bennyschmidt

Think it was a different green area - the Fertile Crescent, not the Sahara. Eden would have been where modern day Kuwait is. As for ancient towns in Sahara, for a long time people wondered how the desert people lived in such a harsh area - but it turns out they've just been there since it was lush. They didn't move to the desert and learn how to survive there, they're just what's left of those populations from the Sahara, and adapted to the changing conditions.

If AI does decentralization better than crypto I'm about to laugh

Level designers use tools, not really contributing at the game engine level. Long before I built Shadowvane I built a map editor in Three.js that anybody could use. If the game became profitable, in-house tooling would sophisticate and the team would be the ones shaping it. But yes if for some reason my first hire was a level designer, they could add value day 1.

I agree with you. There are far more wealthy transplants buying the houses and changing policies after being here 4 seconds than there are inbound homeless.

It took me about 3 days to build the engine, including custom physics, gravity/jumping, collision detection including raycasting, and about 3 weeks to finalize it and start working on the game. Game was released in under a month and we already have a small community. It was definitely worth spending a little up front time to avoid a service provider, and have more control over the mechanics and look/feel of the game.

By the way, you re-use a lot of the same code when you build in-house, like you said often times your 1st title is not a hit, but you improve upon a lot of that engine code and release subsequent games. Most AAA developers do this.

Everyone told me "use Unity" "the biggest mistake you can make is building your own engine". How well did that advice age?

Nobody needs Unity or Unreal.

My most recent game (playshadowvane.com) is built on 100% proprietary technology, I built everything in-house down to the physics.

Always ignore mainstream game dev advice, they are just trying to sell you products. Build as much as you can in-house, it's not only better for the look/feel of the game, but no company will be able to rug pull you later.

"It's like Slack... but with Reddit mods!" I miss the Ventrilo days

GPT 3.5 is so bad it's useless to me - for writing it's too repetitive of the same kind of jargon, for coding it's wrong way too often. The NLP is also worse, I have to be more explicit. It's just an average chat bot IMO.

GPT 4 @ $20/mo. is significantly better at everything, I use it for doing stuff in Angular lol - when you have an AI explaining the why behind everything, this over-engineered mess of a framework starts to actually make sense. Definitely nice to have around as a translator/teacher or troubleshooting assistant. Can't imagine googling for answers to problems if this gets any better. The main thing is just habit - GPT 4 is lower effort to arrive at more direct, bespoke answers.

The one feature I want is built-in prompt-splitting, so we don't have to use third-party tools. In my all-wise random person's opinion: Forget the old versions of GPT, and forget the phony ethics, and focus on the best version of this technology, sell it for $20/month, make billions and disrupt a lot of things online.

Wrong - you're assuming all apps are served over the web, the network firewall is not going to care what port you run on an app on your machine - it only applies to traffic in/out of the network. You better go tell Express.js and all the apps that use 1337 by default they're all doing it wrong, and you know something they don't know.

My external web services are of course served over HTTPS (8443) to external traffic, but there's nothing wrong at all with using 1337 for client-side apps, as I mentioned with Kdenlive (a video editing software that runs on my desktop).

1337 for everything... until I installed Kdenlive and realized they were as cool as me, so sometimes 1336 >.>

people who want to write beautiful code, spend lots of time on it, and don’t care if it actually does what it was intended to do

There was a funny React framework a while back that has all kinds of cool state management and this and that, but it renders nothing. For the developers who spend more time theorizing, migrating, refactoring, than shipping.

It's funny when people go back and forth about the time complexity of a click handler (that is debounced anyway), and they arrive at the optimal solution, but when you use the app the entire thing is super clunky lol where is the concern for time complexity of me using the product xD

lol

Nice try with the quotes hahah. But no, that is not mentioned in the whitepaper, and you are way off now: Cold storage is a cloud term for long-term storage, it has nothing to do with "cold wallets" - the term centralized exchanges use for "off-chain" assets.

Also this (from bitcoin whitepaper):

"A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory."

I'm convinced 90% of people talking about crypto don't get it.

I agree all drugs should be decriminalized.

There would have to be some market regulation around sales and storefronts, at least the level of cigarettes and alcohol in regards to the customer being of age, product packaging, quality control, what-not. There is still a problem where... if you just allow stores to sell amphetamines and opiates, even if they meet the legal requirements, the usage of those drugs will simply go up. Taking that into account, a lot of people prefer it to stay illegal. Even though what you said makes the most logical sense, people would overwhelmingly not want their kids to be able to buy it so easily, and they'd vote to keep them illegal.

Hospitals and doctors of course want them to be illegal too, so they can remain the sole legal distributors of opiates and amphetamines.

I think the cannabis dispensary model could prove out something interesting. Although psilocybin is not my thing, I see they're trying it out in a few locations.

With respect, this sounds like a kids show depiction. It's not like an opiate, nor anything like being drunk. People use it while working - coders, writers, artists, etc. in the day time, often along with coffee. I think a lot of people get this wrong about weed, because "functionally useless" is not at all how I would describe it. Some of your favorite music, video games, even coding libraries were created by stoners!

Also when you say coffee smells good and cannabis doesn't - highly subjective right? I love coffee, but some really high quality coffee smells like s*t haha (literally). There are some fruity, piney, lemony, and floral scents from fresh cannabis, just like there is a nice aroma from fresh coffee. In both cases you're talking about a flowering plant, with highly subjective smells and varying terpenoid profiles. However, note that the terepenes "pinene" "limonene" etc. in cannabis are the exact same plant terpenoids in pine trees, lemons, etc. so if you like the smell of pine trees, lemon, mangoes, roses, and other highly floral scents, you will likely also at least appreciate the smell of cannabis.

I've said too much for Hacker News!

The crypto phase only ended up strengthening institutions, because it showed everyone that you do need a central authority. Until enough public internet infrastructure exists to realistically pull off a fully peer-to-peer Internet, we will need trusts, exchanges, and platforms.

Even in competitive sports, you want a referee. If anything, this whole phase has shown me that private platforms, banks, and governments will always have a place in public societies.

From the Bitcoin whitepaper: "A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority ... The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company"

The vision of course did not include centralized authorities, it's counter to the entire purpose. We already have had digital banks, crypto is not about having digital convenience. It's not the "exchange" part that wasn't envisioned, it's the "centralized" part, because that is the same thing as a bank. That's what the SEC (rightly) made their case on with Coinbase and others. Bitconnect, FTX, Coinbase... that kind of thing was not envisioned originally and is counter to the whole concept and purpose of crypto.

the re-branding of weed as "cannabis"

Clearly "weed" is the slang term and "cannabis" is the name of the plant!

These same potheads

This seems more like branding to me :P

The ultimate denial has to be the people with ADHD, because of course the only cure for ADHD is daily meth amphetamine use. "It actually calms me down"

Cannabis "addiction" is as problematic as caffeine "addiction". I put those in quotes because neither are what typically comes to mind when a person thinks about drug addiction.

If you think quitting weed is hard, try quitting coffee if you have it every day. For me, suddenly quitting coffee results in severe migraine headaches and I can't do my job well. Extreme irritability and fatigue, it's truly a stimulant drug withdrawal. It takes about a week or so to get through it, and having green tea in its place is the only way I can reasonably taper down.

A similar kind of thing happens if you suddenly stop smoking weed when you use it daily - cold sweats, irritability, but it only lasts about a day. Anyone who has struggled with caffeine, alcohol, or amphetamine addiction (yes, including ADHD pills), who has gone through a cannabis withdrawal will be pleasantly surprised for lack of a better description at how short-lived it is. I believe that's why so many stoners exclaim "I can quit at any time if I wanted", it's not that big of a deal.

I really believe the negative effects of over-consuming caffeine (irritability, cold sweats, heart racing nervousness), and also the effect of withdrawing from caffeine, are both more severe than either with cannabis. Because caffeine is an accepted daily-use stimulant in our society, I compare it to that.

Insect memories

That time a flea saw the Eiffel Tower - gone.

For the people who think bullying isn't a problem:

Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.

Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.

2 instances are currently live, the underlying blockchain is a no-fee, peer-to-peer technology I created for decentralized content like this (Decentralized Record of Value or "DRV").

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/bennyschmidt/reverse

The "Pull Shark" one is my least favorite, I don't like when developers use their PR count as some kind of achievement, it's probably the most toxic metric (lol) but seriously, it's toxic. People do all kinds of evil, sabotogy things to preserve their contribution and PR count, and too many CTOs have admitted to me that's all they look at. Now you know why some kids are pushing 25 [pointless] PRs per day haha. It was never about code quality or productivity!

What Code Climate is doing- I would love to see GitHub badges around that. Give me a badge because I pair unit tests with React components, or because I wrote something in an elegant way. That would actually be cool/useful. It would require that GitHub hires good devs though haha! Good devs at a major tech company - that will NEVER happen.

Yes, there is a flat 10% fee for each sale to cover processing costs and service provider fees, but no listing fee or any other hidden fees, and the buyer pays shipping at checkout. So if you sold a $20 shoe, you'd receive $18. The buyer would pay ~$25 or so with tax and shipping.

The prices on products can be 1 of 3 fixed conditions: "Good" ($15), "Great" ($20), and "New" ($25).

Kickflip's payment library is called Fern (based on Square) and is designed around marketplaces, giving users the ability to spend from their current active balance, and it allows the developer to cut and track commissions. Also with Fern the end user has a dashboard they can log into to track their sales, request payouts, etc.

The payments library behind Kickflip is based on Square, who manages sales tax automatically. A buyer in Oregon will not pay sales tax, while a buyer in California will. Because Kickflip is only available in the US for now, it's pretty straightforward and automatic through Square. They also very securely manage compliance around credit card entry.

Selling on Kickflip, as with any other online selling, should be reported to the IRS by the seller as income.

Finally, Kickflip uses Shippo to generate USPS shipping labels, and they also provide nice out-the-door quotes that are surfaced to the user at checkout.

Great question, thanks for asking!