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CliffyA

80 karma · joined March 6, 2013

Formerly of Firemint and Electronic Arts, now working on my first business, a programming library to read and write Excel files.

http://numberduck.com

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CliffyA··on Show HN: SVG Spark – 10 client-side SVG design and dev tools
The "Noting ever leaves your device" text I think is an "eyebrow", a line of text above the header.
CliffyA··on AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
As the OP has "Aussie" in their name I think they'd be referring to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Dollarmites accounts. They were shutdown recently after a watchdog investigation. It was locking kids into using the bank that would continue into adulthood and schools were getting paid to sign kids up.

https://www.morningstar.com.au/personal-finance/the-lessons-...

"They found that it provided little value for children and the largest outcome was that children were being exposed to ‘sophisticated’ marketing tactics."

CliffyA··on HeidiSQL Available Also for Linux
Great news!

I've missed Heidi after changing job and moving from MySQL to Mongo and then Linux many (many) years ago. Looking forward to see how it goes with Postgres and SQLite nowadays.

CliffyA··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
I've been working on a programing language to read and write Excel spreadsheets. Or more accurately I've been writing a custom programming language and porting my library to it, so I can transpile it out to other languages.

Currently it is being transpiled to C++ and C#

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CPlusPlus

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CSharp

CliffyA··on Open source Google Analytics replacement
I have some static websites on S3 and CloudFront. I use https://goaccess.io/ to parse the logs and generate a html report.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there is a lot of bot activity there, that using JS might cleanup a bit.

If you are interested, I have a write up of my setup here, with the report generation down at the bottom: https://gamestrut.com/Blog/2022-06-08-static-site-hosting-on...

CliffyA··on Sanding UI
I see this. My assumption is its some kind of html/js cache, local storage across browser sessions maybe. And when you click an email it realizes it needs to update.
CliffyA··on Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Emulator for ESP32
The display also supports partial updates, so you can just upload a few sub rectangles of what has changed onscreen. AKA "dirty rectangles". You can get over 60fps depending on how much is changing, and since these games are on a static background, that's not much.
CliffyA··on Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
I'm not as jaded, I've been lucky enough to work at nicer places, but having made the same jump I would strongly recommend the same thing.

Either nights and weekends, or after a few years as a SWE you could just retire somewhere cheap and go nuts on your game dev passion.

CliffyA··on The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces
I agree with what you are saying, except that "I AM ERROR" isn't actually a bug. The character is intentionally named that in Zelda II, even in the original Japanese.
CliffyA··on 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)
Ya i think OP may be mixing up crash bandicoot and banjo kazooie
CliffyA··on Game-makers creating new Game Boy games (2021)
Ambernics seem to be very high build quality. I got the RG280v myself after some research. It's not as powerful (so it can't play every PS1 game at full frame rate) and does not have analog sticks.

But it is very small and I think that along with save states and standby helps it be more of a pick up and play toy for short bursts, more so than my 3DS or vita.

CliffyA··on A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech
Or what actually happened was the radio show asked if white going first was racially based, concluding that it was not. But conservative media spent days getting themselves outraged over it before it even aired.

https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/chess/12427690

CliffyA··on DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags
Mino Games is YC backed, as their job ads pop up on here occasionally. Interestingly they seem to have shut down their older larger scale Mino Monsters games and are focusing on (what i assume to be) smaller scale collecting games.
CliffyA··on Morrowind rebooted the original Xbox
I remember some launch demos were able to exit, usually with a forced splash screen ad for the full game. I thought it was a neat trick to use the xbox button to quit out of those and skip the ad.

So maybe exiting was allowed early on and discontinued later.

CliffyA··on Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold Available for Preorder: Hold onto Your Wallet
It's a separate thin keyboard that's sitting on half the screen. There's another picture with the separate keyboard in the other Anantech article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15280/lenovos-thinkpad-x1-fol...
CliffyA··on Top Scores: Video Game Music
Perhaps I can interest you in this live performance of Command & Conquer songs by the original composer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJClbTrY0VE
CliffyA··on Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer
This is Melbourne, Australia.

I'm the following is not very scientific, but just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

Firstly comparing just the numbers of jobs (even tho this is probably a bad time of year near the holidays):

PHP Jobs, 100k/year minimum: 3 added today, 7 the day before https://www.seek.com.au/php-jobs/in-All-Melbourne-VIC?salary...

C++ Jobs, 100k/year min: 0 today, 1 yesterday https://www.seek.com.au/c%2B%2B-jobs/in-All-Melbourne-VIC?sa...

And some of those aren't even C++ jobs, switching sorting from date to relevant gets you C++ jobs from 14 days ago that would already have moved along in their hiring process.

As a cherry picked example, dropping down to 80k/year there's this Embedded C role that requires specific experience in card payment software: https://www.seek.com.au/job/33166443?type=standout&tier=no_t...

To me those requirements seem stricter than what i see in the PHP jobs (experience with MySQL + some form of MVC framework). And on top of that it's paying less.

Another example is the finance job I applied at that was paying 70-90k. But to get in the high end of that range you would need previous stock trading software experience. They also wanted 5 hours of my time for the interview process, but that's a separate topic.

CliffyA··on Low-Level Programming University – A roadmap to becoming a low-level programmer
As someone who can code in C/C++ and was recently looking for work, I don't think someone should learn low level programming for a career. What I would consider simple PHP jobs were easily paying more than C++ jobs.

If you look at everyone reinventing the wheel in electron and not caring about performance I don't think the situation is going to get better anytime soon.

CliffyA··on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 out now
I have too, but I dream for more of an OQO style. I've wondered at some point how difficult it would be to get a quality case created that all the parts could go into.
CliffyA··on Warzone 2100: A Free and Open Source Real-Time Strategy Game
Saga of Ryzom went open source with creative commons assets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzom#Source_code_and_assets_f...

Tho on second thoughts I think the server side quests and world map may not have been released, so it probably does not count.

CliffyA··on Modern textureless deferred rendering techniques
It even inspired a WWII plane game to use deferred rendering, which optimizes for having many lights on an object. Even tho they for the most part had only one light source (the sun)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuDPTw_j6zw (it's somewhere in this presentation, but I'm on mobile ATM)

CliffyA··on Spine: an animation tool that focuses on 2D animation for games
If you click "Setup" in the top left it will switch to animation mode and you can play from there.
CliffyA··on Steam Sales 2015
Mad Max seems higher on that list than I would have expected especially launching alongside Metal Gear. The power of a movie license I guess.
CliffyA··on Adobe CEO desperately tries to avoid answering a simple question (2013)
Back when this video was made (and the Australian dollar was at parity with the American one) it was cheaper to buy a plane ticket to America and purchase Creative Suite than to buy it in store locally.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/02/dont-believe-the-adobe-pri...

CliffyA··on ArnoldC: Programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger
If you click on the original keyword name, it links to a YouTube video of the quote, which usually has the movie name in the title.
CliffyA··on Why video games are so expensive to develop
From a 2009 article, "EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game." http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/26/eas-chief-creative-officer...

And there's some random numbers throughout history in this article, such as Modern Warfare 2 costing $40 to $50 milion to develop and a total launch cost of $200 million. http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-...

And yes game dev is a lot of hours for less pay than your fantastic Silicon Valley wages.

CliffyA··on How much money are you earning from your software products?
$0 a month on http://numberduck.com

Hopefully that's because I'm competing against some established and open source projects, so anything with a lesser feature set isn't good enough for people to pay.

Now I'm slogging away on features to be the best, then hopefully the sales will follow.

CliffyA··on Manage your HTPC from anywhere
So it's a tool that makes it easier to pirate TV shows?

I'd prefer a tool that would pull all the episodes from my legitimate DVDs, or automatically dropped the DRM from my iTunes season pass episodes and imported them into my HTPC.

CliffyA··on Docomo unveils instant translator glasses in Japan
Yep, Word Lens http://readwrite.com/2010/12/16/amazing_instant_translation_...
CliffyA··on HTML5 game with random dungeons
You've posted this link a few times now. Maybe you'd get a better response if you posted more info instead of dumping people onto the login page?

Maybe some blog posts about the server infrastructure, overall design or creating random content? Those are some things I'd like to read about.

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