skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It all depends on what you consider a "classic" game. I can't play NES games anymore. But I still have fun with SNES games. I keep my SNES around to play games that I consider classic: Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Castlevania 4, Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6.

Also, if you like talking and reading about classic games, you should visit: http://www.gamespite.net
same here. I rarely go the new page section. Sometimes i navigate to 1-2 top pages. Thats about it. I definitely think there should be way to show the new article. Maybe we should have a page called upcoming/new pages that shows latest ones.
Dungeons and Dragons, while not quite a gateway drug into books for me, was sure close. I read before D&D, but I read after D&D.

I know exactly why I read newspapers: my fourth grade English teacher taught me the joy of political cartoons, and to have the context for the jokes you need to know most of the rest of the paper. Dad and I read together at the kitchen table.
My one issue with Dropbox is that they own the encryption key and, to the best of my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong), they do not provide a feature to let me define my own locally stored key. If someone gets hold of their encryption keys (or worse yet, if there's a single encryption key), then, potentially, my data can be compromised.
you are forgetting that we are talking about a startup here...they can't afford $12K for a designer.

And who cares about consistency..it's just something to use for a few months until the site gets profitable to get someone good. You just don't want something that looks like crap. And you can always just use the one person whose design you picked for more work.

And it's not like you are guaranteed good stuff from a local designer...plenty of them are worse than the "kids" at 99 designs.
but he took the risk, then immediately left the company. He tried but didn't stay to take actions/accept the problems.

(Disclaimer: I'm assuming Rose left, and wasn't ousted out)
The real money during the lunch rush is definitely not made on liquor.
I genuinely interpreted this headline as that the Digg community had redesigned tanks to clear road traffic. The article was interesting but not nearly as interesting as I was expecting.
Harlan Ellison will say goodbye this weekend: he's dying
Customer Development in One Sketch
are we talking about integrated circuit chips? Because everyone in the EE/SOC world mocks the VLSI monkeys. Its a $120/hour CAD jockey job. It's an entirely different skillset and mindset to adapt an ISA to hardware than is to make sure there's no overlap.
I've actually never seen an ad, and I have a pretty complete profile online. I didn't even know they put ads on the user pages until a few weeks ago when I saw them on somebody else's.
<plug>I hired some pro designers for my site: http://www.hobsonfiles.com </plug>

One thing to keep in mind: No matter how good your design is, it is no match for an ugly site with a really useful feature..
>y children like the George R. R. Martin books

How old are your children?

They're great books but extremely...non kid-safe.
When a house is sold at a loss that particular stream of mortgage payment dries up entirely. Essentially all of the non-paid off loans had their collateral (houses) sold and were declared closed. At the point no money will ever flow into the asset ever again. It's dead.
Many people consume insects today; it's just not very popular in western cultures.
one thing to recognize is that modern games generally have a lot of high-cost content. this is stuff that teams of 100+ people have to work on for 2+ years to make. so in that sense it would be really surprising if modern games didn't appear substantially better to us than in the past, when teams were tiny by comparison
Reading this rings very true to home for myself and I completely understand your situation having gone through and similarly going through the same.

I used to live and breathe my start-up, be passionate about the startup scene and thought my project was on the fast track. Debts mounted up and deciding who to pay first / last is somewhat stressful. I personally focused on paying the areas that would potentially come back to haunt me in my career first, I then restructured and negotiated settlement amounts. The surprising aspect for me was that negotiation is entirely possible, the small amount that firms expect to receive from insolvency is significantly lower than a settlement plan with yourself.

I won't go over my specifics as this is about you, but if you ever want to chat or just some advice in how to deal with this on a personal / mental level let me know.
One of the coolest programs I ever made was a tic-tac-toe with an AI that learned the optimal strategy by playing itself over and over. I wrote that in the process of learning Lisp, which made writing the program easy, and I got to exercise a lot of the language features.

What was so cool about it was watching it learn, and realizing that unless I programmed it to make random mistakes, it would settle for sub-optimal strategies.
I was being ironic.
I got my apple 2 out of storage, and my 11 year old son got addicted to Apple Galaxian. Was one of my favorite games, I thought it was interesting that even though he played modern xbox and wii games he could get so wrapped up in a game that old. Comes down to solid game mechanics and playability I guess.
If you believe the city shouldn't zone space for commercial vs. residential use, I agree with you. Otherwise, in for a penny, in for a pound: the state has created (for good reasons or bad) an artificial scarcity in retail space, and people who exploit public property to skirt the resulting premium are, in fact, free-riders.
Facebook doesn't have a 20%-time /program/. That doesn't mean people don't have side-projects on their own time, or even multiple things they're doing at work. Plus they have regular hackathons which sometimes develop into full projects.
> so that a company with a history of payment fraud or other problems can't simply go bank to bank as each account is closed

but he's not a company. and if he starts another one he can list somebody (or pretty much anybody) else as principal if I understand correctly:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070909074529AA...
Zelda: Link to the Past
i play all mario games on and off through the years. mario bros, mario world, mario 64. the mechanics and "feel" are impeccable, like how tactile the control is
Love it. This is the same thing I was thinking, but I had only gotten around to thinking that the major reason for bad programming was deadlines.
I think programmers should focus on the long term, good serves you decades, bad code is one time use.
Ignore the extra 20% time it takes to get right.
Definitely.

A designer does more than just make pretty pictures.

Ugly or not (the art, not the designer), a designer actually will help design the usability of the site at the same time so that you can grow.

A good designer knows where to put the little calls-to-action and the email signup forms and all that so that you can meet your business goals.

It's definitely worthwhile to get a professional designer.
Customers don't read your code.

No. But the people hired by your customers do.

And your customers are keenly aware of that, because when you're gone from the scene they are either going to have to:

A) hire someone who can read your code, or

B) hire someone to rewrite it all from scratch.

They probably don't really know how to solve problem A, and they almost certainly can't afford to solve problem B even if they knew how, which they probably don't.

This is a vitally important consideration. It doesn't matter how elegant your code is if your customer can't figure out how to hire anyone to read it. If you solve your customer's entire problem in one super-elegant line of lets-call-it-Haskell, but your successor doesn't know Haskell and cannot maintain that line, he will recommend replacing your solution with a Blub app. Then your customer will tell all his friends that (a) "Haskell sucks because it is nonstandard" and (b) "Blub is the greatest language in the world because there are lots of certified Blub programmers around".

This is why it takes so much time and energy to get new platforms off the ground.
Adobe: Plenoptic lenses
I don't get it. You're a Delaware C-Corp. You don't owe anything, do you?

Don't take out a loan. Don't restructure your debts. Don't negotiate with your creditors. Don't sell your car. Don't take a loan from your parents. Don't incur anything more than nominal legal bills.

Collect your contracts and take them immediately to your personal attorney and have them reviewed before you attach your own personal credit to your business'. Doing so is almost certainly unnecessary. You are probably just fine.

You are a businessperson, but you're not thinking like one, and you are going to get screwed. When your company's creditors worked out contracts with your business, they understood that they were assuming the risk that the company might go out of business and be unable to pay. That risk was priced into your contract terms.

If people you've done business with are now telling you that you should stake your personal finances on the debts of your company, then, absent some poorly thought out up-front agreement you had with those vendors to the contrary, you're being taken advantage of. Perhaps we'd benefit from hearing more about who those people are.

As for the merchant account: well, the people saying you could be blacklisted sure sound credible, and maybe you should listen to them. But please also note that there are people on this thread saying you should sell your car or take out a loan to satisfy someone else's debts, and take all the advice you get here with a big grain of salt. It shouldn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars to have an attorney explain to you (not your company, not your cofounder) that you are almost certainly not liable for thousands of dollars of company debts.
Oh, hell yes. I loved Zelda on the SNES. As immersive as was possible given the period's technology. It really took me to another place.
it runs on the client?
They didn't buy Sun for their servers
Yeah, I see the 'new' page as a place for super-contributors to help sort and upvote the good stuff so more people can read it on page one.
I still replay 1 & 2 every now and then, and I enjoyed Fallout 3 reasonably well, but I'm pretty confident it won't reach the same echelon of classic games as the first two. It's mediocre as a shooter and otherwise it's just a solid iteration of the now-standard sandbox RPG a la GTA, Oblivion, etc with the advantage that it takes place in a rich and beloved gameworld.
Didn't someone recently create a way to go back and see your first tweet?
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/09/21/dining/12480690665...
I honestly think this is the way to go, especially if you figure out a good damper on frivolous commentary.
We have both roles in our company -

A UX designer is largely focused on how things work. If I press "X" button what happens? Should the input method for this app be a number pad or a scroll wheel? etc.

A graphic/visual designer is focused on how the app looks. What are the feelings this app is trying to evoke? Does it have a rough "hacker" look or is this something Martha Stewart devotees would like?

These are rough generalizations along a spectrum. Some UX designers are more product manager types, interested in specifying features and high level behaviors leaving implementation level wireframes to a designer or engineer. Some graphic designers also like to get involved in the feature selection/design. It really varies by person, but its important to understand what you need before you hire. Nothing worse than trying to get slick graphics from someone whose passion is task analysis or strategic input from someone who loves polishing pixels.
That's only cheap if you have an incredibly risky account, i.e., lots of chargebacks (think porno). For retail you can get under 2%. For ecom transactions (which is riskier because there is not a card present) look for something in the range of 3%. YMMV since there are so many variables and many merchant account providers play an intentional shell game with rates and fees.
Startup Profile - FillAnyPDF.com
"Linux distributions must build everything from source code."

No, they don't have to. That's a self-imposed rule that's beneficial in some cases but not others. When an upstream developer releases nothing but source code, I appreciate the fact that the distros compile it on my behalf. But when an upstream developer (like Mozilla or Google or all these Java developers) releases a fully built and tested binary, I'd prefer the distros to just pass that on to me.
It really is a shame they haven't provided any mechanism, even if it were less convenient than the standard API interface.

I've seen a lot of talk from Twitter that "you can trust us", "we still have all of your tweets", but it really doesn't help much if there isn't any way to get at them. Has there been any discussion from Twitter that this is even on their radar as a near-term priority?

I was sort of surprised that the Library of Congress work did not include some sort of web.archive equivalent that allowed anyone access to the entire database — Twitter has shown a willingness to let other people solve hard problems it didn't want to, including when it pointed developers to a 3rd-party firehose for a while.
In your post, you advocated protectionism - regulating food trucks since you were concerned they might drive less efficient business into bankruptcy. I advocated protectionism for buggy whip manufacturers and high end bike sellers.

As for the new rationalizations you came up with in this post, I agree with you. We should charge market rates for parking, both for food trucks and for commuters. Food trucks should (and do) pay sales tax and property tax on their vehicles. And we should charge them based on externalities they create (e.g., crowds, litter).

The fact that they don't pay property tax on land is irrelevant - they don't own land. Similarly, taxi drivers don't pay the Stable Tax or Horse Food Tax (assuming such taxes existed in the days of horse drawn carriages). Why should they pay taxes on such goods?

I'm all in favor of properly regulating food trucks. But I'm not in favor of protectionism, which is what you were advocating.
Yes, but those types of services only work if you have less than 3,200 statuses, or, depending on the service, if your first tweet was published while their service was active and collecting your tweets (which isn't likely if your account is old).
Nice post!

"Unless you’re Google or Paypal, whose business models seem built around the idea of hating customer service"

Wow, I think that is a little harsh. I'd be the first to say that Google's lack of a feedback loop in their search interface as well as the myriad of other places where a prominent feedback entry point could be attached is well within the top 10 things that they do wrong. But, they monitor what users do on their site and do their best to provide good service, so I'd say, "Google tries to handle customer service without communicating with the customer."
All creative endeavors must be judged inside a historical context. The movie "Citizen Kane" is terrible in terms of production value when compared to today, but in the historical context it was an amazing work of art that set the framework for many other movies to follow.
I'm a designer. My most fluent language is Actionscript.

I probably don't need to say anything more.
Well, hit me up if you decide to sell anything. My email is in my profile.
Chargify isn't an actual credit card processor, they pass through to your gateway/merchant account. Their value is in simplifying the subscription management and recurring billing.
I'm not suggesting that at all. There are many good reasons to incorporate, including the ability to walk away from catastrophic debt. But there are personal consequences to doing so that the corporation can't do anything about.

A real life example: I am involved in the management of a commercial real estate property. We turned down a prospective tenant because the owners' previous business had declared bankruptcy. How did we know about it? A simple credit report.

If you're not seriously involved in the entity, then none of this matters, obviously.

Side note: it's generally the norm for someone to personally guarantee a merchant account for a new business - I wouldn't call that silly.
The question is: do you still love it? Does your son love it?
I recently ran into this. Thought of implementing a new project in clojure and quickly defaulted to the language i am used to.
One way to mitigate this is to re implement a small project that you have already implemented in your older language. At least you can focus on the language instead of the project nuances.
My email is a University address, so it has my full name and the name of my institution - that's more info than I want to give out arbitrarily.

Maybe HN could add a contact form to user profiles, to facilitate correspondence without sacrificing anonymity?
I (thankfully) don't have kids. But I played it start to finish a couple of years ago and still enjoyed it, as much or more than some modern console games.
1. Sweet, I went to Radford :)

2. "Why are bartenders this way and engineers that way? Unfortunately we just don't know," - eh, if you are a bartender your probably are meeting good looking people daily. The temptation might be just too great to resist.
As an engineer, you are much more less likely to meet good look people during your work, or even just people of the other sex, period.
Except you'll need to submit your app to Apple for approval by Oct 20 if you want to actually sell a copy by Oct 31.

That said, I wonder if it's possible to make a "this does nothing" game in 10 minutes and still sell one copy for $1 assuming it gets past the Apple censors. I think I have an idea for my submission.
I know it is all a matter of opinion, but as someone who dabbles in game development (I am an admin of the Dark Mists MUD, after all), here is my perspective:

If you look across the spectrum of oldstyle games, there are a few aspects off the top of my head that were responsible for our fun: challenge by control limits, challenge by time limits, and challenge by perfection (restarts, saves, etc).

Joust is a perfect example of challenge by control limits. You may accelerate left and right, you can bounce left and right, you can flap your wings to ascend or not flap to descend. This game is still fun for me because I understand and accept those limitations; they are almost the whole point of Joust. In many ways, Joust AI is predictable, so it is essential that you master the control. In other words, Joust is a game of skill!

The challenge of time limits is pretty obvious: You have X seconds to complete the level. In Joust, you have X seconds before eggs turn to soldiers or before the pterodactyl comes out (and he is killable if you have the skill). Time limits create stress; you want to beat the time limits. Some people rise to the challenge of completing things in the shortest time. Often, it is skill that allows you to surmount the challenge of time.

The challenge of perfection is provided by limiting restarts and save points. Some oldstyle games had plenty of restarts and saves, but they kept internal counters of your retries. They would reward you with certain kinds of endings, based on your retries. In Joust, you have X number of lives before you are forced to start all the way over from level 1.

Tetris is another great example of an oldstyle game that incorporates all three of these challenges.

One thing the game industry realized was that they could sell games to more people if the games required less skill, less challenge. Most games now practically walk you through them. What you do for fun is different now. Maybe you play to be an interactive (but aided) participant in a storyline. Maybe you play to be the first to finish the same progression everyone else can finish (WoW). Maybe you play because you want to see the latest pretty lights (aka advances in graphics) or have the stronger system, both of which are less about gaming and more about presentation.

Is it really that classic games are terrible or less fun than today's games? or is it more that the kinds of fun you can have with them are different from the kinds of fun you can have with today's games? As an oldschool gamer myself, I can tell you that I have gotten bored with some of the past approaches, but that does not make them suck. It just means that what I want has changed.
> We turned down a prospective tenant because the owners' previous business had declared bankruptcy. How did we know about it? A simple credit report.

In the case of a sole proprietorship I can see how that link would be made, but otherwise it is highly unlikely that a shareholder/officer would be affected in this way.
I think the better strategy is to infuse your organization with design thinking. AirBnB has been one of YC's best recent performers and 2/3 of their founding team are designers. To quote Steve Jobs:

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

So if your goal is to make something consumer facing or where the user is key in your thinking don't use a professional designer, make one a co-founder.

I think design is wildly underutilized and 1 good design hire can be worth 5-10 engineers at the early stage. This may sound heretical, but a good designer can make UX decisions that have massive impact across a site, but piggy back on pre-existing engineering tasks. This doesn't scale though. 10 designers aren't equal to 10 engineers.

That said, if you are creating some B2B product that doesn't have a lot of meaningful user interaction, the value exchange is simple, or there aren't a lot of competitive solutions (web or otherwise) then piece something together via woothemes and 99 designs, or make friends with a good designer.
I found the writer's comparison of programming to art a bit offbase. I think I'd compares better with writing.
You know ... things like copy writing, elaborate works of fictio, essays?

While the particular thing you're working on (thesis, class essay, fiction, biography) might restrict your ability to be more expressive with your writing. There are some people that can just 'write'.

Doesn't matter what they're writing about, you can read their stuff and enjoy it, largely because they keep things simple, don't use big words unnecessarily or deploy obscure grammatical devices, and focus on getting their point across to you.

There are also some world reknowned writers who nobody can follow because they use complicated grammar and words (Wole Soyinka for example) ...

What I am (clumsily) trying to say is, by making that comparison (of programmers to writers) it becomes clearer that separating good programmers from bad ones might not be as hard as he makes it out to be.
aka the best funded mathematical discipline. It can be used for good, or utter bureaucratic evil.
>I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.

I cringed.

Maybe for data that isn't high value, urgh.
I completely agree with #2. Digg is being run by spammers and desperate guys who will upvote pics of any decent looking women.
Let's hope that SimpleNote never dies :)

They do something simple, but they hit it so far out of the park that it crosses town and lands in a completely different park! I think of it as Dropbox for Text. It's always where I need it.