jayrobin

I remember FreelanceFlashGames - used to work for Flashgamelicense in the early days as a game tester. Your book was a great help in getting enough money in sponsorships to pay for a couple of nice vacations, so belated thanks!

Happened to me the other day. I got a weird feeling when they responded with a long message within seconds of me messaging (maybe it’s partially automated?), then when they wanted to pay upfront with Zelle and asked for my email I knew it was a scam.

At that point they’d send you a fake Zelle/Venmo phishing email, saying you need to upgrade to a business account, or “login” and do something else to accept the payment.

I miss my chunky Enter key! Also whenever I have to write a currency value in £ I'm always annoyed that I need to go to the Wikipedia entry for "Pound sign" and copy it from there. There's probably an easier way, but it comes up so infrequently and I'm far too lazy to learn.

On the subject of moocs and books, which were some of your favorites? I'm an SWE with an out-of-date background in AI and I'd love to deep-dive into ML, but there are _so many_ mooc options nowadays without a great way to determine quality.

The general aim is to figure out how much money you need at different points in your life, for example:

- how many years until you plan to retire?

- how much do you need in retirement? How much do you expect to receive from social security/other income sources?

- do you have/are you planning to have kids? Are you going to pay for college? If yes, how much might that cost?

- are you expecting any other big expenses in the future? e.g. wedding, down payment on a house

- are you planning to take a sabbatical at any point? If yes, for how long and how much do you expect to spend?

The original version was Taco Bell - Pizza Hut was dubbed over in international releases (the latter has a much greater international presence).

I never understood the appeal of Dwarf Fortress until a good few hours into my first game I had just finished following a detailed tutorial and was starting to get a hang of the interface. I decided to start work on my first big construction project - a deep pit to keep the regularly attacking trolls away and a gargantuan drawbridge to lead over it. It's probably child's play by any non-noob player's standards, but I was so proud of it. All of the noble dwarves came to the grand opening of the drawbridge - the mayor, the sheriff, the captain of the guard and all of the highest ranking military dwarves in their bright shining armor. They all stood at the base to witness the first lowering of the grand drawbridge. It was lowered and with a mighty crash, flattened the gathered nobles and military elite...Because I had placed it facing the wrong way.

The fortress didn't last too long after that. I tried my best to clean things up, making a nice new dining hall and brewery, but the remaining dwarves took it pretty hard - one of them ended up losing his mind while drunk and slaughtered most of the rest in the great dining hall, the rest died of disease because nobody wanted to clean up the mess. I was so proud of my towering (and first!) fortress, and I lost it all because of one stupid mistake, but it's definitely the most fun I've ever had losing a game.

I'd also echo the suggestion to think hard about whether you really want to be a Project Manager or are you just following what you think is a traditional 'career path'.

I became a Project Manager right out of college after completing my CS degree and did it for ~8 years. I believe I was pretty good at it, but I don't think I ever once really enjoyed it. I spent all my free time coding, and eventually realized I probably should have been doing it as a job all along. I then spent about a year self-teaching, moved half-way around the world to San Francisco, and found a job that, more often than not, I actually enjoy going to every day.

I'm sure some people really enjoy Project Management, but each of the three points in the parent comments ring extremely true for me, so for now at least I'd much rather be coding!

Setting the desktop background to a screenshot of the desktop, then hiding all the icons and the start bar.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been approach by random people asking for feedback on their killer app idea whilst at http://www.workshopcafe.com/

http://www.theodinproject.com/ helped me when I was first starting out: it organizes a huge amount of free online courses and learning materials into a syllabus to take you from complete beginner to junior web developer.

I'm a Project Manager with eight years of experience, looking to transition back to a dev role. I have a CS bachelors and similar Masters, and have always been hacking away on side projects in my spare time.

Location: San Francisco Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, SASS, SQL (PostgreSQL & SQLite) Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayrobin Github: https://github.com/jayrobin Email: [email protected]

I agree it looks more like Perlin noise due to the finer detail not seen in diamond square [1] and the lack of directional artifacts in midpoint displacement [2].

[1] http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal/heightmap.jpg

[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Plasmafractal....

I can't speak for the big guys, but I'm seeing more smaller Flash game devs make the transition from Flash to Haxe, mostly for the ease of porting to mobile/HTML5.

I've been making Flash games on and off since about 2007 and finally made the transition to Haxe with my latest game [1]. As others have commented, it's not perfect yet (i.e. some features aren't yet available on all targets), but I'll never be going back to Flash now.

[1] http://www.iquitmustdash.com/

I've been learning rails and recently began a personal project to build an app to automate the reinvestment of cex.io profits (i.e. bitcoins into bitcoin mining contracts - Gigahashes/sec). It's very minimalistic at the moment, but it works! http://lazycexio.herokuapp.com/

Interesting perspective. I often get annoyed at myself for remember very little from my school years that's not related to my current career or hobbies (e.g. history, geography, English lit) and almost feel that I should learn it all again, but I guess if I don't actually use that knowledge I'd just be forcing myself to memorise facts for the sake of it.

Perhaps it is best that I just let it go and instead focus on learning new things that I really want to learn or that'd be useful for what I do/want to do?

Now if only I could selectively delete memories I could finally forget the time I ended a call to a client with "Love you, bye!".

I used to be a serious night owl: in university I commonly stayed up till 6-7am working thinking I was at my best. However, since getting into the real world and having a 9-5 I obviously couldn't keep this up, so recently I tried to switch to becoming a morning person.

It wasn't easy (especially those first few days), but slowly I managed to push my weekday alarm back to 6am (from 8am: I live just round the corner from where I work) and on weekends to 8-9am. The biggest things that worked for me were:

1. Make the alarm annoying and put it somewhere that forces you to get out of bed

2. Have a good routine that you can follow in your zombified state (e.g. get up, head straight for the shower, get dressed, have breakfast while not browsing HN/reddit, sit down to work)

3. Give yourself a good reason for getting out of bed. For me, this was only allowing myself to work on an exciting new project in the morning before work

I still lapse occasionally, but it has made me realise that being a night owl or a morning person is entirely my choice.

I don't see how sitelocking would really work with HTML5 games, so I'd assume the revenue primarily came from sponsorships, i.e. a sponsor pays to place ads and links to their site in your game (usually preloaders, inter-stitials) and 'More Games' links), which are then distributed far and wide.

My electronics skills are pretty much limited to upgrading my PC, so I was fully expecting to brick my iPhone in the process. Once you actually open it up though, everything slots in very nicely and obviously. The only tricky bit was keeping track of the different sized mini-screws and making sure I put them back in the right place.

I followed an ifixit.com guide (like this: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Replacing+iPhone+3GS+Battery/154...) which, combined with the video, was very easy to follow.

Alternatively, you could probably find somewhere to do it for you for maybe $50 or so (still cheaper than Apple), but I doubt they'd use anything more than the cheap stuff you find on Amazon.

Still, it's worth following the other suggestions first and seeing if you can downgrade the iOS version.

Actually, replacing components in an iPhone is relatively straightforward (if a bit fiddly). The home button on my iPhone 4 went completely (apparently a common issue): I bought a new one including tools for <$5 on Amazon and, following detailed instructions online, had replaced it in about an hour.

Looking on Amazon, you could buy a replacement battery+tools for about the same price.

Masters of Doom is an absolutely brilliant book that rekindled my interest in game development. I'd heard of Carmack before reading it, but this news is so much more impactful knowing just how integral he was to making gaming what it is today.

It just plugs straight into the HDMI port, so I don't see why not. Before the presentation started you'd need to set it up on the local wi-fi however.

A bit of feedback:

* Nice and simple design

* I can't select the "Contains" or "Ends with" fields (this may be intentional)

* I'm pretty sure it should be Boys' and Girls' rather than Boy's and Girl's

* As Ecio78 mentioned: needs to be case-insensitive

* If I type too quickly in the "Begins with" field, it only matches the first one or two letters (e.g. Begins with bor returns Byson, Byrum, Byron...)

* I could eventually select the "Contains" and "Ends with" fields after messing around with it, but then couldn't sort by "Popularity" until reloading (at which point I couldn't select the text fields again)

* It turns out that I can only select all the buttons and text fields if the browser is maximised. Looks like div#myModal is covering a number of interactive elements and preventing clicks at a certain screen height and below

* Popularity graphs are a nice touch and make it far more interesting to play around with, but I didn't realise I could view them for quite a while (thought I could only see the tooltip)

* Disappointed with the lack of "Bort"

This excerpt[1] from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" comes to mind. Detailing a stage where Feynman lost his passion for physics and regained it by studying things purely for the satisfaction of his curiousity and the enjoyment of the process.

  He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it?"
  "Why are you doing it?"

  "Hah!" I say.
  "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it."

[1]: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

Thanks to that tutorial I made absolutely sure my starting point was aquifer-free, but I might try with one at some point just for the challenge.

I use Phoebus' Graphics Pack on my 1024x600 netbook and it seems ok, but I'm pretty used to a tiny screen and resolution so it might not be what you're after.

Tim Denee's two infographic/comics on his [1]Bronzemurder and [2]Oilfurnace fortresses were what finally convinced me to take the plunge.

I knew basically nothing of the game, so found a random [3]step-by-step tutorial and actually did pretty well until I accidentally killed the mayor, several other nobles and half my standing army at the grand opening of the new great drawbridge due to a...Minor malfunction.

The biggest three tips I can give are:

A. get a texture pack. I'm sure many people love the ASCII, but actually seeing dwarf and goblin icons removed one more thing for me to learn at the beginning.

B. download Dwarf Therapist. It's a great external UI for managing the roles of your dwarves.

C. don't be afraid to fail, because you will. Often.

[1]http://bronzemurder.timdenee.com/

[2]http://oilfurnace.timdenee.com/

[3]http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-u... (warning, may be out of date!)

I respect the effort you've obviously put into developing this site, but in all honesty I can't see why I, as a user, would want to use your site in its current state over Rightmove or Zoopla.

For me, the most important thing is knowing I have access to a large pool of properties and can filter them appropriately. On the latter, it's nice that I can filter by crime rate (if I don't know the bad spots in an area), but it's missing a few key filters such as furnished/unfurnished, term of let, garden, etc. The lack of properties is, in my opinion, a much bigger issue. When I do a search on your site and see 8 properties to let in BN1, but hundreds on Zoopla and RM, I'm probably not going to come back to your site (if you're relying on direct feeds it'll take a lot of time and effort to build up your database and keep it clean).

While there are a fair few bugs and UX issues I noticed, overall the site looks quite nice. You have a couple of neat features not present on the major sites such as combined map+list view, but I'm struggling to see the real USP at the moment.

Rather than a big bang launch, I think you'd do much better to grow and iterate slowly and consistently. Reach out to and work directly with property agents - I'm guessing your main revenue stream will be lead generation, so at the end of the day the agents are your true customer.

When I say a 'basic, one-page app' I just mean a controller serving static content (i.e. not even any models), which is the main topic of Hartl ch3. The point was really to try creating anything from scratch - starting with a newly generated rails project, creating the controller, setting up the routes, developing the page, all the way to actually deploying it on Heroku. It may not be pretty and it may be just a single page, but it was a fantastic feeling to actually build something of my own from nothing in Rails and see it live.