padobson

Now when I come across ‘competitive nerds’ I’m extra cautious to not appear to be too threatening to their assent to alpha nerd status

I agree with this approach.

Being highly competent and also un-ambitious has allowed me to build a very comfortable career. The ambitious people know they can use me without fear of me backstabbing them, and they more or less insulate me from the politics.

My kids eat and my job is low stress, perhaps at a cost of reaching my personal professional potential. I'm pretty happy with this arrangement.

25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.

Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.

The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.

All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.

Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...

The core usefulness of OOP is usability.

This is the reason I find it useful. To me, OOP is as much about your organization as it is about the best way to load, transform, present, edit, and store data. I think the culture of some companies lends itself to various kinds of programming, but it's the cultureless companies where OOP is most useful. The places where nobody is trying to change the world, where people work to pay their mortgages, where an executive may only work for two years and a programmer may only work for six months.

It's in an environment like that where a self-documenting, self-configuring code base with custom classes and exceptions that guide the next developer is essential.

Every developer should have two users in mind. The person using the software, and the next developer who maintains the software after you're gone. OOP is a great way to empower the second user when the only thing that will reliably outlive the developer is the code base.

I'm definitely curating as I scan my library. The first thing I look for is the potential for insight due to a host-guest paring that I may not have seen before - or that I have and it was pretty good last time.

If it's a news-driven podcast, I'll look for topical content I've been interested in lately.

After that, it's just what every topic I'm interested in at the moment.

I would also recommend very liberal use of the pause button. If the conversation is bubbling specific thoughts up in your head and those thoughts seem more interesting than the conversation - PAUSE IT. Nothing will be more relevant than your own insight on the topic. Once you've synthesized the thought, unpause and see how your thoughts compare to the podcasters. This is probably my favorite thing about the medium.

I bought a copy of Hamlet with copious footnotes a year ago, and I really enjoyed reading it - but I found the language too taxing for leisure reading. I'd return to my work and find my mental energy had been drained!

I can certainly see the value of reading Shakespeare, but I'd almost need a long vacation to devote to picking up the language.

It makes me wonder how much of my school years I wasted, because I probably could have mastered Shakespeare at the time and still have that tool in my toolbelt today.

I took 3 years off once and kept to myself and loved it.

Were you stoned the whole time?

I only ask because if you're loving what you're doing, then there's usually some modus operandi or Summum bonum driving you.

A really good high is pretty straightforward.

Most others I know about tend to require something that contributes to a community, but certainly study or meditation can be lonely yet meaningful pursuits.

Didn't think I'd see camels going through needle eyes on HN today, but here we are!

I'm with you here. I have a personal rule that the first information into my head each day comes from the Bible, which for all the criticism it gets is ultimately a story of hope in the face of many disasters. It's been a huge boon to my mental health.

Certainly those late 90s budgets all kept government expenditures below 20% of GDP.

You could also try to raise taxes without stifling growth (and thus reducing revenues), but that's an even harder technical problem to pair with a similar political problem. Personally I'd be in support of a constitutional amendment that caps Federal revenues at 20% of GDP, so I wouldn't be on board for this, but to each his own.

Take a look at page 39 in the latest budget summary[0] and see if you can find the right places to raise revenues and cut spending to eliminate the $1.148 trillion deficit for 2023.

[0]https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2022-BUD/pdf/BUDG...

I read Gleick's The Information[0] a few years ago and was riveted. Do you have any suggestions for further reading if I wanted to take a hobbyist interest?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_...

There was a surplus from 1998-2001[0], so in living memory of most people reading this.

It's worth mentioning this happened under a Democratic president and Republican congress, not far from what we have now.

[0]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

Edit: added citation

For the curious, here's the debt limit bill that passed the Republican-led House of Representatives at the end of April, HR 2811:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2811

Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?

This is my answer. How do you know you've learned something? If you're learning how to build something, you know you've learned it when you can build it.

Fiction is a little tougher, but I've found conversations with my wife help me here. If I can make her as interested in the story as I am, then I must be retaining enough of the important points to say I'm absorbing enough of what I'm reading.

of course one with deliberate and heavy homoerotic overtones

Is it? Or was platonic affection more socially acceptable at the time?

I don't have an answer, but I've seen solid arguments in lit crit circles for both.

This makes sense. Prices are literally encoding information - first the demand for the item being priced and then the cost of supplying the item. The price of beef is signaling a lot of phenomena including consumer tastes, weather, costs for feed, slaughter, and transportation, etc.

You could argue that central banks putting non-market pricing on the money supply distorts the information that a market-priced money supply would transmit effectively - and that's why all these crises seem to originate in the finance sector.

Yes, absolutely correct. I'd say the Showtime Lakers are the poster child for fast pace in the 80s.

This is why I included the number of teams. PPG has fluctuated across eras, but total points has gone up over time.[0]

Talent dilution in the expansion from 23 to 30 teams undoubtedly had an effect on pace in the late 90s/2000s.

There's probably a good formula for determining the value of a point across eras, but I'm not going to waste too many brain cells on it.

[0]https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_total...

Not sure how deep you intended this joke to go, but the NBA had 23 franchises in 1980 [0] that scored 108 points per game[1].

Now there are 30 franchises scoring 114 points per game.

If you look at the points per game stats, scoring dipped as the number of teams expanded, but rule changes, officiating changes and increases in talent over time led to more points being scored.

So a 1980 point was almost certainly worth more than a 2022 point.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980%E2%80%9381_NBA_season

[1]https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_per_g...

edits: typos

This. It was all I could think about while reading the piece. The US Navy is capable of making the seas safe, but under current political conditions I don't even see THAT happening forever.

To make this work, the air force would almost certainly have to get in on the act, and that makes even less geopolitical sense.

Massive airships flying 90/km an hours are LESS susceptible to blockades than cargo ships? I think I'll need a little more explanation than that. Seems like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher would be more than enough to bring one down.

I would bet the factors that lead to following John Carmack highly correlate with the factors that lead to opening an HN account.

Have you spoken to anyone at Steam or GOG or the like and just asked them for a list of Indie games that don't sell? Obviously, one reason they don't sell is that they're bad games, but if you can filter those out, then you've got a pretty decent list of developers that are probably looking for another revenue source.

I like the idea! There's clear value for Indie devs who need a sweetener to get people to play, and there's clear value for gamers that like to try a lot of different games but need to control costs.

+1 for getting away from the screen. I've stopped buying eBooks for exactly this reason. A glass of wine or bourbon and a book with a soft lamp is a much better way to power down at the end of the day then doom scrolling or vegetating to Netflix.

It is a lonely thing though, so YMMV when considering your spouse or roommates.

I identify with this.

I heard somewhere that certain high performing folks only need five hours of sleep a night. I tried this for a week and it was a disaster. Damage to work. Damage to relatonships, etc.

But it did lead me to a years long experiment to discover my limits for sleep (while also struggling to understand how diet and caffeine intake interact).

I just finished a year where I aimed for 49 hours of sleep per week (5 nights of 6 hours, 2 nights of 8 hours, 1 or 2 naps of 1.5-3 hrs), and after 11+ months I started having the same problems I had from the initial 5hr/night experiment that last only a week.

So I've accepted I'm not a 35/hr a week guy. I might be a 45/hr a week guy, with precise diet/exercise/caffeine dosing, but in the meantime I'm comfortable accepting decent productivity at 55/hr a week.

I like that the title implies that Gunpei Yokoi[0] is God.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi

It's also worth mentioning that in order to increase your status in any of these networks, you're going to have to serve the central nodes in some way. So if you're trying to grow your social media following, eventually you're going to have to get the attention of an influencer who will in turn rub off some of their influence on you. If you're trying to increase your capital, you're going to need to provide value to some influential capitalist. If you want to increase your political power, you're going to have to be appointed/elected to a role in some powerful political institution.

I could be wrong, but I don't think cloud-driven graphics processing is dying. The knowledge gained by the dev team making it work will serve them well going forward, in addition to the marketing considerations being discussed.

I think it's unlikely I'll read a wiser comment on the internet today.

I guarantee a black market would emerge immediately

FTFY

But seriously, this experiment is already playing out in NYC[0]. Every marginal % you tax a product, you push some number of consumers into the black market. At some point, the black market reaches a critical mass where the thing you're taxing might as well be banned.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=new+yor...

John Carmack disagrees with your rationale: "As long as people are buying it, it means they’re enjoying it" [0]

[0]https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/07/id-softwares-john-car...