I've always wondered why someone may like to watch people playing videogames when you can play said videogames yourself.
It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go out to play. Thanks to matchmaking systems in games, you don't even need friends to play. You just click a button.
>It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go out to play
In fact this is part of the problem. the Dota-like/MOBA genre indeed has decent match making for the major games, but having a team you know, are communicative with and have a long/deep experience with one-another's playstyles helps immensely. I only really played League, so I can speak mostly towards that, but it's a different game queuing with friends than it is queuing with randoms. A lot of the excess communication required for a smooth match is removed when you have established a "sense" of how your teammates will react to situations, and it changes your judgement a lot when you no longer have as many random variables to consider during team fights, ganks, etc.
Watching pros play does a few things as well; you see not just good strategies, but mathematically sound and consistent strategies, which make the times you do play much more fun since a lot of your guesswork is removed. Pros also tend to have the skill for higher performance, and you get a chance to see pretty unique situations and plays that just never happen in ranked/normal queues. Plus, the pros have a huge audience typically, and you respond with the audience; being excited about an awesome play is amplified when you and thousands of other fans are collectively "losing your shit" over a play.
So yeah, you can go solo in such games, but the experience is always better with a team of people you know and can trust, and you end up in the same situation as football where you need to find others.
The pros are substantially better than you'll ever be. It's fun to see the crazy shit they can pull off, or root for a team, or the tension of the underdog, etc just like normal sports.
Just imagine all those people who still waste money on concert tickets... Don't they know they can just look up the music online and sing themselves?
Sorry for being snarky. The point is people are going to be drawn to those that are experts in just about anything they care about or are interested in.
> I've always wondered why someone may like to watch people playing videogames when you can play said videogames yourself.
I don't like it myself. But a number of my coworkers, and cousins, are of this cohort.
In general, it seems like they want an internet personality to follow. They like watching someone who gets angry and frustrated as they lose, or gets excited when they win. Its no different than following the personal lives of celebrities, except these "Twitch Celebrities" or "Youtube Celebrities" are more personalized and tailored for your specific interests.
When you want to play football you can go out into the street to play as well. The experience won't be top sports level and may in some cases differ significantly, but that's not hugely different from what it is like to play an e-sport with a team full of randoms.
Watching pros play it quickly becomes clear they are playing a different game than what your typical random pick-up-group is going to be playing from matchmaking. Their coordination is on another level.
The third party app platform was pretty slow and missing a lot of APIs relative to the others. The first party UI, which got praise from reviewers for being smooth, was written in a different language and framework.
In the first version, the default blank app from Visual Studio's "new project" wizard was slow to load. I think I measured it on the order of 500ms at the time. Not much room for third parties to add more stuff without being slow.
The only question I'd ask is : how many phones should they sell to break even ? Cos if they actually make some profit, that's just fine. Maybe they don't aim to go to mass market. And that's why MSFT may have failed : they tried to fight on Google's ground, head to head. Of course Pine can't do that. So if they just repeat what's been done for Raspberry, that's just great enough to have a living ecosystem.
I personaly just need SMS, voice and a browser. The rest, I can live without it (or program it :-)
The problem is that they would have to prove that Bloomberg wasn't just incompetent, but rather malicious. It's entirely possible (and imo the most likely scenario) that Bloomberg didn't fabricate the story, but were duped.
That's not true. The company would have plenty of damages to their reputation that a lawsuit would be perfectly reasonable. Not to mention the fact that lost market cap also damages the companies ability to hire and retain talent.
Both Firefox's and Chromium's source code is completely open (it could be argued that Chromium's code is even more open since it's mostly BSD). Google can't stop you from modifying anything in the browser, and that includes the address bar. The language in which that component is implemented is irrelevant, and Google has certainly not chosen C++ to implement to address bar with the express purpose of making that component harder to modify.
If there's no real API, you have to patch things and diverge from master and then you face the problem that Chromium is under constant change that you most certainly can't keep up with, so either you chose to ignore all the work happening in Chromium and end up with a stale branch or you spend most of your time making your patch work with the latest changes.
I urge the mods to take a look at how often the "0x65.dev" domain, which is just Cliqz, ends up on the front page.
Of special note (and I bow to them) is how they've used such a domain name to spam their services. If they had used "cliqz.com" or whatever their actual domain is, fewer people would click, but when I see this I'm inclined to think this is some personal blog of a fellow software developer, and not blogspam of a shady ads company.
If you have concerns with Hacker News moderation, please send them a message at hn@ycombinator.com. They'll see it faster, and it's better than polluting the site with accusations.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
One must know what "astroturfing, shiling, brigading" are to follow that rule. As such, astroturfing is the labor in putting fake grass down. Shiling, I'm guessing is giving the money item, a shilling, to someone. Brigading, I guess is starting a brigade. My point is that making up, or using new words(not in the dictionary) and using them in a guideline without defining them, nullifies the rule to most of the populous. Also, dang is super responsive to HN comments that he finds incongruent with the rules. He'll be here shortly to chastise OP and me.
Merriam-Webster is a popular a publisher of American-English dictionaries: emphasis on American. It also had a significant role in shaping American-English as distinct from British-English. E.g. removal of the letter u in British-English words like colour. Or, the unsuccessful campaign to spell the word acre as aker.
That's false. Webster is the dictionary that had a role in shaping American English in a distinct fashion. The quality of the work deteriorated when the Merriam brothers purchased it, and they changed the title from Webster's by the time they had begun compromising the value of English reform.
I work at Cliqz in the engineering team and have been involved with this advent project. I'd like to provide some background.
For a while, we have been thinking internally about having a tech blog for Cliqz engineering teams. It is fairly common for tech companies to have a separate blog for technical content, separated from the main website. We picked a name: 0x65.dev (0x65 being the hexadecimal representation of 101, the idea was that we would write about the tech at Cliqz in an accessible way).
To make sure we'd commit to writing on this new blog, we thought of organizing an "advent" for Christmas, where we would publish one article per day digging on one of the aspects of what we do: search, privacy, browsers. When creating the list of topics, we did not optimize for Hacker News (or any other community for that matter, we also post and twitter and Reddit equally), as this was suggested by some other comment. We really wanted to create a coherent schedule to explain why and how we do things, to have a logical progression in the topics (looking at the posts from first to last, it should hopefully make some kind of sense!). We started on day one with "Why the world needs more search engines", to motivate our efforts in this area, and started detailing on following days the way we built our engine from scratch.
One thing we wanted especially, was for engineers to write about the projects they work on, to get their perspective, without any filter. So far, many different people have contributed. If some of the technologies or keywords we use seem "trendy", it's because we are ourselves hyped about those, and we use them internally to build our products.
Before the event we never anticipated this would resonate so much with the HN community, and while very pleasant, it was not the goal. We were of course extremely enthusiastic when we saw the great feedback from the community. If anything, this proves that the topics which we are passionate about are also of interest for a part of the HN community (many of us at Cliqz read HN every day; in fact we all used our personal accounts to submit, comment or discuss about the posts). It also shows that what we do is not disconnected from reality, and that there is real interest around the topics of search, independence, privacy; a good validation for us!
Personally, I have never heard of cliqz, so 0x65.dev and cliqz mean exactly the same thing to me, which is nothing. I don't think I would be less inclined to click if it were cliqz.com.
While I understand the need for base training data to launch a competitor to a search engine like Google, I won't deny this gave the name an immediate bad taste in my mouth.
They use a different domain probably because people with uBlock Origin and pi-hole won’t be able to visit their main site at cliqz.com (which is enough for me to ignore everything coming from them).
I think the upvoting has to do with this series of posts on the domain. If it was uninteresting content the posts would not be upvoted in the way they are.
It's not unusual for a company blog to have a different name. A simple example is Signal v. Noise [1] which is the Basecamp folks. I would not want to seem them penalized for doing what others have done for a long time which has been seen as fine.
Knowing who Cliqz is a bit about being an insider for certain technology circles. Many people do not know and many people do not care. Some folks having issues with the company should not stop interesting content from being upvoted. Some members here have issues with Google, Microsoft, and other companies. That never stops their content from being listed.
I am not a Cliqz user. I am curious of the motivations of people who use Chrome (put out by an advertising company) while having issues with Cliqz (being put out by a media company).
My bet is spinning off their own browser has nothing to do with anything but fear the browser vendors, Firefox and Chrome alike, will start blocking their real money maker.
This is not even a new strategy. Other companies have tried similar tricks over the years too, though most of them went with Chromium forks instead for their spy/adware laden wares.
Frankly, it's disappointing to see this even on here, but I don't blame anyone for it; they are really working hard to sugar up the pitch here.
There is a point in there I think you're missing. That is Google is an advertising company. Isn't it hypocritical to have an issue with Cliqz for being an advertising company while being OK with Chrome which is from an advertising company (Google)?
If posts from Google and Chrome are OK for hacker news then why not from others with similar business models?
I'm not attempting to say that Cliqz has an OK model. I'm suggesting self examination and consistency.
Indeed, Cliqz appears to have a weirdly close, Pocket-like relationship with Mozilla. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History), in 2017 Cliqz was bundled in with Firefox for 1% of users downloading the latter (from Mozilla's own website, presumably) in Germany. This was despite that "Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit", and "text typed in the address bar, queries to other search engines, information about visited webpages and interactions with them including mouse movement, scrolling, and amount of time spent". HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708
Maybe not, but many of your neighbors, the police (via ubiquitous public space abuse), every store, every mode of public transportation, and an increasing number of automobiles are all pointing cameras at you, whether you like it or not, and companies like Amazon in particular are actively seeking to aid law enforcement access to all these devices. It's not like you can opt out just because you haven't installed one in your own home.
>neighbors, the police (via ubiquitous public space abuse), every store, every mode of public transportation, and an increasing number of automobiles are all pointing cameras at you
Can be regulated, it is regulated in many places already (like, you can't store recordings for more than 15 days, or you can ask for your images to be removed).
>companies like Amazon in particular are actively seeking to aid law enforcement access to all these devices
A strong part of the protestors are young farmers. Set on taking over their parents farm and continuing the family business. And they probably want the same for their kids as well. It's really puzzling they take this stance, especially since the majority is also anti EU, which is also against their best interest, because most of their revenue is from export, which would suffer havily when a Nexit would ever occur.
Just a guess, but I know some farmers. What I get from them is, that they are all about freedom to do what they think is right on their own land. Anything that brings regulations to their farms is felt as an attack. To be honest, I can understand them. They work insane hours all year long, constant pressure from the markets and society and every year there are more laws demanding their time and resources.
That some of these laws might be necessary is lost in their daily struggle.
No, they don't care. They, like many older people in other countries, feel that they have a right to their "way of life". It's a strange failure of thinking when someone believes that they have a right to be how they have previously been (especially when their previous behavior has been demonstrated to be foolish or harmful to themselves or others).
What if there's a bug in Mozilla's implementation at some point and DoH servers have to return a slightly different response for certain versions of Firefox? How will they achieve that?
That seems less like a fix than a bandaid applied at the wrong level of the stack. It's perfectly normal for websites to serve slightly different pages to different browser versions, but I would submit that is not a desirable property for a system to have but rather a symptom of our inability to properly standardize & implement something as complex as a browser.
It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go out to play. Thanks to matchmaking systems in games, you don't even need friends to play. You just click a button.