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jdludlowon Cards Against Humanity has made more than $12 million

Kickstarter is a huge topic on BoardgameGeek.com. It's everywhere, and tends to dominate the discussions of new titles. It's all over the site, but the concentrated discussion is here:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/forum/915012/kickstarter/genera...

jdludlowon Hire Me GitHub

This is good stuff. Should be worthy of an interview at least.

I prefer Macs, Vim, Nikon Cameras, and Dark Beer.

I don't know anything about cameras, but the other three are dead on.

jdludlowon Coffee meetings

Today my accountant gulped half his down in seconds. I took it as a sign.

It's early April. In the U.S., this is about 1.5 weeks before the largest tax deadline of the year. An accountant here with spare time for a leisurely coffee is a sign that I better start looking for a new accountant.

jdludlowon Bitcoin falls from $266

That's backwards. As the value approaches zero, the relative cost of mining grows not shrinks.

jdludlowon Coffee meetings

I don't think that Len was being sarcastic. I think what he really meant was, "Thanks for posting my article."

jdludlowon Medical Care in the U.S is Bad, But Insurance Sucks Too

There isn't a shred of evidence in that article to support the claim that medical care in the U.S. is bad.

jdludlowon Riak CS is Now Open Source

Erlang has been my latest hobby language, and while I'm not very deep into it yet I'm having fun looking through the source code here to see what "real Erlang" looks like.

https://github.com/basho/riak_cs

If any experts happen to notice particularly good or heinous examples in this source code, it'd be interesting to point them out.

jdludlowon How A Y Combinator Startup Is Born: The Story Of Strikingly

Part of your sentence appears to be missing, but I'll fill it in for myself. The "ly" thing is beyond worn out. The odd thing in this case is that they actually chose a real word.

jdludlowon How safe is your password with Verizon?

Pranaya: and FYI – I use the same password for my bank accounts, etc..

Someone who is serious about security would never do this. The rest of the article falls on its face at this point.

jdludlowon Show HN: We open sourced One-Time Secret today

I use a similar system, but only because I know the people who wrote that one. It's nice to see the code, but there's still no guarantee that this is the code that is running on the real site. Now, having the code available makes it possible to run it myself if I'm super-paranoid, which is cool.

So, thanks.

jdludlowon Behaviors That Destroy Your Financial Health

"Rich people tend to buy things that appreciate in value. Poor people tend to buy things that depreciate in value".

Obviously not a universal truth, but applied to money and/or time it's something that I try to keep in the back of my mind.

jdludlowon Two Billion Pixel Photo of Mount Everest (can you find the climbers?)

If you think "I'm moving the camera on this tripod" it suddenly becomes very natural. It worked for me anyway.

jdludlowon Why we still love board games

BoardGameGeek also has an active secondary market, lowering the risk of new purchases. Unless the game is utterly terrible, you'll be able to recoup some of your money.

The user auctions there fetch high enough prices that I would not hesitate to sell there as opposed to eBay. They also have their own marketplace where users can sell games at fixed prices, but the organic "hey I want to sell these, who wants to give me cash" lists of games[1] are quite successful.

[1] http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/66420/metalist-for-geeklis...

jdludlowon Why we still love board games

I carry a stack of calculators around with me, since my gaming preferences lead me toward heavy economic eurogames and titles from the 18XX[1] world. Power Grid isn't bad enough to need a calculator most of the time, but if someone in my group wants to use one no one is going to bat an eye.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18XX

jdludlowon Why we still love board games

Minneapolis has an embarrassment of riches on this front. We have game shops everywhere and dozens of public groups that meet regularly. There's also a monthly gathering that typically runs Friday to Sunday (16 hours each), and sells out its 90 person capacity almost instantly.

The groups are very newbie friendly, which is typical for this hobby.

jdludlowon Why we still love board games

Power Grid has a lot of simple arithmetic. You're adding numbers in your head constantly. Barring a runaway leader, the endgame tends to have a slingshot effect where the person who is "leading" is actually behind those who are currently in 2nd or 3rd place. Timing this come-from-behind win is a big part of the fun for me.

It's the #6 game on BoardGameGeek [1], and well deserved to be there. Saying that "it's filled with math" doesn't make it sound all that exciting, but there's a good spacial element, an auction system that gets quite tense at times, and opportunity for "screw you" behavior that actually pays off. The winner is typically the one who was most efficient and has made some clever plays to keep his opponents out of his chosen markets.

[1] http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

jdludlowon 37 Signals Ends Affiliate Program - Refuses to Pay Less than $100

I guess they shouldn't have been making promises like this then, under the headline "Now and Forever".

When a customer signs up through your referrer link, you’ll earn 50% of their first month’s payment (after they make that first payment), then 5% of their future monthly payments for the life of their account.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1063-launch-announcing-the-ne...

(Google cache version of same): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CYZy2_t...

I'm sure that there's a lawyer-written T&C doc somewhere that explains how any claims in that post are a lie and they own your firstborn, but this seems shady.

jdludlowon 2D Game Art for Programmers

From the same blog, this is the starting point where he breaks down a very simple process of drawing with circles and introduces some basic concepts.

http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.in/2011/10/lets-get-...

jdludlowon Let Developers Register for Your API with Their Github Profile

Having never used github for authorization, I clicked on the sign-up button that Singly provided. Among the bullet points that github issues, this one seemed a bit more than mildly concerning.

  * Update your public and private repositories (Commits, Issues, etc).

There is a zero chance of me ever agreeing to that.

jdludlowon Vim Creep

  $ man apropos
  
  apropos searches a set of database files containing
  short descriptions of system commands for keywords and
  displays the result on the standard output.

It answers the question "I wonder how to do [this English word]."

For example: "I wonder how I copy a file."

  $ apropos copy

Dumps out all of the matching entries from the man pages for the word "copy". If you just wanted general commands, as opposed to library functions, and assuming your system organizes man page sections in the typical manner, you can filter it down with:

  $ apropos copy | grep "(1)"
  cp                   (1)  - copy files and directories 
  cpio                 (1)  - copy files to and from archives

jdludlowon Vim Creep

It's mainly about muscle memory. If you're using Sublime, emacs, TextMate, or any other "real" text editor then you're fine.

I don't have to think about how to perform most tasks in vim. My fingers just execute what my brain wants to see happen. That doesn't mean that vim is the greatest thing ever, just that I'm used to it and it's fast enough to get the job done.

One concrete benefit to vim is that it works very well over crappy network connections, and it's installed on most every Linux system you're going to touch.

jdludlowon Vim Creep

My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were:

* This is how you log in.

* This is ls.

* This is cd.

* This is man.

* This is apropos.

* Learn vi.

* Have fun.

What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.

jdludlowon Vim Creep

Most people have read this before, but maybe some of the kidlets here haven't seen it.

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

464gg for the greatest chapter about an OS ever written.

jdludlowon Hacking: Always Design the UX First

Speaking of UX, this is what that page looks like when JavaScript is disabled.

https://img.skitch.com/20120604-e4x8dgp8u82akj7ngmyhywbtdb.p...

jdludlowon Google is making a huge and annoying mistake

It's done partially because "everyone else is doing it," but there is also the "wisdom of crowds" value. The number of likes or dislikes is a quick metric that can be used for sorting, searching, populating a home page, or building recommendations.

jdludlowon HBO Decides It Still Isn't Difficult Enough To Watch HBO Shows

Our experiences are nearly mirror images. I cancelled cable TV years ago. When Game of Thrones came out last year, I naively thought "No big deal. I'll just pay HBO for streaming." I was shocked to discover that there's no way for me to upend my wallet into HBO's coffers without funneling it through Comcast and buying multiple tiers of garbage that I care nothing about.

I waited a year and bought the blu ray version, but I still can't understand why HBO wouldn't prefer to get their money earlier rather than later.

jdludlowon Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live

How do you make money if it's completely free?

We have ideas for moentization that does not include charging people to user our service.

Ads or harvesting user info or what? Does anyone know where they are going with this?

jdludlowon No SOPA or April Fools: Slashdot is officially dead

The same thing happened for "April 1". Historically, Slashdot was a leader in posting April Fools prank stories. This year, it posted none.

That sounds like growing up not dying.

jdludlowon Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

(I did throw away $100 on an ad on clientsfromhell.net and got virtually zero results)

My suspicion on this is that since Clients From Hell offers no reason to go to the site itself (no extra commentary, no user comments, etc.) it's easier to just read it from an RSS feed.

jdludlowon Can You Build A Network On Top Of Another Network?

I asked if it is a network if it is built on top of another network. I think in that case, the answer is no.

Ironic that the network he's talking about is built on top of the TCP/IP stack.

I guess the point of the article is to argue about the definition of "social network", which isn't that exciting.