clentaminator

The real reason you procrastinate: You fundamentally don't want to be doing whatever task it is that you're avoiding, and while it might be the logically "correct" thing to do, that doesn't mean you want to do it. What we want and what we are pushed into doing are not always aligned. News at ten.

I'd emphatically recommend Zen Bound and Zen Bound 2.

More than most other mobile games with good touch controls, the Zen Bound games really took advantage of the tactile nature of current mobile devices and their touch interfaces.

Aside from the mechanics, they were also pretty relaxing, while some of the levels managed to be simultaneously challenging while remaining completely passive. A very gentle and non-frustrating form of challenging that not many games manage to achieve.

I don't think Zen Bound gets enough praise as a game that is unique both from a gameplay perspective and how well it relies on the interface of the underlying device.

Thanks for the link. A lot of the software engineer points in that article seem to be focused at the level of writing and maintaining code, but zooming out gives you the chance to look at the nature of a software development job.

- The feeling that everything "new" is something that essentially already exists but that you now need to relearn, because it's different in the most subtle and annoying ways

- The knowledge that there is often no physical, tangible output to your work (as XKCD put it, you press buttons to make a pattern of lights change until it's "correct")

- The damage done to your body from sitting at a desk for most hours of the day

- The knowledge that, in some areas of some countries, billions of dollars are invested in what are essentially clones of existing "social" tools that while promising to connect us actually manage to isolate us, and that the whole concept of "value" seems a bit screwed when you focus on these examples

Oops! Sorry, I thought the article was "worst part about being a Software Engineer". Best bits?

- I get to browse HN from my desk while my code is compiling

Apples/oranges?

Reddit caters to, essentially, everyone, by allowing users to create separate topic groups, while HN is a single collective forum for tech-y/science-y/thing-of-general-interest-y type news.

Was just curious as I wasn't getting the same vibe from it myself. Plus, these guys - http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/working_here - already have the whole "molecule" thing covered :)

What about this is offensive?

Is there a difference between natural fruit juice and the kind of "fruit juice" with high levels of marketing behind it e.g. Tropicana?

One of the problems with the word "diet" is the implicit connotations with fad-y short-term weight management strategies that never last. The same thing happens with the word "fast", but the implications are often religious. It's very easy to dismiss 5:2 for these reasons.

Looking at 5:2 simply as a "pattern of eating", however, makes it easier to consider not only the apparent health changes but also other potential benefits, including:

- Reduction of IGF-1 - Prolonged period of not eating as a means to promote cell repair - Shining a light on the cultural norms around eating three square meals a day with/without snacks in between.

After watching the documentary it seems like 5:2 may be more than just another "fad" diet.

Similarly, "legacy code" is a pejorative that means "Code that I didn't write and don't understand yet because I haven't had a chance to look at it for long enough, which I would really like to rewrite simply because reading other people's code is harder than writing your own and it would be easier for me to do that than to understand the existing code and the context in which it was written".

I think it's funny that both of those sites seems to get represented by a more vocal and publicly visible subset of their users, and in 4chan's case by a slightly unfair-seeming set of associations between anyone using the term "Anonymous" (despite the fact that Anonymous is simply a name that one can take up without it implying any real link to a group), the one board out of many that is apparently implicated in anything "Anonymous" does, and the site as a whole.

I'm assuming it's a reference to http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

But who monitors the status of statuspage.io?

If your site is so critical that it can't suffer any downtime then why is it not provisioned across multiple independent platforms?

Ah yes, the monthly link to an article about intelligent/gifted children and the troubles their talents cause them, leading to all the self-proclaimed gifted HNers coming out of the woodwork declaiming "Me too! Me too! Finally someone who understands me!".

Not dismissing the article itself, but it's definitely a pattern on HN.

I'd like to think that this is the more "hip" side of the tech industry parodying itself, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it's not.

Which for me really highlights the point that, despite using the same title, the word doctor implies two completely different but equally important types of experience.

This pretty much highlights my main beef with the current model of broadcast television, which is that it seems designed around leading to "that question", or "What's on?".

If you don't already know what you'd like to watch then perhaps you'd be better off finding something else to do that you enjoy (aside from those times when you genuinely do just want to crash and not think too much).

>Imagine if you paid for a book and there were appendices about characters or something extra, but written in a language you didn't know.

If you don't already know about it, you may want to check out the book Finnegan's Wake :)

Joking aside, I think you're right that there should be some kind of notice somewhere, in-game or out (even on the Steam page) that indicates that some parts of the game are difficult or inaccessible for players with a degree of hearing loss.

Even better might be to have an option in the game that turns on an additional visual cue that could augment whatever the original audio cue was. Actually designing it to make sense in the same way would of course be difficult, but I don't doubt that there are enough players that would appreciate that option.

Nothing rude meant by this (honestly), but if the experience of discovering the island, finding and completing the puzzles itself isn't motivating enough then perhaps it's just not the game for you?

I understand your point about filler, but the puzzles are the game, and if you're enjoying them then it probably doesn't come across as filler, just more to get stuck in with (though I do wonder whether so many slight variations on a theme are required in certain areas).

Hyped it may be, but that doesn't mean that you absolutely have to enjoy it at all costs. There are other games, and other developers :)

I think the best take-home from the article is simply that your screen time is a problem only if it's distracting you from the things you'd rather be doing.

If you're spending the majority of your Internet time researching a specific topic, or interacting with others online about that topic, or something you're specifically interested in, then there's not really a problem. As you say, the alternative is spending time offline focused on something else, and neither online nor offline is inherently bad.

It's only bad if you're online and you want to be e.g. watching a Coursera video or having a language lesson over Skype, etc., and the incoming Facebook chat messages, tweets and Slack notifications are constantly pulling away from your intended purpose.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

An open world puzzle game seems exactly like the kind of thing that might gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Plus it does make a nice change from reading the latest thing about React ;)

I think the default sorting for Steam reviews is by how helpful a review was.

Looking through some of the positive and negative reviews, it seems like the positive reviews are fairly short and don't say much about the game, while the negative reviews are longer and the reviewers do mention what they thought did and didn't work about the game, so the longer reviews that have a negative opinion end up being the most helpful. Just telling someone you liked something isn't going to cut it for everyone.

I can only guess that everyone who wanted to write a more in-depth positive review was just so keen to get back to playing the game that they cut their review short ;)

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "creepy corner of reddit"?

If you're interested in score layout, Steinberg are working on a new score layout application with (from what I gather) a lot of emphasis on layout flexibility, and there are a series of blog posts about some of the more interesting and subtle score layout issues, including how the other major notation applications handle edge cases.

The most recent post was http://blog.steinberg.net/2015/12/development-diary-part-12/

No disclaimers; I'm not affiliated with the product. Just a keen reader of the development diary.

Any chance this was how the Ferengi from Star Trek were names?

When three more consumer technology giants exist (perhaps oriented towards the dreadful Internet of Things), can we start to call them The Hateful Eight?

Every other commuter I see seems to solve this problem by reading while they're walking, head down, oblivious to their surroundings.

Learning yet another new language for the sake of just knowing another language? Not particularly.

There's an incredible amount of churn in the web languages/frameworks arena. A few years ago it seemed like every week another PHP "MVC" framework was released with exactly the same features as the last one, but with claims that it was faster, more robust, more extensible, and so on. At one point the "big players" were CakePHP and CodeIgniter. Now they seem to be Symfony and Laravel, but feature-wise there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of difference to how your application is structured in these particular frameworks.

Now the churn seems to have shifted away from PHP to JS and JS build systems, and lo and behold we have Imba, "a new programming language for the web".

Sometimes these tools offer clear advantages, other times not so. But often the lifespan on these seems to be less than a year. Everyone is excited about Backbone for six months, until Ember comes out and now no one talks about Backbone. But then Angular comes out and no-one talks about Ember. Investing time in learning any new tool can feel like a huge waste of time when there's a high chance that said tool will disappear a year or so down the line.

Moving this away from the land of web, a new language should at the very least offer a new perspective on something, for example Rust's approach to memory management is intriguing enough for it to potentially be worthwhile.

I like learning new skills and techniques. A language with a different syntax and some sugar-coating that is fundamentally the same as something I already know isn't that.

But maybe I'm just bitter ;)

I also like comparisons to the chances of other things happening as a way to get a feel for the odds, for example you're (apparently) more likely to be killed by a vending machine (1 in 112,000,000), become US president (1 in 10,000,000), or become an astronaut (1 in 12,000,000), than win the powerball.

Of course, just because your program never found the right numbers, doesn't mean it couldn't. People do win...