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dganton The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

His representatives are generally very lenient on unreleased material and very strict on material that's commercially available.

dganton OS X DNS cache reset script

What's the context of this?

dganton The Triboro: Transit plan for the NYC Boroughs

They can if the supply greatly increases. That's among the reasons why a project longer the Triboro brings so much opportunity. Decentralizing New York real estate would drastically improve affordability.

dganton You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. III

Part of the challenge is that design isn't viewed in isolation. A design leaves an impression on the viewer partly based on how it contrasts with other designs.

A minimalist logo in a sea of embellished logos says "We are smarter and easier to use". A minimalist logo in a sea of minimalist logos says "We are safe and normal."

So following a design trend can be one of the tools you use to design for an audience.

dganton We are Nostalrius, a World of Warcraft fan-made game server. AMA

Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 were something powerful, that we haven't really seen since: A platform for distributed game design and testing.

You could play mods as easily as the game itself. Designers could fork each other's maps. This spawned incredible numbers of games. In addition to the MOBA (League of Legends, DotA) genre, Starcraft 1 mods also popularized the Tower Defense genre (Plants vs. Zombies, Desktop Tower Defense).

It was frustrating to see Blizzard's designers drop the ball with Starcraft 2. The original discovery model -- Host a game with a mod, or see hosted games -- was simple and imperfect, but effective. Blizzard failed to understand why the original system worked, and "fixed" what wasn't broken.

dganton Losing Money

Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification

dganton Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL

http://ComboDeck.net

I'm building a faster, easier way to search for Magic: the Gathering cards.

The big question: how can you replace a clunky "advanced search" with a simple smart text box?

dganton TSA Sued Over New Policy to Refuse Opt-Outs

It's still feasible without the direct tracking. If you see the same body/DNA at three different times, odds are only one person was flying at all three times, and then you have a match.

dganton Freecol – open source colonization game

Colonization was originally released as a separate game. It was in the same genre as Civilization ("4X": Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) but otherwise shared nothing in common but its creator.

Colonization was recently re-released as a mod of Civilization IV. It was built in the Civ IV engine, but for the most part was just a re-skinned Colonization.

dganton There’s a 5% chance that these results are total bullshit

Keeping the code around has a cost: the cost of maintaining, reading, compiling, deploying, and building around it. If the new feature isn't adding value, all it's doing is adding to the cost of real value-features you want to develop later.

dganton Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2014)

ZocDoc – Soho, NYC

Engineering Manager and Principal Software Engineer:

At ZocDoc we are working on real products that are improving people’s lives (at 5 million users a month)! We need an Engineering Manager who knows how to strike the right balance between upfront planning and iterative development. When you join a team, you make good engineers great and great engineers even better. You have the technical experience necessary to help your team members with tough challenges and you're not afraid to dive in and write code with the rest of the team. You prefer data-driven decision making and are always chasing the opportunity where you can make the most impact. Finally, you have a history of setting ambitious goals and then crushing them.

We also need a Principal Engineer to drive our elite dev team toward an even brighter future. This role is for a highly experienced engineer with a tireless devotion to good system design across the entire stack. From data storage/retrieval/manipulation to consumer APIs and client template renderers, you’ll care deeply about all of it and push us toward perfection.

We offer:

+ Awesome team of extremely smart devs

+ Ability to help build a product that customers love

+ 100% healthcare, unlimited vacation, catered lunch everyday, and we will do visa transfers/sponsor

Learn more about us at http://engineering.zocdoc.com/ or apply at http://www.zocdoc.com/careers

dganton Flappy Space Program

The game also serves as political commentary on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

dganton 1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Earth Orbits the Sun. Yes, Really.

Here's a different way of looking a the data, on page 23 of http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-7/c07....

Americans know about as much as people in similarly developed countries.

Really. Compare to the success rates versus South Korea and Japan. And then compare it to less economically developed parts of the world. Americans were the most correct among the surveyed populations about radiation, antibiotics, atomic structure, and lasers.

The takeaway shouldn't be "Americans are ignorant" but really that "Education is hard" and "Poverty inhibits education"

dganton The mystery doge ad in the Guardian's financial pages

Ironically -- or perhaps intentionally -- online coverage of this stunt may garner more traffic than a straightforward ad would have.

dganton Twitch Integrates With Xbox One For Live Broadcasting Of Video Game Streams

This is great for Twitch. One of their larger problems is the amount of potential content they're missing out on due to the technical difficulty of streaming. It requires powerful hardware and a lot of software setup.

The closer they get to offering one-touch streaming, the easier it will be for new streamers to enter the ecosystem, and the better Twitch's content will become.

dganton The Gift of Death

As long as environmental externalities of human economic behavior are underpriced, they will continue to happen for reasons that many consider insipid.

dganton Ask HN: Where is the real innovation of the past decade?

Progress is usually evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, in nature. Hindsight allows us to identify specific developments that we glorify and put in textbooks. But in the moment, it can be less obvious what those developments will be.

dganton Those "stupid ideas" may not be so stupid

If you're reading this article on Hacker News, you are a very unusual person. In fact, everyone's very different and very strange, but you in particular are very strange.

If you extrapolate your beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes and expect them to apply to the rest of the population, you are making a mistake, and missing opportunities.

dganton StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

Blizzard definitely struggled with what they were trying to accomplish in attempting to create genre-busting character-centric RTS.

WC3's a great game, but the released product seems to be a backtracking from what they were trying to accomplish. DotA strikes me as having gameplay closer to what Blizzard was striving to create.

dganton So I Made A Mashup, And Then…

"And the most astonishing thing to me? The mashup itself is catchy, but it's far from being technically great."

It's a musical MVP!

dganton The myth of doing “that one thing”

There's definitely an appeal to the idea.

What's a more powerful motivator than knowing that you're 90% towards your goal? That you'll get what you want if you do just this one thing?

This may also be the phenomenon that drives the success of "one weird trick" display ads.

dganton MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) Wants To Turn High School Kids Into iOS Game Developers

American culture is quick to dismiss the abilities of teenagers. But often, the biggest barrier to, say, teens making video games, is the doubt we've taught them to harbor.

"the developers get 70% and MakeGamesWithUs will take 30%."

That's incredibly generous. When I was making games in high school I'd just be thrilled that anyone was actually playing my games. Good on them for not being greedy.

dganton The year 2000 illustrated in 1900

These is quite prescient, interpreted liberally:

* Very liberally, drive-through car wash * Air as a domain for combat * Commuter air travel * Aerial firefighting * Air mail * (okay, nobody's riding on seahorses) * Roomba * (okay, nobody's hunting seagulls) * Air traffic control * Mechanized farming * Spy drones * Mechanized animal processing * Automated goods fabrication * (okay, nobody's stealing eagle eggs) * (okay, nobody's riding fish) * Synthesizers * Mobile homes * Online education * Very liberally, drive-through car wash (again) * Tanks/armored vehicles * Bombers * (okay, nobody's playing sports underwater) * (okay, nobody's domesticating whales or commuting underwater)

Most of what they got right: things we do which are labor-intensive and could be automated

Most of what they got wrong: the value or cost of putting people under water, and the degree to which animals play a role in daily life

dganton Meteor – The next Ruby-on-Rails?

It (can be) page load-time friendly, since there's an overhead for each JS file that's sent.

dganton I will puke if I hear array search interview question again

As the interviewer, the question I'm trying to answer is "Can you fulfill a role we need fulfilled?" There's no direct way to determine the answer to that. However, a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for a broad range of development positions is "Can you write code in any language to sort/reverse/find elements within an array".

The details will vary by interviewer and by role, but the basic idea is the same: if you are incapable of doing this, nothing you say in other interview portions will fool me into thinking we can hire you.

See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

dganton Facebook enters the age of accidental oversharing

If anything, it seems likely to become less creepy. There are a generation of teenagers for whom being able to look into friends-of-friends' lives has always been normal.

dganton Best Hiring Practices

Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy.

When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere -- they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's fine. At least the applicant retains control of his or her privacy.

dganton Hacker Lifestyle Tips: How to Feel Satisfied with Every Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_onset_muscle_soreness#R...

The degree of soreness you'll feel after your first few workouts is a degree of soreness you'll never feel again (until you stop working out and get out of shape).

dganton Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 addresses some of these concerns.

Since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, it's also worth considering that playing chess could be likened to poorly reproducing the output of existing software; wouldn't writing that software be a more meaningful challenge?

There may be lessons to be learned from chess beyond what one might derive from a short stint of it. Achieving a higher level of mastery -- in many domains -- reinforces an appreciation of the extent of one's ignorance in others.

dganton What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1

There are very few software environments where the cost difference of "Read 1MB sequentially from disk" versus "Read 1MB sequentially from memory" is irrelevant.