Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 99 posts

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#71

Post by stordoff »

droithomme wrote: post #58
johnpowell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroin is very good. I'm having a hard time coming up with something better that could be used for prolonged periods of time as efficiently. Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin…

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing that. Closest I've gotten was Valium given by my oral surgeon as part of some tooth extraction. Wow, Valium is great. I would eat it every day if I had access to it. As a result, I stay totally away from everything. I have back problems that qualify me for opioids, but based on my Valium experience, there's no way I wouldn't go all in. So I manage the pain other ways, exerc…

Based on my experiences with benzodiazapines (diazepam, tamazepam), there's definitely a feeling of "More of this would be _great_", even at very lose doses when I'm not really noticing it doing a lot else. With weak opioids (codeine, tramadol), I've never really noticed the same, even though they induce a far more noticeable high-like effect.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#72

Post by TaylorGood »

miguelmota wrote: post #4

HQ Trivia was great at first but it got boring fast, especially when they replaced host Scott Rogowsky and did the show multiple times a day instead of every few days which created more hype. The sudden death of cofounder Colin Kroll was also a bizarre event to add to the mix.

There was a hot three weeks where I was all about it, and told anyone around me to watch or download it. Your points, along with primarily never making it past the third or fourth question was why I stopped. Was easy to forget about.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#73

Post by [deleted] »

droithomme wrote: post #58
johnpowell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroin is very good. I'm having a hard time coming up with something better that could be used for prolonged periods of time as efficiently. Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin…

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing that. Closest I've gotten was Valium given by my oral surgeon as part of some tooth extraction. Wow, Valium is great. I would eat it every day if I had access to it. As a result, I stay totally away from everything. I have back problems that qualify me for opioids, but based on my Valium experience, there's no way I wouldn't go all in. So I manage the pain other ways, exerc…

[deleted]

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#74

Post by rahuldottech »

droithomme wrote: post #58
johnpowell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroin is very good. I'm having a hard time coming up with something better that could be used for prolonged periods of time as efficiently. Cocaine is great, not as great as heroin and cocaine has some drawbacks (sniff). Like everyone knows you are on it. And you can only snort so much before you get nose bleeds. And I have been that guy where my right nostril starts pouring out blood so I snort with my left. Heroin…

That's very interesting, thanks for sharing that. Closest I've gotten was Valium given by my oral surgeon as part of some tooth extraction. Wow, Valium is great. I would eat it every day if I had access to it. As a result, I stay totally away from everything. I have back problems that qualify me for opioids, but based on my Valium experience, there's no way I wouldn't go all in. So I manage the pain other ways, exerc…

I have friends who say marijuana has helped them a lot with chronic pain, might be worth a shot.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#77

Post by vl »

cletus wrote: post #5

This should be surprising to precisely no one. And this is nothing against HQ Trivia (although the founder seemed like a tool [1]) but any sort of format has a shelf life. Long-lasting shows like Jeopardy are outliers. The more typical case is where a given show will play for a few years, people will get bored with it and it'll be replaced by something else. That's really all that happened here. HQ Trivia had a novel…

> Just like Alex Trebek is probably a big part of the reason for Jeopardy's longevity, I think Scott was a big part of the reason for HQ Trivia's popularity.

Scott was a great host, but Matt and Anna are both great hosts as well. I don’t think anything will happen to Jeopardy, since it’s not a host-centered game in the first place. There are examples of shows pulling off a host switch successfully: new hosts of The Great British Bake-off aka The Great British Baking Show are actually quite better than the original team.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#78

Post by gamblor956 »

jedberg wrote: post #41
jonesetc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was broadcast on ABC nation wide instead of the typical contracted station for any given local market, right? Normally the tournaments are broadcast during normal time slots on the usual market station. Definitely makes sense that the mouse would have insisted on a bit of extra coverage for something I bet they paid a lot for, but I would be hesitant to give that much weight for determining the direction of the st…

Yeah, it was on prime time. But the point was that once Alex is gone, there won't be a strong force to keep them from doing that to the regular show. I just hope I'm wrong.

Jeapardy has always done shows like that over its many decades on the air.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#79

Post by roland-s »

DevX101 wrote: post #10

Any write-up on their tech stack? I imagine it's not an easy problem at the height of their popularity to scale so many live video feeds with real-time interactions.

I found a job posting of theirs a while back while trying to figure out their tech stack. It required experience in docker, redis, node, can't remember what else if anything. Given the on demand nature of the game you can kind of imagine the kind of microservice architecture built from those components. For example each container handles X number of users, redis cache has a copy of game state/user state, each round questions/answers are handled and losers are kicked out so load is progressively reduced through the course of a game until only a winner remains. Most likely cloud was used to spin up containers right before trivia starts so you only pay for compute while a game is in progress then spin everything down.

Re: HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

#80

Post by dep_b »

untog wrote: post #54
DevX101 wrote: post #10

Any write-up on their tech stack? I imagine it's not an easy problem at the height of their popularity to scale so many live video feeds with real-time interactions.

If you have money (and they did) it’s actually not too difficult to solve. There are services out there to scale both video streaming[1] and websockets[2] for you. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ [2] https://pusher.com/

Ultra low latency that allows real-time interaction is really hard to scale. I have built an HQ clone and the only right way in terms of latency seemed using WebRTC.
Post reply on HN