mrisoli

Similar to Tibia, which is one of the death systems I hated the most, but becomes a major driving force within the game.

If you died, you'd lose 10% of your experience points(which amounts to multiple levels the higher you are), your inventory and there was a chance you could lose a piece of equipment.

It makes you work on your survival skills both in PvE and PvP, this in turn makes PvP combat and PK an extra challenge which awarded skill, awareness and creativity. Even before Twitch or even YouTube were hits there was already a thriving community recording videos of their PvP gameplay.

Premium players could use in-game currency to buy bonuses to reduce the effects of death(plus an item that would prevent you from losing any inventory), which made upgrading to a Premium account a must for anyone who plays enough of the game.

And in the end it shapes the community and the ecosystem, people would separate in groups and wage wars for dominance, these were wars of attrition as getting big kills means creating major setbacks until one group has to surrender.

In hindsight, it's amazing how some simple mechanics enabled people to emulate real life systems.

I laughed too, I was thinking "Wow, $1B for a photo app that has some lame filters, take a semester of digital image processing and you could do that".

To their credit, the app was extremely simple back then, today it has managed to add complexity without being so overwhelming(although Instagram TV adds more eyesore to the screen), slowly they copied good, proven features and blended well into the Facebook ecosystem.

I find it amusing, my friends and I continuously joke Apple-style hype pitches for mundane things like airline safety videos.

But otherwise, it's pretty cringy not only seeing them demo the new animoji stuff as well as people frantically clapping.

As someone who's had to implement one of those nagging popups(and argue with marketing 'growth hackers' about it) I can tell they are unfortunately effective, and it's more likely to see more of them in future.

Everyone is annoyed, but many of those who are annoyed will just follow the instructions and increase the metric of whoever wanted those .

> I wish we spent as much time on HCI in our field.

So did I, but IME, time and effort spent on minor UX improvements are rarely justifiable to upper management, especially in the case of business software it won't generate more revenue, often because the people using the software are not the ones buying it.

I've had the fortune of working in a couple of places where the most hardcore users of our product were our own employees. So I often silently wandered into others desks and observed their workflows, it's amazing to see the little hacks they come up with because of their routine. Sometimes it's things we can easily fix but it's not prioritized. Quite often I've spent a couple hours of my free time hacking together some minor features to help these internal users and they are always amazingly grateful.

Definitions are complicated, it feels like they should be static when the definition of what a front-end developer does is always changing as technology comes up with different mediums like smartphones, watches, VR, etc.

I've thought about this a lot and I would say something like this:

A front-end/UI designer is concerned about the _user_ interface with the application, that is, how a user interacts and utilizes an application.

A front-end developer is concerned about the _client_ interface with the application, such as what browsers support what and how you can work with that, screen sizes and how to best utilize them(can't have a full word processor and keyboard in a smartwatch), how do you flow data through the client in a way that it doesn't hog the system's memory or makes everything slow, tradeoffs between server-side and client-side rendering, caching, optimization, optimistic UI, unstable connections, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, and much more.

Of course, this doesn't mean a front-end developer/designer won't have to dabble in both roles eventually.

I think people underestimate this issue. One of the reasons Windows is so dominant in the business landscape is because it's the OS people are used to since early years, mostly because it's bundled with most PCs people buy, but kids love to play games, and while a lot of games also come out for mac these days, Windows is still dominant in the PC gaming market.

It's a bit of a reach to say this, but it's a little bit similar to McDonald's selling toys with meals to entice children.

To be fair, living in an European LCC hub I get deals on my inbox every few days and I end up buying plane tickets up to once/twice a month, so it's realistic, maybe not so much for legacy/long haul

I also get many emails from legacy airlines for long haul deals and I end up getting one of them a year, I'd say it's a successful campaign, they don't expect a large amount of customers to jump on every deal, eventually one that's closer to your profile pops up

I am an expat engineer in Budapest and the tech scene here has a lot of ups and downs, definitely meet a lot of engineers just by walking around, it isn't quite a tech hub yet.

The very low cost of living and high salaries for engineers make it quite attractive, even though rent prices keep going up it is still a very good place to live, decent quality of living, centrally located within Europe with lots of options to travel and all, I'd definitely recommend, and hope it becomes an even bigger tech hub in the future.

That's interesting, I find myself in a similar position.

I like coding and I like to improve my coding skills and knowledge, but I feel I am more of generalist than a specialist, I am always lurking around HN, PH, IH, looking at products, trying to always get a little bit more about product strategy, marketing, design and UX.

I have considered a transition into a PM role but I'm still not sure I'm quite ready to step away from the developer role, a part of me would like to have an awesome project that I could build my own company around but I'm just not there yet either.

Either way, I'll be lurking the responses in this thread. Good luck with your move.

Well, the goal of a promotion is to both enable the employee to get more responsibilities and the company to get more out of the employee.

If you're already putting in as much as the senior folk without being one the company has no upside in offering a promotion with the exception of employee retention/reducing employee turnover, so it is fitting that they'd offer it when you are about to leave.

I understand your points and somewhat agree with them, and it's great advice for people who want to build a product on the side.

However what I meant is, what if building and iterating is the goal, not the means to the product? When you're building a SaaS app you have to worry about market fit, sales(as the article talks a lot about), if you're not concerned about finding users and growing, a side project app can be a great way to learn and show knowledge.

Perhaps the classic web app with server-side templates is the quickest way to launch an MVP, but what I want is a way to build something integrating as many different things as possible, a lot of companies will want to see your GitHub, if you can present a largely-complex yet well-designed application where you can showcase front-end development, backend APIs, containers and what not you're one step ahead.

I want a sort of sandbox to play with, not an actual product, would be interesting as a multi-part series course(start with simple web app, keep iterating, separate web app from server code, remove bootstrap or other UI kits in favor of self created styles, incorporate mobile, watch app, whatever you can think of. This could be a good exercise in writing maintainable applications.

Found the course very interesting and it's something I intend to build upon. However, I've done similar stuff with rails since it has more batteries included and found it easier of course.

However, this comes to mind: https://elsyms.com/the-art-of-over-engineering-your-side-pro...

This was followed by a discussion on HN which a lot of people enjoy over-engineering side projects because they use it as a sandbox to learn or test different things, and I relate, so I was looking for as much material on including as many buzzwords as possible on a saas app/business/tool set(microservices, kubernetes, docker, UI frameworks, mobile app, graphQL, whatever else is out there), I'm pretty sure I could get each piece from different sources, but is there someone who covers overblowing everything? Or maybe one could build a curriculum out of several different online courses?

Pretty much what I wanted, plus fitness tracking.

I love the timeline, showing my calendar appointments, seeing notifications(and being able to use some of the Android notification commands on them), fitness tracking, but most important of all, battery life, I love not having to recharge my Pebble every day.

I liked the idea of Nokia Steel HR for instance, but there's little screen real estate for a smartwatch to show me notifications and appointments in a proper way.

I remember seeing a concept video ages ago that touch on many the things that self-driving can change(from Audi I think).

I always think in a fully self-driving world there would be huge shifts in the real estate market, living further from your workplace/school won't be such a problem if the commute is easy and the time is consistent, but also in a way that is more convenient than public transportation, similar to how there's higher demand for living close to good transportation links.

Also, if the car can drive itself then you don't have to park it close to you when you don't need it, it can stay at a remote location while you work then "pick you up" when needed.

I also wonder if that could have any effect on car ownership, one of the biggest hassles of living just with uber is that it might just fail you when you need it, either because of surge pricing or lack of drivers, such as late hours or major events, if Uber eliminates the need for drivers it can deploy its fleet at 24 hours a day besides maintenance and therefore could guarantee it's users a minimum supply in a certain area at all times.

Then again, would Uber own those cars? Does it make sense for them to lease unutilized car time from owners similar to what people do with idle CPUs for crypto mining? Thus allowing owners to have some passive revenue.

I remember reading long ago about how they did something similar at an airport(Dallas IIRC).

Basically, people complained about baggage claim taking too long, so they just moved the baggage claim area to the other side of the airport, so it took longer for passengers to reach it, by the time they did, their bags would already be there, so the complaints stopped.

Exactly this, speaking from personal experience, a PM's job is to make sure things are shipped, not escalate Engineering problems to increasingly non-technical people up in the chain.

If engineering says "This is a bad idea", PMs will say "It's not perfect", for management that means "ship it".

There is a very simple reason for this, you always get more information in person.

If you're interacting with a text-based chat interface you get one thing, pieces of text, not only that's all you have to make decisions, but you have no idea how much effort and time went into designing those messages for you, this translates into the simples human interactions.

If you are talking on the phone, you get words and maybe a tone of voice, you get more timely information, but that is all.

If you are doing video chat, you get to see the persons expressions, which is a plus, but not much more(and how many times have I seen audio/video data issues).

But, if you are meeting in person, you get all of that and then some, plus it signals commitment and effort to allocate time to physically attend a meeting considering how much other options you have. These do not have precise metrics, but it drives people gut decisions.

I agree and this is what I consider to be brutalist web design, but that site(the top search result for 'brutalist websites', 'brutalist design', 'brutalist web' and so on) has a bunch of weird designs(such as http://www.xtragear.services/ ), which is the source of my confusion.

I've seen Brutalist design being mentioned a few times here and it always shows this website gallery, I am no specialist, so I wonder, is this what brutalist design really is?

Quick Google search explains that brutalist architecture is about creating modular elements representing specific functionality often sacrificing aesthetics.

A lot of the sites on that gallery are ugly just for being ugly, they have no functionality and use different types of animations or constructs to just make something unconventional from common website aesthetics, I get why, but it feels like the word brutalist was borrowed here and is applied in a very different way.

While there are a lot of people who care about technology it pales in comparison to those who just want a quick buck from a manic bubble, using the term "no one" is extreme but it's not completely unfitting.

What you want is a Rolling Release Distro, like Arch or Gentoo, then you can add whatever GUI you want on top of it, I like XFCE as a sibling comment mentioned.

It is impossible because it is always possible to game the system.

If you devise an interview framework or a hiring profile, no matter how many traits you want to evaluate(as the article points out), they will lump those together and measure in some scale of how likely they are to hire the candidate(sometimes that is even just binary), if a candidate can emulate their desired profile he gets a high "score" and gets an offer, the bigger the financial incentives to do this, more people will game the system(prepare for specific interviews), think, if you can play the part for a couple of 1-hour interviews, you can get a 6-figure salary at a tech startup, that is a high ROI.

Most companies can't stop that, there isn't limitless budget for interviewing so the interview process has limited resources to evaluate people, which leads to false positives. There are also a lot of talented people that don't practice their interviewing skills enough and end up as false negatives.

It's human nature, people need to evaluate things on a single criterion and you can game that. The same thing happens with school, you can work your way through school material to maximize your grades without learning much.

Well, a handful of tech companies are some of the most valuable companies in the world right now, a few of them thanks to what was then the untapped power of the internet(Amazon, Google, Facebook), Google and Facebook not only are huge companies but they can also influence elections and public opinion.

There is no question that there was a bubble, but the value of the internet as a platform for building businesses now far exceeds what people expected it to accomplish in the dotcom bubble.

I'm not saying cryptocurrencies will have the same fate, but it's not impossible.

Yes, I really like Snapchat's app, it takes some time getting used to the UI but I found the heat map to be a killer feature, pound for pound I find it better than Instagram(still, I think they would benefit by copying Instagram rolling non-ephemeral pictures feed).

However, I don't use Snapchat because none of my friends do, I've met some Americans traveling who use it and that is all, I think a lot of people don't even know what Snapchat is while everyone knows what Instagram is even if they don't use it, that is all because of network effects.

English is not my primary language and I live in a country where I don't speak the local language which is not English, I have consistent issues with miscommunication.

Once I went to a McDonald's and ordered some double cheeseburger with no onions, when the order came it was just the buns with no meat.

Especially in a place like McDonald's where they serve several people familiar with the menu, the staff seems annoyed if you don't know what the ingredients of one of their menu items are and often don't handle specific requests well.

It's not just language issues, my ex-girlfriend always asked a lot of questions when ordering at restaurants, sometimes checking with me, you can visibly see the waiter getting tired or annoyed because of this, not coincidentally, there is always some minor screw up with the order because they forgot to write something down. The same happens if you go to a restaurant with 20+ people and the waiter comes in to take everyone's order, the chances of making a mistake goes up.

People prefer human interaction, but human agents are prone to miscommunication, distraction, and fatigue.

Exactly, I prefer using a GUI over calling over the phone for delivery because I might have communication or listening issues with the person on the other side of the phone.

The same thing happens for McDonald's and other places replacing cashiers with touch-screen terminals, not only I am sure of how the system understood me, I can easily navigate the several options without annoying an employee with dozens of questions, going from that to conversational UI is a step back in the wrong direction.

Well, we have useless content, which might be entertaining but otherwise provide no real benefits to the user, by damaging I mean content that influences people in a negative way(fake news, hate speech, etc). Maybe the right word here is "harmful", but English is not my first language to be 100% sure.

How about applying some (survivorship?) bias here?

Smartphones and the internet make access to knowledge easier for everyone, but that is a small amount of what is otherwise cluttered with mostly useless(and sometimes damaging content), which naturally, appeal to the larger part of the population.

However, if having access to a smartphone can help some kids learn a little bit more, or maybe change someone's life by just making it easier to browse useful content, isn't it worth it? Those who won't find a good use for a phone would just have some other silly pastime if phones didn't exist.

I say just let people play candy crush, maybe while they are waiting for a life reload they might learn something on the tiny screen.