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This is like pole chess from Piers Anthony books. My buddies and I used to play pole chess a good bit.

Each player has a pole, and you can place it or pick it up with a move. Nothing can move to through or capture the pole.

It leads to more draws but also weird and fun tactics.

andrewljohnsonon Eve Online is getting Microsoft Excel support

Traders have to be cynical.

andrewljohnsonon Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism

It's mostly a form of spam-control.

andrewljohnsonon Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism

These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!

andrewljohnsonon An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal

you'd have to be listening for a few decades over the billions of years Earth has existed

Maybe all advanced civilizations are clustered around a certain time. It's less relevant how old the Earth than how old galactic civilization is.

andrewljohnsonon Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

My buyer’s agent could be replaced by giving me access to MLS and lockboxes.

My seller’s agent, on the other hand, was super useful and irreplaceable except by another smart human. I felt like he got us top dollar for the house based on how he renovated, staged, photographed… much more money than we expected.

Also, my experience was I set a budget, put my stuff in truck, left my house a dirty mess, handed the agent my keys, and left town. Then he did all the renovating/etc, posted it, collected offers, and we got paid.

andrewljohnsonon Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says

In the US, you pay about 6.5-7%. You pay 5.5 to 6% to the two agents (buyer and seller agents) and about 1% in closing costs (title insurance, etc).

It has always seemed wildly inefficient to me. Especially the “buyer agent” who gets a couple percent entirely for escorting the buyer through homes and submitting an offer.

andrewljohnsonon Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

I don’t think laziness (in this comment or the ones about the bash-like C macros) is the right word.

I guess there is some pressure/tiredness/newness/taste/external factors driving the choices, test count, and style guide aberrations.

andrewljohnsonon I employed a California resident, so now I’m subject to its regulations

California has a really strict view of what a contractor is, so 1099s are not as feasible as they seem in CA: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm#:~....

IANAL, but if you are building a software product, and you hire someone to do software development work on your core product, then CA may easily take the view that person is an employee because of the ABC test (as of September 2019).

andrewljohnsonon I employed a California resident, so now I’m subject to its regulations

This is less a California issue than a US remote business issue. Any number of states have labyrinthine regulations regarding who must file corporate income taxes, who owes state sales taxes, how you must acquire unemployment and disability insurance, etc.

And you're just getting started with the states. If you happen to employ someone in a bureaucratic or tax-ridden municipality (e.g. Philadelphia, Seattle, NYC, tons of others), then you are going to have processes to file fees and paperwork with obscure offices and locally sanctioned accountants (looking at your Pittsburgh) and insurance companies.

andrewljohnsonon Are legendary music catalogues worth the money?

Old music now gets streamed more than new music.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: General Mood of the Community

Someone should run sentiment analysis on all the comments over time and see if there's anything changing.

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

Cool, want to shoot me an email and we can zoom sometime? There was a point in my life where all I did was play Magic ;)

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

I'm interested in collaborating on video games, maybe especially card games. I built a game similar to Hearthstone (deckzap.com) where the players make the cards, but it doesn’t feel fun. I think I would work better in the game space with a collaborator.

I used to make a hiking app for a living, but now I’m just tinkering with side projects and writing.

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

I found you can get a lot of games that used to be good (e.g. Cut the Rope) in ad-free, IAP-free form by using Apple Arcade. Highly recommend for kids to give them a variety of great and challenging games without ads, and satisfy that constant desire for new stuff kids have.

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?

It’s better to work full time for 10 years than half time for 20, just because of how compound interest works. Getting the energy to do that is another matter.

andrewljohnsonon Monitor the C02 in a Room (not my product)

What makes it spammy?

andrewljohnsonon Japanese game developer hasn't left the house in 10 years

I find longer hair harder to manage than shorter. Easier to cut it very short every 6 months than wear it super long.

andrewljohnsonon The ‘Zelle fraud’ scam: how it works, how to fight back

I just never answer my phone unless you are in my contacts or I suspect I’m due a call from something local. It’s mostly spam.

The lesson in these times is don’t answer your phone… the phone companies are completely overrun.

andrewljohnsonon The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy

I’d follow you on Twitter. Are you there?

andrewljohnsonon How to build a second brain as a software developer

Nah, he should have stopped with the first diagram.

Google plus the internet is your second brain and is the optimal approach for almost everyone. This heavy approach seems like make work that will waste time, and the data will rot, leading to calcified and inaccurate knowledge.

andrewljohnsonon We bootstrapped our open source Google Analytics alternative to $500k ARR

That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C). Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on marketing until around a million annual revenue.

andrewljohnsonon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)

DeckZap | Frontend JS Dev | Contract or Fulltime | Remote | http://deckzap.com/

DeckZap is the uncollectible card game where the players make the cards. I am looking for someone to work alongside me (remotely) building the first prototype - here's what I was building last week: https://twitter.com/deck_zap/status/1453766021760782341

You must be very familiar with Magic: The Gathering, HearthStone, or other CCGs. Bonus points if you know pixi.js or can do fullstack work in Django/Python. I plan to finish the first prototype in JS and then build a Unity client to ship later.

I previously founded the leading backpacking app, Gaia, which was acquired last February.

Email me at andrew@deckzap.com

andrewljohnsonon A cautionary tale from the streets of San Francisco

You could work for a political campaign that supports policies you think will solve the problems.

andrewljohnsonon Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis

Link to the data table you can search by major and college: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7583742/

andrewljohnsonon Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (2018)

If you like such ideas, the book Reason and Persons by Derek Parfit has some mindbending chapters on whether persons exist separately from the meat, as Cartesian Egos or similar.

andrewljohnsonon How South Dakota has become a global tax haven

Why is double taxation a moral issue?

andrewljohnsonon Apple rejects developer's horoscope app, says App Store has enough

Edison did not test 5,000 filaments himself, and a team of his size would always get their app through review.

andrewljohnsonon [dead]

It's more like a trillion dollar market. The actual players are Google, Facebook, and Apple... these startups are just location data gnats.

Location data is probably the single best demographic info to have to make money, and at least 3 companies in the world have basically everyone's phone bugged. Ads, maps, social... all totally dependent on location data from users.

andrewljohnsonon Tell HN: Amplitude (YC W12) just went public – AMA

It seemed critical early on that Amplitude basically made what MixPanel charged a lot for free, by providing a huge free tier. This is how my company ended up on Amplitude... and then we didn't pay for years, until we eventually ended up paying $40K/year then more.

That pricing structure seems like a very long-viewed approach that could have easily been ruined by short-term product thinking.

Was there ever internal or investor pressure along the way to cut or pare down the free tier?