bendotc

Fellow game developer here. I can't wait for "gamification" to die. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what games are and can be. To make it more annoying, in practice, it often seems to be accompanied by a disrespect for the users.

I'm not saying artificial rewards systems are without any merit (e.g. check out the way people react to karma scores in places like HN), but I've seen no indication that this new buzzword has provoked any sort of actual intellectual interest in this stuff -- more just a race to add badges to everything.

Edit: And there's the downvote for raining on the parade! Shocking.

Maybe because this guy is passionate about making a new systems language, instead of solving the problem you want solved?

I never understand people who complain that free project X exists, when those people could be working on Y which is obviously more important. As if production and enthusiasm were both zero-sum and fungible.

Also, as someone who works with systems languages every day, I can tell you that there's a need for this work. I'm not saying Rust is it, but the systems language space is pretty dead, which is scary in a world where processors are threatening to become parallel on scales we don't know how to deal with with traditional tools.

If your problem is spending too much time on HN, do you really think the solution involves posting on HN?

If this is really a problem, close your browser and never come back here and you'll have a much more productive life. If you find yourself coming up with substitutes, do the same with them. Think of this as your alcoholism, and realize that moderation, while it works for some people, is not an option for you.

I personally think engineers' inability to understand the limitations of their own abilities and the complexity of the problems we face, as evidenced by, say, the thought that if they were in charge they could fix everything, to be a strong recommendation against such a technocracy.

Personally, I think the quality the world needs more of in its leaders today is humility. Our theories are probably wrong (an argument for conservatism in a classical sense) and we, as a group, are likely just as corruptible as any other group.

True, though most of the wealth in America is held by a small minority too, which kind of creates the weird taxing/spending incentives. (http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly-misinformed-a...)

> If you're working at one of the newly acquired studios like Bioware, that's probably true. The older studios like EAC in Burnaby or EARS are so close to the EA corporate that it's hard to say that his friend doesn't "work directly for EA".

But the whole point is that EA is made up of many studios, not all of which share a monolithic culture. If you want to argue EARS and EAC have a similar culture, that's fine, but it still doesn't mean that the majority of us share it.

There is no "works directly for EA" unless you're a high-level executive or possibly marketing (not sure on that one). EA is split into studios and cross-studio departments, each with very different cultures.

EA was once well-known for acquiring companies and then assimilating them into the EA machine, often with disastrous results. In the years since my studio was acquired, it's been entirely different, with the executives having a hands-off-by-default position, only intervening when there's trouble of one sort or another. While EA HR takes standard of living issues seriously, each studio is given a lot of latitude in how they manage projects and employees. One place that the organization as a whole did improve thing was moving the bulk of the employees (at least all entry-level ones) over to hourly wages, so the company has to pay overtime.

In my experience, EA's not bad about overtime and such, but I can't speak for every studio, and neither can your friend.

That's not really accurate. It would be safer to say that people who respond to that poll on HN self-report having NT intuitive thinking traits at about seven times higher than the usual distribution would predict, assuming no one voted multiple times.

Which is to say, it's really silly to draw much of anything meaningful from an internet poll.

I believe you're holding Nate Silver up to an unrealistic standard. This is obviously not a complete refutation of all of the stolen data, nor does it claim to be. He is instead taking an instance of what people are complaining about -- a pretty standard example of the things that get pasted about this story, from what I've seen -- and pointing out that people are blowing this particular one out of proportion.

Maybe you're complaining that no one is really complaining about this specific email, but to me, this one looks a lot like the others contained in the stolen data that I've seen. From my perspective, it seems a lot of people are reading what they want into the emails, though I'll readily admit I haven't spent my day pouring through it, nor do I really intend to.

In general, you'll hire people who, * are smart/productive enough to automate the drudgery, * are smart enough to get by, but whom the drudgery provides some lasting challenge, or * are screwing around and will likely screw around more as you keep them on for more hours.

So, even assuming that simple work will allow you to get a significant long-term productivity boost working people 8 hours instead of 12, in the long run, you're going to be working with a set of people who'll likely be challenged by the work, so fatigue will cause problems if they're challenged at 8 hours/day, or you could be getting smarter work out of them if they challenged at 12 hours/day.

Of course, building the tools to automate drudgery does take some time, and considering Ars Digita apparently operated during the first .com boom, time-to-market was critical, so some of this logic doesn't apply to the original example.

You're conflating what I was saying with the idea that we should just say "it's complicated, everyone should give up," which is just silly. What I'm saying is that if we don't stand on the shoulders of giants, there is a limit to how far we can go. And specifically, I'm talking about subjects which are counterintuitive at a basic level, and are not well learned by informal discussion, but instead demand rigorous study. The pernicious thing about these subjects is that it is hard for an outsider to judge good from bad without doing the math or scientific experiments themselves. Most subjects thankfully don't fall into this category, but economics, quantum physics, a lot of medicine, and a lot of math do.

This, by the way, is precisely why it is so difficult for us to "rent" certain expertise when you need it: non-technical people have a hard time hiring a good programmer because they don't have a basis to judge programmers off of. As it turns out, the guy who can talk the most convincingly is often not the person who is the most knowledgeable or skilled.

An aside:

"Then you've chosen my second choice, living with it."

That's ridiculous. The idiomatic phrase "live with it" means that you put up with or endure it. It is pretty much the opposite of working to change something. By your logic, "be frustrated" would also be "living with it" as anything short of killing myself or becoming a hermit would. This is just being obtuse.

My point was not to take the position that karma is an unimportant number in a computer somewhere, but that people often claim as much in defense of various scoring systems on sites like this and Reddit and so on that create perverse incentives for the users.

I work on online videogames. You don't need to tell me the value of a number in a computer somewhere that means a whole heck of a lot to someone, and shapes how they act. :-)

Not seeing the original comment to which you're referring, I can't offer any opinion on it in particular. However, I generally disagree with the statement "if a comment gets down voted but starts a wave of discussion surely it has value." Trolling is, at its heart, the creation of discussion by posts of negative value, usually by eliciting a strong emotional response from readers. Most troll-posts don't have value to those trolled (though there may be exceptions).

I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person.

For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes the way people read as well as serves as a signal for how the community feels about a given post. The value of this signal is debatable, but that's the point.

When I personally down-vote your comment, it's because I think you're wrong or your post is of zero or negative value (spam, noise, etc), and it really has nothing to do with your worth as a person (or any desire to hurt you).

"I think this gets to the heart of our differences. I don't know things, so I ask people. Or I take up positions which others can criticize. As part of a discussion, I learn more. If modern banking practices are germane, educate me on them."

"There is a concept called 'strong opinions, weakly held' You might want to look into it."

These are fine methods of learning when you're surrounded by people significantly more knowledgeable than yourself. The problem is precisely the situation I was discussing: when you don't have a critical mass of knowledgeable people, it's the blind leading the blind, and thanks to the Dunning-Krueger effect, it's unlikely that you'll be able to tell who among the chorus of voices knows what they're talking about, and may even have trouble recognizing that you're going down the wrong path.

"As a side note, the internet is full of folks spouting off about things they know little about. So is life. Democracy is built on the concept of average voters voting on policies about complicated matters."

And direct democracy isn't terribly prevalent. Representative democracy, however, is based on electing representatives who are either themselves more knowledgeable or who can talk to (or employ) those who are on a whole range of subjects. And even on this count, I would argue we generally need to work on finding ways around our biases to make better selections.

"Either learn to deal with these topics as part and parcel of community life or prepare to be frustrated a lot."

You think my options are "live with it" or "be frustrated?" I choose the third option, to advocate for improvement, to advocate for greater education where it makes sense in the public sphere (such as economics), and to advocate for systems of government that are more resistant to direct action on matters that are likely to be adversely affected by common misunderstandings.

"The problem with your argument is that there are huge sections of human knowledge in which we really don't know that much -- even experts. In fact, I'd wager there's a hell of a lot more stuff that's debatable than most people would be comfortable knowing about."

I don't see how this is a problem with my argument. I didn't claim that we should only discuss things about which we have complete information, I was instead suggesting that this community is so information-poor on this subject that we lack the tools to separate right from wrong or reasonable from unreasonable. I was also objecting to the claim of opinion as fact, which I find misleads (usually unintentionally, as often these opinions are believed to be fact).

And to be clear, I'm not talking about us not being steeped in theoretical economics, but rather that most of us couldn't answer questions which have factual, discoverable answers, such as how modern banking works, how money is created, what the role and powers of the Federal Reserve are, etc. These are questions with real, factual answers, but the way these things work is often incredibly complex and counterintuitive, and cannot be gleaned from a couple hours with an introductory book or Wikipedia.

And in case I'm coming across as being condescending, I'd just like to say that I don't consider myself to be an economist and I don't think it's reasonable for anyone to be an expert at everything.

"I've said it before: I don't think any topics should be off-limits as long as people can reasonably discuss them."

Agreed, and I have seen very few reasonable discussions of economics around here.

"Startups are full of people acting under intense pressure with incomplete information. As such, these topics are just little baby toys, artificial constructs of arguments that have little real impact on people's lives."

So, we may as well be debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

"Being able to have reasonable conversations about emotional and important things with incomplete information is something we should all strive for, not something we should be afraid of."

And forming or refining beliefs in the absence of information is something we should be afraid of, not strive for.

> Government spending does improve the economy, but not as much as tax cuts do. If you give money back to the market, it is guaranteed to be spent efficiently.

That's debatable. For example, Moody's Economy believes otherwise (see page 9 of http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Economic_Stimulu...).

Now, I'm not saying one or the other is correct (I know enough to know I don't have the tools to judge), but you say this as a statement of fact when it's not a settled question at all.

> Government spending involves special interests (spending that benefits a small amount of people at the expense of everyone) and incurs some wasteful spending. Example: John Murtha airport http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/23/murtha.airport/index.....

Yes, and so do tax cuts. In the US, we have a menagerie of various taxes and exceptions and brackets, etc., and it's very easy to tweak it to benefit special interests, like we have many times in the past. That doesn't invalidate the idea of passing tax cuts just like earmarks don't invalidate the idea of government spending.

> I thought the article was good in comparing a household (something everyone can compare to) to a government made up of the people. No household could ever keep up that deficit without forcefully taking money from someone else.

I'm not advocating for the deficit, but just because you like the analogy doesn't make correct. Likening a household's budget to the United States' budget is like likening a photon to a race-car: any similarities there are are very shallow, and you're likely to come away with huge misconceptions.

This is actually precisely why I hate seeing economics articles on social news sites: it's a lot of propagation of (often wrong) ideas within a community of people with insufficient knowledge to be able to sort the good from the bad.

I really wish we'd just stick to what we're good at, rather than getting into the subject of macroeconomics and politics around here.

Misandrist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misandrist

DevTrack, with somewhere on the order of 100 users. I really have no idea how well it would work in a small startup environment.

I'm not crazy about it, but I've never met an issue tracking system I am crazy about. DevTrack can be configured pretty well to suit our workflow, but I still run up against inscrutable problems sometimes. This may be due in part to the configuration, but it says something that we're still having problems with that.

Now, I'm not a cheerleader for modern-day psychopharmaceuticals; I often liken antidepressants to kicking a television and hoping that the picture clears up. They often don't work, or mysteriously work for some time, then stop, and there doesn't seem to be a ton of rhyme or reason to it.

That all having been said, from what I've read, for most people with chronic depression, the most effective treatment is a combination of antidepressant drugs and behavioral therapy. For a lot of people, one or the other alone doesn't work very well, and I certainly hope that no one would be unwilling to get help because people would think them weak or lazy for relying on antidepressants.

Put simply, if you have chronic depression, you can use all the help you can get. Sometimes drugs don't work, many have awful side effects, or may just not work for any given person, but it's often worth the trouble in order to fight clinical depression. If people can effectively manage it with behavioral therapy, then great, but for all the people out there who've tried and for whom that's not enough, I hope you reconsider the idea that for the most part, antidepressants are for the lazy.

Agreed.

In general, if you're having trouble tracing through a particular function with a narrow band of input, then the debugger can be useful. If you're trying to figure out a larger system and/or how a system works across a large set of inputs, then stepping through with a debugger is useless.

Put another way, the debugger is to programming what the microscope is to medicine: incredibly useful for some things, but not a very good general diagnostic tool. Metrics data and checking assumptions (via unittest and/or asserting expectations based on reading the code) are much better for getting an over-all idea of what's going on. Once you've localized a problem, then the debugger can help you get a precise idea of the issue, or can help you test a hypothesis (to use the medical example, you can use the microscope to test a theory that there's a bacterial infection).

I disagree. The last thing Python needs right now is to make Python 3.x even more different from the 2.x line. As a strategic move, I think it makes a lot of sense to stabilize 3.x and wait for it to gain momentum before going on to more syntax changes.

Though I have to say, I'm quite disappointed that PEP 380 is getting left behind, since I find the alternative to be pretty ugly and heavy-weight.

Oh, and make Box's constructor explicit.

I'm pretty sure the author was comparing C++ to C, not to Java, but that's kinda beside the point, because as the article says, "The real hidden cost is that now, instead of looking at one piece of source -- the function itself -- I need to look at up to four different classes. Add possible ancestors to find out if a call is virtual."

Put another way, the performance details we so often care about in projects for which we're using C++ are often non-local to the calling site. In order to know the performance characteristics of "a = foo(b, c)" I need to know a lot of things about the types of a, b, c, and foo, in addition to knowing what "foo" does inside its curly braces. In contrast, while it's hard to reason about the instructions being executed in Java in the same way we do in C or even to a large degree in C++, the types of a, b, c, and foo don't really matter, since passing in b and c is always a pass by reference or a primitive value copy, and foo is pretty much always going to be dispatched the same way (and constructors are preceded by a "new" operator at the call site, so we don't have to worry about that, either). Now, the only thing I care about is what's inside the foo method.

I am of course not disputing that you need to know the language you're using. It's just that even when you know C++, if you can't trust everyone who ever touched the code, you need to check in a bunch of different places to reason about the performance characteristics of this one piece of code.

Also, reasoning about the performance of C is all well and good right up until you realize that your compiler is better at translating C to assembler than you are and also, some jackass wrote a preprocessor macro called "foo" which does 18 different things. At some point, writing high-performance code is not about assuming you can guess what will happen but about seeing what's happening and trying to make something better happen.

Disclaimer: it's been a good 4 years or so since I worked with Java, and on top of that, I've never cared too much about Java performance, so please take this with a grain of salt.

"It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock."

Oh, I know you! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304895

You're still wrong about Bioshock, though I've changed my tune about Portal since that thread. Still, thanks for painting me (and I suspect barrkel) with a broad and inaccurate brush stroke.

The funny thing is, we probably agree on more than we disagree. I think the drive for longer games is ridiculous. I roll my eyes when people are upset at the idea of paying $20 for a 6 hour game on the principle that the game should be longer. Also, I got a college degree basically studying the aesthetics of games and have worked in the industry since then, so you could say that making good, interesting, beautiful games is important to me in that I've put my money (and life) where my mouth is.

I probably think a game you like is crap, and I know I like a game you think is crap, but the big difference is, I don't think that makes you "obnoxious and tasteless," I just think it means we have different tastes, or at worst, I think you're wrong.

If the idea you're raging against is that there is no 6 hour experience worth $20, I'm totally behind you.

But you take it a step further and accuse barrkel of being a "tasteless slob" for not valuing World of Goo more than $2, and that's just ridiculous. It's precisely as ridiculous as if I called you a "tasteless slob" for what you were saying about all non-Orange-Box FPSes, 'cause there are a bunch of real gems out there.

What's my point? My point is that there's a question of taste. We can of course still talk about craftsmanship and aesthetics in games, but to criticise someone simply for saying they like games with high replay value and this isn't it, that's ridiculous. You said you don't like FPSes that aren't from The Orange Box, which shows to me that there are some damn fine games that you don't value, but it would be silly of me to criticize you for not wanting to pay market price for them.

That's barely even testing, and it's certainly not TDD. If I play through the feature I just coded or the bug I just fixed, I can verify that it's doing what I think it's doing, but I need outside verification that it's correct. In effect, I can verify my code's precision (it's doing precisely what I told it to do), but not it's accuracy (if my idea of a feature is inaccurate, my own testing won't catch that).

That having been said, TDD and automated testing can definitely make some headway into game development, but there are a whole host of challenges and questions to surmount there, especially for code-bases that are going to get stripped down to bare-bones every 1-3 years for a new game, if they get reused at all, so the tolerance for hacky code is quite a bit higher.

Or buy Brutal Legend, his company's new game. Or better yet, both (Psychonauts is available on the XBox360's back catalog of original XBox games, and I would hope Double Fine still gets a good cut of any sales of it).

Another excellent article from mises.org: http://mises.org/story/2066

And in case you're wondering: yes, I'm being sarcastic.

This article isn't terribly interesting, really. Yes, you can write clean, understandable code in Perl and most widely used languages. Yes, you can write awful code in any language. The real test of messiness, ugliness, readability and comprehensibility is in the cases in the middle. How easy is it to write readable code? How hard is it to write bad code? And this one might be a little controversial, but how does the culture around the language value readable, clean code?

Put another way, when I'm actually working on a project in the language, what's the likelihood that someone who I'm working with or who worked on the project before me has really messed up the code base in ways I'm going to be dealing with for years? And how hard am I going to have to work to not be that guy?

Finally, the article uses an example of parsing LaTeX with Perl vs. Python, and uses a regular expression. Now, I don't know if LaTeX can, in general, be parsed with regular expressions, but writing a parser aside, it's no surprise that Perl wins when dealing with regular expressions. That's a fine thing, and definitely something Perl's got going for it (or possibly against it, depending on how you feel about regular expressions), but Perl just about grew out of being a regexp DSL -- it's not really a fair fight. Put a full Perl TeX parser up against one written in Prolog, and I bet Prolog would win, but it doesn't mean I'd use Prolog over Perl for most things.