Top all-time · #1290
Improbable
Company blog · improbable.io/blogprogramminggames
Improbable is the company blog at improbable.io, writing about programming and games. Since 2015, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 104 times, most often “Unity’s block of SpatialOS”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Improbable's blog for posts on SpatialOS, distributed simulation and gRPC. Most comments mention the company, its products or job listings rather than the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Unity’s block of SpatialOS6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-01-10
- Create Previously Impossible Games5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-07-14
- /careers/opportunities3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-01
- What we found when we simulated the backbone of the Internet3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-24
- /2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated-the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-12
- How a team of five built a simulated world the size of Wales using SpatialOS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-18
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-22
- /games2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-22
- Distributed physics without server boundaries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-28
- Thanos: Prometheus at Scale2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-09
What Hacker News says?
What we really need is a scalable, distributed, physics pipeline so we can scale sims to 1000x realtime with billions of colliding objects. Improbable tried to do that with Spatial OS. They spent $500 million on it.[1] Read the linked article. No big game company uses it, because they cut a deal with Google so their system has to run on Google's servers. It costs too much there, and Google can turn off your air supp…
Comment linking /blog/the-future-of-the-game-engine
on “John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence”Submitted Introducing Thanos: Prometheus at Scale as a story · 177 points
HN discussionWith everyone saying unlimited PTO is a joke, my experience is the opposite. I used to work at Improbable [0], which had (and still has) an unlimited holiday policy. I regularly took 5 or 6 weeks off per year, never had a single problem with that. Managers would actually encourage people to take time off if they weren't taking enough. Now at Google we have a very generous PTO policy, but I do miss not having to do t…
Comment linking /
on “Atlassian fired me while I was taking care of my wife who is fighting cancer”Submitted Improbable announces SpatialOS Game Developer alpha as a story · 122 points
HN discussionLooking at this list, it makes you realize that basing your business on a lesser Google product is a major business risk. Consider Spatial OS.[1] This is a new back end for persistent massively multiplayer games. It's a product from a Google "partner", funded by $500M of VC money. It's only available if you use Google's "cloud". Technically, it's impressive. It's being used for a few minor game titles right now. So…
Comment linking /games
on “The Google Cemetery – A list of dead Google products and why they died”Submitted Show HN: KCP: a new low-latency, secure network stack as a story · 82 points
HN discussionMaybe I'll write a book about Improbable some day - but more likely about the mythical origin story :) That said, at two different times I managed teams that made demos, tutorials and documentation, most recently https://twitter.com/gabrielgambetta/status/92135876311796121... , but there's people much more qualified than I am to write technical stuff about SpatialOS nowadays. Region boundaries are a fascinating topi…
Comment linking /games/blog/distributed-physics-without-server-boundaries
on “Computer Graphics from Scratch (2017)”Submitted What we found when we simulated the backbone of the Internet as a story · 64 points
HN discussionImprobable | London | Visa & Relocation support | ONSITE We are Improbable and we created a new kind of distributed operating system which can power massive scale simulations, we call it SpatialOS - https://improbable.io/ . It enables developers to build massive, detailed simulations across thousands of machines in the cloud. It transforms how we look at complex systems in areas as diverse as city management, defenc…
Comment linking /about/careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2016)”Submitted Create Previously Impossible Games as a story · 60 points
HN discussionImprobable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | https://improbable.io I'm a software engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale. My team is responsible for taking SpatialOS and helping corporations and governments ask huge, "what if" questions of the real world. We're backed by A16Z and partnered with Google. In addi…
Comment linking /careers/opportunities
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2017)”Submitted Introducing kEdge: a fresh approach to cross-cluster communication as a story · 53 points
HN discussionImprobable | Machine Learning Scientists & Distributed Systems Engineers | London, UK | Full time,Onsite | Large-scale real-world simulation. Hiring across our Enterprise engineering division, focussed on building a cutting-edge distributed probabilistic inference platform. We’re building new distributed architectures to handle large scale graph processing to support inference over Bayesian networks. Current opening…
Comment linking /careers/6f6e7d8c-acb4-4d0b-9902-03822e6781bd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted Distributing a simulation over hundreds of physics engines with SpatialOS as a story · 12 points
HN discussionFor internal services communication, gRPC is a better option. For backend to web frontend, I will keep REST for a while although is tempting to have a unified system. For example this: https://improbable.io/games/blog/grpc-web-moving-past-restjs...
Comment linking /games/blog/grpc-web-moving-past-restjson-towards-type-safe-web-apis
on “REST is the new SOAP”Submitted Memory leak or just calculus? (2016) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionImprobable // London, UK // Fulltime, Onsite // (www.improbable.io) Our engineers are the heart of Improbable. We solve some of the hardest problems around distributed systems, high-performance cloud infrastructures, messaging and much more. Together we are building a world-class engineering organisation to usher in the age of Strong Simulation; our platform, SpatialOS, allows developers to build massive, richly det…
Comment linking /about/careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2016)”Submitted How a team of five built a simulated world the size of Wales using SpatialOS as a story · 9 points
HN discussionImprobable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | https://improbable.io I'm a software engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale. My team is responsible for taking SpatialOS and helping corporations and governments ask huge, "what if" questions of the real world. We're backed by A16Z and partnered with Google ( https:…
Comment linking /careers/opportunities
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2017)”Submitted Improbable announces SpatialOS as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIMPROBABLE : LONDON : Full time : ONSITE We are building the only persistent, truly distributed simulation platform capable of running billions of complex entities in real time. From economics & environmental simulations, to massively online & persistent gaming worlds; Improbable Fabric is changing the face of distributed cloud simulations. Check out all of our (21!!) jobs at http://improbable.io/life-at-improbable/…
Comment linking /life-at-improbable/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2015)”Submitted Improbable: What we found when we simulated the backbone of the entire Internet as a story · 8 points
HN discussionImprobable | Multiple Software Engineers | Full Time, ONSITE LONDON, UK ( http://improbable.io/life-at-improbable/ ) Improbable is developing an operating environment that makes building simulated worlds possible. Worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviours and interactions of millions of entities. Spaces with their own rules and properties that a multitude of people can simultaneously change, ex…
Comment linking /life-at-improbable/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)”Submitted Unity’s block of SpatialOS as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIMPROBABLE // LONDON, UK // Full-time, onsite 2016 is going to be a big year for Improbable. Help us shape the new landscape of strong simulation; solving new technical challenges surrounded by super-smart people in a fun, entertaining office. We are creating SpatialOS, a distributed, cloud-agnostic OS that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale, allowing us to ask huge, "what if" questions of the real wor…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2016)”Submitted Hello [simulated] world as a story · 6 points
HN discussionImprobable | Software Engineer | San Francisco, London | http://www.improbable.io I'm an infrastructure engineer at Improbable. We're building SpatialOS, a distributed operating system that facilitates simulation on an unprecedented scale, allowing us to ask huge, "what if" questions of the real world. Improbable is backed by A16Z and we recently announced our partnership with Google ( https://techcrunch.com/2016/12…
Comment linking /careers/opportunities
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)”Submitted Improbable: A final statement on SpatialOS and Unity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionImprobable | London / San Francisco | Full Time | ONSITE Improbable is a London-based startup with almost 200 people and a recent Series B of $500M from Softbank and Andreessen Horowitz. We have partnerships with both Google, to support innovative, upcoming game developers, and multiple established studios like Jagex. We also host a world class team of backend engineers, mainly former Google and Amazon employees, wo…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)”Submitted Improbable raises US$150m to establish a metaverse network as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
