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bemmu

16,726 karma · joined February 21, 2007

me@bemmu.com

On HN mostly known for Candy Japan, which I shut down, and am now making Roblox games full time. Main game currently is https://www.roblox.com/games/7367863399

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bemmu··on After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand
I'm sure there's a lot of actual data sharing going on, but I also wonder how often these are just the Baader-Meinhof effect (noticing recently mentioned things everywhere).

Today I made an insta post about sand that resembled dunes at the beach, mentioning a camel in the description. Less than 5 minutes later I saw the camel logo at the beach bathroom, on someone's discarded cigarettes.

Here it's obvious that there is no connection. But if I had instead randomly seen a camel cigarette ad online at that point in time, I might have seriously wondered if it's because I mentioned it in the post.

bemmu··on Morning diurnal preference is associated with reduced risk of depression: study
Rest of the tribe is asleep, we’re the ones keeping watch while the stars are out, left to our own thoughts.
bemmu··on Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche
Random posts are low quality, but the great thing is you can let others find the good ones for you by coming back to subreddits periodically and sorting by "top posts this week" for example.
bemmu··on Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B
No need to resist, Buy n Large provides everything you need to be happy.
bemmu··on Ask HN: New APIs to Build on Top Of?
OpenAI GPT3 if you can get access.
bemmu··on Major Depressive Disorders Have an Enormous Economic Impact
Link didn’t work, but seems the book is “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness“
bemmu··on Ask HN: How do you share the stuff you find interesting while reading a book?
If I learn something short and interesting I'll sometimes post it on /r/todayilearned and get a conversation going around that. Minor difficulty is that you need to link to something, and unless it's a web article the post won't succeed, but that's usually not hard and you end up learning more in the process.

Actually sometimes you even start to doubt what you've read when it's hard to come up with a second source. For example I read in "Broca's Brain" that Thomas Jefferson refused to believe in meteorites, but could not find a second source.

bemmu··on I Made a Spotify Roulette Game
Just the first sentence already would be an improvement, as now people will probably just bounce seeing a login button with no explanation.
bemmu··on Audacity Aquired by Muse Group
Well, imagining it from the buyer's perspective, if I bought Audacity then now I can make changes to it and while there may be other forks, these changes will be likely be recognized as "the" Audacity.

So if for example I wanted to cross-promote my other products or add a "pro" paid version of some sort, I could do that, and those would end up in the main version most people are downloading.

bemmu··on Utsuro-Bune
Also Momotaro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momotar%C5%8D#Story
bemmu··on When 70M people visit your joke site
Experiencing this just once creates a strong desire (addiction?) to make something popular online again. It's just really interesting to tweak these things and follow their growth (and have sleepless nights when things go wrong).
bemmu··on Book Review: “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins
The neocortex knows whether or not I’m popular, but it doesn’t care, because (on this view) it’s just a generic learning algorithm. The old brain cares very much whether I'm popular, but it’s too stupid to understand the world, so how would it know whether I’m popular or not?

"If I put my hand on this sugar, grab it, and move it to my mouth, then this other part of my brain will release reward chemicals" = good plan.

Concepts become abstracted over time, like "eat" as a shortcut for the above. "Popular" could be another shortcut for something like "many people will smile at me, and not hurt me, causing this other part of my brain to release reward chemicals and not punishment chemicals" = good plan.

bemmu··on Dvorak vs Colemak (2010-2020)
2-3 weeks!?

I switched to Colemak in September (2020) and have been using it solely ever since. I started at 110 WPM QWERTY and am currently at 85 WPM Colemak.

bemmu··on Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
Amos on the Amiga was pretty great. I was able to get sprites moving around, respond to mouse clicks, even some simple 3D with an extension. Admittedly never actually made a playable game, as my programming chops weren't good enough yet. There was a small community making games with it, and they would be distributed among other shareware.
bemmu··on Technologies I thought my son would never use
Agree with you. I think we've just entered a period of rapid adoption, and the driver is FB making better and better low-cost entry level devices, hopefully pulling along more and more competitors.
bemmu··on Ask HN: Solo developer, what's your recipe to start working?
I try to leave a well-defined little task for myself at the end of a work session which will be straightforward to pick up from the next day.

Usually if I just do a little bit of anything at all to bring my project forward, the momentum will carry me.

bemmu··on How many lines of code is Candy Japan? (2016)
Candy Japan guy here. Japan Post announced that there will be price increases, which seemed to more than double the shipping cost. Even if I could ship (haven't checked lately if they opened yet or not), the service would need to change. Probably going from twice a month to once a month while still costing the same, so not sure how attractive that would be to subscribers.

While the site was down I started working on some other projects which are looking promising, so I'm dragging my feet a little bit about restarting it (I already refunded everyone's candy balances in case I never restart). Since I spent 10 years curating candy I also got a little bit tired towards the end to be honest.

I should probably make some use of the organic traffic it's getting though. I've actually had more traffic from Google after I could no longer ship. Thinking of selling one-time boxes on the site instead of subscriptions, as I could then spend the time I used to spend on curation on new projects instead.

bemmu··on Inside a viral website
Donations seem to work for livecasters though. Maybe the donation button needs to give some response like that from the creator to work?
bemmu··on Suppressing a gene by using its antibody can lead to tooth growth: animal study
Quick googling found a funny metastudy: "The articles from the database obtained for further review was N = 1. According to the study..."
bemmu··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
Moving to a new place with a view of a river instead of a parking lot. Thought it’d quickly just feel like the new normal, but there is something calming about flowing water.
bemmu··on “When the entire household goes to bed, I do curl development for 2 more hours.”
Reading in bed is a good transition from active thinking. The book has to be something that strikes a balance between not too exciting, but not unreadably boring.
bemmu··on Ask HN: What is the most complex concept you understand?
When I started learning C as a teen, I somehow got really stuck trying to understand pointers. That's one of the few things I now I feel I understand, but I can also still to a degree recall how it felt not to understand it.
bemmu··on Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it
Growing up in Finland it is also perfectly normal to be with friends and family naked in sauna, and between it while you chill out on the balcony or take a break.
bemmu··on Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams
I had a boss who proudly told us that he likes to deal with work-related issues during his lucid dreams.

I thought that was a profound waste of a rare moment when you can do almost anything at all. Personally I like to fly.

bemmu··on Ask HN: What websites do you visit every day?
Another good one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_in_science
bemmu··on Ask HN: What websites do you visit every day?
1. HN

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

3. YouTube (Daily Dose Of Internet, Two Minute Papers, Sebastian Lague)

4. Roblox

5. keyhero.com

bemmu··on Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp
In Finland it's "we think you owe X amount of taxes, if you agree, do nothing".
bemmu··on Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
The part about reading but no longer comprehending sounds very familiar. If it happens twice that I’m looking at the words, but my mind is going somewhere else, I judge myself ready to fall asleep.

Then after closing my eyes I go through the stuff I just read (to avoid getting stressed out over real-life stuff), and after a while will have one or more thoughts that make no sense.

That’s the sign that falling asleep will happen very soon. From there on I don’t know what happens next.

bemmu··on Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
Also tried to band everyone (MySpace among them) together with OpenSocial, but too late.
bemmu··on Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
Interesting. Assuming he wants to see the finance industry burn, what might his next step be?
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