v21

I remember hearing about it while I was at uni, and checking it out of my uni library. I read through it, and it was a dusty old tome full of references to long dead systems.

And it was good, while not saying anything I was hugely shocked by, but making clear and sensible points.

And now a few years down the line, I'm out of uni and working, and I find myself toying with buying it for my boss...

Raising your voice to have an opinion and getting in lots of flamewars is a fine way to improve.

This is why clinical trial registries are so important. Unfortunately the last I heard they were a confusing mess, with many not actually providing the openness that was necessary for them to be effective.

I am an indie dev, and I do make things myself. But that in no way diminishes the pleasure I get at seeing other people's works, being delighted and surprised by a novel or well-executed bit of game. It's difficult to be delighted and surprised by your own works.

And yeah, they of course have the right to make what they want and I can in no way take that away from them. Remaking the same game might even be worth it, financially. But it doesn't build value like getting going making new IP can, and it doesn't give me something exciting and new to play. I'm allowed to ask, they don't have to give it to me.

It's really excellent to read a guide on this kind of thing that focuses on the difficult human factors rather than the easier technical ones.

I'm glad this is the case. A common trap for indie developers is to make one game, have it be at least partially successful, and then to continue to make that game - making DLC, expansions, porting it to other platforms, making a multiplayer version etc. It makes me sad as a player, because it's done instead of developing something new. It's far better to pass on these porting efforts to other developers and to get to work creating new IP, as Notch is doing.

I'm more familiar with games than with startup culture - does the same thing apply there?

He's not presenting it as evidence, but saying that it can help to illustrate a pattern of behavior. There's still the larger, more important task of showing that that pattern of behavior exists in the world, but this allows exemplars of this pattern of behavior to be internalized. The internalization process is obviously dangerous, but ultimately I'm not smart enough to make rational judgments on most things, so I need to rely upon intuitive understandings of things.

(Though one could argue that stuff like this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM&feature=youtu... can be used as evidence of showing how leading language can work, if you can feel your own opinion being swayed, as Bernard talks. The extent to which one can rely upon one's own feelings of their opinions is another matter... but it's a stab in the right direction.)

Likely enough to be random variation as to have some real underlying cause.

There's a whole world to discover: http://www.moddb.com/mods

But you can respond by going "But it's silly to exclude X from discussion". Which is why I have been trying (and, evidently failing) to convey.

You're right of course - and I should have tempered my post with caveats about "if the poster is correct", and "I don't really know much about the internal workings of the ASF".

The main point I was trying to convey was just that there's a cost to not improving things, just as much as there's a cost to things getting worst.

That Actionscript is still a useful language, within it's niche. And since this post is all about finding the right language for particular niches I don't see why you'd argue against it's inclusion.

I do write games, and Actionscript (3, not 2) is a lovely language.

Piracy is definitely the draw for this. Enough to make it practical? Maybe - it depends on how many good alternatives to piracy exist.

It harms the opportunity cost of the projects that reside within it. That's a real harm.

And I think the point is that while GitHub is there, use it. If it closes off, or goes bust, migrate. You can extract all your data - keep a backup elsewhere. At worst, you can move to Gitorious. I mean, currently they use JIRA for bug tracking - that's not an open project either, that's run by Atlassian.

I'm not the OP, but if something raises my ire almost enough to make me blog about it, it probably isn't going to irritate me enough to fork a large software project. But the lower the bar for submitting a patch, the more likely you'll get one. And the more everyone will benefit from it (assuming it's a net positive patch).

I dunno about that. Spotify offers pretty much the same service, and is legal.

I think one reason they've been luckier legally is that they sold a fair fraction of the company to record labels for a pittance early on.

There aren't any instructions, or even a goal. But if you want one, try setting all the squares to be red. Click on a square and drag over to the grey squares. They do interesting things when the cursor goes over them.

I had absolutely no idea!

...which is a problem.

"In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people."

And a charismatic person who used the word "fuck", would he convey less than the same person avoiding using the word?

I think it was uncommonly honest for him to discuss it in those terms. Possibly not wise, but I hate to condemn a person for not concealing their motives.

And -- there's no exclusion between topic and persona. But you can have many topics, but you rarely get multiple public personas. For many people, and I'd bet Zach is one of them, their reputation is their biggest asset. Being careful about it seems entirely sensible to me.

As someone who swears a lot - it's pretty easy to find a way to swear again, when you really want to make your point known. Becoming deathly serious and quiet, and then deliberately not swearing works well.

I'm sympathetic to what he's saying. It is painful to develop lots of separate platforms.

But I work making games. And so this promised land is still way over the horizon. We're only just getting to the point where a HTML5 game can be notable as anything other than a tech demo on the desktop. It'll be another few years before we reach that point for mobile.

I am constantly running out of internal space on my N1. It's the worst thing about it, and the main reason I would upgrade.

Yup, the main guy behind it is Carlos Alloa. He was also the guy behind Papervision, which did 3D in Flash years ago. And is also just a lovely guy.

> Think of how many "to JS" solutions there are. Seriously, google that. Like 20? 25?

What do you expect? The most important platform to write software for only accepts a single language. It doesn't matter how good the language is, people will be writing things that get converted to that language.

> How much "to C" solutions do you see getting on the front page of Hacker News these days?

Well, there's ShedSkin, and HipHop. But that's not the point. Anything that can run C can run [arbitrary other language]. Because, often enough, that arbitrary other language was written in C. Surely, by your terms, everyone who programs in Python is a desperate grasper hoping to escape C?

Jobs knew public opinion, and how to sway it. Stallman is a zealot.

But there's still a distinction between RMS and the FSF.