
Well put. If I went 5 months off schedule and 750% over budget and then asked the bosses to finance my next project without having delivered anything... I mean... well I'd probably just have been fired at 400% over budget.
Thats kind of the problem with the stretch goals. It just makes the development even more difficult and the wait longer a lot of the times because more money doesn't always mean you can work faster.
No, the budget was 400k. In what bizzaro world does 750% more funding delay project completion by five months? Just because you have extra money doesn't mean you should expand your budget to max out all your resources; try that excuse with any VC and tell me how it goes. Fortunately for Double Fine they're not actually responsible for how they spend their money.
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that if Double Fine took the $3.3 million and delivered a 2D, mobile, prototype-esque game (which if you watched the documentary, was what they would have gone for with the $400,000) in the timeline they stated, people would have been happy.
It's exactly like they took the $2.9 million and ran. I think quite a lot of people would call that a scam at that point. In the end, with an extra $2.9 million, what were they going to do with it other than make sure that the game they end up delivering lives up to the huge sum that their fans gave them?
The budget was 400k for the basic version, then they got 3.3m and changed the scope. So 3.3m was the new budget, or perhaps some number in between and the difference was pure profit.
What do you think of someone who commits $1 million in insurance fraud? Spread out amongst all the other customers and shareholders, it comes to a very small amount per person, certainly less than $20. But you'd still be mad about it, wouldn't you?
There has to be a line between acceptable risk and throwing good money after bad. I suspect Double Fine is on the right side of the line in this case, but if we let "it's $20 dude" excuse everything then we're opening ourselves up to outright fraud (as another poster said). So I think it'd good to question cases like these.
>fraud is totally cool because we're programmers and entrepreneurs
No, it really isn't. This is not a kickstarter to make a game, this is a kickstarter to help pay for the game they already made a kickstarter for before. It isn't about risk, it is about fraud.
Interesting how a lot of people in here assume this is a fraud to support their previous project. Why couldn't they honestly be starting a new project with a separate team?
Yes, it is interesting how a lot of people assume that the most likely explanation is the right one. Of course it is possible that they got money somewhere else and don't need this kickstarter cash to keep the company afloat while they finish their known to be delayed and overbudget game. It just isn't very likely.
And if you are a backer you get beautifully made videos of this – and it’s glorious. All the tough decisions, all the problems, all the decision making processes and compromises, all the joy and sadness.
This was the deal from the beginning and they were very explicit about it. I mean, this whole thing got started because they wanted to document the game making process – warts and all – but you cannot typically do that with a publisher on board. They had to do their own thing.
If you are not a backer it’s very, very easy to get the wrong impression about this – but if you are a backer there is nothing better than getting an update email with a new video on their progress.
This shit is fucking awesome. I don’t even care whether there ever is a game. If this fails and I have it all on video I will be happy. (Well, I will be sad because I have empathy, but I will have enjoyed the ride.) I got hours of excellent video material for next to no money.
I don’t think you are really getting this. And it’s easy to not get it if you are not a backer. (Plus, The Cave has nothing to do with this. That game was made by different people. And I would call it a polarizing game, not a mediocre one.)
Hesitant to "trust these guys" -- the same guys that pointedly stated in their video and materials that the DoubleFine adventure could be a wild success or complete failure?
They made it very clear from the beginning that this was new territory, something not done before, and the risk was high.
As for starting another game before finishing another, that's a silly argument. There's this mistaken belief amongst the general populace that software companies can only work on one project at a time. That couldn't be farther removed from reality.
The reality is that any large software project requires the efforts of dozens (and sometimes hundreds or thousands) of people all of which perform different tasks. There are many parts of software projects where not all of the staff can be involved or working on it, or where their portion of the work is done.
At that point, you're left with the choice of firing the people you don't need, or paying them to sit around and do nothing. Isn't the more logical choice to start another project so you can keep those people employed and pay them to do something meaningful?
The fact that the source of their funding for one of their current projects was kickstarter should not restrict them from starting another project using kickstarter.
So I can't deny that Double Fine are having to find additional funds for Broken Age - it's true and they've been using multiple different ways. However, I think that's mainly because the scope of the game increased significantly due to way the Kickstarter blew up as it did - at the time I don't think anyone expected it to reach $3 million and as such, expectations are higher.
However, I can definitely say that judging Double Fine on purely their last game is a mistake. They've created many games that have had very favourable reviews in recent history (for example: Stacking, Costume Quest, Brutal Legend) [1].
> However, I think that's mainly because the scope of the game increased significantly due to way the Kickstarter blew up as it did - at the time I don't think anyone expected it to reach $3 million and as such, expectations are higher.
The excuse "we got more money, so expanded the project scope too much, so now we need even more money" does not bode well for their project management abilities.
Part of project management is knowing how far one can expand scope given additional funding. I problem I see with a LOT of Kickstarter projects, especially the video game ones, is that they do a very poor job estimating additional costs.
More than once I have seen a project say "and if we raise another $10k we'll port to every platform known to mankind!
I have even seen projects claim they will go from being a PC to adding iPad support!
For a few game genres, sure, that may work, but for the most part? The entire game balance chances, reaction times change, the entire UI changes, performance characteristics of your platform have changed dramatically! Engines like Unity may help, but you still have to tweak the ever living daylights out of any sort of reaction based gameplay to make up for the differences in control methodology, and that means a lot of game balance work. It is rarely as cheap as many developers make it out to be.
But that one (wide spread) example aside, Double Fine needs to provide some reassurances that they know how to properly scope out a project.
Being under the yoke of a publisher does provides one with a hard deadline, schedules, and someone who says no. That is often a useful attribute! (See: Why programmers have project managers!)
When you have a small company like Double Fine, fighting for creativity and independence, and competing in a space dominated by giant game publishers and media companies, I vote to give them the benefit of the doubt. Even if it fails, I'm happy to support the effort.
Also, the documentary coverage that was part of the last Kickstarter already made that more than worthwhile for me. It provided a great inside view of the development process. The game is just a bonus at this point.
> They requested $400k in their last Kickstarter and received over $3.3 million, but that project (now called Broken Age) is STILL overbudget
They learned from this, and have restructured what they are asking for this time around, as well as where they are offering bonuses.
> and delayed [1]
It's only delayed if you assumed you were making a pre-order on KickStarter, which is not what KickStarter does in anyway. It's been clear from the beginning. Imagining it's a unicorn does not make it a unicorn, however.
After viewing all the negativity on here, I'd actually recommend people that feel the same _should_ stay away from Kickstarter.
If the only value to you is getting the game itself, then wait for it to be finished and buy it through Steam or your store of choice.
Kickstarter is meant for people who find value in not just receiving the product, but in watching, and discussing it through its development and also allowing creative people they respect the opportunity to the do the work they'd like to do.
Most of the negativity in these comments seems to be from people that just "want the game". Well that isn't what you signed up for. If you feel burned by the first one, you would be well advised to stay away from future Kickstarters, from Double Fine, or from any other developer.
Yeah, if this is your thinking you should just stay away from Kickstarter. It’s not for you and that’s ok – but please, please don’t change the way Kickstarter is by your stuffy insistence that it has to be something it is not. Just, please stay away from it and let people have their fun.
Kickstarter has been used quite a lot by a whole bunch of artists to deliver comic books; if you look at money brought in, it's consistently ranged from being the #2-5 publisher of comics in the US.
While some of these comics were done on the "here's a pitch and my track record, pay me for a year's work in advance and I'll make this" model that the Double Fine adventure is being made on, the vast majority of them were not - most of them are about "here's some stuff I already drew, I need this much in preorders to make a print run economical." This goes all the way from little campaigns like the one I ran[1] up to huge ones like the $1250k one for the Order of the Stick reprints[2]. Kickstarter has helped make independent comics a lot easier to sell. It's also been a huge boon to board game makers, who work in a similar "make the thing, then seek money to publish it" model.
It is quite possible to run a successful Kickstarter based solely on delivering the product to the audience, with absolutely none of the glimpse into the creative process that Double Fine is providing.
That said: be aware of what you're getting into, be prepared for it to never happen.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I said about DFA and other similar Kickstarters.
If you backed a Kickstarter that was pitched as solely a preorder for an already complete product, then you have every right to be upset if that Kickstarter doesn't deliver.
The original point though, was about kickstarters which are funding the development of products from scratch and allowing tracking and input from the funders.
"Kickstarter is meant for people who find value in not just receiving the product, but in watching, and discussing it through its development and also allowing creative people they respect the opportunity to the do the work they'd like to do."
You didn't constrain your comment to just "pre-buy this thing so I can pay rent while I develop it" campaigns. What you said certainly goes for those. But you were suggesting that ALL of Kickstarter is about that.
As a backer of Broken Age, I have similar fears. I do believe in their creative talent, but I wish this kickstarter was being done after Broken Age was delivered.
Its better for the company and team continuity if this project gets off the ground before the other one finishes. If they wait until the end, they would end up going through a bit of turnover in the downtime between projects.
If you read their pitch, Massive Chalice has a separate team from Broken Age. I think inXile are the ones using the team continuity argument. Obviously it's better for the company if fans keep shoveling in money regardless of (lack of) any results, but you have to admit this sets a risky precedent.
It's a fairly similar logic though, isn't it? They have other teams coming off other projects, so rather than leave them idle until Broken Age is finished or going to a publisher for a project, they decided to Kickstart another independent project.
Independent-in-theory though, yeah? I mean, if Broken Age is running over budget (as they've acknowledged is the case), money has to come from somewhere. I don't think it's super unfair to wonder if that's what this is in part about--whether they hope to use these funds while Broken Age is in development and recoup it to fund Massive Chalice when Broken Age ships.
On top of that they used Humble Bundle to obviously put more funding to Broken Age.
Indie developers not being able to manage their cash is funny. They wanted freedom and responsibility, now they have it, and they realize that having publishers behind your back can be a good thing, actually, to stop focusing on funding the whole time and focus on the game.
I don't see it as at all odd or surprising that the profits of the PC release of Brutal Legend will go in to the game. Double Fine will be reaping all of the profit from Broken Age, so it seems sensible that they carry some of the risk through investing their own money.
> She graduated in 1994 with more than $100,000 of debt. Within three years, she had one daughter, a surprise set of twins, and was earning less than $50,000 per year.
3 kids while earning < $50k and trying to pay off > $100k in debt? If that's not the embodiment of America's dire lack of financial and family planning skills, then I don't know what is.
> "I’ve stressed to my daughter the importance of not borrowing any money."
Maybe she should just teach them to make responsible decisions instead? Borrowing money can be the right thing to do, but you need to carefully measure the costs and benefits.
Also, it would help not to have 3 kids when you're up to your ears in debt and only earning enough money to support yourself.
I read this as: as much as possible, poor, unfortunate, or unlucky decisions you made in your early 20s should follow you around for the rest of your life (60+ yrs).
By extension, having children is a privilege only for either those who were lucky enough to be born into wealth (i.e. no or minimal debt) or those who were lucky enough to make the correct decisions early in life.
However, moral duty is relevant when it comes to how society should think about debt. Everyone has things they would like to do if they had more money. Society should not be arranged to give people a free pass just because they want to do something that requires money.
> However, moral duty is relevant when it comes to how society should think about debt.
A debt is a contractual obligation and should be treated as such. One should not moralize contractual obligations.
E.g. During the housing crisis, there was a lot of moralizing about homeowners walking away from their underwater mortgages. Moralizing about debt in that way is bullshit. When lenders make a loan secured by collateral, they take the risk of the value of that collateral dropping. There is absolutely nothing immoral about forcing a lender to eat a risk it knowingly on.
Similarly, a corporation would not hesitate for a second, on moral grounds, to restructure its debts through bankruptcy, and neither should individuals. No moralizing needs to enter the equation. There is a penalty for declaring bankruptcy and failing to pay your debts, and that is future lenders being wary of lending you money. There is no need to add a moral dimension to the issue.
What I meant was that when designing rules for bankruptcy etc., but also for how education is funded and other things, society has high level goals which are guided by morality.
My point was that when society considers what it's goals are, it should never be a goal that a person should be able to do things that "give their life meaning" when they can't afford them, because ultimately it is a person's own responsibility how they manage their money.
So my post was aimed at people who thought "isn't it horrible that this woman can't do what she wants in life simply because she can't afford it"
You're begging the question. Spilling oil into the oceans inherently hurts people and the environment in an uncompensated way. Bankruptcy, meanwhile, is just part of the rules of the game, just as much as enforceable debt obligations are part of the rules of the game. Everyone knows, a priori that repayment obligations can be enforced by recourse to the courts, and everyone also knows, a priori, that those obligations can be discharged by those same courts (what the federal court giveth it can taketh away). Because bankruptcy is part of the rules of the game, it's priced into interest rates. When a bank loans you money, it expects you to default with some probability and charges you a premium for that risk. There is nothing immoral about forcing them to eat the consequence if the risk you compensated them for.
It's not a matter of ignoring morality. It's a matter of not ascribing a moral dimension to something that doesn't inherently have one.
But by your own words, this woman's bankruptcy does hurt other people... the people looking to get a loan later. They are now paying the even higher interest rate due to her bankruptcy being priced in. The more people that default, the higher the probability that the next person will default and the higher the premium the bank charges for that risk.
The rates for subsequent borrowers will only go up if her bankruptcy was unexpected. That is to say, if the bank charged her interest assuming 10 of 100 loans would default, and she is one of those 10, then her bankruptcy does not change the interest rate the bank charges. On the other hand, if the default rate is higher than the bank expected, whose fault is that?
They can only do so much to predict the future based on the past. When they fund loans today based on today's default rate they have no way to know what crisis hits in 3 years to cause a spike in defaulted loans. The system must correct itself with enough padding to cover the smaller fluctuations.
If people thought this way on a large scale interest rates would probably be moderately higher than they are today. It's not clear to me if that would be an improvement on the status quo.
> Society should not be arranged to give people a free pass just because they want to do something that requires money.
Why not?
I mean, if it works for that society and it's democratically passed, why shouldn't a society do whatever it wants?
Use of the word 'should' makes it sound like there's a moral imperative for us to not help each other. I don't think that's the case, and I think there's a good argument that in future we'll need to consider different types of society that deal with abundance rather than scarcity; for example, with universal living wages.
What I meant was that the amount of wealth redistribution would be a function of your income, not the fact that you really need more money to do a particular thing.
So if I decide it would be really life assuming to quit my job and become an artist, society doesn't have more duty to help me do this than they do to help anyone else on a particular income.
Hey... give your life all the meaning you want... just don't come crying when people start coming around looking to collect all the debt you rack up while doing it.
She could have given as much meaning to her life as she wanted without racking up > 100K in debt. All this does is encourage people to not take responsibility of their own voluntary actions. (And no I am not referring to the children).
I call her 50% responsible. The other half is the lender (gov't-backed entity) squeezing her at relatively high interest. They shouldn't have got so greedy. Now they'll get no more out of her, and of course taxpayers eat the loss.
Interest rates were high back then. 8% is right on par with average student loan and mortgage loan interest rates of the late 90's. So she was not really getting squeezed. She was agreeing to what most people taking a loan were agreeing to at that time.
Contraceptives sometimes fail. Sometimes you make a really bad judgement call. Sometimes the guy might be an asshole intentionally break/remove the condom. Sometimes bad things happen.
Not everybody is comfortable with using abortions to deal with unplanned pregnancies even if it is the financially expedient thing to do.
Twins are much more common among people using fertility drugs than the majority of the population; so if you are on those drugs, you might expect them.
P.S. not trying to be snarky, just thought it was an interesting fact
The way I see it is that every new gaming console is going to do gaming better than the generation before it. Shouldn't that be a given?
Microsoft's job, as far as the Xbox, is the following...
1) Go lobby for components from various manufactures to meet the next-gen specs (whatever that may be)
2) Create tools and APIs for developers to understand the platform for which they are building
3) Improve existing services so that gamers have a consistent and enhanced experience
Its a lot of work, but its no rocket science either. Every console does this. Which goes to my point...
When it comes to the games, these consoles are basically the same thing (especially the ps4 and xboxOne). Sure, some platforms may have an exclusive here and a different game there. Overall, the ps4 and the xboxOne will be matching one-for-one the basic gameplay mechanics.
What Microsoft did was say "alright, lets not focus on the redundant, but lets take a look at what separates this console from the other one (ps4)".
This is just an unveiling of what the console is. Don't worry, the games are still here. They will always be here. They could've made a presentation with nothing but demos. Sure, gamers would be delighted. But, if you think of it, it doesn't make sense to do so. Especially that E3 will be coming in only a couple of weeks. There will be plenty of games there.
It is not really a given at all. What matters are the games, not the technology behind the console. Showing off a new COD and Madden is pretty sigh worthy at best.
My limited circle of friends who game have moved back to PC gaming and given up on consoles. We all own them, but they became glorified Netflix boxes. That was until MS decided to charge $59.99 a year for Xbox Live. Then we all bought Roku devices instead.
MS has always required you to have Xbox Live Gold to access Netflix, no? I only first got Netflix when it came to Canada, so maybe they changed it by then.
You are probably right, but I could of sworn there was a period where Netflix did not require a Gold subscription. Maybe I just had a Gold subscription at the time for playing games online and did not think twice about it...
What more do you want them to tell you as a gamer about the new system? They released specs and talked about the cloud gaming capabilities. Having more 3rd party game makers demo games for the system doesn't really improve my appeal to the console.
I already knew the new xbox would be the next gaming console. It seems like they went for the non-obvious, and wanted to talk about the other features. The games are going to be the draw for gamers, and I'm sure those will be just fine.
agreed. people make it sound like they removed some essential features, just because they didn't emphasize them enough (or because they emphasized others more).
from what i've seen this appears to match the ps4 in every way - even down to the architecture. the only difference is they glossed-over all that and decided to focus on the ways its differentiated..
They removed the ability to buy, sell, and lend games. You have to pay an undisclosed fee to "install" a game that has already been installed, which is mandatory.
the rumor you're basing that on doesn't appear to be entirely accurate [1]. either way, i don't think its fair to draw judgment one way or another until they actually explain how that will be handled..
also, this issue is nothing new and is certainty not unique to microsoft or the xbox. i think its fairly well understood that there's going to be a change in this area as the way content is distributed continues to evolve..
whatever the actual implementation is, i'm pretty sure it wont be as bad as you're implying (... removed the ability to buy, sell, and lend games) and will probably be standard across the industry - and structured in a manner as not to totally decimate the second-hand market..
How did they alienate gamers? Gamers know first and foremost that XBox is a gaming console. They should especially know that after being shown the demo of CoD Ghost. This really is a great move for them, as gamers see the benefit of additional functionality and non-gamers see an intriguing entertainment platform.
I'm a diehard PC fan though so I probably won't get a console anyways
The event's games presentations were oriented to what is usually called the "Bro gamer" demographic (e.g. Madden/FIFA/CoD) ... It focused on TV, for which many of the core gamers don't care. Contrast this to the PS4 announcement, which had many developers and a lot of talk about how the platform is going to be more "open" for the small guys, and it felt really passionate about the "for-gamers" features. As a gamer, I feel like the PS4 is where the real passion for games is, where someone actually cared to provide tools for the "indie" crowd (who, arguably, are doing the good games these days) ... Meanwhile, microsoft is showing a TV machine, has forgotten the indie channel and has killed XNA. If you don't understand why this was dissapointing for gamers, it's most probably because you are not a gamer yourself I guess. Honestly it felt passionless, pointless and underwhelming. It wasn't a blunder or anything, of course. It was just meh.
Chill out dude. I didn't say you were a bro gamer, I didn't say I agreed with the term. I tried to answer Caskain's question on "how did they alienate gamers", and yes, part of it is the sentiment of catering to bro gamers. But notice the usage of quotes. Follow your own advice.
The point you're making is essentially that people that might enjoy popular franchises or particular genres of games aren't "real gamers" but a lower, subclass of gamers.
The point I'm making is that just because someone enjoys playing Madden (or football) does not mean that they don't also enjoy smaller, independent games ('yeah, most people have never heard of it'). We can be "gamers" too you know...
No your logic is just incorrect. This is simple propositional logic. If P -> Q does not imply If Q -> P. Bro gamers tend to like games like Madden & CoD. Because you like Madden & CoD does not make you a bro gamer.
'bro gamer' is just a term used by some gamers to feel superior to the CoD demographic (which is everybody). It seems to me to be a kind of signaling used to mark themselves out as 'serious' gamers who think about 'serious' issues while they blow stuff up and shoot zombies.
I don't play FPS games, but I know smart and sensitive people who do. They don't pretend it's not a badly justified gorefest though, just like smart people who listen to Manowar don't.
A lot of people are very let down by games that get reviews just gushing over the plot and the atmosphere and puzzles but end up being 90% gore and FPS (like Bioshock for example).
It's not everybody. CoD has a very large demographic and it encompasses a significant chunk of the console and hardcore PC gaming market, and they're better games than people give credit for, but they're far from universal appeal.
E3 is in three weeks. They didn't want this event to focus on games, because then they'd have nothing to show at E3. But they still showed some games just to prove it had working hardware.
Agreed. I don't think Microsoft has to focus on the 'game' aspect of the new Xbox - the people making games for it will do that, and we know the hardware is sufficient for the next console iteration. They are focusing on the rest of the experience, which is completely under their control. I think it's a smart play and the standard gaming media is missing the point really hard.
Well, they announced that games would require an install to the HDD, and Wired got a confirmation from MSFT that one would have to pay a fee to install the game to another Xbox. So now people who sell their games will have their resale value reduced and people who take games to their friends' house will have to pay for the privilege.
People who say "I can't do math" are lazy? Sorry, but I think that's a gross oversimplification of the issue (which is also evidenced by the comparison to physical exercise) and the two assumptions fundamental to that opinion are just plain wrong. Namely:
> So what do people actually mean when they say that they can’t “do” math? Usually they are really stating one of two things. First, that they don’t like mathematics. Secondly, that mathematics is more difficult for them than other subjects, and that it takes a great deal more effort on their part to learn it.
He conveniently chose the two reasons that are easiest to dismiss (irony, anyone?). What he fails to account for is the fact that math education is so poor that many people don't truly understand what math is. Beyond arithmetic and algebra, they think it's some really complicated stuff with big numbers and funny symbols that geeky people with glasses do -- it's practically a foreign language to them, except it has a reputation for being much harder.
Why is this? If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. Those who attempt to do so often do it very poorly, which leads students to the false belief that math is extremely difficult. On the other hand, it's very easy to teach someone to memorize formulas and plug in numbers, so that's what we're most often taught in math class. That's good enough to get us through the standardized test so we can graduate from high school, but memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers is not "doing math". So I believe many people are completely justified in saying "I can't do math".
What's more, people who "can do math" should be taking the blame for those who say "I can't do math" rather than using pointless semantics to wag a finger at them.
> If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach.
I think it's even worse than that -- I suspect that many teachers in American public schools are terrified of math themselves, and they transmit that terror to their students. It's going to be very hard for a student to learn to view mathematics as reason if their teachers don't see it that way.
There was a point when I was in grade school and we were learning formulas for the area of different shapes. When a trapezoid came up and I noted that it could be decomposed into a square and two triangles, I was admonished to just use the formula from the handout. Don't get in the habit of trying to think while doing math, it'll just get you in trouble.
This was from an otherwise excellent teacher, but when it came to math we were to turn the thinking switch to "off". This fear of math seemed to not been exceptional, even among my high school math instructors. I may have had a bad run (public school in California in the 80s), but I've been told similar stories by most everyone I've met who eventually managed to figure math out on their own.
Stories like this make me glad I was homeschooled. Mom handed me a Saxon math textbook and I just read it and did the problems. No fear, no classroom consensus that "math is haaaard".
I can support this from the other side. Coming out of a maths degree at a reasonably good university, a lot of the mathematicians who became teachers were those who struggled and pretty much gave up at some point in undergrad. Pushing many of those who will become teachers to mathematical breaking point seems like a bad way of doing things, and I think contributes to this. It's hard to think of a good alternative that still produces enough teachers though.
Only thing I can think of is to pay maths teachers really well, which probably means increasing class-sizes, so is a no-go at least in the current political clime of the US.
I recall a math teacher I had in grade 9 - she was normally a phys. ed. teacher, who had been voluntold to teach math when the usual math teacher had a nervous breakdown and took a year off. She freely admitted that she had studied phys. ed. because she "loved to teach", and wanted her students to have a better time than she did, but she had struggled in English and Math, so she went for one of the easier specialties. Not exactly a shining role model there. All the other students loved her, of course, but I thought it would be better if she were a babysitter, not a teacher.
What he fails to account for is the fact that math
education is so poor that many people don't truly
understand what math is. Beyond arithmetic and algebra,
they think it's some really complicated stuff with big
numbers and funny symbols that geeky people with glasses
do -- it's practically a foreign language to them,
except it has a reputation for being much harder.
I can attest to this. Academically, I am a reasonably able person, but I found math simply baffling at school. Arithmetic and algebra were fine. Rudimentary geometry made sense. When we got to trigonometry, things just fell apart for me. We were taught sine, cosine and tangent in the context of how they could be used to derive angles from other angles, not what they were and how they worked. They were presented as tools that could be used in particular ways that had to be memorized. To me, it felt like trying to teach an alien from another dimension to use a hammer without the alien having any intrinsic understanding of mass or momentum or kinetic energy or friction.
In fact, if I'm totally honest, I'm not 100% I completely understand the sine function now. And it wasn't just math. In physics, current, voltage, resistance etc. were taught as inputs to formulas. I know it must be challenging to teach about these kinds of principles that lack concrete macroscopic analogs, but I can't help but feel they could have done a better job than they did. In chemistry too, I remember being taught about valency and how you could work out the valency of an element by its position on the periodic table. I asked what valency actually was, either didn't understand or wasn't satisfied with the answer, asked again, and the teacher brushed off my question and carried on the with the lesson. "Oh well," I thought, "I guess I don't understand chemistry." That was when I was about 12 years old, and I didn't study chemistry after that. I studied biology until I was 16 because I had a teacher who took the time to actually explain things.
The worst part is, I went to a pretty good school. It must be absolutely dreadful at bad schools.
Most of this happened before I had regular access to the internet and the chance to learn about these things for myself. I can't help but feel the whole course of my schooling and advanced education might have been different had I had better (or at least different) teachers of hard science and math at an early age.
We were taught sine, cosine and tangent in the context of how they could be used to derive angles from other angles, not what they were and how they worked. They were presented as tools that could be used in particular ways that had to be memorized.
This has to be the worst things you could do to a student in a math class. In engineering they call it "plug and chug" -- students must plug numbers into a formula they've memorized and come up with an answer.
By the way, we learned trigonometry with the unit circle. If we forgot a formula, we'd just draw a little circle and derive it. I'm always grateful for that teacher.
It's the phrase, "I'm just no good at math" that breaks my heart. Most of the time, the student is taking the blame that belongs to the education industry.
Last week, my son had a "Chapter 9" math test here in a top-ranked Silicon Valley public school. His teacher pointed us to an official study guide PDF, which we went over carefully. I was not at all surprised to find that it covered a random grab bag of unrelated topics: sorting a half-dozen fractions, each with different denominators, two different silly algorithms for multidigit multiplication, how many $2.30 widgets can you buy for $9.00, and a few others.
This incoherent, random presentation of unrelated topics within a single chapter is totally characteristic of the "reform math" so beloved by our "progressive educators." They despise the approach of methodically working through a small number of carefully sequenced topics, making sure that the foundation of layer N is solid before getting to work building the closely related layer N+1 on top of it. They call it, "drill and kill," "soul-crushing," and "creativity destroying."
Instead of mastering a few closely-related concepts each year and systematically building expertise, they prefer "exposing" kids briefly to lots of unrelated math ideas, trusting that some kids will get some of it, and telling the rest to "trust the spiral," meaning trust that when they hop, skip, and jump over multiple topics the following year and the year after that, most of them will eventually "get" most of the stuff.
The result is that many parents just teach their kids real math outside of school. Many in our neighborhood send them to Chinese school, which teaches them math in addition to Chinese. The Chinese school buses line up in front of all of our local elementary schools at the end of each school day. (A lot of blond kids board those buses.) Some send them to Kumon, which is getting to be as common a sight around here as McDonalds or Starbucks.
I teach mine myself, using non-US curricula (Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean in my case.) I feel terrible for the kids who don't have parents doing the schools' job for them, whose math skills are limited to what they can pick up from their classmates in "group discovery" sessions, since the "professional educators" have now decided that kids learn best what they discover for themselves and now serve merely as "guides on the side" in edu-speak.
My son took his Chapter 9 test and reported to me that, with the exception of testing the two different, useless multiplication algorithms, the test was a DIFFERENT grab bag of unrelated math topics, bearing little resemblance to the study guide. Totally typical of "reform math." He did fine, but only because he had learned all of it outside school. His friends who rely on what they learn at school think he's a genius.
So kids go through this ridiculous joke of a math education and can't do math. The school points at their friends who did just fine (because--shh!--they learned math elsewhere), the school takes credit for having taught them so well and tells the others and their parents, "well, not all kids are equally good at math, but many of your classmates learned quite well," clearly implying that the kids who didn't are somehow defective.
The result is that those kids will soon be saying, "I'm just no good at math." What a disgrace.
I can't link you to the Chinese or Japanese materials, because I bought them in Shanghai and Tokyo. Also, they aren't written in English. The Googlers next door use Russian materials from Moscow, also not written in English.
It's hard to do better than Singaporean materials, which are in English and modified (not in a bad way) for the US market, which you can find at SingaporeMath.com. Their Primary Mathematics series is superb. I use the Standards Edition, which is said to track the California State Math Standards. That sounds ominous, but actually the state standards are excellent. The districts essentially ignore them by using a ridiculous "reform" curriculum that, being "a mile wide and an inch deep," will always include a checkmark every year for any topic you can think of, thereby covering anything mentioned in the state standards (superficially and in random order).
Note that for these Asian curricula, you REALLY need to know how to teach the math. The textbooks only provide visual aids and example problems, not the tutorial text (paragraphs of explanation) typical in US books. If you go for Singapore Math, you should get the Home Instructors Guide (at least for a few levels), which teaches you how to teach it.
And DON'T start a kid at too high a level. Use the placement tests downloadable from singaporemath.com to decide where to start. It's all about carefully building up from the bottom, mastering each level before moving on.
I share many of your thoughts here - we learn so much about using mathematical tools but we don't know why they were invented in the first place. I was wondering if it would be useful to understand the history and basis of concepts like the sine function - would that help me connect to them better?
Your post is insightful. Imagine trying to teach philosophy like American schools teach math. That would be unimaginably awful. Which makes me thankful that (most?) American high schools don't offer philosophy class. Superficially it would be good for the students if done right, but since it will not be done right...
Even worse imagine history taught that way. Whoops that's pretty much how they do teach history and (coincidentally?) that doesn't work too well either.
Well... I don't comment often, but as someone with a B.A. in mathematics who minored in philosophy, let me follow up on your comment:
Would a philosophy class really be good for high school students? Broadly speaking, I mean, not those 1 out of 100 students who are reading Sartre or Nietzsche (or even Dostoyevsky or Kafka) on their own, already, anyway.
A survey course, I mean, a 101-type of course, like you would see at a University. My feeling is that a course in introductory logic is the #1 most useful course that's missing in high school right now.
And again, there are going to be a few students for whom this would be redundant, but something like 99/100 students do not understand the machinery of thinking. If there's one thing my university education taught me, it's the machinery of thinking, carefully and rigorously. Most people never learn this, and I feel like this then precludes any understanding of anything advanced and even slightly abstract--and that includes both philosophy and (of course!) mathematics.
This is barely touched in standard geometry text books. 2-column proofs and all that.
But most people don't notice it, and it deserves far more treatment. Many of the smartest people I know attended special gifted programs in K-12 that did teach formal logic and informal critical thinking skills.
Philosophy is mandatory as part of the IB curriculum. The course I'm thinking of is typically named "Theory of Knowledge", and while formally an epistemology course, it can be taught quite broadly.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but I found being exposed to Philosophy while still in high school to be quite meaningful, and went on to dual-major in it while in college.
As another IB student I can concur that I found the Theory of Knowledge class very rewarding. And the things I learnt in that class have probably given more than the stuff I learnt in math or physics class, despite going off to study physics at university and then switching to math.
That being said I also remember being one of the few students who felt the course interesting and worthwhile. Most of the other students saw it as a waste of time and focused mainly on how to get a good enough grade to not affect their overall average while doing the least amount of work possible.
> What's more, people who "can do math" should be taking the blame for those who say "I can't do math" rather than using pointless semantics to wag a finger at them.
You're invoking a false dichotomy here by assuming that one of the two groups (if they are even well defined at all) should be assigned blame and the other should be held blameless.
It's debatable whether blame should be assigned at all. Many people who do not suffer math phobia live lives where advanced mathematics is rarely, if ever, needed. These people "can do math" but simply find little practical need for it. If their lives are no worse in the absence of serious mathematics, I see no reason to intervene. That said, I do think we would be better off with a more mathematically literate society.
In recent years it seems like there has been a great deal of collective guilt and introspection by the technically literate. It probably has a lot to do with the rapidly increasing difference in one's quality of life that deep technical knowledge of various kinds can produce for individuals. It will never be productive to launch crusades with mottos like "everyone can program!" or "everyone can do math!" because these crusades presume that everyone who can do X should do X. A far more productive use of our time and energies is to expose children to these disciplines early in their lives and be honest with them about the potential rewards (practical, personal, and aesthetic) they can bring. There is no need to blame anyone or try to make anyone feel guilty.
>>Many people who do not suffer math phobia live lives where advanced mathematics is rarely, if ever, needed. These people "can do math" but simply find little practical need for it. If their lives are no worse in the absence of serious mathematics, I see no reason to intervene.
This is highly debatable. We had an economic meltdown just a few years ago, and one of the (many) reasons for it was that people were taking loans that they could not afford to pay off later, given their income, assets and expenses. Many of those people were victims of predatory lending because their math knowledge was so poor.
Commenters in this thread might not think compound interest is advanced mathematics. But you're right, the majority don't have enough confidence in maths to attempt basic finanicial planning, and this is an issue for society.
I think you're using different definitions of math. He clearly shows that he includes basic arithmetic in his definition. And yet, you started off by saying that arithmetic and algebra don't count as "doing math". I'm not really surprised that you came to a different conclusion by defining words differently, but I'm unsure as to why that's relevant.
This reminds me of the comment PG made about people with the most negative rebuttal to the argument getting up-voted.
The argument wasn't entirely about how you perceive math and more about being socially accepted, even proud, of being able to say "I can't do math". It's a very North American perspective and it would be similar to saying "I can't read" in most of Europe.
There are also learning disabilities. I've struggled with Math my entire life, from simple arithmetic in elementary school all they way up into high school mathematics. I believe I suffer from "math anxiety", although I've never been diagnosed. When doing math problems it's almost like dyslexia for me, the numbers get jumbled in my head... I know the basic processes I need to come to an answer, but everything in between gets twisted and mixed up along the way.
How is it my fault (as someone who "can do math") that someone else can't/won't do math? What do you believe I am morally obligated to do that I'm not doing with regard to someone else's preference/understanding of mathematics?
That's mainly directed at the person who wrote the essay (a math professor) and others like him who blame the students rather than themselves. I think he should be examining the state of math education in this country rather than chastizing the people it has failed.
It definitely comes down to the educational issue. I'm a mechanical engineer and have gotten pretty good with "math tricks" (e.g. 103x7 is difficult, but I can compute 100x7+3*7 much easier and know to rewrite the problem to be done in my head).
A trick like that should be pretty simple to figure out, but grade school math is taught in such a rigid fashion that students (who later become full grown adults) don't think to try it. Think about the last time you went to dinner with friends. How many calculators did it take to figure out the bill? Here in New Jersey, tax is 7% and 18% gratuity is pretty standard. Add up your meal and add 25% which you should be able to do in your head since you just need to divide by 4. Yet, last time I went out to dinner, the lawyer, accountant, and two physical therapists (i.e. 3 years of grad school) all pulled out their iPhones and then looked at me with confusion when I tried to explain the 25% solution. I'm not sure they need to be able to do the math in their heads (part of my job involves doing quick math in my head, so I have more practice), but the logic behind it shouldn't confuse them.
I often hear people talk about the need for high school classes that teach people how to balance a checkbook and other questionably useful skills. If you have to teach someone to balance a checkbook, you've already failed them. You've missed the part of education that should teach and develop the logic to make the checkbook lesson take 1 minute.
>Why is this? If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. Those who attempt to do so often do it very poorly, which leads students to the false belief that math is extremely difficult. On the other hand, it's very easy to teach someone to memorize formulas and plug in numbers, so that's what we're most often taught in math class. That's good enough to get us through the standardized test so we can graduate from high school, but memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers is not "doing math"
This got me thinking a bit: What if it's the opposite?
I know I'm really bad at memorizing formula, and I need to really figure out everything for it to stick in my head. You say it's easier to get people to do that, but loads of people have bad experiences with math, so maybe it's because we teach it that way and not in spite of?
Trying to apply memorized formula to a problem is a form of pattern matching, and it might be harder because of all the doubts from the abstraction. This might end up being less efficient than we would originally think (oh I memorised all this, but I have no confisdence in using it...). In the end we have just displaced the difficulty to something a lot less tangible.
Maybe we should try lowering the scope of what is taught, but really try to make sure people can use what they learn, even if it's small.
> If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach.
I don't think critical thinking is very difficult to teach.
I think critical thinking is, despite being foundational, not prioritized in most educational curricula (and, particularly, not in most of the high-stakes testing regimes which we use to evaluate students, schools, teachers, etc.), and consequently insufficient effort is put into teaching it.
Critical thinking is not prioritized because it is hard to evaluate.
Due to the demand for teacher accountability, the insane level of competition for college entry, and the political games surrounding education policy, modern public education is entirely centered around examination and evaluation.
Not only is critical thinking challenging to evaluate, but, more importantly, people—read, parents—do not accept evaluations that report bad critical thinking skills. If a child can't answer 2 + 2 or who President Washington was, then they clearly didn't know. But if you ask a question that truly challenges critical thinking skills, and the child receives a bad score, the parents will be marching into an administrator's office with complaints of "trick questions" and "unfair grading". And fear of parent backlash drives American public school administration's decision making.
> Critical thinking is not prioritized because it is hard to evaluate.
I don't think that's the root cause for why its never been considered a core skill and treated (when treated at all) as sort of an optional additional skill usually addressed, if at all, late in schooling as part of the English curriculum.
But I do think that's an additional challenge to getting it treated as a core focus in today's testing-obsessed public education context.
I think critical thinking is the opposite of what most schools want to teach. Take Khan Academy founder's book [1] which describes the mainstream "Prussian Model":
"The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citzens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teachers, church, and ultimately, king. The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. 'If you want to influence a person,' he wrote, 'you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.'"
Chomsky further discusses the important role of "stupidity" in the educational system (like stupid assignments), in teaching obedience: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFf6_0T2ZoI)
> the greatest motor race in the world: 24 hours of Le Mans
The entire southern half of the U.S. begs to differ. Personally, I'd go with the Monaco Grand Prix if we're talking cars. If we're talking about "motor races" in general, it'd definitely be the Isle of Man TT. Hell, any one of the 18 yearly Moto GP races is probably better than Le Mans.