Androsynth

The zyngafication of games has already begun and is happening regardless of what happens to Zynga. Micropayments and free to play games are moving from the fringe to the default and this is terrible for gaming. It's terrible because it forces companies to become zyngafied. They rely solely on numbers; they shove their their gimmicks down your throat. Gaming is slowly moving from 'nerds and kids having fun' to 'pigeons in a box having their wallets picked'.

Ultimately, hating on Zynga is pointless, because that mindset has infected EA, SOE, THQ and even the 'good' developers like valve[1] and blizzard.

In short, game developers have gone from small groups of nerds to large corporations run with a corporation-like efficiency. The product managers that so brutally follow analytics in the SF web dev scene are also starting to infiltrate gaming.

[1] In team fortress 2, crates drop which require you to purchase a key to open. This exact move is very common in free to play games, but as far as I know it was developed by Zynga in Mafia Wars.

I felt it was the complete opposite. The wiki redesigners were showing an incredible amount of arrogance and know-it-allism with their redesign. I was just dripping out of their poorly thought out, americentric, hover-over design. Just look at the way they designed for I's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth-share_matrix bottom left keeps you fed, top left is doing whats never been done. Cash cow might be your day job and you work on your stars in the evening.

This is probably a HN phenomenon rather than being Erlang specific. I suspect that as HN ramped up in users, we learned all these great new technologies and now they are 'old' to the community.

Thats why you dont see as many posts about nginx, node, nosql, erlang, haskell, etc. At least not nearly as much as 2,3,4 years ago.

The most popular language I see now on HN is clojure, which tells me a lot about which language stuck with people.

More recently, that is true. But it doesn't explain how their early successes (poker, mafia wars, farmville) succeeded before they had the money and the market share to do those things. Back before they were a monopoly and back before they did cross-promos.

It comes down to: did Zynga break the law as it currently stands (probably), is the law just (imo no).

These are multinational corporations. Applying labels like good-guy, bad-guy, underdog, etc are meaningless. The only question is whether they are lawful. Everything else is left to the consumer.

By the way, Zynga usually beats their competitors because in the long run their clones are better than the originals. Like it or not, but thats innovation.

edited for civility :)

I'm an American, but I don't feel US has the god-given right to be the only super-power in the solar system for the next few hundred years.

If China establishes colonies, good for them. When England colonized America, it began the downfall of Spains empire (more or less), but no one is crying that Spain didn't become the global power it 'should' have become.

Its not marketing. Dev Relations is a liaison to developers. They will champion your cause when it is mutually beneficial. But they don't work for you and are not obliged to stick up for you.

No its not obvious because I don't have a problem with their UI. Most CL users don't. They have a clean UI that doesn't overwhelm you. Posting is dead simple.

Anyway, at this point, neither of us will convince the other. So... good day to you.

>>"Developer relations" normally implies a role intended to encourage developers to use your platform.

no, thats marketing.

Dev relations works with you once you are already using the platform. Don't get their intentions confused. They may be on your side with bug fixes and feature requests, but if you try to do something that goes against their company, why the hell would they be on your side?

I've found netflix's offering of old History channel programs to be pretty good. They are from the heyday of The History Channel (late 90s, early 2000s) when HC was making high production-quality shows that were actually about history. It's better than the live channel content.

It may be limited in how much content it has, but I've been watching it on and off for a few months and I still have a lot left.

I would recommend the old HC shows to anyone remotely interested in history. The 13 part mini-series on the US revolutionary war is the pinnacle of depth and production-value that you just can't find anywhere else, especially not on live TV. National Geographic also has high-quality stuff, but I have explored it less.

No, in SO's case, their competitors were physically incapable of entering the market (because they couldn't purchase stakes).

With network effects, the barrier to entry is less for competitors to join the market and there is nothing physically forcing a user to use a monopoly. A great competitor has a realistic chance of entering your market. Plus, a slight shift in public perception and a Monopoly can become a failed business in no time.

Network effects may be a significant impediment to a small business attempting to enter a market, but lets not throw around the 'monopoly' label so easily.

Who knows what positions each took behind closed doors, but do you think they aren't going into a negotiation all on the same page? Do you think they would allow someone in negotiations to take a position opposite to the company line?

Also, relations does not mean advocate. He has relations with the customer, he is not obliged to advocate their views. Especially not when it goes against FBs interests.

SO physically owned all the oil-wells. Physical ownership is much, much different than network effects.

This comment shouldn't be in the gray. We, as hackers, shouldn't place as much importance as we do in our college diplomas. Very few of use are computer scientists. Very few of us learned as much in 4 years as you did at your first startup (or even hacking on the side, for that matter)

I realized as soon as I posted that I could just google it. But the guy did a good job explaining the underlying science between caffeine highs, I would have liked him to explain the negatives as well.

This is interesting, but the article just explains the benefits of coffee. What are the downsides? I would like to hear why he quit.

Your argument is absurd because you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions.

I don't spend all my time looking up stuff on google, I've learned the examples you've given and I don't write crappy code.

In my experience, I write better code than most CS majors I've worked with. It may be that in very few and far between instances, a CS major will have some knowledge that would have helped me, but it is definitely not a daily, weekly or even monthly occurrence.

So experience > college degree in the short term and experience = college in the long term?

Thats not a win at all, its a loss.

Im anti-college, I believe that engineers and computer scientists should go to college, but programmers shouldn't. The majority of programmers aren't computer scientists.

I am anti-college for two reasons:

1-I didn't have the outside-the-class experience you did. In fact I think this is a situation where the top students naturally congregate together, in college and then on HN, and don't really have an understanding of what the non-top students go through. Most of them aren't making connections with other tinkerers.

2-I got a EE degree, but in my late 20's I become a professional programmer. I was instantly better than almost every other CS major I was working with. The majority of programming is closer to craftmanship than to Engineering. I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned.

(by the way, if your counter-argument is 'well I did VERY_HARD_THING_X within my companies app, and I would never have learned how to do this without my CS degree', I would say you may be a computer scientist, but also the vast majority of programmers arent doing this.)

The fact is, you go to college to earn a degree that says 'you are properly trained in this field to get a job'. Any profession that can be learned outside of an expensive college environment, should be.

Any argument that involves 'well you also get these nice benefits on the side' is irrelevant. If you are a smart go-getter, you would have met those tinkerers no matter what path you took. You would have done the same as an 18 year old apprentice programmer at Google.

A blogger ridiculing a blogger who ridiculed a startup....

Is this what we've become? This is second hand crap. This is gossip.

or.... you could just read the comment and form an opinion based on the content.

The reason comment scores are bad is that it leads to leads to anchoring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring This is probably why dumb and/or mean comments get upvoted (as discussed in tokenadults top comment).

So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?

This is a cross between propaganda and the infiltration of extreme domestic organizations by the FBI in the 70's.

Yet more snipping at leaves while the roots continue to grow.

When I say misfit, I mean genuinely different. Being unique and quirky because that is currently what is the 'in' thing isn't unique, different or being a misfit at all.

why do misfits have to do things or change the world? Just be a misfit for the sake of being a misfit. Just be yourself.

You're trying to fit misfits into the same type of homogenous box that school systems put kids in.

ok, that makes sense. I don't want to get off topic, but imo, this is a larger, society wide problem and it doesnt really matter whether the apt is 250 ft or 1000 ft. Dogs are under-excercised in the US, (which is probably why theres so many 'how to fix your dog' shows on tv). The way to keep dogs happy and normal is hours and hours of excercise and attention, which the vast majority of city-dwellers cant provide

Thats ridiculous. If you had a big apartment and a big dog, wouldnt it be just as bad on the dog? 700 sq ft with no yard and a 50 lb dog would be miserable. Your argument doesnt scale at all.

good points, but new construction in SF wouldnt be a good thing. New buildings stick out like sore thumbs in SF, as they arent made of wood. People want to live in the old, creaky wood buildings with the over the top bay windows. Not in plaster boxes, they can get that anywhere else in the bay area.

So you choose to hang out with the worse community so you can have more street-cred (karma) with the worse community?

That is 100% your own fault.