techtalsky

You know, I love inform 7 and was incredibly inspired when I first saw it and played with it. I DID try to create a simple game but was stymied by the documentation. There's a tutorial with the most basic game, and then there's in-depth documentation. There's not a lot of in-between. Syntax examples of how to do a handful of common things would have been wonderful.

Kind of nice, basically turns form submission into a bare-bones API call.

Yeah, the Nested Set model is cool but it does not use recursive postgresql queries under the hood: http://mikehillyer.com/articles/managing-hierarchical-data-i...

Hm, I didn't realize that. I'm using it on a Rails 4 project and haven't had any problems.

There's a great Ruby on Rails gem called acts_as_sane_tree (after the non-recursive acts_as_tree) that uses postgresql's recursive queries. I'm using it on a project and have found it useful with good performance: https://github.com/chrisroberts/acts_as_sane_tree

I'm a little shocked that out of 124 HN Comments (at the time of this writing), no one has linked to or referenced the study in any way.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3227547

Did I read it? No, but I read the abstract and intro. Study was about adults addicted to nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, or cocaine. 43k people total, about 12k people with a real DSM-IV diagnosis of addiction to one of these substances. Eventual remission rates for these things were over 90% (except nicotine, which was 88%).

The study is interesting, so let's start there. The results of the study surprised me, personally. I wouldn't have guessed the remission numbers were that high. I would have liked to see heroin, meth, or, far more pervasive in this day and age: prescription opiates.

It's certainly nice to see good news, and I do consider the study a kind of good news. The study obviously doesn't overstep its bounds or draw any big conclusions. I'm sure the people who actually did the study knew and experienced how damaging drugs CAN be in those 15-25 years before remission.

However, then we get to the article. The author runs the site substance.com and has published a book and several articles with a strong point of view about 12 step programs and the way young people with drug dependence are treated in today's society. I do think she's bending the study a little to her own aims, but I do appreciate her call towards sanity. It's a stretch, but I don't think she's being unfair to use this study to support her approach.

I don't think soft-selling the total life destroying danger of drug abuse is wise, and obviously it would suck if someone started taking drugs because they read an article or study like this, but it's possible.

I love the idea of Open Source applications being distributed this way. Here's our application.... and everything required to run it in a virtual machine.

Hm... I saw some cpan links and a slideshare presentation. I was prepared to be impressed by said "couple lines of Perl".

;)

I have to say I saw every single pixel of every Keen game and I MUCH preferred the pure side view games over the isometric side view games of Episodes 4-6 and Keen Dreams. Episodes 1-3 had such an amazing, precise pixel design and a great sense of movement. The leaping just FELT right, with a slight pause while you pumped off the balls of your feet.

The later games, although much more detailed, with a larger character, had a weird floaty feeling to the controls that I never quite enjoyed playing as much.

That said, I loved all the games and it was an amazing sense of discovery. I remember the moment the shareware model finally took hold of me and I realized that I wanted the next episodes enough to pay for them.

My takeaways from the site for people who would like a summary:

SIREn encodes [...] the index using a completely different model than Lucene, [...] it uses its own disk format, low level compression algorithm and query operator implementation. A comparison between regular method (Blockjoin) and SIREn can be found in this blog post: http://siren.solutions/24-times-less-memory-11-times-faster-...

In SIREn, parent-child relationships of the nested elements are materialised and indexed into the same document. This is at the core of SIREn very high performance and scalability. This means that changes in the nested part of the document will require reindexing of the full document.

SIREn is Free and Open Source under an identical licensing model than MongoDB: http://www.mongodb.org/about/licensing/

No, that's not really "the real question". Kids are smart. The know how to get what they want and parents can't be everywhere at any moment. SOME percentage of kids are going to figure out how to pay for goods with very little understanding of their relative value. Preying on kids in this position skirts the borders of what's ethical. I'm not saying all server owners are guilty of this, but Mojang has their position for a reason and it's not just the profit motive.

I think there's a significant difference in that Ensure and Jevity aren't meant to be sustainable as a long term food source, and don't optimize for cost per meal.

Well, also consider the point she's making. So you had to switch to matlab, but you were able to, perhaps partially because you already had a grounding in programming in a language you found pleasurable.

This was really sweet. A somewhat inconsequential hack but incredibly touching writing about it. I love this kind of video game writing.

In the financial times article, which is more in-depth, they mentioned taking serious security precautions for the exhibitions like searching people thoroughly and providing special headphones. It does indeed still seem possible for a determined attacker to figure out a way to make a copy, but they talked more about preventing it.

I definitely don't think it's just raw engineering talent. I agree that there's most certainly a social aspect to it. I think it has to do with professionalism, architecture chops and experience, a sense of good workflow and process, a sense of accountability, and a proven record of getting projects done and done right.

Well "mystery mean navigation" refers to something specifically where there's little chance of understanding what the icons refer to without rolling over them, much like "mystery meat" in your fridge that you can't remember what it is without opening the tupperware.

I'm a little surprised this wasn't emphasized in the article. It doesn't matter where the equipment is: the us government can still secretly force you to backdoor it and lie to your customers and the press about it.

Well Explosions in the Sky do pretty well.

Alright what is it. Now I want to hear it.

Or, just accurately reclassify marijuana so it's not schedule 1.

Zero dollars flow to music license holders via Grooveshark. It operates in a legal grey area. Also the file metadata is set up by uploaders and is a lower quality than Spotify in most cases. I don't know what the Grooveshark Android/iPhone client is like, but Spotify's is decent.

I don't mind having playlists for albums but the biggest problem is that enough playlists impact performance and slow the client to a crawl, especially on Windows.

I guess I'm not surprised. 100% discussion about whether Haiku deserves to exist, zero discussion about the post. Can anyone talk about the significance of the removal of the hard processor limit?

No, looks cool though. That would impact deployability to heroku though, yes?

I'm working on a project that requires a tree datastructure (basically a graph but with only single-direction parent-child relationships) and the number of nodes will stay under a thousand. I could have chosen a graph database, but for my level of complexity I just used postgres and a table that has foriegn-key relationships to itself.

Then I made a rails front end using the acts-as-sane-tree gem, which is designed to use this postgres data model and recursive queries: https://github.com/chrisroberts/acts_as_sane_tree

Yeah, loderunner is one of its far inspirations, but honestly you have no idea the depth of play of Spelunky. Game designer Derek Yu made an all-time-classic only a few years ago in Gamemaker. It's a platformer-roguelike with permadeath, level generation, and a profoundly tuned sense of difficulty that rewards repeat play. There's also lots of surprises and secrets for a determined player.

Thank you. My company uses ApolloMQ but in a relatively low-data setting. (10-15 queues, with less than 5000 messages in a queue at a time) I don't know that it would make it worth it to move to a different data store but the idea was fascinating to me so I was curious. Thanks for the response.

Can this be used as a drop-in replacement for LevelDB on queue technologies like ApolloMQ that use LevelDB as the default?

I thought there was a word for this: proprioception. The fact that this could bleed into visual perception does not seem surprising. Your brain has a sense of your body's position in space.