HN user
Truly understand your motivation
Sad to say I've only recently come to this realization. It applies to pretty much anything, whether it's building a business or exercise or learning to draw. And if your motivation can't sustain you long-term, change your perspective so that you have a motivation that will let you see it through. "Make something cool and get rich" doesn't take you very far once you step back for a moment.
Agreed. This is my preferred setup, and over the years I've bought several of the MS ergonomic keyboards the GP mentioned.
With the separate numpad you can position it just above the mousepad so it's still easily accessible, but you have minimal movement distance between typing and using the mouse. To me it's the best of both worlds, and it's strange to me that it isn't more common to sell the two as a package. I suppose the assumption is that people who want numpad will just buy a 90% keyboard and numpad separately.
The sidebar link on the Minecraft wiki taught me about the extension "Indie Wiki Buddy," https://getindie.wiki/ which among other things prioritizes non-Fandom search results.
To me, it wasn't just moderating adult content, it was the way they went about it. They used an AI to review every existing post, which resulted in many false positives, and deleted everything it deemed inappropriate.
I was drawing a lot at the time, and many of my portraits with no nudity at all were deleted. That was my sign to leave.
It seems weird to me that the article lists several gamified apps without mentioning advertising. It seems obvious to me that gamified apps like Duolingo are incentivesed to keep eyeballs glued to screens mostly because advertisers pay per view, and strange not to mention this as a reason why we see so much of it in this space. Maybe the author thought it was too obvious to mention.
Although I agree, most times where I mix any of these without parentheses I end up having to explain it either in code review or when somebody does a `git blame` a couple months later. Rather than waste everyone's time explaining it, it's easier to just use the parentheses since it's what many/most people expect and everyone else can read it well enough.
Agreed, with the caveat that you also need a policy/culture that the escape hatch should be avoided whenever possible and the low-code work should not be done by developers.
Whenever I've discussed this, the common theme is that business users continue to request features that would be easily achieved in the low-code platform being used. It's hard to blame them; that's been standard procedure for them for their entire career.
But if you're not strict about saying "no", you still end up writing all the same methods but now on top of that you have a GUI that's not providing any value. Or maybe worse, your developers end up maintaining all of the low-code stuff too when they could have just written the code, switching context pointlessly and (probably, depending on the platform) not using source control.
This xkcd seems relevant also: https://xkcd.com/303/
One thing that jumps out at me is the assumption that compile time implies wasted time. The linked Martin Fowler article provides justification for this, saying that longer feedback loops provide an opportunity to get distracted or leave a flow state while ex. checking email or getting coffee. The thing is, you don't have to go work on a completely unrelated task. The code is still in front of you and you can still be thinking about it, realizing there's yet another corner case you need to write a test for. Maybe you're not getting instant gratification, but surely a 2-minute compile time doesn't imply 2 whole minutes of wasted time.
It's for this reason that I appreciate this article, even though it has a (playful, well-intentioned) negative tone toward Godot which is a project I donate to.
This is wonderful criticism! It's thoughtful and well-researched. Hell, even I'm inspired to finally dive into Godot's internals, which I've yet to do despite following the project for several years. I hope this inspires even more contribution and constructive criticism.
Back when I decided it was time to add a scripting language, Perl and Python seemed like the obvious choices, and in my mind were equally good options. I asked my best friend which I should choose, and he more or less said, "You can't go wrong with either one, but when you ask for help Perl people are assholes and Python people are nice."
I can't confirm his thoughts on Perl and I haven't interacted much with Ruby, but the Python community is definitely welcoming and patient in my experience. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a significant factor in Python's prevalence over Perl, Ruby, or anything else.
This is how I met most of my current friends, as well. I was at a local bar one night on what turned out to be trivia night. There were a few of us who didn't know anybody well but had seen each other at the bar before, so we decided to form a team to win some of our tab back.
Fast forward 8 or so years. We no longer do trivia, but get together just about every week along with the siblings, childhood friends, girlfriends, and wives that have joined us over the years.
It's a little strange to think of how different my life would be had I not been at that bar on that night, but that's how these things work: you put yourself in a situation where something social is going on, and all that's standing between you and making some new friends is saying "yes."
Chromebooks that are a couple years old seem to run pretty cheap, especially refurbished. Installing Linux is simple enough, although some (all?) have non-standard key layouts which can require some additional setup to get working comfortably.
I've had a few of these over the years that I take to coffee shops/bars to work. It's nice not to feel nervous about a $1000+ investment just because the server is coming around to refresh my water.
I highly doubt the phone and PC markets will converge any time soon.
Apple has made seemingly made the most progress toward this and it isn't hard to imagine someone plugging their iPhone in to a screen when they arrive at work and resuming their Excel spreadsheet with the connected keyboard, no different than the company-issued laptop today. But I don't see what incentive Apple has to make that a reality when they can keep selling people two separate $1000+ devices.
Edit: I would love to be proven wrong, so any opinions/examples to the contrary are very welcome.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347
I was a little sad to read that Mills in fact lives in Delaware, not Nebraska. I always had a sneaking suspicion that this comic was NTP-related.
As a fan of Lua, one complaint not mentioned in the article but that I think is relevant if you're starting to learn the language is that minor releases often contain breaking changes. This is fine - the maintainers can number things however they want I guess - but can be a bit annoying if you're expecting to read the latest 5.4 reference manual and then write an embedded script for something using a different 5.x runtime.
This is mostly relevant because when people talk about Lua's speed, they're usually talking about LuaJIT [1] which (iirc) was based on 5.1 and backported many 5.2 features.
So, if you're someone who's decided to use Lua for a specific use case, you may want to see if your target specifies a specific Lua version (ex. Roblox, LÖVE, PICO-8, OpenResty are mentioned in this thread and all use either LuaJIT or a subset of 5.1), or if you expect to need the performance of LuaJIT in the future.
Edit: formatting
The friction in buying games these days is so low, I don't understand how this would result in more units shipped for any publisher that chooses to use this.
If you're "pirating" a game, I imagine (because this is why I pirated games in the pre-Steam days) it's because you can't afford to buy it or you refuse to give the publisher/developer your money on principle. Either way, you're not a potential customer. So sure, this may result in less emulation but not necessarily higher sales.
You obviously know this since you linked a Swift bindings project, but for others reading who may not be aware: Godot officially supports multiple languages ("GDScript, C#, VisualScript, and C++ and C via its GDNative technology"[1]), but other languages are supported by the community.
In particular, a sibling comment mentions Kotlin. The docs[2] link to a project that adds Kotlin bindings https://github.com/utopia-rise/godot-kotlin-jvm
[1]https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
[2]https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...
https://archive.ph/YEv1x This archive from 03:58 has several of the images.
I once had a "Lead Frontend Developer" who mostly did HTML and CSS (and was quite good at it) and could get by with jQuery to do various visual effects. We had a large contract to maintain a site that used AngularJS, and he convinced all the higher-ups that writing all the frontend code was my job because "Angular is more of a backend thing."
I don't think I'd consider this guy a frontend developer given that he couldn't be bothered to learn a framework that falls within his job description. But we also had a UX team to actually design the visuals, so I don't think I'd put him in the designer camp with them either. What was he? "Lead CSS Guy?"
Yep, it sounds like a (semi?)unique structure is required for each target virus.
A specific combination of nucleotides is first modeled in simulation to be the correct size to handle the target virus
I've tried a similar setup with a Novation Launchpad that I had bought to function as a sort of Stream Deck before this product existed (but without the little displays of course.) It's just a MIDI controller, so I could use a [piano-style] keyboard too.
Although my normal keyboard does still have function keys and a numpad, I like being able to map annoying shortcuts to individual buttons. For example, Photoshop's "Merge Visible Layers" (default Ctrl+Shift+E) is hell on my wrist, so I map it to a button on the MIDI controller.
It's also nice having extra buttons to access F13-F24 for whatever behavior I want since virtually nothing uses them by default.
Thank you for the recommendation. I didn’t really understand why I should care about the game from videos/screenshots/marketing text, but after reading this description it was an instant purchase.
While I enjoyed what I've read of the series so far, I think it's a valid criticism that some books read more like a love letter from a fan than a history or notes from the developers.
If you're considering reading some of these but are specifically interested in the developer's point of view, I suggest reading some reviews and/or a bit about the [author] so you know what you're getting into.
For example: I liked the ZZT book very much, but that may be because I was briefly involved in the ZZT community in the early 2000s; it feels good to have a part of my history written down. If you've just read the Spelunky book (written by the developer Derek Yu) and are hoping the ZZT book is something similar from Tim Sweeney, you [may] be disappointed.
A true classic, thanks for reminding me of this article.
If I remember correctly, the "hacking manuals" section is what inspired my reading for much of middle school. I wonder how many other 12-year-olds turned in a book report on Neuromancer to a horrified teacher because of this post?
For anyone seeing the copyright claim and wondering what this was, it seems to be a BBC documentary called Can You Feel It - How Dance Music Conquered the World. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11719632/
I came here to say this as well. I'm glad these libraries (and Ludum Dare!) are encouraging people to explore programming.
Thank you for mentioning Realmz. I played a demo sometime around '97 and have been recently been hoping to find it again, but could never remember the name of the game or developer. I'm glad my search is finally over - looks like one of my projects for this weekend will be finding an OS 9 emulator.
Thank you, that's good to know. I always thought it was normal and people other than me just got used to the pulse noise.
Great idea; I'll add it to my "read later" folder.
Joking aside, this does sound like something I'd actually use and the formatting on the resulting document is very pretty. And just to let you know, your "Buy us a coffee" link gets jumbled at lower screen widths.
I agree with this, also based on my experience working at an ad agency. Particularly the part about team members with different expertise finding better ideas and execution strategies.
I'll buy that on average, brainstorming is an inefficient way to improve the quality of a product, especially if all members of the team are reasonably knowledgeable about the subject. But as the article mentions, that's often not the case.
It may not always or even often result in a better product, but there's definitely value in finding those outlier projects where you can save time and money with an approach that would be obvious to someone with more familiarity with the subject. It's hard to know if this is the case beforehand, so it may be a sensible default to hold a short brainstorming session for any project so your team at least has the opportunity to identify areas for improvement.
Edit: formatting