Garoof

"A gaming platform doesn’t have to compete with iOS on its own terms, but it does have to at least match it in the areas that are relevant to gaming."

I wonder if this is true. I'd like to think that, if you're doing a game console, you don't necessarily have to match Apple at "ownership experience". Like, you can maybe make up for that by putting, say, buttons, on your console. Or Pokeymans.

Never heard of him,

"The context is that I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here and had sent out a mass e-mail with photographs of the goats attached to illustrate that a) I had goats, and b) it was good."

but he seems like an awesome guy :D

Thanks for the link.

My impression is that it tends to be more about reaching out to women and making sure they know they're welcome and less about inviting women because they are women. (Like, putting some effort into making women submit talks to your conference and then treating their submissions like all other submissions.)

That makes sense if you suspect that other people spend a lot of time making women feel unwelcome and that you're going to miss out on some great talks if you don't do anything about it. I don't think it is always unreasonable to suspect something like that.

Maybe if it's only about getting some bug fixed as soon as possible. But I'd say communicating the "MongoDB is terrible" part of it to the public is pretty valuable too. Because nice to know and the hype doesn't mention that so much.

I'm sure we can come up with a best way to go about things. I'm not really cool with the "oh Mike" part of it. But I think it's mostly okayish. Certainly a lot more okay than the bug.

"(how many people you think really empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?)"

I don't know that I prefer people going through the motions of hating on each other. It's not necessarily honest and genuine just because it's unpleasant.

On SimCity and that, Will Wright tends to think of his creations as toys rather than games.

'hell even some BluRay menus could be described as having "gameply."'

Which should be a pretty sure sign that "can be described as having gameplay" isn't that meaningful.

(The problem with arguing semantics on the internet is that everyone starts obsessing about technicalities. Quake, SimCity, Minecraft and Blu-ray menus, all qualify as technically being games. And so technically qualifying as being a game is clearly irrelevant to anything interesting. It is obviously not what people usually mean by "is it a game?" and such.)

"People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing."

Yeah. It's like these guys totally don't get that there are "individuals who either can’t make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game."

People don't ignore that fact.

(I like _why and I don't have any problem with the attention he receives or anything. But I did kind of agree with some of the "that's rubbish" responses to the "first" stuff.)

I'm reasonably sure I won't agree with you on any definition of art. But, uh, here's some stuff. I may-or-may-not think of some of it as art. I do think it's stuff that keeps the coding world from being some dreadful place of "craftsmanship" and "professionalism" and things.

The miniKanren presentations are wonderful. They're all "and now let's run this stuff backwards. Because because." http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren

Meta-circular evaluators. Page 13 of http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m6hoOelZH8&list=ECE18841... http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h7 ("After completing the preceding exercise, use the interpreter to run a copy of the interpreter, and use the copy to run another copy of the interpreter. Repeat this process to see how many levels deep it will go before the system grinds to a halt." :D)

SICP opens with this: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html I think it's lovely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra "One of Dijkstra's sidelines was serving as Chairman of the Board of the fictional Mathematics Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series."

Also obfuscated code and some esolang stuff, I guess.

I remember some competition that was about creating and hiding some bug that did some particular thing in code that appeared to do something else, in a way that seemed (if discovered) like it was a mistake. That was cute.

Oh, and maybe http://sigbovik.org/ Maybe not.

Usually when someone writes a piece on taking gaming seriously, I get the impression that the author does not take gaming very seriously, finds some other issues to be pretty serious, and thinks that to take gaming seriously is a matter of relating it to those issues.

Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more seriously.

Yeah. Was trying to read that as "more free from social and clutter"...

... and also get introduced faster?

"Is that confusion intended by the article author?"

Probably not. Most everything can be misunderstood, but it's not really a particularly confusing paragraph.

It's a reading comprehension thing. We're obviously going back in time, to some kind of cause, at "Her crime?". And then "Shortly thereafter" follows the sentence about the tweet and there is no reason to assume it refers to some earlier sentence.

"Scala is a pretty terrible language to be learning it though."

Pretty good course though. If you want something like that, maybe because you find it helpful to have exercises with deadlines and things, then I'd reccomend the course. But if you have some alternatives you wanna recommend, that'd be awesome.

For Haskell, the only similar thing I know of is the Channel 9 stuff with Erik Meijer. And that's cool stuff. But you're much more on your own there than in a Coursera course. So if you want that kind of thing it might not be a good match.

Heh. When I first checked out Scala, what I liked about it was that it dealt with a lot of the stuff that annoyed me when going from Smalltalk to Java :)

> I see a lot of mentions of Smalltalk on this page yet 'Smalltalk' doesn't appear on the Pharo home page.

Huh? Are we looking at the same page? On the home page I see "Pharo's goal is to deliver a clean, innovative, free open-source Smalltalk-inspired environment."

(Note that the HN link is not to the home page, but to the 2.0 download page.)

> Closure (the construct)

Of course, if we wanna, we can start getting confused right here. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html...

(also also, http://www.4clojure.com/ and the "So wait, I can't buy cheap real estate here?" part :)

"Of course if you could buy the original games directly from their authors it would be a different story, but you can't! Is there something I'm missing here?"

If we decide that games lose all their value the moment the authors are no longer directly involved, then they're probably going to lose some value when the authors are directly invloved too?

I'd say "freedom of expression" serves kind of the same purpose as "political correct" on this one though.

This is not "freedom of expression" being under attack. It is, at most, about let's maybe not so much invite guys like that to talk at conferences.

So, on a "some other language does like so" note, in D you might write it kind of like this:

    allocate_memory();
    scope(failure) free_memory();
    setup_interrupts();
    scope(failure) teardown_interrupts();
    setup_registers();

If no one raises a counter point, maybe the downvotes are not really about disagreeing with the point you made? Maybe it's more like, people don't like your tone, or they don't think that fun post about fun with AR drones is the time and place for dealing with the issue of Clojure syntax and aesthetics.

The "deeply personal story" is about shit that went down in public. Things you might have seen happening because you saw her speak at a conference. It is perfectly reasonable to "attach" it to any "speaking on conferences"-stuff.

"We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion."

He's asking for free books about programming. When someone answers with a book, it's super-easy to verify that it is a book, is about programming, and is free.

It might be a bad fit for SO because there isn't one answer that is "more correct" than all other answers and so on, or something like that. But it is not a question that leads to arguing and extended discussion. It's a question that leads to people posting links to free books about programming.

So like, it might not be arbitrary and it might be that all the right questions are being closed, but it looks like a bunch of deletionists flailing about, knocking shit over. And it looks like that because there's this canned "reason" for closing a question, and it is often a poor match for the question being closed. Not because people don't get that SO is "not meant for discussions".

I don't really feel that way, and it's not really something I've spent a lot of time looking into, but. There is one thing that bothers me and if you feel like talking about that that'd be cool.

Most of time there's some example of people making money with open source it comes off a little like "you can do open source development and have it play into this other thing that makes money". The other thing is often support or some "service" that people can use your product with.

And it's easy to see how that makes sense for something like a Linux distro (although you'd still ultimately want it to not need "service"). But, like, if I was Cosmigo and had made Pro Motion, I would not be sure how to go about it if I wanted to open source it and make money from that. Surely no one wants a pixel art tool that requires "service", and so on.

Might just be that I haven't seen the right examples because I haven't looked into it that much because I'm not actually that interested in this kind of thing. But yeah, it is one thing that has been bothering me, so.

Note that my response was mainly to the "hard to understand because questionmarks" part of your post. I think that's a pretty weak argument, and that being clear about which part of the code depends on the ifs easily makes up for weird syntax or whatever. The "that is goofy, this is mature" stuff is ridicilous.

I get that there are other reasons for sometimes choosing if-statements instead of if-expressions in cases like this. But then it quickly comes down to a bunch of technicalities (language can't do this, debugger can't do that, ...), and really, even if we're talking C++ stuff only I would not agree with it as general advice.

I like the last one better. I think it reads more like "assign one of these values to sides[i]" and less like "do one of these three things".

"By this latter I mean, if you change the code a little bit, you don't have to rewrite it; it looks basically the same."

I'd say that's kind of the point though. The first one would look "basically the same" if in the last else it assigned to sides[j] instead of sides[i]. In the last one it would look very different if it was about "doing stuff" rather than choosing which value should go to sides[i].

"What is being parodied - the experience of Windows users encountering the peculiarities of Linux - is not particularly interesting, nor is it particularly worthy of ridicule. Such stories tend to be about people giving Linux a legitimate chance and running up against technical unfamiliarity."

Yeah, that was what bothered me about the post. The piece that it links to, the example of what is being parodied, is some guy giving Linux a shot because he's tired of Windows breaking all the time. Responding with an attack on Windows seems like missing the point pretty badly. Windows not being very good was like the premise to begin with.

Also note that lots of the stuff in the "State of Linux" piece is about stuff that is clearly wrong/buggy. It is a little funny when Branko goes "people come from Windows to Linux expecting it to behave the way they are used to, and that was the main point." Cause then the whole thing comes off kind of like it's one guy complaining about segfaults and disappearing GUI-elements, and another responding with "you're just expecting them to behave differently because you come from Windows."

It's a nice post/example. Obviously useful, not that trivial, or at least something you might not have thought of doing if you're just beginning to grok macros, but simple enough so that you can do a pretty detailed explanation of it without going on forever.

Mentioning that there is a `for` form might be nice, just so it's clear that you don't have to do (something like) this in order to do list comprehension in Clojure. Kind of disagree with aredington's 2nd and 3rd points though. Those might be fine things to write some stuff about, but I don't know that that post really needs them.

Like, I don't think every post on macro stuff must deal with "macros and evaluation". It's an interesting topic and all, but as it is I like that the post is more like, here's a macro and look how we can use it to turn code like this into code like that. Without getting into every topic that that touches on.

"and therefore keep it out of the package manager"

That is not much like my reasoning. Taking something out of the package manager does not generally make it so that it is taken care of by the same thing that takes care of TF2 being up to date. Making Steam handle Steam updates does.

Once you have introduced Steam as a thing that handles updates for you, moving Steam updates from package manager to Steam is clearly not exactly the same issue as removing things from the package manager in general.

(I mean, it sort of is if "the package manager should handle as many things as possible" is your goal. It is not if "as few things as possible should handle package manager-like things" is your goal.)

"By that reasoning, if you have one package on your system that's not managed by the package manager, you should discard the package manager entirely."

No?

Something like "I want to play TF2, so I should update Steam and TF2" is a reasonably common thing and it makes sense to want one thing to handle both of them.

"You should discard the package manager entirely" does not follow from that.