http://notch.tumblr.com/post/37823268132/i-love-you-dad

I remember that story and it kind of remained with me. As soon as I saw the title of the "game" I recalled this part of this story:

> ... turn around, see my dad being really close to the dog when all of the sudden a big chunk of ice around him breaks loose, tips over, and my dad falls in. I freak out. Then he stands up, the water only reaching about hip height.

I urge you to read the whole story.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

> Missile Command was a social commentary ahead of its time. One that resulted in the haunting of its creator through constant nightmares, punishing him with a reminder of the value of human life and just how quickly that can be taken from us.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-co...

https://cdn.rawgit.com/CyberShadow/11329584/raw/5d295c9557d3...

Code: https://gist.github.com/CyberShadow/11329584

Legend:

  - Round nodes are problems
  - Rectangular nodes are things you can have
  - Gray round nodes are problems that don't go away after solving them
  - Green lines are things solving problems gives you
  - Red lines are things needed to solve a problem
  - Dotted black lines are things you need to have for a problem to appear
  - Dotted red lines are problems that disappear when a problem is solved

This isn't a knock on the game in any way. I love how it cleverly expresses one man's view on what matters in his life.

Pretty soon, you add in jobs, worries, lovers, heartbreaks, friendships, losing friends, money, self esteem, etc. And the more you try to optimize one area, the more you neglect the other areas, and the game becomes increasingly difficult to balance, just like life itself.

What a beautiful piece of art.

  setInterval(function(){ $("a").click() }, 100)

I don't think it does.

Here's the relevant part of the (dart2js'd but slightly cleaned-up) code:

https://gist.github.com/CyberShadow/11329584

Edit: I made a full graph of the entire game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7652770

Also, I noticed that something compounded to solve if you had more of them, notably stress. When you only had 1, it was instantaneous to solve. If you had more than one, the percent counter took time

setInterval(function({[].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll("a")).forEach(function(a){a.click()})},100)

It feels great to know there are some more people who think of automating first, a better life second =)

  setInterval(function(){ $("a").click() }, 1000)

Since "You need to learn." is at the bottom of task list, with 1s delay it never gets attention, so you don't learn, so you don't age.

Here's what I've got:

  You have:
  Hope
  Body
  Life
  Love
  309 Memory
  Integrity
  Job
  180 Experience
  53 Friend
  4 Respect
  216 Stuff
  102 Broken Heart
  6 Stress
  Knowledge
  Lover

  You are troubled. [Can't afford] -Integrity -Lost Ambition

i am also thinking about writing some ifs into it that allow you to focus on "friends", "happy buddha", "people person", "wisdom", "early death" and maybe some other criteria, but that needs user interface and more time, which i dont have today ;)

Hmm...

  fireEvent = function(element){
   var event; // The custom event that will be created

    if (document.createEvent) {
    event = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
    event.initEvent("click", true, true);
    } else {
    event = document.createEventObject();
    event.eventType = "click";
    }

    event.eventName = "name-of-custom-event";

    if (document.createEvent) {
    element.dispatchEvent(event);
    } else {
    element.fireEvent("on" + event.eventType, event);
    }
  }

  setInterval(function(){
     Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('a'),function(d){
      fireEvent(d);
     })
  }, 1000);

A less efficient but shorter way is:

    var interval = setInterval(function(){
    	var links = document.querySelectorAll('#problems a');
    	for(var z =0; z< links.length; z++) {
    		$('#'+links[z].id).click();
    	}
    }, 1000);

A quick fix would be setInterval(function(){ $("a") && $("a").click() }, 100)

[0] https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/co...

  window.setInterval(function(){ Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('a'),function(i) {i.dispatchEvent(event)})},1000);

But it reminds me of A Dark Room, which was excellent. http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

"And 2 broken hearts to stop being a teenager? And the only way to get experience is by losing friends."

i'm not sure i directly relate to this either, but it really doesn't sound too crazy or unfamiliar.

I hope Notch is feeling ok.

That was my first thought, and I suspect that's not the case at the moment :-\

https://twitter.com/mxech/status/460058856216072192

Thats the message I got from it. Beautiful.

Are there any harder to reach options, like having children or reaching old age?

edit: I looked in source, there are no hidden options, you will get everything on the first playthrough.

Brilliant.

Can anyone familiar with Dart to JS explain what is going on with:

  var B=new dart
  delete B.x
  var C=new dart
  delete C.x
  ...

These hidden classes are built on the fly: say you add `x` to a instance to get an object with a configuration that was never seen before. In that case, the engine creates a new description with that new field and remembers the transition (so that further objects with similar configurations can reuse the same hidden class).

Keeping track of these hidden classes takes time and space. If you actually use the JS object as a hashtable, then there will be lots of unnecessary hidden classes, that will never be used again. However, there is a trick to tell the engine that an object is actually a hashtable (and shouldn't be optimized as if it was an instance of a class): when deleting a field from an object v8 (and probably all other engines) assume that the object is used as a hashtable and don't create these hidden classes anymore.

Dart2js uses this trick to avoid this cost some important big hashtables (`B`, `C`, ...).

It's a question of interpretation, of course, but where does a retirement of any kind fit in? Not "stop work and focus on my gardening" type of retirement (which doesn't go so well for people who have defined themselves by their work!), but a switch back to more play and learning, a less rigorous schedule (and less "stuff") but more profound connections.

There's not a possible flow where "go to work" disappears, but "play" and "learn" remain.

Instead, Play/Learn drop out, as does the possibility to get a better job -- which implies that my capacity to grow fails while I'm still in my main working life; so my career will plateau while I go through "you are troubled", "you are bitter", and finally (as options disappear) "you are starting to accept".

"Accept" that I've lost the ability to learn/play and nothing but work (but with no hope of further self-improvement) and "get stuff" remains in my life? That's bleak. I can't even make new friends, apparently.

When I solve "You are starting to accept", that costs me "Life". I.e., accepting that there's nothing more I can expect from my life (in a game titled "Drowning in Problems", I end it.

Counterpoint: "Hope" is the last thing to go -- that doesn't fit with the narrative I'm describing here -- but that strikes me as a red herring, possibly intentional.

I have a bunch of interpretation to add to this -- is this a "too successful too young" anomie? Devaluation of the wisdom that comes with half a century of learning/playing because most people don't learn and play so long? Devaluation of what a relationship with another (friend or love) can be after decades of shared experience, because that doesn't seem to happen?

But yeah, I've spent enough time on HN already today.

[-- until those 2 options disappeared, which I felt was too soon; why should play & learn disappear as possibilities when work and get stuff are still available? Ugh. That's not my plan!]

But a more interesting point -- I liked that while you can rapid-click to get a lot of plates spinning at once (and obviously "progress" faster in the game that way), you start missing things. E.g., I spent a minute just clicking every Solve I saw without reading carefully, and didn't notice how I gained/lost a few things.

To experience life deeply, you have to do things one at a time, in other words.

function solve(i, selector) { if(i > 0) { if(selector('a' || Math.floor((Math.random()*100)+1) % 3 == 0) == null){ setTimeout(function(){ solve(i,selector);}, 1000); } else { selector('a').click(); solve(i-1,selector); } } }

solve(1400,$); //worked thrice under 1400

It looks like the actual Dart file hasn't been uploaded - which is sensible, in a way, since browsers don't natively supports Dart right now, with the exception of Dartium (?).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

Hope

Body

Life

Love

311 Memory

Integrity

16 Friend

Job

35 Experience

40 Respect

3 Stuff

7 Crushed Dream

6 Broken Heart

9 Project

Lover

5 Money

Knowledge

You are troubled. [Can't afford] -Integrity -Lost Ambition

You need to try harder. [Can't afford] -5 Respect -10 Stuff +Lost Ambition

Man why do I even want to buy more stuff. I have projects to complete. Yeah, so seven of them failed. Nine of them didn't. And like a good third of those memories are of making love. Yeah, time to close this browser window and get back to my RL projects. Or to some playing, it's late.

  ornithological = relating to birds
  or  tho  gonal = perpendicular/independent

    You are dead.
    You are forgotten.

P.S. If you stick around long enough after that step, everything starts from scratch:

    There is nothing. Solve.

I think it may have actually made the game better in some ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

Which is why I am disappointed with this game and utterly false “wisdom” it's trying to convey.

I'm all for feeling good about what you've done in the world, but for most of us whose names aren't going to be repeated for centuries it's a drop in the ocean and only becomes less relevant over time.

Even something like parenting, which I don't think any of us will argue is not important. Each generation that goes by, your relative contribution is halved. I'll bet most of us can't tell very many stories about great-grandparents, for example. And we have twice as many great-great-grandparents, etc., which even fewer of us will be able to keep track of. So even as a father, while I try to do the best job I can, I have to admit that's going to happen to me too, and any impact I can have through parenting is going to be blended with an exponentially growing set of people. That's not bad, that's just how it works.

I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy life or be ambitious or do a good job in the things that you do, or that helping people and doing big things is not worth it, but at some point we'll all likely have to humbly admit it: we aren't as important on the individual scale as some would like or expect.

I prefer a different way of measuring contribution: suppose that (for simplicity) the checkpoints on the progress of humanity are fixed and the only difference you can make is to delay or accelerate reaching the next checkpoint. Your contribution is how much time you've won or lost for humanity. Then contribution stops being relative – if you've made future happen five years earlier, this is permanent, period. Your children and grand-children will arrive into their respective futures five years earlier, too, because of you.

> that too is usually a rounding error.

There are no rounding errors! Why do you think that just because you can see how much you've influenced one person thru parenting, but can't see how you influenced the entire world thru your actions, the first influence is somehow “bigger”? Yes, it's epsilon, but it's epsilon × world. And the world is big.

(By the by, the same logic applies to voting – yes, your contribution to the final decision is small, but since the decision itself is so important, in the end your contribution doesn't turn out to be less than contributions from your other decisions.)

Take a long enough view and maybe humanity meets some crisis and gets set back or stops altogether - is that 5 years going to matter then? It sounds defeatist and negative but IMO a valid question.

I'm not going to fault you or anyone for trying to be in that category that sets the world ahead N years, but there is also no shame in being part of the much larger group who lives and dies without accomplishing it, or in admitting that it's very rare to get there.

Think about it. Most people don't have any effect on that whatsoever, but there are many publicly visible people in medicine, politics, tech, research and finance that do have a much larger impact on it than 5 minutes.

And cancer is just one tiny part of it all. I believe that at some point in future we might reach an event where we eliminate almost all death as such; or an event where we destroy ourselves completely. A somewhat cynical implication of this could be, playing the devils advocate, that there are exactly two kinds of actions (and people?) - those that change some +/- epsilon to one of these two events, and those that are irrelevant.

I was with you until somewhere around here. As I said I don't see any shame that one might be in the "irrelevant" group. Maybe you tried and failed. Maybe something else prevented you from doing that. Maybe you just didn't have it in you. It seems wrong get judgmental on that.

It's perfectly understandable that most (perhaps even 99+%?) of the global population won't have any non-local influence, and that's okay, it can't reasonably be much different. However, there are things that scale, and they have a disproportionally large effect. For example, politicians are a particular group who can have huge long-term impact even as unintentional side effects; so are public NGOs. And many of them are intentionally doing things that cause delay in much-needed technologies or increase risk of us killing ourselves - I'd say that this is equivalent to [mass-]murder, even if the deaths are not specific, named individuals but "just a statistic"; and not today but a bit in the future. Perhaps we should be more judgemental about that, instead of agreeing to disagree.

I'm not saying I can't understand the human desire to be liked, or adored, or remembered after your death, or considered to be the Best Human to Ever Live on This Planet. I can. But what I can't understand is why so many people try to justify such feelings.

More money. More Problems.

This is even duller than that borefest.