duneisagoodbook

it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hello HN,

I made a small game to formalize what I do when I find myself bored and staring at a clock. Take the time, and make an equation out of it. Highest value equation wins. The first version just used the time, but I expanded it to include the date, and I think it makes for a pretty fun open-ended daily math puzzle.

Some design notes (if you'll indulge me!):

Factorials presented an issue, 0!=1 is pretty important (some times are impossible to solve without this!), but it allows for arbitrarily large equations, which ruins the scoring of the game. To side-step this, the game only allows one ! per equation. This is occasionally frustrating, but it guarantees that the game is always winnable, while not being trivial.

There are a few quality of life features, many of them relating to parens. When you place a paren, the matching paren is automatically picked up. When you remove one, the matching one is removed. The parens use rainbow brackets, and remembers the order that they were placed in, so the colors don't shift unexpectedly. Symbol placement is limited to "legal" spaces; sqrt( can never be placed to the right of the rightmost digit, for instance.

The scoring system took a few iterations to get right, initially I wanted to reward players for using as few symbols as possible (golf-style), but this was difficult to communicate and made points more abstract. Collapsing the game down to score = value makes for a system which is much more intuitive.

Finally, I added a wordle-like "share" feature, which uses clocks to show what percentile your answer is in.

I think that my score on today's daily is impossible to beat.

yeah! they should focus on more productive pursuits, like telling people online what to do with their time and resources.

Absolutely! I think that's what the author meant when he said "In my prototype, your hand at the bottom of the screen is a background (similarly, in my E-Reader solitaire game, all of the cards are drawn into a background instead of using sprites)."

the emphasis on self-help snake oil leads me to believe you know that this system would fail under the weight of actual information. if you find success, it will be on the backs of marks you conned.

was that a machine you had lying around, or did you seek it out?

I didn't read the article, but--

I hope you reflect on why that is.

politicians are choosing instead to kill these prisoners via indeterminate detention

the sentence in the article "The jail terms were scrapped in 2012 amid human rights concerns, but not retrospectively – leaving almost 3,000 people languishing in prison with no release date." tells me that there is not an amount of danger which justifies this behavior from the state. if we have been able to live without this law since 2012, then there are other answers available which do not include this treatment.

it is important for us (the nerds with skills) to appreciate what the internet is like for those who aren't in the know. you and I will never see an ad, our grandparents will see thousands.

This is a false dichotomy, gross exploitation does not need to present.

"I don't see a societal benefit in people borrowing video games and watching DVDs that aren't educational." "loaning those items is just an attempt to stay relevant lest libraries become vacant and useless." you have answered your own question.

it's possible! encouraging people to go to the library is a net good on society.

being able to not think about race is a privilege enjoyed by those insulated from the harms of racism.

yeah usually it bothers me, but in this case it frames the content quite nicely

well said

Do we know what the minimum physical size is to run doom these days?