Skoofoo

> It's like a more mature reddit

This piqued my interest, but then on the front page I found "Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates". Then I check out the 'architecture' tribe and the top post is "21 Houses to Avoid on Halloween".

Perhaps I am not the target market for this, but what I would like to see is a social news site that actively rejects junk content and promotes content that helps you become a better, smarter person.

If this project used Ruby, it would be an approachable tool for back-end web development neophytes to learn with before moving on to Sinatra and Rails.

I second this. The language appears to be a Ruby with a slightly modified syntax, and most programmers won't be excited about keeping track of the differences. Use Ruby for this and everyone will benefit.

Even if it were legal, it would not necessarily be ethical. People incorrectly assume that when something is ubiquitous, it should belong to the public.

Super Mario is not something that has always existed or would eventually exist, it is a creative work that became successful through Nintendo's efforts. There is nothing wrong with Nintendo wanting to reserve their rights to it.

That is not to say that Mario fan works are not enjoyable - there are awesome Mario ROM hacks and Flash animations out there - but that people shouldn't feel entitled to the rights to make them and to complain when Nintendo takes legal action.

Many of us love the Super Mario franchise and SMB has made a huge cultural impact, but that does not entitle people to use it as a base for their own work.

Take inspiration from Mario and create original games!

Good to see the Bitcoin icon making it in there.

The open source desktop is kept alive mostly through donated spare time. This time is limited. We would do well to maximize the impact of time spent creating and maintaining open source desktop software.

Right now the standard language to build Linux software is C, which is great for performance, but not great for development speed. There are ports of things like GTK+ to other languages, but ports are less supported and usually don't take full advantage of their language's unique flavor.

To maximize impact per unit of time spent developing open source software, and also perhaps to entice more people into contributing to open source software, I believe it would be a good idea to build a desktop environment/widget toolkit with an opinionated API in Ruby. Anyone who has experience writing Ruby on Rails code with an automated red-green-refactor cycle likely could testify that it is pleasant and fast. Why not bring that sort of experience to building desktop software?

This is great. The PS Vita really has more than enough power to express a modern video game. I hope that this becomes popular and makes it more viable for large game companies to spend less time on graphical detail and more time on pursuing original ideas.

I like to listen to http://scenemusic.net.

This is exactly it. I would commonly use the shorthand for something like this, but I felt that it would only deter from the point I was illustrating, which is that a couple methods can seamlessly act like a variable.

You should stick with the original. Remakes have higher resolution graphics, but at the cost of the creative passion that went into the original games.

I wonder if there is any way to turn FOSS into a mainstream movement. The only thing really stopping FOSS from becoming more commonplace is the lack of consumer demand and awareness.

"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language." -Matz

Ruby and its ecosystem revolves around your happiness and productivity. Isn't that great?

> But the tech community may be different from other industries. Degrees are not necessarily seen as a hallmark of achievement and programmers are judged on their ability to type lines of code. You are what you create.

That is the key here. It is reasonable to not focus on education if you wish to pursue a lucrative, high-demand career in an industry that tends to care about actual skill a lot more than education.

Wow, I knew that the forces behind Game Maker at some point stopped having their customers'/community's best interest at heart, but I didn't know it was this bad.

I like the aesthetic of this and the fact that it's based on the open web, though I wish that you invested your time into making more original video games. There aren't enough of those in the world!

SQL actually first started out as SEQUEL and then was changed due to trademark issues, so calling it "sequel" is not all that incorrect.

> I feel I'm trapped now by my past and I'm really out of options to socialize on any meaningful level.

What's stopping you from socializing?

It'd be nice to see an argument for why it is important for the Internet to have a logo in the first place.

I agreed with your first paragraph, but the second one surprised me. Your comparison does not apply to everyone. Many people would much prefer to be hit with baseless accusations and rumors rather than have footage of their most intimate moments be immortalized for public access.

This sort of freedom is available to perhaps the top-earning 1% of the world. At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 per day [1]. Many people have to live in 40-square-foot foot apartments [2], or cages [3], or have to spend their entire waking lives carrying bricks on their heads [4].

You are in a rare position where you're capable of living a leisurely life, but do not misconstrue this as long work days and factories somehow becoming obsolete.

[1] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

[2] http://inhabitat.com/chinese-human-rights-group-releases-sho...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4jjdRzy3w

[4] http://www.lisakristine.com/atlantic-slavery-exists/

A comment gwern left in reply to something like this 2 years ago: http://www.gwern.net/About#comment-257772944

Alternatively, just read the first line of Wikipedia's page on psychopathy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

As wlesieutre mentioned, Team Fortress 2 wasn't free until after microtransactions have been around for some time.

Early on, the game had a consistent 1960s theme and each character had a consistent distinct sillhouette and behavior, so the game was easy to pick up and it was reasonable to play it competitively. It had great game design. Over time they ruined all of that for the sake of profiting off of addicted players.

"After all, isn’t that what open source is all about – the idea that collaboration and teamwork achieve amazing things?" Written by Valve in the cited blog post, despite having nothing to do with open source.

I was disappointed about this, too; not because it's necessarily bad, but because they had set the bar so high for themselves and then totally missed it with this. On the bright side, it raised a lot of money for charity.

If your account is stolen and becomes VAC banned, Valve won't do anything about it and you will be stuck with gimped games, regardless of how much business you gave them (back then they didn't have security codes). I can't find this on Google, but at least twice I've read that Valve just ignores emails from game developers they're not interested in. In Team Fortress 2, the staff is allowed to hop on players' servers and practically cheat by mowing down everyone with overpowered weapons, and they ruined the game's integrity through introducing a microtransaction economy that they take advantage of to promote other Steam games.

Maybe Valve isn't as bad as EA, but it's hardly as good as its reputation.

I would sympathize with Valve if they didn't completely ignore Linux before acting like the Linux community's best friend when it became apparent that they had nowhere else to turn to [1]. Like many, I'm a fan of their games and their flat management, but they have a history of being as short-sighted and callous as EA and I wish more people would see that [2].

I have a lot more respect for the people behind Humble Bundle/Wolfire, who went out of their way to support Linux long before it was cool [3]. Plus they don't force DRM middleware on you.

[1] http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-penguins/

[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/11/valve-tricked-h/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugaru

I tried this at some point and recommended it to a couple people in the past. I liked the convenient interface, though I remember having an issue with my address breaking at an inconvenient location and there was no apparent way to fix it.

I eventually hacked together a solution using Handlebars and PhantomJS, which isn't as convenient as Resumonk, but it gave me the stylistic control I wanted without having to learn LaTeX. https://github.com/skofo/resume

This would benefit the open source community a whole lot more if it weren't made for a proprietary OS.