danko

Just wanted to say: thank you for making and maintaining this. I’m sorry that so many of the initial comments on this HN post are from one person complaining that their submissions didn’t get accepted. That’s the thing with the personal web: it’s personal! It’s what that person wants, which happens to be the thing that makes it great. If you don’t like it, the rest of the internet is still there.

A slight spoiler, but there's a reason why some spaces are '?' - they hint that one specific type of creature may be nearby. (Think of the one that looks like a Beholder from D&D).

For the walls - think of them as an HP sink. The game largely revolves around using your health as efficiently as possible to explore the board. Walls are useful since you can attack them 1 HP at a time to get the XP out of them (thus allowing you to always fully use your allotment before refilling your health).

Prost and Senna were evenly matched – that's why the racing between them was so great, and why the rivalry was so pitched. Senna was faster than Prost in qualifying and over a single lap, and vastly better in rainy conditions. Prost had better race-craft and was more consistent lap-over-lap, race-over-race. They were both otherworldly.

Bingo. It was that kind of thinking that put Neville Chamberlin in the dunk tank of history.

Not to put words in OP's mouth, but I'd guess the weirdness is in a couple of things:

1) Jimmy can go deep on some extremely obscure corners of the industry (e.g. interactive fiction movements that maybe only a few dozen academic acolytes are even aware of).

2) The occasional deep tangent. For example, I don't think a month-long mini-biography of Edward Mannock was really necessary to appreciate the Amiga game _Wings_. But then again, I loved that tangent, so it's the kind of weirdness that I can personally embrace. I'm guessing the Analog Antiquarian is going to end up ultimately absorbing that energy anyway.

For the NY Times, the assertion that most of their revenue comes from advertising just isn't true. 60% of their revenue now comes from subscription fees, and advertising's slice of their revenue has shrunk consistently.

https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/5gNimvTR/New...

Try passing along a vinyl or CD or VHS or DVD collection when you die. See how fast it ends up at a flea market, or on the curb waiting for the trash truck. ALL digital goods are ephemeral one way or the other, unless you're an actual archivist. That's why archivists are important as their own discipline.

It's true there's a non-zero chance the property market implodes, but the shift to remote workers is exactly what WeWork is counting on. Many (even most) people chafe at working in their living space 100% of the time, and squatting in coffee shops and the like also has its limits. People generally need a work place that is separate from their living place, even if their work place is not the same work place as the rest of their company. Throw in the need for quiet places, conference rooms, whiteboards, etc, and before you know it...

The implication here is that a lot of value associated with 2019-era VC-funded startups is derived from the revenue they receive by selling to other VC-funded startups.

If we're keying off of personal anecdote, allow me to be a single point in favor of the touch bar. I actually like the thing, and find it useful. Yes, I do!

I put my money on the former. 4chan is... itself. But it is definitely a vibrant community. And Poole himself has some thoughtful, unique insight into what makes a community vibrant and what kills it.

It's interesting how this article conflicts the narrative (and indeed, Fitzgerald's own narrative) about his life. The narrative was that they lived fabulously until the simultaneous stresses of the the stock market crash and Zelda's mental breakdown in 1929. Turns out that at least from an income perspective, he was doing quite well up until the moment he died. But Zelda's healthcare costs ruined him anyway, and he cognitively backed himself in a corner in terms of making adjustments.

It reminds me of a quote from another famous author, one Charles Dickens:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

There are many, many objectives for which the F1 rules need to account. Competitive balance is one of them. Providing interesting and relevant technical challenges for automakers and teams is another (and was a major driver behind the recent switch to hybrid engines). In addition to those, you have safety, spectacle, cost-containment, logistical considerations, and about a thousand other goals that need to be incorporated. The FIA takes incredible flak for whatever they do because there are myriad tradeoffs between these objectives, and it's impossible to balance them all in a way that makes everyone happy.

For those who need the context -- when Reddit had that big bust-up last week about banning subreddits like /r/fatepeoplehate, aggrieved commenters were recommending that others migrate to voat.co. That effectively means that voat.co recently absorbed the slimy runoff of Reddit's worst element.

Given that, it isn't wholly surprising that their hosting service wanted no part of them.

To be clear here, it's not a single thumb drive (as the title implies) but a network of thumb drives distributed through an ad-hoc parcel service. Frankly, it doesn't sound that different than the old shareware and disc-based multimedia subscription services that used to exist in the US in the early-to-mid-90s (such as LAUNCH and SoftDisk). The biggest difference I can see is that (a) it's largely pirated content and (b) there's seems to be some user generated content as well.

Exactly. One could easily come up with a corollary: "The worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like bad ideas and really are." Which is a truism that probably applies to most startup ideas.

Perestroika is the era in Soviet history when the USSR began to 'thaw' in its relationship to the West and reform its economic policy to be less collectivized and more capitalistic.

In this case, Microsoft would be the USSR and its policy of closed-source Windows/.NET domination would be the old Communist Party hegemonic philosophy. That would make Satya Nadella Microsoft's Mikhail Gorbachev.

And it was the perfect choice, precisely for what it said about his character at the beginning of the show. Walter White, the put-upon high school chemistry teacher living in quiet desperation, driving around in a car generally perceived to be a big, swinging two-ton white flag to the world.

I think that's what he was driving at with the following quote:

"Many people in the car business do not understand that a vehicle has an image. To them, a vehicle is a collection of attributes. If your attributes are better than the other guy’s attributes, you’re gonna win. It’s engineer thinking, along totally rational lines. Their advice to an alcoholic is “stop drinking—is there something about that you don’t understand?” That’s not how people actually think."

If you add up an Aztec as a collection of attributes, it was a damn fine vehicle. If you engage with it from the perspective of an actual consumer -- a sometimes irrational, emotionally-influenced person whose sense of self is in some small way defined by the vehicle they drive -- the Aztec is a fiasco. Part of the function of a car is how the driver feels to own it, so form is part of the function. And the Aztec was a complete failure at providing that part of the function.

Read the article. He mentions that "someone suggested to them to audit and they found 'Millions and millions of dollars of error not in our favor.'" Shady accounting practices were used to intentionally mask earnings that would've contributed to a real royalty payout.

This is a common practice in Hollywood as well. It's the reason why royalties as a percentage of net profits are called 'monkey points'. It's because you'd have to be a monkey to believe that the studio's accountants would ever allow that film to turn a profit in its official books.

But isn't a better sounding boot beep also form? Isn't this really just somebody choosing form over form? Just because the engineer was an engineer doesn't make his aesthetic preference (a better-sounding boot beep) any more empirical than Jobs' aesthetic preference (no extraneous holes in the case).

Also, calling marketers 'worthless people' is a callow statement. I'm an engineer, but we build the things we make for people to use, so the people who help other people understand the value in what we make are far from worthless.

I think the issue here is with the marketing costs necessary to actually get people into theaters. It's so difficult to actually convince folks to get out of their homes for filmed entertainment that it generally takes a $50-$80 MM marketing budget for a film to do _any_ kind of business at the box office.

This ruins the economics of the 'mid-sized' film, since if you have to tack on $60 MM of marketing onto the production budget anyway, even the smaller films generally have a high level of risk. Thus the whole market has bifurcated between enormous $200 MM behemoths and $2 MM indie movies with limited theatrical distribution trying to promote themselves virally.

This is the sort of thing that makes me fear for the Parses, Kinveys, and StackMobs of the world. Today it's Azure -- how many tomorrows is it going to be before it's Amazon or Rackspace?

Once the major cloud hosting players are in on the easy cloud-backed key-value store field, how much oxygen is there in the room for players like Parse? Especially when they themselves are built on EC2? I've got to think we're no more than 6-12 months from seeing that happen, and then they're going to have a tremendous fight on their hands, venture funding or not.

The article makes an excellent point: you can really only demand "startup hours" out of your employees if you can offer "startup perks" (i.e. (a) an extremely favorable work environment, (b) interesting work, and (c) the possibility of the big cash-out).

Zynga has never seemed particularly strong at (a) and (b), but compensated with a heaping helping of (c). Now that's gone. If they're going to demand startup hours now, they'll have to get there by pressure and exploitation (which admittedly is nothing new in the gaming industry). There's always been something brutal and antagonistic about that company, and that's probably just going to get worse.

Also:

TechCrunch comment threads have one positive attribute: they make me appreciate the level of discourse here at HN all the more.

No matter how fulfilling or worthwhile something is, there will always be tedious parts. Always.

It's a refusal to accept this that prevents people from completing tasks -- they hit the inevitable wave of tedium, and they can't grind through it, because they assume anything that's truly edifying will be tedium-free. That's a really dangerous belief.

Now if something is all tedium, then I agree, find something else to do. But there is no project on Earth that won't have frustrating patches where your mind will try to wander.

If there's any joy to take from this (beyond pure, uncut schadenfreude), it's that news articles like this have permanently stemmed the tide of Groupon imitators that saturated every conduit of the tech media in 2011.

I do fully believe that Groupon (and Living Social) will survive -- albeit as much more modestly sized companies -- but the sea of imitators should evaporate except for a very select few in well-entrenched niches. And that's fine, they serve their purpose, and they do have a legitimate market in which they can make money and deliver value. The rest of us can treat their product as an established commodity and move on.

This is a good companion piece to another recent HN post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991122

I've found two axioms to hold true:

1) Don't compare your life to anyone's. Just don't. Comparing any two lives is fundamentally apples to oranges, because each life is its own thing.

2) Once you've got the bottom tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs covered well enough where you can feel assured that it'll stay covered, money doesn't buy much happiness.

I thought this was what Jotly was supposed to be. And then, like magic, Jotly was real. I think they had to go one vaguer to prevent this from materializing into reality as well.

This, to me, is the best counterpoint I've read to Michael Arrington's rant from a few months back on how startup folk need to work harder and stop crying.

http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-m...

Arrington is a romantic, and he believes passionately in the romantic mythos of the startup world. That's what drew him to the valley to start TechCrunch in the first place. And that view of the world is warped as hell.

The key is you've just got to match the level of effort you're willing to give to the level of effort required to achieve the goal you've set out for yourself. Not all goals -- including entrepreneurial goals -- require a 120 hour a week personal commitment to succeed.

At first, I read this and thought to myself -- "charming, but they didn't really pay $5K for the chair, so much as for their lack of proper legal documentation."

Then I thought on it a bit more and realized -- it was the chair that cost them $5K, because if they hadn't established the paper trail via the e-mail chain about giving the chair back, they wouldn't have had the hangup on 'without prejudice'.

Be careful with email, folks. In the end, that is your paper trail.