Hacker News Reader

drewyingon GameLad – Gameboy emulator written in C++

Does it have to be interesting to share? Writing a gameboy emulator is a fun and challenging project in and of itself, and something that not everyone can do. That alone I think is impressive enough to share.

drewyingon The NES Homebrew Scene

I agree with you in general, but I think it's worth pointing out that programming the NES's PPU is actually very similar to programming with a 2D graphics library today.

NES games never wrote their own scrolling logic, or there own graphics logic. They wrote tile values into a background table and then told the NES how much to scroll the playing field, and the NES rendered and scrolled everything automagically.

NES games never drew their own sprites. They just said "Hey NES, write the sprite at this x and y location" and the NES did it.

Audio worked the same way.

Honestly, coding for the NES would be similar to working with a simple 2D graphics library. So I don't know if it would be accurate to say "every line of code is yours" on the NES. It's more just that the "libraries" used were implemented in hardware instead of software.

drewyingon Few Cities Could Accommodate Amazon's New Headquarters

While Salt Lake technically meets the requirements, they do so just barely. The metro area barely cracks a million people, and the airport maybe has 1 or 2 international flights a day. Plus Amazon and the Utah state government still have a lot animosity towards each other from the whole online tax thing.

Plus it's really tough to attract out of state talent in Utah.

I think Salt Lake would be a very hard sell compared to what Amazon could easily get with Denver.

drewyingon How I Defeated the Tolkien Estate

Can someone who is a little more into Lord of the Rings comment on this? This guy didn't really get a lawsuit dropped by claiming that Tolkeins books were actually written 5000 years ago did he?

Or is there something here whooshing over my head?

drewyingon WatchKit

A quick scan makes it look like you don't have direct access to create your own UI elements, you are stuck to the prebuilt stuff.

This definitely is designed to maximize battery life

drewyingon Spider Programming Language

Kudos to the creator. Writing something like this takes a lot of effort and it looks like they did a great job! Well done!

With that said, on wider level, what's the allure of these JavaScript replacement languages? Is JavaScript syntax really that difficult for some developers to wrap their head around? I can understand something like Dart that has an underlying goal of performance, but the purposes of things like this or CoffeeScript genuinely confuse me.

drewyingon The Classic Two Egg Problem

We ask a variation of this question in our interviews. (We use lightbulbs, not eggs). I've yet to have anyone storm out yet.

drewyingon What not to do during an interview

It's not a matter of it's a culture fit or not, it's a matter of showing that you care about the job.

We wear whatever the hell we want to at the office, but if I conduct an interview and the interviewee comes wearing jeans and a T-Shirt with holes, I problem will end the interview short and thank him for his time. If he doesn't care about this job enough to even make an attempt at dressing up then why waste our time.

Same with swearing. If you can't show to us that you care about this job enough to use professional language for an hour then I probably won't consider you past the first round. It's not whether we care about swearing, it's about proving to us you really want this job.

drewyingon Hacking Sonos

Very cool!

I created an app using some of nathanborrors work that let's you browse through all of the Sonos Music services (Like Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, iHearRadio, etc). Setup your account, browse through your collections and play them on your system. I should submit a pull request to see if I can get this integrated into this project!

You can see the project here: https://github.com/drewying/Sonos-Music-Services-Browser

I also have an app on the App Store that turns your Sonos System into a wireless PA system. The current version is a little buggy but an update is coming shortly that makes it much more stable. You can check it out here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sonos-voice/id689673100?mt=8

drewyingon War of the 3D Engines

I didn't think you could run your own login and payment on Apple. Or have they changed that?

drewyingon Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

The author also claims the Gini coefficient doesn't take into count population growth and so skews the number. That is completely wrong. It's calculated using the Lorenzo curve which which is a per capita calculation.

drewyingon HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

This demo (nor none of the others linked to on the main Shumway page) appear to be working on my iPad, mobile Safari running iOS7.

Not sure if it's me or if it's the code. Can anyone else confirm?

drewyingon Is there a STEM worker shortage?

I have a good friend who is a mathematician, masters degree. She works for an insurance company doing statistics as an actuary.

This is just based her anecdotes, but from her stories it sounds like the world of professional mathematicians/staticians is suffering from a talent shortage that completely dwarfs what we experience in the technology sector. A good mathematician is rare gold in the finance/insurance worlds right now.

drewyingon How to save Windows Surface?

As other users have pointed out, Microsoft actually does a lot of this. If you have a successful app MS will pay you handsomely to port it over.

Honest, the Surface's problem is more perception than anything

drewyingon Someone's stealing our identity on Apple's App Store

The curious thing to me is it took me 3 months once to get one of my apps through the app store because reviewer thought it was too similar to the app "Draw Something".

My app was called "Draw Wireless". It was a super dinky app that let people iPhones connect to each other via Bluetooth and draw on a shared whiteboard space in real time. It had a dark blue grey icon with a wireless symbol on it.

Other than the fact the icon had a dark blue background, it looked and behaved nothing like the app "Draw Something". But yet I had to redesign the icon three times and rewrite the app description four times before the reviewer felt I had distinguished enough from "Draw Something" and let it through. It took 3 freaking months.

TLDR; if your app is prominent enough then Apple will only let will go to extreme lengths to protect your app. I guess it's only if you are a small guy like these guys you need to worry about fakers.

drewyingon This coupon code is a slap in the face

I'm sure it's just me, but I've never felt bad or weird or bad or even cared much about the possibility of paying 20 bucks for something vs 19 bucks with a 5% off coupon code. That one dollar savings doesn't seem worth the hassle of spending 20 minutes on Google. I'd rather spend that 20 minutes billing 100 bucks/hour making a website for someone.

Reading these comments it seems there are a lot of people on Hacker News who seem quite passionate about the idea of getting the best deal they can and not "feeling like a sucker".

Which is fine, but it's definitely a feeling I don't experience. Maybe I'm just weird.

With the topic at hand, having maintained an online shop for a client for several years, I see that they use Coupon Codes as a customer service thing. Didn't like your product? Here's a onetime use 15% off code so you don't hate us. At least that's how they used it. So I always ignore those fields.

drewyingon Blink tag removed from Firefox

Fare well old <blink> friend. My high school memories of webrings would not be the same without you.

drewyingon IOS productivity app market on the cusp of change?

Isn't this the dream of the Microsoft Surface and similar tablets? Give them multitasking, a keyboard case, and boom instant productivity.

I personally just think it comes down to screen real estate. Small screens are hard to do anything productive. I still remember trying to type up a paper in college on an Acer netbook. Even with a full "laptop experience", it was a horrible and scarring experience.

drewyingon Android vs. iOS: Comparing the Development Process of the GQueues Mobile Apps

At this point, unless I'm going to be dealing with large (n>5000) data sets, I just use NSKeyedArchiver and serialize/deserialize all my objects to a file.

Might not be as fast as CoreData, but is sure a lot easier to code and it's fast enough that the user never even notices.

drewyingon Apple Developer System Status

I see iTunes Connect is still up. Does that mean that apps can still be submitted, assuming you all ready have the needed provisioning and certs?

drewyingon Google Unveils The New Nexus 7 Android Tablet

Same price I assume?

drewyingon Forgotten Employee (2002)

We have a guy kinda like this at our current company. He is a co-founder of the company. When our angel investors came in there was some drama and disagreements. End result he was demoted and stripped of all his responsibilities.

They can't fire him since he helped found the company and has some protections. But he refuses to do anything they ask him. Now both sides have given up. Guy won't even come into the office most of the time.

I don't know if it's a position I ever want to be in.

drewyingon Would you use PhoneGap again?

Maybe I'm different and strange but I found learning Objective-C and the CocoaTouch/iOS libraries pretty easy.

I think it makes a huge difference getting a formal education and just screwing around/googleing your way. When I tried to teach myself just using Google searches progress was slow and frustrating. But the second I switched to learning via Stanford's online courses in iTunes U, I was able to pick it up after just a few lessons. It really is a pretty simple framework after you get the core concepts down.

drewyingon Agent 008 Ball

Here's the website to the company that made it:

http://www.thinkpixellab.com

They did it for an IE9 promotion a couple years ago. Has help up surprisingly well.

drewyingon Why I Haven’t Hired a Single Developer in Canada

For every outsourcing success story it seems there are two horror stories. I know at my prior employer we hired a development team in India for a year and it was a complete disaster. Not only was the work shoddy and buggy, we ended up paying more than what we would have had we just hired a good local developer. They ended up charging us 300k for the year. We were supposed to get a 25 developer team for that 300k but the work they turned out could have been easily done by two decent experienced State-side engineer and done a lot better too. I had to spend 6 months rewriting large chunks of their code, it was just terrible.

From my experience it seems really hard to get good talent overseas. And if you do find good talent, they usually want almost as much a good local talent.

drewyingon Is Social Media Worthless?

Direct benefits from Social Media are very low, yes. But this article ignores the fact that a lot of modern SEO relies very heavily on Social Media. So even though direct links from Social Media are worthless, the effect it will have you more likely making it on page one of a Google Search result makes all the difference.