fallintothis's comments

In so many words. I trust their second sentence is relevant and makes more sense to investors, but I imagined it being their slogan. "Gamador: We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better" just sounds humorous (hence the giggling). To me, as a Joe-average user, it sounds more like That Guy from Futurama than "we make a lot of really addicting games".

We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better.

"Use metrics better"? I guess that one wasn't crafted with consumers in mind.

I find martial arts discussions funny. More often than not it's a bunch of people arguing over which one is the "best" in a "real-world fight", which usually degrades into arguments over what "real-world fights" are like, because none of them has ever actually been in one. But it's pretty silly: I know I'd have fun in any martial art right now. If I wanted to know how to fight someone for real, I'd study some form of military combat.

Is this true? I was under the impression that the Haskell standard didn't formally specify its type semantics. Do works like http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/ "count" (i.e., is it the canonical reason we presume Haskell's type system is provably sound)? Honest question.

The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just typing it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me.

As any deeper understanding of the universe inevitably leads to practical applications, I should think.

  Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
  physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
  forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
  especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
  relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
  altogether.

Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc
  oding=UTF8&node=1286228011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_r=05
  F7VG5R8T4MBDH7QQ6N&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_i=507846

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?node
  =1286228011

Edit: Just noticed something playing around with it. Is there a way to correct its results if it doesn't happen to get them right? For example, I searched for All That You Are by Mudvayne, and the only result that gets queued is an 8-second intro.

I like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" simplicity, but there should probably be a way to fix the choice -- e.g., a button on the song for "not the right one" that expands a list of search results.

No toon can resist the ol' "Shave and a Haircut" trick!

Aren't there OpenID users who host their own identities exclusively for themselves? Is there danger in letting people do this? (I seriously don't know much about OpenID practices.)

I wonder how much the different director will influence the movie.

Now somebody needs to do a writeup on the history of Nerf guns!

"When does the player die?"

"When their health is 0."

"When do you decrease their health?"

"When they get hit by bullets."

"So, you tell the computer: if the player gets hit by a bullet, then you should decrease the health. If the health is 0, then the player's dead. How much damage should they receive from a bullet? What if it hits their head?"

etc., descending into further complexity until they get the idea of how much they take algorithmic thinking for granted (which I think is probably the most essential thing to realize about programming).

Of course, actual conversations consist of me yakking about over-the-top technical details, amounting to the usual response: "Magic. Got it."

Here's a written sample of my numerous (or just repetitive) rants from an old reddit discussion (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6xrpc):

I participate in the ICPC, my school's local programming contests, and, in a minimal way, this year's ICFP (I had midterms to study for and was fed up with their buggy sample server). They're very fun, and that's pretty much all you should expect. The contests are a lot more social than people give them credit for. Hanging out in the computer lab, kicking over chairs as you miss the deadline for a problem, getting friends to participate for the first time, the exhaustion of failure, the thrill of finally getting that message about passing all the tests, post-game pizza party, high-fiving each other for solving 0 problems each, going over solutions, reading each others' hilariously frustrated code ("Fine! Let's brute-force this fucker!"), exchanging tales of respective challenges on each puzzle, stories about cranking out solutions to a problem while sitting with your laptop in class, intermittent bantering about using conversation as a desperate distraction mechanism, breaking out the Binky (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3796146278554348828&...) for help with pointers, offering Emergency High Fives (tm) to the crowd of fellow ICPC competitors as they shuffle out of the building, golfing down the solutions for days after the end of the contest, last-minute submission races, weighing whether to use the scant prize money to get a Scrolling LED Belt Buckle (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7c60/) set to display a well-intentioned insult to the person who normally wins the contest, ... the list goes on.

The rankings are incidental, though most people don't seem to think so. At times it felt like our group was the only one at the ICPC that wasn't taking the contest so fucking seriously. Certainly good programmers can win contests, but winning contests doesn't make one a good programmer. The problems are short, artificial, and moreover a lot of fun! I don't quite understand the hyper-competitive students who make it their life to win the contest, as little as it counts for anything. I'm just happy to kill an afternoon messing around with puzzles and a group of friends; plus, free pizza.

Here's an obvious one: TechCrunch items get posted on Hacker News. Digg/Reddit/aggregator items, not so much.