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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

“Learn to code and surround yourself with smart people” is good advice, but it’s kind of funny that Google was used as the example of peak success for a group of 15 year olds. I’m fairly willing to bet that most of them think of Google as boring and old, and not exciting or innovative. How to start TikTok or Minecraft would have probably been a more inspiring example.

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The story of Minecraft was an awesome inspiration for my peers and me, much more relatable than Google or any SV startup. Markus Persson did not come from a family of academics or engineers; he was just a poor blue-collar kid who liked videogames and coding (unfortunately his political views have stained his image).

I literally remember following his progress as he posted on Reddit. I imagine following Linus Torvald’s posts on Usenet must bring similar memories to the slightly more matured people around here.

With fully 2 datapoints, I conjecture that this odd Scandinavian combination of being highly advanced nations yet isolated from the action in and around Silicon Valley increases the probability of public social Communication, as we (Scandis) are used to not having peers physically around us. The chi^2 is good with this one.

Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo pages, but I remember that he had several games built from scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive.

One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone.

Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech

He also wrote Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson, all in Java OpenGL. Was a bit of a mess of a game but it still has an engaged community.

Yes, I completely agree, I always fondly remember his game "drowning in problems"[1] because of the notable creativity behind it. Despite barely having an interface, it managed to entertain me until the end.

[1]http://game.notch.net/drowning/

Yup.... if you look at Minecraft Classic or one of the similar early versions' code..... it's quite advanced. It's conceptually fairly simple but the game just has so many small nice things which are taken for granted but are not trivial to implement.

It's no surprise that almost all of the iconic things about Minecraft was created in the first few years by Notch.... everything else afterwards is just polishing it and adding fluff.

I studied it very closely to try to comprehend how someone could create something like that so quickly. The difference between Notch's LDJAM projects and other folks is that HE WROTE THE ENTIRE FUCKING ENGINE ALONG WITH THE GAME. Sprite transforms, pixel art, movement, sound... just everything... John Carmack eat your heart out.

Notch was a great hacker, but not a good coder. His code is hacks upon hack all the way down.

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